Outriders (9 page)

A rippling distortion emanated from the point of impact, a powerful wave of debris. It hadn’t fully registered with her that what she was seeing was real when the edge of the ripple reached the pod. The force hit with such violence that the tumbling of the pod outmatched its internal gravity; in one moment the straps of the harness cut into her shoulders, the next, she was crushed back into the crash couch. Sensations came too fast to process; a stab of pain through her hand, bursts of white light, shrieks of wrenching metal. Warning sirens screamed feeble and futile cries amidst the chaos as the pod’s subsystems sputtered and failed.

Piper had no concept of how long it took for that initial blast to pass through the tiny vessel. Seconds maybe, or minutes. At some point she simply became aware that she could hear herself breathing; panting, really. The pod was lit in dusky hues. Most of its interior lights were out or sputtering weakly. Without any input from its single occupant, the lifepod automatically attempted to stabilize and did so with a broken, staccato rhythm. Its thrusters fired sporadically, jerking the pod first in one direction, then back in the other as its damaged navigational systems overcompensated. After a minute or two, the pod managed to reduce its tumble to a mere slow roll around a single axis.

The constructed image on the wall was patchworked with black squares or strange colors, unsurprising indications that the pod’s sensors and optical array had suffered substantial damage. In the sections that persisted, however, the shattered remains of YN-773 were crystal clear. Piper covered her mouth with both hands. The devastation was complete, and incomprehensible in scale. Veryn-Hakakuri Station YN-773, her home for the past four years, was now nothing more than a field of debris, spiraling and expanding out into the nothingness of the deep.

“Scan for lifepods,” Piper said weakly. The console chirped and futzed out a broken static reply. Piper couldn’t make out the words, but it didn’t matter. She could see for herself. No beacons showed on any of the displays, no telltale strobes flashed in her visualization on the pod wall. Even the hauler was gone. Piper was alone.

A chill poured down on her, a waterfall of dread mingled with trembling despair; numbness overtook her mind, froze her thoughts. The paralysis crept down into her chest, gripped her lungs. From somewhere outside herself, as if she’d become a detached observer, Piper realized that she was going into shock. She’d have to do something about that. If she could only remember what.

She didn’t have time to. A dark silhouette spun across her view, and Piper barely had time for the shape to register before the impact came; just time enough for a final thought to flit through her mind… She should have called her parents.

The pod juddered with savage intensity and the force whipped Piper violently into blackness.

FIVE

L
INCOLN DROPPED
his ruck on the floor of the entryway and took his hat off. After all the hassle he’d gone through just getting into the fenced-off, checkpoint-controlled section of base, he’d been expecting that someone would be there to greet him. There wasn’t. As far as he could tell, he was the only one in the facility at all. Lieutenant Kennedy had been pretty thorough with the instructions on getting
to
the 519th’s main planning facility: keep your credentials handy, be prepared for at least one security check, and if anyone asks, you’re a
technician
for the Information Support Brigade. She’d been surprisingly light on details about what to do once he actually
arrived
.

The small entryway was relatively bare; cheap tile floor, cinder block walls painted a pale yellow that may have been some shade of off-white in its prime. Not exactly the slick, high-tech secret hideout for an elite Special Mission Unit that Lincoln had imagined. In fact, his first impression was that the place was kind of a dump.

He took a deep, slow breath. Sure enough, the air was mildly stale, with a faintly damp smell that lingered just below the strongly antiseptic pine scent of the cleaning solution the army had been using… well, probably since the day of its founding. It smelled pure military. It smelled like home.

The entry led to a short corridor with doors on either side. A woman stuck her head out of one of the rooms; dark hair, dark eyes. Mid-thirties, maybe. Serious. She didn’t say anything, but her chin dropped and her eyebrows went up, and Lincoln got the distinct feeling that he needed to explain himself and quickly.

“I’m Captain Lincoln Suh,” he said. “Lieutenant Kennedy sent me over?” He made it a question, even though he didn’t mean to. Something about the look in the woman’s eyes drew it out that way.

She stared at him for a moment longer than was comfortable, and then disappeared back into her room without a word. Lincoln stood there in the entry waiting for some further development. He was just reaching for his pad to make sure he had the right building when the woman reappeared, walking towards him and wiping her hands on her pants.

“Sir,” she said with a quick salute. Lincoln returned it. “Mind if I check your creds?”

“Not at all,” Lincoln said. He reached under his left sleeve and swiped a fingertip across the dermal pad on his forearm and then used a quick series of hand gestures to call up the necessary details and transmit them to the woman. Her eyes went unfocused briefly as she reviewed them on the holographic display only she could see. A moment later she nodded and extended her hand.

“Sergeant Wright,” she said. Lincoln shook her hand. Her grip was strong, but Lincoln could tell it could get a lot stronger. “Probably want to wash up after that. I was in the middle of cleaning my weapon systems.”

“Good to meet you, sergeant,” he said. “And a little elbow grease never hurt anyone.”

“Never an enlisted, anyway,” she said without missing a beat.

“Truth is,” Lincoln said, leaning forward slightly with a quick wink, “it’s good for my nails.”

Sergeant Wright’s expression didn’t change at all, not even in that polite way people sometimes used at least to acknowledge that you’d made a joke. She was dressed in her standard issue pants and a tan T-shirt, but there were no markings or insignia anywhere on her person. She had a hard look, though; sharp eyes, an aura of intensity that spoke of many years of service. And Lincoln knew from the way she held herself that she was undoubtedly a combat vet.

“You’re not
just
a sergeant though, certainly,” Lincoln continued. “EC-7?”

“Eight, actually, sir.”

“First Sergeant Wright, then?”

“Master sergeant, sir. But yeah. We’re not real big on the formalities around here though.”

“Sounds like my kind of place,” Lincoln said with a smile.

“Well don’t get too comfortable just yet,” Wright said. She let it hang for a moment without elaboration. It wasn’t rude, but she was clearly establishing boundaries. A moment later, she simply said, “You can walk with me, I’ll give you a quick look around.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Lincoln said, and then nudged his gear with his foot. “What do I do about this?”

She turned and started back down the hall, talking to him over her shoulder as she went. “You can leave it. It won’t wander, and we don’t get a lot of visitors through here.”

Lincoln followed along behind Master Sergeant Wright with light steps, tried to keep a respectful distance. He didn’t know anything about Wright yet, but he had no doubt that she’d been one of the colonel’s original team members. It showed in the way she carried herself, in the professional way she treated him that extended only as far as military etiquette required. This was by far her team more than his, no matter what the ranks said. Nothing he’d done before mattered now. He’d been the new guy enough times, the officer getting added in to well-knit teams, to know how it worked. He’d be starting over, again, proving himself, again. But for the first time in years, Lincoln found he couldn’t quite feel certain that he’d be able to do it here.

“So,” she said, holding her arms out to either side. “This is the place.”

There wasn’t much to distinguish those first front rooms from most of the other facilities Lincoln had been assigned to over his career. A little smaller, maybe. As they passed the room Wright had initially stuck her head out of, he saw a wide table laden with hardware, arranged in tidy piles and neat rows. From the quick scan, he recognized parts to at least four separate weapons platforms, though they were all stripped down to their barest components. Tools, cleaning solvent, and bottles of gun oil lined one long edge of the table. A single chair sat at a crooked angle.

“Looks like a pretty thorough cleaning,” Lincoln said, nodding back towards the room after they’d passed it.

“I like to be sure,” Wright replied. She paused at a T-intersection where the front hall transitioned to the rest of the building, and pointed to the left. “Business,” she said, then pointed to the right, “Everything else. You been down to the shop to get fitted yet?”

“Uh, no,” Lincoln said. “I didn’t know I was supposed to.”

“You
are
armor-rated, though?”

“Yeah, just been a while since I had to run it live. And I never did get to run the big assault stuff.”

She nodded. “All right,” she said, and then shook her head slightly. “You really are hot off the press, huh?”

“Yes, ma’am. Colonel Almeida plucked me out of the fire yesterday, Kennedy threw me in the pan this morning.”

“Didn’t brief you much?”

Lincoln shook his head. “I’m a little behind on my reading.” Lieutenant Kennedy had prepped a data package for his review; a couple of weeks’ worth of study on the Group’s role and responsibilities, doctrine, and methodologies. She’d only handed it off about twenty minutes before sending him to the team’s facility.

“I’ll let you meet the team, then we’ll see if we can get you squared away with all the big ticket items.”

Wright tipped her head and led Lincoln away from the “business” wing, towards the “everything else”.

“Back there’s where we do most of our briefings, draw up plans, all the boring stuff,” she said as she walked. “Down this way’s where we spend most of our time though. We operate on big boy rules around here, sir. Unless of course you plan on changing that.”

She glanced back at him briefly, just long enough for him to shake his head, but not long enough for her to see the response. She continued, “Keep yourself and your kit mission ready at all times, and don’t wander off too far. We have to be able to go from zero to a hundred and twenty in about five seconds. I assume if you needed somebody watching over you all the time telling you what to do, you wouldn’t be here.”

“I’ll try to keep up,” Lincoln said. “Or at least not get in the way.”

Wright gave him a cursory tour of the nonessential places: kitchen, lockers, crash rooms for grabbing a couple of hours of sleep when the team was on call. Nothing fancy, and all the rooms felt like they were three-quarters the size they were meant to be, but the layout and amenities confirmed what Lincoln had already suspected. Everything was set up to keep the team close at hand, and to minimize the need for wandering over to other facilities.

“You at least get your housing sorted out yet?” Wright asked.

“Lieutenant Kennedy’s working on it,” Lincoln said. “Haven’t had a lot of time to check it out for myself yet.”

“Might want to get used to that,” she said. She took him to the far end of the hall and paused at the door. “Apart from the range and the kill house, this is probably where we spend most of our time.” She opened the door and revealed the largest room Lincoln had yet seen. The gym.

Like everything else he’d seen so far, there wasn’t a lot of fluff. The room was spartan in its furnishing; bare walls, bare lights hanging from the ceiling, a lot of weights. The only real standout feature was the large mat that dominated the far side of the room, on which two individuals were apparently in the process of trying to murder one another with their bare hands.

“Should we do something about that?” Lincoln asked, gesturing at the two.

“Nah, not yet,” Wright answered, and she motioned towards a man who was in the middle of benchpressing what appeared to be about a hundred and fifty kilos.

“That’s Sergeant Mike Pence,” Wright said. “Probably the nicest guy you’ll ever meet who can kill you from two klicks out.”

Even though the guy was lying down, Lincoln could tell he was tall; six three, maybe six four. He was obviously fit, but had a rangy look, like he’d originally been a couple of inches shorter and had gotten stretched out. Certainly he didn’t look massive enough to be pushing the stack of weights he had loaded on either side of the bar. But the weight was going up and down nevertheless. Wright stood patiently by the door. After six more reps, the last one of which Lincoln wasn’t sure Sergeant Pence was going to complete, the man finished his set, re-racked the bar, and then lay with his hands over his face, breathing deep. Wright took a few steps towards him.

“Hey, Pence,” Wright called. And then again, booming, “Pence!”

Sergeant Pence reacted to the second call, glanced over at them and then removed a bud from his ear. Music blared out of the headphone; sharp, dark, angry tones. He tilted his head back.

“Mas’sarnt?” he said, slurring Master Sergeant Wright’s rank into a single syllable. “What’s the news?”

“Mom sent us a care package,” she said. Pence rolled up off the bench and walked over. As he approached, he flicked his gaze at Lincoln for a brief moment, looked at Lincoln’s eyes, down to his feet, back to his eyes, and then back at Wright. He didn’t seem particularly impressed.

“Yeah? Anything good?”

Wright tilted her head Lincoln’s direction. “New brains, gifted to us from on high.”

“Oh,” Pence said. He saluted with a lazy fluidity. “Sir.” Lincoln returned the salute and then extended his hand.

“Lincoln Suh,” he said.

“Mike,” Pence replied. “You the new shot-caller?” He had a bare hint of rural twang to his vowels, but Lincoln couldn’t place it.

“I don’t know about that,” Lincoln replied. “Colonel Almeida told me a bunch of pretty stories to get me here. That’s about as far as we’ve figured things out.”