Against The Middle

by Caleb Wachter

  “Pilot,” Lu Bu moved to Strider’s shoulder, “where do we hide?”

  Strider had already brought up a trio of possible destinations, including one gas dwarf on the outer edge of the system and two moons orbiting a nearby gas giant with a powerful EM field surrounding it. “We either bank on distance,” he pointed to the gas dwarf, “or we be hopin’ to hide in the interference of the Jovian, mom.”

  Lu Bu knew that the further one went from their enemies, the greater the blow when said enemies finally caught up with one. So she pointed to the gas giant, “Can we reach without engines?”

  Strider made several quick calculations and cocked his head doubtfully upon seeing the results, “Better than fifty-fifty, mom, but not by much. I say…we be havin’ a two in three chance of makin’ orbit if we use the Lost Ark’s inertia to launch the gunship toward the Jovian.”

  “And the one in three chance of not making orbit,” Fei Long cut in casually, “will almost certainly result in our being crushed by the planet’s gravity since we will lack sufficient maneuvering thruster power to break free of the planet’s gravity well without attracting unwanted attention.”

  Lu Bu nodded, knowing that a two in three chance of survival was the best they were likely to get. “All but Hutch, Strider, Fei Long and me will board gunship immediately,” she declared. “We remain at posts until Lost Ark course set for gas giant.”

  She stole a brief glance in her boyfriend’s direction, knowing that there was still an unspoken truth which she had yet to share with him but she decided that this was not the time to open that particular topic. If they succeeded in their mission there would certainly be time for that conversation later, and if they failed…

  Still, she found her left hand had wandered to her belly and she quickly placed it at her side, silently cursing her absentmindedness.

  “Aye, ma’am,” Private Funar acknowledged. He then led the rest of the team onto Yide’s family gunship.

  “Can you make our course look like escape attempt?” she asked intently of Strider.

  “Sure thing,” he nodded. “We look like we be usin’ the Jovian’s gravity to slingshot out to the limit; we already spinnin’ up the hyper drive, so the fake be sold right and proper.”

  “Good,” she said with a curt nod, having acclimated herself to the man’s peculiar speech patterns in recent days. “When ship is on course, we leave on gunship.”

  “Aye, mom,” Strider said, causing Lu Bu to glare at him.

  “I am not your ‘mom’,” she growled for what seemed like the seventeenth time.

  The former pirate shrugged as he manipulated the ship’s controls, fine-tuning its course to make it appear as though they were making a run for it.

  “Hutch,” she said, turning to the former smashball star, “bring dead droids to sickbay.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he acknowledged before setting off to do so. It had seemed too macabre to have the dead droids in the ship’s place of healing, so she had ordered them to be left in the cargo hold until it was time to abandon the ship. It likely made little difference in the end, since placing the droids in the sickbay would only present the illusion that the Lost Ark’s crew had been examining the droids’ remains.

  But she knew that, as in all things, a mission’s success depended greatly on the details being attended to properly. She turned in time to see Fei Long enter the cockpit as Hutch exited, asking him in their native tongue, “Have you stowed your things on the gunship?”

  “It is done,” he replied, his eyes snapping across the various instruments in rapid succession as he took in the scene more quickly than he could have done by requesting a verbal update. “The droid cores have been placed in the sickbay; the false data I have implanted in their storage centers will provide the Harmony Tribe with all the evidence required for them to do as our plan requires.”

  “And what about this ship’s databases?” Lu Bu asked skeptically.

  “They will be purged completely, with no data fragments of a compromising nature recoverable by any known methodology,” Fei Long replied as he scratched the back of his neck absently.

  “What is wrong with your neck?” she asked with muted interest, having seen the affectation several times in recent days. Without waiting for an answer, she turned back to the pilot’s console and checked on the enemy warship’s course and speed.

  “Nothing,” Fei Long replied in what was clearly a lie.

  “We will have Doctor Middleton check it when we return,” she said with finality.

  “Of course,” he said somewhat distantly, and she looked back to see him still scratching his neck but in a more subdued fashion.

  “That be it,” Strider declared, “with the instruments on this bucket, that’s the best I can do if we plan to get off before the machines show up.”

  “Good,” Lu Bu said, “then we evacuate this Lost Ark now. Transfer to gunship—move!”

  “Brace for takeoff,” Yide said after the last of Lu Bu’s team was aboard. Using a local wireless connection, he opened the Lost Ark’s pressure doors and waited as they slowly slid apart, after which time he fired the engines of the gunship and gave a short, powerful burst before killing the engines so as to avoid detection. The burst was powerful enough to squish the pressed bodies of the team together with dangerous force, but Lu Bu’s team had ‘stacked’ themselves with the most physically-imposing members toward the back of the vessel and the smaller, weaker members—like Fei Long and Miss Serendipity—toward the front so they would not be crushed by the sudden acceleration.

  When the acceleration ceased, the cabin’s gravity disappeared since the gunship had no gravity plating, and the previous gravity had been generated by the Lost Ark. Everyone aboard the vessel was wearing pressure suits—except the Lancers, who had donned their Storm Drake armor—and, while it would soon become uncomfortably cold within the cramped quarters of the craft, Lu Bu knew it was their only chance to avoid detection by the approaching Droid warship.

  It would be thirty minutes before they were safely within the gas giant’s EM envelope, meaning that until then they were on complete comm. silence. Lu Bu could still communicate with her team members using hand signals, but given the cramped conditions aboard the vessel she knew it was best if they all simply remained where they were and moved as little as possible.

  Lu Bu watched the passive sensors and video feeds, which had locked onto a pair of empty escape pods which they had jettisoned a few minutes prior to their own launch. The escape pods were transmitting an unconditional surrender message on repeat, but that made little difference to the Droid warship since, as soon as it closed to range, it fired and destroyed both of the lifeboats with chilling accuracy.

  Having expected as much, Lu Bu now prayed that the warship would not detect their craft as it drifted further and further away from the Lost Ark.

  Several minutes passed and, just before their gunship entered the safety of the Jovian’s EM field, the Lost Ark’s automated distress beacon activated. The message contained within, which was generally automatically generated and would include the ship’s most recent itinerary, had been modified to include a completely false leg of the freighter’s trip—a leg that included the system which Captain Middleton had targeted for this particular operation.

  The Lost Ark’s comm. system had been set to broadcast its distress signal not only on local channels, but also on ComStat emergency frequencies. Having devised this particular portion of the plan himself back on the Pride of Prometheus, Fei Long had set the local ComStat hub to undergo one of its routine reboots at the precise moment when the signal was transmitted by the freighter.

  Predictably, the Droid warship sent up a powerful jamming field as soon as its crew—or, possibly, it—recognized the signal as containing ComStat FTL protocols, and the signal was immediately drowned in the overpowering jammer field.

  But that comm. jamming field would also prevent the enemy vessel from detecting the gunship via its sensor suite. Th
ey would have to achieve a visual lock instead, and the Droids apparently utilized visual identification even less than humans did during space maneuvers, so Lu Bu released a breath she had been holding for nearly two minutes.

  Switching on her local com-link, she gestured to the rest of the team that they should do likewise.

  “That was as good as we could have hoped for,” Funar remarked dryly as the Corvette lashed out with a light laser and, with expert precision, it managed to deactivate the freighter’s engines with only a pair of simultaneous strikes.

  After checking the condition of each team member and finding them to be without injury, Lu Bu gestured to the fast-approaching moon which they would use to block the warship’s view of their vessel while they engaged in a severe braking maneuver. “Are we on course?” she asked Yide. The uplift’s overall piloting skills were not on Strider’s level, but his familiarity with this particular craft made him the superior choice for piloting their current craft.

  “We are,” he replied, his voice deep and distorted through the com-link, which had been calibrated for normal human vocal ranges. “We will burn at maximum for ten seconds when we pass to the dark side of this moon and then we will cut engines and drift to second moon’s orbit.”

  “You have calculated this?” she asked neutrally, fighting to keep her voice even.

  Yide nodded, “I have.”

  Finding herself less-than-relieved, she gestured for Strider to come to the fore of the cockpit, “Check Yide’s calculation.”

  “Aye, mom—sorry,” he said irritably, “may-om.” He slided into the cramped space beside Yide’s chair and, after several minutes he gave Lu Bu a nod, “Numbers be solid, mom—sorry, may-om.”

  “Will this actually work?” Hutch asked from the back of the cabin stern of the cockpit. “I mean…isn’t this like threading a needle from a mile away?”

  “Oh, it’s not that bad,” Trixie said with a giggle. “More like…hitting a shuttle with a bow and arrow, from a hundred meters’ plus elevation at the maximum range of the bow—assuming, of course, that the bow is in good working condition and has been properly maintained. Having shot a bow from time to time at my uncle’s ranch, I’d say the odds of me making that shot would be…I don’t know, one in thirty?”

  “…That didn’t exactly help, Trixie,” Hutch said grimly.

  “Oh,” she said, sounding briefly downcast before brightening once again, “well, I never said I was very good with a bow and arrow, you understand. I probably only have three or four thousand hours of practice logged at the range, and to be an expert at pretty much anything it takes more like ten thousand hours—“

  “Silence,” Lu Bu snapped, deciding that allowing the woman to ramble was likely harming team morale. “Let pilot concentrate.”

  “Sorry,” Trixie said meekly before adding in her usual, cheery manner, “but I’m sure Yide’s done this before.”

  All eyes briefly fell on Yide, whose back hairs literally bristled in what Lu Bu took to be a negative display of body language. “No,” he said simply.

  “Oh…” Trixie said before Lu Bu shot her a dark look which seemed to have its intended effect as the other woman remained silent until Strider began his countdown to their window. Each member of her team had been assigned their own positions for this particular maneuver, which would be similar to those they had taken during takeoff from the Lost Ark’s hold, but that particular burst of thrust had lasted less than a second—this one would last for between nine and ten seconds, with gee forces right at the human survival threshold since they needed to make every nanosecond of their window count.

  “Three…two…one…blackout,” Strider declared, the last word garbling itself as Yide slewed their craft around with the attitude control thrusters before firing full-out with the gunship’s engines.

  Lu Bu felt Fei Long’s body press against hers as she held him in her arms, but surprisingly her vision began to black out as she fought to keep her eyes on the thrust clock which Yide had set up directly above his large, hairy head. She remembered seeing six seconds remaining on the clock’s countdown, and then somehow the clock skipped all the way to two seconds remaining. More than mildly alarmed at losing consciousness when she had endured gee forces nearly half again this great during her younger years training at the family compound, she found herself gasping for air when the clock reached zero and the engines cut out.

  She tried to call for a sound-off from her teammates, but her voice would not work properly. Shaking her head and clutching her chest, she shoved Fei Long off of herself and tried desperately to take in a full breath.

  Several panic-laden seconds later, she finally sucked in something approaching a full breath and gasped, “Sound off!”

  No reply came to her, and she looked down to see Fei Long was only now beginning to stir as his arms spasmed in a predictable fashion. She had seen dozens of people regain consciousness after losing it—most often having lost consciousness at her hands—and was reassured when the rest of the team slowly began to stir.

  “Sound off,” she repeated slightly more measuredly.

  “Yide…here,” the pilot said groggily.

  “That was the worst nap I’ve ever taken,” Funar said with a groan.

  “Fine here, ma’am,” Hutch said between ragged pants.

  It took Trixie and Fei Long longer than the others to regain consciousness, but when they did Lu Bu was relieved to find that all of her team was awake and had suffered only bumps and bruises during the dangerous maneuver.

  “Check attitude,” Lu Bu instructed after seeing Strider begin to do precisely that. She silently cursed herself for allowing the stress of the moment to override her responsibility as the mission’s leader.

  “Course be…” Strider began tightly before leaning back and trying to wipe his brow, but finding the back of his hand obstructed by the pressure helmet he wore, “we be good, mom. We’ll settle into orbit of the second moon in twelve hours; we’ll need to fire the thrusters again to maintain steady orbit,” he added, “but we’ll be good for at least six orbits before we be forced into doing anything revealing.”

  “Good work Yide,” Lu Bu said, clapping the uplift on the shoulder and seeing the young Sundered look up briefly into her eyes with bloodshot eyes of his own.

  “Thank you, Fengxian,” he said, and she took no offense at his use of her style name. As far as she was concerned, despite the fact that he was only ten years old, he was and would always be her peer—regardless of the paltry difference in their respective genetic material.

  Of course, she realized the difference between her genes and his might be significantly greater than the human norm, since many of her genes were wholly artificial while most genetically engineered humans benefited from specific activation and deactivation of naturally-occurring gene sequences.

  “Ok,” she said, running through the mission outline in her head one more time before declaring, “power on life support.”

  “Aye, ma’am,” Yide acknowledged before hitting a series of buttons and turning levers which controlled the life-giving gases to pressurized the cabin, “no leaks detected…life support should be online in twenty minutes.”

  “Good,” she said, glad her Storm Drake armor protected her from the chill of the nearby bulkhead which separated them from the vast darkness of interplanetary space.

  She noticed Fei Long begin to rub his neck once again, but seeing her eyes on him he stopped and gave her a wan smile.

  When we return to the Pride, she reminded herself, I must have Doctor Middleton examine him.

  “Good work…Kongming,” she said, torn between the familiar and more official designations available to her.

  “We will see,” he said, tilting his head toward the warship displayed on the craft’s main screen. It had already launched bucking cables and was mere minutes away from boarding the Lost Ark, at which point it would take less than an hour to discover if Fei Long’s programming had been equal to the task b
efore them.

  Nearly two hours later, Fei Long was still intently watching the screen for some sign—any sign—that his falsified records would have their intended effect. The droids had successfully seized the Lost Ark and powered down its comm. suite, which had led to their discontinuation of the local jamming field. But they had not yet behaved as he had expected—and hoped—they would.

  “It was a worthy plan, Kongming,” Lu Bu said from his side, but he could feel the bitter disappointment in her tone. “No other could have even made the attempt.”

  Fei Long knew she meant to soothe him in her own way, but he was in no mood for consolation. He had failed; his rival had won; and Captain Middleton would now be forced to retreat from the conflict or charge headlong into the fray in a suicidal maneuver which, in all seriousness, was likely the best deployment of resources available to him.

  The Raubachs simply could not be allowed to continue with their plans…too many had died, too much had been sacrificed, and if they had their way then everything they had done until that very moment was merely a precursor to the impending terror they would soon rain down on the Spineward Sectors.

  In his higher brain—the cold, emotionally detached portion—he knew that things would not be as terrible as his imagination was suggesting they might. The rulers of Sectors 23 & 24—and possibly even 25—would acquiesce to Commodore Raubach’s will rather than allow their people to be terrorized and crushed beneath the Rim Fleet’s armored heel. But he also knew that the price of his failure would likely measure on a scale which he dared not even contemplate in that moment.

  He had failed, and millions of people would suffer for it. That thought repeated itself in his mind in one form or another as he felt his heart harden against everyone and everything which had stood between his allies and their mission—and then he saw a flash from the nearby console.

  Focusing both of his eyes on it, he quickly decided that it had been an illusion—a product of his mind’s desperate grab for victory where none could possibly exist.