A House United Read online

  McKnight scowled at his and shook her head, “That, right there, is why I walked away from the chance to put those accursed black gloves on. Thank you for validating my choice—again.”

  “Any time. I’m always happy to reinforce self-delusions if they help expedite the mission,” Tremblay shrugged indifferently.

  They both knew she had no choice in the matter. Even if McKnight was callous enough to disregard the added risk to Lu—and, for the record, she wasn’t that callous according to her psych profile and command record—the real heart of the matter wasn’t Lu’s life. The real issue was the success of their mission.

  Nikomedes had been sent to retrieve an Elder module from a planet deep in the Gorgon Sectors. That planet had been on a list of four worlds which Lynch had given to Tremblay and Nikomedes. According to that list, those planets each had a greater than thirty percent chance of containing an Elder module which the savages—make that, Tracto-ans—erroneously referred to as ‘Light Swords of Power.’ How Lynch had determined the locations of these planets was very much a mystery—and an irritating one as far as Tremblay was concerned—but four draws at the deck of a 30% chance to recover such a module had been worth the time needed for Nikomedes to go out, find a module, and return with it.

  But after seeing Lu Bu’s expeditious—and impressively flawless—performance in her five-step mission thus far, Tremblay had decided that an acceleration of the plan was in order. McKnight had grudgingly agreed, which meant that after Lu finished with her fifth stop—assuming she succeeded, of course—she would return to their base and be immediately redeployed to secure the only one of these ‘Elder modules’ which Lynch had determined was within the Empire of Man’s borders.

  McKnight scanned over the latest revisions to his plan to insert and extract Lu and, to his mild surprise, she nodded agreeably, “Proceed with these revisions—but don’t abandon the previous plan. I want both proposals in hand when Lu returns, and I want you to give both of them your full attention,” she added sharply.

  Tremblay was tempted to bite back the retort since he knew that arguing here would accomplish nothing meaningful. But then he realized that he could possibly throw her off the scent of his other plans if he acted as she likely expected him to, so he gritted his teeth, “Do you think we have such an abundance of time that we can process two plans of this complexity simultaneously? I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, Captain, but we’re on the clock here. We need to commit to one or the other of these plans, and we need to do it now.”

  “Both plans, Mr. Tremblay,” she reiterated severely. “Which one we use will be my decision, and I’m not prepared to make that decision just yet.”

  He scowled thunderously, “Fine…but remember this moment if things don’t go our way. Remember that the most informed person in the room advised you to pick one or the other, and you didn’t have the nerve to do it.”

  Her eyes narrowed dangerously, and he wondered if maybe he had overdone it until she held the data slate out and seethed, “You have your orders, Tremblay. Either follow them or vacate your post so I can find someone who will, is that clear?”

  He hesitated, making as though he would retort, but finally ground his teeth and snatched the data slate from her hands, “As a bell, Captain.”

  With that particular verbal flourish, he spun and stormed out of the medical facility. He maintained the façade of righteous indignation the whole way from Medical to the base’s nerve center, where Guo was working tirelessly—as usual.

  The remarkably cool-headed virtual engineer turned after the door slid shut behind Tremblay and asked, “Did you succeed?”

  Tremblay allowed a grin to spread across his face, “Oh yeah—two for the price of one, even.”

  “Good,” Guo nodded approvingly, gesturing to the constant flow of data across a nearby monitor, “the simultaneous projection revisions you anticipated are ongoing; the variables are not sufficiently different enough at this juncture to over-tax the simulator as we refine the two insertion plans.”

  “Good,” Tremblay allowed his grin to spread more broadly across his face, “we might just pull this off after all.”

  “Indeed,” Guo said noncommittally, “it would be an unprecedentedly devastating blow to the Empire of Man—one which might cause irreversible fracturing of their entire society.”

  Tremblay nodded, having pored over the same numbers that Guo had. Then a sobering thought came to mind, “No one here can know, Guo—we have to be absolutely certain of that,” Tremblay said seriously as thoughts of Guo’s friend, Jarrett, flitted through his mind.

  “Shiyuan will not be a problem,” Guo assured him. “I have taken the necessary precautions to keep him from discovering Phase Two until it is already in motion. Perhaps Kongming could uncover our plans if he was here, but not Shiyuan,” he said with conviction, and not an ounce of rancor directed toward his colleague. “Besides, he will be occupied with performing as Fengxian’s Operator; the odds of him discovering our plan remotely while observing those duties are minuscule. Additionally, once Phase Two is under way McKnight and her people will have little reason to detain us—even in the unlikely event that we fail to sufficiently clear our path of egress.”

  Tremblay scanned the data streams for several minutes. Everything was proceeding precisely as he had hoped it would. Lynch’s plan to re-shape the Empire was a grand one, and Tremblay had spent every waking minute since meeting the now-deceased Raubach Prince working to optimize that plan.

  If Lu could pull off these next two stops and return with an Elder module, the path to victory would be clear.

  And when he reached the end of the path, a ruined Empire would lie in his wake.

  It really was the ultimate mission—too bad fools like Spalding Jr. were too short-sighted to see the opportunity for what it really was.

  “Oh well,” he mused as he slotted himself into his workstation, “it’s their loss.”

  Chapter X: Five and Dive

  “You will enter the damping field in sixty seconds,” Shiyuan’s voice crackled in Lu Bu’s ear as she waited—impatiently—in the cramped cargo pod. “Our com-link will be severed once you are within the field, but I have already made connection with the local com-grid. Simply approach a public kiosk of any kind and I will resume our connection from the local grid.”

  “Understood,” Lu Bu grunted as she worked to keep her breathing controlled. Inside the crate which now served as her conveyance, she got the distinct impression that this was how a corpse would feel after being entombed within a coffin—assuming corpses could feel anything, that is. She immediately chastised herself for considering such a childish notion, and soon the crate slipped into the target station’s inner defensive shell where a powerful, but highly-localized comm. interference system instantly disconnected her from her Operator.

  She had expected the disconnection, and was pleased with her own ability to maintain her calm under the circumstances. She was locked inside of a crate, drifting toward one of the station’s cargo processors through the void of interplanetary space, with nothing but a head bag to keep her alive. Any equipment more advanced than that would be picked up by the station’s passive scanners.

  Of course, her collapsible pike was essentially undetectable—even on high-end Imperial scanners—so she was still reasonably well-armed.

  Not that I need a weapon in my hands to be deadly, she thought with a smirk. She had trained with some of the best hand-to-hand fighters humanity had to offer, and she enjoyed significant physical advantages due to her genetically-engineered speed, power, and reflexes. Most opponents underestimated her enough that she rarely failed to seize the initiative and, ultimately, use it to emerge victorious.

  That particular train of thought turned her smirk to a scowl as she remembered the enigmatic ‘Number 80’ character who had known precisely where she would be during the extraction of the egghead at the fourth stop on her itinerary.

  She had lost several nights of slee
p over the fact that she had walked straight into his trap. The fact that he had chosen not to snap it down on her—this time—was of no comfort at all. In fact, the reverse was true! He had so thoroughly demonstrated his superiority in not only sparing her from a trap of his own making, but also by saving her from the base security guard at the last possible instant, that she harbored a growing hunger to settle the score with the bastard-in-blue.

  And after speaking with Shiyuan on the matter, it seemed more than a little likely that she would get the chance to do precisely that sooner than she would have liked.

  The crate jostled suddenly, and an external gravity source suddenly pulled her to the left side of the rectangular crate. She rolled slowly as the crate swung around, apparently having been collected by one of the cargo bay’s semi-automated machines in order to be processed.

  She waited patiently and a few minutes later, just as scheduled, she heard a peculiarly-timed tap-tap-tap repeat four times on the side of the crate, prompting her to exhale sharply and release the crate’s inner lock.

  The door swung open and she rolled out, finding herself in a small alcove adjacent to the station’s primary cargo bay. Standing beside her was a man wearing the uniform of a security guard, and he quickly proffered a small parcel.

  “It’s all there,” he said anxiously, his eyes flitting left and right. He looked to her like a hunted rabbit might look, and she glowered at him before inspecting the flat, six inch square parcel and finding everything in order. “Are we green?” he asked, his voice rising in timbre as his nerves appeared to win the battle with his wits.

  “Super green,” she grunted, repeating the code phrase as instructed as she slipped out of her body glove. Unlike many of her female shipmates, she had no qualms about doffing her duds in public. She was proud of her body—and, perhaps as importantly, she was more than capable of delivering a retributive strike against any would-be wise-crackers.

  “Good,” he looked around nervously, his eyes briefly snagging on her naked, muscular body as she extricated herself from the suit, “you’ll have to wait here for another,” he checked his wrist-link while she did likewise with the compact unit included in the parcel, “twenty four seconds. The blinking yellow light on the far side of the cargo bay will go out then, and then you’ll have twelve seconds to get out of the bay before the security monitors resume.”

  “Thirteen seconds left,” she synchronized her wrist-link after affixing it to her forearm. “Walk with me to the door, then get lost,” she grunted after massaging her jaw-line, where the head bag had likely made a faint, red line after being in place for so many hours.

  “Of course,” he gushed, and a few seconds later the blinking yellow light did indeed go dark. They moved out, side-by-side, and made their way to the cargo bay’s entrance. She swiped her credentialed wrist-link across the access panel built into the heavy blast door’s frame, and the door slowly slid aside to reveal a long, segmented corridor beyond.

  She nodded curtly to the security guard—who apparently had received a bribe equivalent to three years’ salary in order to smuggle her onto the high-security station—and strode purposefully down the corridor. The door slid shut behind her two seconds before her wrist-link chimed, indicating that the cargo bay’s internal security feeds had resumed their watchful vigil.

  The corridor stretched straight ahead for fifty two meters, terminating at yet another set of heavy blast-rated doors like those found on most warships. She swiped her credentialed wrist-link—the only article of ‘clothing’ remaining on her body—across the panel and, to her measured relief, the door slid open to reveal a relatively dark intersection on the other side.

  She stepped into the intersection, glancing left and right to check for active patrols before moving forward to the improbable backside of a waterfall which—equally improbably—made almost no sound as it slid into the pool below.

  She could see faint outlines of people through the distorted wall of water in front of her, and drew a sharp breath before slipping into the water behind the fall and swimming out into the pool.

  The feel of the thermally-regulated water against her sweaty skin was luxurious, and for a brief moment she indulged in the sensation. Shiyuan had explained the vagaries of how the water in this particular pool was treated with surfactants, various salts, and other processes which made it feel unlike anything else she had experienced, and his description had failed to do the sensation justice.

  She swam underwater at full speed, breast-stroking her way across the vast, artificial pool until her lungs demanded fresh air.

  Driving as hard as she could with her limbs, she adjusted her angle and breached the surface of the water at full speed. Due to the relatively low gravity aboard the station, she easily cleared the surface of the water and, even before she splashed back down into the water, she heard a small chorus of applause from nearby.

  After re-orienting herself—and re-focusing on the task at hand—she pushed her head up out of the water and sighted in on the nearby spectators.

  Most of them seemed to be perfect physical specimens. Their geometric symmetry was matched only by the utter lack of blemishes or other ‘defects’ which, as far as Lu Bu was concerned, were more helpful than harmful in establishing one’s personal identity.

  Lu Bu’s own genome had been cut down, re-written, and subsequently edited so many times prior to her conception that—according to every medical text she had referenced—she was only barely human in any sense of the word. Her genes had been flushed of what many considered to be ‘junk’ or superfluous sequences in an effort to create a perfect soldier, and any reasonable analysis of the final product would conclude those efforts had essentially succeeded.

  Her own physical proportions were therefore hand-sculpted, one might say, to better facilitate her performance on the battlefield. But looking at the small group of nearby swimmers, half of whom lounged decoratively—and just as nakedly—on a floating platform, she could not help but think humanity had erred in seeking such superficial physical perfection.

  The faces which looked back at her seemed to combine the worst elements of vanity, of smugness and, perhaps worst of all, of artificiality. Their expressions were so perfect they might have been painted on by master artists; their postures mirrored only in the finest sculptures; and their eyes—their eyes—were nearly devoid of genuine humanity.

  “Come hither!” one of them called out melodiously after making eye contact. His voice was every bit as perfect as his washboard abs, and his smile was as that of a fashion mannequin. “We would speak with thee!”

  “Oh, come now, Percival,” a woman elbowed his ribs with mock joviality, “dispense with the archeo-speech. Please,” the woman beckoned after making the perfunctory social display, “join us.”

  Lu Bu kept her features neutral as she swam over to them, taking note that not a single scar was visible on the assemblage of bared flesh before her—hardly a good thing, to her mind. More so even than blemishes, one’s scars told a tale of her life more honestly and completely than she likely ever would—or could—with words. That these people bore none suggested a combination of vanity and inactivity—both of which disgusted her at a fundamental level.

  Percival, who had been draped across an odd, pear-shaped piece of furniture aboard the floating platform, extended a hand which Lu Bu eschewed in favor of vaulting herself up and out of the pool under her own power.

  Once her feet were on the platform, she looked around and took in the admittedly breathtaking sight of the so-called ‘Paradise Station’s interior.

  The cavernous chamber around her was fully five miles in diameter, and it was—according to Shiyuan—a geometrically perfect sphere down to a ludicrous degree of precision. Carved into the now-hollow core of a dense asteroid that had previously been towed into dark, void space, Paradise Station was a retreat for the rich, the famous, the influential and, now—at least temporarily—to a relatively blunt instrument like Lu Bu.

&
nbsp; She looked around the inner surface of the spherical chamber, seeing no fewer than two hundred individuated ‘resorts’ situated in seemingly random arrangements. Many had great pools like this one, but others had artificial terrain such as cliffs, miniature mountains—one even had something approximating a volcano for reasons which eluded Lu Bu—and a whole host of other individuated regions.

  The artificial gravity of the station was—again, according to Shiyuan—so perfect that one could not detect variances from one zone to another with even the most precise mobile instrumentation. It was—again, if the potato-faced Operator was to believe—programmed to ‘pulse’ rhythmically, increasing and decreasing its pull in such a way as to stimulate the unconscious mind and encourage occupants to indulge their more primitive urges.

  Lu Bu felt no such effect—or at least she thought she felt none—but the very idea that an entire colony-sized ‘retreat’ could be so ludicrously designed was an affront to her way of thinking.

  She saw what looked like a hover-boarder skimming along the surface of the pool not far away, and while she watched his board surged upward into the air above the water to make for the spherical structure floating serenely at the very center of the cavernous chamber.

  That structure, which was not attached to the inner surface of the cavern in any physical way, maintained its central position by manipulating the complex interwoven gravity fields created by the station’s myriad grav-generators. A continuous stream of marquees circled the spherical structure, and the hover-boarder flew straight ‘up’ toward the ‘floating’ platform at the very heart of Paradise Station.