Against The Middle

by Caleb Wachter

  Middleton nodded, and was glad that the enemy ship’s reason for making a heroic last stand was now clear. “Good work, Sensors,” he congratulated the young man. “Tactical,” he turned to Toto, “have Gunnery tear that ship apart at their leisure.”

  “Yes sir,” Toto acknowledged.

  No more than fifteen minutes later, the Droid warship was a slowly-expanding cloud of debris following a core explosion, and Middleton’s people turned their attention to the planet.

  The shuttle glided smoothly through the outer envelope of atmosphere, and Lu Bu checked her team’s gear one last time. Lancers Funar and Traian were present, as was Bernice, and the newly-acquired Steve ‘Hutch’ Inson was also present. Each was wearing form-fitted Storm Drake armor, while the remaining seventeen occupants of the shuttle wore old-style Confederation power armor.

  Hutch, as he liked to be called, had proven himself more than capable in all of the aptitude tests, and Sergeant Gnuko had agreed with Lu Bu’s assessment that he could contribute on the Recon Team. Normally, Recon duty was reserved for specialists who had years of experience in related fields, but the Pride’s Recon Team was necessarily built around minimum physical attribute standards, ability to think critically in high-pressure situations, and above all, a willingness to leap headfirst into an unknown situation so that those who followed would have much-needed intel. There were precious few experts of any kind in the MSP’s ranks, so Lu Bu’s commanders were forced to improvise to the best of their ability.

  But it was a job which presented everything Lu Bu could have ever asked for, and it made her think on her professional smashball-playing days like one might think on time spent in primary school: a necessary step in the learning process, and ultimately a mere shadow of the real thing.

  “Touching down in three minutes,” the pilot reported.

  Her helmet’s HUD flashed briefly, indicating the Lancer command channel was being pinged, and she saw Kratos place a hand to the side of his helmet just as she did likewise. “The LZ has sustained a serious pounding from orbital laser strikes,” Sergeant Gnuko’s voice crackled over her helmet’s com-link, “and it’s got a higher rad level than you’d want to sunbathe in, but your armor will protect you from its effects for at least three hours. The op is simple,” he continued, his voice becoming increasingly distorted the closer the shuttle came to the surface, “scout the area and, if possible, find any leads as to what the Droids were doing here. It goes without saying that, should you discover any sign of Dr. Schillinger, or her team, their recovery takes precedence over all other objectives. Also, pound any mechanicals you see into the scrap metal they are. Good hunting, Lancers.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” she replied, while Kratos did likewise. Since he had assumed command over the Assault Team just a few weeks earlier, the Tracto-ans aboard the Pride of Prometheus had banded together unlike anything she would have imagined possible after seeing how they had behaved under Atticus’ leadership.

  “Recon Team,” she said, switching to the Recon channel, “communication will be short-range when we touch the planet’s surface. Remain in tight formation; Bernice will take point, with Vali and Traian covering the rear. Hutch, you stay with me,” she instructed, and each of her Lancers acknowledged affirmatively in turn. “Assault Team is equipped with ion rifles,” she continued, gesturing to Kratos’ warriors, “but we use blaster rifles. We also bring ion grenades, since planet has extremely thin atmosphere which will let them work. Ion grenades can knock out HUD,” she tapped her head, “but all other suit functions are hardened against ion interference. So we take point ahead of Assault Team,” she finished, making sure her team knew there was very little danger to them since they were each clad in Storm Drake armor, which had proven essentially impervious to ion weapons during her last mission.

  “Do we have any information on the LZ?” Traian asked.

  “We believe it was the site of archeological dig,” Lu Bu replied, “but Droid warship destroyed any camp from orbit before we arrived. Also, the Droids fired heavily into the ground three kilometers north of here,” she continued as the shuttle began to decelerate in preparation for landing, “but our orders are to secure dig site first, and investigate northern area second.”

  “Understood, ma’am,” Private Funar said just before the shuttle set down.

  “Recon Team,” she barked, taking to her feet and slapping the cargo door control panel, causing it to open considerably more quickly than the old shuttle’s had done, “move out!”

  “South zone looks clear,” Bernice reported through heavy static, “proceeding to east zone.”

  “Acknowledged,” Lu Bu replied promptly before using hand signals to coordinate the rest of her team’s advance toward the site. There were dozens of craters surrounding the site, courtesy of orbital bombardment by the Droid Destroyer which the Pride had pounded into scrap less than an hour earlier.

  The team moved forward to the edge of the ravine and Lu Bu peered over the edge, noting the tattered remnants of nearly a dozen tent-like structures which she recognized as some sort of atmosphere-retaining, easy-to-setup hab modules. They were expensive to purchase and maintain, which suggested that they had indeed located the site of the archeological team’s camp.

  “Contact,” Bernice’s voice crackled over the link, and Lu Bu’s people immediately took cover behind a series of rocky outcroppings overlooking the campsite.

  Lu Bu crept up to where she could see Bernice, who was nearly a hundred meters from her current position and approximately halfway down the slope leading to the ruined campsite. She tracked where Bernice gestured once the two made eye contact, and looked to see an Assault Droid moving slowly around the area. Its movements were jerky and strangely uncoordinated, although it appeared to have sustained light damage, at most.

  Not wanting to pass up the opportunity for a quick kill, Lu Bu used hand signals to communicate to Funar, Traian, and Hutch that they were to open fire on the Droid in five seconds’ time. They had good cover, a superior angle, and a member of the team flanking the only visible enemy. The situation was unlikely to improve, so she powered up her blaster rifle, leaned around her protective shelf of rock, and opened fire in unison with the rest of her team when the five seconds elapsed.

  The Assault Droid’s body was hammered by multiple blaster rifles firing in near-perfect unison—Hutch was the lone member whose shot arrived late, causing him to miss while the other four found the mark—and after a second salvo the machine’s wrecked body ceased all motion.

  Lu Bu watched, waiting for additional movement and, surprisingly, she found some. With Bernice’s eyes still on her, Lu Bu made a pair of hand gestures which told her where the second Assault Droid was located. Bernice acknowledged and, after checking the area, returned a gesture which said there was another warrior machine on the other side of a far tent.

  Lu Bu motioned for Vali and Traian to circle around the opposite side of the camp so they could pin the pair of droids down with an inescapable crossfire, and they swiftly—and silently—complied. Fifty six seconds later, Lu Bu opened fire on the droid she could see and her companions did likewise, peppering the ground with blaster bolts as the hapless droids were torn apart by their precise, savage, fury.

  When the dust had settled, her detached members signaled that all was clear, so Lu Bu ordered them to remain in position while she and Hutch went down to investigate further.

  The campsite appeared barren, aside from a pair of relatively intact tents, and it was toward the nearest of these that Lu Bu made her way. Roughly a third of its support structure was still upright, including that portion with the multiple tent flaps which acted as a kind of airlock, so she approached and placed the muzzle of her rifle into the seam between the flaps and quickly tore open the rightward flap while Hutch did likewise to the left.

  Nothing was inside, but the inner flaps—which were considerably stronger, owing to their more critical nature to maintaining breathable air inside the tent b
efore it had been torn apart—had been shredded by what looked like droid blaster fire. She moved inside and found a bloodstain on the ground, not far from which was a human body.

  The body was that of a dark-skinned man, and he wore the uniform of a military officer of some kind. His head had been almost completely disintegrated by what was clearly point-blank droid blaster fire, but his uniform clearly showed that he had been a member of the Red King’s crew. The chin portion of a head bag was lying across his neck, and Lu Bu took several images of the scene using her helmet’s built-in camera.

  A quick scan of the remaining interior space revealed nothing of note, so they moved on to the second structure after communicating what they had found via hand signals. The second tent was in even worse shape than the first, with all of its supporting structure having been flattened. But the tent canvas itself was more or less intact, so she signaled that she would cover Hutch while he pulled back a section of canvas—Lu Bu had proven thus far to be the superior shot, so she decided she should provide cover.

  Hutch moved forward without any trepidation that she could see and peeled back a section of crumpled canvas, revealing what looked to be a smashed desk of some kind. There were several data slates scattered on the ground, some of which looked like they might even be salvageable, so she snapped some pictures of them before they moved on to another section of tarp.

  Hutch threw back this section and they found nothing but the wrecked frame of the tent lying beneath. There was some blood on the ground, but not a fatal quantity, and there were no other signs of activity so they moved on to the last large section of the tent.

  This time when Hutch threw back the canvas, a blur of motion erupted as he did so and before even Lu Bu could fire off a shot, an Assault Droid—in apparently undamaged condition—sprang up and attempted to knock the new Lancer over.

  But Hutch, amazingly, kept his feet beneath him as the mechanical warrior pressed forward with a series of lurching, jerky movements. Lu Bu even managed to fire off a round, which struck the droid in the flank before Hutch drew his vibro-blade and inexplicably grappled with the machine. His legs churning beneath himself as his back stiffened, Steve Inson somehow unbalanced the droid and, like something from a fantasy holo-vid, threw the droid onto its side. He went to the ground with it, stabbing down with savage, but contained, ferocity. His vibro-blade plunged deep into the lesser-armored sections of the droid’s central axis, and after a half dozen such blows the creature was rendered inert.

  Just for good measure, Lu Bu stepped forward and blew the arms off the machine—arms which were still armed with their built-in blasters that had, for some reason, not been used against Hutch.

  “Thanks,” Hutch said over the crackling com-link.

  She made a signal to maintain radio silence, giving him a stern look which he took as gracefully as a chastised warrior who had just won a life-and-death struggle could take such a rebuke.

  After securing the area, Lu Bu went back to the shattered desk and retrieved the data slates. Several of them appeared burned at their interface ports, but she suspected that Kongming could still retrieve at least some data from them—he was essentially a grand master at all things involving virtual data.

  When she had picked up the four slates which could potentially be salvaged, she stuffed them in a satchel she had slung across her back and gestured to her companions to move north while she went to the highest ground she could find.

  Once she had scaled the scramble-strewn slope, she held up a high-powered strobe and pointed it in the direction of the shuttle. A few seconds later, she saw the shuttle lift off the ground several kilometers away and streak toward her location. Her team had crossed the terrain on foot, but the Assault Team would be spared the same experience since her people had already cleared the area.

  When the shuttle set down just a few meters from her position, the cargo doors opened and Kratos leapt out, followed soon after by his Assault Team’s most accomplished warriors—Tracto-ans all.

  “Secure the site,” Lu Bu instructed over the Lancer command channel, gesturing to the remnants of the campsite. “Four Assault Droids have been eliminated, but there may be more. No survivors found, but you should recover all bodies and equipment we can fit on shuttle.”

  “Understood,” Kratos replied, his deep voice that sounded like iron gouging into stone made even more distinct by the severe static pervading the comm. frequencies. Not three seconds later, his people had been deployed in three separate teams, with half of the Assault Team descending the scramble toward the campsite while two teams of four Lancers each set up on opposing points of high ground flanking the site.

  She nodded in satisfaction at seeing that Kratos knew how to deploy his people—but more importantly, that his people were obeying him without question—and she waved to her people to return to the shuttle.

  With their first objective complete, Lu Bu’s people filed into the shuttle so they could investigate their second target.

  “I think you should come up here, Corporal,” the pilot called over the shuttle’s intercom, so Lu Bu unstrapped from her seat and made her way into the cockpit. She quickly moved into the co-pilot’s seat and strapped in before looking at what the pilot had indicated—a sight which took her breath away.

  Below them was a gaping wound in the surface of the planet which could have only been caused by repeated, thoroughly excessive, laser strikes from orbit. But the damage was more severe than she had ever heard of, with a blast zone that looked like it might have been a kilometer across.

  But its diameter was far from the breathtaking part; the depth of the impact zone was truly staggering. It was as though a giant drill had dropped from the heavens and dug a roughly cylindrical shaft which extended almost perfectly straight down into the ground.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that,” the pilot said over the Lancer command channel. “It must have taken weeks—or months—of sustained bombardment by that Destroyer’s entire arsenal.

  The edges of the crater were smoldering in some places, but somehow the shaft itself—which she now saw narrowed fairly quickly until it measured nearly two hundred meters across roughly two miles down—was relatively clear to look down into. “Can we go down?” she asked.

  “Negative,” he replied, “the heat’s too intense and that shaft is unstable; it’s experiencing all kinds of updrafts that might send us into the wall. My scanners are reading nothing but molten rock at the bottom, anyway; if there was anything down there to begin with, it’s gone now.”

  “They were digging down with lasers from orbit,” she said scornfully as she saw the shaft seem to belch a plume of grey smoke, bolstering the pilot’s assertion as to its instability, “but we interrupted them. Whatever they want is still there.”

  “Of course ma’am,” the pilot acknowledged. “It probably didn’t take them long to make the crater,” he offered as they swooped lower to skirt the edge of the crater itself, “but once they got down to the denser material it probably took them just as much time to clear away the rubble by using explosive blasts as it did to gouge away the material. My grandpa was a Belter; he used to go on and on about the difficulties of working in gravity compared to zero-g.”

  “Are you taking images?” Lu Bu asked as she saw a section of the crater’s edge slough away and slide down into the tunnel.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he replied, and a series of still images appeared on a console in front of her after he input some commands to his console. The stills were accompanied by wide-spectrum video footage which showed no activity anywhere near the crater itself. Apparently the Droids, which had been acting strangely and borderline suicidal, had not stationed any of their units this close to the crater.

  Too bad, Lu Bu thought with disdain.

  “Gather the images and we will return to the campsite,” she instructed.

  “Aye, ma’am,” he acknowledged, and the shuttle made one more three hundred sixty degree pass of the crater before doing
as she had ordered.

  Chapter VI: Cracking the Code

  Fei Long worked at his terminal on the bridge, the nagging sensation that he recognized something about the signal emanating from the planet growing with each passing minute.

  Lu Bu had returned from the planet’s surface with reports of strange droid behavior, and close-up visual evidence of the unthinkable hole which the Droid Destroyer had gouged into the surface of the world from orbit using their most powerful weaponry. She had retrieved a small collection of badly damaged data slates, and Fei Long had already gone over all but one of them and found them to be irreparably damaged.

  It seemed that someone had attempted to interface with the data slates and, upon doing so, had initiated some kind of deliberate feedback surge into the circuitry which powered the slate’s functions—including their data storage components.

  There had been traces of information left in the slates’ buffers, but none of it had been helpful in the least, so Fei Long worked with a surgeon’s precision as he opened the final slate and felt a wave of elation upon seeing that this particular slate’s safety mechanisms had kicked in before the innards of the device had been completely cooked by whatever energy surge had ruined the others.

  After carefully connection a series of hard lines to the slate, and checking for any energy irregularities, Fei Long activated the connection between his isolated workstation on the bridge and the data slate.

  A stream of mathematical gibberish appeared, and Fei Long’s prior sense of elation was dashed against the cruel, hard rocks of reality. It seemed there was some form of data corruption which had replaced every last piece of information on the slate, and he sighed as he watched the seemingly endless stream of alpha-numerics stream across the workstation.