Up The Middle (Spineward Sectors: Middleton's Pride Book 2)

by Caleb Wachter

  “I believe escape pods are jettisoning from the Palmeiro, Captain,” Hephaestion reported in an uncertain voice. “There are six…eight…no, eleven distinct signatures with emergency beacons activated.”

  “Verify that,” Middleton said as he made eye contact with his XO, who quickly made her way to the Sensors station.

  After a cursory glance she nodded, “Confirmed, Captain. I’m seeing at least fifteen distinct transponders—”

  “Captain,” Fei Long interrupted, “I have just recei—“

  Before he could finish his thought, the Carsoni Palmeiro was struck by another salvo—this one from the second corvette—and the mining vessel’s hull exploded in an unexpectedly violent display. Overlapping rings of energy blasted outward from the vessel’s hull, and it appeared that half of the escape pods were caught in the ship’s death throes.

  “They’re committed now,” Middleton growled under his breath, noting that in thirty seconds the Pride’s forward batteries would be within extreme firing range. “Helm, alter course twelve degrees to starboard,” he instructed, “and reduce engine output to 70%.”

  “Coming about twelve degrees to starboard,” she acknowledged, “reducing engine output to 70%, Captain.”

  “Mr. Toto,” Middleton continued, “withdraw your gunships to safety if possible; I don’t want them getting caught in the crossfire.”

  “Withdrawing,” the uplift acknowledged, and the diminutive craft’s icons began to skitter away from the incoming corvette. They had brought the second corvette’s stern shields to roughly 20%, which was more than enough of a contribution as far as Middleton was concerned.

  Surprisingly, neither of the droid vessels appeared to have been deterred from their current courses. Instead, they veered toward the Pride of Prometheus as they attempted a flanking maneuver.

  “Inform the gun deck they may fire at will, Lieutenant Sarkozi,” Middleton ordered as the seconds ticked down on the engagement clock.

  “Fire at will; aye, Captain,” she acknowledged with a note of eagerness in her voice.

  A few seconds later, the Pride of Prometheus’ forward batteries erupted in unison and the nearest corvette’s forward shields absorbed the brunt of the aging cruiser’s wrath.

  “Five for ten, Captain,” Sarkozi reported with obvious satisfaction. “Their forward shields are…” she trailed off before drawing a short breath and continuing, “enemy forward shields reading 60% and holding.”

  Middleton’s eyebrows rose in surprise. Had another officer reported the number he would have ordered them to verify it, but Sarkozi’s tactical acumen was second only to his own. He trusted her well enough to conclude that the droids were equipped with stronger shields than he would have thought possible.

  “Continue on target, Helm,” Middleton instructed as he input the apparent strength of the droid shields into the ship’s tactical simulation programs. What had appeared to be a one-sided beat-down with the Pride swinging the hammer had turned into a solid win for the MSP vessel…but not one without its risks.

  “Aye sir,” Helmsman Marcos acknowledged professionally.

  The Pride of Prometheus continued bearing down on the Palmeiro’s last location and the pair of droid warships continued on their own course. At the current velocities of the three vessels, the Pride would come into the droids’ firing range after getting two more salvoes off with her forward batteries. But even with their combined firepower operating at point blank range, there was no hope for the two corvettes to destroy the Pride of Prometheus before it did likewise to them.

  “Sergeant Gnuko,” Middleton switched to the Lancer command channel after working through the situation in his mind, “have Atticus’ team stand down; the mining vessel is out of the picture. Prepare to receive boarders of the mechanical variety—and I’d prefer to keep them out of my ship’s corridors.”

  There was a slight delay before Gnuko replied, “Larry that, Captain. I’m directing the Assault and Recon teams to the airlocks with the Defense team moving to protect the ship’s high-value areas. Atticus’ and Lu’s teams will deploy to the outer hull on your order.”

  “Very good, Sergeant,” Middleton acknowledged before cutting the transmission.

  The Pride’s forward batteries opened fire and the nearest corvette’s forward shields flared again as Sarkozi reported, “Six of ten, Captain. Enemy forward shields reading 24% with mild spotting.”

  “Steady on, Helm; Tactical, after we’ve destroyed this first warship, work with the gun deck on firing solutions which will yield the greatest probability of disabling the second corvette’s engines.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Toto replied as Fei Long caught Captain Middleton’s eye with his frenetic pace as he swiped through multiple menus and interfaces simultaneously.

  “Captain Middleton,” the former hacker extraordinaire said respectfully, “I believe I—“

  “Captain, I’m detecting twenty distinct signatures breaking off from the near corvette’s hull,” Lieutenant Sarkozi interrupted just as those same signals began to register, one by one, on the main viewer. “They appear to be similar to the ones which made planet-fall at Zhu’s Hope and they are clustering behind the corvette’s hull.”

  “They’re using it for cover,” Middleton mused as he forwarded the relevant information to Sergeant Gnuko via the Lancer command channel. But that made very little sense to him since the Pride could easily alter course—

  A quick glance was all he required in order to determine that the Pride was not, in fact, the droids’ target.

  “They’re going after the escape pods,” he said with conviction. “We have to stop them before they make it there; how long until they intercept the Palmeiro’s debris field?”

  “One minute, Captain,” Sarkozi replied tightly. “Time to our own intercept: two minutes twenty seconds.”

  Middleton considered turning the Pride’s heavy lasers onto the debris field in hope of getting a lucky shot or two, but that would have ultimately proven fruitless. Even if they landed all ten shots on distinct targets, that still left ten more of the assault droids—which, according to the droids’ behavior, could apparently operate to some significant tactical degree even in the vacuum of space—to wreak havoc on the escape pods. Even the Pride’s point defense turrets working at peak efficiency and firing at close range couldn’t pick them all off in time if the droids intended to destroy the escape pods.

  “Helm, drive the engines as hard as you can,” Middleton finally said. “All we can hope to do is defend a few of the escape pods. Tactical,” he continued, “is your third gunship battle ready?”

  Toto’s chest swelled with pride. “Mate at battle station; can launch in ten seconds.”

  “Do it,” Middleton said quickly as he forwarded coordinates directly to the Tactical Officer’s station, “and have her protect the pods in this grid as best she’s able. The assault droids should pose no danger to her ship, but if they do then have her return to the hangar.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Toto replied with his chin jutted out so proudly that even a human could read the uplift’s body language with perfect clarity.

  No sooner had he spoken than an icon representing the third Sundered gunship appeared beside the Pride’s icon on the main viewer’s tactical display. The little assault craft rocketed toward the grid Middleton had indicated, and the captain took some small measure of satisfaction in knowing that they would at least be able to recover a handful of survivors from the Carsoni Palmeiro.

  “Firing on corvette in three…two…one,” the Sundered Tactical Officer reported, and another volley of laser fire erupted from the Pride’s formidable forward array. The droid corvette’s shields buckled and the forward third of the ship exploded in an incandescent display which sent the vessel tumbling end over end as its engines cut out and sprays of debris ejected by the momentum created as the vessel spun into the dark void of interplanetary space.

  “Eight for ten,” Sarkozi reported dubiously. “Cor
vette One is showing complete power grid collapse…her shields are gone and her engines are off-line.”

  “Focus on Corvette Two,” Middleton said as the stream of assault droid icons launched by the first vessel continued on course toward the Palmeiro’s debris field. “Helm, continue moving toward the debris field; our gunship can’t survive if the corvette closes to firing range. Coordinate with the gun deck for their firing windows to maximize our shots on target.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Helmsman Marcos acknowledged.

  “Captain Middleton—” Fei Long interjected in a raised voice as the ship was rocked by an unexpected impact.

  “What was that?” demanded Captain Middleton.

  “We’re still outside the corvette’s firing range,” Sarkozi reported as she moved toward the Sensors station.

  “There is nothing on our sensors, Captain,” Hephaestion said before the XO had settled in at the station, and Lieutenant Sarkozi nodded in agreement after a quick look at the instrument readouts before the young Tracto-an.

  “That wasn’t my imagination,” Middleton growled as he switched to the Lancer command channel. “Sergeant Gnuko, deploy your people to the hull; I need to know what just rammed into us.”

  “Yes sir,” Gnuko acknowledged before severing the connection on his end.

  “Captain,” Sarkozi said as she slid into position beside Toto at Tactical, “I believe we were hit by a Liberator torpedo.”

  Middleton felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. “Confirm that,” he said darkly.

  “I’m inferring, sir,” she said as she worked quickly through a series of screens, “but the kinetic impact was similar to what we experienced during our previous encounter with such a weapon, and our shields sustained a nearly identical event then as now.”

  Before she had even finished speaking, Middleton initiated a ship-wide lockdown. That lockdown utilized a sequence of protocols which had been designed in the immediate aftermath of the bioweapon attack which had claimed the lives of half his crew just a few weeks into his first command.

  Within seconds the ship’s entire life support infrastructure had undergone radical modifications, and Middleton was grimly relieved to note that every aspect of their preparation appeared to have been implemented without fail.

  “All hands, this is the captain,” Middleton said over the main audio feed, “we’ve sustained what appears to be an impact by a Liberator torpedo. Remain at your stations and report any suspicious activity immediately,” he said before deactivating his chair’s audio pickup.

  A Liberator torpedo, he had learned after falling victim to one after only two weeks on the job, was capable of housing any number of devices—or warheads. Their construction was absurdly durable, making them capable of cracking through all but the most advanced and robust armor.

  While they generally carried a thermonuclear warhead which would destroy a ship with a single shot, they were equally capable of being fitted with any device measuring less than one meter in diameter and three meters in length. Their inertial dampening systems prevented even relatively delicate electronics from being damaged by the sudden deceleration caused by impact with a warship’s hull.

  And since the Pride was still in one piece, Middleton had to assume that the ship had been struck by a torpedo carrying something other than a nuke…but he was far from comforted by that self-evident fact.

  “Captain,” Fei Long said in a raised voice that was quite uncharacteristic of him, “I require your command codes—now!”

  Middleton gave the young man a look which bordered on incredulity, but when he saw the frantic way the young man’s fingers were flying over his console the Pride’s captain stood from his chair and made his way quickly to the Comm. station. “What is it?”

  “No time,” Fei Long snapped as he flipped through menus and commands far faster than Middleton could ever do. “If you do not input your command codes to my station now, the ship’s entire DI infrastructure will be neutralized by the droid virus!”

  Feeling his heart literally stop in his chest, Middleton quickly did as he was instructed and input his personal command codes into the station. Without the ship’s DI, there was no way the Pride would be able to fight off the incoming corvette.

  After inputting his codes, Middleton stepped back and silently watched as Fei Long did things which the captain knew he would never understand. The lights on the bridge flickered, and several of the consoles turned off in an ominous sequence, but thankfully Fei Long’s was not among them.

  Middleton had been so preoccupied by the young man’s actions that he had failed to notice until several seconds after it had happened that Lieutenant Sarkozi had ordered the ship’s various departments to prepare for a computer meltdown, and he made a mental note to congratulate her for her quick thinking—and to castigate himself for failing to do the same.

  Suddenly the entire bridge went dark, and for several seconds there was nothing but black silence in the command center of the ship.

  Then the lights returned and each workstation rebooted. “I have isolated the virus,” Fei Long said as he furiously wiped beads of sweat from his forehead with the hem of his sleeve. “But we have lost nearly seventy percent of our primary DI processing cores and the entire secondary DI; I dare not attempt to reactivate the affected units until inspecting each one individually in a safe environment.”

  “Can we still fight?” Middleton asked bluntly.

  Fei Long nodded with less confidence than Middleton would have liked to see, “I believe so, Captain.”

  The captain nodded, knowing that while he did not understand how the droids had managed to bring the computers down, he was unlikely to gain any further clarity until the current conflict was resolved.

  As he sat down in the command chair once again and began to flip through his personal console, he had a nagging suspicion that he was missing something…something important.

  Chapter XXIII: The Welcoming Party

  “Kratos, take Stavros and Lysander,” Lu Bu shouted as the last of her team filed out of the airlock and engaged mag-boots, “your team sweep that section.” She pointed to the port ventral midships section of the Pride’s hull, which was one of her assigned areas of responsibility for this particular mission.

  Their objective was simple: find any and all foreign objects lurking on the skin of the ship and remove them with as much prejudice as they could manage without causing significant harm to the ship itself.

  Kratos nodded, and had he been a smaller human being the gesture might have gone unnoticed from within his suit of power armor. The Recon Team had donned power armor for this operation rather than their specialized Storm Drake suits. This was simply due to the overwhelming likelihood of up-close confrontation with the droids during this particular operation. The Storm Drake armor, while stylish and nearly impervious to most small arms fire, did not enhance the wearer’s strength and afforded significantly less protection from kinetic impacts than the duralloy suits of power armor for which the Lancers were known.

  “Bernice, take Lysander and Claus,” she continued, gesturing to the starboard portion of the hull adjoining Kratos’ assignment, “sweep that section. Report when finished with inspection.”

  “Yes, Corporal,” Bernice said, the newly-bestowed rank coming unevenly off her tongue as she spoke in Confederation Standard. It had been only two days since Sergeant Gnuko had informed Lu Bu of the unexpected field promotion, and it seemed impossible to her that she could have been elevated so quickly. It was only a field commission, but that did little to diminish the pride Lu Bu had felt when her Sergeant had given her the patches and pins afforded the post.

  “Traian, Vali,” she finished, rounding on the two members of her Recon Team about which she knew the least, “follow me to engines.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” they replied jointly, and together they made their way to the stern of the ship. Their feet were magnetically locked to the hull of the ship, and Lu Bu found that she very muc
h disliked the limited mobility afforded her while she wore power armor. The enhanced strength and greater protection she presently enjoyed were not things she failed to recognize as beneficial, but for her entire athletic career she had relied on her explosive first step and superior footwork to gain an edge over would-be competitors.

  With each clomping step she took along the Pride of Prometheus’ metal hull, the feeling that she was somehow naked while encased in a suit of high-tech power armor was something she simply could not dismiss from her thoughts.

  As they neared the stern of the ship, a flicker of motion above caught her attention and she signaled for her team to stop. At first she saw nothing, but she kept scanning the portion of the star field which had caught her eye. They stood still for over a minute, eventually prompting Vali to asked, “What is it, Corporal?”

  She was nearly ready to dismiss the flicker as a byproduct of her heightened anxiety, but then she saw another flicker as a star winked out. This time she raised her blaster rifle, which was fitted with a medium-powered scope, and zoomed in on the area.

  What she saw confused her at first, but after a moment she activated the emergency Lancer channel and growled, “Sergeant Gnuko, we have Imperial Marines inbound.”

  “Confirm that, Corporal,” Gnuko’s deep voice replied almost immediately.

  “Confirmed, Sergeant,” she said, and to either side of her she saw Vali and Traian raise their own rifles and sight in on the same patch of dark sky as she was viewing. “I count six—“

  “No fewer than eleven here, Corporal,” Traian corrected her mid-sentence, “no, make that thirteen.”

  “My team confirms thirteen contacts,” she said as the power-armored Marines sailed toward the Pride of Prometheus’ hull, where they landed with uncanny precision, “and they are on the hull.” Lu Bu and her two teammates quickly ducked into cover behind a nearby structure whose purpose she could only guess at. “What are orders?”