“Amazing, isn’t it?” the woman who had rebuked Percival asked after approaching close enough to brush her body against Lu Bu’s—an event which was neither pleasant nor unpleasant to Lu Bu. “They say this place was originally a shelter for AI refugees,” the woman said, placing a hand on Lu Bu’s arm and sweeping the other hand out to encompass the station’s interior. “But no one knows why they carved it into a perfect sphere…”
Lu Bu had little interest in such details, but she had extreme interest in securing her objective and leaving this self-described ‘paradise’ as quickly as possible. So she knew she needed to play along, at least for a while.
“Maybe they needed a very large ball,” Lu Bu mused, just as she had practiced. Her words predictably drew laughter from the rest of the ten person assemblage, including the woman with whom she presently conversed.
“Maybe they did,” the woman agreed, “but then, sports are just a proxy for the ongoing struggle of life itself—and the ball is merely a representation of something more…desirable,” she said lasciviously, and for the first time perhaps ever Lu Bu felt self-conscious as ten pairs of eyes seemed to devour every nook and cranny of her flesh.
Standing defiantly, and keeping in character, she grasped the woman by the waist and pulled her tightly against herself, drawing a short squeal of approval from the significantly smaller woman as Fengxian said, “I am no good with words.”
“Fear not on that account,” the woman purred, “where we’re going words are less important than deeds.”
The necessary exchange concluded, Lu Bu grasped the woman by the waist, lifted her up, and launched their bodies in the water. A chorus of approving hoots followed as they swam side-by-side toward the near shoreline.
They exited the pool and Lu Bu made for the nearest kiosk, prompting the other woman to say, “My room is the other way, darling.”
“I must check my messages,” Lu Bu said neutrally, swiping her wrist-link across the kiosk and hearing the telltale sequence of beeps and blips which indicated that Shiyuan had successfully established a connection. She tapped through the link’s short menu tree—a process which doubled as inputting a password to access the link’s hidden features—and felt her teeth grind at what she read:
Imperial Destroyer just point transferred in and will dock in three minutes. Expedite your exit. Link compromised. Link Compromised. Link Compromised.
“Anything interesting?” the woman asked, her own anxiety barely masked by her light, conversational tone.
“Yes,” Lu Bu grunted. That Shiyuan had thrice repeated ‘Link Compromised’ and capitalized the second word meant that the Mode had already been forced to move off from its original holding position for fear of being discovered. Had the link actually been compromised, he would have employed the phrase: ‘Employ Exit Plan Terra.’ So, at least for the time being, they were still able to communicate via the link.
“Change of plans, Judge,” Lu Bu grunted, breaking character as she turned to the fifth—and final—target of her five-stop-itinerary. “We need to get out of here immediately.”
“They’re still watching us,” the Judge said, indicating the swimmers still lounging around the platform. “At least two of them are Imperial Intelligence—“
“Let me worry about them,” Lu Bu interrupted.
“Forgive me,” the Judge said skeptically as she drew nearer, playing the part of seductress as she sauntered up close enough that Lu Bu could feel her breath as she spoke, “you may be a fine physical specimen, but they are trained agents for whom failure is not an option—while you are alone, unarmed, and sixty miles beneath this asteroid’s surface for which there are only three possible routes available to you. You have a deteriorating set of exit strategy contingencies, coupled with a change of plans thrust upon you mere seconds after making initial contact with your objective—which I can only assume means the Imperial Navy has already arrived to detain me—and you want me to defer to you in determining who worries about what?”
Lu Bu flashed a fierce grin, “Failure is always an option, Judge—and I expect to demonstrate that reality to the three Imperial agents who are even now swimming toward us.”
“Then why are we standing here?” the Judge demanded angrily while studiously ignoring the incoming swimmers—who, even Lu Bu had to admit, moved through the water more quickly and gracefully than she had done.
“Because, all else being equal, surprise is a decisive factor,” she said in a low voice that even her heavily-enhanced hearing would have failed to detect. She adjusted her posture, careful not to expose her clandestine act to the oncomers as she did so, and produced the collapsed pike from concealment.
The Judge shot her a withering look after seeing where Lu Bu had previously hidden the small, cylindrical device, “Really? I mean…really?”
Ignoring the jab, Lu Bu grabbed the woman by the arm, careful to conceal the pike as she did so, “Come with me—the internal sensors in the maintenance corridor behind the waterfall are offline.”
Looking as though she wanted to argue, the Judge wisely held her tongue and did as instructed. The two women scampered toward the waterfall, studiously ignoring the approaching agents as they did so, and thankfully they managed to duck through the slick, perfectly thermo-regulated waterfall a few seconds before their pursuers did likewise.
“Stay down,” Lu Bu instructed after ducking around the corner and pressing the Judge against the joint of the wall and floor. The Judge did as instructed, and Lu Bu activated the pike less than a second before the first of her pursuers appeared at same intersection through which she had passed just a few minutes earlier.
Lu Bu feinted a high kick, causing her foe to freeze for a split-second—an interval prolonged ever-so-slightly when his eyes caught on her pike—before she slammed the weapon's shaft into his left flank.
To her surprise, he somehow took the blow without crumpling as she had expected. It was only after he fired the first in a well-conceived sequence of punches and kicks that she realized his body was heavily-reinforced with cybernetics.
“Cheater,” she grunted as she backpedaled away from his lightning-fast strikes. She parried with the tips of her pike, scoring a handful of minor nicks and cuts that did little to dissuade her enemy as the second agent appeared around the corner and leapt into the fray.
In many ways, her fighting style with the pike—which she had gleaned from Lynch’s data files back on the Rainbow—actually benefited from fighting multiple opponents compared to just one. With careful footwork, methodical sequencing, and the occasional low kick thrown in at irregular intervals, she was able to maneuver her foes into working against each other almost as much as they worked against her.
She thundered a hard leg kick into the left agent’s thigh, stopping his forward momentum long enough to slam the right end of her pike into his chin. His companion tried to grapple with her, but she had already moved out of the path of his predictable attack—and, using the pike's needle-sharp end, she tore a long gash across his hip as she pivoted out of his path much like a matador might do to a rushing bull.
She switched her weight over her hips and launched a brutal front kick into the left agent’s throat, landing the blow squarely and—to her mild surprise—causing the other man to splutter as he gasped for air and clutched his neck.
She spun on her left foot as soon as it hit the floor and delivered a crushing side kick to the outside of his knee, crumpling the limb but unfortunately not crippling it.
The flanking agent lunged toward her, his fists swiping through the air with such speed that they seemed to whistle as the passed mere inches from her weaving head. Crouching so low that she briefly touched her lead thigh against the floor, she sprang into a counter-thrust against the onrushing agent with the pike—and snarled in savage satisfaction at seeing the pike bury into the center of his chest after he woefully underestimated both her flexibility and reaction time.
Kicking him off the pike and watching him
fall to the floor, she saw the third agent come around the corner of the intersection just as the previously-staggered agent came to his senses.
She spun the pike over in her hands—as much for intimidation as to adjust her grip on the smooth handle of the weapon—and dropped into a fighting crouch with it held before her body in anticipation of their next attack.
The attack came, just as she had expected it to—and, for the first fifteen backpedaling steps that they forced her to take, she was reminded of her previous assertion to the Judge:
Failure is always an option.
Then her opportunity came and, like a lion leaping into a herd of fleeing herd animals, she seized the moment with all the savage ferocity she could channel—which, needless to say for anyone familiar with her, was substantial.
Slamming her pike into the left agent’s jaw, she pivoted and launched a roundhouse kick into the right agent’s upper arm. Sliding the pike's shaft down onto the left agent’s shoulder, she used it as leverage to swing her lower body like a pendulum which brought her left shin into the side of the left agent’s head.
She then switched her weight again and slammed her right foot into his belly, driving him back several steps as her toes only briefly touched the floor before she spun like a ballerina—but not one of those tutu-wearing, eighty three pound ballerinas; more like a trained killer packing two hundred and fifteen pounds of rock-solid muscle and bone—and stabbed the right agent in the thigh with her pike.
She wrenched the pike from side to side, drawing a surprising sequence of pops, sizzles, and flashes from her enemy’s leg before she withdrew the pike and pressed the advantage on her wounded adversary.
He backpedaled in the face of her fury, but it took her only six steps to find a home for the pike—in his throat. Blood spurted from the wound as she allowed their opposing inertias to wrench the deadly weapon’s tapered tip into, around, and ultimately through the side of his neck as a wide, ragged gash was opened by her deceptively elegant-looking weapon.
The other agent had recovered by then, but it was a small matter for her to deal with him once he found himself isolated and more than slightly wounded. A snap kick to the groin—while uncouth—was plenty effective to halt his forward advance and a trio of precise stabs with the pike put the last agent down for good alongside his companions.
She made eye contact with the Judge who, by now, wore unvarnished approval—and, Lu Bu was happy to see, more than a trace of fear—on her exquisitely-sculpted features.
“We must go,” Lu Bu commanded, and the Judge nodded as they set off for the nearest conveyance station. The access corridor was oddly-shaped, with twisting and turning that made very little intuitive sense but which was necessary due to the ‘inverted’ gravity present in the spherical main chamber. The corridor coiled, wound, and twisted this way and that as they proceeded through the labyrinthine network of interconnected passages.
Lu Bu collapsed her pike into its smallest form before they finally exited the semiprivate corridor—where they passed no fewer than three cases of amorous trysts in progress—and they made their way to one of the many hover-bikes parked nearby.
The bikes were courtesy conveyances for any of the station’s guests, and—at least for the time being—Lu Bu’s false credentials were good enough to activate one. She climbed aboard and gunned the accelerator, inclining its ascent and aiming for an artificial, cliff-like structure that was on the opposite side of the cavern.
“The exit is located behind the cliffs,” she said over her shoulder as the Judge gripped the side-rails of the bike to compensate for the occasional ‘eddy’ in the gravitational fields at their current ‘altitude.’
The bike was a slug compared to most of the vehicles Lu Bu had driven since joining the MSP, but it still got them across the spherical cavern in just a few minutes. The docking port—where the newly-arrived Imperial Destroyer would doubtless disembark its teams of soldiers—was on the same side of the station where she had arrived via the crate, so using the far-side exit option would hopefully buy them a few precious minutes to make their escape.
They landed on the far side of the cavern and she pulled the bike up to a nearby access corridor—which, aside from serving as a convenient setting for amorous guests, also led to the more affordable rooms built into the rock.
In addition to the guests’ rooms being built into this portion of the asteroid, was the infrastructure which ran the upscale resort worldlet—along with a little-known emergency launch silo housing a lone escape pod which had been originally intended for the facility’s former owner.
They ducked into the winding, seemingly insane tunnels which seemed to defy the laws of physics—which, she supposed, they actually did after a fashion—and made their way to the supposedly secret access tunnel which would take them to the escape vehicle.
The vehicle was little more than an escape pod with a powerful magnetic launch system which, much like a maglev, would propel them out of the asteroid without the craft expending any fuel. A moment before breaching the surface of the asteroid, a series of planned explosions would send a cloud of debris away from the rocky planetoid.
The primary advantage of this launch system, from Lu Bu’s perspective, was that it would—at least in theory—give them a few minutes before passive scans could locate them amid the cloud of debris. The pod itself would be the same temperature as the rest of the asteroid, and it was irregularly shaped, so picking it out of the debris would be difficult until its trajectory took it a few thousand kilometers from the asteroid’s surface.
But even all of that would only buy them, at most, two or three minutes before they were finally detected by the Imperial Destroyer’s crew. And if the Mode was unable to collect them before the Imps swooped in, Lu Bu would have failed in this crucial portion of her important mission.
Lu Bu led the Judge through a set of corridors which she had memorized during her prep for this mission, and were nearly halfway through the tunnels when the sound of blaster fire erupted ahead of them.
“Get down,” she commanded, shoving the Judge down against the floor as the weapons fire intensified ahead of them.
She extended her pike’s twin ends with a flick of her wrist, and cocked her head to listen to the sounds of battle deep in the corridor. She was listening for a specific sound and, after just a few seconds, she heard it.
“Come on,” she growled.
“You’re not actually thinking of going into a firefight unarmed?” the Judge incredulously objected.
“We have friends there,” Fengxian said through gritted teeth, shooting the well-built woman a hard look which—thankfully—the Judge acknowledged by standing and moving behind her as they approached the sound of gunfire.
The intersection where the secret passage was located soon came into view, and—just as she suspected—she saw a blue-armored warrior exchanging fire with three Imperial Marines.
He was quick—almost as quick as Lu Bu in her Storm Drake armor—which was impressive because his counterparts appeared to be moving without the use of their Imperial-grade power armor’s primary motivators.
“Clever,” she grunted as the blue-armored ‘Number 80’ warrior snapped off a trio of well-placed shots as he deftly popped around a corner. One of those shots took a Marine in the visor, but Lu Bu saw that one of the Marines’ suits had apparently rebooted its power systems. That Marine initiated a full charge toward the blue-armored warrior as Number 80 drew what looked like a grenade from his armor’s bulky breastplate.
There wasn’t time for Lu Bu to cross the intersection on foot, so she hefted the pike and—just as she had practiced for the past several months—hurled it like a javelin aimed at the Marine’s chest in an effort to buy 80 a few precious moments.
The javelin was pulled off-course, dipping erratically in its flight as it passed into the intersection’s gravity field, but thankfully it still managed to skewer the Marine in the knee.
The Marine toppled mid-s
trike, crashing to the deck and sending a plasma bolt into the nearby wall—narrowly missing 80 as the blast of blue-white fire streaked past his helmet.
80 delivered the coup de grace with a quad of hammering blaster bolts, the third of which slagged the Marine’s helmet with the fourth doing likewise to the Imperial’s skull beneath.
Grenade now in his free hand, 80 expertly tossed it to the feet of the last remaining power-armored Imp and a moment later the Marine was enveloped in a cascade of arcing electricity. The arcs pulsed several times per second, with each arc landing on a different point on his armor, and the spectacle persisted for four seconds.
During that time, the Marine was totally frozen in place and Number 80—perhaps a bit theatrically for Lu Bu’s liking—casually walked up to him and fired a mini-rocket into his torso.
The rocket penetrated the locsium armor of the Marine’s breastplate, and a nearly silent ‘pop’ followed as the Marine was liquefied within his casement from the explosive yield of the compact rocket.
Number 80 turned to Lu Bu and gestured—again, a tad too theatrically for her tastes—to the grating which concealed the hidden passage that would take them off Paradise Station. “Ladies,” he bowed slightly, as though addressing nobility, “after you.”
As they approached, Lu Bu thought of something—anything—she could say that would steal some of the man’s thunder. She despised being on the receiving end of someone else’s generosity—she was supposed to be the one riding in and saving the day, blast it all!
“Don’t think we’re impress—“ she began, only to be cut short when a hail of blaster fire slammed into his armor.
He immediately returned fire as Lu Bu unfastened the grate and unceremoniously shoved the Judge into the passage beyond. “Sorry,” 80 quipped during a brief lull in the fire, during which he unfastened a cluster of grenades from concealment and prepped them, “looks like the one-liners are mine.”
He tossed the grenades down the corridor where the enemy fire—which quickly resumed—had originated, and Lu Bu clambered into the narrow passageway after the Judge. Somewhat surprisingly, Number 80 did likewise just as the cluster of grenades went off with a truly deafening roar.
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