Outriders (28 page)

“They can get us all out together?” he asked.

“Sounds like,” Thumper said. “Short trip, though, just over to a hop, not all the way home. Best they could do on short notice.”

“As long as they can get us out of here with the precious cargo, that’s fine by me. How long until we leave?”

“About two hours. Be advised, though, Mr Self already made a couple of overtures about taking Prakoso into NID custody.”

“Yeah? What’d you tell him?”

“I told him he’d have to talk to Mom about that.”

“All right,” Lincoln said. He swept his eyes around the main room. Most of his essentials were already gathered up, either on him, or by his pack on the floor. “I’m gonna wake our VIP up and explain the situation to him. We got any juice handy?”

“Yeah, here,” Wright said, appearing from the back bedroom. She grabbed a jector from her pack and tossed it across the room to Lincoln. “You want a hand?”

“Nah, it’s fine. Just make sure Mike gets all squared away when he gets in.”

“Oh sure, give
me
the easy job,” she said with heavy sarcasm and a shake of her head.

“Least I can do after all your hard work tonight,” he said then added, “Hey. Seriously, though. Good work in there.”

“It’s what they pay me for,” she said, shrugging as she returned to the planning room. Lincoln glanced over at Thumper, who was looking at him.

“Don’t sweat it, captain,” she said. “Run about eighty-seven more of those with her, and she’ll warm up.”

“Eighty-seven, huh?”

“Give or take,” Thumper said with a smile. “I think that was her eighty-eighth grab if I remember right. Mike’s coming up. We good to shut Veronica down?”

“Yeah, if we’re all clear.”

“I’ll get to it then.”

Lincoln nodded and headed through the blanket-covered hole in the wall. The room on the other side was lit in dusky orange, by the single functioning light fixture on the wall. Prakoso was on one of the beds still lying on his side, loosely curled with his hands held up near his face, just like they’d left him. Lincoln checked the cuffs one more time, just to be sure, then checked the welt on the man’s forehead. Wright’s shot had impacted maybe a quarter-inch to the left of being right between the eyes. The goose egg that it had left behind had a pale circle in the center, surrounded by a dark, angry ring of bruising. Prakoso was going to have a mother of a headache when Lincoln woke him up.

Prakoso was wearing a long-sleeve shirt with the cuffs unbuttoned. Lincoln pulled one sleeve back and placed the jector against the inside of Prakoso’s skinny forearm. Judging from the sharpness of his wrist bones, Prakoso didn’t seem malnourished, exactly, but definitely seemed like he could have used some fattening up. Lincoln couldn’t help but wonder how long Apsis had been holding the man hostage.

He activated the jector, firing a jet of meds into Prakoso’s bloodstream to counteract the effects of the gel round. Once he’d dosed Prakoso, Lincoln sat down on the other bed across from him and waited. A minute or so later, Prakoso stirred and a few seconds after that, his eyes cracked open. For a while he just lay there, eyes open but mostly unfocused, breathing steady. Then, without even looking up, he spoke.

“Where am I?”

“Safe,” Lincoln said. Prakoso reached up and touched the knot on his forehead gingerly with his fingertips, then drew his hands away and looked at the cuffs on his wrists. His eyes slid over to meet Lincoln’s. “Just a precaution,” Lincoln said.

Prakoso inhaled deeply, closed his eyes for a few seconds. Then, he exhaled abruptly, and pushed himself slowly up to a seated position. He mirrored Lincoln; feet on the floor, hands resting in his lap.

“And now?” Prakoso asked.

“We’re preparing to take you home, Mr Prakoso,” Lincoln said.

Prakoso looked down at his hands in his lap, started rolling them back and forth over one another, slowly, methodically. Calming his nerves, most likely. Though he already seemed pretty calm.

“And where, sir, do you suppose home is for Mr Prakoso?” he asked with his head still down.

“That depends,” Lincoln answered.

“On?”

“You.”

“Naturally. You did not come to my rescue from only the goodness of your heart, sir.”

“Not entirely.”

“Yes, sir,” Prakoso said, as if he’d been expecting it. As if this was the routine. He just sat there, rubbing the heels of his hands together rhythmically. There was something soothing about the motion, even to Lincoln.

“We know what you’ve been up to, Mr Prakoso,” Lincoln said. “We know you’ve been involved in certain things. Bad things.”

“You are no police, sir.”

“No, no police, you’re right. But we can help you,” Lincoln replied. “Or, we can do the other thing. I’d rather help you.”

Prakoso nodded. His hands stopped moving, and he held them in front of himself, palms together. He raised them towards his face and then stopped. Apparently having his wrists bound together prevented him from doing whatever he’d been about to do. After a moment, he used both hands to smooth his wild hair on the right side of his head, then repeated the movement on the left side of his head. He ducked his head further, and smoothed the hair on top of his head, and behind.

When he brought his hands back down towards his lap, he did it so fluidly, so casually, that Lincoln had no warning that anything unusual was happening until he heard a loud pop, and Prakoso’s quick cuffs snapped off. In the next instant, Prakoso surged forward with both hands and snatched Lincoln’s head, twisted it. Lincoln had just enough time to bring his forearm in front of his face, before Prakoso’s knee rocketed up.

Lincoln’s arm absorbed some of the blow, but the knee caught him on the cheekbone, just in front of the hinge of his jaw, and his vision sparked white with the impact. Stunned, Lincoln could only manage to drop forward into Prakoso’s waist. He drove off his legs into an awkward tackle, but Prakoso melted back and away, and Lincoln ended up on one knee. Another stabbing strike caught him in the shoulder blade. He tried to regain his feet, but the room went sideways, and he ended up hard on his back, with Prakoso over him.

An instant later, another body flew into the room, a horizontal lightning strike that swept Prakoso away and into the wall. Lincoln scrambled backwards, too dizzy to follow exactly what was happening. A flurry of motion, someone called out, and then Prakoso was up again, raining vicious elbow strikes down on the person beneath him.

Sahil materialized and lunged for Prakoso, but Prakoso leapt to one side, up onto a bed and then sprang off again in a flying knee. Sahil rolled into the attack, caught Prakoso around the waist and threw the small man across the room. Prakoso impacted and flopped to the floor, then was somehow up again before Lincoln could even process what had just happened. It was like watching a monkey fight a tiger; Prakoso was everywhere. At one point, Sahil lunged, but Prakoso twisted and bent out of the way, and delivered a pair of strikes to the side of Sahil’s head. Sahil took the shots and whipped around with a heavy fist that caught Prakoso square in the chest.

Without warning a slice of the night sky fell and draped itself over Prakoso, and then Thumper was there, with her arms locked around him. Shrouded, he writhed against her, but with her powerful arms she picked him up and launched him like a broken rocket back down to the floor. The impact made a dreadful crunching thud. Afterwards, Prakoso lay dead still, covered with, Lincoln now saw, the blanket they’d been using to block the hole in the wall.

For a moment, everyone sat in shocked silence. Then Sahil finally spoke.

“You all right, boss?”

Lincoln sat up, but kept both hands firmly on the floor. He nodded, and it made the room swim.

“Well, Mikey,” Thumper said. “I think we found your Na.”

Mike rolled up to sitting, with his back against the wall. Two rivulets of blood ran from a split above his eyebrow, leaving trails down the side of his face and threatening to drip into his eye. He wiped it with fingertips, then wiped his hands on his pants. He must’ve been the first one in, the streak that had tackled Prakoso.

“Told ya there’s always one,” he said. “Did you kill him?”

“Nah,” Thumper said, and she nudged the form under the blanket with her toe. “Might’ve busted the floorboards a bit though.”

“What’d you take his cuffs off for, cap’n?” Mike said.

“I didn’t,” Lincoln said. “He broke ’em off.”

“I never seen anything like that before,” Sahil said. He bent down and picked something up off the floor, and then held it up. A shard from the quick cuffs. “I gotta ask him how he did it.”

“Next time
you
can wake him up,” Lincoln said.

“Next time we’ll have more people in the room,” Wright said from the hole in the wall. Lincoln hadn’t even noticed her standing there. She entered the room, and knelt down next to Prakoso, drew back the blanket. He was lying face down; his eyes were open and glassy. “Hey,” she said, and she slapped his cheek a couple of times with the back of her hand. “Hey, Prakoso. You dead, kid?”

He blinked a few times, and then tried to lift his head. Apparently that was too much to ask for the moment, and he laid it back down again and groaned.

“You going to give us any more trouble?” she asked. He groaned again. “If so, I can arrange to have my friend here hit you with the planet again.”

“No,” Prakoso said, and he shook his head as best he could. “No trouble.”

“Yeah, well, we’re gonna have to secure those hands again, just to be sure,” Wright said. She took hold of his hands and pulled them behind him. He didn’t seem to resist at all.

“Sure a funny way of showing gratitude you got there, pal,” Mike said, getting to his feet, with some help from Sahil. “We did just rescue you, you know.”

“No, sir,” Prakoso said, quietly. “No, sir. You just killed me.”

FIFTEEN

“
I
’M
glad one of us has good news,” Colonel Almeida said on the viz, as Lincoln finished an impromptu debriefing of the team’s lunar exploits. Thumper had rigged him up a secure line from the hop that was serving as their new temporary home, at least for the next few hours.

“Sir?”

“Central Martian Authority’s got Higher all worked up,” Almeida said. “Looks like the Martians are moving ships, tightening up their corridors. Official word is it’s all part of routine exercises, joint maneuvers between all the satellite communities, planned months in advance.”

“And we know it’s not,” Lincoln said.

“Opinions vary, as they usually do. But they put a war ship right out front, the
CMAV Relentless.
You don’t move a vessel like that into a spotlight position unless you’re sending a message. And piled on top of the recent unpleasantness, you can appreciate why it makes some people upstairs nervous.”

“The important question to answer is whether or not the Martians even know about the recent unpleasantness.”

“Fortunately, I’ve got some of my best people looking into that,” Almeida said.

“Just some?”

“Jury’s still out on the team lead.”

Lincoln chuckled. “What’s our response?”

“To the Martians? The usual chess match,” Almeida said. “Everybody’s doing one thing and saying they’re doing another. State’s holding a bunch of emergency meetings. We’re contributing ships to a multinational force, deploying forward to monitor the exercises.”

“Monitor, huh? Sending the usual suspects?”

“Not quite. All our friends and cousins of course, India, the Iranians, but even the Eastern Coalition’s kicking in a few support-only vessels.”

That caught Lincoln off guard. “And everybody’s OK with that?”

“Yeah, funny how messing with trade routes on the far end can make all the spats at home seem less important.”

“What about on the Martian side?”

“Apart from moving a bunch of ships around, it’s business as usual, for the most part. Complaining about unnecessary aggression, that sort of thing. This is all high-level games of state sort of stuff right now. Average man on the street probably isn’t paying too much attention to it yet. But as much as it’s stirring up our folks, you’ve got to assume all
their
people who don’t exist are working just as much overtime as
our
people who don’t exist.”

“Any idea what kicked it off?”

“Maybe nothing. Maybe something we don’t know about. Maybe this is what they’d been planning to do all along,” the colonel said. “Obviously, certain elements are taking it as proof that this is all part of a grand strategy to position for war.”

“Sending a bunch of ships to ‘monitor’ exercises sounds like a pretty good way to guarantee something bad happens.”

“Which is why it’s all the more important that you get me something concrete to work with. Hard to trust people who say they don’t want to start a war when everyone’s acting like they do. We’re way right of bang on this, captain. I’m counting on you to rewind the timeline.”

“At least you temper your expectations.”

“What’s going on with your man Prakoso now?” Almeida asked.

“Wright’s talking to him,” Lincoln said. “Figured it was best for us to hold on to him for now, see what we could get out of him before we turn him over to NID.”

“That’s a good call,” Almeida said. “Some of Mr Self’s people have already been down here knocking on my door to assume custody.”

“What’d you tell them?”

“I told them the next time you contacted me, I’d be sure to impress upon you the importance of turning him over at the earliest possible opportunity.”

“I’ll consider myself so warned.”

“I said I’d do it next time you contacted me,” the colonel said. “Unfortunately, you’ve been on mission and dark, and I have no idea when I might expect to hear from you again.”

“Ah. Understood, sir.”

“Do what you need to to keep your tempo up. I don’t want a bunch of paperpushers getting in between you and the raw data.”

“Roger that. Might be a while then, if we can convince him to help us. Maybe longer if we can’t.”

“Whatever you need. Just get it done,” said Almeida, and he started to say one thing, but stopped himself to say another. “Oh, one other bit of news from the Secret World. One of the CMA’s northern representatives was found dead in his room a few nights ago. On one of those luxury hops, further out towards the belt. He was one of the reps from the Martian People’s Collective Republic.”