Against The Middle

by Caleb Wachter

  Based on the look on her face, that particular thought had not previously crystallized in his soon-to-be-former XO’s mind until he had reiterated it. But rather than blanching, or becoming squeamish, she jutted her chin out and said, “I’ll bring them back in one piece, sir.”

  “See that you do that, McKnight,” Middleton said with a knowing nod. “Now get the hell off my ship, if you please—I’ve got a battle to plan.”

  McKnight snapped to a picture-perfect attention posture and saluted Middleton. He would have stood, but just then his legs were feeling particularly numb, so he returned her salute as best he was able. “Good hunting, Captain Middleton,” she said, snapping off the salute.

  “Don’t worry about saving any for us, Lieutenant,” Middleton said, allowing a short-lived smile to spread across his features.

  McKnight turned to leave the bridge, and just as she got to the blast doors, Jo swept onto the Pride’s command deck. “Not even a word?!” Jo snapped as she stormed her way up the dais to stand before his chair. “You were just going to ship me off with the rest of the crew without even speaking to me?!”

  “Doctor,” Middleton began as calmly as he could manage, “the crew needs you—“

  “The crew needs me in sickbay,” she cut in, “but you’ve cut the power to that deck—along with life support—so I’ve got two dozen dying men and women stacked up like cordwood in the corridors on deck five!”

  “The damage caused during the boarding actions was too severe,” Middleton said, adding a hard edge to his voice as he gave her a steely glare. “Sickbay’s a lost cause and you know it, Doctor Middleton.”

  “So you thought you could get me off this ship without so much as a single spoken word by informing me of the other ship’s pristine medical facilities?” she snarled, and Middleton could see her eyes were red—a sure sign she was on the emotional verge.

  “Doctor—“

  “Don’t you ‘Doctor’ me, Tim!” she flared.

  Forcing his legs beneath himself, Middleton lurched out of his chair and nearly fell over, only saving himself with a timely grab of his chair’s armrest. “Jo,” he said in a lowered tone as Toto, Hephaestion, and a handful of bridge standers busied themselves and tried desperately to look like they weren’t listening in on the juiciest source of gossip aboard the Pride, “now really isn’t the best time.”

  She seemed to take the hint, and clenched her hands into fists at his sides. “I won’t leave you here, Tim.”

  “You won’t be leaving anyone,” Middleton replied, knowing it may well be the last time they spoke face-to-face, “you’ll be saving dozens of lives aboard the Slice who desperately need your expertise, and you’ll be doing it from a fully-equipped, state-of-the-art medical facility aboard a ship that was first commissioned when this one was sixty years old. Do the numbers, Doc,” he said, giving her a wan smile as he brought up a decades old argument between them regarding bulk statistics vs. individual case management, “there’s only one way this can play out, and it’s with you joining the crew on the Slice of Life.”

  She bit her lip and stepped toward the chair, “Just tell me you’re going to try to get out of this alive.”

  Middleton actually did a double take; he had never genuinely considered his own survival to be more than a remote possibility after deciding on the course which had brought them to their present position. But after hearing her say what she had just said, he realized that the ordeal had been more difficult for the rest of the crew—Jo among them—than it had been for him. After twenty years of military service, he had made peace with the possibility of dying at the hands of the enemy, surrounded by people who tolerated him at best, and hated him at worst.

  “I’m not here to go out in a blaze of glory,” he said, knowing that it was only half true. He would happily sacrifice himself, forgoing any such glory if it meant his mission would succeed and his people would survive the conflict, but he knew that wasn’t what Jo needed to hear just then. “My first priority is doing what we came to do, with a close second being getting this crew home safely. I can’t do either of those things with my Chief Medical Officer stubbornly clinging to this ship when the people who need her most do the right thing and transfer to McKnight’s ship. At least there they can fight back against the people who have tried to kill them at every single step of this ship’s deployment.” He straightened reflexively as he finished, “I won’t take that chance away from them, no matter how much certain aspects of facilitating that chance disagree with my personal preferences.”

  Her eyes welled with tears and before he knew it their lips were pressed against the other’s. When they parted she whispered, “I should have never left.”

  He shook his head, “I don’t regret any of it, and neither should you. We’ve each done what we needed to do, and we should be thankful for what we’ve had since then.”

  She nodded, and he knew that he needed to hurry her from his ship as quickly as possible while observing a degree of compassion to her situation. But at the end of the day, he was the commander of a warship which still had a fight to join, and he needed to focus on the task at hand.

  Seemingly sensing his thoughts, she said in a slightly louder voice, “I’ll see my patients are transferred before joining them, but first I need to see about your jaw.”

  Before he could protest, she produced a pair of devices from her lab coat’s pockets—one of which was a needle with three syringes attached to it, and the other was a rather ghastly looking piece of equipment which resembled nothing so much as a small nail gun.

  She used the needle to numb the side of his face where his jaw was broken, and he actually welcomed the sensation after he could no longer feel anything between his jawline and his eye. Then she brought up the nail gun and, before he could inquire as to what exactly she was planning to do, she said, “Hold still. I have to do this twice.”

  For a moment he was mortally certain he had just been slammed in the side of the head by a power-armored fist. His vision blacked out, the world began to spin, and he was increasingly concerned that he was about to empty the contents of his stomach.

  But he thankfully avoided doing so, and just as his vision began to return he heard a distant-sounding voice say, “Good…just one more.”

  He heard his voice cry in protest—having done so mostly unbidden by him—but it was to no avail as he felt another blow land to his jaw. But this time it was significantly less painful, feeling more like a potential KO than an actual one.

  Reaching up with his hand, Middleton felt a piece of cold metal was now present over the break in his jaw. It was nearly three inches long, and he realized that she had just nailed—or possibly riveted—the thing to his jaw.

  “Try it,” she urged after putting the tools back into her pockets, and Middleton gingerly opened his jaw. He found the muscles of his mouth were tight and sore from his constant clenching, and as he opened his mouth he also realized just how bad the swelling had become near the break. But the pain was nearly nonexistent—a result he assumed was equally due to the stabilizing plate and the large quantity of numbing medication she had employed—and he nodded in satisfaction as his vision finally returned and the wave of vertigo abated.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Middleton said, giving her a meaningful look as he continued to test his jaw. She lingered for a few moments before nodding and leaving the bridge.

  Middleton took what might be his last opportunity to watch her walk away—a sight which any warm-blooded man would admit to enjoying—and allowed himself a moment of reflection on times long gone, and opportunities lost to foolish intransigence, before refocusing on his bare bones bridge crew.

  “Have every department head report to the conference room immediately, Mr. Hephaestion,” he instructed, straightening his uniform as he shifted in the chair, trying to restore something resembling normal sensation to his still-tingly legs.

  “The conference room was damaged in the attack,” Hephaestion replied respectf
ully.

  Middleton snorted, realizing he should have expected the reply even though he had not received a damage report detailing that particular issue. “Then have them report to the bridge,” he said, setting his jaw in determination and finding the patch job she had done to be equal to the task, “and have them do so as soon as Chief Garibaldi’s team is back inside.”

  Sergeant Gnuko helped with the final transfers of crew and medical supplies from the Pride to the Slice of Life, and was surprised to see Kratos and a handful of his men moving from McKnight’s command back to the Pride of Prometheus. They did not wear power armor, but their combined bulk still filled the boarding tube—a long, flexible section of expandable corridor which now connected the Pride of Prometheus to the Slice of Life with a soft-dock from one warship’s airlock to the other’s—as they filed past the last of the men and women making their way to the captured enemy cruiser.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Gnuko demanded, blocking the Pride’s side of the tube as the one-eyed Tracto-an approached.

  “I am transferring,” the hulking cyclops replied, his voice barely above a growl as he proffered a data slate.

  Gnuko reviewed the slate’s contents and his eyebrows went up in surprise before lowering thunderously. “You’re a loose cannon, Kratos,” he seethed, giving the other man a piercing look.

  “I am victorious,” Kratos retorted, his chest visibly swelling as he squared his shoulders and jutted his chin forward defiantly, “and for this I am transferred.”

  Sergeant Gnuko very much wanted to argue with the last-minute transfer, but he knew that there was simply no time. McKnight’s ship was scheduled to point transfer in another thirty one minutes, and there was no way he was going to bring this particular matter to Captain Middleton’s attention at this stage in the game.

  “Fine,” Gnuko said through gritted teeth, “get aboard and we’ll find some armor for you and your men.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” Kratos said, and Gnuko was surprised to hear not even a trace of resentment or insubordination in the other man’s voice. Kratos and his handful of men exited the tube, and Gnuko was just about to signal to the Slice of Life’s airlock tender that it was time to break the connection, but he saw another person coming down the tube.

  This one was Bernice, the mammoth of a woman who had previously been assigned to Lu Bu’s Recon Team. She had performed exceptionally well, but Lu Bu had correctly left her off the roster for her latest assignment due to Bernice’s relative lack of technical expertise which would have been required during the operation behind enemy lines.

  Bernice spat something in Tracto-an as she came closer, and Kratos turned to give her a steady gaze. Whatever it was she said, the men around Kratos shared looks which ranged from amused to mildly concerned, and Gnuko realized that this particular confrontation was almost certainly of the personal variety, rather than a professional one.

  “You have your orders,” Kratos growled, stepping toward the tube’s mouth before Bernice could reach it. “Return to your ship, woman!”

  She snarled something in their native tongue, and after having spent so much time with Tracto-ans, Gnuko picked out a few of the most colorful insults—most of which had to do with questionable lineage—from her surprisingly vicious stream of words.

  “You are the only one who can command them,” Kratos replied calmly, but the tension in his body was severely at odds with the tone of his voice, “the warriors respect you, rightfully so, and Lieutenant McKnight no longer trusts me. This is the way it must be. Do not behave like a child, Bernice.”

  Gnuko saw something in her expression which told him that his was, without question, a lover’s quarrel of some kind and he, like his fellow Lancers, stood transfixed by the scene unfolding before them.

  Bernice set her jaw, and for a moment Gnuko actually found the masculine-looking woman reasonably attractive. He’d always had a thing for a woman when she got her back up, and this one was either the most dangerous, or second-most dangerous, woman he had ever encountered—the other possible candidate being Lu Bu, who had very nearly KO’d Walter Joneson with a single flying knee, and had actually KO’d Atticus with one.

  Bernice’s fists trembled at her sides as her face went red with anger, and before Kratos could react she lashed out with her lone good arm and punched him in the groin hard enough to stiffen the massive man’s legs. His hands, which had tried and failed to block the blow, moved to intercept the follow-up attack—a vicious uppercut from her bionic arm, aimed squarely at his jaw—but they were too far out of position and Bernice’s thunderous blow lifted the man from the deck before he went crashing back down again.

  Whether his short-lived flight was due to her tremendous punching power, or to the significantly lower gravity present at the airlock, Gnuko would never know for certain. Nor would he ever wonder about the matter out loud—at least not within earshot of Bernice.

  She stood over Kratos, who rubbed his jaw gingerly and gave her a dark, smoldering look as the woman brusquely said, “Now I go to my command.” She turned and, without so much as a glance over her shoulder, made her way down the tube and embarked on the Slice of Life.

  Kratos stood to his feet as Gnuko slapped the airlock’s control panel, causing the inner and outer doors to close in unison. The tension among the Lancers was palpable as Kratos glowered at each of them in turn before his gaze fell upon Sergeant Gnuko. Gnuko tensed in preparation for some sort of altercation, but the old man unexpectedly smirked and declared in a loud, boisterous voice, “A fine woman!”

  Laughter immediately erupted throughout the corridor, and even Gnuko found himself joining in the unexpected mirth as they made their way to the Armory.

  “She’s welded onto the nose,” Garibaldi said nearly twenty minutes later, referring to his having successfully attached what remained of the Liberator torpedo to the Pride’s bow, “but I don’t think any of us want to be aboard when that thing goes off.”

  The Slice of Life had already disengaged from the Pride of Prometheus and was moving to a safe distance in preparation for their point transfer into the enemy’s home system. Middleton had ordered McKnight to operate under complete comm. silence, knowing that the enemy would be listening in on everything they said to each other and wanting to give them absolutely zero free intel.

  “Good work, Chief,” Middleton said with a nod before turning to Sergeant Gnuko. “How many of your Lancers are fit for duty?”

  “I transferred all but myself and four others to the Slice,” Gnuko replied, sporting a heavy drape of Combat Heal-infused gauze over the left side of his skull. The bandage very nearly covered his eye on that side, and Middleton had absolutely no idea how he could have sustained the wound from within his duralloy casement of power armor. “But that makes our current Lancer force twelve strong,” he added darkly.

  Middleton nodded again, having reviewed a truncated version of McKnight’s after action report regarding the boarding of the Light Cruiser she now commanded. It seemed that Kratos was more resourceful, and technically adept, than even Middleton had suspected. Soon after boarding the enemy vessel, he had located the nearest Environmental locker and emergency-purged every deck of the then-enemy warship of its breathable air. The result had been two hundred dead Rim Fleet crew strewn about the corridors, and a paralyzed enemy commander who was unable to move his people about in a coordinated fashion. The only areas which had been unaffected had been the enemy bridge, Engineering, and Medical, but cut off from each other it had only been a matter of time before the MSP Lancers took even those heavily-fortified positions.

  Naturally, the enemy Marines had been protected from death by asphyxiation due to their armor’s internal life support systems, but Kratos’ people had outnumbered the enemy three to two. Somewhat surprisingly, it seemed the Tracto-ans—in their less than state-of-the-art armor—had been more than a match for the enemy warriors when the final tally had been made.

  Middleton could understand M
cKnight’s resentment toward Kratos regarding the boarding action, and much as he shared her indignation on a personal level, as a professional he knew that Kratos had done what was needed to win the fight. He was glad that McKnight would have to author that particular after action report, and not him.

  “Kratos got the job done,” Middleton said, “but McKnight did the right thing in punishing him for his…unorthodox approach.” Garibaldi looked fit to burst in outrage, but Middleton added, “There will be no further discussion of that particular subject. For my part, I’m glad to have an Assault Team—even a small one—and the Deathbacker available for when we enter the enemy system.

  “You’ve got me there, Cap,” Garibaldi grudged with a loud sigh. “I’m just glad those lugs are on our side and not the enemy’s.”

  “Amen to that,” Gnuko said with a slow nod.

  “Which brings us to a final breakdown of our resources,” Middleton said, turning to the ship’s Chief Engineer.

  Garibaldi stiffened, and Middleton hoped his old friend could avoid another outburst like the one he had sent over the link after being ordered to abandon the rescue efforts for the crew on the Pride’s forward gun deck.

  But then the Chief relaxed fractionally and said, “The stern shields are shot, but the bow’s back up to about 45% and the flanks are holding just below 40% each. I’ve re-routed every joule we can spare to the shields, including the majority of the energy normally allocated to the forward batteries.” His jaw set as he continued, “Three of the batteries are in working condition but the rest are done for, and over half of our new broadside weaponry’s gone too. Of course,” he added with a hard look at Captain Middleton, “we’d need gunners for any of that to matter.”

  Middleton nodded slowly, having read reports from damage control teams which had found that the entire forward gun deck had been exposed to the vacuum of space. Even those few tombstones that had come down in time to prevent the crews behind them from dying due to exposure had ultimately done little more than preserve the gunners’ bodies, since the same blast which had ruptured the hull had been issued from a plasma bolt which had turned the gun deck into a raging inferno for a handful of seconds. Unfortunately for the men and women on duty there, the human body was no match for plasma fire, and there was little which could even be recognized as having once been human remaining on the forward gun deck.