McKnight's Mission

by Caleb Wachter

  The edge of the Marine’s arm-mounted shield was composed of a crystalline material, and Lu Bu felt a savage thrill when that crystal shattered beneath Glacier Splitter’s fury. The energy shield disappeared instantly, and the mighty warhammer continued its arc through the sundered shield to slam into the Marine’s gorget with enough force to knock him forward to the floor.

  He braced himself with his left hand—and even managed a reasonable counterattack with his vibroblades—but Lu Bu had already leapt into the air well above where that counterattack was directed.

  Using the warhammer’s temporarily increased mass as a pivot point, Lu Bu leapt onto the Marine’s back and engaged her magnetic boots before he could buck her off. Her weight pressed down on the Marine, who was briefly forced to his hands and knees as she drew Glacier Splitter back for a short, savage chop to his helmet from behind.

  Glacier Splitter cracked into his helmet with punishing force, and she saw air hiss out from several cracks in the polished alloy of his casement. He tried to spin over, but she maintained her balance atop him and drove the hammer into his head a second time. She managed a third blow before he finally bucked her sufficiently to the side that she was forced to disengage her boots and leap clear of his back.

  As Lu Bu leapt off of him, she chopped the warhammer down in a window so brief that even she was surprised she had managed to take advantage of it. As a result, his vibroblades were smashed to pieces against the deck beneath their feet.

  She was just about to launch herself into another onslaught when a roar of blue-white plasma engulfed him, and the Marine briefly clutched at his ruined helmet before collapsing to the deck in a smoldering heap.

  Looking up, Lu Bu was surprised—no, she was shocked—to see that Lynch had engaged another Marine in a melee. The arms dealer had somehow driven a vibro-knife into the Marine’s knee joint, immobilizing him sufficiently that Lynch was able to isolate the Marine’s blade-mounted arm with his hands. With sheer power that was simply impossible for a human being to generate, Lynch wrenched the Marine’s armored arm to the left and then jerked it down hard to the right, causing the unmistakable sound of metal being ground to filings to echo through the chamber.

  Lu Bu caught a glimpse of movement to her left and instinctively rolled forward. A pair of blaster bolts hammered into the ground behind her, and before she had come to a stop another pair slammed into her back and sent her crashing into the guardrail which surrounded the platform.

  She had no idea how many Marines they were fighting, nor did she care. In that moment, Lu Bu was attuned to the chaos around her in a way she had thought would be impossible just a few short weeks earlier. She was in her element, and she knew one thing above all else:

  This was a fight, and Lu Bu did not lose fights.

  She removed a grenade from her belt as she scrambled, rolled, and leapt to what amounted to cover in the exposed area surrounding the platform. That cover appeared to be some kind of power relay housing, and after she reached it she hurled her grenade toward the source of the bolts which had slammed into her back.

  The explosive grenade went off with what would have been a deafening boom, but her helmet protected her ears—and the rest of her head—from the shockwave. She ran out from concealment and quickly sighted in on two more Marines. But for the third time in the last minute, she was surprised at what she saw. One of the Marines was somehow flying through the air, and parts of his armor pulsed with a soft, white light which matched his mid-air movements. The other Marine had apparently been knocked to the ground by her grenade, so she focused on the flyer.

  The flying Marine was facing the Core Fragment—beneath and behind which both Mantis and Shiyuan were positioned—and without thinking beforehand, Lu Bu hurled Glacier Splitter at the Marine who was just a few meters from her position.

  The warhammer struck the Marine a fraction of a second after he fired a pair of rapid-fire blaster bolts toward the Core Fragment, but when Glacier Splitter struck him it did so with sufficient force to send him pin-wheeling into the chamber’s wall as the lights adorning his armor flashed with seemingly random intensity and sequencing.

  Lu Bu spotted one of Lynch’s blaster pistols on the ground and picked it up on the run while drawing Walter Joneson’s vibro-knife from her belt. She charged toward the formerly-flying Marine, firing blaster bolts as fast as the weapon would cycle and hitting him squarely in the torso with each shot.

  He flicked his left arm, causing the same, spindly crystal protrusions to emerge from his vambrace which Lu Bu had shattered on her now-vanquished foe’s strange shield projector. Thankfully the energy shield had not yet sprung to life, so she refocused her fire without missing a step during her sprint toward him.

  Lu Bu fired the blaster pistol at the flimsy-looking, crystalline shield frame and scored an unlikely hit in the instant before she closed to grips with her latest foe. She barely even noticed the pain in her leg as she ran; all she could think about was how she had failed to prevent this Marine from firing on one of her teammates.

  Rage unlike anything she had recently experienced flooded her senses, and for several seconds of pitched struggle it was almost as though she was a spectator trapped within her own body. The Marine’s vibroblade slashed and stabbed at her, but she dodged each of his first four attacks while pouring blaster bolts into his shield generator. The Marine tried to back away, but Lu Bu no longer wielded Glacier Splitter and was far quicker than her adversary while wielding Joneson’s knife in one hand and the blaster pistol in the other. After a dozen exchanges, the Marine attempted to disarm her of Joneson’s knife—an act for which she made him pay the ultimate price when she used her incredible power-to-weight ratio and leapt nearly two meters into the air with her unnaturally explosive lower half, firing the blaster pistol point-blank into his visor as she neared the apex of her jump.

  The Marine’s visor cracked from the impact, and Lu Bu followed up with a brutal thrust of the vibro-knife—which drove through the damaged visor until it was buried at the hilt. The Marine twitched briefly before going limp, and Lu Bu withdrew Joneson’s knife while putting a blaster bolt through the ruined visor to ensure the job had been done.

  She saw Hutch limping toward the lone corridor leading out of the chamber, and quickly scanned to where Lynch had been fighting with the Marine on the other side of the platform. The arms dealer was withdrawing his own vibro-knife from the Marine’s helmet, and Lu Bu saw that Lynch had several deep gashes along his chest and legs which should have put him down a few times over. But he moved around as though he had suffered no appreciable damage.

  “Mantis, report,” Lu Bu said when she failed to find the sniper woman on a quick visual sweep of the platform.

  “She’s…she’s dead,” Jarrett said bleakly, and Lu Bu felt her guts twist in anger as she moved around the platform and found Shiyuan kneeling beside the unflappable woman’s motionless body. The remnants of her helmet were still affixed to her collar, but it was clear that a pair of blaster bolts had penetrated her visor and she had been killed.

  “Are you all right?” Lu Bu demanded of the short technician.

  “I…she was just here,” Shiyuan said numbly, clearly in shock at experiencing the death of a comrade.

  “Stand up, Shiyuan,” Lu Bu said archly in their native tongue. “We are not finished yet; don’t fail her bravery by losing your nerve.”

  Jarrett looked up at her and blinked several times, still clearly in shock, but he began to nod as he stood up, “I…I will be fine.”

  “No, you won’t,” Lu Bu assured him grimly, speaking from personal experience as the faces of a dozen fallen comrades flashed across her mind’s eye. “But you will get out of here to honor her sacrifice.”

  His countenance seemed to clarify, and Shiyuan straightened himself, “Thank you. We should go.”

  “Yeah, we should,” Lynch agreed from a position opposite Hutch at the mouth of the chamber. His wrist-link was displaying a small hologram which
Lu Bu took to represent the facility in which they now stood. There were hundreds of active icons outside of the compound—which was essentially a giant dome where they now stood in the center—and those icons were clearly engaged in a siege of the facility. “Your boys are puttin’ up a hell of a fight out there but if there are more of these Predator Marines out there, then them Tracto-ans ain’t gonna last long. We’ve gotta move, and we’ve gotta move now.”

  Putting action to word, Lynch closed the hologram and tapped a few command sequences into his wrist-link. The Core Fragment began to float toward where the four of them now stood, and Lu Bu checked Hutch’s wounds to find that his left arm appeared to be useless after suffering a combination of blade and blaster wounds.

  “Are you stable?” Lu Bu demanded as she produced a quick-tie tourniquet and wrapped it around his upper arm to slow the bleeding.

  “I can move, but I’m not sure how much good I’ll be in a fight,” Hutch said grimly, wincing as Lu Bu tightened the tourniquet. “What about you?” he asked, tilting his head toward her leg while Lu Bu applied some Combat Heal to his wound.

  After squeezing the contents of the tube into Hutch’s wound, she glanced down at the blood-slicked armor covering her knee and saw a long, deep gash which extended from the front of her leg nearly to her hamstring. “I will be fine,” she quipped as the pain in that wound flared, but Hutch had already produced his own tube of Combat Heal and, without permission, he jammed it into her leg.

  “Now you will be,” he snorted. “We’d better hope they aren’t packing plasma weapons, though, because you and I are toast if they are. Our armor won’t stand up to flame.”

  “Ain’t no plasma weapons,” Lynch said confidently as they began to trot down the long, poorly lit corridor which had been hewn from stone in much the same fashion as the rest of the subterranean complex had been. “They wouldn’t risk it with all the unstable chemicals they’re workin’ with up ahead.”

  “What kind of chemicals?” Lu Bu demanded.

  “You name it,” Lynch shrugged as they jogged down the tunnel, which was inclined several degrees. Shiyuan began to lag behind, but thankfully Hutch was there to prod him onward with his lone good arm. “Let’s avoid grenades and ranged weapons up ahead just to be sure we don’t blow ourselves up.”

  “Then I’m out,” Hutch said sourly. “I can’t scrum one-handed.”

  “You can hang back with the geek,” Lynch said evenly. “We might need him to get outta here if your Tracto-ans don’t bust through the main door—which I’m presently doubtin’ they’ll be able to manage. In any case, he’ll be helpful cuttin’ off communications if we can breach the main tower.”

  Lu Bu drew Glacier Splitter and examined the weapon, finding several deep chips in the weapon’s stone head. But it appeared to still function, and she rather fancied the idea that this battle would leave its mark on the weapon just as it had done on her body.

  “I think I should warn y’all that Senator Raubach ain’t likely to take this lyin’ down,” Lynch added.

  “If he stands in our way, we kill him,” Lu Bu said with a sneer. “Commodore Raubach was not a special warrior.”

  “Yeah, well Jimmy Number Three learned everything he knew from his daddy—but his daddy didn’t teach his son everything he knew,” Lynch said knowingly. “If Jimmy Two wants a fight, y’all are gonna stand back and let me handle him.”

  “We have no time for personal vendettas,” Lu Bu spat, but to her surprise Lynch stopped in his tracks and whirled around to face her with fiery determination in his visage.

  “I ain’t gonna say it again,” he said in what was clearly a threat—something to which Lu Bu did not respond well, “if the Senator and I square off, y’all are to stay back and not interfere. Is that clear—or are you and I gonna have a problem we need to sort out right here, right now?”

  Lu Bu jutted her chest out defiantly and stepped toward him, “You wish to fight me?”

  “Nothin’ could be further from the truth,” Lynch growled, “but too much is at stake, and I don’t have time to educate you on the finer points of every last thing we’re doin’ here just now.”

  Lu Bu looked him up and down, noting the deep, apparently fatal wounds which Lynch seemed to ignore as though they had never happened. “You are not human,” she said simply, deciding against escalating the conflict between them—for now. “No human could survive those wounds,” she gestured to a ragged gash in his abdomen.

  “I assure you,” he smirked, “I’m every bit as human as you are—in fact, I’m more human if you believe these fanatical nut-jobs. I’m also more machine than you are,” he added, reaching into his chest to expose a bundle of wires and miniature hoses which caused Lu Bu’s eyebrows to rise in surprise. “The cybernetics were originally a necessity when Jimmy—that’d be the Senator—almost succeeded in havin’ me killed decades before your grandparents popped out of the oven,” he explained as he lowered the flap of abdominal tissue which he had retracted with his hand, returning his appearance to that of a mortally wounded human. “I learned the upgrades provided me with advantages as time went on, so I kept ‘em…and made a few strategic additions along the way,” he added as he straightened himself. “I’ve been plannin’ this reunion for a long, long time, and I ain’t gonna let anyone stop me from doin’ it my way.”

  “We are wasting time,” Lu Bu said shortly just as the hewn stone floor beneath her feet shook as an explosion rocked the world around them.

  Lynch quickly called up the hologram from his wrist-link and raised his eyebrows in surprise as a horde of green icons began to swarm toward the dome-shaped structure’s primary entrance—where a few even seemed to breach the perimeter before going dark on the virtual display. “Well I’ll be a monkey in a madhouse,” he mused, “your Tracto-an boys cracked the front door open after all. Looks like I might have underestimated ‘em…” he said with briefly narrowed eyes before deactivating the hologram. “We’ve gotta move; are you and I gonna have a problem when we meet up with Jimmy?”

  Lu Bu was sorely tempted to stubbornly cling to the notion that she would, in fact, intervene if they ran into Senator Raubach. As far as she had known at the outset, this mission had been conducted with the purpose of kidnapping Senator Raubach. But it was clear now that Lynch had no intention of making that a primary goal; he had come to retrieve the Core Fragment, and likely to seek vengeance against the Senator for past wrongs.

  She despised herself for actually siding with a known criminal, arms dealer, black marketeer and otherwise wholly unsavory character like Lynch over anyone, but her personal experiences with House Raubach had forever altered her opinion of them. They had authorized, and actually deployed, weapons of mass destruction on several occasions—and those were just the crimes which Lu Bu’s crewmates had been subjected to!

  “If it does not jeopardize the mission, I will not object,” Lu Bu said stiffly. “But we must be quick.”

  “Believe me,” Lynch said darkly as he turned and resumed his jog, “nobody knows that better than I do.”

  “Pen, what are you doing?!” Tiberius shouted as coolant lines began to swell, snapping their relatively flimsy moorings to the ship’s frame in a rapid succession of pings and pops which he knew represented the ship’s death throes. “Get out of that junction, we’ve got to go!”

  “I’ll be fine, sir,” she retorted, but he could barely hear her voice over the buzzing of the portable generators which fed power into the auxiliary coolant circulation system. “We’ll get to the escape pods after we install this last transfer pump!”

  “Pen, get out of there—that’s an order!” Tiberius shouted, attempting to reach into the maintenance crawlspace to snatch her by the ankle but finding her foot just beyond his reach.

  “Horgan’s got the replacement part and he’s on his way,” she said angrily, “if you want to help, hand me that plasma torch so I can cut this mooring bracket out of the way!”

  Tiberius was torn. On the
one hand, if they ran to the last escape pod and ejected—as the rest of the crew, aside from this last team of engineers, had already sensibly done—they had a better than fifty-fifty chance that the ship’s explosion wouldn’t cause significant damage to their escape pod.

  But the other escape pods were still within the blast range, and while their distance grew with each passing second—and with it their chances of safely surviving the explosion of the Freedom’s Bastard—there was still a significant chance their pods could be damaged by the explosion.

  Most military escape pods were heavily-armored and included thrusters which would fire as soon as they detached from their parent ship. Those thrusters would create sufficient distance between the pod and the ship to remove the possibility of a core explosion causing damage to the survival craft. But the pods which the Freedom’s Bastard had been fitted with were a modified civilian design, and as such they were more like lifeboats than proper combat-rated escape pods. They couldn’t even maneuver for a safe atmospheric entry; their gas-thrusters could only allow them to be reoriented a few times before they were spent.

  So Tiberius understood perfectly well why Pen had chosen to crawl into the maintenance tube while ordering her people to evacuate the ship. Her resolve to safeguard her shipmates’ safe evacuation was something which he shared, but in his mind she was one of the people who deserved to safeguarded!

  “Here,” he said, and as he handed her the plasma torch he felt a measure of resignation suffuse his being. He supposed that the religious might call what he was experiencing ‘serenity,’ but for him there was nothing very desirous about his present state of mind. As he watched her cut away at the mooring bracket with the plasma torch, he eyed a nearby coolant line slowly sagging, millimeter by millimeter down the bulkhead, as a result of its contents heating well past the thermal thresholds of their design.

  It was in that moment that he realized he would die on the Freedom’s Bastard, and he could only manage to muster a small measure of anger at the events—and people—which had pushed him and his people to this point in space-time.