McKnight's Mission

by Caleb Wachter

  Mantis, with her surprisingly compact sniper rifle, moved with deft grace and silence as she slotted in opposite Traian. She quickly made a series of hand signals which said she had a visual on one more crewman inside the engine room, and a clear shot on another.

  Lynch and Fisher followed Hutch around the rear of the tanks, and Lu Bu began to reply to Mantis with the same silent signals. Nonlethal measures if possible; lethal if discovered, she signed.

  Mantis acknowledged the orders and drew her rifle into a firing position but held fast once she had done so. Suddenly a commotion erupted from where Hutch, Lynch and Fisher had gone, and before Lu Bu could see what was happening she heard blaster fire.

  Without needing to be ordered, Mantis fired her long rifle with calm precision and Lu Bu heard an enemy crewman fall to the deck. Traian rushed around the corner of the coolant tank assembly with his sonic pistol drawn.

  Lu Bu looked down at the man on the other end of her sonic pistol’s muzzle and made a snap decision. She drew the gun back and struck him sharply in the head with the butt of the sonic weapon.

  When he slumped motionless to the floor unconscious, she jumped up and followed her team into the erupting firefight as a long-absent rush of adrenaline coursed through her veins.

  Mantis was calmly positioned behind a vertical strut, against which frequent weapons fire impacted. The pirate crew was using blaster weapons, which were particularly dangerous in an engine compartment but apparently occupational safety was of no concern to their foes.

  Spying the author of the fire which continued to score deep, black gouges in the duralloy beam which Mantis used for cover, Lu Bu also caught sight of the room’s primary doorway which led to the rest of the ship. Just as she was about to return fire on Mantis’ attacker, the doors to the engine room slid open and a pair of lightly armored warriors burst through and dove for cover behind nearby control panels.

  Lu Bu re-trained her sonic pistol on the newcomers and fired at the far pirate, taking him squarely in the chest. But the range was too great, and the pirate was too well-armored for the sonic pistol to do much more than slow him as he scrambled toward safety.

  But Traian took full advantage of the brief lull, firing his blaster rifle at the momentarily dazed pirate. The blaster bolt struck the pirate’s shoulder with such force that he was spun to the deck and his own weapon went flying. Knowing her team was exposed, Lu Bu dropped the sonic pistol and gripped Glacier Splitter in both hands as she burst across the open engine room floor toward the two pirates.

  When she was halfway to her quarry, the nearer pirate peered around his makeshift cover and fired a blaster rifle at her. She managed to juke out of the way with a stutter step and subtle shifting of her weight, but he re-trained the weapon on her and fired again just before she could close to grips with him.

  The force of the blaster bolt was somehow less powerful than she had remembered, but it was still nearly enough to knock her from her feet as it struck the left side of her chest and briefly robbed her of her balance. Rather than fighting against the sudden change in her body’s momentum, she spun Glacier Splitter wide in a one-handed grip and pirouetted while sidestepping so as to conserve as much of her forward momentum as possible.

  The clearly unexpected maneuver caused a trio of criss-crossing blaster bolts to nearly intersect where she would have otherwise been, had she simply charged forward, and before the pirates could re-train their weapons on her she was within striking range of the nearest pirate.

  Telescoping Glacier Splitter out to maximum took a mere twist of the weapon’s haft while her top hand returned to its usual grip, and she swung the mighty warhammer with every bit of momentum she had accumulated with her long, twirling maneuver.

  The hammer’s head struck the pirate just below the neck with a sickening crunch as his armor caved in several inches beneath the blow. But that was the least of his issues, since his half-armored head slammed into the corner of his former cover so violently that his entire body went instantly limp.

  Moving forward, Lu Bu caught sight of the pirate she had struck with her sonic pistol and burst toward him as she returned Glacier Splitter to its usual length with yet another deft twist of the haft.

  She made eye contact with that pirate in his last moment of life, but she saw no fear in his eyes. Instead, she saw resignation as he valiantly brought his blaster rifle up an instant too late to get a clean shot—and then she caved in his skull with the mighty hammer, which shattered his ceramic helmet as easily as if it had been a flower vase.

  A pair of blaster bolts struck her back, sending her staggering forward as her balance had been briefly undone when the hammer had struck home.

  She rolled to the side, attempting to find cover from the incoming fire and thankfully was able to do so. She set the hammer down beside the twitching corpse of the second pirate and reached for his blaster rifle. She gave the weapon a cursory glance before gripping it and peering around the corner of the control panel behind which she now crouched.

  She heard weapons fire exchanged on the far side of the compartment, much of which was taking place on a catwalk directly over the ship’s primary fusion plant. She glanced around and saw that Traian was laying down covering fire, while Hutch and Lynch were nowhere to be seen.

  Mantis had struck a pose like one might expect of a ballerina, as she contorted her torso and hips so as to expose nothing but her rifle and lead hand as she looked into her scope from an angle—an act only made possible due to the presence of a cleverly-placed hinge in the scope’s eyepiece. Mantis fired a shot even before Lu Bu could train on a target of her own, and a muffled thunk a second later suggested that the frighteningly accurate woman had sent one of their foes plummeting from the catwalk.

  “All clear!” she heard Hutch declare from the far side of the engine room.

  “Clear!” Traian agreed after moving across the compartment and visually sweeping the catwalk above Lu Bu’s head.

  “No contacts,” Mantis said with icy indifference to the battle which had concluded just as quickly as it had erupted.

  “Shiyuan, report,” Lu Bu demanded when the technician failed to make his presence known.

  “Uhh…” Jarrett’s anxious voice came over the com-link, “I’m alive…and I don’t see anyone?”

  Scowling at his chosen reply, but glad that her team was intact, Lu Bu’s focus turned to their companions, “Where is Lynch?”

  “I’m here,” he replied casually, “we might could use Shiyuan’s help over here, though—we only got a few seconds before they work around our temporary comm. block.”

  Shiyuan’s suited form dashed out through the door from which they had all emerged, nearly tripping on the hatch’s lower lip but managing to save himself from a trip to the deck as he scrambled toward the far end of the engine room.

  “Secure the door,” Lu Bu instructed Mantis and Traian, who had already begun to prepare to do that very thing as Traian fastened a pair of sonic charges to either side of the door. Mantis deftly clambered up a nearby strut with dexterity that even made Lu Bu envious as she scaled the vertical, slick surface in just a few seconds before taking up position on the catwalk where she had significant cover from, and a clear shot of the compartment’s main door.

  “Report, Shiyuan,” Lu Bu snapped after several seconds of silence passed.

  “I am busy,” he quipped in Qin.

  Her expression turning sour, Lu Bu saw Hutch emerge from behind the fusion reactor which dominated the center of the engine room, and after gesturing for him to take up her position providing support for Traian and Mantis, she went around the reactor to find Lynch, Fisher, and Shiyuan huddled around a small bank of panels.

  “Report!” she demanded when she reached them, but all three were furiously engaged in some sort of technical wizardry which she never hoped—or wished—to understand.

  “One moment,” Shiyuan said tersely as he and Fisher looked back and forth at each other’s control panels.
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  “Got it,” Lynch declared soon thereafter, “that’ll give us an hour or two before they could possibly rig up a replacement comm. array.”

  Lu Bu saw four fallen pirates on this side of the room—two of which had nearly identical blaster wounds which had nearly erased their facial features—and said, “Nine pirates are down.”

  “That leaves eleven to go,” Lynch nodded, patting the twin blaster pistols fixed to each of his hips. He drew one with his left hand and gestured toward the engine room’s door while bowing courteously, “Shall we?”

  Lu Bu’s scowl deepened, but she knew his mannerisms were the least of her problems at that moment. “Shiyuan, can you sabotage any systems from here without causing damage to the ship?”

  “I can give the grav-plates a tweak or two,” he nodded affirmatively, “but I’ll have to hit every plate simultaneously; the controls from here are indiscriminate since they’re primarily intended to counteract gee-forces generated by the engines—“

  “Short answers,” Lu Bu snapped, seeing a lopsided grin appear on Lynch’s face when she did so. “Can you do it?”

  Shiyuan pursed his lips as his ears turned red, “I can turn off gravity whenever you want…but it will affect you as well as the enemy.”

  “Fine,” she nodded, “we will all engage mag-boots; Hutch stays here since his boots are damaged and you will need his protection.”

  “Copy that, ma’am,” Hutch said over the link.

  “We go to the bridge,” Lu Bu said with a short nod, turning to make her way to the door. She collected Glacier Splitter and saw Traian was securing the lone living pirate—who Lu Bu had knocked unconscious during their entry—to a nearby beam.

  The team assembled at the door and Traian quickly adjusted the sonic mines to permit them to pass through the portal, and after he was done both Lu Bu and Lynch moved through and respectively covered the right and left passages of the adjoining corridor.

  “Clear,” Lu Bu declared after performing a quick check of her side.

  “Same,” Lynch acknowledged, “we go this way.”

  Lu Bu’s team followed as she moved to Lynch’s side, and they made their way to the nearest lift. Surprisingly, it was still functioning—Lu Bu had expected intrusion countermeasures to automatically lock out lift access to any but the ship’s crew.

  “Amateurs,” she grunted as they filed into the lift car.

  “They is that,” Lynch agreed as he input commands that would take them down two decks instead of up, where the bridge was located.

  “We go to bridge,” Lu Bu said, gripping his hand by the wrist before he could initiate the command sequence.

  He looked down pointedly at his wrist, on which she maintained a firm grip, before fixing her with a dangerous look, “The original plan called for us to go to the bridge, but like most plans it didn’t survive contact with the enemy. Now that they know we’re here, we have to go to the cargo bay so they don’t muck with our ticket into the Beta Site. Savvy?”

  Lu Bu briefly felt foolish for having failed to recognize the need to alter the plan, but regained her composure quickly and released his hand. “Why would they destroy cargo?”

  “Because it assures mutual destruction,” he said casually as he input the code. “If this ship shows up at the Beta Site without its cargo, everyone and everything on it deemed hazardous to Senator Raubach’s operation—includin’ us—gets atomized.”

  “What is cargo?” she asked as the lift slowed.

  “Power grid infrastructure,” Lynch replied, drawing his second pistol into his right hand as the door slide aside. “Gotta fuel all them grav-plates, after all,” he said with a wink before moving into the corridor beyond the lift, prompting Lu Bu to follow.

  Lu Bu was still uncertain why the Raubachs would need so many grav-plates, but that was far from germane to the situation at hand so she focused on the corridor as they made their way to the ship’s cargo hold. Just as they turned the final corner which led to the ship’s lone entry into its hold, she caught sight of more pirate crew coming down the opposite end of the corridor.

  She placed a hand on Fisher’s shoulder and shoved him across the corridor, where a small support strut provided him with some measure of cover as the enemy fire began to stream down the corridor toward them.

  Lynch took up a position at the corner and snapped off a pair of blaster pistol shots, one from each pistol, down toward the pirate crew. There was a muffled scream from the other end of the corridor and Lu Bu gripped the blaster rifle she had taken back in the engine room in her left hand while deftly holstering Glacier Splitter across her back.

  “How many?” she asked as she slid into position beside Lynch.

  “Four on the left, three on the right,” Lynch replied as he snapped another quick shot off before ducking back behind the bulkhead. “Make that four on the left, two on the right.”

  Lu Bu shoved her way to the bulkhead, looked down the corridor and saw another strut a few meters down from the one which Fisher now used for cover. She saw the same six pirates Lynch had counted, and ducked her head back for a second before bursting around the corner and sprinting toward the vertical strut between Fisher and the pirates.

  As she ran, she sighted a pirate through her iron sights and sent a round through his left hip. A pair of blaster bolts slammed into her chest, but by the time they impacted she was already leaning hard into her run. She was slowed by the blaster impacts, but was able to keep her feet beneath her as she staggered a half step to her right and crashed into the bulkhead behind the strut she had run toward.

  Without even taking up a proper position of cover behind the strut, Lu Bu snapped off another round and struck a pirate in the shoulder, sending him spinning into the bulkhead. Before he recovered, a blaster bolt struck him in the face, barely snapping his head back as the ceramic helmet exploded at the back of his head.

  Lu Bu leaned behind the vertical strut, which rang with repeated blaster impacts as she did so. She looked down at her blaster rifle and saw that one of the most recent rounds of incoming fire had destroyed the barrel, reducing the weapon to little more than a suicide grenade if she had actually pulled the trigger.

  Tossing it to the ground a few meters away, she reached behind her back to grip Glacier Splitter and made brief eye contact with Lynch while saying, “Two on the left, two on the right.”

  The arms dealer nodded, and Lu Bu saw Traian come around the corner with his blaster rifle spitting fire as he dashed to take cover behind the strut directly opposite Lu Bu.

  Lu Bu’s rifle no longer functioned, so the only way she could cover Traian’s advance was one with which she was intimately familiar—a charge straight up the middle.

  Gripping Glacier Splitter in both hands, and expecting significant incoming fire, she spun around the strut and sprinted toward the enemy warriors—two of which had taken up position in front of the main cargo bay doors and were clearly attempting to override some sort of mechanical lockout.

  “Shiyuan,” she bellowed as she charged down the corridor with blaster bolts streaming around her, “deactivate gravity!”

  Not a second later, three pirates were launched from their feet when their blaster rifles recoiled with enough force to send them tumbling backward several feet above the deck.

  Looks of shock were the last things she registered on the faces of the two pirates who had sought entry into the cargo bay. She drove Glacier Splitter’s head into the rear shoulder of the nearest pirate, sending him into the thick duralloy cargo bay doors just as they began to slide open. Before he had bounced off the door and begun floating motionlessly in her wake, Lu Bu snapped a high kick with her right leg aimed at the second pirate’s head.

  The pirate, who was a slender woman no more than half Lu Bu’s body weight, instinctively raised her arm to block the incoming boot. Her wispy, thin limb was snapped cleanly in two at the forearm as Lu Bu’s metal-shod boot’s drove into her temple with bone-cracking force in spite of the woman�
��s best attempt to block the attack.

  Lu Bu ducked into the cargo bay as sporadic weapons fire streamed up and down the corridor. She unfastened a sonic grenade from her belt and primed it before tossing it down toward the still-reeling pirates. The usual loud, snapping sound was followed by ultrasonic waves that assaulted her sense of balance, but she had experienced the sensation before and charged out of the cargo bay immediately after the grenade had gone off.

  A quick look revealed that the pirates had been incapacitated or killed, and she saw Lynch moving down the corridor with the rest of the team in tow.

  “Nice moves,” the thickly-built arms dealer said approvingly as Traian and Mantis moved to the far end of the corridor and signaled all was clear. “Let’s check the merchandise before we go jack the bridge.”

  Fisher had already moved into the cargo bay, his magnetic boots clomping loudly against the deck plates inside as Lu Bu said, “Reactivate gravity, Shiyuan.”

  “Reactivating now,” came Jarrett’s reply, and a moment later she felt the standard gravity forces return to her body.

  “Good work,” she said before following Lynch into the hold.

  This freighter was considerably smaller than the Perilous Halibut had been, but that was true of nearly every known ship in the galaxy insofar as Lu Bu understood the matter. The cargo bay was fifty meters long and thirty meters wide, with four separate levels identical to the one on which they now stood. But the only entrance into the cargo bay was the door they now held, and Lu Bu watched as Lynch moved to a nearby stack of crates and popped the lid off with apparent ease.

  “There we go,” he said, waving her over to examine the contents, “looks like fifty two of these high-load cut-out breakers if there’s four in each of them crates. And those over there,” he gestured to another stack of containers, though this second set was roughly cylindrical and nearly three meters long, “would be the independent regulators.”

  Fisher grabbed a nearby pry bar and cracked one of those cylinders open, and he nodded as he gestured to the contents within, “Right as rain, Boss; same units used for state-of-the-art medical unit grav-plate regulation.”