Up The Middle (Spineward Sectors: Middleton's Pride Book 2)

by Caleb Wachter

  “Help me remove the striped panels!” he snapped irritably as he attempted, and failed, to do so for himself. The act required two working hands, and without a word Kratos moved to assist the technician while Lu Bu did likewise for the panels on the opposite side of the reactor.

  There were eight panels in all, and at each one was a small interface panel that made absolutely no sense to Lu Bu. But the technician went to work intently as he adjusted the controls manually, sweat profusely running down his forehead as he did so. He moved from panel to panel, re-checking his work several times, but after no more than two minutes he stood and said in an unsteady voice, “We need to power it down by restricting the flow of H3 so the containment field can deal with all the free protons. If we don’t power it down, we have less than three minutes before containment fails—and then the bunker shields go down,” he added with a surprisingly defiant look given his physical condition.

  Lu Bu was hesitant, “You can power down and not lose bunker shields?”

  The technician nodded. “I’ll deal with the step-down process here with…” he gave a wary glance to Kratos as he handed his keycard to Lu Bu, “his help. Take my keycard and go to the main relay room. You must manually deactivate every single breaker except the ones marked ‘Main-7/9’ and ‘TAUM-01.’ Do you understand?”

  “Main-7/9 and TAUM-01,” Lu Bu repeated quickly.

  The technician nodded as he swayed unsteadily. “Go; the sooner you turn off the breakers the faster we can power down this reactor.”

  Lu Bu took off toward a doorway which was only barely large enough for her to squeeze her power-armored bulk through. Soon enough she found herself at a central control room—a room which held the bodies of three operators who had apparently been killed by the droids.

  There was a large, heavy security door on the far side of the room, and it appeared that the droids had attempted to force the security door open but had failed. Blaster scorch marks ringed the door’s thick, duralloy frame, but the keycard interface was thankfully undamaged. She slid the technician’s card into the slot and the red lights above the door switched to green.

  The door began to open, but it jammed no more than halfway through its motion. If Lu Bu had been unarmored it would have been a small matter to squeeze through the narrow gap, but in her power armor it was impossible to do so. She reinserted the keycard, hoping it would restart the cycle, but the lights merely flashed red briefly before returning to green.

  Growling with frustration, Lu Bu wedged her armored shoulder against the door’s frame and placed her gauntleted hands against the door before pressing with her power-assisted arms against the stubborn door. For several seconds nothing happened, and she redoubled her efforts while giving verbal release to the sensation of helplessness she felt in that moment. If she did not open the door then thousands of civilians—including children—would be exposed to the droids who were no doubt attempting to break past the city’s bunker shielded emergency retreat.

  Just when she thought she would have to use her blaster rifle on the door—since stripping out of the power armor would require more time than she thought she had—the reinforced door slid open a few more inches before noisily grinding to a halt at about three quarters open.

  But that was enough for her to squeeze her armored body through the opening and, once inside the apparently frigid chamber beyond, it was painfully obvious even to a complete non-engineer where the power breakers were located. Each one had a large, manual lever and the majority of those levers were flipped up, including the two she had been instructed to leave on.

  Lu Bu began slamming the arms down in what seemed a reasonable sequence: those nearest the door first and working her way to the far side of the room.

  It took her nearly a minute, but she finally did manage to deactivate all but the two breakers the technician had indicated. When she was finished, she returned to the reactor chamber and found the technician sitting down with his head between his knees.

  “Report!” she barked, and Kratos looked up at her before nodding.

  “He said he is finished,” the one-eyed Tracto-an replied, and Lu Bu felt a wave of relief wash over herself. Her knees became unsteady, and for a moment she wanted to shout in joyous exaltation…but then she remembered that Homer had died not ten minutes earlier.

  He had been under her command, and the realization that she had led a man to his death was so shocking to her that she had to brace herself against a nearby rail for fear of toppling in her armor. Her power-assisted gauntlet deformed the rail significantly as she gripped it for stability, and Kratos stood from the technician’s side before making his way over to her. He stood silently before her for several minutes while tears streamed down Lu Bu’s face as she came to grips with the loss of a teammate who had followed her into battle.

  “Do not mourn him that way,” Kratos said in his deep, grating voice, and Lu Bu shot him a hard look. But what she saw in the other man’s eye, even looking through his armored visor, made her refrain from a scathing reply. There was resolve in his expression as well as pride, but somewhere behind all of that was a degree of sympathy she had never expected to see in Kratos’ scarred, aged features. “Homer died as his people believe they are meant to die: in battle on the River of Stars. You dishonor him by regretting that death.”

  “You say ‘his people’,” Lu Bu said with more than passing interest as she felt her spine stiffen at the implication that she would dishonor a fallen warrior who had fought at her side. “You mean your people.”

  Kratos straightened himself and shook his head. “No…not my people.” He turned and made his way to the main entry to the room, and Lu Bu felt that the waves of vertigo had relented and she was no longer weak in the knees.

  “Kratos,” she called out, and the armored man turned to face her, “bring Homer here. Then we must secure this facility.”

  Kratos nodded curtly, “It will be done.”

  Chapter XV: Hot Pursuit

  “Status of the destroyer?” Middleton requested for at least the tenth time during the last hour.

  “Its engines are still driving at…68%, Captain,” the young, Tracto-an Sensor operator reported hesitantly, “we continue to gain on them.”

  “Not quickly enough,” Middleton said dourly. It seemed he no longer had any choice in the matter, so he turned to his new Tactical Officer. “Can your gunships close the distance and make an attack run on that thing to damage its engines?”

  Toto’s chest swelled as his lips peeled back to reveal his teeth, and the Sundered replied, “Yes.”

  Middleton nodded. “Do it,” he ordered, reluctantly asking the Sundered to place his family’s more-or-less private assets in harm’s way.

  The lights along the back of Toto’s skull began to dance at least ten times faster than they had done a few moments earlier, and the tactical readout showed the pair of gunships detaching from the Pride’s outer hull before speeding off toward the target vessel. They were considerably quicker than the Pride of Prometheus, and Middleton suspected that they were even faster than the Droid Destroyer. However, the gunships used primitive—yet extremely powerful—rocket boosters which had a limited fuel supply. This made their deployment risky at long ranges, and Middleton had calculated the destroyer was already at the precise limit of the gunships’ deployable range.

  The Sundered craft burned their engines at full as they rocketed toward their quarry, and Toto reported, “The gunships will deplete fuel three minutes after intercept.”

  “Understood,” Middleton acknowledged, “we’ll pick them up after we’ve finished the destroyer off. Engineering,” he continued, “I need more out of the engines.”

  “If there was one word I’d eliminate from the Captain’s vocabulary,” Chief Garibaldi’s voice replied immediately over the chair’s com-link, “it’s ‘more.’ We can give you a six minute burst of an extra ten percent, but once that’s done we’ll have to back off to eighty percent—max—for an hour. These
heat sinks are barely holding together as it is, Captain.”

  “Noted,” Middleton said gratingly. He knew that Garibaldi would push the ship as far as could reasonably be expected, but Middleton had learned that he wasn’t exactly a reasonable man. Still, a short burst may prove instrumental in heading the droid destroyer off before it could make the hyper limit. Even with Toto’s gunships harrying it for several minutes, it was going to be a close affair for the Pride to neutralize—or destroy—the enemy ship before that could happen.

  The bridge crew waited as Toto’s gunships tore through the space between the Pride and the enemy destroyer, until a series of tactical blips on the main view screen suggested the small craft had begun firing on their quarry.

  The enemy destroyer’s engine output dipped briefly before recovering, and a short burst of counter-fire erupted from the droid vessel’s weaponry.

  “She’s slewing to fire on the gunships with her quarter-facing weaponry,” Sarkozi reported, and a moment later the droid vessel’s vector adjusted to confirm her declaration.

  “Every little bit helps,” Middleton said under his breath as the estimated fuel supply indicators on the gunships began flashing red, indicating they were critically low. “Don’t leave your ships defenseless, Tactical,” Middleton ordered the Sundered.

  “They will survive,” the uplift rumbled as his skull’s implants flashed furiously in unison with another series of attacks. Incredibly, Toto continued to work the controls of his Tactical console even while remotely controlling the gunships via his cybernetic implants.

  The next time when the gunships fired, the droid destroyer’s engine output dipped severely before slowly increasing. But it only recovered to fifty three percent of its rated engine output, which meant that another couple hits similar to the last volley would bring them within the Pride’s zone of control.

  Seemingly out of nowhere, the destroyer came about abruptly and began firing on the gunships. “Crazy Ivan,” Sarkozi called out, and the Sundered grunted in agreement. The gunships worked to cling to the destroyer’s weaponless stern, and one of them succeeded in doing so. But the other failed to leave the droid’s suddenly-presented broadside in time to avoid a potentially catastrophic hail of fire from the much larger vessel.

  For a moment it seemed that the tiny gunship would succumb to the relatively overwhelming firepower of the droid warship, but somehow it managed to pull a hard, tight maneuver which brought the two vessels well within collision distance before it limped into formation with it sister vessel. That sister vessel had continued to pound away at the destroyer’s engines while matching the droid ship move-for-move, and once again the destroyer’s engine output declined sharply as a result. This time when their engines output returned to full, they were fluctuating between forty two and forty seven percent output. This meant that even if the other ship managed to maintain an average of those figures, the Pride of Prometheus would overtake them before they reached the hyper limit.

  “Well done, Tactical,” Middleton said with a nod, “now keep your ships safe while we close distance and take care of the rest.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Toto said with open pride, and Middleton couldn’t begrudge the ‘man’ his sense of accomplishment. Without those gunships, there was literally zero chance that the Pride of Prometheus would have been able to catch the enemy vessel before it could flee the system.

  As it was, the Pride had just received a seven minute window of long-range weapons fire on the enemy vessel, which would be more than enough for the larger, fresher medium cruiser to dispatch the smaller destroyer.

  Apparently the crew of the droid vessel had also concluded as much, since it came about sharply and began to open fire with its turbolasers.

  “Two impacts on the forward shields,” the Shields operator called out. “They’re holding strong at 94%,” he added confidently.

  “Observe bridge protocols, Shields,” Sarkozi snapped before Middleton could do likewise, referring to the man’s somewhat undisciplined verbiage, “no unnecessary adjectives.”

  Middleton couldn’t help but smile as the other man went red in the ears and nodded, “Yes, Lieutenant.”

  But the truth was that the Pride of Prometheus was unlikely to get a ‘softer’ battle for its new crew to learn the realities of space combat than the one in which they currently found themselves engaged. The Pride was classified as a medium cruiser by modern definitions, but it was originally classified as a heavy cruiser due to its robust shields and firepower. However its lack of significant broadside deterrent, combined with the aged nature of several of the class’s key systems—including its communications and sensor suites, as well as its fix-mounted heavy laser batteries rather than turret-mounted primary wepons—had caused the Hydra/Hammerhead-Class to be downgraded many decades earlier.

  Of course, there were some who believed the class’s real reason for ‘demotion’ was that a standing arms tax had been widely considered throughout the Spineward Sectors around the time of the Union Treaty, and an ‘extra’ medium cruiser would incur roughly half the financial sanctions as a heavy cruiser would. But Middleton was among those who believed this to be an overly cynical view of the facts as he understood them.

  “She’s coming at us, Captain,” Sarkozi reported as she moved toward the Shields station and made some curt remarks to the operator there before adding, “recommend we prep for boarders.”

  “Proceed,” Middleton agreed as he dug through the schematics of the enemy vessel. The information was woefully inadequate for any kind of genuine tactical analysis, but they did know that many of these droid vessels possessed the ability to fire antimatter-fueled spinal lasers which could be absolutely devastating in a one-on-one fight. If the droids did, in fact, launch boarders then the probability was high that they possessed no such siege weapons.

  Then again, Middleton had no real working knowledge of a droid’s opinion on the sanctity of life. It was entirely possible they would casually sacrifice their boarding parties as part of a diversion, but he had to work with the best information available.

  “All hands,” Sarkozi said after activating the ship-wide, “prepare to receive boarding parties. Repeat: prepare to receive boarding parties.”

  A collective shiver ran up and down the spines of the Pride’s new crewmembers—except for Toto, who appeared utterly unfazed by the notion of hand-to-hand battle with droids, as he continued to work the controls at his station—and Middleton nodded in satisfaction. He had no use for stupidity or unwarranted confidence on his bridge, and the fact that each of his newer crewmembers was less-than-eager about the prospect of live fire exchanges in an up-close-and-personal fashion with the mechanicals was as good of a sign as he could hope for.

  “Heavy laser range in two minutes,” Toto reported in his deep, grating voice.

  “Coordinate with the gun deck,” Middleton instructed. “They are to fire at will once the enemy vessel clears long range.”

  “Long range, yes,” Toto replied, and Middleton saw Sarkozi shoot the uplift a scowl—but it was a silent scowl, unlike her previous vocal upbraiding of the new Shields operator. Both her expression and the silence that followed it brought a genuine smile to Middleton’s lips that he was unable to hold back.

  Another volley of fire lanced out from the destroyer’s primary weapons, and this time the Shields operator was more professional, if a bit stilted in his report. “Shields at 88% and holding, sir—ma’am,” he added belatedly, once again drawing Sarkozi’s ire as she sliced a metaphorical pair of daggers his way.

  “Just ‘sir’ will do on the bridge, Carpenter,” she said irritably.

  “Yes ma’am—sir,” he said, once again going red in the face.

  “Thirty seconds to our range,” Toto reported, and Middleton nodded as he felt the urge to lean forward in his chair but resisted. He needed to present a calm, professional demeanor at that moment to set the tone for his excruciatingly green crew.

  The destroyer’s engi
nes cut out suddenly, and Toto made some sort of a harsh, barking sound, causing both Middleton and his XO to give the uplift a short look.

  “Engines disabled,” the ape-man reported, “destroyer only maneuvering thrusters.”

  “Good work,” Middleton said after a brief pause which saw Sarkozi’s mouth open and close several times as she clearly wished to reprimand the uplift for his poor grammar but thought better of it.

  The forward batteries of the Pride of Prometheus lanced out in nearly perfect unison, and Middleton’s eyes narrowed as their weight of fire hammered into the destroyer’s previously intact shields. He had specifically ordered for the weapons to fire at will, but the gun deck chief—yet another newcomer named Turbin—had essentially countermanded that specific order. Middleton knew he couldn’t let the gesture slide, but he grudgingly had to admit that their fire discipline had been nearly as good as that displayed by the Pride’s previous gun crews, which was a pleasant surprise all its own.

  “Seven for ten,” Sarkozi reported with the barest hint of surprise at the impressive accuracy of the new gun deck crew, “the destroyer’s forward shields have collapsed; she’s rolling to present her port broadside.”

  Another volley of fire impacted on the Pride’s forward shields and the Shields operator called out, “Forward shields at 83%, sir.”

  Middleton watched as the damaged gunship began to fall out of formation with its partner, and just as the small craft drifted near the droid ship’s near broadside, the undamaged craft made a fast, brutal attack run which ran the length of the droid vessel. The craft had apparently succeeded in neutralizing the nearest weaponry, because the beleaguered gunship managed to regain its propulsion before fleeing the scene of the battle.

  Until that moment the safest place for the little craft had been in the destroyer’s unprotected wake, but now that the droids’ backs were to the proverbial wall its best chance to avoid destruction was by fleeing and hoping the droids would not expend resources going after it.