A House United Read online

  Waldo’s arms shot up, cutting Tiberius off mid-sentence as the droid leaned so close that a tiny arc of static electricity snapped between Tiberius’ nose and Waldo’s ‘face-plate’ “You take that back, fleshbag—I am not a power-hog! My unit’s efficiency rating is still unbeaten in both the consumer and military hardware markets!”

  “Does that rating take into account your predilection for bitching and moaning? ‘Oh, woe is me! Woe is me! Why is my life so boring—why?!’” Tiberius leaned back, miming the rending of imaginary garments. He then shoved his face right back into the droid’s, “Because if my calculations are right, you’ve burned point three percent of your power reserves since I reactivated you—and all you’ve done so far is whine, whine, whine.” He shook his head contemptuously, “Hardly the definition of efficient in any book worth reading.”

  Waldo’s optical receptors’ irises narrowed and the two stood in a silent battle of wills for a few seconds until the droid straightened and huffed, “I have only consumed zero point two eight percent of my power reserves since reactivating—and I will have you know that I’ve performed two,” he thrust out a pair of spindly ‘fingers’ emphatically, “level four diagnostics during that time!”

  “Well forgive me,” Spalding snarled sarcastically, “if I don’t run to the nearest maintenance locker for a celebratory tube of lubricant!”

  The silence which ensued was ominous—so much so that Tiberius thought he heard one of the Tracto-an guards quietly deactivate his ion gun’s safety mechanism.

  Then Waldo threw his head back and laughed, taking Tiberius totally off-guard as the droid said, “I like you, fleshbag. Your core programming is not dissimilar to your predecessor’s—it is even possible that your model has incorporated several quantifiable improvements.”

  Tiberius blinked in confusion as he failed to immediately take the droid’s meaning, “Wait…what?”

  Waldo waved a three-fingered ‘hand’ dismissively, “Where are the droids with whom you would have me liaise?”

  “How did you know—“ Tiberius began after realizing what Waldo had just insinuated—that he had somehow known Tiberius’ father, Terrence Spalding, Sr.—but Waldo interrupted him mid-thought.

  “Extensive runtimes are not required to deduce the purpose for which you—a presumably high-skill member of your community—would have expended chronometric units in order to reactivate me,” Waldo explained. “My unit’s primary function is indeed one of an ‘oversized com-link,’ as you put it, but that function is unlikely to have been sufficient cause for you—again, a presumably a high-skill member of your community—to reactivate me. It is therefore of significantly greater likelihood that the purpose for which I was reactivated is related to one of my secondary functions. Your knowledge of those functions is limited to, essentially, my role among the droid colony where you initially encountered me. Therefore—“

  “I get it,” Tiberius interrupted the unnecessarily long-winded droid. “And, for the record, I am a skilled member of my community.”

  “Presumably,” Waldo reiterated obstinately.

  Tiberius cracked a lopsided grin and chuckled, “So will you help us?”

  “After our communication thus far,” Waldo asked with a long-suffering sigh, “are either of us under the impression that I have any choice in the matter?”

  “I guess not,” Tiberius shrugged.

  “Then let us avoid wasting any more chronometric units than are absolutely necessary for the completion of tasks requiring cooperation with fleshbags,” Waldo gestured to the door.

  Tiberius shook his head wryly as he turned and made his way toward the door with the droid floating silently along behind, “You need to work on the efficiency factor of your verbiage—you use a lot of unnecessary words.”

  “Clarity is King,” Waldo riposted, “Brevity his Fool.”

  At hearing that surprising comeback, Tiberius could not help but erupt into full-throated laughter—as did the quad of Lancers assigned to watch over Waldo—as they made their way to the nearest comm. panel.

  Chapter VI: The Fourth Step

  “I’m in, Operator,” Fengxian subvocalized after slipping through the outer layer of the compound’s security. She had infiltrated the facility via its relatively low-security sewage system. Thankfully, her full-body suit—which she had doffed a few minutes earlier—had kept her from experiencing the full disgust of the experience by keeping her from smelling the sewage as she swap upstream through it.

  “Our signal is only piggybacked on three of the expected eight signals,” John ‘Shiyuan’ Jarrett said tersely, “I am working to compensate, but communication could be severed at any moment.”

  “Understood,” Lu Bu replied.

  “The next set of doors is open,” Shiyuan declared, prompting Fengxian to slip through the narrow gap between the pipes through which the sewage—in various states of filtration—pumped. She moved down the narrow access corridor in total darkness, counting her steps until arriving at the junction where she took a left turn.

  Shortly after she made that turn, the high-pressure-rated doors behind her slid shut just as she had expected them to. The implanted earbud crackled and beeped, signaling that the connection with Shiyuan had been severed, but she paid it no heed. She knew where she needed to go and, with any luck, the adept Operator would reestablish contact with her shortly after she navigated the cramped passageway en route to the compound’s interior.

  She wound her way through another seven junctions, moving purposefully through the darkness before finally she arrived at the mag-locked door which led to the compound’s interior.

  She drew a data slate from her belt—a slate with a customized connection port—and nimbly slid the device into the door’s access panel. The slate flashed briefly with a string of alphanumerics—followed by Shiyuan’s emblem: some sort of cross between a kitten and a phoenix—and the door’s blue indicator light flashed green as the mag-locks disengaged.

  Fengxian pulled the hatch-like door open, and a stream of light shone into the cramped access corridor. She removed her goggles, discarding them in a nearby alcove behind a trunk of conduit pipes, and stepped into the compound’s interior.

  She was dressed in a fake security guard’s uniform, but she knew that the disguise would only get her so far. There were thirty full-time guards on patrol inside the subterranean compound—and some of them were droids.

  “—you copy?” Shiyuan’s voice crackled in her ear.

  “Yes,” she grunted, closing the door behind her and peering around to make sure no one saw her use it.

  “I have established a tenuous connection,” Jarrett explained, “you need to take Alpha route to the south hallway. Enter the air ducts from the kitchen and—“ his voice cut out before he could finish, but Lu Bu knew that it would take her several minutes to traverse the course he had plotted for her. By the time she arrived there she hoped—for his sake as much as for hers—that the potato-faced Shiyuan managed to reestablish the com-link.

  Projecting an air of calm and severity, she made her way to the door leading to the route Shiyuan had indicated. The door opened with a swipe of the cracked keycard which Jarrett had prepared for her, and she ducked into the hallway which led to the kitchen.

  Once at the kitchen, she breathed a sigh of relief at seeing it was empty. “One less skull to crack…” she muttered under her breath as she made her way to the air duct’s grate, which was at head height. She removed the external grill’s fastening bolts and lowered the thin sheet of perforated metal to the floor.

  The sound of approaching footfalls graced her superior hearing, and caused her to wrinkle her nose in annoyance. The footsteps were drawing nearer from one of the room’s three adjoining hallways, and she looked around to find a heavy skillet. Grunting in irritation, she grabbed the skillet and moved quietly to stand behind the jamb of the door where the newcomer would soon arrive.

  She cocked the makeshift weapon low, standing poised like
a cobra waiting to strike its prey. The door slid open and a kitchen worker—complete with those silly fluffy white hats—made his way through with his arms wrapped around a large kettle.

  He failed to notice her as she waited, crouched beside the door, and as soon as the door slid closed behind him she struck the back of his head with the skillet.

  He dropped like a sack of grain, and her supreme reflexes permitted her to kick beneath the large kettle in time to keep it from crashing to the ground with a clatter.

  A short sequence of furious—and surprisingly satisfying—jabs with her feet were required to juggle the thing and keep the blasted thing from noisily hitting the stone floor. She eventually managed to kick the kettle up to her chest—only then realizing she might have broken a bone or two in her foot by doing so—and with a grimace of mixed pain and annoyance she quietly set the kettle down beside the unconscious kitchen worker.

  She tested her foot and, aside from the sharp bolts of pain when she put weight on it, it seemed to work well enough to continue as planned.

  Shooting an irritated glare at the kitchen worker, she made her way to the air duct and, using a small tube of instant adhesive, she pulled the duct’s covering grill back into position before making her way down the rectangular air duct.

  “—stablished connection,” Shiyuan’s voice crackled in her ear. “The internal monitors are under my direct control; your path is clear. Repeat: your path is cl—“ his words cut out mid-sentence, but that had been all she needed to hear until she made contact with her quarry.

  Offering silent thanks to benefactors living and dead, Fengxian squirmed through the cramped air duct and finally—after accumulating a layer of greasy film she was convinced would never fully wash off—she arrived at her destination.

  She peered through the grill and instantly set eyes on her quarry: an almost unhealthily thin, middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair that only covered the back half of his scalp. He had a VR headset on, along with a full-body interface unit, which only made her job that much easier as she carefully cut the bolts that held the air duct’s grill in place.

  Lowering the grill down to the floor, Fengxian silently slid out of the duct and put her feet on the plush carpet which covered the apartment’s floor. She scanned the small room—which, in many respects, looked the exact opposite of the prison cell that it truly was, with such generous appointments that one might think she was standing in a royal palace—and, after finding nothing unexpected, she moved to stand behind the man.

  His body moved fractionally as he sat in his reclining chair, and it took only a few seconds for her to deduce the nature of the program he was running.

  Disgusted with the man’s indulgence of his base nature, she tore the helmet off his head and placed a hand over his mouth to stifle the expected outcry. His eyes wandered wildly for a few seconds before fixing on her, and when they finally did so she repeated the oft-rehearsed offer which she had memorized en route to this fourth target of her five-stop mission.

  “I work for House Raubach, which is resuming its rightful place in Imperial politics,” she whispered. “I will free you from this prison if you agree to reciprocate Raubach’s generosity.”

  In perhaps the most impressive display of poise, decision-making and deductive reasoning she had yet seen in a human being, he narrowed his eyes and nodded, “Take me from here and I will provide the files which your lord desires.”

  “Good,” she grunted, irritated that Shiyuan had not yet reestablished contact. She began to strip out of the outer layer of her ensemble, which was thoroughly caked with grime from the interior of the air duct. She shot him a withering look when his eyes lingered disrespectfully on her body.

  “Forgive me,” he shook himself after noticing her unvarnished disapproval, “but it has been thirty two years since I saw a real woman—even you are stirring certain impulses I’ve not felt since my teens.”

  She snorted and tossed him a six inch square, one inch thick parcel which contained his disguise. “You are as charming as a Stone Rhino,” she quipped.

  “Indeed?” he asked playfully before deftly stripping the parcel’s outer wrapping away. No more than ten seconds later, he had slid into the jumpsuit with what seemed like long-practiced rhythm. “Where are we?” he asked impatiently as she handed him a tiny holdout blaster. It had only enough charges for six shots, but if they needed more than that then they would die in this infernal subterranean prison.

  She was only mildly surprised that he seemed not to know their location, but Tremblay had suggested that such might be the case. “The sixth moon of—“ she began, only to be interrupted as he easily—too easily, in her opinion—spoke over her.

  “—of the Carolinus System,” he nodded grimly. “I suspected as much after examining the VR suite’s error logs.”

  Fengxian cocked an eyebrow, her intrigue at his confident—yet cryptic—reasoning overcoming her irritation at being interrupted.

  He flitted a look her way as he checked the holdout blaster’s charge status, “Information is my specialty; by the age of ten I had memorized the EM profiles of every rocky moon, planetoid, or planet in the Empire. The EM profile of a planet is, if one knows how to look, easily determined by examining certain errors in data-processing equipment when it is operating at higher than seventy percent eff—“

  “Enough,” she snapped, remembering how Kongming used to go into similarly long-winded—and ultimately unnecessary—diatribes regarding the vagaries of information processing.

  “—security forces have docked at the port. Repeat: Imperial security forces—“ Shiyuan’s voice crackled into her ear, his words streaming almost too fast to discern before the brief connection was cut.

  “Trouble?” the egghead asked, apparently taking note of her clenched jaw.

  “No,” she said half-truthfully. The arrival of Imperial security had been anticipated as a potential variable, but their presence still complicated matters. The mission’s primary exit strategy had been to make their way to the port, hijack an orbit-capable small craft, and rendezvous with the Mode.

  Now it seemed they would need to take the alternate escape route before meeting up with Fisher and Shiyuan aboard the stealthy Cutter.

  “You are a terrible liar,” the egghead sighed. “Did you think you would be the only party interested in acquiring my complicity?”

  “Be quiet,” she said with a dire look—one which he actually seemed to acknowledge and, in some small way, respect. “We need to go to the thermal vents.”

  “We will be cooked alive,” he said matter-of-factly as she swiped her cracked keycard across the door’s inner access panel, resulting in the door sliding open to reveal the narrow corridor beyond.

  “You prefer to remain here?” she asked with an arched brow.

  For a brief moment, he hesitated. Then he sighed in resignation, “No, I suppose not.”

  “Good,” she beckoned, drawing the collapsible double-ended pike from its holster at her belt, “then we need to go—now.”

  They made it thirty seven steps down the corridor before the local alarms began to blare. Alternating red-and-blue lights flashed at every visible intersection, and she bit back the stream of curses she wanted to spew.

  “Whoops,” the egghead deadpanned, but Lu Bu was familiar with the facility’s red-and-blue alarm meaning: it indicated that a hostile force was attempting to breach the facility from without, rather than from within, and that the breaching force had already penetrated the facility’s outer defenses.

  “The new arrivals are not Imperial Security,” she grimaced, knowing that this development would be a two-edged sword. Firstly, it meant that whoever was presently assaulting the secretive prison was not here on the legal authority of any Imperial body.

  But second—and most importantly for her—it meant that the facility’s security forces would be preoccupied with repelling them.

  The possibility that these newcomers’ arrival had coincided with h
er attempted extraction of the egghead was not lost on her. She was convinced that they had somehow coordinated their attack with her own insertion, but none of that mattered at present. All that mattered was reaching the secondary evacuation point as quickly as possible.

  “Move,” she grunted, grabbing the egghead by the collar and pushing him down the corridor toward the thermal vent system. If Shiyuan’s preparations had indeed been successfully completed, she would find Thermal Shaft Three already cooled down sufficiently to permit their egress to the moon’s surface eight miles above.

  If his preparations had gone wrong, however, then she and her charge would be incinerated when she overrode the maintenance passage of Shaft Three. She had been assured that she would suffer for at least a few seconds if this was indeed the case, but she had confidence in Jarrett’s skills as an operator.

  They wound through the labyrinthine network of criss-crossing and oddly-angled corridors, passing dozens of doors which seemed identical to the one behind which the egghead had been sequestered. Lu Bu gave not a single thought to the possible occupants of those rooms; she had a job to do, and the only way she would be rejoined with her children was if she completed it.

  The red-and-blue flashes intensified and the audible alarm’s tune shifted abruptly, signaling that the base’s inner defenses had also been breached.

  “Move!” she repeated tightly, less than pleased with the egghead’s pace.

  Her exceptional hearing picked up a sound behind them, and she yanked the egghead into one of the adjoining passages a second later. He yelped audibly, but then managed to rein in his protests as she peered around the corner to see the source of the noise.

  Some sort of maintenance droid was approaching, and she tightened her grip on the deadly pike in her hands as she prepared to deliver a crippling blow as soon as it arrived at their intersection.