McKnight's Mission Read online

  “Should we encounter further issues,” Yuanzhi said deferentially, “we will most certainly enlist your aid, Doctor.”

  The three of them standing together, wearing MSP jumpsuits bearing their birth names just as Lu Bu’s bore hers, was a nearly-comical sight. They were each several years older than Fei Long, with Shiyuan’s age being closest to Kongming’s, and the way the suits draped their pathetically weak physiques would have previously elicited a snort of derision from Lu Bu.

  But she had learned by watching Fei Long that if one was smart enough, and focused enough, then one did not need to have a powerful body to make an extraordinary difference in deadly conflicts. She had spent nearly two months securing their services, and it was nearly time to put their abilities to the test.

  “I have arranged shared quarters for you aboard the station,” she explained, “they are expensive, but you will not be permitted to set foot on Capital Prime until your provisional residences are granted.”

  “Will we have a data connection?” Yuanzhi asked, prompting his comrades to bob their heads eagerly in support of his all-too-predictable query.

  “No,” Lu Bu scowled, “this is a quarantine station, and that includes the quarantine of information. However,” she explained, producing a data slate with the best information Lieutenant McKnight’s people had been able to collect on Fei Long’s virtual network by reviewing some of his work logs—logs which had been transferred from the Pride of Prometheus during the brief time it had been docked with the Slice of Life, “I will give you copies of Kongming’s virtual interface programs so you can prepare for when you gain access to the planetary data net.”

  Their eyes lit up and Shiyuan pushed his way past the others to accept the proffered data slate. “We will prepare ourselves,” he assured her after taking it from her fingers.

  “Good,” Lu Bu nodded as she felt an unfamiliar spasm in her belly, followed by a long, tight sensation unlike any prior cramp she had experienced. “We will return in one week,” she assured them, “do not be foolish with your credits.”

  “Oh, we won’t be,” Yuanzhi said quickly, but she was far from assured after seeing the short-lived gleam in his eye.

  “You’re progressing too fast,” Dr. Middleton said as Lu Bu felt a sharp, painful sensation deep in her abdomen just a few minutes after the Mode began to encounter Capital’s atmosphere in a short-lived series of vibrations and lurches. “I need to slow it down,” she continued tightly as she produced a pre-filled syringe, “or we won’t make it to the hospital before you go into full-on labor.”

  Lu Bu breathed through pursed lips as her adoptive mother injected the tiny vial of liquid into her arm. She took her com-link into her hands and activated the cockpit’s channel, “How long until—“

  Her mother snatched the device from her hand and deactivated it before Lu Bu could protest. “I need you to focus on yourself and your babies right now,” the older woman said severely. “Yide and Traian can land the ship without any help from you; you have to concentrate on what’s happening to yourself.”

  She wanted to protest, but Lu Bu nodded reluctantly. “I will do what you wish,” she obliged.

  “Good,” Dr. Middleton said as she strapped a vital signs monitor on Lu Bu’s upper arm before placing a similar one on her belly, “these will let us know what’s happening with your body and with your babies…Bu?” she asked as Lu Bu began to feel a warm, flushing sensation spread throughout her body. “Bu?!” her mother repeated forcefully as Lu Bu’s vision began to narrow. “Stay awake, Bu!” she snapped, but Lu Bu was completely unable to do so as she felt a cold pressure move outward from her chest.

  Just before she lost consciousness, Lu Bu heard several alarms begin to sound on one of the vital signs monitors. Her last semi-coherent thought before plunging into the abyss of unconsciousness was, I hope the alarm is from the one on my arm…

  She stood on the hull of a warship, encased in a suit of power armor and looking up at the orb of a giant, brown planet which she vaguely recognized as belonging to her memory but could not quite place.

  A silent explosion went off at the periphery of her vision, but instead of reflexively ducking as she knew she should have done, she dumbly stared at the source near the planet’s horizon.

  She saw a great fireball erupt from the surface of the planet, which grew ever larger as it erupted like a giant volcano on the surface. She felt a pain in her middle, and looked down to see a jagged piece of metal had somehow embedded itself into—and through—her duralloy power armor.

  Confused at the sight of blood dripping down along the length of the metal fragment—primarily because she appeared to be in the vacuum of space—she looked down at it for several seconds and became terrified in a way she had never known. Her blood should have frozen on contact with the freezing metal, but it did not. Even when it splashed into a tiny puddle on the deck beneath her feet, she was more confused by the fact that it had not frozen than by the apparent gravity which inexplicably existed on the outer hull of a warship.

  “Wake up, Bu,” she heard a voice say to her left, and she looked over to see Fei Long standing there. He wore no power armor, nor did he wear a vacuum-rated suit. He wore his simple, Taoist robes and had his Zhuge Jin headgear perched on his head. She was surprised to see him wearing the headpiece because it had been one of the few personal articles of his which she had managed to keep with her since his death.

  “Kongming?” she asked as her suit’s alarms began to sound one after another. “How did you get here?”

  “Wake up, Bu,” he repeated anxiously, but it was not his voice that she heard this time. When she realized that the voice belonged to her adoptive mother, the world seemed to fall away and she realized she was on some sort of a stretcher with a small crowd of people surrounding her.

  “Kongming…” she said stupidly. She knew what she had just experienced was some kind of a dream, but she found herself unable to call out for him amid her rising fears.

  “Stay awake, Bu,” her mother said, gripping Lu Bu’s hand between her own as her eyes snapped expertly up to check the instruments every few seconds, “I need you to talk to me.”

  “I…” she began, but another round of alarms began to sound.

  “We’ve got a coagulation cascade happening here,” a man said tightly an instant before Lu Bu felt a pricking sensation in her arm.

  “Stop!” Dr. Middleton yelled, prompting the prick to be replaced with a sharp, tearing feeling as Lu Bu’s vision narrowed once again. “Her blood chemistry is different; we have to start with…”

  The Stone Rhino charged toward her, and it was all that Lu Bu could do to dive out of the way as its uniquely clawed, cloven feet tore great gouges in the dirt where she had stood a second earlier.

  The left side of her body was savaged by the razor-sharp hairs which hung from the beast’s flanks in ragged, unseemly patches separated by the grey, armored hide beneath.

  Her hand found a spear as she scrambled to her knees, and the Stone Rhino pirouetted far more gracefully than a creature of its size should have been capable. She leapt backward while firming her grip on the spear’s shaft, narrowly avoiding the meter-long tusks of her giant foe as it swept its head around in a deadly arc that would have bisected her had she not evaded.

  She backed up as the beast lunged for her again, narrowly escaping its jaws as they snapped down where her leg had been an instant earlier. She nearly lost her footing as the scrabble beneath her feet came loose as she continued frantically retreating from the murderous creature.

  Risking a glance behind her, Lu Bu felt her heart stop as she saw that she was no more than five meters from the edge of a chasm which looked like it was several miles deep!

  She turned to face the Rhino, which stood between her and the only possible escape from the cliff’s edge. It blasted hot breaths from its nostrils and pawed the ground, filling her with a sensation of fear as she clutched her belly instinctively. She somehow knew that it w
as coming for her children—she had to do whatever she could to protect them!

  Holding the crude spear in her hands, she tentatively lunged toward the Rhino in an attempt to buy herself some room to maneuver. But the beast parried her blow with its tusk, turning aside the spear and sending its jagged tip into a nearby rock.

  The spear tip survived, but the shaft snapped in two in her hands and it was all she could do to avoid being skewered by an upward-sweeping tusk which opened a gash in her left thigh as she rolled toward the cliff face.

  For an instant it was as though time stopped—but she could strangely sense that the dream world was moving around her—and she realized this was a nightmare. On some level she had already known that, but as all sense but sight fell away from her she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was all an illusion of some kind.

  Still, the fierce determination she felt at wanting to survive her encounter with the Stone Rhino was far from false. It was as real as anything she had ever known, and she somehow knew that it represented something just as deadly as that great beast ever could.

  She looked over her shoulder as her heel came to the edge of the chasm, and saw the gaping maw of the world at her feet ready to swallow her if she would but surrender to the inevitable. She looked back at the Stone Rhino and felt the ruined weapon in her hand as she considered her options. The easiest way to end the dream would be a leap from the edge of the chasm, which she was convinced would result in the dream coming to an end. She’d had similar dreams to this one in the past, though few were ever as vivid, and they always ended when she behaved in such an irrational fashion as a suicidal leap represented.

  But she knew that she would be losing something of herself if she did that, and as time began to speed up—and the Stone Rhino bore down on her with a murderous look in its inhuman eyes—she knew she had a choice to make. The consequences of that choice were unclear to her, which meant that she was left with a decision of how to meet the danger looming before her.

  Lu Bu had never run from anything in her life, and she was not about to run from this phantasmal force which seemed bent on making her curl up into a little ball and whimper like a child.

  So she gripped the spear tightly, gathered her legs beneath her body, and hurled herself at the monstrosity with a primal, savage determination suffusing her consciousness.

  She didn’t know if she could beat it, but she would not shrink away in fear—and she would do her best to take it with her if, indeed, the beast overcame her.

  “The coagulopathy seems to be under control; we should proceed to an exploratory operation of the brain,” Lu Bu vaguely heard a man’s voice say to her right. “Vitals are still critically low; BP 45/15 and heart rate is 65.”

  “They’re low, but not critically low,” Lu Bu heard Dr. Middleton say with tight, professional poise somewhere to her left, “her physiology is so different that she’s barely human by the established standard; turn those alarms off and pay attention to me.”

  “Her temperature’s climbing up to forty one degrees centigrade, Doctors,” Lu Bu heard a husky woman’s voice reported.

  “Blast,” Dr. Middleton cursed as Lu Bu felt a tight, quivering sensation in her belly. “We’re going to have a bigger problem dealing with these micro-ruptures in her uterus than we will dealing with those in her head. She has an unusual capillary structure in the uterine wall, and her spiking temperature is going to disrupt her clotting factors—somebody get me an abdominal lavage kit before she goes into febrile seizures!”

  “A lavage kit?!” the man’s voice repeated in horror. “What kind of standards do you practice by, Doctor, the same ones the dinosaurs used?!”

  “I practice by the standards that keep my patients alive, Doctor,” Dr. Middleton snapped viciously, her professional veneer vanishing instantly. “I’m not risking a chemical reduction of her core temperature since nearly everything we’ve given her so far has only caused whatever this feedback system is to worsen. One more drug interacting with this crisis just might push her beyond our ability to compensate—now get me that lavage kit!”

  A momentary silence was followed by the sound of a polymer container being torn open, and Lu Bu only then realized she was unable to see. Far from being distressed, however, she felt remarkably calm about the whole affair.

  “What are the Apgars?” Dr. Middleton asked tightly.

  “Apgar scores of ten on baby one and baby two,” another man reported from somewhere behind Lu Bu before belatedly adding, “number three is at four; we’ve got a heart defect I’m working to correct.”

  I gave my baby a heart defect? Lu Bu wondered as the world slipped away from her once again.

  An incessant beeping roused Lu Bu from her unconsciousness, and she opened her eyes to see that she was in an unfamiliar room. She looked toward the window—after realizing that the blurry light to her right was, in fact, a window—and saw a large, green park beyond which was surrounded by large, short buildings consistent with a college campus.

  She tried to speak, but all that came out was a stifled groan from her suddenly painful throat.

  “Bu?” she heard Dr. Middleton say from her left, and Lu Bu turned to see her adoptive mother stand from a chair. “Bu, how are you feeling?”

  “I…” she began to reply, but her voice caught somewhere in her throat. Then she remembered the fragmented imagery, which seemed to blur her dreams and the brief glimpses of reality, and she tried to sit up in her bed but found that her arms were restrained with padded straps. But rather than being angry about the restraints, she felt anxiety unlike anything she had ever experienced as she wheezed, “Where are they?”

  “Everything is fine, Bu,” Dr. Middleton said as she went to slowly remove the straps from her upper arms, “but you need to relax; we only closed your abdomen a few hours ago.”

  “Where are they?!” Lu Bu asked as a wave of panic swept over her and her heart began to quicken.

  “Shh,” Dr. Middleton said after undoing the straps and placing a hand on her upper arms and pointing toward the window, “they’re here.”

  Lu Bu looked over frantically and saw a pair of basinets beneath the window, and she felt an all-consuming terror until she heard a muffled, squeaking sound on Dr. Middleton’s side of the room.

  Looking over, she saw a third basinet with a slowly-moving bundle inside. Lu Bu felt as though everything which had bound her body together came undone for a fraction of a second, and she sank back into her bed as tears welled into her eyes.

  “Su was a little weak,” her mother explained as she went over to the basinet and collected the softly crying baby, “and we had to close the fissure in his heart, but he’s fine now.”

  Lu Bu felt herself begin to tremble as the baby was brought to her, and when Dr. Middleton sat on the bedside with the baby in her arms a profound sense of loss overcame Lu Bu’s senses and she began to weep.

  “It’s all right, Bu,” Dr. Middleton said, gently kissing her forehead, “everyone is going to be fine. How about you hold him?”

  She could not stop the tears from flowing, but she held her arms out gingerly to accept the baby. “Su,” she said quietly as the weight of the world came crashing down on her, “I am sorry I was not there—“

  “You were there,” her mother said forcefully, and at the sound of her voice the other babies began to stir. Standing from the bed, Dr. Middleton moved to the other basinets and attempted to coo them back to sleep. After a few seconds, she succeeded and then turned to whisper, “No one should do something like this on her own, Bu; I’m just glad I could help.”

  Lu Bu nodded and felt a pang of regret as she looked down at her child—her child! She and Dr. Middleton had discovered several months earlier that her breasts would not produce milk without extraordinary measures—including a complete rework of her hormone panel, which Lu Bu found offensive on every level—so she had resigned herself to the fact that she would have to bottle feed them. She found one such bottle on the bedside
table near where her mother had sat, and she reached for it so she could suckle little Su as best she was able.

  Little Su began to drink, and Lu Bu felt a great sense of relief at having safely carried them to term. But she could not keep from thinking that she felt none of the profound, life-changing emotions she had read so much about in the literature which her mother had urged her to read since learning of her pregnancy.

  She felt a connection to Little Su—and to all of them—but it was far from the overpowering maternal instinct she had hoped she might feel. She knew this was almost certainly because she was flawed in some irreversible fashion, but she also knew that she was the only parent these children would ever have.

  Looking over at her mother, as Dr. Middleton reached down to pick up Xun from the basinet and cradle her in her arms, Lu Bu felt a measure of resolve take root deep within her. I must not let her see my weakness, she thought. I must do whatever I can for them…no matter the cost.

  “Here,” Dr. Middleton said, placing the tightly-wrapped Xun down on Lu Bu’s chest, “say hello to little Xun.”

  Lu Bu tried to do so as she shifted in the bed to better face her daughter, but her voice caught in her throat. Be strong, she reminded herself, they will need you to be strong. “Hello, Xun,” she said weakly as tears resumed their flow down her cheeks, “I am your mother.”

  Upon hearing this, both of her babies looked up at her with squinty, innocent eyes. For a brief moment, she knew that they had seen her—regardless of what the medical texts had said about babies being unable to actually see for several weeks—and the profound sense of sorrow and failure she had felt vanished as their eyes shone upon her.

  Time seemed to stand still as, for a brief instant she saw a glimmer of Fei Long in both of their faces. It was a moment which would be etched in her memory for as long as she lived, and when it passed she knew that everything she had previously known was now forever changed.