McKnight's Mission

by Caleb Wachter

  “Why, Wedge,” she purred, knowing exactly what he was suggesting that the boss—or any warm-blooded male, for that matter—might want with her, “I never knew you cared.”

  Before she could continue her game of cat and mouse, the Rusty Unit’s spectrometer returned a verified result on the hit she had decided to intercept. It could have been the wreckage of another freighter, a detached cargo container or, if she was incredibly lucky, it might even be an intact vessel waiting to be salvaged by one of the system’s dozen or so slow-drive freighter pilots — nearly all of which worked for one of the six bosses like she did.

  She shook her head in confusion at the readings; it appeared that the anomaly was a slowly-expanding cloud composed completely of carbon. There were approximately five hundred million cubic meters of the stuff out there, most of it appearing to be industrial grade diamond which would not be worth recovering. There were a few larger chunks of low-grade gemstone present, but nothing that looked big enough to recover a profit which would warrant the costly detour Wedge had warned her about.

  “Oh, fine,” she sighed as she began to input the original course heading back into the Unit’s helm, “back on course, it is.” She scowled; it would take another two weeks for her pitiful craft to reach the Barn and she had already been aboard the cramped, greasy, intra-system vessel for three times that long.

  Just as she was about to do as she had said, the spectrometer returned a giant object — nearly a hundred twenty meters long and between fifteen and fifty meters across — which appeared to be almost entirely composed of carbon.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Wedge replied, the relief in his voice evident to her well-honed ears.

  “Not so fast,” Larissa said, her eyes growing wide as she set the craft’s pitiful sensors to scan the object, which appeared to be near one edge of the ellipsoidal cloud of carbonic particles. A chunk of diamond that large would be a record, at least for a naturally-occurring stone. But as the readings came back, her eyes narrowed as she realized it was no diamond at all—it was a ship!

  “We’ve been over this,” Wedge said tersely, “unless you’re willing to pay—“

  “We’re staying on this course,” she said with conviction, “there’s a large, unmarked cloud of carbonic debris this way with what looks like a derelict, completely intact Corvette-sized ship at its edge. Salvage rights on a rig like that might even allow you to buy your own squadron of fighters,” she said leadingly, playing to the only impulse which could hope to touch the heart of a man as powerfully as carnal lust: greed. “Of course, if that kind of thing doesn’t interest you…”

  The brief hesitation before his reply was all she needed to know she had successfully baited the hook. “What kind of debris are we talking about?” he asked, and she smirked in self-satisfaction before coordinating their approach.

  Nearly four hours later, Larissa completed her craft’s deceleration as she brought the Rusty Unit alongside the slowly tumbling, derelict craft. Part of her training had been to memorize every single craft design ever produced—or even recorded—in the Empire of Man, but this craft was unlike anything she had ever studied.

  It resembled nothing so much as a long, slender insect with a multitude of short legs sprouting from its ‘back.’ Those legs curved down and merged with what looked to be a pair of nacelles, and the hull of the craft was dotted with large, ovular bubbles that a more imaginative person might have thought to be eyes.

  The cloud of debris had continued its outward expansion during the approach interval until it was nearly eighty kilometers across at its widest point. The mysterious craft had been on the far side of the cloud, and due to the Unit’s weak drive system she had been forced to drive partially through the cloud rather than skirt around the edges of it.

  “Looks clear from here, ma’am,” Wedge reported after he and his wingman had completed a trio of orbits around the alien-looking vessel. “But we’ve only got emergency evac gear on these fighters,” he explained all-too-predictably, “so you’re going to have to plant the salvage flag yourself.”

  “What would I do without you boys around?” Larissa quipped as she finished fastening the final pieces of her vacuum suit together. She would don the helmet after she had brought the Unit alongside the craft outside what appeared to be an open shuttle bay.

  Strangely, however, her craft’s sensors could not penetrate the interior of the vessel. It was clear that the majority of the strange ship’s skin was graphene but the bubble-shaped ‘eyes,’ while also composed of carbon, were of a different configuration.

  She eventually matched the Rusty Unit’s rotational period and orientation to the warship’s, and did a last minute check of her freighter’s instruments before moving toward the airlock. She fastened her helmet as she did so, feeling more than a little apprehensive about relying on the aged gear. But she had performed a thorough analysis of the suit and helmet prior to setting off on her latest assignment and knew it would be equal to the task of getting aboard the vessel, recording some images, and leaving with the salvage claim having been properly made.

  But the salvage rights to the vessel were a distant second in her mind to the real priority: investigating the craft and reporting back to her superiors as soon as she was able to do so. If there was a new warship manufacturer operating in the Gorgon Sectors—a region of beyond-the-rim space which had been cleverly named by the Imperial propaganda machine—then it was her duty to report back as soon as she had solid evidence of that manufacturer’s activity.

  Of course, she would have to cut her current mission short in order to do that, given the lack of faster-than-light communications out here in the hind end of space. That was a problem she was prepared to deal with in due time, however, if doing so became necessary.

  The walk to the airlock took her past the craft’s pair of staterooms, one of which she used for herself after converting the other to a storage vault. She entered her biometrically coded passkey to the vault’s door, and after a moment’s silent cogitation the door’s security mechanisms stood down and she opened the chamber to find the various pieces of gear she had stowed securely within.

  Reaching onto a nearby table on which sat a high-grade recording monocle, she hesitated as her hands passed over the pair of vibro-sticks which she had used to such great effect early in the assignment. She had dispatched of the Rusty Unit’s former operators—a husband and wife team—in precisely twelve seconds, and had earned the post for herself by doing so. It was a far from perfect job, but it was also one which allowed her a measure of privacy while also providing her with regular, if limited, contact with the boss of one of the six pirate clans operating in this particular Star System.

  She decided against bringing the vibro-sticks since her suit was unlikely to survive any real confrontation where they might be required. The odds were long on anyone actually being aboard the tumbling vessel she was about to board, and if there was anyone there then a fight was almost certainly the least safe path to her continued survival.

  So she affixed the monocle to her left eye and tested its recording suite before wirelessly linking it to the small, self-contained, independently-powered and heavily encrypted data storage module which sat in the corner of the stateroom-turned-vault. Satisfied that the connection had been made, she performed a cursory check of the storage module’s crystalline housing. She clucked her tongue when she saw that the web of cracks which had appeared several months earlier was continuing to slowly spread across the unit’s entire housing.

  At the storage module’s current rate of degradation, she would be required to cut her mission short nearly a year early or risk losing all of the data she had accumulated to this point. But if that ship outside was in fact the product of a heretofore unknown manufacturer operating in the Gorgon Sectors, she would need to cut her assignment even shorter than that.

  Securing her helmet to the vacuum suit, she exited the vault and secured its locking mechanisms once again—mechanisms which c
ontained explosives that would destroy the front half of the small freighter in the event of an unwanted attempt to access the vault—before finally making her way to the airlock.

  She cycled the inner airlock doors shut before grasping the safety handles near the outer door and initiating a slow purge of the gases inside the airlock. The vacuum suit slowly expanded around her, much like a balloon, before settling several inches from her skin everywhere except portions covering her joints. The light above the outer door turned blue, prompting her to crank the wheel which controlled the locking seal which caused the door to swing gently open after nearly thirty seconds of effort on her part.

  She had brought the Rusty Unit alongside the strange vessel, and had managed to get within twenty meters of the strange, oddly organic-looking craft. In spacewalking terms, it was little more than a hop to go from her craft to the still-open shuttle bay doors on the other craft, but she had never much cared for zero gravity exercises even with state-of-the-art gear, which her present loadout most definitely was not.

  Flattening her body and gripping the door to either side of the airlock’s outer door, she aimed her head at the shuttle bay opposite her position and launched her body like a missile toward the insect-looking ship’s lone entry point.

  She floated through the vacuum between the ships for several seconds, taking a moment to look up and down the vessel with her monocle as she did so in order to file a complete report on the craft at a later date. As she entered the shuttle bay’s doors, she immediately felt the artificial gravity of the craft’s interior pull her down and she managed to roll her body sideways and avoided damaging her helmet as she did so.

  Drawing herself to her feet, she looked around and quickly saw that there was already a craft within the shuttle bay. Cursing herself for having left her vibro-sticks on the Unit, she looked around the dark compartment and saw nothing else of note until her eyes came to rest on a console near what looked like some sort of doorway leading to the interior of the ship. The doorway itself was closed, and appeared to be some kind of iris mechanism composed primarily of carbon, but the console was of decidedly Imperial design—complete with iconography declaring as much.

  Her curiosity piqued, she approached the console and found that it was powered, and a swipe of her hand across the crystalline interface panel saw the menu come up. A few inputs allowed her to scan through the console’s recent history, and she was more than slightly alarmed to see that the console had been accessed just two hours earlier.

  She switched on the primary recording protocols for her monocle and looked around the shuttle bay’s interior, saying, “This is Larissa Patterson; I’m standing aboard a derelict vessel found at the coordinates listed on this recording’s info-stamp. There is no sign of activity aboard the vessel, and I’m proceeding with full a salvage operation,” she lied, knowing that if the console was correct then another salvage operation had probably beaten her to the punch then she would have wasted thousands of credits—credits she didn’t have—investigating someone else’s find.

  Of course, it was possible that whoever had accessed the console had been aboard the vessel the entire time, but that seemed unlikely since the ship’s power plant appeared dormant and the thermal readings were so low that it was clear nobody had inhabited the vessel recently.

  Plus, that cloud of debris had only begun expanding ten or twenty minutes before she had detected it. If she had been the type to invoke luck as a causative factor, she would have concluded that hers was running pretty good to have picked up this particular blip on the Rusty Unit’s pathetic sensor suite.

  She deactivated the primary recording program with a few well-timed twitches of her cheek, but the secondary program remained active as it fed the recording directly into the storage device back in the Unit’s vault.

  With just a few commands input to the console, she found that the iris-shaped door leading to the ship’s interior would not open with the main hangar door still open. Intrigued, she successfully initiated the closing cycle and a few seconds later the auto-pressurization sequence began to pump breathable gases into the shuttle bay.

  After a few minutes, the process was complete and the inner door opened in accordance with its iris design. She stepped into the corridor and found it was unlit and eerily silent. Looking to her right, she saw the corridor extended nearly fifty meters before hitting a dead end. To her left she saw an open, oval-shaped door about the same distance.

  She recorded as much of the inner features of the craft as she could while moving toward the open door at the end of the corridor which led to the craft’s bow. Just before she got to that door, she heard something behind her and spun around just in time to see a massive, fearsome looking figure with a dragon-styled helmet crash into her and knock her to the deck.

  She instinctively reached for her vibro-sticks before remembering she had left them on the Unit, and barely managed to squirm away from the massive, seven foot tall man as he attempted to grapple with her.

  Larissa tried to leap backward, in the direction of the open door which she had nearly reached, but the warrior was simply too fast. Wearing Storm Drake armor of a decidedly archaic, yet form-flattering design, it seemed reasonable to conclude that the warrior was indeed a member of one of the pirate clans at work in the system.

  She scrambled back toward the door, only to bump into something metal and unmovable. Spinning around, she saw a Marine wearing old, but well-maintained power armor now standing in the doorway through which she had meant to flee.

  His metal gauntleted hands reached out for her, and instinct combined with her superb reflexes managed to allow her to avoid his grasp. But the Storm Drake-clad warrior dove on her and clamped his arms around her torso, causing her to struggle briefly before realizing it was hopeless.

  Her struggles ceased nearly as soon as they had begun, and the Marine moved forward to examine her pressure suit briefly before stepping to the side of the doorway.

  A man appeared behind the Marine and this one was completely unarmored. He wore a provincial officer’s uniform of some kind, the make of which she did not immediately recognize. It bore patches that read ‘MSP – Pride of Prometheus’ over the left shoulder. His eyes were as hard as diamonds, his jaw was square and firmly set, and he sported a plate of metal over the bruised left side of that jawline. Larissa had seen prosthetics of those type used as field dressings for broken skull bones, and the swelling beneath this particular plate suggested the wound which it addressed was no more than a day old.

  With little more than the tilt of his head, the uniformed man silently gave an order to the lumbering brute which had pinned Larissa’s arms to her sides. The brute removed her pressure helmet with one hand, and Larissa felt his grip with the other arm relax fractionally when the square-jawed officer once again issued a silent, barely perceptible order with a tilt of his chin.

  Larissa shrugged off the brute’s arm, causing him to chuckle loudly enough that she could hear it even through his vacuum-rated helmet. It was the sound one might expect to hear when metal ground stone into dust, but she kept her eyes fixed on the commander of the group while considering her options.

  “Who are you people?” she demanded, fighting to keep the ambivalent feelings of excitement and fear which she had brought into balance with each other just as she had been taught to do in such situations.

  The square-jawed officer narrowed his eyes and took a step forward, bringing him close enough that she could smell the faint odor of his breath. “My name is Middleton,” he replied grimly, his voice carrying the weight of command authority as surely as every single Imperial Intelligence Officer under whom Larissa had served in her career—including her current CO, who would no doubt be interested in her report as soon as she could file it, “and I’ll be asking the rest of the questions.”

  The Story Continues in Middleton’s Pride, Book 5: Middleton’s Prejudice

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