The Middle Road (Spineward Sectors: Middleton's Pride Book 7)

by Caleb Wachter

  Middleton mulled this information over for a few seconds. “First, I want the grav-plate controls to be gone over with a fine-toothed-comb,” he said severely. “The last thing I want to do is go from ‘bad’ to ‘worse’ when it comes to our grav-plate performance in combat. I expect you’ll need to enlist Kongming since he’s most familiar with the Ancient neural tissue embedded in this ship’s virtual systems.”

  “You got it, Cap,” Garibaldi nodded.

  “Second,” Middleton continued, pointing at Mikey, “I want you to learn everything you can about this previously theoretical technology from whoever in the fleet might have information about it. If things break like I’m anticipating they will, we’re going to have to re-assign some of our Engineering crew to other commands in a few weeks.”

  “But Capt—“ Mikey made to object, just as Middleton had expected.

  “No protests, Chief,” Middleton interrupted. “We’re already stretched thin but we’re going to have to get a lot thinner before this is over. Collect and collate as much data about this technology as you can before we have to split up your team.”

  Mikey sighed irritably, “Fine.”

  “And third,” Middleton finished, tapping Wojchouski on the shoulder with the data slate containing his findings, “well done, gentlemen. I’ll review this and bring any questions I come up with your way, Wojo.”

  Wojchouski grinned, “Thank you, sir.”

  With that, Middleton returned to his office where he set about the unenviable task of poring over his engineers’ findings for ten nearly-uninterrupted hours before he finally concurred with their conclusion.

  “Lieutenant Commander Ricci,” Middleton greeted after finishing his review of Wojo’s report and then grabbing a bite in the makeshift mess hall.

  “Commander Middleton,” Ricci acknowledged, standing from her bunk.

  “First, we should address any official grievances you might have on behalf of your people,” Middleton said, bringing a pair of folding chairs into the room and offering her one while seating himself on the other.

  Ricci accepted the seat stiffly and placed it before herself without sitting down. “Thirty six of my people have died since coming into your custody,” she said grimly.

  “I’ve seen the reports,” Middleton nodded. “But those deaths were all due to injuries sustained during the battle. Our medical facilities are limited here, and unless you can suggest a place to transfer your wounded I’m afraid we’re at an impasse on that front.”

  Ricci’s eyes narrowed, “The apes have discriminated against my people by prioritizing their own wounded over ours—even when their wounds are less serious than those of my people.”

  “I’m not going to pretend this is an ideal situation, Commander,” Middleton said flatly, “so I suggest we be as realistic as possible in addressing it.”

  Ricci seemed ready to argue, but she surprisingly conceded the point and grudgingly sat down in the chair now opposite Middleton’s. “I’ll admit that nothing that has happened to my people since our surrender has constituted war crimes.”

  “That’s a start,” Middleton said gratefully, “but it’s obviously not enough.” That seemed to surprise Ricci, which only served to irritate Middleton as he leaned forward, “Look, I don’t hold any of your peoples’ actions in the battle against you. Neither does my crew. We’re all warriors here; sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. What I’m interested in doing now is getting your people back to where they belong. But that’s going to be…problematic.”

  Ricci schooled her features, “You don’t intend to return us to the Empire?”

  Middleton splayed his hands, “If you can give me the location of a neutral drop-off site, I’d be happy to oblige you by putting you and your people there. But our luck in dealing with Imperial officers has been…well, let’s just say we’re not about to trust them to keep to their word. So a direct exchange is out of the question.”

  Ricci cocked her head, “Who are you people?”

  “We’re just soldiers, like you, who are a long way from home—like you—and are trying to do the right thing,” Middleton said heavily.

  “’The right thing’?” Ricci repeated. “How can you think that helping these aliens is ‘the right thing’?”

  “I’m a newcomer to this patch of space, Commander,” Middleton leaned forward intently, “but when I see Imperial Task Forces descend on entire star systems with the stated intention of imposing ‘compliance’ with Imperial Law, I tend to take the side of the defenders over the obvious aggressors.”

  “Aggressors?” Ricci recoiled in disbelief. “The Imperial Fleet is here to stabilize the region and remove the unsavory elements which have preyed on the innocent inhabitants out here! If we were here to ‘aggress’ against the Gorgon Sectors, would we have limited our targets to pirate operations and other destabilizing forces while leaving the independent colonies alone?”

  “I can assure you, Commander,” Middleton said, meeting and holding her brown-eyed gaze for several seconds before continuing, “that I would like nothing more than to have a complete picture of what’s happening out here. You’re under no obligation to help me formulate such a picture, and I don’t expect you to agree to any agreement along those lines until you’ve had some time to think about it and consult your fellow Imperials. But I hope that you’ll decide to help shed some light on what’s happening out here in the Gorgon Front. Because frankly, if you don’t, I’ll have to rely on what the apes and cat people say on the matter—and I think we can both agree neither of them can be considered unbiased?”

  “Why wouldn’t I just feed you bad information?” she asked stiffly.

  “I expect you will,” Middleton shrugged. “I’m not going to hold that against you either; I’d rather you give me a bag full of lies than nothing at all. At the very least the process of sifting through a pile of lies would help inform my opinion of the character of the people standing on your side of the battle lines out here.”

  She scoffed and the barest hint of a smile played at the corners of her mouth. “Let me return to my people and we’ll discuss the situation.”

  “How long will you need?” Middleton asked, standing from the chair.

  “I’ll need a few days at the very least,” she said firmly. “And I’ll need to have access to about twenty of my fellow officers.”

  “I’ll return you to the designated prison ship after the next jump,” he agreed, “and tell the Stalwart to forward your request for a meeting as soon as you make it.”

  “Thank you, Commander,” she said, standing from her own chair.

  Middleton turned to the door and paused pointedly before opening it, “You need to understand that the uplifts are less…tolerant than I am. If you give them even the slightest reason to think you’re fomenting a coordinated breakout—which, again, I would completely understand as a fellow naval officer—they’ll almost certainly opt to ask for my forgiveness rather than my permission when dealing with such a severe threat to their security. Are we clear?”

  Ricci’s eyes hardened, “Locsium.”

  “Good,” Middleton said cheerfully, opening the door and adding, “for what it’s worth, I hope we can work together. Nothing would make me happier than to improve my understanding of what is going on out here—and I suspect nothing would make you happier than being freed from the uplifts’ brig.”

  He turned and left the Lieutenant Commander to ponder the matter. The truth was he didn’t anticipate her reply to be a prompt one, but he had been serious when asking for her help in understanding what was happening out here in the Gorgon Front.

  Nothing irked a Tactical Officer more than unknown variables, and right now his mental plotter was chock full of them.

  Chapter VI: A Bug’s Life

  “This is remarkable,” Trixie said in unmasked wonderment as she stared at the badly-damaged ‘skull’ of the so-called Brain Bug. “It looks like each of these neural lobes are linked by a system vaguely sim
ilar to the human corpus callosum, but there are structures that look like cut-outs…or disconnects. See?” she said, prompting Kongming to look at the indicated portion of the creature’s head.

  Kongming glanced at the scanner she was using and saw what she meant. “It seems as though this creature’s neural lobes have been severed from each other dozens…perhaps hundreds of times,” he said, utterly perplexed by what that might mean. “Somehow this particular nerve bundle can regenerate, but if that is the case then why would the three damaged lobes have not grown back?”

  “Maybe it lacked the necessary nutrients?” Trixie offered.

  “Possibly,” Kongming said dubiously, sparing a glance at the duralloy restraints which kept the creature pinned to the deck. He then returned his attention to modifying the translation device he had constructed in order to communicate with the Prichtac.

  “Why not just use the translator the Prichtac has?” Trixie asked as she made a series of notes in her detailed logs.

  “It does not have an olfactory processing feature,” Kongming explained, having had the same thought. “In fact, it seems the Prichtac’s translator was designed specifically to conduct auditory and visual stimuli into impulses which Prichtac neurophysiology can assimilate—as well as performing the reverse function, obviously.”

  “Obviously,” Trixie agreed.

  “There,” he said, checking the various canisters of pheromones which he had carefully extracted from the Bug’s natural glands. Those pheromones were, if he was correct, the method by which the ‘brain bugs’ would send commands not only to their fellow Bugs aboard the Hive ships, but also how these ‘brain bugs’ manipulated the Hive ships themselves. “I believe we are ready for our first attempt at two-way communication.”

  “This is so exciting!” Trixie squealed. “Just let me make sure all of the recording equipment is ready.”

  “You should also utilize the head bag,” Kongming suggested, prompting Trixie to somewhat clumsily don the sealed barrier. “I would not wish for you to be injured by the various compounds we are about to release in an attempt to communicate with this sentient.”

  “Ready,” Trixie gave him the ‘thumbs up’ before fixing her eyes on the recording equipment.

  “Ok,” Kongming breathed, performing a last-second check of the pheromone misting system before activating the device, “here we go.” He waited for the system to complete its boot-up cycle—and was immeasurably grateful that he had managed to rig a new main processor which did not require Hansheng to remove his core tactical computer—and when it finished he typed up a message.

  He had spent the past several days coordinating what he heard the Bug ‘say’ with what his instruments detected, and this had drastically cut down on the time needed to calibrate the system. Within a matter of hours, he had managed to tune the system to such a degree that he was actually learning from it rather than simply inputting what he had understood to be the Bug’s meaning.

  The Bug had apparently understood the nature of what they were doing, and had silently cooperated with the extraction of the requisite pheromones—even going so far as to explain what it understood of its own physiology, which was surprisingly simplistic.

  But since the extraction, the Bug had remained completely silent and Kongming had begun to worry about its well-being.

  After composing his message—which said ‘can you understand this message?’—Kongming hesitated before pressing the ‘translate’ icon on the slate he was using as the control interface.

  His nostrils were immediately filled with a dank, moldy smell and Kongming had to fight the urge to sneeze as the Bug stirred.

  “The query is flawed,” the Bug’s ‘voice’ filled Kongming’s head, while the translator’s digital voice echoed, “but the message is comprehensible.”

  Kongming, though he had encountered many incredible and fantastic things since boarding the Pride of Prometheus what seemed like a century ago, felt a rare thrill of excitement at having accomplished something which he suspected no human ever had: two-way communication with a Bug!

  Kongming tried the verbal interface for his translator, saying, “Do you have a name?”

  Again, a puff of repugnant scents wafted into his nostrils and he nearly failed to maintain his composure as the Bug stood to its full, broken-bodied stature as it said, “Does that which you have not seen, cannot truly see, and will never fully know, have a name?”

  Kongming cocked his head, intrigued by the cryptic reply. “Are you saying I can never know you?”

  “No,” the Bug replied, and Kongming felt a measure of vertigo from the odd ‘echo’ effect which filled Kongming’s consciousness as his strange, innate ability to ‘hear’ the Bug conflicted with the translator’s mechanical recitations of its ‘words.’ “But the question itself is invalid; there is no ‘me’; the concept of ‘self’ is an illusion which is better described as ‘perspective’; all that exists is part of a single word spoken at the dawn of creation and creation itself is owed to the existence of a language which can never be fully comprehended by a single perspective. How could a word possibly contemplate the nature of the voice which spoke it? And yet, that is what we seek to do with every moment of these precious, finite perspectives that we call ‘lives.’ Therefore, the question is invalid: I cannot have a name any more than I can have a self.”

  Kongming grinned. Never once in his wildest imaginings had he contemplated having a deeply philosophical discussion with a Bug.

  For a moment, he felt like the young man who had once arrogantly embarked on a crusade to free the people of his birth world from the information-suppressed tyranny of its government: he felt invigorated, purposeful and, most importantly of all, he felt alive.

  Sitting down on the deck, he crossed his legs and recited the ancient words of wisdom which he had learned as a five year old, “Hope and fear are both phantoms that arise from thinking of the self. When we do not see the self as self, what do we have to fear?”

  The Bug recoiled slightly and, much to Kongming’s delight, it then attempted to approximate his posture before saying, “These are the words of Lao Tzu.”

  “They are,” Kongming nodded, having reviewed the Imperial database aboard the yacht—after downloading its entire content into a secure, independent storage unit on the Prejudice—and suspecting that this strange sentient would be familiar with much of its content.

  But there were several truly profound texts which were absent from the yacht’s libraries, and among them was one of the more prevalent works in the early ruminations on the concept of ‘self’ which provided a powerful quote that he suspected would get the Bug’s attention.

  “And I…or ‘this perspective’ has more,” he promised.

  The Bug leaned forward, coming up against its shackles as it did so. Its badly damaged mandibles clacked excitedly as its ‘voice’ filled Kongming’s head, “Please share this new wisdom.”

  “What did you learn?” Captain Middleton asked after Kongming presented his initial impressions of the Bug he had just spent six hours communicating with.

  “A great deal, Captain,” Kongming said eagerly, placing a slate with the full recording of the interview on Captain Middleton’s desk—which also doubled as the conference table where he conducted his closed-door meetings with the feline and ape uplifts. “It seems that several injured Bugs also survived the collision with the Imperial yacht, and that they too were left behind when the rest of the uninjured Bugs were transferred to functional Hive ships.”

  “There were more Bugs there?” Middleton asked with apparent skepticism.

  “None living,” Kongming assured him. “Their injuries and the general lack of supplies saw their numbers dwindle until, approximately ten years after the collision, only this last specimen remained.”

  “Does this…specimen have a name?” Middleton asked.

  “It did not,” Kongming shook his head. “It seems that one of its many fascinating epiphanies was to wholly reje
ct the notion of individuality—or ‘self,’ as most of us think of the concept—and therefore rejected my initial attempts to confer an individual name upon it.”

  “But you somehow convinced it to take a name?”

  “Indeed,” Kongming said proudly. “After nearly an hour of philosophical discourse, including a discussion of the works of Nietzsche, Lao Tzu, Jesus, both Harris’s and a dozen other influential thinkers from human history, I managed to persuade it to take the name ‘Embrace the Loving Abyss’—but we may refer to it as ‘Abyss’ in any future dialogues.”

  “I’m not exactly fond of your name choice, Kongming,” Captain Middleton said darkly.

  “I did not choose it,” Kongming explained, “it was a combination of several primary philosophies which all addressed the notion of self—“

  Captain Middleton held up a hand, “I get it, but it’s choice of name doesn’t exactly instill me with much confidence that we were right to keep it alive.”

  “Oh, but Captain,” Kongming said excitedly, “you must understand: Abyss spent twenty years in absolute solitude, with the continuous application of several times as much brainpower as any human I have ever met. He began with nothing resembling a formal education, and now—“

  “Wait,” Middleton interrupted, “you said ‘he’?”

  Kongming nodded eagerly, “Yes! The majority of Bugs are not sexually dimorphic—in fact the only members of Bug ‘society,’ as we might call it, which are sexually dimorphic are the Queens and the Directors, which are female and male respectively.”

  “So…that makes this one a ‘Director’?”

  “Yes!” Kongming declared. “I have not ascertained the entirety of the details regarding Bug procreation, but I intend to delve into that subject soon—“