McKnight's Mission

by Caleb Wachter

  Like a bolt of lightning, Lynch sprinted forward with his vibro-knife drawn and unceremoniously plunged the blade into the Marine’s gorget. He wrenched it sideways, causing the man to clutch desperately and the eight inch long gash above his collar. Lynch then twisted the knife and jammed it upward, putting an end to the Marine’s flailing less than three seconds after he had struck the stones.

  “Good work,” Lynch said after withdrawing his blade and picking Glacier Splitter off the ground. He handed the weapon back to her, and she quickly undid the wire loop to find that she had ruined the winch mechanism after abusing it as she had done. “Looks like introductions are in order,” the arms dealer said, inclining his chin over Lu Bu’s shoulder.

  When she turned, she saw a trio of power-armored warriors approaching. Each bore a heavy, uniquely-designed and completely unfamiliar sword of clearly high-tech design. Each suit of armor bore dozens of deep rents, including at least four on each warrior’s helmet which looked to have been caused by point blank blaster fire.

  Their armor seemed even bulkier than the suits which Lu Bu had used prior to receiving her Red Hare armor, and even as they approached she could tell that the leftward warrior’s right knee had been nearly ruined. He was all but dragging the limb along the stone, and through the ruined joint leaked no small amount of blood which left a thin trail that marked his passage.

  The warrior in the center reached up to remove his helmet, and when he did so Lu Bu saw that he wore a head bag beneath the helmet. Both his beard and the hair on his head were white with age, but his eyes were sharp and calculating as he looked first at Lu Bu, then to the Core Fragment, and finally at Lynch before bowing as much as the armor would permit. “We thank you for your bounty, Warlord Lynch,” he said in a deep, smooth voice which sounded like it belonged to a man half his age.

  “I ain’t no Warlord,” Lynch said flatly. “How many of your people made it this far?”

  “Thirteen of our three hundred survived the siege,” the white-bearded man replied. “Four of our brothers have accompanied your companions to the central spire while the others are rooting out the last of the enemy—”

  Without warning, the warrior with the ruined knee servo seemed to slump before falling sideways, crashing to the stone where he lay motionless as his vital fluids leaked out onto the ground from a dozen rents in his armor.

  “Make that twelve of our three hundred survived the siege,” the white-bearded man smirked.

  Lynch shook his head piteously as he knelt beside the warrior. A quick check of his wrist-link seemed to convince him that the fallen Tracto-an was past saving, and the arms dealer reached down to collect the man’s bulky sword, which had an exceptionally long hilt unlike any weapon with which Lu Bu had trained. “What’s your name?” Lynch asked as he spun the weapon easily in his hand, testing its balance.

  The white-bearded man inclined his head, “I was born Ganymede.”

  “And him?” Lynch asked, his eyes catching on the as-yet silent warrior’s massive sword—which was significantly larger than that which Ganymede bore, which was in turn larger than the one which Lynch had collected from the fallen Tracto-an.

  “He has not spoken since departing the world of our birth,” Ganymede explained with a shrug, “so I have taken to calling him Siopilos.”

  Lynch’s eyes snapped back and forth between the warriors, and Lu Bu noted that the white-bearded man’s answers had not been as direct as they might have been. But Lynch seemed satisfied as he tapped out a series of commands on his wrist-link before gesturing to the silent warrior to follow, whose armor bore far fewer dents, rents and scorch marks than that of his fellows, “Let’s go finish this thing. And you,” Lynch turned to the white-bearded man, “’warrior who was born Ganymede,’ gather your people and have them follow the directions I just uploaded to your suit so they can get out of here. This place ain’t even gonna be here much longer, so I’d advise haste.”

  “It will be done,” Ganymede said, replacing his helmet over his head bag and clomping away.

  “Come on, Lu,” Lynch urged, “let’s go find Jimmy boy.”

  They resumed their trek across the compound, with only the occasional sounds of battle breaking the almost eerie silence which hung throughout the dome. Lu Bu discarded her ruined wire winch along the way, and noted after several sideways glances that while the silent Tracto-an’s power armor bore nearly two dozen serious rents, none of them was located near a joint or other vital piece of equipment—which suggested either extremely improbable luck had contributed to the distribution of hits he had received during the siege, or that he was even more proficient with power armor than she was.

  She logged the information away, knowing that it was entirely possible they would be fighting alongside each other in short order and that she might need to coordinate her actions with his.

  Soon they reached a structure built near the edge of the dome, and Lynch produced a fist-sized grenade of some kind which he placed against the base of the structure at roughly the mid-point of the near wall.

  “We’d best take cover,” he advised, gesturing to a nearby structure, and after they had ducked behind the corner he tapped his wrist-link and the ground beneath their feet shook as a deafening explosion was accompanied by a brilliant flash of light. The sound of debris showering all around them briefly reminded Lu Bu of rain falling back on her home world, and she surprised herself by indulging in the nostalgic memory for several seconds before refocusing on the task at hand.

  When Lynch led them around the corner she was impressed to see that the thirty foot tall by sixty foot long wall on the building’s front had been completely destroyed by the deceptively powerful device. Beneath that smaller wall and just beyond it was a tunnel that stretched down beneath the dome’s outer wall, which she took to be the so-called spider tunnel. They quickly made their way into this previously secret passage with the Core Fragment floating behind them.

  The tunnel stretched on for nearly three hundred meters before opening into a junction of some kind, where four tunnels including the one they had just traveled were joined in a rectangular chamber nearly fifty feet on a side with a ceiling that was no more than twenty feet above the floor.

  And in the center of that room was a trio of figures, with the middle figure wearing a long, flowing cape which was red on the outside and black on the inner lining. The figures flanking him wore lightweight armor of some kind and bore staff-like weapons as they stood in perfectly mirroring postures to either side of the caped figure.

  “I don’t know who you are,” the caped man began, and Lu Bu found the similarity between his voice and the voice of Commodore Raubach to be strikingly similar, “but I must commend you on a job well done. You have set my House back several years with this attack.”

  Lynch strode forward and Lu Bu kept to his left while the silent Tracto-an kept to his right.

  “I must kill you for your transgressions, of course, but rest assured there will be plenty of time for us to become acquainted before that happens,” the Imperial Senator said with bone-chilling cordiality. “As you may be aware, House Raubach takes great pride in upholding the virtue of reciprocity.”

  “We already know each other just fine, Jimmy,” Lynch said, reaching up to remove his helmet and tossing it aside after he had done so. He shook out his dreadlocks and held up a halting hand in Lu Bu’s direction before briefly looking over his shoulder to the armored Tracto-an. “As for reciprocity…well, that’d be why I’m here.”

  “I must admit,” Senator Raubach said, his seemingly unbreakable composure radiating the confidence of a man who had never lost a conflict in his life, “the possibility of your survival had crossed my mind on more than one occasion, but it has been quite some time since I last seriously entertained the notion. How did you survive?”

  “Willpower, mostly,” Lynch explained, rolling his head around and eliciting several loud cracks as he did so. “A man learns a lot about himself lyin’ alone
in a cold puddle of his own blood.”

  “You are not a man,” Senator Raubach sneered. “You are an abomination—a cancer which I excised from the body of humanity in accordance with the will of humanity’s one true god.”

  “Looks like you only got most of me—or, like a poor marksman, you just keep missin’ the target,” Lynch quipped, dropping his lone remaining pistol to the ground and removing his wrist-link, which he tossed under the levitating Core Fragment without so much as a look in that direction. He hefted the massive sword he had picked up from the fallen Tracto-an and nimbly slashed it back and forth to test its weight and balance. Lu Bu was surprised at how deftly he maneuvered the weapon, considering its apparent bulk in relation to his frame.

  “Whatever inaccuracies I may have been guilty of in the past, rest assured that I will not miss this time,” Senator Raubach declared coolly, reaching up and undoing the clasp which fastened his cloak around his neck. The garment fell away, revealing a physique which might have adorned billboards and posters all across the Spineward Sectors for its symmetrical perfection and lean, powerful musculature. He drew a long, jewel-encrusted blade from its scabbard at his hip and stepped forward—though, Lu Bu noted, neither of his guardsmen did likewise. “Kill the others,” he called over his shoulder to those guards, “while I deal with this heretic according to the Old Ways.”

  The guardsmen nodded and split out from each other, their movements perfectly mirroring each other’s as they moved to flank Lu Bu and the warrior to her right.

  “They will be fast,” Lu Bu growled under her breath as the staff-like weapons in the hands of those guardsmen crackled with what looked like electricity on either end of their tapered, smooth shafts, “can you fight speed?”

  The warrior nodded silently, bringing his absurdly massive sword up to rest on his shoulder as he moved forward to intercept the guardsman on his side.

  “Good,” Lu Bu said as she made to intercept her own opponent, Glacier Splitter feeling like an old friend as she thumbed the activation button. The gravity generators thrummed to life, vibrating more than they usually did during a startup but she was confident the weapon would still perform its function just as it always had.

  As she moved to engage the guardsman—whose face was obscured by an opaque visor, and whose movements were decidedly serpentine—she saw the image of little Su spring to the fore of her mind. But this time, rather than the usual rage or single-minded focus she had known during previous engagements, she felt a deep ache as a single thought seemed to echo throughout her mind:

  You must return to them.

  But that thought was struck from her mind as the guardsman lurched forward, and with nearly perfect unison the three pairs of warriors’ weapons clashed in the opening exchange of the battle.

  Lu Bu parried a swift stab of the crackling staff-like weapon, turning it aside as she deftly swayed to the right. She drove a counter left kick into the guardsman’s flank, which he made no attempt to block. He instead allowed the blow to move him laterally and he redirected that momentum into a spin which saw his crackling, staff-like weapon stab upward at her face. She ducked the attack and swung Glacier Splitter upward at his torso, but he reversed his spin mid-motion and moved his body completely around the arc of her weapon as he stabbed his own weapon toward her chest.

  It was all she could do to bring her hammer’s haft up to deflect the pointed, energized weapon away from her heart. She was understandably relieved that it tore through nothing but air a few inches above her shoulder after she had driven upward with Glacier Splitter’s haft to deflect the blow. But the guardsman leapt up with a blindingly quick front kick which struck her helmet flush on the chin, knocking her head back and taking her eyes briefly off-target.

  She tried to jump back and regain her focus, but her leg erupted in a bolt of white hot agony so profound she genuinely thought it had just been amputated. For several seconds, she focused the entirety of her mind on keeping her leg beneath her as she staggered back, and fortunately her leg complied long enough for her to regain her wits. But no sooner had she re-focused on the guardsman than he stabbed at her helmet’s visor with his energy staff, and in an instant every element of her HUD went dark—as did her life support functions—when the strange weapon’s energy discharged into her suit’s lone electronic component.

  The visor briefly went opaque in response to the bright flash of the weapon’s impact against it, but Lu Bu swung Glacier Splitter blindly before herself, knowing that she was briefly at her opponent’s mercy. Pulling out all the stops, she twisted the haft in rapid succession which powered the gravity generators to maximum, and also telescoped the weapon to its maximum length as she swung the hammer in a wide, powerful stroke.

  The hammer impacted against her foe, and she blindly pressed forward without sighting in on him as her visor slowly clarified. She lashed out with a kick and was rewarded with a faint, but certain impact and followed the kick with an overhand blow of the hammer. She spun her body twice more, repeating the attack as she finally caught sight of her nimble opponent through her decreasingly shaded visor.

  He sidestepped her third overhand attack, but by then her feet were fully beneath her and she was able to react to his staff’s swipe at her injured leg. She stepped back and out of the swipe’s range before instinctively launching a flying knee at his head. She was more than a little surprised that he managed to avoid the blow by dodging to the side, but doing so cost him his footing and she drove forward with the ferocity of a Stone Rhino as thought, feeling, and memory flowed together in her mind until they no longer existed in any meaningful fashion.

  Time seemed to pass by in short bursts, with interminably lengthy interludes where random images flashed into her mind. With each parry, each thrust, and each swipe which she countered or returned in kind, her sense of oneness—for that was the only word she could appropriately use to describe the profound state—was so complete that it was almost as though she and her adversary were cooperating to create something beautiful rather than battling to the death.

  These were not usual thoughts for Lu Bu, but she welcomed the serenity she felt as blow after blow was parried, blocked, or outright dodged from both herself and her opponent. It was an even match if ever such a thing had existed, and for the first time in her life she genuinely wondered if her physical conditioning would ultimately cost her the contest.

  Her body was as fit as it had ever been, but as she passed what must have been the hundredth exchange with her dauntless foe, her limbs became heavy and numb as a miniature star’s furious inferno seemed to have taken up permanent residence in her chest. Her opponent gave no indication that he tired, and she grimly began to suspect that he was simply goading her into expending the last of her energy.

  That thought snapped her back to the present, and she was sundered from the profound ‘oneness’ which had overcome her senses.

  She backed away from the warrior and tore her helmet from her head with a pair of quick swipes at her collar’s locking mechanisms. The locks disengaged and she tossed the helmet to the side while her opponent circled like a hungry jackal.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw Lynch and the Senator were engaged in a pitched battle which might have been a fully choreographed battle scene from a blockbuster holo-vid. But the sound of clomping feet behind her gave her an idea, and without looking back at her opponent she turned and sprinted toward the site of the battle between the Tracto-an and the second guardsman several meters away.

  The guardsman’s staff stabbed at the power-armored warrior, but he blocked the blow with the flat of his enormous blade and stepped into a counterpunch which missed entirely but forced the guardsman to dance back and out of the warrior’s threat range.

  Lu Bu powered Glacier Splitter—finding the usual thrum had been markedly reduced since the outset of the battle—and she launched herself into the fray with a low attack aimed at smashing one or both of the second guardsman’s knees. She knew that she wa
s leaving her back exposed, and that if the Tracto-an did not understand that she meant to confound their enemies via teamwork she would most certainly die with a weapon in her back—an undesirable end if ever Lu Bu had conceived of one.

  The second guardsman—who might as well have been a clone of the first, in both appearance and action—avoided the incoming blow but seemed somewhat hesitant. She followed up with a vicious flying knee which, to her short-lived amazement, actually landed and sent the guardsman reeling.

  There was a clang behind her which filled her with confidence since it meant the Tracto-an warrior had correctly interpreted her meaning and had engaged the guardsman with whom she had been engaged. The second guardsman recovered his balance and counterattacked, but Lu Bu had already parried significantly more dangerous attacks from his counterpart. She easily sidestepped the crackling weapon and fired what was probably the most brutal leg kick she had ever authored.

  Her shin drove into his thigh with enough force to break both bones, but thankfully her leg did not break—though it did flare in riotous pain that suggested it had almost broken. She knew that to use it in that fashion again would certainly result in its failure, so she seized the opportunity created by her adversary’s brief immobilization and struck Glacier Splitter’s butt into the guardsman’s visor.

  A web of cracks spread across his visor, much to her surprise, but before she could execute a killing blow she heard an ominous buzzing sound which prompted her to look over her shoulder.

  The first guardsman was perched on the Tracto-an’s shoulders and had driven his staff’s crackling, pointed tip into the Tracto-an’s helmet. Though the armored warrior thrashed this way and that, he failed to dislodge the nimble warrior—who was slowly pushing his crackling weapon through the duralloy casement which protected the Tracto-an’s head. Even as she watched, the power armored warrior’s movements slowed in such a way that she suspected his suit’s systems were being overpowered by the strange, disruptive effect of the guardsman’s weapon.