Outriders (35 page)

Lincoln had never been very good at either one.

SEVENTEEN

“
W
HEN YOU SAY ‘LOST HIM
’,” Vector said, “what exactly does that mean?”

“Just what it sounds like,” the Woman answered. The intensity was there, all business. “Gone. Cannot be located anywhere on Luna or the vicinity of.”

“How long?”

“At least seventy-two hours,” she said. “I’d guess longer. I suspect Apsis was not immediately… forthcoming about the disappearance.”

Vector did the quick mental math; travel time, logistics. Even if there was a vulnerability, it didn’t seem likely there was any connection. Not in that timeframe.

Still.

“Flashtown?” he asked.

“No evidence of a connection,” she said. “The trouble was contained to the upper decks, far from the relay. It sounds like rival gangs violating Mayor Jon’s cardinal rule and paying the price.”

“So coincidence, huh?” he said. “Just so happens?”

“It would seem.”

“Sounds a little familiar.”

“Too,” she said. “How badly can Prakoso hurt us?”

“He’s compartmentalized,” Vector said. “But… he’s Prakoso. His work’s done, and he never knew exactly what its purpose was, never had direct connections to any of our first-tier people. If he really wanted to come after us, I’m sure he could find a way, but he’s not stupid. Seems more likely he’d just disappear.”

“I agree. But I’m moving the timetable up, to be safe. How close are you?”

“Not long now. Ship’s rigged up, we’re just taking care of some the internals. Few more days at most.”

“And if the next strike goes forward immediately?”

“Shouldn’t interfere if it comes a couple days early,” he said. “That’s all friends-of-friends kind of work. No impact on us, assuming it goes through.”

“Very well. I’ll have them execute. Get your ship underway, nearer to position, but somewhere out of the way, off scopes. I may need you to to move more quickly than anticipated. I don’t want you having to burn in and make a lot of noise.”

“Understood. What about you?” Vector asked, trying to keep the tone professional, operational. “You at home now?”

“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

A
S 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

V
ECTOR 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.

P
IPER 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.