So it was extremely likely that Commodore Raubach’s actions here in the Spineward Sectors were merely part of some greater plan which had been set in motion by Senator James Raubach II, the patriarch and leader of House Raubach these past sixty years.
During his time as House primarch, Senator Raubach had executed several high-profile political coups, foremost among them being a surprising alliance with House Cornwallis in several key areas—not the least of which was the development of the Cornwallis-Raubach consortium which seemed to be at the heart of the Spineward Sectors’ local defense technology industry. It seemed that under James Raubach I’s tenure as House leader, House Raubach and House Cornwallis had been engaged in a not-so-cold war which had eventually seen House Cornwallis emerge victorious, with combined holdings and stature that now dwarfed their onetime rival House.
It had seemed that James Raubach I’s intention had been to ‘go down swinging,’ as the saying goes, but he had died under what were clearly suspicious circumstances and his son had taken direct control over the House entire. This had led to the aforementioned formation of the Cornwallis-Raubach alignments, which apparently extended their influence far beyond their operations in the Spine.
Middleton had examined this information, hoping to glean some useful information that he might use in the battle to come for his own advantage. But he had found precious little of note, aside from the powerful—yet entirely circumstantial—evidence pointing to a fratricidal rise to power on the part of now-Senator Raubach.
“Ping detected, Captain,” McKnight reported after checking in on some activity at the Comm. station. Middleton missed having Mr. Fei at the post, as he knew the rest of the crew would, but the young coder was clearly more needed on his current assignment. His XO turned with a grim, but fiery look on her face as she said, “Our guests have arrived at System #3, sir.”
“Thank you, XO,” Middleton said, “spin up the hyper drive. If our intel is accurate, we’ll have two hours before they join us for the party. We need to take advantage of that window.”
“Aye, Captain,” McKnight acknowledged, and several minutes later she reported, “point transfer in t-minus five hours, fifty eight minutes, Captain.”
Middleton nodded, knowing that he was about to ride his aged warship into what could very well be its final battle. He decided it was worth a trip below decks to check in with his Chief Engineer and old friend. “You have the con, Lieutenant,” he said, rising from his chair.
“Yes sir,” she said as he exited the bridge.
He boarded the lift and descended six decks before exiting the lift and making his way to the forward sections of the vessel. The corridors of the Pride of Prometheus, at least in this section, were nowhere near regulation. Power conduits had been laid against the deck joints on both sides of the corridor, and the lighting in the area had been reduced to one in three panels since the crew no longer occupied the area.
Of course, that meant little to the diligent engineers whose duty it was to perform last-minute repairs and reinforcements to the ship’s systems, all in the hope that they might be forced to do so again in the coming days. It was a wretched job as far as Middleton was concerned, and he never once took his engineers’ efforts for granted. Without them, ships like the Pride of Prometheus would simply shut down, surrender to entropy, and drift through space as cold, dead, hulks.
The flash of arc welders could be seen past an intersection ahead of him, and the bright light snapped him from his reverie as he rounded the corner with a hand held up to protect his eyes from the blinding light given off by the patch-welders.
“No, no, no, no,” Garibaldi groaned, grabbing a Tracto-an—one with a pair of bionic legs on which she knelt—and shoving her aside as he took the welder in his own hands, “you can’t run the bead upward; it’ll only have forty percent of the sheer strength that way.”
“But the plates are joined and no air can pass through the joint,” she argued, wiping sweat from her grimy brown with an equally grimy hand, “what is the difference?”
“’What’s the difference?’ she asks,” Garibaldi scoffed, taking a hammer with a tiny gravity generator built into its head from his belt—the kind used to test breaking strengths precisely like the one he was about to demonstrate, “you see this? This is set to barely two thirds of the strain we’re going to put this joint under in combat conditions just a few hours from now. Ready?” he asked rhetorically before delivering a sharp, perfectly-placed blow to the lower plate of metal she had been welding and seeing the welds break for three inches in either direction from the point of his hammer’s impact. “Human eyes are useless things,” he said, placing the hammer in his belt once again, “and they’ve now cost us a perfectly good duralloy beam. Math is what we go by, missy, not what it looks or feels like to you, is that clear? Now go get a new piece so we can finish this section; that old one’s a waste of time with all the crystallization you’ve caused with your shoddy technique.”
Looking properly rebuked, but clearly unwilling to drop the point so easily, the woman picked up her welding goggles, stood, and pushed past the Chief Engineer as she went to get another section of duralloy beam.
Middleton approached, uncertain if he should intervene as he saw his friend rub his balding head and sigh as he stood, apparently transfixed by the sight of the woman’s stern as she walked away. “Good thing you relaxed the rules about fraternization, Tim,” he said conversationally as Middleton approached.
Middleton was uncertain what his friend meant at first and then he had to suppress the urge to roll his eyes. “You didn’t…”
Garibaldi snickered, “A gentleman never tells. But yes,” he said after a pointed pause, “I did.”
“I thought ‘a gentleman never tells’,” Middleton quipped dryly as the woman picked up a duralloy beam and began to haul it back to where they stood.
“I never claimed to be a gentleman, Tim,” the Chief retorted smoothly, “besides…you might think of it more like a support group than anything.” He tapped his own mechanical prosthetic leg with his fingernails just hard enough to evoke a mild clanging sound, and Middleton suspected that there was more truth to the Chief’s suggestion than he might have believed. The Pride’s crew had more than its share of amputees serving aboard her, and many of them had been fitted with prosthetics like the Chief’s and the Tracto-an woman he had apparently…fraternized with. The two shared a brief chuckle before Middleton and Garibaldi stood aside to allow the woman to return to her duties.
She made her respects to her captain as he and the Chief moved to the quieter, less blinding area beyond the intersection through which he had just arrived. “What’s your status, Chief?”
Garibaldi wiped his hands on his work suit and sighed, “She’ll give you 85%, Cap, but that’s all I can do. And once we start taking strikes to the hull, it’s only a matter of time before she gives up entirely.”
Middleton nodded, having hoped for better but also having feared much, much worse. “How long will it take your people to finish with the 85% work?”
“Another two hours…maybe three,” he amended after a moment’s thought, “I’ve got to double-check pretty much everything these Tracto-ans do, but at least they work a smidge faster than most of my local rod-burners—who are calibrating the shield grid as we speak. Plus these lugs,” he jerked his thumb over his shoulder, “don’t whine about the grav-plate settings when having to haul hundred kilo loads from one end of the corridor to the other.”
“We’ve begun spinning up the hyper drives,” Middleton said, getting to the point he had wanted to make when coming down to see the Chief.
“You think I don’t know that?” Garibaldi asked. “Even if my people hadn’t notified me as soon as they started monkeying with things back in the engine room, I can hear the drives spinning up even over all this noise.”
Middleton gave him a skeptical look, “You can hear the hyper drives spinning up?”
Garibaldi nodded, “Alwa
ys have, ever since I was a little kid. It’s kind of like a high-pitched whine that nobody else seems to notice.” He shrugged, “Not like it’s that important, anyway.”
Middleton nodded, though he was still doubtful that any normal person’s hearing could pick up on the ultrahigh frequency emissions of a hyper drive spinning up. “Your people have done good work, Chief.”
“Not for lack of their trying to bungle the job at every turn,” Garibaldi quipped before nodding in agreement. “They’re a good team, Tim. They know what’s at stake, and they’re ready to stand on that wall you talked about—a talk that seems like a lifetime ago, by the way.”
Middleton blinked in surprise, having completely forgotten that particular analogy since he had come up with it essentially on the fly during his memorial to the fallen crewmembers who had served aboard the Pride during its first tour under his command.
“They won’t let you down, Cap,” Garibaldi assured him, “well…not if I keep my boot in their exhaust ports, anyway. I leave those meatheads alone for another five minutes and they’ll probably start cutting into the perfectly good struts they’re supposed to be building up from. I’ve gotta go.” With that, he gave a shoddy salute and clomp-stepped his way back around the corner of the intersection.
Middleton turned and prepared to head back to the lift, and the last thing he heard was, “No, no, no, no; you’re not supposed to be cutting into those ones! For Murphy’s sake, what is wrong with you lot?!”
The Pride’s Captain allowed a grin to spread across his face as he took the Chief’s incredulous outburst for what it was: a sign that his Chief Engineer knew his people, and his ship, like the back of his hand.
One way or another, they were going to give Commodore Raubach’s people hell.
“This is…unexpected,” Fei Long reported from the co-pilot’s chair in the Mode’s cockpit. It had originally been a six person bridge, but Lynch had made extensive modifications which had rerouted every major piece of equipment to within arm’s reach of the now-central pilot’s chair—a chair that was actually trimmed in gold, unlike the dirty, dingy hull metal found everywhere else on the ship.
“What is it?” Lu Bu asked, moving to his side and checking the instrumentation before him.
“Even I did not expect so many vessels to arrive so quickly,” Fei Long explained, gesturing to a running tally of droid vessels which had arrived in the system—a system which was two jumps from Captain Middleton’s present location aboard the Pride of Prometheus, and one jump from The Bulwark, which was the mission’s code term for the star system just outside of the Raubachs’ hidden base.
As Lu Bu watched him scan up and down the readout, she saw that a total of twenty one vessels—twelve Corvettes and six Destroyers from the Harmony Tribe, and three Motherships from the Conformity Tribe—had arranged themselves into a neat formation at the hyper limit.
“You are certain they cannot see us?” Lu Bu asked warily, to which Strider snorted from the pilot’s chair.
“Ain’t no scanners been made that can see the Mode when she goes dark, mom,” he said with absolute confidence as he gripped the twin joysticks before himself. “I always wanted t’fly this baby and see just how fast she can really go, y’know? Funny how the ‘verse is sometimes,” he said with a shake of his head.
“When we point transfer to the next system, they will see the warp field,” Fei Long explained, “but until then it would seem that the stealth systems aboard this vessel are, indeed, impenetrable to their scans since we have been in this system for three hours already and they have made no show of detecting us.”
Lu Bu checked the point transfer clock, which read eight minutes remaining until the stealthy Cutter made the second-to-last jump of its unexpected journey into the heart of enemy territory.
“Somethin’ been buggin’ my mind, though,” Strider said as he shifted uncomfortably in the seat, “why don’t them Rim Fleet types intercept us—and them—out here?” He jerked his thumb toward the so-far-as-to-be-invisible Droid Fleet assembling on roughly the opposite site of the system.
Lu Bu had wondered the same thing, and Fei Long began to answer the former pirate’s query the same way he had answered her own, “It does not fit with their established modus operandi, or Commodore Raubach’s tactical preferences, Mr. Strider. His forces have shown themselves to prefer entrapment to the overwhelming application of force, and they clearly seek to use every tactical asset at their disposal to maximum effect, with the lone exception to this being the Pride’s battle with Captain Raubach’s six ship squadron several months ago—a decision which, if our prisoner, Mr. Kaep, is to be believed, was none too popular with Commodore Raubach. This is why it is most likely that The Bulwark is precisely where we believe it to be.”
“Sounds a bunch of mumbo-jumbo to me,” Strider grumbled. “If I be havin’ dozens of warships, I be crushin’ fools what threaten to beard me in my own lair!”
Lu Bu snorted, for once having agreed with Fei Long’s longwinded tactical appraisal completely. “If you behave like that,” she chided, “you never get dozens of warships.”
Strider looked like he wanted to argue, but instead he gestured to the countdown clock. “We be jumpin’ in thirty seconds; I suggest you all strap in. Ain’t no tellin’ what might be waitin’ for us on the other side.”
The clock counted down, and the ship point transferred precisely on schedule. When they arrived in the system, their tactical overlay began to populate immediately with signals being broadcast in the open.
“I am reading six…eight…twelve…seventeen warships,” Fei Long said, sounding less than certain that the tally was complete.
“Point transfer be complete,” Strider reported belatedly, “but I be havin’ some problem with the stealth systems.”
“Problem?” Lu Bu demanded, unsnapping her harness and nearly lunging to the side of the pilot’s seat. “What problem?”
“The heat sink be maxxed out with the successive jumps, mom,” he explained. “If we don’t find a proper site to bleed off this stored heat—and quick!—we gonna light up for every ship in the system to see, savvy?”
“I am now reading twenty two warships in the system,” Fei Long called out. “Fifteen Corvettes, three Destroyers—“
“Not now, Kongming!” Lu Bu snapped in their native tongue. “Help Strider fix the stealth systems!”
Fei Long, who had not seemed himself since boarding the Cutter several days earlier, nodded as he seemed to regain focus. “Of course,” he said after a brief delay, and Lu Bu noticed that the back of his neck appeared to have become infected after he turned and his collar fell several inches while he did so.
Several tense minutes passed as Fei Long, Strider, and Yide—who somehow managed to wedge himself between Strider and the port set of readouts—conferred before finally coming to a consensus.
“We must submerge the Cutter,” Fei Long said, pointing to a moon in orbit of the system’s third gas giant. “The surface of that moon is covered in methane, much of which is liquid,” he explained, much to Lu Bu’s rising alarm, “and at its temperature it would take the Cutter approximately one hour to cool vent the heat which our stealth operations have caused to be stored within its trio of heat sinks.”
“Methane?” Lu Bu repeated incredulously in their common tongue. “We will explode if we expose methane to that much heat!” How could he be so stupid?! she wondered furiously.
Fei Long shook his head calmly, “Not without the presence of oxygen. Methane is relatively stable in this saturated environment,” he explained, and she suddenly felt very, very stupid for having doubted his conclusion—especially when she realized that the other two members of the team with whom he had conferred agreed with his assessment. “It is also the only planetary body we can reach before the systems indicate they will overheat past tolerances.”
“Do it,” she growled, very much disliking the idea of submerging their Cutter in a lake—or ocean—of liquid methane.
“Moving toward the Jovian now, mom,” Strider said in his peculiar accent.
Lu Bu watched as the rest of The Bulwark’s forces were revealed to the Mode’s sensors, and she openly wondered whether or not even Captain Middleton’s plan would provide enough advantage for the mission to succeed.
“Point transfer in twelve minutes, Captain,” Lieutenant McKnight reported as the backs of Middleton’s bridge crew grew increasingly tense. If he and his XO had been right, they were about to act as the vanguard to an invasion of The Bulwark with the majority of ships on ‘his’ side of the engagement proving just as dangerous to the Pride and her crew as the Rim Fleet elements he aimed to destroy.
It was a risky plan, but it was the only one he could think of that might level the field enough that he could take his shots. With two Liberator torpedoes now mounted to the bow of his ship, he had two chances to destroy Commodore Raubach’s Flagship—the Vae Victus, which was a Defiance-class Battleship like Captain Manning’s had been back in Elysium.
“This is the Captain,” Middleton said over the ship-wide intercom, “as you all know, we are about to enter a system which we believe is filled with enemy warships. The men and women on those warships are just like us: they have families back home, they have dreams for the future, and they would like very much to stamp out anyone who stands in the way of their vision for the Spineward Sectors.” His tone, while sympathetic, was threaded with iron and he felt himself lean forward in his chair as he continued grimly, “And that’s why we have to tear out this corruption, root and branch, before it spreads to the rest of this part of space—our part of space. Many of these people are interlopers, but some are locals just like us. Give them no quarter,” he said, his voice rising almost entirely unbidden by him, “they’ve turned their backs on us, on our families, on the rule of our laws, and on everything else we stand for.”
Against The Middle Page 17
