McKnight's Mission

by Caleb Wachter

  “Family? We are outcast from the Sundered; if they discover we sold our gunships and their technology to an arms dealer, they will find us and they will punish us—we will be lucky to survive. You are our living family, Fengxian,” Yide snapped. “We are not MSP and we are not Sundered. We are all…we are…” he stammered, visibly struggling to find the right words.

  “Tribe,” his sister offered, yet again surprising Lu Bu with her command of Standard.

  “Yes,” Yide nodded in thanks toward his sister, “we are a tribe. Do we mean so little to you that you would discard us before going on your adventure?”

  “Of course not!” Lu Bu insisted. “We are bonded—we are blooded—and even time cannot break our bond!”

  “Then take us with you,” Yide said with finality.

  Lu Bu felt as though she should argue with them about their choice, but the parallels between doing so and what Dr. Middleton had just attempted were too clear in her mind to permit such hypocrisy. “If you wish to go…I am honored to stand at your side,” she assured them.

  “That was…” Tiberius said as he curled his arm around Pen’s naked, narrow shoulders as they lay in the cool, dark berth assigned to them aboard the Gamer Gate.

  “This would be a good time to keep your mouth shut,” Pen said before he could find the words.

  “You’re right,” he agreed, closing his eyes and considering the events of the past few hours. The fact that they had just engaged in the most satisfying series of intimate acts Tiberius had ever known was somehow not the foremost thing in his mind. He felt tempted to replay the message which he had apparently recorded to himself not but a few hours before his rendezvous with Pen. But he knew that doing so would be rude, insensitive, and most importantly that it would cut short the profound contentment he had achieved in the arms of a woman whose orbit had been so intertwined with his own that he could scarcely believe they had not made direct contact of an intimate nature earlier.

  “What is it?” she asked just as he managed to push the thought of the cryptic message from his mind.

  “It’s nothing,” he tried to assure her, but even in the dark it was clear she wasn’t buying it.

  “Come on,” she insisted, “you’ve got something big on your mind. Are you thinking we shouldn’t have done this?”

  “No!” he blurted. “This was the best thing we could have done,” he said with genuine feeling.

  “Then what?” she pressed, clearly relieved to hear him make such a declaration.

  “Well…” he hesitated before finally taking the plunge, “it looks like I’ve got a decision to make.”

  “Oh?” she asked, propping herself up on her elbow and looking down at him, her silhouette barely distinguishable in the near-total darkness of the room.

  “I can’t remember doing it…but I think I left myself a message,” he explained, reaching over and picking up the same data slate he had examined for nearly twenty minutes before responding to Pen’s missive and meeting her in the abandoned set of quarters.

  “This sounds interesting,” she mused. “Let’s hear it.”

  He powered the slate up and opened the video file in question, causing the slate’s light to perfectly illuminate Pen’s naked torso. His eyes drifted over the line of her ribcage before settling on her unique pair of gloriously modified sweat glands.

  “Tiberius,” she said, placing a finger under his chin and lifting his face until their eyes met, “the message?”

  “Oh, right,” he said, shaking his head in an effort to purge his visual databanks of nature’s most perfect mammary glands and pressing the ‘play’ button on the data slate.

  “All right, I’ve only got a few minutes,” his recorded self said from an unfamiliar compartment inside an also-unfamiliar vessel that looked like some kind of landing craft, “but I’ve made a decision and now you need to make it, too. But I want to give myself—you—the best chance to make a good decision here, so I’m going to make this simple,” his recording said.

  It sounded precisely like something Tiberius would say to himself—he’d had significant practice during showers or exercise sessions where he had perfected his self-directed monologue—but the cryptic nature of the message seemed to do the exact opposite of simplify things.

  “We’ve got a choice,” his recording said, “or, rather, you’ve got a choice since by now you’ve forgotten a lot of what went into my decision. The decision is simple: stay here, probably drop out of the military and go try to make a life—hopefully with Pen,” his recording added earnestly, causing Tiberius’ face to flush with embarrassment as his recording continued, “and, knowing how things tend to work out for us, you’ll probably do just fine. Or…” his image said, leaning closer to the pickup for emphasis, “you can take a shot at seeing what’s just over the horizon by joining Lieutenant Commander McKnight on her newest mission. I’m picking the second option, but this isn’t my choice any more. It’s yours. I’m not going to influence your decision with any more information than that. Whichever way you go, I know it’ll be right for both of us. But you have to make your decision before 0900, and I think it would be best to offer our crew the chance to come with you.”

  The message ended and Tiberius noted that the chronometer on the data slate read 0500.

  “Well that’s no choice at all,” Pen said shortly, pushing off from the bed and angrily gathering up her clothes from the deck beside the bunk they had just shared. “You honestly think what I want is to go settle down somewhere?!” she demanded.

  “What?” he asked in bewilderment.

  “You know, for such a smart man you’re awfully dense sometimes,” she snapped. “You just told yourself that you’re either supposed to choose between what sounded like an excruciatingly boring life with me, or to go have one of the universe’s great adventures without me. I get it—I represent the ‘safe play’ in your mind.”

  Tiberius lurched out of the bunk, nearly tripping over the sheets as he did so. “That’s not it at all!” he objected.

  “Really?” she demanded, turning on her heel and throwing her hastily-collected garments onto the deck. “Convince me of that, Tiberius Spalding, and do it before I go tromping down the corridors of this ship naked rather than endure another minute—“

  He reached out, grabbed her in his arms, and pressed his lips against hers in an effort to cut her completely unexpected tirade short. She resisted at first, but then she grudgingly returned the gesture before finally matching his enthusiasm. When the kiss ended and their lips parted, he said, “I would rather be with you than not be with you.”

  She looked up at him skeptically, “Really?”

  He nodded, “That’s what I was telling myself, Pen, but I didn’t need a recording to know that. If being with you means I have to give up the chance at the adventure I was describing, I’ll do it in a heartbeat and never look back. But if I can have both…” he said leadingly.

  At that, her dubious look melted away and she blurted, “Then what are we doing here? We have to go tell the others!”

  “What about…you know,” he said, his hands moving suggestively toward those perfectly-formed mammary glands of which she was the understandably proud owner.

  “There’ll be time for more of that later,” she declared irritably, removing his hands and hastily sliding into her uniform. “We’ve got to go tell our crew!”

  Tiberius sighed as he reluctantly gathered his own clothing, “You’re such a tease, Pen.”

  “Aww, c’mon,” she quipped mischievously as she finished fastening her collar around her heavily kiss-marked neck, “you know you like it.”

  “You’re right,” he agreed sourly as they made it out into the corridor, clasping her hand in his own, “I do.”

  Chapter XXXV: A New Home

  “This is…surprising, Lieutenant,” McKnight said when her XO finally arrived to the boarding ramp of the Valeria’s Fist with his batch of recruits in tow. A staggering thirty six of the crew which
had come with him to serve aboard the Freedom’s Bastard had elected to accompany him, including the Bastard’s Chief Engineer. “All of these people want to accompany us on this mission?”

  “They do, Captain,” Tiberius nodded firmly. “The rest of my crew has asked to be taken to Capital and released from service, or to have their records cleared so they can continue to serve as part of the MSP Sector 24 Task Force.”

  “I’m not generally inclined to respond positively to ultimatums,” McKnight said sharply before relaxing, “but your people have proven themselves several times over. I’ll forward that request to Captain Archibald, who will be assuming direct command over the Sector 24 Task Force,” she said with a short look to where Archibald himself stood several meters from the ramp. “Consider it done.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Tiberius said with a gracious nod before turning to the crew at his back. “Load up, people!”

  The three dozen crew which had come to the shuttle bay with him began to file past McKnight onto the Fist, and when the last of them had entered the vessel’s interior Lieutenant Spalding made to follow them.

  McKnight placed a halting hand on Tiberius’ shoulder when he reached her. “As far as I’m concerned, the record of anyone who participated in this latest operation is clean, Lieutenant Spalding.”

  He set his jaw briefly before cocking his head in apparent understanding. “Thank you, Captain,” he said after visibly relaxing.

  “We haven’t had the last of our disagreements, XO,” she said, knowing from personal experience that the arguments between Captain and XO would never—and should never—come to an end, “but I’m glad you and your people are coming on this mission.”

  “As are we, Captain,” he said, offering a salute which she returned before she gestured for him to enter the Fist. He made his way within, after which McKnight’s successor to the command of the MSP’s Sector 24 Task Force sighed loudly.

  “I’m not going to pretend that I approve—or, more specifically, that I like your choice,” Captain Archibald said, approaching the base of the ramp with his hands clasped behind his back. “But I choose to believe it’s the right one for you to make.”

  “It is,” McKnight assured him. “I…” she began, but words failed her as she tried to conceive of a way in which she could convey how she felt. Then it came to her, and she descended the short ramp. When she reached the bottom, she proffered her hand and said, “I owe you my life, and serving with you has been an honor that I’ll never forget.”

  Archibald seemed less than thrilled by her sentiment, but he accepted her hand and said, “I’ll take good care of your project, Captain.”

  “See that you do,” she quipped, prompting them to share a brief moment of levity before she released his hand and turned to board the Valeria’s Fist.

  “McKnight,” he said just before she reached the lander’s hatch. She turned expectantly, and he cracked a lopsided grin when their eyes met, “Wherever it is you’re going…give ‘em both barrels—and don’t stop ‘til you reach the back of their teeth.”

  McKnight stared at him blankly for a moment, and then she tried to resist the urge to laugh at his crude joke. She failed spectacularly to do so, and soon the shuttle bay was filled with the decidedly unprofessional sound of a warship captain—well, former warship captain—laughing at an equally unprofessional joke.

  “I’ve got nothing to respond to that,” she said with a shake of her head, “Except for ‘thank you,’ and to reciprocate what I think was your intent,” she nodded when the moment passed. “Thank you, Captain.”

  He returned the nod, and she boarded the Fist with the inescapable feeling that they would never see each other again.

  As far as she was concerned, that was just another part of the job.

  “Thanks, Colson,” Lynch said from the Fist’s cockpit after the assault lander had exited from the tattoo-sporting pirate’s shuttle bay, “I owe you one.”

  “Now that’s something I’ve never heard you say,” the heavily-pierced Colson snickered. “Someone isolate that bit of audio and put it on continuous loop!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Lynch rolled his eyes, “everybody’s a comedian.”

  “You sure you’re good out here in the middle of nowhere in that overgrown shuttle?” Colson asked.

  “I’m fine—or at least I will be after y’all jump outta here and I can stop worryin’ about my valuables bein’ pilfered,” Lynch said sardonically.

  “You don’t have to tell me twice,” Colson said heavily, “with all the heat coming down on this area, I think holing up in void space like this might be the smartest move—but unlike the retired community, those of us in the working world have jobs to get back to.”

  “Who said I was retirin’?” Lynch asked with mock incredulity.

  “You don’t have to actually read the writing out loud for me to understand it once it’s up on the wall,” Colson retorted. “However things manage to shake out for you, I just want to be perfectly clear on two points: one, you are an absolute son of a bitch who deserves everything that’s coming to him. And two, I’d do business with you any day of the week.”

  “I appreciate that, Travis,” Lynch said graciously, “the feelin’s mutual.”

  “Of course it is,” Colson said with a toothy grin, “so long, Lynch.”

  The connection severed, and eight hours later Captain Colson’s Destroyer point transferred and the Valeria’s Fist was left in the cold, dark of interstellar space. A few hours after that, the Mode point transferred to a point just a few million miles from the Fist’s location.

  “All right,” Lynch said, rubbing his hands together eagerly after they had confirmed the Mode’s identity, “time for y’all to see home.”

  McKnight and Tiberius sat in the chairs to either side of Lynch, who occupied the pilot’s station for the Valeria’s Fist. McKnight watched as Lynch tapped out a series of inputs to the craft’s comm. panel and then leaned back once the message had been sent.

  A few minutes later, there was a brilliant flash off the Fist’s port bow which startled both McKnight and her XO. A moment later, the proximity alarms rang out and McKnight saw on the Fist’s tactical display that a gigantic vessel—one which rivaled a settler ship or bulk freighter in terms of sheer volume—had appeared a few hundred thousand miles away.

  “That was close,” Lynch muttered as the Fist was gently, rhythmically rocked by a dozen or so ‘waves’ of some sort. “Thankfully, we won’t have to do that again.”

  “What kind of jump drive is that?” McKnight asked.

  “It can’t be…” Tiberius muttered as he leaned forward to examine the sensor data.

  “Oh, it is,” Lynch assured him as he gunned the Fist’s thrusters and began to close the distance between the two crafts. The Mode followed their lead, and after nearly twenty minutes the massive ship came into sight and McKnight found herself sharing her XO’s disbelief.

  “A Jefferson Class?!” she breathed.

  “You know your history,” Lynch said approvingly as a series of handshake protocols were processed on one of the nearby displays. “Far as I know, she’s the last workin’ one in the universe.”

  “But…” Tiberius began to object as the massive vessel’s hull outline became distinguishable due to a series of lights on the vessel’s own hull, “the old star drives…how did you preserve—“

  “There’ll be time for all of that technobabble later,” Lynch interrupted after releasing the Fist’s controls and sitting back in his chair, “for now, just drink her in—because she’ll be home for at least the next year.”

  The long, utilitarian hull of the vessel was much like one might have expected from an early warship: there were two counter-rotating sections located roughly at the ship’s midsection, each of which was several times the size of the Pride of Prometheus, and they rotated around the five kilometer long keel of the ship to generate the most primitive form of artificial gravity known to humanity. If McKnight believed
the myths, each of those rotating sections could house fifty thousand human warriors for sustained periods.

  The long, central keel section housed the vessel’s most powerful weapon: a mass driver which, according to legend, had played no small part in liberating humanity from the tyrannical oppression it had suffered under the AI’s. The combination of a mobile weapon of mass destruction in the mass driver, and a hundred thousand human soldiers armed with ionic weaponry and other anti-synthetic devices had made for a war machine which enabled humanity to fight back against its oppressors.

  But the ships had been built out of iron ores that were little better than cheap, construction-grade steel, which meant that in spite of its size the Jefferson Class was remarkably vulnerable in a firefight—even to what McKnight and her contemporaries considered ‘light’ naval weaponry.

  And the ship’s star drive had, reputedly, been every bit as potent and flawed as the ship it propelled across the vast expanse between the stars. Ancient records of horrifying radiation poisoning affecting nearly everyone who served aboard a Jefferson were one of the few universally accepted facts associated with the ancient design. The flip-side—according to myth, anyway—was that it required little or no prep time after a jump had been plotted if it had sufficient antimatter fuel. So, in theory, a series of jumps could be executed in a matter of minutes rather than hours or even days if they were accurately plotted beforehand.

  The Valeria’s Fist approached the massive warship, and McKnight found herself sharing more than a few anxious looks with her XO in the minutes leading up to their final approach. It seemed odd to her that they would dock with the rotating hull section rather than somewhere on the keel, but surprisingly the assault lander’s automated controls matched the rotation of the forward hull and slid the bulky craft into one of the massive shuttle bays located near the ship’s midline. McKnight was relieved to look out the cockpit’s window to see the Mode touch down nearby on the hangar deck.