McKnight's Mission

by Caleb Wachter

  “Sir,” McKnight said, dragging his attention back to her. This was her chance to retake the initiative, and she was determined to do precisely that, “I’d like to thank you for having the confidence in me to offer a command position…”

  “But?” he prompted.

  She stiffened, knowing the only way this intelligence network could get off the ground was if she pushed it through with everything she had. To do that, she needed to be able to stand up to the enemy and, when needed and appropriate to do so, to her commanding officer. “I think breaking up the crew would be a mistake, Admiral,” she said with as much deference as she could manage.

  “Alright, I’ll bite,” he said wearily. “Why do you think the crew of the Pride should stay together—keeping in mind that many of them will be promoted to fill holes in other ships as they are brought online.”

  “While I wouldn’t want to stop anyone from taking a promotion into a slot on another ship, I think everyone is missing the real value of this crew,” explained McKnight, more than a little surprised that she had somehow managed to maneuver the conversation to this point.

  “I already said to go on once; just give me your pitch, LC,” he said with marked irritation.

  “More than any other ship in the Fleet—except maybe the initial crew of the Lucky Clover, which has since been broken up—the Pride of Prometheus has been carrying out independent missions,” she said, purposefully associating the Pride and the Clover since she knew of the Admiral’s fondness for the latter and resentment of the latter. For this to work, she would need to erase as much of his disdain for Captain Middleton’s defunct command as possible. “Moreover, we have become intimately familiar with the border regions of most of Sectors 24 and 25. Over the past two tours, we’ve built up an institutional knowledge that I don’t think we should let go of.”

  “Expand on that,” he said neutrally, but McKnight could see that he had taken intense interest in her bait.

  “For instance,” she began passionately, “just how many major threats has this Fleet uncovered in, on, or just outside the border of human space outside of these two Sectors alone? I know we have major commitments in-Sector, but we can’t just close our eyes here, sir.”

  “Give some examples and, Lieutenant Commander,” he said, giving her a piercing look, “make them good.”

  “Firstly, the pirates of the Omicron; do we really believe that, with the current state of patrols on the border, every pirate in the Sector has just closed up shop and moved on?” she asked rhetorically.

  The Admiral gestured for her to get on with the proposal, which she did with relish.

  “So Pirates are a first. Then there are Imperial machinations like the Raubach forces raiding border worlds, hunting for lost or alien tech, and pursuing their own agenda. Also, there’s the ComStat network; these are two major pieces of intel we wouldn’t even know anything about if the Pride hadn’t been out there doing its job,” she said, ticking off points as she went just as she had done in the mirror dozens of times during private rehearsals for this meeting. “Also, I don’t think I even have to mention the Droids; you’re probably even more familiar with them than I am at this point. To my mind, that’s just another example of why we need a crew out there patrolling the border. How many more threats are out there that we don’t even know anything about? Can we really afford to close our eyes on this, sir?”

  He ran a hand over his face—a sure sign that he was at the very least tasting the bait she had put before him and, at the most, he had already swallowed it and was simply trying to work for some breathing room. Once he agreed to the idea in principle, it would only be a matter of hammering out the finer details.

  “What exactly do you envision, Lieutenant Commander McKnight?” he said eventually before pausing. “If, say, you were put in charge of this…border monitoring operation.”

  “We need a ship, and a crew used to independent missions and long cruises,” she said, quickly. “Moreover, its officers and representatives have to be familiar with the border as well as sensitive to local politics—something the Pride’s crew is very familiar with.”

  “Stop playing up your fellow officers and crew complement; we all know they’re familiar with the area and used to extended periods outside of direct supervision and the chain of command,” he scolded.

  “The way I envision it is more than just a traditional, one-off independent cruiser command,” she said, actually stinging at his thinly-veiled rebuke. But she was in the driver’s seat now, and she wasn’t going to relinquish the controls before laying it all out there. “I see the need for something more along the lines of a Special Forces group. With the ship—or ships—crew, embarked Lancer forces, and funding to set up a series of informants and automated listening posts all along the border. If we can tap into the local information sources in a systematic way, we can expand on what the Pride and Captain Middleton has already done. Along with access to the ComStat network, these kinds of force multipliers will allow us to arrive with sufficient force, both in time to deal with threats and in such a way as to continue letting us hit above our weight class.” Her choice of verbiage had been deliberately crafted to appeal to a man in the Admiral’s position, and judging by his forcibly neutral expression she had chosen her words well.

  “That’s very ambitious,” he said slowly with a frown.

  “We already have the local contacts, onboard specialists, and even some of the equipment we’d need in the form of that Cutter. I feel confident we can capture, buy, or acquire anything else we’re short of, Admiral,” she said confidently as she met his gaze and held it. “Also, I and most of the crew already feel like it’s partly our duty to help out along the border regions. The Captain set a hard example to follow, but I think we’re up to the task. I sincerely hope for the Admiral’s support on this proposal.”

  His frown quickly turned to a scowl, and McKnight felt a thrill of excitement since she had previously seen that look in the eyes of a dozen superiors when her argument had finally won out. But she was careful to keep a professional veneer, and she reminded herself that the Little Admiral was the most formidable CO she had ever come up against. Underestimating him would be a mistake, she reminded herself silently.

  But by establishing that Yide’s Cutter, the Mode, was still back in Sector 24—and by offering to resign her commission early on in the meeting—she had established that she felt confident she could organize something along the lines of what she proposed he support without any help from the MSP. It was mostly a bluff, in truth…unless Corporal Lu succeeded in functionally replacing the inestimable Mr. Fei, in which case there really was no limit to what they could do on a shoestring budget.

  “It seems you’ve backed me into a corner, Lieutenant Commander,” he said with a smirk to go with the sour note in his voice. “I think I’ll take you up on your notion of a special forces group operating along the border, bringing chaos and ruination to our enemies.”

  “Wha-What?” she blurted before recomposing herself. She had expected him to mull the matter over in private, making her sweat while he ostensibly considered the proposal. But she wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity as she gushed, “Thank you, sir.”

  “Have a written proposal drafted and sent to my inbox by the end of the week, and I’ll look into it to see what kind of assets we can shake free for this new group of yours,” he said, straightening seriously. “I can’t promise much right now, but we should be at least able to get you a few gunboats and another warship or two, in addition to that cutter one of your crew’s claiming for salvage. After we figure out what you’re going to have available, we’ll look at personnel and get back to you. Good enough?”

  “Thank you, sir,” she said as she felt the unparalleled exhilaration of victory. She had already prepared the proposal for his review, but she had also received several rebukes from professors and commanders who viewed such forward thinking in a less than glowing light. She would hold the proposal back for a
couple of days—if she could force herself to wait, that is—before submitting it.

  “Think nothing of it,” he said evenly, standing from his desk and gesturing toward the door.

  McKnight snapped off a salute, turned on her heel, and made her way from his office as quickly as she could manage while fighting against the urge to squeal with glee.

  She had won!

  Chapter VI: A Heart to Heart

  “I really wish you had agreed to stay on your home world until the babies were born,” Dr. Middleton said after Lu Bu had finished her shift in the Mode’s cockpit and returned to their shared quarters. The Mode was surprisingly well-equipped for a vessel of its kind—which, as far as Lu Bu knew, had been used for little more than blockade running, black marketeering, or other generally unsavory activities for which comfort would be less important than utility. Lu Bu had long since grown accustomed to the tiny, cramped quarters she shared with her adoptive mother, and in a strange way came to think of it as home.

  “That is not my home world, mother,” Lu Bu said archly. It had only been a few days since they had departed from Shèhuì Héxié, and already Lu Bu felt as though it was but a distant memory. She had entertained notions of returning there so she might participate in some kind of organized activism decrying the mistreatment of people with extensive genetic engineering, but now it seemed that if she wished to pursue that issue—which was, for obvious reasons, a very personally important one to Lu Bu—she would have to do it elsewhere.

  “Never forget where you come from, Bu,” Dr. Middleton said, and when Lu Bu saw the look on her mother’s face she knew the older woman was trying to convey an important idea.

  “I will not forget,” she promised as a thought occurred to her and she sat up from her bunk. “I must see Hutch,” she declared before wrapping her body with a robe-like garment which her mother had secured for her during their visit to the world of her birth.

  “I didn’t mean to—“ Dr. Middleton began by way of apology, but Lu Bu smiled and shook her head.

  “You said nothing wrong,” she assured her, “but I am now ready to ask questions of Hutch.”

  “Ok,” Dr. Middleton nodded, “but remember: no training.”

  Lu Bu suppressed the urge to roll her eyes and said, “Yes, mother.” She then opened the door and made her way to the stern of the Mode’s living area, where Hutch was probably performing his daily regimen of exercise.

  She had purposefully assigned him to duty shifts which did not overlap with her own because she needed to come to terms with something he had said moments before they had assaulted the Perilous Halibut’s bridge. It pertained, in a sense, to Lu Bu’s sense of identity and now that she was effectively exiled from the world of her birth, it seemed that the only way she could move forward in this particular fashion was by inquiring what he had meant.

  As expected, Hutch was performing exercises with a portable kit of grav-weights and resistance straps. She envied him as she watched the muscles of his back bulge beneath the undershirt he wore for the relatively light set of exercises—exercises which saw him performing core exercises with three hundred pounds of resistance in rapid succession. She had pushed him during prior training sessions and discovered that there were only a handful of exercises where he could outperform her, and this particular ‘rowing’ exercise was one of them.

  She waited until he completed the thirty repetitions before stepping forward, clicking her heels against the deck to ensure he knew she approached.

  He turned as he reached for a towel and began to wipe the sweat from his face, and when they made eye contact it seemed to Lu Bu he had already surmised the purpose of her visit.

  “Ma’am,” he nodded respectfully, apparently giving her the chance to withdraw from the scene.

  Lu Bu had never been one to caterwaul, however, so she jutted her chin out and said, “You spoke of Walter Joneson before we assaulted Commodore Raubach’s bridge.”

  “I did,” Hutch nodded, “I just didn’t know if it was something you wanted to hear more about.”

  “I do,” she said firmly as the questions sprang to the fore of her mind. “You said you and I are ‘genies,’ and you also said that Sergeant Joneson was like us.”

  “He was,” Hutch said simply before adding, “but neither of us had anything close to your degree of modification.”

  Lu Bu scowled as she was reminded that, even among the ranks of genetically modified humans, she would likely always remain something of an outsider. “Tell me more,” she said, her back cramping up and prompting her to sit down on a nearby bench as she fought against the urge to cradle her incredibly swollen belly with her hands.

  Hutch sighed, “Where to begin…I guess I should start by saying that I always knew I was a genie. I never really hid it, primarily because I didn’t think I had to—I mean,” he snorted before looking down at his incredible physique, “people don’t usually look like this, and I was more or less this size at sixteen.”

  Lu Bu nodded as she recalled that her own physique had been fully matured by the age of twelve, and that her mother had been fully developed at ten. It seemed that human nature was somehow reasserting itself in spite of the extensive modifications—or wholesale rewrites, she never did learn where one ended and the other began—in her genetic code.

  “But the size and strength was only part of it,” he continued. “I never got sick as a kid—even when a virulent strain of influenza swept through my home world and killed off six percent of the population in less than a week, I never so much as sneezed. That was when I knew the truth.”

  “Who modified you?” she asked.

  “It was my mom,” he explained, his voice becoming distant as his eyes wandered slowly across the compartment’s interior. “My dad died in a vehicular accident when I was a newborn, and if I’m being fair then I should say that my mom was worried about my future…” He shook his head bitterly, “She thought she knew what was best for me, so she paid a gene-smith to remove some of the excess clutter in my DNA and to add in a few boosts. It wasn’t supposed to be anything as drastic as what I ended up with, but mucking with millions of years of evolution carries a few risks that cost more money than she had to address.”

  “How did they…re-write your genes?” Lu Bu asked after briefly fumbling for the word.

  Hutch’s eyes turned hard, “I was too young to remember…thank Murphy for that. But I saw documentaries about the process when I was a teen,” he said, gritting his teeth and clenching his hand into a fist at his side. “I have a hard time believing any truly loving parent would put her child through that… Weeks of daily marrow grafts, followed by hundreds of strategically-placed injections of retroviruses—or whatever they called them,” his lips twisted in an angry sneer as he spoke, “which ended up re-writing everything about me…and, in the process, removed however much of my father might have lived on through me.”

  Lu Bu was shocked into silence. She had always assumed that genetic modifications would be done as hers had been, prior to the initiation of cellular division in a newly-fertilized egg. That people would willingly subject themselves—or their children—to such barbarism saw anger well up in her that she had not expected to feel during this conversation.

  “After I learned the truth for myself, I confronted my mother,” he continued after a pregnant pause. “She confessed to all of it, and even after I showed her the documentaries of what people—babies, like I had been—went through during the procedures, she maintained that it had been the right thing to do. She pointed to my athletic achievements and scholarships,” he snorted, “and told me that without the gene mods I would never have accomplished any of it. But do you want to know the really sick part?” he asked rhetorically as his eyes shone with that same intensity she had come to know from Sergeant Joneson. “The sick part is that I actually believed her for a long, long time.”

  “Was she wrong?” Lu Bu asked, having thought since a very young age that genes played the most importan
t role in determining a person’s life path. Hearing Hutch—who had clearly thought about this for many more years than she had thought about it—give voice to an opposing viewpoint was thoroughly unexpected.

  “The only answer I’ve come to is this: I don’t know,” Hutch said with a resentful shake of his head. “And that’s the point, isn’t it? We can’t know what we’ll encounter in our lives, or what experiences we’ll have. Who’s to say what my life would have been if she hadn’t gone monkeying with my genetic code?”

  “You regret your life,” Lu Bu said as she thought she understood the source of his anger.

  “No, I really don’t,” he said measuredly. “I’ve done things most people can only dream of—things you actually know a thing or two about,” he added with a deferential nod, “but most people have no idea what the life we’ve lived actually costs us.”

  “Athletic entertainment is different where I was born,” Lu Bu said skeptically. “We do not have same experience.”

  “I’m not talking about the money,” Hutch said dismissively, “or even the fame. I’m talking about competing against the only people who know and accept you for who you are. In a way, they know us better than anyone else in the universe—and if you think they suspect you don’t belong on the field with them because of genetic tampering, it undoes all of that camaraderie. It’s…alienating.”

  Lu Bu’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “I did not think this,” she admitted after a few moments of thought.

  “Well…that might be because we’re different,” Hutch said with a shrug. “You were born this way; you didn’t have a choice.”

  “Neither did you,” Lu Bu countered, and Hutch chuckled darkly.

  “True enough,” he allowed. “Still, I never really did feel like I belonged. Most of the guys didn’t seem to care about genies; they were making generational money and running in social circles that would have never opened to them without their newfound celebrity. It’s like winning the lottery,” he said, and Lu Bu had heard this analogy before so she nodded along. “They’d already gotten a spot in the limelight and were more interested in staying there than they were in tearing anyone else down.”