Against The Middle

by Caleb Wachter

  “Yes sir,” she replied, taking the slate in her hand but still looking like she had committed some grave mistake.

  “You’re doing the right thing, Lieutenant McKnight,” he assured her. “This is the only way that the people who have stood with us through thick and thin can have a chance at something resembling a proper reward for their hard work and sacrifice—and it’s the only way they can continue to serve in the manner in which they’ve proven themselves to be singularly capable.”

  “It still feels wrong, sir,” McKnight said with a dubious shake of her head.

  Middleton snorted softly, “All command decisions feel like that, Lieutenant, or they wouldn’t make it this far up the ladder. The job of sitting in the big chair is to make those decisions, regardless of how hard they are or how they make you feel, and then to lie awake at night worrying about whether or not you did the right thing. Remember that.”

  “I will, sir,” she replied with a nod. “And…thank you, Captain, but this ship’s not a rust bucket. She’s carried us through thick and thin; she should be shown the respect she’s earned.”

  Middleton suppressed a sigh, splaying his fingers slightly as he said, “I was just making a point, Lieutenant.”

  “So was I, Captain,” McKnight said, her eyes burning passionately. Middleton couldn’t help but be moved by her decision to stand up to her commanding officer over his off-the-cuff denigration of their ship, and he knew then that she was the right choice for the job of XO on his first command.

  “Understood, Lieutenant. Dismissed,” he nodded agreeably and gestured to the door, prompting his XO to leave the room.

  In truth, he couldn’t have asked for that particular exchange to have gone any better. To his mind she had just proven herself worthy of the position she held as second in command of a military Cruiser, and if he had his way she would now be one step closer to being ready to fill the command chair in her own right.

  He allowed himself a moment of proud reflection on where he and his crew had come from before diving back into tactical analysis and projections—some of which involved the Recon Team’s covert operation.

  “No signals detected on the specified frequencies, ma’am,” Vali Funar reported from the Lost Ark’s sensor console.

  Lu Bu felt her face scrunch up in frustration. “Stand down from readiness; prepare for next jump,” she ordered Strider, who had taken up the position of pilot for the light freighter.

  “Aye, ma’am,” Funar acknowledged pointedly after Mr. Strider failed to do so, prompting the pirate-turned-Navigator to sigh.

  “Aye, aye; we be preppin’ for another jump,” he muttered.

  Lu Bu turned to Trixie, “There is civilized port one jump from here. It is small, but we can leave you if you choose.” She dearly hoped the woman would take her up on the offer, but she knew in her heart that there was no way the universe would be so generous.

  “No thanks; I’m happy as a clam riding along,” Miss Serendipity declared cheerfully. “Besides, if what you said was true then we might actually end up at a world previously inhabited by the Ancients,” she said, her voice lowering in reverence, “never in my wildest dreams did I think I would set foot on a world crafted by the Ancients…well, maybe in my wildest dreams,” she said after a moment’s consideration. “But I usually don’t count those ones because rich and famous celebrities would never want anything to do with a simple girl like me. And besides, this is just so darned much fun I think I could squeal!”

  “This is dangerous, important mission—not ‘fun’,” Lu Bu chided as calmly as she could manage.

  “Maybe not for you,” Trixie beamed, “but you didn’t spend the last three months locked in a crate with your captors contemplating turning you into a three course meal. Me? I’m taking everything that’s happened as a sign that all a person needs is a positive attitude and there’s nothing in this entire ‘verse she can’t overcome!”

  Unable to find fault with the woman’s assertions, Lu Bu was even more frustrated with her than she had been prior to the surprisingly philosophical reply she had just received to her mild rebuke. “I will check with Mr. Fei,” Lu Bu grumbled before turning to leave the cockpit.

  As she left, she heard Trixie whisper to Strider, “Maybe I should bake a cake for her or something? She’s so uptight.”

  Deciding against turning around and having a confrontation, Lu Bu pretended as though she had heard nothing and kept walking. Though nothing could have been farther from the truth since her hearing was easily three times as sensitive as a normal human’s due to her extensive genetic engineering. Instead, she did as she had suggested she would and made her way to Kongming’s quarters.

  His mood had lifted markedly since their…private time, but she had been clear with him that they must suspend such activities for the remainder of the mission. He had agreed, but she suspected she might need to reinforce the point in the near future.

  She stepped into his quarters, leaving the door to the room wide open, and asked in their native tongue, “How is your progress?”

  Fei Long stood from his workstation, the bags beneath his eyes having grown deeper and darker since her last visit several days earlier. They had been deployed on the Lost Ark for over a week already, and Lu Bu was beginning to grow concerned at Fei Long’s uncharacteristic lack of success in his endeavors—endeavors which were, and would always remain, unknowable to her.

  “I am having greater difficulty than I had anticipated,” he admitted, his shoulders sagged slightly in a way which Lu Bu would have taken to mean he had accepted defeat—if he had been anyone other than Fei Long, that is. “Sima Yi’s powers have grown since our last encounter…I am uncertain if I can defeat my rival’s code.”

  Lu Bu narrowed her eyes. “You speak as a beaten man, Kongming,” she said, unconsciously slipping into the familiar form of address since she usually did so while rebuking him. “Do you admit defeat so easily?”

  “Easily?!” he blurted, waving a hand at his workstation. “You have no idea how difficult this is, Fengxian; I am required to write three separate programs which will function independently and at a high degree of capability, only to come together at a precise, predetermined time—a time I have still not been able to ascertain—when they will become a single program capable of finally defeating my longtime rival and, with the winds of fortune at our backs, it may defeat the Raubachs’ designs on the Spineward Sectors as well. Not only does this mission require me to do this, but I must also hide my own…” he spluttered, for the first time in her experience seemingly at a loss for words. His face turned red as he seemed to notice her smirk at seeing his moment of weakness, “I must hide my own digital fingerprints!” he finally snapped, using Confederation Standard for the last statement.

  Feeling absolutely no sympathy for him, since she herself had fought, bled, and willingly placed herself in positions where she was likely to die for her crewmates, Lu Bu shook her head in bitter disappointment. “The winds of fortune are what we make of them, Kongming,” she said coldly. “Only a fool waits for the skies to part for him; if you need new winds then summon them just as your predecessor once did, or cast off his name so that you may sully it no more with your failure!”

  His eyes going wide, Fei Long was struck speechless by her admittedly harsh rebuke. But Lu Bu knew that every day which passed brought their enemies one step closer to their ultimate goal of domination over the Spineward Sectors—or at least some part of them. She knew all too well the depths to which those enemies would stoop, having experienced firsthand their brutality on the battlefield and having heard the admission of Captain Raubach’s involvement in the manufacturing of bioweapons which, if deployed in their most efficient manner, could kill billions of people.

  No, she reminded herself coldly, we are all warriors, just as Master Smith Haldis said. He had once told her after a spat with her current—and hopefully lifelong—boyfriend that each member of a state at war fights in his or her own unique way. To
her mind, this was now Fei Long’s turn to bleed—metaphorically at least—for his fellows. If he failed them when they needed him most, she knew that she could accept that outcome, since not all battles result in victory. But she would not abide his quitting the fight at such an early stage.

  That was the act of a coward. And she would have nothing to do with such a man.

  “It is not that simple, Fengxian,” he growled. “There is no other person in the galaxy who could do what I am asked—“

  “What of your rival?” she interrupted. “This ‘Sima Yi’ of whom you speak with such respect?” She knew that Sima Yi was the longtime rival of Zhuge Liang in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and that in the end of the novel Sima Yi’s cunning, treachery, and patience had culminated in his gaining victory over not only Zhuge Liang, but over every other warlord—including his sworn masters, the Cao family—before ascending to the throne as the leader of the entire nation. That Fei Long was so quick to give his rival the title of the one man who could defeat his favored Great Ancestor was more than alarming to her. It was almost as though he had conceded the battle before it had begun simply be recognizing the identity of his opponent!

  “You do not understand,” Fei Long spat, waving a hand dismissively. “There is balance in all things, Fengxian: Yin and Yang must never be separated, and are the source of all wisdom. Do you not understand that?”

  “That is useless superstition, Kongming,” she said icily. “If you seek excuses for your failure, you can certainly find better ones than the ramblings of our ancestors written tens of thousands of years in the past.”

  “We have not changed, Fengxian,” Fei Long retorted. “Humans are as they have been, so the lessons of the past are, and will always be, the keys to our future!”

  Lu Bu felt her lips twist into a harsh smirk. “Yin and Yang may be all you have left, at this rate…I pray you can return to them and find meaning should you concede defeat here, Kongming,” she said before turning on her heel and leaving her boyfriend with a look of bewilderment on his face.

  Stunned into silence, Fei Long stood there after she had gone for nearly an hour. It had taken him but a few moments to understand what her words had stirred within him, but when he did his mind began to work furiously as he considered the possibilities.

  The kernel of a plan popped into his mind after that hour had passed, but the thought itself was weak like the light of a candle in a rising wind. He dared not move for risk of extinguishing it and losing the seed of the plan she had just so brilliantly suggested.

  He had been going about his programming in the traditional manner: from front to back, as any responsible coder might do. But he had failed to see the nature of the problem for what it truly was: Yin and Yang!

  His reverie was very nearly broken when Trixie appeared at his doorway and said, “Ed was wondering if you were going to work on those upgrades—“

  “Silence—please!” Fei Long said, clenching his eyes shut as he tried to tune out her interruption while grasping at the threads of the plan which had very nearly slipped from his mind. He had been working with the assault droid to upgrade portions of his programming, since doing so had allowed his mind to relax. During recent days, he had needed the welcome distraction—and Ed had been understandably enthusiastic, in his own way, at the prospect of enhanced targeting algorithms and basic piloting software which would allow him, in an emergency, to operate as helmsman for over a thousand different ship classifications.

  “Sorry…” Trixie said meekly, slinking away and leaving Fei Long to his now-jumbled thoughts.

  Then he found the thread which he had lost, and the whole plan came back to his mind in a deluge of abstract concepts and visualized code fragments. “Yin before Yang and after again, on and on it goes for eternity,” he whispered to himself repeatedly as his mind spun faster than he could remember it doing in recent months. He saw the structure of his program now and knew that everything he had done until that point would be useless. Sima Yi’s technique was too advanced to be beaten in anything resembling the traditional manner, so he would have to discard all of his work to that point.

  “Yin and Yang…” he whispered as the final fragments of thought coalesced into his mind and he finally saw his unwritten program in his mind’s eye, over an hour after Lu Bu had rebuked him so candidly. “And back again!” he declared, raising his voice in triumph as he pumped a fist into the air and ran toward the cockpit of the vessel. “That’s it!”

  He found Lu Bu in the dining area, surrounded by most of the other team members. They looked like they might have been eating, but he was unconcerned with their activities as he raced toward Lu Bu, hoisted her up—or tried to, anyway; her bulk was too great for him to move without her active assistance, which she clearly had no wish to give as she glared at him—and planted his lips onto hers in the most passionate gesture he could think of that might adequately convey his gratitude to her.

  “You are a genius, Fengxian!” he crowed in Standard before planting yet another kiss on her lips and, before she could respond, he turned and ran back toward his quarters, knowing he needed to get started immediately. He turned abruptly at the doorway of the dining area and found her gaze—along with several looks of concern on the faces of the other team members—and he said, “Out of Yin and Yang, then back to it again! That’s how I’ll summon the East Wind!”

  Uncertain that any of them understood, but finding that he did not care in the least if they did or not, he raced back to his quarters and began a complete rewrite of his program. He was so joyous that even the nagging, itching sensation at the base of his neck which had irritated him for several days—a sensation centered on the spot where he had come into direct contact with the Ancient neural tissue just before boarding the Lost Ark—seemed to vanish amid the waves of positive energy which were now overflowing in his psyche.

  For the first time since embarking on this particular mission, he knew he would defeat his longtime rival. And he had Lu Bu to thank for it.

  He would make it up to her—of that he had no doubt.

  “What was that all about?” Hutch asked after the stunned silence in the Lost Ark’s dining area had lingered for an uncomfortable interval.

  Lu Bu shook her head, finding she was rather less embarrassed by Kongming’s amorous display than she would have expected. Still, she emphatically wiped her lips on the back of her sleeve before shrugging, “His mind is unknowable.”

  “Nah, you be givin’ him somethin’,” Strider said with a mischievous grin. “Spill them beans, mom.”

  She gave him a scolding look at calling her his mother yet again, but found that she truly had little idea what Fei Long intended. “The wisdom was not mine,” she said eventually, “but if the Ancestors are truly with us, wisdom was his all along. I remind him of this, and he understands.”

  “Behind every great man…” Hutch chuckled, causing the rest of the team to break out in soft laughter at the unfinished joke—a joke with which Lu Bu was completely unfamiliar.

  “What this means?” she asked irritably.

  Hutch held up his hands in mock surrender. “It means that every now and then a man needs a good, hard kick in the pants—and some of the time it’s a good thing that his woman is all-too-happy do it.”

  Lu Bu nodded, putting the imagery of a woman standing behind a man and delivering a vicious kick between his legs firmly in her mind, and knowing she understood the wisdom of the reference. She, too, began to chuckle, and the atmosphere of mirth persisted for several hours as the Lost Ark prepared for its next jump.

  Chapter XII: The Seed is Planted

  “Contact,” Funar declared steadily, “we have contact on the proscribed frequencies, ma’am.”

  It had been six days since Fei Long’s unusual show of gratitude in the dining area, but by what she was grudgingly forced to admit was likely the smile of the Ancestors upon their mission, Fei Long had declared his program to be ready mere hours before this latest point trans
fer. He had followed his declaration with caveats, including how he could increase their chances of complete success with several days of refinement to his program, but Lu Bu had been sufficiently convinced that it was ready for deployment.

  “Confirm,” she ordered tightly.

  “Confirming,” Funar said before meeting her eyes, “contacts confirmed: I’m reading three warships in orbit of the second planet of this system, ma’am. Configurations match two Harmony Tribe Corvettes and one Harmony Destroyer.”

  It was a smaller force than she would have liked to happen upon, but Fei Long had assured her that his program would ensure that at least two additional legs of communication would go out once the Droids had assimilated the first of his hidden Yin and Yang code fragments.

  Lu Bu called down to the engine room via the ship’s hardwired intercom system, “Yide, prepare maximum burn on engines.”

  “Aye,” Yide reported in his deep, rumbling voice over the crackling speakers.

  “Mr. Fei,” she continued, piping herself into his dedicated chamber’s intercom speakers, “report to bridge now.”

  Soon thereafter, Kongming stepped into the cockpit and took over at the combined Sensors and Communications station which Funar had manned.

  “Prepare gunship for launch,” she instructed Funar, “and have Ed attached quickly, but securely.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he replied as the cockpit’s main view screen—a barely three foot wide display—shimmered and was replaced by the image of a Droid Corvette which appeared to be breaking orbit of the planet.

  “Northern Corvette is breaking orbit and accelerating to intercept the Lost Ark,” Fei Long reported needlessly. “Time to intercept on current course: one hour twenty three minutes.”