No Middle Ground (Spineward Sectors: Middleton's Pride)

by Caleb Wachter

  “Squawking now, Captain,” the Comm. stander acknowledged. Several seconds passed before the Comm. stander shook her head. “I’m receiving no reply, sir.”

  “Do you have an ID on the third ship yet, Tactical?” Middleton snapped as he flipped through the sensor readings piped through his chair’s console.

  “Negative, Captain,” Sarkozi replied quickly, “but the civilian ID’s have been verified as a pair of ore haulers licensed out of Sector 23.”

  “Sector 23?” Middleton repeated as he considered the distance between their current position, which in astronomical terms was relatively near the border of Sectors 24 and 23. “What’s their logged itinerary?” he demanded as he spun to face the Comm. stander.

  “Checking, sir,” she replied, flushing with frustration after a few moments’ effort to call up the requested information. After an unacceptably long interval, she finally said, “Their flight plan is over a month out of date, Captain; their last logged location was near the border of Sectors 23 and 24 just on the 23 side…a system called ‘Pavonis’.”

  “Captain,” the man at Sensors interrupted, “the vessels are preparing to jump; strange particle readings on all three vessels are consistent with imminent point transfer.”

  “That would account for the unexpected increase in the inertial sump, Captain,” Jersey suggested gruffly.

  “I’ve got a visual on the third ship, Captain,” Sarkozi reported, “putting it on the main viewer now.”

  The viewer shifted from a tactical overlay to one showing a strange ship, the image of which was magnified several times until Middleton – who had memorized the profile of every known ship class to ever operate in the Spineward Sectors – was at a loss for words.

  “What do you make of it, Tactical?” he asked as he leaned forward, his mind racing to make certain he had never come across anything even remotely similar in his studies.

  “It…appears to be a nearly perfect dodecahedron, Captain,” she replied after sitting down at a console and going over the sensor readings. “Measurements are approximately one hundred meters between each of its six pairs of opposing faces. Power profile is roughly that of a destroyer-class vessel.” She tapped away at her console for several moments before shaking her head in disbelief, “I’m reading an extremely odd radiation signature, Captain. There’s nothing in the ship’s database that matches it.”

  Middleton sat forward in his chair eagerly. “Check the radiation profile against the one we recorded in the engagement at the gas mine,” he ordered.

  “Already in process, Captain,” Sarkozi reported curtly before shaking her head. “It’s vaguely similar but definitely different, Captain; not only are these emissions orders of magnitude less powerful than the burst we recorded near the gas giant, they don’t match wavelengths with the other readings we recorded. This is definitely a different bird.”

  “Point transfers detected,” the Sensors officer reported. “One…now two; both of the civilian transports have transferred out of the system, Captain.”

  “Hail the remaining ship,” Middleton ordered, feeling his hackles rise.

  “Hailing now, Captain,” the Comm. stander acknowledged. A few moments later, she shook her head. “No response; I’m not even getting static…Captain, they’re jamming all comm. channels!”

  “Confirmed, sir,” Sarkozi reported immediately. “They’ve just blanketed the area with some sort of ultra-powerful signal like nothing I’ve ever seen.” A second later, her console lit up and a series of alarms went off around the bridge denoting incoming fire. “Massive power surge detected—“

  Before she could finish her report, the bridge was rocked so hard that even a few crewmembers properly seated at their stations were thrown from their chairs and into the ceiling. Those unfortunate crewmembers quickly came crashing back down to the deck with a sickening series of crunches, after which they lay motionless with blood streaming from their faces.

  “Damage report!” Middleton bellowed as half the consoles on the bridge flickered rapidly off and on before stabilizing.

  “Forward shields are down to 26%, Captain,” Sarkozi reported, having miraculously kept to her temporary seat by holding on for all she was worth an instant before the Pride had been struck.

  “Emitters two, four and five of the forward array are off-line, Captain; we’ve got critical spotting all along the forward, dorsal and lateral arrays,” reported the Shields operator.

  “Return fire!” Middleton roared.

  “Returning fire, Captain,” Sarkozi acknowledged hungrily, and a moment later the forward array of the Pride of Prometheus lanced out with its full might and fury, landing home on the enemy vessel with a grouping so tight it brought a smirk to Middleton’s lips when the image of the enemy vessel briefly disappeared behind its shield flares. “Ten for ten,” Sarkozi reported triumphantly, “damage to enemy vessel…negligible,” she finished incredulously. “That’s impossible; no ship that size should be able—“

  The Pride was rocked again, but this time no one lost their seat and the impact seemed to be far less punishing than the first assault. “Damage report!” Captain Middleton snapped angrily.

  “Forward shields have collapsed,” the Shields operator reported, “all forward emitters now offline.”

  “Forward armor has sustained minor damage; no system failures detected,” the Damage Control operator added with a hint of bewilderment.

  “That second volley should have finished us,” Middleton growled under his breath, knowing that a pair of shots equal in power to the first would have easily torn through the Pride’s forward defenses and caused massive damage to the aged cruiser.

  But before he could get any further in his thought process, the Sensors operator reported with obvious relief, “Point transfer detected, Captain; the enemy vessel has left the system!”

  Almost ashamed to admit it, Captain Middleton felt every bit as grateful as the Sensors operator sounded for the enemy’s timely egress. Even with the Pride’s robust forward armor, there was no way they could survive a sustained firefight of even a handful more salvos with that strange vessel.

  “Sensors,” Middleton said in a hard, level voice, “I want you to compile every scrap of data we have on that vessel and bring it to me the second you’ve done so.”

  “Yes, Captain,” the Sensors operator replied.

  “Comm.,” he continued as a pair of crewmen knelt beside the motionless crewmembers that had been thrown from their stations during the attack, “have sickbay send a team up here as soon as they can spare one.”

  “Yes, sir,” the Comm. stander acknowledged.

  “Maintain battle stations,” Captain Middleton said in a loud, carrying voice, “we can’t assume we’re all alone out here just yet. Helm,” he said, turning to Jersey, “I need you to make for the nearest planetoid at best possible speed; assuming that hostile comes back looking for us, we don’t want to be out in the open with a giant bulls-eye on our back.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Jersey acknowledged, this time without his usual, annoyed tone.

  “We’re not jumping out of the system, Captain?” Sarkozi asked in a surprisingly calm, professional voice.

  “No, Ensign,” Middleton replied coldly, doing his best to suppress the sudden upwelling of anger and disappointment he felt—the vast majority of which was directed at himself, “not yet. We may not be able to find out who they are…but I for blasted sure want to know what they were doing here before we tuck tail and run.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sarkozi said snappily, turning back to her subordinates and issuing orders.

  Captain Middleton saw the stream of damage reports coming in over his chair’s console, but all he could think about was how much power the enemy ship had generated on such short notice. It was, from everything he knew of starship combat—and physics in general—practically impossible.

  Then a thought occurred to him and he sat back in his chair with a wave of what most would call euphoria washing o
ver him, but to him it felt more like relief. That’s it, he thought to himself as he ran some calculations on his console. While the numbers weren’t quite identical to what they had observed, they were close enough to support his supposition.

  He would need to verify the readings, but if they were evidence of what he suspected, then this protracted patrol just got a Hades of a lot more complicated.

  After burning to make close orbit of a nearby, rocky planetoid on the outermost edge of the system, the next six hours passed relatively uneventfully while engineering teams worked to bring the Pride’s shields back online. When the window for the enemy ship’s potential return had come and gone without incident, Captain Middleton stood from his chair and ordered the ship to stand down from battle stations but remain on alert status as he took the data the Sensors operator had compiled into his ready room.

  It wasn’t much, especially in light of what appeared to be overwhelming firepower, but at least now he had an idea of what they were dealing with. Developing a strategy of dealing with this new threat was now just a matter of focusing his resources on the problem to find way around it…or through it.

  Chapter XII: Walk a mile in another’s feet…

  Lu Bu had been told by the doctor that she needed to remain in the sickbay for twenty four hours. The Lancer recruit had argued with the other woman, but in the end she had decided that Walter Joneson’s orders likely included her showing obeisance to the ship’s medical officer.

  As she lay there—even through what was clearly some sort of ship-to-ship battle which had taken place not long after their latest point transfer—Lu Bu had realized that the older man who had sat beside her on the shuttle ride to the Pride of Prometheus so many weeks earlier appeared to be working as a doctor in sickbay.

  It should not have surprised her, since it seemed that she was the only recruit from her world who had not been a prisoner prior to joining the ship’s crew. The barcode tattoos over the former prisoners’ right eyes clearly marked them for what they were, and Lu Bu was uncertain she could ever learn to fully accept what that brand represented.

  The woman doctor approached Lu Bu’s bedside with a scanning instrument of some kind in her long, delicate fingers. “How are you feeling?” Doctor Middleton asked in her calm, professional tone. But to Lu Bu that tone bordered on patronizing, especially considering the fact that her wounds were essentially already repaired.

  “This one is fine,” Lu Bu replied shortly. “When may this one return to training?”

  Doctor Middleton’s expression softened and Lu Bu felt a flare of anger at the other woman’s demeanor. “For most patients I would advise at least two weeks of zero exertion,” she replied, “so that’s what I prescribe for you as well.”

  Lu Bu stiffened and looked up at the ceiling. “Lu Bu not ‘most patients’,” she said shortly. “There is no more pain; this one should return to training now.” She sat abruptly and made to swing her legs over the edge of the bed, but the doctor placed a halting hand on her shoulder. Glancing over at the older woman with open irritation, it was all Lu Bu could do to refrain from forcibly removing the doctor’s interdicting hand.

  “I understand you’re eager to return to your…training,” the doctor said, veritably chewing on the last word as she said it. “But right now you are my patient, and I require a minimum of twenty four hours observation before releasing you. I simply don’t know enough about your physiology to properly predict your reaction to the medications and surgical procedure.”

  “This one not require surgery,” Lu Bu scoffed, looking pointedly at her own shoulder which no longer even bore its tiny bit of sticky gauze to cover the needle-sized entry the doctor had made through her skin to effect repairs. Had she not known that a few hours earlier there had been a delicate surgical instrument inserted there, she would have never been able to find the pinprick of a mark that device had made in her skin. “The doctor is skill at her craft after much practice,” she added, clasping her hands before herself respectfully. “This one asks for return to training for similar practice!”

  “Not yet,” the doctor said more forcefully, this time pressing down on Lu Bu’s uninjured shoulder gently.

  Again, Lu Bu felt a flare of anger at this woman’s continued insistence at interrupted her training. Walter Joneson demanded much of his recruits, and there was no possibility that she would fail her Sergeant again; she required a complete rededication to her training if she was to defeat the large, surprisingly powerful men from the world of Tracto.

  But the thought of Walter Joneson’s last orders to her were enough to pin her in place. Shaking her head in frustration, Lu Bu looked up at the sickbay’s chronometer, which showed she had already been within for seven hours. “Twenty four hours,” she said, pointing to the clock after lying down on the bed, “then Lu Bu return to training.”

  “No,” the doctor said unyieldingly, “but if your tests come back to my satisfaction, I will allow you to leave sickbay—with the understanding that you refrain from strenuous physical activity, including training” she said pointedly, “until I have given you medical clearance to resume—”

  Lu Bu bolted upright, ready to argue—using less than cordial language.

  But the doctor continued in a level tone which brooked no argument, “Or, I can keep you here for an additional seventy two hours on a psychiatric hold,” she said, causing Lu Bu to shoot her a look of incredulity, “since, in my professional opinion, you are openly planning to cause yourself potentially permanent harm by disregarding my medical advice and aggravating your wounds.”

  Lu Bu veritably trembled with anger at the doctor’s suggestion that she was somehow a danger to herself, but after a moment she understood why the doctor had said what she had said, and she breathed a series of short, blasting breaths through her nostrils as she resumed her supine position on the bed.

  The doctor, apparently satisfied with Lu Bu’s obeisance, nodded and turned to leave the bedside. Before she had taken a step, Lu Bu said grudgingly, “You as skilled with words as with medicine, Doctor.”

  Doctor Middleton stopped and gave Lu Bu a faintly warm look. “I’m only trying to do what’s best for my patient,” she said pointedly.

  “You believe it is mistake,” Lu Bu continued, “you believe this one not fit to become Lancer like Walter Joneson.”

  “Bu—” Doctor Middleton began with a sigh, but Lu Bu continued over her.

  “This one knows how people think,” she said, fighting to suppress the cold, bitter feelings washing over her, “there is no need to deny.”

  “Bu,” the doctor said, turning to face Lu Bu squarely, “I think you could be anything you wanted to be. Why do you want to become like those men when your life could be so much more?”

  Lu Bu sat up slowly and locked eyes with the woman doctor, expecting to see the woman recoil slightly. Much to her surprise, Doctor Middleton held her ground with an odd measure of composure—especially for a doctor, and not a Lancer or fellow smashball player.

  “Doctor, when,” she paused, searching for the right words to convey her feelings, “you were young, did Doctor Middleton always wish to become doctor?”

  Doctor Middleton’s expression softened slightly. “Yes,” she nodded as she sat on the edge of the bed, “ever since I was young I’ve wanted to help people.”

  Lu Bu nodded and her eyes snapped back and forth as she tried to compose her next thoughts. “This was because of some event, yes?” she pressed eventually.

  The woman doctor nodded again as her eyes narrowed slightly.

  “It is same with this one,” Lu Bu said, hearing a plea in her voice she had not intended, “my…family is no more. This one last of her line, and when this one ceases to be…” she trailed off, feeling her eyes well with tears as she fought to keep her voice level. “This one cannot replace family; only wish is to find…team,” she continued as tears streamed down her cheeks. “Please do not deny this one her wish.”

  The doctor pla
ced a consoling hand on Lu Bu’s shoulder. “Bu,” she said gently, “I understand the need for belonging better than you might know…but you can find camaraderie in many places—“

  Lu Bu shook her head as she angrily wiped away her tears. “It is not same,” she said adamantly. “Only in battle can true bonds be forged,” she said, paraphrasing a line she had read once and immediately decided was the truest piece of wisdom ever expressed by a human mind. “Doctor battles death with her mind,” she continued as she shook her head, remembering her mother’s disappointment in her daughter. Those memories caused another wave of emotions to flood her, “This one’s mind not strong enough for that. This one’s talents can help…but only as a Lancer; it is all this one wishes.”

  Doctor Middleton’s expression changed in a way Lu Bu did not understand, but the older woman nodded. “All right,” she said, “I won’t stand in your way. But I would ask you for two things, neither of which you should feel obligated to oblige.”

  Lu Bu clasped her hands before herself respectfully. “Of course; if this one can, she will do as Doctor Middleton wishes.”

  “First,” the doctor said, “that you cease referring to yourself as ‘this one.’ You’ve already chosen a name for yourself, and it’s been several weeks since you adopted it. You are an individual, and you should always be respected as one,” she said as her gaze drifted briefly.

  “Of course,” Lu Bu said anxiously, “thi—“ she caught the word before it had finished. Lowering her eyes deferentially, she continued, “I will do…my best to comply. What is second?”

  “Second,” the doctor said as she stood from the edge of the bed and straightened her lab coat, “is I would ask that, your schedule permitting, you share a daily meal of your choosing with me in the crew’s galley, or mess hall, or whatever it’s called on this blasted ship.”