Against The Middle

by Caleb Wachter

  “We were given a mission,” McKnight said, her voice turning to one which was less commanding and more sympathetic, or even pleading, “and that mission was to get home and report on what’s happened here. Due to our Lancers’ outstanding efforts,” McKnight nodded by way of acknowledgment toward Lu Bu and Bernice in turn, “we have also secured a freighter filled with data and materials which may prove vital to the Fleet’s efforts to re-stabilize the Spineward Sectors and bring about the peace for which we have fought, bled, and even died for.”

  Lu Bu barely felt a hint of pride at being mentioned with such distinction by her new commander’s first formal address to the crew. The victory tasted like ashes in her mouth, given that the price of their victory had included Fei Long’s life. The telemetry which the Pride’s sensors sent back clearly showed the Raubachs’ hidden base exploding with the precise force of the modified Starfire missile warhead, and the radiation on the surface of the planet had been so intense when it had been wreathed in the strange, hexagonal energy patterns that no human could have survived on the surface for even a few seconds.

  “So now our objectives are twofold,” McKnight said, leaning forward in her chair as her voice returned to one of command, “we have to get ourselves home, and we have to get that freighter home. We can expect resistance at every step of the way, and we can expect to be asked to make even more sacrifices than we’ve already made, but most of all we can expect the unexpected.” She paused momentarily before saying, “I’ll be counting on each and every one of you to do your jobs just like you did for Captain Middleton. Let’s get home,” she said seriously before finishing, “let’s do it for our families, let’s do it for our Fleet…and let’s do it for the old man, Captain Middleton!”

  A brief, but genuine, cheer arose on the bridge, and Lu Bu even felt touched by McKnight’s emotional speech. Lu Bu, Bernice, and Doctor Middleton approached the command chair at the acting captain’s silent request.

  When they arrived, the blond-haired Lieutenant leaned toward Doctor Middleton and asked, seemingly of the entire trio, “How did I do?” She seemed genuinely uncertain and desirous of feedback, and Lu Bu momentarily forgot about her own loss and shared the camaraderie of her fellow warriors.

  Seeing Doctor Middleton wipe a tear from her cheek, Lu Bu heard the other woman say in a lowered voice, “I think it was perfect.”

  Lu Bu and Bernice nodded their assent, and Lieutenant McKnight—formerly Lieutenant Sarkozy—seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. “Good,” she said, straightening in her chair, “then let’s get out of here as soon as that freighter’s jump engines can cycle.”

  Lu Bu nodded, noting that Strider had taken up his post at Navigation, and she made her obeisance to her new commander before making her way to his side.

  “I thought you left,” she said bluntly, referring to his having gone incommunicado coupled with his unsavory background.

  He looked genuinely offended as he stiffened in his chair, “You be havin’ a rough way about ya, you know that?”

  She immediately wished she had not approached the subject so abruptly, but when he snickered softly she was put slightly at ease.

  “Naw,” he said, waving dismissively, “I be in this for the long haul, girly. Besides, I think the Mode might be too much ship for a man like me. She’s a touch high-maintenance, if you know what I mean?”

  “Then how did you—“ she began, causing him to light up and swivel his chair around to face her as he interrupted.

  “Oh, it be a work of art, let me tell ya,” he declared cockily, “see, freighters like them bulkies carry hundreds of tons of liquid fuel—it takes a lot of thrust to maneuver one of those beasts, you see? So I used the mag-locks on the Mode’s landing gear to attach to the freighter’s hull right over the external fuel tanks—after I made sure to drain the fuel from them and vent it to space, see?”

  She had no idea what he was rambling about, but she thought it would be polite to endure his explanation since she had behaved in a decidedly impolite fashion at the conversation’s outset.

  “With the right amount of fuel drained from the tanks,” he continued, “I banked on the pilot havin’ made the jump calculations hours before I drained the tanks, and the result was a near-proper total mass for the freighter when we jumped!”

  “So…” she said after it was clear he had finished his lengthy explanation, “you piggybacked?”

  Strider scoffed, “Sayin’ it like that makes it sound so simple. I assure you, sweetie, weren’t nothin’ simple about it—“

  “I am glad you are here,” she said, feeling the sting of his attempted use of an affectionate term as she realized—seemingly for the first time—that Fei Long was dead. She felt a knot form in the pit of her stomach, followed by a cramping sensation below that, and she said, “Excuse me.”

  Apparently sensing his faux pas, Strider watched silently as Lu Bu left the bridge, fighting to keep from crying in front of her crewmates as she made for the nearest secluded room she could find.

  “Everything’s fine, Bu,” Doctor Middleton said soothingly after a quick check of the instruments she had used in sickbay. “Better than fine, actually,” she said, “all three are doing perfectly…and they’re awfully large.”

  Breathing a sigh of relief, Lu Bu laid her head back down on the hard, flat portion of the medical examination bed which was meant to be a pillow. She knew she had taken too many risks during the mission, but she had been convinced it was the right thing to do. Now, however, with Fei Long gone she wasn’t sure how to proceed.

  “That can’t be right,” Doctor Middleton said under her breath as she checked some readings. This caused Lu Bu to tense in preparation for bad news, or a declaration that she had somehow harmed what would soon be the most important things in her life.

  “What is wrong?” Lu Bu asked.

  “They’re too big,” Doctor Middleton replied as she placed the small probe over Lu Bu’s lower abdomen once again, “I must have messed up the reading somehow. Just hold still for a moment.” Lu Bu did as she was instructed, and a minute or so later—after her heart rate had nearly doubled due to anxiety—Doctor Middleton shook her head in bewilderment. “Everything’s right,” she said, still shaking her head, “but they’re closer to four months along than the two you’ve actually been pregnant.”

  “My mother had quick pregnancy,” Lu Bu said, a wave of relief washing over her, “only took twenty weeks with me.”

  “Twenty weeks?!” Doctor Middleton blurted incredulously before reining in her emotions. “I don’t see how that’s even possible…why didn’t you say something earlier?”

  Lu Bu met the older woman’s gaze sheepishly before saying, “You said three months was cutoff for notifying military superiors. If I tell you my body is…faster, you would have told Captain Middleton already and I would not have commanded mission. We would have failed,” she said without an ounce of uncertainty about the matter.

  “That wasn’t smart, Bu,” Doctor Middleton scolded, but before she could get a full head of steam, Lu Bu reached out and clasped her adopted mother’s hand in her own.

  “I will not endanger them again,” she promised solemnly, pausing for several seconds as she fought against a rising tide of tears which brimmed in her eyes, “they are all I have left…”

  Doctor Middleton embraced her and they shared several minutes of silence before the Doctor gently broke the embrace and looked down at her with what Lu Bu felt certain was a grandmother’s unreserved excitement. “Have you thought of any names?” she asked, and though she was clearly trying to raise Lu Bu’s spirits, Lu Bu could tell that Doctor Middleton was having difficulty coping with her own recent loss.

  “I have,” she replied before listing off, “Meng, Su, and Xun.”

  “Will they carry their father’s family name, yours, or both?” Doctor Middleton asked, smiling as she apparently understood the significance of choosing from the greatest strategists and generals of the Wu kingdom from Ro
mance of the Three Kingdoms.

  “Fei Long has no family name he wishes to survive,” Lu Bu said distantly, thinking back on their few conversations regarding the subject of family, legacy, and children, “so they will bear my name.”

  “Lu Meng, Lu Su, and Lu Xun,” Doctor Middleton said approvingly, “which ones are for the boys, and which is for the girl?”

  Lu Bu reared back in shocked surprise, “Two boys and one girl?!”

  Doctor Middleton literally bit her lip and made an apologetic expression, “I’m sorry…I should have asked if you wanted—“

  “No, no, no,” Lu Bu said excitedly, waving off her mother’s concern, “it is perfect!” She thought for a moment before deciding, “Xun will be girl, Su and Meng will be boys.”

  “And no more fighting,” Doctor Middleton said pointedly, to which Lu Bu reluctantly nodded her agreement.

  “Until they are born,” she amended after a moment’s thought, “no more fighting.”

  Sighing in resignation, Doctor Middleton nodded agreeably, “I guess that will have to do.”

  Epilogue II: ?????????’? ?????????

  The ship crashed into the intersecting beams of light covering the planetoid’s surface, and Middleton was determined not to flinch at the moment of impact. He was going to face his end head-on without shying away from the inevitable. Just as he had long expected would be the case in the moment of his death, at the final instant when his consciousness would be part of the universe’s great tapestry of information…nothing happened.

  He felt weightless and adrift in a sea of emptiness, the world completely black all around him, and he knew that he had finally encountered the oblivion which awaited all living things. It was a peaceful moment, a tranquil moment, and one which was more sublime than he could have ever imagined.

  Then his leg bumped into something hard, and he was torn from his peaceful reverie. His mind sprang into action, and only after he had decided to investigate the unexpected sensation did he realize he actually had closed his eyes.

  Opening them with equal parts irritation and surprise, he looked around and found that his leg had bumped into Ed’s left weapon arm, and that everything on the strange craft’s bridge was precisely as it had been prior to the ship’s collision with the blinding light on the planetoid’s surface. Through the large viewing portal at the front of the bridge, Middleton could see faintly twinkling stars arranged in wholly unfamiliar configurations.

  There was a muffled clang somewhere on the stern of the ship, followed by another, then another, and the frequency of the clangs grew as their individual volume diminished, until the sound was very nearly that of rain falling against a thin, metal roof.

  “What happened?” Garibaldi asked, looking around in bewilderment just before the ship’s artificial gravity returned, causing all but Ed to crash to the deck in unison.

  Middleton grabbed the edge of the pilot’s console, hauling himself up to look at the screen which had previously contained the seemingly endless stream of alphanumeric information. But where that long, meaningless string of characters had been, there was now a single line of text written in Confederation Standard:

  Spatial erasure successful; atomic reconstruction successful; system overload detected; shutting down primary systems.

  Kratos moved around the bridge, looking at the strange design of the bridge as he kept a firm grip on his blaster rifle.

  “Remove Ed from the bridge,” Middleton commanded, and a pair of power-armored Lancers clomped forward to obey his command. It took some work—and Garibaldi’s assistance to depower the mag-locks on Ed’s feet—but they managed to drag the apparently dormant assault droid from the bridge after a few minutes of effort.

  Middleton looked around at the consoles strewn about the bridge as the pitter-patter of impacts near the stern of the ship abated until it ceased altogether. Finding the console emblazoned with the Navigation symbol—an old-fashioned, wooden wheel with constellations of stars in the background—Middleton moved toward it and found that it was already booted up.

  Toto limped to the helm station where Ed had previously been transfixed, and began to manipulate the controls. The ship did not appear to respond to his commands, but Middleton had rather more success at the Navigation console, quickly finding a set of star charts into which he input the visible constellations around their current position.

  “Sensors are offline,” Hephaestion reported from another console before moving to a second console and reporting, “as is Tactical. The consoles have power, but they do not appear to be connected to the ship’s DI.”

  For some reason, the Nav computer was having difficulty establishing a positive location match with the visible star field he had punched into it, but the system estimated it would achieve a match in six minutes.

  Middleton turned to Garibaldi, “Take a team of engineers, along with a pair of Lancers, and move toward the stern so you can find the engines. Once we figure out where we are we’ve got to figure out how to move, but be cautious and don’t go throwing any switches until I make it back there.”

  “You’ve got it, Cap,” Mikey acknowledged before assembling a team and doing as he had been instructed.

  “Where is Miss Serendipity?” Middleton asked of Kratos, whose people had been assigned to remove her from the bridge a few moments earlier.

  Kratos gestured to one of the two doorways leading off the bridge—the other doorway had been the same one through which Middleton’s team had entered—and Middleton nodded as he gripped the sonic pistol’s butt, feeling only slightly reassured by the feel of the less-lethal weapon in his hand.

  Approaching the door, Middleton found that it led to a corridor which appeared identical to the one which had led from the shuttle bay to the bridge.

  There was a door lying toward the hull which was open, and he moved through it to find Miss Serendipity kneeling beside Mr. Fei. Mr. Fei’s head was lolling around in an apparent stupor, his hands had been bound via zip ties to his waist, and he had large, bloody gashes over both eyes but they appeared to be more or less superficial.

  Miss Serendipity—or Trixie as the rest of the crew referred to her—was tending those wounds, and as Middleton approached he knelt beside the young man without whom none of Middleton’s accomplishments would have been possible. But even considering that fact, Middleton was well beyond the point of reason regarding the young man’s mutinous actions when he had diverted Lieutenant McKnight to some still-unknown location.

  “I apologize—“ he began, turning to Trixie before she shushed him.

  “It’s ok, Captain,” she replied, looking up and making meaningful eye contact for a few seconds before returning to the task of cleaning Fei Long’s wounds, “but I don’t know if he’s going to survive. I need to get his temperature down, quickly, if we want any meaningful parts of his brain to survive this fever.”

  Middleton looked down and saw that Fei Long’s body was completely drenched in sweat, and after placing the back of his hand against the young man’s forehead, he concluded that Miss Serendipity was correct. The fever which had gripped Fei Long was more severe than anything Middleton had encountered, and he knew that such a high temperature would begin causing permanent neurological damage in a matter of minutes—damage which had almost certainly begun long before Middleton’s people had boarded the strange craft.

  “Kratos!” Middleton barked, and a moment later the hulking Tracto-an appeared at the doorway. “Get a pair of engineers in here to help Miss Serendipity with Mr. Fei,” he instructed, forcibly setting aside his anger with the young man’s insubordination for the time being, “she’ll need the emergency medical kit from the shuttle, and they might have to move him somewhere cooler—like the inside of an airlock’s outer door if we can’t find a proper refrigerator of some kind.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Kratos acknowledged before doing as he had been ordered.

  Fei Long began muttering something under his breath, but Middleton could not make
out the words.

  “He’s been saying that off and on since I came back here,” Miss Serendipity explained. “I only speak a little bit of their language, but it sounds like a handful of names, or places, repeated over and over as far as I can tell.”

  Middleton picked out the words ‘Su,’ ‘Xun,’ and ‘Meng’ from the young man’s fevered mutterings, and for just a moment he felt a degree of compassion for the brilliant teenager’s circumstance.

  Middleton stood as soon as the engineers entered the room, and returned to the bridge to see if the Navigation computer had finished its calculations and yielded a positive match for their present location.

  “Where are we?” Toto rumbled as his patience had clearly worn thin with their current predicament.

  Looking at the Nav computer’s completed triangulation of their present location, Middleton stood slack-jawed for several seconds as he processed the unthinkable change in their circumstances.

  The computer showed that they had been flung across the galaxy, and were just outside of the Empire of Man’s official territory, in a cluster of stars featuring one prominent system labeled ‘Gorgonus.’ It was the very region to where the Imperial forces had supposedly gone after withdrawing from the Spineward Sectors, which Middleton could not accept as mere coincidence—no matter how much he wanted to do so.

  “One thing’s for sure,” Middleton muttered, turning to face the Sundered, “we’re not in Cagnzyz any more, Toto.”

  The adventures continue in the upcoming series: McKnight’s Mission, and Middleton’s Prejudice!

  Afterword:

  This concludes the story of the Pride of Prometheus and her direct contributions to the future of the Spineward Sectors, the MSP, and all of the people whose lives it touched, either directly or indirectly.

  The seed of Middleton’s Pride was originally conceived by my brother, Josh, as little more than an extra point of view for one of his own novels. But he kept running into sprawl issues, where his stories continued to grow with each new novel as he incorporated more and more characters, and he eventually found it impossible to incorporate the story of Middleton’s lost patrol as he had originally envisioned.