Against The Middle

by Caleb Wachter

  Fei Long knew the other man was trying to prove a point, and decided against escalating the confrontation. “Very well,” he said with a curt nod, and the team unzipped the portion of the canvas through which he would enter.

  Surprisingly, the zipper opened and only a small amount of air rushed out. Fei Long saw another zipper on the surface of a second canvas flap, and he realized that it formed a kind of emergency airlock which was just large enough for a person to stand inside, close the external flap, and then open the internal flap before proceeding into the dome.

  He entered the tiny space, and Funar closed the zipper behind him as soon as he had done so. Then Fei Long opened the zipper on the inside of the dome and found himself in what looked to be a maintenance closet of some kind. Everything was composed of lightweight, reasonably strong polymer tubing, and there were floor-to-ceiling shelves containing the same kind of gear with which he had become familiar during his thankfully short-lived tenure as an Environment technician aboard the Pride of Prometheus.

  He was positioned directly behind one set of the shelves, and saw that the only way to get to the door beyond them was to crawl through the neatly stacked equipment. As he was nearly halfway through, he felt his suit tear and an alarm went off inside his helmet indicating a rupture. He instinctively held his breath and attempted to clamp the tear off with his hand, but quickly realized that doing so would be futile.

  He finished crawling through the shelf, causing several more tears in his suit as it caught on the jagged metal edges of the machinery, and finally found himself standing on the three foot by eight foot rectangular space between the three sets of shelves. A quick look at his vacuum suit was all it took for him to confirm that it would never function properly again, but he knew that was a problem for another time.

  Fei Long removed his helmet and took a deep breath of the slightly greasy-smelling air in the locker before nodding in satisfaction. After testing his glove and finding that his drones, which had accompanied him through the gap, were functioning properly he tested the inner handle of the locker’s only real door.

  The handle moved freely, and he opened it slowly before seeing a winding corridor which matched the curve of the dome’s outer edge. The corridor extended to both the left and right, but he knew that the leftward path would lead to the central dome of the structure. He assumed direct control over his drones, sent them into the corridor, and closed the door behind himself.

  He used the drones as scouts while he, and they, advanced through the corridor until coming to a junction which connected the dome he was in to the central dome. There was no activity in this part of the base, which he found both relieving and odd, but he pressed his drones down the large, white interior of the hallway until they came to an airlock situated at the midpoint of the tube connecting the two domes.

  He maneuvered his hover drone before the airlock and, after taking a steadying breath as he knew that what he was about to do would draw attention, he cracked the security systems built into the airlock’s access panel. A few minutes later, he opened the outer airlock, closed it, and then opened the inner door before closing it also.

  Satisfied that his trap had been set, he moved the drones down the corridor toward the main dome and he followed some ten meters behind them. There was a large door with yet another access panel, and he defeated its security measures using the exact same algorithms he had employed on the airlock a few minutes earlier.

  He knew his rival, if present, would detect his activities but he also knew that there was no other way he could guarantee his plan the greatest chance of success. Lancer Funar would have never agreed to let him go alone if he had known that Fei Long had actually intended to make his presence known, and Fei Long could only hope that his nemesis’ sense of arrogance had not changed since their last encounter.

  The doorway to the main dome opened and Fei Long stepped through to see a wondrous sight which even he could not fully comprehend at first.

  The dome was large, fully thirty meters high at the apex, and nearly one hundred fifty meters across. Where the structure’s normal configuration was to be subdivided into six more-or-less equal-sized portions, all of that internal structure had been removed. The floor, which was supposed to be flat, had been cut away until it was a bowl-shaped recession that was at least as deep as the dome was tall. There were four equidistantly spaced catwalks descending to the base of the depression, and between those catwalks were massive processing banks of computer cores. A quick calculation told Fei Long that the assembled computing hardware was enough to satisfy a medium-sized city’s entire virtual needs in perpetuity.

  At the center of the depression was a five meter across, misshapen, clearly organic mass of what looked to be tentacles with each measuring approximately one foot in diameter. The mass of tentacles reached upward before spilling in all directions, and the further they went from the center of the chamber, the more extensively they were grafted into by traditional computer interface components.

  The sheer size of the operation was truly astounding to Fei Long, and for a moment he shuddered as he realized that the mass of tentacles coming up, seemingly from beneath the planetoid’s surface, were almost certainly composed of the same neural tissue he had extracted from the ComStat hub—the same material which had infected his neck and likely been responsible for several disconcerting experiences recently like his brief, strange loss of consciousness on the surface of the planetoid shortly after landing.

  He saw no Rim Fleet or Raubach personnel at work in the chamber, which was surprisingly cool for a processing center of its size, so he decided to exit the central facility as quickly as possible. As he skirted the outer edge of the dome en route to the northern corridor—the one which would hopefully take him to the transmitter’s location—he could not help but take a few pictures via his hover drone so he could study them later…if he had a ‘later,’ of course.

  After overcoming the paltry security mechanisms in place at the northern corridor—mechanisms which were only fractionally more difficult to defeat than the previous panels had been—he entered a significantly longer corridor than the one he had just traversed. There was no airlock at the midpoint of this particular tunnel, as had been the case with the first tunnel, and at the end of it was a door bearing a symbol he knew all too well.

  It was that of a dragon with its body coiled like a serpent and eyes that were a smoldering shade of red. It was the sign of his rival, his nemesis, and the person who was most culpable for his previous imprisonment. He knew then that he had guessed correctly; his rival was indeed on the surface of the planetoid, and very soon they would be face to face.

  He overcame the security program, but he was impressed to note that none of his older programs worked—a realization which filled him with even more confidence, since it indicated that his rival, too, had grown in ability since their last encounter.

  The door slid open after he employed his most powerful cracking algorithm—an algorithm he had written specifically for this mission—and he entered the chamber to find precisely what he had been looking for: a high-end transmitter control center. It was laid out very similarly to how the Pride of Prometheus’ bridge was laid out, with a central ‘command chair’ surrounded by banks of workstations divided into groups and subgroups. There were considerably more viewing screens in this particular chamber than were present on the Pride’s bridge, but that was only natural given the apparent nature of this particular command center.

  Only a handful of the stations were powered up, and he quickly made his way to what appeared to be a primary control station. He knew he had very little time to work before he was apprehended, so he did his best to move quickly and efficiently as he uploaded a series of programs directly into the computer core.

  Predictably, there were no firewalls between this particular station and the primary processing core—a core which contained several times as much overall processing power as he had initially surmised, forgetting about t
he awesomely powerful neural tissue into which that equipment had been grafted. His rival was known to prefer open networks to segregated data nodes, since the response times and overall power of a virtual network was vastly superior in modern architecture once the firewalls were removed, and he had heavily counted on that preference during his Yin & Yang program’s design.

  Then, just before he was able to upload the last fragment of his file, the screen went blank and he immediately suspected a remote reboot had occurred. His suspicions were confirmed when a cartoonish, devil’s face appeared and cackled maniacally as the characters ‘You Lose’ scrolled down the screen. Those words were soon joined by others, the majority of which were slurs, insults, and other forms of ridicule and soon he heard a familiar voice join in the machine’s laughter.

  He turned to the source of the laughter, which he now saw came from a recessed panel which he had not seen upon entering the chamber. Long, jet-black hair spilled across a narrower-than-he-remembered set of shoulders, and the motion of his rival’s body in motion was significantly different than he remembered as well. This caused him a moment of confusion before he realized that his rival appeared to have lost an unbelievable amount of weight—a realization which disappointed him in more ways than he would care to admit.

  “Nice try, Long,” his nemesis said in their native tongue, “but you should have quit while you were ahead. I beat you once three years ago, and now it looks like I’ll have the pleasure of beating you again.”

  Fei Long stood from the computer and turned to face his former ally and, if he was being truthful, his former partner…and more even than that. “Zhongda,” he said evenly as he attempted to covertly maneuver his drones into flanking positions to either side of the recess from which his rival had just emerged, “we meet again.”

  “Zhongda?” his rival said before laughing piteously. “You and your obsession with that old legend, Long. It undid you once already; please tell me that isn’t why I got you this time, too?” His rival, who Fei Long knew could only be Sima Yi reincarnated—the only commander capable of defeating the great Zhuge Liang, of whom Fei Long had long believed he was the inheritor—looked him up and down appraisingly before acidly saying, “You haven’t changed much.”

  Just as Fei Long’s drones got into position, a pair of ion bolts spat from concealment and Fei Long saw both of his drones were enveloped in the bluish bursts of energy. The hover drone crashed to the floor with a loud clatter, and the tread-mounted drone skittered forward at full speed until crashing into a nearby workstation and deactivating.

  He cursed under his breath as his rival wagged a finger remonstratively before gesturing for a pair of security personnel to flank Fei Long. He had not even seen them, and unlike his rival he was absolutely certain there had been nowhere for them to hide in the room.

  As his rival approached, he saw just how extensive the physical changes were and he had to suppress a shudder. The person standing before him seemed to be nothing but a mere shadow of his former partner-in-crime.

  “What’s wrong, Long?” Zhongda asked in Confederation Standard, growing closer with each step as his rival’s serpentine grin grew wider and wider. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Fei Long shook his head as the security personnel took hold of him by each arm. “Oh, Zhongda,” he said with genuine pity as his former girlfriend stepped into the light, revealing the latex-bound curve of a tight, lithe body that could have only been granted by the expert hand of a cosmetic surgeon, “I much preferred you as you were.”

  Her eyes flared with anger and, at little more than the hint of a nod of her surgically-sculpted head, the guard to Fei Long’s left clubbed him over the head and the world fell into darkness.

  Chapter XXIV: Bare Bones

  “Captain, I wish you’d reconsider,” Lieutenant McKnight said, leaning across the desk in the Captain’s ready room to once again make her case.

  “My decision is made, XO,” Middleton said, glad that the sensation in his legs had returned to the point that he could shuffle into the ready room to have the necessarily private meeting with his second in command, “you’ll take the Slice of Life—along with every single crewmember whose presence is not absolutely indispensible to the Pride’s ability to point transfer and set a course after she’s done so—and you’ll move into the target system ahead of us.”

  “Captain,” she argued, gesticulating severely with her hands, “you need every engineer we’ve got just to keep the lights on here!”

  “Exactly, McKnight,” Middleton said, his voice nearly a bark as he fought to keep a level head, “we’ve got less than one full ship’s crew between us and two ships to divide them between. This one’s a wreck, with only half of her weaponry—most of which is light—remaining functional. The right play is to man the Slice and take maximum advantage of your successful takeover of the enemy cruiser. About all the Pride can do is serve as a diversion in the coming battle—and if that diversion proves effective, I’ll consider it a job well done by this crew.”

  “Chief Garibaldi got the shield grid restored to nearly 40% power—“ she began, but Middleton slammed his fist against the desk and cut her off as his patience finally wore through.

  “We’re wasting time here, Lieutenant!” he snapped.

  She visibly flared as she leaned forward, and Middleton mirrored her gesture perfectly. The two stared at each other in a deadlock of contesting wills before McKnight finally set her jaw and stood to her feet, “Yes sir.”

  Middleton also took to his feet, but as he did so he fought down the rising emotion he had felt a few moments earlier. “That was one Hades of a job you did by seizing that ship, Lieutenant,” Middleton said with genuine appreciation, respect, and even admiration, “I’ve never been involved in anything like that.”

  “It was your call, sir,” she said stiffly, clearly still tending a wounded ego.

  “The call is the easy part,” he retorted easily, “someone’s got to carry out the play, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard of such a fine counterattack that ended in the complete takeover of the enemy ship.”

  She seemed to receive his congratulations in the same tone in which they were offered, and she nodded as she rubbed her cheek. “That’s gotten pretty swollen, sir,” she said, pointing to Middleton’s jaw, “maybe you should get down to sickbay.”

  “Sickbay’s down,” Middleton said dismissively, “so the only way I can get to a working medical ward is by stepping off this ship and onto yours—that isn’t going to happen, but I’ll give you an ‘A’ for effort.”

  She gave him a lopsided grin, “You can’t blame a girl for trying, can you?”

  “I’d have been disappointed in anything less,” he grudged before stepping around his desk, “let’s take one last look at the breakdown before you disembark.”

  “Of course, sir,” she said, and the two made their way to the bridge, slowed only by Middleton’s shuffling gait—a result of his wariness to aggravate the wound to his leg, combined with the numbness which made his butt feel like it was filled with lead.

  The Pride’s main sensor array was down, so Hephaestion had been forced to link up with the Slice of Life’s sensor array to give Middleton a real-time tactical breakdown of the battle still raging above them.

  The Droids were down to four warships—two Motherships and two Destroyers—while the Rim Fleet forces numbered ten. Only a single Heavy Destroyer remained for the Raubach-led defensive force, with the rest of the Rim Fleet group consisting of Corvettes.

  But those Corvettes were proving to be worthy of every nightmare Middleton had suffered since learning of the now-confirmed modifications Commodore Raubach had made to his warships. With surgical precision, the Corvettes had moved to flank the Droid forces to either side of their position. The Rim Fleet had somehow managed to maneuver the Droids into a tight ball, and with the nearly two hundred gunboats swarming around the still-active Motherships, Middleton could only think of the Droid forces as
an increasingly constricted ball of bait fish surrounded by a pack of hungry predators.

  Lending further credence to the metaphor, the Rim Fleet forces had surrounded the Droids on all axes like a school of sharks, and were picking them apart from ranges which far exceeded the Droids’ own weaponry—even including the Motherships’ spinal-mounted lasers powered by intense antimatter reactions.

  “It’s only a matter of time now, sir,” McKnight said grimly, and Middleton nodded sourly. Even a point transfer, signaling the arrival of yet another Droid warship—this one a Harmony Corvette—could do little to convince him that the Rim Fleet forces would not emerge victorious. His strategies—deploying the Liberator torpedoes, dragging the Droids into the system, and even attempting to take the Light Cruiser in the midst of the battle so as to turn the enemy’s advanced weaponry against them—had failed him, and he knew that dozens of good people had died as a result. But the worst possible outcome could be that the mission failed completely…and that was something he simply could not allow to happen, no matter the cost.

  “Which is why you need to get back to your command, Lieutenant McKnight,” Middleton said, turning to the young blond woman as he felt his own resolve strengthen. “You’re already set to point transfer and your crew needs your ass firmly planted in the big chair if they’re to get through this thing.”

  “They’re our crew, Captain,” McKnight said, her tone bordering respectfully pointed and insubordinate—the perfect combination in Middleton’s opinion.

  “No, Lieutenant McKnight,” Middleton said, taking his seat in the big chair as the Pride of Prometheus and the Slice of Life drifted well past the hyper limit to the system’s south, “once you point transfer out of this system, they’ll be your crew.”