Against The Middle

by Caleb Wachter

  McKnight’s face was beet red, but more than embarrassed she appeared to be angry at allowing herself to be deceived by Mr. Fei’s apparently convincing act. “I’m sorry, Captain,” she said, “I shouldn’t have—“

  “Good hunting, Lieutenant,” Middleton cut in harshly before adding more evenly, “frankly, if the Commodore really is there, this is the right call anyway.”

  Before she could reply, the connection was severed as the Slice of Life point transferred out of the system.

  Middleton slumped to the deck, waving off a nearby technician who had been working on a workaround which would connect the port Artemis laser bank to the bridge’s fire control terminal. The DI usually handled such connections, making them as needed during combat maneuvers, but there was a high degree of probability that the Pride’s DI would not remain operational after the opening exchanges of the coming fight.

  Of course, given the condition of his aged warship, Middleton knew it was unlikely that the coming fight consisted of much more than a few opening exchanges. But he also knew that his was now the only vessel which could do anything about stopping the Raubach-led Rim Fleet forces at the system where his ship would jump in another two hours.

  “Everything all right, Cap?” Garibaldi asked, seemingly appearing out of nowhere.

  “Looks like we’re on our own for this next leg, Mikey,” Middleton said, standing to his feet and straightening his uniform. If he was going to charge headlong into the enemy with nothing but the battered hulk of an outdated warship, manned by less than a skeleton crew, he was going to do it with some small measure of dignity.

  Garibaldi snickered and slapped a high-powered soldering torch into the Captain’s hand. “So what else is new?” he asked playfully.

  Middleton shook his head, as his friend’s buoyant attitude failed to lift his spirits in the slightest, “We’re all we’ve got, Chief.”

  Garibaldi shrugged, “We’re all we need.”

  Lu Bu padded softly down the corridor of the massive, labyrinthine freighter’s interior, following the directions she had crafted with Hutch’s and Traian’s assistance. The other Lancers were moving roughly parallel to her position, as each of the trio had taken different paths which would converge on the entry point of the colossal vessel’s bridge.

  She was at least three minutes out from that destination, and thus far she had only observed two pairs of crewmen. The first she had evaded by ducking into a maintenance locker, but the second pair had been too close and she had rendered them unconscious with unarmed strikes. It had taken only three attempted strikes—two kicks and a vicious uppercut sandwiched between them—to put the two down before they could even react to her presence. She had bound, gagged, and stowed them in an apparently unoccupied crew’s berth before continuing on her way to the bridge.

  She had expected more resistance, and wondered if perhaps Hutch and Traian had encountered such along the way, but even if they had encountered such resistance there had been no general alarm of which she was aware.

  As she pressed forward, moving as silently as her armor would allow—which was remarkably silent as far as she was concerned—she came to the tube which went to the bridge of the massive craft.

  It was the only tube of its kind, and there was a pair of guards posted outside of it—armed and armored guards, sporting Imperial-style power armor of a similar design to that which Captain Raubach had worn aboard the Droid Corvette during the second of her back-to-back suicide missions. Ducking her head back behind the corner of the junction where she stood, she reached to her belt for an ion grenade and allowed her thumb to hover over the activation button.

  Without warning, but finding herself appropriately prepared for the occurrence, the ship lurched with modest force as the thrum of the massive vessel’s engines could be felt increasing through the deck plates.

  A moment later, the ship lurched once again—this time less severely—and the thrum of the engines slowly died down until Lu Bu could only barely detect their vibration through the freighter’s decking.

  Knowing the ship had just point transferred, Lu Bu removed another ion grenade from her belt—fully half of her complement of such devices, with another pair of plasma grenades hanging there beside a pair of sonic grenades, bringing her total grenade count to eight—and gripped it in her right hand.

  The operation was to commence in no more than twenty seconds’ time, and she glanced to a nearby junction to see if Hutch had indeed arrived where, and when, he was supposed to. She saw no sign of him, but she knew that if he had already sighted the enemy Marines then he would be keeping his head down until their synchronized HUD timers wound down to zero. They had gone over the plan in painstaking detail, and the first step was to neutralize the guards at the base of the only route onto, or off of, the freighter’s bridge.

  She was taking a large gamble that Commodore Raubach was indeed located on the bridge, but it was the only gamble she could make. She knew that Yide, who had remained behind in the cargo hold, was even more sensitive to the ultralow frequencies generated by a ship’s hyper drive, and he had been charged with manually activating the Starfire warhead before making his way safely to their position.

  It would take him eight minutes to do so, assuming he ran—or loped, whichever was faster—the entire way and encountered no resistance. But those eight minutes would decide the siege of the bridge, one way or another, and if they failed to take the bridge then Yide was to remain hidden aboard the freighter and do whatever he felt would hinder the enemy with maximum effect until he was discovered and neutralized.

  It was a grim fate, but he had done his namesake proud by accepting the responsibility unflinchingly, and Lu Bu felt supremely honored to have served alongside each of these men, and she felt privileged to be called their leader.

  The counter ticked down to zero, and without awaiting a signal from her teammates, Lu Bu leapt across the intersection where she had remained concealed and hurled her ion grenades in perfectly parallel arcs toward the enemy Marines.

  Amazingly, the right-hand Marine brought his left arm up and fired a trio of rapid-fire blaster bolts at the incoming grenades while they were still in flight, while the other Marine lowered his stance and snapped his right arm downward, causing a pair of long, deadly, serrated vibro-blades to extend from the housing mounted on his vambrace until they extended a foot and a half past his gauntleted fist.

  One of the ion grenades was taken from mid-air by the unexpectedly precise shots from the right-hand Marine’s arm-mounted blaster, but the second landed squarely between the two of them. It exploded with a brilliant, blue light which saw their armor crackle with electrical shorts as arcs of energy danced along the surface of the high-end power armor.

  A pair of shapes was illuminated by the flash as they came from concealment precisely where they were supposed to have done, and Lu Bu charged down the corridor as she drew the massive, stone-headed Glacier Splitter from its sling across her back. Using the newly-crafted, telescopic haft by pressing a button at the base of the pommel, the hammer’s haft lengthened until it was four feet long and the massive, duralloy-bound stone hammerhead began to thrum with the fully-powered energy of two smashball gravity generators—the upgrades which Kratos had thought she would find ‘agreeable,’ which would have to be the understatement of the year.

  The weapon, with which she had practiced in isolation but never drawn in battle, felt like something out of legend in her hands. For a brief moment, in her mind’s eye she saw a glimpse of herself in ancient battle armor, astride a massive, red warhorse with the awesome weapon gripped in her hands as she descended upon the enemy with the vengeance of the Great Ancestors fueling her fury.

  Then she clashed with the enemy, and the time for such fanciful thoughts disappeared in a flash of metal and stone.

  First to come to grips with the enemy was Hutch, who slammed sidelong into the right-hand Marine, displaying as much finesse as a landslide as his forward momentum temporari
ly unbalanced the armored Marine. Traian dove at that same Marine’s legs with his vibro-blade drawn, and scored a hit against the Marine’s still-frozen knee joint before rolling out of the enemy warrior’s melee range.

  The attack plan had called for Lu Bu to square off against whichever of the guards appeared to be the most dangerous, and after smashing her stone-headed weapon into the Marine’s midsection—amplified with the full force of an impacting smashball on maximum settings—and seeing him deftly turn aside the blow , she knew that her team had correctly assessed the situation. There was a loud crack as the duralloy-bound hammerhead of Glacier Splitter struck the Marine’s armor, but he managed to make a counterattack in spite of his suit’s ion-grenade-induced impairment.

  The long, serrated vibro-blades lashed out at her but she managed to duck beneath them by leaning backward and using the butt of her hammer’s haft to keep from falling completely over. She used the leverage provided by the weapon to launch her feet at the enemy Marine’s midsection, and was rewarded by seeing her enemy driven back to the nearby bulkhead. Beyond that bulkhead was the lift which would take them to their ultimate target, but she needed to neutralize these two warriors before they could enter the command center of the enemy vessel.

  Sparing a glance at her teammates, she was surprised—and pleased in a savage, primal fashion—to see that Hutch had clamped his arms to either side of their Marine’s midsection and improbably driven him back into the bulkhead. Traian leapt atop the Marine’s shoulders and brought his vibro-blade down on the arm-mounted blaster cannon just before it could be turned on Hutch, and a shower of sparks flew from the ruined weapon.

  Refocusing her attention on the enemy before her, Lu Bu brought the hammer upward in a long, sweeping arc that saw the head of her weapon strike the chin guard of the Marine’s helmet. A long, massive crack appeared on that part of the warrior’s helmet, and the warrior was briefly unbalanced as he staggered backward.

  Lu Bu, knowing this would be her best opportunity, allowed the hammer’s momentum to carry her body in a pirouette before slamming it into the Marine’s helmet once again before he could get his arms up to defend against the savage, direct, blunt attack—an attack which mirrored Lu Bu’s personality perfectly.

  This time when her weapon impacted against the helmet, fully one third of the helmet came off and Lu Bu could see her foe’s face beneath—and she saw that it was not a man, but a woman!

  The woman kicked out with her near leg, desperately fighting for room to maneuver, and Lu Bu found she was overbalanced from the pair of powerful attacks which had ruined her foe’s helmet. She knew that one more blow to the head and the Marine would die, but her counterpart knew that as well as she successfully pushed Lu Bu back a handful of steps with her desperate kick.

  Regaining her footing—and apparently benefiting from her armor’s systems beginning to come back online after the ion attacks—the enemy Marine stomped forward and extended a pair of blades from her left arm’s vambrace, mirroring the weapons affixed to her right arm.

  Lu Bu gripped her hammer tightly in her hands and circled toward the ruined side of the Marine’s helmet. The Marine countered by stepping forward quickly and launching a series of short, quick strikes which were not intended to actually hit Lu Bu, but rather to buy time for the rest of her suit’s systems to come back online. Lu Bu needed to press the advantage while she had it, so she timed her attack and swung low at her foe’s legs, forcing the woman to block downward with her left blades. The right blades came across in a short, potentially debilitating strike, as the woman aimed at Lu Bu’s left arm.

  But Lu Bu had expected the attack and she pivoted her weight against the hammerhead’s inertia, managing to avoid the strike by spinning inside the woman’s guard and bringing the butt of her hammer up and striking the woman in the face. Lu Bu actually felt the woman’s jaw break against Glacier Splitter’s haft, but to her enemy’s credit she brought her knee up into Lu Bu’s groin with enough force to life Lu Bu’s relatively lightly-armored body off the deck.

  Had Lu Bu been a man, the attack might have cost her a vital second or two of concentration due to the supposedly stronger sex’s all-too-accessible, centrally-located, overly sensitive genitalia. But she was able to fight through the intense, stinging, throbbing pain and avoid a downward stab from the Marine’s right arm blades by rolling to the side.

  But she had been forced to drop her hammer in the process, and the weapon lay motionless on the deck several meters away as Lu Bu reached for Walter Joneson’s knife which was strapped to her belt. The weapon thrummed to life in her left hand, and she slid her grip down until she was holding it by the tip as she began to circle the Marine, hearing the sounds of pitched battle from her back where Hutch and Traian were attempting to bring down their Marine.

  The woman Marine spat a gob of bloody sputum on the deck, and was about to say something when Lu Bu leapt into the air instinctively, sensing the opening just before it presented itself. The enemy Marine brought her blades up in a criss-crossing block, but Lu Bu’s non-power-assisted leap had taken her foe by surprise.

  Leaping fully four feet into the air—a result due to both her immense physicality and the lower-than-average grav-plating of the freighter’s corridors—Lu Bu lashed out with her left leg and managed to knock the woman’s right arm blade just far enough out of position that she cleared a narrow window through which she hurled Walter Joneson’s knife.

  The knife flew straight and true, burying itself to the hilt in the enemy Marine’s exposed cheek and causing the woman warrior to fall to the deck in a fit of spasms. The woman’s vibro-blades lashed this way and that as Lu Bu rolled to safely—noticing as she did so that she had sustained a hit to her right thigh which had begun to bleed slowly, but steadily. She spared a glance to Hutch and Traian, and saw the pair bring their foe down in an impressive, yet thoroughly unorthodox fashion.

  Somehow, Hutch had managed to keep his position chest-to-chest with the enemy Marine. By using his incredible lower body strength, the former smashball star got just enough leverage to lift the Marine from the floor and slam him onto his back with a picture-perfect, double-underhook body slam.

  There was nothing unorthodox about the maneuver—save for the fact that Hutch had managed to upend an armored Marine using brute strength, much as Kratos had done on a previous mission—but Traian and Hutch had cleverly choreographed their actions so that when the Marine fell to the deck, Traian had placed his vibro-blade’s pommel against the deck with the blade pointing upward.

  The Marine’s upper chest was skewered by the vibro-blade as his body slid slowly down to the deck. His arms flailed for several seconds, but Traian somehow kept his grip on his blade’s hilt and wrenched the vibro-blade sideways violently, causing the enemy soldier’s body to go limp just a few seconds after his companion’s body did likewise.

  Lu Bu saw her own foe cease her twitching, so she retrieved her hammer as Hutch and Traian worked to retrieve Traian’s blade from the Marine’s torso. Turning to her teammates she nodded approvingly. “Good work,” she panted, her breaths barely managing to quench the all-too-familiar fire coursing throughout her muscles after the short, yet intense, burst of activity. “Traian, get door,” she pointed to the lift, before kneeling and retrieving Walter Joneson’s vibro-blade from her fallen foe’s face.

  Traian obliged, and thankfully the lift’s only active security mechanisms now lay in bleeding ruins in their power-armor-shaped tombs. The door opened, and Lu Bu’s team filed into the tube just as the deck lurched beneath their feet.

  Lu Bu, now a veteran of several naval engagements, recognized the sensation for precisely what it was: a direct hit against the freighter’s hull.

  Fei Long might have stopped to cogitate as to the possible authors of the fire which had landed on the massive ship’s thin armor, or made some last-second modification to the plan which had thus far brought them to the brink of success.

  But Lu Bu was, at least in th
at regard, nothing like her boyfriend. She slapped the control icon which would take them to the bridge, glad for whatever diversion might have at least temporarily distracted Commodore Raubach and giving silent thanks to the Great Ancestors for bestowing their favor upon her and her companions.

  It seems that the Ancestors are with us, after all, she though as she gripped her hammer’s haft in her hands and waited as the lift slowly rose to the level of the vessel’s bridge.

  While they ascended, she removed the sonic grenades from her belt and set them to activate on impact. “You fight bravely, Lancers,” she said, holding Glacier Splitter in one hand and cradling the pair of sonic grenades in the other, “if we die today, I am proud to fight with you.”

  “It’s been a pleasure, ma’am,” Traian said professionally, his muscles rippling beneath his form-fitting Storm Drake armor as he tensed in preparation for the fight to come.

  Hutch unslung his scattergun and checked the weapon’s ammo chamber before chuckling, “You’re just like Walt; you know that, Bu?”

  Lu Bu turned to him and cocked her brow, checking the lift’s status and seeing it was only half way through its journey to the bridge, which was located on top of a mast which set the bridge nearly a hundred meters from the freighter’s main hull. It seemed an odd design to her, but then Lu Bu had never aspired to be an engineer, so she knew she was unqualified to critique the ship’s layout. “What you mean?” she asked, knowing that she might never get another chance to ask the question, let alone receive an answer.

  “He was a great leader; I’d follow that bastard anywhere. Don’t get me wrong, I’d be cursing his ancestry every step of the way, but I’d also be matching every move he made if I had my druthers,” he replied. But at her intent look when she sensed he was holding something back, Hutch sighed, “I guess now’s as good a time as any to tell you: he was a genie, just like you…and just like me.”