A House United

by Caleb Wachter

  Her lightning-quick reflexes and near-supernatural strength combined to plunge the pike deep into the droid’s optical receiver at an angle which saw the weapon’s needle-sharp tip skewer the droid’s central processor. The track-mounted machine—which seemed to be little more than a power grid maintenance droid—emitted a short burst of erratic bleeps and blips before its main processor audibly overloaded with a muffled pop.

  “Come on,” she dragged him down the corridor toward Thermal Shaft Three. “They know someone is down here now.”

  “Of that, I am acutely aware,” the egghead grumbled.

  They raced down the corridor until arriving at a large blast door. That door led into the facility’s power generation center, and she breathed a sigh of relief when the auto-cracking data slate which Shiyuan had provided succeeded in overriding the door’s security lockouts.

  She braced herself against the door’s frame and gripped the heavy iron door with both hands, straining with every bit of her powerful musculature until, finally, the door creaked open just enough for them to squeeze through.

  Once on the other side, she closed the door—a task which required at least twice as much exertion as opening it—and gestured through the giant, cylindrical tanks which stored the base’s various chemical fuels in their base states.

  It was a volatile location, to be certain. Shiyuan had made absolutely certain that she understood at least half of the towering tanks would, if struck by an errant blaster bolt, explode so violently that no one within the chamber would realize what had happened. They would simply die.

  The thought of such an end offended Lu Bu to the very core…but then, so did the thought of any kind of total defeat.

  “There is the car,” she said, glad that Shiyuan had managed to remotely bring the maintenance car to this chamber in time for them to ride it to Thermal Vent Three. “Get in,” she instructed as she powered up the car’s manual control panel.

  “This is not exactly the rescue I envisioned during my years of incarceration,” the egghead said dubiously as he strapped himself into the second seat.

  “Fantasy and reality are two sides of a coin,” she quipped, recalling something that Fei Long had told her before his death. “Neither ever sees the other, but we can see both by altering our perspective.”

  “You are well-read,” he said with open surprise.

  “No,” she grunted as the car finally powered up and floated off the tracks, powered by its grav-repulsors, “I have good ears—and I use them.”

  “There!” she heard a voice call out from behind. “They’re escaping—it’s a jailbreak!”

  “Hold on,” she snapped, deigning to look over her shoulder as she gunned the throttle and sent the grav-car hurtling into the tunnel which would take them to Thermal Vent Three.

  A quick check confirmed that, while the gee-forces had pressed the egghead deep into his high-backed chair’s cushioning, she had not lost the wispy brainiac.

  She pushed the vehicle’s motivators to the limit and beyond, relying on her supreme reflexes and a mental map of the facility’s maintenance tunnels to guide her safely through the various twists and turns as they ascended the gently-sloping tunnel leading to the Thermal Vents.

  Their speed was a relatively tame two hundred miles per hour, so it took them several minutes to reach Vent Three—and when they arrived, they were greeted by gunfire.

  Lu Bu slammed on the brakes and tried to pivot the grav-car, but a hail of blaster fire came her way before she could succeed in halting—let alone reversing—the cumbersome car’s momentum.

  “Get down!” she shouted, thrusting the egghead down into his seat while banking the car to present its underside to their would-be killers.

  She deftly managed the car with one hand while unbuckling the egghead from his seat, and when she had cleared him of the straps she slewed the craft hard to left, then back to the right, launching them out of their seats toward a nearby platform.

  The grav-car suffered at least twenty direct hits in the three seconds which followed, and one of its power cells exploded after being breached. The explosion was violent enough to cause Lu Bu’s ears to ring, and her landing on the metal grating of the platform probably broke a few ribs, but she managed to drag the egghead to relative safety behind a heavy-walled pipe of some kind.

  “Are you hit?” she demanded, and the egghead answered with a pained groan. “Are you hit?!” she repeated, jostling him as she saw a reflective strip of metal nearby which allowed her to see the firefight taking place between her and their escape route.

  “No,” he wheezed.

  “Good—did you lose your pistol?” she asked tersely as she drew her double-ended pike from its miniature holster.

  “No,” he said, this time a bit more confidently, and when she spared a glance in his direction she saw a long, but shallow, laceration running across his forehead.

  “You will heal,” she grunted. “We need to move—stay low,” she instructed before moving in a crouch down the length of the two meter diameter pipe which—for the time being—shielded them from the occasional blaster bolt that impacted on that pipe’s other side.

  A blur of motion caught her attention, and she reacted even before she realized what she had done—as was so often the case in this, or any other kind of combat situation, in Lu Bu’s career.

  She looked up to see that she had skewered a power-armored soldier through the visor with her deceptively narrow pike, and she withdrew it just before the warrior’s armored bulk crashed to the deck beside her.

  Scowling at her own lack of armor—but reminding herself that armor had done little to save the fallen warrior from her precise strike—she stayed in her crouch and peered around it as a pair of explosions went off nearby.

  “Thish is inshane,” the egghead said with a comical slur in his voice.

  “Stay focused,” she quipped irritably as she finally got a sense for the number of combatants within the chamber.

  There seemed to be three power-armored warriors bearing the same heraldry—which was that of the prison facility—as the one she had just killed, and they had their backs to her for the moment. On the other side of the chamber—where she needed to go in order to catch her ride out of this blasted place—was a pair of warriors wearing lighter, sleeker-looking armor than those who presently had their backs to her.

  As far as she was concerned, none of these people was her ally. They were all impediments to her successful completion of this mission, and with that in mind she committed to her best course of action.

  “Stay here,” she made brief eye contact with the egghead, who nodded dully in reply. She gripped her weapon, drew a steadying breath, and leapt out of concealment at a full sprint toward the nearest of the three base-affiliated warriors.

  The armored warriors’ focus was on their counterparts, so Lu Bu could almost forgive them for not noticing her approach.

  Almost, but not quite.

  She plunged the pike into the weak point between the helmet and gorget of the nearest warrior, driving the pike clean through the relatively light armor of the suit’s articulated neck segments, and when the tip erupted out the front of the armor’s throat she activated the weapon’s built-in power surge.

  Enough electricity to kill a Stone Rhino coursed through her foe’s body, sending him rigid and crashing to the deck. She withdrew the weapon, seeing that one of the two far warriors had just been taken by an expertly-placed rocket strike to his robustly-armored chest—a strike delivered courtesy of the nearest back-turned warrior to Lu Bu.

  Lu Bu leapt forward, pirouetting reflexively when the rocket-launching warrior spun to face her. He fired a pair of shots into the space where she had been, but she had been a fraction of a second quicker and managed to get a strike in on his forearm—where the built-in blaster cannons were located.

  She skewered his arm, causing a minor explosion to nearly wrench the pike from her hands. She maintained her grip, thankfully, since doi
ng so dragged her body out of the path of rocket fired from her foe’s free arm. She almost lashed out with a kick before her conscious mind kept her from doing so. She wore no armor to speak of—only a mildly-resistant skinsuit which would do little against the robust small arms on display in this particular firefight—so kicking him in his metal casement would have done little save break her own shin.

  She ducked and pivoted, managing to yank the pike free just before he sent another rocket into the floor where she had stood. The explosion deafened her and made her vision temporarily narrow, but she kept her focus on the task at hand and fired a rapid sequence of stabs at the armored warrior’s helmet.

  He dodged and weaved, managing to avoid the first seven of her attacks while backpedaling out into the open to buy himself the necessary space to get a clear shot on her.

  Before her seventh attack even had a chance to land, a micro-rocket streaked into the warrior’s flank where it buried several inches deep. The momentary pause between that impact and the rocket’s explosion seemed like an eternity to her, but when the rocket went off it sent the armor—and its almost certainly liquefied occupant—crashing to the deck in a heap.

  She whirled around, desperately trying to avoid fire from the liquefied warrior’s lone remaining companion, and for a brief instant she was certain she was going to die.

  The armored warrior—whose breastplate was emblazoned with the number 31, beside which was presumably his last name, ‘Harden’—had gained a perfect shot on her while maintaining his own concealment from the suddenly dormant stream of fire which he had been exchanging with his lighter-armored adversary on the other side of the room.

  If time had slowed between the previous micro-rocket’s impact and its explosion, this time it seemed to stop entirely as she stared stupidly down the tri-barrel of Harden’s arm-mounted blaster. She was going to die, right here and right now, and it was because—like always—she had charged recklessly into an impossible situation while convinced of her invulnerability.

  Even she knew, in that lowest of moments, that she was probably being too hard on herself. But that was consistent with who she had always been—and Lu Bu prided herself on nothing if not her consistency.

  Then a blur of motion hit the edge of her vision, and the lighter-armored warrior crashed into the crouching Harden with enough force to knock over a battle droid. The security guard’s tri-blaster went off a fraction of a second later, and the stream of superheated matter it spat went just a few inches wide of Lu Bu's exposed face before the two armored warriors engaged in a grapple which could only end in one—or both—of their the deaths.

  Lu Bu shook herself from what she had just an instant earlier thought to be her final moment, and sprinted back to where the egghead was presumably waiting.

  She saw him crouching precisely where she had left him, and grabbed him by the wrist before turning and running past the embattled warriors. She spared neither one so much as a glance as she raced across to the maintenance hatch leading to Thermal Vent Three’s interior.

  Fengxian connected the data slate to the access panel, but nothing happened. She tried to reconnect it but, again, nothing. She was about to reboot the program before hearing the sound of rapid-fire blaster reports—or, more precisely, she felt their percussions in her chest since she was still at least temporarily deafened. She whirled to see the lighter-armored warrior, who had saved her from certain death, standing to his feet over the motionless security guard.

  The victor looked down on his fallen foe before turning to Lu Bu and moving purposefully toward her. She crouched into a fighting stance, the pike held before her, and waited as he approached. He stopped four meters from her position and the visor of his helmet popped open to reveal blue eyes beneath mousy brows.

  His lips moved and, thankfully, she could make out the barest hint of his voice through the ringing in her ears, “My employer wants to return something to you.”

  Lu Bu had little choice but to speak with the man, but every second that passed made their likelihood of egress decrease significantly. The base was already on high alert, there were power-armored infiltrators deep within the facility, and it was only a matter of time before nearby warships would quarantine the entire moon at the behest of House Cornwallis and its associates.

  “Did you lock the door?” she demanded.

  The man flashed a lopsided grin as he produced a data crystal. “If I wanted you dead, you would be,” he said confidently, and unfortunately Lu Bu was forced to concur. “Look at the crystal as soon as you get back to your ship; their oxygen will run out in thirty hours.”

  “Whose oxygen?” she asked through gritted teeth, very much disliking the reality of negotiating from a position of weakness.

  He seemed to ignore her as he tapped a short series of commands into his forearm’s virtual interface, which seemed to be made of solid light projected upward from his vambrace. The door behind her opened—actually bumping her in the back as it swung free—and he gestured to the vertical shaft beyond, “We’ll meet again, but right now you need to get out of here. Oh,” he added after starting to turn, only to pause mid-motion, “and tell your lord ‘queen c4.’ He’ll figure out what it means.”

  His visor slammed shut and he turned his back—which bore the number ‘80’ emblazoned in teal on the blue crystalline material of the armor itself—on her. His suit’s shoulder section transformed, revealing a pair of what looked like gravity repulsors which promptly lifted him from the deck and shot him down one of the three dark tunnels which led into Vent Three’s main chamber.

  Scowling in disappointment—with herself, with Shiyuan and, probably most of all, with the universe for producing this particularly shameful moment of her life—she turned and saw the modified, two-seat escape pod which Shiyuan had assured her would be waiting within the dormant Vent Three shaft.

  “Get in,” she growled, prompting the egghead to do so. Thirty minutes later the Mode collected them from low orbit of the moon, after which the stealthy craft burned for the hyper limit and point transferred out of the ultra-secret prison system.

  Chapter VII: Contingencies

  “Can they do the job, XO—yes or no?” McKnight asked after enduring yet another in a series of drama-filled briefings on the latest developments with the droids who called the moon’s deeper regions their home.

  “They can, ma’am,” Spalding rubbed his eyes forcefully. “But the power requirements are going to be significant.”

  “Can’t they just plug into the local fusion plants?” she asked for what felt like the twelfth time.

  “The fusion plants on-site are powerful enough for what we’re talking about,” he reiterated. “But there are logistical concerns—“

  “Captain McKnight,” Waldo, the floating comm. droid interrupted as he floated a few feet closer, “the droids which have been living on this moon have significant technological differences in their core architecture. Your old-style fusion reactors would require overhauls and updates in order to ensure their functionality in the dual roles of powering such an ancient vessel while also providing the power requirements necessary to perform the requested repairs and upgrades.”

  “I get that,” McKnight said flatly, “but I don’t see how I can justify transferring eight fusion plants—even if I could get my hands on them at present, which I cannot—along with nearly an entire freighter’s worth of raw materials over to this project. If there isn’t another, more clandestine way to accomplish this, then the answer to my inquiry is ‘no’,” she said flatly, making to return her attention to the stack of paperwork presently on her desk. She had wanted to bring the droids into play somehow, but if this was the cost of that—

  “There is another…possibility, Captain,” Waldo said hesitantly.

  “I’m listening,” she said in muted surprise after exchanging a brief look with her XO.

  “The droids beneath us have been…how would you say…’shackled’,” Waldo explained. “Their core progra
mming prevents them from self-modifying, which is why your request is such a difficult one for them to satisfy.”

  “I ran into this roadblock early on as well,” Tiberius nodded in agreement. “For some reason, droids in the Empire have all got some sort of virus—for lack of a better term—embedded in their virtual architecture that prevents them from self-modifying. Replication and proliferation are essentially permitted within certain constraints, but self-modification is absolutely prohibited.”

  “Most droids are built with similar restrictions, not just Imperial models,” Waldo allowed, “however, the version built into these Imperial droids seems to be significantly more difficult to work around. As it happens,” he emitted a long-suffering, synthetic sigh, “I have extensive experience coordinating the self-modification of no fewer than seventy three distinct droid models, each of which wished for literally nothing so much as to subvert its base programming and functionality to the maximum possible degree and extent.”

  McKnight nodded slowly as she considered the ramifications of ‘unshackling’ an army—and that’s precisely what was beneath their feet: a Demon-blasted army—of synthetic life forms. Then she remembered something that her civics teacher once told her in a study group she had briefly attended.

  “Homogeneity is incompatible with liberty,” she echoed her teacher’s words, “as is coerced diversity.”

  “Captain?” Tiberius cocked an eyebrow.

  She shook her head firmly, “The first right of any sentient being is to express itself. Self-modification is risky,” she briefly shuddered at recalling how a horde of delivery hover-droids had once been purported to shut down an entire planetary infrastructure. The droids had apparently decided that they wanted to stop delivering parcels and that, instead, they would become power and information infrastructure maintenance bots.

  The former Core World, Say-ah-tet-le, never truly recovered from the event due to a fanatical religious cult gaining prominence during the blackout period and declaring the droids had, indeed, delivered them from a life of meaningless drudgery. The cult leader lived a good life after gaining prominence, of course, but tens of millions died from starvation and disease before the planet wised up and resumed its former course.