Against The Middle

by Caleb Wachter

  Traian was first to hit the hull, followed by Lu Bu, then Hutch, and then Yide. As they slammed into the smooth metal, their ring broke apart between Yide and Traian and they each took turns slamming into the metal surface.

  Somehow, Hutch managed to keep the bomb from slamming into the hull but he very nearly launched Lu Bu back into the void as he used her body for leverage against the metal housing of the warhead. Yide bear-hugged the bomb’s casing and used his own body to cushion its impact, and Lu Bu knew there was a very real chance the Sundered had been mortally wounded by doing so.

  But amazingly, they had managed to secure themselves against the hull, with each of the Lancers’ boots mag-locked to the metal now beneath their feet. Yide had brought a pair of electromagnets discs like those used for scaling vertical structures, but he somehow lost them in the landing. Thankfully, Hutch had been strong enough and aware enough to keep the Sundered from flying off into the void.

  Using hand signals, Lu Bu instructed her people to make for the airlock after Yide gave an awkward ‘thumbs up’ sign. Lu Bu gripped one side of the bomb, Hutch held the other, and Yide was forced to float along as he gripped the top of its hastily-assembled housing—housing which had been modified on the Mode to carry a small, oblong piece of hardware which would prove critical to breaching the freighter’s airlock.

  Six minutes later, they stood around the airlock’s outer door, and Lu Bu opened the bomb housing’s add-on to reveal one of Fei Long’s Attack Dogs: a small, oblong piece of metal which vaguely resembled a smashball to Lu Bu’s eye. This particular unit had been fitted with spider-like legs, and she carefully withdrew it from its small case before activating its power supply.

  A moment later, the thing’s legs splayed out before flexing back into a ready position. It repeated this movement twice, and Lu Bu knew it was Fei Long’s way of communicating with her that he had gained control over the drone.

  She placed it against the hull and the drone nimbly scampered its way to the outer control panel. A small, wire-thin probe extended from the drone’s midsection after it had situated itself directly over the control panel, and a brief arc of electricity could be seen once the probe made contact with the panel.

  At first nothing happened, but then the panel’s lights flickered on and the drone moved its wire-thin probe toward a small, recessed notch beside the touchpad interface. Twenty three seconds after Fei Long’s device had begun to interface with the panel, the outer airlock door unlocked with a perceptible clanking of metal which she felt through her boots.

  Signaling for the team to proceed, Lu Bu led her people into the airlock.

  The drone scampered inside the airlock with them, and less than a minute later the door had closed behind them and the airlock had been pressurized. After the pressure indicator turned green, the inner door opened and Lu Bu’s people moved into the dark intersection of three corridors.

  The grav-plating was powered up and generating standard gees, so Yide was able to move under his own power. Thankfully, he appeared to have only suffered what looked like a mild fracture of his left forearm and possibly a broken rib or two. But he was every bit as tough as he looked, stoically shrugging off Lu Bu’s silently-indicated concern.

  Hutch and Yide carried the bomb into the corridor, and Lu Bu activated her suit’s vox to its lowest possible setting to avoid detection. A whispered voice was far less likely to attract attention than wireless signal were, so she whispered, “We are at stern of ship. Which corridor do we take, Traian?”

  Traian gestured to the right-most corridor, “That one, ma’am.”

  “How far to main hold?” she asked.

  “That’s a good two hundred meters to the nearest of the eight interconnected holds, ma’am,” Traian replied, his voice barely above a whisper, “but it’s a straight shot along this corridor.”

  “Good,” she said, glad for that much at least. “I take point,” she said, going against standard protocol by placing herself in the lead, “Traian covers rear. Hutch and Yide carry package—move.”

  They moved through the corridor more noisily than she would have liked, but there was nothing that could be done about it. She had wanted to bring the plasma cannon for this operation, but there was simply no way she could have carried it during the jump from the Mode. Instead she had brought a blaster rifle, two short vibro-blades barely longer than daggers, an ion pistol, and a dozen grenades of various types.

  Hutch’s rifle accuracy was poorer than the rest of her Recon Team’s had been, so he had opted for a scattergun and a slightly oversized vibro-blade.

  Traian had chosen a standard issue blaster rifle for his primary ranged weapon, with an ion pistol as a backup, and a standard-issue vibro-blade for close encounters.

  Yide had brought a peculiar-looking plasma weapon of some kind. Lu Bu did not recognize it, but he had assured her he was proficient in its use and that it would prove most effective in close quarters. It resembled an overly thick scattergun like the one Hutch had brought, except it had a trio of barrels which appeared to rotate into and out of firing position.

  Lu Bu’s helmet was set to low-light sensitivity, and she had ordered the team to remain dark during this phase of their mission. Yide was effectively moving blindly, but he had been adamant that he could cope with low-light conditions after relaying several accounts of having navigated depowered sections of the Omicron as a child while evading hunt packs.

  They moved down the corridor with Fei Long’s drone scampering along beside them, until they reached a door that was conveniently marked, ‘Hold Six.’ She saw the access panel beside the door, and before she could request that he do so, Fei Long directed his drone to access it and the four-piece door slid slowly open to reveal the hold.

  When she stepped through, what she saw quite literally took her breath away.

  “What…the Hades…is that?” Hutch whispered.

  “I have no idea…” Traian replied belatedly, and Lu Bu felt fortunate that her teammates had just voiced her own responses to the sight which had greeted them. “But look at the size of it.”

  The hold was lit from within by what looked like temporary floodlights which cast their beams into the center of the truly immense cargo hold. Lu Bu instantly knew that this was not merely one of eight cargo holds after looking down the length of the space they now occupied. The hold in which they stood must have been at least half of the holds in the ship put together, with the separating bulkheads having been removed to make way for the giant object which occupied the cavernous chamber—a chamber which easily measured two hundred meters tall and a kilometer long.

  The central object around which all of the floodlights had been arranged filled the chamber from top to bottom, and was cylindrical in shape with, presumably, three rows of smaller, fatter cylinders protruding from its sides. Its surface looked less like it had been machined and more like it had been grown, but it was quite clearly composed of some kind of metal. She counted nine cylinders protruding from each of the three rows adorning its sides, and for the life of her she was reminded of nothing so much as some kind of giant engine.

  She had no reason to believe that was what it actually was, but she simply could not look at it and think of any other purpose for the massive piece of machinery.

  As she looked at the short cylinders protruding from its sides—cylinders which protruded at least twenty meters each and measured twice that in diameter—she saw that several of them appeared to have sustained some kind of damage. She found herself walking along the catwalk where the door had led them to, and after closer examination of the closest cylinder—which was no further than ten meters from her face after she had repositioned herself—she saw that it bore tool marks like those made by giant saw teeth.

  “They must have pulled this up from the planet,” Traian said, his voice low and his tone nearly awestruck.

  “What is it?” Hutch whispered again, while Yide merely looked up and down it and shook his head warily.


  Lu Bu knew that she had no idea—but then she realized that was not entirely true. “It is important,” she replied, “and it is secret. There are no guards in this ship that we see, so no one in enemy fleet is to know of it.” She nodded her head slowly, increasing the speed at which she did so as she came to a decision, “This is where we put device.”

  “If it’s important,” Hutch said warily, his eyes moving left and right as he scanned the hold, “there have to be guards.”

  “All the more reason to put the device here,” Traian said, giving her a nod of agreement with her decision-making process. “We can’t move around this ship undetected forever; better we stow it, set the timer, and jump out of here.”

  “We lower it down,” she said, peering over the edge of the rail to the deck seventy meters below. She spotted a ladder nearby and pointed, “We use that.”

  Fei Long nodded as he walked, his glove’s tiny built-in display screen showing that Lu Bu’s team had begun to strap together a harness which Hutch, or possibly Yide, could use to carry the heavy warhead down to the deck below their catwalk.

  Then, suddenly, the feed went dead and he stopped in his tracks. He had been able to provide the support Lu Bu had needed while walking, and he doubted his teammates even knew what it was he had been doing.

  “What’s the hold-up?” Funar asked as he came to stand beside Fei Long. The Lancer’s eyes scanned the horizon as he awaited a reply.

  “The signal is being blocked,” Fei Long replied shortly, rebooting his glove’s interface systems and finding that every available frequency was being blocked. “This…will complicate matters,” he said, deactivating the glove’s transceiver and looking ahead at the pressure dome which was now no more than two kilometers away.

  “What signal?” Funar asked warily.

  “Lu Bu’s team is on their own…” Fei Long said grimly, feeling as though something deep inside of himself had been wrenched about so severely that it was about to break apart. “Our presence has been detected by the enemy, and they have erected a jamming field to suppress our communications,” he said, thinking through the possibilities as quickly as his sharp, agile mind could do, “we must complete this phase of the mission quickly.”

  Funar nodded toward the base, “Those hab modules on the northern side have emergency access hatches we can use to sneak in to the crawlspace, assuming they’re still there.” After both Trixie and Fei Long gave him querying looks, the Lancer explained, “I spent a few years on a start-up colony as a boy. Those are the same prefab modules we lived in there.”

  “Would it not stand to reason that our enemies would have closed such a breach in security?” Fei Long asked dubiously. Any information advantage might well prove decisive, but he knew that their enemies would have likely addressed such a potential gap in security.

  “Oh, they’re there all right,” Funar said confidently, “and I doubt they’ve done anything to them since they’re holdovers from the previous model. They’re nowhere on the spec’s, and it would take a visual check to find the seam between the panels. The only question is whether or not Ed can fit inside. I was only about five feet tall the last time I used one, but they didn’t seem all that big even then—and Ed’s what you’d call a ‘wide load’.”

  “Warning,” Hansheng growled, stomping his feet as his torso swiveled to face Funar, “deception protocols activated—probability of sarcastic remark from Lancer Funar: 64%.”

  “If he can squeeze through the door,” Funar continued with a wary look toward the lumbering assault droid, “he’ll have to sidestep his way around the crawlspace. But there are two or three locations we can enter the interior of the dome and probably remain undetected.”

  Fei Long nodded slowly, “I had thought it would be necessary to split the team. It is good that we do not need to do so yet. However,” he said, fixing the Lancer with a hard gaze, “it is quite possible that we will need to do so once we have entered the facility.”

  “Why?” Funar asked with narrowed eyes. “We need to get in, plant the bomb, upload your program and then get out so we can blow the place apart.”

  “Ideally, events would occur as you describe,” Fei Long allowed, “but my rival’s presence within the base has complicated matters. It may become necessary for me to remain behind while you three egress with Doctor Schillinger, assuming she has survived and is still present.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question,” Funar growled, squaring up to Fei Long in a low-brow attempt at intimidation, “why would I leave you, my top mission asset, behind for the enemy to potentially capture?”

  “Because, if I am correct about my rival’s involvement,” Fei Long replied, meeting the man’s gaze with a steely one of his own, “then that may be the only way I can clear the path for Captain Middleton and the others to approach this planetoid.”

  Funar looked like he wanted to argue, but Trixie stood between them and pointed, “Maybe we could argue about this while we walk?”

  Fei Long wanted to continue the argument, but he knew that Lu Bu—and, to a lesser degree, Captain Middleton—were counting on him to do as he had promised he could.

  “You heard the lady,” Funar quipped, “let’s move out.”

  Chapter XXI: Coming To

  “That’s it, just lie still now,” Middleton heard a familiar voice say, and he felt his eyes flutter open while mental cobwebs cluttered his mind. “No sudden movements, Tim,” she said, and he realized it was Jo who was speaking, “it was faster to do this in the corridor than to move you to sickbay.”

  His vision slowly clarified until he could focus on her face, and he saw that she had a large bruise on her left cheek—and her glasses were nowhere to be seen. “Where am I?” he asked stupidly, the memory of the battle only returning to him after he had asked the question. “Did we repel the boarders?”

  “Sergeant Gnuko moved below decks with the rest of his Defense Team,” Jo replied as several of her people worked to stabilize wounded crew strewn throughout the corridor. “Mikey’s working on getting power restored, but you were down for nine minutes before I started working on you—and that was nearly an hour ago. If Hephaestion hadn’t gotten a breathing mask for you, you would have died all the way before I could revive you.”

  Looking around, Middleton could not see the Tracto-an Sensor operator, “Where is he?” He then realized that Garibaldi had survived, and was more than slightly relieved to know that his Chief Engineer was still among the living.

  “Hephaestion joined Gnuko’s hunting party,” she explained as she drew up some sort of pinkish solution into a syringe and verified the quantity before unceremoniously injecting it into Middleton’s forearm.

  The Pride’s Captain then noticed Toto was sitting on the deck, his back propped up against the bulkhead and Middleton tried to stand but found himself unable to do so. His legs felt like rubber and his sense of balance was nowhere to be found.

  “He’ll live,” Jo said tersely, the syringe cap lodged between her teeth, “but you won’t if you don’t do exactly as I say.”

  He looked down at his legs and saw a mess of blood all over the lower half of his uniform. “That can’t all be mine,” he said, grimly confident that it almost certainly was.

  “You’ve had four units of synth-blood already—my kit’s entire supply,” Jo explained as she produced a hemostat and scalpel from her med-kit, “and if you don’t lie down, even I won’t be able to clamp off that pumper in time.”

  Middleton heard the clanking of power-armored boots rhythmically landing on the deck, and despite his desire to follow her orders he was not going to die lying on his back. If those boots belonged to enemy Marines, Middleton would die with a weapon in his hand, so he reached to his belt and found his ion pistol’s holster was empty.

  A quick glance saw that the boots belonged to Sergeant Gnuko, and Middleton forced himself to lie down as the ship’s Lancer Sergeant moved purposefully toward him.

  “Did we repel them?” Mi
ddleton asked as Gnuko clomped his way to a spot a few feet away.

  “We got ‘em, sir,” Gnuko replied with a nod from within his helmet, and Middleton saw that the Sergeant’s leg had clearly been worked on, with several of the armor plates comprising his greave having been removed so the damage could be addressed. “Hephaestion was right behind me,” he explained just as the bank of auxiliary lights fluttered, died, then were replaced a few seconds later by the main lights of the corridor. “Looks like the Chief got the plant back online,” the Sergeant said with a satisfied nod.

  “How bad was it, Sergeant?” Middleton asked, looking around and finding no fewer than twenty immobile suits of power armor in plain sight—suits which contained a mix of MSP and Rim Fleet warriors who had died fighting each other.

  “It wasn’t good,” Gnuko replied, popping the visor open on his armor and taking a deep breath, “but we held them out of key areas. You were right,” he said with a nod, “they were after you and Mr. Fei.”

  “What’s your team’s status?” Middleton asked, trying not to look at what Jo was doing on his upper thigh. He briefly wondered how he had gotten injured so badly, but pushed the thought from his mind.

  “We’ve got nine still breathing with five fit for duty,” Sergeant Gnuko replied, taking a moment to hawk up a gob of blood and spit it onto the deck, “including me.”

  Middleton remembered the battle between Gnuko, Toto, and the enemy Major, and looked to where the giant of a man had fallen. The Major’s armor was a ruined husk of metal plates, and there was significantly more damage done to his pageantry-adorned battle-suit than Middleton remembered seeing prior to losing consciousness.

  He gave his Lancer Sergeant a meaningful look—a look which Gnuko clearly wanted to shrug off, but Middleton made sure the other man understood just how much had hinged on bringing the enemy commander down.