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

by Caleb Wachter

  There was a brief pause, followed by the Pride of Prometheus slewing hard to port, then to starboard in what was clearly an evasive maneuver intended to prevent further landings. But as far as Lu Bu could tell all of the Marines had successfully landed on the outer hull and were taking up position far too close to the engine exhausts for her liking.

  “Your orders stand, Corporal,” Sergeant Gnuko replied, “you blast anything off the hull that we didn’t put there. I’m sending reinforcements to your location; give them the Demon’s fury until we get there—and keep them off our engines.”

  “Understood,” Lu Bu acknowledged, and after giving each of her teammates a brief look she wrapped her blaster rifle around the corner of their barricade and sighted in on the Marines. They appeared unaware of her team’s presence, which was all the advantage a warrior could ever ask for.

  Using hand signals, Lu Bu indicated that her teammates should split out one to either side at ten meters distance from her position, and when they had done so they would advance on the enemy from the flanks—leaving her heading straight up the middle.

  Lu Bu checked the pair of plasma grenades fastened to her waist and considered employing them. The difficulty with doing so was the zero-gee environment and lack of foresight into the Pride’s combat maneuvering. If she threw the grenade and the Pride made a sudden turn, the grenade would ‘move’ unpredictably and could become as dangerous to her team as to the enemy.

  So she set the butt of her rifle against her armored shoulder and sighted in on the nearest Marine as she clomped her way across the hull. Sixty meters separated her from the Imperials, and there was no serviceable cover to be had before the mid-point, which meant she would be exposed for several seconds if they saw her.

  She had not made five steps before the very Marine she had set in her sights brought his own weapon around in a well-practiced sweep of her area, and without hesitation she squeezed her rifle’s trigger and sent a bolt of energy into the Marine’s right shoulder. His feet were mag-locked to the hull just as hers were, and his armor seemed to completely absorb her round’s impact.

  The Marine had begun to bring his own weapon back into a firing position when he was struck by two more blaster bolts simultaneously. The force of the dual impacts knocked the weapon from his hands and sent it flying into the void, and Lu Bu followed with a well-placed shot of her own which went into the narrow gap between the Marine’s helmet and breastplate.

  That shot would have killed a Lancer since their armor was of a relatively antiquated design, but Imperial Marines apparently had better protective gear than Confederation Lancers. The Marine’s head was snapped back by the force of her perfectly-placed shot, and it was clear that her round had done some damage, but he drew a sidearm from his waist in the same motion he used to recover his bearings.

  After that, events became a blur.

  Lu Bu picked up her footspeed as she sighted in on another Marine which had already taken up a defensive crouch and trained his weapon on her. Reacting purely on instinct, she fired a bolt of energy into the Marine’s hands and was rewarded when the weapon he held exploded in a green flash. She quickly acquired another target but a split second before she could fire her weapon, a trio of impacts struck her in the chest with such force that her feet very nearly came off the Pride’s hull.

  Cursing her armor’s hindrance of her normally outstanding footspeed, she crouched down as quickly as she was able, receiving another pair of bolts to her armor with one round slamming into each pauldron covering her shoulders.

  She reset her weapon against her shoulder and saw a brilliant, white bolt of energy go streaking past her helmet. Lu Bu felt anger in that moment which rivaled the blind rage she had felt when holding the hyper dish junction against the droid invaders, and that anger heightened her focus as she began spraying rounds into the Marines’ position almost randomly. She knew the chance of her shots hitting the mark was very low, but she also knew that she and her two teammates were outnumbered at least four to one—no matter how good of a shot she was, she knew that weight of fire would prove decisive in relatively short order if she didn’t get at least a little bit of good fortune.

  Seeing that her cover was approximately twenty meters away, and that the Pride had not made any erratic course corrections in the previous few seconds, she made perhaps the rashest decision of her life: she disengaged her mag-boots and launched herself toward the relative safety of the depression in the Pride’s hull.

  Lu Bu had trained zero-gee combat, both armored and unarmored, for several months and was therefore careful to keep her feet as close to the hull as possible while turning her body into a ball. The key to avoid being flung from the ship’s hull entirely was re-engaging the mag-boots at maximum power before being struck by enemy fire, and she managed to clear six or seven meters in her first ‘leap’ before engaging the magnetics of her boots and latching her feet to the hull.

  No sooner had she regained her footing than the Imperial Marines concentrated their fire on her. She suspected she would be unable to make another leap, now that the Marines had focused their fire on her, so she ran as fast as she could toward the makeshift foxhole. A nearly constant stream of blaster fire streaked around her, with several shots finding her armor and threatening to upset her footing.

  Focusing only on successfully taking the next step, she placed one foot in front of the other as round after round found their mark against her protective casement. Warning klaxons went off in her helmet indicating vacuum exposure had occurred, but she kept fighting forward for every precious meter. She knew full well that, should she fail to reach cover, she would most certainly die at the hands of these Imperial Marines.

  She saw the flash of an explosion before her but she paid it no mind as she continued to take step after step, for what seemed like an eternity but she knew had consisted of only fifteen steps—she had subconsciously counted each one—and just as she reached the safety of cover her left leg was hammered by a pair of impacts which ruined her knee servos.

  Lu Bu toppled ponderously into the hole and lay there for several seconds, unsure if she had survived the experience as the brown disc of the gas giant came into view overhead. It took her a moment to realize that the Pride must have been rolling, and then a brilliant flash exploded into view overhead which caused the ship’s shields to become radiantly incandescent. What looked to be tongues of blue flame caressed the warship’s protective barriers for several seconds, and it was only after watching them that she abruptly realized she had not died—and that there was still a fight on!

  Rolling over to her front, she switched her blaster rifle from her left to right hand and dragged herself to the front edge of the makeshift foxhole. Her left leg’s power servos were completely useless, but she was able to get herself into position after a few awkward seconds of dragging her almost useless limb into a proper firing position. Maneuvering in such a way as to keep her right mag-boot on the hull at all times was even more frustrating than the relative uselessness of her left leg, but she managed to succeed in doing so after several attempts.

  Taking a deep breath, Lu Bu placed the barrel of her rifle over the edge of the hole and began pouring round after round into the Marines’ position. She could see at least seven of them still standing, and it was only then that she checked on her teammates’ condition.

  To her left, Traian had fallen to the hull and had cleverly lain on his back, exposing primarily his thighs to enemy fire as he exchanged fire with the Marines while lying on his back.

  To her right, Private Vali Funar was nowhere to be seen. Her HUD had failed during her ‘run’ to the foxhole, so she had no way of knowing whether or not he had become a casualty.

  A pair of Marines began to rush her position and she quickly retrained her weapon on them before realizing that all of the Marines were rushing toward her with no semblance of military coordination. A moment later there was a brilliant flash and she felt her mag-boot briefly break contact with th
e hull as the ship was thrown ‘down’ by the force of the explosion.

  Realizing they must have detonated an explosive of some kind near the engines, but unable to do anything about it, Lu Bu poured shot after shot into the nearest Marine’s legs. She doubted that her blaster rifle could penetrate their superior armor, but she thought it was possible to disrupt the Imperials’ mag-boots with well-timed shots to the legs.

  She was proven correct when her target’s left leg was struck by a blaster bolt midway up the shin, sending the Marine’s leg splaying to the side at precisely the wrong moment during his stride. The Marine’s plant foot came off the deck briefly, but before he could regain his footing Lu Bu sent another round into his chest which sent the fearsome-looking warrior spinning away from the Pride’s hull toward the ship’s shields.

  Lu Bu quickly retrained her weapon on the Marine’s companion, who was no more than five meters from her position. She knew that if he closed to grips with her that she would be unable to mount a suitable defense, due to the damage inflicted to her suit’s left leg.

  She took aim at his head and fired three shots, two of which struck his helmet with the third missing entirely, and he raised his vambrace-mounted vibroblade for a killing strike. Lu Bu defiantly swung her rifle up in a last-ditch attempt to save herself, but before her weapon could intercept the Marine’s arm the Imperial’s body was wracked with a rapid series of impacts which tore gashes in his armor the length of her forearm.

  Precious, life-sustaining gases vented violently through those rents, but the weight of fire continued to pour into the Marine’s partially exposed body until nothing remained of his torso but a blood-spattered wreckage of meat and metal. Lu Bu was actually unable to properly determine where the man ended and the metal began, but she was not about to waste time on such a meaningless curiosity.

  She resumed a firing stance and put another target in her sights, but by the time she had done so that Marine had also come under fire from the awesomely powerful weapon which had utterly annihilated the first.

  Turning to get a look at the author of the fire support, she was more than a little surprised to see the assault shuttle swooping down along the Pride’s hull and training its forward-mounted anti-vehicle weaponry onto yet another Imperial Marine.

  By then, what remained of the Imperial charge was routed, and Lu Bu saw Traian move into the open to better provide his own weapon’s support to the cause of eradicating the remainder of the Imperial strike team. Lu Bu did likewise, and with the shuttle’s help it was only a matter of seconds before every last Marine had been cut down, or dislodged from the Pride’s hull and sent spinning into the cold, dark, void.

  “Inspect the damage, Traian,” she called over the Recon channel. “I cannot walk; report what you see to main Lancer channel.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Traian replied through heavy, panting breaths. He began to clomp his way over to the explosion’s location, and after a maddening interval he reached what looked to be the damaged area. “This is Traian,” he began as he took a few steps to his left, “I’m seeing significant damage to the external heat sinks on engine number two, Sergeant; repeat, we’ve got a lot of damage out here. Suggest you forward my suit’s vid-feed to Chief Garibaldi ASAP.”

  “Larry that, Recon,” Gnuko replied over the primary Lancer channel, and Lu Bu felt a pang of shame at being unable to make the report herself. But with only one functioning mag-boot and the ship still engaged in active combat, it was nearly suicidal to attempt a return to the nearest airlock solely under her own power.

  A few seconds later there was a minute shift in the thrum of the Pride’s engines, and Lu Bu saw the peripheral light of the ship’s number two drive unit go dark.

  “Two engine is down, sir,” Traian reported as he turned and made his way to Lu Bu’s location.

  “Good work, Recon,” Gnuko said grimly, “now get your wounded back inside on the double; I doubt that’s the last we’ll hear from them.”

  “Yes sir,” Traian replied as he came to Lu Bu’s position and extended his gauntleted hand. She accepted it and began the slow march back to the airlock as the shuttle sped away from the Pride, likely to inspect the rest of the hull for other uninvited guests.

  Chapter XXIV: “I have you now.”

  “All teams reporting in, Captain; we’ve scrubbed the last of them off the hull,” Sergeant Gnuko reported.

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” Captain Middleton acknowledged before cutting the connection. If he had been a less rational man, the urge to tear his hair out and scream might have been more than he could resist.

  Instead he sat quietly in his chair and steepled his fingers before his face while processing the surprising presence of Imperial Marines in the system. He had never heard of an attack like they had just come under; it was the kind of thing reserved for holo-vids, not genuine warfare. A unit of Imperial Marines, apparently using cutting-edge technology, had lain in wait for the Pride to move through a predetermined region of space and then, somehow, had survived contact with the warship’s shields before landing on the outer hull and placing an explosive device dangerously close to the engines.

  Had it not been the quick reactions of the Lancer force, the Pride of Prometheus may well have had her engines taken completely offline by the attack—or worse, suffered a catastrophic reactor meltdown. As it was, the ship’s drive power had been reduced by approximately thirty percent due to critical overheating. But thirty percent, especially for a ship not known for its speed to begin with, was a significant blow.

  “The enemy corvette is continuing to gain distance, Captain,” Lieutenant Sarkozi reported clinically. “They have now left our extreme firing range.”

  “Gunships can attack,” Toto offered, and Middleton briefly considered the possibility. The Pride had managed to get off a pair of salvoes before the engines had gone down, but the corvette had expertly maneuvered to present fresh shield facings after each strike. Once again, Captain Middleton’s ship had proven more than a match up close, but was unable to close the distance with the nimbler vessel.

  “Recall the gunships,” Middleton ordered, straightening himself in his chair as his mind finally concluded its gymnastics. He was missing something, of that much he was certain, but until he could figure out what that was there was no point in dwelling on it. “Continue pursuit but don’t push the engines any harder than Garibaldi suggests.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Helmsman Marcos acknowledged with a bob of her ponytail.

  “Captain,” Fei Long said as he stood from his station and approached the command chair, eliciting a stern look of disapproval from the Captain.

  “Man your post during combat conditions, mister,” Middleton said, his voice barely above a growl.

  “Of course, Captain,” Fei Long replied as he stopped mid-stride and blushed before returning to his seat, “but there is something I must convey.”

  Middleton resisted the urge to cuff the young man as he asked, “What is it, Mr. Fei?”

  “I attempted to inform you several times earlier,” Fei Long explained as though in apology, which only served to set Middleton’s jaw, “but each time I was interrupted. Two seconds prior to the Carsoni Palmeiro’s destruction I detected a transmission on the ComStat carrier frequencies.”

  Middleton turned his chair to face the young man, and as he did so it was as though the pieces of the puzzle were falling together before his very eyes. “Where did it originate?” he asked, painfully aware that Fei Long would have been unable to ascertain the message’s contents.

  “The Carsoni Palmeiro was the source of the transmission, Captain,” the Pride’s new Comm. Officer replied confidently.

  Hearing his Comm. Officer confirm his suspicion was all Middleton needed to determine his next course of action—and what the Pride could expect to happen in three hours and twenty two minutes. “Mr. Fei,” he beckoned for the young man to approach, and Fei Long complied. When Mr. Fei reached Middleton’s chair, the captain said, “I
recall that you requested access to…sensitive schematics during your unorthodox presentation in my ready room.”

  Fei Long nodded, and the look of anticipation in his eyes gave Middleton brief pause. He knew it was a risk to give the young man access to sensitive information—such as the Distributed Intelligence architecture of a warship operating in the Spineward Sectors—but he also knew that Fei Long’s ‘pet project’ may well prove decisive in the battle to come.

  “How long would it take you to develop a program, or code, or whatever you call it,” the captain asked, lowering his voice as he leaned across the arm of his chair, “that would prove as effective against an enemy warship as the one you demonstrated in my ready room?”

  Fei Long’s eyes snapped side to side briefly as his far-more-powerful-than-normal brain worked up an answer. “Like so many answers, this one is conditional upon several variables,” the computer expert began as his eyes continued their rapid movements without meeting the captain’s gaze, “but I can say that a vessel with a comparable architecture to the Pride of Prometheus’ would require no less than six hours of continuous work in a conducive environment—provided I am given comprehensive information on the target, of course.” As he finished, his eyes met Captain Middleton’s and the Pride’s commanding officer could see that the young man was absolutely confident in his assessment.

  Middleton leaned over toward the console built into his chair and accessed sensitive files using his command codes—codes which he reminded himself would need to be changed at the earliest possible convenience. When he was finished, he forwarded the encrypted data’s access authority to Mr. Fei. “You may not have six hours,” Middleton said, fixing the young man with a hard look, “I’m guessing we’ll get no more than five before the enemy closes with us.”

  Fei Long cocked his head doubtfully, “I do not build additional time into my—“

  “Then you’d better get started,” Middleton interrupted as he gestured for Lieutenant Sarkozi to approach.