Feeling her face flush at his rebuke, McKnight stiffened her spine and said, “My crew has reason to believe that Alice Schillinger is no longer alive.”
Lynch’s gruff veneer cracked for the briefest of moments, but he nodded slowly and that façade reformed almost quicker than McKnight had seen it sunder. “Do you have any evidence of that?” he asked levelly, but the weight of his gaze very nearly made McKnight shrink away from him.
Standing firm, and determined not to back down in the face of the arms dealer, McKnight shook her head, “Before my Recon Team of Lancers killed Commodore Raubach, they overheard a conversation where the Commodore mentioned her death in passing.”
“Some things are better left unsaid, so think very carefully before answering,” Lynch said darkly as he moved down the ramp, prompting the Lancers to tense in unison before McKnight waved them off as the thickly-built arms dealer came to a stop less than a meter in front of her, “who was he speaking to when he said that?”
McKnight cocked her head in slight confusion. She didn’t follow his innuendo in the slightest, and at her look of confusion he stepped even closer and lowered his voice to barely above a whisper.
“Did he have a st-st-stutter?” he whispered barely loud enough for her to hear the words.
McKnight gave him a curious look, but recalled from Corporal Lu’s after-action report that the Director with whom Commodore James Raubach III had conversed was, in fact, afflicted with a speech impediment of the type Lynch had just suggested. She narrowed her eyes and nodded once, prompting Lynch to lean back and regard her in silence for several seconds.
“Is he dead too?” Lynch asked.
“We have every reason to believe he died on the Alpha Site,” McKnight nodded.
Lynch nodded slowly for several seconds as his eyes snapped back and forth far faster than McKnight had seen a human do. The sight of it was more than slightly unnerving, but when he was finished the arms dealer sighed. “That ain’t the news I was hoping for,” he said before releasing a sigh, “but I can work with it. I appreciate you offerin’ it up, and in return,” he measuredly reached into his jacket’s right pocket to produce a second data crystal, “I’ll give you something I was plannin’ on giving Tim. I thought him bein’ gone would scrub you and your people out of the equation, but after this cordial chat of ours it seems we might be able to work together.”
“We’re MSP, Lynch,” McKnight said stiffly. “You helped us before and I was simply returning the favor.”
“Favors for favors is how beautiful things begin,” Lynch said with a twinkle in his eye before proffering the crystal. “Use it or don’t; it makes little difference to me. But if you find yourself in my neighborhood and need a sit-down, all you gotta do is upload that to the ComStat network—and please,” he added sternly before McKnight could deny that they had gained access to the FTL network, “don’t bother denyin’ you got access. It’d make you look weak, and you know what they say about perception’s relationship to reality.”
McKnight hesitated, knowing that simply by accepting the crystal she was playing into his hand. But the truth was that Captain Middleton had come to appreciate the value of Lynch’s intelligence network, and McKnight had played no small part in her former CO’s decision to eventually deal with Lynch.
So she took the crystal and said, “Good bye, Lynch.”
“With me it’s never ‘good bye,’ Lieutenant,” Lynch chided before turning and re-ascending the ramp to the Yacht, “it’s always ‘til next time’.”
Chapter IV: Homecoming
The Mode touched down on the surface of Shèhuì Héxié after clearing customs at one of the planet’s high-security, orbital customs offices. The paperwork had been suffocating, and even with Hutch’s diplomatic visa it took twelve hours—and a not-inconsiderable amount of legal wrangling, including hiring a barrister to argue their case with the immigration agent processing their arrival—to finally gain official government approval for their visit to the world of Lu Bu’s birth.
But it appeared that Yide and his sister would not be allowed to disembark the ship upon arriving on the surface, which seemed like no great inconvenience to the pair of Sundered. They had expressed a desire to continue their examination and familiarization with the Mode since it would serve as their home for the foreseeable future.
“The ship is secured,” Yide reported after powering down the vessel’s systems.
“Good,” Lu Bu nodded, doing her best to ignore the cramp in her lower back—an increasingly common pain in this, her fourth month of pregnancy, “unless our assignment takes us far from the ship, we sleep on the Mode every night.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Hutch and Traian said in unison, while Yide and his sister made their way toward the ship’s engine room to begin a round of maintenance which the Sundered had seemed convinced was essential.
“Hutch,” Lu Bu turned to the hulking smashball-pro-turned-Lancer, “you will take first shift on Mode as security. Tomorrow will be Traian’s turn.”
“Got it,” Hutch nodded.
“Traian,” she turned to him, “you come with Dr. Middleton and me. Remember: private citizens and visitors are prohibited from carrying weapons—even knives,” she said with a pointed look at Traian’s left boot, where she had learned several months earlier he liked to stash a polymer blade with an obsidian edge. It was virtually untraceable on civilian scans, but if he got caught with it the penalty was a minimum of six months in prison—and they simply could not afford the inconvenience of that term or a lengthy extradition process.
“Yes, Corporal,” Traian said with a bitter note as he reached down and removed the knife from its usual place and set it on the nearest cockpit chair.
“Good,” she nodded, “now we go find a new tech expert.”
“I’ll check the attendance log,” Traian offered after they arrived on the college campus where the first person on Fei Long’s list was supposed to work as an assistant to one of the professors.
“Good,” Lu Bu nodded as she felt one of the babies kick repeatedly. She was certain it was Meng, due to the short-but-intense nature of the outburst. As she had predicted, it subsided after only a few seconds.
“Are you all right?” Dr. Middleton asked, prompting Lu Bu to sigh.
“This is hard,” she grumbled. “I have not exercised in weeks; I do not like being pregnant!”
“I don’t think many women really enjoy it,” her adoptive mother soothed. Though Lu Bu knew the older woman was mostly speaking as a medical professional, she took some solace from the fact that Dr. Middleton had gone through the ordeal once herself. She genuinely wondered how a woman could trust anything a doctor who hadn’t gone through pregnancy and childbirth said on the matter. “But judging by our latest tests, you’re near the end; speaking of which, I really would like to stop at a hospital with a proper imaging center and lab so we can get an update on your bio-chemistry.”
“You used portable scanner on ship,” Lu Bu said, a note of concern entering her voice, “there is problem?”
“No,” Dr. Middleton hastened to assure her, “it’s just that a comprehensive, full-body scan is better in just about every way and gives a more complete picture of where everything is in the process—remember just how accelerated this pregnancy is, compared to a…” she stopped just short of saying the word which Lu Bu knew she had meant to, and the teenaged Lancer Corporal shook her head.
“Compared to a normal woman,” she finished. “It is ok, mother; I know I am different.”
“But you’re not, Bu,” Dr. Middleton said sharply. “You’re just like the rest of us; so what if your genetic code was built from the ground-up?”
“It is ok,” Lu Bu said simply, “I know what I am, and I know what I am not. There is no need to offer support in this.”
“Everyone needs support, Bu,” her adoptive mother chided. “Nobody can go through life alone. I just want to be as ready as possible for when the time comes to bring your little ones
into the world.”
Lu Bu looked up at the only woman she would ever truly think of as her mother and nodded, “I thank you for help—“
She would have continued, but another cramp took root in her back and she gasped in surprise. It came and went relatively quickly, but she placed a hand on the nearby wall to steady herself just in case another followed.
“Good news,” Traian said as he came around the corner with a small piece of polymer paper in his hands, “looks like this one’s right where he’s supposed to be. The building he’s in is about five minutes from here.” He stopped when he saw Lu Bu’s hand pressed against her back and asked, “Should I get a cart?”
Lu Bu shot him a dire look and growled, “Only if you ask that again—because you will need it after I break your legs!”
Traian laughed, as did Dr. Middleton, and Lu Bu scowled at what she took to be a haughty tone in her fellow Lancer’s voice. But even she joined in the mirth as they set off toward the building where the first person on Fei Long’s list was located.
“Excuse me,” Lu Bu whispered in her native tongue as she approached the man seated behind the teacher’s desk in the virtual laboratory. Two dozen students were furiously engaged in exercises involving numbers, symbols, and holographic images of geometric shapes she had no desire to learn about, and her respect for the incredible focus it must have taken for each of them made her lower her voice as she approached the teacher’s desk.
Seated behind the desk was an almost comically short, slightly overweight man whose face was concealed by an opaque visor of the type which Lu Bu had seen some of the Pride’s technicians use during complex repairs or operations. The man wearing the visor made no move to suggest he had heard her, and continued waving his own fingers around in the air before him for several seconds after she had reached his side.
After waiting for what she felt certain was a polite interval, she tapped him on the shoulder and whispered, “Excuse me?”
The man’s intricate, wizard-like movements of his hands ceased and he reached up to lift the visor. When he did so, Lu Bu actually felt squeamish at a face which could only charitably be compared to a potato—and that was probably an unforgiveable insult to tubers everywhere.
His teeth were so horribly crooked she doubted he could use them properly to eat; his skin was pock-marked with acne-like scars and also riddled with small, active boils; his eyebrows improbably merged with each other at an angle which suggested his cranium was far from symmetrical; and his hairline was equally asymmetrical and patchy.
But his eyes were sharp and fierce as he muttered, “Who are you? Get out of here until these students have finished with their examinations!”
“I am looking for John William Jarrett,” she explained, and his eyes went wide briefly—a truly disturbing sight, since they rose in uneven amounts—before he schooled his features.
“I, uh…I don’t know that man,” he said nervously, “you must have the wrong office. Go back to the main office and tell them they made a mistake.”
“Who said I came from the main office?” she asked pointedly, prompting the color which had flushed his face to drain away—naturally, this was also more than mildly revolting to behold given the blotchy consistency of his skin.
“I…uh…” he stammered, “well…you seem like…”
She gave him a withering look and the man slouched just as an overhead chime rang, signaling the end of the class. Almost as one, the students silently deactivated their virtual terminals and filed out of the room without so much as a look in Lu Bu’s direction. After they had left, she leaned down slightly and said, “You are John William Jarrett, correct?”
“It wasn’t my fault!” he unexpectedly blurted. “They told me to do it—I swear by all the Great Ancestors that I was an unwilling accomplice. You have to believe that! Please, have mercy!” he begged, throwing himself on the floor and literally groveling at her feet.
“Worshiping the Great Ancestors is forbidden,” she sighed irritably, prompting him to freeze at her feet before veritably wailing.
“Yes, yes, I know,” he gushed apologetically, “that’s what I told them but they didn’t listen to me. You have to believe that I had no idea he meant to reset the global financial account—I tried to stop them, but look at me. I mean look at me! What could I possibly do to stop them?” he pleaded, and though Lu Bu had no idea what he was talking about she was growing strangely confident that she had indeed found the man she had come for.
She produced the data slate she had brought and opened it to the document listing the names of the men in Fei Long’s final message. “Do you know these men?” she asked, prompting the man to look up with fearful eyes.
Those eyes snagged on the list and he recoiled before scrambling to his feet and taking a more intent look. As he did so, his entire affect changed from one of groveling, sniveling, spineless worm to something considerably less loathsome—and the speed with which he shifted from one to the other was something which understandably caught Lu Bu’s attention.
“Who are you?” he asked, his voice no longer that of a quivering, terrified boot-scraping. In its place was a quiet, calm, calculated tone which was far more like that of Fei Long than Lu Bu had expected to hear—and for a moment it took her by surprise and she was dumbfounded.
“You know these men?” she pressed after re-gathering her wits.
“Not all of them are men,” he said, looking over her shoulder to the door, where Traian stood and observed the exchange with more than a passing interest. “Who is he—who are you?”
She hesitated briefly before deciding to take the path that came most naturally to her: the blunt, straightforward approach. “I am Lu Bu,” she said, offering her hand. “You must be Shiyuan?”
His eyes went wide as his mouth fell open. “You know Kongming? He is free—he is alive?!”
Lu Bu’s rising hopes were derailed by the question, and she shook her head dubiously, “He is neither.”
The man’s expression went crestfallen. “Then…” he said, eyeing her warily after a few moments of silence, “who are you?”
“I am Lu Bu,” she repeated, thrusting her hand out again, “and Kongming told me to seek out Shiyuan for an important task.”
He looked her up and down and nodded slowly, “We should speak elsewhere.”
“Agreed,” she nodded, “I have a conveyance waiting at the campus parking structure.”
“Any friend of Kongming’s is a friend of mine,” he said, gesturing to the door, “lead on.”
“So…let me get this straight,” he said skeptically in their native tongue after Lu Bu had explained the purpose of their visit—or at least enough of it to determine whether or not the man had any interest in joining their cadre. “Kongming actually did hack the ComStat network?” he said disbelievingly.
“He did,” she nodded, “he often said that Shiyuan was an important ally in crafting the original plan for uploading the program to the nearest ComStat hub. I was on the team when we infiltrated the first hub and physically uploaded the program.”
“Wow,” Jarrett, aka Shiyuan whistled appreciatively. “I always thought it was a pipe dream…I mean, I’d run the tests with him and it seemed like our work might actually do the job. That’s not fair,” he shook his head gravely, “it was his work. All I did was build a container file and figure out how to piggyback the signal on regular broadcast channels so the data would recombine—“
Lu Bu had heard Fei Long engage in far too many technobabble monologues and had no intention of enduring any more than were absolutely necessary, so she abruptly interrupted, “Will you come with us?”
He stopped and blinked in confusion for a few seconds before nodding eagerly as a light entered his eyes, “Of course! Are you kidding?! But…how do you plan to get me off-world? Ever since Kongming was arrested everyone on that list has been under round-the-clock surveillance.”
“I’m guessing that if we’re discrete,” Dr. Middleton lean
ed forward in her seat, “whoever it was that saw to Fei Long originally being transferred to the Pride of Prometheus under a false identity will cause local law enforcement to look the other way. Of course…” she trailed off.
“I would be a fugitive at worst, or automatically expatriated at best,” Shiyuan mused before shrugging. “It’s still not even a decision as far as I’m concerned; when do we leave?”
Lu Bu nodded and breathed a sigh of relief. “First we need to contact the rest on this list,” she urged, “do you know where to find them?”
Shiyuan cocked his head skeptically. “There are five names here…I only know the locations of three of them, but of those three one is already dead.”
“Dead?” Dr. Middleton asked in alarm—using Lu Bu’s native tongue with far better ability than Lu Bu had given her credit for during their practice sessions. “What happened?”
“It was a…cancer,” Shiyuan said in Confederation Standard. “My Standard not so good,” he apologized, “but I am a quick learner.”
“Your Standard is better than my Qin,” Dr. Middleton replied in Standard. “I thought this world had one of the Sector’s best health care systems; how could he die of anything as simple as cancer?”
“It was…” Shiyuan began, but shook his head after a moment’s consideration, “I have not words.” He then switched to Qin and turned to Lu Bu, “It was not the cancer in his body that killed him—it was his association with Kongming’s crusade that caused his death.”
“How?” Lu Bu asked, more than a little intrigued.
“Several state doctors agreed that he was on the proper medication for his cancer,” Jarrett explained, “and that the prescribed treatment should have resulted in a 90% cure or at least a 98% remission rate. He took all medications as instructed, but instead of getting better he got worse and his liver and kidneys even began to shut down. Before this was detected, he was too ill and was unfortunate in that he failed to meet socially-mandated medical criteria for extraordinary measures. He was left to die in his home…alone and afraid, as a warning to the rest of us.”
McKnight's Mission: A House Divided, Book 1 (Spineward Sectors- Middleton's Pride 4) Page 4