“Well, whoever made it saved this little guy’s life,” Largent shrugged. His eyes snagged on the sleeping trio and he muttered, “It seems that only a child can escape the shadows.”
“What?” Lu Bu asked with a furrowed brow.
“Nothing…it’s just something I heard once,” he shook his head before turning far more serious than he had ever been in Lu Bu’s company. “If you’d permit me to gather as much biometric data on your children as possible, it would mean everything to the rest of us tanks. We might,” he cast a determined look toward the playpen, “be able to unshackle ourselves from the limited existence granted by our creators. We might actually be able to have children…just like you.”
Lu Bu had expected this turn in the conversation, and judging from Largent’s affect he had already surmised as much. She nodded, “After we complete our mission here, I will give you the data you request—but even if it does not help, my children will be left alone. Is that understood?” she added with dire warning.
He considered the addendum for a few seconds before proffering a hand, “Shake on it and it’s a deal.”
She clasped his hand in her own, and their grips were perfectly matched as each tried to out-squeeze the other for several seconds before mirrored smirks appeared on their lips.
“Good,” she said with a firm nod. “Would you like to stay for dinner?”
He rubbed the back of his neck with what looked like genuine awkwardness, “I…I’d like that.”
“Good,” she said agreeably, and they spent the next few days primarily playing with the children.
“I’ve decided to grant your request to take Helena,” McKnight said at the edge of the platform as mission-critical equipment was loaded aboard the grav car which would take them to the moon-base’s surface.
“Thank you, Captain,” the Corporal nodded graciously. “I am grateful.”
“You’ve all earned a little leeway,” McKnight said, knowing that nothing could be truer. “We’ll maintain emergency contact via the local ComStat grid, but until you’ve successfully extracted the package you’re to maintain absolute comm. blackout. Understood?”
Lu Bu nodded, “Understood.”
McKnight sliced a glance down the platform to where Largent was helping to load some of the crates. “Do you trust him?” McKnight asked in a low voice.
“No,” Lu Bu shook her head flatly, “but I understand him—and I have something he wants more than anything else. I am confident he will do what we need him to do.”
McKnight cracked a lopsided grin, “Am I really the only person around here who thinks in terms of ‘trust’ any more?” Lu Bu cocked her head questioningly, but McKnight quickly waved her off. “Good hunting, Fengxian,” she said, shaking the other woman’s hand and feeling the restrained, titanic strength of her grip as she did so. “Bring this thing home.”
“I will succeed,” Lu Bu vowed, and then turned to help load the grav car.
Chapter XIX: Like Marionettes
“All seems to be proceeding apace, Senator,” the wispy Clyde—whose meager frame belied the hundred different ways he could kill with his bare hands—said from the Comm. station on the bridge of the sleek, Pulsar-class Constans Vigilantia.
“So it does,” Senator Bellucci agreed, handing the data crystal containing the report back to him. “But we, of all people, must recognize the value of maintaining constant vigilance,” she added with the barest trace of a smirk.
Clyde, the long-time associate—and some might even say ‘friend’—of the Senator chuckled, “Very good, ma’am. Shall we initiate the first point transfer?”
“Not yet…” she leaned forward in her chair, her eyes fixated on the image of the relatively low-tech—but impressively modified—stealth Cutter, Mode, as it pulled away from the moon which her operative had just confirmed did indeed serve as the base of operations for Prince Raubach’s crusade. “Confirm the defensive capabilities of that moon base,” she commanded, swiveling the chair fractionally toward the Sensor operator.
Lieutenant Styles leaned toward her, “I do not trust Clyde, Commander.”
Bellucci waved a hand dismissively, “Clyde has done more to actively advance my interests than all other humans combined.”
“The hidden knife strikes cleanest,” Styles said under his breath. “With the stakes as high as they are, I must repeat my protest at allowing this non-com—who possesses nothing in the way of security clearance—onto the bridge of this ship.”
“Noted,” she said lazily as the Sensor operator turned and handed her a crystal containing the updated schematics for the moon-base’s defensive grid. She slid it into her delicate-looking wrist-link’s data port, and her field of view exploded with a barrage of virtual imagery and data streams. To an uninitiated mind, the interface would cause vertigo and nausea at the very least—and potentially debilitating seizures at the most.
But she had been trained from a young age to interface with such devices, so it was little more than an annoyance to have her conscious mind flooded with the information contained within the report. It took what seemed like a few seconds, but what could have only been a fraction of one, for her to separate the data streams and examine their contents discretely.
“Impressive,” she purred, resisting the urge to lick her lips at what she saw.
It seemed the moon-base had indeed been extensively—and heavily—modified during recent decades. The Pulsar-class Cutter’s sensor suite was without peer among human technologies, and they painted a picture of a base that was more heavily-armed than most battle fleets.
The precision of the construction, and the angles of the connecting shafts which shunted power from deep within the moon-world’s mantle, were indicative of droid craftsmanship rather than human. Like a three dimensional spider-web, the network of interconnecting power junctions and access corridors spread beneath the surface of the moon-world and seemed to cover the entire globe—save the poles.
Heavily clustered around the equatorial band, and fed by that maze of infrastructure, were three hundred turbo-lasers. Each one was buried in its own, custom-made crevice and had the ability to pop up from cover long enough to author a lance of laser-fire at an approaching warship. The number of turbo-lasers sounded more impressive than it was, however—even with the increased fire arcs afforded by their pop-up turrets, no more than a hundred of the beams could be brought to bear on a given target.
She reached out with her mind to examine the reports of the polar regions, nodding approvingly at what she saw there, “Antimatter torpedo launchers…most impressive.” Four launchers were located at each of the poles, which made this moon death incarnate to any would-be attack fleet.
All told, the base below her was as well-fortified as any individual rocky body not found in the Capitol System—but like any nut, no matter how tough, cracking it was a simple matter of applying the proper technique.
“It could fend off an entire Battle Group,” Styles said after Bellucci withdrew the crystal from its data port, severing the flow of data into her mind in the process.
“No commander worth her family name would be foolish enough to attack it directly,” she chuckled. “But besieging it will take time, which plays perfectly into our hands.”
“Shall we send the message?” Clyde asked, a hungry gleam in his eye.
Bellucci made a show of pondering the query before ultimately shaking her head, “No…for now we wait and gather intelligence.”
“Of course, Senator,” Clyde agreed, and his perfectly-composed veneer was one which Bellucci knew only too well since, like him, she was wearing a similar one at that—and nearly every other—moment.
Too much planning, too much work, and too many compromises had been made in order to bring this moment to fruition. She had no doubt that the worldlet below them would soon be bathed in fire and ash, and she cared not for who—or what—fueled those fires.
All she cared about was killing that accursed Core Fragment and end
ing, once and for all, the grip of mysticism and theocracy which played the Empire—her Empire—like a band of soulless marionettes.
“No,” she reiterated chillingly as her golden eyes watched the Mode make for the hyper limit, “we wait…for now. Wait for the Mode to point transfer and then lay in our parallel course; we are not done providing them with our support,” her lip curled as she finished, “at least, not yet.”
Chapter XX: The Heist—Insertion
“There she is,” Largent grunted, “Aqua Helix.”
“It is…breathtaking,” Shiyuan said as he examined the Mode’s sensor feeds while the rest of them—save Largent—watched the visual feeds with slack jaws.
Lu Bu had difficulty processing what she was seeing. At first it appeared to be a comet, but the sheer size of the planet in question rendered that possibility impossible. With a long, twisting ‘tail’ comprised predominantly of water vapor, the planet did look for all intents and purposes like the universe’s largest comet as it made its way through its elliptical orbit around its parent red dwarf star.
To the naked eye, it did look like a giant helix as the gases spun off in its wake.
“It appears to be…forty percent water by mass?!” Jarrett said in dumbfounded awe. “I thought that much water was impossible to accumulate on a planetoid of this size?”
“Ain’t nothin’ impossible if you put enough effort in,” Largent scoffed. “But if you meant it couldn’t naturally occur that way, the experts agree—Aqua Helix is an example of planetary engineering on a scale humans have never even attempted, let alone succeeded at—publicly, at least.”
“Not only that,” Shiyuan continued in unmasked fascination, “but its southern pole is directed precisely at the equatorial plane of its parent star…and the planetoid is spinning more rapidly than should be naturally possible for a planetoid of its size and mass.”
“That’s to power the dynamo,” Largent explained tersely. “Without it pumping out an EM field roughly eight times as powerful as a rock its size should put out, all the water would have been flensed off it thousands of years ago.”
“Someone…created this planet?” Shiyuan asked in slack-jawed awe.
“Seems that way,” Largent shrugged indifferently.
“But…we are only a few hundred light years from the Imperial Core’s border,” Lu Bu protested. “How can something like this remain a secret?”
Largent snickered, “Because stupid people—meaning most people—think a virtual experience is as good as the real thing. Who wants to go gallivanting around the galaxy when the VR feeds can bring ‘reality’ to your doorstep? And once the sheeple have been conditioned to believe everything they see on the nightly feeds,” his tone and affect became increasingly condescending as he spoke, “it’s not exactly rocket surgery to make entire planets disappear—especially when their very existence contradicts centuries of Imperial propaganda.”
Lu Bu recalled how, early during the Pride of Prometheus’ mission, they discovered a similar ‘erasure’ of entire star systems due to House Raubach’s meddling in local astrometric databases.
“This is more common than I thought,” she mused, boggled—and more than slightly disgusted—at how easy it was to fool people into believing outright lies.
“If people want to be blind, it’s not that hard for them to make it happen,” Largent said with open contempt. “Don’t waste your time trying to open their eyes—figure out how to take advantage of their blindness instead. It’s the only guaranteed way to make them internalize the price of close-mindedness.”
He reached down and gestured to the northern hemisphere of the planetoid on the tactical viewer, “The facility is there, about thirty miles down. Keep the stealth suite on this clunker at maximum or we’ll get scraped outta the sky before we make high orbit.”
Yide, who was piloting the stealthy craft, shot Largent an irritated look, “This is not a ‘clunker’.”
“Of course it’s not, hairball,” Largent said in mock apology as he looked around the partly-corroded interior of the cockpit-slash-bridge, “why, it’s the finest piece of engineering I’ve seen since the auto-digesting toilet.” Lu Bu shot Largent a hard look, which thankfully prompted him to roll his eyes and mutter, “Ok, ok…it’s almost as good as my ship.”
Now it was Lu Bu’s turn to roll her eyes, but before she could do so Shiyuan piped in, “How do you know so much about this place?”
“Oh, that part’s easy,” he shrugged, “see, Aqua Helix is something of a dream target for top infiltrators like yours truly. Only three people ever made it in past the base’s defenses—and of those only one made it back off. He’s a bitter dude, but he’s where I got my intel.”
“Do you believe him?” Lu Bu asked pointedly.
“I don’t believe anything, Girly,” he scoffed, “not even my own senses. But I’ve got no reason to doubt the info.”
“Fine,” Lu Bu gestured to the cargo hold, “we should prep for insertion.”
“Righty-o,” Largent mimed a salute—one which somehow managed to be worse than Lu Bu’s first attempt several years earlier—and the two set off to make final preparations for their insertion into the underwater facility.
“The information in Lynch’s database says we can fool the station’s security sweeps if we time your drop precisely,” Shiyuan’s voice crackled in her ear as she performed her last-minute check of the vehicle which—in theory—could withstand the enormous pressure at the depths they would need to dive in order to reach the facility. “But grav-chutes are a no-go since the station’s gravity detectors would pick them up in a heartbeat.”
“Copy that,” Fengxian replied, having gone over these details a hundred times during mission prep.
“You’ll gain limited maneuverability once you’ve reached a depth of twenty miles,” Shiyuan continued, “but I have to stress that this will be extremely limited. If we mess up the drop angle by even a quarter of a degree, you’ll miss the station by a wider margin than your vehicle can correct.”
“And we’ll find out what the real crush depth is for one of these things,” Largent patted the side of the flattened, locsium sphere which would carry them to their destination. “Incidentally,” he added sarcastically, “I’ve never had a crush—wanna be my first?”
“Get in the pod,” Lu Bu snorted, and a few moments later they were seated back-to-back in the cramped compartment with their knees pulled tightly against their respective chests. “We are ready for launch,” she nodded to Yide’s sister, who returned the nod and closed the pod.
The shell of the pod was clear, though light bent and warbled through it like a fun-house mirror which, for the briefest of moments, made Yide’s sister look comically tall and skinny before immediately rendering her short and squat.
Lu Bu almost laughed—and would have if not for Largent’s presence—but maintained her cool as she checked her link, “I will deactivate this link in thirty seconds.”
“Copy that,” Shiyuan acknowledged as Yide’s sister rolled the pod to the airlock, where it had less than an inch of clearance on all sides. Once they were positioned inside the airlock, the clamps which they had installed into the airlock locked onto the outside of the pod.
Soon the airlock’s inner door was closed, and the outer door opened to reveal a light blue sky above the largest ocean she had ever seen below.
“Deactivating link,” she said as she reached up to the link to switch it off.
“Good hunting, Fengxian,” Jarrett said just before she severed the line.
“Oh, good,” Largent deadpanned after the line was dark, “we’re finally alone.”
“Keep your hands to yourself,” she quipped.
“Always do—‘never trust your most valuable equipment to others,’ that’s my motto,” he replied easily, drawing a groan from Lu Bu as the Mode tilted them toward the water’s surface which sped by just a few hundred meters below. The surface of the pod was then coated in a thin layer of hydrophi
lic gel, which—according to the math, with which Lu Bu had never had any real affinity—when combined with their entry velocity and angle, would make their impact survivable when the pod crashed into the flat water below.
The red light above the airlock’s outer door flashed three times in rapid sequence before turning orange, then yellow, then green, and finally blue—which presaged the pod’s release as the Mode dipped to a scant few meters above the gently-rolling waves below.
The crash was immediate and, if Lu Bu was being honest, it robbed her of her vision for several seconds before she reacquired her senses.
“That was fun,” Largent said dryly, but something sounded different about his voice. A moment later, she saw him holding something between his fingers that looked suspiciously like a tooth. He held it over his shoulder—apparently offering it for her inspection—as he quipped, “Where’s my money?”
“I am not a fairy,” she grumbled as the craft slid gently beneath the waves.
“Neither am I!” he protested before tossing the tooth to the floor of the pod. “Though I did have this roommate in college once…”
“You did not attend college.”
“Ok, so you got me there,” he sighed. “But we’ve got a long drop ahead of us. I thought a little light conversation—“
“You thought wrong,” Lu Bu interrupted as she watched the light slowly dim above them as the pod drifted deeper and deeper into the ocean.
“Fine by me,” he shrugged, and a few seconds later it sounded like he was actually snoring.
Uninterested in determining whether or not he had actually fallen asleep, Lu Bu spent the next two hours in total silence as they descended into the abyss in search of their quarry.
“There it is,” Largent declared into the increasingly ominous silence. The only available light at this depth was that given off by the goggles they had brought along which allowed them to read the pod’s limited instrumentation without giving away their position.
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