Against The Middle

by Caleb Wachter

  He checked the chronometer beside the view screen and saw that, one way or another, their fate would be decided in two minutes and thirty six seconds. If the droids showed up on schedule, they might just make a fight out of this yet. If they didn’t, Middleton had already prepared to deliver his thanks to the brave crew of the Pride of Prometheus.

  Either way, they were going to go down swinging.

  Another round of turbo-laser strikes hammered into the Pride’s flanks, as the Corvettes slowly, but surely, moved to surround the defiant cruiser. A clever maneuver by the helmsman, coordinated with Mr. Toto and the gun deck, saw them spit hot fire from their forward laser array at another Corvette, causing it too to veer off from its course rather than suffer the Pride’s wrath any further.

  But Middleton knew that the only reason those Corvettes were moving within his heavy laser range was to goad him into the exchange. There was no need for them to come within his firing arcs, and he knew that a less-accomplished commander than Commodore Raubach would likely have kept all of his forces at maximum range throughout the engagement.

  Had he done so, however, Middleton would have had several opportunities to escape the slowly-tightening noose around his neck in the form of the eight ship squadron. By keeping his ships just outside of the Pride’s firing range, Commodore Raubach ensured that his people would maintain firing arcs and tactical positioning on the aged cruiser until they finally wore her down. The Commodore was ensuring that his warships would come under fire, but he was also ensuring that there was no possibility of escape for Middleton and his people.

  But just because one’s enemy wants you to take a given course of action is not in and of itself reason enough not to take that action. Sometimes, Middleton thought grimly, you have to give up material for position.

  Seeing the countdown clock at ten seconds remaining, Middleton had to fight to keep from counting aloud with the timer as it went three…two…one…zero.

  The bridge crew, while still attending to their duties, perceptibly froze as they glanced between the main viewer and Hephaestion’s station. This remained the case even after another pair of turbo-laser strikes landed against the Pride’s stern shields, and Hephaestion—clearly aware that all eyes were on him, but also clearly unfettered by that fact—kept to his console, adjusting his instruments for nearly a minute before turning to Captain Middleton with a fierce look on his face, “Reinforcements have arrived, sir. I am reading four…nine…seventeen…twenty one warships at the hyper limit adjacent to the Vae Victus’ position.”

  A cheer went up on the bridge as the screen began to populate with the twenty one droid warships, which were very nearly in firing range on Commodore Raubach’s Flagship since he had pulled so near to the hyper limit. The Rim Fleet vessels quickly moved to a new formation consisting of three separate groups, each centered around one of the Vae Victus or the pair of light cruisers which were moving to flank her.

  “Execute Mr. Fei’s program labeled ‘Chi Bi,’ Comm.,” he instructed, “and then open a channel to Commodore Raubach.”

  A moment later, the Comm. operator said, “Chi Bi program executed and confirmed, Captain; the local ComStat hub is down, sir.” Middleton nodded, breathing a sigh of relief at knowing that the Commodore’s ships would now be unable to coordinate with whatever reserve forces were nearby. “Channel now open with the Commodore,” the operator reported.

  Commodore Raubach’s face, still well-composed but now bearing faint stress lines around the corners of his surgically-perfected eyes, appeared on the main viewer. Middleton, knowing he still needed the Commodore’s complicity in one last matter, leaned forward and said, “I forgot to tell you to expect them, Commodore…it must have slipped my mind for some reason. Maybe they’ll be amenable to one of your famous bribes?” he said with anything but genuine intent before adding, “They’ve worked such wonders with everyone else you’ve come across.”

  “You are a dung fly, Middleton,” Commodore Raubach said haughtily, making a show of being unconcerned, “and all of your blind buzzing about has only served to paint a target on your back.”

  Middleton spread his arms wide, “I’m right here, Commodore. In fact, we’d be exchanging…how did you put it?” he said, thinking back to the other man’s words of an hour earlier. “Oh yeah, a ‘heated debate,’ you called it—and we’d be having one right now if you hadn’t fallen back to the supposed safety of the hyper limit.” He leaned back in his chair and shook his head as though in disappointment, “I frankly expected better from the great Commodore James Raubach III, but the universe does seem to have a nasty habit of disappointing us, doesn’t it?”

  Raubach’s eyes narrowed and his lips parted in what seemed to be a genuinely pleased smile. “Very good, Lieutenant Commander…very good indeed. I find I am most disappointed that my scouting teams labeled you ‘Class III’ during our mission briefs five years ago. What was it…” his eyes flicked briefly to the side as he apparently sought to remember some obscure detail, “oh yes: Lieutenant Commander Tyrone Middleton: third tier candidate. Officer is an intelligent and capable, if unimaginative, tactician with borderline sociopathic personality who is unlikely to command respect down through the chain of command—and even less likely to obey orders from above. Addendum: recently divorced and now displaying signs of psychological instability. Recommendation downgraded: do not approach.”

  Being called a borderline sociopath was something of a shock to Middleton, but he had quietly wondered if there was a fundamental reason why he seemed to view the job of military command so very differently from others.

  “I see we got at least one part of that wrong,” Raubach said as his ship’s course changed to intercept the Pride of Prometheus.

  “And what part’s that?” Middleton asked, doing his best to keep the rising tide of emotion welling up within him from registering on his face.

  “You are nothing if not imaginative,” the Commodore replied matter-of-factly. “And right now, the last thing I need is a loose cannon like you running amok of my operations. No, Captain Middleton, I think it’s time I put you down like the wild animal you are.”

  Middleton smirked as he caught the other man’s slip from constantly referring to him by his full rank rather than his field commission, “You called me ‘Captain’.”

  Raubach shrugged as the Vae Victus and its attached Corvettes moved to intercept the Pride of Prometheus, “Consider it a parting gesture of respect—one I bestow even though you have not fully earned it.”

  The connection severed and Middleton leapt out of his chair as soon as it had done so. “Tactical, coordinate with the gun deck: you are to overcharge the forward batteries and avoid firing until we have closed to medium range.”

  “They will not close,” Toto said with certainty.

  “Oh, they’ll close all right,” Middleton said sharply as he moved beside the uplift at the Tactical station. “They’re going to knock out our weapons…and then they’re going to board us.”

  The Sundered seemed to understand after a moment’s consideration, and he grudgingly made to follow Middleton’s order. As he did so, the Pride’s Captain activated a newly-installed panel on the Tactical console and input his command authorization. This particular panel was rigged solely to control the pair of Liberator torpedoes which had been mounted on the Pride’s bow, and Middleton had ensured that only he could authorize their deployment.

  The torpedoes’ arming systems went through their activation protocols, which Middleton followed step by step according to the instructions Lynch had left for them—instructions which Middleton’s experts had concluded were appropriate. Nearly three minutes later, Hephaestion reported, “The eight ship squadron is pulling back, Captain.”

  Middleton didn’t even need to look at the tactical overlay to know the two enemy formations were forming a pincer which would be able to reform itself into an unbreakable wall of firepower, set to annihilate the Droid warships once they reached the inner system. />
  With all of the inertia the Pride had built up to that point, there was simply no way Middleton could turn his ship around and avoid being caught in the deadliest crossfire he had ever experienced.

  As usual, the only way out of his latest predicament was to charge headlong into the enemy forces.

  “Just once, I’d like to have a speed advantage,” Middleton muttered under his breath after linking fire control for the Liberators to his command chair. The torpedoes had incredible range, according to the research he had done, and it was entirely possible they would be capable of traversing the entire system in search of their quarry.

  But the longer they stayed in flight, the higher the chance that Commodore Raubach’s people would shoot them down before they could deliver their deadly payloads into the heart of the Rim Fleet itself: the Vae Victus.

  “Adjust course, Helm,” Middleton said after returning to the big chair, “bring us bow-on to the Vae Victus. Tactical: reiterate my orders to the gun deck that they are to overcharge their weapons and await my explicit order before firing.”

  “Aye, Captain,” the helmsman acknowledge, followed by a wordless grunt from Toto.

  The Vae Victus drove ahead of her supporting ships, which were fanning out in an inwardly-curving crescent. Their counterparts in the eight ship squadron were doing likewise, and in just a few minutes the pincer which Middleton had anticipated for several days finally materialized on the tactical overlay.

  But he didn’t care about the supporting pieces—even as nearly a dozen turbo-laser strikes from their guns landed against the Pride’s shields, more or less equally distributed across the ship’s facings. All that mattered, as in chess, was an attack on the king.

  “Mr. Toto,” Middleton said after performing some quick calculations, “inform the gun deck that if we remain on course, and the Vae Victus does likewise, we should be in firing position in roughly twelve minutes.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Toto acknowledged after a brief, but pointed, delay. Twelve minutes would bring them very nearly into short range, all but ensuring that every weapon either side had would land against the other.

  There was very little chance the Pride came out the other side in anything resembling shipshape condition, but it was the only way Middleton could guarantee lining up a potentially game-ending shot.

  Behind Commodore Raubach’s ships, the Droid fleet which had assembled on short notice—and in alarming numbers, as far as Middleton was concerned—began to form up into their own coherent formation as swarms of gunboats detached from the dodecahedron-shaped Motherships. Meanwhile, the Destroyers and Corvettes of the Harmony through Specialization Tribe took up flanking positions alongside their dodecahedron-obsessed allies…or brethren…or whatever they called each other.

  When the gunboats had finally achieved a tactical formation—one that looked like nothing so much as a swarm of angry bees—their total number was four hundred thirty two. Middleton quickly calculated that four hundred thirty two just happened to be twelve squared times three. That meant that those particular ships, at the very least, were at absolute peak capacity and condition, given the Conformity tribe’s apparent obsession with the number twelve and its various products.

  “This is what we came here for,” Middleton said into the growing silence which now hung over the bridge. “The people of the Spineward Sectors don’t even know we exist, but they depend on us to maintain their freedom from the yoke these Imperials would like to fit around their necks. We’re going to get our shot,” he said, watching as Commodore Raubach’s ship closed on the Pride, “and the only way it will count is if each of us keeps to the tasks in front of us.”

  Another impact hammered into the Pride’s bow, but this one felt different than the others and Middleton turned to his Sensor operator for an explanation. His heart skipped several beats before the young Tracto-an said, “We appear to have collided with a meteorite, Captain.”

  “Forward shields at 68% and…holding, Captain,” the Shields operator reported tensely as his fingers moved this way and that over his console.

  At least it wasn’t a torpedo, Middleton thought with a short sigh of relief as the Vae Victus continued bearing down on the Pride of Prometheus. Six minutes remained until the two ships were in optimal firing range for the torpedoes, and much as Middleton would have liked to fire back at the Commodore’s Flagship, he knew he would need every scrap of firepower he could bring to bear if he was going to penetrate a Defiance-class Battleship’s robust shields.

  Several more impacts registered along the Pride’s hull, causing the Shields operator to call out, “Stern shields at 52%; port shields at 33% with moderate spotting; starboard shields at 42%-- make that 29%,” he amended after another pair of impacts shook the ship. “Heavy spotting on the starboard side,” the operator reported, clearly becoming flustered at the overwhelming amount of data flooding into his station.

  A nearby petty officer took up position alongside him, and after a few words the two began to work as a team to streamline the process of shunting power from one facing’s generators to another.

  A severe impact near the bow of the ship nearly threw Middleton from his chair, and the Damage Control rating quickly reported, “Two impacts registered on the forward hull, Captain.”

  “The Battleship hit our front with six turbo-lasers,” Toto reported with a savage roar of frustration as he smashed his fists into a nearby console, which had thankfully been inactive, “shields did not hold.”

  “Shields,” Middleton said tersely, “what’s the status of the forward facing?!”

  “They suffered a momentary blackout, Captain,” the operator reported belatedly, “they’re back up to 43% with mild spotting, sir, but I can’t pinpoint the failure. I’m on the secondary grid now, but I don’t know how long it will hold if we don’t get a team down there to fix the failing of the primary grid.”

  “Get a team up there, Damage Control,” Middleton said before realizing that the gravity in that area was far beyond human tolerances. The only way to get a team in there would be to undo the Chief Engineer’s patch job on the forward superstructure, which depended heavily on tweaked grav-plates to achieve something resembling combat readiness of the beleaguered superstructure. “Belay that,” he said without even turning to see the look on the Damage Control rating’s face, “keep to the secondary grid for now, Shields; that’s why we installed the extra lines.”

  “Yes, Captain,” the operator acknowledged with less than overt enthusiasm.

  The hits kept landing against the Pride’s shields, until her starboard facing collapsed under the constant weight of fire with a minute and a half remaining before they achieved firing position. With forty seconds remaining, half a dozen strikes had landed against the hull on that side, causing unexpected decompressions on decks five and eight. With twenty seconds remaining, the port facing’s shields finally surrendered to the relentless onslaught of enemy fire, and a direct hit to that side took out one of their newly-installed lasers before it could ever be turned against an enemy.

  The stern’s shields began to buckle with ten seconds remaining, but Middleton kept his focus as the Vae Victus came within range of his Liberator torpedoes. He had preprogrammed them with the Vae Victus’ profile, and their onboard computers would ensure that they struck the vessel if they did not run out of fuel.

  “Mr. Toto,” Middleton said when eight seconds remained, “launch the Starfires.”

  “How many?” Toto asked with a gleefully savage note to his voice which transcended culture or even race.

  “All of them,” Middleton replied, “coordinate their fire with the gun deck; I want maximum heat on that ship two seconds before these torpedoes slam into her.”

  “Done,” Toto acknowledged, and first six, then twelve, then twenty four, and finally forty eight Starfire missiles appeared on the tactical overlay. They blossomed outward, looking to Middleton like they were forming a deadly flower as it unfurled its petals, beckoning would
-be thieves to make a try for her life-giving nectar. At the same moment the Starfires launched, Middleton fired the Liberator torpedoes and the fifty total projectiles streamed ahead of the Pride.

  The Vae Victus didn’t even flinch in the face of the weaponry which had been deployed against her, and Middleton had to admit that Commodore Raubach was as unflappable as they came. A lesser commander might have been tempted to pull his ships in toward the flag in a last-ditch attempt to soak up some of the damage coming his way. But the Commodore did the exact opposite, and his accompanying ships spread even further out while maintaining their relative formation.

  If the Vae Victus was lost, unthinkable as the prospect likely seemed to the enemy commander, then the Commodore knew his best chance to salvage the position left to him after the Starfires had done what they were built to do, was to break his fleet into smaller, more maneuverable packets which could work their way around the oncoming Droid fleet from extreme range.

  As the fire control clock wound down and the Liberators streaked toward the twin-hulled battleship, Middleton felt a measure of grudging respect for the enemy commander. Standing tall and taking the hit that was coming his way, it was clear to Middleton why so many had flocked to the man’s banner after the Imperial withdrawal.

  There were no impacts against the Pride’s hull for several seconds, prompting Middleton to turn to Hephaestion. The young man was already in the process of turning to the captain with a report, “The enemy warships are targeting the Liberator torpedoes, Captain.”

  Middleton clenched his jaw tight as he watched the torpedoes streak toward their quarry. They needed to survive for twenty seconds before they would strike the Vae Victus’ hull, and Middleton silently wished them along as he prayed, promised, and otherwise bargained everything—including his immortal soul, if such a thing existed—if the two torpedoes would strike their target.