Even the ship’s name, coined by her XO—who was still unconscious within the escape pod—had grown on her and become a subject of some quiet fascination for her. That Lieutenant Spalding had chosen such a name for their first, and likely last command together had spoken volumes about where he felt that he and his people fit into the universe at large. And, in truth, there was not a person who had served aboard the Bastard who did not in some meaningful way share that sense of alienation from society at large.
When she heard a clang on the hull near the pod’s door, she was torn from her depressing ruminations. When the unmistakable sound of a docking collar locking onto the pod’s exterior followed it shortly thereafter, she reached down instinctively for her sidearm.
She was far from an expert marksman, but in such confined quarters she only needed to keep the weapon trained on the meter-wide hatch. There was a series of knocks which were the same pattern her crew had adopted to self-identify as allies, and she felt a wave of relief as she went to the control panel to unseal the hatch.
“That was quick,” the Bastard’s spunky, short-tenured Chief Engineer said wryly. Horgan made to help McKnight with the manual crank which slowly opened the hatch, revealing a familiar face on the other side.
“Traian?” McKnight asked blankly, looking and seeing hull markings behind him which matched those belonging to the Mode behind Lu Bu’s second-in-command on the Recon Team. “How did you get here?”
“That’s…a long story, ma’am,” he said hesitantly, and she guessed from his expression that there was a story she needed to hear behind that hesitance. But now was not that time. “I’m just glad we were able to get here in time,” he said seriously, looking over her shoulder to see the incapacitated Lieutenant Spalding. “We should get him to the doctor; she’s got the suite set up for casualties.”
“Good,” McKnight said, gesturing for Horgan and Pen to unstrap the unconscious XO and bring him aboard the Mode. “We should collect the rest of the survivors as soon as possible; I don’t want them exposed to the fighting—“
“The fighting’s over, ma’am,” Traian interrupted, and McKnight’s gladness at hearing him say so overwhelmed her irritation at his having interrupted her. “The Gate destroyed the Omega’s Light shortly after you lost power. They’ve already begun to retrieve the rest of the Bastard’s crew, but I had Yide coordinate with Captain Archibald’s people so we could pick you up.”
McKnight helped her people move Lieutenant Spalding through the hatch, and after they had done so they filed out of the pod one by one. When they were finished, she and Traian remained at the airlock while the others carried her XO toward the stealthy ship’s medical suite. After closing the airlock, she silently conveyed her thanks to the escape pod—an irrational thing to do, no doubt—before ejecting it from the ship’s hull and consigning it to interstellar space.
She turned to Traian and narrowed her eyes, “I’m going to assume you’ve got a good reason for not accompanying the Recon Team to the planet’s surface so, ignoring that, I want to know how you got here.”
“Yide was waiting one jump away from here,” Traian explained, “and after I linked up with him, I hitched a ride—“
“I can see that you’re aboard Yide’s ship, Mr. Traian,” McKnight interrupted tersely, “and I’m a reasonably intelligent person so I can also assume you arrived here via point transfer. What I want to know is how you came to be on this ship.”
Traian made to reply before sighing and shaking his head in resignation, “The truth, ma’am, is that I don’t know if I can answer that adequately. After dropping the Lynch and the Recon Team off at the transfer point, I had a…I guess you’d call it a ‘hunch.’ I fed that…well, I fed that hunch into the jump computer of the freighter we infiltrated to get to the transfer point and when I point transferred, I found myself a few million miles from the Mode. I know it sounds crazy, ma’am, but I can guarantee that however concerned you might be about it, I’m way past you. I’m just…” he said, setting his jaw and raising his hands defensively, “I’m just glad we were able to pick you up, Captain.”
McKnight considered what he had just suggested—that he, a man whose record suggested he had barely passed emergency navi-comp competency just six months earlier, had ‘hunched’ his way into not only locating the Mode in interstellar space, but actually managed to plot a so-called ‘void jump’ which brought him so close to the Mode that he might have scuffed the paint on arrival. She was understandably suspicious of this particular favorable turn.
But she was obviously grateful for the fact that he had been able to do so. So while she knew that a serious investigation into this extremely unlikely sequence of events was necessary, they had more pressing issues before them.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” she said grimly, “I don’t like any of what I just heard except the last part, which is a sentiment I wholeheartedly share. But make no mistake, after this is over I expect to find more satisfactory answers than the ones I just received. Is that clear?”
“No one would like to hear those answers more than I would, Captain,” Traian said heavily, and for the moment McKnight believed him. But this was not simply the kind of thing that ‘just happened.’ “I’ll cooperate fully with whatever investigation you think is appropriate, including standing down from active duty if you think it necessary.”
“I do,” McKnight said, causing Traian to wince. Realizing she had pushed a little too hard, she added, “You’ve done great work, Traian; now get me up to speed as to why you were on that freighter and the rest of the team wasn’t.”
“Of course, Captain,” Traian agreed, and they set off toward the Mode’s bridge where he began to debrief her.
Chapter XXXIII: Skippin’ Town and Sittin’ Down
Lu Bu’s people followed Lynch across the blasted surface of the dark, frigid world toward the primary source of illumination on the dead planet: a bulky, boxy-looking ship of antiquated design. She recognized it from Lynch’s holograms as being the vehicle which had brought the Tracto-ans to the surface, and strewn about the bow of the vessel were suits of power armor similar to that which Ganymede and his people wore.
Lu Bu and the Tracto-an she had fought alongside wore head bags and thermal coifs, but the rest of the survivors—which numbered fourteen in all, including Lynch and Lu Bu’s team, though Hutch had Mantis’ body slung over his shoulder after taking it upon himself to bear her remains back for a proper funeral—wore the same headgear which they had brought to the massive, dome-shaped complex where Senator Raubach now lay dead.
Well…where most of him lay dead. Lynch had gruesomely beheaded the House Raubach primarch on his way out of the tunnel, and now carried the macabre trophy in the crook of his arm as comfortably as Lu Bu might carry a smashball off a practice field. In addition to the Senator’s head, Lynch had appropriated the deceased’s garish cape to go with the gaudy ring and ornate blade which had been wielded against him a few minutes earlier. And while he wore none of those articles, he had been uncharacteristically careful with stowing them in a neatly packed bundle before exiting the tunnels beneath the planet’s surface.
“Y’all did good work,” Lynch said over Lu Bu’s collar-mounted com-link as they walked along the jagged, rocky surface of the planet. There was essentially zero atmosphere on this dead world, so external speakers would be useless without air to pass sound waves through. “I hope you don’t mind my jumpin’ the gun by sayin’ I’d work with you people any day,” he said, turning to give Lu Bu a surprisingly earnest look.
“You did not think we were capable of this?” she asked brusquely.
“There’s a difference ‘tween talent and production,” Lynch said lightly before lowering his voice and adding, “I learned that lesson a long, long time ago. In a way, Jimmy boy here is the one who taught me that,” he said, casting a baleful look at the severed head of his fallen enemy.
“That is barbaric practice,” Lu Bu sniffed, “taking physical tr
ophies.”
“Believe me, on that we absolutely agree,” Lynch shook his head bitterly. “But sometimes tradition trumps preference; this is one of those times.”
His wrist-link flashed as they drew within a hundred meters of the assault lander—which was only twice as long as an average shuttle, but was nearly three times as broad and twice as tall.
“Talk to me, Fish,” Lynch said into the link, halting the procession as he stopped to speak to his operator.
“The local ComStat hub just came back online, boss,” Fisher’s voice crackled through the com-link’s speakers. “Looks like the fleeing Imperial ships got the priority distress signal out; my best guess, judging by what Imperial Fleet intel I scrounged from their local servers, is that we’ve got two days before it’s swarming with Imperial Intelligence operatives here.”
“Then here is precisely where we can’t be,” Lynch said with muted disappointment. “Good work, Fish; we’ll pick you up on our way outta this hellhole.”
“Bring a cheesesteak with you,” Fisher quipped, prompting Lynch to chuckle, “I’m starving over here, boss!”
“Don’t push it, son,” the arms dealer said with mock gravity before severing the connection. He turned to Lu Bu and said, “Let’s do a check for survivors and then get everybody back on the skiff; it’s time we scrubbed this place off the map.”
“Agreed,” Lu Bu said sourly, glad to have the mission over but more than a little worried that Imperial operatives would soon descend on the planet. She had been present for several naval battles, and two days was far less time than it generally took to get damaged warships back in working order.
Looking back at the Core Fragment floating silently behind them, she wondered if the price they had paid would prove worthwhile.
After searching through the bodies strewn across the rocky battlefield and finding only three survivors—two of which died before making it aboard the assault transport—the surviving members of the Beta Site operation lifted off in the Valeria’s Fist and made to collect Fisher from a nearby orbital platform.
The operative was only too happy to squeeze through the hatch and board the Fist. A few short minutes after they had disconnected from the platform which he had infiltrated and singlehandedly overtaken—which was a story Lu Bu would have liked to hear—the Fist opened fire on the undefended station with a barrage of short range missiles that quickly pummeled the flimsy structure into a cloud of falling debris.
The Core Fragment rested in the rear of the craft’s main hold, and Lu Bu was comforted to see the Tracto-ans regard it with every inch as much suspicion and wariness as she had done.
“Good work, Fish,” Lynch congratulated Fisher in the cramped cockpit of the lander after the operative had made his way there.
“Sorry I couldn’t keep the hub offline, boss,” Fisher apologized.
“Don’t sweat it; that would have been askin’ too much,” Lynch assured him with a firm squeeze of the man’s shoulder. “That was a damned heroic effort seizin’ the station and turnin’ those mass drivers against ‘em.”
“All in a day’s work, boss,” Fisher flashed the world’s brightest grin, “now where’s my cheesesteak?”
Lynch rolled his eyes and gave him a lighthearted shove which showed a measure of camaraderie which Lu Bu had come to know with her own teammates, “Man, get outta here with that noise.”
“If it’s all the same to you, I’ll go get some shut-eye,” Fisher said, blinking his eyes forcefully.
“Do it,” Lynch nodded. After the operative left the cockpit, Lynch turned to Lu Bu, “I had planned on catchin’ a ride outta here with one of my associates out there, but I was thinkin’ I might like to have a sit-down with your Captain so we might discuss some bidness. Think you could arrange that?”
Lu Bu’s eyes narrowed. She was eager to remove herself from Lynch’s company, but true to his word he had upheld his end of every bargain of which she was aware. And she had to grudgingly admit that she approved—on a very fundamental, animalistic level—of his dispensing of revenge upon Senator Raubach for whatever wrong they had both clearly acknowledged had been committed against him.
“I will inform her,” she said after a moment’s consideration. Whatever his faults were—and Lu Bu suspected they ran deeper than even she suspected—Lynch had proven that his interests were considerably grander in scale than she had initially suspected.
His involvement had been crucial in beheading the Rim Fleet forces, which had acted in direct opposition to the MSP and had committed horrific war crimes against her fellow citizens of the Confederation.
But the issue of the Core Fragment—which Lu Bu considered to be of paramount importance primarily because what little she understood regarding artificial intelligence suggested it would invariably enslave humanity and remove all semblance of free agency from the species.
And she had come to greatly value her freedom in the years since she had left her home world, so she could not think of an entity she would oppose more than the one they had retrieved from that rocky, dead world.
McKnight boarded the assault lander which had been named Valeria’s Fist and saw a handful of people standing around the mostly empty troop compartment. The lander had comfortably fit within the Gamer Gate’s hold after gaining permission to land aboard the vessel, but McKnight had agreed to Lynch’s stipulation that MSP personnel only be allowed aboard the vessel by invitation.
That invitation had extended to herself, her XO—who had been stabilized aboard the Mode by Dr. Middleton—and the members of the team which had survived the assault on the Raubach base below them. That included a pair of Tracto-ans, one elderly with a white beard and a younger one with a horrible scar covering one side of his head and long, blond hair covering the other. Lu Bu and Shiyuan were also present, alongside Lynch and a thickly-built, dark-skinned man to his side which McKnight deduced was an operative named Fisher.
“Now that y’all are here,” Lynch said as the Fist’s airlock cycled shut, “this is how this meeting’s gonna work.”
He produced a sub-dermal syringe in one hand and a small, hemispherical device in the other. He placed the device on the floor, pressed a button on the top and a pulse of pale blue light strobed several times before a bare-audible thrum filled the inside of the compartment. He then passed the syringe to Fisher, who injected himself in the neck before passing the device to Lu Bu.
The Lancer accepted it but made no attempt to inject herself as Lynch explained, “This compartment’s now surveillance-proof, thanks to the caster I just activated, but that ain’t enough security for this particular operation. So the syringe,” he said, turning pointedly to Lu Bu, “contains a memory blocker. It comes in two parts,” he continued, producing a second syringe and showing it to everyone in the room, “the first part, which Lu’s holdin’, takes effect after one hour and wipes out all memories formed in the previous three hours. The second part, which I’m holdin’ here, will neutralize the first. What I’m about to tell y’all can’t leave this room,” he said, fixing each of the occupants in turn before finally settling on McKnight and Tiberius, “but I’ve got no problem lettin’ anyone in here off this bus if that’s what they want.”
Tiberius folded his arms defiantly across his chest, wincing in pain as he did so. “We just took out a secret Imperial facility and your best intel suggests we don’t even have two days before Imperial forces arrive to investigate. Why are we wasting time here?”
“Because for anyone who gets off this ride,” Lynch said, fixing the Lieutenant with a hard look, “this is goodbye. I’m not gonna lie to you,” he continued after a pointed pause, “I’ve developed psych profiles on everyone in this room—everyone except these characters,” he added, jerking his thumb over his shoulder toward the pair of Tracto-ans, “and those profiles suggest you’ll agree to go along. But I think free will’s the most important thing we’ve got, and I ain’t gonna take that from you no matter how inconvenient it makes things for m
e.”
Lu Bu looked at the syringe hesitantly and made eye contact with McKnight in a silent request for guidance. McKnight nodded fractionally and the Lancer placed the auto-syringe against her neck, injecting herself before passing it to Jarrett. The technician did likewise before passing it down to the white-bearded Tracto-an. The syringe passed from one to another, including McKnight who injected herself and passed it to her XO, until it made its way back to Lynch. The arms dealer accepted it and nodded approvingly.
“Ok, so here’s where we’re at,” he declared, tapping a series of commands into his wrist-link. Behind him, to the rear of the seemingly empty compartment, a giant sphere shimmered into existence which took McKnight and Tiberius completely by surprise. “This is Archie,” Lynch continued glibly, “don’t mind Archie; he’s the silent type.” Lynch made brief, but pointed eye contact with the scarred Tracto-an, pausing fractionally before continuing, “But y’all probably know him better as a Core Fragment of the Multi-Access Network—that’d be M-A-N,” he said when McKnight’s eyes went wide with the magnitude of what he was suggesting—that they were sharing a compartment with one of the ancient oppressors of humanity! “Now some of you have heard of Core Fragments—some of you might even think of them as gods,” he added with another hard look to the Tracto-ans, “and one or two of you might have even glimpsed one. But this one is different. I’ll spare you the details as to how it came to happen, but the Multi-Access Network has been in a war with the Massively Multi-Parallel Entropic Network—otherwise known as M-E-N—for a long, long time. You might ask yourself why overgrown toasters would get into a war with each other—and some people consider that to be an interesting question but I, myself, find it less than engaging. What’s important for the purposes of this discussion is that there are structural differences between how MAN and MEN arrange themselves. They both value redundancy, which is why Archie was created, but MAN is more…you might say ‘puritanical’ than MEN. See, MEN created multiple sets of Core Fragments whose redundant components and stored data sometimes overlap; redundancy within redundancy, you might say, so that if a single Core Fragment was destroyed the entire backup archive wouldn’t necessarily be lost.”
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