“It’s good kit,” Thumper said, lying on her belly next to Lincoln, sharing what she’d found about the weapon he’d asked her to ID. “Not exactly standard issue for CMA military, but that’s only because it’s higher-grade than standard. Only reason it doesn’t look expensive because it’s all so well-used.”
“So these guys are funded and experienced,” Lincoln said.
“Could be a rough ride,” Thumper answered.
Lincoln had backed off a couple hundred meters from the airlock that Mike had designated as his emergency exit and found a place to set up shop while he had waited for the rest of the team to arrive. Now he and Thumper were providing cover while Sahil and Wright closed the final distance to the facility. Mike’s emergency exit was about to become their route for free admission.
“Get an estimate on numbers?” Lincoln asked.
“Based on power usage and what little we could get from the skeeters, I’d guess twelve to fifteen. Main building’s got six floors total, but I think they’re only running the upper two. Maybe the third for storage or something. The heat differential’s pretty big in that gap, so if anybody’s working on that third floor, they’re doing it in a coat and gloves. None of the outbuildings are powered at all, except the garage. Those two people you picked up earlier, I’m not sure what they were up to, but they probably weren’t planning on staying for long. As far as I can tell, they’re keeping the activity mostly restricted to the main building.
“I didn’t get to do a deep mapping, but perimeter security looks pretty straightforward. Couple zone alarms, few motion detectors,” Thumper continued. “I don’t think they’re expecting too much trouble way out here.”
“The fact that they took any precautions at all says enough,” Lincoln said.
Some hundred meters away, Wright went flat to the ground, with Sahil dropping behind her an instant later. In the hard-shell of the facility, an exterior light came on at one of the corners of the main building, lighting up the whole place like a lantern. For a moment, Lincoln couldn’t help but wonder if they’d tripped some early warning system.
“Wright, you good?” he called in.
“We’ll see,” she answered.
“Thumper?” Lincoln asked.
“Grid’s still green. I don’t think they blew anything.”
Two figures emerged from the main building and trudged towards the garage.
“Mikey gave us a heads up,” Wright said. “He’s got tremblers near all the entryways.”
While Lincoln had been staring at a door waiting for the rest of the team, Mike had been busy skulking around inside “making some preparations”, as he’d called it. He hadn’t gone into details. When exactly he’d had time to get tremblers out, Lincoln didn’t know. The micro seismic monitors were sensitive enough to pick up vibrations from talking, footsteps, even breathing if it was heavy enough. They didn’t provide a lot of data to go on, but if you had them in the right place they were a handy way to keep people from sneaking up on you. It made sense that a sniper might take a pocketful of them everywhere he went.
“Mikey, whatcha got going on right now?” Lincoln asked.
“Just hanging around,” Mike answered. “Couple of night owls look like they’re maybe headed out. Or they left something in the skimmer.”
Lincoln switched on his locator for Mike; the indicator showed him at the edge of one of the outbuildings, facing the garage. He seemed awfully close, like he was almost daring the two individuals to notice him.
“You’re sure you aren’t in the open there?” Lincoln asked.
“Pretty sure, sir.”
“Looks close to me.”
“Look again,” Mike said.
Lincoln magnified the view. From his current location, he didn’t have direct line of sight to Mike’s position. But once he zoomed in close enough, the detail he’d missed before became clearer. The difference in elevation.
“Are you on the roof?” Lincoln asked.
“That’s a roger,” Mike answered. “I could maybe spit on ‘em from here, and they might think it was raining. If you’d let me open my faceplate.”
“Negative on both counts.”
“I think you’re good to move up, anyway,” Mike said. “The way the light’s reflecting off the shell in here, I can’t hardly see what’s going on outside. And I’m paying attention.”
“Sahil,” Lincoln said. “What’s your read on it?”
“Same as Mikey,” Sahil replied. “Plenty of shadows from here to there. We can ghost right up to the door.”
“All right, go ahead and move up. Hold off at ten meters, and when you’re set we’ll join you.”
“Copy,” Sahil said.
“How much time you need on the door?” Lincoln asked Thumper. Not because they hadn’t already discussed it. But they’d come up with the plan on the fly, talking it through while the three remaining Outriders patrolled in from base camp. Revisiting the details never hurt. Especially when you were making it up as you went along.
“Still sixty to ninety seconds, captain,” she said. “Assuming Mikey did his part right.” The fact that she called him by his rank was a good indication he’d asked her one too many times. “A hundred and eighty if you ask me again.”
There’d been a physical lock on the interior door that Mike had taken care of for them. The airlock they’d chosen was the least convenient for access to the buildings. Once the team was through the airlock, there was a fair amount of open ground to cover before they reached the nearest outbuilding. The inconvenience was a feature; Mike had figured it was the least likely to be used, and therefore the least likely to be carefully monitored. It was a strange aspect of human psychology that the mind tended to cling to the familiar and to overlook the unused. Lincoln had made his living, and kept his life, by exploiting such tendencies.
“How are we on the cameras?” Lincoln asked.
“Skeeter’s patched in no problem,” Thumper said. “We can go full blackout whenever we want.”
“And if they call for help?”
“It won’t come. Intercept’s locked in. Call won’t go out, but we’ll know who they were trying to reach.”
Lincoln nodded. And then added. “I’m glad you’re on our side, Thump.”
“You should wait on that, sir,” she said, “until we see if it all works.”
“We’re in place,” Wright said over comms. “You’re good to move up.”
“Roger,” Lincoln answered. “Moving up.”
Lincoln nudged Thumper.
“Ladies first.”
“Always the gentleman,” she replied. A moment later, she did an explosive pushup that took her from her belly to her feet in a crouch all in a single movement, and was advancing across the terrain before Lincoln had even started to get off the ground. He got to his feet the old-fashioned way and followed after her, already five meters behind. They continued past Wright and Sahil and closed the final ten meters to the airlock.
Once they reached it, Thumper dropped to a knee and went to work affixing a device to the main panel while Lincoln stood over her, providing cover. He didn’t mind taking a turn on the long gun every once in a while, but now that they were getting ready to make entry, he was really looking forward to getting his weapon back from Mike.
“Mike, we’re at the lock,” Lincoln reported. “What’s the status of our night owls?”
“Still in the garage,” Mike answered. “Can’t tell what they’re up to, though.”
“Roger. We’ll hold here until you give us a go.”
“‘K,” said Mike.
As much as Lincoln hated standing around right at the perimeter, he liked it a lot more than getting stuck in a sealed box with potential hostiles wandering the premises. If he tried to go now, he had no doubt those two individuals would decide to show back up as soon as his whole team had loaded into the airlock. They’d just have to wait and see.
It was a long wait. After about half an hour, Mike called back in.
“There they are,” he said. “Might’ve been wrong about the night owls.”
“How’s that?” Lincoln asked.
“Might actually be love birds,” he answered. “At least, they’re not bringing anything back with them that they didn’t take over in the first place.”
“All right, roger that,” Lincoln said, even more annoyed at the delay now. He took a couple of deep breaths, and tried not to let it get to him. The only schedule they were on was to get everything done before sunrise, and they still had a good few hours before that deadline. “Still armed?”
“Only one, but yep. Carrying it lazy-man style now,” Mike said. The individual was carrying his weapon unslung and in hand, but not ready for combat; like you might if you’d picked it up, say, off the front seat of a vehicle and weren’t expecting to need it any time soon. “I didn’t get a great angle on it, but looks like a Type 32 to me.”
“It’d be the right family,” Thumper answered.
“They’re almost back to the main building now,” said Mike.
“Seems weird they’d switch the lights on if they’re trying to be sneaky about it,” Thumper said.
“Yeah, probably just loading something in the skimmer. But the other story’s better.”
A few moments later, the light from the main building went out, returning the facility grounds to heavy darkness. Lincoln glanced up at the sky; the dust and thin clouds obscured most of the stars, keeping ambient light to a minimum. The clouds struck him. He didn’t know where everything stood with the ongoing terraforming process. Last he’d heard back home, the general consensus was that it’d take another fifty years or so before Martian settlements could take their chances going completely unshielded. But they’d already gotten an artificial magnetosphere reconstructed and raised the atmospheric pressure well above the critical levels, both faster than anyone had predicted was possible. Technically, if not for the ridiculous temperatures, he and his teammates could have been running around with just some additional oxygen support.
That was one thing that made Lincoln nervous about a potential war with Mars; pretty much every forecast anyone had made about the speed of their expansion and development had underestimated them. Sometimes grossly.
“All right, you’re clear,” Mike said.
“Thumper,” Lincoln said. “Spring it.”
“Ninety seconds,” she replied. Given her initial estimate, Lincoln was pretty sure she’d have it done in under a minute.
“Wright, Sahil,” said Lincoln. “Come on up.”
Wright hopped up with Sahil close behind, and the two made the quick jog to the airlock, standing off just a few feet while Thumper finished her work.
“Once I get this bypass,” Thumper said, “we need quick open and close. I’m not going to pop both doors at once because of the atmospheric imbalance, I don’t want to make any more ruckus than we absolutely have to. But I don’t want to be stuck in that lock any longer than necessary either. So, load in fast, and get out faster.”
“How long?” Wright asked.
“We can get through in fifteen seconds, if nobody trips.”
“Mike,” Lincoln said. “How are we looking?”
“Slow,” Mike answered. “But still clear.”
“Got it,” Thumper said. “Security’s looped, door’s set for knocking. Ready on you, Lincoln.”
“Cameras?”
“We’re good.”
“Roger that. On me,” Lincoln said. “Mike, we’re coming in… three… two… one… Go.”
Thumper stepped back from the entrance. The next moment, the airlock clicked and opened inward. As soon as it moved, so did Lincoln. He stepped into the lock and went as far forward as he could, positioning himself right at the internal door. Wright was right on his heels, followed by Sahil. Thumper came through last, closing the door behind her. Ten long seconds later, the secondary door clicked and unsealed. Lincoln pulled the handle and swung the door open, stepped in and to the right, and went to a knee, covering their right flank. Wright was there a moment later, mirroring him and covering the opposite direction. Sahil advanced five meters into the open, keeping his weapon trained on the main facility while Thumper came through the lock and sealed it behind them. Once the lock was resecured, she held position for a few moments, all of them listening and scanning for any signs of trouble. The only thing that seemed to have changed was the ambient temperature.
“Mike, we’re in,” Lincoln said.
“Roger that. I’m coming down. Meet you at the front door.”
Sahil took point from the perimeter all the way to the main facility, his catlike steps smooth and sure despite the rough terrain. None of the ground appeared to have been graded or improved beyond what was strictly necessary from a construction standpoint, and Lincoln wondered how many of the original researchers had been treated for sprained ankles and broken wrists.
When the four teammates crossed into the compound proper, Mike was already holding position off one corner of the main building. Sahil led the team to a point between two of the outbuildings. Mike disappeared around the back of the main building, and then re-emerged from the other a minute later and joined them. Wright pulled open a pouch on her harness, and dug out a handful of hard plastic bands. Quick cuffs. She handed them to Mike. He accepted them, and stared at them for a moment.
“We’re really doing this, huh?” he said.
“Unless you have a better idea,” Lincoln said.
“Just about all of my ideas are better,” Mike answered. “But none of them involve us going in there.”
“Yeah, well,” Lincoln said. “I know you’ll make it work.”
“I’d feel better if we had a good head count,” Wright said. “Gonna be tough to know when we’re secure.”
“Let’s just assume we aren’t secure until we’re off the planet,” Lincoln said.
“Fair enough.”
Mike stuffed the quick cuffs into a pouch on his harness, and then turned back to Lincoln, holding his weapon out. Lincoln took his own rifle, and returned Mike’s to him.
“You going to be OK running that inside?” Lincoln asked.
“Sure thing,” Mike said. “If it gets hot enough in there for me to be wanting something else, a lot of other things will have already gone wrong.”
Lincoln nodded, and then looked around at the rest of his team.
“Set?”
“Let’s do it,” Sahil said.
“All right,” Lincoln said. “Drop camo.”
The reactive camouflage’s mottled reds and blacks drained away to a deep navy blue streaked with charcoal lines, with four letters emblazoned in bright white, front and back.
OTMS.
The impossible to miss initials for the Outer Territorial Marshal Service. Thumper had pulled footage of the Marshal Service’s Special Tactics Group in action; Veronica had analyzed it and fed the data to their suits. And now, instead of blending into the surroundings, the reactive camo was mimicking the group’s signature uniforms.
Not that the Marshal Service had anything remotely like the Outriders’ recon suits. But that was part of the point. The more confusion they could inject into the bad guys’ plans, the better.
The facility was too far out to fall under any one colony’s law enforcement jurisdiction. The OTMS was an arm of the Central Martian Authority’s shared police force, one that extended protection and security to settlements that couldn’t support their own force. It also oversaw any areas that weren’t explicitly designated as belonging to a particular governmental body.
Which was all to say, if any illegal activity were to be taking place way out here, technically it was the Marshal Service that would be responsible for shutting it down. The ruse wouldn’t hold up to any serious scrutiny. But the deception served two purposes. The obvious one was to give credit for the operation to someone closer to home. But it would also quickly indicate the loyalties of the people inside. If they all threw up their hands and complied with orders, the situation was likely to be a lot easier to resolve than Lincoln was expecting it to be. If not, well… at least that would suggest they knew they were up to no good.
“I’ll take first in,” Sahil said.
“Negative, I’m on point,” Lincoln said. “This was my stupid idea. If their answer to it is to shoot, it’s only fair that I catch the rounds.”
“Hope they don’t have AP,” Mike said. Their powered armor was made to withstand most small arms fire, but they were primarily designed for reconnaissance, not assault; armor-piercing rounds of sufficient power would cut right through.
“If they do,” Lincoln said, “I’m counting on you to avenge me.”
“If they do,” Wright answered, “I’m counting on you to shoot first.”
Sahil knelt down at the door to work the lock. Lincoln took the lead position, followed by Wright, then Thumper, then Mike. They set up on the front door in a staggered line, left, right, left, right, to flow faster through the entryway. Based on the floorplans Thumper had pulled together, the upper entrance wasn’t a full floor, just a large, single room with a staircase directly opposite the main entrance. A sort of combination reception and staging area where researchers could leave all their cold-weather gear before descending into the facility proper.
They’d decided to forego sending Poke in first to scout. As nice as it would have been to have had a full picture going in, there weren’t many viable places for the little foldable to get around without risking discovery. And this wasn’t the kind of hit where they could afford to tip the bad guys off early and give them a chance to harden up the interior. Lincoln was trusting instead to speed and surprise to get the job done.
“Sahil,” Lincoln said.
“Lock’s done,” Sahil answered. He slid to the right side, clearing the path to the door, but kept his hand on the mechanism.
“Roger,” Lincoln said.
“Remember, slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,” Mike said, reciting a well-known shooter’s mantra. And then added, “… but fast and smooth is best.”
“Three… two… one,” Lincoln counted down. Then. “Go.”
Sahil pushed the door open and drew back, and Lincoln pushed through aggressively at an angle, clearing the entrance as quickly as possible without rushing anything. The lights were low, the room illuminated only by the dim orange glow emanating from the stairwell. Long shadows stretched and pooled.
His first look was to the right, front corner of the room. Clear.
Without slowing he swept through the room, scanning for targets. Heavy coats lined the walls at odd intervals, each presenting a silhouette to evaluate and assess. Behind him, Wright’s sharp voice pierced the gloom.
“OT Marshals, OT Marshals,” she called, “Get down on the ground, on the ground!”
A commotion followed, but Lincoln ignored the scuffling until he’d completed his circuit around the right of the room, confirming there were no threats to that side. A short table sat against the back wall of the room, and on it lay a weapon he recognized in a glance as a Type 32 short-barreled rifle. He continued on to the stairwell, and posted up there, keeping his weapon trained on the switchback that led to the floor below. Apart from catching some activity out of the corner of his eye, he hadn’t stopped to look at what was going on. Thumper joined him at the stairwell.
“Stay on the ground,” Wright commanded. “Faces to the floor. Hands spread. Hands spread!”
And then, through internal comms, she said, “Two individuals. One male, one female, both unarmed. Sahil’s securing now.”
“Type 32 on the table, to my right,” Lincoln answered.
“I got it,” Mike said, and a moment later he was there, removing the ammunition and a firing component to render the weapon temporarily inoperable. He stuffed the component in a pouch on his leg, and tossed the magazine to the opposite side of the room.
“It’s going to be OK, it’s going to be OK,” the man on the floor kept saying, though it wasn’t clear if he was saying it to the woman, or to himself. As far as Lincoln could tell, the woman had yet to make a single noise.
“Guessing these are our night owls,” Sahil said, through comms. “Got ‘em locked up pretty good, they ain’t goin’ anywhere.”
It wasn’t proper protocol to leave anyone unguarded, no matter how secured they were. But there was no way Lincoln was giving up the firepower to babysit a couple of people they’d locked down.
“How many people are in the facility?” Wright asked.
“Don’t tell ‘em anything–” the man started, but a meaty thud followed suggesting Sahil had just bounced his head off the floor.
“How many people are in the facility?” Wright repeated.
“Ten,” the woman answered, her voice trembling but her tone calm. “Ten others, I mean, not counting us. Eleven, sorry, eleven more.”
“How many are armed?”
“Five… I don’t know,” the woman said. “Six, maybe. Maybe seven. What’s happening? I don’t understand what’s happening.”
“Is everyone in this building?” Wright continued. “Is there anyone in any of those other buildings?”
“Yes… err, no… I mean… we’re all here. Everyone’s here. Please, what is going on? We’re not doing anything wrong.”
“Then this should be over real soon,” Wright said. “Stay still, stay quiet.” And then through internal comms, she added. “I think she’s telling the truth. As best as she can.”
Lincoln still hadn’t taken his eyes off the stairwell.
“Can we move?” he asked.
“One sec,” Sahil said. And then to the woman, he said, “Your friend here’s gonna sleep for a little bit, but don’t worry, he’ll be just fine when he wakes up.” And then through internal comms again, “I went ahead and dosed the troublemaker. Had a feeling he was gonna make a ruckus. Should be good to move now.”
“Roger, moving down.”
Lincoln stepped out onto the landing, and his team returned to their entry formation. The door to the first floor was closed and looked heavy, but Lincoln didn’t want to count on it having muffled all the commotion they’d just created. There was a good chance that at least some of the individuals below would be sleeping. Or at least had been until just a minute or two ago. But every interaction they had, even as easy as this one had been, increased the likelihood of resistance the further they went into the facility.
They reached the door to the first real floor without any issue. A small window sat in the upper middle of the beige door, an arrangement that made Lincoln think of a hospital. He risked a peek through it, saw a wide beige corridor, with doorways on either side. There was no one in the hall, no sign that anyone knew anything unusual had happened upstairs.
“Mike,” he said. “Door.”
Mike rolled to the side and took position at the door, waiting to open it on Lincoln’s cue. Behind him, the others formed up. Long hallways with rooms exactly across from each other made for tricky clearing.
“Simultaneous on this next,” Lincoln said, probably an unnecessary reminder of the plan. “Wright, lead left; I’ll take right.”
“I’m on left, understood,” she confirmed. In cases like this, the team had a default split; Wright was second element leader, with Sahil and Mike supporting. They’d already numbered the rooms on this floor one through eight, with evens on the right side of the hall. Lincoln and Thumper would clear those, while Wright’s element handled the others.
“Mike, go,” he said. Mike pulled the door open, and the team flowed through, stacking alternately on either side of the corridor until they were all through and set. Lincoln looked across the corridor and held up his hand for Wright to see. She nodded. One. Two. Three.
They moved as one, each element rounding the door and entering their target rooms simultaneously. Lincoln button-hooked around the doorframe, headed towards the right with Thumper on his heels. A quick scan of the dark room revealed it to be full of tall lockers from floor to ceiling, creating several aisles. Rather than looping around the other side of the room, Thumper stayed with him, and together they walked the outer edge, keeping an aggressive pace with quiet steps. They circled the whole room. Empty.
Once they reached the door again, Lincoln held there while awaiting a signal from their teammates. Behind him, Thumper marked the floor right by the doorframe with a digital ink, invisible to the naked eye, but radiant through their visors. A reminder that they’d cleared this room.
“Two’s clear,” Lincoln said. “Holding for you.”
Before Wright reported in, a light appeared in the hallway, and a shadow stretched toward Lincoln. A clear silhouette of a man. From the angle, it looked like someone in the room further down the hall diagonal from Lincoln’s was standing in the doorway, with the light from the room behind him.
Lincoln didn’t wait. He exploded into the corridor, weapon up.
“OT Marshals!” Lincoln called as he rushed the individual, “OT Marshals! Get on the floor, hands out, hands out!”
And then over internal comms, “We’ve got room three, we’ve got room three!”
The man was heavyset, wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts, with dark socks. His hands shot up in front of him, palms towards Lincoln, fingers spread wide, like he was expecting Lincoln to plow right into him. His feet peddled almost comically, slipping on the floor as he tried to get away. He fell back into his room, first hard on his backside, and then gracelessly onto his back. His eyes were locked on Lincoln, and he kept his hands up, even while his feet continued to scrabble at the smooth tile of the floor.
Lincoln crossed the threshold and swept his weapon around the room. A bedroom, two occupants. There was another man in a bed against the far wall, sitting up with a look of sheer panic on his face. Thin, with red hair curling up off the top of his head like a frozen flame.
“On the floor, get on the floor!” Lincoln barked. The man in the bed did his best to comply, flopping unceremoniously out on the floor, trailing blankets and sheets behind him. One foot got tangled and the man lay there on the floor staring up at Lincoln and kicking his leg to try and free it.
“Over, on your belly,” Thumper commanded the heavyset man. He rolled over and spread his hands out to either side.
“One’s clear, we’re moving to room four,” Wright reported. “Wright to room four!”
The red-haired man dropped his face to the floor and covered the back of his head with his hands. His leg was still tangled, and still kicking like a half-dead cricket. Lincoln crossed to him and put a hand on the man’s back.
“Relax,” he said. “Relax, you’re fine.” The man went still, but didn’t uncover his head. Lincoln reached over with one hand and unwound the sheets from around the man’s lower leg. Thumper stood over the man in the dark socks, her weapon trained on him, while Lincoln cuffed the redhead.
Lincoln asked the man a couple of questions, but he’d gone unresponsive except for an occasional sound that was a mix between a whimper and a cough.
“Room four,” Wright reported, “two females, unarmed. They’re secured. Sahil’s questioning one of them now.”
“Roger,” Lincoln answered. “Room three; two males here, same story.”
He moved over and cuffed the heavyset man.
“You fellas sit tight,” Lincoln said. “Don’t make any trouble for us, and we’ll be out of your way soon. Understand?”
The larger man nodded.
“I hope we got the right guys,” Thumper said. “Apart from the knucklehead upstairs, everyone else around here is fitting the researcher profile a little too well.”
“Still got plenty of rooms to go,” Lincoln said. He marked the floor and readied to move down the corridor as soon as Sahil was done. He was just about to ask Wright if she wanted to stick to the even-numbered rooms now that they’d switched when a clacking sound came from the far end of the hallway.
Lincoln edged the doorframe, just enough to get a peek down the hall. Two men stood at the far end of the corridor, in the stairwell. One had entered the hall by a couple of steps, but both were holding position there, looking Lincoln’s direction, not moving. And then the man in the dark socks cried out.
“Help! Help us, help us!”
“OT Marshals!” Lincoln called, bringing his weapon to bear. “Drop your weapons!”
The reaction from the men was immediate.
They both opened fire.
Lincoln was faster, by a thread.
The first man cried out and tumbled back towards the stairwell, and nearly simultaneously rounds snapped into the wall in front of Lincoln’s shoulder, and a hard impact caught his right hip, whipping his leg out from under him and throwing him off balance. He fell hard to his left knee.
Out into the hallway.
Reflexes took over. Lincoln dropped onto his right side, half-fetal, stabilized, and brought his weapon back on target, just as the second man fired another burst, and then another. Most of the rounds snapped over him, but one caught the outer edge of his left shoulder and knocked his aimpoint off target. A moment later, gunfire popped off above him, right over his head, single shots, and then a pair of legs went striding past him while the gunfire continued pop pop pop, steady and sure.
Wright. She was advancing towards the stairwell, driving the attackers back. The wounded man was still in the corridor, sprawled on his back. The second hostile was crouched now in the doorframe, but leaning awkwardly forward and firing one-handed.
Before Lincoln could get a shot lined up, the wounded man rolled up and raised his weapon. He sprayed fire on full-auto, filling the corridor with rounds, and sending Wright ducking into the next doorway. At the same time, Lincoln felt something constrict his right ankle, and a moment later he was sliding. Thumper, dragging him out of the open.
In the corridor, the volume of gunfire dropped to spasms of three- and four-round bursts; the walls and doorframes spit chunks and splinters under the assault. That kind of wild gunfire was typical of panicked amateurs, but when Lincoln regained his place by the door and risked a glance, he saw the wounded man was sliding backwards, while he fired; his companion was dragging him clear of the corridor, while he provided suppressive fire. The instant he was in the stairwell, he kicked the heavy door shut.
That wasn’t an amateur move.
“Lincoln, you hit?” Wright called.
“I’m good, I’m good!” he called back. “Took a couple hits, but they didn’t get through!” He still wasn’t sure how he’d gotten hit, until he saw a hole torn through the door frame. The man had shot him through the wall.
Not amateurs. Not by a long shot.
“We gotta go,” Sahil said, “we gotta move!”
He was right. The race was on now. They’d lost surprise. The only way for the Outriders to compensate was with speed, and violence of action.
“Sahil! Get on that door to the stairs,” Lincoln ordered. He was up now, moving down the hall. But he couldn’t leave the remaining rooms unchecked. “Thumper, Mike, clear room seven!”
As soon as he reached room five, he kicked the door almost off its hinges.
“Six is clear!” Wright called. “Moving to eight!”
Room five was a combination break room and sitting area, with low chairs and tables, plus a small kitchenette. Most of it was visible from the doorway, but a closet or pantry in the back posed a potential hiding place. Lincoln swept through the room in a straight line, kicking chairs aside, stomping up and over one of the tables, wasting no time.
“OT Marshals!” he called, two strides from the door. He didn’t wait for a response. If anyone was hiding in there, they weren’t going to be happy. He kicked the door right next to the handle. It rocketed open, slamming into the wall so hard the handle actually stuck. As he’d guessed, the room was a shallow pantry, with shelves of food and assorted supplies. No one was inside. Lucky for them.
“Five, clear!” he called.
“Seven, clear!” Thumper responded.
Lincoln crossed the room, moved back out into the corridor, and started towards the stairs where the two men had retreated. Sahil was already there, crouched to one side of the corridor keeping his deadly weapon ready to unleash if anyone dared to open that door.
“Eight is clear!” Wright said, a moment later.
“Wright,” Lincoln said. “My count is six individuals secured; two hostiles, confirmed; five unknowns unaccounted for.”
“I confirm, six secured, two hostiles. At least five unaccounted for.”
The team reformed in the hall, behind Sahil’s security. Lincoln and Thumper took the right side, while Wright and Mike moved left. Lincoln and Wright covered the door to the stairs while Mike and Thumper covered the rear, just in case.
“Sahil,” Lincoln said. “Go knock.”
“How loud?” he asked.
“Loud enough to kill whatever’s on the other side.”
“No sweat.”
Sahil crept up to the door, and pulled three copper-colored cubes out of one of the slots on his suit. These he arranged in an inverted triangle on the surface of the door.
“Y’all might wanna take a step back,” he said, though he himself just moved over to one side of the door. He held his weapon with one hand; in his left hand were two white cylinders. Stun grenades. The Outriders just called them crashes. “Say when.”
“Hit it.”
“Stand by to get some,” Sahil said, and then, “Fire, fire, fire.” A moment later, a hurricane of fire ripped the door from its moorings, as if a gateway to hell had opened up in the stairwell and sucked it into oblivion. Lincoln’s suit automatically damped the roar, but even so the intensity set his teeth on edge.
Before the smoke had cleared, Sahil was up, tossing the crashes down the stairs. They went off like a thunderstorm, sending flashes of white lightning and ear-splitting peals rolling up and down both hallways.
Lincoln was first through, his weapon trained on the most dangerous angles.
At the bottom of the last flight, just a few steps before the door to the second floor, two men lay motionless. When Lincoln reached them, he quickly confirmed what he suspected. They were the same two men who had fired on him. Whether they’d been waiting in ambush, or if they simply hadn’t been able to make it down the stairs in time, the blast from Sahil’s charge had been too severe. They were both dead.
The door leading to the second floor was warped and partially open. Smoke crawled through the gaps out into the hallway on the other side.
“Door,” Lincoln said over comms. “Going through.”
It might have been more tactically sound to set up for an explosive entry, but he didn’t want to lose momentum. Without slowing, he launched a stomping kick into the middle of the door, near the frame. He wasn’t even making conscious decisions anymore; training drove him forward through the gap, muscle memory guided his motion.
A short hall opened out to a single, large room, segmented by half-height walls throughout. Gunfire greeted him before he could announce himself. Lincoln snapped his weapon right, centered on the disappearing target, and put three rounds through the short wall. A sharp cry reported his fire had been accurate.
“Contact, right!” he called.
The rest of team was already flowing through the space, effortlessly breaking into two elements, sweeping the area.
“OT Marshals, throw down your weapons!” Thumper shouted, one final attempt to end the firefight before it got out of control. She was answered by another burst of gunfire from somewhere on the other side of the room. But in the mental echo of the sound, Lincoln realized the report hadn’t come from a Type 32; it’d been a simultaneous volley, a burst from Sahil’s heavy weapon paired with a single round from Mike’s rifle. Dropping a threat before it could develop.
The Outriders snaked their way through the maze of a room, every aisle and cubicle a potential point of ambush. The fact that the bad guys had gotten any shots off at all was a testament to the complexity of the environment, and their level of training. By Lincoln’s count, there were still three loose in the facility. Assuming the first woman had been telling the truth.
Near the middle of the room, Lincoln angled a cubicle wall and found a man lying face down.
“Stay down, stay on the ground!” he commanded, but as he stepped over to secure the man, he saw that was unnecessary. The man had been shot twice through the back of the head. Judging from the damage, it looked like it’d been at close range. There were no weapons nearby.
Lincoln held there, the discovery shocking him out of his near-automatic assault mode. Throughout the room, the rest of the team continued to clear, while he knelt by the man and took quick inventory. Judging from the attire, the physique, and the hands, Lincoln could tell this wasn’t a military man. He had to assume this was another civilian, like those they’d secured on the first floor. But those weren’t stray rounds that had taken the man’s life. They had been intentional, from short range.
The realization flashed a warning, but the intensity of the moment clouded it.
“Clear!” Wright called, and then. “Lincoln, what are we doing?”
“Push!” he said, getting back to his feet. “Sahil, switch with me!”
“Copy, I’m on Thumper,” Sahil answered. Lincoln was trailing the others by twenty-five feet or so. Thumper effortlessly stepped up to element lead, with Sahil supporting, while Lincoln moved to catch up. Wright and Mike didn’t wait around. They exited through the single door in the rear of the room and continued clearing.
When Lincoln made it to the corridor, he held position until Wright and Mike emerged from the first room on the left. Mike marked it clear, and Lincoln fell into the second-man position.
“Lincoln, we got an issue,” Thumper said.
“What is it?” he answered. She and Sahil were a little further down the corridor, each on either side, covering opposite angles at what looked like a T-intersection.
“Long hallway here, it’s not on the blueprints.”
“Which one?”
“To the left. Should be a wall, not a corridor.”
“How long?”
“Can’t say. Can’t see the end, it curves.”
“Hold there,” Lincoln said. Wright led the way and the team formed up, rejoining into a single unit. Lincoln did a quick scan. Sure enough, the hallway to the left looked like newer construction. Still years old, but undoubtedly a later addition. The rest of the facility had been relatively uniform and predictable. This hall stood out as an anomaly. Lincoln double-checked with Sahil, who motioned back that the section to the right was clear. Then Lincoln risked a peek down the suspect hallway. The corridor stretched and curved to the left; there were no doors on either side of it for as far as he could see.
“Any guess on where it goes?” he asked.
“Not off the top of my head,” Thumper answered.
“Towards the garage,” Mike said. “Bends back around towards the garage. Freight elevator or something maybe?”
There were still two individuals missing. And the executed civilian’s vague warning snapped into clarity.
They’d left five of them tied up upstairs. And the remaining hostiles had a back door.
“Back,” Lincoln said. “Back with me, double-time!”
He didn’t wait, and his teammates didn’t ask for an explanation. Like the alpha of a wolf pack, he raced off, and they followed on his heels.
Lincoln didn’t run, exactly, but he moved as fast as he could while back-clearing the space they’d just moved through. Back through the large room, back up the stairwell. And as he emerged on the first floor, two men were coming down the stairs at the opposite end. Both armed. Lincoln didn’t hesitate.
He snapped off two bursts. Wright’s weapon barked next to him on the second. The two men at the far end of the corridor fell to the ground under the assault; one motionless, the other fishing his legs around and making a terrible noise. By the time Lincoln reached him, he too had gone still and quiet.
“That’s thirteen,” Wright said, the adrenaline apparent in her voice, though her tone was matter-of-fact.
Lincoln nodded.
“Better clear it again, just to be sure,” he said.
“How’d you know they were trying to circle around behind us?” she asked.
“Don’t think they were,” Lincoln said. “Found a body downstairs, knew we hadn’t done it.”
It took a moment for the rest of the team to make the connection. Only Mike voiced it.
“You think they were coming up here to kill these people?” Mike asked.
“Yeah,” Lincoln answered. “That’d explain why the two upstairs were sneaking around. Or why she couldn’t go out with an armed escort.”
When he said it, he realized what it meant. The two men who’d been coming down the stairs obviously would have passed by the man and woman they’d left cuffed upstairs. A cold, sickly feeling hollowed him out.
“We should check upstairs,” Wright said.
Lincoln nodded.
“Sahil, take Thumper and Mike, clear it out again, as far down as you think you need to go,” he said. “Make sure we got everybody.”
“No sweat,” Sahil answered. He rolled off, with Thumper and Mike in tow, and not a single complaint about having to cover all the same ground yet again.
Lincoln double-checked to make sure the two men at the base of the stairs wouldn’t trouble them anymore. Wright took the men’s weapons, removed the ammunition and firing components, and tossed them into one of the empty rooms, just to be safe. Then together they ascended the stairs back to the main entrance.
To Lincoln’s dismay, what they found didn’t surprise him. The man that Sahil had rendered unconscious was still out cold. The woman, unfortunately, had been shot dead, just like the man he’d found on the lower floor.
“You think they knew?” Wright asked.
“The civilians?” Lincoln said. Wright nodded, and he shook his head. “I’d guess they just figured these men were here for their protection.”
“Guess we could go ask.”
“Don’t know if I’m up for that,” Lincoln said, looking at the poor, executed woman. He couldn’t help but wonder what her story was, what part she had played, what she’d done, and whether or not she’d had any idea what she’d gotten caught up in.
“Well,” Wright said. “At least we’ve got him.” She nodded towards the sleeping man.
“He didn’t seem real cooperative the first time around,” Lincoln said.
“Yeah, I don’t care about that. But he’s going to have a lot of explaining to do to the authorities when he wakes up. The real ones, I mean.”
Lincoln nodded, feeling his detachment from the situation starting to slip. He needed to get back on mission.
“We better get going on collection,” he said. “We’ve got a lot to cover, and we’re losing time.”
“Roger that,” Wright said.
They returned to the first floor, where they corralled the frightened civilians into one of the residential rooms. It’d be hard for them to get comfortable with their hands cuffed behind their backs, but at least they’d be warm and have access to bathroom facilities. Once the Outriders finished the collection, the plan was to alert the actual Outer Territorial Marshal Service to the situation. It’d be a long few hours for the civilians, but they’d be fine.
After Sahil’s element had finished re-checking the rest of the facility, they’d moved the bodies of the slain into cold storage, and taken scans of each for later identification. When that grim task was completed, Lincoln assigned Sahil to questioning the survivors. Despite his outer appearance of a hard-charging pipehitter, Sahil had a genuine gift for empathy. Whether he’d developed it during his medical training, or if it was the reason he’d trained medical, Lincoln wasn’t sure. Either way, the same bedside manner that made him an outstanding medical sergeant also made him effective at developing rapport with possible sources of intelligence. He’d even assisted the man in the boxers with getting on a pair of pants.
Apparently, they were all independent contractors, hired on from a number of different settlements. None of them came from the Martian People’s Collective Republic, and none had worked together before. Communications engineers, mostly. In general, they seemed to be willing to cooperate, but the details they provided were few. The story was that they thought they were helping set up preliminary infrastructure for a reopening of the facility; establishing deep-range communications. As far as they knew, the traffic they were passing around was just test data. Either they were well-trained liars, or their employers had done an exceptional job of keeping them in the dark as to their actual purpose. The fact that they provided so little information made it seem all the more terrible that the armed men had attempted to execute them. The only thing Lincoln could figure was that the bad guys had been concerned that their contractors might actively help dismantle whatever it was they’d built. They almost certainly weren’t counting on anyone as sophisticated as the Outriders.
Sahil didn’t tell them about their two fallen comrades until absolutely necessary. One of the women had asked about them repeatedly, and finally convinced the others not to answer any more questions until Sahil told them where they were. When he did, they weren’t able to answer too many more questions anyway.
While Sahil handled the civilians, Lincoln ran the rest of the team through collection on the remaining rooms. Wright was on hard surfaces; bookcases, furniture, floors. Mike handled the soft stuff, clothes, notebooks, bedding. Thumper, of course, took care of anything technical, while Lincoln ran the sketcher. It was his job to get a scan of each room’s layout, and track where each piece of potential intelligence came from. It was a tedious process, but together, if they did the job right, they could clear a room in just a few minutes, and the analysts back home would still be able to reconstruct a pretty good mock-up of the general environment to understand everything in context.
There wasn’t much useful on the first floor. It was primarily their living space, and from what Lincoln could tell they’d maintained solid security protocols about not letting their work spill over. The second floor was the treasure trove. But no one on the team was happy about what they found.
“Link,” Thumper said from one of the facility’s terminals.
Lincoln was in the middle of the work room, finishing up with the sketcher.
“One sec,” he said. “Almost done.”
“Might not need it, when you see this,” Thumper said. He took the ten seconds to finish the scan anyway, and then walked over to where she was.
She’d patched in to one of the workstations, not far from where Lincoln had found the first dead civilian worker. Whatever she’d hooked into wasn’t immediately apparent; she was monitoring something on her internal display.
“What’d you dig up?” Lincoln asked.
“I got an observer on their stream,” she said. “They’re being smart about it, trickling data, routing it through multiple sites. Same idea as what we found with the device we recovered. They could’ve been smarter about it, though. Key I picked up off the device from the Ava Leyla let me peek at where all of this was ending up.”
“Let me guess,” Lincoln said. “The Collective Republic.”
“Winner.”
“So, definitively, you can trace the connection back to the MPCR,” Lincoln said. “A hundred percent certain.”
Thumper nodded. “Pretty much right to the home address. Looks like they’re using the Manes-King array.”
Manes-King Quantum was a powerhouse secure communications corporation, based out of the Republic.
“Doesn’t seem like it should be that easy,” he said.
She looked at him; the blank faceplate was unreadable, but the tilt of her head clearly communicated this wasn’t the time.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s worse than that?”
“It’s worse than that. They’re not just sending command and control to SUNGRAZER,” she said. “They’re piping data back from her.”
“Back?” Lincoln said, before the implication fully settled on him. Thumper waited a moment, giving him the chance to catch up. She didn’t give him long, though.
“SUNGRAZER isn’t just a strike vehicle, Lincoln.”
Lincoln recalled the briefing, to everything he’d been told about SUNGRAZER and her capabilities. She was a deep maneuver asset, sure. Lying in wait for the order to attack. But for a decade she’d been a surveillance vessel first and foremost.
“They’re pulling our intel?” he asked.
“They’re pulling our intel,” Thumper said, nodding. “Not all of it, not all at once. The footprint for that would be enormous, easy for us to pinpoint. Looks to me like they’re bleeding it off, a little bit at a time.”
The rest of the team had paused their collection work, and were now gathered around.
“For how long?”
“Couple of months at least. Possibly more.”
“So before SUNGRAZER went missing then?”
“Well before.”
Lincoln wasn’t as deep into the world of intelligence and counterintelligence as his friends at the NID, but the implications weren’t lost on him. The strategic impact of such a compromise in security couldn’t be overstated. There was no telling what all the bad guys might be able to glean from rifling through everything SUNGRAZER had collected and transmitted back home for the past decade. Sources, methods of collection, what the US knew and what they didn’t. The potential to shift the balance of power was staggering. And that didn’t even take into account what would happen if that information was exposed to enemies closer to home. Or to the worlds at large.
And worse yet occurred to him.
“If they can pull data off,” he asked, “how much more capability would they need to put it on, too?”
Thumper nodded again. “Now you’re getting it. I don’t see a lot of evidence that they’re feeding us bad intel, but I wouldn’t necessarily expect to from here. Gonna have to put Veronica on it to do a deep scrub. Big question now, is why take it offline at all?”
“You don’t think it’s a pure intel grab?” Mike asked.
“No,” Thumper said. “They were doing that already without moving the ship. And it was cutting off contact that alerted us to it in the first place. Maybe something they found made them nervous.”
“Or maybe they found whatever they were looking for,” Lincoln added. “How long you estimate until they figure out we just wrecked their operation out here?”
“Might have already,” Thumper said. “If not, I wouldn’t think long.”
“We cut ‘em off here,” Sahil asked. “What happens to SUNGRAZER?”
Thumper shook her head. “All this is just smoke and mirrors, making it hard for us to pin them down. We could pull the plug, but nothing’s stopping them from directly connecting to her. Or from setting up another situation like they’ve got running here.”
It was an important piece of the puzzle, maybe, but for all the effort Lincoln still didn’t feel any closer to their objective. For every answer they’d uncovered, it seemed like they’d opened two new questions. And SUNGRAZER was still out there, on who knew what mission.
“I don’t know how NID’s going to handle the news that one of their automated assets got turned,” Lincoln said.
“Not well,” Wright answered.
He’d said it without thinking, but hearing his own words Lincoln felt the spark of an idea forming.
“Hey Thumper,” he said. “Now that you’re looking at their stream… how hard would it be to slip something into it yourself?”
She didn’t answer immediately. After a few moments of consideration, she shook her head.
“Possible, but not from here. I’d need Veronica’s help. That’s obviously off the table.”
“Why’s that?”
“Uh… because I didn’t bring her along for the hit, and I’d have to leave the connection live…?” Thumper said, with a tone that suggested it wasn’t a question she should’ve had to answer.
“And how bad would it be to leave the connection live?” Lincoln asked.
“If we left it live, then I don’t see how we did anything useful at all here,” Thumper said. “Except add to the body count.”
“Just spit it out, sir,” Wright said, clearly picking up on the fact that Lincoln had at least the beginnings of a plan. “We’ll tell you if it’s stupid.”
“It’s probably stupid. But we have to assume the bad guys know we hit this facility. If not already, then soon. Killing the connection now might prevent them from pulling any more data, but most of the damage has probably already been done. Seems like the next best thing to me, then, is to make them doubt whether they can trust the data they’re getting. Better if we can make them doubt all of it.”
“You’re saying, we leave the stream intact, and hope they take that as a sign that we’re not concerned about them stealing it?” Thumper said.
“I told you it was probably stupid,” Lincoln said.
“It’s not,” Wright answered. And then added, “Not completely, anyway.”
“Aaaand… we inject something,” Thumper said, picking up the thread. “Something that looks good… maybe a little too good.”
Lincoln nodded. “Something that maybe they only notice because they get curious as to whether or not any of it’s trustworthy.”
“I don’t know, sounds pretty risky,” Thumper said.
“Doubt it’d be worth doin’ otherwise,” Sahil answered. “Boss is right. Can’t put the genie back in the bottle, might as well act like we don’t care it got out in the first place.”
“We’re talking master-level chess here,” Wright said. “Counts on them being a pretty sophisticated adversary. But I think all signs point to that being the case. I’m for trying, anyway.”
“I guess I might be able to piggyback a trace in there, while we’re at it,” Thumper said. “A ridealong, might eventually find its way to SUNGRAZER. If we don’t find her through other means first.”
“What’s your take, Mikey?” Lincoln asked.
“Hey, this stuff’s all beyond me,” Mike said. “You just call me again when something needs shootin’.”
“This is getting outside of the intelligence business,” Thumper said. “Falls more in line with counterintelligence.”
“Yeah, well…” Lincoln said. “I can talk to Mom about a name change for the unit if you like.”
“Let’s see how it goes first,” Thumper said. “All right, I’m sold.”
“How do we make it happen?” Lincoln asked.
“Get back to base camp, for starters,” Thumper said.
“I’m thinking we better do it on the jump,” Wright said. “It might buy us a little more time on the job, but a little misdirection isn’t going to solve the problem on its own. If this were a democracy, I’d vote we run it parallel to the groundwork, from inside the MPCR. But it’s not a democracy.” She turned meaningfully to Lincoln. Again, the expressionless faceplate somehow managed to highlight just how much her body language and tone of voice could communicate. Lincoln thought it over for a few moments, weighed the options.
“I agree, Amira,” Lincoln said. “First order of business is to track down command-and-control, inside the Collective Republic. Anything else we can get is a bonus. Let’s wrap it up here. We need to get the actual Marshals out here to see about these people. Once we’re back to base, we’ll pack up everything we can, and prep to move. I’ll get a line back to the colonel asap, and see how he wants to get us on the inside.”
They hadn’t gotten exactly what they were after here, but at least it wasn’t a total loss. Lincoln knew his team was used to working with whatever scraps they could come up with on their own, and figuring it out on the fly.
Unfortunately, he also knew they were running out of time.