Outriders by Jay Posey

Author:Jay Posey
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780857664525
Publisher: Angry Robot
Published: 2016-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

THE TEAM ASSEMBLED in their planning center, laid out plans on the thin-skin. Sahil and Mike both looked ragged, but the cups of coffee and the promise of action kept them from grumbling too much. Not that Lincoln could remember ever having heard Sahil grumble at all.

On the left side, the thin-skin showed images of a number of individuals, with Prakoso at the top. The others were all people the team had ID’d as Apsis personnel, or close associates of Apsis. The right side of the thin-skin displayed a top-down view of the three blocks surrounding the building labeled Puck, as well as a closer view of Puck itself.

Lincoln touched the thin-skin over the image of Puck, selected a wireframe view of the floorplan.

“This one ain’t real complicated, sir,” Sahil said. “Go in, get the guy, don’t get shot.”

“We could do it,” Wright said, matter-of-fact. Apparently breaching a safehouse to pull a guy out was routine business as far as she was concerned. “But everybody would know about it. It doesn’t help us if the bad guys know he’s compromised. Or even if they believe it.”

“Agreed,” Lincoln said. “We’ll have to cover it.”

“How you plan on that?” Wright asked.

“Well, we can’t do it perfectly,” Lincoln said. “I’m guessing our bad guys aren’t going to be happy about Prakoso being gone, no matter where he ends up. And I don’t think we can pull off the old ‘hey, we’re Apsis employees moving him somewhere safer’, though I’m sure you all love that one. Best thing I can think of is to make it look like he did it himself. I figure a criminal like Prakoso probably has more than enough reason to want to disappear.”

“I don’t think it’s fair to call him a criminal, exactly, sir,” Thumper interrupted. In response, Lincoln just held his hand out next to the image of Prakoso, where the long list of charges he was facing in a large number of different nations was displayed. “Well sure, yeah, he broke some laws, but I’d be willing to bet more than half the time he was working for some other country when he did it. If you picked up an Eastern Coalition report on any one of us, it’d probably say the same sort of thing.”

“If anyone knew what we were actually up to, maybe,” Mike said. “Which they don’t.”

“You hope,” Thumper said.

“Fair enough, Thumper,” Lincoln said. “But the point remains. Guy like this has motivation and skills. Given the tools at his disposal, how does he get out of there on his own?”

“Seems like he already would have done it, if he’d wanted to,” Thumper said. “That’s assuming he could.”

“How would you do it? Put yourself in there.”

She shook her head. “Too many guys, too many sensors, I don’t see how I can do it and get more than about fifty feet before someone’s on me. You saw how fast they reacted when he came out for a smoke.”

Lincoln opened his mouth to encourage her, but Sahil stopped him with a look and a subtle shake of the head.

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