Lu Bu reached out and snatched it from the doctor, only realizing she had done so in anger after already taking it in her hands. She closed her eyes and took a deep, calming breath as she set the slate down and bowed her head in apology. “I am sorry, Doctor.”
“Don’t worry about it,” the other woman said warmly. “I couldn’t find the original language version in the ship’s library,” she said apologetically with a shake of her head. “I suppose these military types don’t much care for the classics.”
Lu Bu silently reprimanded herself for her outburst before activating the slate and finding herself confused for several moments before realizing what she held in her hands and gasping involuntarily. “Doctor!” she exclaimed, her mood having reversed almost instantly. “Thank you!”
“It was nothing,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand, “but that book is really quite large; it will probably take you a few months to finish it, especially since it’s not in your native language.”
Lu Bu felt herself almost trembling with excitement. She could not believe that she actually had a copy of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, by Luo Guanzhong, right there in her hands! This book had caused more upheaval and controversy on her world than any other, and was one of only one hundred eight works to have been officially banned by her government for its supposedly discordant effect on those who read it.
She had actually chosen her own name from the pages of that book, since bits and pieces of the book’s content had been whispered among those of her generation, and Lu Bu sounded like someone with whom she could identify. But other than being a legendary warrior with a fiery temper, she knew very little about the man who had been named Lu Bu—a situation she was now determined, and able, to remedy!
“Thank you, Doctor!” she gushed as she stood from the table with every intention of returning to her bunk so she could begin reading.
“Not so fast,” Doctor Middleton said with obvious amusement. “I’d like to run another scan of your shoulder while I’ve got you.”
“Of course,” Lu Bu nodded her head vigorously. She had never felt this excited in her entire life, and it was all she could do to keep from shrieking like one of those ridiculous girls attending a popular music concert.
Feeling as though she was floating on a cloud, Lu Bu followed the doctor to the sickbay and flipped through the foreword of the book as she walked, stopping in her tracks at the first line and gaping in awe as she felt a chill wash over her body. “Long divided, must unite,” she muttered under her breath, “long united…must divide…”
Those four words, spoken in two different arrangements, struck a chord somewhere deep within her and she began to understand why this book had been outlawed.
She continued reading and barely noticed as she entered the sickbay, actually bumping into Doctor Middleton’s back as the other woman had inexplicably stopped in her tracks just inside the door.
“Why did you take him out of the chamber?” Doctor Middleton asked irritably. “I haven’t even been gone twenty minutes.”
The Lancer shrugged his shoulders as he handed her the data slate. “He said he was finished, so your assistant opened the chamber.”
The doctor scowled and Lu Bu looked up from her slate to see Doctor Middleton’s eyebrows rise in unison as she flipped through the slate.
“Is there anything else I can do for you, Doctor?” the young man asked respectfully, and Lu Bu saw that his hands were once again encased in the strange gauntlet-like bindings.
Doctor Middleton was silent for several moments as she reviewed the slate’s contents before shaking her head. “I suppose not,” she said as she gave the boy an appraising look which put Lu Bu on her guard. “You can return him to his…cell,” she said with a wave to the Lancers as her eyes returned to the slate.
“Thank you, Doctor,” the Lancer said before turning to the boy. “Come on,” he said, gesturing to the door, and the young man did as he was bidden. As he passed Lu Bu, the prisoner gave her a completely unsolicited wink, which only served to infuriate her.
Had it not been for the precious contents of the data slate she held in her hands, she might have smashed it over his presumptuous head.
Chapter XVII: Disappointment
“We’ve completed our scans of the planet, Captain, and the engineering teams have finished dismantling the communications equipment located on the colony,” Lieutenant Commander Jersey reported in his gravelly voice. “The orbital com-satellite has also been retrieved and is now stowed in the main cargo bay, per your orders.”
“Thank you, XO,” Middleton said with a curt nod. It had been four days since their arrival in-system and subsequent attack by the enemy vessel, and Captain Middleton was ready to resume his duties. “Engineering,” he turned fractionally toward the crewman Garibaldi had assigned to the bridge, “prepare for disembarkation. We’ll make for the edge of the system before point transferring out of here.”
“Yes, Captain,” reported the young woman before relaying his orders.
“What’s our destination, Captain?” Jersey asked.
Middleton made a last-minute check of his itinerary before forwarding it to the Navigator’s console. “Our mission is to patrol the border and seek out threats to Confederated interests,” he said in a slightly raised voice. “I’d say we’ve done a barely passable job of the first, and only slightly better at the second,” he said, fighting the bitterness which sought to suffuse his voice, “so it’s time we stopped moving around aimlessly like traffic enforcers and started acting like the honest-to-Murphy MSP that we are.” The corner of his mouth turned up in a smirk as he looked around the bridge at the expectant faces of his crew, “We’re going on a hunt.”
“Orders received, Captain,” the Navigator reported. “Plotting our jump now.”
“Good to hear, Captain,” Jersey said gruffly before turning to the rest of the bridge. “Secure from station-keeping and prepare to disembark!” he barked, a tad too loudly for Middleton’s liking but he made no mention of it when he saw the crew snap to their duties with a noticeably more confident spring in their strides.
“Comm.,” Middleton turned to Ensign Jardine, “I need you to go down to the cargo bay and take a look at this ‘colony’s’ recovered satellite.”
Jardine stood from his station with a faint look of confusion. “What am I looking for, Captain?” he asked professionally.
“Anything that can help this ship,” Middleton replied. “Our main comm. transmitter burned out when we used it to jam those Starfires; I want you to take a good, hard look at the specs of whatever’s there. That gear might be of just a little help, or it might be a lot; either way you can pull whatever personnel you need for help, including department heads.”
“Yes, Captain,” Jardine reported before making his way off the bridge as a petty officer took over at Comm. Middleton knew he needed to make a full round of field promotions to better establish the chain of command aboard the ship, and he had been procrastinating for too long on that front. But he needed to focus his efforts where they could do the most good, and right now that was precisely what he aimed to do.
“Make for the hyper limit, Commander,” Middleton said as he stood from his command chair. “You have the conn.”
“Sir,” Jersey responded with a curt nod as he surveyed the bridge crew at work with barely-concealed disappointment. The crew’s lack of operational discipline and efficiency was certainly an issue, but to the Captain’s mind it was too far down the list to gain any measure of priority. Lieutenant Commander Jersey, however, would almost certainly take a different view of the matter and begin work at once to remedy that particular shortcoming.
Middleton made his way into his ready room to review some reports which had arrived earlier in the day—one of which regarded the young Mr. Fei Long down in the brig.
After sitting down, he activated the com-link to sickbay and Jo answered in her usual, less-than-punctual manner. “Sickbay here,” she said, for th
e first time sounding reasonably comfortable in doing so.
“I was just about to review Fei Long’s examination results,” Middleton said, “would you care to join me?”
Jo smirked slightly but nodded. “I think that might be wise,” she agreed.
“I’ll be in my ready room,” he said before deactivating the link and perusing the first portion of the report. A few minutes later, the door chimed and he beckoned, “Enter.”
The doctor entered the room and sat down across from the captain, who had just finished the section regarding Fei Long’s ‘kill pill,’ which appeared to be undeniably real.
“Ok,” Middleton said, placing the slate on the desk before himself and clasping his hands, “first things first: tell me about the kill pill.”
“That term is offensive and inaccurate,” she snorted.
Middleton held up a hand haltingly. “It’s just military short-hand,” he said by way of apology. “Please, just tell me what you know about it.”
She leaned forward and took the slate from beneath his hands and opened a series of images before handing it back to him. “It’s mostly organic,” she explained, “and by ‘mostly,’ I mean basically everything but the trigger mechanism. There are miniscule quantities of chemicals which, when combined, will cause an explosion that will cause catastrophic damage to the vasculature of both his low- and mid-brain regions. Without surgical intervention within minutes he would die from intracranial hemorrhage, and even with the surgery the insult to his brain stem would almost certainly paralyze him in a best-case scenario, and destroy his autonomic functionality completely in a worst-case scenario.”
“So, we’re talking about complete brain death either way?” Middleton confirmed.
“Barring extreme luck, yes,” the doctor replied, and Captain Middleton flashed back to when his previous doctor had used those same words a few hours before his own death due to Captain Raubach’s bio-weapon.
Shaking the image of the old doctor’s face from his mind, Middleton leaned back in his chair. “Can it be disarmed?”
Jo shook her head slightly. “It’s possible,” she allowed, “but incredibly risky, assuming you’re talking about removing the micro-nodules containing the explosive components. Honestly, even with a full, Grade One neurosurgical suite I wouldn’t give him better than a thirty percent chance of survival. Those chemicals are just too sensitive, and the cystic nodules they’re encased in are specifically designed to be tamper-proof.”
Had Tim Middleton not lived with Jo for half a decade, he would have let the matter rest at that. But he saw a familiar look in her eye that told him she was holding something back. “But?” he prompted.
“But,” she breathed a hissing sigh through gritted teeth, “I think I might be able to deactivate the triggering mechanism non-invasively. It’s still risky, but if it works then it should decrease the risk of injury, either by accidental or intentional activation.”
“What do you need?” he asked.
“I’ve got most of what I need in sickbay,” Jo replied with a firm shake of her head. “If Engineering can re-wire the imaging suite in sickbay, I can interrupt the trigger’s signal using the bio-scanner set on maximum for a few seconds while I trigger the device electrically. With the scanner’s current wiring we might cause damage to the imaging matrix, but the modifications should only take a few hours.”
“Trigger it electrically?” Middleton repeated, referring to her plan rather than the specifics of modifying the imaging scanner. He had helped her study for many of her different courses during college, but unlike the rest of the things which found themselves permanent housing in his memory warehouse, he had allowed the late-night details of neurobiology to evacuate the premises after his wife had done likewise.
“The trigger detects activity in a few portions of his high brain,” she explained. “Truth be told, I’m amazed it hasn’t gone off accidentally since what constitutes a lie is largely debatable—even within a person’s own consciousness—and measuring electrical impulses so crudely can’t hope to guarantee success.”
“They are extraordinary measures,” Middleton agreed, finding that even he was more than a little unnerved by the boy’s situation.
“Extraordinary measures?” she scoffed. “Hardly; try barbaric,” she quipped as she opened the PSI results on the data slate before handing it back to him, “but everything else about that boy is extraordinary. He pegged the exam right down the line on everything except the social measures.” She snickered softly as she shook her head in wonderment, “In that regard, he’s actually a fairly normal sixteen year old boy. But his psychological makeup and intellectual capability are literally off the charts, which places him at least five standard deviations above the norm; even you and I are only in the three deviation range in total brainpower, and we were both first in our respective classes nearly every year.”
Captain Middleton found himself almost grinning at her observation that he was fairly normal for a teenage boy, but he thought it best if he kept his reason for doing so to himself. Normal, indeed, he thought with a chuckle. “So he’s prodigal,” Middleton confirmed.
Jo nodded. “Absolutely; even if he’s only five deviations above the norm in brainpower,” she said pointedly, “he’s one in roughly four million. If he’s six deviations above, it’s closer to one in a billion. This boy should have an entire lab built around him so he can work on improving information processing, advancing medical science, or developing that elusive ‘quantum conversion theory’ everyone’s raved about for the last fifty years.”
Middleton nodded as he mulled the situation over, having seen that Fei Long’s apparent aptitudes lay in the fields of information processing and particle theory. “Still,” he said as he tapped his chin thoughtfully, “he was in a prison facility, and his government surreptitiously foisted off on us under false pretenses. If that’s not cause for concern…” he trailed off into silence.
Jo gave him an incredulous look. “That boy’s perception of reality is so different from ours that it’s no wonder he got himself into trouble—”
“Did he say what his crime was?” Middleton interrupted as he looked down and typed out a message on the data slate, which after he was finished he slid across the desk toward her.
Jo shook her head after a moment’s pause as she ignored the slate, “Why haven’t you asked him?”
The captain shrugged, “I doubted I could trust anything he said until now. But with you to vouch for his honesty—“
Jo bolted to her feet, “Is that what this was about?!”
“Doctor—“
“No, Tim,” she snapped, pointing an accusing finger at him, “you tell me right now if that was why you called me up here, or Murphy help me I’m getting off this ship at the next stop!”
“Doctor,” he repeated calmly, “I don’t have the luxury of taking the moral high ground. Nearly five hundred people serve aboard this ship, and their safety is one of my highest concerns; I can’t allow my own private reservations to interfere with my doing what’s best for this ship, its mission, or its crew. Until I’m recalled, I’m going to do everything in my power to carry out my mission—including utilizing strategic advantages which allow for increased clarity.”
She stood there gape-mouthed at him as he pointed at the data slate. “Then I’m done,” she said hollowly. “Find yourself a new doctor.”
He actually felt a twinge of guilt at having played the scene out this way, but it was important for him to know how far she would go—or not go—and he now had his answer. “You’re a guest aboard this ship, Doctor,” Captain Middleton said as he stood to his feet. “You’re free to come and go as you please, and that would remain the case even if you weren’t the ship’s acting Chief Medical Officer. But before you make that decision, I have one request to ask,” he said with a pointed look at the data slate.
She shook her head adamantly. “No,” she refused, “I’m done, Tim; you’ll need to speak with Doctor Cho
from now on. The military has taken too much of what I love already—I’m not giving it another instant of my life.”
She turned to leave the room, and Tim Middleton cleared his throat. To his pleasant surprise, she actually did stop—but she pointedly kept her back to him.
Scooping up the data slate, he made his way to her side and offered it to her. “One last request,” he said, knowing that the Pride of Prometheus would be worse for not having her aboard, “and if you still want to leave, I’ll be sure we put in somewhere safe as soon as possible so you can get back to your life.”
Jo sliced a cold, piercing look over at him before glancing down at the data slate. Shaking her head, she took the slate and stuffed it into a pocket. “I’m beyond disappointed in you, Tim,” she said coldly, “you’re nothing like the man I once knew.”
With that, she made her way out of the ready room and left him alone. He knew that she had spoken truly, even if her reasons for doing so might have been…misguided. But any change in attitude or life view—often for the bitter, the resentful, or worst of all, the apathetic—was the non-negotiable price of experience.
And he paid it gladly.
Chapter XVIII: Warmer…
The Pride of Prometheus completed two more jumps over the course of the following week, encountering nothing out of the ordinary—including no sign of the enemy vessel they were pursuing. Seconds after making their third jump, the main viewer’s tactical readout lit up like petroleum under a plasma torch.
“Captain, I’m reading four vessels in orbit of the fourth planet,” the Sensors operator reported promptly.
“Are they squawking IDs?” Jersey demanded, taking a step toward the man at Sensors. Middleton had to admire the way the newly made Lieutenant Commander was filling the role of XO—at least, so far.
“Affirmative, Commander,” the man replied. “I’m reading…System Defense Force signatures on one of the four vessels but nothing on the other three.”
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