Outriders

by Jay Posey

  “I mean whoever was talking to station control wasn’t doing it from the bridge of that hauler. There’s no reason for this otherwise. Destiny’s Undertow was bouncing signals back and forth between 773 and wherever the captain really was. Which was probably somewhere really far away.”

  “Like Mars?” Sahil asked.

  “Mars, Luna,” Thumper said with a shrug. “Could’ve come from here. Or from Pluto.”

  “And NID didn’t pick up on it?” Wright asked.

  “I guess not,” Thumper said. “But that’s not that surprising, there’s no reason to look for it. I wouldn’t have gone hunting for it, if Sahil hadn’t brought it up. And I only noticed it because I spend so much time staring at this stuff running commo for you guys.”

  “And they ain’t our Thumper,” Sahil said, with a smile. “You’re the brains, Thump. Put it together for us. You got a ship on remote, a quantum relay, and a rock. How would you do it?”

  Thumper sat back again, put her hands on top of her head and stared at the ceiling for half a minute. For as much as Sergeant Coleman talked once she got started, Lincoln appreciated the fact that she always actually seemed to consider her words carefully before she began.

  “Some of each, I guess,” she said, finally. “Get someone on the inside to open it up. Do the rest remotely. Probably the usual kind of gig… exploit somebody inside who’s maybe lonely, vulnerable somehow. Willing to do a favor or two without necessarily understanding what I’m really asking them to do. Then, I’d sneak the code in some routine procedure. A system update or something. Or… oh…”

  She looked back down at the panels she had arrayed on the table in front of her, and disappeared back into her own head. Everyone gave her a little time. Sahil was the one to finally draw her back out.

  “What is it, Thumper?” he said.

  “Or in something like a handshake…” she said, blinking up at him. “Check this out. When a ship’s coming into a station, their systems exchange some data. Helps the station keep track of the ship and vice versa, logs get updated automatically, that sort of thing. Theoretically, you might be able to hide a payload in that.”

  “Theoretically?” Lincoln said.

  Thumper shrugged. “You’d have to be code god to pull it off. Typically those connection protocols are where you see the most robust security, because it’s an obvious vulnerability. But if you knew the inner workings of a station well enough to convince its sensors to ignore a threat, you’re probably the right person to give this a try. Or people. We’re probably looking at a team, here.”

  She stopped and shook her head.

  “Awful lot of trouble to go through to wipe out a hop full of civilians.”

  Her final comment triggered a strange connection in Lincoln’s mind, gave him a new perspective. He could tell that somewhere in its hidden inner workings, his subconscious was busy constructing something it wasn’t ready to offer up. But it didn’t seem to mind tipping him off a little. Images of the courtyard restaurant where Henry had been killed played through his head. Stray rounds, no unintended casualties.

  “What if you were genuinely concerned about mitigating collateral damage?”

  “Then I probably wouldn’t have put a rock through a space station in the first place,” she said.

  “But if you knew both Henry’s identity and the true nature of LOCKSTEP?” Lincoln said. He was starting to catch on to what his subconscious was up to. Thumper looked at him blankly, not following.

  “Then I could consider them both valid military targets,” Wright said. Lincoln looked her way and pointed at her. She nodded, and in her sharp eyes he could see reflected her mind rapidly reframing the conversation. “I keep the moral high ground. Two relatively soft targets. And if I keep my name out of the papers, I can evaluate the results before I decide whether I want to claim any responsibility.”

  In that moment, he finally dredged up the memory that had been haunting the corners of his mind.

  “Controlling the aftermath,” Lincoln said, to himself.

  “Say again?” Mike said. He was leaning on the edge of the holotable now, arms crossed. Lincoln shook his head.

  “Sorry. This all just suddenly reminded me of something I learned back in the early days,” he said. “It’s kind of a story.”

  “Well, do tell,” Mike replied.

  Lincoln glanced around at the others, who were all looking at him expectantly. He leaned back in his chair, ran a hand over his chin. They’d been at it for hours; a little storytime probably wouldn’t hurt anyone.

  “Okay, so back when I was with 1st Group,” he said, “we did some work around Ragon, out of Tumangang mostly. And the militia we were working with, it’s basically what you’d expect. The big boss, can’t tell if he’s a gangster or a patriot. Probably some of both. Pretty much ran Tumangang at that point, so he was loaded. He was married, loved his wife. Still had like five girlfriends, of course, but he absolutely doted on his wife. Anyway, he had this head bodyguard, he called him his chief of security, but you know, he’s basically just some guy who worked out a lot and liked to carry guns.

  “Well, we’re there for about three days before it becomes obvious to us that the boss’s chief of security is maybe a little too familiar with the daily business of the boss’s wife. And that’s none of our concern, except that apparently everyone else had figured it out, too, except the boss, and you know how that is. Erodes the boss’s authority, gets tough to maintain discipline. I’m pretty green at that point, but I know I have to deal with it. And seeing as I’m an officer, you know that means I think I’m pretty clever, too.

  “So I pull the boss aside one day and request that he assign the chief of security to us, as our direct liaison. Need someone to travel around with us, keep us out of trouble. Not going to be around the home front so much anymore. Well, the boss wasn’t having any of it. Kept offering up all these other people, insists on keeping his chief of security close to home. So, finally, I give him some less than subtle hints about the goings-on with his wife.”

  “You didn’t,” Thumper said.

  “Oh, I did,” Lincoln said, nodding. He paused long enough to take a couple of swallows of water, and then continued.

  “Two days later, the chief of security dies in an accident at a shipyard. Overseeing an incoming shipment, stack of containers tips over on him, or some such thing. Right in front of a whole crew of the boss’s people. Everyone’s shocked. I shouldn’t have been, but I was. Obviously, I have to go have another talk with the boss. This isn’t how we do things. And the boss looks at me like this…” Here Lincoln recreated the gesture, hands spread, apologetic shrug, “as if he has no idea what I’m talking about. So I explain how, you know, killing your own people is bad for morale. And he does the same thing, all sunshine and innocence. So finally I just come right and say, ‘Look, you had your own chief of security murdered. I know you did. Your own people will turn on you for that sort of thing.’

  “And now he just smiles at me, and nods, as if now he understands my concerns.

  “‘No, no, Mr Lincoln,’ he says, ‘it’s OK. I take care of my people. I feed them, I give them clothes, nice things when they do well. They will not believe this about me.’

  “And I tell him I’m not so sure about that. He says not to worry, he’s sure. So I ask him how he knows for certain. And he looks at me with that same smile, easy as can be, and says, ‘Because I gave them something else that they would rather believe.’

  “Well, being an officer, of course I knew better, which I tried to patiently explain to him. He didn’t seem to be too bothered about that. And you know what? Turns out he was right. There were some whispers the first couple of days, but pretty soon after that, the story took over. Terrible accident. Really sad. No more rumors about the chief of security and the boss’s wife. Everyone just went about their business as if it was one of those random, unpredictable tragedies of life.

  “A couple of weeks later, we’re at his house a
nd I’m trying to brief him on the latest developments. His wife comes in, sweet as can be, offers us tea, no hint whatsoever that her husband had her lover executed. When she’s gone, the boss looks at me with that smile again and he says, ‘You see Mr Lincoln, we cannot always control what happens, even in our own homes. But, when you control the aftermath, it is almost the same.’”

  Lincoln glanced around at his team again, gave a little shrug. “That stuck with me.” His teammates were silent for a moment, each thinking through what he’d just told them.

  “Cool story,” Sahil finally said. “But how you figure that into this again?”

  “Giving people a lie that’s easier to believe,” Master Sergeant Wright said. “That they want to believe. Both attacks are plausibly deniable.”

  “Not just plausibly,” said Coleman. “Anybody who doesn’t want to see them as an attack doesn’t have to. You can make a strong case here that these are both just things gone wrong, with no connection at all. A coincidence of coincidences.”

  “And while we argue about what it all means, the bad guys get some breathing room,” Lincoln said.

  “Well,” Mike said. “I guess I can see that for ol’ Henry, yeah? Undeclared officer gets whacked, NID probably doesn’t want to admit he had anything to do with them. If they just pretend it’s nothing, it’s best for all parties.”

  “Except for Henry,” Coleman said.

  “But LOCKSTEP,” Mike continued, ignoring the side comment, “you don’t go to all that trouble unless you want someone to notice. It’s too big to ignore, too expensive to pull off.”

  “It’s actually a pretty low-rent solution,” Wright said. “Biggest cost is time. And of course, the brains to make it all work. But the threat’s been around forever. It’s just never really been considered credible before.”

  “Why’s that?” Mike asked. “If it’s cheap, seems like that’d be the weapon of choice for all those oppressed off-worlders.”

  “Because most people don’t want to completely destroy anything that’s big enough to hit. Except those nutjobs a few years back,” Wright answered. “You know the uh… ones who wanted to drop a kilometer-wide asteroid in the Atlantic, give the Earth a chance to start over without the human involvement.”

  “The Re-bEarth Movement,” Lincoln said. Mike snorted and shook his head. Wright gave Lincoln a single nod.

  “That’s the ones,” she said. “Other than those people. Rocks are good for killing moons and planets. Anything smaller, probably easier to just use a ship or something.”

  “Unless you want it to seem like an accident,” said Thumper. “You can trace a ship. Pretty sure we haven’t gotten around to tagging all the rocks in the Belt yet.”

  “Even so,” Mike said, not entirely convinced. “How long you think it takes to prep an asteroid to move it? And the planning. No, forget the planning. Just think about the math. Trying to aim an asteroid at a hop in the middle of nothing? You can’t even guarantee a station’s path. That’s not the kind of thing you’re going to see a bunch of terrorists pull off, no matter how spunky they are.”

  “We don’t know they haven’t missed before,” Wright said. “Maybe they’ve been trying for a while, finally got lucky.”

  “You could put guidance on it,” Coleman added. “Couple of mining corps are working on that. Instead of sending ships out and back to haul chunks, they send a long-term crew out to rig them up. Basically build a drone around it, let it fly itself home. It’s not like it has to be aerodynamic. Or even pretty, for that matter.”

  Mike shrugged. “Would you say that’s common?”

  “Nah, not yet,” Thumper admitted. “But I think that’s more of an insurance thing. Not too many people want to be on the hook for the bill if one of their long-term crews gets a little sloppy and a thruster falls off on the way home.”

  “And sends a rock through somebody’s space station?” Mike said.

  “Something like that, yeah,” said Thumper. “You think LOCKSTEP was an accident, then?”

  “No, no, I’m not saying that. But to me, there’s no middle ground. It’s either an accident, which I doubt, or it’s an act of war. Nothing in between.”

  “And by act of war,” Lincoln said, “you mean state-level.”

  “Yeah. Maybe not Central Martian Authority, but somebody with that kind of muscle. Could be closer to home.”

  “Eastern Coalition?” Lincoln asked. Mike shrugged again, and Thumper shook her head.

  “I’m not sure I buy that, Mike,” she said. “If the Russians or Chinese cared about us looking at Mars, they’ve got a bunch of easier ways to get to us.”

  “Maybe they’re about to do something down here we’re not going to like, and they want us looking the wrong direction.”

  “Yeah maybe,” said Thumper, “but–”

  “All right people, look here,” Wright said, cutting Thumper off. “Talking isn’t planning. We’re not here to figure out who did what and why. We’re here to decide what we’re going to do.” She looked significantly at Lincoln. “Are we anywhere closer to that?”

  “You’re right, sergeant. Thank you,” Lincoln said, nodding. He stood and walked to the head of the holotable, taking control of the room. “Here’s what I think.

  “Point one: Henry Sann and LOCKSTEP are connected, and both were intentionally targeted. I’m not sure which came first but I wouldn’t be surprised if when the bad guys uncovered one, it gave them the other.

  “Point two: there’s not much we can do for Henry. I think it’s clear he was the primary target of that attack, but we don’t have much else to go on there. The hit was clean enough, I think it’d be a waste of our time to try and chase it down. Let NID handle the investigation; they can keep us informed. I think we follow the station, see where that leads. My guess is we’ll get the folks behind Henry’s death along the way.

  “Point three: our bad guys are very good at deniable ops. That probably means using proxies whenever possible, but always keeping the tough work for themselves. Controlling the aftermath. That’s their fingerprint. So we’re looking for people who do things the way we do. Special people.

  “I don’t think these folks want to go completely unnoticed. I think they want to attract a very specific kind of attention. Thumper pointed out the way ahead a few minutes ago. Maybe we can’t trace a rock but, as you said, sergeant, we can trace a ship. Destiny’s Undertow is our thread. Let’s all pull on it and see where it leads.”

  With that directive, the team returned to the intelligence dump that Lieutenant Davis had given them with renewed energy and fresh clarity of purpose. Walking backwards from Destiny’s Undertow, and viewing everything through the lens of an intentional, coordinated attack, new connections emerged. Some were tenuous, but recognizable; the kind of connections Lincoln might have created himself, if he’d been running such an operation. Over the next three hours, they winnowed the list of possible entities involved down to a handful, and from a handful to just three. Finally, after nearly eighteen hours of intense analysis and debate, Lincoln stood in front of his team and tapped one image displayed on the wall.

  “If I had to roll the dice,” he said. “I’d put my money on these guys.”

  Apsis Solutions. A grey group based out of Shackleton, near the southern pole of Luna. They billed themselves as a full-spectrum security contracting corporation, and had ties to legitimate companies as well as tangential connections to darker organizations. They also had operational reach from Earth to Mars, and had been slapped on the wrist more than once for facilitating low-profile breaches of both technological and material embargoes. Somehow pleading ignorance had gotten them out of any serious trouble, which probably meant the group also had more than a little political protection.

  “So,” he said. “Who’s up for a trip to the moon?”

  Lincoln looked around the room at each of his team members in turn, and got nods of agreement from each of them.

  “How’s your Russian?” Mike
asked.

  “Rusty,” Lincoln said. “Maybe we can practice on the way. Good work today, folks. I think all we’ve got left now is drawing up the official packet for the colonel. I can take care of that.”

  “I’ll help you out,” Wright said.

  “I don’t mind handling the tedious part, sergeant,” he said.

  “I think it’d be good to have an extra set of eyes on it,” she answered. “Just to be sure.”

  It wasn’t a direct challenge, but it was obvious to Lincoln that she didn’t trust him to get it all right on his own.

  “If you’re up to it,” he said, “then I’d appreciate the help.”

  She gave a single, sharp nod, and started organizing the panels on the holotable, grouping some together and clearing out the ones they no longer needed.

  “As for you lucky folks,” he said to the other three, “I recommend you try to rest up while you can. I’m guessing we’re not going to have to wait around too long to hear back on this one.”

  “Roger that,” Mike said. He, Sahil, and Thumper gathered up their personal effects and made their way out of the planning room. Lincoln returned to his seat at the holotable and brought up the standard template for a mission proposal. This had always been his least favorite part of the gig. He sat back in his chair for a moment, stretched his neck and shoulders, rubbed his face.

  “Hey, cap’n,” Mike called from the doorway. Lincoln turned to look at him and saw him standing in the hall with a wide grin. He tilted his head at something just out of Lincoln’s view. “Your suit’s here.”

  NINE

  IT WASN’T OFTEN that Vector got to visit the high-class hops. And he’d never been on a five-star before. Even dressed as he was in a finely tailored suit, he was certain that the people around him could tell he didn’t belong. There was something in the bearing of the super-rich; a softness in their eyes and hands that spoke of a life free of any true hardship, a superiority in their tone of voice that declared entitlement to such lavish surroundings while hinting that even this opulence was at least somewhat beneath them. No one said anything impolite to him, of course. They were all warm condescension and barely detectable disdain.