Outriders (6 page)

“Well, if it’s all the same to you, Lieutenant Kennedy, I think I’d prefer the walk.”

“Due respect, sir,” she answered, “it’s not the same.”

He looked her straight in the eye, and she held his gaze. She had some steel in her, for a junior officer. After a moment, she stepped closer and leaned forward.

“Five minutes of your time, sir. Ten at most.”

Unusual behavior to say the least.

“I’m not much for conversation just now, ma’am.”

“How are you for listening?” she said.

That didn’t have much appeal either. Maybe she had some weird thing for guys who’d just had their hopes and dreams destroyed. Lincoln was just about to blow her off, but something in his gut checked him. She was too professional, too focused. And it wasn’t like he had much of anywhere else to go today, or to do. He gestured for her to lead the way. She nodded and swiveled around, leading him towards a nearby avenue. He followed along after her, watching her move. She was all sharp angles and precision; a projection of confidence and certain intent. Wherever she’d come from, it was obvious to Lincoln that Lieutenant Kennedy wasn’t a typical first lieutenant.

She led him to a plain white vehicle that was parked right along the thoroughfare. It was one of the smaller four-seat affairs with darkly tinted windows, and it hummed to life as they approached.

“You’re not planning to do anything untoward to me, are you, lieutenant?”

Kennedy stopped at the side of the car and turned back.

“Not me,” she said with a smile.

The door slid open. When Lincoln saw who was sitting inside staring back at him, he physically flinched and immediately hated himself for it. He’d reacted that way because the man sitting in the car was a legend in the special operations community. It just so happened that the man in the vehicle also bore heavy scarring, his bald head and face mottled with scar tissue that stretched down his neck into the collar of his impeccable uniform. The disfigurement wasn’t why Lincoln had flinched, but he knew it would be the man’s first impression of him.

“Captain Suh,” the man said. “I’m Colonel Mateus Almeida.”

“I know who you are, sir,” Lincoln said, snapping a salute.

Colonel Almeida returned the gesture with easy grace and an undisguised prosthetic hand.

“Got a bit of a reputation, do I?” he said.

“A bit, yes sir.”

Almeida gave him a broken grin. “Only the worst parts are true.”

“I doubt that very much, sir.”

“Well,” he said, “I hear the worst parts are also the best parts.”

Lincoln smiled. “That may be. What can I do for you, sir?”

“You can get in my car so I don’t have to sit here staring up at you.”

Lincoln nodded and slid into the rear-facing seat. The door slid closed, and Kennedy walked away as if she’d had nothing to do with any of it.

“Alberton, 109,” Almeida said. The vehicle pulled away from the curb, headed to an address on the other side of the base. The opposite direction from Housing, where all of Lincoln’s gear was. “Don’t worry, captain, I won’t make you stare at me for long.”

Lincoln wanted to apologize, or to explain himself to the man, but he couldn’t find the words. He just said, “It’s an honor to be sitting here with you, sir.”

Lincoln was no stranger to the physical realities of combat and trauma. He’d seen plenty of both. Colonel Almeida’s injuries had clearly been severe; he’d lost an eye, an arm, and most of his face to a white-flamed fireball with a shrapnel heart. But the colonel’s career in the field had ended at least a decade prior, probably closer to two. There’d been more than enough time for reconstructive surgery to have patched him up so perfectly that no one would ever have known he’d even seen combat. The fact that he didn’t even have a simple synthetic dermal covering for his prosthetic made it clear that his appearance was a conscious choice.

The colonel furrowed his brow. “And here I thought you were a straight-shooter, no-nonsense type.”

“I do try, sir.”

“Well try harder, son. My face is a wreck. You know it. I know it. If you’re going to come work for me, it’s better to get it out of the way now so I don’t have to listen to you trying to talk around it all the time.”

“I’m sorry?” Lincoln said. Almeida had him completely wrong-footed.

“I look more like a Martian terrain feature than a man, eh? What do you think? Gimme the truth, boy. Always the truth with me.”

Lincoln didn’t know what the colonel wanted from him, and his mouth formed the words without ever checking with his mind.

“I’ve seen worse, sir.”

The colonel chuckled at that. “Close enough! Though if that’s actually true, I feel sorry for the poor kid that got blown up worse than me.”

“Oh, he wasn’t blown up, sir,” Lincoln said, and he finally risked a smile. “Just ugly.”

Almeida grinned at that. “Then I feel sorry for his mama.”

“Colonel, I have to ask your forgiveness sir. I guess I’m a little behind. You mentioned something about me working for you?”

“I did.”

“This is the first I’m hearing about it.”

“I’ve a got a new command, captain. Working in the 301st Information Support Brigade. I’m heading up the 519th Applied Intelligence Group.”

“Congratulations, sir,” Lincoln said. “I’m afraid I’m uh… I’m not familiar with the unit.”

“Really?” Almeida said with mock surprise. “But we have patches and everything.” He gave it a moment and a crack of a smile before continuing. “On paper, the 519th is a support group, but it is in reality a special mission unit. It was officially formed only in the past few months, but we’ve been operating for oh, I dunno, about three years now. You work in the right circles. Ever hear mention of Grey Aegis?”

Lincoln shook his head.

“Victor Dawn?”

“No sir.”

“Element Five?”

“Oh,” Lincoln said. “Those guys.”

Almeida dipped his head. “Those guys.”

“Not great with names, are they?”

The colonel shrugged. “I had to change it so often, I never really put a lot of thought into it.”

“That’s great, sir, but I’m not sure why you’d want to talk with me. I’m not an analyst. Intel’s never been my main department.”

“The 519th isn’t a traditional intelligence apparatus.”

“Sure,” Lincoln said. “They’re
applied
intelligence.”

“That’s right.”

Lincoln shook his head. “I don’t know what that means.”

“We can kill a man from orbit without spilling the cup of coffee on the table in front of him. But all the precision in the world doesn’t matter if we don’t know what cafe he’s sitting in,” Almeida said. “The one lesson from the McLaren Incident that everyone
should
have learned, is that we can’t keep our people off the front lines and expect to stay ahead of the curve. Information is only part of the problem; usually we have too much of it. We can see just about everything, but ninety-eight percent of the time we can’t tell what we’re looking at. Not until after the fact. That’s what happened with McLaren. Had all the pieces, didn’t know how to put them together until the bad guys showed us.

“I need people with field experience, people who are familiar with violence and the what-comes-before. People with the instincts to recognize the pre-incident indicators, and who can do something about it. I need people to tell me what we’re looking at, before it happens.

“Ultimately, we’re problem solvers, captain. Quiet ones. Intelligence collection’s part of the game, but we maintain the capacity for direct action operations as well. And that’s about all I’m going to tell you. Until you come work for me.”

Lincoln smiled at the use of the word
until.
“For the 519th.”

“That’s right.”

“Which I know nothing about.”

Almeida nodded.

“Not giving me a lot to go on, sir.”

“Get used to it. The ability to operate on incomplete information is a requirement, captain,” the colonel said. “I expect my people to be comfortable living in that reality. You’ll be making a lot of high-stakes decisions on partial data, some of it likely false. You’ll have to act decisively, and you’ll have to make the best of the consequences, come what may. But…” Here he held up a hand and ticked off the points as he mentioned them. “Some highlights of the job: pay’s not great; most sergeants will have command of more people than you; you’ll be in the Information Support Brigade, which makes you sound like the biggest weenie on the planet. Oh,
and
, if you do the job right, a bunch of other people will always get the credit. It’s pretty much a career-killer.”

Lincoln blinked at the job description. A moment later, he added “… and the downside?”

“Responsibility.”

“How much?”

“A world’s weight, at least. I need a team leader. Someone I can put in the field and trust do the right thing without a lot of handholding. We move fast. The nature of our work requires it. I need someone who isn’t afraid to figure things out on the fly.” The colonel leaned forward. “Someone who isn’t afraid to act on a clearer understanding of fluid situations that require timely responses.”

Almeida let the phrase hang in the air, an echo of the very words Lincoln had used earlier that day. Had Almeida been in that room? Or did he have people reporting to him? Either option had uncomfortable implications.

“I’m honored that you’d consider me, sir,” Lincoln said. “But I’m sure there are a lot of other individuals out there better suited for that than me.”

Almeida shrugged as he sat back and cleared his throat. “It’s currently a list of one, captain.”

“That
is
flattering, sir, but I would expect someone of your caliber to have a, uh…” Lincoln paused, searching for the most diplomatic word he could think of, “… more robust set of options available.”

The colonel rumbled with a chest-deep chuckle. “Yeah, OK, so there might be a few other folks in line. But you’re at the top. And first. I haven’t offered this opportunity to anyone else yet, cross my heart.”

Lincoln looked down at his own hands, clasped in his lap. Most of his career had been in more traditional special operations forces, and while he’d certainly done his best in every one of them, he’d never considered himself to be a superstar or a stud. He could have easily rattled off the names of fifteen men and women who’d be better suited to lead a Special Mission Unit, as far as he was concerned.

“And what makes you think I’m the right one for the job?” Lincoln asked.

“I don’t think. I know. And I know because it’s my business to know,” Almeida said.

“Can you be a little more specific?”

The colonel scratched his nose with his prosthesis, a gesture that would have looked completely natural if not for the gunmetal grey surface of the hand. “I’ve been at this a long time, captain. If you hang around the halls long enough, you hear names picking up buzz. Rock stars in a community of superheroes.”

Lincoln’s eyebrows went up at that. He’d never gotten the impression that anyone knew who he was outside his immediate circle of peers.

“And,” Almeida said, “I’ve never once heard anyone talking about you.”

Lincoln let out a single, involuntary bark of a laugh. “Easy, colonel, you keep talking so nice, I might start getting uppity.”

“Well, you’ve never been in the spotlight, never been singled out by the brass for exceptional contribution. Seems you’ve even been passed over for promotion at least once, maybe more. And yet, somehow, when I ask around, every team member you’ve ever worked with puts you in the list of folks they’d call in a heartbeat if they needed to get something done. There’s a pattern to your career, captain. The reason you don’t pop up on anyone’s radar is because not many people know how to measure what you do. You make the people around you better. That’s what I need most. A leader who gets things done and doesn’t need a lot of attention or pats on the back for doing it.

“Bottom line, I believe in you, Captain Suh.” Those were powerful words coming from such a man, particularly after Lincoln’s recent failing. “But we can’t wait for you. I’m looking for men and women who can seize the initiative. I thought that was you. If I was wrong, no harm done. Better to find that out now.” The colonel brushed some lint off his pant leg with the back of his prosthetic hand and then continued. “But I can tell you this. The unit you just volunteered for? Wherever
they’re
going, you’ll be there first. In some cases, to prepare the way for them. In more cases, to keep us from having to send them at all.”

“The unit I just failed out of.”

“You didn’t fail.”

“‘Non-select’. Same thing.”

“No, you did
not
fail, son,” Almeida said, “I had you selected.”

Lincoln looked back at the colonel. “You did what now?”

“
I
selected you.”

“You selected me… out of Selection?”

“Cheaper than setting up my own program. Budgets, you know.”

A knot of emotion coiled and then bloomed in Lincoln’s chest; relief, bewilderment, anger. He hadn’t failed after all. And yet, the outcome remained the same. He ran his hand over his mouth, stroked his chin. When he spoke, he tried to keep his tone neutral and wasn’t completely successful.

“I just spent fourteen weeks slogging through that course so you could pluck me out at the last second…? What if I say no?”

“Then you get out of here and by the time you walk back to Housing, a very apologetic second lieutenant will be there to explain about the unfortunate clerical error that led to your premature dismissal. And no one will have any recollection of us ever having this conversation. But you’re not going to say no, are you?”

“All due respect, sir, I died and then got resurrected a couple of hours ago,” Lincoln said. “And that was the
easiest
part of my day. Easiest part of my last three months. I don’t know that I’m in the right frame of mind to make any career decisions just now.”

“I already told you, son. There’s no career in this. Just a job that needs doing, with precious few people qualified to do it. You might not be sure of yourself, but I am. You’re the right one for the job. But I’m only going to ask you once.”