Against The Middle

by Caleb Wachter

  Fei Long muttered to himself as he worked to connect a pair of his digital cracking devices to the interface, and Lu Bu turned to the other members of her Recon Team. “Traian, Funar,” she pointed to a nearby outcropping of ‘rock,’ which she now knew was merely cleverly-disguised panels of metal, “cover this wall from there. Bernice, Hutch,” she continued, pointing to a pair of points with significantly less cover, but they were the best that was available, “three point firing positions there. Do not fire unless I fire first, or I am killed.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Hutch replied, while Bernice nodded sharply. A few seconds later, her team was in position and she could hear the crump of power-armored boots approaching. Her HUD, at this range, functioned well enough to show that they were Kratos’ people, doing as they had been instructed and coming in to cover the door.

  “All too easy,” Fei Long said scornfully, and a moment later he turned to Lu Bu to say, “I shall summon the conveyance as soon as you are prepared.”

  “Do it,” she said, kneeling in front of him and shouldering her rifle, uncertain of where exactly the passage’s entrance was located. A moment later, however, a section of ‘rock’ approximately five feet wide and eight feet tall parted in the center, and the two panels slid sideways to reveal an unexpected sight.

  There was a chamber beyond, and it was circular in shape with dimensions of approximately ten feet from floor to ceiling, and thirty feet across. There were six one meter wide panels, which glowed with a soft, green light, and those panels were set equidistantly on the floor at the midway point of the room’s radius.

  The walls of the room were made of a gleaming, silvery alloy, and the reason the walls gleamed was because a shimmering, liquid material bubbled up from the center of the room. The center of the chamber was slightly depressed into a shallow bowl-shaped area which filled the area between the six panels, and it gave the appearance of a glistening pool of water, the surface of which was neither placid, nor tumultuous. The pattern of the ripples seemed almost hypnotic, and Lu Bu forced her eyes from it as her mind was filled with an irrational fear that it could somehow affect her mind.

  “Remarkable,” Fei Long said as he stood to move past her, but Lu Bu gripped his wrist in her Storm Drake-clad hand and yanked him back.

  “Replace your gloves, Fei,” she snapped, and for a moment he scarcely seemed to notice she had spoken, but then he nodded and did as she had instructed. “Bernice, Hutch,” she beckoned, “secure the room—but do not touch the liquid.”

  “Yes ma’am,” the two replied, and after a brief hesitation at the door, Bernice followed Hutch inside. The smashball player was proving to be as unflappable as Lu Bu could have hoped for, and after a careful—if a bit amateurish—sweep of the room, he gave Lu Bu the ‘all clear’ sign.

  “Funar, Traian,” she said, standing from her crouch and stepping toward the room with Fei Long close at her heels, “cover the rear.”

  The team moved into the chamber as she had instructed, and Fei Long knelt beside the pool of liquid. Before Lu Bu could chastise him, the pool seemed to swell in his direction and Lu Bu unthinkingly slammed into him with her shoulder, sending him sprawling away from the pool. After seeing he was clear of the pool, she turned and saw the liquid had risen up into the shape of a giant funnel. She tried to bring her blaster rifle up to defend herself, but the liquid enveloped her before she could do so.

  Struggling in vain against the incredibly strong material’s grip, she saw her teammates rush to her side. But before they could act, she was filled with an overwhelming sense of vertigo as the world went black around her.

  In what seemed like no more than a few seconds, she felt her limbs break free of the liquid and her vision returned. She fell to a heap on the floor, finding that all of her companions had vanished!

  Bringing her rifle up, she visually cleared the room as her heart began to pound in her ears at the thought that, somehow, the liquid had frozen her in time while it had somehow disposed of her companions.

  She rushed to the entry of the chamber and took up a firing position before realizing she was no longer in the same chamber she had just occupied.

  The chamber’s dimensions and features appeared absolutely identical to her, but the door leading out of it did not connect to the false-rock-lined passageway through which she had entered a few minutes earlier. Instead, there was a long catwalk stretching far into the darkness before her, and she activated her helmet’s low-light visual filters to get a better look at her surroundings.

  The catwalk was located in a long, perfectly cylindrical shaft that extended forward at least a hundred meters. Her helmet’s visual enhancement suite was incapable of allowing her to see any further. Before she could decide how to proceed, there was a splashing sound behind her and she spun to see Hutch on his hands and knees—much as she had been—above one of the six circular panels set into the floor. He quickly rolled forward and brought his vibro-blade up in a defensive grip before sighting her and relaxing fractionally.

  “That was a good guess,” he said as he stood and sheathed the short blade. He then unslung his blaster rifle and gestured to the floor, “Long thought I should try a return trip to prove his theory.”

  “Of course he did,” she said irritably before nodding. “Proceed.”

  Hutch turned and knelt beside the pool of liquid, and just like it had done before, it rose up into a roughly conical shaped funnel. But this time, with the benefit of having survived the ordeal once herself, Lu Bu was able to take note of the bowl-shaped depression at the center of the chamber and saw that the ceiling of this chamber was also depressed. That part of the ceiling opened up like an iris, and just as Hutch was encased in the liquid, he was pulled — or sucked — up into the opening the iris had revealed. As soon as his body cleared the iris, it closed and Lu Bu was once again left alone.

  Not more than a minute later, Fei Long emerged via the same mechanism with an eight year old’s grin plastered across his stupid face. “I love being right,” he said giddily before moving toward the door of the chamber and crouching behind Lu Bu, who shook her head at his childlike exuberance.

  One by one, the rest of her team emerged through the strange transit device—which left them completely dry, Lu Bu noted after the third member of her team emerged—and she formed them up so they could investigate the area beyond the catwalk.

  The catwalk extended for three hundred meters—and Lu Bu only realized when reaching the mid-point that the catwalk had almost certainly been built by the archeologists, since the pre-fabricated components bore legible markings in Confederation Standard. When they reached the far end, Lu Bu ordered her people to stop as she saw a flicker of light ahead.

  When she gauged the distance to the flicker of light as being nearly fifty meters away, inside of what looked to be a vast cavern, she used hand signals to order her people to take up covering positions on the far end of the catwalk.

  They filed quickly, and quietly, across the catwalk and Lu Bu adjusted her helmet’s pickups to compensate for the presence of the light source. When she did so, she saw a large, smooth structure in the middle of the cavern, and she signaled for Funar and Traian to cover the specialists while she, Bernice, and Hutch moved forward into the cavern.

  The light was coming from what looked like a crack in the roughly dome-shaped structure at the center of the vast cavern, and Lu Bu quickly spotted human equipment—a micro-fusion generator, a trio of tents, and several empty crates—just outside the crack in the dome.

  She heard noises coming from the structure as she approached, and realized it was muted speech, so she silently halted her people and increased the sensitivity of her helmet’s audio pickups. The suite of such features in her Storm Drake armor’s attached helmet wasn’t nearly as robust as those on a proper battle suit, but Lu Bu had long preferred the unrestrictive, form-fitting Storm Drake armor, and had decided that her team would don it whenever possible. Still, the built-in pickups managed to filter out th
e ambient noise inside the dome-shaped structure and allow her to hear the conversation inside.

  “I’m telling you, we’re going to run out of food here,” a man’s voice said.

  “Quit complaining, Kaep,” a woman rebuked acidly. “HQ knows we’re here; they’ll send a rescue operation any time.”

  “The Commodore didn’t even send reinforcements to his firstborn son—and heir to the family fortunes—when he asked for them, Boldin,” the man retorted. “How much do you think he’s going to miss a couple of petty officers from one of his Corvettes? Nobody’s coming to help us; I say we make a run for it.”

  “And go where, Kaep?” the woman, Boldin, snapped. “Just because the orbital strikes stopped a few hours ago doesn’t mean the Droids decided to give up the chase. They want what’s down here just as much as we do, but so far they haven’t managed to find the entrance or, even if they have, this archeo-tech might not allow them to pass.”

  “But we’re running out of food, Boldin,” Kaep argued in a pleading tone. “We’ve only got another dozen ration bars, and we’ve recycled our water supply so many times I’d probably commit murder for a drink of fresh urine!”

  “Pipe down,” Boldin chastised, “I thought I heard something.”

  Lu Bu froze, and she could actually sense her teammates do likewise—apparently they, too, had piped into the conversation in the same fashion she had done.

  Several seconds of silence ensued, followed by Kaep whispering, “What did you hear?”

  “It must have been your nerves as they ran screaming into the night,” Boldin quipped before snickering.

  “That’s not funny, Boldin,” Kaep said sourly as the woman continued to snicker.

  “I know, I know,” she said, “but just look on the bright side: if we actually do run out of ration bars, at least we’ve got a fresh supply of protein in the back room.”

  “Don’t even joke about that,” Kaep said before making a strangled, choking sound which Lu Bu concluded was a suppressed bout of emesis.

  “Pansy,” Boldin said, “besides, you’re the one who was begging to drink fresh urine a second ago.”

  Another bout of retching on the man’s part ensued, followed by more snickers from the woman but Kaep eventually recomposed himself. “We’re here to retrieve whatever intel they might have,” he said in a lowered voice. “That’s our primary mission; the Commodore hasn’t exactly been pleased with this team’s leader, Doctor what’s-her-name, and her reluctance to contribute to his plans. How do you think the old man would treat us if we told him we ate an alternate source of the intel he’s after?”

  “Don’t pretend you haven’t been thinking the same thing,” she said contemptuously. “You don’t get to claim the high ground any more than I do; we’re in this thing together—remember that. Besides,” she said bitterly, “at least it would put a permanent end to her rambling. That girl could talk a fusion reactor into submission.”

  Deciding she had heard enough, Lu Bu gestured for her Lancers to flank the entrance to the structure while she prepared to approach with her blaster rifle drawn, ready to take down the pair of enemy operatives. Personally, she found their comments to be in bad taste, but she also understood the realities of subsistence living in a crisis. To teach her that particular lesson’s import, her ‘family’—the people who had given birth to her, and then subjected her to what she was quite certain any reasonable person would consider physical and psychological torture during her formative years—engineered a situation where she was forced to eat her lifelong pet dog in order to survive.

  Pushing thoughts of that horrific period in her life from her mind, she shook her head sharply and padded toward the entry.

  She could no longer hear their words, but she knew the Raubach operatives continued to speak from within the dome-shaped structure. When she reached the entrance, she risked a glance inside and was rewarded with a clear line of sight to a woman, who she assumed was Boldin. Her suspicion was confirmed when the woman spoke, and this time Lu Bu was close enough she did not need to use her helmet’s suite of audio pickups to listen in.

  “This isn’t even an Ancient facility,” Boldin said argumentatively. “Most likely it was built by some aquatic species they, or someone else, uplifted—a species that evidently didn’t pass the self-destruction hurdle. Nothing here can be of too much value to our mission; I doubt the Commodore would argue with the evidence if we presented it accurately.”

  Kaep scoffed loudly, “As if anyone knows what the old man will or won’t do? And even if we did manage to convince him of your version of things, we already know too much. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed,” he said, a hint of fear creeping into his voice, “but not a single one of the expeditionary teams—teams like ours—have returned as far as I can tell.”

  “Hush,” Boldin snapped, and Lu Bu froze in position, her grip on her blaster rifle tightening as she prepared for the engagement, “I heard something.”

  “More wisecracks?” Kaep sniffed. “Fool me once, shame on—“

  Lu Bu spun around the edge of the door and snapped off a low shot at the woman’s legs, resulting in a clean hit which took her left leg off completely at the knee. The woman, surprisingly, kept her composure throughout and produced a blaster pistol which she fired—errantly—in Lu Bu’s direction before collapsing to the ground and writhing in agony.

  Lu Bu turned the muzzle of her rifle toward the man, who was seated on a supply crate and raised his hands into the air in the universal sign of surrender. “How many others?” Lu Bu asked, the volume of her helmet’s external speakers cranked up to maximum. She had learned during her training that this was more conducive to a nonviolent end with a subject of Kaep’s apparent sensibilities—mainly, a potent, cowardly streak which ran down the middle.

  He looked ashen-faced at his fallen companion for a moment before pointing, “You have to help her!”

  Lu Bu took a menacing step forward, “How many others?!”

  He leapt from the crate, apparently having forgotten all about the badass warrior woman who had an overpowered rifle pointed at his head. “Help me, quickly!” he cried as he sought to tear the sleeve from his uniform and apply it as a tourniquet to her bleeding stump of a leg.

  Assuming the man had finally snapped, Lu Bu saw Bernice and Hutch appear to either side of her with their own weapons trained on the Raubach operatives—operatives who wore an unfamiliar uniform bearing a crest she recognized as belonging to the Rim Fleet. She stepped toward him and cradled her weapon across her body, “Answer my question, Kaep. How many others are here?”

  “Nobody is going to be here if she dies!” Kaep snarled, pointing to her neck. Lu Bu followed his gesture and saw a collar-like device with some kind of transmitter attached to it, and Kaep continued, “She has the transmitter wired with explosives that will go off if her heart stops beating!”

  Realizing the error of her ‘shoot first, ask questions later,’ philosophy, Lu Bu dropped her rifle and dove to the woman’s side. Before she could clamp down on the woman’s legs with her hands, however, Boldin’s eyes rolled back into her head and she slumped into unconsciousness.

  “How far will transmitter go?” Lu Bu demanded, and for a moment Kaep actually seemed to process her question.

  “Two hundred meters, no more,” he said. “We need to get out of here—there might be time to make the lift!”

  “Where is prisoner?” Lu Bu demanded, placing a hand on the man’s shoulder and squeezing hard enough to cause a long-lasting bruise. To his credit, he stifled the yep he almost certainly wanted to issue, and jerked his chin in the direction of a crate on the far side of the chamber.

  Without needing to be ordered, Hutch sprinted across the room and gave a sloppy ‘target acquired’ sign before slinging his rifle over his shoulder and drawing his vibro-blade. With just a pair of swipes, he cut through whatever it was he had been hacking, and bent down to collect a young woman’s limp, clearly malnourished form.

&
nbsp; “Bernice, restrain Kaep and bring him,” Lu Bu instructed after securing the tourniquet around Boldin’s leg. The massive Tracto-an woman complied by placing the man’s wrists in zip-ties before doing likewise to his ankles, and finally ‘hog-tying’ him in reverse. Lu Bu cradled Boldin’s limp body in her arms. “No other survivors?” Lu Bu demanded as the collar around Boldin’s neck—which had been flashing green with the regularity of a well-conditioned heart’s beat—was now flashing yellow and less regularly.

  “No, none,” Kaep replied quickly, “I swear on my family jewels!”

  Glad to have secured a prisoner with such a wealthy family—Lu Bu had learned that people who had much would cooperate more readily than those who had nothing, since the fear of losing that which one has is greater than the hunger of not yet having anything—she ordered her Lancers to leave as she quickly spun around in the room, taking pictures of the scene before exiting.

  When she turned to leave, she saw Fei Long was already inside the chamber. “Long—out!” she snapped.

  “This could be our only chance to study it,” he gestured to the glowing orb resting halfway in the floor of the chamber.

  “Do you see the explosives?” Lu Bu demanded, pointing to the pack of high explosives—which, she noted, had a flashing light which matched the one on Boldin’s neck perfectly. “We must go or we will die!”

  Fei Long was many things, but a fool was not among them. Needing no further encouragement to do what any reasonable person would do, he turned and sprinted out of the room, followed quickly by Lu Bu and her Lancers.

  “Go, go, go, go,” she barked after switching her helmet’s com-link to the Recon Team frequency. “To the lift—leave fast, no wait for teammates,” she ordered, her verbiage failing her in the tension of the situation.

  Her Lancers complied, with Traian and Funar ushering Fei Long and the engineers back to the catwalk and sprinting down its length as Lu Bu, Bernice, and Hutch moved as quickly as they could manage. Which, given their respective physical abilities, was not altogether that much slower than the first group’s pace.