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

by Caleb Wachter

  “You’re a Lieutenant,” Gnuko snapped, prompting the other man to nod vigorously. “That means you’ve got bridge access codes.”

  The Lieutenant, who wore several command stripes on the breast of his uniform, paled instantly. “We just surrendered,” he protested. “You have to accept our surrender; we can’t be coerced into acting against our own ship!”

  Gnuko hesitated briefly, and an instant later Kratos fired a blast from his plasma cannon at a pair of enemy crewmen standing several meters from the Lieutenant who acted as a spokesman for the group. Sergeant Gnuko whirled around and trained his rifle on Kratos, but the Tracto-an ignored him as he checked the cannon’s power cell indicator.

  Lu Bu wanted to be horrified at his action, but she knew that the enemy officer was attempting to stall them. At any moment the two warships would enter striking range, and if Captain Middleton’s plan succeeded then the best chance they had of capturing Captain Raubach was while he remained on the bridge—a post he would soon be abandoning if Fei Long’s drones could actually bring down the Dämmerung’s shields.

  Sergeant Gnuko apparently arrived at a similar conclusion, and after giving Kratos a look that promised a future reckoning for his action, he re-trained his blaster rifle on the enemy Lieutenant—who had all-too-clearly wet himself after watching two of his crewmembers be vaporized by the plasma cannon’s final shot.

  “The codes,” Gnuko growled as he advanced toward the enemy officer.

  The Lieutenant, who by that point was as white as a glass of fresh milk, reached beneath his uniform’s top and produced a key crystal attached to a chain which had kept it suspended around his neck. “You…you’re nothing but p-p-pirates,” he stammered as Lu Bu stepped forward and snatched the crystal from his hand.

  Gnuko went to a nearby door and opened it with a slap of the access panel. “Get in,” he ordered shortly, and the remaining enemy crewmembers did so without protest. After the door was closed, he slagged the control panel with a pair of shots from his blaster rifle and turned to face Kratos with unbridled fury.

  The larger man met Gnuko’s eyes with his lone remaining orb, and Lu Bu knew from personal experience observing—and engaging in—such behavior that the two were seconds away from a potentially lethal conflict.

  She stepped between them and shouted, “Mission is not complete. Kill each other after!”

  Kratos narrowed his eye, and for a moment Lu Bu thought that Sergeant Gnuko had already made up his mind. But the two relaxed fractionally and Sergeant Gnuko shouted, “One more deck to go; let’s move!” He only took his eyes off the Tracto-an after the rest of the team had begun to move out.

  The spider-like drone followed at Lu Bu’s heel as she set off after her commanding officer but she, too, cast a dire look in Kratos’ direction before doing so.

  Fei Long was dimly aware of the fact that Chief Garibaldi had executed his part of the battle plan, and the Pride had slowed to less than one fourth its rate acceleration.

  Fei Long knew it was all part of the plan, and it took only a brief glance at the main viewer to see that the Dämmerung’s captain had fallen for the maneuver ‘hook, line, and sinker,’ as his grandfather used to say. The enemy warship’s course had altered immediately, as Captain Raubach aimed to capitalize on the apparent failure of the Pride’s engines.

  Mere seconds after the apparent failure of the Pride’s engines, Chief Garibaldi had ordered his crews to turn on the portable micro-fusion plants they had taken from Gambit Station. Each of those plants was now wired directly into individual shield generators which had been moved from the stern of the ship to the other facings, leaving the ship’s engines critically exposed if the Dämmerung managed to gain an advantageous angle.

  But, to an outside observer, it would appear that the Pride’s shields had completely recharged themselves—something Captain Rabuach had actually done during the last encounter between the two vessels. Fei Long knew that Captain Middleton needed every possible edge he could get, even if that edge was just a brief flinch by the enemy commander in their deadly game of chicken.

  “The Dämmerung is breaking to port,” Lieutenant Sarkozi reported tensely, and the Pride of Prometheus was struck by a hail of fire from the enemy vessel. Damage reports came streaming into the Damage Control station just two spots down from Fei Long’s post, but he did not have time to help them prioritize and distribute the information. He was desperately working to reestablish direct control over his two remaining ATTACK DOGs, but his efforts had met with nothing but failure for more than twenty seconds.

  “Mr. Fei,” Middleton said heavily, and Fei Long nodded silently as he attempted to initiate a remote reboot of the tread-mounted drone. The nexus, or control drone, was the spider-legged unit but Fei Long was capable of issuing limited orders directly to the other units if his signal could reach it.

  He increased the output of the Pride’s primary, secondary, and even tertiary transmitters in an attempt to force the signal through whatever interference the Dämmerung was generating. A fragment of code flicked across his screen, and his heart leapt as he knew he had managed to reach the tread-mounted drone.

  “Mr. Fei!” Captain Middleton barked, but Fei Long had precious little time to reply as he very nearly executed the wrong command sequence when his shaking fingers missed a pair of critical command icons on his control panel.

  But then, in a window as narrow as any he had successfully navigated, he sent the command code in a short-wave burst that burned out all but one of the comm. transmitters aboard the Pride of Prometheus.

  He quickly forwarded a six second countdown to Toto, and stood from his station as the uplift roared, “Firing window in three…two…one…firing!”

  Fei Long’s eyes snapped up to the screen, and when he did he saw the Pride’s heavy lasers stab into the Dämmerung’s unshielded hull. In that instant he fully processed the very real probability that he had just killed Lu Bu, who was the only person in the universe who had ever truly mattered to him.

  But for the life of him, he was unable to determine a preferable course of action. He felt a pair of tears run down his cheeks as the Dämmerung’s stern exploded in a violent display unlike anything he could remember seeing.

  The deck beneath Lu Bu’s feet lurched so violently that she was thrown into a bulkhead five meters from where she had stood. The lights in the corridor went out immediately, and a series of unfamiliar alarms began to sound.

  The vision in her right eye had left her, and she stubbornly shook her head in an attempt to regain it. It did not comply but after testing her left eye and seeing that her teammates had all fared better than she had, she stood to her feet and felt the gravity of the ship’s deckplates begin to fluctuate.

  “We got ‘em,” Gnuko roared as he gestured with his blaster rifle toward the final access panel which would lead them to the deck on which the bridge was located. “Now let’s finish this job and get off this pile of scrap!”

  Even Kratos roared in approval, and the team quickly blasted their way through the door leading to the ladder which would take them to the bridge.

  “Six of ten,” Sarkozi exclaimed, stabbing her fist above her head in triumph, “her engines are gone, Captain, and I mean gone! The stern-most twenty percent of the Dämmerung has been destroyed and she’s experiencing a cascade failure of her power grid.”

  “It’s not over yet,” Middleton snapped before the rest of the bridge crew could join his XO in her jubilance. He activated his com-link and raised Atticus, “War Leader, you’re up. If that Corvette’s got Marines and they plan to launch a counterattack, it’s going to happen now; I want your Assault Team on the hull and prepared to receive intruders.”

  “We hear and obey,” Atticus replied in his thick, Tracto-an, accent.

  “Corvette reaches firing range in three minutes,” Toto reported.

  “What’s the status of the Dämmerung’s weapons?” Middleton demanded, and Lieutenant Sarkozi made her way to Hephaestion’s
side at Sensors.

  “They are still active,” the young Tracto-an replied before the XO could reach his station, “as are their shields along the bow, left, and right facings.”

  “She’s still got attitude adjustment, Captain,” Sarkozi reported quickly, ignoring the young man’s use of improper terminology for the moment. “She’s turning to present her shielded bow to us.”

  “He won’t go down without a fight,” Middleton said, more to himself than anyone else. He had secretly hoped that a child of privilege, like Captain James Raubach IV, would abandon the battle when his ship had been functionally destroyed. But, much like his father, he appeared to have dug his heels in during the pivotal moment. “Re-focus fire on the Corvette; the Dämmerung isn’t going anywhere and I don’t want any of the enemy escaping this system.”

  “Helm, re-orient to give the gun deck a clear shot on the droid vessel,” Sarkozi ordered, and Helmsman Marcos quickly obliged.

  The Pride’s lights dimmed as another salvo from the Dämmerung hammered into her shields, and a new series of damage reports came streaming in.

  “Forward shields have failed, Captain,” Sarkozi reported tightly. “Port shields are down as well; I’m getting heavy casualty reports from the teams manning the portable generators—”

  “Focus on the fight, XO,” Middleton said, knowing that it would do none of them a single bit of good to mourn the losses of the brave engineers who had made their deception possible.

  Without them manning the portable generators and giving the illusion that the Pride’s shield grid had miraculously regenerated, Captain Raubach would have continued on his course and, of critical import, would have never presented Middleton’s gun deck with a clean shot on the Dämmerung’s engines. “Let the Chief handle his teams.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Sarkozi replied, but he heard something in her voice that he knew he would need to address later.

  “The Corvette is continuing on course, Captain,” Hephaestion reported.

  “Keep our stern clear of their arcs, Helm,” Middleton warned when he saw the Pride’s orientation drift dangerously close to providing the Dämmerung a clean shot on their unshielded engines. But even with their shields down on all but the starboard facing, the Pride was still able to absorb a significant amount of damage before being rendered defenseless.

  The Hydra class of cruiser was built economically. In most ways this resulted in an inferior warship armed with less than competitive equipment, but in a very short list of possible circumstances that same cost-cutting behavior could prove beneficial—a list that happened to include the very situation in which they found themselves.

  The Pride was outfitted with exceptionally robust armor, especially on its bow and stern. This was to maximize the class’s capabilities when operating as part of a formation comprised of allied vessels.

  So long as Middleton kept his bow facing the enemy Corvette, even without shields there was very little chance that the smaller vessel would cause critical damage to the Pride of Prometheus before Middleton’s ship could do so to the Corvette.

  All of that information had led him to the conclusion that, if the droid warship was making an attack run similar to the one it was currently making, it had an ace up its sleeve. His first guess had been that such an ace would involve a boarding party, prompting him to deploy the Assault Team to the ship’s exterior in order to intercept any inbound Marines.

  But the second likely possibility was that the Corvette was armed with another Liberator torpedo—and that this one would be carrying a game-changing, ship buster warhead.

  The first possibility he could deal with, and had already begun to do so. The second possibility was essentially a checkmate. Middleton had never given much credence to fatalism as a way of thinking, so he had dismissed the Liberator possibility from his plans almost as quickly as he had considered it.

  “Firing,” Toto reported, and the Pride lanced out with her forward array firing as a single unit. “Four hits,” he reported before Sarkozi could do likewise.

  The Corvette adjusted its course predictably, making an obvious attempt to pull the Pride’s bow over far enough that the Dämmerung could get a clear shot on Middleton’s engines. But the Pride had already cleared her guns, so there was no need to risk presenting the opening—at least not yet.

  Middleton saw that the Corvette appeared to also be moving toward the rocky, inner, planet of the system. He suspected it was nothing but a ruse; however there was a very real possibility that it could use the planet as cover while attempting to flee the system and call for reinforcements.

  In his present position, he was torn. The enemy commanders had, rather brilliantly, created exceptionally effective leverage and were essentially forcing him to choose between finishing off the Dämmerung once and for all, or he could pursue the Corvette to prevent its escape from the system.

  But if he pursued the Corvette, he would be exposing his stern to Captain Raubach’s guns. Still, he knew that Captain Raubach was the high-value target, which made it odd that the Corvette would not move to support the larger destroyer. That seemingly inexplicable choice would leave Sergeant Gnuko’s team free to capture and return Captain Raubach to the Pride, where they could extract whatever information they could from him—

  It was in that moment that he put it all together, prompting him to whirl his chair around to face Fei Long. “Send Sergeant Gnuko a priority message,” he barked, feeling himself go red in the face as he realized what was really going on. “Tell him to pull out immediately,” he growled as he regained some measure of control over himself, but his error had cost several dozen of his crew their lives. Even for a man like Middleton, whose mind was cold and calculating, it was difficult for him to clear his thoughts as he voiced the realization he had come to mere seconds earlier, “Captain Raubach’s not on board the Dämmerung—he’s on that Corvette!”

  Lu Bu’s helmet began squawking loudly, and she lowered her blaster pistol to her side after firing what she assumed would be the final shot of their bridge takeover.

  The bodies of a dozen crewmembers lay strewn about the bridge, and an officer wearing the stripes and pips of a Commander—likely the vessel’s XO—was sprawled across the command chair.

  “Traps within traps,” Gnuko growled, and again Lu Bu’s helmet crackled loudly. It was only then that she realized the spider-like drone had been patiently tapping her leg. When she looked down at it, she saw the tiny light beside the vid pickup begin to blink. Her mind was considerably sharper than it had been immediately after awakening in the warship’s Main Engineering section, but she was still unable to make any sense of the flashing light.

  “Corporal?” she heard Bernice say from her side, and she looked up to see a concerned look on the hulking woman’s face. “You need to sit.”

  Lu Bu shook her head adamantly. “This one is fine, but drone is—“

  A wave of vertigo overcame her, and when she regained her vision she found Bernice’s steadying hand on her right arm. She briefly met the other woman’s eyes, and nodded her thanks as she spread her feet slightly and blinked her eyes several times in an effort to banish the sensation.

  “Lu, what is it?” Sergeant Gnuko asked.

  She tore her eyes from the drone and shook her head. “Drone is broken,” she said, feeling a powerful urge to throw her hands in the air in despair. She had never experienced that particular emotion until that moment, and she finally understood how it could affect people so deeply.

  Gnuko gave her a concerned look before looking down at the drone and doing a double take. “It’s Lancer signal code,” he said in a slightly raised voice, and after he said it Lu Bu flushed with embarrassment. It seemed so obvious after he said it, and she silently cursed her stupidity. “It’s ok, Lu,” Gnuko said after observing the flashes for several seconds, “you took a serious blow back there. Frankly, I’m amazed you’re on your feet.”

  “What says it?” she asked, dimly aware that her grammar had
just failed her spectacularly.

  “We pull out,” he barked. “The target’s not here; we make for the nearest escape pod and eject.”

  When he said that, the entire situation made perfect sense to her. Of course Captain Raubach was not on board the Dämmerung; that was how they had breached the ship with relative ease.

  “No escape pod,” she said defiantly.

  “Lu, we’ve got our orders,” he said in a tone that brooked no argument.

  She shook her head hard—too hard, in fact, as she very nearly lost her balance once again. “No,” she repeated after ensuring her feet remained where they belonged, “we go to shuttle bay.”

  Sergeant Gnuko opened his mouth to argue, but he quickly closed it and snorted as he gave her a wry grin. “You heard the lady,” he barked, “let’s see what they keep in the garage!”

  “Message received, Captain,” Fei Long reported, glad for the nearly seven continuous minutes he had been receiving video data from the primary drone. “Sergeant Gnuko’s team has left the bridge after receiving your orders.”

  “Good work, Mr. Fei,” the Pride’s commanding officer acknowledged.

  “Captain,” Fei Long said hesitantly, “I am no longer able to jam transmissions in this system. Our primary and secondary transmitters were destroyed when I uploaded my final instructions to the drones aboard the Dämmerung.”

  The captain nodded, “Noted.”

  “However,” the young man continued, deciding it was best to make the suggestion now and waste no more time, “if I understood Bu’s body language correctly, I believe we should reposition Toto’s last gunship as soon as possible to place it in communications range with the Corvette.”

  Captain Middleton raised an eyebrow. “Her body language?” he repeated with a withering look.

  “Yes, Captain,” Fei Long replied quickly. “I believe they are…well, it is likely they have modified their exit strategy. I do not believe they intend to egress the Dämmerung via escape pod,” he explained with a pointed look.