Master Sergeant Wright moved down the passageway with careful steps, her weapon shouldered, muzzle sweeping a graceful arc back and forth as she advanced. Keeping the weapon in controlled motion made it faster to snap on target if one should present itself, and also caused less fatigue in the muscles than trying to maintain a static aim-point. Mike followed a few paces behind. Not that she could hear him. If not for the small icon in her view marking his position and distance from her, she would have had to glance over her shoulder to be sure he hadn’t disappeared.
Of course, that might not have helped either. As soon as they’d entered the vessel, they’d both switched on the reactive camouflage of their recon suits. Combining input from its sensor suite and threat matrix, the suit evaluated the environment and adapted its surface to blend in from multiple viewpoints. Even though Wright had never understood the math behind it, she was intimately familiar with the end result. The algorithms weren’t good enough to make anyone invisible yet, but in the right situations they could be almost that good. And even in the wrong situations, it was usually enough to buy Wright those extra few seconds she needed to come out on top.
Thus far, the compartments and passageways had all been clear from their entry point. They’d already checked the deck where they’d entered and two cargo holds, and were working their way down. But they’d been taking it slow. With so many unknowns on board, any contact was likely to lead to a mission abort. The delay on entry and the extra cautious pace once inside had already kept them on the target almost an hour. The whole op was supposed to have taken them less than two, and they hadn’t even really gotten started yet.
“Anvil,” said Lincoln, over team comms. “Check in when you can.”
Wright held up a hand, signaling for Mike to hold position. In situations like these, she didn’t like trying to talk while moving. She dropped down to a knee and kept her weapon up.
“Hammer, Anvil. We’re wrapping up deck four, preparing to move to deck five. No sign of our extra personnel yet.”
“Copy, Anvil. We’re at our access point in the service tunnel. Thumper’s doing her work.”
“Roger.”
“After you hit five, go ahead and move to delta. Hold there until you hear from me. Unless deck five gives you something.”
“Understood.” Delta was her element’s position below the bridge. “Continuing to five.”
“Anvil to five, copy.”
Five was the lowest deck, and typically was the largest cargo hold on a Type-43. For the other decks, holds were placed along the exterior of the ship, arranged around a central passageway. Deck five had a large centrally-located bay that spanned the width of the vessel, since it could be loaded from either side or through the bottom of the ship. It was also where, according to Thumper’s earlier scans, most of the personnel was.
Once the brief conversation was concluded, Wright eased back up to her feet and continued down the passageway. There was an eerie stillness to the vessel, made all the more unnerving by the amount of clutter and garbage scattered in pockets along the way. Clearly, there were a number of people aboard, and whoever they were they didn’t appear to be too concerned about keeping their ship tidy. The fact that they hadn’t heard or seen anyone yet was good for the op, but it made it all feel wrong; like walking through a house abandoned ahead of a sudden disaster that had struck without sign or warning.
Wright led Mike a few more paces down the corridor, to a narrow compartment on their left. She passed by, but motioned for Mike to check the room while she stood guard.
“On it,” Mike said in a whisper. Then, a few moments later, “Clear.”
A door at the end of the passageway was marked as leading down to the lower deck. Once Mike had rejoined her, Wright pressed on to the door and then held there. Mike slid up to one side, looked to her for the signal. On her nod, he opened the door. Wright slipped through, quickly checked the upper landing for hostiles.
Still no one.
The landing was metal grating; looking down through it, Wright could see the tight skeletal staircase that doubled back on itself multiple times before reaching the lower deck far below. Wright hated clearing stairwells. No matter how many times she had done it, she still got a twinge of anxiety before stepping out onto that first step. And she had done it a lot. Too many angles, too easy to get cut off on both sides, trapped.
According to the schematics, Five was twice the height of the other decks, to accommodate the larger freight. Staring down at all those steps, with all their corners and angles, made it seem twice again as far.
“Hammer, Anvil’s on the stairs down to deck five,” she reported, more to help anchor herself than for any reasons of protocol.
“Roger,” Lincoln answered.
“Moving down,” she said, and started the descent. She kept her weapon up and out over the thin railing the whole way down, aimed at whatever next twisting angle posed the greatest risk of threat. Mike sidestepped his way along behind her, performing the same constantly-shifting dance to cover the landing above.
It only took a minute or two to reach the lower deck, but it felt to Wright like twenty. Once there, they repeated their door-opening routine, with Wright leading the way. The door opened to a short passageway with two compartments on each side, and an intersecting passageway that cut through the middle of them. Wright moved forward to the corner of the intersection, while Mike checked the first two compartments.
“Clear left,” he said. And then several seconds later, “Clear right.”
Before he could rejoin her, though, a sharp, ringing clatter came from down the right-hand side of the intersecting passageway.
“Hey, careful, those aren’t free!” a woman said loudly, in Mandarin. After so long without any contact, the sound of another human voice was almost startling to Wright.
“Well maybe you should carry them all, then,” came an answer in English, tinged with a Martian dialect. A man, further away than the woman, but not by much.
“I’m not cleaning that up!”
“You never do!”
Wright glanced over her shoulder, saw Mike standing halfway out of one of the compartments, covering the door back to the stairwell. After some shuffling sounds and muttered words she couldn’t make out came an unmistakable noise. Footsteps. Moving their way, and quickly.
Two people, at least one of them carrying something metallic and possibly heavy. The question now was, where were they headed? To the upper decks? Across the hall? To one of the compartments Wright had just passed?
She’d know the answer soon enough.
Wright hissed sharply, to get Mike’s attention. When he looked, she motioned for him to move back into the compartment. He didn’t acknowledge her in any way, except to glide backwards and disappear from her view.
She backpedaled slowly, then slid into the compartment. Once inside, she quickly glanced around. The compartment was narrow, deeper than it was wide, and had large pipes running from floor to ceiling. There wasn’t much room for the two of them. It was sufficient for the moment, but there was absolutely nowhere to hide. If that door opened, the only option they were going to have was to shoot first and hope no one else came along before they could move the bodies. At least it was mostly dark, lit only by a single low-intensity red light in the ceiling.
The footsteps grew sharper, more distinct, and then fell silent as Wright pushed the door closed and it sealed. She felt as though she’d gone deaf and blind.
There was a device on her belt designed exactly for this situation; when attached to a surface and paired with the sensor suite of her reconnaissance armor, it enabled her to see through walls. It would take her only a few seconds to set up, but she would need both hands to do it. And she would have to stand within arm’s length of the door. If the two individuals came through, she’d be caught between the wall and the door, wouldn’t be able to fire, wouldn’t be able to guarantee she could even get clear for Mike to take the shot. Wright made a split-second call, decided it wasn’t worth the risk. Better to be blind and hope. At least that way, they could keep two guns up.
Mike had already moved as far towards the rear of the compartment as he could, standing his back against one of the pipes. Wright tucked in front of him, in a crouch at his feet, so he could shoot over her if it came to that. Both weapons trained on the door.
“Hammer, Anvil’s got two unknowns moving through,” Wright reported. “Might be headed up.”
“You at risk?”
“Not if they don’t open this door.”
“Take ‘em if you have to. But only if you have to.”
“Understood.”
Wright kept her eyes locked on the door handle, intent on catching the first sign of movement, a hawk waiting for the field mouse to twitch. Counted out the heavy seconds. Three. Five. Ten.
After thirty, it seemed likely that the two crew members had passed by on their way to some other part of the vessel. That was a short-term blessing that could easily turn into a mid-term curse. On ops when the environment allowed for it, Thumper would stay behind at a command point and run surveillance to help the rest of the team mark and track hostiles. Wright was old-school and generally thought that too many people relied too heavily on the tech. To her, it was a crutch, and if you didn’t have the skills to do without it, you’d be in big trouble when it failed on you. Which it would.
Even so, it was cases like these that made her admit sometimes it was really nice to have the help.
She gave it another sixty seconds before she spoke.
“I’ll check it, Mike,” she said. “Be ready.”
“Yep,” he answered.
Wright lowered her weapon and crept forward in her crouch, drew a device from her belt, placed it against the door. It attached and held itself in place while she activated it. After a moment, an electric-blue border radiated outward from the device, spreading like a ring of lightning rippling in slow motion across water’s surface. Wherever it spread, the door became translucent. Nothing in the physical world had changed, but through her visor the door appeared to have been rendered to mist.
From her vantage point, the passageway looked clear in all directions. Unfortunately, the device didn’t let her see around corners. Wright deactivated the device and returned it to her belt.
“Clear,” she said to Mike. “Ready to open.”
“Open,” he answered.
“Opening.”
Wright reached up for the handle. Slowly applied pressure, gently, gently, until it started to move. She had to force herself consciously to keep the pressure steady, while the undisciplined lizard-brain part of her told her to do it all fast, fast, fast. When the handle reached its lowest point, she eased the door open, pulling it towards herself. She did the best she could, but there just wasn’t enough room to maneuver to put herself in any sort of tactically advantageous position. If anyone had come into the passageway in that brief span, Wright was going to have to count on the few seconds of surprise and confusion to get the work done.
She opened the door until light from the corridor seeped in around the edges; she held it there, and leaned her head closer, straining to hear anything that might indicate where the two had gone. Even with the sensors on her suit dialed up, she couldn’t make out anything useful.
Wright glanced back over her shoulder and said to Mike, “Coming up.” He raised the muzzle of his weapon towards the overhead in response. She stood, took a half step back from the door, and then opened it wide enough to get a clear view. The passageway remained empty and silent.
“Hammer, Anvil’s clear,” she reported. “We’re continuing on towards the cargo holds now.”
“Roger. Any sign of your people?”
“Negative. Might have gone up, might still be roaming around down here with us.”
“Copy that. Keep your head on a swivel.”
“Yeah.”
Wright stepped out into the passageway and held there for a few seconds listening before she motioned to Mike to follow her. They resumed their slow crawl of the ship. At the intersection, she turned right. The fact that people had come from there seemed to be as good an indication as any that maybe there was something that direction worth seeing.
The passageway led to another door, this one marked as access to one of the vessel’s side cargo holds. On the floor just outside there was some sort of grey-white residue spattered along the deck and up one bulkhead. She crouched down to take a look, touched it with her middle finger and then rubbed the substance between fingertip and thumb. It was vaguely slimy, but with a gritty texture, like rice or oatmeal cooked too long in too much water.
Some kind of cleaning solution, or fluid from a machine, maybe. Then again, judging from the general disarray of the other parts of the ship, she could probably rule out cleaning solution.
She got back to her feet and moved up to the entrance of the cargo hold.
“Ready Mike?”
“Ready.”
She opened the door, and pushed quickly through.
From the instant she stepped in, Wright knew something was off. Her instincts detected it first, before she had any obvious indication of what it was. It wasn’t anything she could see. But it felt wrong. The main lights were off; the hold was lit only by low-power reds at wide intervals, casting the hold in ember-glow hues and pools of smoldering darkness. Wright’s visor automatically adjusted to compensate.
On first glance, it looked like she had expected, given the state of the rest of the ship. Various containers were stacked in haphazard groups, separated by irregular aisles. It almost looked like the loaders had just dumped all the freight into the hold, and then pushed everything into piles at random. The arrangement was neither an efficient use of space, nor particularly convenient to navigate through. Typically haulers would try to maximize one or the other, and which one they prioritized could generally tell you something about the skipper’s personality. Tidy rows usually meant ease of access to cargo verification; a sign of order and concern for inventory. Cargo holds full to the brim indicated a prime interest in maximizing profits per haul. Based on the layout of this hold, the impression Wright got was that the Ava Leyla’s captain didn’t especially care about either.
She held position for a few moments while Mike closed the door behind them, and they remained there in silence for several seconds afterward, listening. Here, too, it was still and quiet. The hold’s temperature was warmer than she would have normally anticipated. Not warm, certainly. It would have been too cool to be comfortable had she not been in the suit. But many cargo vessels kept their holds barely above freezing, unless they were shipping temperature-sensitive freight.
“Mike, cover,” Wright said. “I want to double-check something, internal.”
“Copy.”
They moved a few paces deeper into the hold into an alcove formed by one stack of shipping containers, where they had some concealment. There, Wright activated her internal display while Mike kept watch. She pulled up the schematic of the ship, overlaid with the signatures Thumper had detected with Poke before the team had made entry. The imagery hadn’t been updated since the initial scan, but looking at the large, bright cloud on the lower deck of the ship, it seemed certain that Wright and Mike should have run into more people by now. And if she was reading it correctly, they ought to be standing pretty close to being right in the middle of that cloud.
She switched the display off, and took another look at the surroundings. In doing so, her conscious mind finally caught up with her instincts. The reason the hold felt wrong was because it was too small. All the time she’d spent in the haptic sim had given Wright a good sense of the general structure of the vessel. Even with all the different layouts available, certain elements should have remained fixed.
The bulkhead was too low. Or, maybe, the deck was too high. Either way, the cargo hold had been modified, there was no doubt about that.
“Hammer, Anvil,” she said.
“Whatcha got?” Lincoln answered over comms.
“You guys using Poke right now?”
“Yeah, Thumper’s got it assisting her. You need it?”
“Possibly. Got a hunch, but I’m not sure how to confirm it just yet.”
“Roger that, stand by.”
Wright waited, and a few seconds later Thumper clicked in over the team channel.
“Heya Mir,” she said. “I can work without Poke for a little bit, but I can’t run him for you right now. You want me to hand off?”
“Yeah, if you can.”
“No sweat. Passing control to you now,” said Thumper. And then added, “Don’t let it hurt itself.”
Wright’s suit chimed as it acquired Poke’s control system. Poke was still in between the inner and outer hull of the ship, somewhere near Deck Two. She took over and started the work of navigating the team’s foldable to their current position.
Lincoln resisted the urge to look back over his shoulder to check on Thumper. He was standing guard off her right shoulder, keeping an eye on the long service tunnel that stretched off and curved with the shape of the ship. She was crouched behind him with one of her tech kits out, working to get hooked in to the Ava Leyla’s system network. From what Lincoln could tell, it was part information technology, part neurosurgery. She’d been at it for almost half an hour.
“Where are we at, Thump?” he asked.
“Trying to make sure I don’t give anybody any reason to come up here and see why their comms are making funny noises, captain,” she answered. Thumper didn’t usually call him by his rank, unless she was annoyed with him.
Lincoln knew better than to hassle her. Thumper never wasted time on an op. But standing in that narrow tunnel was starting to wear on his nerves. Everything was too close; floor, walls, ceiling, all of it felt compressed, almost as if the space had been intended for children. It gave him the same gradually expanding annoyance as having someone’s hand hovering an inch from his face, doing the whole I’m-not-touching-you thing. Which, by this time, had become almost irritating enough to make him want to go full-on assault mode, just to take it out on someone. Almost.
“OK,” Thumper said, with an exhale that made it sound like she’d been holding her breath the whole time. “I’m in. Just gonna take me a second to crawl it.”
Lincoln hoped it really was only going to take a second. In fact, it took her about ten, which was close enough.
“Huh,” she said.
“You get a hit?” Lincoln asked.
“Yep,” Thumper said. “Comm array’s got a command module bridge piggybacked on it. Or a jury-rigged one, anyway.”
“And that does what?” Lincoln said.
“It’s like a uh…” she said. “Well, a bridge. Like I said. Sort of like a repeater: you pass a signal through one end, it gets strengthened and passed on to the final destination. But it’s special-purpose, command-and-control code type stuff. And it’s got some high-grade encryption baked in, so whatever it’s talking to isn’t your off-the-shelf kind of gear.”
“These are our guys, then.”
“No,” Thumper said, with a head shake. “I don’t think so. I mean, yeah, sort of. But you wouldn’t need a bridge if you were running the C&C from here. You could just do it straight. I’m thinking your pass-through theory is probably right. Somebody’s sending comms through this ship. Whether these people are in on it or not, they aren’t running the show. Pretty sure we’re on the right track, but we’re not at the top yet.”
“What are we doing about it?”
“Well. Good news is I can probably extract the bounce data from it, and figure out where the other end is.”
If Thumper led with the good news, then that meant there was bad on the way.
“But the bad news is…” Lincoln said.
“I’m going to need access to their comm array. For a while.”
“No chance that’s somewhere easy to get to, I guess.”
“It’s on the bridge.”
“Of course it is.”
Lincoln reflexively reached up to pinch the bridge of his nose before remembering he had the suit on, and there was no way for him to touch his face. He stopped his hand halfway and clenched it into a fist instead.
“All right,” Lincoln said. He switched over to the team wide channel. “Anvil, Hammer’s done in the service tunnel.” He waited for Wright’s confirmation before continuing.
“Anvil copies,” Wright responded after a moment. “What’s the story?”
“Thumper’s got an ID on some gadget, we’re going to have to go down into the vessel to pull it. Looks like we’re going to have to take the bridge after all. Can you start making your way into position?”
“Not just yet. I want to get confirmation on our extra personnel first.”
“Roger that,” said Lincoln. “We’ll make our way to internal entry and hold for your callback.”
“Understood Hammer. Shouldn’t be long.”
“Keep us posted. Hammer out.”
By the time Lincoln had checked in with the rest of the team, Thumper had already finished collecting her tools. She was in the process of replacing the panel she’d removed in order to gain access to the ship’s communications array.
“Wish you could work as fast as you clean up, Thump,” Sahil said. “I ain’t been this bored on an op since that babysittin’ job for the Brazilians.”
“I do it to annoy you, Sahil,” Thumper answered. “I’m sure I could find an alarm in here to trip if that’d help.”
“Too late now,” he replied.
Thumper secured the panel back in place, and if Lincoln hadn’t watched her do it he would have had a hard time telling she’d done anything all. She’d even put it back on slightly off-angle, just like they’d found it. Thumper got to her feet, brought her weapon around from her back, and nodded at Lincoln.
“Let’s go see if we can find something for Sahil to do, sir,” she said.
“Roger that,” Lincoln responded, trying very hard not to let the numbers get to him. If they could take the bridge fast enough, there was a good chance they could seal off the lower decks and prevent the rest of the crew from retaking it. Better than good. Ninety-nine percent likely. But there was always the if.
Wright brought Poke into the cargo hold through one of the environmental control vents. Once it had made its way to them, she had it reconfigure to a wide, flat shape, and set it to autoscan. From there, the little foldable went to work crisscrossing the hold, navigating around and through the containers on some search pattern of its own devising. Wright led Mike on their own separate search, confirming that there was no one else in the cargo bay. They’d completed their circuit when Poke chimed at her.
The datafeed showed its location and what it had found.
Based on the heat and electrical impulses, there were seventeen people somewhere directly below it.
But when Wright crossed the hold to where Poke was, she found that the foldable had wedged itself in between two closely-packed containers. She quickly surveyed the immediate surroundings, and then summoned Poke back to her as her suspicions coalesced. The bot trundled its way over, gradually spreading out again as space allowed.
“Mike, check that container,” she said, pointing to the one on the right. “See if there’s a way in.”
“You mean besides cutting through?” he asked.
She ignored the comment and went to work searching the other container. Most shipping containers were sealed at the loading point, both for safety and security, particularly when freelance haulers were involved. Made it more obvious when any tampering had gone on. Wright walked around the outside, scanning for any indication of a door or hatch. Nothing unusual stood out or caught her eye, and she paused at the back side of the container, wondering if she’d gotten it wrong. She was just reaching to pull her scanner off her belt to get a look inside when Mike spoke.
“Got it,” he said.
“‘K, hold on a sec,” she answered. She moved around and rejoined him. Sure enough, at the back corner of the container there was a thin seam. Even with the visor’s light amplification and its sensors picking up other spectra outside normal visual range, the line was difficult to see. It was well-camouflaged in the regular contours of the container.
“Good eyes,” Wright said.
“Pretty, too,” Mike replied, deadpan. Despite the wise crack, his tone of voice suggested absolute focus; sometimes it seemed like his mouth wasn’t even connected to his mind. “Think we can spring it?”
“Better get a second opinion first,” she answered. She clicked over to the team channel. “Thumper, you got a sec?”
“Yeah, what’s up?” Thumper responded.
“Got what looks like a shipping container with a concealed entry point on the side here. I need to see if it’s wired up.”
“What, like a secret door or something?”
“Yes.”
“Cool! Sure, yeah, is Poke still running around?”
“It’s here with me. You want it back?”
“Yeah, gimme a sec with it.”
Wright handed control of the foldable back over to Thumper. After a moment, it reconfigured itself into a vaguely beetle-like shape and proceeded to crawl up the side of the container. It paused at a height just above Wright’s head.
“Whatever’s in here, they’re not delivering it,” Thumper said. “From the tracking history, it looks like they just update the destination every so often. Never actually offload it.”
“I’m just worried about the door right now,” Wright said.
“Working on it,” she answered. Wright glanced back at Mike, who had turned to face the opposite direction, keeping watch. Every minute they spent down here was a minute longer they had to spend on target. And every minute longer on target was just an extra opportunity for it to go wrong. Ninety seconds later, Thumper got back to them.
“Neat,” Thumper said. “This is sort of clever. Looks like two actually, one on the side, and a hatch in the floor. Like a double false bottom. I guess if the authorities are clever enough to find the first one, it just looks like a way to skim some product out of the container. Probably wouldn’t look any harder beyond that. And yeah, good call, they’re both wired.”
“Think you can bypass?” Wright asked. As she was asking, the side entry point clicked and partially retracted.
“Hatch is physical,” Thumper said. “You’ll have to open it manually. But it shouldn’t set off any alarms.”
“Roger. I’m taking Poke back,” said Wright. “Mike, keep an eye out.”
“You got it,” Mike replied.
Wright assumed control of the foldable, and sent it into the container first, attached to the underside of the roof. It was pitch black inside; Poke’s sensors fed data directly to her visor, crafting images from the darkness. Metal crates were stacked nearly floor to ceiling, held in place against either side of the container with networks of straps. A narrow corridor ran down the middle. Wright made her way to the far end, where a row of crates reached only to waist height. These were braced against the roof of the container with a series of expandable arms. The crates were visually indistinguishable from one another, except for the one that Thumper had marked with a digital signature. Wright removed the brace from the top of it and after a minute or two of searching, found two portions of the crate that were actually latches.
She’d already confirmed enough to know her hunch was correct. There was no doubt about it now, the extra personnel they’d detected were down there below her. Hidden under the deck, with an entrance that was itself doubly-disguised. Human cargo, being smuggled to who knew where. Maybe they were refugees. Maybe escaped prisoners. Maybe radicals, looking to infiltrate some stable society so they could make a statement. Whatever the case, whoever they were, right now they were trapped in a shipping container.
And if they were in a shipping container, then they weren’t a threat; if not a threat, then no factor for the op. A complication, possibly, but not a threat. There was no good reason to risk discovery, just to satisfy curiosity. And yet, even as her mind worked through the angles and implications, her desire to know, to positively identify, drove her hands.
Silently, slowly, she unhooked the latches and raised the edge just enough to let Poke slip through. It worked its way down, clinging to the side, and then to the ceiling.
There was a single light in one corner of the hidden compartment, a dull, yellow-brown globe that coated the room in a clinging, muddy aura. And through Poke’s feed, Wright saw that her hunch hadn’t been exactly correct.
People, yes.
Seventeen of them, as expected. They were gathered in small groups, huddled together for warmth and whatever comfort they could find. Some appeared to be sleeping. On second look, Wright realized that the groups were gathered around large bowls or pots. Scooping their hands in and bringing them to their mouths in hurried desperation. Her mind flashed back to the substance she’d found spattered on the deck in the passageway outside. The slimy, gritty grey-white mess she’d taken for some kind of mechanical fluid. Their food.
With Poke’s lens she scanned the faces, and despite her years of service in some of the most horrible locations and situations in the known, her heart lurched and her emotions slipped. Their eyes were frightened, confused, hollowed with weariness, and hunger, and who could say what else. And the oldest among them could not have been more than thirteen years of age.
Wright stood in silence, her mind shocked into stasis. For how long, she didn’t know. Her comms brought her back to herself.
“What you got, mama bear?” Mike asked.
In response, Wright split Poke’s feed, piped it into Mike’s visor. For once, he had nothing to say.
“Hammer,” Wright said. “Anvil. We’ve located your personnel. Count is seventeen, appear to be subject to trafficking.”
“We copy, Anvil. What’s your assessment?”
Wright didn’t know how to answer.
“Kids, Lincoln,” Mike said. “It’s all a bunch of kids.”
The revelation hit Lincoln with nearly physical force. He felt a shock of cold pass through, a force of frost reality crashing over his expectations for the op. This was one possibility the sim hadn’t come up with, and one for which he felt completely unprepared. He had known it was a possibility that all those extra people weren’t on board by choice. But children… the thought had never entered his mind.
“You copy?” Mike said. Lincoln wasn’t sure how many seconds it’d been since the report had come in.
“Roger, I copy,” he answered. And then added, “Stand by.”
Stand by for what? Lincoln didn’t know yet. His thoughts buzzed through his mind, an overturned hornet’s nest of plans and contingencies and options, without coherence or cohesion. Seventeen kids, headed off to who knew what fate.
“What’re we doin’, Cap’n?” Sahil asked. He was keeping things neutral, but Lincoln could hear the anger in his voice. Lincoln was pretty sure that if he left Sahil to his own devices, the man would likely walk through the vessel and execute every member of the crew with extreme prejudice and zero regret.
“Thumper,” Lincoln said. “Is there any way you can get what you need from the comm array without getting onto the bridge?”
She thought for a moment, but then shook her head. “No, not really. I need physical access to it.”
“What about the device itself? Is it on the bridge?”
“Nah, it’s buried down in the guts, underneath.”
“Anything we can do with it?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t have any of the tools I’d need to be able to pull data directly from it while it’s in place.”
“I mean if we take it home.”
Another span of silence, while Thumper evaluated. It seemed to take her longer than usual.
“Huh. I hadn’t thought about that,” she said. “It’s a little more complicated, probably take me longer on the back end, but yeah, maybe.”
“No time for maybes, Thump.”
“Yeah. Yeah I should be able to do it. Just going to have to replicate a setup once we get back. But I guess if I spend some time with the hardware that might get us some good info too.”
“Are they going to notice it’s missing when it’s gone?”
“I’m not sure they even know they have it, sir. I guess we’ll find out?”
There were no good options.
The seventeen kids brought the potential bad guy count down to more manageable levels. Lincoln knew his team could take the ship now. But then what? They couldn’t leave the ship floating in open space with a bunch of kids on board. There was no telling how long it would take for the nearest authorities to respond. Lincoln couldn’t keep his team on the vessel. The potential cascade of events put too much at risk, too much beyond the team’s ability to control. And they were already short on time, and leads.
No good options. Lincoln made the only choice he could. The only one there was, really.
“Anvil,” he said. “Close it back up.” No matter how lightly he said it, the words sounded harsh even to his own ears.
There was a pause.
“Say again, sir,” Wright replied, her tone carefully controlled.
“Put everything back the way you found it,” Lincoln answered. “I want zero footprint. No indication we were here.”
“But we are here, sir,” Mike said. “We’re here, now.” Lincoln didn’t miss the implied message.
“Not for them,” Lincoln answered.
“We can’t just leave ‘em–” Sahil said.
“We can, and we will,” Lincoln responded, cutting him off. “We have our mission. We lose focus now, a lot worse is going to follow, for a lot more people.”
He said it with a conviction he didn’t feel.
“Wright, take facial on each individual,” he said. “We’ll put it out on the wire when we get back. Let the proper authorities take it from there.”
“Roger that,” Wright answered. Her previous request for Lincoln to repeat his order was her only sign of protest. She knew the decision had been made, and now it was only time to execute.
“Once you’ve got it clean down there, exfil and return to the Lamprey,” Lincoln said. Then he turned and looked back at Sahil. “You too, Sahil. Go ahead and prep the ship for detach. Thumper and I will head in and retrieve the device, then meet you back outside. We’ll freespace to pick up.”
Sahil nodded curtly.
Lincoln didn’t love the idea of sending the rest of his team outside the ship; if trouble came, they wouldn’t be able to provide support. But the fewer of them there were sneaking around the ship, the fewer chances there’d be for accidental contact, and the quicker they could exfiltrate when the time came.
No one argued. Sahil turned and made his way back down the service tunnel, towards the hatch they’d first used to gain entry. All that was left to do now was for Lincoln and Thumper to sneak down through the most active part of the ship, steal a device buried somewhere under the bridge, and get back out without anyone noticing. Success seemed unlikely. Business as usual.
“All right, Thump,” he said. “Lead the way.”
She nodded and squeezed by him, which was no easy task in the narrow service tunnel. And as Lincoln followed her out, he fought to turn off the portion of his mind that was still trying to figure out how they could save all those kids.
“OK, I can get to it from here,” Thumper said. She was more somber, more direct with her words than usual. She hadn’t spoken to him at all during their tense crawl down into the main passageways of the vessel; she’d only communicated through hand signals. But Lincoln didn’t get the impression she was deliberately showing her displeasure at his choice; it seemed more like it was her way of insulating herself from everything outside of the objective at hand. He was trying his best to do the same thing.
The proper access panel to the communications array was actually on the deck above them, on the bridge. But if they had any hope of pulling this off without detection, trying to gain entry to the bridge was clearly no longer an option. Instead, they’d opted to make an access point of their own, through the overhead of a storage compartment roughly beneath the command bridge. It wasn’t ideal, but the few choices they had were all poor, and Thumper had figured that from their limited choices this one was the least bad.
The compartment housed several tall steel sets of shelves running lengthwise from the front of the room to the back, with narrow aisles in between. The lights were off, except for the low-intensity always-on red bulbs that were placed throughout the ship. One near the back corner flickered sporadically, a sure sign that it needed replacement.
For once, the ship’s general disarray worked in the team’s favor. Various foodstuffs and supplies were haphazardly strewn all over the shelving, with no apparent order or plan. Sacks of rice and beans sat on the deck in one corner, alongside what looked like a pile of oil-stained mechanic’s coveralls. The likelihood of anyone noticing anything missing or having been rearranged was slim.
Which was good, as they’d had to move a number of items to make room for Thumper. At the moment, she was lying on her back on the very top of one of the shelves, her face maybe six inches away from the overhead, and her legs propped over a soft-sided container of emergency environment suits. She scooted backward a few inches; the movement caused the whole shelf to shake and wobble. Lincoln instinctively reached out to stabilize it, but Thumper didn’t seem the least bit fazed.
“How long?” Lincoln asked.
“Couple minutes to cut through,” she answered. “Couple minutes to close it back up. Unknown amount of time in the middle.”
He glanced up and saw she’d already begun the work. She traced thin lines in a silvery, metallic paint to form a rectangle on the overhead, a little wider than her shoulders, and starting from just above her head down to her midsection.
Lincoln went back to watching the door a few feet away. He took a deep breath, held it, exhaled slowly. There was something draining about this kind of operation. A slow-burn anxiety. At least in an assault, the training and muscle memory took over, clarity of action became razor sharp, and all that pent-up energy could be poured out. In an infiltration like this, there was nothing to react to, nothing to push against. It was all just waiting, waiting, waiting for that moment of sudden action, with no guarantee that it would come, but disastrous consequences if it came and caught you on your heels.
He’d placed a scanner on the door, but had dialed it in so he could still see the physical structure of the door as well as out into the passageway. If anyone showed up, he wanted to be able to quickly pull the device and didn’t want to lose time fumbling around for it. The early warning wouldn’t do all that much good if the scanner itself was still stuck to the back of the door for the bad guys to see. So far, they’d only seen one person in the passageway, a scruffy wastrel of a man who had hurried past without any sign of slowing.
“Burning now,” Thumper said.
Above her, the silvery line glowed white, star-brilliant for a half second. And then she was pushing the panel up, and sliding it into the hole she’d just made. Through the hole in the overhead, Lincoln could see a beam of the ship’s internal infrastructure, flanked on either side by pipes and masses of cabling. The idea that Thumper could sort through all of that in any sort of quick fashion seemed absurd.
“I’m going to have to get up in there a ways,” she said. “Let me know if I’m making too much noise.”
“Roger,” Lincoln answered. He looked up to check on her again, and saw that she was rolling into an awkward not-quite-seated position. She disappeared into the overhead from the shoulders up, her arms held above her head.
“Oh boy,” she said.
“Problem?”
“Not if I had all day,” she replied.
For the next fifteen minutes, Thumper punctuated the long spans of silence with the occasional grunt or curse. Lincoln had to resist the urge to ask her for updates; he knew she’d let him know whenever there was something to know. There would be no point in the request other than his temporary relief. It was like trying not to scratch an itch.
After about seventeen minutes of Thumper working, Lincoln got more of a distraction than he’d wanted.
People in the passageway. A man and a woman, with a little girl between them. The woman held the girl’s wrist in a controlling manner, which seemed unnecessary, as the girl offered no resistance whatsoever. The moment Lincoln saw them, his gut told him they were headed his way.
“Trouble,” Lincoln said. “We’ve got two inbound. There’s a kid with them.”
“What do you want me to do about it?” Thumper asked; not confrontational, despite her tone. A genuine question.
“How quickly can you get down?”
“Up would be easier.”
“Do it.”
There was no doubt about it. The man in the passageway was in the lead, and he slowed as he approached the storage compartment. Lincoln snatched the scanner off the door, slapped it back in place on his belt, and turned to find a hiding place. Above him, he saw Thumper’s feet disappear into the overhead. A moment later, the panel slid back over the hole she’d cut, angled slightly so it wouldn’t fall through. It wasn’t a perfect fit; to Lincoln’s eyes, the gaps at the corners seemed painfully obvious, a warning that would be impossible to miss. They would just have to hope that no one looked up.
Then again, if that was the thing the bad guys noticed, that would mean Lincoln had solved the biggest problem. Himself.
He quickly moved to the back corner of the storage room, furthest from the door, with the largest amount of stuff between it and him. There he crouched down in between a stack of several large water canisters and a pile of unmarked sacks made of some rough, unrefined cloth. The canisters were taller and provided better coverage, but the irregular lines and colors of the sacks made for easier blending with his suit’s reactive camouflage. The handle on the door clanked and light from the passageway sliced a narrow channel along the dark floor. But it didn’t immediately widen.
“Then just wait,” the man said, out in the passageway. He’d opened the door partway, but hadn’t entered yet. “Or don’t, I don’t care.”
At the last moment, Lincoln dragged one of the unmarked bags over in front of him, covering the lower portion of his body. He kept his weapon low but clear, in case he had to use it in a hurry.
The lights came on, and Lincoln felt as though he’d been caught in the open under a spotlight. He could just barely see the door through a gap in the water canisters and the shelves. The man moved through first, and was quickly lost from view. The woman shoved the little girl forward ahead of her, roughly.
“Stand over there,” the woman said in Mandarin. “And don’t touch anything!”
The little girl didn’t appear to understand any of the words, but there was no doubt she understood the general meaning. She stepped forward a few paces to a point where Lincoln could see her quite well through the shelves. She was seven or eight years old, he guessed, with dark hair, and skin deeply tanned. Though he couldn’t be sure of her ethnicity, Honduras leapt to mind. He had spent months operating in Honduras early in his career; he’d seen plenty of boys and girls her age, and she would have fit in right among them. She kept her hands at her waist, in front of her, the pointer finger of her left hand wrapped in the loose fist of her right. Eyes on the floor.
“Are you sure we even still have them?” the man said from near the front corner of the room.
“We should,” the woman snapped, “but I’m not the one who’s using them all the time.”
“Not like I do either,” the man answered, but he swallowed it, apparently not wanting to invite any more of the woman’s obviously substantial wrath. The sounds of rummaging came from his general direction. After a few moments, the woman sighed in irritation and walked over to join him.
“Move, just move out of the way.”
The rummaging became sharper, more violent. And the little girl, left alone and unguarded, did what children often do without supervision. She started exploring.
At first, she just reached out and touched the shelf in front of her, ran a finger along it. She glanced towards the front of the room where the adults were and, having earned no reproach, grew bolder. She stepped closer to the shelf, touched some of the items on it, picked up a small box and examined it. After she set the box back on the shelf, she dared to leave her spot by the door, and started walking down the aisle. Towards the back of the compartment.
She disappeared from view for a span, but it wasn’t difficult to anticipate her trajectory. Sure enough, a moment later she reached the end of the shelf and paused. A stack of cans prevented him from seeing most of her, but he could see the top half of her legs through the shelving. She was still facing the shelves, investigating whatever those cans were, most likely.
Lincoln willed her to turn and go back to the door. If she did, there was still a chance no one would notice him. But if she decided to come around the end of the shelf, she would be standing in the aisle with an unobstructed view directly to Lincoln and his hiding place. There was no way to know how she’d react if she saw him. And there seemed vanishingly little hope that that wouldn’t happen.
The girl shifted, her legs turned back towards the door. But she didn’t move. Just stood there. Weighing her options, maybe. And then, to Lincoln’s disappointment, she turned the other way and crept around the aisle. She trailed a hand behind her, running it along the smooth end of the shelf. She didn’t seem to be searching for anything in particular. Looking around, taking it all in. It occurred to Lincoln that this might have been the first time she’d ever seen so many basic necessities all in one place. He noticed then that she wasn’t wearing any shoes.
And then her eyes fell on him.
They were deep brown, and made Lincoln think of rich earth, and open fields. At first, they passed over him, swept casually from the water canisters to the sacks without pause.
Still, still, still, Lincoln told himself. He held his breath, would have stopped his heart if he could have.
The girl looked up at the corner of the room, and then started a lazy turn around the end of the shelf, making her way back towards the door along a different aisle. But before she disappeared between the shelves, she stopped, and suddenly looked back, as if she’d caught something out of the corner of her eye. It was then that she saw him. She turned her body towards him, and stared, wide-eyed.
“We had six the last time I checked,” the woman said. “There should be at least three more.”
The rummaging sounds approached closer, as the woman widened her search. The little girl didn’t move. Her arms hung down straight at her sides, her hands clenched in tiny fists. Lincoln didn’t know what to do. She was looking at him, there was no doubt about it. But she didn’t seem to know what to do about it either. For maybe as much as a full minute, they sat there staring at one another. There was no fear in her eyes; just a careful attentiveness. Waiting.
“Here,” the woman said. “They’re right here! Four of them! Right here!”
“Well, that’s not where they were last time,” the man said. “Maybe you shouldn’t leave your stuff spread out everywhere.”
“I told you – I’m not the one using them all up!”
The woman was close now. A few steps away, just on the other side of the canisters. If the little girl screamed, or pointed, or even walked over for a closer look, there was nothing he’d be able to do about it. His action would have to be decisive in those next confused moments, his aim sure, if he had any hope of preventing the man and woman from raising an alarm.
But then, a sudden, unexpected thought occurred to him. It was foolish, probably. But the hope of escaping the storage compartment without being discovered seemed all but lost. He took the risk, and moved. Slowly, he brought his pointer finger to his lips, or to the place on his faceplate where his lips would be if there had been any face at all for the girl to see. In response, she blinked several times.
And then she backed away, slowly, a step at a time. She remained by the end of the shelf, at the far side of the compartment, silent, never taking her eyes off him.
“Girl,” the woman snapped, from farther away. Somewhere near the door. “Come here.”
The little girl looked at the woman. Then back at Lincoln.
Lincoln thought for certain his heart had stopped. Involuntarily, he tightened his grip on his weapon, tensed his legs, readying to spring out and drop both adults before they could react. The woman was by the door; he would target her first. Through the gap in the shelves. Then the man, somewhere to the right.
The woman started to take a step towards the girl, but the instant she moved, the little girl turned and obediently went to her. She didn’t look back.
A few moments later, the lights switched off, and the storage compartment was once more bathed in a red darkness.
Lincoln gave it a full minute before he spoke.
“We’re clear,” he said.
“I can put my feet back down?” Thumper asked.
“Yeah, you’re good. Just do it quietly.”
The panel slid back, and Thumper’s feet descended, touching down lightly on the top shelf.
“My abs are killing me,” she said.
“That was too close,” Lincoln said. “How much longer?”
“Almost got it. Already rerouted everything I need to, just got to safely disconnect now.”
“Soon’s good.”
Lincoln moved the sack out from in front of him, slipped forward out of his hiding place, and made his way over to the shelf at the far end, where the little girl had stood, maybe eight feet away. From there, he looked back at the corner where he’d been. The fact that she hadn’t given him away made it seem unlikely she would mention the strange, not-quite-invisible man sitting in the corner. But he couldn’t help but wonder what she had thought he was.
“Hey Thumper,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“While you’re in there… anything you can do to make them easier to find?” he asked.
She didn’t answer immediately, but when she did she seemed to understand his meaning. “I’ll see what I can work up.”
Exfiltration, for once, had gone smoothly. Thumper had found an exterior hatch on the same deck as the storage room, one that led out to a small loading bay on the starboard side of the vessel. She and Lincoln exited from the bay, and traversed the exterior of the ship to where the Lamprey was still tethered. From there, they made the leap across open space. Once they were all loaded in, Sahil punched out a command on the console. The Coffin vibrated slightly as the grapples released and retracted. Sahil activated the reverse thrusters, gradually slowing the vehicle and allowing an ever-widening gap to open between them and the freighter.
Sahil left the display up, so they could all watch the Ava Leyla as it receded from view, shrinking to a single point and finally vanishing in the great void.
“Spooky One Seven, this is Easy One,” Sahil said.
“We copy, Easy One,” Noah answered. “Good to hear from you. Will was starting to worry.”
“We got distance on the target, startin’ our burn to rally now,” Sahil responded. The directness of his words and the flatness of his delivery communicated everything Lincoln needed to know about Sahil’s feelings on the outcome of the op.
“Roger, Easy One, we’re en route to pick up. ETA is… forty-seven mikes.”
“Forty-seven minutes, understood. Easy One out.”
Lincoln glanced over at the device they’d recovered. Two conjoined cylinders, one narrower than the other. Smaller than a loaf of bread, and maybe two pounds total. And yet they were headed back home with a much heavier burden.
“You leave that on me,” Lincoln said. “I know it’s going to be tempting to question what we did back there. We’re all going to be thinking about what we could have done differently, or what we should have done. And I’ll tell you right now, what you should have done is exactly what you did. You followed orders, you got the job done. Anything beyond that, you let me carry.”
For a time, no one replied. But then Wright spoke up.
“Team’s a team, captain. Whatever we do, we all do.”
“It’s my job to decide,” Lincoln answered. “And the consequences of those decisions are mine to bear. That’s my part. So you leave that on me.”
They rode the rest of the way in silence. Lincoln knew he didn’t want to second-guess himself the whole trip back, but there didn’t seem all that much else to do. It wasn’t that he doubted the call he’d made. There was no question it was the right one. On paper, out of the moment, detached from the emotion, there was no question. If it came down to trading the lives of a few kids here, no matter how desperate, for all those at risk if they didn’t recover SUNGRAZER, Lincoln had absolutely done the right thing.
But it wasn’t doubt that plagued him. It was the quiet fear that at some point on that long trip home, he was going to think of another way he could’ve done it. That the solution would present itself too late, when there was nothing he could do except regret he hadn’t thought of it sooner, faster. Like having the perfect snappy comeback, three minutes after the argument ended. He thought about that little girl, bravely enduring. And how much longer she’d have to continue to do so, because of the call he’d made.