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

by Caleb Wachter

  “If the op is looking too dangerous, you are ordered to withdraw, Private,” Gnuko continued sternly. “There are plenty of these hubs out there and every time we successfully board one we gain valuable tactical data which will prove useful in future missions. There is no reason to sacrifice anyone unnecessarily,” he said, and she felt the sting of his words as though they had penetrated her to the absolute core of her being. She was overcome with the image of Homer’s fallen body and realized she had missed some of her Sergeant’s words when he said, “good hunting, Lu.”

  She snapped off her best salute and replied, “This one will succeed.”

  “I know you will,” Gnuko said, returning the salute and gesturing for her to board the shuttle. She did so and slapped the button which controlled the loading ramp, and the ramp began to close behind her as she took stock of her team’s status.

  Every one of her six, hand-picked Recon Team Lancers was seated with their harnesses fastened, and their gear had been stowed in a more or less appropriate fashion. Each member of this particular team had been fitted with Storm Drake Armor suits—most of which had been redesigned for their new wearers following the personnel transfers from the Pride of Prometheus which had seen all but Atticus, Lu Bu, and Sergeant Gnuko disembark the ship—and their dragon-styled helmets looked appropriately fearsome to Lu Bu.

  She completed her quick appraisal of her team’s gear, and after verifying that they had fastened their harnesses she made her way to the front bench where Fei Long was seated. Her irritation with him had grown over recent days since he had brought the Uplift in to help examine the star chart files. Ever since the Uplift had arrived in his quarters to assist with his various projects she been unable to spend a moment alone with her boyfriend, and the frustration was beginning to mount.

  “Calm your nerves,” Fei Long said in their native tongue over a private comm. channel.

  She shot him a dire look as she finished fastening her harness. He was wearing the same ‘bomb suit’ he had worn during their previous ComStat hub infiltration, but this time he also wore the strange glove-shaped device which he had built during the previous months on his right hand.

  “I am not nervous,” she retorted as she pressed her back firmly against the bench. She tried to look directly ahead but Fei Long was fiddling with the glove so intently that she eventually gave him a withering look. “What are you doing?”

  “Making some last-minute adjustments,” he replied without ever taking his eyes off the glove.

  She snorted loudly just as the shuttle lifted off from the hangar deck, and Lu Bu felt a wave of anxious energy course through her body. Much as she was loathe to admit it, she knew that Fei Long was correct: she was indeed anxious.

  This was just her second independent command, so to her rational mind the mission should have been less nerve-wracking than the fusion plant operation. But memories of their last ComStat hub operation were never far from her thoughts, and inextricably linked to those memories was a storm of emotion surrounding her departed mentor, Sergeant Walter Joneson.

  “As I said,” she heard Fei Long say in his infuriatingly patient voice, “you must enhance your calm.” She very nearly lashed out at him with the back of her hand but he continued smoothly, “You are the only able-bodied Lancer on the ship who has previously infiltrated a hub, and these people have been hand-picked for this mission based on their individual and collective abilities. As a soldier it is your obligation to your commander to carry out orders without question; as a commander it is your obligation to your soldiers to provide sound leadership. For this you must reach balance within yourself, and it is a different balance than what is required of a soldier.”

  She desperately wanted to find some fault with his words, but as usual she was unable to do so—which only further fueled her anger. But there was a grain of irrefutable truth to what he had just said, and she knew that it would require further examination in the future.

  Because being a commander was definitely different from being a soldier.

  “You know your tasks,” she said as her team went through the final round of gear checks. “Cassius stays at corridor entrance with rifle; he provides cover for our rear.”

  “Why do we no all have rifles?” Bernice asked in a respectful, but pointed, tone.

  Lu Bu shook her head as she instinctively gripped her own blaster rifle. “The hub is delicate,” she replied, “a missed shot could damage the hub and end this mission. Only this one and Cassius carried rifles,” she finished, all-too-aware of her grammatical mistake but deciding it best to push on. “You five,” she waved her left hand toward the rest of the team, “use boarding axes and shields.”

  She saw Kratos hoist the metal, disc-shaped shield and begin to chuckle. “Axes and shields,” he deadpanned in his deep, gravelly voice, “did we come to the River of Stars to chop wood?”

  The rest of the team laughed tightly, and Lu Bu knew that Walter Joneson would have said something to control the mood but she could not find the right words to say. “Cassius covers rear,” she said in a raised voice, “Kratos and Bernice take point. I will cover the operative with Claus; Stavros and Lysander cover rear. Point and rear teams stay ten meters close to operative. We use visual communication during this mission.” She knew they had drilled this precise entry at least fifty times, but last-minute speeches had become a familiar thing during her smashball-playing days and she found herself needing familiarity in that moment.

  “By your command,” Kratos said as he braced to attention, and the rest of the team followed his lead.

  With no more words to say, Lu Bu slapped the button which would lower the ramp and less than a minute later the team had taken up position outside the familiar-looking corridor. In every way Lu Bu could determine, this hub was identical to the first one they had boarded. She noted Fei Long was recording images of some markings located near the mouth of the corridor, and she waited for him to finish before signaling for her team to move down the corridor in their well-rehearsed fashion.

  Kratos and Bernice, possessing the greatest raw, physical strength of the Recon Team’s members, moved quickly down the corridor and Lu Bu’s eyes snapped left and right in search of the concealed ion turrets which they had encountered during the first hub insertion.

  She noted that Cassius had taken up his covering position and had his rifle trained down the corridor, which was one hundred twelve meters long if it was, in fact, identical to the first hub. Cassius was the only member of the team—other than Lu Bu—who could make such a shot with any kind of reliability, but there was little chance he could avoid hitting a teammate given the cramped dimensions of the corridor.

  The main reason for stationing him in his current spot was to give a clear line of fire on any surprises—like the MR-93 hover platform which had claimed the lives of three Lancers, including Walter Joneson.

  They continued down the corridor, and Lu Bu’s eyes tracked a blip of motion precisely where she had anticipated the first set of ion turrets to be. Almost without thinking, she raised her rifle and snapped off a shot at the turret just as it swiveled around toward Bernice. Lu Bu’s rifle round hammered into the ion turret’s barrel and the weapon stopped moving briefly.

  On the other side of the corridor, Kratos surged forward and took an ion bolt to the chest before he could get his shield into position. But it appeared to have been a conscious exchange, as he tore into the turret with brutal efficiency and reduced it to a pile of metal fragments with just a few powerful blows of his boarding axe. Bernice did likewise opposite him, and without fanfare or celebration the two continued down the corridor having only stopped for a few seconds each.

  Lu Bu felt pride in their efficiency as she continued down the corridor with her eye trained along her barrel sight in search of a new target. If this hub was truly identical to the last one then it would have a proximity mine built into the wall just a few meters ahead of where Bernice and Kratos had come to a stop. The team had drilled thi
s insertion dozens of times in simulations, and Lu Bu took up her position with the blaster rifle trained at the section of wall which almost certainly hid the explosive device.

  She squeezed the trigger time and again, sending round after round from her blaster rifle into the relatively delicate paneling until the section exploded with a blue-white plasma fire identical to the one which had slain Laertes during the first hub op.

  After the debris had settled she motioned for Kratos and Bernice to move forward and take up guarding positions at the intersection where Fei Long would interface with the local systems.

  They moved with expert precision and just a few seconds later she took up a defensive posture while Fei Long crouched down and opened up a nearby access panel. The last time they had been aboard a hub he had used a series of data pads with temporarily-rigged interface cables attached to them, but this time he had no such devices. Instead, he simply pulled away a portion of the glove-like apparatus’s ring finger section and slid it into an open data port.

  He waited for several seconds—during which interval on the previous mission, Lu Bu recalled him furiously tapping away on the data slate—before nodding in satisfaction and withdrawing the jack from the port.

  “I have shut down all onboard, centrally-controlled defensive systems,” she heard him say over the team-wide channel, “in addition to regaining local comm. access. We have three minutes before the jamming field resumes but the defensive systems have been deactivated for twenty minutes.”

  “Good,” Lu Bu said, more than a little surprised—and impressed—that he had been able to do so much in so little time. “You heard him; move,” she barked to her team, “Stavros, Lysander; guard this intersection. Watch for mobile units but leave shot for Cassius if it too far for axes.”

  “Aye,” she heard them reply as one, and she gestured for Kratos and Bernice to move down the corridor while she and Claus followed with Fei Long sandwiched between them with Claus in the front and Lu Bu in the rear. She desperately wanted a chance to destroy whatever device might be waiting to spring an ambush on her team like had happened last time.

  She forced thoughts of the past from her mind as her team arrived at the doorway leading to the hub’s control center. Her team took up positions to either side of the corridor in the tiny, cramped space afforded them—it was this cramped space’s dimensions which had determined the size of her team, since there was simply no room for even one more Lancer to squeeze into the cover afforded by the short, blind recesses to either side of the door.

  Claus quickly removed the access panel, behind which the controls for the door were hidden. Fei Long calmly knelt down and removed a segment from the little finger of his glove, which had a tiny wire connecting it to the glove, and he plugged the jack into the slot.

  Satisfied that he had accomplished the task, Lu Bu re-trained her barrel on the corridor and waited for any kind of movement. For what seemed like an eternity, nothing happened. But then she saw a panel in the ceiling open and a familiar-looking, globe-shaped, MR-93 hover platform descended silently into view at the nearly exact mid-point between her position and the intersection where her rearguard team was stationed.

  Lu Bu didn’t even wait for the hover platform to finish its descent before snapping off a round and sending the platform spinning like a top around its axis, but the MR-93 remained almost exactly stationary otherwise. A second blaster bolt, authored by Cassius, hammered into it from the rear and this time the globe careened violently into the nearby paneling.

  Taking careful aim so as to avoid sending an errant round toward Cassius, she fired another round into the MR-93 and this time the globular anti-personnel unit went crashing to the floor. With it lying on the deck, Lu Bu and Cassius sent round after round into the device until she was satisfied that it had been neutralized.

  “Rear team,” she called over the Recon Team’s channel, “hold position and remain alert.”

  “Aye,” they replied as one, and Lu Bu turned to see that the door was now open and Fei Long had already entered the control chamber. She gestured for Kratos and Bernice to remain where they were while beckoning for Claus to follow her into the heart of the hub.

  Fei Long had already begun to interface with the same panel he had accessed during the previous mission, and Lu Bu cast a wary look at the glowing, gently pulsating core at the heart of the circular room.

  She knew very little of engineering, and even less of Imperial technology, but she did know that the beating heart of a ComStat hub was capable of generating lethal radiation. Her helmet had been equipped with a radiation monitor, and thankfully the levels inside the chamber were deemed merely ‘unsafe’ and not ‘emergent’ or ‘lethal.’

  Everything Lu Bu had done since boarding the Pride of Prometheus had been ‘unsafe,’ so she dismissed the supposed danger and took a careful look around the room while Fei Long silently went about his work.

  She walked around the pulsing core and saw a trio of stations positioned equidistantly throughout the room. There was nothing remarkable about the first two, but when she came to the third something about it caught her eye. At first she could not determine what had gotten her attention, so she slowly circled the workstation for several seconds and still nothing came to her.

  She was about to dismiss the matter when she saw Fei Long moving toward the same station. Lu Bu stepped forward and held a hand out before him, “Your work is there, Kongming,” she said in their native tongue, with a pointed look at the first workstation.

  Fei Long shook his head. “There is something wrong with that station,” he said, gesturing to the same workstation which had gotten her attention, “do you not see it?”

  Lu Bu shook her head adamantly. “Finish your work,” she said in a commanding tone that she hoped was neither too hard, nor too soft.

  “It is done,” he said dismissively as he made to push past her, and she was so surprised to hear that he had already finished his work that she allowed him to pass. A moment after he had come to stand before the workstation, she realized what was different about it.

  “The indicators are unmoving,” she muttered, irritated with herself for failing to deduce what was wrong with the series of panels behind the station.

  “Indeed,” Fei Long agreed as he carefully examined the station without physically touching it. He circled it three times before kneeling beside one edge of the meter-square base of the station. “Assist me, Fengxian,” he said, gesturing to what looked to be an access panel.

  “I am not certain we shou—“ she began, but he cut her off calmly.

  “There are subroutines at work in this hub’s mainframe,” he explained. “I do not recognize them and they might jeopardize our ability to subvert this hub. Please assist me,” he repeated with a sense of urgency in his voice.

  Lu Bu checked her mission timer and saw that they still had fourteen minutes until the automated defenses would come back online. So she reluctantly knelt beside Fei Long and the two of them removed the panel he had indicated. What was revealed to be within made her lean forward to get a closer look.

  Nestled amid a series of crystal-based components—for which Imperial technology was known—was a brown, amorphous, decidedly organic-looking object with several fleshy-looking protrusions filled with multi-colored fluids.

  “What is it?” she asked with a note of concern in her voice.

  “I do not know,” he replied, and for the first time since she had known him she heard a note of wonderment in his voice. He gazed at it as though he was glimpsing a precious piece of art, or an inexplicable quirk of nature, but after a few seconds he visibly shook himself and began making recordings.

  “We should not remove it,” she said sternly, decidedly disliking his interest in the strange…thing.

  “Naturally,” he agreed before belatedly adding, “at least not until we know what it is.” He continued scanning the device for several minutes in silence until Lu Bu had decided enough time had been spent on it.


  “Kongming…we must go,” she said in a commanding voice as she picked up the panel and made to replace it.

  “Just a few more minutes,” he insisted dismissively, “this is unlike anything I have ever seen…a high concentration of rare elements mixed with complex, undocumented proteins…fascinating…”

  “No, Long,” she said severely and brushed him aside as she replaced the panel, “we return to the ship now. Is your work truly finished?” Her anxiety level had steadily risen with each passing second and she knew that her nerves might not survive another five minutes aboard the hub.

  Fei Long gave her a look which bordered annoyance and outright anger, but his expression softened quickly and he nodded. “It is complete; this hub has been, to the best of my knowledge, connected to the first hub for the purpose of our mission.”

  “Good,” she said with a curt nod, holding back a sigh of relief at his words, “then we move out.” She stood to her full height and switched to Confederation Standard as she said, “Recon Team, the mission is complete. We return to shuttle in formation; retrieve fragments of the hover platform for examination.”

  With that, they returned to the shuttle in a tight, well-practiced formation. But Lu Bu did not release the pent-up sigh of relief until the shuttle had lifted off and began its journey back to the Pride of Prometheus’ hangar.

  Chapter XX: A New Wrinkle

  Two days passed after the successful mission aboard the ComStat hub, and Middleton found himself reading a report authored by Fei Long regarding a strange…device which the Recon Team encountered aboard the second ComStat hub onto which his crew had managed to load Mr. Fei’s program.

  “I’m not certain what to make of this, Mr. Fei,” he said measuredly after re-reading the report.

  “Neither am I, Captain,” the young man replied hesitantly as he veritably squirmed in his seat.