McKnight's Mission

by Caleb Wachter

  Lu Bu nodded, stopping mid-stride to return to her adoptive mother’s side and stoop down to give her a soft hug. “Thank you, Mother,” she said with the most genuine feeling she had experienced in the last several weeks.

  Dr. Middleton returned her embrace, and then Lu Bu made her way to check on her team’s frustratingly slow progress.

  But she took some small measure of solace in Traian’s report which, if Dr. Middleton’s relayed message was correct, meant he had finally tracked down one of the Raubach operatives they had been searching for since landing on Capital.

  Chapter XVII: A Dark Alley, and Eureka!

  Traian blinked in confusion as he looked at his surroundings. The alley he was standing in was completely unfamiliar; the last thing he remembered was striking up a conversation with the man he had identified just a few days earlier as working for House Raubach. That man’s name was Arnold Benedict, and Traian had secured a meeting with him in a rather seedy pub.

  The problem was that Traian had absolutely no idea how he had gotten from there to where he now stood. He had been drinking more than usual lately—partly to cope with the death of his best friend, Vali Funar, and partly to deal with the intense nightmares which had plagued his sleep for the past several months.

  Was I sleepwalking again? he wondered silently as he tried to get his bearings. He had recently experienced a handful of sleepwalking episodes—or, more worrisomely, they might have been actual blackouts—and in that moment he began to seriously question just how hard he had been hitting the sauce since Val’s death. Before he could continue with that train of thought, the sound of footsteps at the open end of the alley brought his mind into focus.

  “Are you Benedict?” the author of the nearest footfalls asked as a quartet of well-muscled men approached.

  Thinking quickly—and seeing that the men were all armed with slug-throwing pistols—Traian nodded, “I am.”

  “I’ll give you this,” the man said scoffed, “you’re brave. Stupid,” he added with a sneer, “but brave—especially since you haven’t paid for the last shipment we sent your way.”

  Traian was well out of his depth, but he saw from the tense postures of the men standing between him and the alley’s lone exit that they were expecting trouble. He was carrying a slug thrower similar to those on the hips of the four men, in addition to his trusty vibro-knife, but even Traian wouldn’t give himself better than a twenty percent chance to take them all out before they got the better of him—especially not in such tight quarters.

  So he decided to take a chance at playing along with the charade. Jutting his chin defiantly, he quipped, “If your merchandise had been worth paying for, I wouldn’t have had to go to the competition.”

  “Competition?” the man repeated amusedly. “Ever since the twins got burned from the inside, I’ve been running the market here on Capital.”

  “You’re awfully full of yourself,” Traian said with forced calm as he folded his arms across his chest. “You should be thanking me for not notifying the authorities after your shipment failed inspection.”

  “Inspection?!” the man blurted incredulously. “When you agreed to take delivery of a thousand grav-plates, you understood they were in ‘as is’ condition.” He thumbed his sidearm menacingly, “Or are you going to try backing out of a business deal here on Capital?”

  Traian knew from his research that even black market deals, if brought before a magister, would be adjudicated identically to fully legal claims. Capital prided itself on permitting the trade of just about anything—including, under certain circumstances, sentient resources. Most sentient resource transactions required extensive paperwork in order to verify that the individuals involved were willingly subjecting themselves to the terms of their labor agreements. So he had little doubt that whatever deal Benedict had struck with this man—who was completely unfamiliar to Traian—would, in fact, be enforced using Capital’s somewhat extreme legal system.

  “You’ll get paid what the plates were worth,” Traian growled, knowing the situation was not far from spinning out of control. “If you get no money, you can take that as our official appraisal of the merchandise’s real value. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to report in—“

  The man drew his pistol in a blur, moving almost as fast as Traian could move, and it was all the MSP Lancer could do to avoid responding with a preemptive counterattack. He knew that his best chance at surviving was still by playing along, but he doubted that would remain the case for much longer.

  The pistol’s muzzle remained unwaveringly aimed at Traian’s nose, and the man let the silence linger for a dramatic moment before saying, “I don’t care that you’ve got Imperial connections—this isn’t the Empire, pretty boy. Even if it was, your masters’ fortunes have taken a turn for the worse of late if my sources are right. Give me one reason why I shouldn’t blow your head off and send a few of your more…unique body parts along with the next shipment to show your boss that I’m the wrong guy to steal from?”

  Traian actually felt like breathing a sigh of relief at hearing the man wished to send another shipment. That meant he might get some more information out of them before the meeting concluded—which, if it concluded in his favor, meant his temporary blackout might not have cost him as much as he had previously feared.

  “House Raubach honors its bargains,” Traian retorted, remembering from Lu Bu’s report that a similar sentiment had been expressed by Commodore Raubach. “Besides,” he added defiantly, taking a measured step toward the man and diving headlong into the role of antagonistic buyer, “who else is going to buy your merchandise? Let’s face it, your organization isn’t exactly the equal of its predecessors—you’re looking to establish yourself in the current power vacuum, and we’ve agreed to support you in doing that. But you serve us,” Traian snapped, “and you’d be wise to remember that.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “For an Imp, you sure sound a lot like a native,” he mused, causing Traian’s heart to skip several beats.

  “If I didn’t,” he retorted, “then I might be as bad at my job as you are at yours—and House Raubach doesn’t make a habit of employing anyone but the best.”

  Fury flashed in the man’s eyes, and for a moment Traian very nearly succumbed to the urge to draw his weapon and take his admittedly bad chances rather than face summary execution.

  But the moment passed, and the man lowered the pistol. “Fine,” he said agreeably, “you live—for now. But here’s a message to take to your master.”

  The pistol flashed in his view and smashed into Traian’s nose, which audibly broke upon contact with the heavy, metal weapon. He staggered backward a couple steps before regaining his balance, and he had to fight to keep his hand from going to the grip of his own weapon.

  “I know your face now, Benedict,” the man said darkly as Traian felt blood trickle down from his onto his shirt. “Tell your boss that I always collect what’s mine.”

  With that, he spat on the ground and turned to exit the alleyway. His trio of thugs left with him, and soon Traian was left with the adrenaline dump which so often followed a tense situation.

  He eventually glanced down at his wrist-link and saw that it had been two full hours since he had set foot in the pub where he’d planned on meeting Benedict.

  “I’ve got to stop drinking,” he muttered as he flipped up his jacket’s collar and made his way out onto the street so he could report back to the Mode and brief Corporal Lu.

  If his last update had been correct, Lieutenant Commander McKnight would arrive in three days—and the Three Stooges had still been unable to access Fei Long’s virtual network. That meant that Traian belonged back aboard the Mode ASAP.

  As he walked toward the nearest tram stand, his thoughts were increasingly filled with fond memories shared with his best friend Val, and he was not ashamed to admit that a handful of tears rolled down his cheeks during the trip back to the Mode’s docking slip.

  “What do y
ou mean?” Lu Bu asked impatiently for no less than the fifth time since she had braved the small, poorly-lit compartment which Fengxiao, Yuanzhi and Shiyuan had converted into their workspace.

  “We have been able to isolate the virtual network’s entry points Kongming created,” Shiyuan explained in Qin, gesturing to three separate displays arrayed on his workstation. “Some of them have been shut down as a result of systematic updates to their local hosts, but once we gain access we can re-open these defunct points.”

  “But what does that have to do with you actually gaining access?” she asked tersely. Their technobabble and propensity to speak in verbiage that straddled the line between arcane jargon and unintelligible shorthand had worn her already diminished patience dangerously thin.

  “The issue,” Fengxiao interrupted with calm poise that was quite unlike the expressive Shiyuan, “is that we have been unable to solve the cipher he left in place.”

  “You have attempted and failed?!” she asked in alarm, knowing that Fei Long had been explicit in stating that even a single failed login would result in the entire network being destroyed.

  “Of course not,” Yuanzhi said irritably. “But we have been unable to recombine the supposed ‘half’ of the ciphers he included in the message with the other half—which we seem to have been correct in assuming were held by each of us.”

  “What does that mean?” Lu Bu asked in exasperation.

  “Basically,” Jarrett interjected, his face even more scrunched up and unattractive than usual, “what we think he did was leave each of us a slightly different version of the network to access. It is difficult to explain, but our tests here suggest that each of us could access the network using his own unique piece of the cipher—however, if one of us does that, it will cause some portions of the network to go dormant and, possibly, to self-delete.”

  “Why would he do that?” Lu Bu muttered, knowing that all of this was far above her ability to positively contribute in any meaningful fashion.

  “We think,” Fengxiao said calmly, “that he did this to protect each of us from recrimination. He is ensuring that those code fragments which each of us assisted in creating back on home world would not fall into hands other than our own.”

  “It does fit his modus operandi,” Yuanzhi nodded slowly. “But it’s…well, frankly it’s an insanely complicated undertaking. None of us could hope to duplicate its complexity.”

  “But,” Shiyuan said, pointing to one of Fengxiao’s screen, “we are confident we have all of the pieces we need. The issue is introducing them in the correct order; if we input the cipher fragments out of sequence then the whole network will delete.”

  “How do you think I can help with that?” Lu Bu asked, finally feeling as though she had some vague understanding of what they were up against.

  “You spent more time with him than anyone in the past few years,” Yuanzhi explained. “Did he ever mention how he intended for us to open this program?”

  “No,” Lu Bu said a bit too harshly. She drew a steadying breath and continued, “No…I did not even know that he intended to recruit any of you until he was already…gone.” She balked for some reason at actually saying that he was dead, which was odd since she had already come to terms with his death.

  “What about hobbies?” Fengxiao pressed. “Aside from that thrice-cursed book, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, of course,” he added sourly.

  Lu Bu shook her head. “It was the core of his being, and a copy was never far from his side.”

  “But we have already run every single recombination sequence derivative that we can think of,” Shiyuan sighed, “including referencing page numbers which feature each of our namesakes in the story, or even those pages which feature his namesake’s appearances. We’ve even run algorithms based on the character locations in the book, converted to every base numeric system up to base one thousand. There is nothing,” he declared with nothing short of despair.

  Lu Bu felt her hands clench into fists at her sides. They had come so close to unlocking the network, but now it seemed she would report to her commanding officer in failure when Lieutenant Commander McKnight arrived in a few days.

  Then she remembered something Fei Long had said to her before planting a surprising—yet far from unwelcome—kiss on her lips back on the Lost Ark. “Yin and Yang…” she whispered.

  “Excuse me?” Yuanzhi asked with a furrowed brow.

  Lu Bu shook her head and closed her eyes as the memory seemed ready to vanish like a wisp of smoke from her mind. “Yin and Yang,” she repeated more forcefully as she tried to recall his precise words. “Yin and Yang…that is how he said he would summon the East Wind!” she declared, her eyes popping open as she reached for the data slate which contained his last message to her. She replayed the message, skipping to the very end and backing it up just a few seconds before playing it for all to hear.

  “If there is some form of afterlife for us, I will spend every moment seeking you out once I reach it,” Fei Long’s recording said in a voice that tore at her heart strings. But she fought against the rising mixture of embarrassment and sorrow she felt at hearing him speak once again, and paid close attention to the last line of the message, “Fare well…and may the East Wind forever be at your back.”

  She paused the recording and looked up at them. “The East Wind was how Zhou Yu defeated Cao Cao at Chi Bi,” she said earnestly. “Zhuge Liang supposedly summoned it atop an altar of some kind…” she trailed off, trying desperately to remember the details and failing to do so after several seconds of intense focus.

  “That was a scene from a work of fiction…high fantasy, even—” Yuanzhi began dismissively.

  “Not to Kongming it wasn’t!” Shiyuan protested. “He saw that book as nothing less than a blueprint to understanding all of human nature, and for accurately predicting the outcome of every possible conflict humans might engage in. Whether he was right or wrong isn’t the point,” he said in a rising voice as Yuanzhi rolled his eyes, “whether he might have incorporated that belief into this cipher is the point.”

  “This is correct,” Fengxiao mused as his eyes narrowed in contemplation.

  “Oh, come on,” Yuanzhi threw his hands in the air emphatically. “Don’t tell me you’re buying into Kongming’s silly ideas.”

  “My primary goal is to preserve freedom in all its forms, Yuanzhi,” Fengxiao said as he closed his eyes in an apparent attempt to focus. “And we need to win battles like this one if we are to do that. If temporarily subscribing to Kongming’s admittedly eccentric beliefs will help me win, then that is what I will do.”

  “Wait a minute…” Shiyuan said slowly. When all eyes had fixed on him, his expression shifted in an unreadable fashion, but his voice bespoke excitement unlike anything the three tech experts had displayed during this lengthy meeting, “He said the wind should be at your back, correct?”

  “Yes,” Lu Bu nodded, “But Lu Bu was not part of the battle at Chi Bi—he was already dead.”

  “So who led the fire ships into Cao Cao’s navy?” Shiyuan pressed.

  “Huang Gai led the Southland’s navy,” Fengxiao replied before Lu Bu could remember the name of the famous Wu General which had spearheaded the surprise, night attack.

  “Huang Gai,” Shiyuan nodded knowingly, “whose back and legs had been beaten in the battered body ruse—and an East Wind had been at his back during the attack!”

  Fengxiao’s eyes snapped open as a look of realization came across their collective faces. A moment later, and in perfect unison, the three tech experts spun their chairs around and began furiously working at their stations.

  Lu Bu actually held her breath for half a minute while they worked in silence. She heard footsteps outside the compartment and turned to see Traian—whose nose had apparently been abused recently—step into the doorway.

  She held a finger to her lips and he did as she had silently instructed, clearly appreciating the significance of their collectively furious, yet impre
ssively controlled efforts of the technicians.

  “Run this sequence, Fengxiao,” Shiyuan instructed without breaking his tempo.

  “It checks out,” Fengxiao replied measuredly a moment later.

  “The upload sequence looks like it fits the packet size,” Yuanzhi said excitedly.

  Several more minutes passed, during which time Lu Bu and Traian did not move—and hardly even breathed—as the experts worked in a way that reminded Lu Bu of Fei Long so much more than she had expected it would.

  “The sequence is programmed,” Shiyuan declared before leaning back from his workstation and adding, “check my work before we upload. This needs to be unanimous.”

  “Checking,” Fengxiao said as he scrolled through several pages of code, highlighting entire sections and seemingly deleting them before returning them and doing likewise to other segments. “It looks good.”

  “Same here,” Yuanzhi agreed. “I think this will do it.”

  Shiyuan turned to Lu Bu, and that same fierce intelligence she had come to both love and hate in Fei Long’s eyes now burned in the hideous-looking programmer who had apparently been Fei Long’s best friend. “This looks like our best bet, erm…ma’am,” he reported with awkward professionalism.

  Lu Bu stood to her feet and moved over to stand at his workstation. She gave the screen a hard look, but the truth was she had no way of confirming or refuting their belief that they had indeed found a way to do that which had thus far eluded them.

  “Do it,” she said decisively. One way or another, she needed to know if this virtual network was an asset they could depend on—and if it wasn’t, then it was time to destroy it so it wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands.

  Jarrett exhaled loudly as his fellows moved to flank him behind either shoulder. “Uploading…now,” he said, inputting a series of commands. After he finished, a progress bar appeared on the bottom of the screen and it quickly began to rise from empty toward the full point.