Against The Middle

by Caleb Wachter

  “Mr. Toto has some ideas in that regard,” Middleton said, nodding to the Sundered Tactical Officer. “He assures me that he will only need two pairs of hands and a working com-link to get the guns slaved to his station with forty minutes of work—work which will begin as soon as this meeting is concluded.”

  Middleton very much disliked the idea of slave-rigging the guns to a single control station, since doing so required his people to increase the processing power of a single DI node well beyond the legal threshold. Once an individual processing unit becomes too powerful, it is only a matter of time before it goes droid—and there is little in the galaxy more terrifying than the thought of a sentient warship in full command of itself and its awesome weaponry.

  “Can’t say I like it,” Garibaldi sighed, “but what else is new? He’ll get his hands.”

  “Good,” Middleton said with an approving nod, feeling a throbbing ache in his jaw begin to develop. Pushing the pain aside, he turned to Hephaestion, “Your credentials are lacking, but your aptitudes with the equipment and your performance of late have led me to place you in command of the Sensors and Comm. sections. I hope you can keep up.”

  “I will endeavor to do so, Captain,” Hephaestion replied stoically, and for the first time Middleton noticed a trio of wounds on the young man’s neck which could have only been caused by near-misses from a blaster rifle.

  “Sergeant Gnuko,” Middleton continued, “I trust your men have enough gear to hold the ship against would-be invaders?”

  “That won’t be a problem, sir,” Gnuko assured him. “Without our own crew aboard the ship, there’s no reason to pull any more punches if the enemy sets foot on this ship.”

  Middleton snickered softly, considering the fact that his Lancer Sergeant had just suggested their previous welcoming festivities had been the equivalent of ‘pulled punches’ when the Slice of Life’s former Marine contingent had boarded the Pride of Prometheus with an eye to taking her a prize. “That’s the spirit, Sergeant.”

  “We’ve rigged up another handful of improvised explosives, just like you requested, Sergeant,” Garibaldi interjected, “but I’m not sure there are many places left to hide them. You boys did a good and proper job of gutting the central-forward sections of the ship during the last go-round.”

  “I said ‘set foot on this ship,’ Chief,” Gnuko said with a pointed look, “not in it.”

  Middleton had already gone over several contingency plans with Sergeant Gnuko, and he had been impressed with the man’s forward thinking in terms of maximizing their available gear for the mission ahead. “This ship’s only got one last charge in her, gentlemen,” he said turning to each of his remaining department heads in turn, “and we need to make it count.”

  Garibaldi squirmed in his seat before raising his hand like a child in primary school might do, “Which brings me to the elephant in the room, Captain: do you actually think you can get this ship in position to ram the Vae Victus? We’ve only got forty percent motive power, and about that in forward-facing shielding. That Defiance-class battleship—even half of her—is more than a match for the old girl in her current state, even if that’s all we’ll be facing when we arrive.”

  “I don’t know how it’s going to play out,” Middleton shrugged as he met his Chief Engineer’s eyes, which were beneath dubiously-beetled eyebrows, “but I do know that I want that warhead where I have a chance at using it.”

  The Chief continued to look skeptical, but Hephaestion was the one who spoke up next, “This ship will not survive the explosion.” His tone was calm and measured, and his words were spoken as one would state an obvious fact, and Middleton was impressed with the young man’s resolve as he continued, “I, however, will be proud to guide the arrow of vengeance into the heart of the enemy.”

  “Arrows and other archaic metaphors notwithstanding,” Gnuko cut in uneasily, fidgeting with his bandage briefly before continuing, “we should be thinking about completing the mission and getting out afterward, not making grand sacrifices and going up in the proverbial blaze.”

  “Agreed, Sergeant,” Middleton said with a nod, knowing that he had every intention of making sure that torpedo’s payload got delivered where it could do the most damage—no matter the personal costs entailed. “I want all hands on the bridge for this op; reroute whatever controls you can manage in the time between now and our point transfer, but consider everything else offline for the duration. Private Kratos’ team will remain aboard the Deathbacker in the event we identify a target he can neutralize, or in the event his people are needed to scrap intruders off the hull, but the rest of us will remain here on the bridge after the T-minus-ten-minute countdown to point transfer has begun.”

  “We’d better get started on those workarounds,” Garibaldi said, “aside from us in this room, and Kratos’ people on the shuttle, we’ve only got five engineers I couldn’t sweet talk off the ship. Even without the internal damage to the ship we have to navigate, we’ll be cutting it close to get all this work done.”

  “Good,” Middleton said, standing and finding his legs reasonably steady beneath him, “I’ll join your repair teams for the next two hours. The rest of you know your assignments. Dismissed.”

  Chapter XXV: Old Flames Burn Hot

  “Wake up, Long,” Fei Long heard a woman’s voice explode in his ear, and he quickly realized he was standing behind bars and had absolutely no idea how he had gotten there.

  Then he remembered being clubbed over the head, but that still did not explain how he was standing—

  “Good,” she said, and this time her voice was fractionally less thunderous in his ears, “you’re just in time.”

  He blinked his eyes several times and realized that Zhongda—whose original name had been Liu Chan, but he had forever remembered her as his nemesis and arch-rival—was sitting just a few feet from him behind a trio of portable workstations set beside each other.

  “Why did you join them, Zhongda?” he asked with more bitterness in his voice than he had expected to hear. “Your talents should not be wasted on such base and amoral goals.”

  “Amoral?” she repeated before giggling in a way which he had previously found intoxicating, but now found well-and-truly revolting. “You should talk, Kongming,” she used his chosen moniker as a slur, “you, whose masterwork was supposed to be gaining access to the ComStat network so you could disseminate banned media to the citizenry of our world.”

  “Freedom of information is the only true freedom,” he quipped, feeling a familiar, yet nearly forgotten knot in his stomach as they picked up the old argument precisely where they had left it several years earlier. “But I would not expect you to understand.”

  “Oh, I understand,” she quipped as her fingers moved with machine-like precision across the trio of workstations. Her ability to multitask was truly an inspiration to Fei Long; he had once seen her manage twelve separate operations across five terminals, with each requiring major inputs approximately every six seconds. “You wanted to find the latest nude celebrity pics and vids, and were tired of waiting for physical couriers to bring them from two Sectors away.” She shook her head contemptuously as she sneered, “You always were so predictable, Long.”

  Ignoring the barb about downloading pornography—a charge which he had to admit would carry at least some weight—Fei Long sighed, “At least I had goals, Zhongda. You were only ever concerned with winning.”

  “And what’s wrong with that?” she asked archly, her eyes only briefly moving from her terminal screens to meet his. “It’s worked out pretty well for me, while your supposedly high-minded morality has landed you on a rattletrap with a borderline psychotic captain who can’t learn to let go of a grudge—even if it gets everyone around him killed.” She gestured to the facility, “All of this was brought here for me, Long—me,” she repeated forcefully, and he literally winced at seeing just how vain she had become. “House Raubach knows how to treat talented individuals; before I’m twenty I’ll be one
of the wealthiest women in the galaxy, and you’ll be nothing more than a footnote on the virtual crime statistics report from three years ago.” She threw her head back and cackled triumphantly, “So much for your ridiculous claim to be Zhuge Liang’s inheritor, Long. The real Kongming would have learned something in the last three years about developing data deconstruction methodologies, and probably would have concerned himself with hiding his virtual fingerprints a little more cleverly than by using Romance of the Three Kingdoms body text as the primer to his cipher.”

  Fei Long’s eyebrows rose in a mixture of surprise and admiration. She had broken the first level of his program’s encryption matrix, which meant there were only two more steps between her and the truth of his three-part program…

  “Impressive, Zhongda,” Fei Long said with grudging respect as he turned and found a fold-out cot attached to the wall of what was clearly a prison cell, “you managed to break my encryption system…the only question I have is: just how long did it take you to do so?”

  “You’ve only been out of it for forty four minutes,” she replied as she continued to work at a furious, yet perfectly controlled pace. “I’ve had the first layer down for twenty six minutes now, and the second layer is about to fall…” she smacked a key on the left-hand console with an audible click, “now!”

  A screen situated behind her lit to life, and Fei Long leaned forward to see that she had, indeed, successfully broken the second layer of his program’s encryption. He heard a stirring from the cell next to his, and he looked over to see a man lying on a cot with blankets draped over him and a whole host of medical equipment connected to his body. It seemed the only part of his body not connected to some kind of life-sustaining device was his mouth, through which he drew shallow, but steady breaths.

  His eyes, however, were what took Fei Long by surprise: instead of bearing normal pupils, they were completely white. Fei Long had seen people with afflictions which had destroyed the pigmentation in their eyes, and he had even seen images of eyeballs that had been so horribly damage by chemical or thermal trauma that they were grey, or milky-looking, but this man’s eyes were as white as falling snow. Still, he could somehow feel the man’s eyes moving back and forth between the screen behind Zhongda and Fei Long.

  Just then, Fei Long felt a flare of pain in the back of his skull and he heard himself cry out in pain as he crashed into the wall of his cell. Just like when he had first set foot on this planetoid, it seemed his limbs were no longer connected to his body, and his consciousness merely floated in a dark, silent void of pain for an indeterminable amount of time.

  But just like the previous experience, his senses quickly returned to him. As his vision returned, he found that he had somehow braced himself against the wall and avoided a complete collapse to the floor.

  “You don’t look too good,” Zhongda said coolly, clearly reveling in his discomfort, “but then, in fairness, neither would I if my work had been undone so easily. Really, Long, I’m disappointed,” she clucked her tongue and shook her head in apparent disappointment, “I’d hoped this might provide a few hours of diversion before they came and took you.”

  “Who will come and take me?” he asked, shaking the last of the cobwebs from his mind as he focused on the screen behind her and saw that she was already working on the last layer of encryption he had put into the disparate segments of his crucial Yin & Yang program.

  “The Commodore’s people will need intelligence,” she replied casually, “and despite what I told them about your pronounced lack of that particular attribute, they were adamant that you be put on the same shuttle as the Director when he arrives to take your neighbor off the base.”

  Fei Long looked at the white-eyed man, and saw that his eyes were no longer white at all. Fei Long blinked twice, just to be certain his eyes were not deceiving him, and found that the man’s eyes were now a pale blue color and appeared to be more-or-less normal.

  “Who is he?” Fei Long asked, his curiosity getting the better of him as he saw the man’s eyes flick once again to the screen behind Zhongda—a screen across which scrolled line after line of Fei Long’s slowly-decompiled and deciphered programming code.

  “Some sort of mystic,” Zhongda replied disinterestedly. “The Director has…interviewed him on several occasions,” she said, her face twisting into a contemptuous expression, “but so far he speaks only gibberish and refuses to participate in any form of dialogue.” She then stopped for a moment and cocked her head in Fei Long’s direction, “I just cracked your encryption protocols in less than an hour and you’re more interested in that slab of meat lying on the cot in there?”

  “I suppose I am in shock,” Fei Long replied with a shrug. In truth, he had not expected her efforts to take much longer than they had taken; with the amount of processing power at her fingertips, there was precious little she could not crack — given the fact that she had stolen his own source code, of course. “But I should have expected such success from you…since you are using my code, after all.”

  She bristled briefly before returning to her work, “They say that possession is nine tenths of the law.” Fei Long allowed himself a smirk, having heard the same thing from the arms dealer, Lynch, whose base of operations had actually been named ‘The Other Tenth,’ but Zhongda did not appear to notice as she continued, “Most of what was yours is already mine, what was mine is still mine, and what little you have apparently retained will soon be mine.” She leaned back in her chair as her equipment worked to decompile his Yin & Yang program, lacing her fingers behind her head as she did so, “You were a gifted coder, Long, but you lacked a certain…” her lips twisted into a killer smile as she found the words she was looking for, “killer instinct. At least you’ll get to know—for however long you have left—that your work will be put to better use than it would have been while downloading the latest holo-vids and novels from the extranets and distributing them freely to the tween-age crowd.”

  Fei Long marveled at how cynical she had become. “What happened to you, Chan?” he asked, nearly overcome with pity. “You are not the girl I once knew…and loved,” he added hesitantly, finding the words were absolutely true as he spoke them.

  She scoffed, but for a moment he could see that he had gotten through her thick veneer of false confidence, “No one could love her. She was pathetic…a loser…a cow that weighed more than a hundred kilograms. But now look at me,” she said with overt—likely forced—confidence as she stood and modeled her admittedly impressive physique. Rarely had Fei Long seen such an impressive specimen of feminine geometry, and for a brief moment he could comprehend why she might have opted for the change.

  When he had known her previously, she had never been the center of attention, nor had she known many who would call her a friend. She had been something of a loner, always looking in on society from the outside, and that was what had attracted Fei Long to her. He had felt some sort of kinship with her in that regard—and in the fact that they were two of the only three hackers to actually break into the main government’s secured databases using independently-crafted methods.

  She posed suggestively for a moment, and Fei Long felt his hormones surge before he fought them back down. Zhongda giggled and pointed triumphantly at his face before sitting back down and resuming her work, “That’s the look, all right—that look which you just fought to hide is why I did it, Long. There’s power in being able to bend attention in that way, and I realized years ago that I was sick of being ignored. I’d seen other girls make men look the way you just did,” she said darkly, “and now, whenever I enter a room, I’m the one they stare at. I can have any man I want, any way I want, for however long I want,” she said, stopping for a moment to crack her knuckles—an affectation he once found charming, but now found hideous. “I can have most any woman I want, for that matter,” she added, as though it was an unimportant aside, “but men are so much easier to manipulate…I mean, just look at what I did to you even before I got these upgra
des?”

  He saw that she was very nearly finished breaking through the third layer of his encryption. He guessed she would need no more than three minutes at her current, insane, Ancient-tech-driven pace before she had laid bare the elements of his program.

  But just then a chime rang on her console and she stopped her work, sighing and muttering under her breath in a clearly mocking tone, “Time to pay the b-b-b-bills.” She input a few commands to the right-hand console, and an image appeared on the screen behind her as she swiveled her form-fitted chair to face it. “Director, what a pleasant surprise,” she said in Confederation Standard, “I thought you had transferred to the mobile base?”

  “Never you m-mind that,” the man, who was an elderly, pale-skinned man with white hair, blotchy skin, and wore a white lab coat, “what is the status of our prisoner?”

  “Which one?” she asked with false innocence.

  “The only one I c-c-care about,” he replied, his eyebrows lowering as his expression turned to a glare.

  “Resting comfortably,” she said, swiveling her chair and gesturing to the cell beside Fei Long’s. “He has barely moved since you increased his dosage two days ago.”

  “See that he is not d-disturbed,” the Director instructed, “I will be there shortly.”

  “We will await your arrival,” Zhongda said with false deference as she bowed her head in the same fashion which Fei Long often did.

  “Have you d-discovered the whereabouts of the other prisoner’s ship?” the Director demanded.