Against The Middle

by Caleb Wachter

  “We’ve got to get out of here, Fei,” Funar said sharply, dragging the Director—who was pale as a ghost and totally silent following the Lancer’s impressive entry, “there’s no time for mucking around in their system.”

  “I must send a communiqué,” Fei Long said as he entered the proper access codes which would allow him to take direct control over his system. Even if Zhongda had betrayed him, there was nothing she could do to interrupt him as he scoured the databases for information. At first he was uncertain what he needed to look for, and his anxiety grew with each passing second as the pain in his skull intensified.

  “We’re blowing this place, Fei,” Funar said gruffly, grabbing him by the arm and trying to yank him from the chair. But Fei Long had anticipated the other man would do so, and he managed to slide his arm free of the Lancer’s powerful grip by using perfect timing and letting his limb go limp.

  “Not yet, Lancer Funar,” Fei Long said, giving the man a level look before sparing a glance at the flat-lined medical monitoring equipment in the prisoner’s cell. “My program has taken complete control,” he said, tilting his head toward the screen behind himself which showed the Yin & Yang symbol and a string of rapidly-executing commands beneath it, “I must retrieve mission-vital information or this operation will fail—and everyone who is depending on us will die.”

  The conviction with which he made that last statement seemed to take Funar by surprise. The Lancer gave him a dubious look before glancing into the dead prisoner’s cell, “Who was that?”

  Without thinking, Fei Long replied, “A Seer.” He stopped and thought about what he had just said. Somehow he knew it was true, yet he had no idea how he knew it. “But he is gone now.”

  “W-w-who are you people?” the Director stammered, looking between the frighteningly-clad Lancer and Fei Long.

  “If you’re lucky, we’re just the beginning of a very, very bad day for you,” Funar quipped, cuffing the man on the back of the head. “Now shut up and keep still,” he commanded, forcing the elderly man to his knees before going to the cell with the dead Seer and restraining the medical duo’s hands with zip ties. “We—or rather you—are going to run out of air in another three minutes, Fei,” Funar said, “so whatever you’re going to do, do it fast.”

  Fei Long strained to think about what it was he needed to find. He had caught a glimpse of it during the last whiteout, but it had flitted out of his mind before he could focus on it and maintain that focus. Knowing he would need to enter another whiteout, but being uncertain how to initiate one, he drew a deep breath and closed his eyes. He tried to find his center, the place he went whenever he tried to unravel a particularly challenging riddle, or solve an overly difficult problem, but his thoughts were jumbled and disorganized.

  “Domains under heaven, after a long period of division, tend to unite; after a long period of union, tend to divide. This has been so since antiquity…” he muttered under his breath, reciting the beginning of the most important literary work in human history.

  “Fei!” Funar snapped, literally snapping his fingers in front of Fei Long’s face. “Snap out of it!”

  Fei Long was about to retort harshly, but the world around him was replaced with the menacing shapes of writhing image strings—called probability strings by the Seer, Fei Long now recalled, realizing that was indeed what he now beheld—but this time before they could become chaotic and disobedient, he commanded them to assume structure.

  “…the Supreme Ancestor slew a white serpent…” he heard his voice say briefly before it was washed out by the howling sounds of the probability strings as they struggled against his imposed will. But he succeeded in bringing them to heel, and soon he found the string he needed. Events moved both forward and backward along the string at first, but he managed to wrest total control over them and found what he needed in order to complete his work in the base’s databanks.

  Snapping out of the dreamlike state—a state which was quickly becoming more like a nightmare than a dream—Fei Long input the queries for the information he needed and found everything was still within the databanks.

  Seconds turned into minutes, but he managed to download the information he needed to a safe buffer area within his program. The first piece of information was the Raubach access code to their own implanted hardware on the ComStat network—a network for which the local hub had been deactivated by Captain Middleton at the outset of the battle at The Bulwark. All he needed to do was reboot that particular hub remotely via his previously implanted program and he would be able to issue a communication to Lieutenant McKnight aboard a vessel called…

  “The Slice of Life,” Fei Long declared under his breath, pulling up that particular ship’s comm. codes after setting the reboot cycle to initiate on the local ComStat hub—a process which would take forty one seconds. As his program found and retrieved that information, he set it to work finding the second piece: the Commodore’s Fleet-level command codes. Normally it would be impossible for even a great hacker to find this information under such time constraints, since sensitive data of its sort was heavily guarded and often recorded in fragmentary fashion.

  But Fei Long was not a great hacker—he was a grandmaster who had just soundly defeated his chief rival. By allowing Fei Long’s program into the mainframe, Zhongda had given him complete, unfettered access to all of the raw data stored in the base’s banks. Fortunately he was able to exclude extraneous data—like the scientific discoveries made on this planetoid, for instance—and quickly isolated the command codes. They had been used for sending a series of coordinates to the Rim Fleet warships—coordinates which would be used for an eventual rendezvous, no doubt, and that rendezvous was one of several enemy plans which Fei Long intended to interrupt.

  He knew he could not change the freighter’s jump destination, but he also knew that he could find their destination via wireless uplink with that vessel if it was not yet out of range of the base’s transmitter array. Testing the connection, he found that it was weak but present. He opened the connection and used simple, brute force powered by the base’s robust, Ancient tech-enhanced mainframe. He normally would have eschewed that particular approach, preferring elegance to brawn in all things. But time was of the essence, and after just a few seconds he managed to retrieve the information he needed from the freighter’s navi-computer: the destination for their first point transfer.

  Taking that information and hastily scrambling traces of his activity in the freighter’s computer, he barely completed the task before the connection was severed on the other end via hard disconnect of the freighter’s comm. transceiver.

  The ComStat hub reboot cycle completed, and Fei Long immediately shut off the Pride’s access to it, at least temporarily. He could not allow anyone to interrupt his communiqué with Lieutenant McKnight; if he did, Lu Bu would die and Commodore Raubach would escape with the freighter full of Ancient technology.

  The former was all that concerned Fei Long, but the Seer had been more focused on preventing the latter. So Fei Long prepared himself for what was to be the pivotal moment of this particular probability string. He looked over at Funar and felt a pang of regret. “Take the prisoners, Lancer Funar,” he said, feeling his breathing becoming more labored as the atmosphere slowly leaked from the module. “I will follow soon.”

  “No dice, Fei,” Funar growled, “hurry your ass up or I will throw you over my shoulder and carry you out of here.”

  Fei Long knew what needed to be done, but he still disliked the notion of doing it. The base’s ultra-powerful computer system finished with the calculations he had put to it after finding the freighter’s destination in its navi-computer, and the result was a long string of data which the Slice of Life could use to jump to that same location. “Where are Hansheng and Trixie?” he asked as he sent a hail via the ComStat network to Lieutenant McKnight.

  “You worry about your job and let me worry about mine,” Funar barked.

  McKnight accepted the inco
ming hail, and her face appeared on the monitor before him. “Mr. Fei?” she asked warily.

  “There is no time for pleasantries,” Fei Long said quickly, and Vali Funar cocked his head in surprise at hearing McKnight’s voice, “you must upload the following information directly to your navi-computer; your previous mission has been changed. I say again,” he repeated as the screen wavered with static, “upload the following coordinates and jump solution directly to your navi-computer.”

  “Fei…” Funar said, and Fei Long managed to hit the mute button before the Lancer could speak. Standing on the opposite side of the monitors from Fei Long, the Lancer began to move around the bank of workstations with the Director in tow, “have you received new orders from Captain Middleton?”

  “Have you received the transmission, Lieutenant?” Fei Long asked, cutting the audio pickup as soon as he had finished speaking to ensure that McKnight could not hear Vali Vunar’s voice. He felt sick to his stomach as he did so, but he knew it was the only way Lu Bu would survive.

  McKnight looked down off-screen and nodded, “We’ve got it, but how did you—“

  “Fei,” Funar said severely, “answer me: did we receive new orders from Captain Middleton?!”

  “Upload the solution, Lieutenant,” Fei Long said, his eyes briefly flicking to Vali Funar—whose hand was already on the butt of his holstered blaster pistol—and the world fell into whiteness once again.

  This time, Fei Long was determined to find even a single scenario which would save Lu Bu and spare Lancer Funar’s life. Aside from the occasional spat over operational authority, Fei Long had never held the Lancer in low regard, and he detested the idea of killing him even though he felt increasingly certain that his death was indeed required to save Lu Bu’s life.

  He forcibly laid the probability strings apart and examined them, one by one, as he attempted to find a single string which contained Vali Funar’s and Lu Bu’s survival. No other factors were important to Fei Long; all he cared about was finding a single string which would allow him to do both of those things.

  But string after string revealed that the two were mutually exclusive. Every course of action Fei Long might take which resulted in Vali Funar’s survival ultimately ended with Lu Bu’s death aboard the freighter. Conversely, every string which resulted in Lu Bu’s survival—represented by only a handful of strings, compared to the relative plethora of lines which saw her counterpart survive—saw Vali Funar die in the next three seconds of Fei Long’s life. If Vali Funar survived even one more second beyond that threshold, Lu Bu would die—along with the rest of her team when their hidden Starfire warhead went off.

  Though that sequence of events would still mean the end of the freighter, as well as Commodore Raubach, Fei Long simply could not allow that to happen.

  The whiteout ended abruptly, the world snapped back into focus. “I am sorry,” he whispered after muting the audio pick-up, and without another thought Fei Long took up the fallen guard’s blaster pistol from the workstation’s tabletop and shot Vali Funar through his helmet’s still-raised visor.

  The last expression the Pride’s valiant, honorable, and capable Lancer made was one of shock—but his pistol made it out of its holster and went off at Fei Long’s feet, narrowly missing his leg while destroying the right-hand workstation by skewering it with the bolt of powerful energy.

  “What’s going on there?” McKnight demanded, growing concern evident in her voice. “Why can’t I raise the Pride?”

  “Your communications have been blocked,” he said half-truthfully. The channels had been temporarily blocked, but by his hand. He had used Commodore Raubach’s command codes to remotely suspend the Slice of Life’s short range communications by overloading the ship’s comm. buffer with looping data fragments sent by his own connection. “I was only able to briefly open connections with yourself and Captain Middleton. I cannot hold remain here any longer, however,” Fei Long lied, knowing full well that McKnight had seen him stand and fire the blaster pistol off-screen at a target she could thankfully not see. “Make the jump I have calculated for you, Lieutenant McKnight, and do so immediately. If you wait even a few seconds, it will be too late to input the new solution!”

  “Ok,” McKnight said after a brief pause, and Fei Long felt genuinely sick to his stomach—not for killing Vali Funar, but for betraying the trust which both the dead Lancer and Lieutenant McKnight had clearly placed in him. Death was a simple fact of life for professional warriors, and there were myriad ways in which Fei Long could convince himself that Vali Funar would understand dying in the line of service—even tor friendly fire. But there was simply no way that Fei Long could ratify his betrayal of these people; it was the act of a low, cowardly, and evil person, and he knew he would suffer for his actions this day. “The old solution’s been scrapped and we’re set to jump to your new coordinates in two minutes…I just hope the navi-comp’s able to incorporate the data in time.”

  “It will,” he breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that now there was no way for the Slice of Life to undo their new jump coordinates in time. The ship had already passed its hyper drive’s PNR, and any further tampering would result in the ship’s total destruction when it attempted to point transfer without a valid solution in the navi-computer. “Good luck, Lieutenant. There will be a freighter arriving at your new destination in approximately thirty minutes; you must be prepared to board her, for that is where Lu Bu’s squad is located,” he explained. “Commodore Raubach is aboard that ship, along with technology which must not fall into enemy hands,” he said seriously before adding, “if you see Lu Bu, tell her…”

  He realized that he had no right to give any message to Lu Bu, or anyone else who had previously called him their friend. He had just violated every facet of trust which could exist between shipmates, and he knew he would pay a price for his betrayal.

  But he would not pay it yet.

  “Repeat your last?” McKnight said, but Fei Long cut the connection before he could reply. He manually blocked the Slice of Life’s ComStat token, cutting the ship off from the FTL comm. network, and opened a channel to Captain Middleton.

  The pain in the back of his skull had become excruciating, and he saw the Director reach into his pocket for something. With his vision blacking out instead of whiting out this time, he aimed the pistol at the Director and fired, knowing that the old scientist’s death was also integral to the completion of his plan.

  The only difference was that the Director’s death had nothing to do with Lu Bu’s survival; Fei Long had promised the Seer to prevent the Ancient tech from falling into enemy hands, and the Director had to die for that to be assured.

  He barely even took note of the ruination which the blaster pistol made of the Director’s head as he put the pistol beside the scientist’s hand, giving the far-too-thin illusion of a shootout between the Director and Lancer Funar. That done, he sat back down in the chair clutching his temples just as the door opened and Trixie—still wearing her pressure suit—stepped through.

  Her eyes went wide when she saw the carnage of the two dead men, one on either side of the workstation, and when they found Fei Long’s he was barely able to maintain focus through the intense pain in his head.

  “Long?” she whispered tremulously. “Are you ok?”

  He saw movement on the wall beside her and reflexively moved for the blaster pistol on the floor before realizing that what he was seeing were the gnawing, thrashing, writhing forms of the probability strings in his normal vision.

  “We have to hurry,” he said, staggering to his feet, “where is Hansheng?” He knew that he needed to communicate with Captain Middleton, but it appeared that would have to wait. He could not let Trixie stand over the scene for too long, since she was fairly intelligent and would eventually realize that the probability of the two men shooting each other in the head with blaster pistols, at point blank range, was extremely unlikely.

  Almost as unlikely as Lancer Funar’s faceplate bein
g down when such an event was even remotely possible.

  “He…well, we,” she amended, looking down sadly at the fallen Lancer, “were going to use their shuttle to get out of here. Ed’s taken out their soldiers and has the shuttle pilot pinned down at the landing pad.”

  “The shuttle is no good,” Fei Long said, shaking his head as much in negation as in a vain attempt to rid himself of the throbbing pain which threatened to overcome his senses. “But there is another way from this place,” he said, staggering toward her and barely reaching her side as he grasped for her to support him where he stood, “we must find Hansheng…he is important…”

  And with that, the world spun into darkness.

  Chapter XXVIII: A Rude Surprise

  “He did what?!” Middleton snapped, leaping to his feet and nearly falling to the deck as he did so. He had been working on the repairs with Garibaldi’s people when his com-link had connected him with an urgent incoming transmission from McKnight.

  “Mr. Fei said he was acting on your orders, sir,” McKnight said, clearly taken aback by the revelation that he, in fact, had not been doing so.

  “He most certainly was not,” Middleton growled as the Slice’s time-to-jump clock wound down to thirty seconds remaining. He had no idea what Fei Long’s game was, but at this point he could do nothing about it. Even though the Slice still had a viable jump solution in her databanks that would take it to the enemy’s base system, it would take over a minute to upload it into the ship’s navi-comp and make the proper adjustments. “It doesn’t matter,” Middleton said with a chop of his hand, “if the Commodore really is there, then your top priority is apprehending him—alive—and returning him to base HQ along with whatever hardware you find. If not alive,” he added with a dark, pointed look, “then for the sake of your command and everyone under it, you’d better bring what’s left of him back to Fleet HQ in a body bag.”