Outriders (22 page)

“Forty seconds,” Mike said.

“That’s too long,” Wright said, almost to herself. “He’s not going to make it.”

A moment later, Wright slowed her pace and stepped closer to the side of a building. Instinctively, Lincoln matched her, angled his body towards her to see what she was up to.

“Lean in and kiss me,” she said.

“What?” Lincoln said. “Seriously?” The move was such a cliché, he’d never thought anyone actually used it.

“Just do it. Sir.”

Lincoln hesitated for a moment, but Wright’s eyes were intense, insistent. He leaned down, closed his eyes, brought his lips to hers.

They didn’t meet.

Instead, a jarring impact on the right side of his jaw stumbled him. He brought his arms up reflexively to protect himself but before he could get oriented, a second blow caught him in the back of the knee and buckled him to the ground. An instant later, he was caught in a vicious chokehold from behind. His assailant was over him, crushing down. Black Coat couldn’t have closed the gap that fast, they must have had a fourth guy. Fourth and fifth. Where was Wright?

Even as his mind was racing to process what was happening, Lincoln’s training took over. His attacker’s hold wasn’t perfect, wasn’t deep enough. Lincoln knifed his hands back and sought out those of his attacker. When he managed to grab hold of one, he snatched it down and forward over his shoulder, wrenched the wrist, forced the arm over his head and used it as a lever to break the hold. Free from the choke, he rolled sideways onto the attacker’s ankle and shin, dropping his opponent hard to the concrete. Not knowing how many other attackers he had to deal with, Lincoln’s first priority was to get off the ground. He twisted and whipped an elbow back behind him, felt it glance off the side of his assailant’s head, and then wrested himself free and spun up to his feet.

He instinctively came up in a defensive posture, scanned the crowd around him for a second attacker, and for any sign of Wright. There, just behind the first row of people, stood a man in a black coat, staring right at him with a startled expression. Lincoln had just enough time and presence of mind to make one quick gesture before he realized that Wright was surging up off the ground in front of him, and someone behind him screamed. Pain exploded at the base of his neck. Blackness swallowed him.

ELEVEN

P
IPER LAID
with her face to the wall and her hands behind her back, hoping that the woman couldn’t hear the sound of her heart pounding against the bed. It wasn’t that she feared anything that might happen while the woman was in the room with her. She’d gotten used to the routine now of lying still until the door was closed again. It was what would happen after the woman left that had filled Piper with anxiety.

“I grabbed you an extra couple of pieces of bread,” the woman said. Her voice was direct, purely informational, though the words themselves hinted at a sense of concern for Piper’s wellbeing. “I know you like them.”

“Thank you,” Piper replied.

The woman finished up her work, and moved to the door. Paused there. Piper’s heart leapt into her throat, and she had to shut her eyes and clench her jaw to keep herself still.

“If you need anything else, let me know,” the woman said.

“I will,” Piper said. “Thank you.”

A few rapid heartbeats of silence passed, and then the woman left the room and the door slid shut. The lock clicked, as it always did, but there, if anyone had known to listen for it, was a second, quieter click just ahead of it. Piper made herself count to twenty before she came out of her position, and then to one hundred before she sat up on the bed. She was going to do it. Now that the moment had come, she knew she was going to. She had to try. Even so, it took all of her will to make herself stand to her feet.

Piper went to her little table and sat in the folding chair. The woman had left her a meal and, as promised, with it were three discs of the flat bread Piper had come to enjoy so much. She wasn’t especially hungry at that exact moment, but she tore off some of the bread and nibbled at it, poked at the rest of her meal with its corners.

There was no way to know how long they’d been holding her. Her wrist seemed to have completely healed, and the woman had removed her cast. So that was probably at least a week of time, depending on what nanos they’d used to help heal the bone. But it had been a long stretch before Piper had even thought to try to keep track of time, and the only system she’d been able to come up with since then wasn’t exactly reliable. She’d started counting the number of times she’d slept, which was now up to twenty-three. Unfortunately, she could never tell how long she’d slept at any given time, nor how much time had passed before she felt tired enough to go back to sleep, so she had no clear idea of how long she’d been a prisoner.

It must have been intentional on the part of her captors, as well. At first, Piper had assumed that her body was just out of kilter from the stress and trauma of her circumstances; that she needed more sleep than usual, or that sometimes she was ravenous when it was time to eat and other times she had no appetite at all. Over time, though, she came to suspect that the people holding her were purposefully avoiding establishing any sort of set routine for her. Maybe they would bring her two meals only a couple of hours apart, and then make her go a full day before the next one came. Piper had no way to measure it, of course, but once she started paying attention, it seemed very likely that they were manipulating her to keep her off balance.

That was OK, though. Because Piper had started manipulating them right back. Carefully, cautiously, she’d begun to establish a routine of her own, to build a certain level of expectation and maybe even something like trust. She had no idea if she was under constant surveillance, but she’d decided to assume she was. After a couple of experiments, she’d located the camera they were using to keep an eye on her and, more importantly, the extent of its vision. It was high, near the door, and angled mainly to focus on the bed and table. Piper had managed to extract some concessions from the woman that brought her meals by mentioning several times how difficult she found it to use the bathroom knowing that anyone could be watching her. Eventually they’d brought a makeshift folding screen for her and set it up to give her a small corner of privacy.

Piper had also taken to doing yoga and some calisthenics to keep her strength up. For some of these, she made use of the wall by the door, just out of view of the camera. No one made any comment to her about it, undoubtedly to avoid acknowledging that there was a gap in their surveillance. But she was on good behavior anyway, and never gave them any reason to think she would do anything other than what they expected of her.

She’d made good use of her privacy screen. Over time, she’d managed to pull a few parts from the waste recycler; a spring here, some flexible tubing there, a small amount of some kind of thick pasty substance that clung to surfaces and never seemed to dry out or harden. A couple of components came from her table. And her work to establish rapport had gone far enough that they were even trusting her with an eating utensil now: a single instrument part fork, part spoon, with an edge that was enough to cut butter and not much else.

Over several sessions of sitting on the toilet behind her screen, she’d assembled a small device. Nothing special or fancy, by any means. Just a tiny, spring-loaded metal plate on a makeshift hinge crafted from flexible tubing. This device she’d stuck to the door frame during one of her stretching exercises. It was this device that had clicked, just before the lock had settled into place, preventing it from securing completely. And, with any luck, it was this device that would enable Piper to work the lock open. Studying the door and the lock had confirmed what she had begun to believe; the ship she was on hadn’t been built with prisoners in mind, and her captors didn’t consider her to pose any serious threat of escape. The lock was a simple catch, dialed in from the outside. Undoubtedly there were security measures preventing any sort of attempt to hack the control, but that was a common mistake. High-tech security often had the most embarrassingly low-tech vulnerabilities.

She poked at her meal a few minutes longer, with both bread and eating utensil. Then, after hopefully having given a good performance of not being especially hungry, she got up, sat on the edge of her bed for a span and let her nervous energy show. She bounced her legs, she fidgeted, she rolled her head around to stretch her neck. And she hoped no one noticed the utensil was no longer on the table.

She got up again and started going through a series of yoga poses. Her usual routine. If anyone was watching, they would know the whole series of movements, and how long it would take for her to get through them. After the first few minutes, she’d move over to the wall for a while. Twenty to thirty minutes or so, by her best estimation. How long would that give her before they came looking?

Piper completed the first part of her routine, and went calmly to the wall. There, she executed her first two stretches as usual. Partially to keep up the ruse, and partly because her hands were trembling with the enormity of what she was about to attempt. There was no telling what was on the other side of that door. She could very well open it and find her captors all sitting right on the other side. And what would she do if they caught her? Or, more likely,
when
.

She didn’t know. But it didn’t matter. She couldn’t take being trapped in this room any longer. She had to get out, had to breathe other air, if even for a few minutes. At that very moment, the idea of a few minutes of freedom seemed worth giving her life for.

Piper steeled herself, and slid over to the door. She had to crouch down to examine the locking mechanism. Worried that she might show up on camera if she did so, she ended up standing with her back pressed against the wall, but bent over and twisted awkwardly so she could see what she was doing. Fortunately, all of the yoga she’d been doing had given her excellent balance and flexibility.

The moment of truth. Piper angled her view first this way, then that, trying to get a good view of the lock. With some disappointment, she discovered her device hadn’t worked exactly as intended. Either she’d misjudged its location, or the pressure from the lock had shifted her catch. At first, it appeared that the lock had seated itself completely, and Piper felt a cascade of defeat, mingled with a wave of relief she didn’t want to admit to. The idea had been sound, at least, if not the execution.

But then, on second look, she noticed her device was angled slightly inward, which suggested that perhaps it
had
caught part of the lock. She fished the eating utensil out from her pocket, and carefully inserted the handle just behind her device. It shifted again, and Piper’s breath caught. Fortunately, the device didn’t drop out to the floor. After that near heart-stopping moment, Piper began working the device and the lock once more with a surgeon’s care. Sweat beaded on her forehead, her back and legs trembled from the strain of her unnatural position. But after a few minutes, there was a click, the device fell free, and the door slid open just enough to let light through from the other side.

Piper froze in place, listening for the sounds of any alarm, movement, or reaction from whatever was on the opposite side of the door. She waited in silence longer than was strictly necessary; she knew that once she slid the door open, everything would change. There was still time to close it back, to go back to bed, to remain safe in the meager comfort of her cell.

But no. She hadn’t lived her life in fear, not since she’d left her home. Since she’d left the old Maria behind and embraced the new Piper, the talented technical specialist for Veryn-Hakakuri, who had emerged.

A deep breath. Stand tall.

Piper slid the door aside and crossed the threshold.

S
HE STEPPED INTO A PASSAGEWAY
, narrow but long. A few hatches lined the sides; some doors like the one she’d just opened, others larger, on heavy hinges. It was a ship, then, most certainly. And an industrial one, from the immediate look of it. Her first impression was that she was on a drilling rig, though she couldn’t see anything that specifically identified it as such. Maybe it was a freighter. It didn’t appear to be military in nature, at the very least.

Piper took soft, cautious steps down the passageway, her head cocked and listening for any sound of activity. At least this far, it was quiet, apart from the steady, deep, background hum of the ship. With each step further from her improvised cell, she felt the tether stretching, drawing her back, screaming a warning at the danger. She was free, yes, for the moment, but her freedom brought with it an exhilarating terror; the liberty of a sparrow in the open sky, with a hawk soaring high above it.

She crept about ten meters down the hall and came to a stop where a second passageway met the first in a T-intersection. There, she checked back over her shoulder, and noticed then the open door she’d left behind. She should have closed it. Anyone walking by would know she’d gotten out. But going back to slide it shut now seemed like a retreat, or a return to a cage. She couldn’t bring herself to turn around. She’d just have to take her chances.

Piper peeked around the corner, first one way then the other. The second passageway stretched off in both directions, even longer than the one she’d first stepped into. Still no sight or sound of anyone else. She eased around the corner, turning right for no conscious reason, and continued her slow-motion escape.

As she made her way down the second, longer passageway, an uncanniness settled on her; the heavy, unnatural emptiness of such a large ship without its crew. It wasn’t unusual for freighters or transports to run with just a handful of crewmembers, but this felt different to her. It felt wrong, somehow. Like a city block, abandoned in the middle of the day.

It occurred to Piper in that moment that she had no idea what she was doing. She’d been so focused on just getting
out
of the room, that she hadn’t thought ahead to what she would do once she was free. So focused on executing the first plan, she hadn’t even realized she needed a second. Adrenaline poured through her, icing her hands and making them tremble. She stopped again, panic threatening to paralyze her. Maybe she could find the communications room. Or a place to hide. Would hiding be any different than being held captive? Where was she going? What was she even looking for?