Outriders (32 page)

“Downtown, Highrise is in,” Lincoln reported. “We’re moving to the second breach point now.”

“Roger, Highrise,” Thumper said. “We’re going to go ahead and move into the dock. It’s dead down here.”

“Downtown to dock, copy,” Lincoln said.

The metalwork spread and overlapped like many hands with long fingers splayed; Sahil led the way as the trio navigated space that had never been intended for traversal. As Lincoln climbed over and around, ducked under, and stepped across, he was once again amazed at how natural the movement felt, at how closely the suit matched his body’s expectations. If ever there was a place to catch a too-wide shoulder or clock a helmeted head, it was here, in between the hulls of a poorly constructed station. But there was none of that for Lincoln, nor for his teammates ahead of him, at least thus far.

After a few minutes of careful climbing, Sahil reached the entry point. He crouched and started assembling his necessary tools. Wright took a position next to him, and readied her weapon. Lincoln clambered in just behind Sahil, placed his hand on Sahil’s shoulder. The three of them balanced on a three-foot-wide girder flush against the inner hull. Sahil attached a small device to the hull about waist height.

“How big a hole you want?” he asked in a whisper. There was no real need to keep voices low; Lincoln could have screamed and no one outside his suit would have heard it. But it was a hard habit to break. And Lincoln wasn’t sure it was worth breaking anyway. Quiet voices reinforced quiet movement.

“Big enough to get through in a hurry if we have to,” Lincoln answered.

Sahil produced a cylinder from somewhere on his hip, and used it to trace a silvery outline on the inner hull, roughly the size and shape of a normal ship hatch. When he’d completed the circuit, he tapped the bottom of it with his knuckle.

“Don’t trip goin’ in,” Sahil said. He replaced the cylinder on the suit’s belt, and then quickly went to work setting up two additional devices, one just above the top right corner of the outline, and one below it, at the bottom corner. Once he was certain they were secure, he activated the small device he’d first attached to the hull. As the device came on line, an electric border radiated outward from it, like lightning pooling against the hull, and wherever it spread, the hull appeared to become translucent. Outside the suit, nothing had changed, but from inside, Lincoln and his teammates had a good look at what was going on on the other side of the wall.

And what was going on, Lincoln was glad to see, was pretty much nothing.

“Downtown, Highrise is ready to make entry on the station,” he said. “What’s your status?”

“We’re holding in the dock, by a service tunnel entrance,” Thumper answered.

“You got eyes on that relay yet?”

“Not yet. Poke’s reading strong signal, so he’s close, but there’s a lot of clutter. My guess is that they tucked it back in one of the secure storerooms and camouflaged it with a bunch of junk.”

“You want us to wait?”

“Negative, we’re ready to move. Poke should have it by the time we get there.”

“Roger that. Stand by,” Lincoln said. He switched his comms back to local. “Sahil, we set?”

“Set.”

Lincoln pulled his short rifle up from his chest, shouldered it, kept the muzzle pointed low. “Burn it.”

“Don’t trip,” Sahil said again. He pulled the small black box off the hull, and the image of the empty passageway on the other side dissolved. A moment later, Sahil touched off the silvery outline. There was no sound from it as it brightened into white, a white so intense that Lincoln’s visor had to filter it to keep it from blinding him. It didn’t take nearly as long as Lincoln expected. In just a few moments, the two devices at the top and bottom of the cut whined quietly, as they extended and then swiveled together to draw the cut section of the hull to one side. The instant there was enough of a gap, Sahil shot through it to the left. Wright moved in just behind him to the right, and Lincoln followed her through, mindful to step high over the lip at the bottom of the cut.

In the few seconds it had taken to get into the station, nothing in the passageway had changed. Still, the team held position, weapons ready, listening for any sounds of warning. Lincoln gave it thirty seconds to be sure.

“Downtown, Highrise is in,” he said.

“Copy, Highrise,” Thumper responded. “Downtown is moving into the tunnels now.”

“Roger that,” Lincoln answered. “Sahil, patch it up and let’s go.”

Sahil nodded, lowered his weapon and returned to the entry point. After a moment, Lincoln heard the mechanical arms on the other side of the hull reverse to slide the section back into place. There was a noticeable gap where the cut had been made, but the lighting in the passageway was poor, and this section of the station seemed to be fairly low traffic anyway. Lincoln wondered briefly how long it’d be before anyone noticed. Given the state of the station interior, though, it might not even seem that out of place.

Sahil brought his weapon back up and returned to his position ahead of Lincoln.

“Go camo,” Lincoln said, “Move when ready.”

Lincoln activated the reactive camouflage of his suit; the function surveyed the environment and adapted the suit’s surfaces to blend in as much as possible from multiple viewpoints, using the sensor suite and threat matrix to prioritize the camo scheme. It didn’t make anyone invisible, but in the right situations, it could be pretty close. Ahead of Lincoln, the pattern on Sahil’s suit shifted like thin trails of mist and shadow stretching to meet.

“Camo’s up,” Sahil said. “Mir, you set?”

“Roll,” she answered from behind Lincoln.

Sahil moved forward with quiet steps and careful aggression; a delicate dance of speed without haste, masterfully executed. Lincoln matched pace, with Wright following close and providing security to the rear. The route they took was cleanly plotted and clearly marked through the augmented display, but within the first few minutes, Lincoln knew there could be trouble ahead. Though they didn’t have to redirect at any point, there were places along the way, passages blocked that should have been clear or doors where walls should have been, that warned of bad mapping data. The deeper they got into the station, the worse it seemed to get.

There was nothing to do about it now. The suit was capturing all the new data, correcting as they went, so at very least they’d know what to expect when they came back through on the way out.

“Thumper wasn’t wrong about twisty,” Wright said.

The three pressed on in silence the rest of the way to their target; a high-security hold on Flashtown’s upper decks. Under normal circumstances, this was the kind of operation Lincoln would have carried out in the dead of night; an oh-dark-ugly kind of hit. But Flashtown was special. There was no dead-of-night on the station. Officially, it ran on a thirty two-hour clock, though Lincoln didn’t know what the point of that was. Mayor Jon’s way of keeping some sort of nonconformist order, maybe. Whatever the case, people were up and about at all times, which made everything that much more difficult. Lincoln and his team weren’t here to cause indiscriminate murder and mayhem. But given the kinds of folks who generally populated Flashtown and the chances of bumping into someone unexpectedly, there was a very real and present risk of doing just that.

Fortunately, after some careful navigation and thanks to Sahil’s good instincts, Lincoln’s element reached the deck without alerting any of the station’s citizens. Green Deck was dedicated to loading, unloading, and storing cargo from Flashtown’s various clientele. Unlike most stations with their contraband and safety regulations, anyone could store just about anything at Flashtown, as long as they paid. And the more they paid, the better the security got. From the look of things, Lincoln guessed he and his team were in the cheap seats. Several holds were little more than open hangars, sectioned off by haphazard fencing. Security personnel patrolled in and around the aisles between these areas.

And calling them security personnel seemed generous. Mostly they were skinny kids with rifles too big, with a few mean-looking roughnecks mixed in here and there. Lincoln had seen the same composition in any number of irregular military forces back on-planet; exploiting young would-be warriors was a common recruitment tactic favored by warlords, cartels, and paramilitary groups. No matter how far from home they got, people didn’t really change.

Across from one of the bargain-rate hangars, separated by a thoroughfare wide enough to drive a couple of trucks down, sat the target area, and it was clearly a different story. It too appeared to have been a hangar at some point, but had since been substantially reinforced. A pair of guards lounged near the front entrance, which was a large, thick steel door that Lincoln guessed had maybe once belonged to some sort of vault. The guards themselves weren’t exactly professional, but they both had a veteran look; mercenaries who’d seen some action, or maybe a couple of former pirates who’d managed to survive to retirement. Or, Lincoln thought, maybe not former at all; pirates who were taking a couple of weeks off to earn some pay.

Lincoln decided to set up shop in the hangar across from the target. With some well-timed maneuvering and a quick lock circumvention, Lincoln and his two teammates gained access to one of the holds and took up concealed, elevated positions among the stacks of crates and containers. From his perch atop a double stack of large shipping containers, Lincoln had a good view of several of the patrolling guards below as well as the two men posted at the entrance of the target area. He tagged those he could see, and his visor marked each with a thin bracket. Those tags were in turn automatically distributed to his teammates’ suits. From that point, as long as at least one of them had visual on the guards, the tags would update in real time.

“Downtown, Highrise,” Lincoln said.

“Stand by, Highrise,” Thumper answered. Lincoln waited, keeping careful watch on his surroundings. About twenty seconds later, Thumper spoke again. “OK, go ahead, Link.”

“We’re set up across from the target, and about ready to make some noise.”

“Copy that,” Thumper said. “We’re almost to the relay. Poke’s got it ID’d.”

“How long you going to need, you think?”

“Couple more minutes to get there at least. Ten to do the work, maybe. Lot of activity down here though, it’s slow going.”

“We’ll see if we can pull some attention up our way. You OK for us to get started?”

“As long as you don’t hassle me when I’m on the box.”

“No promises,” Lincoln said. “I’ll let you know before we get loud.”

“Roger.”

Lincoln held a quick conference with Sahil and Wright to form a plan of attack. Two minutes later, Wright crept off and made her way to a second hold, deeper in the hangar. Sahil kept watch over her while Lincoln kept his eyes on the guards across the thoroughfare. He was doing more than watching, though. He’d boosted the magnification on his visor and zeroed in on the hold door’s locking mechanism. The suit executed a scan and fired up a process. In a few seconds, it had run through the army’s extensive library of known locks and methods of defeat, and had fed the information back to Lincoln. It was an older digital model, expensive but not as secure as its manufacturer or its price made it appear. Before Wright had finished setting up her end of the plan, Lincoln accessed the lock remotely, spoofed the necessary credentials, and loaded them up for later use.

“Wright’s in place,” Wright said over comms. “Say when.”

Lincoln checked over his shoulder. Sahil was already holding up an OK sign.

“We’re set,” Lincoln said to Wright, before switching channels. “Downtown, Highrise is about to make some noise.”

“Copy, Highrise,” Thumper answered. “Make it pretty.”

Lincoln switched back to local. “Wright. Execute.”

“Executing,” she said.

A few seconds later, a sharp bang rattled the hangar, followed by a series of pops and the deep rumble of crates overturning. To Lincoln’s trained ears, the pops were easily identifiable as a multistage flash grenade. But he understood why the security personnel might mistake them for gunshots.

The commotion caused a variety of reactions, all of which revealed the experience levels of the guards. Several of the younger ones scattered to the nearest cover, clutching their rifles. One of them stood frozen in the open, eyes fixed in the direction of the sound, apparently unable to process what he should do next. The two guards at the target entrance, predictably, had the most casual reaction of any of them. They perked up, exchanged a few words, and crossed about halfway to the hangar.

“Yo!” one of them called. “Yo, what’s that in there?”

“Somebody’s shooting!” one of the young ones called back.

“You see ’em shooting, or you think they’re shooting?”

“I don’t see anything, man!”

“Sahil,” Lincoln said. “Time to move.”

“Yep,” Sahil answered.

“Wright, we’re climbing down,” said Lincoln. “You got eyes on?”

“Yeah, I got you,” she answered.

Lincoln carefully climbed down from his hide and met Sahil at the gate of their hold. He couldn’t see Wright directly from where they were, but the visor displayed a ghost image of her position, up high in yet another hold closer to the hangar entrance.

“You’re clear to move to the hangar entrance,” Wright said.

“Moving,” Lincoln replied, and in the next moment he and Sahil were out and on their way towards the thoroughfare. The Flashtown security guys were still yelling back and forth, trying to figure out who was where and what had happened. The two brackets representing the guards from the target advanced on the hangar.

“Keep going,” Wright said. “If you go quickly you can make it across.”

“Copy,” Lincoln said. From his view, it looked like he was going to step out into the open before the guards entered the hangar, but he trusted the master sergeant’s judgment. He kept the same pace and sure enough, just as he stepped out of cover, the guards passed into an aisle and remained out of view. Lincoln didn’t look back. Sahil was right behind him, and the two swiftly covered the ground to the target. Before they reached the door to the hold, Lincoln activated the spoofed credentials and heard the locking mechanism respond. He reached the vault door and pulled it smoothly open. There wasn’t time to do a careful peek before they entered, so Lincoln relied on speed and training to carry him through. He rolled straight in, and Sahil followed without missing a beat.