Outriders

by Jay Posey

  “Yes. To stay, I should think,” the Woman answered. “Too close now for me to be stepping out for fun. I don’t expect you to run into any trouble, but I trust you will take precautions nonetheless.”

  “We will. And we are.”

  “Let me know the instant you’re ready to move.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Good. Signing out now. I expect to hear from you soon.”

  “Sure thing. Stay safe.”

  “Safe?” she said, and she arched an eyebrow in cold amusement. “No, my dear. I plan to stay very, very dangerous.”

  EIGHTEEN

  AS IT TURNED OUT, the wait wasn’t nearly as long as Lincoln had feared it would be. But that wasn’t necessarily good news. They’d been back on board the Curry for less than twenty-four hours, and he’d been asleep for less than two, when Thumper woke him up.

  “Captain, we got a hit,” she said, before he was fully awake.

  “Yeah, OK,” he said, but he couldn’t quite remember what she meant by it. He sat up, rubbed one eye with the palm of his hand. “OK… so, what now?”

  “The relay,” she said. “Caught a lucky break on it.”

  It all snapped back into place.

  “Show me,” he said.

  Thumper took him to the compartment across the passageway, where she and Prakoso had set up their makeshift tracking station. To Lincoln, it looked like a cross between a middle-school science fair project and some high-tech startup in a garage. Prakoso was chewing his left thumbnail while tabbing through some stream of data on a display.

  “What are we seeing?” he asked.

  Thumper flopped into a chair, tapped out a few commands on her console, and transferred the image from her display onto the thin-skin mounted on the wall.

  “That’s just a visualization,” she said, “not an actual map, but those nodes are the network of relays. Basically any time you use one, you’re using them all, so we know they’ve got at least twelve. They may have more they’re keeping offline for the moment, but they definitely have these twelve.”

  “Can you pull a location off these?”

  “Sure,” Thumper said. “Veronica’s working on it now, but that might not mean anything. Like Flashtown. These could just be in storage somewhere, that won’t necessarily help us. But what can help, is this.” A second layer appeared over the visualization, thin colored lines streaming between multiple points. “These are access requests to the relays. Different colors for different requesters, brighter means more activity on the same access. Important takeaway is that these guys are talking to each other. A lot. We don’t have a baseline established yet on what normal usage looks like, but my gut says this is elevated chatter.

  “Now, if you’re the paranoid sort, the right way to do this is, you set up your system to drop and reacquire access every so often. But that’s a pain, slows you down, you have to build in the recycle time to your schedule, communication gets blacked out for a few minutes, maybe an hour at a time depending on your gear. So if you’re lazy, or you’re in a hurry, you just send traffic on the same relay access. That’s what you’re seeing in those bright lines there. Same folks, using the same access, sending a lot of traffic.”

  “And that’s something you can track?” Lincoln said.

  “If you’ve got the gear and the knowhow,” Thumper said. “Which we do.” She smiled and reached over, punched Prakoso in the shoulder.

  Lincoln looked at the flow on the thin-skin, filtered out the relevant bits, and interpreted what he guessed Thumper was implying in her own technical way.

  “They’re going to hit us again,” he said.

  “They’re going to hit us again,” Thumper confirmed. “But we’ve got target information now. And an operational window.”

  “I thought you said we couldn’t pull messages out of the relay,” Lincoln said.

  “We can’t,” Thumper said. “But we didn’t have to. 23rd’s already got taps on these guys,” she pointed to one of the streams on the thin-skin. “Veronica pulled them out for us already, processed it, found the pieces we needed. And NID’s watching these guys,” she pointed to another line. “We just had to put them together.”

  “So you’ve already talked to Mr Self then.”

  Thumper shook her head. “We haven’t talked to anybody yet.”

  “Then how’d you get access to Directorate feeds?”

  Thumper looked at Prakoso. Prakoso looked at Thumper, then at Lincoln with a do-you-really-want-me-to-tell-you expression.

  “Nevermind,” Lincoln said.

  Thumper said, “There wasn’t time to ask–”

  “I said nevermind,” Lincoln repeated more firmly. “We get an ID on where it’s all coming from? Who’s giving the orders?”

  Thumper shook her head again. “We haven’t been able to find the other end yet. I doubt we will any time soon. These are the foot-soldier types down here, and I’m guessing we’ve got layers to peel back before we ever even see the puppet-strings, let alone who’s pulling them.”

  “All right. Get everything together, get a packet over to the colonel, a-sap. Everything you’ve got.”

  “What about NID? Or the 23rd?”

  “You really want to tell NID what you’ve been up to?”

  “It’s another NID target. One of their front companies, looks like. On Mars.”

  Lincoln thought about it for a bare few seconds before he answered.

  “Whatever gets this to the right people the fastest,” Lincoln said. “If that means NID, then do it. I’ll take the heat if it comes.”

  “Roger that,” Thumper said.

  “Good work, you two,” Lincoln said. “Great work.” He pounded Thumper on the shoulder, reached over her and clapped Prakoso on the arm. “You did a good thing here, Yayan. Except maybe the NID thing. But I won’t mention it if you don’t.”

  Prakoso nodded with a mild smile, as if he was secretly pleased but didn’t want to admit it to anyone, especially himself.

  “And I meant what I said,” Lincoln added. “About getting you home. You’re saving lives today.”

  Prakoso nodded again.

  “I’m gonna ping the colonel, give him a heads up,” Lincoln said again. “Great work, guys.”

  Lincoln left the compartment and went to fire up a session with Almeida. He had no idea what time it was back on Earth, but it didn’t really matter. There were lives on the line, and for the first time since he’d joined the Outriders, he was ahead of the curve. Admittedly, some part of him was eager to share the win, to earn the approval of the legendary colonel and show that the man’s trust in him hadn’t been misplaced. But the urgency of the moment didn’t go unmarked; if they didn’t act quickly enough, this little victory could easily vanish into catastrophe.

  NINETEEN

  VECTOR WATCHED the two of them on the display, Kid standing in the room, and the girl sitting on her cot. Kid was leaning against the wall, arms crossed, in obvious conversation. Vector could have turned the audio on, but he felt uncomfortable spying on his own people, even though Kid knew he could be listening in.

  “I still don’t know why we didn’t just leave her floating,” Kev said.

  “Someone else would have found her,” Vector replied.

  “Yeah, but so what? One survivor from the whole station. I doubt she even knows what happened, let alone what happened, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Could’ve just popped the pod for that matter.”

  “Look, Kev. There are a lot of things we could’ve done that wouldn’t involve that girl being on board. But the only one I know of that guarantees she’s controlled, is the one we did. She’s on the ship, we know where we she is, we know she can’t hurt us. Maybe if we’d dumped her out an airlock, there’s only a millionth of a percent of a chance that anyone would have found her and wondered how she got where she did. But there was no reason to take even that chance. And that’s one less thing to worry about.”

/>   “Except now we’ve got to deal with her.”

  “You haven’t had to,” Vector said.

  “Yeah, but, you know. Takes energy, anyway. And Kid’s been down there a lot. Maybe too much.”

  Vector didn’t like hearing the implication. Kid was his closest partner, the one he’d worked with the longest. He loved her like a sister. But at the same time, Kev’s suggestion echoed something he’d been trying to ignore himself. Kid had been spending a lot of time with the girl. Seemed like a good bit more lately.

  “Seems like it’d be easier just to go ahead and plug her,” Kev said.

  “We’re not murderers, Kev.”

  Kev chuckled darkly at that. “Yeah? I got a lot of folks in my head that might disagree.”

  “War’s a different thing,” Vector replied. “Every target we’ve hit has been a valid military one. You know better.”

  “To be honest, I’m not so sure I do, these days.”

  “You want to walk down there and do it? Kill that girl in cold blood? If so, then you’re not the man I thought you were. And you’re not the man you used to be.”

  “Ain’t none of us the men we used to be, Doc.”

  Vector glanced over at Kev, but Kev was busy watching the display. He shook his head.

  “What are they doing now?”

  Vector looked back at the viewscreen to see the girl getting up off the cot. She embraced Kid. It looked almost like she was crying.

  “Come on, Kid,” Vector said. “What are you doing?”

  “Think maybe you oughta have a talk with her about that,” Kev said.

  “Yeah,” said Vector, getting up out of his chair. “Yeah, I think you’re right.”

  But before he could do anything more, the girl made a sudden motion and Kid’s legs buckled. An instant later, Kid was down on the floor on her hands and knees, and the girl was gone.

  Vector bolted for the door.

  * * *

  PIPER SPRINTED DOWN THE HALL. Left turn, second left, up the ladder. Second right. That should get her to the exterior section of the ship. Talking with the woman who had become her caretaker, she’d learned enough details about the ship to piece together a rough layout. The adrenaline was coursing now, her heart hammering. She hoped she hadn’t hit the woman too hard. She’d hated doing that. A terrible betrayal. Even though the woman was technically her captor.

  How much time did she have? A minute? Maybe less. She raced down the hall, found the ladder. The adrenaline made it hard to grip the rungs. At the top, she missed a step and stumbled coming out of the hatch, fell hard in the passageway. Piper scrambled up, but stopped, panting. The passageway stretched off in both directions. Which way? The second right, but the second right from which facing? She spent too long thinking about it; she had to move.

  She went left without knowing why. Ran down the passageway to the second right, took the turn, and slowed to a jog, scanning for directions. After ten seconds, she still hadn’t found what she was looking for. She should’ve seen something by now. Should she have gone the other way? Was she still in the exterior of the ship, or was she running back towards the middle? What if she’d gotten the directions wrong?

  There, a few meters further down the passageway. A small, square sign directing her to the nearest lifepod, reminding her to remain calm. Piper took off again at full speed, following the path laid out by the evac signs. They led her to take a turn and then further down, another; she realized she’d still been too deep in the ship. Her rough layout had been an educated guess, but a guess just the same.

  The turn she took led her to a short, connector passage and almost into the bulkhead; she skidded out at a T-intersection, and had to catch herself to keep from colliding face first. She looked up and down the passageway for the next sign, realized her left hand was covering it. Right, ten meters. Piper turned that direction just as a man came dashing out at the far end. A man she hadn’t seen before.

  For a moment, they just stood there, each shocked to see the other. The pod entry was between them; Piper was closer.

  She ran for it.

  As soon as she moved, the man launched forward. He was fast. Faster than Piper could have guessed.

  She wasn’t going to make it.

  He was maybe five meters away when she hit the latch to pop the pod door; almost arm’s length by the time it was open. He was going to grab her. Already, his hands were outstretched.

  Without thinking, Piper dropped to a knee, ducked her head. The man crashed into her, knocked her over, and went sprawling to the deck, hard. Piper scrambled up to her hands and knees, threw herself into the airlock. Lurched up to her feet, through the pod hatch.

  The man appeared at the airlock entrance as she was hitting the emergency latch to shut herself in. The door sealed just as the man reached it; so close, he had to snatch his hand back to avoid losing his fingers.

  Piper took a few disbelieving steps back from the door. She’d done it. She’d made it. She was safe, for the moment.

  And with that realization, she collapsed to her knees by the door, shaking, panting, crying from the terror and the relief. Displays glowed to life and the pod hummed as its systems came up. One of the screens showed a view of the airlock, where a second man had now joined the first. There was no audio, but Piper didn’t need it. The image alone was enough to communicate the fury.

  Piper threw the metal-handled switch by the door, a double safety that locked the hatch mechanically and made it impossible to unlock from the outside without specialized equipment. If they wanted to come get her, they’d have to cut her out. Retrieval arms typically had a built-in interface that could do the job, but that was only a possibility if she launched and they recovered the pod. And she didn’t plan on doing that.

  She gave herself a few moments to recover from the emotional toll of the adrenaline dump, and then forced herself back to her feet. There was no telling how long it would take them to find a way to get her out, but there was no question that her captors were smart. The only safe thing to do was to assume she didn’t have much time.

  The pod had a ring of seats positioned to cram as many people in as possible. One, however, was ostensibly the command chair, closest to the essential controls. Piper sat there and went to work.

  * * *

  “HOW LONG UNTIL SHE LAUNCHES?” Vector asked as he ran through the arming protocols. While the rig didn’t have much in the way of weaponry, the point defense cannons were enough to get the job done, as long as he could manually target the lifepod. He’d at least make an attempt at recovering the pod before it got too far, but he wasn’t taking any chances. If it looked like it was getting out of range, he’d just have to explain to the Woman that the girl had become troublesome.

  “Could’ve done it by now, if she was gonna,” Kev said.

  “What do you think she’s waiting for?”

  “No idea. Maybe she doesn’t know how to launch it.”

  “Did she get out?” Kid said from the door. Vector looked over his shoulder at her. She held up her hand before he could say anything. “It was stupid, I know, you don’t need to say it.”

  Vector looked at his long-time friend, saw the hard look in her eyes. There wasn’t anything he could say that she hadn’t already said to herself; and she probably hadn’t been nearly as kind about it as he would have been.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  “Yeah, fine,” she answered. “Did she get out?”

  “Nah, she’s holed up in a pod,” Vector said, returning to his console. “Not sure what she’s up to yet.”

  “Maybe she just got scared, didn’t really think it through…”

  “No, I almost caught her,” Kev said. “She could’ve run the other way, but she ran towards me instead, raced me to the pod. That was where she was headed, no doubt.”

  Vector finished bringing the retrieval arm and the cannons online.

  “Kid, go grab Royce and see if he has any ideas about overriding that hatch,” h
e said. “Maybe some of his guys know a trick or two.”

  “You got it,” Kid said, and she left the control room.

  “There it goes,” Kev said. “She’s trying to bring up the commo.”

  “Can she do that?” Vector asked.

  “Sure. Pod’s got a great array on it. It’s still slaved to the main ship, but smart girl like her, I bet she can figure a way around it.”

  “Anything we can do from here?”

  “Depends on what she does in there, I reckon.”

  Vector eyed the console. He could force-launch the pod and try to recover it, but he knew that the girl would blast a distress signal out as soon as the pod was free. That was attention he didn’t want to deal with, not unless it was the only option.

  “Let’s wait and see, then,” he said.

  * * *

  PIPER WAS deep in the lifepod’s system configuration, modifying settings and permissions. By default, the communications array was inactive unless the pod had been launched, preventing any sort of accidental interference with the main ship or erroneous distress signals from going out. But there were protocols hidden to the normal user that had to be accessible to the technicians who ran diagnostics and safety checks on the equipment.

  She remembered well sitting in the lifepod connected to YN-773’s bubble, with Gennady leaning over her shoulder, walking her through the process. Remembered the quiet smile on his face at her excitement when she realized just how much of a secret world lay behind the surface of all the technology she interacted with. He’d been so generous to share his vast knowledge with her, so patient with her constant questions and curiosity. And now what Gennady had taught her out of the goodness of his nature was quite possibly the thing that would save her. Save her again. Piper’s eyes welled while she made the final changes.

  The communications array bleeped when it woke, its display spooling out diagnostic data as it stepped through its startup routine. A distress signal would have been the best way to get some attention; they were designed to radiate signal in a specific pattern, in all directions. But even if she could have overridden the protocols that prevented it, she knew her captors could easily explain it away as a malfunction to whoever came looking. Unlike the distress signal, the communications array was tight-beam, designed for targeted transmission. If she wasn’t smart about how she used it, she’d literally just be screaming into the void. Not that she had much choice. Without launching, the array was limited by the pod’s housing in the ship.