Outriders

by Jay Posey

“Sure thing,” Noah said.

  A breach of protocol, and poor etiquette. Whiplash was technically running the show; as escort, Havoc element was subordinate. But, Will decided, the crew would get over it. And even if they didn’t, it was worth the friction to double-check that there wasn’t a ball being dropped somewhere along the line. Will didn’t know who’d gone out on that Lamprey, but he knew whoever they were, they were brothers and sisters-in-arms. He didn’t have any intention of leaving until he was absolutely certain they had a way to get back home.

  * * *

  “SIGNATURE READS as a Mako-class cruiser, captain,” the tactical officer reported. “At current velocity and bearing, it will cross into protected space in two hours, ninety minutes.”

  Commodore Liao let the words sink in for a moment before she responded. What was that vessel up to out there? Tensions were already high, with the Terran fleet holding off just out of striking distance. Was this an initial probing attack? Or did they just think they could slip a vessel by, while everyone’s attention was focused on the main body? Were they trying to provoke a response, looking for an excuse to bring their fleet in? Or was this a taunt?

  “Captain?”

  Liao didn’t want to start a war. But she wasn’t going to stand by and let the UAF dictate the course of events, either.

  “Helmsman,” she said. “Plot an intercept course. Coordinate with tactical to follow trajectory, and correct as necessary.”

  “Plot to intercept, aye, captain,” the lieutenant answered.

  “Communications,” Liao continued, “inform Higher Command that Relentless is moving position as response to possible contact.”

  “Aye, captain.”

  The Mako didn’t appear to be doing anything to mask its approach. That likely meant they were either doing something completely benign, or that there was some deep treachery underway. There didn’t seem to be any middle ground.

  “Course laid in, captain.”

  “Very good, helm. Take us on.”

  “Aye, captain.”

  Whatever the cruiser was up to, Relentless would be the first ship it met. And, depending on how the next few hours unfolded, possibly the last.

  * * *

  LINCOLN HAD JOINED Mike next to one of the canisters, bewildered by the discovery. They hadn’t checked all of the containers in the passageway, but the handful that they’d scanned all showed the same. Each one held at least one person; in some cases, two. An adult with a child.

  “You think they’re in stasis?” Mike asked. He’d opened his faceplate once they’d confirmed the passageway was clear, and his expression showed he was as unsettled as Lincoln was about their finding.

  “Hard to say,” Lincoln answered. “Stasis, or maybe already dead and on ice. Either way, this is all real creepy.”

  “I’m gonna see if I can get one open,” Mike said. “Be a lot easier to tell once we can take a look inside.”

  “I don’t know, Mike. This seems one of those things better left to the experts.”

  “Well, sure. All right, tell you what. I’ll work on it for now, and then when they get here, I’ll let them take over, how about that?”

  Lincoln looked at the canister, and the simple panel on the front. He didn’t like it, but Mike’s point was well taken. If there was anything to discover here, they were the only ones to do it.

  “All right, Mike. But be careful. You see anything you don’t like, leave it alone.”

  “Roger that,” Mike said. He knelt down in front of the canister’s panel and started to work. Lincoln stood by, watching for a few moments until Mike said, “I know I’m pretty, captain, but you don’t have to stare.”

  Lincoln chuckled and took the hint.

  “I’m going to walk to the far end of the passageway, get a count,” he said. “Let me know when you get it.”

  “Yep.”

  Lincoln moved further down the passage, stopping briefly beside each canister to let the suit run its scan. By the time he’d counted seventeen individuals, Thumper’s earlier mention of multiple manifests sprang back to mind.

  “Hey Mike,” he said over direct comms. “Want to make a guess about how many people we’ve got down here?”

  “Closest buys the beer when we get home?” Mike said.

  Lincoln chuckled. He wasn’t sure Mike had been paying attention to anything Thumper had said earlier.

  “OK, sure.”

  “All right, I’ll say forty,” Mike said. “No, forty-five. I’ll say forty-five. What’s your guess?”

  “Fifty-seven,” Lincoln said.

  “Pretty specific.”

  “I like to be precise.”

  “Hope you like to buy beer, too.”

  “Uh, Lincoln?” Thumper said, cutting in over the team channel. Lincoln switched to team comms.

  “Yeah, go ahead, Thumper,” he answered.

  “I cracked the communications log,” she said. “Want to guess who they talked to last?”

  “Just tell me.”

  “It was a CMA vessel. The Relentless.”

  Lincoln’s mind leapt forward from those words. Were these people all CMA military? A special unit like Lincoln’s, working some black operation? If so, this could be the definitive proof they’d been looking for. Confirmation that CMA was waging a shadow war, laying the groundwork for future conflict.

  “Can you pull the feed?” he asked.

  “Yeah I did, it’s all just chatter, but that’s not the important part. They exchanged ship credentials, authorization information,” she said. Lincoln didn’t respond immediately, still thinking through the implications of CMA involvement. Maybe Mr Self had been right after all. After a moment, Thumper spelled it out for him. “The handshake, Lincoln. Prakoso’s code.”

  And now Lincoln’s thoughts wrenched the other direction. They hadn’t been working with the CMA vessel. They’d just infected it with Prakoso’s injection attack.

  “We’re coming back up,” he said. He turned around and headed back towards Mike. Whatever was going on with the canisters could wait. “Hey Mike, we need to head back up to the bridge.”

  “All right, yeah, one sec,” Mike said. “I’ve almost got–”

  He was cut off by a loud pop, and he toppled over backwards from the container.

  “Whoa, Mike, you all right?” Lincoln said. Mike didn’t answer. He didn’t even stir. And Lincoln felt a coldness hollow him out. “Mike!” he called, and he ran to his teammate.

  “Sahil, I need you, now!” Lincoln called through comms. “Mike’s hit!”

  “What?” Sahil said. “Hit by what?”

  “Now, now, now!” Lincoln repeated. There wasn’t time to explain. He dropped to his knees next to Mike. The front of Mike’s armor was pockmarked around the neck and shoulders with divots that looked like someone had pressed fingertips into clay. But there was a hole through his visor, low and near the left side. Mike’s eyes were wide, his mouth, open. His jaw, working like he was trying to say something, was spattered on one side with blood.

  “Hang on, Mike,” Lincoln said. “Hang on, we got you.”

  Lincoln scrambled around, trying to get a view of a wound, but there was nothing he could find. All the damage was on the front as far as he could tell, and it didn’t seem like the suit had been penetrated.

  A loud and heavy thump signaled Sahil’s arrival on deck; he’d leapt down through the hatch, and was now sprinting towards his fallen teammate, trauma kit already in hand.

  “What happened, what’s he got?” Sahil asked, sliding to his knees next to Mike.

  “I don’t know, some kind of countermeasure on that thing,” Lincoln said, pointing at the canister. “It popped, he fell. Suit’s intact, but it breached his visor.”

  “Hang on, Mikey,” Sahil said, doing a rapid assessment of his own. And then, to Lincoln. “We’re gonna have to get this helmet off.” They worked together quickly to override the security protocol and unseal Mike’s helmet from its attachment point.

/>   As soon as they did, blood poured out onto the deck behind Mike’s head.

  Sahil pulled the helmet off and tossed it aside, and Lincoln’s first thought was that there wasn’t going to be anything they could do. Blood pumped from a hole on the left side of Mike’s neck, just next to his Adam’s apple. A ragged exit wound tore through the back side, on the right. He’d taken damage to his jaw as well.

  Sahil went to work anyway, plugging what he could.

  “Hold his head, hold his head,” Sahil said. Lincoln moved around and put his hands on either side of Mike’s head to keep him from turning it.

  “Hang on, Mikey,” he said, keeping eye contact. Already, Mike’s eyes were weak, losing focus.

  Mike reached a clumsy hand up and grabbed Sahil’s shoulder. Squeezed it.

  “I got you, brother,” Sahil said, working feverishly to staunch the bleeding. “I got you.”

  Lincoln hadn’t seen Sahil’s medical skills in action, but they were impressive. Fluid, expert, patient in the middle of the chaos. Just like he was in combat. The nanoagents on the bandages worked quickly to seal off the blood flow, to numb the damaged nerves. In maybe sixty seconds, Sahil had the bleeding under control.

  But even that wasn’t enough.

  Mike’s hand relaxed, slipped off Sahil’s shoulder. He closed his eyes, and a moment later his face went slack.

  “Mike,” Sahil said. “Mike, buddy, come on now. Don’t do that.”

  Sahil continued to work, kept a steady stream of encouragement coming, even though he seemed to know he was talking to a dead man. After a minute or so, Lincoln touched Sahil’s forearm.

  “I know,” Sahil said. “But I ain’t gonna just leave him lookin’ all tore up.”

  They finished in silence. Once the bleeding had fully stopped, Sahil wrapped fresh bandages neatly around Mike’s neck, and placed a patch over the wound on his jaw.

  “Whatever that was,” Sahil said, “came in through the visor. Looks like it deflected off the jawbone, went through the neck, and then where?” Lincoln couldn’t tell from his tone whether he was looking for an answer, or just talking to himself.

  “Didn’t come back out the suit,” he continued. “So…” Here, he looked up at Lincoln. “It just ping-ponged around inside till it stopped.”

  And now Lincoln understood why Mike had slipped away so quickly, despite Sahil’s efforts. The two men sat next to their fallen brother for a minute or two, neither one seeming to know what should come next. Nothing seemed right, or appropriate.

  But Lincoln was the team lead. His burden to be the first to set the shock and the grief aside, to get the team back on focus.

  “Let’s get him up topside,” Lincoln said. Sahil nodded, packed up his trauma kit, got to his feet. He rolled Mike… or rather, Mike’s body, onto its side, positioned him to lift in a fireman’s carry.

  “Let me help you,” Lincoln said, moving to assist.

  “I got him,” Sahil said.

  “Be easier if we both carry–”

  “I said I got him,” Sahil said, sharply. Lincoln held up a hand, acquiescing. It wasn’t an easy process to get a man up off the ground on your own, but Sahil didn’t struggle at all.

  “Lincoln,” Wright said over comms. “What’s your status? What’s going on with Mike?”

  “We’re bringing him up now,” Lincoln said.

  “How is he? Is he all right?” As controlled as it was, there was more emotion in her voice than Lincoln had ever heard before.

  “Amira,” Lincoln said. “He’s gone.”

  * * *

  “UNDERSTOOD, Hawkeye,” Will said to the officer in charge of command and control for his current operation. “I’m just trying to verify that nobody’s getting left behind here.”

  “I appreciate the concern, Havoc Lead,” the officer replied. “And the initiative. It’s all being handled.”

  “Roger that, you’ve got another element inbound to receive the Lamprey then?”

  A pause.

  “It’s being handled, Havoc Lead.”

  “Hawkeye, be advised, we’re zero on scopes, and not seeing anything projected our way. Is there a reason we shouldn’t remain on station until that team gets back?”

  “Colonel,” the officer said, and the tone of his voice suggested he had Will outranked. That too was unusual. “The situation’s hot enough as it is. If anybody runs across you out there, I don’t expect they’ll take time to ask any questions. And if they shoot, then we have to shoot. And that’s going to get real ugly, real fast. It’s been decided that it’s best to recall you now.”

  “… and what about the team we inserted?”

  There was a long pause before the response came in.

  “Those assets are deniable, colonel,” the officer said, his words clipped. “You are not. So, execute the mission you’ve been given, continue your escort, and return to Point Artemis. End of discussion.”

  That settled it, then.

  “Havoc Lead copies all, Hawkeye,” Will responded. “Thanks for the time.”

  “Hawkeye, out.”

  On the viewscreen, Whiplash’s maneuvering thrusters flared, preparing to bring the ship about.

  “Havoc Lead, this is Whiplash. We’re preparing to come about. Adjust course to follow station.”

  He’d done his due diligence. Whatever was going on was way above his paygrade. He eased the throttle, nudged the stick to maintain his relative position to the sleek Corsair-class vessel that was his charge.

  “Roger that, Whiplash,” Will answered. “Havoc Two, bring it around.”

  * * *

  LINCOLN LED the way into the control room, dark herald of the darkest news.

  Thumper and Wright both turned to the door when he entered, but nobody said anything. Sahil followed, with Mike over his shoulders, then laid him gently on the deck.

  Wright approached and knelt next to Mike, placed one hand on his forehead and the other on his chest. Thumper’s hands went up to her visor and then stopped, as if she’d been about to wipe tears away and then remembered she couldn’t.

  “Why’d you have your plate open, you big idiot,” Wright said quietly. “I don’t know how many times I’ve told him to stay buttoned up.”

  And that was the moment that Lincoln felt the most coldly nauseated. The memory flashed back in perfect detail, Mike crouching down to work on the canister, Lincoln too distracted to remind him to close his faceplate, just in case. It was such a simple thing, a detail Lincoln should have noticed, should have commented on, and that should have saved his man. And that made it all the worse. If he hadn’t felt so sick, he would have been furious at how such a mundane detail overlooked could extract such a terrible cost.

  Lincoln gave them some time, himself included, to come to terms with the reality of the situation, but he couldn’t let it linger. They’d have to pack the loss away for the moment, and get back to work. There’d be plenty of time to grieve when they were done. And now, a man down, that meant more work for everyone.

  “Sahil, take him on, get him loaded up in the Co–” Lincoln caught himself. The nickname didn’t seem that funny anymore. “Get him loaded up in the Lamprey.”

  “Maybe oughta get the girl out of here too,” Sahil said, nodding at María.

  Lincoln nodded. “Good call. Wright, why don’t you help Sahil out, get everyone situated.”

  “Then what?” Wright asked, getting up to her feet. She was already flipping the switch, getting back on point.

  “I’ll let you know as soon as I have it figured out,” Lincoln said.

  “And him?” Wright asked, dipping her head towards Vector.

  “I’ll keep an eye on him for now.”

  Wright nodded. She helped Sahil get Mike up across his shoulders again, and then went to talk with María.

  “Piper,” Lincoln heard the girl say. “You can just call me Piper.” And her voice sounded stronger, steadier. She seemed to be breathing more easily. Starting to believe she really ha
d been rescued, maybe.

  As Wright led her out, Lincoln turned back to address Thumper, only to discover that she was already back at the ship’s console.

  “Hurts, doesn’t it?” Vector said.

  Lincoln looked over at him.

  “Losing a man,” he said. Lincoln’s first thought was to walk over and stomp the man’s face in, but then he realized it hadn’t been meant as a taunt. He seemed sincere. Still, Lincoln couldn’t restrain his tongue.

  “I wouldn’t think a man willing to kill fifty-seven men, women, and children would have much room for sentiment.”

  Vector blinked slowly; his face was ashen, his breathing, strained.

  “All those below decks were already dead,” Vector said. “We’re not monsters.”

  “Oh? Just grave robbers then?”

  “Gathered up from the gutter… We’re giving them more dignity, than they ever got at home… And purpose.”

  “Tell yourself whatever you want, bud. There’s no way to justify what you’ve done.”

  Vector grunted a weak and brittle chuckle.

  “Spoken… like a man… who’s never seen behind the veil,” he said. He gave a ragged, wet cough, and winced. “Ain’t none of us… can justify… what we’ve done.”

  He closed his eyes.

  “Not a one,” he said.

  After that, he said nothing more.

  Lincoln stood in the center of the control room for a long moment, looking at the man slumped over against the bulkhead. There was a story there, to be sure. They’d served the same nation once, maybe even at the same time. Lincoln couldn’t help but wonder how their paths had diverged, and why. Another mystery to solve later. Or, most likely, that would never be solved.

  “Link?” Thumper said.

  “Yeah,” he answered.

  “This ship is definitely being run remotely,” Thumper said. “And I mean remotely, not just on AI. I’m locked out of commo right now, but look. Someone’s broadcasting on our channel, probably hopping off that relay I’d guess.”

  “Making it look like there’s a crew on board?”

  “That’d be my guess.”

  “You been able to figure out what they’re saying?”