“What are these points of interest?” the Stalwart Commander asked.
“They vary,” Middleton explained, calling up the nearest point of interest and expanding the sub-listing attached to it so that all could read the description. “This first POI is an abandoned Imperial colony which appears to have been occupied by a largely human group labeled as ‘pirates’ in the Imperial databases aboard the Prejudice.”
“You have still not shared those databases with us,” the Commander grunted.
“I never suggested I would share them,” Middleton said easily. “As the Supreme Commander of this fleet, information dissemination is one of my primary concerns and privileges.”
“The Commander makes a reasonable point,” Mrr’shan purred—a sound which made Middleton’s hairs stand on end. “You ask much of us and yet refuse to reciprocate in these ‘gestures of goodwill’.”
“I’ve never once refused such an overture,” Middleton dismissed. “You, on the other hand, have never made such a request.”
“Then I formally request access to your ship’s databases,” the Commander thumped his fist on the table.
“And I can assure you that your request will be taken into consideration,” Middleton said dryly. “But, for now, operational security demands that I sequester all sensitive information aboard this ship. This is primarily,” he held up a halting hand when both representatives made to object, “because neither of your fleets is anything resembling information-tight at this point. The amount of chatter going back and forth between your ships, in the open and completely unsecured, is enough to set off any and all listening posts in the region.”
“Our people demand the freedom to exchange information,” Mrr’shan hissed, and the Commander grunted his agreement—which was precisely what Middleton had hoped for.
“That’s fine,” Middleton agreed, “but until such a time as military comm. discipline is effective throughout this entire fleet, I can’t allow sensitive information—like the contents of my databanks—to be transferred.”
Mrr’shan’s eyes flashed dangerously before she half-laughed, half-purred, “Most clever, Captain. We approve of your methods.”
“Make that ‘Supreme Commander,’ Mrr’shan,” Middleton corrected neutrally.
“Of course,” she inclined her head, but Middleton knew she was testing him in much the same fashion that the Commander had relentlessly tested him since the formation of the Allied Fleet.
“The cats might find this amusing,” the Commander growled, “but my people do not. You demand—“
“Command,” Middleton interrupted pointedly.
The Commander gave him a murderous look before continuing, “You command that we submit ourselves to you in all things.”
“We’ve been over this,” Middleton sighed, “you’re welcome to take your ships—your original ships—and leave whenever you wish. I’m sure the Prichtac would even generously grant you control over several of their ships in recompense for your standing with us against Commodore Paganini, but the majority of their ships would be returned to the Alliance Fleet if you insist on withdrawing from it.”
The Stalwart ground his teeth audibly—and, truth be told, the spectacle of his doing so was enough to unsettle the usually unflappable Middleton—but eventually the uplift settled back into his seat. “We will not abandon our Oath.”
“That is fortunate,” Prichtac said serenely. “The Stalwart have ever been the most dutiful and resolute members of Our coalition. We would be most dismayed to find that Our staunchest allies no longer wished to stand beside us against these Imperial interlopers.”
That seemed to unruffle a few of the Commander’s metaphorical feathers, and the Stalwart nodded curtly to the Prichtac before Middleton continued, “Back to the plotter: this group of mostly human ‘pirates’ on the abandoned colony possess significant military hardware, and Prichtac says that they were once part of the Gorgon Alliance.”
“Indeed,” Prichtac nodded. “They call themselves ‘The Unbordered,’ and fought alongside Us at one of the earliest battles with the Empire.”
“Are we certain they are still there?” the Stalwart Commander asked.
“No,” Middleton allowed, “but the Crafter said there is something on that world which is potentially more valuable than the dozen or so warships the Unbordered had at last count.”
“What might that be?” Mrr’shan purred.
Middleton shook his head, “I can’t go into specifics just yet…but I will say this much,” he tapped his fingers on the conference room table. “There could be technology on that world which, if the Crafter was truthful, would allow us to make significant modifications to large portions of this fleet’s armaments.”
“A weapons cache?” Mrr’shan’s eyes lit up.
“I can’t say more,” Middleton said flatly. “Not until we’ve gotten down there and had a look first. But I can assure you both,” he said steadily, “that if it is as the Crafter advertised, we’ll sit down and go over the possible applications of this technology as soon as we’ve recovered it.”
“I find that difficult to believe,” the Commander grunted. “You have ‘compartmentalized’ every other piece of sensitive information during this ‘alliance.’ Why should we trust you to behave differently now?”
Middleton shook his head irritably, “Because, Commander, unlike the other information you have previously requested I am telling you that I’ll share this information with you. When have I broken my word?”
The Commander was clearly less than convinced, but Middleton didn’t care. Instead it was the Prichtac who chimed in next, “The Supreme Commander has Our confidence in this matter.”
“We are curious,” the cat leader said after a brief pause, “and agree that the fleet should visit this world.”
“Good,” Middleton said, turning back to the Stalwart, “and the Stalwart?”
The Commander grunted, “We will comply with the will of the group.”
“Excellent,” Middleton nodded. “After we arrive there and examine whatever we find, we’ll have to decide how to approach the rest of these destinations. My suggestion is that we prepare four of the Prichtac 2nd Gen Corvettes for independent survey missions. Those ships, owing to the impressive automation features built into them, only require crews of eight—four engineers and four bridge crew—to operate at peak efficiency even during independent deployment. They’ll be independent and out of contact with the fleet for up to three months each, so we’ll need to come up with crews that can operate together for that long.”
“What about the ComStat network you spoke of?” the Stalwart asked. “Why can we not use it to communicate with these ships?”
Middleton shook his head. “It seems that there were only a handful of buoys and, at most, three hubs in the local region. We’re already out of their operational range, and the Crafter seems to think there aren’t any more FTL buoys in this end of the Gorgon Sectors. My com-tech did manage to download some information about Imperial activity in the region that might prove beneficial, but it was far from comprehensive. My guess is that Commodore Paganini’s people were methodically moving the miniature ComStat network with them as they advanced deeper into the Gorgon Sectors. If they observed proper military protocol—and we have no reason to suspect they wouldn’t have—then those hubs and repeaters will be scuttled in short order. In any event, I’m afraid it’s not worth the effort to attempt to locate and collect enough of them to help us.”
Mrr’shan clicked her claws against the table rhythmically, “That is…unfortunate.”
Middleton nodded in agreement. He had hoped that Kongming’s efforts would yield a fully-functional FTL comm. system just like he had established back in their native Spineward Sectors. Having such a resource at his disposal would have made planning this next phase in their journey deeper into the Gorgon Sectors that much simpler.
But he was not the type to pine away for things he no longer had, or could never acqui
re. Middleton was interested in doing the best he could with what he had.
“The journey to this planet will take at least three weeks—four if we experience more of those frequent hyper drive failures among the 2nd Gen Prichtac Corvettes,” he said with a sympathetic nod to the Stalwart Commander. “I’ve worked up some exercises and protocols which I hope will enable us to move more quickly in the future by separating our jump groups by hyper drive range, but for now I still think it’s important to stick together so we can share engineering expertise. We would have lost four of those Corvettes already if we hadn’t kept our engineering expertise available to all of the fleet’s ships.”
“We concur,” the Stalwart Commander said grudgingly. “The 2nd Generation Corvettes are…troublesome to maintain.”
“I have every confidence that your people will rise to the challenge,” Middleton assured him with as much genuine feeling as he could muster. “Is there anything else?”
“The Imperial prisoners,” the Commander bared his teeth. “They eat our supplies and breathe our air; they are a continued drain on our resources.”
“I understand,” Middleton acknowledged, “but we don’t have any other options at this point, and it’s not like an extra fifteen hundred humans is any kind of a strain on ships that are, for the most part, undermanned to begin with. I’m having their representative, Commander Ricci, brought over after we finish setting up a brig for her but we can’t accept any more people aboard this ship. It’s part of the deal, Commander: you wanted to command the Prichtac’s big ships—including ten Cruisers and three Battleships—so this is part of the price.”
The Commander fumed silently, which Middleton took to be his compliance.
“Is there anything else?” Middleton asked.
“No,” Mrr’shan said, clearly enjoying the Stalwart’s displeasure. “The Void Hunter Clans are satisfied with the progress made thus far.”
“The Host is also satisfied,” the Prichtac agreed.
“Good,” Middleton nodded, turning to the Commander. “And the Stalwart?”
The Commander had regained some measure of composure as he stood from the table, “We will comply with the will of the Alliance.”
“Good,” Middleton stood, prompting Mrr’shan and Prichtac to do likewise. “Then this meeting is adjourned; we’ll make our next jump in two hours.”
Middleton’s com-link chimed, prompting him to receive the incoming connection, “This is the Captain.”
“Cap, Garibaldi here,” his longtime friend replied. “We’ve got a report ready for you if you’ve got a minute?”
“I’m on my way,” Middleton acknowledged, pushing back from the Tactical station where he and Toto, the Sundered uplift Tactical Officer, had been working on optimizing the fleet’s formations and maneuvers by incorporating the latest drill reports and observations of their mismatched armada. “This is good work, Toto,” he said approvingly. “Your incorporation of the gunships in this latest round increased our overall tactical value by nearly six percent—that’s unprecedented considering how few of those small craft there are.”
“The gunships are good for herding ships into Void Hunter paths,” Toto replied in his broken Standard. The cybernetic cranial implants flashed hypnotically as he directly interfaced with the Tactical computer using the powerful—and patently illegal—cybernetics to speed the process of tactical revisions far beyond anything even Middleton could match while using a conventional interface. “But I am not satisfied with Stalwart Battleship performance,” Toto grunted.
“They’re Prichtac Battleships,” Middleton said pointedly, grinding his teeth and feeling his cheek bunch against the metal plate still affixed to his jaw line. But even as he protested his Tactical Officer’s chosen verbiage, he was reminded of the enigmatic Mr. Lynch’s chosen moniker for the orbital station where he had conducted much of his black market business. “Possession might ordinarily be nine tenths of the law,” Middleton said irritably as he turned and made his way to leave the bridge, “but it seems to me that the override codes the Prichtac gave us for those ships change that particular equation.”
He moved through the fast-receding iris which led off the bridge and made his way to the stern of the strange, alien-looking vessel. He knew that the Prejudice had been designed and built by humans—he had even found and reviewed all of the construction notes buried in the ship’s formidable databanks—but the strange, insectoid appearance of the sleek warship made it difficult for him to think of it as anything but alien.
He shook such thoughts from his mind as he entered the ship’s mysterious power plant in the Prejudice’s equivalent of Main Engineering. The truth was that there was very little inside the spherical chamber except a bank of power shunts, a virtual control network which controlled when and where power was supplied to the ship’s various systems, and the orb-shaped ‘power plant’ which was suspended between two of the largest power conduits he had ever seen aboard a warship.
“Captain,” Mikey Garibaldi greeted as soon as Middleton came to the circular catwalk which lined the equatorial edge of the spherical chamber. “I think we’ve finally figured out what that thing is,” Garibaldi said with a mixture of relief and disbelief as he pointed to the spherical, meter-diameter sphere suspended between the two massive, cutting edge Imperial power conduits.
Middleton cocked his head dubiously. “You said it was impossible to scan that thing,” he remembered. “Did you manage to penetrate its shell?”
“Nope,” Garibaldi shook his head, beckoning for one of his engineers to come over, “but it turns out we didn’t need to. This is Wojo,” he clapped the other engineer on the shoulder, “and he’s the one that figured it out.”
Middleton’s eyebrows rose. Mikey Garibaldi was as good of a problem-solver as Middleton had ever encountered, and his engineering expertise was excellent-bordering-on-impossible when it came to tinkering with unfamiliar technology. That was a huge part of why Middleton had originally requested him to be Chief Engineer of the Pride of Prometheus; military engineers are worth their weight in gold to their commanders, but a civilian like Mikey’s expertise was in many respects superior to the more rigid thinking of most military engineers.
“Al Wojchouski,” Middleton nodded in recognition of the man the rest of the crew called ‘Wojo’, “I’m guessing this will be a story worth hearing.”
Wojo grinned and nodded, “I can’t take all the credit, mind you; my son Dylan once tried to crack the Total Conversion Theorem back in high school. It’s a fool’s cause, of course, but any engineer worth his lytes thinks he’s got the answer at some point in his youth.”
Middleton nodded, having heard of similar stories from other engineers with whom he had served. Arrogance was actually something Middleton had come to appreciate in the younger members of his crew.
“Anyway,” Wojo continued, “I remembered that he had a particularly interesting point he made in his paper—which got him an A- in Advanced Physics, by the way,” the fifty two year old crewman beamed, “and that point was that any Total Conversion system undergoing significant output peaks and valleys would play havoc with local gravity fields—and that the fluctuations it would cause would require unthinkable computational power to compensate for in real-time combat situations.”
Middleton’s eyebrows rose as he recalled the dangerous grav-plate ‘malfunctions’ they had experienced during the battle with Commodore Paganini’s fleet. He looked over at the featureless, spherical power core of his ship and could hardly believe he heard himself asking, “Are you saying this is a Total Conversion Drive?”
“I believe it is, sir,” Wojo nodded, proffering a data slate which was filled with advanced mathematics that made Middleton want to sigh in resignation. “After I remembered that particular quote from my boy’s paper, I started running some calculations and the math seemed close enough to warrant further investigation. There were a bunch of power lines over there,” he jerked his thumb toward one of the largel
y-dormant power relay stations, “that we didn’t know the purpose of. But after examining the systems they were attached to, I’m confident they’re for an automated grav-plate control system.”
Middleton was impressed—more than that, he was blindsided by what Wojo was saying. He turned to Mikey and waved the data slate with Wojo’s report on it, “Does this check out by you?”
“It does,” Mikey nodded, casting a wary look at the power core. “We think this thing is a Total Conversion Drive, which means a few important things: first, that it’s got a finite amount of fuel; second, that after re-connecting the grav-plate controls we should be able to execute combat maneuvers without any of that nastiness we experienced in the last fight; and third, depending on which Total Conversion Theories are correct, this thing is destined to either go ‘boom’ or ‘crunch’ when it reaches the ‘E’ mark on the ol’ fuel gauge. The gravitational forces at work within that thing, theoretically, are…well, they’re mind-numbing to contemplate. When it runs out of fuel it’s going to be decidedly unpleasant for anyone in the general vicinity.”
“How much fuel is left?” Middleton asked, less than happy about that latest bit.
“If my calculations are correct,” Wojo gestured to the slate in Middleton’s hands, “we’re currently at something like 80% of capacity. But I have to stress, Captain, that this is all back-of-the-napkin math—and most of it is based on equations I haven’t studied since college. We need to gather more data before coming up with anything like a hard answer.”
“We’ve got a new monitoring system built,” Mikey gestured to an unfamiliar station attached to the power junctions, “so the next time we get into a high-output situation—like, say, another dust-up with Imps—we’ll collect enough data on power consumption to give a better answer to that question.”
The Middle Road (Spineward Sectors: Middleton's Pride Book 7) Page 7