Against The Middle

by Caleb Wachter

  “What?” she reared back in surprise, certain she must have heard incorrectly. Walter Joneson had, on several occasions, denigrated her for her genetically-engineered physical traits. How could he also have been a ‘genie’—a derogatory term used to describe the genetically enhanced—while clearly holding them in such low regard?

  But before she could ask the following questions, the lift’s ascent began to slow and her teammates leveled their weapons as they stood to either side of the door. They were prepared to lay down the fire which would hopefully let her breach the bridge and incapacitate the Rim Fleet personnel within—chief among them being Commodore Raubach, of course.

  Lu Bu gripped her sonic grenades and cleared her mind of distractions in preparation for the fight to come. The lift ceased its upward motion and the doors began to slide apart. When the gap between the doors was no more than eight inches wide, she hurled the sonic grenades through the breach. Stepping forward, she brought Glacier Splitter up into a two-handed grip as she cleared the doorway—just as a hail of fire slammed into her torso.

  The grenades went off just after she had exited the lift, and she saw a half dozen bridge crew fall to the ground as the specially-tuned frequencies of the grenades’ blast rendered them unconscious. Sonic weapons were designed to be nonlethal, requiring extraordinary circumstances—or extraordinary determination—to be employed in a life-threatening manner.

  But the blaster fire she felt slamming into her chest was every bit as lethal as her modified hammer was in her hands. It was only due to her Red Hare armor’s incredible resilience that her legs were able to keep churning away beneath her as she fought her way onto the bridge and dove behind a nearby workstation for cover from the lethal storm of blaster bolts.

  No sooner had she hit the deck behind her newfound cover, than Hutch and Tray opened fire from within the lift. Hutch’s scattergun took a pair of bridge standers who were near Lu Bu’s position, and their bodies were reduced to little more than grizzly, misshapen patterns of blood and bone fragments which covered the nearby surfaces of bridge control stations. Tray’s blaster rifle snapped a pair of well-aimed shots which found a bridge crewman and, surprisingly, the hulking bodyguard who had accompanied Commodore Raubach in the cargo hold.

  Lu Bu gripped a pair of ion grenades from her belt and heard the Commodore’s voice barking out orders in what she had learned was the Imperial language. She’d had enough difficulty learning Confederation Standard, so she had not wasted any time attempting to learn fragments of the new language which the Imperials spoke. But she could tell the Commodore was a calm, collected commander from the way he snapped order after order at his people while she readied the ion grenades.

  After the grenades were firmly in her grip, she risked a glance around the workstation’s edge and her face was immediately surrounded by a hail of incoming fire. There were at least eight crewmembers arrayed on the opposite side of the bridge from her position, and she caught sight of the massive, silent, dark-skinned bodyguard as he broke away from the main group and made his way toward her position.

  She tossed the grenades as hard as she could without achieving a better throwing position, and one of the grenades was shot from the air by the bridge crew formed up around the Commodore. But the other managed to clear the bank of workstations between them and Lu Bu, and she saw the Commodore leap clear of the area just before the blast went off.

  The bridge went dark instantly, and the only source of illumination was that provided by the streaking blaster bolts converging on her position. She could only hope that Tray and Hutch had made it clear of the lift, because she knew she was about to become entangled with the Commodore’s bodyguard, or champion, or whatever his title happened to be.

  For her, he was nothing more than another in a long line of challenges—challenges which she had not yet failed to overcome.

  She had barely gotten Glacier Splitter up and extended its haft to a fighting length of roughly one meter when the dark-skinned bodyguard was upon her. His body was covered in a form-fitting jumpsuit of some kind which could very well have been of similar composition to her Storm Drake armor, and his head was totally unprotected. But his fists were armored in strange-looking gauntlets, and she warily gave two steps of ground after bringing the hammer up into a defensive position.

  Those two steps of ground saved her life, as the warrior brought his fists up into a fighting guard before lashing out with them in rapid-fire succession with his long, muscular arms. At the apex of each punch, the gauntlets he wore flashed with a brilliant, blue-white light, and she suspected there was enough energy being discharged with each blow that a glancing blow against any unarmored portion of her body would be lethal.

  She tightened her grip on the hammer’s haft and lashed out with the butt of its haft, parrying one of the warrior’s thunderous blows in the process. The jolt of electricity which thrummed up and down the haft of her hammer was very nearly powerful enough to make her drop the mighty weapon—and somehow that energy had penetrated her Storm Drake armor.

  Feeling her anger rise at the far-too patient, calculating expression on her foe’s face—an expression only visible when his gauntlets flashed, lighting up his features—Lu Bu re-tightened her grip on the weapon and made as though to parry another blow. The warrior was firing three, four, and five punch combinations and if Lu Bu was being honest, he was varying his attacks brilliantly. There were absolutely no openings through which she could bring the hammer up and through his guard during the brief intervals his seemingly-rehearsed attack provided.

  So instead of trying to out-think her opponent, she did what came naturally to her: she fired a leg kick at his left thigh and followed up with another strike of her hammer’s butt aimed at her opponent’s head. The warrior checked the leg kick perfectly, but Lu Bu felt a savage thrill when she felt his flesh give as any ordinary man’s might do against her shinbone. He then leaned back and out of the way of Glacier Splitter’s butt, easily avoiding the attack—but Lu Bu had seized the initiative and would not relinquish it willingly.

  She switched her balance easily over her hips and fired her left leg at her foe’s midsection, and the warrior parried it easily with his gauntleted fist. The numb, buzzing, jolting sensation which seized her leg was almost enough to unbalance her, but she had expected it and barely managed to keep her momentum driving forward. She swung Glacier Splitter’s massive, duralloy-bound stone head at her foe’s skull, but the warrior turned the blow aside with a swat of his powerful, gauntleted hand as he kept his momentum moving backward under control.

  She could tell by the way he was moving that he had willingly adopted a defensive position—an understandable move, given his height and length advantages, coupled with the fact that counterpunching is far more conducive to a knockout punch than moving forward ever is—but she did not care about what he wanted from this fight. She knew that if she maintained focus, there was not a warrior in the universe who could defeat her. As Walter Joneson had told her before his death, she understood that her greatest enemy was not the warriors with whom she would do battle, but rather her greatest enemy was herself.

  So she pressed forward, but fought back against the savage, primal urge to abandon all tactics and hurl herself at her would-be killer. As she rained kick after punch after hammer blow into her opponent’s impenetrable guard, she knew that both she and her foe were getting precisely what they wanted out of this fight. For the first time since she could remember, she was unable to land a single, clean blow against her foe, and she knew that this was a truly equal match.

  The only question would be whose preparation, training, discipline, or body failed first. And with Walter Joneson guiding her, even from the grave, she knew she would prevail.

  Time lost meaning as the duel unfolded. She felt the odd blaster bolt strike her armor, but she paid it no heed. Her focus was sharper than it had ever been, and she knew that this warrior was the only enemy that truly mattered aboard the freighter. Once sh
e defeated him, the Commodore—and the ship, loaded with its inestimable treasures—would be theirs, and her mission would be a complete success.

  She heard a woman scream, and only vaguely realized that Glacier Splitter had taken an unarmored bridge stander in the gut during one of Lu Bu’s backswings. Somehow they had fought their way across to the opposite side of the bridge while she had been so focused on penetrating the warrior’s guard. A moment after she realized this, she was vaguely aware of an explosion going off behind her, followed by a shower of bloody gore spraying against her back—and her opponent’s face.

  Seizing the brief advantage caused by his temporarily obscured vision, Lu Bu lashed out with her hammer aimed squarely at the warrior’s knee. The man somehow sensed the incoming blow, and leapt clear of Glacier Splitter’s head before switching his weight and smashing a brutal front kick into her helmet’s visor. The visor actually cracked, and in what she knew was no mere coincidence but almost certainly was some act of fate, her own vision became impaired after she had attempted to capitalize on that very impediment which her foe had experienced a moment earlier.

  Determined not to be upstaged, but only able to see out of a tiny portion of her visor’s ruined window, she brought the hammer up and down in a pair of seemingly wild, chaotic strikes which had very little chance of landing. But while they failed to land, what they did do is allow her to shift her momentum and begin backpedaling, and the trio of brilliant flashes she saw—along with the jolting numbness which gripped both of her hands, apparently from blocking one of her foe’s blows with her hammer’s haft—told her she had chosen the correct course as her feet took her blindly backward from the lumbering, yet incredibly agile warrior.

  She still had a proverbial ace up her sleeve, and she knew that it was now time to play that particular ace. Adjusting her grip on the hammer’s haft as she backpedaled, she twisted the two sections of the shaft which her hands gripped in perfect timing with the beginning of a seemingly blind, lateral swing of the weapon before her. To an outside observer, it would have appeared as though she was panicked and attempting to buy herself reprieve from the warrior’s relentless barrage of punches, and she was hoping her foe sensed this false desperation.

  When the weapon’s balance shifted dramatically in her hands, she knew she had done as she desired—and when it made a muffled, cracking sound upon impact with her foe’s ribcage, she knew she had achieved the outcome she, and her team, had desperately needed. She had used the last surprise available to her to land the decisive blow on the agile, powerful, but lightly-armored warrior: a mid-swing extension of the hammer’s haft to nearly double its regular length. She had caught him off-guard with the surprise maneuver, and he had been unable to dance away from the blow as a result of being too confident in his technique.

  Bringing the weapon back, she adjusted to its new, more distant, center of balance and swung again as she stepped forward. The warrior blocked the blow, but the block was weaker than his previous ones and she knew that this was her best chance to defeat him.

  Swinging her weapon left and right, up and down, and lashing out with the occasional kick, Lu Bu fought in near-total darkness as she drove her foe across the bridge. She had practiced fighting in myriad conditions—extreme heat, extreme cold, high gravity, low gravity, complete darkness, and even in blinding light—and while she would never claim to be comfortable in those extreme conditions, she had learned to work effectively within them.

  When her hammerhead struck one of the warrior’s gauntlets and that gauntlet exploded, she leapt into the air and drove her knee into his chin. She was rewarded by the familiar, yet thoroughly satisfying sensation of a man’s jaw breaking against her knee, followed by the also-familiar sound of a muscle-bound warrior’s body collapsing to the metal deckplates on which he had previously stood.

  Reaching up, she ripped her helmet from its clamps and looked down on the man, seeing she had caved in the side of his face with one of her furious hammer blows before breaking his jaw so horribly that its left side was completely unhinged and bulging up near his eye. In spite of his disfigurement—and almost certain agony—he made no sound as he scissored his legs blindly, attempting to take her own legs out from under her and bring her to the floor where his massive bulk would prove decisive in a grappling contest.

  She planted her feet and kicked his legs violently once, twice, three times to defend against his last-ditch efforts to turn the tables on her. As she did so, she brought the hammer—with its nearly two meter long haft, following her surprise, mid-fight adjustment which had proven decisive—into position and swept Glacer Splitter across the warrior’s shin, shattering the bone completely and causing his leg to briefly go limp. Without further ado, Lu Bu brought her hammer up above her head as high as the ceiling would permit and drove it into his skull with the smashball generators reaching their maximum delivered kinetic force at the moment of impact. With the surprising sound of metal on metal, his head was messily cleaved in two by the awesome power of her unique hammer.

  She saw bits of metal in the man’s ruined skull where bone should have been, and for good measure she struck twice more—these blows aimed at his neck—and decapitated him with Glacier Splitter’s duralloy-bound head.

  Satisfied he was dead, she drew several deep breaths and looked up, finding both Hutch and Traian had survived and were flanking her.

  “Where is Raubach?!” she spat between ragged, panting breaths as she fought against the urge to lean on a nearby workstation to steady her suddenly-quivering legs.

  “Holed up in there,” Traian replied through equally labored breaths.

  “I’ll get it,” Hutch growled, apparently possessing better wind than either of them—in spite of a mass of bloody rents in his armor—as he moved toward the door which Traian had indicated. When he arrived, Hutch checked the chamber for his scattergun and threw the weapon down in disgust.

  “No,” Lu Bu huffed as she raised Glacier Splitter with trembling hands, “I will.”

  Lugging the heavy weapon over to the door, she tested the control mechanism built into the hammer’s haft and found it was still in working order. She extended the telescopic haft to its standard, one meter length, and raised it to the level of her waist before slamming it into the door’s frame. The frame bent, but did not break so she struck it again. Again and again the hammer smashed into the frame of the door, until the frame itself cracked and fell apart under the strain her increasingly weary arms put upon it.

  Hutch stepped forward and gripped the exposed edge of the still-closed door—a door which was far less sturdy than those aboard the Pride of Prometheus, especially those in the critical areas of the ship like the bridge. His fingers wrapped around it and, with a mighty heave, he levered the two foot wide panel of metal out of its moorings within the sundered frame. The panel itself was far too strong for him to have broken with his bare hands, but once the frame had been destroyed it was a small matter to remove it from its gear-driven track.

  Stepping into the chamber beyond, Lu Bu led her three man team into the cramped office-like chamber and came face to face with Commodore Raubach.

  The Commodore wore the same cape he had worn in the cargo bay, and his features looked like they had been sculpted from wax—literally. His skin had a sheen to it which appeared wholly unnatural to her, but she had heard that some of the life-extending therapies often carried with them such side effects. Being a scion of one of the Empire’s most powerful Houses, Commodore James Raubach III had undoubtedly availed himself of such treatments at several points in his life.

  “I must congratulate you,” he said, his voice melodious and light in spite of the situation he faced, outnumbered three to one and backed into a corner, “you managed to steal aboard this ship undetected, slip past my security measures, defeat my personal guards and somehow ascertain these coordinates several hours before I myself had decided to use them. I must say,” he said as his hand moved to his waist, where he drew a dagger
with an overly elaborate hilt from a short scabbard, “were I not faced with the reality of the situation, I would declare it utterly impossible. But I suppose we both know you had help.”

  “Commodore Raubach, by order of Captain Middleton, commander of Pride of Prometheus, I place you under arrest,” Lu Bu said, ignoring his last-ditch attempts to distract her. She dropped Glacier Splitter, knowing that the massive, cumbersome weapon would be far less nimble and responsive in the cramped quarters than the Commodore’s dagger was. She drew Walter Joneson’s vibro-knife from her belt and activated its power cell, feeling the weapon thrum to life in her hand, “Come quiet and we you let live.”

  “Grammatical issues with your altogether predictable offer aside,” the Commodore replied easily, “I believe I understand the gist of your proposition, but I fear I must decline. You see, I know you are the only ones aboard my vessel,” he explained as he shifted his weight expertly from one foot to the other, looking like a tiger preparing to leap into action, “but you, on the other hand, are unaware of my force’s true number. Despite the obvious factors in play,” he gestured to Lu Bu, Hutch, and Traian with the tip of his dagger, “the odds are still stacked neatly in my favor.”

  Lu Bu’s eyes flicked around the small room, which measured approximately three meters by four meters, and held a large desk on the far, narrow end of the room behind Commodore Raubach. She suspected he had meant that she was unaware of the Dark Seer’s presence aboard the ship, and while she knew very little of them—next to nothing, in fact—she would not be dissuaded by fear of the unknown. She had a mission to complete, and she was determined to complete it.

  “Drop weapons and come quiet,” she instructed severely, reversing her grip on the vibro knife as she crouched into a fighting stance, “or I kill you.”

  “Again, your numerous compositional errors notwithstanding,” he sighed, “I fear I must decline what is, at face value, an eminently reasonable offer.”