Outriders (7 page)

Lincoln glanced out the window again. He was used to doing things a little outside of normal. He sought it out. It’s why he’d been attracted to special operations in the first place. Some people thought it was a high-risk occupation; Lincoln had come to consider it one of
precisely calculated
risk. Every man and woman he’d served alongside in the teams had been willing to risk it all, but the ones who had excelled had developed a habit of leaving absolutely nothing to chance.

But this was so far from normal it wasn’t even on the same planetary map. Forget all the things he didn’t know about the 519th. He’d heard the stories of Colonel Almeida, but he didn’t really know the man.

The vehicle slowed and drew up alongside the curb in front of a low building that was nondescript even by base standards.

“I’m getting out here,” Almeida said. “You can stay if you want, take the car back to Housing, try your luck with the unit. No hard feelings.” The colonel shifted himself to the seat next to the door and rested a hand on it, preparing to open it. “Or,” he added, “you can come with me right now and do the thing you were made for.”

He paused long enough to let the weight of the moment settle, and then without another word he opened the door and stepped out into the bright sun. He remained at the vehicle’s side just long enough to don his cap and straighten his immaculate uniform. Then the door closed behind him and Colonel Almeida walked towards the building with a sharp stride. No hesitation, no looking back.

Lincoln sat in the vehicle, strongly tempted to take the bait; to swallow the hook he knew was there and just see where it took him. But there wasn’t enough for him to go on. He’d dreamed about joining the unit for years. And now, on the cusp of realizing that dream, or at least finding out for certain whether he had what it took, this man he didn’t know was trying to entice him into throwing it all away, just to solve the mystery. There was no calculation to it. Lincoln didn’t have any data to calculate. It was all risk. All chance.

It was crazy, is what it was. Lincoln glanced out the tinted window at the shadow world beyond. It certainly looked like the normal world was still out there, doing its thing. Was any of this actually happening?

The car chirped twice, signaling its availability for a new address. A few words, and Lincoln would be on his way back to Housing, and the very apologetic second lieutenant. A few words, and this would all fade into a weird memory, something in time he could probably convince himself was just a fever dream brought on by the trauma of his very difficult Wednesday. Just a few words.

And before he’d consciously made the decision, Lincoln found himself opening the door and stepping out of the car.

“Colonel Almeida, sir,” he called. Almeida didn’t miss a step. He swiveled right around and marched back over to Lincoln at the exact same pace.

“Captain?” he said when he reached Lincoln.

All risk. All chance.

“Sir,” Lincoln said. “Where do I sign?”

Almeida flashed his broken smile.

“We don’t like to leave a lot of records lying around,” Almeida answered. He extended his prosthetic hand. Lincoln clasped the cool metal in his own, firm grip, shook it. When he drew back his hand, there was a weighty coin in his palm. A challenge coin. A long-standing military tradition. On it was a simple design; an angular shield with a sword laid on top. Or, on second look, maybe the shield was a coffin. Along the top in scrollwork it read “519th Applied Intelligence Group”, with the nickname of the unit underneath. The bottom edge of the coin read simply “No Grave Too Deep”, which sounded just vaguely ominous enough to seem like a bunch of weenies trying to sound like tough guys.

“Captain Suh,” Almeida said. “Welcome to the Outriders.”

FOUR

P
IPER SWEPT
two slender fingers across the panel to her left, switched the view from Sol-side to the Deep. Another deft motion and the view expanded to fill the entire station wall in front of her. It was just a constructed image of course, not a real actual window into outer space. When she’d first seen pictures of people working a hop, she’d thought they had real honest-to-goodness windows, big old panes of glass separating the watchers from the vacuum. Then she’d learned about what a grain of sand moving at velocity could do to the outer hull of a ship and she came to appreciate why no one had ever once made a hop with a real honest-to-goodness window. It was still a little disappointing.

Most of the watchers preferred to look back from the station, back towards the sun. Back towards home. Not Piper. The stars had always called to her, always been her destiny. She’d spent her formative years staring up at them from her family’s little patch of dirt in the eastern lowlands of Peru; when she turned seventeen, she signed up to see how close to them she could get. It’d been almost nine years since and even though her current assignment was the furthest out she’d ever been, it didn’t feel nearly far enough. She hoped that by the time she was her parents’ age, people would finally take space travel seriously and really find a way to get out there amongst the stars. For some reason, her great-grandparents’ generation had celebrated just for getting off Earth, and her grandparents’ generation seemed to think colonizing Mars had made them a space-faring race. To Piper, that was like moving to the house next door and patting yourself on the back for being well traveled.

Still, she was off to a good start. Right now she was sitting about sixty-five million miles from Earth, and, as far as she was concerned, maybe infinity miles from home. She really ought to call her parents, she thought with mild guilt. But talking with them always had a way of pulling her mind back Earthward, to oppressive humidity and too much rain, and to promises broken and hearts too often betrayed. Here, sitting in front of the crystal-clear projection where the perfect image made it seem like the hull of the hop had been sheared cleanly away, she could almost believe space was embracing her, inviting her further out, promising only hope, and discovery, and joy. She loved her parents. She did. She’d get in touch with them soon. Maybe not today, but soon.

Piper cleared her head with a shake and settled in to work. The console in front of her glowed softly with subdued blue lines, gentle traces in the darkness of Hari’s preferred display configuration, the colleague she’d just replaced. Piper glided fingertips over the surface, waking it and calling up the sensor suite. The console recognized her prints on contact and instantly reconfigured the layout of the screens to her liking. A message appeared in the main interface.

Hello Piper.

“Hey, Gus,” she said. Her coworkers argued both with her and amongst themselves as to whether Piper was a technophobe or just old-fashioned for disabling the voice features on the console, but they all agreed it was a strange choice. Neither side was right, of course. She was just an introvert and always got more than her fill of chat down on deck. The bubble was her one place of solace on the whole station, and she didn’t see any reason to clutter it up with unnecessary chatter. Gus was the perfect gentleman, only speaking when spoken to, and then only in text.

Piper ran through her checkpad of diagnostics, making sure all the sensor systems were in shape and tracking. Technically it wasn’t necessary; it was part of end-of-shift protocol to ensure the next watcher had everything they needed. Hari had reported all systems green before handing the station over to her, but Piper always double-checked. It’s not that she didn’t trust her coworkers. She just knew how routine too often led to complacency, and the fact that nothing had ever been out of order in the four years she’d been on station made it all the more likely that everyone else had just gotten used to assuming things were working fine. She wasn’t confident that everyone was keeping a close eye out. And Piper always kept a close eye out.

Satisfied, she settled back into the mesh chair, situated herself for a long shift. Someone had adjusted the armrests. Again. Piper loved that chair. She’d spent hours searching out its most-guarded mechanical secrets, learned the ways of every knob, switch, lever, and slider. Weeks of testing and experimenting had unlocked a comfort she’d believed, like sunrises and ocean waves, she’d lost forever. The adjustment was only moderately annoying, though. There generally wasn’t much else for her to do anyway.

The hop she was assigned to was officially designated Veryn-Hakakuri Station YN-773; VH was a minor corp in the grand scheme of things, and YN-773 was pretty out of the way even for them. It wasn’t along any of the main trade routes. She’d only seen three big cruisers since she’d taken the job out here. Smaller craft docked more frequently, but never for long. Just to get tooled up, or to re-sync the latest bounce report on their way to whichever station was their final destination. Piper liked the little hop, though. It was the first one she’d been on that was synced up with Mars’s orbit instead of Earth’s, and even though they maintained a Terran day-night schedule and the orbit didn’t actually make any difference in her day-to-day routine, it still felt more exotic, somehow. And there was some kind of executive suite down on the lowest level that was off limits to all the techs and corporate peons like her, and that at least gave everyone something to talk about.

It still struck Piper as funny that the station had a down. Technically the station’s top-most section was supposed to be aligned along the same axis as Earth’s magnetic northern pole, but that didn’t really make any sense either when you thought about it, because it’s not like ground folk went around with all their heads northward. And it all seemed a little sad to her too, the amount of effort everyone put into trying to make life in space just like life on one of the planets. Such a waste, to get so far out and then to refuse to embrace all the promise the Deep offered. Like going to the beach for the first time and spending the whole day inside.

Maybe Piper had never really been meant to live on-planet. She had some affection for Earth, and a mild loyalty to the United American Federation, but she credited that more to her place of birth than anything else. Many of her hopmates spent endless hours talking about the politics between planets, making predictions about what the latest treaty or interplanetary report would mean, arguing about whose fault it would be if a war ever started, and who would win. But to Piper that was exactly the kind of thing that was holding the entire human race back. Her forebears had moved to a neighboring planet, but nothing had really changed. They were all still doing the same things they’d always done.

For Piper, it was a disappointment to see people so concerned with such petty nonsense. There was so much more out there, so much waiting to be discovered, and yet everyone was still obsessed with deciding which patch of dirt belonged to whom. Terran dirt, Lunar dirt, Martian dirt – it was still just dirt, and there was a whole universe full of it.

The strained relationship between Earth and Mars had about as much impact on YN-773 as any of the millions of disputes that took place on either planet’s surface every single day. It was all too distant to matter, the station too remote to feel any noticeable effect. And yet it was still a constant source of chatter. The fact that her coworkers relished the meaningless debates probably played into Piper’s decision to volunteer for so many shifts on watch. Though, if she was being fair, she had to admit there usually wasn’t a whole lot else for them to do. It just all seemed like a waste of energy and brainpower to her.

Of course, there had been a bit of excitement of late, at least as far as the hop was concerned. A hauler, called
Destiny’s Undertow
, was limping its way towards YN-773 and had been for a couple of weeks, supposedly all the way from the belt. According to the ship’s captain, they’d been hoping for a gravity sling off Mars to help them get all the way back to Earth, but took damage from a collision and missed the window. Somehow that put them far enough out of the way of anything that 773 was the closest hop that could provide service, and so they were slowly trundling their way towards the station.

The story didn’t completely add up. Unless the captain was really bad at math, there was no way 773 was the best choice for anyone trying to sling Mars. Of course everyone on 773 had their own theories about what had really happened. The most elaborate involved pirates and an attempted hijacking. The most mundane were that the captain was trying to save money and ran his ship too long without good maintenance. The most likely, at least in Piper’s mind, was that they’d been hauling something they shouldn’t have been and whatever deal they thought they were going to make didn’t go so well. People didn’t just show up at 773 for convenience. It was too far out of the way from… well, everything.

Still, business was business and any business that showed up at 773 was probably good for everyone. No one thought much about the out-of-the-way stations until they were low on juice and drifting, then everyone prayed for one.
Destiny’s Undertow
was finally close enough that a couple of tugs had gone out to meet her and were bringing her in. Piper pinched one of the sensor windows to compress it and then expanded a new window from exterior cameras to check out the progress. The tugs were already flaring thrusters in their slowing protocol, which meant they were maybe a half hour out from starting the docking procedure. Maybe when it got closer to time, she’d flip her main view around to watch the ship come in. Maybe.

For the time being, Piper was content to let her gaze fall out into the soft and endless expanse of the Deep. A few minutes later, out in the nothingness, motion caught her eye. Reflexively her gaze snapped to it, but when she looked, she saw nothing out of the ordinary. Just the pinprick lights of stars so distant they might no longer exist. It struck her then, oddly; the idea that some of those pale, cold lights might be ghosts of things long dead. And while she was staring out into the emptiness pondering what such an ending would look like, and whether she’d ever get to see such a spectacle, one of the stars winked out. Vanished.