McKnight's Mission

by Caleb Wachter

  “That is wise, of course,” Fengxiao agreed. “But assuming your findings coincide with my own then allow me to offer my congratulations, Lieutenant.”

  Before he could rebuke the man, Tiberius realized he was right: congratulations were in order.

  Assuming they could repeat the test results, and assuming they hadn’t just spawned some sort of virtual abomination, they had just put into practice a theory which Tiberius had posited as far back as the academy—where they had all said he was daft for even suggesting such a thing could be done.

  “It was all Bachmann and Turner,” Tiberius said with a short nod, to which his colleagues grinned like a couple of sailors about to hit port. “But let’s hold off on the celebrations until we’re sure this will actually work.”

  Despite his sobering words, he was convinced that they had indeed done what they had set out to do: give themselves a fighting chance in the upcoming battle.

  Chapter XXVII: Insertion

  “Clear,” Mantis whispered after the crate’s surroundings had been silent for several minutes.

  The team popped the hatch off the crate and climbed down, one by one, until they were all wedged between rows of crates which, just two days earlier, had been aboard Jasper’s freighter. The trip from the cruiser had taken several hours, and Lu Bu’s breathing gases were down to almost exactly one hour remaining.

  A quick check of the local air quality confirmed that it was safe to breathe, so Lu Bu whispered through her suit’s vox, “Switch to external air.”

  She then examined their surroundings and found that they were within a massive, cube-shaped chamber with dark, hewn stone walls that reached a hundred feet above their heads.

  There were three apparent exits, each on a different wall—with one of those about halfway up between the floor and ceiling—and Lu Bu moved toward Lynch as the arms dealer checked his pistols in what she now recognized as something of a ritual. “Where are we?” she asked in a low voice as her people spread out through the chamber.

  “We in the Beta Site,” he replied nonchalantly. “Truth be told, I’m impressed we got inside.”

  “But where is the Beta Site,” she hissed. “We are underground—how far?”

  “About sixty miles,” he said with a shrug. “This rock’s colder than anything you’ve set foot on; that’s why it got hidden down here.”

  “What got hidden?” she asked as they began to move toward one of the chamber’s exits.

  Lynch’s silence was both ominous and angering; Lu Bu had placed her people in his hands, and she had gone as far as she cared to go without demanding some answers. She grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around before shoving him up against a nearby crate.

  He surprisingly did not resist, and she drove her helmet’s visor into his own as she growled, “What did they hide here?”

  “Their real reason for bein’ in the Spineward Sectors,” Lynch said calmly, and she felt a tap on her inner thigh. Looking down, she saw that one of his blaster pistols was pressed into the left side of her groin—even if the Storm Drake armor resisted the energy bolt, the kinetic power would be enough to shatter her hip from the inside and likely cause a critical amount of internal bleeding. “Back down, Lu; I told y’all you’d get the full download after we succeeded. I don’t alter deals after they’ve been struck, feel me?”

  Before she could respond, Hutch called from near the chamber’s exit where Lynch appeared to have been headed, “Ma’am, you should come look at this.”

  Glaring at Lynch, she released him and made her way to Hutch, “What is it?”

  When she reached what she had taken to be a corridor leading out of the chamber, she realized it was in fact a vertical tube like those used on large warships to facilitate travel between different decks.

  “Where’s the car?” Mantis asked dryly.

  Lu Bu turned to Lynch and saw him fastening a forearm-mounted data link of some kind to his left arm. He tapped out a series of commands on the device’s curved surface, and a moment later Lu Bu felt a whoosh of air coming from the entrance.

  “How did you do that?” Shiyuan asked in amazement as a flat, ten meter across lift platform which fit the cylindrical tunnel perfectly lowered to their level.

  “I wouldn’t walk into a place like this without a set of keys and a backup plan,” Lynch said with a wink before turning to Fisher. “You ready, Fish?”

  Fisher, meanwhile, had been clambering out of his vacuum suit while the rest of the team had stood near the lift tube. Beneath it he wore what was clearly a Rim Fleet uniform, complete with rank insignia and nameplate beneath his collar. “Ready, Boss,” Fisher nodded after checking his uniform once over.

  “Hop to it,” Lynch waved the barrel of his blaster pistol—which seemed to always be in his left hand—toward the platform. Fisher stepped onto the platform and Hutch made to accompany him, but Lynch held out a hand haltingly. “Fish is goin’ solo on this one; the rest of us have got to get down below before McKnight arrives.”

  Lu Bu recalled from their pre-mission briefing that Fisher’s primary task was to reach a control station of some kind which would give him access to the Beta Site’s fixed military assets. Those assets would, according to Lynch, even the odds when Captain McKnight arrived at the head of Lynch’s battle fleet. But at no point in the briefing had she understood Fisher would go alone.

  “He will not need escort?” she asked skeptically.

  “Nah,” Lynch snickered as Fisher reached some kind of control panel on the left edge of the platform, “he’s been trainin’ for this job a long, long time. He’s ready to rock.”

  The lift then began to rise in the tunnel, picking up speed rapidly until it all but disappeared into the blackness of the shaft.

  “How do you know so much about this place?” Shiyuan asked, giving voice to a concern which Lu Bu was certain the rest of her team shared.

  Lynch shrugged indifferently, “I discovered it.”

  “What?!” Hutch snapped.

  “Like I told y’all when we began our association,” Lynch said, meeting Hutch’s angry gaze unflinchingly, “me and them Raubachs go way back.”

  “You’re going to tell us more than that,” Lu Bu growled.

  “I am,” he nodded matter-of-factly, “but I ain’t gonna tell you everything you want just yet, so don’t get them panties in a twist.” Hutch took a menacing step forward, but Lu Bu waved him off and he complied with her silent order by halting mid-stride. Lynch eyed the massive smashball star for a tense moment before saying, “To be more precise: the late Alice Schillinger—of the Empire’s notable House Schillinger—discovered this place after I helped her build a model that narrowed down the possible sites to just a few hundred in total.”

  “Why were you helping her to build such a model?” Shiyuan asked, his intellectual curiosity apparently piqued—and standing at odds with Lu Bu’s muted anger at only having such important details revealed now that they were deep within the bowels of the enemy stronghold.

  “We was legally betrothed,” Lynch explained. “It was conditional, of course—like any arrangement involving a member of a Great House. In truth, we didn’t really care for each other initially…but I liked her mama just fine, which I guess was how things really started out ‘tween us. Long story short, I wanted to do something for Alice so I turned my not-inconsiderable brainpower onto the issue of finding an archeological site she’d been dreamin’ of for as long as she’d known archeology was a thing.” He paused for a moment in apparent reflection before adding, “It’s too bad she’s dead…things would have been quite a bit simpler if I could have gotten to her before them Raubachs did.”

  “What is so important about this archeological site?” John ‘Shiyuan’ Jarrett pressed, and Lu Bu grudgingly found herself nearly as interested in hearing the answer as Shiyuan appeared to be.

  “For one thing, it’s a rogue planet,” Lynch said. “She’s been floatin’ ‘tween the stars for about a billion years, so sh
e’s gone a bit cold since bein’ orphaned from her parent star. That makes it an ideal location for a secret base, don’t you think?”

  “Or as a place to hide something extremely valuable,” Mantis mused.

  Lynch’s eyes flashed as he looked at the sniper, and Lu Bu didn’t need to be an expert in reading body language to know that Mantis had hit the target between the eyes with that particular observation.

  “I like you people,” he said with a nearly-disarming grin. “You’re blunt almost to a fault—which is how I’d be if I had my druthers. Yeah,” he nodded approvingly, “it’d be the ideal hiding spot for something and it’d be awfully tricky to find once its location was erased from the local star charts since it’s got a tiny gravity footprint, no atmosphere, and no bright stars in the vicinity. Closest star brighter than a red dwarf is a hundred light years.”

  “So what was hidden here?” Lu Bu asked.

  “I told you I wasn’t gonna answer all of your questions,” Lynch shook his head as the air began to move outside the massive lift tube, signaling that the platform was returning. “But accordin’ to my game clock,” he added as the platform settled to a stop and Lynch stepped onto it while making a show of checking his wrist-link, “you’ll have your answer in less than twenty hours.”

  Knowing she had no leverage, and that her shipmates depended on her to succeed if they were to have their best chance at victory, Lu Bu clenched her teeth as she said, “Move out, Lancers.”

  She made to board the lift, as did Hutch and Mantis while Shiyuan stood frozen like a statue near the edge of the platform. She grabbed him by the arm and assisted him—with more applied force than she had intended—onto the platform.

  “That includes you, Shiyuan,” she snapped, irritated at everything about their predicament but glad that they had made it this far undetected.

  With any luck, the fighting would soon commence—and then she could vent some of this pent-up frustration on their enemies!

  “Final countdown commenced, ma’am,” Strider reported, and his report was followed by a ten hour countdown timer appearing in the corner of every screen on the bridge. “We be T-minus ten hours and counting.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Strider,” she acknowledged before spinning her chair to face her XO. “You’re certain that each of the modules was already installed on the other ships?”

  “They were already tested, re-tested, and had tests run on the tests,” Tiberius said grimly, “that’s all we had time to do, though.”

  “It will have to be enough,” she nodded, sharing her XO’s deep-seated concern that they may have inadvertently spawned an AI within their new shield control system. But their resident expert, Mr. Guo—aka Fengxiao—had assured them in the strongest possible language that such fears were unfounded.

  Despite his assurances, Lieutenant Commander McKnight felt a chill run down her spine—a chill which any believer in the supernatural might share when speaking of vengeful gods, ravenous demons, and flaming pits where the damned spent eternity suffering to satisfy the unknowable appetites of their captors.

  “Then in ten hours, we jump in,” she said, knowing that while her battle plan was far from perfect, it was the best they would ever have.

  She hoped it would be enough.

  The lift platform descended into the vast depths of the planet for hours—three hours and twenty three minutes, to be precise—during which time Lu Bu’s team passed hundreds of chambers similar to the one where they had exited the crate. Eventually, the lift began to slow and Lu Bu’s people assumed flanking positions around her and Lynch.

  “Now what we’ve got to do,” he said as he manipulated his wrist-link with a rapid series of inputs, “is make our way over to the vault.”

  “How?” Lu Bu asked as the lift’s slowing produced significant, but far from dangerous gee forces which pressed her against the deck of the platform.

  “There’s a tunnel over here,” Lynch explained as a hologram of what appeared to be the underground complex sprang into the air above the data link on his wrist. A flashing yellow section of tunnel amid a truly massive labyrinth of similar tunnels increased in size to the point that she could see their apparent position on the lift represented by a flashing red dot. “It leads to the vault, which only a few people up on the surface even know about.”

  “If it leads to a vault, won’t it be secured?” Hutch asked skeptically.

  “It will be,” Lynch affirmed.

  “Then how do you expect—“ Lu Bu began, only to have the lift’s descent slow as it came to rest at an opening that was nearly identical to the one they had boarded through.

  “I told you,” the brash arms dealer said as it became clear that the supposed escape tunnel was through this particular opening, “I’ve got the keys.”

  Lu Bu had made peace with the fact that she wasn’t going to get any more information from him than what he wanted to give, but she had also committed herself to holding him to account for his unnecessary withholding of mission-critical information.

  She wasn’t ruling out rearranged facial features as the ultimate product of that particular future encounter.

  Hutch, Lynch, Lu Bu, Shiyuan and Mantis made their way off the platform, and Lynch gestured toward the far end of the tunnel, “There’s a mag-lev there that should be waitin’ for us.”

  After a few minutes of walking in the eerie, pitch black tunnel—which was hewn of seemingly identical stone to that in the chamber above—Lynch’s prognostication proved correct as they came to a large, circular tunnel. The vertical shaft through which they had just descended had also been circular, but every other opening or passage to this point had been perfectly square.

  The mag-lev was also unusual; it was composed of four equidistantly placed tracks at ninety degrees inside the cylindrical tunnel, and each track had its own flatbed car. The individual tracks were opposite each other, with the one on the bottom also having an attached passenger car. The other three were identical, and were mounted with some kind of grav-plates that were strikingly similar to the ones the Raubachs had apparently purchased from Mr. Jasper.

  “All aboard,” Lynch said as he seated himself in what was apparently the primary seat. Lu Bu and her team sat across the benches behind him, and when they were all seated the arms dealer tapped out a series of commands on his data link before reaching into what looked like some sort of control aperture which had a hollow recess just large enough for a human arm to fit inside.

  A few seconds after Lynch reached inside the recess, the mag-lev cars systems came online and bright lights stabbed into the darkness of the tunnel ahead of them. It was only then that Lu Bu realized just how much warmer it was this deep into the planet—though she also realized at that moment that she had no real idea how far they had come. It could have been dozens, or possibly even hundreds of miles; she had no way to gauge precisely how fast the lift had descended.

  The mag-lev car began to move through the tunnel with alarming speed, though the only reason she could tell they were moving at all was due to the visual cue of the tunnel whipping by at truly ludicrous speeds. The air around the car was stable, and the car had apparently been fitted with grav-plates which made the ride every bit as smooth as one aboard a starship.

  “How did you access the car’s control systems?” Shiyuan asked after a few minutes.

  “I could tell you,” Lynch said flippantly, “but then you and I might not be friends any more. I happen to like bein’ friends with you,” he added with a snicker. “I ain’t had this much fun since I last put on the pads.”

  “You played smashball?” Lu Bu asked, deciding against pressing for more mission-sensitive information.

  “I only ever practiced with my team,” he explained with a sigh. “I’ll tell you all about it after we get outta here.”

  The mag-lev hurtled through the tunnel for nearly an hour before finally coming to a stop at the far end, where the tunnel flared into a room that was identical to the one which had
been on the other end of the mag-lev’s tracks.

  “Ok,” Lynch hopped down off the car, landing on the stone walkway cut between the mag-lev’s tracks, “we’re here.”

  “Where is ‘here’?” Lu Bu asked as she used hand signals to direct her people to sweep the empty, cavernous chamber.

  “The doorway,” Lynch tilted his head toward the far end of the chamber, prompting Lu Bu to look and see a giant, metal disc on the far end of the chamber that was as large as some outer shuttle bay doors. It was the same diameter as the tube through which they had just traversed, and it was clearly human-made judging by the lettering on its outer border.

  “How do we open that?” Hutch asked skeptically after sweeping the empty cavern and finding nothing of note.

  Lynch’s forearm-mounted link chimed, and for a moment all eyes were on him as he tapped out a series of inputs before nodding approvingly, “Fish is in. We are officially on the clock here, y’all.”

  “We came for whatever is in there, correct?” Shiyuan asked as he appraised the doorway from several meters. None of their suits’ external lighting sources were active since Lynch and Lu Bu had agreed to keep the team on stealth protocols.

  So Lu Bu’s surprise at Lynch activating a floodlight was understandable, but the arms dealer moved past her and ran his hand across the giant door’s surface as he said, “That’s right. The prize—the thing them Raubachs were really out here lookin’ for when they ran across that Ancient world—is in that vault.”

  “It does not appear as though it has been activated in a long time,” Shiyuan observed, stepping forward and touching the door as Lynch had done. “There are areas of significant metallurgical degradation.”

  “Yeah, it’s rusty,” Lynch agreed, “but it’s done its job. The only way in here is via a three-part lock; this girl has a state-of-the-art gene lock, followed by a neural map lock, and finally she requires a comprehensive question and answer series to be satisfied before she’ll open up. It may not look like it,” he said, turning around and looking at the cube-shaped chamber with what Lu Bu took to be actual nostalgia, “but these tunnels were dug out by human equipment almost exactly a century ago. The part that ain’t apparent to the naked eye is that there are about three hundred megatons of explosives buried in smaller, adjacent passages—along with a line of core-busters a few thousand miles down from here, of course, which will bury the whole thing in what’s left of this rock’s magma when it comes boilin’ up.”