Against The Middle

by Caleb Wachter

They sat in silence for nearly ten minutes as she flipped through departmental rosters and, finally, presented her list for the Captain’s approval.

  “This team should be of myself, two experts, assault droid,” she began, feeling butterflies in her stomach as she continued, “and addition of Mr. Strider, Lancer Funar, Lancer Traian, Lancer Inson, and Yide.” She had opted for one fewer team members than the maximum they had listed because she knew that he operation would likely hinge on the team’s mobility and low profile.

  Captain Middleton and Sergeant Gnuko shared a brief, yet significant look before Gnuko took the slate with her list and gave a once-over before handing it to the captain. “Looks like I lost,” Gnuko said with a sigh.

  “Can’t win ‘em all, Sergeant,” Captain Middleton quipped before accepting the slate she had just used, and handing her one of his own. When she took it, she saw a pair of lists similar to the one she had just compiled—in fact, one of them was identical to her own! “That was impressive, Corporal,” Captain Middleton congratulated, “it took you ten minutes, without preparation or forewarning, to come up with the same list I did after thirty minutes of consideration.”

  She scanned the two lists, feeling numb at receiving such an overt compliment from the Pride’s commanding officer. Captain Middleton’s list was, indeed, identical to her own. Sergeant Gnuko’s list, however, exchanged Bernice for Kratos and Yide for Chief Garibaldi. Yide provided engineering expertise which was sufficient, in Lu Bu’s mind, to the tasks they were expected to encounter and he was also an accomplished pilot. Traian was also a capable pilot, and Lu Bu felt confident in her own ability to learn the nuances of the craft—or crafts—they would be piloting, while Funar was the best shot of anyone on the team with a rifle. Hutch had proven to be unflappable in his short service time, so she had decided to include him based primarily on that…but, if she was being honest, there were still certain questions she wished to ask of him regarding Walter Joneson. She was more than mildly surprised that neither Sergeant Gnuko nor Captain Middleton objected to his inclusion—and even more surprised to see that Captain Middleton had also included him on his roster.

  “Congratulations, Corporal,” Gnuko said with what could only be described admiration, “you just earned yourself command of this mission.”

  Lu Bu felt a thrill of excitement as Captain Middleton nodded, “If your list had been significantly different than either of these, Sergeant Gnuko would have taken command of the op. You just proved you’ve got a certain…spark,” the captain’s eyes seemed to glaze over for a moment, as though lost in reflection, “that we’re going to need to get this mission accomplished.”

  “This one will not fail,” Lu Bu said with certainty. “The team will accomplish mission.”

  “Not the team, Lu,” Gnuko said heavily, “your team. This will be your first wholly independent command and you’ll be operating without support of any kind. It’s what the Recon Team was intended to do, but nothing can fully prepare you for your first operation behind enemy lines.”

  Lu Bu nodded curtly, “This one will not fail, Sergeant Gnuko.”

  “Let’s iron out the material assets you’ll take with you,” Captain Middleton said, “and then we’ll get you loaded onto your ship. The sooner we do so, the better our odds.”

  “This one…I will not fail, Captain Middleton,” she said confidently, knowing that every moment of her life had prepared her for this great honor. She bit her lip as she considered whether to ask her next question, which she feared would sound cowardly but she had good reason to ask it so she decided to do so. “What is extraction plan?”

  Captain Middleton quirked a grin, “Let’s just say we’re calling in a favor from a…new friend who was willing to postpone other plans once we presented him with a rough outline of the plan.”

  Lu Bu felt a knot tighten in her stomach, “There is no danger of compromising mission?”

  Sergeant Gnuko snickered, “No, Lu, I don’t think there’s much danger of him mucking this up for us.”

  It took her a moment, but when she realized who they meant she felt her nerves calm significantly. “Good,” she said, “I will inform team.”

  Lu Bu was gathering the last of her belongings from her quarters. She would take only the essentials with her for the mission she had been given the opportunity to command, but she still took a few moments to ensure she was not forgetting anything prior to departure.

  The door chimed and she moved to open it, wondering who it could have been. When she opened it, she found Kratos looking down at her with a look of condescension clear on his face.

  “You will leave soon for a mission,” he said, prompting her to arch an eyebrow at his having learned of her mission since it was supposed to have been secret, “and I must speak with you before you go.”

  “What is it, Kratos?” she asked wearily, very much disliking the idea of spending much of her time remaining about the Pride of Prometheus conversing with the large, brash, unruly Tracto-an.

  “I am…not skilled with words,” he said, shifting uncomfortably from one foot to the other before catching himself doing so and stiffening, “so I will be blunt.”

  “I expect nothing else from you,” she quipped coldly.

  Ignoring her remark, he said, “All my life, I have rebelled against those things which I believe to be wrong. Until serving on this ship, I remained confident that I had fought against people and ideas which were worthy of opposition. But, serving under your command, I have learned…” He trailed off, clearly uncertain of what words to say before finishing, “you have challenged me in ways I had thought impossible. Honor demands that I show you the proper gratitude for this.”

  Lu Bu was more than a little surprised by his candor and by the idea that he—a fifty year old Tracto-an veteran of over a hundred battles, by his own claim anyway—had learned anything from her, a teenage girl with less life experience than most twelve year olds due to her suffocating childhood.

  “I want you to have this,” he finally said, reaching down to something which had been propped against the bulkhead beside the door. “I am no longer worthy of it, but I believe that you may be.”

  She looked at the object he held in his hands and saw that it was a massive, stone-headed hammer with a far-too-short haft, which measured less than one foot long from butt to base of the hammerhead. The head itself appeared to have sustained some sort of catastrophic break, with at least three distinct pieces comprising the roughly smashball-shaped hammerhead with flattened ends instead of the pointed ones like a smashball had. The damaged head had been bound with a series of overlapping duralloy bands, so that it retained its presumably original shape, and Lu Bu quickly noted a pair of curious activation buttons near the butt of the weapon’s haft.

  She took it from his outstretched hands, feeling its impressive weight in her hands as she did so but uncertain how to accept such a clearly generous gift. She saw chiseled lettering—Tracto-an lettering, if her eyes served her—covering the weapon’s head, but the too-short handle of the weapon was newly made and composed of what looked to be hollow duralloy.

  “I had Haldis make the repairs to the head, as well as some modifications which I believe you will find…agreeable,” Kratos explained, proffering a data slate which she graciously accepted. “I only hope it will serve you as well as it has served those who bore it before you.”

  “What is its name?” she asked without even thinking, and she realized that she had become so swept up in the scene that she had just assumed it was a named weapon, given the reverence with which Kratos treated it.

  “It is called Glacier Splitter,” Kratos replied as he turned to leave, “and it was first wielded by my grandfather.”

  Before she could ask after it further, the one-eyed Tracto-an’s massive legs had taken him to the nearby junction and he disappeared around the corner, leaving her holding the heavy, strangely-built weapon. She scanned the data slate and found that it detailed the weapon’s specifications,
and her eyes lit up when she read the details of its apparently telescopic, adjustable haft.

  But it was the last section, detailing the upgrades to the hammerhead itself, which convinced her to take the cumbersome weapon with her on the mission she had been assigned to command.

  Fei Long was just finishing some last-minute tests on the neural tissue they had recovered from the ComStat hub. He needed to have a more precise measure of the material’s raw processing power, and had hoped to devise a whole new set of tests which would allow him to do precisely that.

  But recent developments had spurred him to simply repeat several inconclusive tests from earlier weeks in an effort to gain some greater insight into the material’s properties. He suspected that the material would prove pivotal in the coming conflict, and he wanted to be armed with as much information as possible.

  So he worked alone in the Pride of Prometheus’ medical laboratory. Normally Doctor Middleton was present for the experiments, but her duties as CMO had required her to absent from these particular experiments.

  The last test he needed to conduct was one involving combined electrical, thermal, and pressure variances. It seemed that the tissue responded predictably to nearly every kind of measurable stimulation, and it was the combination of stimuli which yielded the most complex, and therefore important, results.

  So he placed the specimen of neural tissue inside the modified pressure clave before affixing the thin electrodes to either side of the specimen dish. Closing the door, he activated the preprogrammed sequences he had designed to test the interactivity of heat, pressure, and electricity on the tissue.

  He was rewarded with a stream of input data from his various scanners and pick-ups which had been directed to monitor the neural tissue.

  “Fascinating…” he heard himself mutter as he copied the test’s results before initiating the second set of preprogrammed variances. Again, the results were immediate and extraordinary, and he knew it would take him days to properly analyze the data he was collecting. Thankfully, he also knew he would have time enough to do so in the near future.

  He opened the clave and ran a series of localized scans, finding the neural tissue appeared to be no worse for the experiments thus far. Briefly turning his back to the clave, he made to set up the third preprogrammed sequence of tests while gathering a bottle of solution which Doctor Middleton had concocted which seemed to prolong the tissue’s survival, for lack of a better word, during the testing procedures. He would need to apply a few drops to the—

  A sharp, stinging pain erupted on the back of his neck and he whirled around only to realize that the specimen container had exploded, sending fragments of glass and the container’s contents—namely, the strange neural tissue—outward.

  Knowing he had likely been contaminated, and not wanting to take any chances, he reached for the syringe filled with the poisonous concoction which Doctor Middleton had created that had proven capable of killing the neural tissue without harming humans in any way. Reaching behind his neck, he injected half of the syringe’s contents into, and around, the small wound which was located just below his robe’s loose collar.

  He stopped and thought about the matter for several minutes, knowing that even the best precautions taken against such an unknown bio agent could ultimately prove useless, but as he ran through the situation calmly and calculatingly he realized there was simply nothing more that could be done. Doctor Middleton had found no success in creating further counteracting agents, and she had spent a not inconsiderable amount of time attempting to improve on what was essentially her first attempt. So he had already administered their best antidote in quantities far exceeding those which Doctor Middleton had prescribed during their early experiments when going over protocols for dealing with exposure.

  If Fei Long told anyone of the incident, he would almost certainly be taken off of his active assignment and that was simply an unacceptable outcome. The ship needed him, the Fleet needed him and—a possible swollen ego notwithstanding—the Spineward Sectors needed him doing what only he could. His personal health came far behind the well-being of the billions of inhabitants of the Spine.

  So he cleaned up the mess, disposed of the specimen and its container in the same fashion they had done for the previous tests—by autoclaving it and then ejecting the fragments into space—and replaced everything as it had been before leaving the laboratory and making his way toward his quarters.

  Chapter X: Departure

  “Good hunting, Corporal,” Middleton said after the last of the team had loaded aboard Toto’s last remaining gunship. The Pride’s Tactical Officer was present in the hangar, as was his wife, and together they watched what would very likely be their family home’s last takeoff from the deck of the ship.

  Middleton had needed to make certain assurances to the Sundered and his family in exchange for using their gunship, but since they involved salvage rights over future light craft—salvage which could only take place in the event of the crew’s survival, which was still no better than a fifty-fifty proposition—he had been amenable to the uplift’s demands.

  “We will succeed, sir,” Lu Bu replied, snapping off a crisp salute that did her fellow servicemen proud. Middleton returned the gesture, and the door to the small craft closed behind her after she signaled for the pre-flight routine to commence.

  Ed, the assault droid, would not fit inside the craft so he had opted to be welded to the outer hull. Toto had complained about such unwanted bulk’s undesirable effects on the craft’s maneuverability, but had eventually relented and after several hours of work the engineers had managed to secure the assault droid with a series of removable braces that could be undone in just a few minutes—or even torn from their mounts by the droid itself with a few well-placed shots from its rotary cannon.

  Captain Middleton ordered his people to exit the hangar bay, which they did, and thirty minutes later the Sundered gunship had successfully been wedged inside the Lost Ark’s cargo hold. An hour after that, the vessel had been secured sufficiently that the Recon Team was ready to take on its most difficult mission yet.

  Middleton watched from the bridge of the Pride as the Lost Ark spun up her jump drive and, finally, exited the system without so much as a word.

  “Navigator,” Middleton said, knowing that Lieutenant McKnight would now be required to take over some of the ship’s navigation duties, “initiate jump sequence.” He watched as she gave several commands which would set the ship’s hyper drive into action, resulting in a countdown timer to appear over the main screen. When she had finished doing so, Middleton nodded and leaned forward in his chair, “Let’s go hunting.”

  “The ship be ready to initiate the next point transfer sequence, mom,” Strider said after fidgeting with the Lost Ark’s controls for several minutes post-transfer.

  “I am not your ‘mom’,” Lu Bu scowled, knowing the other man was likely twice her age.

  “Sorry fer that, ‘may-om’,” he said, scowling briefly at receiving the rebuke. “The engines be prepped for a ten hour cycle; not the fastest, but she’ll be getting us to the first point on the route in six days if we don’t be molested.”

  “Good,” Lu Bu said, breathing a short sigh of relief before realizing it was foolish to feel relieved at having successfully made a single point transfer. “I will check others.”

  She pushed out of the Lost Ark’s relatively cramped cockpit, which was only fractionally larger than that of the Deathbacker back on the Pride of Prometheus. A narrow corridor took her past a pair of crew quarters—likely belonging to the ship’s captain and Doctor Schillinger—and she came to a short set of stairs which brought her to the ship’s mess hall.

  But this ship’s mess hall was more like a standard, if larger-than-usual, dining and living room with an attached kitchen on the other side of a ten foot long island with a half dozen stools secured beneath it.

  Lancer Traian was going through their supplies and inventorying what had been aboard the v
essel prior to their series of transfers several hours earlier. “Looks like we’ve got some good stuff here, ma’am,” Traian said, gesturing to a few crates of what looked to be vacuum-sealed, cryogenically-preserved fruits, vegetables, and naturally-grown protein. “Plus the ship’s captain was something of a sauce-hound,” he added conspiratorially, opening a previously-locked cabinet to reveal a wide array of alcoholic beverages which Lu Bu suspected could, if imbibed in one sitting, knock out an entire smashball team in their prime. “At least the first few days of this mission won’t be all bad.”

  “No spirits,” Lu Bu scolded, and though he gave her a wounded look, she suspected he had fully expected her reaction. “Catalogue items and separate into what we can stow on gunship, and mark what must remain here. We eat from non-transferrable stock first.”

  “Aye, ma’am,” Traian acknowledged with a nod, and Lu Bu turned to the far end of the room as she made her way to another corridor. There were several hatches leading, presumably, to living quarters which Traian and Hutch had already secured.

  So Lu Bu made her way past them to yet another set of stairs, which she navigated and followed the cramped corridor to the left before it curved back toward the stern of the ship and she found herself standing beside Trixie, one of the specialists assigned to the mission. “Is there problem?” she asked after briefly considering pushing past the woman in silence. She could barely stand to be near the other woman when her tongue began to waggle—as it was prone to do with alarming regularity—but she knew it was her responsibility as mission leader to check in on the other members of the team.

  “Problem?” Trixie asked in confusion, looking up with a blank look before seeming to realize something important. “Oh, good; I’ve been meaning to speak with you, Corporal. I just remembered that the captain said ‘if you need a place to hide for a few hours, check under the port gangway in the cargo hold: second panel from the left.’ I have no idea what he meant, but I thought it might come in handy?”