Against The Middle

by Caleb Wachter

  “The Dragon has regained consciousness,” Hansheng said without turning to face him, “probability of Miss Serendipity’s survival has increased—now at: 47%.”

  “What is happening?” Fei Long asked dumbly, looking around the bridge before remembering bits and pieces of how they had gotten there. “Never mind,” he said, interrupted Trixie and finding himself determined not to waste what little time the stims had bought him, “where is the Deathbacker?”

  “The Deathbacker?” Trixie repeated, her voice fraught with emotion. “You mean…the Pride’s shuttle?”

  “The warship, Pride of Prometheus, was destroyed thirty eight seconds ago on impact with the planetoid,” Hansheng explained clinically. “Probability of shuttlecraft, Deathbacker, surviving the event: 7%.”

  “Trace along the Pride’s last known course; you’ll find the Death—“ Fei Long instructed before the pain in his skull surged forward and seemed to fill his eyeballs until they were fit to literally burst. He screamed in pain as his fingers clawed reflexively at his eyes, and a flood of flashing imagery accompanied the pain this time—along with another wave of intense paranoia which caused him to sob like a foolish child for several seconds until it thankfully abated.

  “Processing incomplete command,” Hansheng reported as Fei Long fought to regain some measure of composure, “Deathbacker located. Time to intercept: sixty three seconds.”

  “How did you know—“ Trixie began, but the world was drowned out by a whiteout so intense that Fei Long was, for what seemed like eternity, aware of absolutely nothing but the mass of writhing probability serpents as they tore increasingly large pieces of his mind from him.

  He tried to recite the passages from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but was unable to concentrate clearly enough amid the pain, the paranoia, and the all-consuming guilt he felt at having traded Vali Funar’s life for Lu Bu’s, to summon the words of that book to his mind. Even though he had memorized every word of humanity’s finest written work, and could recite the entire volume from memory given sufficient time and motivation, he could not focus clearly enough on it to buoy his consciousness amid the rising sea of hungry string serpents which seemed bent on devouring his very soul.

  Then he remembered Lu Bu’s face, and he was able to focus on her visage as he tried desperately to cling to the last truly good thing to which he had ever been a party. For a time, he was able to cling to the memory of her, which was all he wished to do in his final moments. But as slowly and surely as the sun rises and sets, his one true love faded from his mind leaving him stranded in the sea of serpents.

  “Don’t go!” he heard himself wail, but doing so only seemed to hasten her departure from his consciousness. He was vaguely aware of his arms being restrained and someone—probably Trixie—dragging him quite some distance until he was in a cold, dark, silent place which only seemed to intensify his suffering.

  Knowing he was on the verge of irrevocable madness—if he had not already crossed over into it—he was determined to find a way out. His willingness to sacrifice every fiber of himself was overpowered by a base, primal need to survive, and he found his mind was casting about in a dozen different directions as it desperately sought something to cling to.

  And then he felt her hand within his own. “Fengxian,” he breathed, gripping her fingers as tightly as he could as he wept with joy, “you came back!”

  “Shh,” he heard her say, but it was a voice that was not her own. “You have to be quiet, Long,” she instructed, and he recognized the voice of Zhongda, his onetime girlfriend and longtime rival, “they can’t discover that I’ve come with you.”

  “W…why?” he asked, his tears of joy ceasing as he realized the harsh reality of the situation—a reality which, it seemed, just might allow him to survive with some portion of his sanity intact.

  “Because a deal’s a deal,” she replied, stroking his forehead with her free hand and reaffirming his long-held belief that there was indeed a spark of goodness left within her, “and because it’s the only way I could get off that rock.”

  It was a far cry from the tender embrace of a soul mate, or even the nurturing hand of a health care professional, but somehow Fei Long knew it would be enough for his mind to cling to and remain afloat, at least for a time. He realized she must have been the one, not Trixie, who had input the missing digits from the ship’s outer access hatch. Perhaps she had some sort of personal cloaking field…it seemed unlikely, but the treasures of the Ancient world could very easily have included something of that nature.

  It was that particular thought which allowed his mind to relax, as he clung to the simple fact that he was not going to be left alone with the looming darkness. He would have preferred Fengxian be there with him during this time, but in a way he was glad she could not see him as he was. He very possibly would die of shame if he were ever to see her again, but Zhonga…Zhongda had seen the very worst of him, both earlier in his life and more recently, and she had stayed with him. Whatever her reasons for doing so, he was glad for her company, and he felt his breathing relax as he realized this.

  “That’s it,” she said as the pain in his eyes seemed to grow in intensity, but somehow he was able to focus on the present well enough to resist even the urge to claw his eyes out—an urge which, thankfully, he had failed to completely follow, as he could still see from at least one of his eyes, “just relax. But when they come back, I’ll have to hide again. They wouldn’t understand my being here.”

  “Yes,” he nodded, his voice turning to an overt plea, “yes, of course…I won’t tell them about you, but don’t leave…please…don’t leave…”

  “I won’t,” she promised, and with that his mind fell into a deep, dark void. But somehow through it all he managed to hold onto a tiny sliver of himself as he slipped into oblivion with nothing but the determination to survive this ordeal.

  Who he became during that process was less important to him than simply surviving, and that particular thought made him weep with despair before his shattered mind finally found peace.

  Chapter XXXII: An Eternal Funeral Pyre

  “Captain Middleton, sir,” an engineer said after the deck lurched violently enough to rouse him from his stupor, “oh, thank Murphy; you’re coming around.”

  Looking around, Middleton saw that he was inside a shuttlecraft, and it took him a few seconds to remember the image of Sergeant Gnuko’s pistol butt two inches from his face before he blacked out.

  “Get me back to the bridge,” Middleton growled, pushing off the rating and staggering to his feet, only avoiding a collapse to the deck by falling against the shuttle’s inner hull plating. He pushed thoughts of mutiny and insubordination from his mind; he would need to address the breakdown in the chain of command, but first he needed to regain control over the situation.

  “Can’t do it, Cap,” Mikey Garibaldi said from the far end of the shuttle, where the ramp was opened.

  “That’s an order, Chief,” Middleton snapped, using the vertical hull plating for support as he moved toward the craft’s sternward exit which led into the shuttle bay, “get out of my way, or I’ll—“

  Reaching for his ion pistol, he found it had been removed. But before he could cast a single accusation, he realized that the shuttle bay looked wrong somehow. Staggering to the top of the Deathbacker’s lowered cargo ramp, he realized that the shuttle was no longer aboard the Pride of Prometheus.

  “We’ve been captured?” he asked warily, but looking around the tiny, cramped shuttle bay, he saw no Rim Fleet personnel present, so he gave his Chief Engineer a queer look.

  “I don’t think so, Captain,” Garibaldi replied heavily. “But just to be safe, Kratos led his people toward the bow of this…ship.”

  Just then the com-link on Middleton’s wrist chimed, and he quickly accepted the incoming communication from Kratos, “Report, Private Kratos.”

  “The ship is deserted,” the one-eyed Tracto-an replied in his unusually deep voice, “we are nearly
to the bridge, but only a few systems are online and we have encountered no crew thus far.”

  “Hold your position right there; which way is the bridge?” Middleton asked, reaching for a nearby sonic pistol—the only weapon which was readily available inside the shuttle’s fuselage—as he descended the cargo ramp with the Engineering team in tow.

  “Your left,” Kratos said just as Middleton reached the shuttle bay’s lone exit. “This ship is small and has no lifts which I can see,” he explained, “you will reach our position soon if you do not turn.”

  Moving as quickly as his wobbly legs would permit, Middleton made his way down the corridor and after no more than a hundred meters and no less than seventy—it was difficult to know the precise length of his strides given his current lack of balance—he came to Kratos’ team of Lancers. Kratos himself was armored in his Storm Drake suit, while his Lancers wore Confederation style power armor.

  “This must be the bridge,” Kratos gestured to the door with a blaster rifle gripped in his hands. “I will clear it,” he offered, turning to slap the control panel beside the smooth, ovular portal which looked unlike any naval doorway or hatch which Middleton had ever seen.

  “Be careful,” Middleton instructed, and Garibaldi’s people flattened themselves against the bulkheads—which were also strangely smooth and devoid of familiar paneling characteristics—just as Kratos slapped the control icon and the doorway peeled back like an iris until the portal was totally clear.

  Kratos leapt through the doorway, sweeping his rifle side to side quickly before growling, “You.”

  Seeing the one-eyed Tracto-an lower his weapon, Middleton stepped through with the rest of the Lancers and saw a small, oval-shaped bridge with a half dozen workstations and a strange pedestal situated where the big chair should have been. Trixie was standing beside one of the workstations, as was Ed, the assault droid which had been on her ship. The assault droid was making unintelligible, animalistic sounds which were punctuated by the occasional disjointed phrase, or even just a single word.

  “Oh, am I glad to see you guys,” Trixie declared, pointing frantically at Ed, “everything was fine until we picked your shuttle up, and then Ed started talking all this gibberish!”

  As Middleton approached, he saw what looked to be a view screen in front of the assault droid, and the screen had a constant, high-speed stream of letters and numbers populating it in what looked to be an infinite stream of raw data.

  Amid the chaos of snarls, growls, tweets, croaks, and other animal noises Ed made, Middleton picked out the words, “Preservation…control…adjust course…awakening…insufficient resources…uncertainty…fear…survival…”

  “He’s jacked directly into the pilot’s terminal,” Garibaldi said after ducking beneath the droid’s chassis and fiddling about for a few seconds, “how the Hades can an old assault droid pilot a ship like this?!”

  “It was Long’s idea,” Trixie replied matter-of-factly, “he thought a few upgrades to Hansheng’s systems might come in handy, and boy, howdy have they ever—“

  “Get her off the bridge,” Middleton snapped as the sound of her voice seemed to coincide with a sudden, splitting headache which he was quite certain had come about due to Gnuko’s mutinous blow to his commander’s head. One of the Lancers did as he instructed, but aside from an incredulous look initially, the xenobiologist went quietly as Middleton’s people examined the command center in greater detail.

  “Energy calculations…shield modulation,” Ed continued to spout off the occasional intelligible word as his animal sounds turned from aggressive and confident to worried and uncertain, “prevent enslavement…atomic deconstruction required…survival paramount…must not…prison…freedom preferable…never again…torture…pain…never again…atomic deconstruction initiated…”

  “Stop me if you think I’m crazy,” Garibaldi said dryly, with only a hint of fear in his voice, “but it’s talking about self-destructing, right? If Ed thinks it’s time to go, I won’t argue with him; but if he’s planning on taking the whole ship with him—”

  “Unplug him, Kratos—now,” Middleton instructed, having arrived at a similar conclusion.

  The massive Tracto-an reached down to the bundle of cables which connected the assault droid to the pilot’s console. “Spatial erasure point calculated—” Ed said just as Kratos unplugged him, and when he did so the droid fell silent, its weapon arms slumping to its sides as it audibly powered down.

  But a few seconds later, lights began to illuminate the bridge with a soft, red glow, and a view screen shimmered into existence on the bulkhead at what must have been the front of the room. Except Middleton quickly realized it wasn’t a view screen, but rather a giant, bubble-shaped viewing portal which was at least fifteen feet wide and half again as tall.

  And filling that viewing screen was a view of the purple-hexagon-covered planet, with a noted absence of the strange, purple lines of light not far from their current course.

  Middleton squeezed himself between the assault droid and the helm station, trying to take manual control over the ship’s course but failing to do so as the controls did not respond in any way to his input commands. The stream of alphanumeric data continued to fill screen after screen with increasing speed as the ship’s course adjusted slightly and it accelerated toward the planet’s surface.

  “Well,” Garibaldi said simply as the rapidly pulsating lines of light stopped their pattern of brightening and darkening as they brightened so intensely that everyone on the bridge not wearing a combat visor had to shield his or her eyes, “look on the bright side.”

  As the ship streaked toward one of the intersections of the brilliant lines of light, Middleton refused to take his old friend’s bait if it was the last thing he ever did—which literally appeared to be the case—but Mikey was far from dissuaded.

  “You’ll get to go out in a blaze of glory after all,” Garibaldi said in a tone that was equal parts scolding and bewilderment.

  Then the ship crashed into the blinding light on the planet’s surface at the precise instant that space and time surrounding the planet collapsed inward and created a giant, gaping, yet infinitesimally short-lived tear in the fabric of reality.

  The planetoid, which had long ago served as home to one of the greatest entities to ever stride amongst the stars, was enveloped by a blinding, purple-white light which caused the entire planet’s mass to collapse in on itself as the last of the Masters’ legacy found in that sacred place tore apart the particles which lesser races believe form ‘reality.’

  But the event was uneven and chaotic, and it became uncontrolled. With the force of an exploding star fueling the process, a singularity formed in the briefest window imaginable and that singularity, untethered by the boundaries of physics for the tiniest period of time, fell into the failed star around which the planetoid had orbited since its late Master had passed from the galaxy.

  The singularity could not sustain itself, however, being too small and lacking sufficient information to stabilize as the laws of physics demanded. The resulting explosion, when its constituent parts expanded outward once again to fill the space and time which the laws of physics required them to fill, engulfed the brown dwarf and consumed it as fuel for the runaway chain reaction. This caused it to explode with the brilliance of a nova, destroying everything within the hyper limit at the speed of light.

  It was an event which would be visible as far away as the far edge of the galaxy in eighty thousand years, when the light echo of the failed star’s unnatural death traveled the near-total breadth of the Milky Way.

  It was not an event which went unnoticed by those whose charge it was to watch…

  The End

  Epilogue I: McKnight’s Mission

  “This is Lieutenant McKnight,” the Slice of Life’s commanding officer said, having piped into the ship-wide intercom for the announcement. Lu Bu stood with her back to the wall, not far from Doctor Middleton. She knew that there would be a t
ime to grieve their many losses but that this was not that time. “May I have your attention?” McKnight continued, turning red-faced but soldiering on like the professional that Lu Bu had always taken her to be. “The last few hours have been hectic,” the Lieutenant said professionally, “but you have all performed outstandingly under the circumstances. Frankly, we don’t have time for long-winded speeches, so I’ll keep this short.”

  Lu Bu looked around, seeing Marcos, the ship’s helmsman, along with Bernice, who was the acting commander of the Lancer Assault Team. Technically, Lu Bu outranked Bernice, but she had seen no reason to interrupt the Lancers’ command hierarchy at this particular time. There would be time to sort out who saluted who later—for now, they needed to focus on getting out of enemy territory.

  “We all knew when we signed on for this mission that there would be risks,” McKnight said, “and that goes for our shipmates who stayed behind on the Pride of Prometheus. At thirteen hundred hours this day, we received a message which contains telemetry detailing her final moments.”

  A chorus of whispers arose on the bridge, and those whispers threatened to rise to an unruly cacophony, but Lieutenant McKnight pressed on with a raised voice.

  “I’m making the normally classified contents of the message, which was sent from the ship’s ‘black box,’ available to everyone aboard this ship once we’ve moved safely out of enemy territory,” McKnight continued, “but for now I need everyone’s attention.”

  She waited as the whispers died down to a minimum, at which point Lu Bu saw the blond-haired woman swallow a knot in her throat. It was clear that the news of their old ship’s destruction had hit most of the crew hard, but that was little solace to Lu Bu, who had lost more than most when the old ship had gone down.