McKnight's Mission: A House Divided, Book 1 (Spineward Sectors- Middleton's Pride 4)

by Caleb Wachter

  “There’s no treatment—“ Hutch began.

  “Not true,” Lynch interrupted, “there ain’t no cure but that don’t mean there’s no drugs that can help with the symptoms. I seen you peelin’ patches and stickin’ ‘em on your neck back on the Cruiser when our helmets were off and you thought no one was lookin’. I’m bettin’ they’ve worn off. Am I right?”

  Hutch scowled, but Lu Bu grabbed him by the collar and demanded, “Is this correct?”

  “It is,” Hutch said sheepishly. “I thought I’d get a chance to put another couple stim patches on during this ride before things got rough, but it looks like the old patches already wore off.”

  “Keprel’s is rough,” Lynch said sympathetically. “I've seen a few go out that way in my time.”

  Lu Bu genuinely wanted to rail against Hutch for concealing the truth of his illness from her, but after a few seconds of silent fuming she realized that his lack of disclosure had probably been the right choice for all involved.

  If he had told her about his condition, she would likely have removed him from the team for this mission—and if she had done that, there was a very real possibility that none of them would have made it this far.

  “You owe me, Hutch,” she growled before releasing his collar and turning her back on him.

  “We’re comin’ up on the surface,” Lynch said after a hologram representing the lift platform appeared and quickly expanded to show the distance remaining between their present location and the surface of the planet.

  “How can that be?” Jarrett asked in apparent confusion. “We have not been on this platform for half as long as we were for the trip down.”

  “Archie’s shell back there is basically a Hoberman’s sphere composed of unnatural materials in arrangements that I don’t claim to understand,” Lynch explained, which made absolutely no sense to Lu Bu but she saw the potato-faced Shiyuan begin nodding enthusiastically. “But what I do know is that it’s got internal anti-gravity generators which keep it in its current form—and they make tossing it into a star or other massive object impossible. It would use the star’s gravity well like a trampoline and launch itself away at near-light speeds. Since it’s impervious to most scans in this configuration, it becomes lost until it slows down.”

  “And those anti-gravity generators somehow interact with the lift platform’s gravitic repulsors?” Jarrett nodded slowly.

  “You got it,” Lynch nodded, and Lu Bu suspected that at their present distance and velocity the lift platform would reach the surface in less than twenty minutes.

  “If the Fragment’s shell is essentially a Hoberman’s sphere,” Shiyuan pressed after just a few seconds of blessed silence, “then I surmise that a resonance between the internal anti-gravity generators and external gravity forces are the most likely method for expanding its matrix sufficiently to access its interior, where the Core Fragment itself resides.”

  “Smart boy,” Lynch snickered, turning to give Jarrett a look of surprised approval. “That’s what the grav-plates that your boy Traian learned about were for, and it’s what the shipment of power gear we rode in with was for: they was gonna build a key and use it to open Archie up.” Lynch drew his blaster pistols and checked them as had become customary for him to do during this mission, and after he was apparently satisfied he holstered the weapons and growled, “Ain’t no way I’d let ‘em do that.”

  “The main engines are overheating!” Damage Control shrieked as the Freedom’s Bastard shook violently beneath its crew’s feet. “If we don’t back off they’ll overload the coolant system!”

  “XO, keep my engines online!” McKnight snapped, seeing that they still needed six minutes of maximum thrust to prevent the Omega’s Light from escaping the relatively weak pincer which she and Captain Archibald had created with their ships. If they fell out of position now, Captain Archibald would lose his firing angle on the fleeing warship.

  “The Light is showing severe spotting on the stern facing,” Ryan shouted as a nearby power conduit began to vibrate so loudly that it became difficult to hear one’s own voice.

  “Pour it on them, Ryan,” McKnight ordered, watching as Captain Archibald’s ship lanced out with a rapid barrage of laser strikes as he rolled his ship to present both broadsides to the enemy while continuing on his intercept course. The Light’s stern shields icon flashed crimson—suggesting that critical failure was a possibility—before stabilizing on a brighter red which indicated that critical failure was not yet imminent.

  “We can’t keep pushing the engines this hard, ma’am,” Lieutenant Spalding said forcefully. “We’re two minutes away from a catastrophic coolant failure—if we lose those heat sinks, we lose the engines and everything else in the stern power grid—and this ship has none of the standard safety mechanisms installed on human-built warships.”

  McKnight knew that her XO was not one to exaggerate, and she was genuinely torn as she scanned the tactical overlay of the system to confirm the situation at hand.

  The plague of fighters which had been unleashed from the bulk freighter’s hull had neutralized every warship within their operating range, clearing the way for McKnight’s ships to pursue Captain Bashir’s Imperial Cruiser. The fighters which had been assigned to escort the Valeria’s Fist had also succeeded in punching a hole in a surprisingly light ground-based defensive grid. The assault lander had touched down a few minutes earlier, and the dozen or so fighters which survived the approach were now peppering the surface of the rocky world with bombs as they scrubbed the last vestiges of deterrent from the dark, frozen planet.

  Two Raubach warships had already disengaged and made for the hyper limit, clearly recognizing their cause as lost after the horde of fighters had turned the table solidly in favor of McKnight’s—or Lynch’s—mini-fleet. There was nothing she could do about them given their distance and speed advantage, so she had already put them from her mind.

  All of that information meant that she had been cleared to pursue Captain Bashir without fear of being harassed by his allies, but now it seemed that she must abandon that particular hunt.

  Just before she opened her lips to give the order to decrease engine output, Lieutenant Spalding snapped, “Are you sure about these numbers, Guo?”

  “I am,” Mr. Guo replied confidently.

  “Captain, we might be able to get one more shot on the Light,” Tiberius said quickly. “I can’t explain how, but I think we can take out their engines if we time it right. The ship’s DI will have to be purged immediately after the shot, though, which means I’ll have to shut down primary power all across the ship—there’s no other way I do this.”

  “Do it!” McKnight barked.

  “Re-route the targeting computer as you indicated, Mr. Guo,” Tiberius said with what sounded like genuine dread, “coordinate with Mr. Ryan to take one good shot with the forward battery—I’m killing this thing after that.”

  “Understood,” Guo acknowledged with his usual, serene grace. “Mr. Ryan, have you received my—“

  “I got it, Guo,” Ryan cut him off. “Are you sure about this, Lieutenant?”

  “No,” Tiberius quipped, “but do it anyway—that’s an order.”

  “Slave-linking fire control to Mr. Guo’s console,” Ryan reported. “It’s all yours.”

  McKnight sat on metaphorical pins and needles for the next several seconds before the Gamer Gate’s batteries lanced out and struck the stern of the Omega’s Light, causing the latter’s shields to once again flash a dangerous, deep crimson. Even before she had registered the change on the tactical display, the Freedom’s Bastard fired its two turbo-lasers in near-perfect unison with Archibald’s gun deck, and the icon representing the Omega’s Light went dim.

  “The Light’s engines are failing!” Ryan shouted just before the bridge went black. A few seconds later, the locally-powered auxiliary lighting activated, but every display on the bridge was offline.

  “Lieutenant Spalding…” McKnight said tightly wh
en it appeared that the interval had exceeded the usual interval for a complete power restart cycle. The darkness on the bridge’s many readouts and workstation displays was more ominous than McKnight had expected it to be; she had endured power shortages on the Pride under Captain Middleton, but this seemed somehow different.

  “I’ll meet your people at the ventral heat exchange junction, Pen,” her XO said in a nearly panicked tone as he spoke into the com-link affixed to his collar. “Bring portable generators and jumper cables; we have to get that pump back online!” He turned to McKnight, who saw the color had fully drained from her XO’s face as he said, “Requesting permission to oversee repairs to the ship’s last functioning heat exchange unit, Captain.”

  “Should we eject the heat sinks with the explosives you mounted?” she asked, knowing that to order such a thing done was to essentially order an evacuation of her ship.

  “We already tried that; it’s too late,” Tiberius said shortly. “They’re fused to their moorings; if we don’t get that last unit back online, the coolant is going to start expanding within the system. We’ve already ejected our trillium and reactor fuel but I have to get down there and I have to go now if I’m going to make a difference.”

  “Do it,” McKnight said grimly, knowing precisely why her former Chief Engineer had requested to go down to assist the Engineering team in such a crucial task. She switched her own com-link on and activated the local emergency channels as she prepared to utter the words she had hoped to never utter in this life—or any other. “This is Captain McKnight: all hands are to abandon ship. Repeat: all hands abandon ship. Get to the escape pods immediately.”

  The bridge crew sat in stunned silence until, one by one, realization dawned on their faces: if the ship’s coolant system had experienced catastrophic failure, as the XO had just clearly explained it had, then it was only a matter of time before its twin fusion reactors overloaded.

  In the grand scheme of things, a fusion reactor’s overload was no great problem—especially when processed trillium and fusion fuel were already removed from the equation—but a human life was, contrary to many writers’ fanciful declarations to the contrary, far from grand in scale. The inevitable explosion when the reactors on the Freedom’s Bastard overloaded would be measured in kilotons rather than megatons, but human beings could survive neither at close range.

  So it was with silent resolve that her people donned their head bags, filed out of the bridge one by one, and made their way to the escape pod designated for their part of the ship.

  Chapter XXX: Fourth & Goal

  “Are your patches working?” Lu Bu demanded of Hutch after waiting several minutes.

  “They are,” he nodded. “I’m good to go, ma’am.”

  “You take point with me,” she said as the lift’s ascent slowed noticeably. “Mantis, use the Fragment for cover; Shiyuan stay behind Mantis; Lynch, cover us from opposite side of Mantis.”

  “And let you have all the fun?” Lynch asked archly. “Ain’t happenin’. You just do your thing and let me do mine.”

  “Fine,” Lu Bu grunted, having expected such a reply from the unsavory Lynch.

  Lynch’s wrist-link chimed and he looked down for a moment. His eyebrows rose in surprise, “Looks like your Tracto peeps have more sand than I thought they would; they already cracked the outer compound.”

  “They like to fight and do not retreat,” Lu Bu said, summing up her personal opinion on them as best she could in a single sentence.

  “That’s good,” Lynch said as the platform’s ascent continued to slow, and as it did so it provided the curious sensation of light gravity which prompted Lu Bu to bend her knees reflexively. “I can use that,” the arms dealer added contemplatively as a pinpoint of light appeared at the top of the shaft.

  “Mantis, do you have a shot?” Lu Bu asked as she and the rest of the team took up positions around the Core Fragment, crouching beneath its perfectly spherical shape to gain cover from any incoming fire while the platform continued to rise.

  “One,” the cool, calculated sniper replied while lying in a contorted position with her rifle pointing upward. The weapon’s scope was once again bent at the mid-point to give her a clear line of fire without exposing her to return fire, and Lu Bu knew that if they survived the mission she would ask the expert markswoman for some lessons on operating the powerful weapon.

  “Take it when we have three seconds left,” Lu Bu said as the light from above outlined the Fragment’s shadow as they drew nearer to the illumination’s source.

  “Copy that,” Mantis replied, and as the lift continued to slow the icy woman squeezed the rifle’s trigger. No sooner had she done so than a spat of return fire began to crash into the deck all around the Core Fragment.

  Lu Bu thumbed a pair of grenades, one in each hand, and just when the platform rose high enough that she could see a large, metal corridor she hurled her grenades into that corridor and ran as fast as she could behind them.

  Hutch’s plasma shotgun spat a pair of rapid-fire blasts which enveloped a nearby Marine, but to Lu Bu’s shock it seemed as though the blue-white fire seemed to splash against an invisible barrier just a few feet in front of the Marine’s chest.

  As she ran across the platform toward the Marine, her plasma grenades went off in tandem. The nearest grenade was close enough to the Marine who Hutch had fired on that his back was bathed in a roar of burning plasma that knocked him forward a step.

  His armor was of a different design than the Marines they had fought deeper within the planet, but Lu Bu was only too glad to see that it seemed lighter and less robust than those others’ had been. Bringing Glacier Splitter up from behind her back, she brought the weapon around in a powerful, overhand blow that would likely send the Marine to the ground if she struck him squarely.

  But he pivoted at the last moment, and her hammer struck something that was simultaneously solid and somehow soft. She saw a flash of movement and leapt vertically as high as she could leap from her surprised standstill, and she narrowly avoided the forearm-mounted vibroblades which sliced through the space where her legs had been an instant later. It was then that she saw what had repelled her hammer: a shimmering surface of some kind, nearly two feet long and roughly ovular in shape which was affixed to the Marine’s left arm via a relatively delicate-looking framework of crystalline lattice-work.

  Lu Bu lashed out with her foot in a halfhearted attack—one which she hoped would let her push away from her surprisingly-equipped adversary—and was rewarded with a satisfying crack as her boot slammed into his right shoulder. She landed a few feet behind where she had pushed off, but the Marine was in close pursuit with his vibro-blade stabbing and slicing at her in such a well-timed and well-orchestrated barrage that she failed to mount any kind of counterattack as she struggled to keep her legs beneath her.

  Blaster bolts suddenly slammed into the Marine’s helmet in rapid succession, prompting the Marine to halt his advance and turn his forearm-mounted shield toward the author of those bolts—who must have been Lynch, but Lu Bu didn’t care to visually confirm that suspicion. Snarling in anger, she launched herself at the Imperial Marine in his far-too-fancy armor and powered Glacier Splitter’s gravity drivers to maximum as she brought the weapon around for a square blow aimed at his torso.

  The Marine was calm, giving ground half a step at a time as Lynch continued to pour blaster bolts into his apparently impregnable shield. Lu Bu decided to take it upon herself to test precisely how impregnable that shield could be, and the Marine obliged by blocking Glacier Splitter with an expert pivot of his weight which saw the shimmering, vaguely yellow-tinted shield intercept the mighty weapon just before it would have struck his exposed flank.

  The shield visibly deformed, and the Marine was knocked nearly a full step to his right as Lu Bu pressed with her attack. She was more than slightly miffed that her best hit had not destroyed the bubble-looking field outright, but she was prepared to finish the job she had started.


  She brought the weapon back around and executed a series of quick blows, each of which seemed to deform the shield with roughly equal effect regardless of how hard she swung her weapon.

  The Marine regained his footing—and Lynch’s fire ceased for some reason—which saw the Imperial’s arm-mounted vibroblades lash out at her in a series of simple, brutal, and impressively coordinated attacks which robbed Lu Bu of the initiative as she was forced to give ground to her opponent. The Marine’s eye slits, which glowed with a faint, blue light, seemed demonic to her and she felt the familiar rage welling up within her. That rage had been her only constant companion throughout her young life, and her relationship with it had been bittersweet, but she had long since learned to accept every part of who she was and she used that part of herself to fuel her onslaught against the Imperial Marine.

  The Marine was good, Lu Bu had to admit that much. And with his power armor he was far stronger than she would ever be without mechanical assistance. Their speed was roughly equal, but Lu Bu’s weapon was not conducive to agile maneuvers, so aside from the occasional surprise attack—made possible by her practiced manipulation of Glacier Splitter’s gravity generators—she was forced to backpedal for twenty six steps before another genuine opportunity presented itself.

  By then she had gained her opponent’s measure, and she fully understood that if the battle continued as it had done she would receive a fight-ending injury before backpedaling another dozen steps.

  So she swung Glacier Splitter in an obvious, overhand attack with its gravity generators set to maximum. The Marine expertly lashed out at her, stabbing her in the left leg with his vibroblade before drawing back to receive the hammer’s blow with his shield raised above his shoulder.