Prologue I: A New Course

The conference room doors slid shut behind Lieutenant Commander Middleton, who schooled his features into a sour expression as he moved stiffly past the small group of people waiting for their own meeting with Vice Admiral Jason Montagne.

Middleton’s second in command, an Ensign named Sarkozi—who he had recently field-commissioned to the rank of Lieutenant when he elevated her to the position of Executive Officer—fell in at his shoulder as he ground his teeth.

“How was the mee—“ she began as they crossed the room, but Middleton snapped a hand up angrily, cutting her off mid-sentence.

“Not now, XO,” he growled, drawing a few interested looks from the crew stationed on the Armor Prince.

His footfalls were audible as they made their way down the long corridor and Middleton was doing everything he could to give the impression of a boiling mad officer who had just received the tongue-lashing of the century by his superior. The truth was, while most of it was for show, there was a not inconsequential thread of bitterness running through him which he hadn’t expected to feel.

Middleton’s ship, the Pride of Prometheus, had been on patrol without any meaningful support for over half a year. They had fought pirates, droids, inexperience, and myriad other battles during that time only to return to ‘home space’ and find those contributions to be nearly ignored by the other members of the Multi-Sector Patrol Fleet.

And, given the story told by the tactical summaries and after-action reports which he had gotten his hands on, Middleton had to grudgingly admit that his own ship’s accomplishments had been somewhat less impactful, at least by comparison, than he had expected them to be. The MSP had just concluded a knock-down, drag-out fight with the Sector’s most prominent pirate organization and had simultaneously managed to rid the area of a previously undocumented Bug threat.

The two officers entered a lift and Middleton slapped the icon which would take them to the shuttle bay. As soon as the doors slid shut, he exhaled deeply and shook his head. He was glad to finally be able to relax.

“Sir?” Sarkozi asked warily. She was a petite, blond-haired woman in her early twenties with brilliant, blue eyes. Her tactical acumen was, if Middleton was being honest, significantly greater than even his had been at the same point in his career—and to Middleton, that was saying something.

“It’s nothing, Lieutenant,” he said easily as a tight smile stretched his lips. She exhaled softly, as though a burning question had just been answered positively, and Middleton shot her a reproachful look. “The field promotions are still very much under review,” he added pointedly, and Sarkozi’s expression darkened fractionally. “But,” he added after a brief pause,” at least we’ve got our orders.”

This time when Sarkozi exhaled, she did so more measuredly and gave a short nod. “The crew will be pleased,” she said officiously.

Middleton snorted. “Some of them will,” he agreed darkly. Middleton had forged a bond with the members of his crew over the previous months and had come to think of that relationship as a deep one, but Admiral Montagne had expressed a need for experienced officers and crew in order to man the rest of the vessels in the MSP fleet—a fleet which, when Middleton had left, had been nothing but a laughable idea.

But now it seemed that the Little Admiral had managed to round up enough supporters to wage war with what had to be the largest pirate organization in recent history—and he had won!

Tyrone ‘Tim’ Middleton had to admit that the Little Admiral’s latest victory had been nothing short of inspired. Admiral Montagne had, using nothing but an aged Heavy Cruiser, fought off wave after wave of Bug expeditionary forces which traditionally went ahead of a Hive Fleet. That Hive Fleet had been bearing down on Tracto—the planet of genetically-engineered super soldiers living in a strange, medieval society—while the Pirate Lord had taken control over the planet itself, along with every other piece of hardware which Admiral Montagne had left in orbit.

The brilliance of the Little Admiral’s plan had been in its bold simplicity. A Bug Fleet operates in a predictable fashion, and the Pirate Lord had been counting on that pattern of behavior repeating itself as expected. A major part of a Hive Fleet’s modus operandi is to send increasingly frequent—and increasingly large—patrols ahead of the main body in order to prepare the region, and the fleet, for the inevitable encounter. It is only by monitoring this behavior that a Star System can recognize, and respond to, an impending Bug attack.

By killing off every incoming Bug expeditionary force before they reached the Tracto System proper, Admiral Montagne had essentially blinded the Pirate Lord in control of Tracto to the threat of the Hive Fleet’s pending arrival. And when the Bugs had descended on Tracto, they had done so with a vengeance of apocalyptic proportions.

For the price of one Heavy Cruiser, Admiral Montagne had wielded the awesome power of a Bug Hive Fleet with a surgeon’s precision, gaining total victory over his adversary in a single battle. In Middleton’s view, the Battle for Tracto would go down as one of the finest displays of military tactics in the history of the Spineward Sectors…and Tim Middleton hadn’t been there to participate in it.

Admiral Montagne had dressed Middleton down over his extended patrol, and had made clear his displeasure at the proverbial bee’s nest which the Pride of Prometheus had uncovered during that mission. Middleton knew he deserved the reaction he had received from his superior officer and, frankly, he knew it could have been much worse. The Admiral had threatened to strip Middleton’s command, which Middleton could understand—and even agree with, to a point. Even when Admiral Montagne had all but declared he was stripping the Pride of Prometheus of any and all experienced officers, again, Middleton could understand and thereby keep his emotions more or less in check.

But none of that angered Tim Middleton as much as the fact that he had missed out on one of the greatest battles the Spineward Sectors had ever seen. And, only adding insult to injury, it seemed that his new mission would similarly preclude him from participating in any future battles of such scale and import.

“Assemble the crew, XO,” Middleton said as the lift doors opened and they moved toward the shuttle bay. “Some changes are coming and the Pride needs to be made ready for them.”

Prologue II: Sleeping Dragon Ridge

The sounds of water cascading gently over rounded rocks filled the room, and the chirping of birds could just be heard if one was to focus hard enough. The windblown rustling of leaves joined the auditory scene, and for a perfect moment the soundscape reached a crescendo which should have made any sane person weep.

But Fei Long had learned many years earlier that whatever ‘sanity’ might have been, it was something which would be denied him for all his days. Still, the soundscape moved him deeply as his fingers tensed in preparation for the opening notes he would pluck from the zither.

He waited for the sound of the water clock in the recorded soundscape, and when it made its hollow striking sound, he began to play the song he had always wanted to play with his own hands. He did not know the name of its composer, but he did know the name ever since hearing it as a child. He had never forgotten its deliberately mellow, almost tragic, tune.

Memories flooded his thoughts as he played and he found it difficult to keep time amid the unexpected imagery. Just as he thought he had managed to wrest control of his emotions, the chime at his door sounded and his rhythm was broken.

“Enter,” he called out in Confederation Standard as he placed the zither on the floor. Forge Master Haldis had been kind enough to essentially build the instrument for him as a way to thank Fei Long for securing the Storm Drake hide. The fashioning of that armor was bound to gain some measure of honor for the one-handed Tracto-an, and Fei Long had been pleasantly surprised by the Forge Master’s gesture and the quality of his work. The zither was far from perfect, but the sounds it produced were accurate and Fei Long had always wanted to practice with the traditional instrument of his Ancestors.

The door slid open and Lu Bu entered, wiping sweat from her brow as she did so. Fei Long was once again taken by the sight of her; he was a sixteen year old man approaching his seventeenth birthday, so he knew that his hormones played a powerful part in his train of thought at times, but when he saw Lu Bu he didn’t just see a woman with admirable physical qualities.

And those qualities were impressive in their own right. She stood at five feet ten inches, which was almost exactly the same as Fei Long. But that was where the physical similarities between the two ended; Fei Long scarcely weighed one hundred ten pounds soaking wet, but Lu Bu likely weighed twice that—he had never asked for a precise measurement because he had been led to believe this would be inadvisable—and the difference was entirely muscle and bone.

Her frame was as broad as some of the Tracto-ans who served as the Pride of Prometheus’ Lancers, but most of them stood nearly a foot taller than Lu Bu. Her legs were thick and bulged with musculature which, like everything else about her physique, had been designed in a laboratory back on their native planet, a planet called Shèhuì Héxié. Her genetically engineered musculature provided far more power-to-weight than even the Tracto-ans could boast—which was, frankly, amazing.

“You finished early?” Fei Long asked in their native tongue as he awkwardly moved across the room to where he kept his dry towels. The one Lu Bu held was already saturated, so he handed her a dry one.

Lu Bu nodded curtly as she accepted the towel. “Sergeant Gnuko ended our drills early,” she explained as she wiped her hair, which was soaked from root to tip with sweat. She kept that hair braided tightly most of the time, but Fei Long had seen just how long it was when she let it down. He winced absently as he rubbed his left arm where she had slugged him when he had suggested she wear her hair down more often. “The drills were cut short because Captain Middleton has called a general assembly of the crew,” she continued before giving him a hard look, “that includes you—you did not receive my call?”

Fei Long nodded slowly, realizing he had deactivated his com-links so as to focus on his budding zither play. “I desired silence,” he replied easily as he retrieved a container of water, which he handed to her.

She shot him a harsh look. “You want me to leave?” she demanded.

He shook his head, holding back a sigh. “I am glad for your presence,” he said as smoothly as he could. Then he decided it would be best to change the subject, “Do you know the assembly’s purpose?”

Lu Bu shook her head as she guzzled down nearly the entire container of water—a container which provided a whole day’s worth of hydration for Fei Long—and wiped her mouth as nearly a mouthful of water ran down her chest. Fei Long had difficulty averting his eyes as the water did so, but he thankfully managed to avoid ogling her before she met his gaze, “It is for the entire crew; that is all I know.”

“When is it scheduled?” Fei Long asked as he moved to the bench which had been installed per his specifications into the officer’s quarters. Captain Middleton had been supportive of Fei Long’s desire to construct a suitable work environment for himself, and had given him appointments which would make all but a handful of people on the Pride of Prometheus purple with jealousy.

He carefully began to stow a small pile of mechanical and electronic components which he had been tinkering with. The idea for the project had come to him during the examination of one of the droid soldiers which Lu Bu—along with Sergeant Gnuko and the late Lancer, Peleus—had dispatched during a boarding action several weeks earlier. If his experiments yielded the fruits he expected them to, he could provide the Pride of Prometheus with a potent weapon to add to its arsenal.

“Forty minutes from now,” Lu Bu replied, setting the container of water down beside the bed and moving to Fei Long’s side. “What is this…project?” she asked, picking up a micro servo and eyeing it warily.

Fei Long gently plucked the tiny apparatus from her thick, powerful fingers and gave her a significant look as he placed it into the case with the rest of the components. “I am attempting to design, and eventually produce, an,” he switched to Confederation Standard, “Autonomous, Trans-locational, Tactically-Adaptive Chassis Kilogram with Distributed, Organized, Goal-based programming.”

He couldn’t help but smirk in satisfaction, but Lu Bu shrugged her shoulders. “A big name for such a small thing,” she quipped, giving him a meaningful look.

“Hey,” he protested, nearly dropping a miniature anti-grav unit as he spun to face her, “you said you did not wish to discuss what happened in the airlock!”

She snorted derisively. “Are you embarrassed? You should be,” she said, folding her arms across her broad, muscular chest, “I have eaten sandwiches which lasted longer than you did—and I eat quickly.”

Fei Long took an angry step forward and quickly found himself nose-to-nose with the larger, more powerful, clearly unimpressed girl. He hesitated briefly before saying, “I just need practice….besides, you happen to be a very attractive woman.”

A look of anger flared over her face and she thrust her chest into his, pushing him back a step as she began to walk him across the room. “Attractive?” she snapped, her eyes flashing dangerously.

“I meant ‘beautiful’,” Fei Long corrected as he backed nearly into the workbench, “and ‘exquisite’ and ‘unique’.”

“Flowers,” she roared, “you would use those words to describe flowers. I am a warrior; I do not need to attract what I want—I take it!”

Fei Long backpedaled and tried to create as much space as possible, but Lu Bu was too agile and she easily cut off his escape route. His mind raced as he tried to come up with a proper response, and finally it came to him. “You are a warrior, of course,” he said quickly, “and warriors are often faced with superior forces, correct?”

Hot breath blasted out of her perfectly-shaped nostrils, and she narrowed her intoxicating eyes at him and pushed her forehead into his before saying, “More words? They have not yet served you well, Kongming.”

“When a warrior is faced with a superior force,” Fei Long continued, ignoring her dig at his chosen nickname and meeting her gaze, “h—she,” he corrected quickly, “must manipulate variables to her benefit, yes?”

Lu Bu’s eyes narrowed even more but she moved fractionally back. “Of course,” she spat.

“Then,” Fei Long said, taking a short breath as he realized his pulse was higher than he could ever remember it being, “being deemed ‘attractive’ is of tactical benefit. If a warrior can distract her opponents with…err…trivial things, like beauty,” he said, wincing in preparation for possible retribution, “she can then lure them into a trap where she can finish them using her martial prowess, yes?”

Lu Bu seemed to consider his words for a moment. “So…” she began slowly, still eyeing him with metaphorical fire in her eyes, “you do not compliment me merely for my appearance?”

“Of course not!” Fei Long lied with mock incredulity. “The attributes a person possesses are of far less importance than how those attributes are utilized. What good is beauty if it is not used to win a contest of some kind?”

Her expression softened briefly, but then she grabbed him by the collar of his robe and pulled him close to herself. She then planted what was easily the most passionate, powerful, uncomfortable, frightening and exhilarating kiss on his lips that he had ever experienced.

When their lips parted she shook her head severely. “You are a liar, Kongming,” she said before cracking a grin, “but at least you are good at it.”

“That is good to hear…I think,” he said with relief, not wishing to remind her of the kill pill implanted in his brain which would reward any dishonesty with instant death. He then checked the room’s wall-mounted chronometer and said in a politely suggestive tone, “We have thirty two minutes before the assembly…”

Her grin broadened. “You are also smart,” she said, grabbing and literally throwing him toward the bed, “which is why I love you.”

Chapter I: From the Top

“This crew has served with distinction, and I’m proud to have stood alongside each and every one of you,” Captain Middleton said from the mouth of the Pride’s shuttle bay, his back to the closed doors which led to the vacuum of Tracto’s space. “But we aren’t the only ones who have been through Hades in the past few months. The rest of the MSP has also suffered greatly since the Imperial withdrawal. The latest conflict, the Battle of Tracto, was a costly affair in terms of not only material assets but also human lives.”

He swept the bay with his gaze, and found every familiar face he had expected to see. He knew that this might be the last time he saw some of his brave crew, so he deliberately made eye contact with each person in sequence as he spoke.

“Admiral Montagne recognizes each of your contributions to the MSP’s charter and, more importantly, to the stability of the Spineward Sectors,” he continued, and he saw several shoulders square proudly throughout the room. “And it is because of that steadfast, exemplary service,” Middleton said, working hard not to chew on the words as they passed his lips, “that the Admiral and I have decided to impart your knowledge throughout the rest of the fleet. Effective as soon as the orders come through the pipeline, there will be a series of personnel transfers,” the chamber was filled with a chorus of murmurs, over which Middleton raised his voice commandingly above the din, “which will ensure that the rest of the fleet is as equipped to deal with the Droid menace as we have been.”

The assembled throng’s noise level diminished as they looked at Middleton with looks varying between resentment and acceptance—with even a few looks of unmitigated relief—and Middleton began to pace slowly along the deck in front of the massive pressure doors.

“Each of us,” he said, moving his hard gaze to each of his crewmembers in turn, “has overcome situations which would have sent lesser men and women screaming into the void. We have stood tall against insurmountable odds, and have lived not only to tell about it,” he paused emphatically as he continued to pace back and forth, “but to warn our fellows of the threat gathering beyond their horizon so that they might prepare to defend humanity from this virulent scourge—a scourge which would wipe out, or enslave, organic life everywhere if given its druthers. That, above all else, has been our greatest achievement.”

He stopped and squared his shoulders to the center of the group, clasping his hands behind his back as he did so and he could see looks of resolve appearing in the gathering of crew.

“And now it is our duty,” he continued in a slightly softer tone, “to assist our fellows in making the necessary preparations. You and you alone have faced these Droids and left them in your dust,” he said, fixing a rebellious-looking man with a piercing stare. The man—wearing Engineering patches—met Middleton’s gaze briefly before lowering his eyes. “And this makes each of you not only the bravest crew I’ve ever served with, but the most valuable asset the MSP has. All the ships in the fleet,” he swept his arm wide, as though encompassing half of the Tracto System, “will be worthless without the proper preparation. Our mission has given us valuable technical, and tactical, experience to impart; by transferring to the other ships in the MSP we give them the best chance, not only to survive, but to win.”

He stopped and heard a short chorus of soft snickers which were accompanied by barely-perceptible nods of approval, so he decided to seize on the moment.

“Oh, we could just ride back out there,” he said confidently as he began to pace again, “and I have no doubt that we would survive anything those upright washing machines could throw at us—after all, we’ve already recycled more than a few of them.” The room erupted in a round of tight laughter which quickly subsided, and Middleton waited until it had nearly died down before adding, “And while I can’t speak for each of you, I’ve resolved to kill, deactivate, slag, or atomize as many of those Demon-blasted things as possible. What about you?”

A chorus of approval burst from the assemblage, and Middleton nodded in approval as he kept his face a stony mask.

“Good,” he said loudly enough to be heard over the hoots, “because the best way to do that is to pack up your gear and await your transfer orders. The only way the MSP beats this synthetic horde back is if each of you teaches your new crews everything you know about taking these mechanical down hard, fast, and where they live. Do you get me?”

“We get you, sir!” the room roared, causing Middleton’s ears to ring immediately.

He ignored his temporary—at least he hoped it was temporary—deafness and nodded smartly, “Dismissed!”

The door to Middleton’s office adjoining the bridge slid shut and Lieutenant Sarkozi took her seat opposite Middleton’s, while Sergeant Gnuko sat beside her. The Lancer Sergeant was a mammoth of a man—the only men larger than he on the Pride of Prometheus were the genetically-engineered Tracto-ans.

But while Gnuko’s physical dimensions were strikingly similar to his predecessor’s, he somehow failed to live up to Middleton’s visual memory of the late Sergeant Walter Joneson.

“I’m going to keep this brief,” Middleton said as he lowered himself into his chair and leaned back, “expect each of your departments to be gutted in the coming days.”

“Sir?!” they responded in unison, their voices achieving an improbably harmony as they did so with his deep, rumbling bass and her sharp, tight soprano.

“You heard me,” he said, setting his jaw and fixing them with a withering look in turn. “Fleet Command’s in need of skilled crew and officers, and it seems we’ve a plethora of both.”

“Captain,” Sarkozi protested, leaning forward and gesticulating animatedly with her hands, “we have barely a full shift’s worth of trained bridge officers! The rest are transfers or OJT’s who never set foot on a starship before coming aboard this one.”

“I’m well aware of our human resources, XO,” Middleton said grimly. “But it seems that while our situation seems barely tenable, the Fleet’s as a whole is so understaffed that I’m amazed they keep the ships from running into each other. We have nearly five times as many green junior officers and chief petties as the rest of the fleet; I doubt even the Admiral’s Flagship has as high a density of trained,” he scoffed the word, “officers as we do. In its current state, the MSP is as far into the red zone, when it comes to combat readiness, as one could imagine a mobile military force to be.”

“What about the seniors?” Gnuko asked, leaning forward intently. “Or, at least, what passes for a senior officer on the Pride,” he added with a smirk.

Middleton nodded in silent approval of his Lancer Sergeant’s cool-headed approach to the problem. “In light of our mission’s…sensitive nature,” he said with a pointed look to each of them, eliciting knowing nods from both, “the Admiral has expressed support for my suggestion that current department heads and senior-most officers should remain aboard the Pride of Prometheus. That includes me, the two of you, Chief Garibaldi, Mr. Fei, War Leader Atticus and a handful of other essential personnel…including one of our medical officers.”

Sergeant Gnuko leaned back in his chair and exhaled slowly. “It could have been worse,” he said with a short shrug.

Middleton nodded in silent agreement as Sarkozi shot Gnuko a harsh look. “How can you say that?” she blurted. “Our mission is of the utmost importance to the security of the Spineward Sectors; we should be adding skilled personnel, not subtracting!”

“This is not a debate hall, XO,” Middleton said heavily, fixing the young woman with a hard look. She clearly wanted to protest but wisely sat back in her chair instead. “The Sergeant is right: this could have been much, much worse. Considering our…tardiness,” he said wryly, “along with the fact that we didn’t exactly come back bearing flowers and chocolates, we’re lucky to retain command of this mission. I firmly believe,” he swept his gaze between the two of them, “that the two of you have been instrumental to the creation of a command structure aboard this ship that gives us the best chance of accomplishing this mission. We need to consider ourselves fortunate if we retain the ability to perform this mission ourselves, rather than being forced to hand it off to some harebrained reservist—or worse, a Tracto-an commander.”

“I’ve read the reports of the Furious Phoenix’s mission to Capria,” Gnuko chuckled darkly. “I’ll say this for the Lady Akantha: she goes straight to the heart of the matter.”

“She assaulted the Royal Palace and then kidnapped the King!” Sarkozi blurted incredulously. “She attacked the Body Royal—literally—and then stole a battleship from orbit on her way out the door like one of us might palm a donut from the cafeteria.” She shook her head adamantly, “That woman’s insane, power-hungry, barbaric, and paints the rest of her gender in a bad light.”

“All the more reason for us to count our blessings,” Middleton said knowingly, and even Sarkozi had no rebuttal to that particular point. “See to securing all essential gear before the transfers take place, and get me an accurate,” he stressed the word, “inventory of our deployable gear ASAP. I’ve heard rumors of a secret stash the Admiral’s put away at fleet HQ, and I want to work our way to the head of the line with a workable set of requisitions. With any luck we might end up with some broadside weaponry on this old girl,” he said, and he could almost feel Sarkozi’s mouth begin to salivate from across the table.

He was cut from the same cloth as Sarkozi, as both had been Tactical Officers before attaining their current posts, so he shared her desire to shore up the Pride of Prometheus’ most glaring weaknesses—chiefly, her lack of broadside armament—as quickly as possible.

“What about our Lancers, Captain?” Gnuko asked hesitantly. “I’d just arranged rapid-response security teams out of our remaining Lancers. If we lose our Lancers…”

Middleton ground his teeth, understanding all too well what his Lancer Sergeant was implying. The Pride’s internal security was a potentially serious problem, and that problem would be magnified if Gnuko’s hand-picked loyalists were transferred to other ships. “I’ve got a few ideas on the matter,” he confessed, “but the truth is none of them negate the security gap these transfers are going to create. At least we can count on keeping most of the surviving members of the ComStat Hub strike team here,” he said, thanking Murphy for small miracles. “The Admiral wants our mission kept on the strict QT, is that clear?”

“Tri-Locsium, sir,” they replied in unison, shooting each other bemused looks after they had once again harmonized. Tri-Locsium was a theoretical material which, supposedly, would solve several micro-engineering problems. But, as yet, it had never been produced outside of a virtual simulation. Sergeant Joneson had often used the ‘Tri-Locsium’ quip in place of the standard ‘crystal’ reply, when asked if he had clearly understood his orders. In Big Walt’s mind, Tri-Locsium was perfectly transparent since it didn’t actually exist.

Apparently Middleton was not the only one who had been affected by the former Smashball star’s time aboard the Pride.

“Work up those reports,” Middleton instructed, “and be prepared for the worst.”

“I’m not packing my bags just yet, sir,” Gnuko said with a deliberate shake of his head.

Middleton chuckled softly. “Ok…maybe not the worst,” he allowed, “but be ready to re-tool every department either of you oversee in any capacity. This is going to get worse before it gets better, and I don’t want us caught with our pants down.”

“We’ll be ready, sir,” Sarkozi said confidently.

“Good,” Middleton said, gesturing to the door, “dismissed.”

The two stood and left the room, after which Middleton closed his eyes and rubbed the back of his neck. Ever since his meeting with the Admiral he’d had a headache that simply would not go away, and it didn’t look like that was going to improve any time soon.

But a headache was the least of his problems. The list of things he needed to do was longer than his arm, and he knew that it would all need addressing sooner or later. For better or worse, right at that moment he knew what he really needed to do.

So Middleton stood, straightened his uniform, and made his way to the brig.

Chapter II: A Medical Quandary

Middleton strode into the brig and nodded to Rice, a former Lancer whose injuries sustained early on in the Pride’s mission had rendered him unfit for active Lancer duty, so he had become an internal security officer who spent the majority of his time overseeing the brig.

“Captain,” Rice said, standing to snap off a shaky salute. Middleton returned the salute and looked to the cell whose occupant he had come to speak with. “She’s awake, sir,” the former Lancer said before lowering himself back down into his chair. His nerves had been damaged so extensively that his limbs visibly shook whenever he performed complex gestures—even gestures like standing and sitting—and Middleton winced at the price the man had paid to protect the citizens of the Spineward Sectors. He silently promised himself—for at least the hundredth time—not to allow that sacrifice to have been made in vain.

“Thank you, Lancer,” he said as he moved toward the door. It slid open to reveal a small cell, and inside that cell was Doctor Jo Middleton—Captain Tim Middleton’s ex-wife.

“Tim—err, Captain,” she said as she stood from her bench-like cot. The two stood in mutual silence for several moments as Middleton looked pointedly around the room.

“I ordered you to report to your new quarters,” he said evenly, dearly hoping he had not made a mistake in tacitly requesting that Doctor Middleton remain aboard the Pride of Prometheus—a request made in spite of her all but committing treason on the bridge of the warship by authoring an unauthorized communication to a droid battlecruiser located in the same system.

Jo shook her head slowly. “I can’t do that yet, Tim,” she said, “not without a further understanding between us.”

“I think we understand each other well enough, Doctor,” he said levelly. “I’d like you to report to your new quarters so you can resume your duties aboard this vessel.”

“Tim—“ she began, but the cold, hard look Captain Middleton shot her way caused her to start over, “Captain…we have to talk about our last conversation.”

Middleton bristled. “I disagree, Doctor. This vessel is at war,” he said severely, “and her Captain has neither the time, nor the desire, to indulge in an examination of personal events so distant in the past as to be rendered utterly irrelevant. What that Captain does have, however,” he continued, fighting to keep his voice from rising as he did so, “is a desire for his Chief Medical Officer to resume her duties since the person currently filling that post is about to transfer to another ship. You took an oath,” he said, stepping forward and pointing an accusing finger at her—a finger which he quickly lowered to his side. “In that oath, you said you would do no harm. I think that it’s too late for that; all we can do is move past the harm you’ve already done. Now…are you going to transfer to your quarters or should I have you escorted off this ship on the next Tracto-bound shuttle? I’ve heard it’s nothing short of breathtaking—especially where the fairer sex is concerned,” he added bitterly before turning on his heel. When he reached the door, he paused and said over his shoulder, “If you haven’t checked into your new lodgings in ten minutes, I’ll have Sergeant Gnuko escort you from the Pride and you can get to know your new neighbors. While your medical skills would be superior to theirs, I’m guessing they know more about Hippocrates.”

The door to her quarters slid open, and Lu Bu snapped up from the edge of the bed where she had been sitting and trimming her toenails. One of the many disadvantages of her genetically-engineered body was that it grew hair and fingernails far more rapidly than a regular human body did. If she did not perform basic grooming every two or three days, her fingernails and toenails would grow long enough that they would become problematic for her training garb.

Annoyed at the unexpected interruption—as well as the violation of her privacy—Lu Bu was ready to fight whoever had just breached her room’s security. But when she saw that it was Dr. Middleton she literally squealed with joy and ran toward the shorter, slenderer woman. “Doctor Middleton!” she said, grasping the other woman in a bear hug while ensuring she did not squeeze tightly enough to harm the smaller woman. “This one—I,” she corrected hastily as she withdrew from the short-lived embrace, “did not know if you would come.”

Dr. Middleton gave her a warm, yet somehow hollow, look and surveyed their quarters. Lu Bu moved excitedly toward the split beds and gestured to the one she had used since being informed of her new living arrangements. In truth, she found them to be far more comfortable than she was used to, but she had learned to make good use of the extra space by having a few exercise stations installed in the far corners of the room.

“Yours there,” she gestured to the perfectly-made bed before gesturing to the slightly less-well-made bed beside it, “mine here. We have water shower,” she continued pointing to the private head as she moved to a small bench built into the wall near the foot of Dr. Middleton’s bed, “and even private data terminal.”

When she finished showing off the appointments, she saw Dr. Middleton had a tear in her eye, and Lu Bu suddenly became anxious.

“What happens, Dr. Middleton?” Lu Bu asked warily as she set her jaw. “Who hurt you? This one will deal with,” she said, cracking her knuckles audibly.

Dr. Middleton shook her head and reached out with her arms, and Lu Bu carefully embraced the older woman. They stood there for several moments of silence before Dr. Middleton said, “I’m sorry, Bu. I wanted to come sooner, but I thought it was best if I waited a little while. I should have left the brig earlier than I did…you shouldn’t have been left alone all this time.”

Lu Bu shook her head dismissively, eyeing Dr. Middleton uncertainly as she did so. “Dr. Middleton needs time,” she said, “Lu Bu gives Dr. Middleton time. Also…Lu Bu takes care herself.” The door chimed and Lu Bu cast a sour look at it, “Wait here—I deal this.”

She went to the door and opened it, ready to verbally unload on whoever it was that had disrupted her reunion with the Doctor, but she saw Sergeant Gnuko standing outside and she immediately snapped to attention.

“Sergeant,” she said quickly, “I not expect you.”

“At ease, Lancer,” Gnuko said easily as he leaned forward just enough that he could see Dr. Middleton. He nodded as though in satisfaction at seeing her and then the Lancer Sergeant produced a large box, “I was going through Sergeant Joneson’s effects and…well, considering the possibility of a pending transfer, I thought you should get this now rather than later.”

Lu Bu’s eyes went wide as she reverently accepted the box. It was made of a durable, hardened polymer and bore the emblem of the Omega Bowl—the ultimate championship game of professional Smashball. The box was large enough to house a helmet, and she briefly forgot her commanding officer was standing in front of her. “This…for me?” she asked hesitantly, unable to believe the possibility.

Gnuko nodded. “For what it’s worth, you were second from the top on my list of essential personnel to keep aboard, Lu. Whatever happens,” he said, straightening himself and nodding deliberately, “it’s been an honor serving with you…but I’m not about to let them take you if there’s anything I can do about it.”

Lu Bu tried to salute, but found the box too cumbersome to quickly accomplish the gesture and Sergeant Gnuko waved her off from further attempt. “Thank you, Sergeant,” she said, a mixture of emotions warring within her as she was reminded of the possibility that she might have to leave the Pride of Prometheus soon.

“As you were,” he said before briefly making eye contact with Dr. Middleton, who had nearly made it to the door by that point. “Doctor Middleton…I’m glad you’re still with us.”

The Doctor nodded silently in reply and Gnuko turned to make his way down the corridor, leaving the women alone as the door swished closed.

“What is it?” Dr. Middleton asked with what sounded to Lu Bu like mild interest.

“I do not know,” Lu Bu replied honestly. She moved toward the workstation and set the box down before gently unclasping and lifting the lid. She saw an assortment of personal effects but, in an odd moment of disappointment, Lu Bu saw no Omega Bowl helmet. She had assumed the trophy case would have carried the iconic symbol of Smashball domination, but instead there were several books printed on long-lasting plastic sheets—and even one which looked to have been printed on paper.

She pulled the paperbound book up reverently and examined the cover, which had faded so badly it could barely be read and read the title aloud, “Win Forever.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” Dr. Middleton admitted, and neither had Lu Bu.

Lu Bu slowly produced the rest of the books and found a small data slate wedged between two of them—one of which was The Art of War, by Sun Tzu, a book with which Lu Bu was already partially familiar. She knew that—at least, according to her home world’s account—the tome had not been written by one person, but was instead a combined work of several equally brilliant military tacticians.

Still, the name ‘Sun Tzu’ had become synonymous with military tactics on her home world—nearly overshadowing that of Zhuge Liang—and she was eager to read a physical edition which had not been censored by the government of her home world.

She reached into the box and withdrew another pair of novels, the first of which was On War, by General Carl von Clausewitz; the other was The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli.

At the bottom of the box was a physical photograph printed on a high-grade silicate background. Lu Bu took the picture—the dimensions of which fit the interior of the box perfectly—and examined it.

There were two men featured wearing the proud colors of their team—blue, green, grey, and white—and they were holding a trophy between them amid a frozen-in-time rain of confetti composed of the same colors. But they were holding no ordinary trophy—it was the Omega Bowl itself!

One of the men was a youthful-looking Walter Joneson; the other was a massive, white-skinned man with whom Lu Bu was unfamiliar. The second man’s physique, almost impossibly, seemed to dwarf Joneson’s own in terms of muscle mass, and his neck appeared half again as wide as his head. There was no caption on the photo itself, and the reverse was blank as well. It was pristinely preserved and had a tiny number printed on the bottom left corner of the back which showed it to be one of two such printings.

“You know him?” Lu Bu pointed at the second man, and Dr. Middleton shook her head.

But it didn’t matter; Walter Joneson, even in death, had found a way to speak with her…and Lu Bu was not one to dismiss such an event as merely random chance.

She carefully replaced the items in the box—all save the photo—and then placed that box on a small table which she had already begun to use as a shrine to her departed mentor. During their brief time together he had managed to communicate more meaningfully with Lu Bu than any other person had done during her entire life, and she knew that there was still much she could—and would—learn from Walter Joneson.

Chapter III: Creative Interpretation

Middleton smirked after Sergeant Gnuko had completed outlining his plan for securing as many of the loyal Lancers as possible for the Pride of Prometheus. It was actually a good plan and, more to the point, even if it failed in its primary purpose it would at least yield a batch of more desirable candidates than they might otherwise become saddled with.

The transfer orders for the rest of the crew had already begun streaming in, and in just two days’ time over a third of the Pride’s crew had been transferred to their new assignments in the MSP.

“Not bad, Sergeant,” he said approvingly, “not bad. Are you ready to execute this…maneuver?”

“I can have my people in the shuttle in thirty minutes if you give the word, Captain,” Sergeant Gnuko replied smartly.

“Sergeant Gnuko,” Middleton said, affixing his digital signature to the proposal Gnuko had given him a few minutes earlier, “the word is given. Bid your people good hunting down there.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Sergeant Gnuko said with a lopsided grin as he activated his com-link and turned to leave the ready room. “Operation Stone Horn is ‘go;’ repeat: Operation Stone Horn is ‘go’.”

Middleton heard a chorus of chatter come back over his Lancer Sergeant’s com-link before the ready room doors closed, at which point he chuckled softly. “Good eye, Walt,” he muttered under his breath, appreciative for his friend’s astute judgment of character when it came to suggesting a successor for his post.

“But…when will you return?” Fei Long asked in their native tongue as Lu Bu grabbed several personal articles which she would need for the mission she had just told him about.

“I will not return,” she corrected with a scolding look, “you will. When the Pride of Prometheus returns to Tracto, we will embark.”

Fei Long had to admit that having a little time to himself would be a welcome change, but he was also far from pleased with the fact that he would be unable to see Lu Bu for several weeks at least.

“I have something for you,” she said, as though she had nearly forgotten. She reached into her duffle and produced a book with which he was already quite familiar: The Art of War, by Sun Tzu. It was clearly an old copy, and his brow furrowed as he accepted it.

“Where did yo—“ he began.

“No time,” she said as she zipped up her bag. “Take care of it,” she said with a hard look, and he nodded almost dismissively. He couldn’t have cared less about the book at that moment, and Lu Bu made to leave the room without another word.

“Wait!” he protested.

She sighed loudly. “What is it?”

Fei Long looked around for something that would do, and then he remembered his Zhuge Jin copy—the headwear which his favored Ancestor was known to wear—and quickly went to the closet and withdrew the article while Lu Bu tapped her foot impatiently. He proffered the hat and said, “Please…it is my favored possession.”

She eyed it dubiously. “It is a cheap imitation,” she scoffed.

He shook his head and locked gazes with her, and for a moment he saw her recoil slightly at the look in his eye. “It, and this robe, are all that remain of my childhood that I would carry with me…please, take it and keep it safe until we are reunited.”

Lu Bu nodded slowly and unzipped the bag before carefully folding the hat and placing it within. She then zipped the bag up and, after a brief hesitation, grabbed him by the collar and planted a hard kiss on his lips.

He tried to lose himself in the moment, as many meditation masters suggested one could do, but he failed spectacularly as he felt their lips part and Lu Bu awkwardly said, “Thank you.” She then turned and exited the room, leaving Fei Long to wonder precisely what it was he felt. Was it longing? Jealousy? Could it be nothing more than simple, rampant, hormonally-driven lust? Or was it something deeper…?

He shook his head, knowing that such thoughts had no place in the mind of Kongming’s inheritor, which he had long believed himself to be. He exhaled slowly, regaining control of his emotions as he did so and moved to his workbench. The components had already been assembled for his prototype, and with any luck, he would have assembled the three distinct variations of his new ‘pet’ before he was reunited with Lu Bu.

“Now,” he muttered under his breath, all thoughts of Lu Bu finally banished from his mind so he could focus on the work at hand, “say ‘arf,’ little boy.”

Lu Bu strapped into her seat on the shuttle and received a reproachful look from Sergeant Gnuko as she did so. Apparently she had been the last entrant to the shuttle, and she looked around to see that Atticus, along with the rest of the survivors of the ComStat Hub mission, were present. A few other members of the Pride’s crew were also aboard the small craft, including Haldis—the Tracto-an who had made the Red Hare armor she had worn during the Hub mission where Walter Joneson’s life had ended.

The ramp via which she had entered rose up until it locked in place, and the shuttle began to undergo its familiar pre-flight sequence. The engines thrummed and the deck beneath her feet shuddered as the craft lifted off from the deck and spun around to face the launch doors.

As the craft slowly exited the Pride of Prometheus’ shuttle bay, Lu Bu found herself absently feeling inside the duffle bag for the archaic headwear which Fei Long had given her. Despite his often infuriating inability to understand her—or to even attempt to explain himself in a reasonable fashion—she had found the previous few weeks to be the most enjoyable of her entire life. And, if she was being honest with herself, it was entirely because of her budding relationship with him.

She didn’t know where it would lead, but one thing she had learned from Walter Joneson’s example was that one could not worry overmuch about the future; if one addressed the present in a manner which is consistent with her personal code, then the future would be precisely what she made of it.

For the first time in her life, she felt a bond she had only ever read about in novels—and she dearly wanted that bond to be part in her future.

The shuttle had touched down several hours earlier, and Lu Bu had helped set up camp on the rocky, broken terrain a few clicks west of Argos Citadel. The air on Tracto was unlike anything she had ever breathed in her young life, and she drank in the pure, sweet smell as an alcoholic might sample a new spirit.

To her, the smell of Tracto’s air was one of freedom and she was nearly overcome by the intoxicating, verdant, green grass, which was irregularly broken by jutting ledges of stone. Lu Bu caught sight of Sergeant Gnuko beckoning her to approach the shuttlecraft, so she quickly made her way to him. As she approached he asked, “Are you situated?”

She nodded curtly. “The terrain defensible, there is much running water,” she gestured to a small stream splashing across the rocks not far from their location, “and primary settlement, Argos, is one hour away at walk. Our rations are secured and we have food to survive for one month.” She was getting better at speaking Confederation Standard, but at times like these she knew she was still making several errors per sentence.

“Good,” Gnuko said before leaning forward pointedly, “I’m leaving you in command of the non-Lancer recruiting drive, Lu. Make sure the assessors have freedom to perform their duties…no matter what. Is that clear, Lancer?” he asked with a hard look.

Lu Bu shot a look over to Atticus, who was strutting like a self-important peacock now that his feet had found the soil of his old home. “Tri-Locsium, Sergeant,” she said, baring her teeth briefly. She could not wait for Atticus’ inevitable intrusion on her clearly-defined authority.

“Good,” Sergeant Gnuko said with a satisfied nod. “I have to return to the Pride and make ready for our trip, and I’ve given Atticus authority over the Assault Team recruitments. That said,” he added with a wry grin, “if you see anyone interesting that slips through his thick, white, fingers, you’ve got my authorization to run your own examinations on them however you see fit. Just remember,” he added with a stern look, “we’re not here to bring each and every one of these people to the stars. The Pride has specific personnel needs which need to be addressed, and I’m counting on you to help facilitate that.”

Lu Bu shook her head hesitantly. “This one is not good in…tests,” she said with a slightly anxious glance at her Sergeant.

Gnuko clapped her on the shoulder. “You know more about them than you think,” he assured her. “But if you’re stuck and can’t figure a way out of a situation, just ask yourself one question and the answer will guide you…just like it has guided me these last few weeks.”

Silence hung between them for several seconds before she finally asked, “What question, Sergeant Gnuko?”

Gnuko drew up to his full height, turned and ascended the ramp to the shuttle as the craft’s engines powered up. He then turned and gave her a wan smile as he said, “What would Walter Joneson do?”

When those words met her ears, she realized that Sergeant Gnuko was even wiser than she had previously known. And the almost grim look on his face told her that he had been battling the very same issues she, herself, was now facing. “Understood, Sergeant,” she said, standing to attention and snapping off a salute as best she was able. Sergeant Gnuko returned the gesture and the cargo door to the shuttle raised up until it was closed, and not long after that the craft lifted slowly from the ground and began its ascent to rendezvous with the Pride of Prometheus.

When the shuttle had disappeared into the low cloud cover which seemed to permeate the entire continent of the planet, Lu Bu turned and made brief eye contact with Atticus. The look she saw in his eyes was one somewhere between grudging respect and annoyance, and she returned it with an iron-hard look of her own as she made her way to the handful of specialists who had been assigned to the mission.

“Forge Master Haldis,” she said as the middle-aged Tracto-an man drove a final piton into the ground to secure their main tent, “we must go to Argos.”

Haldis nodded as he stood to his full, impressive height—a height which somehow seemed small to Lu Bu. After spending so much time with four of the Tracto-an warriors like Atticus, who served in the Pride of Prometheus’ Lancer contingent, she somehow found a man like Haldis to be noticeably smaller. But she suspected he was only a few inches shorter, and no less broad, than most of his countrymen were.

“We should approach during morning hours,” he replied. “Our business will be better received at that time; my people prefer to set about their duties as quickly as possible. We will not find sufficient foot traffic to warrant a foray this evening.”

Lu Bu considered his words and nodded. “We go at dawn,” she said with a nod of agreement.

Haldis nodded in reply and Lu Bu continued toward the other members of the specialist team. She had read each of their names during her review of the mission brief on the ride down but had never exchanged words with any of them prior to that moment.

One was a nurse from the Pride of Prometheus’ sickbay; another was a petty officer for the gun deck; and the last was a member of the Engineering department who just happened to have some sort of background in psychology.

They were checking their gear, which had been stored in stackable, polymer crates and would allow each of them to conduct their individual examinations of the Tracto-ans.

Sergeant Gnuko had come up with a plan—a plan which Captain Middleton had endorsed within minutes of hearing it—which would take advantage of a major loophole in Tracto-an society and, potentially, provide every bit of unskilled labor the Pride of Prometheus would require for its upcoming mission.

Lu Bu sliced another glance over at the pompous Atticus, who looked as though he truly believed in his own unique perfection. He had supposedly never lost a single fight, and Lu Bu suspected he never would—for as long as he lived, anyway, which was a period likely to be determined by the first time his supreme self-confidence was shattered.

Lu Bu, like Sergeant Gnuko—and Walter Joneson before him—believed in the value of defeat as the only teacher one should never ignore regardless of the message it conveys.

And she was eager to put that belief to the test.

Chapter IV: A Demonstration

“Thank you for seeing me, Captain,” Fei Long said as he made his way into Captain Middleton’s office.

Middleton eyed the young man and suppressed a sigh as he saw a small stack of boxes, papers, data pads, and even a few tiny tools used for adjusting sensitive electronics. “Mr. Fei,” he said with a wave to the pile of material the young man placed on Middleton’s desk, “what, exactly, is all of this?”

“This,” Fei Long said with more than a hint of pride, “is my latest project. I must still refine the sensitivity of the motivators and micro-servos, but I believe I have achieved a degree or efficiency which will facilitate a demonstration you will no doubt find—“

“Mr. Fei,” Middleton held a hand up to forestall the young man’s technobabble, “please…if you’re here to demonstrate something, I’ve just got one question: is it dangerous?”

Fei Long actually seemed to consider the question—an act which did little to allay Middleton’s rising fears—before shaking his head. “The probability of harm coming to either of us during this demonstration is statistically negligible, Captain,” the young man said confidently.

“How negligible,” Middleton asked dryly before adding, “statistically?”

Again, Fei Long appeared to consider the question and shrugged his shoulders lightly, “Perhaps one in ten thousand?”

Middleton exhaled quietly and nodded. “Proceed.”

Fei Long opened the box and carefully withdrew an almost egg-shaped piece of metal with an irregular surface dotted by dozens of what seemed to be tiny emitters of some kind. “This,” he said as he set the eight inch long, egg-shaped device on the table, “is Vladimir.”

Middleton cocked an eyebrow. “Is that the extent of the demonstration?”

Fei Long shook his head as he withdrew a glove from the box—a glove which looked suspiciously like part of a VR suite—and affixed it to his hand. “Please do not be alarmed, Captain,” he said as he fiddled with the last of the clasps, “it may take me a moment to align the controls.”

A few moments passed as Fei Long adjusted the output of the glove, but eventually a small, blue, light came to life on the top of the egg-shaped device. Before Middleton could ask what that light meant, the device sprang upward several inches from the desk and, before it landed, sprouted a half dozen tiny, mechanical, spiderlike legs and turned to ‘face’ Captain Middleton.

“A pet?” Middleton asked after a few moments of consideration.

“Not just a pet, Captain,” Fei Long said knowingly, “but an attack dog. If you will permit me a temporary breach of ship’s security, I believe it would be illuminating as to the possibilities we might explore by incorporating Vladimir into various tactical scenarios.”

Middleton narrowed his eyes. “What kind of ‘breach’ are you suggesting? If this is another attempt to peep on the ladies’ showers—“

“No, no, no,” Fei Long said, going red-faced with embarrassment immediately, “I assure you it is nothing of that nature. No ship’s functions will be affected, I assure you.”

Middleton was of half a mind to deny Fei Long’s request, but he had learned a week earlier that the young man had locked himself away in his quarters day and night while working on this particular project. And if Mr. Fei believed it was worthwhile, then Middleton needed to at least hear it out—after all, raging hormones or not, Fei Long was easily the most intelligent person Tim Middleton had ever met.

“All right, Mr. Fei,” he said, before raising a finger warningly, “but consider yourself on a short leash.”

Fei Long shot him a look which was a mixture of resentment and resignation, “Of course, Captain; bear in mind, however, that the remote control mechanism I have employed will permit me to achieve this degree of control at tactical combat ranges…and possibly beyond.” He then flipped a switch on the back of the glove and the ‘Vladimir’ unit quickly scampered across Middleton’s desk until arriving at his private access console. The console activated—without the tiny, mechanical unit even touching it—and the screen began to flip through its activation sequence before coming to the login page.

“Mr. Fei—” Middleton growled, but before he could even finish the thought his private console had been activated and the entirety of his private information was on display for everyone to see—which, in this case, meant himself and, if it had eyes, the egg-shaped, spiderlike automaton.

“One more demonstration, Captain,” Fei Long said and the spider scampered to the edge of the table before launching itself with surprising power into the far wall some fifteen feet away.

When it landed, its needle-sharp legs dug into the metal of the bulkhead and a small cutting laser began to slice into the wall, producing a tiny cloud of acrid smoke as it did so.

“Turn it off!” Middleton bellowed as he leapt to his feet and, almost surprisingly, Fei Long complied and the unit deactivated immediately. “Just what the blue blazes kind of havoc are you trying to wreak here?!”

Fei Long turned, slipped the glove from his hand, and met Middleton’s gaze with a cold, calculating one of his own and said, “I have just hacked this ship’s most sensitive systems in less than three seconds, remotely, via Vladimir.” He gestured to the egg-shaped, spider-legged machine, which was still ‘standing’ on the wall before looking back at Middleton before going silent for several seconds.

During that time, the Captain was processing just how ‘Vladimir’ might be used, and his mind raced with the possible applications.

“Captain, I understand all too well the extraordinary nature of the request I am about to make,” Fei Long continued, “but if I was given access to the DI architecture diagrams for any hostile vessels we are likely to encounter—the SR class of Corvettes, for example—then I have every confidence I would be capable of wreaking precisely this kind of…” his lips twisted slightly, “havoc on our enemies. All I would then require is a delivery device which could intercept a warship in a fight, punch through its shields, and deliver the units into the enemy vessel.”

Middleton pressed his knuckles against the top of the desk and resisted the urge to shake his head in resignation. “Mr. Fei…how many of these things do you have?”

Fei Long virtually deflated before Middleton’s eyes, “I fear I have only constructed three, and the other two are not yet functional…but I believe I could craft nearly thirty of them in the coming weeks, should I be granted access to the proper materials and equipment.”

“What kind of materials are you talking about?” Middleton asked warily. He had visions of Fei Long dismantling droids and repurposing their constituent parts for this plan, and for a moment he was reminded of a mad scientist he had seen once in a holo-vid.

“I assure you, Captain,” Fei Long said, gritting his teeth briefly, “I have not deconstructed the droid cores for this purpose. However,” he admitted after a moment’s pause, “several of their units were destroyed beyond repair and I was able to salvage enough of the micro-transceivers from their chassis’ before they were disposed of. The transceivers are composed primarily of rare elements like…the names of which are unimportant,” he said, correctly identifying Middleton’s diminishing patience and hurrying his speech. “But their replication is beyond our ability to replicate—at least on short notice and without a proper workshop. I currently have thirty eight such transceivers in total, but I anticipate only three fourths of those being usable in this application.”

Middleton considered the matter before shaking his head. “You’ve been on the Pride for months; you could have hacked my passwords or placed a virus in the system which was dormant until you activated it. How do I know this isn’t all some elaborate ruse designed to make me sign off on this project?”

“I assure you, Captain,” Fei Long said indignantly, “I have done nothing of the kind. I merely availed myself of the DI infrastructure schematics for this vessel’s class and then wrote a security cracking algorithm which I installed in Vladimir’s operational firmware, and this algorithm is specific to a Hammerhead’s DI. Most vessels—especially military vessels,” he added with a knowing look, “maintain absolute discretion between the systems of the ship and any outside communication sources, thereby preventing subversion of key systems from outside the vessel. But,” he said with a hint of pride, “a DI is vulnerable to such an attack from within, and would be unable to stop a program of this variety from causing, as you say, short-lived havoc on their internal systems. The DI would eventually counteract such an intrusion, but by using these attack dogs we might manage to even the odds during a crucial moment.”

Ignoring the ‘attack dog’ line, Middleton nodded slowly as he swept up the data slate Fei Long had brought with him. “Does this contain all of the relevant data?” he asked.

Fei Long nodded confidently. “Everything is there, including several possible applications and alternate configurations which might provide for maximum efficacy when deployed within specific mission parameters. This,” he gestured to the spider-legged drone, “is merely one such configuration.”

“Then I’ll keep this,” he said, sliding the data slate to one side of his table before waving an arm at the rest of the materials Fei Long had brought, “and you can take…the rest of this back to your quarters.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Fei Long said with a gracious nod as he began to collect the items from the table. When he had finished, he turned and made for the door.

“Mr. Fei,” Middleton called out pointedly, and when the young man turned to make eye contact, the Captain pointed to the mechanical ‘creature’ still attached to the far wall.

Fei Long flushed briefly before making his way over and, using only one hand, carefully removing the remote device from the wall and then making a hasty egress of Middleton’s office.

With the young genius gone, Middleton sank into his chair and began to peruse Fei Long’s notes. Amazingly, while the young man had become increasingly scatter-brained in recent weeks, his writing was as clear as a person could ask for. After just twenty minutes, Captain Middleton had scanned the contents and concluded that this little project of Fei Long’s would warrant further review…as well as support.

Chapter V: A Gambit at Gambit

“I’m sorry,” the station manager repeated as Middleton, accompanied by Chief Engineer Garibaldi, attempted to negotiate on the Pride of Prometheus’ behalf, “there simply isn’t enough time to satisfy this request list.”

“C’mon,” Garibaldi said irritably, “we all know there’s a little slop around the edges. All we’re askin’ for is a few extra hours in the cradle and a replacement of the Pride’s basic weaponry—you know, the stuff the Imps ripped off her when they tucked their tails and ran home.”

The manager—a woman named Glenda Baldwin—nodded irritably, “I am well aware of that, Chief Garibaldi, but in case you haven’t noticed we simply do not have enough yard time to devote to such an extensive refit.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,” Garibaldi said, smirking as he gesticulated emphatically, “we’re not asking for a refit; the old girl just needs a little extra time to let the paint dry, that’s all.”

Baldwin cocked an eyebrow and looked pointedly at the requisitions list. “You’ve submitted a request for the installation of eight light lasers and four short-ranged plasma cannons along your broadsides; an overhaul of your secondary power grid; and a completely new sensor suite to be installed parallel to the current one. I hardly think that qualifies as ‘letting the paint dry’,” she said in an appropriately dry tone.

“These modifications aren’t expensive; you’ve got the materials out in your bone yard,” Middleton cut in, waving the data slate the Gambit engineers had provided, which included the tallied wreckage of several vessels deemed too badly damaged to warrant any kind of refit. “We can salvage the gear with our own teams,” he continued, “but we’re going to need the extra yard time—“

“Which I can’t give you,” Baldwin cut him off adamantly. “There’s a whole fleet out there, and while your ship is second in line—behind only the Admiral’s—I’ve got to see each and every one of the others in turn. Four days is the most I could give you, and I’m tying myself in knots at that! I’ll probably be unable to swap out a leaky fusion reactor on the Silent Strike; I shouldn’t have to tell either of you the dangers of excessive radiation exposure—to say nothing of an unreliable power plant which may or may not keep up under a combat load—which is precisely what the crew of the Silent Strike will get if we experience so much as a three hour hiccup in our schedule here. There is no more room, gentlemen.”

“Bah,” Garibaldi scoffed, waving his hands angrily as he began to stomp off.

But Middleton thought about what she was saying and a plan came to him. “Manager Baldwin,” he said, referring to her by the title ‘Construction Manager’ which appeared next to her name on the forms he had been reviewing.

“Oh, for the love of all that’s holy,” she snapped, “I’ve been conscripted into military service; I’m a Lieutenant now.”

“Lieutenant, then,” Middleton said agreeably, “it sounds like you’re short on time…” He let the words linger for several seconds before continuing, “How long will the radiation purge of the Pride’s primary hull take?”

Baldwin rolled her eyes. “That’s the lengthiest part of the whole op,” she replied in a patronizing tone as she rubbed her eyes wearily, “if all goes according to schedule, we’re looking at another fifty two hours to complete the job.”

Middleton nodded slowly, “And, stop me if I’m wrong, but it seems the limiting factor here isn’t one of resources so much as it is available cradle time, is that also correct?”

Baldwin’s eyes narrowed. “If you’re wasting what little time I’ve got—“

Middleton shook his head and Chief Garibaldi turned around to listen in on the conversation. “That’s the exact opposite of my intention, Lieutenant,” Middleton assured her. “How about this…” he tapped out a few revisions to his requisition form—most of which were deletions of previous requests—and handed it to her, “might this ease your logistical burdens a bit while providing my people with the resources they’ll need to do the rest of the job later?”

“Later?” Garibaldi interrupted. “Tim, what are you—“

Middleton held up a hand haltingly and, thankfully, his Chief Engineer stopped mid-sentence. Lieutenant Baldwin accepted the data slate with a skeptical look on her face and began perusing its contents. Her stern, scowling expression softened as she went through the list, and her eyebrows actually lifted in surprised before reaching the end of the list, when much of her former scowl returned.

“I can agree to all of this, on the condition you return the last items before leaving the system,” she said, and Middleton shook his head adamantly.

“I can’t do that,” he said with a piercing look, “what I’m offering you is a chance to take a huge load off your crew and your equipment, but the final items on that list are what I need in exchange for that relief. If you can permanently transfer those materials to the Pride’s inventory, I can cut our time in your cradle by half. That should ensure that all essential repairs get done to ships like the Silent Strike, and all it costs you is equipment you’ll be able to reproduce here after the Fleet’s out of your hair.”

Garibaldi snatched the data slate from Baldwin’s hands and skipped to the end of the document while Lieutenant Baldwin chewed on her cheek thoughtfully. The Pride of Prometheus’ Chief Engineer sighed but nodded grudgingly before handing the slate back to the older woman. “We can make that work,” he said with a withering look at his Captain, which was all Middleton could have hoped for from his fastidious Chief Engineer.

“All right,” Lieutenant Baldwin said with a decisive nod. “I think we can part with the things you’re looking for…we might even have some Hydra-specific components lying around. I’ll send a yard monkey out to get a full list before end of the shift and you can see if there’s anything on it you can use.”

“It’s a ‘Hammerhead’,” Middleton corrected with a wry look to his Chief Engineer, who snorted and rolled his eyes, “not a ‘Hydra,’ Lieutenant Baldwin.”

Baldwin threw her hands into the air. “It’s always politics with you people,” she muttered before affixing her digital signature to the work order and transfer requests. “Oh, why do I even bother?” With that, she turned and made her way down the corridor, leaving the two Pride officers in her wake.

Before she turned the corner Garibaldi commented under his breath, “For an older woman, she sure can rock a tool belt…”

“You said it,” Middleton smirked as she left their view around the corner, “not me.”

“But Captain,” Garibaldi said warningly as he turned to Middleton, “I don’t think we can get all of this done even with the extra resources you just managed to pluck from this place’s stores.”

“We can get it done,” Middleton said confidently as he turned and made his way to a nearby viewing port. The Pride of Prometheus was just visible in a geostationary position relative to the station inside which they stood, and he looked out at the aged vessel with a pang of regret.

“I’m tellin’ you, Captain,” Garibaldi said with certainty as he joined the Captain at the port, “there is no way, even with the entire crew running triple shifts, that we can get that much gear salvaged, checked out, and installed in less than a month of nonstop work.”

“But you can salvage and collect it all?” Middleton asked pointedly.

A look of realization crossed Garibaldi’s features and he sighed. “Yeah, we can get it into the ship…assuming I can find the space for it,” he muttered.

“Then do it,” Middleton said with a sharp nod, “we’ll make the installations along the way…why do you think I asked for the extra gear?”

Garibaldi snickered, “I usually love it when a plan comes together. I’m just not sure I’m a huge fan of your plans.”

“Noted,” Middleton said with a slow nod as he considered the workload he had just saddled his engineering team with, “but think on the bright side.”

“Yeah,” Garibaldi arched an eyebrow, “what’s that?”

The Captain shrugged lightly, “This will give our new recruits an opportunity to learn about our tech in a decidedly ‘hands-on’ setting between jumps.”

The Pride’s Chief Engineer groaned before asking rhetorically, “It’s never easy with you, is it?”

Middleton snorted. “It’s not me, Mikey; it’s the universe,” he said heavily before turning to the Chief. “Let me know your work crews’ schedules and I’ll see what else I can do here.”

“Will do, Captain,” Chief Garibaldi replied.

Chapter VI: A Wizard’s Duel

Fei Long checked his data slate for Gambit Station’s internal layout when he came to stand before the very door he had wanted to find.

He opened the door by inputting his ship’s code into the panel and a large room was revealed beyond with materials stacked from floor to ceiling. There were what looked to be outdated power couplings; crude, iron mounting pins for the telescopic boom lifts used in the shipyards; and a pile of outdated power armor not much older than the units employed by the Pride of Prometheus’ Lancer contingent.

But, tucked away in the far corner and barely visible from the doorway, was the very thing which Fei Long had come to examine: an antique, Stotch Bseries grav-cart manufactured under the General Deseret consortium at least a hundred years earlier. G.D. had gone under when several of their appliances had, inexplicably, overheated and subsequently caused a cascade failure of an entire colonial population. The colony had exclusively purchased G.D. appliances as part of an advertising blitz by the consortium, which had hoped to showcase its supposedly superior line of product.

Needless to say, despite the facts of the matter remaining somewhat vague, G.D. never recovered from the disaster on Meridiem Parcum—the name of the colony—and was later rolled into the Cornwallis-Raubach conglomerate. The merger took place several decades after the debacle when G.D.’s stock value had plummeted so low that they were bought outright for less than one half of one percent of their peak value.

But those grav-carts had possessed extraordinarily advanced anti-grav motivators, and Fei Long suspected he could incorporate one of those units for his ATTACK DOGs. Having the arachnoid version provided for nearly 85% of tactical scenarios he had projected, but adding a hover-capable unit to the arsenal would push that number to 99.5%.

Unfortunately, the grav-carts were in short supply and he had come to this particular storage room in the desperate hope that he might find one. Fei Long breathed a sigh of relief as he set off for the far side of the room, checking his tool belt as he did so. He had not brought heavy tools for the job, since he primarily wished to examine one of the grav-cart’s anti-gravity motivators. He had brought only those tools he would require for the job—seven in all—and sat down cross-legged in front of the cart as he set out to begin the task of removing the motivator’s housing.

Just then the door to the chamber opened and Fei Long turned to see a pair of people walk in. The first was a fairly nondescript worker wearing a grease-stained jumpsuit, but the other could have been none save Lieutenant Commander Terence Spalding himself.

“We keep a supply of ‘em in here,” Spalding said in his strangely-accented voice, which to Fei Long’s ears seemed to borrow from a handful of disparate linguistic origins—origins he was only familiar with via smuggled holo-vids he had watched as a child. “Ah, here we are,” Commander Spalding said—whose body was nearly half as much metal as machine, as far as Fei Long could tell—as he opened a nearby crate and produced what looked to be a mid-sized power isolator like what powered the Pride of Prometheus’ secondary computer core, “that should get ye back up and runnin’.”

“Thank you, sir,” the other man replied and turned to leave the room. Spalding made to follow, but Fei Long could not pass up the opportunity to pay his respects to one of the Multi-Sector Patrol Fleet’s living legends. He stood quickly and rushed to the door as Spalding began to clomp with his droid-like legs in pursuit of the crewman.

“Lieutenant Commander Spalding,” Fei Long called out as he approached, causing the elderly Engineer to turn and cock an eyebrow in what looked to be confusion.

“Eh?” he asked, giving Fei Long an appraising look with his pair of eyes—one of which appeared normal, while the other was a reticular implant the likes of which Fei Long had never seen. It was clear that the external aperture could be removed in order to perform maintenance, and the area around the old Engineer’s bionic eye was a plate of metal which conformed to the shape of his skull. “I didn’t see you there,” the old man muttered, “what do you want? And how’d you get in here?”

Fei Long clasped his hands and bowed his head in deference. “Forgive me, Master Engineer,” he said respectfully, “I serve aboard the Pride of Prometheus and came here to retrieve some components I might need.”

“Serve?” Spalding repeated dubiously, giving Fei Long a critical look. “Judgin’ by yer thin whiskers, I’d put you at fourteen. The MSP doesn’t condone child labor,” he said with certainty before a conflicted look crossed his stern, cyborg features, “although…we seem to have set a precedent regarding war slaves, so the legal landscape regarding human resources might have changed a wee bit…” He continued to mutter unintelligibly for several seconds as his gaze drifted to a nearby pile of power couplers.

Fei Long waited for a respectful interval before saying, “I am sixteen.”

“What?” Spalding asked, broken from whatever silent reverie had momentarily enthralled him.

“I am sixteen,” Fei Long repeated respectfully with a slight bow of his head, “not fourteen; on my planet military service is permitted at my age.”

“Ah,” the elderly Engineer replied simply. The two stood there in silence for several seconds before Spalding pressed, “And?”

Fei Long was briefly confused, but then remembered the train of their conversation prior to the elderly Engineer’s odd, tangential direction in the conversation. “I have a project—“

“Right,” Spalding interrupted, “how is she?”

Fei Long blinked. “She?” he repeated warily.

“The old girl,” the Engineer said, as though it was obvious to any involved.

Fei Long grappled with the question for several seconds before clasping his hands again, “I fear I do not understand the question.”

“Bah,” Spalding threw his hands in the air, “kids these days. No hope, I tell you—no hope at all. The ship,” he emphasized, “how is the Pride of Prometheus?”

“Ah,” Fei Long said, relieved to understand the nature of the query, “it—she—is a fine vessel. We have met difficult odds at several junctures and each time the Pride of Prometheus has proven itself worthy of such a lofty name.”

“Lofty?” Spalding scoffed. “If you want lofty, you should check the rolls of the Caprian SDF; near all the names listed will put the ‘Pride of Prometheus’ to shame, but there’s one whose name—whatever the moment might make it be—stands proud above the rest.”

Fei Long was, again, confused but this time he recalled the vessel on which Spalding’s record listed as his primary posting for nearly all—or, quite possible, the entirety—of his career.

“The Lucky Clover,” he concluded, uncertain that such a name actually rose above that of his own vessel, but Fei Long’s people placed great value on the wisdom of the Ancestors. And while there was likely no genetic connection between himself and Spalding, Fei Long placed far greater emphasis on ideological or intellectual legacy than he did on a genetic one. Also, according to his record, Terence Spalding was one of the few people to whom Fei Long should primarily listen rather than speak.

“Aye,” Spalding said, and his organic eye began to mist before a tear rolled down his cheek, “it’s a cryin’ shame, I tell ya. But every girl has her day,” he sighed.

Fei Long was well and truly lost at that point, but he decided to show deference while attempting to move past the apparently emotional issue. “I was hoping I might receive your wisdom on a matter,” he said as he gestured toward the grav-cart.

“Wisdom?” Spalding repeated, squinting at the younger man. “If that’s a crack at me age…” he trailed off pointedly.

“No,” Fei Long recoiled in genuine alarm, “I meant no disrespect, Commander Spalding. My people have a saying: to receive wise advice is preferable to reading books for ten years.”

Spalding harrumphed, but took a step toward the back of the fully-stocked supply room. “What were ye hoping to monkey with here, then?”

Fei Long was unfamiliar with the other man’s chosen vernacular, but he chose to take it in the best possible fashion as he gestured to the grav-cart. “I wish to extract and examine one of this unit’s anti-grav motivators,” he explained. “I believe its architecture will permit me to disassemble the base components and repurpose them into a dozen smaller units.”

“What would you want with smaller units?” Spalding asked with a furrowed brow.

“I have a…project,” Fei Long said, hesitant to reveal the nature of his project even to such a high-ranking member of the MSP, “which requires several smaller units. To my knowledge, the Stotch Bseries grav-cart is the only one with motivators which has separate coils and plates. The rest of the grav-carts, like those on the Pride of Prometheus, are mass-production models with a single unit.”

“Aye,” Spalding sighed, “they don’t make ‘em like they used to. T’was a time, me boyo, when a man could take a piece of equipment apart and put it back together without sending it to a Demon-blasted service center.”

Now it was Fei Long’s turn to furrow his brow, “But manufacturing costs decrease significantly with the standardization of components. One of the newer grav-carts costs only two thirds that of the older units.”

“’Costs’ he says,” Spalding scoffed as he wagged a finger in Fei Long’s face, “lad, the purchase price of a thing is only a small fraction of what you should be hoping it ‘costs’ you over the course of its life. Once ye factor in the ten, twenty and—crazy as it might sound to a whipper-snapper like yerself—the fifty year operating values, ye see a clear advantage for the ‘older’ style of construction.”

This was actually a facet of consumer purchasing which Fei Long had never applied to industrial equipment, but now that the old man mentioned it there seemed to be the ring of truth to his words. Fei Long clasped his hands before himself, “You are indeed wise, Commander Spalding.”

“Get yer tongue out of me exhaust port,” Spalding snapped before sighing, “I suppose ye’ll be needing some tools.” He began to clomp his way over to a nearby toolbox while muttering, “Kids these days…naught but a wasted generation.”

“I brought tools,” Fei Long assured him as he reached for the small, roll-up kit he had assembled.

“Now, now, lad,” Spalding said in a terse voice, “I’ll be havin’ no multi-tools in this, or any other, shop. It pays to—“ he cut off his clearly well-rehearsed lecture when his eyes locked onto the roll-up kit Fei Long placed on the ground beside the grav-cart. “Well…maybe not a completely wasted generation,” Spalding grumped as he pointed to the miniature torque wrench Fei Long had brought, “ye’ll need a Mark Three; the Mark Fours are little better than a multi-tool at the ranges you want.”

Fei Long’s brows rose in confusion. “I have never experienced an issue with the Mark Four,” he said respectfully.

“Trust me, lad,” Spalding said as he approached the toolbox and threw open the lid, “the Mark Three is the best micro-torque wrench ever produced in the Spine. They sold this model for over thirty years without changing so much as the anodizing process, but then some greasy-haired kid went and redesigned the whole thing. You know the ridiculous part?” he said as he fished a Mark Three micro-torque wrench from the toolbox. Before Fei Long could reply, the old man began to clomp his way over to the cart, “He designed the blasted housing out of a ferrous compound. A ferrous compound,” he repeated incredulously, “so what happens when ye’re in the vicinity of, say, a rail gun?” The old man shook his head adamantly as he slapped the Mark Three into Fei Long’s hand, “Six men lost their fingers to those abominations working warships during live fire exercises. So they scrapped the entire line and shipped off the remaining units to some Murphy-forsaken world out on the Rim somewhere in order to cover up the debacle.”

Fei Long, while having no real love for the world of his birth, actually took offense to Spalding characterizing that world as ‘some Murphy-forsaken world out on the Rim.’ Shèhuì Héxié (the Confederation Standard translation for which was ‘Social Harmony’) was a Core World in Sector 24. Its population rivaled that of the largest Core Worlds in Sector 25 and eclipsed all but those in terms of economic output and standard of living.

“My birth world is located in Sector 24,” Fei Long said evenly, as he set about the task of removing the motivator’s housing, “we are not ‘out on the Rim somewhere’.”

“What?” Spalding asked, a blank look on his face as he did so before waving his hands dismissively. “The important thing isn’t where they went, but that they’re not allowed aboard a ship-of-the-line. Tell me more about this project of yers,” he urged, kneeling down as Fei Long removed the exposed motivator’s outer housing.

Fei Long bit his lip briefly before deciding it could do no harm to let the other man know, in broad terms, what he was attempting. The truth was he had run into several engineering hurdles which he had not expected to encounter, and while Chief Garibaldi was an impressively efficient repairman and operator of existing equipment, he did not have a…robust creative streak.

“I am attempting to design autonomous, remotely-directed devices to assist in varied mission parameters,” he replied, hoping to keep things as vague as possible.

“You’re building war drones?” Spalding asked with a hint of appreciation which threw the younger man out of his composure briefly. “Bah, every attempt to go that route winds up runnin’ into the same blasted problem: interference.” He shook his cyborg head severely, “No one’s managed to design a transceiver capable of operating in tactical situations—it’s a fool’s hope, lad. Commendable, but a fool’s hope just the same. Even the Sundered need to keep their command ships in short range—and their equipment is far from legally-sanctioned, if ye catch my drift,” he said, laying a finger aside his nose.

Fei Long nodded as he began to disconnect the power source of the motivator, to ensure no damage would befall the delicate connections between the series-linked anti-grav plates. “I believe I may have solved that particular dilemma,” he said, still impressed at how quickly Spalding had deduced the nature of his mission.

Spalding threw his hands in the air. “You young people,” he said in exasperation, “always lookin’ to reinvent a perfectly good wheel. Why, in just this room alone,” he waved his arm to encompass the neatly stacked piles of outdated equipment, “there are a thousand different pieces of forgotten, ‘derelict,’ technology just waiting for a creative mind to come along and put them to work. You mark my words, boyo,” he said with a piercing look, “humanity’s got to learn to balance its priorities to include a healthy respect for the past, or before you know it we’ll all be marching to the tune of a cost-benefit ratio.”

Fei Long was starting to get irked by the elderly man’s superior attitude, so he decided it was time to take him down a notch. “If the past is, as you say, so valuable,” he began evenly, keeping his tone as respectful as he could but failing worse than he would have liked, “then how may it help in establishing handshake protocols between remotely linked units operating on a distributed, Heisenberg architecture, multi-transceiver system?”

Spalding’s brow furrowed for several seconds before his eyes narrowed, and Fei Long thought he had pushed it too far when the older man took a menacing step forward, “Boy…you’ve got no business messin’ with Heisenberg architecture unsupervised.”

Fei Long jutted his chin out defiantly. “I did not adopt an existing system,” he retorted evenly, “I created my own, fractal, version of a true Heisenberg and have placed it in a distributed architecture. There is no risk of runaway data procession, and it solves the issue of latency to the fourth decimal.”

“The fourth decimal,” Spalding blurted, “ye want to live as an AI slave, is that it?!”

“The fractal nature makes the data environment hostile to artificial intelligence,” Fei Long retorted more defensively than he had thought he would, but he kept his determination not to back down—even in the face of the half-man, half-machine standing before him.

Spalding seemed to consider this for a moment before shrugging. “Well…I suppose it might, at that,” he admitted before sighing, and Fei Long folded his arms across his chest triumphantly. Then the old man turned and began to clomp across the room toward the door. When he reached the door he called over his shoulder, “The grav cart’s main processor will do the job just fine.” Then he unexpectedly grasped a smaller grav-cart’s handle and moved it back in Fei Long’s direction.

“Excuse me?” Fei Long asked, nearly convinced the other man was either insane or senile—or both.

“You want to solve a fractal Heisenberg in real-time?” Spalding repeated irritably before jutting his chin toward the grav-cart which Fei Long had already begun to disassemble. “That cart’s main processor will do the trick—but I’ll not let ye leave this room until after we’ve disconnected its secondary and tertiary caches.” The smaller, newer, grav-cart came to a stop just in front of Fei Long and the old Engineer loudly made his way to the side of the Stotch Bseries unit. He began unstacking several crates which had been placed atop the Stotch B and, as he did so, he confided, “Not many know this…but the Stotch B was partly responsible for the desalination catastrophe on Praxis IV…awful uppity, these ones.”

Fei Long was growing impatient, but he was also somewhat intrigued. This was not because he had ever heard of Praxis IV, but because for some reason Commander Spalding seemed to believe that a grav-cart could actually help him solve a fractal Heisenberg—a digital information architecture which was, mostly, just a theoretical construct since it was considered hazardous due to its similarities to a true Heisenberg architecture.

Without asking permission, Commander Spalding reached down and plucked a pair of Fei Long’s meticulously maintained instruments from his neatly arranged toolkit and promptly placed one between his teeth while using the other to pop open the grav-cart’s control housing. “Now,” he said, his teeth still clamped on the tool, “what ye need to remember is that the processor itself is harmless. But if ye put it in touch with its secondary or tertiary caches…bad things can happen. Why, this very unit once went droid about…oh…two years ago?” he said as he stopped to scratch his head. “Needed a total wipe, it did…cheeky thing actually mocked my Droid accent. The nerve!” he spat before going back to work. A few seconds later he swapped the tool in his hand with the one in his mouth and shortly thereafter, he handed Fei Long what looked to be the secondary cache’s main assembly. Not long after that, the old man did the same with the tertiary cache.

“You…speak Droid?” Fei Long asked, unsure if he should be impressed or trying to find a way to the nearest security terminal to request an armed guard. The aged Engineer was at least as much machine as man, and if he was actually professing to speak Droid?!

“Not fluently,” Spalding hastened to assure him, “but I can keep most of the blips and beeps straight enough to get a rough message across. Help me transfer this cart over,” he said, and while Fei Long was less than Herculean physically, he did manage to assist in loading the older grav-cart onto the newer one.

When they were done doing so, Spalding handed Fei Long back his tools and grumped, “Good luck with yer project.” He then turned and left the small shop.

Fei Long thought he heard him muttering something about ‘green horns’ as the doors closed behind him, which made no sense to him whatsoever.

Chapter VII: Testing a Theory

“Next,” the short, young man from Engineering said, and Lu Bu folded her arms impatiently as she oversaw the procession of the one hundredth person to come through the examination tent.

The next applicant was a large, burly-looking woman who caught Lu Bu’s attention immediately. She had jet-black hair; a strong, round face; and stood at least as tall as any Tracto-an man Lu Bu had seen—outside of Atticus, that is. In fact, this woman appeared to be the near physical equal of the late Walter Joneson, a fact that intrigued the younger woman. Lu Bu had all but given up hope regarding uncovering an acceptable candidate for her own quota.

“What is your name?” the young man—whose name was Jake Smith—asked as he prepared to populate the application form. He was speaking in Tracto-an, since he was one of the few members of the crew who had a knack for linguistics. Lu Bu had heard these particular phrases enough times that she, herself, could repeat them with at least as much proficiency as she could do for Confederation Standard.

“Bernice,” the woman said, and Lu Bu looked at the massive woman’s left arm and saw that it was an atrophied ruination of its healthy, well-muscled opposite.

“Where do you hold lands?” Smith asked patiently, again speaking in Tracto-an.

“I,” Bernice said, using Confederation Standard in a truncated, deliberate fashion, “do not…make lands.”

Lu Bu cocked an eyebrow. “You speak Standard?” she asked appreciatively. Bernice was only the sixth person to display anything resembling proficiency with Confederation Standard, so Lu Bu was naturally intrigued.

The larger woman gave her an appraising look before nodding curtly. “I speak small Standard,” she emphasized the word, “but not have practice much.”

“Do you mean to say, then,” Engineer Smith interrupted easily in Confederation Standard, “that you do not own lands?”

Bernice nodded quickly, “Yes.”

“But,” Lu Bu said in confusion, “I think all women of Tracto owned lands?”

The mammoth of a woman shook her head. “I…” she seemed to struggle to find the correct word, “not line with fate of mothers.”

Lu Bu scrunched her forehead in further confusion, but Engineer Smith stepped in confidently, “You mean you didn’t abide by your Matriarch’s wishes…you were ostracized? Err,” he said, fishing around for a word of his own for several seconds, “you were removed from your family line?”

Bernice nodded in apparently equal measures of relief and shame—she was likely relieved that her information had been accurately conveyed, but she was still shamed at her social status.

“And your injury,” Smith pressed, gesturing to her arm, “how was it sustained?”

Bernice furrowed her brow and Lu Bu stepped forward. “How is your arm hurt?” she pointed at the ruined, permanently contracted limb.

The massive woman’s chest stuck out proudly, and Lu Bu was instantly envious of the other woman’s physique. She had pectoralis muscles which would likely grant her as much raw strength as Lu Bu’s artificially-designed, more compact musculature could generate. Her bone structure was clearly heavy, but she moved with surprising agility and held her posture perfectly. “I lose arm in Sky Demon God battle, fighting with Lady Adonia Zosime’s side.”

“Battle wound,” Smith nodded knowingly as he held up his own, mechanical right arm, which had been replaced shortly after the Pride’s battle with invading droids—a battle which had cost Chief Engineer Garibaldi his leg, which had likewise been replaced with a mechanical prosthetic.

Lu Bu nodded and clapped the larger woman on her upper, right, arm. “You are warrior?” she asked, looking up into the other woman’s eyes.

Bernice nodded proudly. “No man breaks me,” she said pointedly, and Lu Bu decided it was unimportant to press her on the precise meaning of her words. Suffice to say, it was clear that any man who thought they could coerce Bernice into submission or compliance on any matter would have bit off more than he could chew. “Only Sky Demons break arm,” she said bitterly as her eyes landed and lingered on Smith’s prosthetic arm.

Lu Bu felt a flare of something warm and anticipatory deep within herself and she turned to Smith pointedly, “Bernice is Candidate One for this one’s quota.”

Smith nodded agreeably and gestured to a nearby station before switching back to Tracto-an and saying, “Please step over there for a medical examination.”

Bernice’s eyes widened and Lu Bu grinned, tilting her head toward the medical station. “I would fight with you, Bernice,” she said with feeling, “but first, let nurse examine you.”

Bernice nodded graciously and clasped her hand over her chest before making her way to the medical station.

Finally, Lu Bu thought to herself with satisfaction, my first recruit.

The days came and went, with the routine consisting of nearly nine hours of continuous examinations. Atticus held his own ‘tryouts’ on the far side of the small encampment, and Lu Bu wandered out to observe his predictable methodology from time to time.

He arranged his applicants in lines and then, with what seemed to be a far-from-random method, pitted the largest, strongest, and clearly most battle-tested warriors against the smaller, less-practiced counterparts. Predictably, there were few upsets to Atticus’ ‘favorites,’ each of which eventually took his place within Atticus’ portion of the encampment.

It seemed that Atticus’ idea was to pit the strongest against the rest in order to prove which attributes were most successful, and indeed, Lu Bu found difficulty arguing against the idea behind his method. After a full day of physical exercises, weapons demonstrations—including blaster rifles fired at flung objects—and one-on-one combat between applicants continued, until only one man stood victorious above the others.

During the four days which they had been there, Atticus had already accepted six warriors into the Pride’s Lancer contingent under his direct authority. Several ‘failed’ applicants would return the following day to try their hand once again but inevitably a larger, more fearsome warrior would outshine them yet again.

It was on the third such attempt by one man—a man who had caught Lu Bu’s eye on his first day of tryouts—that she paid special attention to the outcome of the day’s events as the sun began to set.

The man’s left eye was already swollen shut, and his opponent towered nearly a head above him and seemed half again as broad. But the smaller, relentless man spun his wooden sword over in his hand as he checked his shield’s position and straps for weakness as the larger man rolled his head around laconically. Lu Bu felt a surge of anger at the larger man’s apparent lack of concern; the smaller man was not his physical match in any measurable dimension, but there was something present in him which warranted careful observation.

“Arrogance,” Lu Bu spat under her breath as she shook her head derisively.

Atticus made his way between the warriors. “The final contestants are Quintus, son of Tacitus,” his voice boomed across the rocky hillside as he gestured to the larger man before turning to face the smaller man, “and Cassius. The match is to three falls.” He held his hand up between them and chopped it down, “Begin!”

The two men circled each other and, wasting no time, Quintus brought his blade up in a series of quick, upward slashes designed to send his opponent backpedaling. But Cassius appeared wise to the ploy, and easily sidestepped the attack while hammering the tip of his own sword—which he held in his left hand, rather than the traditional right—into Quintus’ tardy block. The larger man did manage to bring his shield across his body and intercept the attack, stopping it cold using simple, brute, strength.

Lu Bu snorted in derision at the larger man’s obvious showboating, but she kept her eyes on Cassius as he circled—it would seem unadvisedly—toward the larger man’s sword arm. Quintus rewarded the smaller man with a hard, savage sweep of his blade aimed at Cassius’ midsection. The smaller man diverted the blow using his own weapon while ducking beneath the arc of the large man’s blade, but Quintus wasn’t done just yet. He kicked out with his long, tree trunk-like leg and Cassius’ leg bent so viciously at the knee that Lu Bu feared a catastrophic knee injury had just taken place.

The blow sent the larger man to the ground and Atticus called in a loud, carrying voice, “Fall! Quintus has one, Cassius has none.”

It was only then that Lu Bu realized Atticus had been speaking in Confederation Standard, rather than his native Tracto-an tongue. She found his gaze and met it, suspecting he had been looking at her before she had done likewise. She narrowed her eyes and folded her arms across her chest as the combatants regained their feet.

“Begin!” Atticus called from the perimeter of the combat circle, and again the two men began to circle. Cassius’ leg looked no worse for having sustained the devastating kick, which was a relief to Lu Bu—she wanted to see what the smaller man could do against a larger, stronger, fresher opponent.

Cassius circled away from the larger man’s sword-arm this time, and lashed out with a kick of his own. Quintus’ face twisted into a contemptuous sneer as he easily blocked the maneuver with his shield—but then Cassius, to even Lu Bu’s surprise, leapt into the air and brought his sword high before plunging it down toward the other man’s throat.

It was all Quintus could do to keep from falling down as he backpedaled away from the attack. He did manage to avoid the potentially fight-ending strike when Cassius failed to close distance quickly enough due to the other man’s longer strides. Quintus got his shield up into a guard and counterattacked with a furious series of well-practiced blows—clearly, he was no longer content to showcase his admittedly impressive physique, having identified Cassius as a real threat.

The two exchanged blows back and forth, sword to shield, until Cassius once again worked an opening against Quintus’ lead, left, leg. He hammered his sword into the other man’s thigh with enough force that Lu Bu questioned whether or not her own thigh would have broken outright, but Quintus absorbed the blow and trapped the smaller man’s wooden blade between his shield and leg. He then lifted Cassius up into the air—as Cassius clearly did not wish to lose grip of his weapon—and flung the smaller man to the ground with an expert foot sweep that saw the wind knocked from Cassius’ lungs as soon as he landed flat on his back.

“Fall!” Atticus declared, and Lu Bu grimaced as she refused to meet the other man’s haughty look. “Quintus with two falls to Cassius’ none.”

Cassius was slow to stand, but Lu Bu’s eyes were locked firmly on Quintus’ lead, left, leg as the larger man stiffly moved it back and forth in an all-too-familiar attempt to regain sensation in the limb. Lu Bu had been correct in her initial appraisal of the damage: had the two men been wielding real blades, the smaller man would have likely severed the larger warrior’s leg—or at least rendered it useless.

“Begin!” Atticus called out, and the two men began to circle each other yet again. This time they were more wary of each other and, Lu Bu noted with grim certainty, they each bore wounds which would require several weeks to heal without advanced medical assistance.

Cassius initiated the attack by slamming his shield into Quintus’ shield. He then pivoted with surprising speed and grace as Quintus made a brutal, overhand chopping attack with his sword which very well may have killed the smaller man had it landed on or near his neck. The attack sent the larger man staggering, and Cassius took advantage of the opening by hammering the larger man’s left hamstring with his blade.

Quintus’ leg unexpectedly gave out, and he fell to a knee as Cassius followed up with a vicious kick to the larger man’s back. But Quintus was simply too large, and too well-prepared. He somehow kept from being kicked forward by resisting the attack and then, inexplicably, he dropped his weapons and spun his body before Cassius could withdraw his foot to launch a second kick.

Cassius fell forward a half step before trying to regain his balance, but Quintus already had his long, massive arms wrapped around the smaller man. Cassius struggled mightily against the crushing grip, and even smashed his forehead into Quintus’ nose three times with bone-cracking force before the larger man locked his hands behind Cassius’ back.

Lu Bu winced as Cassius’ feet were lifted from the ground, and without ceremony or celebration, Quintus spun the smaller man’s body in mid-air before driving him into the ground with enough force to kill a normal human outright.

Quintus’ massive shoulder drove into Cassius’ chest as the smaller man’s back was driven into the ground, and Lu Bu took several steps forward as cheers erupted from Atticus’ camp. “Fall!” Atticus declared with a savage, triumphant look as he met Lu Bu’s eyes briefly, but she was too focused on Cassius’ well-being. “Quintus is the victor; Cassius is dismissed. He, and the other failed applicants, are welcome to try again on the morrow.”

Quintus was slow to get up from the smaller man, and Lu Bu was about to rebuke the larger man for abusing Cassius when Quintus extended a hand to the smaller man.

But, inexplicably to Lu Bu, Cassius batted the hand away even while he struggled to breathe. Up close she could see just how badly his face had been abused over the previous days of trials. She knelt beside him and said, “Can you breathe?” She did not know the words in Tracto-an, so she used Confederation Standard instead.

Cassius looked up at her between labored, but decidedly calm, attempts to regain his breath. It was clear to her that he did not understand her words, and she growled before looking around for a translator. She quickly saw Atticus, who was looking smugly at her while slapping Quintus on the shoulder in a congratulatory fashion.

“Translate,” she snapped.

He shook his head. “The strong survive,” he said matter-of-factly, “the weak perish. Leave him. If he is strong, he will return in the morning.”

She stood to her feet and felt her blood begin to boil. “He did what you command,” she spat, “and you turn your back?!”

Atticus took a threatening step toward her. “I have command of this recruiting mission,” he said in a dire tone. “Do you challenge my authority?”

Lu Bu suddenly suspected that the entire scene had been designed to provoke precisely this reaction from her. She took another step toward him and growled, “You have no heart.”

“And you have no brain!” he retorted, matching her step with one of his own. They were now standing well within striking distance, and he raised his voice as he said, “You are a runt from a broken line, assembled from the broken fantasies of humankind. We,” he swung his arms wide, “are the chosen of Men, fired and forged here, on the world of Tracto!”

A short chorus of assent erupted from the nearby Tracto-ans—both from those who had already gained inclusion to Atticus’ Lancer team and those who awaited their own opportunity to do so.

Atticus looked down at her, and Lu Bu could feel tears in her eyes at his hateful words. He had just defiled the memory of her forebears, and she could not allow that insult to go unanswered. Before he could open his mouth to spew more venomous, fascist, filth, Lu Bu snapped a sharp leg kick into his near shin.

But he was ready for the attack and he checked the kick expertly by turning his knee toward the attack—a technique he could have only learned since arriving on the Pride of Prometheus—before uncorking a sharp, overhand right aimed squarely at her jaw.

Lu Bu ducked her entire body just beneath the powerful strike and drove her shoulders into his hips. A round of cheers broke out from all around the camp, but Lu Bu could not have cared less for having satisfied their apparent bloodthirst. She aimed to put Atticus in his place once and for all, and while he sprawled his legs out behind himself to counter her attempted takedown, she had the advantage of positional leverage and continued to drive forward while grasping his thighs in either hand.

The two struggled in the position for twenty three steps, with neither managing to gain the upper hand as Lu Bu drove him fifteen meters from the point where they had first grappled. But then his foot caught on a small ledge of stone, and the impact brought his left knee too close to her chest. Without thinking, she gripped the leg in her hand and shifted her momentum to drive through the larger man’s hips.

She drove him into the ground with bone-cracking force, and only after she had begun to scramble for position atop him did she realize she had driven him into one of the many stony outcroppings dotting the landscape. But she didn’t care; this was not a battle of honor, or a sporting affair of any kind. She meant to teach Atticus a lesson, much as Walter Joneson had taught her a similar lesson back on the Pride of Prometheus prior to admitting her into the Lancer contingent.

As Atticus flattened his body against the ground in the scramble, Lu Bu knew that she had one chance, and one chance only, to put him away. If the longer, undoubtedly stronger, man got on top of her then there would be little she could do to prevent whatever damage he wished to inflict. She spun around his back until she had a clear path to his head, and she drove her knee into his temple with every Newton of force she could generate.

Her knee met his skull and, for a brief moment, she thought she had rendered him unconscious—much as she had done during an earlier training session gone awry—but the other man kept his wits and managed to clasp his hands around her leg. She tried to sprawl out of it, but he was simply too long and her best posture did little but slow his inevitable reversal of their position as he slammed her—face-first—into the same stone ledge she had driven him into a moment earlier.

She heard him growl before the left side of her body exploded in pain, after which her vision went white, then red, then blue, then yellow, then red again before she finally regained her sense of sight.

Not long after she had regained her sight, the world went black and she briefly wondered why she had slept in so late. What punishment will I receive from Sergeant Gnuko for tardiness? she wondered in her concussed stupor.

Then she heard raised voices and shook her head to clear the confused, random images which flashed through her mind. She was vaguely aware of some pain on the right side of her face, but aside from that sensation the world was surprisingly sterile to her slowly-awakening mind.

She looked dumbly up and saw a huge, towering man standing with his back to her and she instinctively grasped his legs as she gathered her own beneath her. The shouting continued for several seconds until it turned to mocking, derisive laughter, and only after she had climbed halfway up the figure’s legs in a weak, pitiful attempt to drag him to the ground, did she realize the laughter was directed at her.

She looked up and saw the face of the man whose back she had nearly taken, and was immediately shaken from her addled haze. He had a heavily-scarred head, with what little hair remained atop it being more white than grey. He had only one eye remaining in his scarred, savage features, which looked as though they had endured an attack from a very large cat in the distant past. She followed the man’s gaze and saw that Atticus—whose face was bleeding profusely—was making threatening gestures while his cohorts snickered at Lu Bu.

The two exchanged words she could not understand, but eventually Atticus spat on the ground in her direction—or, perhaps, the one-eyed man’s—and turned his back on the two as he made to rejoin his group.

The world began to spin far too quickly after Lu Bu released her grip on the large man’s torso, and she would have fallen to the ground had it not been for his steadying hand on her upper arm.

“Steady, girl,” he said in Tracto-an accented, Confederation Standard. His voice was deep and grating, seeming to Lu Bu like as she imagined a mountain conversing with thunder might sound, “Back to your camp.”

She fought off his hand and said defiantly, “I walk alone.”

He released his hold on her arm and made a grunt of acknowledgment as the two of them made their way back to the examination tent. Along the way, she stooped and helped the shallow-breathing, but still conscious, Cassius to his feet and slung one of his arms across her shoulders. The large man, however, did not do likewise.

“What you say to him?” she slurred, the pain in the side of her face seemingly increasing with each heartbeat.

“I said,” he replied in his deep, rumbling voice, using surprisingly clear Confederation Standard, “there is only one man born of this world who can beat me…and he is not him.”

When they arrived at the tent, she turned to face him and examined his features while the nurse made a yelp of alarm and ran to the tent’s entrance. “Your name?” she asked, appraising the three lines of scar tissue which appeared to have been caused by the same wound which had cost him his sight.

“Kratos,” he replied with a short nod. “I…come to serve,” he added awkwardly, and Lu Bu felt Cassius tense at her side but he said nothing.

She turned to Cassius and said, “We dress your wounds. Then we talk,” she said, feeling a flare of pain from her side before darkness overcame her.

Chapter VIII: Two Weeks…

“Let’s hear it, Mikey,” Middleton said as soon as the door to his ready room had closed behind the apparently agitated Engineer.

“Captain,” Garibaldi fumed, “I cannot get all of that gear stowed securely before we break out of here.”

Middleton gestured to the seat opposite his own, hardening his visage when the Chief made as if to ignore the gesture, and Garibaldi reluctantly took his seat. “Are you saying that you know something about our departure timetable that I don’t?” he asked levelly.

Garibaldi scoffed. “It’s plain as day that we’re only stickin’ around here for another two weeks—at most,” he added in a raised voice. “The yards have gotten through the biggest ships in the fleet and, with the Pride coming out of the dock this morning, the writing’s on the wall.”

Tim Middleton took a slow breath as he fought to keep his jaw from clenching shut. Everyone aboard the Pride of Prometheus was on edge, what with the recent personnel transfers they’d received—a group which almost made the ship’s first group of ‘recruits’ look like model citizens—from the far flung ships of the fleet.

“My point, Chief,” the Captain said evenly, “was that neither of us knows exactly what the Fleet’s disposition is. So we should just keep our heads down and work through the situation the best we can. Now,” he said, holding up a hand to forestall Garibaldi’s pending outburst, “what about the equipment we received from the Gambit yard crew?”

Garibaldi’s face was beet-red, but almost as quickly as his ire had risen it subsided as he slouched in the chair. “Well…they didn’t short-shrift us there,” he grudged, “the four heavy load lifters are in nearl-new condition, and the six additional heavy work suits look as well-maintained as anything else we’ve got.” Middleton ignored the dig at the Pride’s venerable condition as his Chief Engineer continued, the other man’s mood seeming to lift as he did so, “In fact, those dozen portable micro-fusion generators might come in handier than I could have imagined. After we’re done working through all the external hull installations—assuming we actually do get finished with them,” he added with a deliberate roll of his eyes, “I can think of at least thirty applications for those generators which might help us compensate for this old girl’s…let’s say, ‘high-strung,’ power grid. Gotta hand it to you, Captain,” he added with a lopsided grin, “you pulled a fast one over them there.”

Middleton shook his head. “Gambit’s got more resources than we can see,” he assured his Chief Engineer. “Just looking at some of the modifications made to the other ships in the fleet, it’s obvious they’ve got a little more manufacturing capacity than they’re letting on. I don’t think they’re going to miss what are, essentially, redundant pieces for an operation their size.”

“Still,” Garibaldi quipped, “it’s nice to be the one doing the pilfering for a change.”

“It came with a price,” Middleton reminded him, “and I appreciate you and your people working on short sleep to pay it.”

“Well, you know what they say,” the Chief buffed his nails emphatically on his jumpsuit before a confused look crossed his face and he shrugged, “bah, whatever it was it made clear as a supernova that Engineers are the most important part of a ship.”

“I won’t argue that point,” Middleton said with an eye-roll of his own, to which Garibaldi chuckled.

“About those new transfers, Cap…” he said leadingly.

Middleton’s mood soured. “I’m aware of the difficulties,” he said bitterly. “Fleet Command apparently thinks we’re the local rehabilitation vessel; not a single one of those transfers came without at least two actionable offenses in the last six months of active duty—and they’ve all spent significant time in the brig.”

“How are we supposed to take that, Tim?” Garibaldi asked as he set his jaw. “I mean, we go out there and bust our asses in defense of the Spine just like the charter says we should, and when we come back we get ninety percent of the regulars—including all of the ones without criminal histories—transferred off the ship, only to be replaced with the rest of the Fleet’s castoffs? I’m guessing there’s a message here, but I’m not seeing it,” he said darkly.

Middleton snorted derisively, having already asked himself the same question, and smirked as he repeated a silently-rehearsed line of bunk he had concocted earlier in the day, “We should take it as a compliment to our exemplary record for establishing and maintaining discipline among a disparate, undisciplined collection of people who, by all rights, should have never set foot on a starship in the first place.”

Garibaldi threw his head back and laughed, slapping his mechanical leg emphatically. Apparently the gesture caused him significant pain because he cut off mid-laugh and began to shake his hand out as he said, “That’s why you’re the Captain. You know what to say.”

A hollow smile spread across Middleton’s face. “Well…that’s one reason.”

Garibaldi nodded and stood from the chair. “On a serious note: if we leave this system when I—and even you—think we’re going to, then you have to decide which of the salvaged gear you want left behind.”

Middleton sighed. “What’s your recommendation, Chief?”

Garibaldi shook his head doubtfully, “You’re gonna hate me for saying it…but I’d have to vote to ditch those broadside guns you were eyeing. Their short range, coupled with our already-shaky power grid, just doesn’t give much crunch for the cost. You want my opinion? We’re better off focusing on the shields and creating redundant power lines throughout the ship.”

“I’ll give you the lasers and plasma cannons,” Middleton grudged, “but I’ll need those adaptive launch tubes no matter what.”

Garibaldi shrugged before chewing on his cheek. “The power draw on those is minimal,” he allowed, “but, Tim, they don’t have any ammo for them here. Starfires went out of style before our grandparents were born; do you really think we’re going to find any more out there?”

“I have no idea what we’re going to find,” Middleton replied evenly, “but whatever we do run into, I intend to be prepared to handle it—and possibly repurpose it. That means adaptive—“

“—Launch tubes,” Garibaldi finished with a dismissive wave. “Yeah, yeah, yeah; I got it. We can cold weld those puppies onto the external mounts with just a few hours of prep…might even be able to have it done in forty eight hours if you’re callin’ them a priority.”

“I am,” Middleton said with a firm nod, “I don’t want to leave the system without every single one in battle-ready condition.”

Garibaldi grinned as he turned to leave the office, “I guess they fit the rest of this old girl’s style.”

“Careful now,” Middleton said only half-jokingly, “she’s carried us through worse than I ever thought she would. I think she’s earned our respect.”

Garibaldi clutched his chest in mock outrage, “Captain…nobody knows how to push her buttons like I do—and nobody does it as mu—“

“That’ll be all, Chief,” Middleton said with a humorous shake of his head.

“You got it, Cap,” Garibaldi replied before leaving the ready room.

Middleton sighed and decided that, despite his reluctance to do so, it was time to pay a visit to the ship’s Chief Medical Officer.

The Pride’s Captain entered Sickbay and was greeted by a confusing scene.

There were several crewmembers on the far side of the room, and a similarly-sized group on the near side. Those nearest his position appeared to all be natives of Shèhuì Héxié, while those on the far side of the room appeared to be relatively recent transfers—the same group in regard to which Chief Garibaldi had recently bent Middleton’s ear. Both groups appeared to have suffered more or less superficial wounds, but the volume of injuries suggested a heated and somewhat protracted affair had been the cause.

Sergeant Gnuko was present, with a sonic pistol as a sidearm, in addition to several other Lancers who Middleton recognized. He approached his Lancer Sergeant and asked, “What was this all about?”

“Sorry, Captain,” Gnuko said grimly, “I haven’t had time to file the report.”

“I’ll take the short version now, Sergeant,” Middleton said as his gaze shifted from group to group, “you can write the report later.” He counted twenty three total ‘combatants,’ split almost exactly down the middle with eleven representatives from the Shèhuì Héxié population, and twelve newcomers who looked to have hailed from every corner of Sector 25.

“Captain,” Gnuko acknowledged before gesturing to the newcomers, “this group apparently had some…disrespectful things to say regarding our ship’s record as it pertains to crew safety. While this group,” he gestured to the Asiatic members of the Pride’s crew, “took offense to their characterizations. Things sort of escalated from there.”

Middleton nodded slowly; it wasn’t the first scuffle which had broken out aboard the ship during his tenure, but there was something about it that seemed slightly off.

“In the interests of full disclosure,” Gnuko said sheepishly—at least, as sheepishly as a man of his stature could manage, “I may have become entangled in the affair in a…less than strictly official capacity, sir.”

The Captain arched an eyebrow. “I’d expected more of you, Sergeant,” he rebuked coolly, and from the other man’s demeanor his words had taken their desired effect. “So,” he said under his breath, “which side did you throw in with?”

Gnuko blinked disbelievingly. “I’d never get involved in a fair fight, Captain,” he protested in what seemed to be genuine, if muted, outrage, “it was eleven on eleven up until one of those three,” he waved toward a small subgroup, “brought a spanner into the mix after his group’s fortune took a turn for the worse.”

“There are no ‘groups’ here, Sergeant,” Middleton said coldly, affixing the other man with a hard glare, “this is one ship, with one mission, and one crew—or have you forgotten that?”

“No, sir,” Gnuko replied promptly, snapping to rigid attention with his eyes forward.

Middleton kept the weight of his gaze on the larger man until several seconds had passed, and then moved toward the group of newcomers. “Who will speak for you?” he asked sternly.

The men looked side to side until one of them stepped forward. “I will, Captain,” he replied, coming to an approximation of attention which more or less satisfied the military code, “Private Vali Funar, Promethean SDF Marine assigned to the MSP’s Lancer Corps.”

“Your world has a rich and storied history of military service, Private,” Middleton said, raking him up and down with a critical eye, “I’ve come to expect a better showing from her people—especially during first contact with a new CO.”

Vali shot him a surprised look before stiffening his posture and assuming a significantly better—if still far from perfect—posture. “Respectfully, sir, Prometheus has more than earned its reputation. There isn’t a planet in the Sector that can match our tradition, or our record.”

Middleton could see at least two heads behind Private Funar bob up and down in subconscious support of the statement, and the Captain took a step forward. “Bold words,” he said levelly, “but if you’re the best grunt she’s got to offer, I’d advise your people to stick to ship-building—at least that skill appears beyond reproach.” The heads which had been nodding stiffened—along with the spines to which they were attached—and Middleton snapped a short look into each of their eyes. “Do either of you have something you’d like to add to this conversation?”

The man on the left looked directly ahead, but the other met Middleton’s gaze and said, “It was all a misunderstanding, Captain—“

“Shut up, Tray,” Private Funar snapped, and Middleton immediately deduced the other man’s name must have been Traian. He had memorized certain aspects of the personnel transfer report, including which members were from which worlds. It was important information—information which would come in useful during situations precisely like this one.

“No, please,” Middleton said levelly, stepping toward the second man, “go on. Describe the nature of this ‘misunderstanding’.”

Traian looked briefly at the floor before saying, “We were just…umm…trying to…”

“What he means, Captain,” Private Funar cut in, “is that some of us were expressing concern over crew safety.”

“Crew safety?” Middleton repeated deliberately. “Just to make sure we’re speaking the same language,” he said as he moved toward Private Funar until their noses nearly touched, “you new transfers are afraid for your lives aboard this ship?”

“Afraid?” Funar blurted incredulously before setting his jaw. “We’re not afraid of anything, sir.”

There was a chorus of snickers from the far side of the room, and Middleton held Private Funar’s gaze for several seconds before turning pointedly to the members of the other group. “Do you have something to add?” he asked shortly.

One of the Asiatics jutted his chin forward—all of the Asiatic crewmembers were already at sharp attention—and said, “The new crew calls Pride of Prometheus a ‘Ship of Ghosts.’ Some even disrespect her Captain,” he said with a pointed look at Private Vali Funar.

Having thought the entire matter to be one of simple discipline, Middleton actually found himself amused and more than a little interested in what the crewman meant by ‘disrespect.’ “I see,” he said, realizing that he could at least relate to why Sergeant Gnuko had apparently taken it upon himself to leap to his ship’s—and Captain’s—defense. “Well,” Middleton said as he turned back toward Private Funar, “let’s hear it.”

“Sir?” Private Funar said blankly, but Middleton wasn’t about to let the matter rest.

“Would you prefer your crewmates,” Middleton said, gesturing to the Asiatics, “answer the question, or are you going to repeat your…concerns to the ship’s Captain when he has ordered you to do so?”

Private Funar’s eyes flicked toward Captain Middleton briefly before he seemed to somehow wilt. His shoulders were still square, and his chest puffed out as one would expect from a crewman at attention, but the Captain knew the other man would no longer resist.

“I—” Private Funar began.

“We,” Traian interrupted pointedly, and the rest of the crew assembled on their ‘side’ of sickbay nodded in agreement.

Funar cast a sharp look over his should before correcting, “We were just checking ship’s morale—honest, Captain.” Middleton searched the other man’s visage for signs of deception, but found none as Funar continued, “With the heavy losses the Pride’s incurred on her ‘maiden’ voyage as a ship of the MSP, we wanted to know how the crew felt about the decisions which may have led to those casualties.”

“Mutinous sc—“ Gnuko growled, but Middleton cut him off with a sharp gesture.

Captain Middleton fixed Private Funar with a heavy look. “And what did you find?” he asked dryly.

Private Funar shook his head. “Ship-wide morale is better here than any other ship in the fleet,” he replied promptly. “We had our suspicions as to why that might have been. We…” he added nervously, “well, we might have made some suggestions regarding said suspicions involving a, uh, cultural gap between certain segments of the old crew and the new.”

“He calls us drones!” one of the Asiatics spat, and the others growled their assent.

“So, let me get this straight, Private,” Middleton said slowly as he fixed the other man with a piercing glare, “on top of generally poor respect for the chain of command—and mixed with a thick, borderline mutinous streak—I can also infer that you, and the crewmembers with you, are bigots?”

“Bigots?!” Funar repeated incredulously. “Captain, we are not bigots; this has all been a…a…a cultural misunderstanding,” he stammered in protest.

Middleton set his jaw. “I don’t have the time, or patience, to indulge in this kind of sophomoric behavior,” he growled. “This ship’s entire command structure has been upended, and I’ve been saddled with the rest of the Fleet’s castoffs—castoffs like you,” he snapped, causing the assemblage to collectively wince. “If you can’t learn to deal with life aboard a warship on active deployment—and all the harsh realities that entails,” he added coldly, “then I suggest you opt out of your service contracts. There is absolutely nothing compelling any of you to serve aboard this vessel, and frankly I don’t want anyone aboard the Pride who isn’t ready, able, and eager to put his or her life on the line at the drop of a hat.” He drew back slightly and added, “We hold ourselves to a higher standard than the rest of the Fleet; either catch up to our speed or I’ll have you confined to quarters until we can let you off someplace that won’t threaten your delicate sensibilities, understood?”

The men—accompanied by one woman—bristled and Middleton didn’t wait for them to collect themselves before turning to Sergeant Gnuko.

“Escort them to the brig; place them on a twenty four hour hold,” he instructed. “That should give them time to think about whether they have what it takes to serve on this ship.”

“Yes, sir,” Gnuko replied evenly before gesturing for the newcomers to follow him. They did without objection, and the looks they cast their Captain’s way were mixtures of surprise and confusion. After they had left sickbay, he turned to the second group composed almost entirely of Asiatics—apparently, one of them had been a recent transferee which Middleton had not correctly identified at the outset.

“And you lot,” he said, sweeping them with his gaze, “I suggest you thicken your skins. This is the last time I’m stepping in on something like this; after we get under way we’ll be observing wartime military discipline, so I suggest you get a head start learning what that entails. The games end here and now, is that clear?”

“Tri-Locscium, sir!” they replied in unison, and he blinked in surprise at hearing Walter Joneson’s words coming from their mouths.

“Dismissed,” he barked, and the group quickly dissipated.

When they had left he turned to the lone, silent occupant of the sickbay and saw that she was giving him a faintly disapproving look. But the expression was wiped from her face as soon as their eyes met and Middleton couldn’t resist the urge to engage her.

“You disapprove, Doctor?” he asked rhetorically, almost hoping she would take the bait.

“Only because several of them still have untreated wounds,” she replied evenly.

Several seconds passed and he nodded, deciding to let the matter rest at that. “Have you received the medical supplies you requested from the station?” he asked.

She nodded curtly. “The ship’s stores have been resupplied, and most of the radiation meds I requested have already arrived and been stowed.”

“Do you have any other requests for equipment transfers to sickbay?” he asked.

His ex-wife shook her head. “The ship’s stores are robust; I’ve taken the liberty to double up on our antivirals just in case we run into another bioweapon,” she said pointedly.

“Good,” Captain Middleton replied before switching topics. “It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out that morale is going to be an issue in the coming weeks and months,” he said as he grimaced in disdain. “The Pride has apparently become the Fleet’s penal ship, so we’d better get used to the current state of affairs…at least for the time being. Our mission is too important to get lost in the usual squabbles.”

“If you say so,” she said, and Middleton snapped a glance over at her. He was surprised—and, if he was being honest with himself, pleased—to see the same, fiery determination behind her eyes which he had come to know so many years earlier. In spite of everything that had happened between them—much of which had been kept from him, it seemed—Middleton knew that he needed Jo’s counsel during whatever lay ahead of them.

He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “Doctor,” he began in a slightly subdued voice, “the personal history you and I share isn’t something I intend to ignore in perpetuity. But you need to understand that on this ship,” he pointed to the deck and fixed her with a thousand meter stare, “things must, out of absolute necessity, conform to my schedule above any other. And right now, I need to know if I can count on my Chief Medical Officer to serve in the same capacity she had done prior to…” he trailed off, unable to find the proper words for her life-saving display on the bridge of the vessel so many weeks before.

“I will tend to your wounded, Captain,” she said before he could fish the right word from his mind, “and I will follow your ship’s code of conduct, as well as whatever particular limitations you might see fit to place on me.”

“That’s not what I meant, Doctor,” Middleton said, his voice tinged with equal parts weariness and irritation. “Let me put this as bluntly as I can: I am woefully short of support structure out here, and where we’re going we can expect what little support I do have to evaporate. I want…no,” he corrected, “I need your advice going forward.”

“Why?” she shot back quickly—so quickly that Middleton deduced she had been waiting for the opportunity to ask that very question. The way she had pounced on the opening reminded him of the way a cat might pounce on a mouse, and he allowed half a grin to play out over his features.

“Because I’m the Captain,” he said simply. The two stood in mutual silence for nearly a minute, engaged in a familiar battle of wills until Middleton stepped forward and continued, “And because, as the Captain, it’s my duty to see to it that every member of this ship is able to perform at peak ability. I pushed for those medical supplies that you mentioned to be transferred even though Supply only wanted to give us a fourth of what you requested. Why?” he asked, mirroring her own inflection as closely as he could. “Because it’s my job to keep this ship running in the right direction and to make sure everyone has what they need. Right now,” he said, gritting his teeth, “I need to look after the Captain’s support structure. Can you understand that?”

Jo shook her head slowly, “It’s all just variables to you, isn’t it?”

“Doctor…” he trailed off, closing his eyes as he fought to keep his temper under control. But he knew the meeting would only last for another few minutes at most if things continued to escalate.

“But somehow,” she added belatedly, and with a hint of empathy in her voice, “this time I can understand why you see things that way. I’ll offer whatever advice you think appropriate,” she said with a meaningful look, “but in return I need to know that we’re going to talk about…”

The words trailed off, but each of them knew precisely what she meant.

“As I said,” Middleton said evenly, “everything aboard this ship must conform to my schedule whenever that is possible. Do you understand?” he pressed, hoping she could understand.

She nodded slowly. “I do,” she agreed.

He wanted to breathe an epic sigh of relief, but Middleton nodded instead. “Then I would like to propose a schedule,” he said.

Jo arched an eyebrow. “What kind of schedule?”

Tim Middleton clasped his hands behind his back, “I took a big gamble suggesting to the Admiral that you remain on this ship, Doctor. He agreed to my request, but given the recent transfers I think it’s safe to say he doesn’t entirely trust my judgment.”

She furrowed her brow. “I had no idea…” she trailed off before shaking her head. “But what does the Admiral’s trust have to do with anything?”

Middleton looked pointedly over his shoulder toward the door through which Private Funar and his cohorts had been escorted, “Half of that group of troublemakers was part of a covert operation to infiltrate Capria and launch a surprise raid on the Royal Palace.”

Doctor Middleton reared back in surprise. “I had no idea…why wasn’t anything in their files?”

“Possibly because that mission, like our upcoming one, was off the books,” Middleton replied darkly, “but almost certainly it’s because we weren’t supposed to know about it. Thankfully, I’ve still got a few friends throughout the Fleet who gave me the straight download. Those men,” he jerked his thumb over his shoulder pointedly, “are almost certainly plants that the Admiral, or his people, sent here to keep an eye on us and, if we’re being generous, secure the ship against outside influences. As far as they’re concerned, that might mean me, you, or anyone else who was part of our previous mission.”

“Why such mistrust?” she asked with a wary look.

Middleton chuckled shortly. “Trust, but verify, Doctor,” he chided. “Besides, the Little Admiral’s already been betrayed by his supposed allies; I can’t blame him for being proactive and neither should you. He’s just doing what any responsible leader would do. And, frankly,” he admitted, “it doesn’t look good that half of our crew was from an Asiatic League world after just a few weeks on patrol—and they were reported to be prisoners, at that. Then, after the better part of a year—when our mission was supposed to last only a month—we come back to port carrying a Sector Judge whose home world just so happens to belong to that same Asiatic League?” He shrugged indifferently, “It’s not hard to realize how it might look. I’d have done the same in his shoes.”

“But what does that have to do with any sort of ‘schedule’?” she asked after a moment’s consideration.

“Well…the problem arises not from the fact that we might have Admiralty agents aboard who are looking to secure the Flag’s interests. Far from it,” he said with genuine feeling, “I welcome the extra security. The issue is that the Pride’s Captain wasn’t apprised of these officers’ transfers, which were apparently meant to be hidden among the genuine malcontents we received as part of the mass transfers. As such,” he gave a tight smile, “I have to treat them as potential threats to ship security. I believe, however, that I can keep them off-balance long enough to determine their true allegiances with just a few subtle shifts to shipboard protocol. I won’t bore you with the details,” he waved a hand dismissively, “except to say that it would serve many purposes if you were to have dinner with me, in the conference room, three nights out of seven.” He held up a hand before she could get indignant, “You don’t have to eat, or even pretend to enjoy yourself, but I’ve come to value your advice. Unfortunately, given your official record I can’t give you free run of the ship. But I can have you escorted via armed guard to my ready room whenever necessary which, as I suggested, three days in seven would probably satisfy that requirement.”

She chewed on the thought for several moments before shaking her head in confusion. “I’m back to my original question: why?” she repeated. “Why do you feel the need to ask my advice on anything? We both know you’re going to do what you think is best regardless of what others say—”

“Please, Doctor,” Middleton said coolly, “let’s keep this above board.”

Jo nodded quickly, “I apologize.”

Middleton shook his head, “You don’t need to apologize…but the truth is I’ve made decisions on behalf of this ship which did, as you suggest, treat my crew as nothing but variables, or assets,” he admitted. “I firmly believe that is what any good commander must do, but” he allowed, “there are times when a less…calculating perspective might better serve the ship, the mission, and the crew. I can think of no one better qualified to provide that perspective than the Pride’s current Chief Medical Officer. What do you say?”

Doctor Middleton nodded slowly before saying, “All right…I agree.”

“Good,” the Captain said. “We’ll start tomorrow night.” He turned to leave sickbay before stopping and looking around, “Strictly between you and me…if you can think of anything else you might need in the coming months then now is the time to fill out a requisition. We aren’t going to have this kind of material support for a long time,” he said pointedly.

Comprehension seemed to dawn in her features and she nodded, “I can think of a few things.”

“I’ll put the full weight of my office behind those requests,” Middleton said resolutely before leaving sickbay.

All things considered, the meeting had gone far better than he had expected.

Chapter IX: A New Game

“Why you want to join?” Lu Bu asked of the group. She was standing outside the examination tent with each of her hand-picked applicants standing before her. There was Bernice, the mountain of a woman who had apparently fought alongside Lady Akantha, the Admiral’s wife. There was also Cassius, whose wounds had been tended by the Pride of Prometheus’ nurse. Three more were wash-outs of Atticus’ ‘application’ process, each of whom had suffered severe injuries in the process but whom Lu Bu believed would serve the Pride’s Lancer contingent admirably.

However, the man to whom she had directed the question most pointedly was Kratos, the one-eyed mammoth of a man who had intervened on her behalf following the scuffle with Atticus several days earlier.

But he was silent, so she turned her gaze to Bernice and repeated, “Why you want to join?”

The proud woman jutted her chin forward. “I have no home…no line…only battle. I would fight in River of Stars, and die in River of Stars, if worthy.”

Lu Bu nodded. It wasn’t the best answer she could hope for, but it was something. She turned to Cassius and repeated, “Why you want to join?”

Cassius, whose eye was no longer swollen shut but was still purple from the heavy bruising inflicted a week earlier, stepped forward gingerly. “I am…shamed,” he said, casting his gaze toward the ground, “years ago we lost a fight.” He shot a dire look at Kratos before once again lowering his eyes to the ground, “Now no woman will take me and no warlord will have me.” He lifted his gaze to meet Lu Bu’s eyes, “I must find a new path; I will fight for you.”

The others behind him nodded and Lu Bu asked, “Is this same for you?”

They nodded before shamefully turning their faces to the ground, and Lu Bu cast Kratos a hard look.

“And you?” she pressed, looking up at the man who easily towered a foot above her. But his girth was just impressive as his seven feet of height; he easily weight four hundred pounds, and though his body was no longer in its physical prime, Lu Bu had not seen a more impressive specimen of muscle definition outside of professional bodybuilders.

“I…” he said, giving Cassius a cold look with his lone, remaining, eye, “have learned what is important.”

“And what is ‘important’?” Lu Bu asked, genuinely curious what a man like him considered a priority in life.

He gave her a hard look and shook his head, apparently at himself. “Life is a fight,” he replied evenly, “but I have wasted mine fighting against things which cannot be changed.”

“Anything can be changed,” Lu Bu retorted.

“Perhaps,” he allowed, “but I now understand that the things I once fought against could not have been changed by me—or by those who followed me. As I said: my efforts were in vain. I would not waste another minute of my life if the choice is mine to make, and the only way to ensure that is by leaving this world behind once and for all.”

Lu Bu could almost feel the pulsing anger emanating from Cassius and the other men as Kratos spoke, but Bernice seemed interested in the man’s words and not in the least predisposed against him. If anything, Lu Bu believed she detected some sort of weak, yet distinct, bond between the two of them.

“Fine,” Lu Bu said, uncertain how she should respond to such a personally profound statement.

Just then she heard a cheer erupt from Atticus’ side of the encampment, and she looked over to see the group hoisting spears, picks, and shovels. Atticus himself held a spear, and stood atop a meter-tall rock as he addressed the dozen men he had assembled in his elite ‘war band.’

“What do they say?” Lu Bu asked, and Kratos snorted.

“They prepare for the hunt,” he replied matter-of-factly without casting so much as a glance in their direction.

“Hunt?” she repeated.

“Aye,” he replied, finally giving a grudging look, “a dozen can build, set, and spring the trap easily enough. There is no challenge in it, but the trophies will be well worth the effort.”

“What trophies?” she demanded. “What do they hunt?”

Kratos blinked his one eye disbelievingly. “You did not know of the season?” he asked uncertainly.

“Answer me,” she growled, and the one-eyed man shrugged indifferently.

“They prepare to hunt Stone Rhino,” he replied. “The warriors your army defeated—you call them ‘pirates’—herded the beasts toward the Citadels, including Argos, before the Great Battle of Stars.”

Lu Bu was familiar with the term ‘Great Battle of Stars,’ having learned that it referred to what the Tracto-an servicemen and women called the Battle of Tracto. Apparently the pirates had attempted to use Tracto’s indigenous life against its human population by herding Stone Rhinos—a reputedly dangerous animal of some kind—toward the cities.

“When is the hunt?” she asked.

“When the moon is full,” Kratos replied evenly, “three days from now.”

“And what…trophies will they take?” Lu Bu pressed, the beginnings of a plan forming in her mind.

Kratos appeared to be following her train of thought because a smirk spread across his scarred, weathered lips as he turned to face Atticus’ group. By now, the rest of Lu Bu’s ‘group’ had done likewise, and for a brief moment she genuinely felt that they were a single unit.

“The Stone Rhino is prized for its armored hide,” the huge man explained in his deep, grating voice, “a large specimen can yield three, or even four, full suits of battle armor which are equal even to your magical armor for protection. These suits are a badge of honor among our people…they are highly valued, as is the honor gained by felling a Stone Rhino in the traditional way.”

“Magical armor?” Lu Bu repeated blankly.

Kratos shrugged, “You call it ‘power armor;’ we call it magical armor. The difference is only in words.”

“So…” Lu Bu mused as she took stock of the implements Atticus’ group was carrying with them as they took off across the rocky hills, “they dig pits?”

“Yes,” Kratos said with open appreciation. “Pits are dug, with spikes embedded which are tipped in black glass—you call it ‘obsidian’,” he clarified. “Poison is often employed as well, but your friend,” he snorted derisively after saying the word, “has declared no poison to be used. Such is dangerous, but also yields a higher portion of glory for the participants, and with a dozen warriors of their ilk the beast will have no chance.”

“He is not my friend,” she growled, casting Kratos a hard look, to which he nodded with only the barest hint of apology in his visage. “How do you learn Confederation Standard?” she demanded. “You speak it well.”

Kratos shrugged but made no reply, which only served to anger Lu Bu but she fought to keep her temper under control.

She returned her gaze to Atticus’ group. “What if we take Rhino hide?” she asked bluntly, and Kratos chuckled.

His deep, rumbling laughter nearly made her ribcage vibrate. “That is an offense punishable by death during a sanctioned hunt,” he replied conversationally. “However,” he added with a cold grin, “this is not a sanctioned hunt. If they cannot hold what they take, they prove themselves unworthy of it. This is the way of our people.”

“Good,” Lu Bu said, feeling a flare of savage anticipation well up deep within her, “I have plan.”

Cassius came jogging back to their new camp just as dawn broke two days later.

Without waiting for him to catch his breath, Lu Bu said, “Show me.”

Cassius nodded wordlessly as he lowered himself to his knees and began to sculpt a crude, three dimensional, diagram of Atticus’ pit site in the dirt at their feet. The self-proclaimed ‘War Leader’ had set up camp on the opposite side of the pit nearly half a kilometer away in a small cave, presumably to prevent the Stone Rhino from smelling their presence.

Meanwhile, Lu Bu had done the opposite but her camp was nearly two kilometers from his. The prevailing winds appeared would blow her camp’s scent toward the site, rather than away from it, which necessitated the greater distance.

As Cassius drew an approximation of the terrain, Lu Bu saw how Atticus had intended to draw the beast in by assessing the rough topography which Cassius was representing.

“A good plan,” Kratos said gruffly, and Lu Bu was forced to concur. There were at least three separate methods by which Atticus could trap the Stone Rhino and drive it into the pit—a pit which Cassius had carefully shown to be fully as deep as it was wide.

Cassius cast a bitter look at Kratos before the two conversed in their native tongue for several exchanges before Lu Bu interrupted, “What you said?”

Kratos turned to her in surprise and said, “He says the pit is mostly natural, and that it is deeper than he shows. It is part of a cave network,” he explained, “which they have uncovered and expanded. The fall alone will likely wound the beast fatally—but a live Stone Rhino is dangerous regardless of its wounds.”

“How deep?” she asked after considering the information.

Kratos and Cassius went back and forth for several seconds, with Cassius gritting his teeth throughout the exchange before Kratos said, “Between twelve and twenty five meters. He did not get close enough to confirm.”

Lu Bu nodded slowly, ignoring the interplay between them. “He will lure it in this way,” she said, rather than asked, and every head in her group bobbed up and down in agreement. “If that fails, he will drive it from here?” she continued, showing a rocky outcropping behind which she had surmised he would hide an ambush force.

Kratos shrugged. “He might have archers and javelineers provoke it from the opposite side of the pit,” he pointed out, gesturing to a high, rocky, ledge on the opposite side of the pit from the apparent entry point through which Atticus would lure the beast.

Cassius grunted, “No. Atticus has many men,” he said in a hard tone, casting a dark glance at Kratos, “he will use traditional way.”

Kratos looked like he wanted to argue, but instead he nodded as he relaxed his posture slightly. “Cassius is right: Atticus has no imagination, just like the rest of his countrymen,” he added with a repugnant look at Cassius. “He would rather ensure two of his warriors die to slay the beast than risk the lives of six others in an less certain outcome.”

Lu Bu was mortified to hear him speak so casually of human lives being spent in pursuit of what amounted to little more than a hunting trophy. “So…ambush first,” she repeated slowly as she considered the probable distribution of Atticus’ men, “then archers?”

The two men appeared to agree on that much, at least, and so did the rest of her small group.

“Good,” she said smartly, eyeing the quarrelsome Tracto-ans in turn before she drew up their plan of attack, “we wait until Rhino down. Then,” she drew X’s and O’s to represent their team, relative to Atticus’ team, “we move together.”

“How do we arm ourselves?” Kratos asked with what looked to be more than passing interest in the reply.

Lu Bu shook her head. “No weapons,” she said severely, making eye contact with each of her people in turn.

Kratos scoffed, and even Cassius snorted in derision.

Lu Bu stood and glowered at them as she repeated, “No weapons. We are not here to kill—we here to teach.”

“Teach?” Kratos barked. “I did not come here to be that fool’s tutor.”

There was a barely audible grunt of agreement from the others, and Lu Bu snickered. “We do not teach them,” she said pointedly, “we teach us—they will be the lesson.”

At that, Bernice snickered and one by one, the members of her little group took her meaning clearly enough—even Kratos.

“Seven on thirteen,” the one-eyed man mused. “With them armed and us unarmed…long odds even with the luck of numbers on our side.”

Lu Bu snickered. “I said ‘no weapons’,” she chided, “I never say ‘unarmed’.” Looks of confusion crossed the faces of her group as she went to a nearby crate—the only crate she had brought from the primary camp—and lifted the lid. She withdrew a single, prolate spheroidal object, the exterior of which was covered in cowhide. Her fingers gripped the familiar, raised portions which ran longitudinally along one of its four seams before she flipped it to Kratos.

The huge man snorted in derision, “A child’s toy?”

She shook her head and gave him a knowing look, “We practice…then we win.”

They slept that night and practiced with the athletic equipment until noon of the following day. Once Lu Bu was satisfied that the Tracto-ans had achieved a minimum level of proficiency with the devices, she turned the drills to unarmed combat with emphasis placed on blood chokes. She knew that for her plan to work they would need to use stealth and that their first targets would need to be subdued quickly, quietly, and without incurring significant injury.

She was surprised at how quickly the Tracto-ans picked up on the subtleties of the combat techniques she had learned in her family’s underground complex back on her home world. Several of the techniques were ones she had thought to be unique to her own group, but it seemed that these Tracto-ans had learned similar maneuvers during their lives. As she worked with them throughout the day, she came to appreciate some of the realities of growing up in a warrior’s society—which Tracto most certainly was.

But she had endured her own trials, and she knew that none of these Tracto-ans had dealt with multiple-gravities for sustained periods of time like she had during her youth. But the entirety of Lu Bu’s makeshift team had endured, survived, and ultimately conquered their unique trials and tribulations. And as they worked beneath the harsh, Tracto-an sun throughout that day, she knew that they were about to be put to the test.

When night finally fell, they packed up their gear and set off toward Atticus’ camp. Cassius had reported just before nightfall that the trap had not yet been sprung, and that Atticus’ group apparently expected that to change before the coming dawn.

Lu Bu moved quietly up the last hill separating their group from Atticus’ ambush site and confirmed the locations of each of his people after a few minutes of careful examination. Her eyesight during a full moon, like the one which hung overhead, was almost identical to her eyesight during broad daylight, owing to her extensive genetic engineering.

She was easily able to make out every one of Atticus’ team, and was even able to verify that they were, in fact, the same people who had left camp with him. It was possible this was a trap he had laid in order to further humiliate her, but Lu Bu did not believe Atticus capable of such thinking. Even Kratos had suggested that Atticus was not an overly creative thinker, and Lu Bu was depending on this exact attribute in order for her plan to succeed.

It appeared that there was a significant supply of fresh meat placed on the far side of the concealed pit trap, but she knew from discussions with Kratos and Cassius that this was likely to be nothing more than icing on the proverbial cake. The true attractant would be musk harvested from a recently-killed Stone Rhino—Stone Rhino males during mating season could not resist the opportunity to battle another for mating rights.

She carefully worked her way back to her small team, which was positioned nearly a hundred meters away from the ridge she had just climbed, and said, “We move to position.”

The group nodded in agreement. Even Kratos made no rebellious gestures, having witnessed firsthand—more than once—the viability of her plan. Sneaking up on the javelin hurlers would be no great difficulty for her, Cassius, Kratos—who moved with surprising agility and stealth for such a huge man—and the other three male Tracto-ans. Unfortunately, Bernice’s left arm was useless so she would need to stay back for this stage of the operation.

Lu Bu led the band of warriors down to the approach, none of whom wore armor, and their movements were uncannily silent as they moved through the broken hillsides. They finally reached their staging area and she knew they would need to wait until Stone Rhino fell into Atticus’ trap before they could spring their own trap on him and his people.

Lu Bu had been explicit that fatal wounds inflicted on Atticus, or his people, would result in automatic dismissal from the Pride’s roster. Though this had upset several of the warriors, they had grudgingly accepted the restriction. She had been equally explicit in declaring that Atticus was hers—and hers alone—when the battle was properly joined.

Several hours passed and finally Lu Bu caught the scent of something strange, pungent, and clearly not human. She peeked over the tiny ledge of stone behind which they were hiding and saw a massive, hideous creature standing at the mouth of the small ravine where the trap had been set.

It had six legs, small patches of shaggy fur, and two pairs of long, sharp tusks jutting outward from its mouth. It had a large, serrated, cruel-looking horn situated at the end of its snout, and she knew that she was looking at her first Stone Rhino.

It was large, but not overly so—at least not compared to some of the tales she had heard the Tracto-ans retell on the Pride of Prometheus. She estimated it stood no taller than twice her height at the top of its head, which would place it slightly below average for a creature of its kind. Still, it was a formidable creature, and seeing it reminded her of the fact that she was essentially unarmed.

The creature snorted before bellowing a deep, grating sound which echoed throughout the ravine, and Lu Bu felt her hackles rise as she saw Atticus’ javelin team tense in anticipation. For several seconds, it seemed that the Stone Rhino was about to enter the ravine; it had clearly caught sight of the meat pile situated on the far side of the concealed pit trap—a trap which had been covered with a visually convincing pile of tree limbs which had, in turn, been covered with thick, muddy dirt to give the illusion of a solid surface.

But then the Rhino turned and made to leave. It took two steps before a pair of Atticus’ warriors leapt from concealment near the mouth of the ravine and began to bellow a wordless, primal challenge to the creature.

The Stone Rhino turned with surprising—no, with terrifying!—speed and agility as it locked onto the Tracto-ans with its reddish eyes. It blasted a pair of breaths into the dirt as it lowered its head and began to paw the ground. Each time it did so, the creature’s giant feet tore huge, half-meter-deep grooves in the rocky soil as though it was nothing but light mud.

The Tracto-ans continued their bellows and brandished obsidian-tipped spears in the creature’s direction, with one of the warriors even hurling his spear like a javelin at the Stone Rhino. The tip of the spear struck the creature’s skull squarely between the eyes but skittered harmlessly off before becoming entangled in a patch of the beast’s deadly razor-sharp, hair-like fibers. It was then that the creature accepted their challenge and it began to charge toward them.

Lu Bu felt her pulse quicken as the two men turned and ran full-out toward the pile of meat, and she silently urged them to outrun the creature before it caught up with them.

Halfway to the pit’s location, one of the warriors lost his footing and nearly sprawled out on the ground, barely managing to keep his momentum moving forward as he scrambled to keep pace with his companion.

That momentary lapse proved fatal, as the Stone Rhino lowered its head and swept its vicious horn toward him when it had closed the distance between them. The Tracto-an apparently realized the Rhino was within striking distance, because he rolled quickly to the side and attempted to dive for cover behind a small, rocky, outcropping. But the Stone Rhino leapt through the air with what looked to be impossible grace and swept its head side-to-side as it did so, just barely catching one of its splayed tusks on the Tracto-an’s thigh.

The man cried out in pain and tried to scramble away, but the Rhino drove its powerful, cloven foot into his back before he could do so. There was a sickening, wet, crunching noise followed by a muffled scream as the Rhino eviscerated the warrior with a single swipe of its horn. With another pair of swipes with its massive head, the behemoth had dismembered the once-mighty warrior and turned its eye to his companion.

The other warrior had already crossed the pit trap and was still bellowing his primal challenge at the hexapedal monstrosity. The beast turned its attention from the ruined corpse of the Tracto-an it had just slain and pawed the ground in anticipation before charging toward the man.

The Tracto-an hurled his spear at the Rhino, and Lu Bu saw several of Atticus’ men come out of their concealment at the mouth of the ravine with spears of their own. These warriors were wearing armor—an eventuality which Lu Bu had considered, but hoped would not come to pass since it would make the confrontation’s outcome less than certain.

The spear lodged itself in the Rhino’s thick, razor-sharp hair as the beast lunged across the divide separating it from its prey. It had apparently not noticed Atticus’ group, as it seemed focused on finishing off the raucous human.

Lu Bu raised her hand to signal to her band that it was nearly time to spring their own trap. The Stone Rhino charged across the narrow ravine, with the Tracto-an who had acted as bait continued to goad the creature into its doom.

All around her Lu Bu’s group depressed each of their devices’ manual activation buttons and she began to count backward from three, knowing that the makeshift grenades would require an additional two seconds to reach their targets.

The Stone Rhino crashed into the false ground and attempted to prevent its roughly ten meter fall to the spear pit below, and for a brief instant Lu Bu feared it would do precisely that. If it managed to extricate itself from the trap, it would turn on the assembled Tracto-an band and several of the Pride’s newest warriors would fall to the beast’s savage fury.

But the creature’s momentum proved too great, and it merely managed to slow its descent for a split second before plummeting, head-first, into the spiked pit below.

Lu Bu’s count reached zero just as a cheer went up from the assembled Tracto-ans, and she stood to her full height to lob her makeshift grenade into the backs of the unsuspecting Tracto-an javelin hurlers beneath her. Her team did likewise, and the smashballs soared through the air in a unified, picture-perfect arc—an arc which did not behave as one would expect of an object under the influence of normal gravity.

The gravity generators built into the smashballs increased their apparent mass until they each weighed a hundred kilos precisely five seconds after activation, with the increase in mass beginning at the three second mark. The group had practiced extensively with this throw and other variants, and as their missiles fell upon the Tracto-ans like mortar rounds, Lu Bu and her companions leapt over the stony ledge. Her people sprinted toward their quarry with nothing but short lengths of rope hanging from their belts—rope they would use to bind the Tracto-ans as soon as they closed to grips with them.

The smashballs fell upon their targets with all but one striking true. Bernice remained atop the ledge, ready to launch a smashball against any target which was not quickly subdued by the strike team. When the smashballs impacted against their targets’ backs, each Tracto-an was driven forward with the equivalent force of a thirty five kilometer per hour hover car collision. Each of them was driven into the stone ledge behind which they had hidden and, of the seven warriors present, four were rendered unconscious by the double impacts of smashball and stone.

Lu Bu and her companions remained silent as they sprinted down the shale-strewn hillside, with only the skittering of gravel to mark their passing. The lone, untouched Tracto-an whirled around just in time to see Lu Bu launch herself through the air with her knee aimed squarely at his square, comically-dimpled, chin.

She drove her knee into his face with such force that his head snapped backward violently enough that Lu Bu briefly wondered if she had killed him. But his eyes rolled around as he flailed in a vain attempt to regain his balance, and she quickly sunk a deep chokehold around his neck. In just a few seconds, he was unconscious and she took the cord from her belt which she used to bind him in place while her band moved on to his cohorts.

The Tracto-ans beneath the javelin ledge were roaring with victory, but thankfully they did not appear to notice the absence of their now-unconscious companions. Lu Bu knew that would not last long, so she quickly checked to see if her team had subdued and bound the javelin squad. She noted with a primal, barbaric, glee that they had done so and she knew they could now proceed to the next phase of their plan.

Kratos met her gaze with his lone, smoldering, eye and he nodded as he and the others picked up their smashballs to reset the timers as she had instructed them to do.

Bernice made her way down the scramble, careful to avoid making undue noise as she did so, and Lu Bu waited until the effectively one-armed woman had joined them on the rocky ledge before signaling to her team of Lancers that the next phase was upon them.

She knew that even if they landed each of their smashballs, there was little chance that the impacts would render any of the armored Tracto-ans of Atticus’ war band unconscious simply due to the fact that there would be no double impact like there had been with the javelin throwers.

But they might buy themselves a clean approach with the improvised, single-target, grenades and that was enough for her. Once they closed to melee range, she knew that her people would have close to even odds.

She made eye contact with her team and gave the signal to activate the smashballs just as Atticus’ team began to make beckoning calls in the direction of the ledge. She peered around the rocky outcropping which provided them visual cover and saw that they were all still in their positions around the pit, and when her count reached two seconds she drew her arm back, throwing it precisely as that count reached three.

Her companions did likewise and, almost as a single entity, they flowed around the rocky ledge before sprinting toward their quarry. They were unarmed and unarmored, which Kratos and Cassius had agreed would prevent Atticus’ people from using deadly weapons. But just to be certain, she had been taught a strange word that she should lead her team in bellowing which would invoke a non-fatal conflict. Even so, she fully expected the affair to become, at the very least, potentially deadly—at least between the leaders of the two groups.

Atticus’ eyes, and those of his band, sighted in on Lu Bu and her people just as she bellowed the strange word at the top of her lungs. She was joined by her teammates, and the looks on her opponents’ faces was one she had not expected to see: grudging respect mixed with eager anticipation.

Atticus barked a command and his people made to throw down their weapons just as the smashballs crashed into their targets. Unfortunately, only four of the balls hit their targets, and of those four only two were sent to the ground with the other two suffering glancing impacts that did little more than unbalance them.

Lu Bu found her voice mixed with those of her teammates, who were screaming a savage battle cry that transcended social, political, ethnic, or linguistic barriers, and for a perfect moment they were precisely what she had hoped they would be: a team.

Then, as is known to happen at such times, all hell broke loose.

A small creature which looked like a grotesque, four foot tall wasp with delicate, human-like hands, leapt up out of the pit snare and crashed into one of the Tracto-ans in Atticus’ band. The creature wielded a tiny, cutting device which Lu Bu recognized from her mission briefs on Bugs to be capable of slicing through even power armor in short order.

Her group skidded to a halt as Atticus and his warriors scrambled to collect their weapons, and all eyes were on the creature as it sank its cutting-wheel weapon into the first Tracto-an’s neck. A shower of blood sprayed out from the wound, but to his credit the warrior did not panic. In what was almost certainly his final act, the warrior gripped the Bug’s arms in his massive, powerful, hands and splayed the creature’s arms out to either side of its body. With a herculean effort—and accompanying, bloody gurgle which should have been a defiant roar—the warrior tore the creature’s weapon-wielding arm completely from its body.

A short spray of green, viscous fluid shot out of the Bug’s empty arm socket and some of that liquid landed on the warrior’s face. Had his throat been intact he would have screamed in pain, but instead all that came out was a short, muffled, wet sound that Lu Bu could not even call a gurgle.

Atticus was nearest to the man, who had fallen to his knees as the Bug began to back away, chittering madly as it did so. With a brutal, cleaving stroke of his iron sword, Atticus neatly bisected the creature diagonally across what Lu Bu took to be its torso.

His blade seemed to smoke from contact with the acid, and both he and Lu Bu briefly exchanged looks which promised that when they had dealt with the interruption they would return to the business at hand.

But then a chittering erupted from the mouth of the pit trap, and five of the larger, two meter tall Soldier Bugs emerged. They each looked vaguely like a humanoid mantis, with heavily-armored arms ending in long, crab-like pincers. Each of them had apparently suffered significant injuries which had not yet healed, but they moved with surprising speed and fluidity as they descended on Atticus’ group.

Lu Bu looked around for a weapon but saw none, until her eyes settled on a smashball. She dove for it just as Atticus’ warriors formed up into a line and received the Bugs in formation.

Atticus wielded the largest sword of the group, and he laid into the Soldier Bug before him with controlled ferocity. His eyes were alight as he and the vicious-looking creature attacked, countered, parried and feinted. Meanwhile, to either side of him, his men did likewise and Lu Bu pressed the manual activation button on her smashball as she saw Kratos pick up a spear which had been, until that point, lying on the ground.

Two more of the smaller Bugs crawled out of the pit, and Lu Bu made directly for the nearest of them while Kratos moved to intercept the other. Without armor—or at least proper weapons—it would have been suicide for any of her people to engage the Soldier Bugs, and she saw Cassius and the other three pick up nearby stones and sight in on potential targets.

Lu Bu counted backward in her head as her chosen target appeared to realize she was approaching, and it skittered toward her faster than she had expected. It swiped with its cutting wheel at her midriff and she easily spun around the attack before kicking out at the creature’s spindly legs with enough force to break an ordinary person’s shin.

But the creature deftly ‘rolled’ with the attack, allowing the force of her kick to twist its leg into an impossible angle—impossible for a human, anyway—while it seemed not to lose its balance for even a second as it brought its cutting wheel up for a follow-up attack.

Thankfully Lu Bu had anticipated this, and she brought the smashball—which was only about fifty percent ‘charged’—into the creature’s back and sent the deceptively frail-looking creature to the ground. She pounced on it and grabbed the weapon it was wielding, wrenching it from its grip with her superior strength. She was enraged when it deactivated as soon as she gripped it, but before the Bug could get its feet back underneath itself she began to bludgeon its near eye with the body of the tool-like weapon.

After the third blow the Bug began to twitch violently, and after the sixth it no longer moved with any coordination at all. The tenth blow saw the entire side of its ‘face’ cave in before her bludgeoning effectively decapitated it, and the last signs of life left the disgusting creature’s body. She quickly retrieved her smashball and activated the manual play clock as she counted down from five once again.

As she did so, she looked up to see that Kratos had endured a wound to his leg, but it did not appear to slow him as he gave the Bug he had fought an emphatic stomp between what Lu Bu took to be its shoulders. The creature’s carapace ruptured and its acidic innards began to ooze out, but Kratos deftly avoided getting any of the foul substance on his skin as he stepped carefully away.

Lu Bu then looked over at the Soldier Bugs which Atticus was battling just in time to see the Pride’s War Leader cleave through his enemy’s arm, with the force of his blow lodging his sword in the Bug’s upper torso. The Tracto-an Lancer tried to free the weapon, but the Bug made a quick, stabbing attack with its remaining arm and nearly skewered the towering Tracto-an while he tried to extricate his weapon.

After dodging the attack, Atticus unexpectedly released his grip on the weapon and kicked the Bug squarely in the ‘gut,’ sending it sprawling back toward the edge of the pit trap. Lu Bu’s count had already reached three, so she gripped the ball like an Olympian grips a shot put and launched it at the Soldier Bug with everything she had.

The ball came up short by several feet and she cursed her poor timing. She saw one of the other Bugs fall to an expertly-coordinated attack sequence executed by a pair of Atticus’ Tracto-an warriors just as Kratos hurled a smashball into the Soldier Bug facing Atticus, eliciting a vicious, cracking sound as one of its legs snapped from the artificially enhanced force of the smashball’s impact.

Atticus produced a dagger from his belt and drove it between the Bug’s eyes, sending the creature into a spasming heap that saw its limbs contract after their motions had ceased.

Hearing a thunk from her rear, Lu Bu whirled to see a javelin sticking out of a Soldier Bug’s torso—a Soldier Bug which had only been a few steps from her. She realized it had been coming toward her, and she looked up to the ledge to make eye contact with Bernice, who had already retrieved another javelin and was attempting to sight in on another target.

Another Bug fell to the efforts of Atticus’ warriors, leaving only one Soldier Bug standing. It began to backpedal away from the armored warriors of Atticus’ war band, and for a brief moment Lu Bu thought the creature looked afraid. Then the warriors made a series of feints, causing the Bug to flinch just enough to create an opening for a spear-wielding warrior. He drove the weapon through the Bug’s torso and then pushed it into a nearby rock as the Soldier Bug’s pincers clamped down on the spear’s shaft and snapped the wooden weapon with little apparent effort.

But the opening had been more than enough; just as the spear-wielder released his grip on the shattered weapon two of his cohorts swung their blades at the Soldier Bug with one aiming high and the other aiming low. The Bug, predictably, ducked the high attack—but the price it paid for avoiding decapitation was the removal of its front legs.

The Soldier Bug put up a good fight, but it was only a matter of seconds before Atticus and his men had savagely dismembered the thing and reduced it to a pile of disparate body parts. It’s slowly leaking bodily fluids burned anything and everything they came in contact with, but the demonic-looking creature was most certainly dead.

Lu Bu moved to her left and picked up a smashball she found there, her thumb hovering over the activation button as she strode purposefully toward Atticus.

The large Tracto-an removed his helmet and burning rage was clearly visible in his eyes as he matched her step for step.

“You foolish child!” he bellowed, and Lu Bu could almost feel her teammates fall in behind her as Atticus’ men spread out into a defensive formation. “You could have killed us!”

Lu Bu was actually stunned to hear him say that, and immediately fired back, “Yes, I could have!”

His eyes narrowed as he threw his dagger to the ground, prompting her to drop her smashball. “You know that is not my meaning,” he roared as he cocked his fist and prepared to fire a devastating punch at her.

But she had prepared for exactly that moment while drilling with Kratos earlier in the day. She intercepted his incoming wrist with her hands and pulled her body ‘up’ his arm as she snaked her legs around his limb while attempted to secure a blood choke using her legs. She had learned it was called a ‘triangle’ choke or a ‘figure four’ choke by her fellow Lancers aboard the Pride of Prometheus, and Atticus appeared to realize his mistake immediately. He attempted to redirect her body’s momentum and smash her—head-first—into the nearby stone.

Lu Bu tucked her chin and twisted her body in mid-air, and was thankful when only her shoulder struck the hard chunk of stone. She immediately lost sensation in her left arm but managed to maintain her grip on the larger man as she reached for the back of his head and pulled it toward her belly while securing the choke by squeezing her legs around his neck and arm.

To one uninitiated in the combat arts, it would have appeared to be a position more suited to a Kama Sutra manual than a fighting repertoire, but both Lu Bu and Atticus knew that there was a very real chance he was about to go to sleep—which is precisely what happened less than two seconds later.

As his body went limp, she rolled him over onto his back and secured a dominant position, cocking her fist as she heard a chorus of protests from Atticus’ people. But Lu Bu’s team had closed the distance, and the two groups exchanged barbs in their native tongue as Lu Bu released the blood choke just enough to allow Atticus to regain consciousness.

When he did so, he blinked and looked up at her in confusion for several seconds before she briefly flexed her thighs. The confusion vanished and he made to resist, prompting her to hammer her fist into his nose at the perfect angle to lay it flat against his cheek. She hammered another pair of blows into his face as he attempted to reverse their position, but Lu Bu managed to maintain the hold, and posture, as she drove yet another series of blows into his face. His trapped arm stiffened as he flailed wildly, and acting more on instinct than design, Lu Bu released the choke and spun her hips as she isolated the arm and applied a joint lock that would certainly destroy every ligament and tendon in his shoulder.

“Submit!” she snapped as she began to apply the pressure which would ruin his right, primary, arm. He continued to resist until she felt something give out in his shoulder.

“Submit…” he growled as he ceased struggling against her.

She released the hold and stood to her feet, her still-bloody hand cocked in preparation for treachery as the Tracto-an War Leader stood to his feet. He briefly cradled his right arm before assuming a more neutral posture, and for a moment the two of them merely regarded each other in cold, indignant, fury.

“I beat you,” she growled as a wave of exaltation swept through her as she gestured to a nearby smashball, “with toys!”

Atticus looked fit to lunge at her following her bold—yet wholly accurate, since smashballs were little more than toys—declaration, but then something in his visage changed and he relaxed as he began to laugh boisterously.

Looks of confusion flashed across his peoples’ faces, but then they, too, began to laugh. Soon Lu Bu’s team was laughing as well, with the most prominent voice belonging to Kratos, whose grating, rumbling laughter reminded Lu Bu of a glacier grinding its way between mountains.

“A good game,” Atticus said grudgingly, and while Lu Bu knew that it was not over between them, she could tell from the look in his eye that there would be no need for violence between them in the immediate future.

Lu Bu came out of her combat-ready crouch and nodded sharply as she reached into her pocket to retrieve her com-link. She found that it had been smashed into several pieces, and she turned to Atticus, “We must contact Argos to warn of Bugs.”

Atticus nodded agreeably as the laughter died down and he produced his own com-link, which he used to make contact with their camp. When he was finished, he placed the link back inside his armor.

“Stone Rhino is mine,” Lu Bu said severely, remembering the primary purpose of her raid against her fellow Lancer’s group.

Atticus’ eyes narrowed, and all was silent throughout the ravine as the two sides, which had previously been joined in mirth, tensed in preparation of further conflict.

Atticus eventually shook his head. “You beat me,” he admitted, “but we killed the beast. Honor demands a share—but no more,” he said unyieldingly.

She considered the offer and grudgingly accepted as she thrust her hand—her right hand—out to grasp his. She knew that it would cause him severe discomfort to match the gesture, and she took more satisfaction than she would have liked to admit to as she saw him wince in pain as he deliberately raised his arm and clasped her hand in mutual, if grudging, respect.

As far as Lu Bu was concerned the score was settled between them. But if Atticus felt differently on the subject, she would be ready for him.

Chapter X: Unusual Recruits

“We have achieved a stable orbit, man” the Pride of Prometheus’ new Navigator reported smugly and Middleton watched as his XO whirled on the uppity ‘recruit.’

“We have achieved a stable orbit, Sir,” Sarkozi corrected scathingly, and the Navigator—a former pirate Captain named ‘Strider’—snorted.

“Right,” Strider said, “we have achieved a stable orbit, sir.”

Middleton nodded grimly. A ship of misfits, indeed, he thought to himself as he opened a channel to the shuttle bay, what’s a few more?

“Commence embarkation protocols,” he instructed the pilot via his chair’s built-in com-link.

“Aye, Captain,” the pilot replied.

“We are receiving packets of information from our recruiting team,” Fei Long reported from the Comm. station. Middleton had considered replacing the transferred Ensign Jardine with a qualified petty officer, but the truth was Fei Long knew more about the job than anyone they were likely to get, so he had become the Pride’s de facto First Shift Comm. Officer. “All of our units report green status,” the young hacker-turned-MSP recruit reported with a hint of relief.

Middleton knew of the relationship between the young man and Lu Bu, the promising young Lancer who Sergeant Joneson had identified as potential command material. The truth was that Captain Middleton could have found firm grounds for interfering with their relationship using a strict interpretation of the MSP’s codes of conduct, but nothing about the Pride of Prometheus’ mission to date had been what he might consider ‘by the book,’ so he had decided to relax certain aspects of ship-wide discipline while tightening others.

“Give me a count, Mr. Fei,” Middleton said as he called up the highest priority communiques from the planet’s surface.

“Initial estimates…” Fei Long trailed off as he accessed several different reports, “put our total Tracto-an recruits at two hundred and nine—forty seven confirmed Lancers and one hundred sixty two general crew applicants.”

Middleton’s eyebrows lifted in open surprise. He had expected the Lancer number to be slightly higher, and the general crew applicants to be no more than a third of what Fei Long was reporting. “Confirm that those are pre-qualified numbers,” he said as he stroked his chin. Two hundred additional Tracto-ans would present some interesting, and challenging, operational variables…

“Confirmed, “ Fei Long replied quickly, “it would seem there are an additional eighty four recruits who might qualify if they pass a more rigorous medical examination, bringing the total to two hundred ninety three hopefuls.”

Middleton switched his chair’s com-link to Sergeant Gnuko’s frequency. “Sergeant,” he said after the connection had been established, “adjust the schedule for the Lancers assigned to shuttle escort duty to account for three hundred total transferees.”

“Three hundred?” Gnuko asked in surprise.

“Three hundred,” Middleton repeated. “Also have your people tighten security on anything that might be used as a weapon,” he continued, “at least until our new crew have had a chance to settle in.”

“Larry that,” Gnuko replied professionally, and for a brief moment Middleton was reminded of his former Lancer Sergeant’s similar, unflappable demeanor, “Gnuko out.”

“Captain,” Fei Long said just after the connection with Gnuko had been severed, “it would appear that two of our recruiting teams encountered a small Bug unit while engaged in…erm,” he hesitated, “war games.”

Middleton felt the hairs on his neck rise. “Scan the surrounding area for Bug propulsion trails,” he said quickly.

A few seconds later the Sensors operator shook her head. “No Bug trails detected, Captain.”

“It would seem that a Bug Scout Marauder crashed near Argos not long after the Battle of Tracto,” Fei Long continued evenly, “and the specimens our Lancers encountered were the last remnants of the Marauder’s ‘crew.’ Our teams have conducted a thorough sweep of the area, with the support of the Argosian military, and they are confident the threat has been neutralized.”

Middleton relaxed and nodded. “Very good; relay the relevant information to the Furious Phoenix,” he instructed, “Fleet Command needs to be aware of any lingering Bug presence.”

“Yes, Captain,” Fei Long replied smoothly.

Lu Bu helped fasten the final group of Tracto-an recruits into their harnesses inside the shuttle, and when she was finished doing so she checked to ensure that her portion of the Stone Rhino’s hide had been properly stowed.

Satisfied that all was as it should be, she signaled Sergeant Gnuko to that effect before strapping herself into a harness beside the mammoth Tracto-an, Kratos.

“You have my thanks,” Kratos said after she had finished securing herself, and the compartment juddered slightly as the shuttle lifted off from the ground.

“For what?” Lu Bu asked.

Kratos shrugged. “I had long thought that I would die on my birth world,” he explained, “but you have given me a chance to walk among the stars themselves. For that, I am grateful,” he said before hesitating and ultimately saying no more.

“Why you don’t like Tracto?” Lu Bu asked in genuine curiosity. “It is your home.”

Kratos snorted in open derision. “That world is not my home,” he said darkly, “it was only my prison…and now I am free.”

Lu Bu considered his words but could not understand how he believed his world to be a prison. Kratos had freely been allowed to walk up to their tent and apply for a position among the Pride’s crew—unlike her own countrymen, who had literally been imprisoned prior to Captain Middleton officially requesting their transfer to the Pride of Prometheus to replace heavy losses the ship had previously suffered at the hands of their enemies.

“I see no chains,” Lu Bu said evenly as she leaned back in her chair. “And I see no brands,” she added bitingly, knowing that every other person serving aboard the Pride who hailed from her home world had a barcode tattoo prominently placed over their right eyes.

“A man with a bound and broken body is freer than one with a bound and broken mind,” Kratos retorted sharply in his deep, grating voice. “You could not understand.”

“Why,” she demanded, “because I am woman?”

His brow furrowed in apparent confusion before he laughed. “I suppose not because of that,” he allowed, “but because you were born in a place where freedom of thought was not restricted as it is on…Tracto,” he nearly ground the name of the world into sand as it passed his gritted teeth.

Now it was Lu Bu’s turn to snort derisively. “You speak much…but know little,” she rebuked before closing her eyes.

Fei Long had been excused from his bridge duties so he could assist Doctor Middleton in the psychological examinations of their prospective crewmembers. The addition of so many crewmembers reminded Fei Long of a proverb which suggested one should ‘be wary of quenching thirst with poisoned wine’—implying that a person should take care to avoid creating a large problem by applying a quick solution to a smaller one.

The Tracto-ans were a proud, warrior culture and as such they proved invaluable in times of combat. But they had also been more than slightly disruptive to ship-wide operations on a fairly regular basis—and that had been with fewer than two dozen of them aboard the Pride of Prometheus during its previous mission!

But Fei Long had learned that Captain Middleton was a sagacious commander, and he had come to trust the Pride’s Commanding Officer over the previous months. Fei Long was uniquely capable of identifying the potential flaws in a given plan, due to his enormous intellect, but he also knew there was truth to the adage ‘a good plan today is better than a great plan tomorrow.’

The door to sickbay slid open before him and he felt butterflies in his stomach upon seeing Lu Bu standing with a group of Tracto-ans.

He made his way toward her and realized just how much he had missed her in the previous weeks. It was amazing to him that he could remove her completely from his conscious thoughts and yet, now that she was in front of him again, it seemed as though he could think of nothing else.

She nodded her head curtly as he approached, and his buoyant mood was instantly deflated. Her face was covered in deep, purple bruises and more than a few scrapes, and it appeared she was wearing a sling on her left arm. He took her gesture to mean he should keep a professional distance, so he did as she apparently desired and adjusted his course to intercept Doctor Middleton, who was on her way to one of the examination beds.

“I am here to assist in the evaluations,” he said, stealing one final glance at Lu Bu as he fell in beside the Doctor.

“Good,” Doctor Middleton replied, handing him a data slate as she began to wave an examination wand over the Tracto-an lying on the examination bed. The patient was a truly gargantuan woman with what looked to be a permanently contracted arm which had atrophied to no more than one third the size of its opposite. “Call out the names and begin the examination—how is your Tracto-an?”

He bowed his head graciously as he accepted the data slate, and replied in his best Tracto-an, “I believe I am capable of fluent discourse.”

She shot him a withering look before tilting her head toward the group of Tracto-ans beside Lu Bu. “Start at the top of the list and work your way down,” she instructed, and he bowed as he backed away and made to follow her instructions.

He looked down at the data slate and found the first name on the list, which he called out, “Kratos.” He looked up and saw a veritable mountain of a man, who had only one eye remaining in his head, turn deliberately toward him, and a quick series of calculations suggested the man weight approximately four hundred pounds and was easily seven feet tall. “Have a seat,” he said, threading his voice with the sternest stuff he could muster as the other man towered over him.

He sliced another glance at Lu Bu and saw a bemused look on her face as he commenced with the psychological examination’s question-and-answer segment.

Chapter XI: An Arms Race

“Two hundred thirty two is all we can manage, Tim,” Doctor Middleton repeated impatiently, but Captain Middleton wasn’t about to give up so easily.

“Doctor, I got us the growth vats,” he repeated, “along with a total of a hundred bionic prosthetics—“

“We’ve been over this,” she snapped. “We have an extra thirty partial leg prosthetics lying around down there but we’re short just as many mechanical arms. What do you want me to do, attach BKA prosthetics to their shoulders?!”

Middleton gave her a sour look as he rallied, “But the growth vats—“

“Are already operating at maximum,” she reiterated. “We’ve been over this, Tim: the crew we’ve picked up are, to put it insensitively, short of arms and there’s no way we can overcome the gap.”

Middleton ground his teeth. In the last few days they had conducted interviews with their prospective crewmembers and found that all but a dozen were psychologically and intellectually qualified to contribute to shipboard operations. Not only that, but the group would likely perform to a similar standard to those recruits which Commodore Druid had rounded up from the nearby Confederation worlds.

Not only were the Tracto-ans qualified, but they would provide the Pride of Prometheus with roughly two hundred percent the standard combat rating of an unarmed crewmember from the Confederation worlds. Middleton had already factored the increase in combat rating to several aspects of the ship’s tactical capability, and he would be blasted if he gave up such a valuable resource without a fight.

He took a deep breath, “If we got extra vats—“

“There aren’t any, Tim,” she cut him off adamantly. “I’ve already scoured every single piece of medical technology from the rest of the Fleet that I can get without employing physical coercion.”

Middleton fixed her with a hard look and repeated, “If we got extra vats…” He saw her roll her eyes before sitting back in her chair and fold her arms, but thankfully she was silent as he continued, “say…two of them, how long to get the limbs replaced or rehabilitated using fresh neuro-muscular tissue grafts?”

She narrowed her eyes and chewed on her lip as she performed silent calculations. “Two more vats would get us another twenty or so up to combat ready,” she bitter spat the words, “in two months.”

“And the rest?” he pressed.

She shook her head. “We simply don’t have the resources to perform such sensitive rehabilitation. We could grow the new limbs, sure,” she agreed with forced patience, “but you’re talking about a six month rehab cycle to train their central nervous systems to interface properly with the new tissues—and that’s only with fully-outfitted facilities, which we clearly don’t have.”

Middleton nodded slowly. “What about bionics?” he asked yet again, hoping she would budge from her previous position.

She shook her head doubtfully. “Another dozen—maybe,” she said pointedly, “but even then we’re talking about incredibly expensive implants, Tim, the kind even you and I would be hard-pressed to afford. Only Core Worlds will have them, and they’ll only be available at a premium.”

Middleton closed his eyes and ran some numbers in his head. If she could get him another three dozen crewmembers, that would put him solidly into the roster depth he needed for the mission they were about to undertake. Factoring in losses to battle, potential morale issues, and limited material resource availability, they were going to need every able-bodied—or roughly able-bodied—person they could stuff into the Pride.

“Ok,” he said, arriving at a decision, “we go with your maximum theoretically possible rehabilitation figures. I know you don’t want to hear it,” he said, raising a hand gently as she looked ready to engage in another outburst, “but the sad truth is that if this mission goes anything like the last one, we’re going to have bionics available before too long.”

Jo’s eyes widened in horror, “I can’t believe you just said that…”

Captain Middleton set his jaw and leaned across the table, “Despite what you may think, I don’t like it any more than you do. But this is the hand we’ve been dealt,” he said, stabbing his finger onto the table emphatically, “and if we were going to fold we should have done so a month ago. That said,” he allowed, easing back into his seat as his ex-wife snapped her jaw shut, “I fully intend to make every effort to secure the materials these people will need in order to bring them to peak efficiency.”

“Peak efficiency?” she glared with a condescending shake of her head.

“Call it whatever you will,” he retorted, “but the end result will be the same thing that each of us wants. You want them made whole, and I want them to contribute to the defense of the Confederation. So ask yourself this, Doctor,” he quipped as he drummed his fingers against the tabletop, “do they have a better chance of achieving those goals here with us or back on Tracto?”

Jo looked like she wanted to argue, but as usual Middleton had outmaneuvered her with cold, hard, logic. “I hate when you do that, Tim,” she grumped as she folded her arms across her chest. “Fine…I’ll go over their files again and submit my final,” she gave him a pointed look, “medical recommendation. What you do after that is out of my control.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Middleton said agreeably. “Now…onto a more sensitive subject.”

He could see Jo wince, and it wounded him that she had apparently taken his meaning to be a desire to broach a subject he would prefer remained precisely where it was: in the past.

He shook his head and said, “The Droid implants.”

Jo’s hand instinctively went to her head before she lowered it down to the table. “What about them?”

“I appreciate your submission to a series of scans which were conducted by Doctor Cho prior to his transfer,” Middleton said neutrally. “And the medical consensus throughout the Fleet is that you are, in fact, in control of your faculties and no longer an artificially enslaved puppet.”

“Puppet?!” she repeated in outrage. He held up a hand and gave her a hard look, but she would have none of it. “I told you everything I knew about them, and I also said I had no idea how those messages got sent; isn’t that good enough for you?”

Middleton gave her a heavy look before shaking his head sympathetically. “My words were callous,” he admitted, “but I did say ‘no longer’ a…puppet.”

Jo blinked several times before the meaning became clear. “Are you telling me…” she trailed off.

“The truth is that we don’t know,” he said, “but some of your implants appear to have been burned out recently—probably during our battle with the Droid Destroyers. And those parts contained a transceiver which would have, potentially,” he stressed, “allowed for direct neural subversion of your conscious mind while you carried out activities deemed congruous with the Droids’ plans.”

She opened her mouth before quickly closing it. Then Jo shook her head in disbelief, “They saved my life, Tim…I knew they had an agenda in doing so, but still…”

“My point, Doctor,” he said, hoping to regain control of the conversation, “is that I, personally, see no reason to believe you are a security risk. Doctor Cho tentatively agreed and, barring the opinion of a neurological expert who specializes in the field of synthetic neural implants, I’m going to have to go with the information I have.”

“So what about my ‘security detail’?” she asked archly.

“I can’t do anything about them,” he replied, “they’re acting on orders handed down directly from Fleet Command. I’ve already bent the rules as far as I think I can in that regard, Doctor,” he said with finality.

She nodded slowly before asking, “So why tell me all of that?”

Captain Middleton leaned back and steepled his fingers. “ Because I need you to understand my position if there’s any hope of us working together,” he explained as he fixed her with a piercing gaze. “In spite of everything that’s happened, I trust you,” he added heavily, “and I need you to understand that. Friction between us is fine—no, it’s better than fine,” he corrected quickly, “it’s probably the main, stabilizing force in our relationship, such as that relationship is.”

“Alright,” Jo said after a lengthy silence. “I think I understand you.”

Middleton nodded as he stood from the table. “That was the primary goal of this meeting, Doctor,” he said neutrally.

“Where are you going?” Jo asked shortly.

Middleton shook his head and sighed. “We’re going to break orbit soon, and I’ve just received confirmation that our mission has been green-lit; there are preparations which require my attention. Good evening, Doctor.”

With that he left the ready room and nodded acknowledgment to the Lancer stationed outside the door. His name was Marsh, and he was a loyal, trustworthy man who had served with Sergeant Joneson several years earlier. He was one of the few men with whom Middleton would entrust Jo’s security, primarily because he knew Marsh was sympathetic to the Doctor’s position.

And right then, even though Middleton had no intention of getting chummy with her in the near future, he knew that his ex-wife would need all the support she could get.

Chapter XII: Setting Course

“I’ll begin this mission by saying that what you’re about to hear is strictly confidential,” Middleton said, sweeping the conference room with his gaze. “The details of our mission are to be kept strictly confidential—if I find a single breach in this intelligence envelope then everyone here can rest assured that the consequences will be felt by every single member of this assembly. I will also say that such consequences will be consistent with punishment for aiding and abetting the enemy in a time of open war; review the regulations if you’re unclear what that means.”

He paused and let the gravity of his words sink in, and was glad to see that every man and woman present appeared to understand what he had implied. The Pride of Prometheus was about to embark on a dangerous mission unlike anything a Multi-Sector Patrol Fleet vessel had conducted in the MSP’s entire history. The MSP was primarily a peace-keeping force, but the Pride was about to conduct what was, essentially, a covert operation more properly suited to an Espionage or Intelligence agency than a patrolling warship. As such, keeping a tight lid on the flow of sensitive information was going to be the most crucial aspect of the mission.

“You each represent various teams aboard this ship,” Middleton continued, having silently rehearsed the speech off and on for several days prior to this meeting, “but none of your subordinates or crewmates can be apprised of what we will discuss in these meetings. Is that clear?”

“Tri-Locscium, sir,” more than half of the table replied in near-perfect unison, with the rest issuing a more traditional, ‘aye, sir.’

Middleton couldn’t keep a short-lived grin from his face at hearing Walter Joneson’s phrase uttered by his command team, but after he wiped the expression from his lips he gestured to Fei Long. “Mr. Fei is our resident expert on the matter and I’ll be turning the meeting over to him in short order so he can explain the details. But now that we’ve jumped away from Tracto, the entire crew is aware of the fact that we did not accompany the rest of the fleet. The message I want spread throughout the ship following this meeting is that we received last-minute orders to investigate a nearby Star System which made contact with Fleet Command. Once we’ve done this, we’ll attempt to rendezvous with the Fleet and support their actions in Sector 23.”

“But we aren’t going to Sector 23, are we, Captain?” Chief Engineer Garibaldi said dryly.

Middleton met his Chief Engineer’s eyes and shook his head, having expected Mikey to be the one who would break the silence. “No, we’re not,” he replied shortly before grimly adding, “at least not if our mission goes according to plan.”

“The crew has been placed on battle-ready status, sir,” Lieutenant Sarkozi, Middleton’s Executive Officer, said in her professional manner, “I assume this will continue going forward?”

Middleton nodded. “Not only that,” he replied, “but I want all combat-readiness drills tripled in frequency, and I don’t want department heads coordinating with each other. Drill proposals will be submitted directly to me, and me alone, is that understood?”

A chorus of ‘aye’ filled the room, prompting the Captain to nod in approval.

“We’ve brought an unexpectedly large number of Tracto-ans aboard,” he said, turning his gaze to the trio of Lancers seated at the far end of the table, with Sergeant Gnuko sandwiched between War Leader Atticus and Lu Bu, the almost-seventeen year old girl who had helped Middleton re-stock his depleted roster nearly a year earlier. “As such, I need honest appraisals of their morale and incorporation into the general crew. So far they’ve proven adaptive and more capable than I would have thought possible,” he said appreciatively, “but while they come from a warrior culture, I cannot emphasize strongly enough just how different that culture is from any military we—aside from the War Leader—can relate to.”

He saw Lu Bu and Atticus exchange a meaningful look, but Middleton knew he needed to keep the meeting moving along. Before he could do so, Atticus said, “My Lancer team will fight until our dying breaths, Captain Middleton. I will swear on my own life to their valor.”

“That’s good to hear,” Middleton said after meeting and holding the Tracto-an’s gaze for several seconds. He knew Atticus was making a point about only vouching for his hand-picked team; apparently the War Leader held the other Tracto-ans which Middleton’s people had brought aboard the Pride of Prometheus in far lower esteem. “But let me make something perfectly clear,” Middleton added, leaning forward as he placed his knuckles against the table, “this is one ship, with one mission, and one crew.” His eyes bored into Atticus’ eyes, then swept slowly across the table as he regarded each of his senior officers in turn. “The time for petty bickering, social jockeying, and bigotry is at an end; if we don’t learn to work together then we might as well set our reactors to critical right now because that will prove a gentler, kinder end than the one that waits for us if we indulge in jingoism of any stripe—is that clear?”

“Tri-Locscium, sir!” the room replied…all save Atticus. He nodded curtly a brief moment after the others had made their verbal acknowledgment, and Middleton knew that squaring off with the War Leader would only result in disrupting the meeting. He needed to leave the Atticus issue for Sergeant Gnuko to deal with.

“Good,” he said, turning to Fei Long. “Now, Mr. Fei, if you would work through the details?”

Fei Long stood to his feet, and Middleton could barely restrain himself from rolling his eyes at the young man’s chosen attire. He was dressed in some kind of robe—which he had learned through some research was of an ancient, ‘Taoist’ design—with an odd piece of headwear. The MSP code didn’t specifically cover Intelligence or Espionage meeting dress codes, so Middleton decided to restrict enforcement of the uniform code on the young tech specialist to those times he served on the bridge.

“Thank you, Captain,” Fei Long said smoothly as he moved to the main view screen set near the Captain’s seat. He activated the display, and a map of the nearby Sectors sprang to life and began to rotate, demonstrating its three-dimensional nature. “Some of you are already aware, but a few of you are not,” he said with pointed looks at the pair of officers who had not been aboard the Pride of Prometheus during its previous run—the former pirate captain named Strider, who now served as the Pride’s Navigator; and the ship’s newest Tactical Officer who, as far as Middleton was aware, was the first of his species to hold a bridge post in MSP history, “so I will put this as succinctly as I can: our primary mission is to gain access to and, potentially, control over the ComStat network.”

Navigator Strider snorted in disbelief, while Toto—the massive, silver-maned Sundered Tactical Officer—narrowed his eyes and noisily flapped his lips in a manner which bore striking similarity to the way a toddler does when ridiculing someone. “The ComStat be dead, know what I’m sayin’, man?” Strider scoffed, his accent making the word ‘man’ sound more like ‘mon.’

“We don’t have time to indulge your disbelief,” Middleton snapped as he fixed the rebellious man with an iron glare, “so I suggest you refrain from further outbursts, mister. Examine the brief after this meeting is adjourned and you’ll be up to speed.”

The Navigator sighed but, surprisingly, he did not roll his eyes so Middleton gestured for Fei Long to continue.

The young man nodded agreeably, “We have already gained access to one of the estimated fifty hubs scattered throughout Sectors 23 and 24, and during that mission we were able to retrieve valuable data which allowed me to refine the program we used to gain that access. If my latest calculations are correct, we must rendezvous with no more than six additional Hubs—and possibly as few as two—in order to gain total access to the ComStat network.”

Sarkozi leaned forward with a hungry look in her eyes, “We’ll be able to read what’s happening in the Empire?”

Fei Long shook his head. “Unfortunately, no,” he replied with a hint of disappointment, “it would seem that the Spineward Sectors’ portion of the ComStat network no longer interfaces with the rest of the galactic network.”

Eyebrows rose in surprise and confusion as Lieutenant Sarkozi sank back in her chair with a disappointed scowl on her face. Doctor Jo Middleton leaned forward and said, “Perhaps this is stating the obvious…but that would seem to imply some measure of complicity on the Empire’s part in not only deactivating this part of the network, but in leaving the hardware in place, would it not?”

A deafening silence hung over the room, and Middleton let it linger for a fraction of a second longer than he might have otherwise done as he said, “That’s speculation, Doctor, and we need to keep that to a minimum. Regardless of the ‘who,’ or ‘why,’ or ‘how,’ we have a mission to carry out and conjecture won’t do us any good at this point.” He delivered the words as gently as he could while maintaining a firm grasp on the collective mood of the room—he didn’t want to be unnecessarily harsh on his ex-wife, but he also needed to nip any future murmurs in the bud. “That said,” he allowed, “these meetings are the only ones where I will tolerate any kind of conjecture, so if there are questions then let’s have them bandied about before we adjourn. For now, let’s let Mr. Fei continue his presentation.”

Heads bobbed up and down slowly, and Middleton gestured for Fei Long to continue.

“However,” Fei Long said hesitantly, “the ComStat hubs are not our only mission.” He gave Middleton a look, and the Captain nodded his assent, prompting the young man to change the image on the main screen to show a region of space which the Pride of Prometheus had recently visited. “This is the location of the first ComStat hub which we were able to infiltrate,” he explained, zooming out to show its position relative to the nearby inhabited systems. Middleton remembered coming out of their FTL jump and nearly falling into the neutron star around which the ComStat hub made its orbit, and he suppressed a shudder as the vivid memory replayed itself in his mind’s eye.

“I don’t understand,” Sergeant Gnuko said as he leaned forward, “why are you showing us that system…unless you’re saying we need to head back there?”

Fei Long bowed his head in that infuriating fashion that was his way and he minimized the image of the neutron star’s location by splitting the screen. The other side of the screen displayed an image which appeared identical—except that this image did not show the neutron star as existing at all.

“What is this, a magic act?” Garibaldi quipped. “So you made it disappear; who cares?”

“An interesting choice of words, Mr. Garibaldi,” Fei Long said smoothly, and Middleton could tell the young man enjoyed the limelight a little too much for his liking, “because that is precisely what has happened…except I was not the one who made it disappear.” He allowed a moment to pass before he gestured to the two images, first indicating the one which showed the neutron star’s location, “This image is the Pride of Prometheus’s active star chart, which incorporates all relevant astrometric data—including data collected directly by our sensors—into its working database. While this,” he indicated the second image, “is the representation of every single database which has ever, at any point, been connected to the ComStat network throughout the Spineward Sectors—at least, as far as I can tell. I have not yet directly interfaced with each of those systems so I cannot verify with any certaint—“

“Mr. Fei,” Middleton cut him off sharply, and the young man gave him an almost apologetic look, “if you please?”

“Of course, Captain,” he replied evenly before getting back on track, “my point, ladies and gentlemen, is that I believe that these databases were corrupted—deliberately,” he added pointedly, “at some point in the recent past.”

“Charts could be incomplete,” Toto rumbled, speaking for the first time since the meeting had commenced, “neutron stars not luminescent. Could be unnoticed?”

Fei Long once again bowed his head in that maddening way, “That is, of course, a possibility. However, neutron stars are exceptionally dense and, while they are ‘dark,’ they are quite active in terms of their effect on nearby stellar structures. Additionally, modern astrometric techniques can easily detect their presence. This leads me to conclude that there is a greater than 96% probability that this particular star’s location had already been gathered and was subsequently removed.”

“They are hiding their resources,” Atticus concluded confidently. “How do we find them?”

Middleton had to keep a smirk from his lips. For all of the War Leader’s faults—which included a narrow perspective and focus—he was unerring in his efficiency and dedication to winning any conflict in which he found himself. It was a quality which they would need in abundance during the coming mission.

Fei Long, however, made no attempt to hide his smirk – a smirk which seemed to convey some deeper meaning, but Middleton could not guess at what that was. “Well put, Atticus,” he said levelly as he erased the images from the screen and showed a fresh view of Sector 24 without including Sector 23. A dozen systems began to strobe yellow and Fei Long explained, “These are the Star Systems in Sector 24 which possess—or which we have reason to believe possess—high-powered astrometric arrays with databases which, for one reason or another, were never directly connected to the ComStat network. They represent our best chance to, as the War Leader so aptly put it, ‘find whatever resources our adversaries are hiding’.”

Middleton nodded as he swiveled his chair around to sweep the assemblage with his eyes, and found them all attentive, focused, and eager-looking—even Navigator Strider. “In the interests of expediency,” he explained, “we’re going to make for the nearest of these systems. We’ll then attempt to synchronize the Pride’s Navigation computer with the astrometric data they have and see if our hypothesis proves out.”

“That be makin’ our destination Zhu’s Hope,” Strider said with certainty, and several eyes turned to him in surprise—including Middleton’s.

“He is correct,” Fei Long said with a faint note of praise in his voice. “We will arrive there in twelve days if we are unimpeded.”

“Good,” Middleton said before fixing his new Navigator with a withering look, “but I’ll expect you to speak Confederation Standard on the bridge, Navigator, and that includes proper grammar, understood?”

The former pirate captain rolled his eyes. “Oh, aye, Captain,” he replied.

Middleton wanted desperately to lay the man out in front of the group, but he knew that to do so would compromise the positive energy with which they now found themselves suffused.

So he leaned back and said, “In addition, any crewmembers who were not aboard the Pride during our previous tour will find themselves requiring Sergeant Gnuko’s crash course in power armor, as well as a round of hand-to-hand combat training with Lancer Lu Bu. I’d like those instructions to begin immediately, Sergeant,” he said, allowing his gaze to linger on the clearly annoyed Navigator before adding, “I think Mr. Strider here has shown himself eager for the exercise. See that he gets it.”

“Yes sir,” Gnuko said, briefly allowing a grin to flash across his face while Lu Bu gave the Pride’s Navigator a look like she might give a cockroach that had recently wandered beneath her boot.

“Dismissed,” Middleton said before making eye contact with Toto. “If you would stay a moment, Mr. Toto?”

The massive uplift puffed his chest out and popped his lips as the rest of the officers stood from their chairs.

“And I’m only going to say this one more time,” Middleton reiterated heavily, “none of this information makes it to the general crew, clear?”

“Tri-Locscium, sir!” they replied, and he nodded agreeably.

“Carry on,” he said, and one by one they filed out of the room until he was left alone with the enormous uplift—who was apparently on the small side for his kind.

Middleton stood from his chair and moved to one nearer Toto. After sitting down he asked, “How is your family acclimating?”

Toto popped his lips before peeling them back, revealing several missing teeth that somehow only made the ones that were still there all the more impressive. “Pride is good ship,” he rumbled, his cybernetic implants flaring with activity as he spoke Confederation Standard, “we thank Captain Middleton for this chance.”

Middleton shook his head pointedly, “It’s me who should be thanking you; those gunboats of yours are going to come in handy. But I want an honest answer: how is your family acclimating?”

Toto narrowed his eyes before rolling his head around in some odd expression which the Captain didn’t recognize. “Children never have this much room,” he said in what Middleton took to be a warm tone, “cleanest air, best food, no Hunt Packs; as father I cannot ask more than their safety.”

Middleton nodded slowly, “And your wife?”

Toto chortled, which was a far more enveloping and room-filling sound than any laughter which Middleton was capable of authoring. “Life mate fine engineer—Pride not have better. She work hard; earn her keep.”

“I don’t think there’s any question that your family is going to pull its weight around here,” Middleton chuckled. “All the same, we’ve got a lot of Tracto-ans aboard and they’re not exactly known to be the most…tolerant people.”

Toto’s eyes narrowed as he shrugged stiffly, “Conflict inevitable; we not initiate. Good for children to learn defend themselves,” he added with another shrug, this one more relaxed.

Middleton thought about the Sundered’s reaction, which he had not exactly expected. “You’re not on a pirate station any more, Toto,” he said slowly as he worked his way through his reply, “we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard. I’ve got no problem with your family defending themselves if there’s a problem,” he said with a pointed look, “but whenever possible, it would be best if any harassment was handled through official channels. Do you understand?”

The Sundered peeled his lips back once again, and this time Middleton was certain that the absent teeth made the present ones that much more intimidating in appearance. But the ape-like person’s posture was relaxed, so Middleton did his best to remain likewise. “You ship leader,” Toto agreed, “we follow rules. If rules not help us…” he said with a narrow-eyed look.

“You have my permission to depart as soon as it’s reasonably possible,” Middleton assured him. “I cannot stress that enough: I will not hold you, or your family, or your equipment, here against your will. My Executive Officer and I are both trained Tactical Officers, but you’ve got more actual battle experience than both of us put together; I consider your presence to be a luxury that I will do my level best to look after. Do we understand each other?”

Toto’s chest reverberated deeply with harsh, grating laughter as he slapped his open hand on the table, giving Middleton an apologetic look after he had done so—there were not many pieces of furniture present on the Pride of Prometheus which could withstand an adult, male, Sundered’s expressions of joy or happiness, which the slap clearly was.

“You not need us, we not need you,” Toto said knowingly. “Alliance is not allegiance.”

“Exactly,” Middleton said as he felt his eyebrows climb in surprise. “I’m glad we see eye to eye on the matter,” he said before shifting gears, “how are your gunships coming along?”

“Repairs good,” Toto replied with a nod of approval, “first ship repairs finished; second ship repairs take two more days. Main ship need more work…two weeks to finish.”

Middleton nodded slowly. “So your remote-controlled vessels will be combat-ready in two days and your control ship will take a few weeks…we can put them up in the shuttle bay for that the next couple of days, but as it sits right now we can’t deploy our shuttle in a combat drill with all four vessels crammed in there.”

Toto nodded knowingly. “Life mate speak with Ga-ri-bal-di,” he said, stressing the syllables as he said the Chief’s name, “he say can build cradles on hull in three days.”

Middleton nodded approvingly. “I can live with three days,” he said agreeably. “And we can keep your main ship in the hangar indefinitely.”

“Family sleeps on main ship,” Toto said brusquely, “too long live with pirates…no sleep elsewhere.”

“I can’t say I understand,” Middleton said, meaning every word. He could not imagine living in a place like the Omicron and worrying whether or not your children would be taken and, literally, eaten in the middle of the night. A hard airlock and a not-inconsequential amount of polarizable hull plating between your loved ones and the would-be diners would go a long ways toward peace of mind. “But seeing as your children are making themselves useful down in the shuttle bay as well, it’s a win-win as far as I’m concerned.”

“Good,” Toto said, and Middleton stood from the chair.

“I’m glad to have you aboard, Toto,” he said, offering his hand.

The uplift eyed Middleton’s hand for a moment before also standing and, as a parent might do with a newborn, delicately gripping Middleton’s hand in the universal—for primates, anyway—gesture of trust, respect, balance, and equality. “Glad be here,” Toto replied.

Chapter XIII: Girding Up

Fei Long worked at his private station as he put the finishing touches on his first complete batch of ATTACK DOGs. He had been pleasantly surprised to find that Lieutenant Commander Terence Spalding’s suggestion regarding how to bypass his recurring processor issue—by incorporating a grav-cart’s processor, of all things—actually worked. The young man had to grudgingly admit, in the privacy of his own thoughts, that the old—possibly senile—engineer had accumulated a vast wealth of real world knowledge and experience, and that such experience might yet play a pivotal role in Fei Long’s latest projects.

The door to his quarters slid open and Lu Bu came into the room. It had been over a week since she had returned to the Pride of Prometheus, and her bruises had only just begun to fade.

“Fengxian,” he said, greeting her by using her adopted courtesy name—a name which essentially came with her also-chosen legal name, “I did not expect you so soon.”

She snorted derisively. “Our new Navigator is not half the warrior he previously believed himself to be,” she said as she reached for a towel which he had placed near the door specifically for her to use. “I have demonstrated his failings,” she assured him, and Fei Long took quiet pride in Lu Bu’s steely resolve, “he will likely require several days to regain his smug demeanor.”

“At which point,” Fei Long said as he set his tools back into their kit, “I trust you will remind him of those same failings?”

Lu Bu shrugged. “I may…or I may expose others,” she said offhandedly before cracking a grin.

Fei Long threw his head back and laughed, and she soon joined him. When their merriment died down he shook his head, “Among men, Lu Bu.”

She nodded slowly and bit her lip for several seconds, but said nothing.

“What is it?” Fei Long asked warily. “Is there another problem…with Atticus?” he asked, unable to keep his voice from lowering as he said the Tracto-an’s name.

She gave him a surprised look before snorting angrily. “I could have killed that fool,” she snapped, her nostrils flaring the way an enraged bull’s might, “not once, not twice, but three times in one night! He is of no consequence; I do not understand your insistence on discussing him.”

Fei Long and Lu Bu had undertaken some variation of this precise argument several times in the last few days, but Fei Long was not about to let the matter rest. “Fengxian,” he began, but when he saw her eyes seemingly burning a hole in his head, he paused and reconsidered his next words before continuing, “I do not know what happened on Tracto, and I am content that it remains in the past. However,” he added, matching her glare for glare, “what happens on this ship is a different matter entirely.”

She squared her shoulders to him and took a pair of steps, causing his heart to quicken in response. “And what would you do if he was the cause of my distraction?” she challenged before giving him a scathing look. “You are a weakling, Kongming,” she bit out his courtesy name, once again turning it into an insult, “and Atticus is a trained killer. He would toy with you then deny you the peace of death after had wrecked you—and there is nothing you could do to stop him.”

Now it was Fei Long’s turn to raise his voice. “You think a person’s physique defines their power?!” he shot back. “What a fool you are if you truly believe that, and if you do not then you are merely attempting to goad me. Either way I would advise you not try my patience again, Fengxian!”

“Or what?!” she snapped, chest-bumping him hard enough that he staggered back several paces, but he refused to surrender this particular battle. “What can you do?” she challenged as she picked up a highly-sensitive calibration tool from the workbench and waved it in his face. “Will you use one of your contraptions on me?” she seethed before tossing the tool back onto the bench, ensuring that Fei Long would need to spend at least twenty minutes recalibrating it later. She stopped mere inches from his face and growled, “You are only as good as your toys, Kongming…without them you are nothing.”

Fei Long lowered his chin, causing their foreheads to touch as he said, “I made those ‘toys.’ It would be a small thing for me to defeat you even without them, Lu Bu—an almost trivial thing, at that—let alone a thickheaded fool like Atticus!”

“Prove it,” she glowered, not yielding so much as a millimeter of ground as he pressed his head against hers.

His mind raced through the possibilities, but every plan of action he could conceive in that moment resulted in his nearly-certain defeat at the hands of his girlfriend—a title he considered tenuous at that moment. This was actually something of a concern to him, seeing as he had never considered he would need to defend himself against the one person with whom he had shared any kind of meaningful connection on the ship.

She took a step back and shook her head piteously. “You see? Even if there was a problem with Atticus, you could do nothing about it. Your mind is sharp, Kongming,” she said, her voice softening only slightly, “but your body is not.” She then unexpectedly grabbed him by the hem of his robe and pulled his body against hers before planting a firm, wet kiss on his lips, which he grudgingly returned as his hands moved around her waist to the small of her back—as if anything about her could be called ‘small.’ When their lips parted, she placed her cheek against his and whispered into his ear, “It does have its uses, however.”

Needing no further encouragement, Fei Long began undoing her clothes while she did likewise with his. As they tossed about in a furious, short-lived passion which only the young can know, he almost forgot about their argument and its startling revelation regarding his personal security.

Almost.

Chapter XIV: First Down

“Emergence,” the helmswoman called out, “shield strain is within limits; breaking the sump…now.”

The Pride of Prometheus shuddered beneath their feet, and Middleton had to admit that the constant practice had produced an even steadier hand at the helm than the Pride had known during the previous mission. Of course, Garibaldi had been as deep into the jump drive as he dared without requiring a complete rebuild, so it was entirely possible that a large portion of the difference was owed to his fastidious nature.

“Sump cleared,” she reported calmly, and Middleton was glad for her steadfast demeanor. Her name was Marcos, and she was a Chief Petty Officer who had transferred, in a roundabout way, from the Easy Haven crew after requesting to be moved to the MSP proper. She was an excellent pilot with high marks across the board.

The main reason she had been available for the Pride was, in all likelihood, because of an admittedly troublesome history of substance abuse. But Middleton’s ship was already packed to the rafters with crew who had backgrounds that made hers pale in comparison, so he had snatched her up as quickly as possible.

“Sensors,” Middleton said irritably, turning his chair to face the Sensors station, “I need eyes on this system.” The Sensors department had been the weakest link in the bridge crew, owing primarily to the Pride’s antiquated equipment, which was so outdated that it required even experienced operators to completely retrain.

So instead of retraining a proficient operator, he had assigned the task to a young, smooth-skinned Tracto-an man who had shown exceptional communication skills, poise, and intellect.

“Yes, Captain,” the young man replied as he calmly fought with the cumbersome controls of the aged cruiser’s sensor suite. After several seconds the screen began to populate in a painfully slow fashion, but at least the inexperienced bridge officer—named Hephaestion—was working outward from the ship as he cleared the many grids comprising the star system’s space.

After nearly twelve minutes—an eternity in tactical terms—the screen was populated with the system’s planets, moons, orbital facilities and other noteworthy features.

“Scan complete, Captain,” Hephaestion said with disappointment clear in his voice, “I have two contacts in orbit of the colony which I cannot verify at this ranges.”

Middleton let the man’s grammatical error pass as he called up the objects in question. He quickly deduced, from their distances, trajectories and velocities, that they were small warships engaged in an active battle.

“Set Condition One throughout the ship?” Lieutenant Sarkozi pressed, and Middleton acknowledged with a curt nod. “Condition One,” Sarkozi said severely after activating a ship-wide intercom channel, “repeat: Condition One. All hands to battle stations; this is not a drill. Repeat: this is not a drill.”

The gently strobing alert lights began to pulsate in their customary fashion, and Middleton began to examine the raw data more closely. The ships were moving sluggishly, and one of them appeared to be in a decaying orbit.

After a few minutes of examining their behavior, he concluded that the ship with the decaying orbit would crash land on the planet—if it avoided burning up in the atmosphere—in approximately half an hour. The other vessel looked to be moving better, but not excessively so, as it moved into a more stable orbit while attempting to keep a tactical angle on the falling ship.

“I estimate the lower ship will crash into the planet in thirty minutes,” Hephaestion reported before belatedly adding, “Captain.”

It was a close enough estimate; Middleton himself put the number at twenty eight minutes. “Try to cut through the atmospheric interference,” he instructed the young man, “compensate for the EM flares; those vessels are near the northern pole.”

“Yes, Captain,” Hephaestion said, and Sarkozi gave Middleton a meaningful look. As it stood, she would step in and take over at any station where underperformance was a danger to the ship and she was checking to see if he wanted her to do so.

But Middleton knew that if they pulled the rug out from under the young man during his first live fire event, they might as well assign him to the galley for the duration of the op. Confidence was nearly as important as raw ability for a member of the bridge crew, and keeping calm under fire was arguably the most important attribute any warrior could possess. So far Hephaestion was holding up well for his first naval battle, and it was unlikely that they could ask for a less stressful induction to space warfare.

Several minutes later, the higher-orbiting vessel’s information began to populate the screen and Middleton ground his teeth. It was a droid ship, but it was from the one tribe which the Pride had not encountered during its previous mission.

“Profile makes it a destroyer, Captain,” Lieutenant Sarkozi reported just before Middleton had independently arrived at the same conclusion, “her power plants are running at less than half of the design’s recorded combat output.”

“Log this information,” Middleton ordered Hephaestion, and the young man nodded as he verified that the information was being permanently stored in the Pride’s data banks.

“Mr. Toto,” Middleton turned to the Pride’s Sundered Tactical Officer, “instruct the gun deck to prepare for live fire.”

“Yes, Captain,” the giant, silver-maned uplift replied in his deep, reverberating voice.

The enemy destroyer adjusted its course and its engines increased their output by several percent as the ship made to flee from the Pride of Prometheus. It had previously seemed content to remain in orbit until its prey had crashed into the surface of the planet, but upon seeing the MSP warship bearing down on it the droids had opted to retreat.

“I detect multiple contacts,” the Tracto-an Sensors operator called out in a slightly raised voice, “they are firing on the planet.”

Middleton felt his guts clench as Sarkozi briskly made her way to the Sensors station to verify the findings. Several seconds later, after making a series of adjustments she reported, “Contacts confirmed; I’m reading thirty one distinct objects descending toward the planet along the destroyer’s path…but they’re slowing their rate of descent as they enter the atmosphere more than atmospheric drag would account for.”

The Captain furrowed his brow, wondering what kind of bombardment device would actually slow down. He had the brief, grim, thought that the droids might be unleashing a bioweapon in the upper atmosphere, but before he could relay that concern his XO made another report.

“The objects are too small to be ships and they have no apparent drive units,” she said in confusion. “They almost look like…marines using grav-sleds?”

“Marines on a droid ship?” Middleton repeated doubtfully before realizing what they actually were. “Smart,” he grudged as he flipped through the database on droid configurations which had been reported in Sectors 23 and 24. He quickly found what he was looking for and activated his chair’s com-link while raising Sergeant Gnuko.

“Gnuko here, Captain,” the Lancer Sergeant responded promptly, and Middleton saw a look of realization cross his XO’s eyes as she stepped away from the Sensors station.

“Sergeant,” Middleton said levelly, “prepare your teams for rapid deployment. We’re showing thirty plus assault droids on approach to the planet.”

“One LZ or multiples?” Gnuko asked quickly, with an unexpectedly eager note.

Middleton examined the data but Sarkozi piped in, “It looks like they’re heading for two…maybe three separate landing zones, Captain.”

“You copy that?” Middleton asked through the chair’s link.

“Two, possibly three LZ’s,” Gnuko repeated, “we’ll be ready for deployment in twenty minutes.”

“Good,” Captain Middleton acknowledged, “but it looks like we’ll have to drop you off while we chase down their ship—it’s making for the hyper limit and even though their engines are damaged it’s going to be tight for us to catch them.”

“Larry that, Captain,” Gnuko replied professionally. “My people will have things wrapped up before we swing back around.”

“Wish your people ‘good hunting,’ Sergeant,” Middleton said before severing the connection and seeing that Sarkozi had already thrown up an intercept course on the main viewer. If all went perfectly, they would intercept the enemy vessel in two and a half hours.

Dropping off the Lancers would be a relatively costly maneuver in terms of time, since the Droid Destroyer had adjusted its course to prevent the Pride from maximizing any potential gravity slingshot around the planet to aid in its pursuit.

Toto’s gunships were fast enough to intercept the Destroyer, but even a damaged Destroyer would prove more than a match for the trio of small Sundered craft.

It seemed it would be a close-run thing, so Middleton sat back in his chair and considered his options as the Lancer deployment clock ticked down from one hour, five minutes.

“You have your missions,” Sergeant Gnuko said to the two groups of armored Lancers standing at the base of the Shuttle’s lowered cargo ramp. “The smaller group of droids appears to have landed near a fusion plant; they will have already infiltrated the facility by the time your team arrives,” he said, fixing Lu Bu with a hard look. “Civilian casualties must be avoided, but we have every reason to believe the droids mean to overload the fusion reactor—that means that the two hundred sixty on-site technicians will be killed and the fusion plant will be reduced to rubble. But more importantly, the generators must remain online or the city’s bunker shield will fall—exposing nearly twenty thousand unarmed civilians to those droids. You need to keep the plant online, is that understood?”

Lu Bu fought against the knot which had formed in her throat as she nodded. “Yes, Sergeant Gnuko.”

Gnuko held her with his gaze for a moment before nodding in satisfaction and turning to Atticus, “Your team will deploy in the primary settlement on the northern continent. The shielded bunkers at the event center appear to have been activated, so collateral damage should be minimized now that the majority of the populace has taken refuge within those bunkers. Root out those droids, but your mission will take place inside a civilian center—that means you need to exercise caution. Is that understood?”

Atticus jutted his chin forward. “Understood,” he said, and the two men stood locked in a silent battle of wills for several seconds before Gnuko turned back to Lu Bu, whose heart had begun to beat with a familiar rhythm which had always presaged an important contest.

“Intel says you’ll have no more than eight droids to deal with at the fusion plant,” he said heavily, “so your team of hand-picked Lancers will deploy via grav-sled.”

Lu Bu’s eyes went wide for a moment; she had only just completed the initial training for grav-sleds herself and her team had only done a handful of simulations using the devices. But she stoically schooled her features, “Yes, Sergeant.”

Gnuko nodded as he gave the other three members of her group an appraising look. He flashed her an approving nod as he turned to Atticus, “Your team of twenty Lancers will deploy in groups of four to predetermined grids spread across the main settlement. You’ll coordinate your movement with the shuttle, which will provide aerial support and tactical updates to the team. Again,” he said as he set his jaw, “the civilians should be in the bunkers, but I want you to exercise extreme caution regardless. We’re reading just over twenty individual droid signals scattered throughout the city, and you can anticipate that they will execute a terror op. That means they’ll be looking to cause civilian casualties, which is precisely what you need to avoid.”

Atticus lowered his head and sneered, “I do not need to be reminded of civilians.”

“That’s for me to decide,” Gnuko snapped, “is that clear?”

Atticus took a sharp breath before exhaling and nodding stiffly, “Yes.”

“Good,” Gnuko said before signaling for the shuttle to begin its pre-flight launch sequence, “Captain Middleton wishes you all ‘good hunting’ and that will do for me, too. Move out!”

“Sir!” Lu Bu acknowledged before gesturing for her smaller team to file into the shuttle. First Kratos, who had barely fit into the largest suit of power armor the Pride’s armory held, filed into the craft. He was followed by Cassius, who had proven remarkably good with a rifle during simulated training. The last member of the team was a man named Homer. He had proven reliable during simulated missions, and Lu Bu knew that her four man team would need a dependable rear guard which she thought he was qualified to provide.

These particular droids seemed craftier than the previous ‘tribe’ she had encountered in the hyper dish junction. Those droids had literally flung themselves at the Pride’s crew, but the intelligence which they had gathered on their previous mission suggested that this particular tribe would not only prove more potent on a droid-by-droid basis, but that they were capable of employing complex tactics.

With Kratos, Cassius, and Homer seated, Lu Bu checked the grav-sleds and found them to be in working order. She took a deep breath as Atticus’ Lancers filed into their seats, and when Atticus himself passed her he cast a superior look down at her before joining his warriors and fastening his seat harness.

Lu Bu did a head count and found the number to be correct at twenty four, so she slapped the button which would close the shuttle’s cargo ramp.

After it had locked shut, she made her way to her own seat, her power-armored footfalls clumping loudly against the shuttle’s duralloy deck plates.

An hour later, Lu Bu checked her team to ensure that they were secured to their grav-sleds properly. When they all checked out, and their suits were set for low-pressure atmospheric operation, she activated her suit’s HUD and opened the ramp.

There was no rush of air as the ramp lowered and she looked down at the planet below. They were at a high altitude, but the grav-sleds were programmed to automatically bring their riders down to the surface in a gentle descent. In truth, all a grav-sled rider needed to do was hold on and keep their sled from running into her fellows.

“Sound off,” she said as she fought against the butterflies which had apparently formed a tornado in her gut.

“Kratos—clear,” the one-eyed man said, his voice unnaturally ‘thin’ as a result of the com-link’s audio filters.

“Cassius—clear,” Cassius followed promptly, and she could hear a note of trepidation in his voice but it was accompanied by a familiar resolve which she shared.

“Homer—clear,” the final member of her team called out.

Lu Bu took a breath, “Bu—clear. Team Lu: follow me!”

She gripped her grav-sled, which was standing upright before her in a position matched by those of her fellows, and she leaned forward. At first the sled leaned ponderously, then it tilted downward and before it had reached a forty five degree angle she placed her feet in the stirrups. As soon as she did so, the sled seemingly shot out the stern of the shuttle.

Lu Bu’s grip tightened instinctively as the sled’s nose continued to turn toward the ground. She checked her team’s status and felt a surge of pride as her HUD’s three dimensional graphic showed that they had fallen out of the shuttle in a picture-perfect line at equidistant spacing.

She pulled up on her grav-cart, which was one of the few real control methods available to her that would slow her descent. “Form line,” she snapped.

The other three began to manipulate their grav-sleds but it took far, far longer for them to achieve anything resembling a rank line. But when they had done so, she checked their trajectory and saw that they were almost perfectly on target.

Time seemed to go by far too quickly, and before she knew it the sled’s final approach alarm sounded. She checked their altitude and saw that they were one kilometer from the surface.

“Prepare for braking,” she ordered, and one by one the acknowledgment icons lit up on the HUD, starting with Kratos and followed at a significant delay by Cassius and Homer.

The grav-sleds began to brake as their anti-grav generators increased their output to compensate for the inertia of the descent.

She felt a violent jolt as the final braking deceleration cycle initiated, but to her shock Kratos’ grav-sled failed to brake with the rest of the team.

“Kratos,” she snapped, “emergency brake!”

His acknowledgment rune flashed twice, then a third time, followed by his static-laden voice, “No good.”

She cursed under her breath, “Brace yourself; your suit should cushion the hit.”

His acknowledgment icon flashed again, and she watched as his sled hurtled toward the ground at several times the speed of the others.

She winced as his grav-sled slammed into the ground and slid at least fifty meters before coming to a stop, but not before hurling Kratos’ power-armored bulk several meters off-tangent where he, too, came to a stop.

The rest of the sleds came to a relatively smooth stop but they, too, tore deep gashes in the soft dirt of the ground. It was a jarring experience, but Lu Bu—and, she suspected, the rest of her team—had experienced far worse during training.

Lu Bu removed her feet from the stirrups of the grav-sled and called in a raised voice, “Sound off!” She wasted no time waiting for their replies as she made for Kratos’ position with long, heavy footfalls as her duralloy boots left deep impressions in the soil of the planet.

Cassius and Homer’s acknowledgment icons flashed, and she came to a stop at Kratos’ side just as he began to stir. He rolled over and she saw that, aside from his blaster rifle having been ruined—thankfully without explosive consequences—his gear appeared more or less intact.

“Are you good?” she asked, unable to find the precise words she wished to speak on such short notice.

“Aye,” Kratos replied as he slowly gathered his power-armored bulk beneath himself. He got to his feet and checked his ruined blaster rifle, which had been locked onto his suit’s back plate during the descent, and snorted in derision, “What I would give for my hammer.”

“Form up,” Lu Bu called over the team’s private channel, “and switch to frequency Omega.”

One by one, the team complied and when they had gotten into formation she drew her vibroblade and offered it to Kratos, who had already drawn his boarding axe. “You fight with two?”

Kratos shrugged and accepted the blade, which was just under three feet long, and placed it in his right hand while gripping the axe with his left.

Lu Bu sighted in on their destination and range-checked it, finding they were just over a kilometer and a half from the site. “Move out!” she barked and they began to march toward the fusion reactor facility, which from their current distance looked like a perfectly tranquil power plant.

But Lu Bu knew all too well that appearances could be deceiving.

The four man Lancer team arrived at the security fence and Lu Bu quickly saw signs of battle. There was a pair of hovercraft bearing heavy scorch marks on their hulls not far from the main gate of the facility, and the small security checkpoint at that gate-house was a smoldering ruin.

Lu Bu shouldered her blaster rifle, and she saw both Cassius and Homer do likewise. “Droids move fast in open,” she said warily, “but when fighting they move slow.”

“It is hard to move with stealth in these suits,” Kratos said bitterly, causing Lu Bu to snap a look of consternation in his direction. He clearly read her disapproval because he added, “Stealth is invaluable against a fortified enemy.”

She couldn’t argue with his logic, so instead she said, “Kratos you take center; Cassius take right; Homer cover rear; this one take right.” She had been working hard to modify her speech patterns, especially since Doctor Middleton had become her roommate, but during tense situations she often reverted to her more familiar phraseology.

Acknowledgment icons flashed and the team spread out before advancing on the facility’s main entry. The gate was huge and appeared to be made of solid duralloy that was over two feet thick. The fusion reactor facility was supposedly one of the most heavily-fortified facilities on the colony, but the colony was a peaceful, scientific outpost. So ‘heavily-fortified’ was clearly a relative term if a group of eight droids had managed to gain entry without, apparently, having suffered any losses.

She checked the quartet of ion grenades fastened to her belt as she crept up on the door leading to the bowels of the power plant.

After her team had achieved their entry positions—more or less, anyway—she silently signaled for them to follow her into the large, industrial-scale corridor which led down into the bowels of the facility.

As she moved forward, the lights went out and she froze briefly, scanning her line of sight for any movement. When nothing emerged, she continued moving down the ramp until coming to the end, where the remnants of a relatively normal-looking industrial door lay in a deformed pile of metal wreckage.

She looked inside the facility and saw a pair of human bodies lying motionless in pools of their own blood. Lu Bu scanned the interior of the large, cavernous chamber—which was apparently Reactor Number Two, judging by the markings present on the catwalks suspended above what she assumed to be the reaction chamber—and saw a flicker of motion.

Using her plasma rifle’s scope, she sighted in on what was clearly a droid—but bore no resemblance to the ones she had fought aboard the Pride of Prometheus—attempting to interface with the reactor’s primary control panel. She had learned what to look for, and how to initiate an emergency shutdown, during her mission brief. She had also been given the general layout of the facility, which suggested there were three such reactors present but that only Number Two and Number Three would be active at this time.

She signaled for Kratos to enter the chamber and make his way to the right, while Cassius was to move left. They complied wordlessly—with only Kratos making his acknowledgment via the suit’s silent acknowledgment system—and Lu Bu gestured for Homer to take up a position near the door where she herself was positioned.

She entered the chamber and moved to the right, following Kratos as he came to the end of a large piece of machinery which would provide them with cover should a firefight break out.

Lu Bu suspected that the droids would be evenly distributed, since they clearly had no intention of actually holding the facility for any meaningful duration. Their intention had been clear: to overload the reactors and cause an explosion which would ultimately lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians.

And since the droids were unlikely to be clustered together she knew that once the first group was dealt with, the second would be alerted to her presence.

She motioned for Kratos to swap positions with her, and he hesitated before complying. The noise inside the facility was incredible, and Lu Bu suspected that it was due to the droids’ efforts to overload the reactors.

Using her suit’s low-light visual suite, she peered around the corner and caught sight of the droid once again. This time, however, she saw two other droids. She scanned the room for several seconds but found no sign of another droid, so she quickly input their positions into the team’s three-dimensional representation of the chamber.

Lu Bu indicated which of the droids each team was to engage, and the acknowledgment icons flashed almost in perfect unison. She took a breath and, just as she spun around the corner, an overload alarm began to sound overhead as yellow lights flashed in warning.

But she was committed to her motion, and lined up a shot on the droid interfacing with the control systems. She squeezed the trigger and a bolt of energy belched from her rifle’s barrel, slamming between the short, squat droid’s ‘shoulders.’ A short shower of sparks flew from the enemy’s metal body as she squeezed off her second shot.

With uncanny—one could accurately say ‘machine-like’—precision, the trio of droids turned as one and unleashed their fire on her. They sent blaster bolts of their own from their roughly humanoid, weaponized arms which appeared to have each been fitted with a blaster of similar power to hers.

She ducked behind the corner in time to avoid all but one of the bolts, which slammed into her vambrace with enough force to spin her body a quarter turn before she regained control of herself.

Cassius and Homer then opened fire on their targets, displaying considerably less coordination than the droids had done with their counter-fire. But Lu Bu knew it would buy Kratos time to circle around behind them with his melee weapons. So she spun around the corner and crouched down as she did so, a blaster bolt torching the air above her head as she did so. She sighted in on the droid she had already hit and snapped off another precise round, this one aimed at the droid’s ‘shoulder.’

The mechanical’s arm flew off in a spray of sparks and fluid, but it seemed unfazed as it poured a trio of rounds into her torso’s armor as Kratos’ long, power-assisted strides took him across the gap which Lu Bu was covering with her own fire.

The droid attempted to fire at the massive Tracto-an, but it missed by less than a foot as Kratos gained cover and continued to sprint around the roughly circular chamber, making for a flanking position near two of the droids.

Lu Bu returned to cover when the droid returned its fire in her direction, and heard an explosion from the far side of the room which seemingly signaled that a droid had fallen to her team’s fire.

She gripped her rifle tightly and spun around, preparing to fire as soon as her weapon’s muzzle cleared the edge of her cover.

But when she sighted her target, she held her fire upon seeing Kratos lay into the droid with his boarding axe, which cleaved one of the artificial warrior’s four legs from its torso. The giant Tracto-an ignored a pair of blaster bolts that hammered into his back as he jammed his—or, rather, her—vibroblade into the center of the droid’s back, causing a series of spasms in its limbs.

Lu Bu took a carefully-aimed shot at the droid’s remaining weapon arm and, with a squeeze of the trigger, removed the mechanical’s weaponized limb. She then sighted in on the droid which had fired on Kratos and took a hasty shot as it ducked down beneath a console on the far side of the chamber.

“Flank it!” she barked, and saw her teammates Cassius and Homer move to do precisely that. A volley of fire erupted from their position, and the droid’s ruined form went sprawling to the floor.

When it was clear the three droids had been neutralized, Lu Bu moved toward the control panel and found that it was no longer functional—likely due to the droid’s last-moment efforts.

“Secure Door Three,” she barked as she tried one last time to activate the console. The Tracto-ans moved toward the door she had indicated and, when they were near their positions, she abandoned her hope of reversing the reactor’s impending overload. She would have to hope that the other reactor’s control system was not yet compromised—and that she could stop this reactor from self-destructing after she had secured the second one.

The door to the other active reactor was already open, and Lu Bu moved through the heavily-reinforced portal which led to the long corridor connecting the reactors with her team at her heels. No sooner had they cleared the doorway than the doors slowly slid shut behind them. It was of little concern to Lu Bu—the only way any of them were going to survive was if they shut the reactors down before they overloaded.

No sooner were they in the long corridor than a hail of blaster fire came streaming at them. Kratos dove left, Lu Bu dove right, and Cassius followed her lead. Homer, however, was struck by a trio of blaster bolts. Two of the bolts struck him high, and Lu Bu returned fire as she sighted in on a pair of droids stationed just inside the far reactor chamber. They were using the doorway for cover, and she growled wordlessly as she sent a quartet of rapid shots at them.

She was rewarded by a pair of impacts, but they seemed to have been absorbed by the droid’s heavy frontal armor.

She reached down to her belt as Cassius opened fire behind her, and he even managed to get a hit on the same droid she had struck as Lu Bu removed one of the ion grenades form her belt. She primed the tiny, egg-shaped device, and threw it with as much precision as she could manage.

The droid on the left, which she had already hit, pulled behind the corner while the droid on the right did something she had not expected.

Tucking its arms and legs in and bending them at odd, seemingly impossible angles, it quickly formed a pair of metal rings nearly two meters in diameter with its previously distinct four legs and two arms. It then rocketed toward her team as it rolled along the smooth, concrete of the corridor’s floor using those rings as wheels.

It covered a distance of forty meters in less than two seconds—including the time it took it to transform—and Lu Bu managed to get a shot off at the incoming droid before its wheels broke apart and became distinct arms and legs once again.

She had to admit that the sequence had jarred her, but Kratos seemed unimpressed as he stood and charged headlong into the creature’s flank. The droid turned in time to author a quartet of blaster bolts at the one-eyed Tracto-an, during which time both Lu Bu and Cassius took advantage of the mechanical’s brief presentation of its flank.

A half dozen blaster bolts impacted on the droid’s left side as Kratos’ boarding axe cleaved the robotic warrior’s right arm from its short, squat torso. No sooner had the droid fallen than there was a pulse of deep blue light from the doorway where Lu Bu had tossed the ion grenade, and she gathered her feet under her and screamed, “Charge!”

Her fellow Lancers at her heels, Lu Bu began firing her blaster rifle as soon as she saw motion on the far side of the reactor chamber. Her shots went wide by several meters, but Cassius managed to get a lucky strike while running full-out which was just enough to put the droid off-balance as it began to return fire.

The droid near the door was seizing in a fit of violent spasms as electricity visibly danced across its joints, and Lu Bu hammered a pair of rounds into its less-armored flank as she took up a crouching position behind a large panel box. Her shots appeared to neutralize the robotic warrior, but her fellow Lancers followed her lead. By the time the four of them had made it into the chamber, the droid was little more than a disparate collection of metallic fragments lying in a pool of thin, yellow-ish fluid.

Lu Bu used hand signals to order Cassius to move to the catwalk directly above their current position and he complied immediately. She then gestured for Kratos to flank the lone visible droid’s position, and instructed Homer to take up her position while she moved around the room opposite Kratos.

Homer did as he was instructed, as did Kratos, and Lu Bu began to carefully circle around the chamber until she heard a scream from the far side of the room that had not been issued by any of her teammates. She stopped behind a large, iron support beam and glanced around the corner, barely managing to pull back as the second and third shots of a droid’s blaster arms skewered the space her head had occupied during the quick check. The first shot had landed on the iron beam itself, which was now glowing cherry red from the energy transfer.

She looked up and saw a mirror which granted her visual access to the entire chamber, but no sooner had she sighted in on the second droid—a droid which was holding a living human on front of itself like some kind of shield—than that mirror exploded in a shower of smoldering fragments as the droid blasted it with a perfectly-placed shot.

“You have to cut off the H3!” she heard the man cry before screaming in pain. “The yellow lines!” he said in a barely-articulate manner as his screams of agony nearly drowned out his message.

Lu Bu looked up and saw a series of yellow lines running along the wall, and looked to feed directly into the fusion generator at the center of the room. She closed her eyes and considered whether or not Kratos could sneak up on the droid, and knew there was no chance since the droid was poised on a catwalk which could only be accessed from the mouth of the chamber.

Cassius would also have difficulty acquiring a clean shot, and she couldn’t risk sending her orders over the com channel. Secure or not, she didn’t trust sending digital information for the droids to potentially intercept—especially battle plans.

That left her as the only member of the team who could even possibly free the man. But, judging by his position, it would be impossible to get a clean shot at the droid that didn’t go through the man’s body.

She briefly considered lobbing an ion grenade, but the man was being held near a control panel which would almost certainly be rendered useless if the ion grenade went off in close proximity, and there was always a chance that the grenade itself would kill him.

Her eyes snapped open as she gripped her blaster rifle, knowing with grim certainty that there was only one chance for the man to survive. She inhaled deeply, attempting to find her metaphysical center, and as she exhaled she leaned around the corner.

Acting almost on faith, and trusting her reflexes implicitly, she barely registered that the droid had fallen into her sights before squeezing a shot off. The droid returned fire and a pair of bolts slammed into her breastplate.

The man, who was wearing a technician’s uniform, was struck by her blaster rifle shot in the upper left arm. The energy bolt tore easily through his flesh and bone and, losing almost none of its violent energy as it slammed into the droid’s armored front.

The worker screamed in agony but the droid had primarily controlled his posture by gripping the very same arm Lu Bu had just shot off. She followed up the shot with three more, each of which hammered into the droid’s protective plate of armor on its ‘chest.’ Her fire was joined by that of Cassius, who tore the droid’s right arm off with a pair of blaster bolts.

A few seconds later the droid was armless and the hostage it had held before its mechanical body was dragging himself slowly away using his remaining, right, arm.

Lu Bu felt a moment of pure, all-encompassing, savage fury as she poured round after round into the droid. Even its heavily-armored front could not withstand the weight of her fire, to which Cassius added with his own weapon, and before long the droid was no longer recognizable as it lay in a motionless pile of scrap.

A salvo of fire erupted from the other droid’s position which was quickly cut off. She looked over to that droid’s position and saw that Kratos was hacking it apart using his boarding axe. Her vibroblade had apparently been broken in two at some point in the battle as half of its blade was lodged firmly in the droid’s shoulder, but that was of little concern to her. She preferred the vibro-knife she had kept at her belt to the larger, less-nimble weapon—in part because the knife was what Walter Joneson had favored.

Lu Bu clomped over to the technician’s side and gripped him by his good arm, lifting him as gently as she could manage in the power armor. He was surprisingly stalwart as he looked up at her visor with an ashen complexion, and she knew it was probable that he would lose consciousness very soon due to the shock of losing a limb. Thankfully the blood loss did not look life-threatening—at least not for the next few minutes.

“How to shut down reactor?” she snapped.

He looked at her blankly for a moment before blinking his eyes quickly and shaking his head. “Right,” he said, his voice sounding somewhat distant, “this panel.”

He moved toward the panel in front of which he had lost his arm, and gagged at the sight of his ruined limb’s remains.

“Focus,” Lu Bu snapped, wishing she did not need to be so forceful with the man. Unfortunately, that moment was not one for tenderness—people were about to die if they did not shut down the reactors!

“Let me try…” he said before swaying to the left and nearly crashing into the deck. Lu Bu braced him by gripping his right forearm and he returned to his senses quickly enough. “Sorry,” he said dully as he regained his balance, and Lu Bu released his arm to allow the man to manipulate the station’s controls.

He flicked several switches and called up a series of readouts before tilting his head to the far side of the room. “Cut off the helium three lines,” he instructed, the look in his eyes sharpening as he did so, “I will be fine.” He promptly emptied the meager contents of his stomach, but kept said contents confined to the floor rather than the workstation before him. “Go!” he instructed in a panic-laden voice.

Lu Bu saw Kratos approaching, and she said, “Keep him awake.” She then clomped over to the only visible valve, which was shaped much like any other plumbing valve. She began to turn the valve, and after a few seconds it was closed.

“Good,” the technician said as he pointed to the now-closed door at the end of the corridor adjoining the two reactors, “now do the sam—“

He unexpectedly collapsed, but Kratos caught him before he hit the ground entirely. Lu Bu set off at a run for the corridor, her heart racing as the flashing yellow lights overhead turned from yellow to red.

When she reached the entry portal of the chamber, she saw Homer’s body lying supine on the floor almost precisely where she had left him. The droid had gotten a lucky shot which had pierced his visor, and she knew with a glance that he was dead.

She briefly felt sick to her stomach, but pressed on and quickly reached the heavy industrial door at the far end of the corridor. It was still closed, so she slapped the emergency-open control panel after breaking the glass covering the button. But nothing happened and Lu Bu screamed in frustration.

Kratos appeared soon thereafter, having apparently carried the technician, and the one-armed man woozily removed a keycard from his pocket after reaching across his body. He then inserted the card below the emergency-open button, and Lu Bu impatiently slapped the button again.

This time the doors rumbled open, and she moved through them as soon as the gap was large enough. She ran to the far side of the room as fast as the power armor would allow and immediately began to close the valve. After a few seconds she was done, and she raced back to the main entry ramp where Kratos, Cassius, and the technician were gathered.

“This reactor stays on,” Lu Bu barked via her suit’s built-in speaker, and the technician gave her a blank look in reply. She turned to face him as the sirens began to rise in their volume, “If reactor dies, droids kill civilians.”

A look of recognition flashed over the man’s face and he nodded as he set off toward the same control panel Lu Bu had attempted to use a few minutes earlier. He shook his head—impressively ignoring his missing arm—and said, “The magnetic interlocks are out of alignment; I can’t keep the reaction stable any longer. We need to abort!”

“No,” Lu Bu snapped, knowing that thousands of lives might hang in the balance. “Fix reactor—now!”

The man shook his head doubtfully as he eyed the exit, “The controls are offline. There’s nothing I can—“

Lu Bu stepped between him and the door, shaking her head and saying in a dire voice, “We stay here.”

His eyes widened. “You’re insane—they don’t pay me enough to blow myself up. Do you know what happens if I misalign the coils using the manual controls?!”

“We die,” she said hotly, “and if you do not try, we die. No difference.”

She heard Kratos issue a short, bark of laughter, causing what little color remained in the technician’s face to drain. But thankfully he did not lose consciousness as he seemed to find his Ki—his center—and with renewed resolve he moved toward the giant, hemi-spherical reactor in the center of the room.

“Help me remove the striped panels!” he snapped irritably as he attempted, and failed, to do so for himself. The act required two working hands, and without a word Kratos moved to assist the technician while Lu Bu did likewise for the panels on the opposite side of the reactor.

There were eight panels in all, and at each one was a small interface panel that made absolutely no sense to Lu Bu. But the technician went to work intently as he adjusted the controls manually, sweat profusely running down his forehead as he did so. He moved from panel to panel, re-checking his work several times, but after no more than two minutes he stood and said in an unsteady voice, “We need to power it down by restricting the flow of H3 so the containment field can deal with all the free protons. If we don’t power it down, we have less than three minutes before containment fails—and then the bunker shields go down,” he added with a surprisingly defiant look given his physical condition.

Lu Bu was hesitant, “You can power down and not lose bunker shields?”

The technician nodded. “I’ll deal with the step-down process here with…” he gave a wary glance to Kratos as he handed his keycard to Lu Bu, “his help. Take my keycard and go to the main relay room. You must manually deactivate every single breaker except the ones marked ‘Main-7/9’ and ‘TAUM-01.’ Do you understand?”

“Main-7/9 and TAUM-01,” Lu Bu repeated quickly.

The technician nodded as he swayed unsteadily. “Go; the sooner you turn off the breakers the faster we can power down this reactor.”

Lu Bu took off toward a doorway which was only barely large enough for her to squeeze her power-armored bulk through. Soon enough she found herself at a central control room—a room which held the bodies of three operators who had apparently been killed by the droids.

There was a large, heavy security door on the far side of the room, and it appeared that the droids had attempted to force the security door open but had failed. Blaster scorch marks ringed the door’s thick, duralloy frame, but the keycard interface was thankfully undamaged. She slid the technician’s card into the slot and the red lights above the door switched to green.

The door began to open, but it jammed no more than halfway through its motion. If Lu Bu had been unarmored it would have been a small matter to squeeze through the narrow gap, but in her power armor it was impossible to do so. She reinserted the keycard, hoping it would restart the cycle, but the lights merely flashed red briefly before returning to green.

Growling with frustration, Lu Bu wedged her armored shoulder against the door’s frame and placed her gauntleted hands against the door before pressing with her power-assisted arms against the stubborn door. For several seconds nothing happened, and she redoubled her efforts while giving verbal release to the sensation of helplessness she felt in that moment. If she did not open the door then thousands of civilians—including children—would be exposed to the droids who were no doubt attempting to break past the city’s bunker shielded emergency retreat.

Just when she thought she would have to use her blaster rifle on the door—since stripping out of the power armor would require more time than she thought she had—the reinforced door slid open a few more inches before noisily grinding to a halt at about three quarters open.

But that was enough for her to squeeze her armored body through the opening and, once inside the apparently frigid chamber beyond, it was painfully obvious even to a complete non-engineer where the power breakers were located. Each one had a large, manual lever and the majority of those levers were flipped up, including the two she had been instructed to leave on.

Lu Bu began slamming the arms down in what seemed a reasonable sequence: those nearest the door first and working her way to the far side of the room.

It took her nearly a minute, but she finally did manage to deactivate all but the two breakers the technician had indicated. When she was finished, she returned to the reactor chamber and found the technician sitting down with his head between his knees.

“Report!” she barked, and Kratos looked up at her before nodding.

“He said he is finished,” the one-eyed Tracto-an replied, and Lu Bu felt a wave of relief wash over herself. Her knees became unsteady, and for a moment she wanted to shout in joyous exaltation…but then she remembered that Homer had died not ten minutes earlier.

He had been under her command, and the realization that she had led a man to his death was so shocking to her that she had to brace herself against a nearby rail for fear of toppling in her armor. Her power-assisted gauntlet deformed the rail significantly as she gripped it for stability, and Kratos stood from the technician’s side before making his way over to her. He stood silently before her for several minutes while tears streamed down Lu Bu’s face as she came to grips with the loss of a teammate who had followed her into battle.

“Do not mourn him that way,” Kratos said in his deep, grating voice, and Lu Bu shot him a hard look. But what she saw in the other man’s eye, even looking through his armored visor, made her refrain from a scathing reply. There was resolve in his expression as well as pride, but somewhere behind all of that was a degree of sympathy she had never expected to see in Kratos’ scarred, aged features. “Homer died as his people believe they are meant to die: in battle on the River of Stars. You dishonor him by regretting that death.”

“You say ‘his people’,” Lu Bu said with more than passing interest as she felt her spine stiffen at the implication that she would dishonor a fallen warrior who had fought at her side. “You mean your people.”

Kratos straightened himself and shook his head. “No…not my people.” He turned and made his way to the main entry to the room, and Lu Bu felt that the waves of vertigo had relented and she was no longer weak in the knees.

“Kratos,” she called out, and the armored man turned to face her, “bring Homer here. Then we must secure this facility.”

Kratos nodded curtly, “It will be done.”

Chapter XV: Hot Pursuit

“Status of the destroyer?” Middleton requested for at least the tenth time during the last hour.

“Its engines are still driving at…68%, Captain,” the young, Tracto-an Sensor operator reported hesitantly, “we continue to gain on them.”

“Not quickly enough,” Middleton said dourly. It seemed he no longer had any choice in the matter, so he turned to his new Tactical Officer. “Can your gunships close the distance and make an attack run on that thing to damage its engines?”

Toto’s chest swelled as his lips peeled back to reveal his teeth, and the Sundered replied, “Yes.”

Middleton nodded. “Do it,” he ordered, reluctantly asking the Sundered to place his family’s more-or-less private assets in harm’s way.

The lights along the back of Toto’s skull began to dance at least ten times faster than they had done a few moments earlier, and the tactical readout showed the pair of gunships detaching from the Pride’s outer hull before speeding off toward the target vessel. They were considerably quicker than the Pride of Prometheus, and Middleton suspected that they were even faster than the Droid Destroyer. However, the gunships used primitive—yet extremely powerful—rocket boosters which had a limited fuel supply. This made their deployment risky at long ranges, and Middleton had calculated the destroyer was already at the precise limit of the gunships’ deployable range.

The Sundered craft burned their engines at full as they rocketed toward their quarry, and Toto reported, “The gunships will deplete fuel three minutes after intercept.”

“Understood,” Middleton acknowledged, “we’ll pick them up after we’ve finished the destroyer off. Engineering,” he continued, “I need more out of the engines.”

“If there was one word I’d eliminate from the Captain’s vocabulary,” Chief Garibaldi’s voice replied immediately over the chair’s com-link, “it’s ‘more.’ We can give you a six minute burst of an extra ten percent, but once that’s done we’ll have to back off to eighty percent—max—for an hour. These heat sinks are barely holding together as it is, Captain.”

“Noted,” Middleton said gratingly. He knew that Garibaldi would push the ship as far as could reasonably be expected, but Middleton had learned that he wasn’t exactly a reasonable man. Still, a short burst may prove instrumental in heading the droid destroyer off before it could make the hyper limit. Even with Toto’s gunships harrying it for several minutes, it was going to be a close affair for the Pride to neutralize—or destroy—the enemy ship before that could happen.

The bridge crew waited as Toto’s gunships tore through the space between the Pride and the enemy destroyer, until a series of tactical blips on the main view screen suggested the small craft had begun firing on their quarry.

The enemy destroyer’s engine output dipped briefly before recovering, and a short burst of counter-fire erupted from the droid vessel’s weaponry.

“She’s slewing to fire on the gunships with her quarter-facing weaponry,” Sarkozi reported, and a moment later the droid vessel’s vector adjusted to confirm her declaration.

“Every little bit helps,” Middleton said under his breath as the estimated fuel supply indicators on the gunships began flashing red, indicating they were critically low. “Don’t leave your ships defenseless, Tactical,” Middleton ordered the Sundered.

“They will survive,” the uplift rumbled as his skull’s implants flashed furiously in unison with another series of attacks. Incredibly, Toto continued to work the controls of his Tactical console even while remotely controlling the gunships via his cybernetic implants.

The next time when the gunships fired, the droid destroyer’s engine output dipped severely before slowly increasing. But it only recovered to fifty three percent of its rated engine output, which meant that another couple hits similar to the last volley would bring them within the Pride’s zone of control.

Seemingly out of nowhere, the destroyer came about abruptly and began firing on the gunships. “Crazy Ivan,” Sarkozi called out, and the Sundered grunted in agreement. The gunships worked to cling to the destroyer’s weaponless stern, and one of them succeeded in doing so. But the other failed to leave the droid’s suddenly-presented broadside in time to avoid a potentially catastrophic hail of fire from the much larger vessel.

For a moment it seemed that the tiny gunship would succumb to the relatively overwhelming firepower of the droid warship, but somehow it managed to pull a hard, tight maneuver which brought the two vessels well within collision distance before it limped into formation with it sister vessel. That sister vessel had continued to pound away at the destroyer’s engines while matching the droid ship move-for-move, and once again the destroyer’s engine output declined sharply as a result. This time when their engines output returned to full, they were fluctuating between forty two and forty seven percent output. This meant that even if the other ship managed to maintain an average of those figures, the Pride of Prometheus would overtake them before they reached the hyper limit.

“Well done, Tactical,” Middleton said with a nod, “now keep your ships safe while we close distance and take care of the rest.”

“Yes, Captain,” Toto said with open pride, and Middleton couldn’t begrudge the ‘man’ his sense of accomplishment. Without those gunships, there was literally zero chance that the Pride of Prometheus would have been able to catch the enemy vessel before it could flee the system.

As it was, the Pride had just received a seven minute window of long-range weapons fire on the enemy vessel, which would be more than enough for the larger, fresher medium cruiser to dispatch the smaller destroyer.

Apparently the crew of the droid vessel had also concluded as much, since it came about sharply and began to open fire with its turbolasers.

“Two impacts on the forward shields,” the Shields operator called out. “They’re holding strong at 94%,” he added confidently.

“Observe bridge protocols, Shields,” Sarkozi snapped before Middleton could do likewise, referring to the man’s somewhat undisciplined verbiage, “no unnecessary adjectives.”

Middleton couldn’t help but smile as the other man went red in the ears and nodded, “Yes, Lieutenant.”

But the truth was that the Pride of Prometheus was unlikely to get a ‘softer’ battle for its new crew to learn the realities of space combat than the one in which they currently found themselves engaged. The Pride was classified as a medium cruiser by modern definitions, but it was originally classified as a heavy cruiser due to its robust shields and firepower. However its lack of significant broadside deterrent, combined with the aged nature of several of the class’s key systems—including its communications and sensor suites, as well as its fix-mounted heavy laser batteries rather than turret-mounted primary wepons—had caused the Hydra/Hammerhead-Class to be downgraded many decades earlier.

Of course, there were some who believed the class’s real reason for ‘demotion’ was that a standing arms tax had been widely considered throughout the Spineward Sectors around the time of the Union Treaty, and an ‘extra’ medium cruiser would incur roughly half the financial sanctions as a heavy cruiser would. But Middleton was among those who believed this to be an overly cynical view of the facts as he understood them.

“She’s coming at us, Captain,” Sarkozi reported as she moved toward the Shields station and made some curt remarks to the operator there before adding, “recommend we prep for boarders.”

“Proceed,” Middleton agreed as he dug through the schematics of the enemy vessel. The information was woefully inadequate for any kind of genuine tactical analysis, but they did know that many of these droid vessels possessed the ability to fire antimatter-fueled spinal lasers which could be absolutely devastating in a one-on-one fight. If the droids did, in fact, launch boarders then the probability was high that they possessed no such siege weapons.

Then again, Middleton had no real working knowledge of a droid’s opinion on the sanctity of life. It was entirely possible they would casually sacrifice their boarding parties as part of a diversion, but he had to work with the best information available.

“All hands,” Sarkozi said after activating the ship-wide, “prepare to receive boarding parties. Repeat: prepare to receive boarding parties.”

A collective shiver ran up and down the spines of the Pride’s new crewmembers—except for Toto, who appeared utterly unfazed by the notion of hand-to-hand battle with droids, as he continued to work the controls at his station—and Middleton nodded in satisfaction. He had no use for stupidity or unwarranted confidence on his bridge, and the fact that each of his newer crewmembers was less-than-eager about the prospect of live fire exchanges in an up-close-and-personal fashion with the mechanicals was as good of a sign as he could hope for.

“Heavy laser range in two minutes,” Toto reported in his deep, grating voice.

“Coordinate with the gun deck,” Middleton instructed. “They are to fire at will once the enemy vessel clears long range.”

“Long range, yes,” Toto replied, and Middleton saw Sarkozi shoot the uplift a scowl—but it was a silent scowl, unlike her previous vocal upbraiding of the new Shields operator. Both her expression and the silence that followed it brought a genuine smile to Middleton’s lips that he was unable to hold back.

Another volley of fire lanced out from the destroyer’s primary weapons, and this time the Shields operator was more professional, if a bit stilted in his report. “Shields at 88% and holding, sir—ma’am,” he added belatedly, once again drawing Sarkozi’s ire as she sliced a metaphorical pair of daggers his way.

“Just ‘sir’ will do on the bridge, Carpenter,” she said irritably.

“Yes ma’am—sir,” he said, once again going red in the face.

“Thirty seconds to our range,” Toto reported, and Middleton nodded as he felt the urge to lean forward in his chair but resisted. He needed to present a calm, professional demeanor at that moment to set the tone for his excruciatingly green crew.

The destroyer’s engines cut out suddenly, and Toto made some sort of a harsh, barking sound, causing both Middleton and his XO to give the uplift a short look.

“Engines disabled,” the ape-man reported, “destroyer only maneuvering thrusters.”

“Good work,” Middleton said after a brief pause which saw Sarkozi’s mouth open and close several times as she clearly wished to reprimand the uplift for his poor grammar but thought better of it.

The forward batteries of the Pride of Prometheus lanced out in nearly perfect unison, and Middleton’s eyes narrowed as their weight of fire hammered into the destroyer’s previously intact shields. He had specifically ordered for the weapons to fire at will, but the gun deck chief—yet another newcomer named Turbin—had essentially countermanded that specific order. Middleton knew he couldn’t let the gesture slide, but he grudgingly had to admit that their fire discipline had been nearly as good as that displayed by the Pride’s previous gun crews, which was a pleasant surprise all its own.

“Seven for ten,” Sarkozi reported with the barest hint of surprise at the impressive accuracy of the new gun deck crew, “the destroyer’s forward shields have collapsed; she’s rolling to present her port broadside.”

Another volley of fire impacted on the Pride’s forward shields and the Shields operator called out, “Forward shields at 83%, sir.”

Middleton watched as the damaged gunship began to fall out of formation with its partner, and just as the small craft drifted near the droid ship’s near broadside, the undamaged craft made a fast, brutal attack run which ran the length of the droid vessel. The craft had apparently succeeded in neutralizing the nearest weaponry, because the beleaguered gunship managed to regain its propulsion before fleeing the scene of the battle.

Until that moment the safest place for the little craft had been in the destroyer’s unprotected wake, but now that the droids’ backs were to the proverbial wall its best chance to avoid destruction was by fleeing and hoping the droids would not expend resources going after it.

The gambit seemed to pay off as the little gunship, quickly flanked and partially shielded by its partner craft, sped off before apparently exhausting its fuel supply and drifting away from the conflict.

“No more fuel,” Toto reported matter-of-factly, and Middleton nodded after making eye contact with the Sundered officer. Toto had clearly known his craft possessed a small, but significant, reserve of fuel beyond that which he had originally confessed. But Middleton did not hold that fact against his newest Tactical Officer.

The Pride shuddered slightly as another pair of impacts landed near the bow. “Forward shields are experiencing power fluctuations!” the operator cried. “I can’t get ahead of the cascade.”

Without needing any encouragement to do so, Sarkozi leapt across the bridge far more quickly than her diminutive frame would have suggested possible and slotted in beside the operator. She quickly reported, “Power conduits three through seven have overheated; we’re going to lose the forward shielding, Captain.”

Middleton growled just loudly enough that he could hear it. “Keep our guns on them,” he said grimly, knowing that their inability to add a significant broadside complement to the aged cruiser’s arsenal was about to cost them in a very real way. “Don’t stop firing until their engines are completely out, is that clear?”

“Yes,” Toto replied, and for once Sarkozi made no gesture of irritation with the uplift’s less-than-professional reply—she was too busy trying to save the Pride’s forward shields.

“Helm: stay oriented with our bow on them,” Middleton commanded, “but cut our acceleration and put as much braking thrust as you can manage without changing our attitude. The more distance we can keep between us, the better our chances for a clean kill.”

“Yes, Captain,” the woman at the helm replied and the Pride’s tactical indicators flanking the main viewer image began to note a fractional, but consistent, decrease in velocity for the MSP cruiser.

Another barrage of heavy laser fire erupted from the Pride’s forward batteries, and the indicator for the droid destroyer’s shields flashed red before going grey. “Enemy shields down,” Toto rumbled.

“I’m reading inbound contacts, Captain,” the Sensors operator reported anxiously. “I have fifty…sixty…no, seventy incoming projectiles!”

“Check your tone, Sensors,” Middleton reprimanded coldly, and the operator visibly winced at the rebuke. The Captain then opened his chair’s mirrored sensor readout and examined the available data, concluding that the inbound objects were moving far too slowly to be missiles and that their energy signatures were nearly nonexistent. “Boarders,” he muttered as he spun to face his Sundered Tactical Officer, “Tactical, lock our point defense weaponry on those targets as soon as they’re in range. Continue pouring fire from the forward batteries onto the destroyer until it’s a lifeless hulk.”

“Yes, Captain,” Toto replied, and as the second wound down another round of fire erupted from the Pride’s forward weapons array. The destroyer’s port shields buckled immediately, and when they went the entire shield grid of the enemy vessel collapsed due to some sort of cascade failure similar to what the Pride had just experienced.

“Inbound objects will make contact with the hull in twenty eight minutes,” Sarkozi reported after sliding from the Shields station to the Sensors station. “We should be able to neutralize them before then.”

“All the same,” Middleton said, knowing this would be as good of an opportunity as any to get in some boarding action drills, “have Sergeant Gnuko’s rapid response teams formed up and awaiting orders at their assigned stations. Secure the airlocks and have department heads report when their crews are secured against incursion.”

“Yes, sir,” Sarkozi replied, and the droid destroyer sent a relatively pitiful volley of laser fire into the Pride’s forward shields, which absorbed it easily after Sarkozi’s apparently successful workarounds involving the forward power couplings.

“Forward shields at 77%, Captain,” the Shields operator reported sheepishly, clearly perturbed at needing the XO’s assistance to correct the issue.

“Good work, Shields,” Middleton acknowledged, making brief eye contact with the rating. Having his people thrust into combat hardly seemed fair, but then again the universe is rarely ever fair.

“The citadel—make that, destroyer’s power signature,” Hephaestion corrected, “is fluctuating. It might be going cri—“

Before he could finish his report, the destroyer’s primary hull ruptured near the drive section as a series of explosions rippled forward from that point. Debris from the warship went outward in a cloud of turbulent particles and the bridge crew let out a collective, if uncoordinated, cheer—all save Toto, the XO, and the Captain.

Middleton clenched his jaw as he forced a neutral expression onto his face. He was more than slightly disappointed that the enemy vessel’s power plants had melted down and the Pride’s bridge crew had been unaware of that fact until literal seconds before they had destroyed the enemy vessel. If such a simple thing could be missed for so long, it was probable that even more sensitive information had been missed as well.

But he also knew that to expect significantly more than he had gotten from his new crew would have been unrealistic. Still, the only way to improve was by constant practice, and Middleton knew that combat drills would rise to the top of the Pride’s daily schedule for as long as they remained in the Zhu’s Hope system.

“Focus on those boarders, everyone,” Sarkozi snapped, clearly sharing Middleton’s irritation over the destroyer’s unexpected destruction. “We’ve got eighty one droids inbound, and I shouldn’t have to remind everyone of what happened the last time just a fraction of that number managed to board this ship!”

Her words put an instant stop to the short-lived celebration, and the collective visages of the bridge crew returned to their workstations as they appeared to regain some semblance of professionalism. Middleton gave his XO an almost imperceptible nod of approval, and they went about the task of removing the would-be boarders from the Pride’s path.

“All droid signatures have been neutralized, Captain,” Lieutenant Sarkozi reported snappily some twenty minutes later. With the destroyer blown from the space ways, it was a fairly routine matter for the MSP cruiser to adjust its course to prevent the droid boarding party from maneuvering close enough to land on the hull.

Once their heading had been adjusted, the point defense weapons had picked the droids off one by one. Their pace had been far slower than Middleton would have liked, but the job did get done and now that it was concluded, he knew it was time to return to the planet.

“Helm: come about and make for orbit above the colony,” he instructed, and the woman at the helm nodded as she complied. “Secure from Condition One, XO, and set Condition Two throughout the ship.”

“Standing down from Condition One, aye, Captain; making Condition Two throughout the ship,” Sarkozi replied promptly before relaying his orders through the rest of the vessel.

Middleton knew it would be a long road to get his new crew into proper fighting shape, but he had managed to do so once before and he knew that, appearances notwithstanding, his current roster was capable of exceeding his previous crew.

It would just require a firm hand at the tiller and, thankfully for the Pride of Prometheus and her crew, Middleton’s was just such a hand.

Chapter XVI: Stargazing

“Here’s the report on the surface teams’ activity, Captain,” Sergeant Gnuko said as he sat down across from Middleton in the Captain’s office adjoining the bridge. “The fusion plant was secured with one fatality sustained by our Recon Team, but they were able to keep the bunker shields up throughout the engagement. As a result, Atticus’ Assault Team was able to secure the settlement and root out the droids while sustaining only two casualties. All three suits of armor will be back in rotation within the week, but Lancers Homer, Scopas and Eustace were confirmed KOA.”

“Three fatalities,” Middleton mused, “that’s within your expectations, correct?”

“Correct, sir,” Gnuko replied. “If I had led the Assault Team I’m confident we could have cut that to one, but the Recon Team’s job was less predictable. They were on a timetable, and frankly it’s impressive that they were able to get the job done at all. Without some quick thinking on Lu’s part, I doubt the shield would have stayed up—she made a tough decision in the heat of battle and it paid off just like it should have.”

Middleton nodded slowly. “It would seem that both you and your predecessor was right about her,” he said as he affixed his signature to the twin reports. “Atticus’ success was more of a guarantee; he had the shuttle for aerial support and a fortified position to defend. Still, it’s good to see that your planned division of the Pride’s Lancer force is shaping up nicely.”

“It wasn’t my plan, sir,” Gnuko reminded him, “but I do believe in it. I just hope we can make it work; it’s a template I think the rest of the organization could benefit from.”

“So as of now your total combat-ready Lancers are…” Middleton led, having put off this part of the Lancer inspection as long as humanly possible.

Gnuko bit his lip briefly before shaking his head, “In truth, only two of Lu’s Recon Team were checked out on the grav-sleds. And of the Assault Team, only half of the ones we sent to the surface were rated over 80% effective in power armor. As of now, thirty two of the ninety four crew assigned to my department are combat-ready, and half of those are assigned to the Pride’s Defense Team. I should be able to get the number up to twice that within two weeks’ time, but the rest will be a more gradual process of sifting the wheat from the chaff.”

“And you’re confident you’ll end up with a hundred total Lancers?” Middleton pressed, not exactly encouraged by the Lancer contingent’s schedule.

Gnuko nodded evenly, “We’ve got an additional thirty hopefuls currently serving in Gunnery, Environmental, and even helping out in Engineering while they adjust to their new implants. It would be impossible for them to learn how to use their new prosthetics and incorporate the combat training they need to undergo simultaneously. If anything, I’m thinking we might end up more like a cen-ten.”

Middleton’s eyebrows rose at his Lancer Sergeant’s assertion that the Pride could end up with a hundred and ten active duty Lancers. “They’re proving out that well, are they?”

Gnuko nodded. “Those Tracto-ans are a determined bunch, you’ve got to give them that much. But I think the balance we struck, between the classic, alpha-type personalities serving mostly under Atticus, and the ones with chips on their shoulders and something to prove has been everything we could have hoped for. If anything,” he added with a shake of his head, “the rivalries between the groups are heating up a bit more than I expected.”

“Keep them in check, Sergeant,” Middleton said sternly. The last thing he needed was for the Tracto-ans to begin waging war against each other in the corridors of the ship.

“I’ve got it in hand, sir,” Sergeant Gnuko said confidently, “I’ll let you know if I need an assist, but I’ve got to keep them motivated to compete with each other. There’s no other way we can form them into cohesive units in this setting.”

“Always compete,” Middleton echoed the sentiment he had read in one of Sergeant Joneson’s favorite books.

“Yes, sir,” the powerfully-built Lancer agreed.

“Speaking of prosthetics,” the Captain said abruptly, “how’s your leg?”

Sergeant Gnuko looked down at his limb and nodded slowly, “The therapy’s going better than I’d expected. The Doctor is a talented woman.”

“Indeed she is,” Middleton replied neutrally, fighting the rising wave of anger he felt at hearing her mentioned. He knew he needed to address the matter she had revealed to him so many weeks earlier, but it simply had to wait until a better time.

“I’ll be a hundred percent in another month,” the Sergeant said, clearly picking up on his CO’s downturned mood. “Until then I’m still ninety percent in a suit of armor, so I’m on active Defense Team duty.”

“Speaking of your team…” Middleton urged.

Gnuko sneered briefly before schooling his features. “Tight-lipped as a dying clam and none too pleasant, at that,” he replied bitterly, referring to Funar and Traian, who Middleton suspected were aboard the Pride with orders from the Admiral to watch for signs of disloyalty. “They’re clearly here on assignment, but none of them will say what it is or even confirm the theory.”

The Captain sighed. “Do what you can, but ensure that they’re accounted for if things take a turn.”

“I’m on it, Captain,” Sergeant Gnuko replied with a curt nod. “I’ll put them down myself if I have to.”

“Let’s hope, for all of our sakes, that it doesn’t come to that, Sergeant,” Captain Middleton said with a knowing look before finishing, “dismissed.”

“How long will you require on the planet’s surface, Mr. Fei?” Captain Middleton asked, and Fei Long wondered briefly if he should get into the variables in play which would determine his reply. But in less than a second, he deduced that the Captain, as usual, was requesting what he called the ‘short version.’

“Three days, Captain,” the young man replied, “but it may require four. I must write the software which will interface with, and then download, their outdated records. I must then manually modify that program with each of the twelve, distinct, data classes they have used over the past three hundred years of the university’s existence.”

He could almost see Captain Middleton’s patience wearing thin even as he finished his—in his opinion—succinct reply. He had made no mention of the linguistic obstacles involved, seeing as the scientists had recorded their findings in pure, mathematical ‘language’ which was quite unlike anything he had encountered. He had also glossed over the fact that some of that data appeared to be privately held, and would possibly require…discrete methods of access which, fortunately, lay well within his specialty. He had also ignored the fact that, as a military organization without proper political backing—at least at the moment—there was no truly ‘proper’ way for the Pride of Prometheus to request this information. But Fei Long had already devised several methods of approach which should, in theory, grant the Pride’s crew access to the files they sought.

“We need to do better than that, Mr. Fei,” Middleton said sternly, and Fei Long’s jaw nearly dropped open. “We can’t spend four days at every one of the science facilities you’ve placed on our itinerary; we have a mission to complete that is of the highest importance to the Fleet.”

“I understand that, Captain,” Fei Long assured him as graciously as he could manage. “However, I am simply incapable of accomplishing this task any more quickly than I have suggested.”

The Captain’s eyes narrowed and he regarded the young man silently for several seconds. “Fine,” he said eventually, “we’ll dispatch you to the surface where you’ll conduct your retrieval. But after that we’re going to need to bypass at least one of the scheduled stops so we can keep to our itinerary.”

Fei Long wanted to protest, but he suspected the Captain had more on his metaphorical plate at that moment than he could reasonably handle. So instead, he stood and clasped his hands in deference, “As you command, Captain.”

“Dismissed,” Middleton said with a wave of his hand as he began examining a short stack of data slates which appeared to contain recent shift reports.

Fei Long nodded and left the office, making a bee-line for the lift after doing so. His mind was keenly focused on the task at hand, but there was so much that needed to be done.

He barely even realized he had walked all the way to his quarters without thinking about his need to visit Haldis, the Tracto-an smith who had crafted Lu Bu’s Storm Drake armor—armor which Fei Long had lovingly called ‘Red Hare’ to respect Lu Bu’s Ancestral namesake. The Ancestor whose name Lu Bu had adopted was famous for riding a fearsome, legendary steed into battle which bore the same name as her Storm Drake armor.

He reversed course, re-entered the lift, and after a few minutes found himself entering the workshop of Haldis. The Tracto-an was working a piece of cylindrical metal at a bench grinder, and Fei Long made his respects as he came to a stop a respectful distance from the metalworker. Fei Long knew that success in any endeavor required a degree of focus which was incompatible with distractions, so he waited for nearly twelve minutes until Haldis had finished working the shaft of metal—which Fei Long had deduced was an axial pin for one of the Pride’s heavy laser mounts.

Haldis only then made eye contact with him and, gripping the re-worked pin in his bionic hand, he nodded curtly. “Kongming,” he said, using Fei Long’s chosen moniker.

“Master Haldis,” Fei Long replied, once again making his respects with a courteous nod, “I humbly request an update on the project I set before you.”

Haldis nodded as he set the heavy, metal pin—which was nearly three feet long and three inches in diameter—in a coolant bath. “It is nearly finished,” the Tracto-an replied in his deep voice which seemed to only carry a hint of the ‘Tracto-an accent’ with which Fei Long—and the rest of the crew—had become so familiar since the ship had taken on over two hundred new crewmembers from that fascinating world.

“May I see it?” he asked, anxious to witness the forge master’s craft.

Haldis coughed to clear his throat as he opened a nearby locker. He pulled a small box from it and set that box on the table before lifting the lid and gesturing for Fei Long to see for himself.

The young man stepped forward and peered inside, feeling a rush of excitement as he beheld the craftsmanship. “It is remarkable,” he breathed as his fingers, seemingly of their own accord, reached out to grasp the slender handle before he quickly withdrew them. “May I?” he asked respectfully, noting with some minor annoyance the bemused look on Haldis’ face.

“Of course,” the forge master replied with a gruff gesture as he washed his hands in a nearby sink fitted with an old-style, sonic pulse-powered cleansing unit which would, given enough time, do a better job of cleaning human skin than any combination of soap and water ever could. Such cleaning devices were standard issue throughout the Pride of Prometheus, with only the officers enjoying genuine water in their showers and other toiletry facilities.

Thankfully, Fei Long’s new quarters were equipped with such facilities.

Returning his focus to the content of the box, he reverently removed the small, slender handle and examined it carefully. The details were precise, just as he had come to expect from the Pride’s finest metal-smith, and while the materials used in its construction were quite different from what the original may have been, he felt confident that his favored Ancestor would approve.

He laid the exquisitely crafted handle back down in the box before lifting one of the false feathers which had laid beside the handle. He examined the feather, and found all the details to be perfect. It was, for all intents and purposes, a crane feather—but as with everything, appearances could be deceiving.

“You are truly a master of your craft, Smith Haldis,” Fei Long said as he gently placed the feather back inside the box.

Haldis shrugged. “The re-se-quen-cers,” he forced out the word, clearly having only used it a few times before, “which we brought from the Gambit Station allow even fine materials like those to be produced to specification,” he said, proving by his humility that he was, indeed, worthy of the praise which had been given him.

“How long until it is ready?” Fei Long asked excitedly.

Haldis shrugged. “While we are in orbit I cannot attend to its completion,” he replied with a finality that made Fei Long’s stomach seem to fall. “However, once the ship moves, I believe it will require only one or two days to complete.”

“Have you tested its internal components?” Fei Long asked before wincing at questioning the smith’s attention to his craft.

But Haldis seemed not to even notice the potential slight against his ability as he nodded, “It will function as you desire.”

“Excellent,” Fei Long said with elation before clasping his hands and bowing his head, “thank you for your time, master smith. Oh,” he added before leaving, “what of Lu Bu’s rhino hide?”

The smith tilted his head toward a crate on the far side of the shop, “I’m curing it now. She has asked that I store it after I have completed the curing process, which will require another month.”

“I shall inform her of your timetable,” Fei Long said graciously as he bowed respectfully.

Haldis grunted before turning back to his work, and Fei Long quickly made his way to the shuttle which waited to take him to the surface of the planet below.

As was so often the case with him, mere seconds after leaving the machine shop Fei Long had completely dismissed the smith’s project from his mind. He needed to focus on the task at hand—a task which Fei Long hoped was merely the first step on what he considered to be a treasure hunt of unprecedented scope and substance.

He had recently realized that he was, perhaps uniquely in human history, about to embark on a hunt for lost stars!

Chapter XVII: Nerd Diplomacy

“I have already told you,” the rail-thin, blotchy-skinned attaché said irritably, “the Science Directorate will not agree to the accessing of our databases by a military entity of any kind. Your request must go through proper channels,” she reiterated for the ninth time during the meeting.

“I understand your concern,” Fei Long repeated, for the fifth time, “however the governmental entities which processed such requests have been functionally disbanded. Surely you can appreciate the complexity of the situation?”

“This situation is far from complex,” the woman retorted, thankfully using a fresh bit of verbiage. Fei Long had grown weary of her clearly-rehearsed rhetoric just five minutes into the currently twenty eight minute meeting, but he kept his features as placid as a lake’s surface in summer. “Your people have come here under the guise of aiding us from attack; you fly a flag which not one system in this Sector officially recognizes as legitimate; and now you demand that we hand over some of our most precious data—data which we did not surrender even to the Empire of Man fifty years ago. I can assure you that we have no intention of doing so now—even under duress!”

“Miss Harper,” Fei Long began, almost feeling the waves of annoyance pouring from the pair of Tracto-ans behind him, “we have come here under no guise, are making no demands of you, and will not resort to the use of force in order to take what we desire—which, it seems to me, is precisely what you would have us do.”

The woman’s eyebrows shot up incredulously. “How dare you—“

“Please,” Fei Long cut in gently as he produced a small data crystal from the fold of his Taoist-style robe, “I would dispense with the next few hours of needless posturing if, as they say, it is all the same to you?”

The woman eyed the crystal as her skin somehow reddened even more deeply than it had been at the outset of the meeting. “What is this?” she demanded, making no move to accept the proffered crystal.

“It is my offer,” Fei Long said with a respectful bow of his head, and he held the pose for several seconds until she finally accepted the crystal by snatching it angrily from his fingers. “I would advise you to upload it to a disposable device, however,” he added with the barest hint of a smirk as he stood to his full height, “and that you be prepared to manually remove your slate’s power supply.”

The woman eyed him suspiciously for a moment before producing a small data slate from her lab coat’s pocket and scanning the crystal with its externally-mounted, modular interface device. Fei Long’s eyebrows shot up in surprise; he had read the specifications for such devices but he had never actually seen one. He almost regretted that he had just given her one of his most powerful viruses in the data crystal, since that virus would no doubt infect the modular firmware and render it more or less useless for anything but low-security operations.

Miss Harper’s eyes scanned the data slate for several seconds before those eyes widened in surprise, then horror, then something akin to abject terror as she quickly tore the power supply from the data slate. “You…you…” her voice trembled as she waved a finger at him reproachfully, “you thug!”

“Before you give voice to the remaining quotient of your outrage,” Fei Long said as he produced a second data crystal, “I would advise you to load the program on this crystal to that device.”

“Your virus just cracked through our highest-level encryptions and nearly infected our tertiary databases,” she howled in protest. “And you actually think I’ll upload another one?! Get out!”

“I assure you,” Fei Long said as evenly as he could manage, having grown exceedingly tired of the woman’s incredulity, “if I wished to deploy that virus on your systems, I could have done so far more surreptitiously than by giving it to you and then warning you of the potential consequences. Please,” he gestured to the second data crystal.

She snatched it from his hand with fingers still trembling with rage, and somehow the shade of red which her blotchy skin had taken on was even deeper than it had been previously.

She manually disconnected the wireless antennae of the data slate before reconnecting the power supply and scanning the crystal, all the while shooting dark looks in Fei Long’s direction. Surprisingly, she never once made eye contact with either of Fei Long’s escorts and it was for this fact alone that Fei Long deduced the woman was merely there to present an official position of noncompliance which she, and her superiors, fully expected to be subverted.

Zhu’s Hope was a completely non-military colony, the population of which had dedicated itself absolutely to scientific exploration of every kind. This was, understandably, why their fusion reactor had been so easily infiltrated by the droid force which Lu Bu’s team had neutralized. As such, the colony had fully expected—or perhaps even hoped—that the Pride of Prometheus’ crew would simply take what they wanted. “This…” she said, her voice low and steadier than it had been, “is this what it seems?”

“It is,” Fei Long agreed as he bowed his head for the eleventh time in the meeting, “I am the author of the virus, and as such I have become quite adept at detecting, and neutralizing, similar threats to virtual integrity. The suite of antiviral programs I have just given you will safeguard your systems with a simple reallocation of existing hardware, but I would not ask you to take my word for it. Given two weeks’ time, I am confident your virtual technicians will be capable of confirming this information.”

Miss Harper narrowed her eyes, “A protection racket, is that it? You come here and threaten to destroy our data if we don’t do precisely as you say…I suppose I should have expected as much from a band of pirates.”

“Miss Harper,” Fei Long sighed, “I have already told you thrice that we are not, in fact, pirates. The Pride of Prometheus is assigned to the Multi-Sector Patrol Fleet—a fleet which, I might add, recently destroyed a pirate force whose operations had even reached as far as this Sector.” He met her gaze for several seconds before continuing, “And what I have offered you is a gift, nothing more. My Captain has not authorized me to force my way into your archives; as such I will be content to report your recalcitrance to him upon my return, should you deem my offer unworthy of such a meager return.”

“Meager?” she blurted. “You would download this facility’s entire—proprietary—astrometric database! Our data is more accurate than any locally-sourced records and has contributed to the understanding of intra-galactic interplay—”

“Again,” Fei Long cut in smoothly, “I would prefer we dispense with the posturing. Your facility was state of the art eighty years ago,” he said pointedly, “but has long since been surpassed by at least eight other facilities in this Sector alone.”

Miss Harper bristled visibly, and Fei Long knew he had her right where he wanted her. “If our data is so extraordinarily mundane,” she said icily, “then you will have little difficulty finding better elsewhere.” She turned as if to terminate the meeting, and Fei Long waited a fraction of a second before taking a tentative-looking step forward.

“The truth, Miss Harper, is that my mission is time-sensitive,” he said honestly. “I do not have time to go from one planet to another in search of fractional or segmented databases which contain the information I need. Zhu’s Hope was my first choice simply because of the complete, precise nature of your records. They are purported to be, if not of up-to-date precision, more complete than any records now available to us. Please,” he said, putting an edge of desperation into his voice, “much depends on my sourcing and examination of data like that which is stored in your astrometric vaults.”

Miss Harper stopped and turned, giving him a haughty look before cocking her head and relaxing her features. “What possible value could century-old star charts hold?” she asked, finally giving in to her innate, scientific, curiosity.

Fei Long wanted to exhale in relief, but he kept his posture as firm as possible as he shook his head doubtfully, “I am not authorized to say—”

“Then we have nothing more to discuss,” she interrupted with certainty, turning to leave once again.

“Wait,” he said in a false, pleading, tone. He then let loose a long sigh before stepping forward and lowering his voice, “You cannot share this information with anyone, do you understand?”

Her eyes narrowed, “How else am I to convince the Directorate to grant you access if not by conveying the true motives behind your request?”

Fei Long nodded slowly, as though in thought, before meeting her eyes and saying, “I believe it is entirely possible that the recent droid attack which your colony suffered was aimed at destroying these very records, Miss Harper. I cannot say more than that but, in the interests of protecting the labors of your colony, I would ask that you trust me. Remember,” he said when she snorted derisively, “I could have quite easily taken what I wished to take by force and then caused irreparable harm to your data storage systems.”

“I doubt that,” she said stiffly.

Fei Long hardened his visage and gave her a look which saw her nearly recoil as he said, “You do not know me, Miss Harper, so your doubt is understandable. But I can confidently say that there has not yet been a system invented which I cannot crack—regardless of its origin or architecture.”

“So if this data is so important, what’s to stop you from just taking it should we refuse?” she demanded hotly.

Fei Long shrugged. “Because I will not need to do so; you are an intelligent woman, and I believe the same can be said of your Science Directorate. I have just offered to upgrade your data storage security with a suite of programs which, as yet, have never been beaten.”

Harper seemed to search his features for several seconds before shaking her head. “It’s not enough.”

Fei Long sighed in relief. “Finally,” he said agreeably, “the negotiations can commence.”

“Well done, Mr. Fei,” Middleton said after reviewing the report in detail, “you’ve secured their entire astrometric database in exchange for replaceable data and materials.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Fei Long replied calmly, and Middleton wondered just what the young man couldn’t do if he put his mind to it.

“I won’t ask for details,” Middleton said before leaning across the desk and fixing the younger man with a piercing look, “but I can’t condone coercion of any kind in negotiations of this kind, are we clear?”

The young man’s eyes flashed briefly before he bowed his head in that same, infuriating fashion as Middleton had come to rue. “We are ‘clear,’ Captain. No coercion was necessary, I assure you,” he added when Middleton gave him a dubious look. “We merely went about the task of identifying our mutual needs and attempted to ascertain how we might assist one anot—“

“Enough,” Middleton held up his hand haltingly. “I just want us to be clear on this matter for whatever future contact we might need to make with colonies like this one.”

“Of course, Captain,” Fei Long replied.

“Good,” the Captain said, easing back into his seat and gesturing to the data slate, “how long will it take you to incorporate their data into the Pride’s navigation computer?”

Fei Long cocked his head hesitantly, and Middleton dearly hoped that the young man wasn’t about to launch into yet another of his long-winded dissertations. “It is a significant task; alone I shall require no less than two months to synchronize the data. With assistance I may be able to cut that time in half.”

“What kind of assistance do you need?” Middleton asked.

“Data entry, primarily,” Fei Long replied as his eyes flicked back and forth in silent calculation. “Breaking the data into fragments which can be processed in a single shift will consume the majority of my efforts, and then verifying the data has been integrated will also take some time but I believe I can handle that operation virtually.”

“How many assistants will you need?” the Captain pressed.

Fei Long cocked his head again before saying confidently, “I believe one will suffice.”

Middleton blinked in surprise. “I assume that means you have a particular one in mind?”

“I do,” the young man replied with a smooth nod.

“So long as that person is not a senior staffer, consider them reassigned effective immediately,” Middleton instructed.

“Thank you, Captain,” Fei Long said as he tapped out something on a data slate before sliding that slate across the Captain’s desk.

Middleton picked it up and had to suppress a roll of his eyes. “If you can convince his father, you’ve got my blessing.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Toto,” Fei Long said with a courteous bow, keenly aware of the face that the being he currently addressed was well over four times his total body mass, “I would ask for a moment of your time?”

The lumbering Sundered turned from his project, where he had apparently been working on the exhaust manifolds on one of his trio of fighting craft. He moved toward the young man on all fours before drawing himself up to his full height. He squinted at the young man and said, “Who are you?”

“My name is Fei Long,” he replied with another courteous bow, curious as to why the uplift did not seem to recognize him after sharing the bridge for several weeks already, “and I am currently working on a project for which I will require skilled assistance.”

“I have no time,” Toto replied, and Fei Long had to fight the urge to stare at the marvelous, haphazard, array of cybernetic implants which had been grafted into the uplift’s head. “Tactical Office is big job.”

“I can appreciate that,” Fei Long assured him, “however, I am not here to beseech you for aid. Rather, I wish to enlist the aid of your son in a series of projects.”

Toto’s lips peeled back and Fei Long recoiled instinctively as he was faced with a nearly full mouth of long, savage-looking teeth. Fei Long recoiled slightly in the face of the massive uplift’s displeasure. “Why?” the ape man rumbled, and his hot, unpleasant-smelling breath wafted into the young man’s nostrils in measured blasts.

Fei Long resisted the urge to gulp but failed to suppress a stammer as he explained, “You-your son is listed as a…qualified data analyst and compiler. He also…” he trailed off as the uplift stood to his full, imposing height, “umm…he is also listed in the ship’s personnel database as highly qualified with micro-machinery, and I have need of his expertise to complete a small project I have—“

“What project?” Toto interrupted shortly as his eyes narrowed.

Fei Long quickly produced a data slate and handed it to the larger great ape. “The details are all there,” he hastened to assure him lamely, silently cursing himself for losing his composure in the face of the mammoth mammal.

Toto’s eyes flicked down to the slate and he perused its contents for several seconds before fractionally relaxing. “Where you work?” the uplift asked in an only slightly less dangerous tone.

“In my quarters,” Fei Long replied quickly. “The area is climate-controlled and electrostatically stable; I have already brought all of the tools we will require to complete the scheduled tasks.”

Toto nodded slowly as he handed back the slate—which looked comically small in his massive, black hands—and asked, “How long?”

Fei Long took a steadying breath and replied, “I believe I will require his assistance for seven or eight hours daily for no less than three weeks.”

Toto snorted, and once again his hot breath found its way into Fei Long’s nostrils. The young man didn’t even want to guess how such a smell got inside of a living creature, but he was not about to antagonize the ape man.

“Good,” Toto said eventually before turning and bellowing a primal roar in the direction of the Pride’s primary shuttle.

A smaller—though still huge, at least compared to the average human—Sundered came loping around the nose of the shuttle using all four limbs for locomotion. Fei Long silently catalogued the obvious similarities between this younger version and Toto, most notably the lack of the silver stripe running down the younger version’s back—a feature which seemed unique to the family’s patriarch.

As Toto’s son approached, he reared up onto his legs and assumed an upright posture for the last several steps. He gave Fei Long a short, disinterested look before turning to his father and ‘speaking’ in native Sundered with his father. The communication was clearly more complex than what Fei Long had observed between chimpanzees or gorillas on science vids, but it still sounded very much like it relied on the same guttural, harsh sounds as humanity’s closest natural relatives.

“You work with him,” Toto said after the brief exchange in their Sundered tongue, and he pointed at Fei Long with a gnarled, outstretched finger.

The younger uplift barked in protest as he made a dismissive gesture, and Fei Long saw Toto swell as he squared up to his apparently rebellious son.

“You work with him,” Toto growled, “and you use his words.”

The younger Sundered began to object, but before a sound could escape his son’s lips Toto reached out and grabbed him by the throat before slamming him unceremoniously onto the deck. The younger uplift struggled—while Fei Long backed several steps away from the conflict—but Toto’s grip was too powerful and he leaned down to bare his patchwork set of vicious teeth in his son’s face. As he did so he bellowed a primal roar that any ape—upright, clothed, and versed in mathematics or not—would recognize as a dire threat.

Toto’s son looked as though he wanted to continue the struggle, but Fei Long watched as his father squeezed his neck even harder. When Toto raised his free hand menacingly, his son went limp and looked away in an obvious sign of submission.

Toto held the position for several long, tense, seconds before releasing his son’s neck. He then stood to his full height and turned his back to his son before saying, “He work with you—and use your words.” The latter bit he added with a short look over his shoulder at his son, who had just resumed an upright posture.

The younger Sundered nodded and gave Fei Long a dark look. “I will,” he agreed in a voice that was considerably more human-sounding than his fathers, but even the younger uplift’s vocalizations were considerably deeper than any human voice Fei Long had heard.

Uncertain if he had made a wise choice in requesting the uplift’s assistance, Fei Long gestured to the blast doors leading out of the shuttle bay. “If you will follow me,” he said diplomatically as he tentatively led the young ape man from the shuttle bay.

Chapter XVIII: A Drop-off and a Lead

“You’re putting us in an escape pod?” Raphael Tremblay asked neutrally. It was clear to Middleton that the Lucky Clover’s former XO had come to terms with his fate, which was fine and well with Middleton. As far as he was concerned, the traitorous Intelligence Officer was getting off light.

“So this is his plan: to maroon me in some out of the way uninhabited star system,” Bethany said bitterly, with more than a note of haughty entitlement in her voice which Middleton had come to despise among the Royalist elites. “I don’t know why I’m surprised that this mission with the droids was all a farce from the get go. Although why it took you so long to reach a place to drop us off baffles me. Perhaps you hoped that if we were cooped up with only the two of us for company we would kill each other?” the Princess-cadet smiled sweetly. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

“We aren’t putting you off the ship as castaways,” Middleton growled, silently appreciating the fact that his two ‘guests’ had spent the rest of the trip inside a maintenance locker, “your mission goes forward. We’ll drop you off and leave the system—only after that will the droids risk picking you up.”

“A likely story; one that even if we are found later will only go to prove the duplicity of the droid tribes and not that of Flat Nose, my oh-so-beloved Montagne cousin,” Bethany said, her voice dripping with scorn.

“I neither care what you think, nor what you have to say,” Middleton said coldly before handing each of them a data slate, dearly wishing to get this particular objective behind him so he could leave it in the Pride’s wake, “inside this is a copy of everything in our database that might help you on your mission. What little we have is yours and it’s in there—one for each of you.”

“You can’t—“ Bethany began, but Middleton took a step toward the arrogant young woman as he gave Lu Bu a meaningful look.

“I have a briefing to conclude with the two of you,” Middleton growled, “and nowhere in my mission brief does it say that you have to retain the ability to speak while that briefing takes place. Are we clear?” he asked, his voice cracking like a whip and having the desired effect on the haughty Royalist.

She stood in seething silence for several seconds but made no further outbursts as her eyes flicked to Lu Bu, who was now toying with an expanding ball-gag and returning her look with a hungry one of her own.

“Now,” Middleton continued, proffering a pair of data slates, “here is all the information we have on the Droid Tribe which calls itself ‘United Sentients Assembly.’ It’s mostly technical specifications on some of the units which make up this particular Tribe, but included are some notes garnered from the Fleet’s intel database as well as a few firsthand observations from this ship’s crewmembers who have come in contact with them in the past. I’m guessing you’ll have plenty of time to review the entirety of these slates’ contents while you wait for your pick-up.” Middleton had to fight to keep a smirk from his lips as he contemplated the fact that the escape pod, despite having been fitted with extra atmosphere recyclers and foodstuffs, was little better than a raft drifting in the middle of an ocean. “The pod’s emergency transponders have been set to broadcast on specific frequencies monitored by the United Sentients Assembly’s vessels,” he continued, “and I’d advise you to refrain from modifying those transponders in any way. You’re more likely to attract unwanted attention by sending up a general distress signal than a friendly pick-up.”

“How do I know this pod isn’t just a coffin?” Bethany bit out acidly.

Middleton bristled as he allowed the previously suppressed smirk to twist his lips contemptuously. “You don’t,” he retorted, “but on this ship we value the ability to follow orders and adhere to the chain of command.” A quick glance at Tremblay revealed that the Intelligence Officer had apparently tuned out the briefing at some point, which was fine with Middleton, who couldn’t wait to get the mutinous green creeper off his ship. “Besides,” he added as he handed the two of them their data slates, “if I wanted you dead I certainly wouldn’t waste one of my ship’s escape pods in the effort. There’s a line that runs from the bow to the stern of this ship made of people who would love to get a few minutes alone with either of you if they knew you were aboard—consider yourselves lucky that we were able to keep your presence a secret.”

Captain Middleton turned to Lu Bu and gave her the signal to assist the traitors-cum-diplomats into the escape pod. Tremblay went quietly, but Bethany began shouting about her lineage while referencing obscure laws regarding the treatment of prisoners, dignitaries, and even formal representatives. Lu Bu took obvious pleasure in lifting her from her feet and shoving her through the escape pod’s hatchway. Bethany tumbled head-over-heels, and just as the hatch closed behind her Middleton saw her come to a stop more or less upside down with her dress falling over her face as she made sounds of outrage.

“Thank you, Lancer,” Middleton said with a nod to Lu Bu. The look of satisfaction on her face was something he felt he probably should have reprimanded her for, but his hypocrisy went only so far—he absolutely shared her enthusiasm for ridding the Pride of its traitorous passengers. Still, he was the Captain, and he needed to set an example. “Straighten up, Lancer,” he chided, and Lu Bu’s face immediately went blank as she stood to attention.

“Captain,” she acknowledged as he made his way past her. The escape pod jettisoned only a second after he had rounded the corner and made his way toward the lift which would take him back to the bridge.

Mr. Fei had seemed rather excited when Middleton had left the bridge, and after weeks of searching, the Pride’s Captain was ready to find another ComStat hub so they could get on with their primary mission.

“Let’s hear it, Mr. Fei,” Middleton prompted as soon as the door to his ready room had closed.

“I have located a ComStat hub, Captain,” Fei Long replied with obvious satisfaction.

“Can we expect any…surprises like last time when we jump in?” Middleton pressed, remembering all too vividly their first jump to a ComStat hub—the Pride had nearly been swallowed by the ‘missing’ neutron star around which the hub had been set in orbit.

Fei Long shook his head. “I have checked with our Navigator and Sensors team,” he assured the Captain, “and after extensive examination of available information we have concurred that this hub is located in interstellar space. There should be no ‘surprises’ this time,” he said, his voice a mixture of sheepishness and anger—presumably directed at himself for failing to recognize the threat to the ship prior to their last encounter with a ComStat hub.

“Very well,” Middleton nodded slowly. “Have Navigator Strider plot the jump.”

Fei Long nodded before hesitating briefly, and the Captain felt his throat tighten. Whenever the Pride’s newest Comm. Officer hesitated like that it did not bode well for the Captain’s peace of mind.

“Something else?” Middleton asked a bit too tersely.

“The hub is located in interstellar space…” Fei Long repeated deliberately, and Middleton quickly took the younger man’s meaning. “The Navigator has informed me that we are unlikely to jump to its precise location without a nearby gravity well to use as a target.”

“How many jumps are we talking about?” Middleton asked as he sat down in his chair, prompting Fei Long to do likewise.

“Perhaps three or four,” the young man replied quickly. “He cannot say with any degree of certainty.”

“Fine,” Middleton nodded as he gestured to the door, “help him plot the first jump and let’s get underway as quickly as possible. The sooner we get to that hub, the sooner we can complete our mission. The Fleet needs that asset, Mr. Fei, and they’re counting on us to secure it for them.”

“Yes, Captain,” Fei Long said, standing quickly from his chair.

“Send the XO in on your way out,” the Captain said as he opened the Pride’s latest readiness reports on his desk’s built-in data link.

“Yes, Captain,” the young man repeated before quickly egressing the room. A few moments later, Lieutenant Sarkozi entered the ready room and made her way to the Captain’s desk. Middleton envied the crispness in her stride and the purpose which seemingly radiated from her visage, and for a moment he recalled the time when he was her age.

“These latest reports indicate progress, XO,” he said, gesturing to the empty seat situated opposite his own. “Our Tracto-an crewmembers are integrating better than we had expected.”

Sarkozi sat in the chair and nodded. “Discipline remains a significant issue,” she said pointedly as she produced a data slate which Middleton didn’t even need to read in order to know it contained the previous few days’ incident reports—reports he had already examined, “but on the whole they’ve acclimated to life aboard the Pride of Prometheus better than most first-timers.”

“Take the bad with the good, XO,” Middleton sighed as he reviewed the incidents listed on the slate. There were two additional confrontations described which had taken place just two hours earlier but, thankfully, none of the involved parties had been confined to the brig—or sickbay—so the Captain considered it a sign of progress.

“I’m not overly concerned with the violence,” Sarkozi said hesitantly as she shifted slightly in her chair, “but the divisiveness I’m hearing about between the Tracto-ans is a cause for concern.”

“Divisiveness?” Middleton repeated with a cocked eyebrow.

“Yes sir,” she replied with a nod, “it seems we’ve got two distinct groups of Tracto-ans forming along unexpected lines.”

“What kind of lines?” the Captain asked, silently calculating the odds of putting down a general uprising among half of the Tracto-an crewmembers—and very much disliking his preliminary results.

“The first group,” she explained as she produced another slate, “seems to have rallied under Atticus. They’ve been the instigators in over eighty percent of the intra-Tracto-an confrontations, while the other group is composed primarily of those who have received cybernetic implants or other major medical therapies since coming aboard.”

“Who is the second group led by?” Middleton asked, forcibly relaxing his jaw after it had clamped down in reaction to the news.

Sarkozi shook her head. “I don’t think they even have a leader,” she said doubtfully. “The groups’ respective numbers are close to even…although the majority of Atticus’ group is assigned to the Lancer contingent, while the other group has mostly found stations in Gunnery, Engineering and Medical.”

Middleton mulled over the information for several seconds before nodding. “The situation will bear watching,” he said decisively, “and I’ll have Sergeant Gnuko see if he can come up with some activities to redirect this hostility. I’d rather it was released in a controlled environment, and on our terms, than have it boil over in the corridors of the ship.”

“Agreed, Captain,” Sarkozi replied.

“What else?” Middleton asked, and they began to analyze their latest section reports.

“You don’t be knowin’ the first thing about jumpin’ a ship into dark space, do ya, man?” Navigator Strider rebuked in his usual, insufferable tone.

“I understand the principles at play,” Fei Long assured him in a slightly raised voice as he, Strider, and Sensor Operator Hephaestion huddled around the Navigator’s station.

“The ‘principles’,” the dark-skinned, former pirate captain scoffed, “there be no guarantee we’ll land anywhere close to the target zone without better data than dis!” He slapped the data slate Fei Long had proffered away as though it was utterly worthless.

“Navigator Strider—“ Hephaestion began, but the former pirate cut him off.

“Bah,” Strider snapped under his breath, “give me the blasted thing.” Fei Long handed him the slate, and the former pirate re-examined its contents for several moments before shaking his head. “We can try the conservative approach,” he sighed after giving Fei Long a withering look.

“That is fine, Mr. Strider,” Fei Long assured him, “once we make our first jump, Hephaestion and I should be able to provide you with a more refined location.”

“It would help if I knew what we were jumpin’ toward,” the Navigator muttered as he began to input parameters into his console.

Fei Long decided to disengage at that point as he and Hephaestion returned to the Sensors station, where they worked to provide the Navigator with as much data as possible prior to their first jump. With any luck they would only need three or four jumps to reach their destination.

Fei Long was eager to complete his masterpiece.

Chapter XIX: The Second Command

“You know the mission, Lu,” Sergeant Gnuko said as the last of Lu Bu’s Recon Team filed into the shuttle, “and after you reach the first access point we should have audio communication for a few minutes. We’ve run through the tactical simulations a dozen times,” he added with a meaningful look, “and there’s no one I’d rather entrust this mission to than you.”

Lu Bu nodded sharply. “This one will not fail, Sergeant Gnuko,” she said as she felt a thrill of anticipation surge throughout her body.

Gnuko began to nod but his face contorted into a grimace as his hand went down to his leg. He gritted his teeth and shook his head in irritation, “I’d be leading this mission if power armor was viable, but my leg is still out of commission. I’d just slow the op down.”

“Understood, Sergeant,” she replied evenly. She knew that losing Homer in the fusion reactor was fundamentally her fault as the leader of the mission, and she was eager to prove she was a better leader than that. And even though it was only a temporary command of the Recon Team, Lu Bu had already begun to think of the unit as her own. Much to her growing surprise, the Recon Team’s members appeared to share her view on the matter—including Kratos.

“If the op is looking too dangerous, you are ordered to withdraw, Private,” Gnuko continued sternly. “There are plenty of these hubs out there and every time we successfully board one we gain valuable tactical data which will prove useful in future missions. There is no reason to sacrifice anyone unnecessarily,” he said, and she felt the sting of his words as though they had penetrated her to the absolute core of her being. She was overcome with the image of Homer’s fallen body and realized she had missed some of her Sergeant’s words when he said, “good hunting, Lu.”

She snapped off her best salute and replied, “This one will succeed.”

“I know you will,” Gnuko said, returning the salute and gesturing for her to board the shuttle. She did so and slapped the button which controlled the loading ramp, and the ramp began to close behind her as she took stock of her team’s status.

Every one of her six, hand-picked Recon Team Lancers was seated with their harnesses fastened, and their gear had been stowed in a more or less appropriate fashion. Each member of this particular team had been fitted with Storm Drake Armor suits—most of which had been redesigned for their new wearers following the personnel transfers from the Pride of Prometheus which had seen all but Atticus, Lu Bu, and Sergeant Gnuko disembark the ship—and their dragon-styled helmets looked appropriately fearsome to Lu Bu.

She completed her quick appraisal of her team’s gear, and after verifying that they had fastened their harnesses she made her way to the front bench where Fei Long was seated. Her irritation with him had grown over recent days since he had brought the Uplift in to help examine the star chart files. Ever since the Uplift had arrived in his quarters to assist with his various projects she been unable to spend a moment alone with her boyfriend, and the frustration was beginning to mount.

“Calm your nerves,” Fei Long said in their native tongue over a private comm. channel.

She shot him a dire look as she finished fastening her harness. He was wearing the same ‘bomb suit’ he had worn during their previous ComStat hub infiltration, but this time he also wore the strange glove-shaped device which he had built during the previous months on his right hand.

“I am not nervous,” she retorted as she pressed her back firmly against the bench. She tried to look directly ahead but Fei Long was fiddling with the glove so intently that she eventually gave him a withering look. “What are you doing?”

“Making some last-minute adjustments,” he replied without ever taking his eyes off the glove.

She snorted loudly just as the shuttle lifted off from the hangar deck, and Lu Bu felt a wave of anxious energy course through her body. Much as she was loathe to admit it, she knew that Fei Long was correct: she was indeed anxious.

This was just her second independent command, so to her rational mind the mission should have been less nerve-wracking than the fusion plant operation. But memories of their last ComStat hub operation were never far from her thoughts, and inextricably linked to those memories was a storm of emotion surrounding her departed mentor, Sergeant Walter Joneson.

“As I said,” she heard Fei Long say in his infuriatingly patient voice, “you must enhance your calm.” She very nearly lashed out at him with the back of her hand but he continued smoothly, “You are the only able-bodied Lancer on the ship who has previously infiltrated a hub, and these people have been hand-picked for this mission based on their individual and collective abilities. As a soldier it is your obligation to your commander to carry out orders without question; as a commander it is your obligation to your soldiers to provide sound leadership. For this you must reach balance within yourself, and it is a different balance than what is required of a soldier.”

She desperately wanted to find some fault with his words, but as usual she was unable to do so—which only further fueled her anger. But there was a grain of irrefutable truth to what he had just said, and she knew that it would require further examination in the future.

Because being a commander was definitely different from being a soldier.

“You know your tasks,” she said as her team went through the final round of gear checks. “Cassius stays at corridor entrance with rifle; he provides cover for our rear.”

“Why do we no all have rifles?” Bernice asked in a respectful, but pointed, tone.

Lu Bu shook her head as she instinctively gripped her own blaster rifle. “The hub is delicate,” she replied, “a missed shot could damage the hub and end this mission. Only this one and Cassius carried rifles,” she finished, all-too-aware of her grammatical mistake but deciding it best to push on. “You five,” she waved her left hand toward the rest of the team, “use boarding axes and shields.”

She saw Kratos hoist the metal, disc-shaped shield and begin to chuckle. “Axes and shields,” he deadpanned in his deep, gravelly voice, “did we come to the River of Stars to chop wood?”

The rest of the team laughed tightly, and Lu Bu knew that Walter Joneson would have said something to control the mood but she could not find the right words to say. “Cassius covers rear,” she said in a raised voice, “Kratos and Bernice take point. I will cover the operative with Claus; Stavros and Lysander cover rear. Point and rear teams stay ten meters close to operative. We use visual communication during this mission.” She knew they had drilled this precise entry at least fifty times, but last-minute speeches had become a familiar thing during her smashball-playing days and she found herself needing familiarity in that moment.

“By your command,” Kratos said as he braced to attention, and the rest of the team followed his lead.

With no more words to say, Lu Bu slapped the button which would lower the ramp and less than a minute later the team had taken up position outside the familiar-looking corridor. In every way Lu Bu could determine, this hub was identical to the first one they had boarded. She noted Fei Long was recording images of some markings located near the mouth of the corridor, and she waited for him to finish before signaling for her team to move down the corridor in their well-rehearsed fashion.

Kratos and Bernice, possessing the greatest raw, physical strength of the Recon Team’s members, moved quickly down the corridor and Lu Bu’s eyes snapped left and right in search of the concealed ion turrets which they had encountered during the first hub insertion.

She noted that Cassius had taken up his covering position and had his rifle trained down the corridor, which was one hundred twelve meters long if it was, in fact, identical to the first hub. Cassius was the only member of the team—other than Lu Bu—who could make such a shot with any kind of reliability, but there was little chance he could avoid hitting a teammate given the cramped dimensions of the corridor.

The main reason for stationing him in his current spot was to give a clear line of fire on any surprises—like the MR-93 hover platform which had claimed the lives of three Lancers, including Walter Joneson.

They continued down the corridor, and Lu Bu’s eyes tracked a blip of motion precisely where she had anticipated the first set of ion turrets to be. Almost without thinking, she raised her rifle and snapped off a shot at the turret just as it swiveled around toward Bernice. Lu Bu’s rifle round hammered into the ion turret’s barrel and the weapon stopped moving briefly.

On the other side of the corridor, Kratos surged forward and took an ion bolt to the chest before he could get his shield into position. But it appeared to have been a conscious exchange, as he tore into the turret with brutal efficiency and reduced it to a pile of metal fragments with just a few powerful blows of his boarding axe. Bernice did likewise opposite him, and without fanfare or celebration the two continued down the corridor having only stopped for a few seconds each.

Lu Bu felt pride in their efficiency as she continued down the corridor with her eye trained along her barrel sight in search of a new target. If this hub was truly identical to the last one then it would have a proximity mine built into the wall just a few meters ahead of where Bernice and Kratos had come to a stop. The team had drilled this insertion dozens of times in simulations, and Lu Bu took up her position with the blaster rifle trained at the section of wall which almost certainly hid the explosive device.

She squeezed the trigger time and again, sending round after round from her blaster rifle into the relatively delicate paneling until the section exploded with a blue-white plasma fire identical to the one which had slain Laertes during the first hub op.

After the debris had settled she motioned for Kratos and Bernice to move forward and take up guarding positions at the intersection where Fei Long would interface with the local systems.

They moved with expert precision and just a few seconds later she took up a defensive posture while Fei Long crouched down and opened up a nearby access panel. The last time they had been aboard a hub he had used a series of data pads with temporarily-rigged interface cables attached to them, but this time he had no such devices. Instead, he simply pulled away a portion of the glove-like apparatus’s ring finger section and slid it into an open data port.

He waited for several seconds—during which interval on the previous mission, Lu Bu recalled him furiously tapping away on the data slate—before nodding in satisfaction and withdrawing the jack from the port.

“I have shut down all onboard, centrally-controlled defensive systems,” she heard him say over the team-wide channel, “in addition to regaining local comm. access. We have three minutes before the jamming field resumes but the defensive systems have been deactivated for twenty minutes.”

“Good,” Lu Bu said, more than a little surprised—and impressed—that he had been able to do so much in so little time. “You heard him; move,” she barked to her team, “Stavros, Lysander; guard this intersection. Watch for mobile units but leave shot for Cassius if it too far for axes.”

“Aye,” she heard them reply as one, and she gestured for Kratos and Bernice to move down the corridor while she and Claus followed with Fei Long sandwiched between them with Claus in the front and Lu Bu in the rear. She desperately wanted a chance to destroy whatever device might be waiting to spring an ambush on her team like had happened last time.

She forced thoughts of the past from her mind as her team arrived at the doorway leading to the hub’s control center. Her team took up positions to either side of the corridor in the tiny, cramped space afforded them—it was this cramped space’s dimensions which had determined the size of her team, since there was simply no room for even one more Lancer to squeeze into the cover afforded by the short, blind recesses to either side of the door.

Claus quickly removed the access panel, behind which the controls for the door were hidden. Fei Long calmly knelt down and removed a segment from the little finger of his glove, which had a tiny wire connecting it to the glove, and he plugged the jack into the slot.

Satisfied that he had accomplished the task, Lu Bu retrained her barrel on the corridor and waited for any kind of movement. For what seemed like an eternity, nothing happened. But then she saw a panel in the ceiling open and a familiar-looking, globe-shaped, MR-93 hover platform descended silently into view at the nearly exact mid-point between her position and the intersection where her rearguard team was stationed.

Lu Bu didn’t even wait for the hover platform to finish its descent before snapping off a round and sending the platform spinning like a top around its axis, but the MR-93 remained almost exactly stationary otherwise. A second blaster bolt, authored by Cassius, hammered into it from the rear and this time the globe careened violently into the nearby paneling.

Taking careful aim so as to avoid sending an errant round toward Cassius, she fired another round into the MR-93 and this time the globular anti-personnel unit went crashing to the floor. With it lying on the deck, Lu Bu and Cassius sent round after round into the device until she was satisfied that it had been neutralized.

“Rear team,” she called over the Recon Team’s channel, “hold position and remain alert.”

“Aye,” they replied as one, and Lu Bu turned to see that the door was now open and Fei Long had already entered the control chamber. She gestured for Kratos and Bernice to remain where they were while beckoning for Claus to follow her into the heart of the hub.

Fei Long had already begun to interface with the same panel he had accessed during the previous mission, and Lu Bu cast a wary look at the glowing, gently pulsating core at the heart of the circular room.

She knew very little of engineering, and even less of Imperial technology, but she did know that the beating heart of a ComStat hub was capable of generating lethal radiation. Her helmet had been equipped with a radiation monitor, and thankfully the levels inside the chamber were deemed merely ‘unsafe’ and not ‘emergent’ or ‘lethal.’

Everything Lu Bu had done since boarding the Pride of Prometheus had been ‘unsafe,’ so she dismissed the supposed danger and took a careful look around the room while Fei Long silently went about his work.

She walked around the pulsing core and saw a trio of stations positioned equidistantly throughout the room. There was nothing remarkable about the first two, but when she came to the third something about it caught her eye. At first she could not determine what had gotten her attention, so she slowly circled the workstation for several seconds and still nothing came to her.

She was about to dismiss the matter when she saw Fei Long moving toward the same station. Lu Bu stepped forward and held a hand out before him, “Your work is there, Kongming,” she said in their native tongue, with a pointed look at the first workstation.

Fei Long shook his head. “There is something wrong with that station,” he said, gesturing to the same workstation which had gotten her attention, “do you not see it?”

Lu Bu shook her head adamantly. “Finish your work,” she said in a commanding tone that she hoped was neither too hard, nor too soft.

“It is done,” he said dismissively as he made to push past her, and she was so surprised to hear that he had already finished his work that she allowed him to pass. A moment after he had come to stand before the workstation, she realized what was different about it.

“The indicators are unmoving,” she muttered, irritated with herself for failing to deduce what was wrong with the series of panels behind the station.

“Indeed,” Fei Long agreed as he carefully examined the station without physically touching it. He circled it three times before kneeling beside one edge of the meter-square base of the station. “Assist me, Fengxian,” he said, gesturing to what looked to be an access panel.

“I am not certain we shou—“ she began, but he cut her off calmly.

“There are subroutines at work in this hub’s mainframe,” he explained. “I do not recognize them and they might jeopardize our ability to subvert this hub. Please assist me,” he repeated with a sense of urgency in his voice.

Lu Bu checked her mission timer and saw that they still had fourteen minutes until the automated defenses would come back online. So she reluctantly knelt beside Fei Long and the two of them removed the panel he had indicated. What was revealed to be within made her lean forward to get a closer look.

Nestled amid a series of crystal-based components—for which Imperial technology was known—was a brown, amorphous, decidedly organic-looking object with several fleshy-looking protrusions filled with multi-colored fluids.

“What is it?” she asked with a note of concern in her voice.

“I do not know,” he replied, and for the first time since she had known him she heard a note of wonderment in his voice. He gazed at it as though he was glimpsing a precious piece of art, or an inexplicable quirk of nature, but after a few seconds he visibly shook himself and began making recordings.

“We should not remove it,” she said sternly, decidedly disliking his interest in the strange…thing.

“Naturally,” he agreed before belatedly adding, “at least not until we know what it is.” He continued scanning the device for several minutes in silence until Lu Bu had decided enough time had been spent on it.

“Kongming…we must go,” she said in a commanding voice as she picked up the panel and made to replace it.

“Just a few more minutes,” he insisted dismissively, “this is unlike anything I have ever seen…a high concentration of rare elements mixed with complex, undocumented proteins…fascinating…”

“No, Long,” she said severely and brushed him aside as she replaced the panel, “we return to the ship now. Is your work truly finished?” Her anxiety level had steadily risen with each passing second and she knew that her nerves might not survive another five minutes aboard the hub.

Fei Long gave her a look which bordered annoyance and outright anger, but his expression softened quickly and he nodded. “It is complete; this hub has been, to the best of my knowledge, connected to the first hub for the purpose of our mission.”

“Good,” she said with a curt nod, holding back a sigh of relief at his words, “then we move out.” She stood to her full height and switched to Confederation Standard as she said, “Recon Team, the mission is complete. We return to shuttle in formation; retrieve fragments of the hover platform for examination.”

With that, they returned to the shuttle in a tight, well-practiced formation. But Lu Bu did not release the pent-up sigh of relief until the shuttle had lifted off and began its journey back to the Pride of Prometheus’ hangar.

Chapter XX: A New Wrinkle

Two days passed after the successful mission aboard the ComStat hub, and Middleton found himself reading a report authored by Fei Long regarding a strange…device which the Recon Team encountered aboard the second ComStat hub onto which his crew had managed to load Mr. Fei’s program.

“I’m not certain what to make of this, Mr. Fei,” he said measuredly after re-reading the report.

“Neither am I, Captain,” the young man replied hesitantly as he veritably squirmed in his seat.

It was clear he had something he dearly wished to say, so Captain Middleton sighed softly, knowing he was going to regret his coming words, “I take it you have an idea?”

The Pride’s newest Comm. operator nodded quickly, “I have a hypothesis, but nothing more.”

“Let’s hear it,” Middleton said, leaning back in his chair and preparing for a lengthy dissertation on whatever it was that currently bubbled and boiled inside of Fei Long’s overly-fertile mind.

Fei Long leaned forward conspiratorially, very nearly causing the captain to do likewise before he recognized the urge for what it was and resisted it. The young man lowered his voice and said, “I believe it is a biotechnological organism of some kind. If I was to indulge my imagination, I would venture to say it is likely related to Elder, or possibly Ancient, technology. But as you are well aware, no examples of such tech have ever been recorded.”

Middleton blinked. Then he blinked again, followed by a double blink. His eyebrows then rose higher than he could remember them doing and this time he did lean forward. “Maybe you need some rest, Mr. Fei…” he began politely, contemplating a forced medical review of the young man’s competence at such a suggestion.

But Mr. Fei shook his head adamantly. “Please follow my logic, sir,” he said as he stood from his chair and began gesticulating in an almost hyper fashion. Well, it was almost hyper for him, at any rate.

Fei Long was usually the most unflappable person in the room, though Middleton felt confident that was not the case whenever the two of them shared a confined space, but just then the young man looked like a figurative kid in a candy store.

“The device was found embedded among Imperial technology,” the young man continued, apparently oblivious to his captain’s wary looks, “and not only did it appear to be having an impact on its neighboring systems, but my scans indicated that it has been growing rather steadily for quite some time.”

Middleton cocked his head slightly as he considered the information. “Go on,” he said, leaning forward and lacing his fingers together. He suspected he was very much going to dislike whatever it was the young man had deduced—and he also suspected that those deductions would be predicated un unassailable logic.

“Given its obviously foreign nature compared to the housing in which it was located,” Fei Long continued as he paced back and forth across the deck, “and given the fact that all Imperial technology is composed of crystalline, rather than metallic—or, in this case, organic—materials, I am forced to conclude that the device we discovered is not, in fact, Imperial in nature.”

“I’m with you so far,” Middleton said as he felt his guts begin to twist.

Fei Long nodded as he continued moving his hands this way and that while saying, “If it is not Imperial in origin then we must conclude that it was designed by another group entirely, and we must also assume that it had been placed there recently. But all attempts to create sustainable, organically-based computing technologies which have been researched in recent centuries have failed for one reason or another—”

“Hold up,” Middleton interrupted, raising his hands in an obvious attempt to request clarification, “how do you know the device was placed there recently?”

Fei Long stared at him blankly for several seconds before a figurative light switched on behind his eyes and he waved a hand dismissively, “The readings I collected have dated the installation of the object with a margin of error no greater than two weeks.”

“Are you certain about that?” Middleton pressed, knowing full well what it meant if he was, in fact, certain.

Fei Long nodded with conviction, “It was placed there shortly after the Imperial withdrawal from the Spineward Sectors.”

Middleton sat back in his chair and considered the matter in silence while Fei Long looked on, surprisingly refraining from any verbal outbursts while the captain mulled over the information. After a few minutes, Captain Middleton said in a lowered voice, “Go on.”

Fei Long looked torn as to how he should proceed, and after a few moments of indecision he retook his chair opposite Middleton’s own. “Whatever that device was, it is technologically superior to cutting edge Imperial tech,” he explained, “otherwise it would not have been able to integrate itself seamlessly into the hub’s systems. Not only that, but no unshielded, natural,” he emphasized the word, “complex organic material of any known type could survive in the environment of a hub for so long. The fact that it has clearly remained undetected also speaks to its superior design and ability, and I have indeed confirmed that there are several subroutines at work aboard this hub which, while subtle and difficult to detect, have fundamentally altered minor portions of the data transfer process which is the backbone of the ComStat network.”

Middleton found himself nodding in agreement. “Which leads you to believe it is either Elder, or Ancient, technology,” he concluded.

Fei Long returned the nod with feeling. “Yes, Captain, but given the ship’s admittedly limited databases I am inclined to believe it is the latter and not the former. And I believe that whoever placed it aboard the hub has gained access to the ComStat network in a fashion similar to my own, physically non-invasive and possibly superior, method.”

The captain couldn’t suppress a snort of amusement at the young man’s abject arrogance. But he wasn’t about to call him to task for it since the young man had accomplished every other thing he had set his mind toward.

“Will this interfere with our mission?” Middleton asked, hoping for a succinct answer rather than another lengthy dissertation or display of deductive reasoning.

Fei Long hesitated, but surprisingly his answer was as short and direct as the captain could hope for. “I do not believe so,” he replied with unusual confidence. “The subroutines which appear to have been hijacked by this device do not interact in any way with my program.”

“’Hijacked’?” Middleton repeated with amusement. “You’re picking up Confederation parlance pretty quickly.”

Fei Long bowed his head in deference, “As the ship’s Communications Officer I feel it important to familiarize myself with the verbiage and—“

“Take the compliment and move on, Mr. Fei,” Middleton chided as he picked up the data slate containing the young man’s secretive report. Fei Long did as he had suggested, and the captain asked in a pointed voice, “How many others know about this?”

Fei Long shook his head quickly. “Lu Bu and I are the only members of the team to see the device, although it is possible Claus saw it from a distance. All aspects of the operation have been compartmentalized per your directives.”

Middleton nodded in satisfaction. “Keep it that way, Mr. Fei,” he said as he deleted the information stored on the slate. He then ran the slate’s onboard formatting tool and handed it back to the young man, “Go over that data but keep it off the ship’s DI, is that clear?”

“Yes sir,” Mr. Fei replied as he accepted the slate.

“Now,” Middleton said, changing subjects while his thoughts were still orbiting the almost unfathomable notion that someone—someone who was likely in league with the Raubachs—had managed to not only find, but use Ancient technology, “how goes your examination of the star charts?”

Fei Long nodded shortly, “I have decompiled the entire database but am encountering unexpected issues in format conversion. I believe I will be finished in two weeks’ time.”

“Good,” Captain Middleton acknowledged while he continued his silent musings. “That will be all; dismissed.”

Fei Long stood and bowed before leaving the room.

Minutes passed as Middleton considered the matter. Gaining access to the ComStat network was, and remained, the Pride’s primary mission but that mission had just gotten a whole lot more complicated. It seemed that the MSP wasn’t the only group which had such a goal in mind—and the other team seemed to have a head start.

But even more important than the presence of a rival force attempting to accomplish the same objective as his mission outlined was that group’s successful application of the strange biotechnology. That biotech almost certainly came from a long-dead civilization about which humanity knew next to nothing, but traces of which could be found all across the galaxy.

It was a mystery, but to Middleton a mystery was nothing but an unquantified variable…and he hated variables.

Chapter XXI: Reconciliation is Hard

“Come in, Doctor,” Captain Middleton said when the chime rang at his door. Their dinner had been delivered to the conference room several minutes earlier and Middleton had used the time to go over various department reports.

All in all the crew was performing well, but the brewing morale issues between the former convicts from Shèhuì Héxié, the Tracto-ans like Atticus, and the other group of Tracto-ans comprised primarily of formerly handicapped or crippled warriors deemed unfit for military service on their home world.

Tracto-an society was an enigma to Middleton. On the one hand it was largely a meritocracy, with the men earning privileges based on their accomplishments and the women largely abiding by the same code as it pertained to their administration of property.

On the other hand, there was a severe fascist streak running through nearly all of the Tracto-ans when it came to identifying the ‘successful’ from the ‘unsuccessful.’ It seemed that in many cases—like with Atticus—it was not enough to simply rise above the rest of the pack. For him, and those like him, it seemed almost automatic that those who had been deemed failures in society should be castigated for their failure at every opportunity.

The door slid open and Jo stepped through. Middleton saw the familiar face of the man who had been assigned to escort the ship’s doctor throughout the ship, and he gave the man a barely-perceptible nod before the door slid shut.

“Doctor,” the captain greeted, briefly standing and gesturing to the seat opposite his own, “please have a seat.”

Jo did as he requested and kept her eyes on him, never once looking down at the plate of food before her. Middleton saw something in her visage that twisted bits and pieces inside of him he had forgotten about, and he silently reminded himself that the purpose of this particular meeting was to go over the morale situation aboard the ship while checking on the medical status of the ship’s crew.

Wishing to forgo any awkward silences, Middleton picked up a slate and said, “I’d like to go over Mr. Fei’s latest physical—“

“When are we going to talk about it, Tim?” she interrupted. “I’ve tried to give you some time on this but we can’t just keep ignoring it.”

He had hoped to avoid this particular subject during the meal but realistically he knew that they would need to broach the topic sooner or later. “Doctor—“

“No, Tim,” she cut in harshly, “not in this! It wasn’t your ship’s doctor that lied to you, it was me—and I have a name. Stop hiding behind your protocols and regulations and be a human being for once in your life!”

Middleton felt a chill spread throughout his body. “Is that what you think?” he asked after a lengthy silence while they locked eyes with each other. “You sorely misunderstand me if you believe that I’m hiding behind anything, Jo,” he said coldly.

“Then why won’t you talk about it?” she demanded hotly. “I took advantage of you, of our legal system, and of your generosity and now there’s no way it can be made right. Or are you trying to convince me that it doesn’t affect you?” she spat in what was a clear challenge if Middleton had ever heard one.

He set the data slate down slowly before leaning across the table. “What would you have me do, Jo?” he asked, his voice measured and calm. “Would you prefer that I run through the corridors of my ship rending my garments and gnashing my teeth?” he asked all-too-patiently and he saw her eyes flare with an almost forgotten, yet vividly familiar anger. He shook his head adamantly from side to side, “I’m not here to satisfy your personal ideations of what constitutes a proper grieving process. And frankly,” he added, his voice rising slightly, “you’re the last person with whom I’d choose to discuss the matter. I suggest we move on.”

“I took your daughter away from you, Tim,” she said, the defiance in her voice mixed with an unexpected, pleading, tone, “but not only that, I took away any chance you had to know her; nobody can just ‘move on’ from that. The least you could do is to show some blasted emotion!”

Middleton felt a surge of anger at her words but was determined not to give her the satisfaction of seeing it. He leaned back in his chair and slowly drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “You’re right, Jo,” he agreed after a pregnant pause, “you did take any chance I may have had. And since that is indisputably the case, I see little point in poking around the topic—especially with the very person who took advantage of my trust. Now if you need to discuss it to get a firmer grip on the issue for yourself, that’s a different matter entirely,” he said with more contempt than he had hoped to hear in his own voice.

Jo shook her head in apparent disbelief. “You really are that cold?” she asked distantly as she sank back into her chair. “You’ve changed, Tim…at first I thought it was just the passage of time, but you’re different.”

Middleton shrugged lightly, a gesture at odds with his feelings at that moment. “I asked you here to discuss the crew’s medical status, with specific emphasis on Mr. Fei Long,” he said, hoping to cut off the entire line of discussion then and there. “But if you’re unwilling or unable to do that then I suggest we eat our meal, wait an appropriate interval for the benefit of anyone who may be keeping tabs on us, and you can return to your quarters.”

They sat in silence for several moments until Jo said, “I am this ship’s primary medical officer. I would be remiss in my duties if I did not tend to the duties of that post.”

Nodding in approval, Captain Middleton picked up the data slate he had held at the beginning of the conversation. “You deactivated Mr. Fei’s kill pill during our previous deployment out here,” he said in a tone that barely hinted at a query. “I assume you respected my request that he not be apprised of that fact?”

“Yes,” she said coldly, “against my better judgment, I was complicit in your subjugation of his most fundamental human—“

“I’d like you to tell him that it is no longer a threat,” Middleton interrupted, and Jo’s mouth froze mid-phrase. After a brief, but pointed, silence the captain continued, “I was concerned about his psychological stability, and frankly too much depended on him at that point for me to risk the outcome of the mission. As the ship’s Chief Medical Officer, I would like you to perform a final assessment of the device and, if it has been successfully deactivated, I leave the matter of disclosing the truth of the matter to him.” His lip curled as he added, “You can paint me in whatever light you think best as you do so; I’m satisfied that Mr. Fei is capable of processing the situation and arriving at the same conclusion I did.”

Jo’s mouth closed and she cocked her head slightly before asking, “You think I won’t do it…is that it? You honestly think I’m more concerned with covering my own backside than I am in doing what’s best for my patients?” she challenged icily.

Middleton shook his head evenly, knowing that nothing could be further from the truth. “I trust you to, as you say, do what’s best for your patient,” he said with a shrug. “And you can even demonize me if you need to, telling yourself that I violated his – and your – rights in this matter. But everything I’ve done,” he jammed his finger into the tabletop hard enough to separate the fingernail from its bed, “since sitting down in that chair has been to defend the very rights you might accuse me of violating. The Spine is at war, and—“

“Spare me the rhetoric, Tim,” she cut in angrily, and Middleton saw tears gathering in her eyes as she continued, “I didn’t want to listen to it when we were still married and I certainly don’t want to listen to it now. Is that all?” she asked, standing abruptly to her feet as the first tear slipped down her cheek. But her features were stoic, just like he remembered from so many years ago, and for a brief moment he empathized with her.

Maybe I’m being unfair, he thought to himself before hardening his resolve. “If you’re in no mood for dinner,” he gestured to the platter of food as he stood from his own chair, “then yes. That will be all.”

She turned on her heel and made for the door as quickly as her feet could carry her, and Tyrone Middleton was left alone with the distinct impression that he would need to apologize for something that just happened…but he would be blasted to the Demon’s Pit if he could figure out what that was.

“Lie back; this will just take a minute,” Doctor Middleton said a bit more shortly than was usual for her. Fei Long briefly searched her features before lying back in the scanning device. This would make the sixth time he had been subjected to such an extensive cranial scan, and he could only assume it was due to the presence of the ‘kill pill’ which had been implanted deep in his brain shortly after his arrest on the world of his birth.

“May I ask whether I should be concerned for my well-being?” he asked in a playful tone that belied the very real concern he felt as he tried to relax on the sliding cot portion of the device.

Doctor Middleton adjusted the controls of the machine and shook her head. “I have no reason to expect so, but yours is a unique…condition…” She paused awkwardly before adding, “I just want to make sure nothing has changed.”

“I see,” Fei Long replied, knowing a white lie when he heard it but deciding against challenging her statement. There was clearly something on Doctor Middleton’s mind which weighed heavily on her conscience, and Fei Long knew that she had precious few people with whom she could speak regarding personal matters.

The cot slid backward along its track until Fei Long’s shoulders were fully enclosed in the cylindrical scanning device. Not long after it had stopped, the familiar sounds and tactile sensations which he had come to expect from it began, and for a brief moment his entire body was awash in a chilling sensation. The sensation passed, as it always did, and when it had done so he thought about the best way to broach the subject of the Doctor’s obvious distress.

After a few seconds of consideration he said, “While I was growing up, my mother was overly fond of a particular saying. It is strange to me because, while I never did see the value in this phrase, I find myself pondering those words with increasing regularity in recent days.”

“Please,” the doctor interrupted, “this is a delicate scan; you should remain quiet while it is conducted.”

Fei Long knew as well as the doctor did that the motion of his jaw would have zero impact on the outcome of the test, but he abided by her stated wishes even though he truly thought he might be able to help ease her stress. The minutes passed and the scan came to its eventual conclusion, after which time the machine slid his body out and he regained his feet.

“Are you having any headaches?” Doctor Middleton asked in a businesslike tone.

“I am not,” he replied with a calm shake of his head.

“And the insomnia?” she continued as she made notes on a data slate.

He chuckled softly. “As I explained previously,” he said with the barest hint of reprimand in his tone, as he disliked broaching this particular subject with the ship’s doctor, “I have been experiencing an altogether normal sleep cycle since the…event in the airlock those months ago.”

The doctor looked at him over the rims of her glasses and Fei Long knew that she harbored some measure of resentment, or possibly simple disapproval, regarding the relationship which had blossomed between himself and Lu Bu. But he would not be cowed, nor would he allow himself to feel as though he had committed any wrongful act since that time. If anything, it was Lu Bu who should receive a stern ‘talking to’ regarding her conduct within the confines of their private relationship.

The doctor seemed strangely hesitant as she continued, “How are things between the two of you?”

The young man cocked an eyebrow in surprise. “I had assumed that the two of you engaged in what people in your culture refer to as ‘girl talk’ on a regular basis?”

Doctor Middleton set her jaw, and Fei Long knew he had only a brief window through which to navigate her uncharacteristically negative mood, so he decided to take the path which would supposedly set a person free: the truth.

“I confess,” he said with a sigh of genuine relief, “while we have our share of…friction, she has become the second-most stabilizing force in my life. I know that I would function without her, since I have done so in the past, but hearing of her experiences has shed light on matters previously bathed in symbolic shadow for me. My relationship with her has been, for lack of a better term, an enlightening experience.”

The doctor seemed satisfied with the answer—the providing of which seemed to cause actual, physical pain to Fei Long deep in his being—and visibly relaxed before apparently realizing something which he had said. “You said your relationship is the ‘second-most stabilizing force.’ What would you say is the first?”

Fei Long tapped his temple lightly. “Captain Middleton calls it a ‘kill pill.’ But I have come to think of it as something of a partner, or at least a moral guidepost.”

Doctor Middleton looked genuinely offended by the notion, but she was also clearly intrigued—and for reasons unknown to Fei Long, disturbed—by his confession. “I don’t understand,” she said after a short pause. “How can you think of it as anything but an affront to your most basic human rights? It was placed there against your will in order to control your actions with literally lethal consequences; that’s the opposite of moral!” she finished, clearly having considered the matter at some length.

But Fei Long, having lived with the harsh realities of the device for two years, had considered the matter much more deeply than she—or anyone other than him—could possibly understand. “You must understand,” he said with a soft sigh as he delved into a topic which was very personal to him, “for me there has never been any true imperative to which I was required to adhere. My mind is too strong,” he explained without as much as a microgram of pride or condescension, and he shook his head at the thought of long-buried memories as he did so. “As such I have always been able to, as some might say, ‘out-think’ those who thought it their obligation to guide, instruct, or otherwise control me.”

“I don’t see the relevance of that,” she countered sharply, putting the slate in her pocket and folding her arms—a certain sign of body language indicating opposition. “People often have horrible things done to them,” she continued, her voice taking on a slightly patronizing tone that very nearly made Fei Long’s jaw clench tightly shut as he correctly anticipated her next words, “and many times they attempt to rationalize the necessity of those horrors in one way or another.”

Fei Long nodded calmly, keeping his voice level as he asked, “You believe I suffer from a form of psychological self-delusion, the purpose of which is to ratify the harsh reality of my circumstances?”

The doctor’s eyes narrowed slightly. “You’re still human,” she said in a similarly level tone, “and that means you can fall victim to the same psychological processes as the rest of us.”

“That is, as they say, ‘true enough’,” he allowed as his mind worked through the possible reasons for her having broached the subject. “But I have given the matter a rather significant amount of thought…”

She shook her head as though in empathy, but he recognized the affectation for what it truly was: pity. “Your culture isn’t exactly receptive to outward displays of individuality,” she said in a now-infuriatingly patronizing tone, but Fei Long continued fighting to keep his emotions under control. Doing so had been relatively easy for him prior to his relationship with Lu Bu, but it had become increasingly difficult in recent weeks for reasons he still could not understand. “I believe that you think this…atrocity,” her voice became tremulous as she forced out the word, “is some sort of gift in disguise, but in my opinion you probably aren’t in a position to make that determination.”

Fei Long took a breath and briefly closed his eyes as he searched for the right words. “You were married, yes?” he asked after the train of thought had crystalized in his mind.

Doctor Middleton bristled visibly. “I don’t see how that—“

“In marriage,” he cut in as smoothly as he could manage, “one subjugates aspects of his or her freedom—even going so far as to place his or herself in direct, physical, danger—to support the marriage or family.”

Her eyes narrowed slightly but Fei Long saw a light of comprehension begin to flicker behind her eyes. “That’s different,” she objected all-too-predictably.

“How?” he asked patiently, his anger abating somewhat as the doctor seemed at least somewhat interested in a meaningful exchange on the subject—rather than some short-sighted lecture based on values Fei Long already understood perfectly well.

“Because you have a choice to get married,” she said in a once again tremulous voice. “And you have the freedom to undo that choice at some future point.”

He nodded patiently. “And since I was not given a choice of whether or not to accept this,” he gestured to his temple, “condition, you would say that it should be removed since it is the result of an immoral, illegal, or unethical action. Moreover, you seem to believe that any emotional or intellectual interaction I have had with my condition is necessarily tainted by the coercive nature of said condition, and that I am therefore unable to make a rational…no,” he said after a moment’s consideration, “that I am unable to make a correct determination. Is that so?”

She shook her head defiantly, but he could see that she understood his meaning well enough by the look in her eyes. “You were a victim—“

“No!” he interrupted in a raised voice, briefly losing control of his emotions. He closed his eyes again and took a deep, cleansing breath. “No, Doctor Middleton,” he said in a more measured voice after meeting her gaze and holding it for several seconds, “I am not, nor have I ever been, a victim.”

“You might not be able to legally make that determination—“ she began stiffly, but again he interrupted—this time more politely.

“Doctor, I am a dangerous person,” he said, cutting through several layers of social niceties so as to address the very heart of the matter in no uncertain terms. “If I set my mind to it, I could topple entire economies with little more than time and a decent network connection. I could break into secure databases and divulge secrets which would incite entire societies to riot,” he continued, knowing that he had come quite close to doing just that prior to his incarceration. “In fact, had I not been apprehended I very likely would have done precisely that,” he continued, his own voice beginning to tremble as a flood of emotion threatened to overcome him. “Some people look to gods in order to find the proverbial ‘line’ over which they should not step, but gods have never held more than a passing interest for me, as I believe them to merely represent facets of ourselves. Others seek guidance in the wisdom of their ancestors, and I admit that this does provide me with some measure of stability,” he said, realizing for the first time just how true that was, “but ultimately none of it could have stopped me from taking actions which would have brought untold suffering and turmoil. It was only when I was given this gift,” he tapped his head yet again as he finally regained a reasonable degree of composure, “that I found my true path.”

Doctor Middleton had the look of a person who desperately wanted to say something but, for reasons unknown to Fei Long, she resisted. When she spoke, her voice was much more calm and clinical than during any other point in the conversation. “And if that ‘gift’ is deemed hazardous to your health by the medical officer charged with your physical well-being?” she asked pointedly.

Fei Long’s eyes narrowed as his mind spun through the possible reasons for this particular turn in the conversation. He then relaxed, releasing a pent-up sigh as he nodded in what he was certain to be at least partial understanding. “Then I would only ask that she—being a fine doctor and an even finer human being—attempt to treat not only her patients’ bodies but also their minds and, to some lesser degree…their souls. However, should she deem it possible, and necessary, to remove the device…I will submit myself to her expert opinion in the matter, for I have no wish to die unnecessarily.”

Several seconds passed in silence, with only the faint, rhythmic beeps of the medical bay’s various devices to greet his ears. He had suspicions as to why she had broached this subject in such obvious anger, but those suspicions led only to dark places in his mind—places which Fei Long desperately wished to avoid.

“Very well,” she said, removing the data slate from her pocket and making a series of notes. “We’re finished here.”

Fei Long nodded and took a few steps toward the door. But the gnawing sensation he felt in his stomach grew with each step, so he turned abruptly and asked, “Is there anything I should know, Doctor?”

Doctor Middleton met his gaze for several moments before shaking her head. Her visage was unreadable in that moment, and she said, “No…not right now.”

Fei Long hesitated briefly, but during that fraction of a second he made a decision. He knew there was something unsaid between them, but he had made his desires as clear as he possibly could. He decided to do something he was unwilling—or perhaps unable—to do except during extreme circumstances.

Fei Long decided to trust her judgment, and like so many things, he dismissed it from his mind entirely before he had even returned to his quarters.

After leaving sickbay, Fei Long entered the mess hall and grabbed a platter as he assumed his place in line. There were several people in front of him including Hephaestion, who manned the Sensors during First Shift. The decidedly un-Tracto-an looking man with his slender physique and smooth, unmarked, skin was only two spots ahead in the line from Fei Long’s position.

“You learn quickly, Hephaestion,” Fei Long said in a slightly raised voice, prompting the other man to turn around. “Sensor theory is not simple,” he continued, “but your dedication does you credit.”

“Thank you,” Hephaestion replied, and the young Tracto-an gestured for the crewman who stood between them to take his place as he slid back to stand beside Fei Long. “But the…theory, as you say, is difficult.”

“Perhaps I could assist you?” Fei Long offered. “Particle and emissions theory are hobbies of mine, after all.” He knew only too well the pain of isolation and the joys of friendship; if he could become the young man’s friend then it would likely serve their mutual interests. Fei Long was also understandably fascinated with Tracto-an culture, but there were few Tracto-ans aboard the Pride who seemed interested in answering his questions.

Hephaestion looked surprised but he quickly smiled and nodded, “This—that,” he corrected sheepishly, “would be much appreciated.”

“Your people pick up new languages incredibly quickly,” Fei Long observed as they moved up in line and began to fill their trays.

“Doctor Middleton,” Hephaestion said as he placed a spoonful of something which roughly approximated mashed potatoes on his plate, “says our…language centers are significantly larger than those of the Starborn. What would take a Starborn years takes us only months—or sometimes weeks.”

“That is extraordinary,” Fei Long said, having never suspected that the Tracto-an brain had also been engineered. He had naively assumed their bodies had been the only aspects which had been heavily modified. “How many languages can you learn? I, myself, am fluent in only three,” he explained self-consciously.

“Some of the holds have their own dialects,” Hephaestion shrugged, “but grammar and composition is very similar across all cultures. If you would like, I—“

“Stand aside, boy,” a deep voice growled, and before Fei Long could react he saw Atticus and three of his Tracto-an Lancers, each wearing sweat-drenched exercise clothing, push Hephaestion from his spot in line while consequently shoving Fei Long to the side as well. The Lancers began to fill their plates as though nothing had happened, and Fei Long saw Hephaestion lower his eyes in deference to his much larger countrymen.

“There is a line,” Fei Long said in a loud voice, but the Lancers ignored him. He dearly wished he had come to the mess hall prepared for a conflict but he had left his self-defense gear in his quarters. “Atticus!” Fei Long snapped, causing several heads—many of them Tracto-an—to look up from their plates from around the mess hall.

Among those heads was the self-declared War Leader’s, as he turned slowly to face Fei Long and said, “You will address me by my title, runt, or you will receive a lesson as to how I earned it.”

“There is a line,” Fei Long repeated, jerking his thumb over his shoulder toward six other crewmembers who had formed an orderly file behind Fei Long. “Take your place in it.”

“This is my place in it, weakling,” Atticus quipped, causing several of the Lancers—both those who had arrived with him, and some seated throughout the mess hall—to snicker. “It seems to me that you are the one standing where he does not belong.”

Fei Long set his platter down and stepped toward the herculean Tracto-an, whose physique and musculature Fei Long had only ever seen in e-zines and holo-vids until serving with the genetically engineered Tracto-ans.

“There are rules, Atticus,” Fei Long said as he held the other man’s contemptuous gaze. “We all must follow them.”

“We have a rule, as well,” Atticus sneered as he lashed out with a hand and pushed Fei Long to the floor with as much effort as it would take to do so to a toddler. “It is called ‘survival of the fittest.’ You should learn of it.”

“You are a coward, Atticus,” Fei Long heard an even deeper, grinding voice say as he picked himself up off the floor. The young man’s murderous outrage was briefly forgotten when the entire mess hall fell silent, and Atticus turned to face the speaker.

“The runt does not know better,” Atticus seethed, “but you, old man, have no excuse not to address me by my rank of War Leader.”

The man laughed harshly, and Fei Long saw that it was the one-eyed Tracto-an named Kratos. He was even larger than Atticus—who had been, until Kratos’ arrival, the largest Tracto-an to serve aboard the Pride of Prometheus—and he moved so close to Atticus that Fei Long was certain they felt each other’s breaths.

Kratos actually managed to look down at the massive Atticus, standing half a head taller and seemingly half again as thick in the chest. “What wars have you led, coward?” the one-eyed man challenged, quirking his good eyebrow incredulously.

“You will show respect—“ Atticus began, dropping his platter to the floor and pushing his chest very nearly into the other man’s.

“Respect is earned, whelp,” Kratos interrupted as he pointed at Fei Long, “but not by attacking those weaker than you. Cowards do that.”

The tension in the mess hall was so thick that Fei Long actually had to force his breaths to continue, and it seemed like an eternity as the two men remained locked in a silent test of wills until a voice called out from the entrance, “What’s going on here?”

Fei Long, and most of the mess hall’s occupants, turned to see Sergeant Gnuko standing at the entry.

“This is who we must fight beside?” Atticus asked in a raised voice as he took a step sideways—and slightly backward, in Fei Long’s estimation—and addressed the Tracto-ans who had arrived with him. “Heretics,” he veritably spat the word as he looked briefly at Kratos, “cripples,” he added, looking at a table full of Tracto-ans, many of whom had cybernetic prosthetics attached at their elbows, or knees, or even shoulders, “and sword swallowers?” he sniffed contemptuously as he looked down on Hephaestion, who stood a full head shorter than he and certainly weighed less than half as much as the self-styled War Leader. “To say nothing of demons and the defeated,” Atticus said in a raised voice as his eyes briefly locked onto a pair of Tracto-ans taking their meals on the opposite side of the room.

“Atticus,” Gnuko snapped, stepping toward the two men and eyeing them briefly before tilting his chin toward the door, “report to the armory. Now,” he growled when the man made no attempt to comply with the order, “or this little fracas is about to get hotter than you can handle.”

Atticus gave Kratos a smoldering look before moving past Gnuko. The Tracto-an very nearly made contact with the Lancer Sergeant, and judging by Gnuko’s tense posture he was ready to deal with such contact immediately, but thankfully no contact occurred.

Gnuko gave Kratos a heavy look, “Report to your bunk, Kratos.”

Kratos nodded stiffly and walked out of the mess hall as though nothing had happened.

Gnuko gave the Tracto-ans who had arrived with Atticus withering looks before he, too, left the mess hall.

Fei Long exhaled, seemingly in unison with everyone else, and found that his anger at having been shoved to the ground was completely gone. He fully intended to get revenge on the War Leader, but such would have to wait.

He took a cleansing breath and handed Hephaestion the tray he had been filling. The young Tracto-an still looked to be affected by the incident, but in Fei Long’s experience the best way to deal with such anxiety was to simply push past it. “So,” he said leadingly, “you were about to describe the different dialects of Tracto, paying special emphasis to the compositional and grammatical elements?”

The young man smiled weakly as he accepted the tray, and Fei Long knew that he would get revenge for both of them on Atticus for his arrogant bullying.

Unfortunately, it would have to wait.

Chapter XXII: Pulling at Threads

“Point emergence,” reported Helmsman Marcos. “Firing engines now.”

“Shields drained to 93%,” reported Sarkozi as she lurked over the shoulder of the Shields station. Over the two weeks since their departure from the ComStat hub, Middleton had finally begun to see something resembling a military level of discipline during point transfers conducted by the First Shift. But the Shields section had, oddly, been the weakest link in the group. Sarkozi had therefore taken it upon herself to oversee their actions during such transfers.

The ship shuddered gently beneath their feet and Helmsman Marcos reported, “We’ve shed the sump, sir.”

“Scanning,” reported Hephaestion, who had remarkably shed a significant portion of his native, Tracto-an, accent. “Populating the grid now, sir.”

Middleton watched as the system’s planets began to pop into virtual existence on the main viewer, followed by the major satellites and other orbiting bodies. This particular system was nearly in the center of Sector 24; Middleton’s search for ComStat hubs had taken the Pride of Prometheus almost directly away from the border region of Sectors 23 and 24. But while there had been several possible contacts with ComStat hubs, they had failed to find another in two weeks of searching along Fei Long’s prescribed flight plan.

“Mr. Fei?” Middleton asked, turning to the young man as the tactical overlay continued to populate.

Fei Long seemed to almost ignore Middleton entirely as he adjusted the Comm. station’s instruments. But after a moment he shook his head in clear disappointment. “I am only reading repeater signals, Captain; there does not appear to be a hub in the local vicinity.”

Middleton nodded as he came to the decision that they would need to modify the flight plan in some way. That was likely to be easier said than done, seeing as Mr. Fei had put a great deal of work into their current one, but the ship should have encountered at least two of them by now using Fei Long’s probability model.

“Captain,” Hephaestion called out in a slightly raised, but still professional, voice, “we have contacts.”

Middleton turned his chair just as a trio of signals appeared in orbit of the second planet in the system. Two were clearly in pursuit of the third, but as yet the Pride’s DI was unable to determine their identities. This suggested that they were either unwilling to squawk universal identification codes, or they had never been equipped with them in the first place. One vessel running dark could have been explainable, but all three meant that none of them wished to be identified.

“Time to intercept?” Captain Middleton asked as Lieutenant Sarkozi made her way from the Shields station to the Helm.

A few moments later she replied, “Thirty six minutes, Captain.”

Middleton called up the information on the system’s two planets. The innermost planet was rocky and hellish, with surface temperatures well in excess of seven hundred degrees kelvin and an atmosphere composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide. Only specially designed probes, or heavily shielded craft, could survive in that environment for more than a brief period.

The outermost planet was a relatively massive gas giant, which was pumping out sufficient radiation to distort the Pride’s antiquated sensors enough that it took several additional minutes to get accurate readings on the three vessels’ profiles.

“Captain, I am receiving a distress signal,” Fei Long reported from the Comm. station.

“Put it on,” Middleton prompted, and a moment later a burst of static filled the ears of the bridge crew before a human voice emerged.

“This is Captain Clive Trent of the deep space mining vessel Carsoni Palmeiro,” the man said, his voice taut with anxiety. “We are being pursued by droid warships and request immediate assistance from any vessels in the area.”

As the mining vessel’s captain spoke, the icons of the pursuing vessels morphed from unknown status to confirmed droid configurations. They were apparently the equivalent of corvettes, and their physical configurations suggested they were from the Tribe which called itself ‘Harmony through Specialization.’

“This is the XO,” Sarkozi said in a piercing voice, “set Condition One throughout the ship. Repeat, set Condition One throughout the ship; all hands report to battle stations.”

Middleton switched his chair’s pickup to transmit on the emergency channel employed by the mining vessel’s captain as that ship’s information identity was corroborated by the Pride’s DI. “This is Captain Tim Middleton of the MSP cruiser, Pride of Prometheus,” he said as he called up a series of tactical specifications for the mining vessel. It was clear that, while the Carsoni Palmeiro was maneuvering quite deftly around the gas giant in order to cut off the two corvettes, those corvettes would soon surround the mining vessel and bring it to its metaphorical knees if things continued as they were. “Can you continue on your current evasion course for thirty two minutes?”

During the delay as the message traversed the distance between the two vessels, the Pride’s Executive Officer worked up a trio of tactical scenarios which she and Captain Middleton examined together while Middleton mulled the possible reasons for the mining vessel to be in the system. Aside from a pair of rocky, barren moons orbiting the gas giant there was no cataloged location which might yield anything of mineralogical value to a privately owned and operated vessel like the Carsoni Palmeiro.

Before they came to a decision on which course of action to pursue, the mining vessel’s reply came through, “Our secondary engines are inoperable and we’ve got limited maneuvering capability. The droids will achieve firing solution on us before you enter range; our shields have already been pummeled during our approach to the planet and will collapse after one or two more volleys. There are thirty two souls aboard this vessel who would greatly appreciate a miracle if you’re capable of delivering one, Captain Middleton.”

Middleton shared a meaningful look with his XO, who appeared to have caught the same undertones from the message. He left his command chair’s audio pickup deactivated as Lieutenant Sarkozi leaned in closer at his beckoning. “His verbiage is too professional for a mining ship captain,” he mused under his breath.

“Could be a mercenary outfit,” she suggested as her eyes flicked to the main screen, which showed the time to intercept winding down as the droid vessels neared a firing solution. “Or maybe the ship’s been overtaken by pirates?”

Middleton shook his head slowly. “No…that doesn’t track. If they were pirates they’d have escorts—or at least would have had escorts, the remains of which would still be registering on our sensors,” he added as though it was an afterthought. “And if they were mercenaries they would be squawking their idents. I’m not sure what they actually are, but they’re definitely not what they appear…and they’re not mercenaries or pirates, at least not in the traditional sense.”

Lieutenant Sarkozi’s expression was neutral but her body language was stiff, telling Middleton that she had drawn the same conclusion as he had: that the situation smelled mightily of the Raubachs. With the general instability in Sectors 23 and 24, no mining ship captain in his right mind would be operating without some sort of escort in an uninhabited, remote system like this one. But if the Raubachs were, in fact, the group which had sent the Carsoni Palmeiro out here…where was Commodore Raubach’s Rim Fleet?

Middleton flicked on the audio pickup built into his chair and began streaming a data packet over the attached frequency as he said, “Captain Trent, alter your course to rendezvous with us as indicated in the attached data packet. We can cut down on the time you’re under fire by two minutes if you do so; those corvettes will think twice before engaging my ship in the open.”

He deactivated the audio pickup and Lieutenant Sarkozi nodded professionally in response to Middleton’s silent order. “Get Engineering on the line,” she ordered crisply, “tell them to redline the engines on the double.”

A few moments later, the Pride’s velocity increased by twelve percent and all sections of the aging warship reported they were at Condition One. Then the mining ship’s icon made a deliberate turn away from the relative safety of the gas giant and began to burn for all it was worth to intersect the Pride’s projected course.

Middleton checked the clock to see how long it had taken for the crew to reach battle stations and was only slightly disappointed to see the last department had reported ready thirty eight seconds later than was the minimum standard for the MSP. The good news was that every other department had reported in on time, which meant that the seemingly endless drills and inspections which Lieutenant Sarkozi had implemented were having their desired effect.

“If our engines don’t fail, we’ll rendezvous with you in twelve minutes, Captain Middleton,” the mining ship’s captain said over the emergency channel. “But there’s no guarantee our stern shields will hold that long.”

“Understood, Captain,” Middleton acknowledged quickly before severing the connection and turning to the Pride’s Tactical Officer. “We’ll need your gunships,” he said, making no attempt to hide the disappointment in his voice. “They might buy the mining vessel a few minutes if we launch them now.”

Toto’s chest swelled as he assumed what Middleton took to be a defiant posture. “If mining ship enemy, why we risk gunships to save them?”

Unaccustomed to having his orders questioned on his own bridge—but understanding that these were unusual circumstances, seeing as the entirety of Toto’s family wealth was tied up in those ramshackle fighter craft—Middleton nodded slowly, silently impressed that Toto had deduced the Carsoni Palmeiro’s true affiliations without the benefit of having served aboard the Pride during her previous mission. “If the gunships strapped to the hull are available for action then I’m ordering that they be deployed immediately, Mr. Toto. If they are not, I need to be made aware of that prior to engagement with the enemy—and by that I mean more than eleven minutes prior,” he added with a hard look that matched his tone.

Toto cocked his head in apparent confusion and gave the main viewer a pointed look. Middleton followed the Sundered’s gaze and saw that the two gunships had, in fact, already launched and were streaking toward a likely intercept point with the mining vessel.

It was clear they had been launched prior to Middleton’s upbraiding, so the Pride’s captain straightened himself in his chair and made brief eye contact with his Tactical Officer. “Thank you, Mr. Toto. Please disregard my last,” he said, coming as close to an apology as he dared while sitting in the command chair during combat conditions.

“Yes, Captain,” the uplift replied in his deep voice, and Middleton thought he detected a hint of amusement in the old ape man’s tone.

“Even with the gunships,” Sarkozi said as she stood back from the Sensors section, “I’m getting a sixty two percent probability that the Palmeiro’s shields will collapse prior to our entering firing range.”

“True,” Middleton agreed, leaning forward in his chair, “but the droids will have to commit to the attack, which means they will come under our fire if they pursue the miner that far; they can’t reverse course quickly enough to escape our firing arc.”

“Of course, sir,” Sarkozi acknowledged as her ears turned red, “which means we’ll have a good idea of how valuable the Palmeiro’s cargo is to the droids.”

“Quite so, Lieutenant,” Middleton agreed as he wondered what a simple mining vessel might be carrying which might cause the smaller droid vessels to pursue in the face of almost certain destruction. He switched his chair’s com-link to the Lancer command channel. “Sergeant Gnuko, is your boarding party ready?”

“The shuttle is ready to board the enemy vessel at your command, Captain,” the Lancer Sergeant replied promptly.

“Stand by, Sergeant,” Middleton ordered, “we’ll need to neutralize the droids prior to your team’s embarkation.”

“Larry that, Captain,” Gnuko acknowledged.

Middleton swiveled his chair to face Fei Long’s Comm. station. “Mr. Fei, scan the ComStat frequencies passively; under no circumstances are you to issue any signals which may tip a local force off to the fact that we’ve gained some limited access to the network, is that clear?”

“Yes, Captain,” Fei Long replied crisply as he began to input commands to his station with obvious grace and efficiency. After just a few moments he reported, “I am now passively monitoring the ComStat carrier frequencies. I will be unable to record the content of any messages sent or received by vessels in the immediate vicinity, but I will be aware of which ships may attempt to access the ComStat network.”

“Good enough,” Middleton replied as he turned to face the main viewer.

“Near corvette firing,” Toto reported as the Palmeiro’s icon was lit up briefly on the main viewer. “Distant corvette in range thirty seconds,” he added, and after so many weeks of drills and shifts manned by the uplift, Middleton barely even noticed the Sundered’s broken verbiage.

“The Palmeiro’s shields are holding,” Hephaestion reported in his decidedly high, un-Tracto-an voice.

“But not for long,” Sarkozi cut in. “One more salvo might bring them down; their shields can withstand two more at most.”

Toto’s twin gunships streaked past the mining vessel’s position as they made for the droid corvette which had not yet engaged the fleeing vessel. Middleton was pleased to see that the Pride’s newest Tactical Officer thought as he did; the best chance the mining vessel had to survive was if the second corvette could be kept out of firing range long enough for Middleton’s ship to intercede. If both droid warships brought their weapons to bear on the relatively defenseless vessel, it would only be a matter of minutes and the mining ship would be destroyed.

“Time to extreme weapons range: eight minutes,” Sarkozi reported, likely more for the rest of the bridge’s benefit than for Middleton’s. “Helm, coordinate with the gun deck to ensure our bow is in optimal firing position against the near corvette when we achieve a firing solution; I want as many shots on target as possible.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Marcos replied, her fingers navigating the controls of her console with practiced efficiency.

“Mr. Fei,” Middleton turned to the Comm. station, “have you detected any transmissions from the droid vessels?”

Fei Long shook his head without ever taking his eyes off the various readouts embedded in his station. “No, Captain, I have detected nothing to suggest the droid vessels are attempting transmissions of any kind. ComStat frequencies are still inactive, as well.”

“Keep monitoring,” Middleton ordered, knowing that if either the droids or the Raubachs were alerted to the Pride’s location it would complicate his primary mission.

“Yes, Captain,” the young man replied as he continued to work at his console.

“Gunships firing in ten seconds,” Toto reported. Middleton knew it was a long shot that the pair of fighter craft would be able to effectively harry the corvette, but it was the only play available to him.

The icons of the gunships flashed on the main viewer, and an enhanced image of the second corvette filled the screen as its shields flared under the rapid-fire assault of the Sundered craft. But the corvette continued its pursuit, and failed to make even a token gesture of resistance as its engines drove the warship toward its ultimate quarry.

Seeing the droid warships pursue the mining vessel so intently only heightened Middleton’s resolve to find out what, exactly, the Carsoni Palmeiro was up to.

The nearest corvette fired on the Palmeiro again, and the mining ship’s shields appeared to fail as a result.

“Their engines are still operable,” Sarkozi reported crisply, “but one more shot on their stern and the Palmeiro’s as likely to explode as it is to lose motive power.”

The gunships continued to harass the second corvette and appeared to be having some success in bringing down its stern shields, which were currently showing 50% power. Toto’s vessels would certainly not succeed in crippling the warship in time to prevent the warship from opening fire on the mining vessel, but they would limit the corvette’s tactical options afterward since its stern would be relatively vulnerable—especially to the Pride’s big guns.

“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. “Corvette One is showing complete power grid collapse…her shields are gone and her engines are offline.”

“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 much 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?”

There was a brief pause, followed by the Pride of Prometheus slewing hard to port, then to starboard in what was clearly an evasive maneuver intended to prevent further landings. But as far as Lu Bu could tell all of the Marines had successfully landed on the outer hull and were taking up position far too close to the engine exhausts for her liking.

“Your orders stand, Corporal,” Sergeant Gnuko replied, “you blast anything off the hull that we didn’t put there. I’m sending reinforcements to your location; give them the Demon’s fury until we get there—and keep them off our engines.”

“Understood,” Lu Bu acknowledged, and after giving each of her teammates a brief look she wrapped her blaster rifle around the corner of their barricade and sighted in on the Marines. They appeared unaware of her team’s presence, which was all the advantage a warrior could ever ask for.

Using hand signals, Lu Bu indicated that her teammates should split out one to either side at ten meters distance from her position, and when they had done so they would advance on the enemy from the flanks—leaving her heading straight up the middle.

Lu Bu checked the pair of plasma grenades fastened to her waist and considered employing them. The difficulty with doing so was the zero-gee environment and lack of foresight into the Pride’s combat maneuvering. If she threw the grenade and the Pride made a sudden turn, the grenade would ‘move’ unpredictably and could become as dangerous to her team as to the enemy.

So she set the butt of her rifle against her armored shoulder and sighted in on the nearest Marine as she clomped her way across the hull. Sixty meters separated her from the Imperials, and there was no serviceable cover to be had before the mid-point, which meant she would be exposed for several seconds if they saw her.

She had not made five steps before the very Marine she had set in her sights brought his own weapon around in a well-practiced sweep of her area, and without hesitation she squeezed her rifle’s trigger and sent a bolt of energy into the Marine’s right shoulder. His feet were mag-locked to the hull just as hers were, and his armor seemed to completely absorb her round’s impact.

The Marine had begun to bring his own weapon back into a firing position when he was struck by two more blaster bolts simultaneously. The force of the dual impacts knocked the weapon from his hands and sent it flying into the void, and Lu Bu followed with a well-placed shot of her own which went into the narrow gap between the Marine’s helmet and breastplate.

That shot would have killed a Lancer since their armor was of a relatively antiquated design, but Imperial Marines apparently had better protective gear than Confederation Lancers. The Marine’s head was snapped back by the force of her perfectly-placed shot, and it was clear that her round had done some damage, but he drew a sidearm from his waist in the same motion he used to recover his bearings.

After that, events became a blur.

Lu Bu picked up her footspeed as she sighted in on another Marine which had already taken up a defensive crouch and trained his weapon on her. Reacting purely on instinct, she fired a bolt of energy into the Marine’s hands and was rewarded when the weapon he held exploded in a green flash. She quickly acquired another target but a split second before she could fire her weapon, a trio of impacts struck her in the chest with such force that her feet very nearly came off the Pride’s hull.

Cursing her armor’s hindrance of her normally outstanding footspeed, she crouched down as quickly as she was able, receiving another pair of bolts to her armor with one round slamming into each pauldron covering her shoulders.

She reset her weapon against her shoulder and saw a brilliant, white bolt of energy go streaking past her helmet. Lu Bu felt anger in that moment which rivaled the blind rage she had felt when holding the hyper dish junction against the droid invaders, and that anger heightened her focus as she began spraying rounds into the Marines’ position almost randomly. She knew the chance of her shots hitting the mark was very low, but she also knew that she and her two teammates were outnumbered at least four to one—no matter how good of a shot she was, she knew that weight of fire would prove decisive in relatively short order if she didn’t get at least a little bit of good fortune.

Seeing that her cover was approximately twenty meters away, and that the Pride had not made any erratic course corrections in the previous few seconds, she made perhaps the rashest decision of her life: she disengaged her mag-boots and launched herself toward the relative safety of the depression in the Pride’s hull.

Lu Bu had trained zero-gee combat, both armored and unarmored, for several months and was therefore careful to keep her feet as close to the hull as possible while turning her body into a ball. The key to avoid being flung from the ship’s hull entirely was re-engaging the mag-boots at maximum power before being struck by enemy fire, and she managed to clear six or seven meters in her first ‘leap’ before engaging the magnetics of her boots and latching her feet to the hull.

No sooner had she regained her footing than the Imperial Marines concentrated their fire on her. She suspected she would be unable to make another leap, now that the Marines had focused their fire on her, so she ran as fast as she could toward the makeshift foxhole. A nearly constant stream of blaster fire streaked around her, with several shots finding her armor and threatening to upset her footing.

Focusing only on successfully taking the next step, she placed one foot in front of the other as round after round found their mark against her protective casement. Warning klaxons went off in her helmet indicating vacuum exposure had occurred, but she kept fighting forward for every precious meter. She knew full well that, should she fail to reach cover, she would most certainly die at the hands of these Imperial Marines.

She saw the flash of an explosion before her but she paid it no mind as she continued to take step after step, for what seemed like an eternity but she knew had consisted of only fifteen steps—she had subconsciously counted each one—and just as she reached the safety of cover her left leg was hammered by a pair of impacts which ruined her knee servos.

Lu Bu toppled ponderously into the hole and lay there for several seconds, unsure if she had survived the experience as the brown disc of the gas giant came into view overhead. It took her a moment to realize that the Pride must have been rolling, and then a brilliant flash exploded into view overhead which caused the ship’s shields to become radiantly incandescent. What looked to be tongues of blue flame caressed the warship’s protective barriers for several seconds, and it was only after watching them that she abruptly realized she had not died—and that there was still a fight on!

Rolling over to her front, she switched her blaster rifle from her left to right hand and dragged herself to the front edge of the makeshift foxhole. Her left leg’s power servos were completely useless, but she was able to get herself into position after a few awkward seconds of dragging her almost useless limb into a proper firing position. Maneuvering in such a way as to keep her right mag-boot on the hull at all times was even more frustrating than the relative uselessness of her left leg, but she managed to succeed in doing so after several attempts.

Taking a deep breath, Lu Bu placed the barrel of her rifle over the edge of the hole and began pouring round after round into the Marines’ position. She could see at least seven of them still standing, and it was only then that she checked on her teammates’ condition.

To her left, Traian had fallen to the hull and had cleverly lain on his back, exposing primarily his thighs to enemy fire as he exchanged fire with the Marines while lying on his back.

To her right, Private Vali Funar was nowhere to be seen. Her HUD had failed during her ‘run’ to the foxhole, so she had no way of knowing whether or not he had become a casualty.

A pair of Marines began to rush her position and she quickly retrained her weapon on them before realizing that all of the Marines were rushing toward her with no semblance of military coordination. A moment later there was a brilliant flash and she felt her mag-boot briefly break contact with the hull as the ship was thrown ‘down’ by the force of the explosion.

Realizing they must have detonated an explosive of some kind near the engines, but unable to do anything about it, Lu Bu poured shot after shot into the nearest Marine’s legs. She doubted that her blaster rifle could penetrate their superior armor, but she thought it was possible to disrupt the Imperials’ mag-boots with well-timed shots to the legs.

She was proven correct when her target’s left leg was struck by a blaster bolt midway up the shin, sending the Marine’s leg splaying to the side at precisely the wrong moment during his stride. The Marine’s plant foot came off the deck briefly, but before he could regain his footing Lu Bu sent another round into his chest which sent the fearsome-looking warrior spinning away from the Pride’s hull toward the ship’s shields.

Lu Bu quickly retrained her weapon on the Marine’s companion, who was no more than five meters from her position. She knew that if he closed to grips with her that she would be unable to mount a suitable defense, due to the damage inflicted to her suit’s left leg.

She took aim at his head and fired three shots, two of which struck his helmet with the third missing entirely, and he raised his vambrace-mounted vibroblade for a killing strike. Lu Bu defiantly swung her rifle up in a last-ditch attempt to save herself, but before her weapon could intercept the Marine’s arm the Imperial’s body was wracked with a rapid series of impacts which tore gashes in his armor the length of her forearm.

Precious, life-sustaining gases vented violently through those rents, but the weight of fire continued to pour into the Marine’s partially exposed body until nothing remained of his torso but a blood-spattered wreckage of meat and metal. Lu Bu was actually unable to properly determine where the man ended and the metal began, but she was not about to waste time on such a meaningless curiosity.

She resumed a firing stance and put another target in her sights, but by the time she had done so that Marine had also come under fire from the awesomely powerful weapon which had utterly annihilated the first.

Turning to get a look at the author of the fire support, she was more than a little surprised to see the assault shuttle swooping down along the Pride’s hull and training its forward-mounted anti-vehicle weaponry onto yet another Imperial Marine.

By then, what remained of the Imperial charge was routed, and Lu Bu saw Traian move into the open to better provide his own weapon’s support to the cause of eradicating the remainder of the Imperial strike team. Lu Bu did likewise, and with the shuttle’s help it was only a matter of seconds before every last Marine had been cut down, or dislodged from the Pride’s hull and sent spinning into the cold, dark, void.

“Inspect the damage, Traian,” she called over the Recon channel. “I cannot walk; report what you see to main Lancer channel.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Traian replied through heavy, panting breaths. He began to clomp his way over to the explosion’s location, and after a maddening interval he reached what looked to be the damaged area. “This is Traian,” he began as he took a few steps to his left, “I’m seeing significant damage to the external heat sinks on engine number two, Sergeant; repeat, we’ve got a lot of damage out here. Suggest you forward my suit’s vid-feed to Chief Garibaldi ASAP.”

“Larry that, Recon,” Gnuko replied over the primary Lancer channel, and Lu Bu felt a pang of shame at being unable to make the report herself. But with only one functioning mag-boot and the ship still engaged in active combat, it was nearly suicidal to attempt a return to the nearest airlock solely under her own power.

A few seconds later there was a minute shift in the thrum of the Pride’s engines, and Lu Bu saw the peripheral light of the ship’s number two drive unit go dark.

“Two engine is down, sir,” Traian reported as he turned and made his way to Lu Bu’s location.

“Good work, Recon,” Gnuko said grimly, “now get your wounded back inside on the double; I doubt that’s the last we’ll hear from them.”

“Yes sir,” Traian replied as he came to Lu Bu’s position and extended his gauntleted hand. She accepted it and began the slow march back to the airlock as the shuttle sped away from the Pride, likely to inspect the rest of the hull for other uninvited guests.

Chapter XXIV: “I have you now.”

“All teams reporting in, Captain; we’ve scrubbed the last of them off the hull,” Sergeant Gnuko reported.

“Thank you, Sergeant,” Captain Middleton acknowledged before cutting the connection. If he had been a less rational man, the urge to tear his hair out and scream might have been more than he could resist.

Instead he sat quietly in his chair and steepled his fingers before his face while processing the surprising presence of Imperial Marines in the system. He had never heard of an attack like they had just come under; it was the kind of thing reserved for holo-vids, not genuine warfare. A unit of Imperial Marines, apparently using cutting-edge technology, had lain in wait for the Pride to move through a predetermined region of space and then, somehow, had survived contact with the warship’s shields before landing on the outer hull and placing an explosive device dangerously close to the engines.

Had it not been the quick reactions of the Lancer force, the Pride of Prometheus may well have had her engines taken completely offline by the attack—or worse, suffered a catastrophic reactor meltdown. As it was, the ship’s drive power had been reduced by approximately thirty percent due to critical overheating. But thirty percent, especially for a ship not known for its speed to begin with, was a significant blow.

“The enemy corvette is continuing to gain distance, Captain,” Lieutenant Sarkozi reported clinically. “They have now left our extreme firing range.”

“Gunships can attack,” Toto offered, and Middleton briefly considered the possibility. The Pride had managed to get off a pair of salvoes before the engines had gone down, but the corvette had expertly maneuvered to present fresh shield facings after each strike. Once again, Captain Middleton’s ship had proven more than a match up close, but was unable to close the distance with the nimbler vessel.

“Recall the gunships,” Middleton ordered, straightening himself in his chair as his mind finally concluded its gymnastics. He was missing something, of that much he was certain, but until he could figure out what that was there was no point in dwelling on it. “Continue pursuit but don’t push the engines any harder than Garibaldi suggests.”

“Yes, Captain,” Helmsman Marcos acknowledged with a bob of her ponytail.

“Captain,” Fei Long said as he stood from his station and approached the command chair, eliciting a stern look of disapproval from the Captain.

“Man your post during combat conditions, mister,” Middleton said, his voice barely above a growl.

“Of course, Captain,” Fei Long replied as he stopped mid-stride and blushed before returning to his seat, “but there is something I must convey.”

Middleton resisted the urge to cuff the young man as he asked, “What is it, Mr. Fei?”

“I attempted to inform you several times earlier,” Fei Long explained as though in apology, which only served to set Middleton’s jaw, “but each time I was interrupted. Two seconds prior to the Carsoni Palmeiro’s destruction I detected a transmission on the ComStat carrier frequencies.”

Middleton turned his chair to face the young man, and as he did so it was as though the pieces of the puzzle were falling together before his very eyes. “Where did it originate?” he asked, painfully aware that Fei Long would have been unable to ascertain the message’s contents.

“The Carsoni Palmeiro was the source of the transmission, Captain,” the Pride’s new Comm. Officer replied confidently.

Hearing his Comm. Officer confirm his suspicion was all Middleton needed to determine his next course of action—and what the Pride could expect to happen in three hours and twenty two minutes. “Mr. Fei,” he beckoned for the young man to approach, and Fei Long complied. When Mr. Fei reached Middleton’s chair, the captain said, “I recall that you requested access to…sensitive schematics during your unorthodox presentation in my ready room.”

Fei Long nodded, and the look of anticipation in his eyes gave Middleton brief pause. He knew it was a risk to give the young man access to sensitive information—such as the Distributed Intelligence architecture of a warship operating in the Spineward Sectors—but he also knew that Fei Long’s ‘pet project’ may well prove decisive in the battle to come.

“How long would it take you to develop a program, or code, or whatever you call it,” the captain asked, lowering his voice as he leaned across the arm of his chair, “that would prove as effective against an enemy warship as the one you demonstrated in my ready room?”

Fei Long’s eyes snapped side to side briefly as his far-more-powerful-than-normal brain worked up an answer. “Like so many answers, this one is conditional upon several variables,” the computer expert began as his eyes continued their rapid movements without meeting the captain’s gaze, “but I can say that a vessel with a comparable architecture to the Pride of Prometheus’ would require no less than six hours of continuous work in a conducive environment—provided I am given comprehensive information on the target, of course.” As he finished, his eyes met Captain Middleton’s and the Pride’s commanding officer could see that the young man was absolutely confident in his assessment.

Middleton leaned over toward the console built into his chair and accessed sensitive files using his command codes—codes which he reminded himself would need to be changed at the earliest possible convenience. When he was finished, he forwarded the encrypted data’s access authority to Mr. Fei. “You may not have six hours,” Middleton said, fixing the young man with a hard look, “I’m guessing we’ll get no more than five before the enemy closes with us.”

Fei Long cocked his head doubtfully, “I do not build additional time into my—“

“Then you’d better get started,” Middleton interrupted as he gestured for Lieutenant Sarkozi to approach.

“Yes, Captain,” Fei Long replied before handing off his duties to a nearby petty officer and egressing the bridge with a measure of haste which Middleton found faintly comforting.

“Captain?” Sarkozi asked after the young man had left the bridge.

“Get on the line with Garibaldi,” Middleton said grimly. “As soon as he’s certain the engines won’t melt down without his direct supervision, you’re to call an emergency senior staff meeting.”

Sarkozi was clearly curious, but her professionalism won out as she acknowledged with a curt nod and made her way to the Engineering console.

Captain Middleton took the opportunity during the next few minutes to conduct a series of tactical simulations, but the outcome of each was precisely the same.

When Sarkozi reported that Garibaldi could step away from the engines for a few minutes, Middleton purposefully made his way to the conference room to meet with the ship’s top officers.

It seemed the enemy had turned the tables on him, but he wasn’t about to concede defeat.

“Thank you all for coming,” Captain Middleton said before even half of the officers had been seated. The only officer who was absent from the meeting was Lieutenant Sarkozi; even with the enemy corvette retreating, the ship was still set to Condition One and Middleton knew that a steady hand was needed on the bridge. Mr. Fei was also absent, owing to his particular set of orders which very well may prove pivotal to the final outcome. “I’ll spare you all the formalities; in no more than three hours and two minutes, we can expect a familiar enemy to jump into this system. Our Lancers,” he continued with a deliberate nod of acknowledgment to Sergeant Gnuko, “may well have saved us from outright destruction from a surprise attack carried out by an elite force. In short, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, feeling his ears burn as he spoke, “I ran us headlong into a trap and it was only due to the Sergeant’s tireless efforts that we’re able to have this meeting.”

“Just doing our duty, sir,” Gnuko said deferentially, but Middleton knew that his own words had been nothing but accurate and that the Lancer contingent deserved recognition for their fine work.

But this was neither the time nor the place for such recognition, so the Pride’s captain turned to Chief Garibaldi without another word on the matter. “How are the engines, Chief?”

Garibaldi shook his head doubtfully. “We’ve got Number One at 100%, but Number Two is shot until we can put in for significant repairs. Number three looks like it’ll hold together, but I can’t guarantee for how long. These old ships weren’t built with redundancy in mind, they were more concerned with cutting costs. So in this case the damage to Number Two is going to affect Number Three. I can’t say how much just yet, but I wouldn’t go redlining it any time soon—and that’s not just my typically conservative nature talking,” he added with a pointed look, “you push them any harder and we could see a cascade failure of the central coolant system. That means no more engines, no more guns, and no more shields until the entire thing gets replaced at drydock—assuming we get a tow to the nearest one.”

“Can we count on your 70% engine output estimate for the next twelve hours?” Middleton pressed, referring to a damage report the Chief had filed minutes after the explosion which had taken out the primary heat sinks for engine number two.

“If you give me another two hours, I can give you 70% for that time frame,” the Chief replied confidently.

“You’ve got the two hours,” Middleton said, feeling more than a little relieved at Garibaldi’s prognosis. He turned to the conference room’s primary view screen and called up an image taken by the Pride several months earlier. “Just before the mining ship was destroyed,” he chewed on the word as it came out, knowing it had been nothing but a ruse, “it sent a message using ComStat frequencies. I have little doubt that message was a signal indicating that we had arrived, and that a nearby ship should jump into the system as soon as it received the message.”

Eyebrows rose in unison around the table and even Jo appeared incredulous at Middleton’s revelation. But he needed to get the meeting over with as quickly as possible, so he enlarged the image until its identifying markings and registry were plainly visible.

“You all remember the Dämmerung,” he said as he recalled the elaborate trap which he had sprung on the cutting edge Heavy Destroyer during their previous excursion into the Sector.

Middleton’s crew very nearly defeated not only the Heavy Destroyer, but also a Light Destroyer and a handful of Corvettes during the fight by placing dozens of Starfire missiles throughout the area and using them to knock several vessels out of the fight at the outset. But Middleton had learned that Captain Raubach, the son of the Commodore who commanded a significant portion of the Rim Fleet in the area, had a trick or two up his own sleeve.

Had it not been for the timely arrival of a Defiance-class Battleship from a world which had been affected by widespread mutinies—orchestrated by none other than the Raubach family—the Dämmerung would have proven victorious that day by using its superior speed and weapons range to pick the Pride apart. It might have taken hours, but it was as certain of an outcome as Middleton had ever encountered during his brief tenure as captain of a warship.

“There’s only one group we know of which is operating in this Sector, has access to the resources and organization to pull off an ambush like we just walked into, and has even the slightest chance of utilizing the ComStat network,” he continued, and the mood around the room darkened as his officers, one by one, realized what the Dämmerung’s presence would mean to the crew of the aged, lumbering, now-hamstrung Pride of Prometheus, “and that group is under command of Commodore Raubach.”

“Can we jump out?” Jo asked, and Middleton was slightly surprised to hear her voice first among the officers.

“It’s possible,” Middleton allowed, “but our jump cycle would require us to elude the Dämmerung for three hours after they arrived in-system, and with our diminished engine output—”

“No gamble,” Toto rumbled, and a handful of heads turned to face the Sundered with looks of confusion, “must fight.”

But Middleton understood his Tactical Officer perfectly well. “Toto’s right,” he said with a short nod, “if we burn for the hyper limit without knowing where the Dämmerung is jumping in from—thereby not knowing approximately where they’ll appear—we’d be gambling not only with our ship and our lives, but also with the fate of our mission. I’ve run the projections,” he said, sweeping the assemblage darkly, “and tucking tail would only buy us a thirty percent chance of escape even if the Dämmerung is the only ship that jumps in. If there’s another ship bigger than that Corvette out there,” he jerked his thumb over his shoulder, “that arrives at the same time as the Dämmerung then the odds go down so far as to be unworthy of mention.”

“A Soyuz-class Heavy Destroyer is that far out of our league?” Garibaldi asked in apparently genuine amazement.

“Long range, fast engines,” Toto said before the captain could reply, “Pride slow; heavy shields, heavy weapons, but too slow.”

“That would be the long and short of it,” Middleton agreed. “These old cruisers were built for formation fighting where they could cover each other and pin opponents with numbers. In a wide-open, one-on-one duel, we’re no match for a newer, faster, longer-gunned ship like the Dämmerung.”

Silence fell over the room for several seconds before Garibaldi clucked his tongue and sighed in mock exasperation. His body language suggested that he was more irritated than anything else as he said, “I suppose this is the part where you tell us about your grand strategy?”

Placing his knuckles down on the table, Middleton shook his head emphatically. “There’s no easy way out of this; when the Dämmerung arrives, our only hope is that she’s the heaviest-hitting ship we’ll have to deal with. If she is, and if we make the necessary preparations…” he trailed off, “I’d say our odds are fifty-fifty.”

“How, exactly, did those Marines get onto the hull undetected?” Garibaldi asked into the brief lull.

“I’ve heard of Imperials using giant gravity sleds with stealth propulsion units that could penetrate shields,” Gnuko said doubtfully, “but I thought those were just rumors—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Middleton said coldly, “what matters is that our Lancers foiled their attempt to completely destroy our engines. That means we’ve still got a chance. But I’m not going to lie to anyone here; this isn’t going to be any fun…even if we catch a few breaks.”

“Battle protocol commands we low orbit outer planet to limit enemy fire arcs,” Toto rumbled, and again Middleton found himself appreciating the uplift’s sense of priority.

“That’s what the book says,” the Pride’s commanding officer agreed, all-too-aware of standard tactics called for in their present situation, “but Captain Raubach also knows the book.” Middleton felt his lip curl as he prepared to lay out his strategy, “Which means that, aside from tucking tail and running, following the book is the last thing we should do.”

Chapter XXV: On the Ropes

“T-minus eight minutes, Captain,” Lieutenant Sarkozi reported in her usual, professional, tone. Captain Middleton only hoped that the rest of the bridge crew took as much comfort in her increasingly cool demeanor as he did. “All units deployed and in position.”

Middleton nodded his acknowledgment before turning to Toto, whose cybernetic implants flashed hypnotically around the patchy sections of skin on his skull. “Your family’s contributions won’t be forgotten, Tactical,” he said after making eye contact with the Sundered.

The ape man narrowed his eyes briefly before a harsh, deep, barking sound escaped his lips and Middleton quickly recognized the display as some form of laughter. “No sacrifice, no life,” the uplift shrugged.

“True enough,” the captain agreed before activating his chair’s com-link and connecting with Mr. Fei, who had retreated to his quarters to work on his potentially crucial project. “Mr. Fei, a status update if you please.”

A few seconds passed in silence before a harsh wave of static came through the chair’s speakers, followed by Fei Long saying, “My apologies, Captain; I left the com-link beneath some tools and—“

“A status update,” Middleton repeated forcefully before relaxing and adding, “if you please.”

“Of course, Captain,” Fei Long gushed. “The architecture is, surprisingly, more susceptible than I had anticipated. I expect to be completed in no more than one hour.”

Middleton heard a short sigh of relief escape his lips before he collected himself, straightened in his chair, and nodded to no one in particular. “Very good, Mr. Fei; carry on.”

“Yes, Captain,” the young man replied before the connection was cut.

Middleton flipped to the Lancer command channel. “Sergeant Gnuko, are your teams in position?”

A few seconds passed before Middleton received his reply. “We’re locked and loaded, Captain; ready to deploy on your order.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Middleton said evenly.

“We’ll carry the ball when called, Captain,” Gnuko replied with a hint of indignation in his voice.

Half-smiling at the Sergeant’s response, Middleton had to suppress a chuckle. “Good hunting, Sergeant,” the captain said before cutting the connection.

“Enemy corvette is maintaining position to the stellar north,” Sarkozi reported needlessly, but Middleton appreciated her desire to maintain dialogue during these final, tense, moments. “They’re still outside of our extreme range.”

Middleton checked the countdown for the earliest point at which the Dämmerung could jump into the system and saw that forty seconds remained. If Captain James Raubach was the man Middleton thought him to be, he expected that arrival to occur within seconds of the clock reaching zero.

The final seconds ticked down, and the Pride’s captain considered making some sort of speech to his anxious crew. But speeches, while sometimes necessary, had never been to his liking. So he watched the countdown run to zero, along with the rest of the bridge crew, and no more than three seconds after the absolute earliest that the Dämmerung could have arrived in-system did Hephaestion report, “There is a point transfer occurring at the system’s edge.”

It wasn’t the most succinct version of the confirmation which had played itself in Middleton’s mind over the previous hour of waiting, but he needed no further information to conclude that their enemy had arrived for what they thought would be the killing blow.

“Confirm the ship’s profile,” Lieutenant Sarkozi said sharply as she made her way to the Sensors station.

“Confirming,” Hephaestion acknowledged as the Pride’s XO arrived at his station.

“The ship is squawking the same identification codes in the ship’s database, sir,” reported the petty officer who had taken over at Comm. for Fei Long.

“Power profile, acceleration, and auto-handshake protocols all match, Captain,” reported Hephaestion. “It’s the Dämmerung.”

Middleton nodded after his XO made brief eye contact to silently confirm what they already knew. “Thank you, Sensors,” he said as he opened a channel to Engineering. “Mikey, it’s time.”

“We’re ready down here, Captain,” answered the voice of his longtime friend.

“Incoming transmission, Captain,” reported Comm. “It’s from Captain Raubach…and he’s asking for you by name.”

The Pride’s commander had expected the hail, and despite the fact that his ship was still on the short side of the odds he took small comfort in his correctly anticipating his adversary’s actions.

“Put him on,” Middleton said coolly.

The image of Captain James Raubach, wearing his Rim Fleet uniform and looking every bit the victorious conqueror, appeared on the main viewer. “Lieutenant Commander Middleton,” he said, adding a derisive snort. “It looks like I lost a bet.”

“Oh?” Middleton arched an eyebrow in feigned interest.

Raubach sighed and nodded with apparent reluctance as he looked off-camera and said, “My XO drew up the ambush plan, but I told her it was a fool’s hope. I said ‘Middleton may be a backwater bumpkin, running around in a ship old enough to have fought in the Great Rebellion, and surrounded by,” his lip curled into a contemptuous sneer, “what I suppose could charitably be called ‘peasant militia,’ but one thing he is not is a blasted fool’.” Raubach leaned toward the pick-up and shook his head again, this time in pity, “It seems I was wrong about that last part.”

“You staged an ambush,” Middleton agreed, “and I fell for it. Even I have to admit that the similarities to our last encounter are striking.”

“But now I’m the one closing the trap,” Raubach said, and for a brief moment Middleton saw genuine anger—or outrage—flash across the other man’s visage and it was in that moment that the Pride’s captain realized his odds had just improved, “and there won’t be any battleships riding in to your rescue, this time.”

“Are you sure about that?” Middleton asked neutrally.

Raubach nodded knowingly. “I am. A pity about those Marines, though,” he said bitterly, “they were some of the best I’ve known.”

“My Lancers were decidedly unimpressed,” Middleton countered easily, “but then we peasant militia have a little different standards, as I’m sure you surmised.”

“Quite,” Raubach said, his eyes narrowing briefly before gesturing to one of his bridge crew. “Flank speed; I want firing solutions in one hour. Let’s get this business over with as quickly as possible.”

“Captain Raubach,” Middleton said just as it appeared the other man was about to sever the connection, “I’ve been wondering something since last we met.”

“What might that be?” Raubach asked disinterestedly, the arrogance of nobility thick in his visage.

Middleton leaned forward and paused for several seconds before asking, “Just how did you convince so many commanders to abandon their oaths to become your pirate lackeys?” Raubach’s visage stiffened, prompting Middleton to say in a raised voice, “The Pride of Prometheus won’t go down without a fight; someone remove that man off my view screen.”

The viewer went dead, and Middleton knew that his last words were hardly the kind of last-minute battle cry his crew may have wanted. But the odds were already stacked against them, and he needed every possible advantage he could get.

“Helm,” he said in a commanding voice, “execute your maneuver.”

“Aye, Captain,” the woman at the helm acknowledged, and the icon representing the Pride on the main viewer’s tactical overlay began to move toward the system’s primary. Their course had been laid out precisely, and if they deviated from it in any appreciable manner then their chances of survival would decrease to almost nil.

Middleton knew that the Dämmerung would form a pincer with the droid corvette providing leverage opposite its own position. With the corvette to the stellar north, Captain Raubach’s Heavy Destroyer would move to the stellar south. If Middleton followed standard protocol, it would be a small matter for the Dämmerung to chip away at the Pride’s shields from outside Middleton’s own weapons range. Working in tandem, Raubach’s ships would drive the older, slower warship into the waiting arms of the Corvette.

Middleton knew he could destroy the Corvette, but if he drove toward it then Raubach would come up onto his stern with guns blazing. Every tactical simulation he had run showed the wounded Pride being destroyed ninety eight times out of one hundred, with a one percent chance of victory and a one percent chance of effective retreat. The two percent variability rested solely on his foe’s guns missing the mark more than they hit it, and even if the chances had been ten times as ‘good’ for his crew in such projections, he would never leave an engagement up to what was essentially random chance.

So he watched as his warship made its way toward the heart of the system. Chief Garibaldi had managed to make a few last-minute modifications to the shield grid by employing every single one of the portable generators they had taken from Gambit Station. Middleton silently prayed to the Saint that those modifications would prove worthwhile.

“The Dämmerung is in pursuit, Captain,” Hephaestion reported, and Middleton saw the icon representing his adversary’s vessel begin the long journey toward the system primary. Predictably, Captain Raubach’s vessel made for the stellar south, and the Corvette adjusted its own course so as to follow the Pride while also cutting off its escape routes.

Had his engines been at full power, Middleton could have easily smashed through the Corvette en route to the hyper limit and escape. But there was simply no possible way that he could accomplish the same with his drive system in its current shape.

“Steady on,” Middleton said, adjusting his posture in his chair. It was going to be a long ride with a decisive end, one way or the other.

“Check your gear,” Sergeant Gnuko ordered, and the Recon Team did as instructed. Lu Bu was glad for his presence, even if that meant that her own role was significantly diminished for the mission’s duration. “We only get one shot at this,” Gnuko said in his deep, commanding voice. Lu Bu checked her blaster rifle and briefly wondered if she could ever command as much respect with a spoken word as he so effortlessly managed.

Walter Joneson had made it look even easier than Sergeant Gnuko did and, despite the encouraging words of her superior, Lu Bu had begun to doubt whether or not she could even come close to matching either of the men’s leadership abilities.

“Chin up, Corporal,” Gnuko said, and Lu Bu quickly looked up to see a faintly disapproving look on her commander’s face. “This is liable to be the greatest insertion no one ever hears about,” he said as he sat down and strapped himself into the seat beside her. “Either that,” he added nonchalantly, “or worst insertion everyone hears about.”

Lu Bu nodded as she gripped her hands tightly, feeling the gloves stretch slightly as she did so. The feel of the Red Hare armor against her body, hugging every part of her as if it was a second skin, was far more comforting than she had expected it to be. “We will succeed,” she said with certainty as she laid her helmet in her lap and checked its external features for possible issues.

“You’ve got that right,” Gnuko agreed, but Lu Bu thought she heard a hint of doubt creep into his voice. The Sergeant looked over his shoulder pointedly, and Lu Bu did likewise as she performed a quick head count. Cassius, Kratos, Bernice, Claus, Lysander, and Stavros were all strapped in and looked to have completed their pre-launch checks.

“They’ve been trained well,” Gnuko said as he turned to face the front of the shuttle. “You’ve been as much a part of that as I have.”

Lu Bu felt herself flush with embarrassment. “This one begins with fourteen on team,” she said with an angry snort. “Now only six.”

“Not everyone’s cut out for recon work,” Gnuko chided. “It takes a flexibility of mind and body which most people can’t understand. Take your first mission against those droids at the fusion reactor, for example,” he said, rolling his head around slowly and the cracking sounds in his neck were audible even over the shuttle’s idling engines, “you reacted to the situation on the ground, and you did it like a veteran. But you would have failed if your teammates had been the blunt instruments Atticus commands.” He locked his eyes with hers for a few seconds before adding, “Better to have six teammates you can trust to do their jobs than fourteen you have to second guess—or worse, who can’t think on their feet.”

To hear her commander speak so candidly regarding the Assault Team under Atticus’ command was surprising, but his words carried the ring of wisdom which she had come to expect from the higher-ranking officers aboard the Pride of Prometheus.

Lu Bu clasped her hands before herself in deference. “Thank you, Sergeant Jones—“ she began before catching the word halfway past her lips. She had disrespected her commanding officer more than she could have believed possible, and for the first time in her life she felt certain that she would fall ill with shame.

She flushed in abject humiliation and lowered her eyes in shame, but to her numbed shock she felt the Sergeant cuff her on the shoulder as he began to chuckle.

“It’s ok, Lu,” Gnuko said warmly, and when she reluctantly met his gaze she saw understanding mixed with something darker in his face. The Sergeant then leaned back and closed his eyes before adding, “I miss him too.”

“We are now on final approach to the system primary,” Helmsman Marcos said precisely when the Pride of Prometheus passed the point of no return for the unorthodox maneuver.

The system was, thankfully, a small one otherwise the Pride would have never been able to reach the star before coming under fire from the Dämmerung. As it was, the aging cruiser had just barely managed to keep outside of the Heavy Destroyer’s range owing to Engineering’s impressive performance over the previous hour since the maneuver had begun.

“The Dämmerung is altering its course,” Hephaestion reported, and several seconds later the tactical overlay confirmed the young man’s report.

“They’re following your projected flight plan, Captain,” Sarkozi added as she moved from the Sensors station to stand beside the Shields operator. Since the Pride was about to come far closer to the system primary than a vessel manned by a sane crew had any business doing, Lieutenant Sarkozi had been assigned to oversee the ship’s shields during this particular phase of the operation.

“Of course they are,” Middleton muttered under his breath as he flipped through screen after screen of status reports. After using the primary’s gravity to perform an unorthodox slingshot maneuver, he knew they would come under the firing arc of Captain Raubach’s newer, faster, all-around-better warship. Until then, the bridge evoked the very image of the calm before a storm.

“The Corvette is maintaining its angle as well, Captain,” Sarkozi said with mild disappointment.

Middleton nodded wordlessly. The fact that the Raubachs had managed to commandeer a droid warship was, oddly, the least interesting thread of the tangled web he had begun to unravel since the fateful encounter with the former Mrs. Raubach.

“Steady on, Helm,” he said after he was satisfied that his ship was as ready as it would ever be for this particular maneuver.

The Pride’s course gently tilted toward the sun’s surface while the bow of the ship remained slightly oblique to the star itself. The good part about falling into a star at their current angle was that it would provide a significant boost to their forward velocity. The bad part was that if the engines failed at any point during the approach, it was unlikely that the warship’s disintegration would even create a solar flare that would be visible from the goldilocks zone.

The minutes passed and all around the bridge Middleton’s crew was dabbing their foreheads as sweat began to pour off of them. The interior of the ship was fully thermo-regulated, and a quick glance told him that the internal temperature of the ship remained precisely the same as it had been prior to the potential death ride.

The command chair’s com-link flashed, indicating an incoming connection and Middleton quickly accepted. “You have a report to make, Mr. Fei?”

“I have completed the project, Captain,” Fei Long replied promptly. “I have run twenty nine simulations and I am confident that it will perform as I had anticipated.”

“Bottom line, Mr. Fei,” Middleton said as the Pride continued barreling toward its far-too-intimate encounter with a main sequence star, “what can we expect out of it?”

“I have uploaded a series of programs which, when introduced to the Dämmerung’s DI, will attempt to interrupt key systems in order of priority—an order which I had hoped you might determine?” the young man said plaintively.

“What are my options?” Middleton asked, and he noticed more than a few eyes sneaking looks in his direction. It was only then that his voice had grown much louder than he had wanted, so he moderated his tone as he reiterated, “What kind of systems can you target?”

“If the Dämmerung’s DI is substantively the same as the Soyuz-class schematics indicate,” Fei Long mused, and Middleton was convinced he would soon be subjected to another in a long, seemingly endless series of lectures conducted by the too-smart-for-his-own-good hacker, “I believe my program can completely interrupt sensors, communications, or shields, but that interruption—“

“Stop,” Middleton snapped, “you said you can interrupt their shields?” He couldn’t believe his ears; that kind of control was supposed to be impossible to execute on a modern warship. “I need to know if that’s true, Mr. Fei, and not just some vain boast.”

“The Soyuz-class employs a type of crossover between its DI nodes,” the young man rebuffed, sounding genuinely offended by Middleton’s suggestion that he might not actually be capable of doing what he suggested, “as such it is more vulnerable to a system-wide attack than is an old, antiquated vessel such as this one.”

“Antiquated?’ Sarkozi snapped, and only then did Middleton realize she had taken up position to his flank. But the captain forestalled further outbursts by raising a hand sharply.

“How long can you bring them down?” Middleton asked, the words sounding more like a demand than a query.

“It is difficult to say,” Fei Long replied hesitantly, “the interruption would only affect a single facing, would last for no less than three seconds and, in all likelihood, for no more than five seconds but—“

“Shields it is, Mr. Fei. Upload your program and deliver it to the shuttle bay, Mr. Fei,” Middleton cut in. “Inform me when you’ve finished.”

“Yes, Captain,” Fei Long replied before Middleton severed the connection.

The Pride’s captain turned to his XO, and the hungry look he saw on her face perfectly reflected his own mood in that moment. “We’ll only get one shot,” he said heavily as he pulled up the Dämmerung’s schematics on his chair’s display, “so let’s make sure it counts.”

Fei Long walked as briskly as he dared while cradling the cumbersome crate in his arms. He knew that his ATTACK DOGs were far from a finished product, but if the Lancers could manage to introduce them into the Dämmerung‘s interior then he knew it would provide invaluable data regarding future developments in the field.

Toto’s son—who Fei Long had begun to refer to as ‘Yide’ in memory of Ancestor Zhang Fei—went before him, clearing the corridor of interlopers and obstacles so as to provide a clear path to the shuttle bay.

Yide had proven to be every bit as helpful as Fei Long could have hoped; his affinity with micro-electronics was significantly greater than Fei Long’s own, which was likely the only reason deploying the ATTACK DOGs so soon could possibly result in success.

A particularly loud roar from Yide cleared the final corridor between Fei Long and the shuttle bay, and had the situation been less dire he would have apologized profusely for the Sundered’s poor manners.

The shuttle was no longer in the bay, which was as Fei Long had expected, so he made his way to the gunship which served as the Sundered family’s sleeping quarters. Yide’s mother—whose name was unpronounceable as far as Fei Long was concerned—was making last-minute adjustments to the craft’s communications suite.

Fei Long set the crate down on the floor between the pilots’ seats, and lowered himself into the overly large seat opposite Yide’s mother. She barely gave him a glance, but began conversing with her eldest son in what Fei Long assumed was their native tongue.

Fei Long carefully connected the relay device—a device which he and Yide had only completed a few hours earlier—to the communication unit’s exposed innards, and after three minutes he had successfully connected the device.

“We must fasten the crate to the deck,” he said, looking to Yide expectantly.

The uplift returned the look with a decidedly nonplussed affect, but before Fei Long could explain further Yide’s mother produced a bolt gun and punched a pair of bolts through the crate’s bottom at opposite corners.

Fei Long looked at her in surprise, prompting her to peel her lips back in what he eventually took to be a mischievous smile—but, much like her husband, her teeth were decidedly vicious and intimidating in appearance. As such, Fei Long was unable to ascertain the nature of the expression as quickly as he would have done otherwise.

“Thank you,” he said after briefly inspecting the device to ensure it had not been damaged by her handiwork. It appeared that the system was ready for deployment, so he nodded to himself and said, “I believe it is prepared.”

He exited the craft, followed soon thereafter by Yide and his mother. As soon as the female uplift had stepped off the ramp and was standing on the deck, the ramp lifted up and became part of the craft’s hull. The shuttle bay’s alarms began to sound, indicating that the craft was prepping for launch and that personnel should evacuate the area immediately.

The three of them did so, with Yide and his mother sharing a long, meaningful look at the craft before turning their backs and exiting into the adjoining corridor. Fei Long knew that the mission called for the tiny craft to be placed in harm’s way, and that the odds were high that it would not return from the mission. He had no frame of reference for what the two of them must have felt in that moment, but he found it nonetheless fascinating to observe them and ponder their potential loss’s implications for their future.

It was only after the airlock doors had sealed shut behind them that he realized there was a very high probability that he, too, would be losing something precious during this particular conflict.

He fought against the powerful feelings of despair which came over him in that moment, and knew that he still had a part to play in the events which were about to unfold.

So without speaking another word, he ran to his quarters as fast as his feet could carry him. He needed to retrieve his control glove, and then he needed to get to the bridge.

The battle was soon to unfold, and he would be blasted to the so-called Pit if he failed to do his part in it.

Chapter XXVI: The Couched Lance

“Vacuum test,” Sergeant Gnuko called out, lifting his helmet into the air for those seated behind the front row to see.

Lu Bu took her helmet in hand and turned to face her Recon Team. They quickly set their helmets over the collars built into the Storm Drake armor they each wore, and one by one the seals engaged with a muffled whir. The lights inside their helmets activated in turn, and after they had each donned their headgear Lu Bu did likewise.

A few seconds later her head was encased in the draconic visage which Haldis had fashioned for them, and Lu Bu remembered Sergeant Joneson’s lecture on the ‘superhero-looking stuff’ she now wore. It was supposedly capable of improving human reaction times measurably, and she could personally attest to the sharpened senses she associated with wearing the fantastic gear.

Her helmet’s HUD activated and automatically began to check the integrity of her suit with a series of pressure tests. Almost a minute passed before the diagnostic cycle was complete, and her suit was found to be in perfect condition for spacewalk.

She looked down onto the floor at the crate which contained Fei Long’s so-called ‘attack dogs’ and, for the first time she could remember, she had reservations as to whether or not even he was capable of backing up his latest boasts.

“Sound check,” Gnuko called over the main channel.

One by one, and in predetermined order, the Recon Team began to sound off until it was Lu Bu’s turn, at which point she called, “Recon Two, check.”

“Recon One, check,” Sergeant Gnuko finished. “All right, ladies and germs, get your game faces on. We are ‘go’ for insertion; repeat, our mission is ‘go’. Switch your air cyclers to intake from the shuttle until we get a countdown. Until then, sit tight and stay loose.”

Lu Bu felt her heartbeats begin to quicken in a familiar, almost comforting, pre-game buildup of nervous energy. There had been a time when the feeling had very nearly overwhelmed her, but she was no longer a little girl.

She was a smashball player, a soldier, and a Lancer. And she was about to play the most important game of her life—one which required her team to defy the odds and emerge victorious if they, and those who depended on them, were to survive.

Lu Bu couldn’t have dreamed of a better start to the day.

“Shields are down to 30% on the port facing,” Sarkozi reported, “we’re at risk of spotting, Captain.” Their proximity to the star’s corona had already placed a severe strain on the Pride’s shields, but there had been little choice in the matter. Fully-charged shields merely meant that the Pride would survive for a fractionally longer period under the combined fire of the two warships. Middleton’s maneuver, however, would give them one shot at leveling the playing field relatively early in the engagement.

“Helm, roll the ship,” Middleton commanded, and no sooner had the words passed his lips than the ship began its roll to present the fresher, starboard, shields to the system’s primary.

“We have achieved escape trajectory and momentum, Captain,” Strider, the former pirate captain-turned-Navigator, reported in an uncharacteristically professional fashion.

“Thank you, Mr. Strider,” Middleton acknowledged, knowing full well that they had passed that particular threshold. The question was no longer whether or not they would crash into the sun’s surface for lack of sufficient angular momentum, but whether or not they would survive the longer-term issues created by such near proximity to its blazing hot corona.

“Starboard shields at 60% and falling predictably,” Sarkozi reported tightly. Despite Garibaldi’s best efforts, he had been unable to dissipate the heat generated by maintaining the shields under such a constant strain. Middleton knew that, even at 60%, the Pride would escape the star’s intense energy before the shields themselves fell altogether. But they would be significantly more vulnerable to the inevitable attacks by the Dämmerung and its partner Corvette.

The tactical overlay had not been updated in several minutes due to the intense interference thrown out by the star, but Middleton knew exactly where Captain Raubach would be waiting for him so the temporary blackout did not concern him in the least.

The doors to the bridge, which were flanked to either side by Lancers, slid open and Fei Long entered the bridge. He wore a strange, bulky glove on one hand regarding which one of the Lancers began to question him as soon as he had set foot in the command center.

“It’s all right,” Middleton called loudly enough to be heard over the commotion, and the Lancer—who happened to be one of the suspicious transfers sent over by the Little Admiral, a man named Traian—stepped aside so as to allow Fei Long to pass. Middleton knew that whatever Traian’s true allegiances, they most certainly lay with the MSP, and he preferred to have a non-Tracto-an serving as bridge security at that moment. That preference was only likely to change if, and when, Atticus’ people incorporated themselves into the crew with an order of magnitude less friction than they had generated to date.

“Captain,” Fei Long said as he slid into the seat beside the standing Comm. Officer. “I must tend to this particular device until the program has been uploaded,” he explained as he gestured to the bulky, bizarre glove.

Middleton waved a hand dismissively, “As you were.”

“Starboard shields at 45% and falling steadily,” Sarkozi reported, “integrity is optimal; they should hold long enough to escape the hot zone.”

The captain leaned forward in his chair and watched as his ship’s icon neared the star’s blackout zone. “Now comes the fun part,” he growled, knowing that the coming hours were certain to accumulate heavy losses.

He only hoped that enough of his people survived to successfully carry out the mission.

Nearly an hour had passed, and Lu Bu found that her nervous energy had not diminished in the slightest. This was somewhat unusual, even for her, but she could almost sense that the same could be said of the entire Recon Team.

Sergeant Gnuko’s head snapped forward suddenly, and she felt a thrill of anticipation as he nodded to himself—or, more likely, in an unseen acknowledgment of receiving his orders from Captain Middleton.

“All right, Recon,” Gnuko called out as he twirled his finger in the air above his head, “switch your re-breathers to vacuum mode. We’re at T-minus ten minutes.”

Lu Bu looked over at the heavy weapons arrayed against the front of the compartment, and she could almost feel the grip of the heavy plasma burner in her hands as she remembered using it during the insertion on the Cardinal’s Wrath so many months earlier. She had practiced for at least thirty hours with the weapon using flash loads that would do little more than scorch the hair off a person’s head, and she could not wait to squeeze the trigger with live ammunition at her disposal.

Chapter XXVII: Receiving a Charge

“Is the Dämmerung within the shuttle’s range?” Middleton asked when the icon of the Heavy Destroyer appeared to kiss the outer border of the hidden shuttle’s effective range.

“Yes, Captain,” Hephaestion replied just as the Pride was struck by yet another turbolaser blast. “But they are still at extreme range.”

“Aft shields are down to 26% with mild spotting, Captain,” Sarkozi reported.

Middleton nodded grimly as he silently congratulated Captain Raubach’s fire control equipment’s unerring accuracy. The Soyuz-class Heavy Destroyer was equipped with a trio of turbolasers which far outstripped the Pride’s own heavy lasers’ range and, apparently, were considerably more accurate as well.

“Their accuracy is a good indication, Captain,” Fei Long said into the brief lull in status updates.

Middleton shot the young man a withering look. “Just whose side are you on, Mr. Fei?”

“The probability is high that they have centralized fire control to their primary computer core,” Fei Long said with a shrug of his shoulders, and after a moment of confusion Middleton finally took the other man’s meaning.

“It’s a silver lining, I suppose,” he grudged as the ship received another turbolaser strike to her stern. “Status on the shuttle?” he demanded as Sarkozi slotted in beside Hephaestion.

“Point-to-point contact is uninterrupted; they’re reading all systems ‘go’ for the mission, sir,” she replied after a brief check of the instrumentation.

“Helm, adjust heading seventeen degrees to starboard while rolling the ship,” Middleton ordered. This latest maneuver was far from imaginative; in fact, it was so unimaginative and ‘by the book’ that he was genuinely concerned that Captain Raubach would begin to suspect something. But if the Dämmerung’s commander continued to follow that same book, he would adjust his own course to bring him almost directly toward the shuttle’s location.

Hiding behind an asteroid measuring just under four hundred meters in median diameter, the shuttle had been powered down for the majority of the operation to that point. The asteroid’s orbit was extremely elliptical with its current position well to the stellar south of the system’s plane.

The Lancer team aboard the shuttle, led by Sergeant Gnuko, was prepared to make a high-risk run at the Heavy Destroyer with a little help from one of Toto’s automated gunships. If they succeeded in penetrating the shields of the Dämmerung undetected, Fei Long would have the opportunity to once again prove his skills as a hacker extraordinaire.

“You wanted the ball, Gnuko,” Middleton muttered under his breath as the Dämmerung’s course adjusted precisely as Middleton had expected it to do, “here it comes.”

Chapter XXVIII: Touchdown

“This is going to get a little rough,” the pilot said over the shuttle’s intercom. “Our grav-plates aren’t designed to counteract this much acceleration, so everyone—and everything—had better be locked down back there.”

Sergeant Gnuko replied over the local channel, “We’re locked and loaded.”

“Commencing our run in five…four…three…two…one…ignition,” the pilot counted down, and when he finished Lu Bu felt her head snap back against the bench’s headrest. The apparent gee-forces were tremendous, and she was startled to find that she briefly lost consciousness. Sergeant Gnuko had warned them that such might occur, but she had assumed that her superior physical makeup would have left her unaffected.

She became aware of a series of impacts registering somewhere on the starboard hull, but then she remembered that both of the autonomous gunships which the Sundered had brought were strapped to the shuttle’s hull. Their engines were providing the additional acceleration required to give them a fighting chance to close on the Dämmerung before its point-defense and short range weapon systems could tear them to pieces.

The shields of the three craft had been merged into a single unit, with all generators diverted to protecting the collective bow of the craft. Chief Garibaldi had been doubtful that the hasty welds would hold under the strain, but as usual his fastidious nature had proven equal to the task.

A massive explosion to port snapped Lu Bu’s head sideways and, again, she briefly lost consciousness from the violent jolt. Cursing herself in her native tongue, she came to and saw Sergeant Gnuko was beginning to unstrap himself from his seat. She almost reached out to stop him, believing he was suffering from some sort of delirium, but then she realized that the shuttle’s apparent gee-forces were markedly reduced.

“On your feet and saddle up, Lancers!” Gnuko barked. Lu Bu quickly unstrapped herself and turned to check on her teammates to find that only one of them—Kratos—was presently conscious. The rest of the team began to stir, and Lu Bu quickly retrieved her designated weapon from the front of the compartment.

The weapon came free after a few latches were undone, and Lu Bu briefly gripped the weapon in anticipation of what was to come. She then strapped it across her back using the attached carriage, and went about the task of getting the rest of the team ready for the final leg of their approach.

Once awakened, the Recon Team began to retrieve their own weapons from storage and when they were finished they each went to the rear of the compartment to retrieve their individual grav-sleds.

The shuttle lurched violently to port, causing Lu Bu to lose her footing and slam into the bulkhead shoulder-first. Her arm went numb immediately, but she was able to regain her footing quickly enough and make her way to her own grav-sled.

“You all know the drill,” Gnuko said after a brief inspection of Lu Bu’s helmet and collar. “When the pilot says ‘go,’ then we had blasted well better ‘go’.”

“We’ll reach position in thirty seconds,” the pilot called out over the intercom.

“You heard the man,” Gnuko barked as the last of the team got into position for the insertion. “The shuttle won ‘t survive contact with the enemy shields at these speeds,” he said as the pilot made his way out of the cockpit and quickly made his way to the final grav-sled, “but it should punch a big enough hole for us to get through. Timing is everything, people,” he bellowed as he slapped the button which controlled the cargo ramp. The ramp began to descend, and Lu Bu gripped her grav-sled tightly in her hands.

A quick check confirmed that Sergeant Gnuko had secured the crate containing Fei Long’s so-called ‘attack dogs’ to his grav-sled. Without Fei Long’s latest inventions on hand post-insertion, the mission would be as good as dead.

“A Soyuz-class Heavy Destroyer has a standard Marine complement of twenty five,” Gnuko said as the clock in Lu Bu’s helmet wound down to twenty seconds remaining before launch. “Lu and Lynch already got half of them back on the Pride, and they aren’t expecting us to be nearly impervious to energy weapons when we show up. Make for the nearest airlock and once inside, head for Main Engineering to shut down their engines. Three…two…one…go!”

The front line, of which Lu Bu was a part, fell back and out of the assault shuttle, followed quickly by the second row. Precisely two seconds after the Lancers and pilot had departed the shuttle—which streaked forward like a rocket as it put at least a hundred meters between itself and the Lancers—the craft which had carried Lancers to and from every mission of which Lu Bu had been a part exploded against a radiant, blue-green field of energy. In that brief instant, Lu Bu’s field of view was filled with the sleek—rapidly enlarging—hull of the Dämmerung.

Then her grav-sled kicked in with its resistors at maximum, and again she lost consciousness. She was dimly aware of tumbling against a hard surface for what seemed like an eternity before coming to a full stop and looking around blankly.

It took her several seconds to realize that she was lying on the outer hull of the Dämmerung and that the only thing keeping her in place were the grav-sled’s magnetic strips running along its edges.

She then realized that her suit was registering a failure in its air seals, and after a panic-laden moment she realized it was not as severe as she had feared. She would lose her supply of breathable air in a little under seven minutes at the current rate of escape, which was far more time than the team needed in order to breach the enemy vessel’s nearest airlock.

She sat bolt upright when she thought of her team, and for several seconds she was unable to locate them visually. Then her HUD began to register their locations relative to her own, but it appeared that only Kratos, Bernice, Claus, Cassius, Gnuko, and the shuttle’s pilot, Jackson, were present.

The others must have either missed the hull, or possibly been killed passing through the shields. Lu Bu was frankly amazed that so many of them made it through the hole; simulations had put survival rates for each team member at roughly 50% for that particular phase of the mission.

“Sound off,” she heard Gnuko bark over the static-laden channel.

“Recon Seven,” Bernice reported quickly.

“Recon Five,” growled Kratos.

“Recon Four,” Claus said, and Lu Bu caught sight of him climbing out of a small pit about ten meters from her position.

“Recon Three,” Cassius added stoically.

“Recon Two,” Lu Bu said as she planted her feet on the deck and swung the heavy plasma cannon down into the ready position. The bulky weapon took both hands to maneuver and a strong lower body to fire without causing the wielder to lose her footing with each shot.

“Recon One,” Gnuko finished, “nearest door is indicated on your HUD. Move out!”

Lu Bu began to move toward the indicated area, which was closer to her position than most of the other Lancers. She arrived outside the portal alongside Claus, and the two took up positions to either side and temporarily locked their mag-boots to the hull. Doing so expended significant energy, but it also provided protection against localized polarization, which was a common defense mechanism featured near most modern warships’ external airlocks for obvious reasons.

“Crack it, Kratos,” Gnuko ordered, and the largest member of the Recon Team moved forward with a boarding tube held easily in one hand. This one, like the others which Lu Bu had seen deployed, had no self-sealing pressure membrane. Sergeant Gnuko was using a trick out of Walter Joneson’s playbook, and Lu Bu was glad for her former mentor’s continued presence on a mission of such importance, even if that presence was little more than a memory.

The boarding tube sealed itself against the airlock door and a dozen individual cutting devices went to work on the reinforced metal of the hatch.

The process took much longer than Lu Bu had hoped, but she had learned during the mission’s briefing that the construction methods, and materials, employed in the Soyuz-class was far superior to that of the aged Hydra-class on which she served.

But the cutting wheels and plasma jets did their duty, and a meter-wide circle of metal fell away from the portal when Kratos kicked it with his metal-shod boot.

“You’re up, Jackson,” Gnuko gestured, and the lone member of the team not wearing Storm Drake armor slid through the opening, taking a pair of explosive charges with him. A few seconds later the man exited through the same hole. No sooner had he taken up position beside Lu Bu than there was a bright flash from inside the airlock, and Lu Bu could even feel the explosion’s force through reverberations in the hull. A massive geyser of breathable gases came roaring out of the hole for several seconds with enough force to knock over a cargo hauler, but before long the majority of the gases were expended and it was time for their insertion.

“Observe comm. silence once we’re inside; move in!” Gnuko barked, and Bernice quickly slid through the hole and disappeared into the ship’s interior. Cassius followed her, and then it was Lu Bu’s turn. She and Claus were the only members of the team who were armed with heavy weaponry, so they were to move in separate teams to maximize their potent weapons’ firepower in the cramped corridors of the warship.

Lu Bu pushed past the molten wreckage which had been the inner airlock door and swept her plasma cannon side to side, covering first the corridor to her left and then the corridor to her right. The engines were to the stern of the vessel, so after finding the left corridor clear of hostile contacts she moved to a supporting position behind Bernice and Cassius a few meters down the right corridor.

After she had done so, the second team covered the left corridor and Sergeant Gnuko knelt beside the bulkhead. He opened the crate containing Fei Long’s drones and almost immediately one of the drones sprang from the crate, causing the Sergeant to rear back in alarm as his hand went to the vibro-knife at his belt. This first drone had spiderlike legs arrayed around a roughly egg-shaped body, and it quickly skittered down the corridor until it came to rest beside Lu Bu.

The second drone gently hovered up and out of the crate far more smoothly than Lu Bu had seen it do while her boyfriend had been tinkering with the thing. It, like all the drones, had an egg-shaped body but this one also had a micro-repulsor fitted to its ‘bottom’ surface.

Sergeant Gnuko took the third drone from the crate, and this particular unit had six equidistant treads running the full length of its body. Fei Long had explained to her in nauseating detail how this particular unit could infiltrate any compartment measuring larger than ten inches in diameter; it was easily the least elegant-looking of the three, but it was also potentially the most useful—according to Fei Long, of course.

Gnuko unslung a micro-grenade launcher from his shoulder and assumed a position beside Lu Bu. The drones clustered around the two of them, with the hover-drone hovering a little too close for Lu Bu’s comfort, and the Lancer team set down the corridor at a quick pace knowing the enemy were most certainly aware of their presence.

Fei Long adjusted the settings on his control glove until the visual feedback from all three drones was coming in clearly enough for his liking. The hover-drone had been the most difficult to complete on short notice, and he knew its power supply would not last for longer than ten minutes under combat conditions.

The program he had written which governed their autonomous actions—a program which would become necessary if, or possibly when, the enemy decided to blanket jam the local comm. frequencies—would have the drones remain with the team for several minutes before automatically seeking out the nearest DI nodes through which they would upload his modified virus.

Although, to call it a virus was likely a misnomer; the program was little more than a high-priority version of standard diagnostic protocols inherent to the various systems which Fei Long had targeted: shields, communications, and sensors. As such, the continuous function of those services could be interrupted, albeit briefly, by placing them in an emergency diagnostic cycle which generally required command override to authorize.

It was a fairly ingenious trick, even by Fei Long’s standards. Each DI node aboard a modern warship operated independently of the others, and as such was vulnerable to certain misinformation regarding the status of the network as a whole. Fei Long’s program essentially tricked the targeted node into believing that catastrophic failure had occurred across the network and that it needed to prepare for an increased workload. Such a catastrophe was the only scenario during which an interruptive diagnostic cycle could be initiated automatically, and therein lay the weakness which Fei Long had uncovered in every DI-based system he had encountered: the need for persistent, immutable autonomy while simultaneously preparing for an unexpected increase in workload should a network failure occur.

His drones accompanied the Lancers down the corridor for several meters until there was a bright, blue flash of light. The visual pickups on all three drones were briefly interrupted, but when they returned Fei Long saw a firefight taking place aboard the Dämmerung. Lu Bu, standing to the two ground-based drones’ right, had apparently fired her plasma cannon at the outset causing the drones’ visual pickups to cut out.

The teams exchanged fire for several seconds, and after a quick look at the ship’s schematics Fei Long knew that the team still had six decks and two hundred thirty total meters of deck to cover before reaching Main Engineering.

He assumed control of the hover-drone and drove it at the unit’s top speed toward the intersection where the enemy Marines had taken cover. He spotted four power-armored Marines in total, and while he knew that his drone could not kill them, he also knew that it could give the Lancers a window.

One of the Marines reacted quickly enough to get a shot off, but thankfully he missed the delicate drone. Before the others could react, Fei Long initiated the unit’s overload cycle and crashed it into the nearest Marine’s helmet.

The feed on the hover-drone went dead, but the other two units’ visual systems recorded a crackling explosion as the high-voltage of the drone’s electrical overload arced across two of the Marines’ battle suits. The overload was just powerful enough to briefly cause the two suits to seize up, and thankfully Sergeant Gnuko recognized the opening for what it was.

Stepping in front of his Lancers, the Sergeant lobbed a micro-grenade into the intersection and a bright, yellow, flash caused Fei Long’s visual systems to cut out once again.

Except this time, the grenade appeared to have interfered with his drones’ remote control interface. He quickly initiated a diagnostic of his local systems and prayed to the Ancestors—and even to Saint Murphy—that the Lancers had broken through.

It seemed entirely possible that he had provided them with as much assistance as he could manage.

Lu Bu strode down the corridor with the two ground-based drones at her sides. Two of the Marines at the intersection were still moving, but both had been thrown from their positions by the powerful blast of Gnuko’s grenade.

Claus pushed up beside her, and Lu Bu needed no further encouragement to clear a line of fire for his devastating plasma cannon. He poured a blast of blue-white energy into the nearest Marine, whose armor was enveloped in a layer of burning plasma that tore through the vulnerable portions of his fancy Imperial equipment and sent his armor crashing to the deck where it became its wearer’s superheated tomb.

A precisely-placed blaster bolt smashed into the lone remaining Marine’s visor, knocking the enemy warrior off-balance long enough for a hail of follow-up fire to pin him—or possibly her—to the far wall as Kratos and Bernice stalked forward with their rifles firing as quickly as they could cycle.

Sergeant Gnuko was still in the lead, and he signaled for the team to cease fire as he drew a vibro-dagger from his belt and ran toward the Marine while the Imperial was still recovering from the savage onslaught of Lancer fury.

Before the enemy warrior could react, Sergeant Gnuko drove his vibroblade up under his Imperial helmet’s jutting chin-guard and the Marine’s armor instantly went limp and crashed to the deck.

Barely breaking stride, Gnuko signaled for the team to continue down the corridor. They had nearly reached an access junction which would allow them to descend three decks, which would bring them one step closer to their target: Main Engineering.

Lu Bu quickened her pace and, for the first time since leaving her family’s torturous, heavy-gravity compound where she had grown up, the muscles in her legs burned fiercely. The continued effort of carrying the massive plasma cannon through the corridors of the enemy vessel was apparently more than even her genetically-engineered physique could manage effortlessly.

It was an almost intoxicating feeling to her, and it was one which she relished as her team reached the junction.

Chapter XXIX: Maneuvering for Advantage

“Recon Team’s mission clock is at three minutes, forty seconds, Captain,” Lieutenant Sarkozi reported tightly. “The Dämmerung has adjusted her course predictably, sir; she’s still well outside our firing range.”

“Captain,” Fei Long interrupted, “I must request that the final gunship move into position; I have lost contact with the drones.”

Middleton hesitated. He did not want to sacrifice the last of their gunships so quickly, but if Fei Long’s ability to interrupt the Dämmerung’s shields depended on him doing so then he knew he had no choice in the matter.

“Tactical,” Middleton said, turning to face Toto, “maneuver the gunship into position.” He knew that the Sundered had called that gunship their home for several years; the least he could do was be courteous when asking them to sacrifice it.

“Yes, Captain,” the uplift rumbled, and while it was clear that he disliked the order he seemed to have arrived at the same conclusion as Middleton. “Home craft reach comm. range in two minutes,” he reported, “will initiate attack run after.”

Middleton wanted to tell Toto that wasn’t necessary, and that simply placing the little craft in harm’s way long enough for Fei Long to use the signal booster he had installed would be sufficient. But he knew that was a lie; if Toto had an idea for incorporating the gunship into the battle plan then Middleton could not, in good conscience, object.

“The Lancer clock is at four minutes, fifty seconds, Captain,” Sarkozi reported, and Middleton thought he heard the traces of anxiety creeping into her voice. Everyone on the bridge knew that if the Lancers didn’t accomplish their mission within nine minutes then they had almost certainly failed. But there was no realistic way they could have breached Main Engineering any earlier than six minutes and twenty seconds.

The ship shuddered, and then shuddered again with increasing force, prompting the Shields operator to report, “Starboard shields at 32% with mild spotting, Captain.”

Middleton knew he had no choice but to keep the enemy off the starboard beam; the port shields were in even worse shape and Garibaldi’s teams were still hot-swapping relays on the port grid. To roll would not only present a less stable facing to Raubach’s turbolasers, but it would also guarantee several fatalities among the Pride’s engineers.

“We’ve got more pain in store, people,” Middleton said, knowing that everyone was already thinking it. He firmly subscribed to the notion of facing adversity head on rather than ignoring it and hoping it would go away. “Let’s set our jaws and be ready to give some back when we get our shot.”

He couldn’t help but give Fei Long a look when he said this. Middleton’s slingshot maneuver around the system’s primary had managed to drag Raubach’s ship into range of the Lancer team, but it had also ossified the Pride’s course in the process. If they were to get a meaningful shot off then they were going to have to overcome a significant portion of their ship’s momentum and reverse course to bring their forward batteries to bear on the enemy vessel.

But all of that was predicated on Sergeant Gnuko sabotaging the Dämmerung’s engines even more effectively than Raubach’s Marines had done to the Pride’s. And even then, the other ship was markedly fresher than the Pride, so Raubach’s ship would likely prove victorious in a contest of relatively immobilized vessels exchanging maximum firepower for as long as they could keep their guns firing.

Fei Long worked furiously at his controls, and Middleton was acutely aware that once again, their mission came down to that young man’s seemingly limitless abilities, and the Lancer contingent’s equally inexhaustible determination.

He had initially questioned the late Sergeant Joneson’s decision to place Lu Bu in direct command of the Recon Team, but after observing her exemplary performances to date he was forced to admit that his old friend’s eye for talent was much keener than Middleton’s would ever be.

Lu Bu’s plasma cannon belched another stream of superheated plasma down the corridor, but before she could regain cover a pair of blaster bolts struck her in the torso. They would have been fatal wounds if not for the Storm Drake armor, which protected her from all but the kinetic energy of the impacts—the force of which nearly drove her from her feet.

She saw Claus bring his plasma cannon up for a supporting blast down the corridor at the hastily-fortified junction before them. The Marines had erected a barricade made of duralloy plates and what looked to be parts of a machinist’s bench. The plasma cannons would burn through the metal barrier in time, but time was a luxury they could not afford.

Claus’s weapon tore a gash half a meter long in one of the upper duralloy plates protecting the Marines, but before he could regain cover he was struck in the visor by a blaster bolt and his body crashed to the deck.

Lu Bu’s weapon required several seconds to recycle for another shot, but she knew she was down to no more than four additional shots remaining before the cannon’s energy was depleted.

She saw Kratos step forward toward Claus’s body and briefly felt pride at how quickly her teammate had moved to collect the heavy weapon in the face of enemy fire.

But to her shock and abject outrage, Kratos eschewed the plasma cannon in favor of picking up the fallen Lancer’s body and gripping it with his massive, right arm clamped around the dead Tracto-an’s chest. Kratos drew his boarding axe in his free left hand and before Lu Bu could physically intervene, Kratos charged headlong down the corridor using Claus’ body as a shield.

Bernice and Cassius laid down covering fire with their blaster rifles, and even Gnuko added a micro-grenade in support of the Tracto-an’s suicidal charge. The grenade exploded against the ramshackle barricade and the majority of the blaster bolts missed the Marines, but the weight of fire proved sufficient to clear a path for Kratos.

Even still, Claus’s body was struck repeatedly by blaster fire his Storm Drake armor succumbed to the overwhelming onslaught of streaming energy bolts. But before his remains had been reduced to a charred lump of unrecognizable flesh wrapped in a formerly-intimidating skin of Storm Drake hide, Kratos managed to reach the near side of the barricade where he discarded the smoking ruin of his former teammate’s body.

With a deft, practiced motion—one Lu Bu knew had only recently been taught to him by herself and Sergeant Gnuko—Kratos drew a grenade from his belt and gently lobbed it over the barricade.

The Marines’ stream of fire halted briefly before the grenade exploded in a blinding flash. Lu Bu’s visor filtered out the majority of the blinding light, but before it had readjusted to the ambient illumination Kratos had already vaulted across what remained of the Marines’ fortification where he had begun laying into the power-armored defenders with his boarding axe.

Sergeant Gnuko was already moving to support him with his vibro-knife drawn. The rest of the team advanced in unison while providing as much covering fire as they dared with their comrades engaged in melee combat.

Gnuko cleared the barricade with a leap which Lu Bu had doubted him capable of executing with his still-rehabilitating leg. No sooner had he breached the barrier than a Marine’s vibro-knife sliced into his upper arm, drawing a red line across his Storm Drake armor.

Cassius fired a precise shot into the offending Marine’s helmet, sending the man lurching. Sergeant Gnuko took the momentary opportunity to launch himself at his attacker, and the two of them disappeared behind the barricade.

Lu Bu saw Kratos locked in a violent struggle against a Marine, with the two warriors locked in what would certainly prove to be a victorious struggle for the Imperial. Kratos was larger than any man Lu Bu had ever seen, but no human being’s muscular strength could match that of power armor, so Lu Bu did the only thing she could do: she took aim as best she could and fired a jet of searing hot plasma at the Marine just as he forced Kratos to his knees.

The plasma seemed to splash against the Marine’s armor, and for a fraction of a second Lu Bu thought his armor must have been wrought from some fantastically heat-resistant material. But before she could even fully process that fragment of thought, the warrior’s left arm went stiff.

Kratos, whose body had been bathed in the enormous heat of the blast—but who had remained almost entirely untouched by the plasma cannon inferno itself—surged upward and toppled the Marine in a display of raw strength which even Lu Bu envied. The Marine was lifted clean off the deck for an instant before the massive, one-eyed Tracto-an slammed his enemy onto his back with enough force that the impact could be felt through the deck plates.

Lu Bu led the rest of the Recon Team to the barricade but, by the time they arrived, Sergeant Gnuko and Kratos had already dealt with the defenders manning the makeshift fort.

A few seconds was all it took for the team to clear the hurdle, accompanied by the drones, and Lu Bu looked at the markings above the door before them with a sense of profound accomplishment.

The words embossed above the door read: Main Engineering.

“No sense being coy,” Gnuko said, breaking the radio silence he had previously ordered. “We’ve got two minutes before this op is called dead; let’s get in there and bring this ship to a grinding halt!”

“Why no more Marines?” Lu Bu asked before thinking.

“What’s that?” Sergeant Gnuko snapped, whirling to face her with anger clear on his visage.

“Ship complement more than this,” Lu Bu gestured to the corridor from which they had just come before waving at the corpses near their feet. “Why they not send others?”

Sergeant Gnuko took a step toward her, but before he could say anything Kratos stood and removed his helmet, which had apparently become damaged by her plasma cannon. “She is right,” he said grimly, and for the first time Lu Bu felt she saw the true man behind the mass of scars which covered his head from front to back. There was a sense of calm about him which she could not understand; her own heart felt as though it would quickly beat itself out of her chest. “There must be an ambush waiting for us inside,” Kratos continued as he bent over the barricade and removed the helmet from Claus’s body. After a quick examination, he placed it over his head.

Lu Bu very much wanted to rebuke him—possibly via plasma cannon—for showing such utter disregard for his fallen teammate, but she saw that Gnuko was considering their observation so she kept silent.

“I’m open to suggestions,” Gnuko said after a few seconds of silence, “but one way or another, those engines need to be brought offline and it needs to happen fast.”

Lu Bu had a thought, and she reflexively dropped her plasma cannon before removing the pair of grenades from her belt and gesturing to Claus’s body. “Give me grenades,” she said hastily, but none of the team questioned her as they began unfastening their grenades and handing them to her.

Kratos retrieved the lone visible grenade from Claus’s belt, and when all was tallied Lu Bu held twelve high-yield explosives in her hands. She linked the detonators as she had been taught to do by designating a ‘primary’ grenade and then touching each of the others to it, creating ‘secondary’ grenades which would only detonate after the primary had done so. She then took up Kratos’ helmet and carefully placed all of the secondary grenades inside before tucking it beneath her arm.

Surprisingly, the spider-looking drone crept up to the main door’s control panel, and Lu Bu nodded to no one in particular as she drew a long, measured breath. This would be the most difficult run she had ever attempted, and would require the most accurate throw she had ever made with a projectile she had never even considered using in the fashion he had planned.

“I clear left with bomb,” she gestured to the left side of the doorway before them as the drone interfaced with the access panel, “then I dive right. Team makes cover fire,” she continued as she bent down to scoop up the tread-mounted drone from the deck.

“I think I’ve got the idea, and it’s not a very good one,” Gnuko said before nodding sharply. “But it’s what we’ve got; Cassius and Bernice will lay down covering fire as soon as the door is opened, the rest of us will follow through and take up positions to the left after you’ve cleared it with the grenades.”

The spiderlike drone lowered itself from the panel and turned its optical pickup toward Lu Bu pointedly. She gave a curt nod of thanks to it, knowing that she was really thanking Fei Long since he was the only one who could operate the drones.

Cassius and Bernice took up positions to the left and right of the door, respectively, and Cassius put his hand over the panel which would open the door when pressed.

Lu Bu tucked the helmet under her arm, remembering the general layout of a Soyuz-class Heavy Destroyer’s Main Engineering section. She had three possible targets for her bomb, and would need to make a decision for which to target in less than a second.

She backed up as far as she could before drawing a final breath in preparation, and then she sprinted toward the door as fast as her feet could carry her over the tiny section of corridor leading to the beating heart of the warship.

The doors slid open almost too slowly for her to pass between them, and she felt her left arm impact against the duralloy of the left panel as she turned sideways to squeeze through the narrow gap. Blaster bolts hammered into her chest even before both of her feet had cleared the portal, but she sighted in on her first prospective target: a nearby catwalk manned by five Marines.

Before she had consciously decided to do so, Lu Bu hurled the helmet toward the catwalk and gripped the primary grenade in her left hand. She was naturally left-handed, but had learned to throw with her right during the past several months and was filled with savage glee upon seeing the makeshift bomb sail through the air toward the catwalk and the five Marines manning it.

A blaster bolt smashed into her helmet, followed by a trio of impacts on her thighs, and she scrambled blindly to the right for no more than two steps as her visor blacked out entirely. In the same instant that the first bolt struck, she pressed the activation button for the grenade and tried to hurl it toward the center of the room.

Not long after it left her hand, the world went black.

“Maintain course,” Middleton ordered after the Pride had been rocked by yet another extreme range turbolaser strike courtesy of the Dämmerung’s guns.

He looked up at the chronometer which indicated that Sergeant Gnuko’s team had already exceeded the mission’s timeline by thirty seconds and felt his stomach tighten into a hard knot.

“Mr. Fei,” he spun his chair to face the young man at Comm., “status report.”

Fei Long’s fingers were flying so quickly over his console that Middleton could scarcely keep up with his deceptively rhythmic motions. “I am still attempting to—“ he cut off mid-sentence as the Pride was rocked once again by the Dämmerung’s weapons. The impact was powerful enough to knock several people from their stations, including the Shields operator.

“Critical spotting on the starboard shields,” Sarkozi reported after helping the Shields operator regain his feet and return to his duties. “We must roll the ship, Captain.”

“Helm,” Middleton growled, “make it so.” He then returned his attention to Fei Long, knowing that if Sergeant Gnuko’s team had failed to breach Main Engineering then it was his obligation to retreat to the system’s gas giant in the hope that the Pride could use it for cover on an almost certainly doomed-to-failure run for the hyper limit. “Mr. Fei…now would be a good time for that report.”

“The signal has returned,” Fei Long replied anxiously, and a moment later a section of the main viewer was filled with the image of the enemy ship’s Main Engineering compartment. A firefight was under way, and catastrophic damage appeared to have been done to the main catwalk which had previously hung over the left side of the compartment.

The hulking form of a Lancer wearing Storm Drake armor appeared in front of the video pickup. The Lancer was hefting a plasma cannon in his hands, and the weapon’s power cell flashed an instant before Fei Long blurted, “No!”

The video stream cut to black instantly, and Middleton became aware of just how tightly his hands had been gripping the arms of his chair. “What happened?” he demanded of the talented young computer specialist.

“High frequency bursts caused by the plasma cannon are interfering with the onboard serial buses,” Fei Long replied as though it was an afterthought. His hands moved over the console with blazing speed, and after a moment he growled in frustration—an uncharacteristic sound to come from the young man. “The processors should re-align in forty three seconds,” he bit out angrily. “The drones will be incapable of reestablishing contact until then.”

“In thirty six seconds,” Middleton said after checking the new countdown which had appeared in the video feed’s place on the main viewer, “this will be decided…one way or another.”

An intense blast of heat was the first thing Lu Bu registered, and she looked dumbly toward the source for a moment as her brain struggled to cope with reality.

She saw Kratos standing nearby, with her plasma cannon in his hands and the glowing barrel pointed toward a nearby structure which Lu Bu’s mind instantly recognized as a standard LM ‘Skunk’ style fusion core.

The situation clarified in her still-addled mind in that instant, and she tried to regain her feet so she could join her fellow Lancers in completing their mission. Her left arm stubbornly hung limply at her side, but thankfully her legs worked properly. It was only when she had rolled to a kneeling position that she realized her helmet’s visor had been completely destroyed, and there was a wave of pain across her face unlike anything she had ever felt.

A Marine’s body lay nearby, and his weapon was still beside him so she scooped it up and felt a pair of relatively weak impacts hammer into her left flank. The Marine’s weapon was thankfully a one-handed blaster pistol, and she quickly sighted an engineer wielding a sonic rifle. Her first shot took him in the left cheek, and the crewman fell to the ground in a boneless heap.

“Secure the door!” she heard Sergeant Gnuko bark, and she turned to see that he, too, wore a ruined helmet. Bernice and Cassius made their way inside the compartment, followed by the pair of drones. The spiderlike drone climbed up the bulkhead to interface with the door’s control panel, and a second after it had begun to do so the doors slid shut.

Lu Bu staggered toward the center of the room and quickly realized that only Gnuko, Kratos, Bernice, Cassius, and Lu Bu remained of the original team. The loss of her fellow Lancers should have caused her some measure of anger, or sorrow, or disappointment, but she felt absolutely nothing in that moment. All that filled her thoughts was the mission, and the fact that the Pride—and everyone on board—was depending on them to succeed.

“Lu, are you with me?” Gnuko snapped as he came into her field of view, and she realized she had been standing motionless for several seconds prior to his query.

She shook herself in an attempt to clear the cobwebs and nodded. “Shut down reactors,” she said, her words slurring oddly as they passed her lips. Her forehead and cheeks felt like they had been freshly boiled while she had been unconscious, but she was thankfully able to breathe without difficulty.

“You take port, I’ll take starboard,” Gnuko said, and for the first time in her life Lu Bu was grateful for someone treating her like an idiot and pointing while telling her where to go.

“Port,” she repeated before turning and proceeding to the indicated area. Scramming a fusion reactor was not as difficult as she had once thought it would be. All that she needed to do was cut off the supply of fuel—helium three in this case—just like she had done on Zhu’s Hope. Improperly deactivating a fusion plant would cause significant damage to the core itself, but since that was actually their mission she knew that the only thing that really mattered was shutting the reactors down as fast as possible.

She was dimly aware of Kratos following her, and for a moment she was struck by just how utterly absurd it was that she, of all people, should be tasked with shutting down a fusion reactor—with little better than a stone-age savage providing support, no less!

Lu Bu felt her cheeks begin to sting differently than before, and she very nearly reached up to massage the area before realizing that if her face had been burned then the last thing she wanted to do was worsen the damage by rubbing it.

“Corporal,” she heard Kratos say as he gripped her right arm tightly in his massive hand, “we must move.”

“Yes,” she agreed after a brief pause to recollect her thoughts, and they quickly found themselves at the primary helium three feeds. She knew that turning them off was only the first step, but between her and Kratos they quickly closed the manual valve and then made their way to the second step of the process.

There was enough helium three staged inside of a warship’s reactor to feed it for several days even in the event of a catastrophic failure to the fuel system. The quantities in question were ridiculously small, being measured in microliters, so the reactors required only a few drops of fuel to maintain their reaction.

This differed from the fusion reactors she had encountered on Zhu’s Hope in that those larger, land-based reactors were purposefully constructed with manual shutoff procedures in mind. The volumes were still incredibly small, but the delivery systems were calibrated accordingly. During combat maneuvers a warship could not risk a fuel leak depriving the ship of much-needed power, so shutting down this particular type of reactor would be different than the ones at Zhu’s Hope.

So after they had shut off the external fuel supply feeding the Dämmerung’s number two fusion reactor, Lu Bu and Kratos worked to access the emergency shutdown systems. They had gone over the schematics in the shuttle, and every member of the team had been taught how to manually shut down the reactor, but Lu Bu’s mind was foggy and she was finding it difficult to focus on the task at hand.

“This one,” Kratos said with only the barest hint of a query in his voice.

Lu Bu looked at it for several seconds before nodding. “Yes,” she agreed, and he wrenched the valve open before proceeding with the rest of the checklist.

An explosion near the entrance snapped the world back into focus, and Lu Bu instinctively raised the blaster pistol in the direction of the door.

“This one?” Kratos demanded loudly, and Lu Bu tore her eyes from the still-intact blast doors to verify that he was proceeding correctly.

“Yes, that one,” she replied irritably. She had resolved during the shuttle ride that if she was going to die, it would be with the enemy in her sights. So she kept her weapon trained on the door until there was a marked shift in the sounds the reactor behind her was making. When she spared it a brief glance, she saw that the indicators had all gone red.

Kratos had successfully shut the reactor down, and he had managed to do so without getting any of them killed. It was a minor miracle worthy of formal appreciation at some point in the future, but Lu Bu knew their mission was not completed just yet.

“This is too easy,” she heard Sergeant Gnuko growl as he came away from the other reactor.

“Dämmerung still have third and fourth reactor,” Lu Bu said, barely managing to resist an urge to strike the side of her head to banish a sudden headache.

“Yes, and they’re out of our reach,” Gnuko said sourly just before another explosion went off outside the very doors through which they had entered. “But the crew should have put up more of a fight,” he continued, and even in her addled state it was clear to Lu Bu that her commander was torn as to how they should proceed.

“We have secondary mission,” she said with a measure of confidence she did not actually feel. “Cut the head off the dragon and it can no longer see.”

Gnuko met her eyes for several seconds, and for a moment she considered recanting her suggestion that they proceed with the mission as directed. The odds had been against them surviving long enough to shut down the two fusion reactors in Main Engineering, but now that they had it seemed cowardly to find the nearest escape pod and flee.

The crew of the Pride was still depending on them to do their mission, and Lu Bu realized in that moment that she was willing to do whatever it took to protect her shipmates.

“You heard the woman,” Sergeant Gnuko barked, and another explosion rocked the blast doors. This time the doors deformed along the seam formed where they met, and Lu Bu knew that the next blast would finish the job which the previous blasts had begun. “We fight through to the bridge and cut the head off this ship.”

The short burst of acknowledging shouts issued by her teammates filled Lu Bu with honor, and she felt privileged to stand at their sides in that moment. The small, track-based drone scurried toward an access tube and, working together with the spider-legged drone, managed to remove the covering panel.

The tread-based drone quickly disappeared into the tiny passageway, and Lu Bu knew that Fei Long had regained control of the drones once again and was carrying out his own part in the mission. The spider-legged drone returned to Lu Bu’s side, and she gave it a brief nod before returning her attention to her squad-mates.

Only Kratos remained silent while the others shouted their assent to Sergeant Gnuko’s plan. The massive, one-eyed Tracto-an hefted the plasma cannon and nodded stoically as he turned the weapon’s muzzle toward the entry. “Then we should waste no more time,” he growled in his deep, stony voice. He then, quite unexpectedly, fired a blast of superheated plasma at the heavily damaged door and the rest of the team quickly followed suit with their weapons.

Chapter XXX: The Shot

“Confirmed, Captain,” Sarkozi reported gleefully as the Pride was rocked by another salvo from the Dämmerung. “The Dämmerung has slowed to sixty percent its previous speed.”

“Good work, Gnuko,” Middleton said under his breath. “Helm: alter course to intercept the Dämmerung. Tactical: I want every one of our guns clearing on target as soon as we’re within range. Comm.,” he spun to face Fei Long, “I need those shields down as soon as our guns are in range. Coordinate with Tactical.”

“Yes, Captain,” Fei Long replied, his previous anxiety markedly diminished. “The drone was executing its programming when we lost contact with it,” he reported, clearly disappointed in his drones’ sketchy long-range communication capabilities, “it will not bring down the Dämmerung’s shields until I have issued the final command.”

Captain Middleton could understand Fei Long’s disappointment—in truth, he partially shared it—but as far as Middleton was concerned, the drones had already proven more capable than he had ever dreamed possible. No one had managed to produce combat drones with capabilities even remotely resembling those of Fei Long’s units since the dawn of the AI wars—which begged a whole host of questions which Middleton needed to ignore for the time being.

“Very good, Mr. Fei,” he said as he turned and saw the icons of the Pride and Dämmerung on the main viewer begin to converge with increasing speed. The enemy vessel, with her superior shields—shields which had yet to be so much as caressed by the Pride’s weapons—was doing precisely what any good commander would have her do after losing the speed advantage: she was barreling toward the Pride at the maximum speed her engines could manage.

The Pride’s greatest offensive strength—her fix-mounted forward heavy laser array—was also its greatest limiting factor. In order to keep his guns on target, Middleton needed to drive his ship toward the enemy at all times. The Dämmerung, on the other hand, possessed weapons with broad fields of fire, which meant that she could keep her guns trained on an enemy vessel during maneuvers—maneuvers like rolling to present a fresh shield facing, for example.

This meant that one of two things could reasonably be expected to happen in the ensuing exchange. First, and most likely, the Dämmerung would strafe the Pride with particular emphasis on further damaging the aged cruiser’s engines. Second, and significantly less likely, was that the Pride would somehow escape the exchange with more or less the same motive power it possessed prior to the head-on exchange and would use its momentum to escape the Dämmerung’s zone of control.

Of course, none of that allowed for the possibility of the Dämmerung’s shields failing at precisely the wrong moment. Nor did it take into consideration the last-minute modifications Garibaldi had made to the Pride’s shield grid. And, of course, there was probably still Sergeant Gnuko’s suicide team in play.

“We’ve got him right where we want him,” Middleton growled, knowing that statement would never be truer than it was in that moment.

“Enemy corvette is closing, Captain,” Sarkozi reported stiffly. “She’s moving to interdict our escape trajectory.”

“Good for her,” Middleton said darkly, silently grateful for his opponent’s strict adherence to conventional strategy. “That just means we’ll get the one-on-one dance we wanted after all.”

“Heavy laser range in two minutes,” Toto rumbled.

Middleton raised Garibaldi via the command chair’s com-link. “Chief, Sitting Duck is ‘go.’ Execute the package in sixty seconds.”

“Sitting Duck,” Garibaldi acknowledged with a wry note to his voice, “aye, Cap. T-minus fifty five seconds and counting.”

“Convey my appreciation to your crews, Chief,” Middleton said evenly.

“We’ll do our part, Captain,” Garibaldi replied with mock indignation similar to Sergeant Gnuko’s during the emergency briefing. “Everybody wants their chance with the ball.”

Middleton wanted to roll his eyes at the latest in a seemingly endless stream of smashball metaphors, but the stakes were too high and he knew that before long his engineers were going to find themselves squarely in the line of fire. “Middleton out,” he said after failing to think of anything more constructive to say, and he cut the com-link.

It had finally come down to those final thirty seconds, and the Pride’s commanding officer knew that when the dust had settled the cost to his crew would be extreme.

But it was his job to make sure that their enemy paid an even higher price, and he would be blasted and damned to the Pit for eternity if he failed.

Lu Bu fired a short burst from her pistol and saw a crewman’s torso explode in a red mist when her round struck home.

Kratos’ opening shot—which had taken even his own team by surprise—had succeeded in killing a half dozen enemy crewmen on the other side of the door when their explosives had cooked off and turned them into little more than carbon residue on the bulkheads.

To the Lancers’ collective surprise, the next resistance they met was made of nothing but regular crewmembers armed with an assortment of weapons ranging from plasma torches to blaster rifles. They had not seen a single Marine since their exodus from Main Engineering, and their absence grew more conspicuous with each junction the Lancers passed through.

“We surrender!” one of the enemy crewmen shouted before throwing his hands into the air and coming out of hiding. “Please don’t kill us; we didn’t sign up for this!”

Lu Bu trained her pistol on the crewman as five others came out of concealment, and Sergeant Gnuko approached with his own blaster rifle sweeping through the small group until settling on the spokesman.

“You’re a Lieutenant,” Gnuko snapped, prompting the other man to nod vigorously. “That means you’ve got bridge access codes.”

The Lieutenant, who wore several command stripes on the breast of his uniform, paled instantly. “We just surrendered,” he protested. “You have to accept our surrender; we can’t be coerced into acting against our own ship!”

Gnuko hesitated briefly, and an instant later Kratos fired a blast from his plasma cannon at a pair of enemy crewmen standing several meters from the Lieutenant who acted as a spokesman for the group. Sergeant Gnuko whirled around and trained his rifle on Kratos, but the Tracto-an ignored him as he checked the cannon’s power cell indicator.

Lu Bu wanted to be horrified at his action, but she knew that the enemy officer was attempting to stall them. At any moment the two warships would enter striking range, and if Captain Middleton’s plan succeeded then the best chance they had of capturing Captain Raubach was while he remained on the bridge—a post he would soon be abandoning if Fei Long’s drones could actually bring down the Dämmerung’s shields.

Sergeant Gnuko apparently arrived at a similar conclusion, and after giving Kratos a look that promised a future reckoning for his action, he retrained his blaster rifle on the enemy Lieutenant—who had all-too-clearly wet himself after watching two of his crewmembers be vaporized by the plasma cannon’s final shot.

“The codes,” Gnuko growled as he advanced toward the enemy officer.

The Lieutenant, who by that point was as white as a glass of fresh milk, reached beneath his uniform’s top and produced a key crystal attached to a chain which had kept it suspended around his neck. “You…you’re nothing but p-p-pirates,” he stammered as Lu Bu stepped forward and snatched the crystal from his hand.

Gnuko went to a nearby door and opened it with a slap of the access panel. “Get in,” he ordered shortly, and the remaining enemy crewmembers did so without protest. After the door was closed, he slagged the control panel with a pair of shots from his blaster rifle and turned to face Kratos with unbridled fury.

The larger man met Gnuko’s eyes with his lone remaining orb, and Lu Bu knew from personal experience observing—and engaging in—such behavior that the two were seconds away from a potentially lethal conflict.

She stepped between them and shouted, “Mission is not complete. Kill each other after!”

Kratos narrowed his eye, and for a moment Lu Bu thought that Sergeant Gnuko had already made up his mind. But the two relaxed fractionally and Sergeant Gnuko shouted, “One more deck to go; let’s move!” He only took his eyes off the Tracto-an after the rest of the team had begun to move out.

The spiderlike drone followed at Lu Bu’s heel as she set off after her commanding officer but she, too, cast a dire look in Kratos’ direction before doing so.

Fei Long was dimly aware of the fact that Chief Garibaldi had executed his part of the battle plan, and the Pride had slowed to less than one fourth its rate acceleration.

Fei Long knew it was all part of the plan, and it took only a brief glance at the main viewer to see that the Dämmerung’s captain had fallen for the maneuver ‘hook, line, and sinker,’ as his grandfather used to say. The enemy warship’s course had altered immediately, as Captain Raubach aimed to capitalize on the apparent failure of the Pride’s engines.

Mere seconds after the apparent failure of the Pride’s engines, Chief Garibaldi had ordered his crews to turn on the portable micro-fusion plants they had taken from Gambit Station. Each of those plants was now wired directly into individual shield generators which had been moved from the stern of the ship to the other facings, leaving the ship’s engines critically exposed if the Dämmerung managed to gain an advantageous angle.

But, to an outside observer, it would appear that the Pride’s shields had completely recharged themselves—something Captain Rabuach had actually done during the last encounter between the two vessels. Fei Long knew that Captain Middleton needed every possible edge he could get, even if that edge was just a brief flinch by the enemy commander in their deadly game of chicken.

“The Dämmerung is breaking to port,” Lieutenant Sarkozi reported tensely, and the Pride of Prometheus was struck by a hail of fire from the enemy vessel. Damage reports came streaming into the Damage Control station just two spots down from Fei Long’s post, but he did not have time to help them prioritize and distribute the information. He was desperately working to reestablish direct control over his two remaining ATTACK DOGs, but his efforts had met with nothing but failure for more than twenty seconds.

“Mr. Fei,” Middleton said heavily, and Fei Long nodded silently as he attempted to initiate a remote reboot of the tread-mounted drone. The nexus, or control drone, was the spider-legged unit but Fei Long was capable of issuing limited orders directly to the other units if his signal could reach it.

He increased the output of the Pride’s primary, secondary, and even tertiary transmitters in an attempt to force the signal through whatever interference the Dämmerung was generating. A fragment of code flicked across his screen, and his heart leapt as he knew he had managed to reach the tread-mounted drone.

“Mr. Fei!” Captain Middleton barked, but Fei Long had precious little time to reply as he very nearly executed the wrong command sequence when his shaking fingers missed a pair of critical command icons on his control panel.

But then, in a window as narrow as any he had successfully navigated, he sent the command code in a short-wave burst that burned out all but one of the comm. transmitters aboard the Pride of Prometheus.

He quickly forwarded a six second countdown to Toto, and stood from his station as the uplift roared, “Firing window in three…two…one…firing!”

Fei Long’s eyes snapped up to the screen, and when he did he saw the Pride’s heavy lasers stab into the Dämmerung’s unshielded hull. In that instant he fully processed the very real probability that he had just killed Lu Bu, who was the only person in the universe who had ever truly mattered to him.

But for the life of him, he was unable to determine a preferable course of action. He felt a pair of tears run down his cheeks as the Dämmerung’s stern exploded in a violent display unlike anything he could remember seeing.

The deck beneath Lu Bu’s feet lurched so violently that she was thrown into a bulkhead five meters from where she had stood. The lights in the corridor went out immediately, and a series of unfamiliar alarms began to sound.

The vision in her right eye had left her, and she stubbornly shook her head in an attempt to regain it. It did not comply but after testing her left eye and seeing that her teammates had all fared better than she had, she stood to her feet and felt the gravity of the ship’s deckplates begin to fluctuate.

“We got ‘em,” Gnuko roared as he gestured with his blaster rifle toward the final access panel which would lead them to the deck on which the bridge was located. “Now let’s finish this job and get off this pile of scrap!”

Even Kratos roared in approval, and the team quickly blasted their way through the door leading to the ladder which would take them to the bridge.

“Six of ten,” Sarkozi exclaimed, stabbing her fist above her head in triumph, “her engines are gone, Captain, and I mean gone! The stern-most twenty percent of the Dämmerung has been destroyed and she’s experiencing a cascade failure of her power grid.”

“It’s not over yet,” Middleton snapped before the rest of the bridge crew could join his XO in her jubilance. He activated his com-link and raised Atticus, “War Leader, you’re up. If that Corvette’s got Marines and they plan to launch a counterattack, it’s going to happen now; I want your Assault Team on the hull and prepared to receive intruders.”

“We hear and obey,” Atticus replied in his thick, Tracto-an, accent.

“Corvette reaches firing range in three minutes,” Toto reported.

“What’s the status of the Dämmerung’s weapons?” Middleton demanded, and Lieutenant Sarkozi made her way to Hephaestion’s side at Sensors.

“They are still active,” the young Tracto-an replied before the XO could reach his station, “as are their shields along the bow, left, and right facings.”

“She’s still got attitude adjustment, Captain,” Sarkozi reported quickly, ignoring the young man’s use of improper terminology for the moment. “She’s turning to present her shielded bow to us.”

“He won’t go down without a fight,” Middleton said, more to himself than anyone else. He had secretly hoped that a child of privilege, like Captain James Raubach IV, would abandon the battle when his ship had been functionally destroyed. But, much like his father, he appeared to have dug his heels in during the pivotal moment. “Refocus fire on the Corvette; the Dämmerung isn’t going anywhere and I don’t want any of the enemy escaping this system.”

“Helm, re-orient to give the gun deck a clear shot on the droid vessel,” Sarkozi ordered, and Helmsman Marcos quickly obliged.

The Pride’s lights dimmed as another salvo from the Dämmerung hammered into her shields, and a new series of damage reports came streaming in.

“Forward shields have failed, Captain,” Sarkozi reported tightly. “Port shields are down as well; I’m getting heavy casualty reports from the teams manning the portable generators—”

“Focus on the fight, XO,” Middleton said, knowing that it would do none of them a single bit of good to mourn the losses of the brave engineers who had made their deception possible.

Without them manning the portable generators and giving the illusion that the Pride’s shield grid had miraculously regenerated, Captain Raubach would have continued on his course and, of critical import, would have never presented Middleton’s gun deck with a clean shot on the Dämmerung’s engines. “Let the Chief handle his teams.”

“Yes, Captain,” Sarkozi replied, but he heard something in her voice that he knew he would need to address later.

“The Corvette is continuing on course, Captain,” Hephaestion reported.

“Keep our stern clear of their arcs, Helm,” Middleton warned when he saw the Pride’s orientation drift dangerously close to providing the Dämmerung a clean shot on their unshielded engines. But even with their shields down on all but the starboard facing, the Pride was still able to absorb a significant amount of damage before being rendered defenseless.

The Hydra class of cruiser was built economically. In most ways this resulted in an inferior warship armed with less than competitive equipment, but in a very short list of possible circumstances that same cost-cutting behavior could prove beneficial—a list that happened to include the very situation in which they found themselves.

The Pride was outfitted with exceptionally robust armor, especially on its bow and stern. This was to maximize the class’s capabilities when operating as part of a formation comprised of allied vessels.

So long as Middleton kept his bow facing the enemy Corvette, even without shields there was very little chance that the smaller vessel would cause critical damage to the Pride of Prometheus before Middleton’s ship could do so to the Corvette.

All of that information had led him to the conclusion that, if the droid warship was making an attack run similar to the one it was currently making, it had an ace up its sleeve. His first guess had been that such an ace would involve a boarding party, prompting him to deploy the Assault Team to the ship’s exterior in order to intercept any inbound Marines.

But the second likely possibility was that the Corvette was armed with another Liberator torpedo—and that this one would be carrying a game-changing, ship buster warhead.

The first possibility he could deal with, and had already begun to do so. The second possibility was essentially a checkmate. Middleton had never given much credence to fatalism as a way of thinking, so he had dismissed the Liberator possibility from his plans almost as quickly as he had considered it.

“Firing,” Toto reported, and the Pride lanced out with her forward array firing as a single unit. “Four hits,” he reported before Sarkozi could do likewise.

The Corvette adjusted its course predictably, making an obvious attempt to pull the Pride’s bow over far enough that the Dämmerung could get a clear shot on Middleton’s engines. But the Pride had already cleared her guns, so there was no need to risk presenting the opening—at least not yet.

Middleton saw that the Corvette appeared to also be moving toward the rocky, inner, planet of the system. He suspected it was nothing but a ruse; however there was a very real possibility that it could use the planet as cover while attempting to flee the system and call for reinforcements.

In his present position, he was torn. The enemy commanders had, rather brilliantly, created exceptionally effective leverage and were essentially forcing him to choose between finishing off the Dämmerung once and for all, or he could pursue the Corvette to prevent its escape from the system.

But if he pursued the Corvette, he would be exposing his stern to Captain Raubach’s guns. Still, he knew that Captain Raubach was the high-value target, which made it odd that the Corvette would not move to support the larger destroyer. That seemingly inexplicable choice would leave Sergeant Gnuko’s team free to capture and return Captain Raubach to the Pride, where they could extract whatever information they could from him—

It was in that moment that he put it all together, prompting him to whirl his chair around to face Fei Long. “Send Sergeant Gnuko a priority message,” he barked, feeling himself go red in the face as he realized what was really going on. “Tell him to pull out immediately,” he growled as he regained some measure of control over himself, but his error had cost several dozen of his crew their lives. Even for a man like Middleton, whose mind was cold and calculating, it was difficult for him to clear his thoughts as he voiced the realization he had come to mere seconds earlier, “Captain Raubach’s not on board the Dämmerung—he’s on that Corvette!”

Lu Bu’s helmet began squawking loudly, and she lowered her blaster pistol to her side after firing what she assumed would be the final shot of their bridge takeover.

The bodies of a dozen crewmembers lay strewn about the bridge, and an officer wearing the stripes and pips of a Commander—likely the vessel’s XO—was sprawled across the command chair.

“Traps within traps,” Gnuko growled, and again Lu Bu’s helmet crackled loudly. It was only then that she realized the spiderlike drone had been patiently tapping her leg. When she looked down at it, she saw the tiny light beside the vid pickup begin to blink. Her mind was considerably sharper than it had been immediately after awakening in the warship’s Main Engineering section, but she was still unable to make any sense of the flashing light.

“Corporal?” she heard Bernice say from her side, and she looked up to see a concerned look on the hulking woman’s face. “You need to sit.”

Lu Bu shook her head adamantly. “This one is fine, but drone is—“

A wave of vertigo overcame her, and when she regained her vision she found Bernice’s steadying hand on her right arm. She briefly met the other woman’s eyes, and nodded her thanks as she spread her feet slightly and blinked her eyes several times in an effort to banish the sensation.

“Lu, what is it?” Sergeant Gnuko asked.

She tore her eyes from the drone and shook her head. “Drone is broken,” she said, feeling a powerful urge to throw her hands in the air in despair. She had never experienced that particular emotion until that moment, and she finally understood how it could affect people so deeply.

Gnuko gave her a concerned look before looking down at the drone and doing a double take. “It’s Lancer signal code,” he said in a slightly raised voice, and after he said it Lu Bu flushed with embarrassment. It seemed so obvious after he said it, and she silently cursed her stupidity. “It’s ok, Lu,” Gnuko said after observing the flashes for several seconds, “you took a serious blow back there. Frankly, I’m amazed you’re on your feet.”

“What says it?” she asked, dimly aware that her grammar had just failed her spectacularly.

“We pull out,” he barked. “The target’s not here; we make for the nearest escape pod and eject.”

When he said that, the entire situation made perfect sense to her. Of course Captain Raubach was not on board the Dämmerung; that was how they had breached the ship with relative ease.

“No escape pod,” she said defiantly.

“Lu, we’ve got our orders,” he said in a tone that brooked no argument.

She shook her head hard—too hard, in fact, as she very nearly lost her balance once again. “No,” she repeated after ensuring her feet remained where they belonged, “we go to shuttle bay.”

Sergeant Gnuko opened his mouth to argue, but he quickly closed it and snorted as he gave her a wry grin. “You heard the lady,” he barked, “let’s see what they keep in the garage!”

“Message received, Captain,” Fei Long reported, glad for the nearly seven continuous minutes he had been receiving video data from the primary drone. “Sergeant Gnuko’s team has left the bridge after receiving your orders.”

“Good work, Mr. Fei,” the Pride’s commanding officer acknowledged.

“Captain,” Fei Long said hesitantly, “I am no longer able to jam transmissions in this system. Our primary and secondary transmitters were destroyed when I uploaded my final instructions to the drones aboard the Dämmerung.”

The captain nodded, “Noted.”

“However,” the young man continued, deciding it was best to make the suggestion now and waste no more time, “if I understood Bu’s body language correctly, I believe we should reposition Toto’s last gunship as soon as possible to place it in communications range with the Corvette.”

Captain Middleton raised an eyebrow. “Her body language?” he repeated with a withering look.

“Yes, Captain,” Fei Long replied quickly. “I believe they are…well, it is likely they have modified their exit strategy. I do not believe they intend to egress the Dämmerung via escape pod,” he explained with a pointed look.

A look of recognition flashed across Captain Middleton’s face, and he nodded slowly before turning to the ship’s Tactical Officer. “Mr. Toto, is your remaining gunship capable of moving into position as Mr. Fei suggests?”

The uplift sent a deadly look in Fei Long’s direction, and the young man was once again filled with dread at the sight of so many savage, naked, teeth. “It is, Captain,” he growled before returning his focus to Captain Middleton.

“Make it so, Mr. Toto,” Middleton ordered, and Fei Long looked to the tactical overlay and, after performing some simple calculations, concluded that the gunship would be in range well before it would be needed.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Fei Long leaned back in his chair. He knew Lu Bu well enough that he fully expected her to engage in yet another suicide mission, and he needed to do everything he could to support her.

Because he had come to realize something during this second battle with the Dämmerung, and it was not a realization that he was eager to share with the rest of the crew for obvious reasons:

The only thing that mattered to him was Lu Bu.

Chapter XXXI: A Ride fit for a Commodore

“This not shuttle bay,” Lu Bu protested. “We must go deck four.”

“We’re not going to the shuttle bay, Corporal,” Sergeant Gnuko chided with a knowing look. “We’re taking a cruise on the captain’s yacht.”

Lu Bu had to process his words several times before she understood what he had said. “Of course,” she said lamely as they exited the emergency junction through which they had descended to deck five.

“What is ‘captain’s yacht’?” Bernice asked warily after she had slid down the ladder to the deck upon which Lu Bu and Sergeant Gnuko stood.

“These newer ships have them,” Gnuko explained as he waved Cassius down the ladder. “They’re faster than any shuttle, armed with weapons similar to a gunship, and the higher-end versions even have jump drives.” He snorted as Kratos made his way to the deck, representing the last member of the team who had survived—so far. “A poncy Imperial mama’s boy like Captain James Raubach IV wouldn’t be caught dead in anything but the best.”

“But Captain Raubach not here,” Lu Bu argued as they exited the junction and made their way into the barren, lightless corridor which was only illuminated by their weapon-mounted floodlights, “how we activate ship?”

Gnuko produced the Lieutenant’s command crystal and laughed. “I’m hoping this thing will do the trick; the Dämmerung is dead in space and a quarter of the escape pods have already jettisoned. Whatever security lockdowns are usually in place have probably been overridden by evacuation protocols.”

“But guns still firing,” Lu Bu protested. “Not whole ship evacuated.”

They entered another junction, which had a ladder similar to the one they had just used. “The gun crews have self-contained life support,” the Sergeant explained. “Trying to breach their blast doors would be next to impossible with small arms,” he waved his blaster rifle pointedly, “especially considering we’re all but empty in the ammo department. No, they won’t be coming out until their guns are empty and they’re down to their last gasps of breathable air. I’m guessing that anyone who could evacuate has already done so—the Lieutenant,” he waved the crystal in his hand, “didn’t seem too keen on going down with the ship. And now that I know their captain isn’t even aboard, I can understand his reluctance to make a heroic sacrifice.”

It all made sense when put that way, and Lu Bu was tempted to blame her inability to comprehend the situation on the concussion she had suffered during the Main Engineering entry. But the truth was that her mind often failed her, and she silently cursed her progenitors’ attempts to create a perfect soldier. She had learned that she very likely was the perfect soldier, since she was not smart enough to understand every angle without some assistance.

“Here we are,” Gnuko said after they had all descended the final ladder and come to a set of blast doors with a data crystal port built into the locking mechanism. “Let’s see if we’ve got the right key,” he said, and Lu Bu could feel the team’s collective breaths being held as he inserted the crystal into the port.

At first nothing happened, but then there was a whirring sound and the locking mechanism methodically began to open. Concentric circles of interlocking metal plates spun until they achieved the proper orientation, and the door’s three panels slid open to reveal a narrow tunnel-like passage leading to what was clearly an external airlock portal.

“So far, so good,” Sergeant Gnuko said as he led the team down the boarding tube. When he arrived at the airlock door, he once again inserted the crystal but this time Lu Bu heard the mechanism emit a clearly negative sound. “Blast,” Gnuko cursed before trying the crystal again. But, again, the door emitted a clearly disapproving sound and Lu Bu doubted the wisdom of her suggestion that they find another way off the dying warship.

Then the spiderlike drone at her feet scurried forward and, without waiting for Sergeant Gnuko to clear the way, it leapt onto the airlock door and moved into position over the locking mechanism. Gnuko backed away, and a moment later the airlock emitted an affirmative tone prior to sliding away in three sections.

“Thank you,” Sergeant Gnuko said awkwardly to the drone, and the team entered the airlock one by one. The inner portal opened on Gnuko’s first attempt at using the crystal, and the team entered the most lavishly appointed space-faring vessel any of them could imagine.

“Captain,” Hephaestion said as the Corvette’s rapid-fire, light weaponry landed strike after strike against the Pride’s hull, “there is a ship launching from the Dämmerung.”

“Configuration?” Middleton asked, knowing that Gnuko would have taken the fastest possible ride off the crippled destroyer.

“I…I cannot determine that, sir,” he replied in clear frustration.

“XO,” Middleton prompted, and Sarkozi moved from her post at Damage Control to assist the Tracto-an Sensor operator.

“It’s…uh,” she began before shaking her head in confusion. “I have no idea what it is, sir. But it’s larger than a shuttle, and it’s making good time toward the Corvette. It will rendezvous with the droid Corvette in eight minutes.”

“Sergeant Gnuko’s team is aboard that vessel, Captain,” Fei Long reported as a small corner of the main viewer shifted to display one of his drone’s video feeds. It showed Sergeant Gnuko, Corporal Lu, and a trio of Tracto-ans—judging by their impressive physiques—as it panned around a chamber that looked more like a billionaire’s penthouse suite than a warship’s small craft.

“Thank you, Mr. Fei,” Middleton said, impressed that the Lancers had managed to gain control of the small craft. He knew that if there was to be any hope of stopping the Corvette from fleeing the system, he would be forced to expose his unshielded engines to the Dämmerung’s still-firing long guns.

But there truly was no choice in the matter; if Captain Raubach was indeed aboard the captured droid vessel and was allowed to escape, he would bring reinforcements and the Pride of Prometheus would be at the mercy of those who had already tried on several occasions to destroy her.

“Helm,” he said, straightening in his chair, “plot an intercept course with the Corvette on the far side of the inner planet.”

“Captain,” Sarkozi interjected in open alarm, “that will expose our—“

“I’m well aware of the consequences, XO,” he cut in coolly. “If we don’t prevent that ship from fleeing then everything else we’ve done will be moot.”

For a moment he actually thought that Sarkozi would countermand his order—and, in truth, he couldn’t have blamed her overmuch for doing so—but she nodded curtly and said, “You heard the Captain, Helm: intercept course.”

“Chief Garibaldi,” Middleton said as he opened a direct channel to his old friend, “our engines are about to come under enemy fire. If you have any tricks up your sleeve, now would be the time to bring them out. We need speed, and we need it now.”

There was a brief pause during which Captain Middleton actually thought that his old friend, Mikey Garibaldi, had been among those killed when the portable generators. Alarmingly, he felt absolutely nothing as he contemplated the possibility, but he was torn from his silent ponderings by the sound of Mikey’s voice, “Well…I guess if they’re going to go out anyway, we can overload the remaining heat sinks and then perform an emergency ejection.”

“How much speed can you give us, and for how long?” Middleton asked, having already concluded that this was likely the only option available to them. Without the primary heat sinks it would take several weeks of dedicated yard work to install new ones, and that was assuming they could fabricate or otherwise acquire said heat sinks.

“I can give you a little over a hundred percent of our rated output with the remaining drives,” Garibaldi replied, “but it won’t last for longer than twenty minutes at the absolute maximum…I’d put the over under at seventeen minutes if you put a gun to my head.”

Middleton ran a few course projections on his chair’s built-in console and nodded grimly. If the engines provided one hundred percent output for fifteen minutes it would give the Pride two shots on target at most. The good news was that if the engines held out for even half that period while taking fire from the Dämmerung, Captain Raubach’s crippled Heavy Destroyer would be unable to get off more than a pair of shots from her long guns, which were the only weapons still capable of striking the Pride.

“Do it,” Middleton said, knowing full well the bad news: that after Garibaldi overloaded and ejected the heat sinks, the Pride would be very nearly dead in space with only attitude adjustment capability provided by the ship’s docking thrusters.

“Give me thirty seconds,” Garibaldi said before severing the connection.

Lu Bu applied combat heal to her burned face without using a mirror to give the damage a proper assessment. Thankfully, the tube of healing gel soothed the pain almost immediately and she was able to focus a bit more clearly as a result.

Sergeant Gnuko sat at what appeared to be a fairly standard pilot’s chair built into the bow of the strange vessel. The interior appointments were ludicrously expensive-looking to Lu Bu’s untrained eye with gold, platinum, and other precious metal trimmings inlaid with what looked to be natural gemstones every color of the rainbow.

There were also art objects ranging from stone carvings to utterly bizarre geometric shapes composed of intertwined wires, crystals, and even what looked like living wood. She knew very little of such things, but she was quite certain that the appointments inside the yacht would constitute a not-so-small fortune.

She stood after applying the combat heal to her face and made her way to Sergeant Gnuko’s side, where she quickly saw a tiny tactical display. The Pride of Prometheus was pursuing the same vessel which the Lancers were prepared to dock with in just over five minutes.

“This is it, Lu,” Gnuko said under his breath. “The Pride’s giving it one last burn; my B-minus grade in propulsion theory from ten years ago tells me they’re going to have to eject their heat sinks in another ten minutes or so.”

Lu Bu saw the two ships approaching the rocky, inner, planet on opposite sides with the Corvette taking the solar ‘inside’ path and the Pride taking the outer path.

Her basic understanding of the visual representation suggested to her that Captain Middleton would not be in firing range for very long after the maneuver was completed and his engines went dead.

“We destroy engines,” she said grimly.

“Not from the inside, we won’t,” Gnuko chided. “We have no idea of that ship’s layout; our best hope is to ram this ship into their stern and hope it does enough damage to keep them in the Pride’s range. Besides,” he added with a short look over his shoulder at the other three members of the Recon Team, “tough as we are, we’re banged up and ammo dry. Assuming Raubach started with a full complement aboard the Dämmerung, we’re looking at around a dozen Imperial Marines on that ship.”

Lu Bu shook her head. “Corvette small; droid ships make radiation.”

Sergeant Gnuko gave her a confused look, and her choler unexpectedly rose when she realized he was doubtful of her mental faculties in that moment.

“Radiation kill humans,” she snapped, frustrated that he failed to see something as obvious as what she was trying to convey. “Humans need shielding.”

The confused look persisted for several seconds and then his eyes lit up and he nodded in understanding. “Ok…so everyone not wearing power armor will be pinned down. That might work to our advantage…and they’ve probably had to install their own control interfaces…” he trailed off, clearly lost in thought before his eyes settled on the last of Fei Long’s remaining combat drones.

“Why will they not destroy this ship?” Kratos asked, and only then did Lu Bu realize he was standing an arm’s length from her.

Gnuko made a minor course correction and then tilted his head toward the ship’s lavishly appointed central compartment. “My guess is this ship represents Captain Raubach’s golden parachute; only Murphy knows what’s secreted away on board this thing. He wouldn’t risk destroying it,” he said confidently before adding with a snort, “and in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re practically performing valet service here.”

Bernice came to the tiny pilot’s station, which could in no way be considered a cockpit, and said, “Cassius has wound to leg. He cannot run, and loses blood.”

“Did you give him a shot of combat heal?” Sergeant Gnuko asked as the craft banked, presenting the orb of the system’s innermost planet for them to see.

“It does not work,” she said matter-of-factly.

Gnuko growled wordlessly. “Lu, are you rated for this piloting interface?” he asked, and Lu Bu shook her head.

She had never even seen such an interface, which consisted of a series of completely unfamiliar crystalline protrusions which Sergeant Gnuko was twisting and pressing to adjust the craft’s course and speed.

“Blast,” he seethed before apparently arriving at a decision. “All right, I’ve got a plan. It’s not pretty…but then, nothing we do ever is,” he added with a predatory grin which he flashed at Lu Bu, and she could not help but return the expression. “I think I can get out in front of the Corvette and slow it down, or maybe even force it into the Pride’s firing arc a little longer than Captain Raubach would like. But that means I have to man the controls,” he said heavily, and Lu Bu understood his meaning perfectly.

“We need helmets,” Lu Bu said, gesturing to Kratos and herself as she unfastened her own, ruined, headgear. The massive, one-eyed Tracto-an did likewise, and Sergeant Gnuko handed Lu Bu his own helmet. He had removed it before sitting down at the craft’s controls, and Lu Bu seated it on her armor’s collar before engaging the seals and initiating a suit integrity test.

Kratos returned with Cassius’ helmet in hand after her suit’s integrity had surprisingly shown no worse for the wear since the initial entry onto the Dämmerung. Kratos’ helmet also checked out, and Bernice appeared ready for battle as well.

“You won’t have grav-sleds this time,” Gnuko warned, “so I’ll have to bring us alongside close enough to scrape the paint on this thing. These Imperial autopilot systems have good attitude-matching systems, so we should be able to get you transferred in one piece even without a proper docking link. Get your boots engaged on the hull and proceed….here,” he said, calling up the image of the Corvette’s hull. “That’s where they went in, judging from the hasty patch job on the access hatch. This thing has a pair of light cannons so I’ll try to punch a hole through right there before I use this ship to harry them. After that, it’s up to you three to get in and bring that ship down from the inside. With any luck, that shouldn’t be too hard for your boyfriend,” he added with a fiendish snort.

Lu Bu would have rebuked him, but she felt her knees begin to buckle and was forced to lock every muscle in her legs defiantly. She was going to lead this mission, and she was going to succeed; there would be time for dealing with wisecracks about her love life later.

“Understood,” she said sharply, knowing there was a very good chance that none of them would survive their boarding maneuver. Just then a bright flash of light erupted before them, and all four of the Lancers turned to see the Corvette’s starboard shields flare under the fire of the Pride’s heavy laser array.

“That’s as open as it’s going to get,” Gnuko said as he resumed operating the helm controls. “Get to the airlock; I can use Kratos’ helmet to coordinate the jump.”

Lu Bu turned and saw that both Bernice and Kratos were holding boarding axes in their primary hands, with vibro-knives reverse-gripped in their offhands. She checked her own vibro-knife as she slid it into its sheath on her hip.

“Take it,” Cassius called, and when she turned she saw him proffering his blaster rifle. She went over to him, briefly checked his leg—which looked much worse than she had expected—and accepted the rifle with a nod of gratitude.

The Tracto-an laid down on the overly padded piece of furniture—a piece which resembled some odd combination of bed, sofa, and reclining chair—and Lu Bu turned to the pair of Lancers who would accompany her on this particular mission. “To the airlock,” she ordered, and together they made ready for what she was confident would be the final stage of this particular operation.

Chapter XXXII: Holding Out vs. Breaking Through

“Number Two engine is offline,” the Damage Control warrant reported worriedly. “Chief Garibaldi is recommending we shut down all engines and eject our heat sinks now, Captain.”

Middleton considered the Chief’s suggestion for several seconds before arriving at the same conclusion Garibaldi had arrived at. “Do it,” he ordered, knowing that the Pride would be capable of little more than attitude adjustment from that point on.

“Initiating ejection protocols,” the Damage Control operator acknowledged.

“Mikey,” Middleton raised the Pride’s Chief Engineer over the com-link, “shut down the drives but keep our fusion plants operational. There’s still a chance we can bring our guns back into the fight, but I want all non-essential personnel evacuated from Engineering as soon as you can manage it. Get everyone else into thermal gear; it’s going to get hot down there.”

“You got it, Captain,” replied Garibaldi. “We’ve got medical teams working on severe plasma burns down here, but after they’ve stabilized my wounded we’ll get everyone out of here that we can afford to.”

“Captain,” Fei Long interrupted, “War Leader Atticus is reporting multiple contacts out on the hull. The War Leader’s people are already deployed around sensitive areas, and report engaging at least ten enemy Marines.”

Captain Middleton nodded in genuine relief. “Excellent,” he said as he fought the urge to sink back into his chair. “Every Marine tied up over here is one less that Gnuko’s team will have to deal with.” Even though the Marines’ method of traveling so quickly, and stealthily, across space was a concerning one, Middleton knew that Rabauch’s decision to send them against the Pride may well have cost the entitled Imperial officer victory in the battle.

While it was essentially a lucky break for his own people, Tim Middleton wasn’t about to look this particular gift horse in the mouth.

“We’re coming alongside now,” Sergeant Gnuko’s voice crackled in Lu Bu’s ear via her replacement helmet. “You need to wait until I give the order before depressurizing the airlock, am I clear?”

“Tri-locsium,” Lu Bu replied as she performed a final check of her blaster rifle. To her left, Bernice gripped a boarding axe in each hand, while Kratos held his own axe easily in one hand.

Several seconds passed, during which time Lu Bu’s hand hovered over the emergency access button which would depressurize the airlock and, hopefully, send them onto the hull of the Corvette.

“If it’s a choice between capturing the target and destroying the ship, our priority is to prevent that ship from leaving the system, Lu,” her Sergeant explained.

“Understood,” she acknowledged.

“Good. We’re coming up on the transfer. Wait…wait,” Gnuko said, and Lu Bu fought the mounting tension by drawing short, measured breaths. “Wait…now!”

Lu Bu’s hand slapped the icon, and the three Lancers were shot out of the airlock toward the droid warship’s hull. Even Lu Bu’s reflexes were unable to seamlessly handle the transition from normal gravity to zero gravity, and she slammed into the warship’s hull hip-first with enough force to shatter ordinary bone. Thankfully, Lu Bu’s bones were far from ordinary, while the same could also be said of her two remaining teammates.

A brief scramble ensued, but Lu Bu managed to get one boot partially engaged against the hull long enough to right her body and redirect her momentum into a controlled roll which quickly saw her plant both feet firmly on the warship’s hull.

Bernice rolled to a kneeling position and her mag-boots automatically engaged against the droid ship’s metal hull almost as quickly as Lu Bu’s did, and the two women knelt there motionless for a moment to gather their wits.

But Kratos was unable to engage his boots to the hull, and his body tumbled in an increasingly violent log roll toward the stern of the warship which saw his boarding axe fly out of his grip when he tried to use it to gain some sort of purchase on the angular, metal skin of the enemy vessel.

Kratos’ rolling body quickly approached an antenna of some kind, and acting purely on instinct Lu Bu fired a round from her blaster rifle aimed squarely at Kratos’ chest.

The round struck him in the near shoulder, and the force of the impact was enough to slow his roll sufficiently that his flailing arm hooked on the slender antenna. A few seconds of flailing later, and the one-eyed Tracto-an had engaged his mag-boots to the hull of the warship.

No sooner had he done so than there was an explosion fewer than ten meters from his position. Lu Bu looked to see the streaking form of the smooth-skinned, teardrop-shaped vessel which had brought them to their target, and she heard Sergeant Gnuko’s voice crackle in her ear, “Door’s open, Lu. Good hunting.”

“You heard him,” she growled as her left arm flared in pain. She had not taken a serious look at it since breaching the Dämmerung’s Main Engineering section. She had, however, applied a fast-acting sealant to her suit’s multiple compromised areas, but even with the patch job her helmet’s HUD suggested that she had no more than nine minutes before her oxygen supply was depleted.

The three Lancers moved with purpose toward the newly-made hole in the droid ship’s hull, and as they approached their entry point Lu Bu could not help but look up at the planet high above her. To her untrained eye, it looked like it might have been a view of her own home world. It had with patchy, white clouds concealing a largely brown surface. But she had learned in the briefing that it was utterly inhospitable to human life, and knew that if she ever reached the surface that the atmospheric pressure would crush her like a bug.

But that did not prevent her mind from briefly wandering to thoughts of her birthplace. She could almost smell the greasy, humid confines of her ‘family’s’ underground compound but, as quickly as the wave of nostalgia came over her, it disappeared entirely. For a moment she was nothing but a sixteen year old girl holding a blaster rifle, standing on the hull of a warship which was hurtling around a planet at speeds her mind could barely comprehend.

Never in her life had she felt as small as she did in that moment, and somehow she knew it was a moment in time that would be perfectly preserved in her memory for as long as she lived.

“Corporal?” she heard Bernice say over their channel, and Lu Bu shook herself from her silent reverie.

“Move out,” she snapped, more irritated with herself for losing focus than with her teammate for doing her duty.

Kratos stood beside the hatch and gestured for Bernice to hand him one of her boarding axes. She did so quickly, and for a moment Lu Bu thought she read something in their mutual body language which she had not expected to see. But she knew that the clock was ticking so she shook her head sharply and led her team the only way she knew how: from the front.

Her footsteps took her inside the ruined airlock, and she noted with satisfaction that both the inner and outer doors had been reduced to molten scrap by Sergeant Gnuko’s fire.

She had learned during the briefing that all droid ships maintain a vacuum seal inside their vessels, even though oxygen was harmful to many of their internal components over long-term exposure. Apparently they used airlocks for precisely the opposite reason humans used them: to keep gases out, rather than in.

As such, the airlocks were nowhere near as durable as those found on the Pride of Prometheus. If humans were to lose access to breathable gases, they would die almost instantaneously. But if droids were exposed to those same gases, the damage would be much less severe and would occur over a much longer period of time.

The interior of the droid warship was alien in its geometry, but thankfully the ceilings were high enough that her teammates could proceed in a deep crouch. They moved into the warship’s corridors—or perhaps the droids referred to them as something like ‘access paths’ or some such, Lu Bu wondered briefly as she visually cleared the nearby area.

They came to a T-junction and Lu Bu, leading her three-Lancer team, decided to head toward the stern of the vessel rather than the bow. Intelligence gathered by the Sectors 23&24 militaries suggested that command centers were more likely to be found in the stern of droid warships near the engines, which were generally even more heavily-armored than their human counterparts.

The corridor was rectangular, for the most part, with the passage about half again as wide as it was tall, which put it at just over two meters from one side to the other.

Using hand signals, she called a halt to their advance fewer than ten paces down the passage when she saw lights flickering ahead. But before she could motion for her people to find cover, a hail of fire erupted from the far end of the corridor.

The kinetic force of the impacts on her torso was enough to briefly shake loose her grip on her blaster rifle as she went staggering backward. She loosed a pair of wild shots, one of which struck a nearby pipe that began to spray a blue liquid into the zero-gravity environment of the passageway.

After the fifth, or perhaps sixth, impact on her chest Lu Bu fell over backwards while her boots stubbornly refused to release from the deck. The droplets of liquid which were spraying from the damaged pipe covered her helmet and even through her metal helmet she could feel the intense heat being given off by it. Her Storm Drake armor was superbly insulated, but her helmet was not so well-protected from thermal radiation and she knew she needed to get away from the superheated fluid before her visor became damaged and what little breathable gases she still had would escape.

She felt a hand under her armpit, and looked up to see Bernice was helping her to her feet. Meanwhile, Kratos had taken off down the low-ceilinged corridor with a boarding axe in hand. The hail of enemy fire began to hammer into him, and Lu Bu quickly concluded that even the mighty, one-eyed Tracto-an would be unable to push through the onslaught of enemy fire.

“We must charge,” she shouted after reaching her feet and, no sooner had she and Bernice begun their own push down the corridor, Kratos’ run had been stymied by the incredible weight of enemy fire.

Bernice somehow managed to get in front of Lu Bu, which was infuriating to the teenaged woman—she was supposed to be the leader! But just as the Tracto-an woman had charged past Kratos’ position, the enemy fire consolidated on Bernice and Lu Bu realized something crucial: there was only one weapon firing against them, and it was a crew-served, relatively low-powered, ion cannon!

Bernice’s steps were slowed even more quickly than Kratos’ had been. Taking a page out of her old smashball playbook, Lu Bu slammed her shoulder into the other woman’s side and, using their combined strength, managed to drive their way several more steps down the corridor. The thought occurred that if the ion cannon struck any of their helmets directly, it could possibly deactivate their functions—which included the recirculation of breathable gases.

She pushed the thought form her mind, and at the precise moment when even their combined strength failed to drive them forward, and Lu Bu became worried for Bernice’s armor integrity.

Then she experienced what a lesser physical specimen might describe as being hit by a hover-bus. Memories of smashball scrums came to her in that moment, realizing that Kratos had added his own strength to Lu Bu’s and Bernice’s. Together the three of them drove down the corridor until finally Bernice tripped and staggered to her knees when the ion cannon’s fire lowered to her shins.

“Push!” she screamed, and Kratos did precisely that as she felt his massive, powerful arm reach around her waist. She was only a handful of steps from the weapon’s position, which appeared to be a makeshift fortification comprised of quickly welded plates from nearby sections of the corridor’s floor, ceiling, and walls.

The fire ceased unexpectedly, and Lu Bu was driven to the deck when Kratos’ bulk drove through her as though she was not there. Her head struck the deck violently, and when she shook out the cobwebs she looked up to see Kratos engaged in melee with an enemy Marine.

“We’ve lost heavy laser number eight,” the Damage Control stander reported tightly after recovering from the latest turbolaser strike to land on the Pride’s unprotected port hull. “Engineering is reporting a coolant leak,” she added, a note of horror clear in her voice.

“Divert all available personnel to Engineering,” Middleton ordered immediately, knowing that a coolant leak in Main Engineering was one of the absolute worst possible things that could happen. Even if it was a relatively minor leak, it would significantly diminish the Pride’s ability to perform tactically until the damage was patched up.

If it was a severe leak, then Main Engineering would soon be turned into a tomb for anyone unfortunate enough to have been inside when the emergency doors contained the leak of superheated chemicals.

“War Leader Atticus reports all hostiles have been neutralized,” Fei Long reported, “I am instructing his unit to assist in Main Engineering.”

Middleton very nearly belayed the young man’s initiative, since recalling the Pride’s Lancers to the ship’s interior would expose them to further intrusions on the hull. But he realized that the young man had made a solid appraisal of their available assets:; the power-armored Lancers were among the only crewmembers capable of surviving for any significant period of time inside of Main Engineering during a severe coolant leak.

“Make it so,” he said with a firm nod before returning his attention to the main viewer. “Status of enemy Corvette?”

“They’re still on escape trajectory, Captain,” Sarkozi reported grimly. “And they’re well outside of our firing arc.”

“It was a good try,” Middleton muttered under his breath as he saw Sergeant Gnuko’s top-of-the-line yacht zig and zag in front of the Corvette while strafing with its relatively light weaponry. But the enemy pilot clearly had no wish to destroy the nimble craft, which spoke to the value of whatever cargo the yacht might be carrying.

“Gunship low on fuel,” Toto reported, “but enough remains for attack run on Corvette, Captain.”

Middleton shook his head as he sliced a look over at Fei Long, who was apparently in direct control of his remaining war drone as he manipulated his glove-like remote control while watching one of the screens built into his workstation. “Maintain safe distance, Tactical,” he replied, knowing that one gunship’s relatively minimal amount of fire could not deter the Corvette in a short period of time. Had Toto’s assault craft been fully fueled, it would have been a different consideration altogether. But the gunship was ‘operating on fumes,’ as the saying supposedly went.

If there was even a small chance that Fei Long’s drone could disrupt the Corvette’s operation, the better play was to support the drone and not endanger Fei Long’s tenuous uplink with his so-called ‘attack dog.’

The ship shuddered and lurched violently to port. “Decompressions on decks three through six port-side,” the Damage Control stander reported.

“How can they hit us from this far away?” Sarkozi growled as she moved to the Sensors station. “We’re already twenty percent beyond the maximum rated turbolaser range, Captain!”

“Steady on, XO,” Middleton said with a warning look. The last thing the ship needed was a morale crisis on the bridge, and his XO’s nerve appeared to have frayed to near the breaking point. But she was right; there was an extremely low probability that the enemy vessel should have been able to land strikes at their current range.

“Yes, sir,” she replied stiffly, and Middleton knew that his ship, and its crew, were very nearly done for.

Their engines were offline, the port shields had finally collapsed, and they had even lost one of their heavy lasers to a lucky shot from the Dämmerung’s unfathomably long-ranged weaponry. The impact profiles suggested that they were being hit by standard, current-generation, Imperial turbolasers. But he had never heard of more than a lucky shot landing at such an extreme range, and it seemed that the Heavy Destroyer’s accuracy was more like fifty percent.

Another handful of turbolaser strikes to his unshielded hull would likely cause catastrophic damage and render the Pride a drifting hulk. Thankfully, they had already achieved escape velocity and were in no danger of crashing into the system’s inner planet.

“Get me an update on Engineering,” Middleton barked, knowing that his ship was very nearly done for. They had caught a few breaks in the battle already, but it seemed that they would need at least one more in order to emerge victorious. “Come on, Gnuko,” he hissed under his breath.

Lu Bu staggered to her feet with nothing but stars in her field of view. She fell against the nearby bulkhead before she could reach out and steady herself in an effort to counteract an intense wave of vertigo.

She pushed herself to a standing position, completely unaware of where she was or how she had gotten there. But the first sight she laid eyes on snapped everything back into focus immediately.

Kratos and Bernice were engaged in a pitched battle with a strangely-armored warrior. The speed and ferocity of his movements, along with the unfamiliar design of his sleek power armor, were like nothing she had ever seen. She raised her blaster rifle to her shoulder and found that her left arm refused to obey her commands. She looked down and saw it hanging limply at her side, and decided the best she could manage was a one-handed shot with the cumbersome rifle.

Propping the weapon against a nearby support strut, she sighted in on the enemy warrior and squeezed off a shot. The blaster bolt ricocheted off his breastplate, and she cursed loudly at having missed the lesser-armored gorget.

The warrior, whose melee weapons were forearm-mounted vibroblades, deftly turned Kratos’ and Bernice’s attacks to the side and kicked out at their legs as he moved with almost hypnotic grace and efficiency. Even with the low ceilings, the warrior did not appear to be in any way hindered while Lu Bu’s teammates were struggling to do battle in a perpetual crouch, which too often became a brief three point stance.

She lined up another shot on the warrior, but just as she was about to squeeze the trigger he raised his arm and fired a blaster bolt from another built-in weapon mount positioned near his left forearm-mounted vibroblade. Lu Bu reacted just in time to prevent the bolt from striking her weapon’s power cell, but the force of the impact knocked the rifle from her hand and elicited a scream of frustration as she reached for the vibroblade at her hip. If she was going to fail in her mission, it would be with that warrior’s blood on her blade!

The warrior seemingly ignored her as he pirouetted smoothly around one of Kratos’ upward swipes with his boarding axe. Never breaking his stride, the warrior plunged his right vibroblade into Bernice’s upper chest and withdrew it as though the devastating blow had been nothing but a minor step in an elaborate, perfectly-practiced dance.

The warrior’s disdain for his enemies—for Lu Bu’s teammates!—filled her with a blood-boiling rage she had not felt since the battle in the hyper dish junction. That event seemed like a lifetime ago to her, but the overwhelming sense of unbridled fury was so familiar that it seemed like it had never left her.

She leapt across the wreckage of the crew-served, rapid-fire, ion cannon and drove her vibroblade at her foe’s neck as Bernice fell to the ground clutching her bleeding wound.

The enemy warrior contemptuously turned Lu Bu’s blade aside, but Lu Bu followed up the lunge with a vicious kick to the warrior’s lower leg. Her Storm Drake-armored shin drove into the other man’s armored leg, and for a brief moment the pain she felt convinced Lu Bu that she had snapped both her tibia and fibula in two.

But her leg did not give out, so she continued to press forward and the enemy warrior’s balance was briefly disrupted by her vicious, clearly unexpected, attack. He swung his left blade somewhat crudely at her neck, and she barely managed to limbo beneath the attack before it could decapitate her. The blade still struck her helmet with enough force to knock her off-balance, and she knew that the opening the enemy warrior had created was a fatal one.

She barely even noticed Kratos intervene with his boarding axe as the huge Tracto-an brought his weapon down on the warrior’s right, forearm-mounted, vibroblade. The blade snapped under the crushing power of the Tracto-an’s two-handed attack, and Lu Bu fought to regain her balance before launching herself at the warrior once again.

But in the three seconds it took her to regain her footing, the sinister-looking dervish whirled and ran his vibroblade along Kratos’ left hamstring. The Tracto-an fell to the ground, defiantly swinging his boarding axe at the warrior’s midsection as he eschewed any kind of defense for one, almost certainly final, attack at his would-be killer.

“No more!” Lu Bu screamed, refusing to allow even one more of her teammates to fall to the enemy that day. Rather than attacking the warrior’s slightly exposed flank, she kicked out with her right leg at the man’s calf with every last newton of force she could muster.

This time, when her leg impacted against the warrior’s sleek armor, Lu Bu’s shin did snap in two. But the force of her blow also briefly upended the warrior, sending his attack aimed at Kratos’ head off-target by just a few inches.

As his forearm-mounted vibroblade struck Kratos’ metal helmet, Kratos brought his boarding axe up into the other man’s gut, where it buried to the shaft. Lu Bu knew that her right leg would not serve her, so she dropped her vibroblade and reached out with her lone, useable, hand and grabbed for a hold of the enemy’s armor.

Her fingers caught on his neck, and she lunged—or, rather, fell—toward him as she desperately attempted to pin him with her body weight.

The warrior tried to spin away, but Lu Bu had already wrapped her arm around his neck and begun to drag him down—only then did she notice that, unlike the corridor they had come through, this part of the ship actually had artificial gravity.

The warrior tried to spin, but Kratos’ axe was still held firmly in the Tracto-an’s right hand. Lu Bu knew she could not hold onto the armored warrior’s neck indefinitely, so she drove her knee into the small of his back with enough force to knock a Tracto-an out cold—she knew, since she had done so on more than one occasion during hand-to-hand sparring. The warrior was almost certainly not harmed by the blow, but it disrupted his movements enough that Kratos was able to crawl atop the entangled bodies of Lu Bu and the armored Marine—or whatever he was.

The deadly warrior tried to bring his remaining vibroblade around to fend Kratos off, but Lu Bu hammered her forearm into the warrior’s forearm with all the grace and finesse of a drunken bull.

She heard herself screaming wordlessly as her movements became a knot of mindless fury, and she realized the warrior had somehow slammed her head into the nearby bulkhead. She had no idea how long her senses had left her, but when her focus returned she saw that Kratos had somehow destroyed the warrior’s second vibroblade—along with the rest of his forearm-mounted weaponry.

The warrior went limp and Kratos hesitated, prompting Lu Bu to scream, “Finish him!” She knew that if the warrior got back into the fight, they were all done for.

Kratos shook his head, and for a moment she considered the handful of ways she might kill him for insubordination, but then he spoke and the world seemingly fell silent as she processed his words. “This is Captain Raubach,” he pointed to a section of the warrior’s breastplate.

She looked down in shock at the seemingly lifeless warrior, and saw a significant amount of blood had come out of his chest—courtesy of the vicious wound Kratos had inflicted with his boarding axe.

It was only then that Lu Bu noticed the heraldry of House Raubach—an animal known as a ‘gryphon’ set against a starry backdrop—accompanied by a long, superfluous string of titles which were apparently bestowed exclusively upon Imperial nobility.

Fei Long’s spider drone appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and came to a stop beside Lu Bu’s head. “Stop the ship, Kongming,” she snapped in their native tongue, feeling both her left arm and right leg explode in pain as she attempted to slide out from beneath Captain Raubach’s armored body. “Do it—now!” she said through gritted teeth.

The drone hesitated for several seconds before skittering away down the corridor which Captain Raubach had apparently been guarding.

“Follow him,” Lu Bu cried as the pain in her limbs seemed to increase with each passing second.

Kratos looked doubtful, but he obeyed before she was forced to reiterate her order with a dire threat included to ensure his obedience.

Lu Bu hauled herself out from beneath her fallen foe’s limp form and grabbed her discarded vibroblade. Her weapon in hand, she found what looked to be the power supply for Captain Raubach’s armor, and she carefully carved into the housing until the unit’s main power went offline.

Securing Captain Raubach had been a goal of the mission, but the primary mission had been to stop the Corvette before it could escape the system and, presumably, alert the rest of the Raubach forces in the area. If his fancy armor was anything like Lancer power armor, then it would possess an emergency power supply for life support functions.

But even if it didn’t, and Captain Raubach died from exposure or anoxia, that was a chance Lu Bu was perfectly willing to take.

That was the last thought she had before the world slipped into darkness.

Chapter XXXIII: The Price of Victory

“The Corvette has been taken, Captain,” Fei Long reported. “Sergeant Gnuko has docked his small craft with it, and my drone was able to successfully disconnect the control interface Captain Raubach’s people installed.”

“Relay my congratulations to our Lancers,” Middleton said, more than slightly impressed at the Recon Team’s performance. He then caught Fei Long’s eye and added, “Well done, Mr. Fei.”

“Captain,” the young man acknowledged without his usual flair for pomp. The young man then proceeded to relay Middleton’s message to Sergeant Gnuko’s people.

“We’ve drifted to sixty percent beyond the Dämmerung’s rated turbolaser range, Captain,” Lieutenant Sarkozi reported. “They haven’t landed a strike in their last four volleys, none of which have been particularly close; I think we’ve exceeded even their robust targeting equipment.”

“Good,” was all Middleton could manage. Captain Raubach’s ship was full of surprises and, almost certainly, technological mysteries which he would love to have examined by the Pride’s people.

Unfortunately, he was unlikely to get the chance to send teams over; any good commander would scuttle such a valuable warship, and the fact that it was now missing its stern quarter—and engines—made the decision to scuttle an easy one.

“Mr. Toto,” he turned to the Sundered officer, “it seems we’re currently lacking a shuttle, forcing me to once again impose on your family’s largesse. How many armored Lancers could squeeze into your gunship?”

Toto considered the query for several seconds before answering, “Eight. No more.”

“Bring it to the shuttle bay and we’ll use it to ferry some Lancers over to the Corvette. I’m guessing the Recon Team could use a little help at this point,” Middleton said, and the Sundered Tactical Officer nodded his acknowledgment.

The command chair’s com-link chimed, and Middleton looked down to see it was War Leader Atticus who was attempting to raise him.

“This is the Captain,” he said, “report, War Leader.”

“Captain Middleton,” Atticus began, his voice raspy and coming between labored breaths, “the leak in Main Engineering has been contained. There were heavy losses.”

Middleton felt his heart sink as he felt his fingers grip the arm of his chair. “Assist Medical by transporting the wounded to sickbay, War Leader,” Middleton instructed, knowing there was a very real possibility that what remained of the Pride’s engineering crew had been killed by the coolant leak. “When you arrive, ask Doctor Middleton what your people can do to help her triage efforts.”

There was a pause, during which time the Pride’s captain understood with absolute clarity what the other man was about to say. That understanding, however, did nothing to alleviate the wave of nausea he inexplicably felt upon hearing Atticus say, “Doctor Middleton was among the casualties, Captain. She has already been taken to sickbay, but the healers were…pessimistic regarding—”

“Thank you, Atticus,” Middleton interrupted, feeling as though his entire body was being squeezed by some unseen force which existed just beneath his skin, “you have your orders.”

Lieutenant Sarkozi approached the command chair with an urgent look on her face. “We should transfer all medically-trained personnel to sickbay, Captain,” she said, and for a brief moment Middleton agreed with her.

Then he came to his senses, and knew that no matter how he felt about the recent turn of events, the battle was not yet over. “Transfer qualified personnel from environmental and gunnery,” he instructed as he straightened himself in his chair. “Engineering will continue working on repairs to the ship, and the bridge crew is to remain at their posts.”

“Captain—“ she began, but he had no time for coddling.

“Don’t make me repeat myself, Lieutenant,” he snapped, his eyes flaring as he nearly leapt out of his chair. “Either carry out your orders or you can stand relieved, is that understood?”

Sarkozi winced before her visage hardened, and Middleton knew he had gone too far but there were still two enemy warships out there which had yet to be fully secured.

“Yes, Captain,” she said stiffly before turning on her heel and moving to the Damage Control station where she helped coordinate the repair efforts.

Tim Middleton was at a complete loss for why the news about Jo had affected him the way it had. He had truly considered the entire matter of her dishonesty, and its ultimate cost, closed when they had last spoken on the matter over dinner.

But there was no denying that, no matter what his conscious mind told itself, there was something entirely different taking place in his subconscious. Addressing that particular quandary however would, like nearly everything else, have to wait until the current crisis was well and truly concluded.

Assuming, of course, that he ever got the chance to do so.

In a rare moment of self-pity, Tyrone Middleton thought to himself, If she died before we got a chance to finally sort things out, I suppose it would be a fitting end to the whole affair.

“Captain?” he heard Fei Long say, as though he was repeating himself, and Middleton turned to see the young man standing beside his command chair.

“What is it, Mr. Fei?” Middleton asked levelly, determined not to let his inner turmoil express itself.

“Our communications equipment is largely inoperable,” Mr. Fei explained in a voice that spoke of a looming request, “and I have nearly completed the basic field medic courses found in the ship’s database. Also, aside from Doctor Middleton, I happen to have the most comprehensive working knowledge of human anatomy of any active crewmember…”

Middleton considered Mr. Fei’s unspoken request, and after thinking on the matter for a few seconds, nodded shortly. “Have Winters take over at Comm., and stay within arm’s reach of a com-link after you’ve reported to sickbay.”

“Yes, Captain,” the young man said, bowing briefly before doing as Captain Middleton had suggested.

“XO,” Middleton said in a raised voice after seeing her cast a short look in the direction of Fei Long as he exited the bridge, “contact Sergeant Gnuko and coordinate the transfer of Lancers to the Corvette. Once that is concluded and the ship is under our control, your orders are to carry out the personnel transfers you just suggested.”

To her credit, Sarkozi did a good job of masking the sour expression she clearly wanted to wear as she acknowledged, “Yes, Captain.”

Middleton knew that was as close to an apology as she was going to get in public, so he refocused his attention on the relative courses and speeds of the three warships as he began to formulate his post-battle plan.

Sickbay was crammed with at least fifty crewmembers, all of whom were suffering from some sort of burn wounds. Fei Long worked his way through the plasma burn victims, injecting them with medications designed to stabilize their cardiopulmonary systems long enough for them to be seen by the ship’s acting Chief Medical Officer.

Fei Long sliced a quick look over at the tall, blonde, woman who was presently operating on a crewman’s left leg—or, rather, what remained of his left leg. He had been in Main Engineering when the coolant leak had occurred, and somehow his leg had been trapped in a pool of the super-hot liquid.

The only parts of his leg which remained below the knee were his tibia and fibula—the bones which comprise the lower leg. Mid-way up his thigh was a ruined, red mass of tissues which Fei Long knew he would be unable to identify even after several seconds of close examination.

But the woman wielding the scalpel worked calmly and steadily, as though she had seen this precise wound a thousand times before. Using hemostats and a rapid cautery device, she clamped off the blood vessels in the affected limb one by one until the bleeding had slowed to a manageable level.

Fei Long returned to his own duties, marveling at the blonde, Tracto-an, woman’s acclimation to the modern facilities aboard the Pride of Prometheus. He would never have guessed that just a few months earlier she had been grinding herbs by hand and treating relatively modest infections via amputation.

He had been working in sickbay for at least an hour and, thankfully, there had been no call for his return to the bridge. He had assisted in several emergency operations—not all of them successful, much to his disappointment—and, thankfully, it seemed that the ramshackle medical staff had finally gotten the situation under control.

The doors to sickbay slid open and Fei Long turned to see Sergeant Gnuko enter, carrying an unfamiliar man in his arms. It took only a few seconds for Fei Long to deduce that the man was none other than Captain James Raubach IV, and for a brief moment he exulted in the success of Lu Bu’s twin suicide missions.

Then his thoughts came to a deafening halt and his senses seemed to abandon him entirely. Behind Sergeant Gnuko was Kratos, and in his arms he carried the still-armored form of Fei Long’s one, true, love.

“Fengxian,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper as he very nearly dropped the injection apparatus he had used to administer the life-saving medicines to the burn victims.

“Stay at your post,” he heard a deep, growling voice say from behind him, and he whirled to see Atticus looming over him. The so-called War Leader looked down at him with barely-concealed contempt, and Fei Long decided to ignore him as he turned back to find Lu Bu.

He had not taken one step before feeling Atticus’ restraining hand on his shoulder, prompting him to try shrugging the overgrown ape’s hand off—of course, referring to him as an ‘overgrown ape’ was an insult to the actual ape people aboard the Pride, but it was how Fei Long had silently come to think of the self-important Tracto-an.

“I said ‘stay’,” the War Leader growled.

“Remove your hand,” Fei Long said coldly as he turned to make eye contact with the much larger, much stronger, and in every other measurable way, the far superior physical specimen, “or you will come to regret it.”

“Return to your post,” Atticus said in a tone that was quite clearly a command, and Fei Long saw Kratos set Lu Bu’s limp form down on a hastily-cleared bed.

“I will not say it again,” Fei Long warned as he once again tried to remove the Tracto-an’s massive hand from his shoulder.

“Neither will I,” Atticus spat, his face twisted into a contemptuous smirk. “Serve your role and let your betters serve theirs.”

Fei Long felt several sets of eyes on him—among them was Kratos’ eye, which seemed odd—and he knew that to escalate the confrontation any more would, indeed, endanger the safety of the crew who had come to sickbay for the treatment of their life-threatening wounds.

“I forget nothing, Atticus,” he said, his hands balling into fists at his sides. He was acutely aware of the gesture’s impotence, so he forcibly relaxed his hands as he returned to his duties with a cold knot of anger forming in his gut. “I will come for you when the present crisis is finished.”

Atticus snorted as he removed his hand from Fei Long’s shoulder. He then looked down at his palm in mock alarm before wiping it on a nearby sheet, as though physical contact with Fei Long was likely to spread some sort of contagion. “I am not difficult to find, runt,” he said with an exaggerated shake of his head as he turned his back on Fei Long.

No sooner had he done so, Kratos appeared—seemingly out of nowhere—and cracked the War Leader on the jaw with the most beautiful straight left hand that Fei Long had ever seen. Before his head had even whipped back around from the impact, Atticus fell to the deck in a heap. His unconscious body knocked over a nearby tray of blood-soaked rags on its way down, making a loud enough clatter that every able head turned to see the source of the commotion.

“Kratos, outside!” Sergeant Gnuko barked from the other side of the room, but the one-eyed Tacto-an was already moving to oblige the order when Gnuko had given it. The massive, bald-headed Tracto-an made brief eye contact with Fei Long and gave a wordless nod of what Fei Long took to be respect before exiting the medical facilities.

Fei Long saw a nearby scalpel, and a torrent of thoughts so dark and unexpected came flooding into his mind in that moment as he looked down at Atticus’ limp, snoring form.

But instead of taking up the blade, he looked across the room and saw that a pair of medical technicians had already begun to work on Lu Bu at a pace which suggested that she was not beyond hope.

Before returning to his duties, with his mind threatening to tear itself apart, Fei Long muttered under his breath, “I forget nothing.”

“The Corvette has been secured, Captain,” Lieutenant Sarkozi reported from the Comm. station. “Her drives are offline and her fusion plants have been powered down.”

“Thank you, XO,” Captain Middleton acknowledged. “Status of the Dämmerung, Mr. Hephaestion?” he asked. Apparently several of the Tracto-an crewmembers had no family name—and had been reluctant to change that particular fact—so their given names were forced to serve double duty.

“I see seven escape pods, Captain,” the young, boyish-looking man replied. “The warship’s energy output continues to fall.”

Sarkozi slid into position beside the young Tracto-an and nodded, “It looks like their shields are down, and whatever backup power they were using to fire their weapons looks to have been spent as well.”

Middleton nodded, having expected as much. “Send out the following short-range message on emergency channels,” he instructed, and Mr. Winters at Comm. made ready to do so. When the young man was ready to record, he gave the captain a nod. “This is Captain Tim Middleton of the MSP Cruiser, Pride of Prometheus. Activate your short-range beacons and we will collect you as soon as we are able to do so, but I need to be absolutely clear,” he said, lowering his voice as he fought the urge to grit his teeth, “if my people catch a single whiff of resistance during the rescue process, they will be under my explicit orders to space each and every person aboard the escape pod in question. If you would prefer not to accept our help, you are to adjust your emergency beacons as outlined in the instruction packet you receive attached to this message. Pride of Prometheus out.”

“Gunship returned to hangar,” Toto reported as soon as he had finished authoring his message to their soon-to-be prisoners.

“You were able to squeeze it in?” Middleton asked, knowing that Sergeant Gnuko’s hijacked yacht was fully three times as large as any small craft the Pride had previously housed in its hangar.

“It fits,” the uplift replied simply, and Middleton knew it was best to leave the subject of gunships alone for the time being. The battle had just cost Toto’s family two of their three craft, and he knew the subject would be sore for quite some time. He also knew it was up to him to replace their craft, if at all possible, but that would be a problem for another day—assuming there was another day.

“Captain,” Sarkozi said as she turned to face the main viewer, “I’m reading multiple explosions within the Dämmerung.”

Middleton turned his attention to the magnified image of the once-mighty warship and saw its hull begin ripple with a series of coordinated explosions. Those explosions continued for nearly ten seconds, at which point the ship was little more than a slowly expanding cloud of debris. “Monitor the escape pods’ transponders,” he said, having fully expected the Heavy Destroyer’s remains to be scuttled before he could dispatch a team to salvage valuable data or materials from it. “And log their positions so we don’t lose any that take us up on our offer of aid.”

“Yes, Captain,” his XO acknowledged, and for the first time since he had stumbled into Raubach’s trap, Tim Middleton felt a wave of relief wash over himself.

“XO, Set Condition Two throughout the ship,” he ordered. “Have the department heads submit crew readiness reports within the hour.” He hesitated for several seconds as he checked the latest update from sickbay, but eventually added, “I’m heading down to sickbay.”

Lieutenant Sarkozi nodded her acknowledgment. “Condition Two, aye, Captain. I’ll forward any updates to your link.”

Middleton stood and gave her a short nod of approval before heading to the blast doors and making the long trek to the ship’s medical center.

There were some tough decisions in need of making, and he knew that with Jo incapacitated, the entirety of that particular responsibility had fallen to him. He had never given as much thought as he thought others expected him to do when making tactical decisions which could end up costing crewmembers their lives. To him, that part of the job had always seemed natural, and in some ways, familiar.

But the decisions in sickbay were of an entirely different variety, and he was uncertain how he would react when faced with them.

Chapter XXXIV: Tough Choices

Fei Long made eye contact with his Captain as soon as the ship’s commander entered sickbay. The majority of the young man’s contributions had already been made, and now that triage had been effectively conducted—with far more grace and alacrity than Fei Long had expected, given the absence of Doctor Middleton throughout the process—he knew that the next few minutes would determine who lived and who died.

“Mr. Fei,” Middleton said with a short nod as he passed by on his way to the Tracto-an woman—named Heldryn Foulchen, as Fei Long had come to learn—who was presently in charge of sickbay. Fei Long returned his Captain’s recognition with an obeisant bow, and the Pride’s commanding officer made his way to the surgical suite without another word.

Several minutes passed as Heldryn operated inside the suite on a poor crewmember whose liver had been torn apart by shrapnel when one of the portable power generators had exploded early in the battle. Captain Middleton waited patiently—or, as patiently as a man in his position could do—before finally pressing the intercom button and saying, “Miss Foulchen, I don’t mean to be impertinent but we need to speak as soon as you are able.”

Heldryn looked up over her surgical mask’s attached face shield and briefly met Captain Middleton’s gaze before resuming her task. A few seconds later she said, “I can speak in two minutes; any faster and she dies.”

“Fine,” Middleton replied, and the seconds ticked by far too slowly for Fei Long’s liking. He stole a glance at Lu Bu’s unconscious form and, after seeing that no one needed his assistance, he made his way to her side.

She had not regained consciousness since being brought to sickbay, and Fei Long had overheard Sergeant Gnuko imply that she had gone for several minutes without proper oxygenation. Her initial brain scans had revealed no catastrophic damage, but there were indications of an active subdural brain bleed which could be fatal if left untreated.

The problem was that there was only one person on board who was qualified to undertake the corrective procedure, and that was Doctor Middleton. Fei Long looked at the three cryo-tubes arrayed behind the surgical suite, and knew that since Doctor Middleton had already been placed within one of them, there were only two remaining openings to which Lu Bu could gain access.

Fei Long looked over at the physically, and chemically, restrained Captain Raubach. He was simply too valuable for Captain Middleton to risk losing, so if Heldryn’s opinion was that he required cryo-stasis in order to survive then he would be placed in one of the remaining tubes.

He looked around sickbay and counted no fewer than twenty two crewmembers whose chances of survival would be drastically improved by placement in the last cryo-tube. Some of them even had more pressing wounds than Lu Bu, but that made absolutely no difference to Fei Long.

Heldryn came out of the surgical suite and removed her mask as she came to stand before Captain Middleton. The woman was at least three inches taller than the Pride’s commanding officer, and at least three inches broader at the shoulders, but even with the physical disadvantage it was clear who the commander was simply by observing their affect.

“Captain,” she said, “I did not wish to disturb you.”

Middleton raised an interruptive hand. “Never start a conversation with me by apologizing,” he said evenly. “Let’s go over the priority patients as quickly as possible while still being thorough.”

“Of course,” she replied as she made her way to Captain Raubach’s bedside. “This is the prisoner; he was exposed to va-cuum,” she chewed on the word, which had almost certainly been unknown to her prior to joining the Pride of Prometheus’ crew. “His lungs are damaged, but functioning. He suffered significant blood loss, but the brain scanners suggest he will not be a dullard when he awakens.”

“When will that be?” Middleton asked after giving his adversary a quick, appraising, look.

“I cannot say, Captain,” she replied with a shake of her head. “I am only trained as a field medic; the brain is unknown to me.”

Fei Long felt his heart sink at hearing Heldryn’s report. He knew that Captain Middleton would have to protect the valuable asset which Captain Raubach had become after being taken prisoner, and without a convincing prognosis to the contrary, that meant ensuring his safety by placing him in a cryo-tube.

“Who’s next?” Middleton asked, and Heldryn moved to a nearby cot which held the same crewmember whose leg had been destroyed by the coolant leak in Main Engineering.

“This crewman will die without transfu-sion,” Heldryn explained, once again fighting to pronounce the foreign word properly. “He has wrong type of blood for syn-the-tic blood bags.”

Fei Long’s ears pricked up at her last revelation. He could scarcely believe his ears, but she had just suggested that the wounded crewman’s blood type was incompatible with synthetic replacements—a condition which Fei Long, himself, shared, as did approximately one in ten thousand of his countrymen.

In that moment, Fei Long tilted his head back and closed his eyes as he silently thanked the Ancestors for their beneficence. He still did not truly believe in the souls of people who had died years, or even millennia, earlier having the ability to manipulate reality as many appeared to believe. But his position had just taken a decided shift from ‘active disbelief’ to ‘cautiously skeptical.’

“Have you checked the ship’s blood banks for a match?” Middleton asked, and Heldryn nodded affirmatively.

“There is not in supply,” she replied firmly. “Without transfusion, he will not survive.”

Middleton nodded before gesturing for Heldryn to continue and the Tracto-an woman did so. Fei Long felt butterflies attempt to create a typhoon in his stomach, and he fought against them as he looked down and found he was holding Lu Bu’s hand between his own.

“This warrior,” she said, adding a hint of pride as she looked down on Lu Bu, “has several wounds which are severe, but most significant is bleeding in brain. The repair technique is beyond my abilities, Captain,” she said, giving Fei Long a guarded, yet sympathetic look. It seemed the entire ship knew of his relationship with Lu Bu, which he found oddly comforting.

Middleton looked down at Lu Bu for several seconds, his eyes moving up and down her body as he appraised the significant damage which had been done to her improbably physique. Bruises covered her torso, and her lower right leg had been fixed with a splint after the jagged ends of her broken tibia. Those pieces of bone had protruded through her skin upon admission to sickbay, but had since been cleaned and returned to their proper alignment prior to splinting.

Her left arm had experienced similarly catastrophic damage, with a complete break of the upper arm near the shoulder which, fortunately, failed to break through the skin. Significant bleeding had developed in that arm which called into question the long-viability of the limb—which was still nearly black from elbow to shoulder—but the circulatory damage had been corrected not long after Heldryn had seen to her.

And her face, which had been sharply angled and proudly defiant to Fei Long’s approving eye, was now beet red and swollen so badly it was difficult to recognize her. She had apparently suffered minor plasma burns during battle, which was fortunate because anything more significant would have caused fatal respiratory collapse within minutes.

And scattered throughout the rest of her body were bruises, apparently caused by blaster bolt impacts, which were already between purple and black in color. Fei Long had counted no fewer than twenty such impacts on her thighs and chest. He had also noted—with no small amount of pride—that she bore no such wounds anywhere on her back.

How she had fought through those wounds was very nearly beyond Fei Long’s ability to comprehend. He had sustained injuries in the past, including a few broken bones, but nothing as severe as any of the worst ten which had been inflicted on her during the back-to-back suicide missions.

“Can you estimate how long she has?” Middleton asked, and even through his professional veneer, Fei Long could hear the conflict in his commander’s voice.

Heldryn cocked her head dubiously. “I am not expert…but perhaps hours. No more than days if bleeding is not stopped.”

Middleton looked around the room and asked, “Who else?”

Heldryn gestured to a nearby man with severe cranial trauma—his left ear, and much of the skull beneath it, had been cut away when a power relay had exploded near his station. “That one has severe head damage,” she said simply. “Brain scanner is unclear if his mind will live, but he will become infected and our an-ti-bi-o-tics are almost empty.”

The captain nodded slowly. “Are there any others?”

Heldryn shook her head. “Others are stable…for now,” she added as she wiped her brow with her sleeve.

“Good work,” Middleton said almost absently as he looked at each of the four in turn. He quickly pointed to Captain Raubach, “Place him in one of the cryo-tubes immediately.”

“Yes, Captain,” Heldryn replied, thought even through her thick accent Fei Long could tell she was not pleased at receiving the order.

Middleton then looked at the remaining crewmembers, and Fei Long knew he had to make his move then or lose the opportunity—and possibly Lu Bu—forever.

“Captain,” he said, clasping his hands before himself and bowing his head deferentially, “may I speak?”

“Now is not the time, Mr. Fei,” Middleton said darkly, but Fei Long would not be deterred.

“Captain, I have reviewed this crewman’s brain scans,” he said, gesturing to the man missing part of his skull, “and they are inconsistent with a probable recovery. Lu Bu’s wounds, however, have not yet caused permanent damage to her brain.”

“Mr. Fei, I understand your position—“ Captain Middleton began, but Fei Long interrupted him, knowing that by doing so he was violating military protocol.

“The technician’s blood type is, in all likelihood, similar to my own,” he continued. “It is a rare, but not unheard of, condition which afflicts those of my birth world. I could serve as the source of a transfusion if my blood is indeed found to be compatible.” He almost added that this would free Captain Middleton to put Lu Bu in the final cryo-tube, but he knew that doing so would be properly viewed as insubordination.

Captain Middleton took a pair of slow, deliberate steps toward him, and Fei Long cast his eyes to the floor immediately. He knew his commander would be unpleased with his interruption, but he did not care. If his actions helped save Lu Bu’s life, then he was willing to pay whatever price was required of him.

“Mr. Fei,” Middleton said in a low, dangerous tone, “you are an invaluable member of this crew, but you have just placed me in a very difficult position.”

“I apologize, Captain,” Fei Long gushed as he felt himself go red between the ears, “but I could not—“

“You couldn’t what?” Captain Middleton interrupted icily. “You couldn’t wait to hear my orders before questioning them?”

Fei Long fell to his knees and kowtowed to his commander. While he knelt in prostration before Captain Middleton, silence hung between them for what seemed like an eternity.

“I’ve been lenient with regards to your eccentricities, Mr. Fei,” the Pride’s commanding officer said coldly, “but as long as I am in command I will have discipline on this ship, however it is achieved…do we understand one another?”

Fei Long nodded as he rose to an upright, kneeling position with his hands still clasped before himself in obeisance. “I apologize, Captain,” he said, the words turning to ash in his mouth, “I submit to your judgment, as always.”

“Stand up, Mr. Fei,” Captain Middleton ordered, and Fei Long did as he was instructed. “You are to submit your blood for examination; if it is, in fact, compatible with engineer Xu’s then you will provide enough for a stabilizing transfusion. Technician Xu has much-needed expertise in fabricating high-pressure containment systems—systems we are now in need of after ejecting our heat sinks.”

“Yes, Captain,” Fei Long replied as his heart threatened to beat a hole through his chest. He took his commander’s meaning plainly enough: Xu’s expertise may well prove crucial to the ship’s ability to limp to a nearby port for proper repairs. In a truly bizarre twist of logic Lu Bu was, for all intents and purposes, expendable now that she had succeeded in her mission.

If he had been emotionally detached from the situation, he would have concurred with Captain Middleton’s assessment. But he knew now that he could never be emotionally detached where Lu Bu was concerned.

“Miss Foulchen,” Middleton continued, “have Corporal Lu transferred to the cryo-tube immediately. If the transfusion for Technician Xu is impossible, or does not stabilize him properly, then you are to exchange Lu and Xu immediately. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Captain,” Heldryn replied, her expression and tone unreadable.

Captain Middleton looked through the surgical suite at the lone, occupied, cryo-tube and asked, “What is Doctor Middleton’s prognosis?”

Heldryn turned to face the tube and briefly chewed her lip, prompting Fei Long to turn toward the tube as well. He wondered what had happened to her; she had already been placed in the tube prior to his arrival.

“Doctor Middleton’s lungs were severely burned by poison winds,” she explained, “and she will require new hair, but these wounds can be treated later. I put her in the tube because I could not heal her quickly enough to save her life, and I thought—“

“You did the right thing,” Middleton interrupted. “Can you perform the…healing her lungs require in order to come off life support?”

Heldryn nodded confidently. “I must use hy-per-bar-ic chamber for two days, then give medicine in-jec-tions direct to her lungs,” she replied. “And she must wear breathing mask for some weeks but, if medicine works, she will walk after four or five days. I have reviewed the process already and am confident I can perform it.”

Captain Middleton looked around sickbay and said, “Good work, Miss Foulchen. You’ve managed this situation better than I could have hoped.”

“Captain,” she acknowledged with a deep, awkward, bow. Fei Long knew that it must be difficult for the woman—who had apparently been a land owner on Tracto prior to enlisting—to address a man as her superior. Tracto-an society placed clear divides between men and women and, in all cases but warfare, women were given total social primacy over men.

“I won’t take up any more of your time,” Captain Middleton said as he turned to leave sickbay. He stopped halfway to the door and added, “Work to stabilize these people the best you can. When that’s finished, and assuming there are no new emergencies, you’re ordered to report to your bunk for at least six hours of sleep. Notify me when you’ve closed out your current shift.”

“Of course, Captain,” she replied, and Captain Middleton left the room. Heldryn turned to Fei Long and said, “You are brave…and foolish. But I am also foolish,” she added with the barest hint of approval in her voice as she gestured to the bank of scanning equipment where the blood analyzers were located.

Fei Long gave Lu Bu’s hand one last squeeze before following the ship’s senior-most healer to the equipment. Thankfully for all involved, his blood type did match Technician Xu’s.

He did not want to even consider what he would have done if it had not.

Chapter XXXV: A Snail’s Pace

“It’s been three days since the battle concluded,” Middleton said after the last of his department heads had reported to the conference room. “Let’s start with Engineering,” he gestured to Chief Engineer Garibaldi, who was still standing since he had been the last officer to arrive. It was understandable, given the continued state of affairs throughout the ship.

“Right,” Garibaldi said as he wiped some grease from his hands onto his work suit, “well, the good news is we’ve removed the heat sink from the Corvette and, with a little luck, we should have it patched into place by this time tomorrow. After that it’s a matter of calibration, which could take hours, or days, depending on a whole bunch of things I doubt would interest any of you.”

The Chief’s attempt at witticism, while normally well-received, fell on a group of people who were every bit as exhausted and drained as he was. This was in no small part due to every single member of the ship, excluding the Captain, XO, and Tactical Officer, having been temporarily reassigned to his department and pulling double shifts.

“Beyond that, the jump drive looks no worse for wear,” the Chief continued, “so once we’ve got the heat sink installed we’ll be good to go. Of course, even with that one undersized sink we’ll only be able to make about fifteen percent our rated acceleration.”

When it was clear he had completed his report, Middleton nodded and gestured for his longtime friend to take a seat. “Medical,” he continued, turning to face Heldryn Foulchen, “what do you have to report?”

The former Tracto-an farmer stood stiffly and, judging from the black semicircles beneath her eyes, she may have been the least rested of the officers in attendance. “We lose three more crew to old burn wounds,” she reported matter-of-factly. “No new ca-su-al-ties since last meeting.”

Middleton nodded grimly, knowing that these latest deaths brought the total to one hundred thirty four during the battle with Rabuach’s people. “When will you work to revive Doctor Middleton?” he asked, knowing that a second doctor’s presence would save lives, even if Jo merely acted in a consulting fashion.

Heldryn nodded as she rubbed the bridge of her nose. “The process begins now; she will be in hy-per-ba-ric chamber in ten hours and will awaken soon after.”

“Good,” Middleton gestured for her to be seated. “What of our morale problem?” he asked, turning to Sergeant Gnuko.

The Lancer Sergeant’s nose had been broken recently, and the external fixation device he had been fitted with made his voice sound hollow as he said, “I’m keeping Atticus’ people working in the bow and all the other Tracto-ans in the stern. But we’re running out of work to do on opposite ends of the ship,” he said grimly. “Sooner or later things are going to flare up again, and when they do we’re going to have bloodshed.”

Captain Middleton leaned forward and pressed his knuckles against the conference table’s top as he considered the matter. Apparently one of the Recon Team members, an older warrior named Kratos, had cold-cocked Atticus in sickbay. The particulars had been difficult to pin down, but in the ensuing hours several fights had broken out between the Tracto-ans which Atticus had hand-picked and those Tracto-ans he had not.

“Can I at least assume that the armory is locked down?” Middleton asked, venting a portion of his disappointment in his Lancer Sergeant’s failure to keep his people in line.

Sergeant Gnuko clenched his jaw and nodded sharply. “Everything with a trigger’s been inventoried and placed under lock, key, armed guard, and round-the-clock video surveillance set up by Mr. Fei,” he gestured to the young man seated to his left. “All power armor’s also been recalled; the only Tracto-ans with power-assist are the ones in heavy work suits out on the hull.”

“Good,” Captain Middleton grudged. The past few days had been stressful in the extreme, but it appeared that light was finally at the end of the tunnel. “I’ve been going over our flight plan with Mr. Strider,” he said, turning to the ship’s pirate-turned-Navigator, “and he has some thoughts.”

Mr. Strider stood and made his way to the conference room’s view screen. Once there he pulled up the image of the Pride’s current position, which was roughly half way across Sector 24.

“This be—erm, this is,” he corrected as he briefly met Captain Middleton’s disapproving gaze, “our current location, yeah? The only Core World within four jumps be…erm, is,” he corrected again, clearly fighting against his own heavily exaggerated accent and verbiage with each word he spoke, “Capital.”

Eyebrows popped up around the room, and Middleton knew that their attention had been piqued. “I’ll be a creeper’s knee,” Garibaldi said after a brief whistle. “Are you actually suggesting we go there?”

“I am,” Middleton said simply before gesturing to Mr. Strider to continue.

“Right,” the Navigator said as he brought up a new image of the Capital system, “the Pride be—“ he stopped mid-sentence, and Captain Middleton rolled his eyes in annoyance as the other man shot him a concerned look.

“If it will speed the process,” Middleton said tightly, “then disregard my bridge orders about proper nomenclature—for this meeting only,” he added with a hard look.

Strider visibly relaxed as he exhaled. “Right, man,” he said, slipping back into his previous, at times incoherent, speech patterns, “well, it be like this: Capital ain’t all bad like y’all be thinkin’. Sure, there be rough patches here an’ there, and the occasional pikey-type keeps a brother on his toes—lest he wind up with debts not entirely earned, if you catch my meanin’,” he said with a knowing look as he laid a finger aside his nose.

Silence hung over the conference room for several seconds, but Mr. Strider seemed oblivious as he continued rambling on.

“The Pride be in need of major repair work, and for a shiny price there be any of a dozen outfits what might take a wounded bird like us under wing,” he explained, zooming in on the image of a space station in orbit of Capital Prime. “Of course, we be needin’ somethin’ worth tradin’. But assumin’ we’ve got coin to spend and can talk the talk, I know of a few types what might even help source some of those hard-to-find components we need to put our gal back in. Are we green?”

“No,” Heldryn said sourly, and a subdued round of snickers made its way through the assemblage.

“Right,” Strider said, apparently confused as he splayed his hands. “Capital be known to me; assumin’ things be much as they was last time I set eyes on the place, I can get us in touch with a brother what owes me a tat.”

“A what?” Middleton asked, barely able to make sense of the man’s fast-paced, piecemeal verbiage—which had apparently been drawn from at least a dozen fictional sources.

“A tat,” he repeated with a stupefied look. “Gods of the spaceways,” he grumbled, “ain’t none of you ever heard the expression ‘a tit for a tat’?”

“Ah,” Garibaldi said, as though that explained everything. Which, Middleton supposed, maybe it did.

“Anyway,” Strider rolled his eyes, “we be needin’ a fair bit of cheese if we be wantin’ a crack at the good stuff—”

“I’m sorry,” Gnuko interrupted, “but ‘cheese’?”

“Money,” Middleton cut in, grateful that Strider’s speaking part in the meeting had drawn to a close, “thank you, Mr. Strider.” Strider looked dejected as he made his way to the chair beside Middleton as the Pride’s commanding officer gestured to the screen. “We need currency, but for obvious reasons I don’t think it would be acceptable in any way, shape, or form for us to barter away MSP property during our stay at Capital.”

“Leaving us with…what?” Garibaldi asked, his brow furrowed in confusion.

“Mr. Fei,” Middleton gestured for the young man to stand.

“Thank you, Captain,” Fei Long replied as he stood. The young man reached into his pocket and removed a tiny pin bearing the insignia of House Raubach, which he handed to Sergeant Gnuko before continuing, “This pin was found aboard the yacht which our Lancers commandeered from the Dämmerung during the boarding action.” The young man hesitated as the officers passed the pin around the table after each had taken a few moments to examine it. “That pin was crafted by one of the foremost jewelers in the Imperium of Man and, if my preliminary research is any indication, it is worth at least three suits of power armor in liquid currency.”

Eyebrows shot up all around the table, and Mr. Strider—who was holding the pin when Fei Long had revealed its value—briefly clutched the object in his hands before casting a sideways look at Captain Middleton and handing it to him with a reluctant, longing look in his eyes.

Once a pirate, always a pirate, Middleton thought to himself as he handed the pin to Lieutenant Sarkozi.

“Ok, so we can get the Lancers a few new suits of armor while we’ve already got a surplus of battle suits,” Garibaldi quipped. “What good does that do us?”

Middleton smirked as the pin finally made its way back to Fei Long, who reverently placed the object in his pocket. He cast a sharp look in Mr. Strider’s direction before saying, “The vessel is in the hangar bay and has been placed under round-the-clock guard; the total value of objects inside it is likely greater than the practical replacement value of the Pride of Prometheus.”

Captain Middleton gestured for Fei Long to be seated. “That’s right,” he said, “which means we’ve got all the money we’ll need, even if Mr. Strider’s contacts deem us worthy of a ‘friendly discount’.” He made eye contact with each of his officers in turn before continuing, “Capital is purported to be a rough place but, aside from Mr. Strider, no member of this crew can lay claim to having set foot there.”

“That’s because of the trade and travel embargoes the Sector Assembly levied against them nearly sixty years ago,” Lieutenant Sarkozi cut in, and for some reason Sergeant Gnuko looked uneasy for a moment before straightening in his chair. “As such, lawful travel to Capital is expressly forbidden by three fourths of the Core Worlds in the Spine.”

“I heard it was basically a pirate haven,” Garibaldi mused, clearly amused by the entire notion of the Pride seeking aid from pirates.

“The irony isn’t lost on me, Chief, I assure you,” Middleton said shortly. “But intel paints a little different picture than the one we’ve been treated to in the media. The planet has a population of just over a billion and is broken down into no fewer than two dozen autonomous states—a handful of which exist only in orbit—and each state has its own rules and regulations.”

“That sounds problematic,” Fei Long said as he stroked the miniature patch of facial hair he grew on his chin.

“It would be,” Middleton agreed, “which is why, for logistical reasons, we’re going to limit our interactions as much as possible. Shèhuì Héxié is one of the few Core Worlds which, somewhat surprisingly, did not join the embargo against Capital. So any away missions will be comprised primarily of your countrymen, Mr. Fei.”

“Of course, Captain,” the young man acknowledged, and Middleton suspected Fei Long had already arrived at that conclusion judging by his lack of surprise.

“Mr. Strider assures me that his credentials are still valid for travel to and from Capital,” Middleton said, “so a team will need to be put together with Mr. Fei acting as the ship’s representative.” Strider’s crestfallen expression made clear he had been of the belief that he would be conducting business on the Pride’s behalf, and Middleton grudgingly added, “Mr. Strider will serve in an advisory capacity to you, Mr. Fei, so I suggest you two sit down and get your stories straight.”

“Our stories, Captain?” Fei Long asked.

“I’ll make this as plain as I can,” Captain Middleton said as he leaned forward in his chair, “under no circumstances are you to reveal that you are crewmembers of an MSP vessel. The last thing we need is a target on our backs, is that clear?”

“Perfectly, Captain,” Fei Long replied with a knowing nod. “We shall construct a suitable cover story.”

“Good,” Middleton said before turning to the last bit of business. “What about the prisoners, Lieutenant Sarkozi?”

The XO shook her head in obvious frustration. “I can’t get them to say a thing, Captain. They’re all clamped up tighter than a virgin on—“

“Thank you, XO,” Middleton interrupted with a forced look of disapproval. He very much would have liked to let her finish the joke, but he wanted his ship out of the system as quickly as possible. “Have you been able to determine any of their ranks?”

Sarkozi cocked her head doubtfully. “I’m fairly certain one of them is a Lieutenant, and another a Chief Petty Officer, but beyond that I can’t tell with the other two dozen. They could be environmental workers or top-flight espionage agents as far as I can tell, but they’re convinced we won’t do anything to jeopardize their safety so they’ve been smugly confident in their decision not to cooperate.”

Middleton considered bringing up the topic of chemical interrogation, but that was likely a subject better left to a smaller gathering of officers if it became necessary to discuss.

“Are there any questions?” he asked. When no one replied, he nodded and stood from his chair, “Dismissed.”

Captain Middleton sat bolt upright and struck his head on the hyperbaric chamber as he did so. His hand went to his scalp unconsciously as he looked around to ensure nothing was amiss. Aside from one of the nurses giving him a briefly concerned look, everything was precisely as it had been prior to his falling asleep inside sickbay.

He had not intended to fall asleep, but as is so often the case his body had not asked his permission to deal with the past several days’ worth of exhaustion with a perfectly reasonable nap interval. A brief look at the chronometer put said interval at nearly two hours, which was far more than he had initially suspected.

He looked inside the hyperbaric chamber and felt his heart skip a beat at seeing Jo’s eyes were already open. Not only were they open, but she was looking directly at him.

It was one of the instances in his life when Tim Middleton was unable to think of something to say, so instead of flailing about with words he sat back down and maintained eye contact with his ex-wife.

“Is everything all right, Capt—“ began the same nurse who had seen him awaken roughly before her eyes drifted to Jo and she cut off mid-sentence. “Miss Foulchen,” the nurse said, her query to the ship’s commanding officer seemingly forgotten, “Doctor Middleton is awake.”

Sickbay began bustling with activity as a trio of personnel surrounded the hyperbaric chamber, and Middleton took several steps back without breaking eye contact with his ex-wife. He honestly did not know what had compelled him to come down to sickbay between shifts, but he did know that whatever it was, it needed to be addressed.

He saw a tear roll down her cheek and, much to his own surprise, he found his own eyes had begun to mist. He set his jaw as hard as he could, trying to keep from causing a scene during Jo’s delicate recovery process, but he failed to control the rising tide of emotion he felt when he looked at her.

There was still anger there, of that he had no doubt. And he also felt a wave of sorrow over a loss he knew he could never truly deal with. But somewhere beneath it all was a feeling he had genuinely thought was lost to him.

He wiped his cheek before nodding silently to his ex-wife, and she did the same before she began to sob.

Middleton turned and left sickbay, determined not to make the situation any more difficult than it needed to be. It took him three decks of walking and climbing through access tunnels before he realized the tactical significance of the ship’s chief medical officer having awakened.

He didn’t know if he should be happy, or angry, about the delay in that particular thought’s arrival.

“Point emergence,” Navigator Strider reported tightly. It was their third jump in two days, and Middleton was uncertain his battered ship could survive even one more jump without at least a few days to make repairs to the tattered shield grid.

“Shields are down to seventy…sixty…forty percent,” Sarkozi said anxiously. The patch job they had done to the Pride’s shields had barely been enough to even theoretically handle a point transfer, but it had lasted this long and Middleton made a silent promise to the space gods if it held out. Exactly what he had promised to those gods was anyone’s guess, because a few seconds later the thought vanished from his mind as his ship shuddered beneath his feet.

“We’ve shed the sump, Captain,” Helmsman Marcos reported, her hands shaking visibly as she manipulated the helm’s controls.

“Well done,” Middleton congratulated with no small amount of relief in his own voice. “Scan the system, Mr. Hephaestion.”

“Scanning, Captain,” Hephaestion acknowledged. Two minutes later, he shook his head, “There are no vessels in the system, Captain.”

“Confirm that, XO,” Middleton ordered. Hephaestion had actually become as adept at his job as any of the new bridge standers, Tracto-an or not, but the Pride would be hunkered down in this particular star system for quite some time and he wanted to ensure that they were undisturbed during that period.

“Confirmed, Captain,” Sarkozi reported confidently. “Sensors show nothing but the still-forming star and its accretion disk.”

“Good,” Middleton said, taking some small solace in having reached this far in their trek. Capital was still one jump away, but this was as close as he dared bring the Pride of Prometheus in its current state. “Find a suitably large asteroid in the disk and come up with a flight vector; we’ll need to stay in its shadow for at least a few days, so make it a big one.”

“Yes sir,” Sarkozi replied before carrying out the order.

“Mr. Fei,” Middleton turned to his Comm. officer, “is your team prepared?”

Fei Long nodded. “Mr. Strider, Sergeant Gnuko, and Yide—that is,” he added with a brief look at Toto, “Mr. Toto’s son have been briefed and are prepared to leave as soon as you order it. However, Chief Garibaldi and I still require time to prepare the yacht.”

“How long?” Middleton asked, knowing that the sooner they departed, the sooner the Pride could get its repairs underway in earnest. Sergeant Gnuko had approached him and explained that his own travel documents were in order for entry to Capital, which had been a great weight off Middleton’s mind. He had secretly dreaded the thought of Fei Long actually leading a mission of this particular nature.

Fei Long cocked his head before replying, “Perhaps two days, Captain. The transponders have been replaced, but the Chief and I agree that the entire computer system must be deactivated and replaced, at least temporarily, with spare units from the Pride before it is secure. I have already found multiple sleeper programs embedded in those system to which I have gained full access.”

Middleton nodded slowly, upset at the delay but glad for his two top specialists having agreed on a course of action. “Two days, Mr. Fei,” he said with a stern look, knowing it was possible that Mr. Fei had pushed Chief Garibaldi to sign off on the delay for personal reasons—reasons involving a certain Lancer who was currently being operated on by the team of Dr. Middleton and Miss Foulchen.

“Two days, Captain,” Fei Long agreed. “I would like to request permission to continue my work on the yacht, Captain.”

The captain nodded as he gestured for Winters to take over at Comm. “I’ll tell Chief Garibaldi you’re on your way,” he said as Fei Long turned to leave the bridge.

Fei Long nodded graciously, and Middleton returned his attention to the main viewer while he silently calculated the amount of time it would take to reach the rocky portion of the star’s accretion disk.

He had been sorely tempted to bring the droid warship along, but the truth of the matter was the Pride was already short-handed and there was no guarantee that whatever workarounds Raubach’s people had wrought on it would hold out.

So he had instructed Mr. Fei and Chief Garibaldi to salvage as much of the Raubach’s control gear as possible, along with whatever components were easily harvestable, and he had given them twenty four hours to do so. He had also gathered as much technical information as he could about the vessel, since the MSP’s database was nearly empty when it came to describing the artificial life form’s vessel specifications.

After that had been accomplished, the Pride had maneuvered into range and destroyed the droid warship with his ship’s nine remaining heavy lasers. The little ship was tougher than it looked but, after a trio of salvos had landed against its hull, nothing larger than a meter in diameter had survived.

“We’ve worked up an approach, Captain,” Sarkozi reported after stepping away from the helm. Helmsman Marcos was still visibly shaken from their latest point transfer, and Middleton made a mental note to sit down with her later. She had performed admirably and deserved recognitions for her efforts.

“Good work, XO,” he said as he glanced over the plan, which would put them behind a chunk of nickel and iron measuring three kilometers in diameter. The asteroid would provide them with dual protection: first, from the star’s radiation, which would be significant at close range; and second, from nearly all long-range sensors.

It wasn’t much, but it was a lot better protection than the Pride had found in recent days.

After completing a shift’s worth of work removing the old computer systems from the luxurious yacht, Fei Long made his way to sickbay. He had checked on Lu Bu prior to working on the yacht, but she had been in surgery under the care of Heldryn and Dr. Middleton.

He entered the sickbay to find the most glorious sight he could hope to see: Lu Bu was lying on one of the beds with her head inclined slightly, and her eyes were open!

Beside her was Dr. Middleton, who still wore a breathing mask and looked pekid but was awake and alert. Her hair was gone and her head had been wrapped in a skintight cap which would facilitate the healing of her scalp so that her hair could eventually be regrown. She was holding Lu Bu’s hand, but when Lu Bu saw Fei Long approaching she withdrew her hand from Dr. Middleton’s.

“Fengxian,” Fei Long greeted, feeling a grin light his face as he came to stand beside her bed. Her face was still swollen from the burns, but the treatments she had undergone had already reduced the visible effects significantly. He guessed that, given another day or two of therapy, she would be capable of smiling—or frowning, such was her wont—without causing herself pain.

Lu Bu reached across her body with her right hand and grasped his tightly. They stood in silence for several moments before Dr. Middleton spoke, “The surgery was a success. Given another week of rest,” she drew a shallow, raspy, breath, and it was clear that her lungs had not yet recovered to the point where she could carry a conversation without becoming winded, “she should be fully recovered within a week.”

“That is wonderful news,” Fei Long beamed as he looked into Lu Bu’s eyes.

“What of the battle?” Lu Bu asked intently, her lips barely moving as she spoke but her voice sounded clear and strong to Fei Long.

“We were victorious,” he replied quickly, noticing Dr. Middleton give him a thunderous scowl. “The price was high,” he continued hesitantly, “but we have found shelter in a distant system and are looking to make repairs.”

“Cassius,” she said, and Fei Long was briefly confused as she asked, “how is Cassius?”

Then he remembered that Cassius had been one of the Lancers assigned to the Recon Team, and he gave Dr. Middleton a brief look before answering, “Cassius did not return from the mission.”

Lu Bu’s face scrunched up in an unrecognizable expression, and Dr. Middleton’s scowl darkened. “She needs to rest, Long.”

He nodded, knowing the doctor was correct. “Bernice and Kratos are recovered from their wounds,” he said, hoping to alleviate Lu Bu’s sorrow with good news, “and Captain Raubach was successfully recovered as well.”

After a few seconds, Lu Bu squeezed his hand reassuringly and said in their native tongue, “Thank you for the truth, Kongming.”

He nodded wordlessly and returned her affection by squeezing her hand tightly in his own. “I have been selected for a mission,” he continued, “and, with luck, it will be the first of several while we repair the damage to the Pride.”

Lu Bu’s eyes flashed briefly and she tried to sit up, but both Dr. Middleton and Fei Long placed restraining hands on her shoulders.

“You need to lie down, Bu,” Dr. Middleton said in a commanding tone which, in Fei Long’s experience, was only possessed by doctors. “You could die if you do not lie down for the next twenty four hours.”

Lu Bu shot the doctor an angry look, but Fei Long squeezed her hand with every bit of strength his measly muscles could muster. “Obey her, Fengxian,” he said in their native language. “She seeks only your health and safety.”

She gave him a look which he did not understand; it seemed as though she was surprised at what he said—or, perhaps, that he had said it.

He gave her a reassuring look, and Doctor Middleton said, “I think she should rest, Long.”

Leaving her side was the last thing he wanted to do, but even he had to concur with the doctor’s opinion. As beaten and battered as she was, it was no small miracle that she still drew breath. “I bow to your learned wisdom, Doctor Middleton,” he said with a brief, but pointed, glance in the older woman’s direction.

He leaned down and planted a soft kiss on Lu Bu’s forehead, and bid her farewell before leaving sickbay and returning to his quarters for some much-needed sleep.

Chapter XXXVI: Capital!

“Point emergence,” Sergeant Gnuko reported, and unlike every time Fei Long had experienced the effect aboard the Pride of Prometheus, there was no great shudder to accompany the event. In fact, several seconds later Sergeant Gnuko surprisingly reported, “And we’re free of the sump.”

“Truly?” Fei Long asked without the least bit of incredulity or disbelief.

Gnuko snorted before nodding agreeably, “It’s a smooth ride, that’s for sure.”

Fei Long looked to Mr. Strider, who had been napping until a few minutes prior to the luxurious yacht’s point transfer. The drive’s charge cycle aboard the craft were much, much slower than those of the Pride, but the fact that such a small craft could jump at all was truly remarkable—and spoke to the vessel’s immense value just as clearly as its former appointments had done.

Those appointments had largely been catalogued and transferred to the Pride’s armory. The initial valuation estimates had not been far off; when all was tallied, Mr. Strider had reluctantly appraised the inventory and placed its value at just above the replacement cost of a Hydra-class medium cruiser like the Pride of Prometheus.

“We’re receiving an identity challenge,” Gnuko said as he manipulated the controls at the pilot’s station. A few moments later he breathed a sigh of relief, “We passed the first round.”

Fei Long looked at the three-dimensional tactical grid which was projected over the console to Gnuko’s right and counted no fewer than eighty vessels in the system. The readout labeled the majority of them as freighters, but standing out in the crowd was a pair of battleships and no fewer than six cruisers.

The closer they came to Capital Prime, the more vessels showed up on the yacht’s sensors. Fei Long counted one hundred fifty six total vessels operating inside of the star system, which was more than had been present at Elysium—which, by any measure, was an affluent system—by at least double.

“Impressive,” Sergeant Gnuko observed as they passed a freighter that rivaled even the legendary settlement ships which carried the entire infrastructure a new colony with ten thousand colonists would need to survive for several years. ‘Passed’ is, of course, a relative term considering the fact that thirty light seconds separated them, but the yacht’s imaging scanners were able to present a detailed image of the vessel.

The rest of the journey toward Capital Prime was relatively uneventful, but Fei Long could not wait to set foot on the world. What little he had heard of the place suggested that freedom was valued above all else.

And that made it quite unlike the world of his birth, which made the prospect of landing there exciting in itself.

“Welcome to Capital,” the Custom’s official said after scanning their four identification packets. “You’re all cleared for forty eight hours, except the uplift,” she said as she turned to Yide, who visibly bristled at being singled out. “His visa is good for seven days; Capital is proud to lay claim to the Sector’s largest free community of Sundered.”

Fei Long and Gnuko both gave Yide looks of muted bewilderment before accepting their ident packets. “Thank you,” Gnuko said as Strider made to push past him toward the bustling street just a few meters away.

“The docking fees for your vessel will be one thousand standard credits,” she said as she produced a data slate. “You’ll need to pay them at the office on Sandur Street. Of course, if you’d like that to be taken care of for you, that can be arranged for a mere fifty credit surcharge,” she said as she gave Gnuko a suggestive look.

Gnuko—who Fei Long gathered was not entirely unattractive, judging by the female crewmembers’ reaction to his presence—leaned forward and said, “We might be able to work something out.”

The official gave him a brief, appraising look and shook her head wryly. “I thought you guys weren’t supposed to arrive for another two weeks?” she said, her eyes looking over Gnuko’s broad shoulders hungrily.

Sergeant Gnuko recoiled only slightly before leaning back in and asking playfully, “Us guys? How am I supposed to take that, exactly?”

The Customs official blushed and giggled softly. “You know, the smashball players,” she explained. “Still…if you’re up for some early practice, I might know of a nice place…” she said leadingly, and Fei Long very nearly vomited at the hormone-driven display.

Gnuko nodded and tilted his head toward the ship. “Tell you what, you wait to file my ship’s landing for a few hours and I can get you those twelve hundred credits.”

The woman cocked her eye approvingly, and Fei Long marveled at the Lancer Sergeant’s deft manipulation of not only the woman’s sexual urges but also an equally powerful human desire: greed.

“Well…I suppose something could be arranged,” she purred as she placed her hands on his upper arms. “Of course, if you don’t show…”

“I’ll show,” he said as he flexed his arms, evoking a stifled gasp from the woman. “You just tell me where.”

The woman held his gaze for several seconds before pulling back and making some sort of entry on her data slate. A moment later, a small scrap of paper spat out from the device and she handed it to Gnuko. “Seven o’clock,” she said before turning and walking away.

All four of them took a moment to admire the view she presented, and then Gnuko said, “We’ve got to find a place to liquidate some of that jewelry; looks like you’re up, Strider.”

“That’s my final offer,” the jeweler said for the third time since negotiations had begun.

Strider tisked emphatically and shook his head. “You be knowin’ this ain’t no cheddar, man—this here be the stinky stuff,” he countered, gesturing to the handful of gem-encrusted jewelry. “No Imperial goods be comin’ to the Spine since the withdrawal; even Capital be short of Imperial branded shinies, man,” he said as though outraged.

The truth was that he had already managed to secure a higher value for the trinkets than they had expected by nearly ten percent. His methodology was unorthodox, in Fei Long’s opinion: whenever the jeweler declared his ‘final offer,’ Strider would argue with him, feign indignation, threaten to leave the establishment, and then add yet another piece of jewelry to the pile.

This amazingly obvious—yet, to Fei Long, completely novel—tactic immediately re-opened the negotiations. Fei Long was fascinated by just how quickly the negotiations reset each time Strider had pulled the simple, but surprisingly effective, maneuver. Not only did it keep the haggling going, but it also established a floor value to the jeweler’s subsequent offer.

“We be goin’ across the street,” Strider declared as he reached down to retrieve the half dozen pieces of jewelry. Sergeant Gnuko tensed, and Fei Long was likewise alarmed at Strider’s insistence on continuing the negotiations. They had already secured an offer of two hundred thousand credits, which far exceeded this particular mission’s needs. “Maybe the Carbon Consortium be makin’ a reasonable offer—they be knowin’ the stinky from the yellow,” he said as he turned to leave the establishment.

The jeweler tried to put on a stoic front, but even Fei Long—who was completely uninitiated in the ‘art of the deal,’ as it were—could tell that he wanted the jewelry enough to yet again increase the offer.

The three of them made to leave the establishment—Yide had remained with the yacht for security purposes—but just after Sergeant Gnuko had exited to the street, Strider stopped in his tracks and sighed.

“You be a tight one,” he grumbled as he turned back to face the jeweler. “Tell you what I be doin’,” he said, as though a thought had just occurred to him, “I be havin’ one more piece of sparkly here—belongin’ to my sister, you see—and she be tellin’ me I can’t accept any less than eighty thousand for it, man.”

The jeweler cocked an eyebrow incredulously and drawled, “We would be happy to appraise your sister’s bit of precious.”

“No, you don’t be hearin’ me too well,” Strider said with a wag of his finger. “There be no negotiation on this piece…but, if you be agreein’ to her price, I might persuade my client,” he jerked his thumb over his shoulder just as Sergeant Gnuko opened the door and re-entered the premises, “to accept your low-ballin’ offer on the others.”

The jeweler gestured to the countertop, over which was draped a black velvet cloth. “Please,” he said, and Strider reached into his jacket for the most valuable piece in the collection.

He produced it and placed it down on the countertop triumphantly, at which point even the jeweler could not keep his eyes from going wide. To Fei Long’s untrained eye, it looked like nothing more than a man’s ring with a broad, ovular surface like those on ancient signet rings.

“Is this…?” the jeweler asked, his eyes alight as they remained fixed on the ring.

“It be like this, man,” Strider said conspiratorially as he leaned across the countertop, “my sister be meetin’ a man—a right true piece of creeper waste, if you feel me proper—and he gives to her this ring as an engagement gift. But he done passed recently and she be fallin’ on hard times, savvy?”

The jeweler’s eyes dimmed slightly, but he was still clearly excited at the prospect of securing the ring. “May I?” he asked, and Strider gestured in the affirmative.

The jeweler took the ring in his hand and produced a monocle, which he affixed over his right eye, and began to examine it in far greater detail than he had done for the previous pieces.

The jeweler spent nearly five minutes in absolute silence as he appraised the ring, and when he was finished he said, “We would dearly love to help your sister move on from such an unfortunate chapter in her life. Your proposed price of sixty five thousand credits is acceptable to us.”

“Sixty five?!” Strider blurted, deftly snatching the ring from the jeweler’s hand before the other man could even react. “You must be cooked in the brain,” he scoffed as he made to pocket the ring once again. “Sixty five…the blasted monkeys would give me sixty five—you ain’t be seein’ an Imperial Ambassador’s ring in your miserable career, you pikey, you. That’s it; we be jammin’ outta here, man!”

They turned to leave once again, and the jeweler called out, “I apologize, I misheard your price. Seventy thousand will, of course, be acceptable.”

Strider stopped mid-stride and turned to scowl at the other man. “Whatcha got in those ears, man, little birds? ‘Cuz that’s all I be hearin’ in this place: cheap, cheap, cheap!”

“Your sister must understand,” the jeweler said, his visage hardening, “that simply carrying such an article without the proper custodial documents can be…problematic.”

Strider cocked his head and narrowed his eyes. “You be threatenin’ me, man? Do you know who I am?!” he snapped, prompting Gnuko to place a hand on his shoulder. Strider gave the Sergeant a quick look before grumbling, “We’ve an accord at seventy five.”

The jeweler, whose hand had very nearly clasped with Strider’s, easily withdrew before the deal could be sealed. “In light of your sister’s…unfortunate circumstances, I am authorized to acquiesce to your demand of seventy two thousand credits—but I fear that is my maximum.”

Strider stroked his chin thoughtfully. “So we be lookin’ at two hundred thousand for these,” he jingled the small pouch of jewelry, causing the jeweler to wince at the jewelry’s rough treatment, “and seventy three thousand for my sister?”

The jeweler looked ready to burst with outrage, but before he could speak he moved his hand to his ear. He was clearly receiving a message from a superior, and after a moment he nodded and extended his hand. “We have a deal.”

An hour later, after the articles had been painstakingly appraised, the group left the jeweler’s shop with more money than Fei Long could comprehend. With two hundred seventy three thousand credits, he was fairly convinced that he could construct the Sector’s finest grinder—a colloquial term given to a computer hacker’s central processing system.

“We be makin’ out right spiffy, I’d say,” Strider said, clearly proud of himself. “That was a smooth piece of work, if I do say so myself.”

“No,” Sergeant Gnuko said as he pocketed the credit chits.

“No?” Strider blinked as though in confusion. “What you be meanin’, ‘no’? I just got us near 80% retail—retail, man—and he says ‘no’.”

“No,” Gnuko repeated evenly.

“No?” Strider echoed. “Aww, c’mon now, man,” he said conspiratorially as he moved out front to hail a conveyance-for-hire, “every good negotiator deserves a slice of the pie to show for his good work, feel me?”

“No,” Gnuko said yet again, and Fei Long could not keep from grinning at the seesaw affair playing out before him.

Strider clucked his tongue as a conveyance pulled up before them. “I used to have my own ship, you know?” he muttered as they entered the boxy-looking vehicle. “Horse-traded my way into her, fought tooth and nail to keep her runnin’ and full of crew, and now look at me.” He sighed wistfully as he looked out on the bustling city, which was composed of architecture so wildly varied that Fei Long could only guess at half of the styles on display.

“We’ve got two hours before I meet the Customs agent,” Gnuko said, shifting topics as though Strider’s lamentations had fallen on deaf ears. “How do we reach your contact?”

“Oh, I see how it be,” Strider sniffed, folding his arms across his chest and jutting his chin defiantly. “You be needin’ ol’ Strider’s contacts, but you think he don’t be needin’ no fair compensation, do I get you clear?”

Gnuko rolled his eyes. “We’re not here for pleasure,” he said severely, and Strider snorted derisively.

“Be sure to tell that to your lady friend with the badge,” the former pirate countered.

Gnuko looked like he wanted to argue, but the conveyance’s driver said, “I enjoy a bit of drama as much as the next person, but I thought it fair to warn you that the meter is running.”

“Take us toward the stardock, please,” Fei Long said, drawing looks from his companions. He shrugged, saying, “I doubt any of Mr. Strider’s contacts will be based on the planet’s surface. Am I mistaken?” He had read the local laws regarding the transaction of military weapons technology, and it quite clearly read that such transactions were expressly forbidden on Capital’s surface—but they were conspicuously devoid of any such clauses regarding such activities taking place in orbit.

Strider mumbled something in a language which was unfamiliar to Fei Long, but Gnuko gave the other man a hard look which prompted the former pirate captain to sigh as he gave a longing look to a nearby ‘house of pleasure,’ if the advertising signage out front was accurate. “Aye, that be the way of it.”

“We’ll drop you two off at the yacht,” Gnuko declared, “and I’ll go see if I can work some information out of that Customs agent.”

“I believe the word you were lookin’ for was ‘pump’ some information from her,” Strider quipped, and the three of them quickly broke into laughter.

Chapter XXXVII: A Beast’s Cage

Several hours later, at nearly nine p.m. local time, Sergeant Gnuko returned to the yacht. Fei Long had kept a watchful eye on Strider—who had seemed far more nervous than Fei Long had expected him to be. But the former pirate had spent much of that time attempting to make contact with his connections on the planet—Fei Long had confirmed as much by monitoring every bit of data the shift Navigator had sent or received since they had returned to the ship.

The communications were conducted in a simple enough code that Fei Long had cracked in less than ten minutes, and surprisingly it did not appear that Mr. Strider was making any attempt to subvert their mission—or to gain freedom from his pressed service in the MSP.

“All right, I’ve worked a few things out,” Gnuko said as he set a data slate down on the table. “First things first: have you contacted any of your possible dealers?”

“I be doin’ more than ‘contact’,” Strider quipped. “We be havin’ a meet with an old brother of mine.”

“A brother?” Gnuko repeated warily.

“From another mother,” the former pirate said with a dismissive wave, “and father, for that matter. He be the one who helped get me into my first ship, man. He be good people; a rock-solid jammer right down to the deck, savvy?”

Gnuko gave Fei Long a quick look, and the young man nodded slightly. “Ok,” the Lancer Sergeant said after a momentary pause, “then it looks like I’ve got us a ride.”

“How is it that your documents permit you to travel to Capital?” Fei Long asked Sergeant Gnuko as the tiny, four seat spacecraft made final approach to their destination.

Gnuko looked down at his leg—the same one which had been severely damaged during the battle in the hyper dish junction so many months earlier—and began to rub it absently. “I wasn’t always a Lancer,” he said after a pregnant pause. “I was drafted ten years ago.”

Fei Long quirked an eyebrow in confusion, “I do not understand how conscription into military service would—“

The Lancer Sergeant laughed, cutting Fei Long off mid-sentence. “No,” he said with a grin, “I wasn’t drafted into the military. I was drafted by the Prometheus Peregrines—the smashball team.”

It took only a moment for Fei Long to process the revelation, and when he had done so it explained a great many things. “Why is there no record of this in your service record?” he asked, having already reviewed said record several times. Fei Long liked to know as much about his companions as possible—especially when they were likely to be armed.

“I changed my name just after the draft,” Gnuko replied absently as he looked out the nearby porthole at the station. “Somehow the old records never caught up with me,” he shrugged indifferently.

“So your status as a professional smashball player entitles you to traveling privileges to normally off-limits worlds?” Fei Long pressed, still uncertain if he understood the connection properly.

“No,” Gnuko said distantly, and Fei Long could sense that it was likely best not to push the subject much further, “I signed a sponsorship deal with a corporation headquartered on Capital. It’s pretty standard, actually,” he explained, “most trans-sector corporations base at least part of their holdings here, since Capital is widely considered the last bastion of pure capitalism…hence the name. But in order to qualify for the deal, I had to go through a bunch of hoops. Long story short: they paid to permanently upgrade my travel visa, but that’s all I ever got out of them.”

Fei Long wanted to ask several more questions, but he held his tongue and nodded respectfully instead.

“Here we are,” the pilot said as the craft pulled into position beside the massive space station. Fei Long estimated it was well over three miles across, and was of an old-style, spinning wheel design. The design was larger than a comparable facility equipped with grav-plating would need to be, but would also require substantially less power to operate due to the apparent gravity being generated by centrifugal force rather than artificial gravity plating. “Now, just because I’ve got the ok to fly up here doesn’t mean I’ll be overstaying my visit,” the pilot said sternly, and Fei Long detected yet another disbursement of funds was in the offing.

Gnuko was well ahead of him, and drew out a credit chit which he waved in front of the pilot’s nose. “You’ll get the agreed fifteen hundred, and another two thousand for the return trip. We both know you’ll be dead-heading it back to the surface otherwise so let’s just cut the haggling here, shall we?”

The pilot looked hesitant, but his expression turned sour and he grudgingly nodded just as the airlock seals engaged. A few moments later, the green light went on over the craft’s lone access hatch.

Sergeant Gnuko gestured for Strider to lead the way, and after swallowing an invisible knot in his throat, the former pirate did so. Gnuko gave Fei Long a concerned look, and the young man shrugged indifferently. All of this was unfamiliar to him; his primary task was to ensure that whatever components were acquired matched the Pride’s needs and were compatible with its older systems.

They climbed the ladder inside the boarding tub until arriving at the outer deck of the station. There were no guards stationed nearby. In fact, Fei Long was surprised to find the corridor completely empty. He produced his crane feather fan and began to fan himself, even though the temperature inside the station was by no means hot.

Strider dusted himself off—there had actually been a grime of unknown composition all over the inner surfaces of the tube through which they had just crawled—and pointed to the leftward passage. “It be this way,” he said before setting off.

Sergeant Gnuko gestured for Fei Long to go second, and he obliged. Having the Lancer Sergeant covering the group’s back did seem like the logical choice to him, and after a forty meter walk they came to a closed door with a security camera mounted above it.

“We be havin’ an appointment, man,” Strider explained while looking up at the camera. “Tell the maestro we be lookin’ to do real business.”

For several seconds nothing happened, but then the door slid open to reveal a massive Sundered who was almost certainly larger than Toto. The ape-man looked down at them with clear disapproval before gesturing for them to enter the chamber, which was apparently a lift.

The three men did so, and when the doors slid closed behind them Fei Long noticed Sergeant Gnuko sizing up the Sundered. They had brought weapons—including Fei Long, whose weapon had been cleverly disguised thanks to the efforts of Haldis, the Pride’s master smith.

The ride was surprisingly short, and when the doors opened Fei Long’s ears were greeted by the deep, punishing beat of an insanely powerful subwoofer. It seemed to rattle his teeth with each of its semi-rhythmic pulses, and the effect was so profound that he could barely even make out the words which accompanied the music—music which repulsed Fei Long, who had never cared for its ilk.

“Go,” the Sundered gestured, and the trio made their way into the chamber beyond. It was a club of some kind that was only half full, but the people who had come there were clearly enjoying the experience. The near-naked flesh on display was enough to raise Fei Long’s eyebrows seemingly every time he turned his head.

A heavily-tattooed man wearing little more than a pair of chaps and a dozen pieces of heavy piercings approached and bowed courteously. “My employer bids you join him on the balcony,” he gestured to the far side of the chamber. Somehow the man’s voice was clear amid the chaotic, pulsating music, and Fei Long suspected he had some sort of sound dampener operating when he spoke.

“Thanks, man,” Strider said, and the tattooed usher brought them to a staircase which was roped off with red velvet, and to Fei Long it looked like something from one of his old holo-vids.

They ascended the staircase and a bouncer at the top, who made Sergeant Gnuko look small—and would have possibly been even larger than Kratos, who was easily the biggest Tracto-an Fei Long had ever seen—stopped them for a frisk.

Strider lifted his arms, and after a brief pat down the bouncer let him by. Fei Long did likewise, and aside from a disdainful look at the crane fan, the bouncer allowed him to pass.

Gnuko was next, and surprisingly to Fei Long, he openly produced the vibro-knife which had been tucked into his belt. The bouncer folded his arms and blocked the entry to the balcony, and for a moment Fei Long was convinced that the affair would come to blows.

But the bouncer placed a hand to his ear, apparently having received a message from his superior, and grudgingly stood to the side while giving Gnuko a dark look.

The Lancer Sergeant wordlessly made his way to the nearest table, which had been set in advance of their arrival, and the trio each took a seat. Fei Long noted that there was no entry other than the one they had just used, and to make matters worse there was an additional pair of bodyguards stationed at the base of the stairs which led to the balcony.

Fei Long decided there was no purpose to be served by indulging his anxiety, so he picked up a nearby menu and examined the logo. “The Other Tenth,” he read the establishment’s name out loud. He did not recognize the significance of the phrase, and heard Gnuko chuckle at his side.

“That’s clever,” the Lancer Sergeant said with an approving nod.

“I do not recognize the term,” Fei Long said, annoyance creeping into his voice.

“You know what they say,” Gnuko said with a shrug, “about possession being nine tenths of the law.”

Fei Long had actually never heard that particular expression, but he quickly grasped the meaning and had to agree that it was a reasonably clever choice for an ‘acquisition’s expert’ to name his base of operations.

“Here he comes’,” Strider said, tilting his head across the dance floor toward a thickly-built man wearing what looked to be an opaque-visored combat helmet. His face was completely obscured by the lowered visor, but he had long locks of knotted hair—Fei Long had heard them called ‘dreadlocks’—spilling across his broad shoulders.

The man was flanked by a pair of women dressed—if the term could be applied to them in their current state—in tiny bands of stretchable material which only barely covered the parts of their bodies which Fei Long had grown up believing to be private.

The way the women moved suggested they were more than pleasant-looking accessories, and the way their eyes swept across the dance floor was decidedly predatory. Even the outrageous curve of their bodies—which appeared to be identical, Fei Long quickly noted, deducing that if they had not been born twins then they had been made twins at the hand of a skilled surgeon—was not enough to distract him from the fact that they were clearly intended to serve as some sort of security.

The man ascended the stairs with the women following behind, and Strider stood up to greet him with a broad, beaming grin on his face. “Marcus! You be lookin’ thicker than last we spake. It’s good to be seein’ you,” he declared as he held his arms out for an embrace.

The thickly-built man removed his helmet and Strider froze mid-step as the man handed the helmet to the woman on his left. He shook his dreadlocks out almost lazily before making eye contact with Strider and drawling, “That ain’t the look of a man glad to see me.”

Sergeant Gnuko tensed, and even Fei Lon was unable to keep his nerves completely in check. The meeting had taken an unexpected turn, but Fei Long did his best to keep a calm exterior as he gripped his crane feather fan tightly.

“L-L-Lynch,” Strider eventually stammered as he took a slow, cautious step backward, “fancy meetin’ you in the Tenth.”

“Things changed since you was here last,” the thickly-built man said as he looked out on the dance floor. “There’s new management in the Tenth.”

“Tell us who your friend is, Marcus,” the woman holding the helmet purred, and Fei Long had to resist the urge to gulp as she took a step forward and let her eyes lick Strider’s body from his toes to his top.

“Marcus?” Strider repeated in obvious confusion.

The dreadlock-sporting man shrugged. “Ain’t but a few people seen the man since he moved up here; my keepin’ his name was the girls’ idea of facilitating a….what’d you call it, girls? Oh yeah,” he snapped his fingers as though in revelation, “a ‘smooth transition’.”

“So…” Strider began hesitantly in a tremulous voice, “what do I call you now, Marcus or Deshawn?”

“You can call me Marshawn if it makes you happy,” Lynch replied casually before taking a deliberate step toward Strider. “Now where’s my money?”

“Look…Lynch,” Strider stammered as he backed away from the advancing man, and Sergeant Gnuko stood slowly from the table but said nothing as the Pride’s Navigator stammered, “there was problems, see? We be doggin’ it out on the Rim, just like I told you was planned—“

“You ain’t been on the Rim in two years,” Lynch interrupted as he cracked his knuckles. “Little bird told me you got hooked into that bidness over in 25 with the Blood Lord. You wanna try lyin’ to me one…more…time?” he asked, punctuated the last words with a menacing step which saw Strider back into the balcony’s waist-high rail.

“Lynch, don’t be like that, man,” Strider said, his voice very nearly a plea as he held his hands up defensively. “I be gettin’ the money—“

“You mean you don’t got it?” Lynch interrupted, and Sergeant Gnuko took a step toward the pair. Without looking, Lynch wagged a finger in Gnuko’s direction and said, “Tsk tsk tsk, don’t be steppin’ to me in my own house lest you want to do the man dance.” Lynch cocked his head, as though he had just realized something, and turned to face Gnuko, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

Sergeant Gnuko shook his head. “We’ve never met…I’d remember.”

Lynch narrowed his eyes and wagged a finger in Strider’s face. “Nah…I know him from somewhere. Where do I know him from, Percy?”

“Percy?” Fei Long repeated in surprise, unable to hold his tongue at hearing Lynch refer to Strider by that name.

Lynch furrowed his brow in confusion before a knowing, lopsided grin spread across his face. “Ah, you’re goin’ by that stupid-ass name again. That it?”

Strider looked ready to argue, but his shoulders slumped slightly and he nodded.

Lynch burst into laughter and took several steps back from Strider as the woman with her hands free brought him a drink. He eyed Gnuko thoughtfully, without an apparent care in the world as he down the glass in one shot. “Nah…I know you from somewhere,” he said as he squinted before slamming the glass down on the table in apparent frustration. “I never forget a face…”

“The name’s Russell Gnuko,” the Lancer Sergeant said tightly.

Lynch shook his head briefly before recognition dawned in his eyes. “Arake Shielding Technology,” he said triumphantly as he leveled an accusing finger. “You’re the Peregrines’ right tackle who quit the league before his endorsement deal with Arake went through!”

Gnuko grimaced before nodding wordlessly.

“Now that right there’s amazing,” Lynch grinned. He gestured for one of the women to pour a drink, and she obliged. He then handed it to Gnuko and shook his head, “I lost thirty grand on you during the Sub-Sector round your last season.”

“I didn’t allow a sack all game,” Gnuko bit out as he accepted the drink but, pointedly, did not partake.

“I know, I know,” Lynch said as he grabbed another glass and poured himself a drink. “I was bettin’ on Peters beatin’ you for a sack in the fourth. You always did tire as the game went on,” he snickered. “But that game, that night, you was straight-up boss of the field. Wasn’t that your nickname…‘boss’ somethin’ or other?”

“Sorry I had to disappoint you,” Gnuko nonplussed. “But maybe we can get down to business?”

“Bidness?” Lynch repeated in his strange accent. He shrugged indifferently as he cast a brief look at Strider, “Only bidness I see is the matter of an outstanding debt which I fully intend to collect—with two years’ worth of interest.”

“How much does he owe you?” Gnuko asked, slicing an annoyed look at Strider.

“It ain’t your problem,” Lynch said dismissively as he gestured to the dance floor. “Why don’t y’all head down to the dance floor, bump and grind awhile, and let me do my thing up here. After that’s taken care of,” he said with a hard look at Strider before cracking his neck, “we might could talk some bidness.”

“Lynch, I—“ Strider began.

“Not another peep, Percy,” Lynch snapped, his eyes and nostrils flaring in unison. “Or I’ll take more than your precious ship, feel me?”

Sergeant Gnuko began to chuckle, and Fei Long could not help but think that all of this would seem perfectly normal in a cheap rate holo-vid. Except the drama unfolding in front of him was really happening, yet Sergeant Gnuko somehow managed to maintain his calm throughout.

“What’s so funny, boss man?” Lynch asked, his eyes seeming to twinkle with amusement.

“Do you want to tell him, or should I?” Gnuko turned and asked Strider pointedly.

Strider, who had been a virtual chatterbox during the mission to that point, was speechless as he looked back and forth between Gnuko and Lynch.

“Tell me what?” Lynch asked, the twinkle disappearing from his eye.

“It seems your collateral was captured during a recent scuffle,” Gnuko said, folding his arms across his chest and shrugging. “It couldn’t be helped, apparently.”

Lynch narrowed his eyes and looked between Gnuko and Strider for several seconds before saying, “You better not be joking me, boss man.”

“No joke,” he said with an emphatic shake of his head. “Strider—or Percy,” he corrected with a sideways glance at Strider, “is currently paying off another debt—one he owes to me.”

For a moment Lynch seemed ready to explode, but he threw his head back and laughed as he reached down for a handful of nuts, or some other form of snack, and popped a few crunchy bits in his mouth. “How much he owe you?” he asked playfully.

“More than he’s likely to repay,” Gnuko said with a dire look at the former pirate captain. “But I’m not letting him out of my sight until he does.”

“Well then,” Lynch said, popping the rest of the snack in his mouth and swallowing it without chewing, “looks like we got ourselves a dilemma. See, ol’ Percy over there took a loan from me in the amount of half a mil. That number, plus interest—and takin’ into consideration my currently generous mood—comes to just over a million, and he gets to keep most of his body parts. You gonna stand for it?”

“No,” Gnuko replied simply, and the female companions, or guards, or whatever they were took up flanking positions to either side of Lynch.

“See?” Lynch said with a dramatic sigh. “Now you tell me how we’re gonna work our way outta this mess, ‘cause my only idea ain’t likely to be fun for any of us.”

“Lynch—“ Strider took a step forward.

“You just cost yourself a pinky,” Lynch said, pointing a finger at the former pirate without breaking eye contact with Gnuko. “Keep flappin’ them gums and I’ll take the whole hand.” Lynch then reared back slightly as he asked Gnuko, “You ain’t got a problem with that, do you?”

Gnuko shrugged. “He doesn’t need all his fingers to do what I need him for.”

“Smart man,” Lynch said as he took out what appeared to be a pair of pruning shears and stepped toward Strider. “Now, before I forget, best I collect this one before you run off again.”

Strider blanched but strangely, at least to Fei Long, he made no attempt to stop Lynch from taking his left pinky finger and putting it in the shears.

“Of course,” Gnuko said casually, “I might have to take my business elsewhere if you harm him too much. Like everyone, I’ve got a reputation to protect and my people know that Percy belongs to me. It wouldn’t look good if he showed up missing a digit and I wasn’t the one that took it.”

“Not my problem,” Lynch said as he gripped the shears in his right hand and prepared to remove Strider’s finger.

“You’re probably right; you look like you’re doing well here,” Gnuko said lazily, but Fei Long could clearly see the tension in the Sergeant’s eyes. “With the Bowl coming to Capital, I’m sure it’s been easier than ever to move your merchandise.”

Lynch cocked his head and looked toward Gnuko with an interested expression. “Best spit it out, boss man,” he said shortly. “I ain’t one for so many words. What you lookin’ for?”

Gnuko hesitated briefly, and Fei Long decided it was his turn so he stepped forward and said, “We heard you might be in possession of class four shield generators, fifteen thousand meters of military-grade power relays, large-scale atmospheric recyclers, capital class heat sinks no smaller than tier four—“

Lynch snorted derisively. “What’d y’all do, find a salvage project that needs more than a fresh coat of paint?”

“—and a dozen Artemis-class lasers, complete with turrets,” Fei Long continued when Lynch had finished, “as well as a look at any other naval weaponry you might be willing to part with.”

“And an assault shuttle with a cargo compartment no smaller than one hundred cubic meters,” Gnuko added pointedly. “It doesn’t have to be cute, just fast and able to take a punch.”

Lynch narrowed his eyes and looked at Strider, who had managed to remain conscious—and to keep from soiling himself. “That’s a tall order, boss,” he said after a pregnant pause during which Fei Long’s heart rate doubled.

“That’s why we came to you,” Gnuko countered easily.

“Oh, I’m good for the stuff,” he said thoughtfully, “but y’all ain’t given me nothin’ but words yet. I’m gonna need some action before I decide against dropping y’all out the nearest airlock.” Too quick for Fei Long to see, Lynch picked Strider up off the floor with such ease that he concluded it likely that Lynch had extensive cybernetic augmentation.

Gnuko produced a handful of credit chits, “Does a hundred thousand get your attention?”

Lynch easily held Strider by the wrist with his left hand while his right still held the pruning shears. “It’s enough to keep me from killin’ y’all,” he allowed casually, and much to Fei Long’s surprise the people dancing below seemed hardly to notice the scene unfolding before him. “But Percy’s still gotta pay.”

“You cut off his finger and we don’t have a deal,” Gnuko said, and the two engaged in a silent contest of wills in which Fei Long was glad not to have found himself included, “leave the fingers alone and we can transact.”

Lynch’s eyes briefly wavered as he looked at the credit chits and shrugged, “That’s fair.”

He let go of Strider’s wrist, and only when he had done so did the former pirate captain scream as he fell to the dance floor below. Fei Long ran to the rail and looked down to see Strider had fallen nearly twenty feet, and was rolling on the ground in agony. It seemed that he had broken his left leg, but he was quite clearly alive.

Lynch approached Gnuko, put the shears away and then reached out for the credit chits. Gnuko relinquished them, and the thickly-built Lynch appraised them quickly before nodding in approval.

“Best get your friend outta here,” he tilted his head toward the dance floor as he pocketed the credit chits. “My customers don’t exactly appreciate that kind of ruckus.”

“And the merchandise?” Gnuko pressed.

Lynch cracked a grin, “I’ll contact you, boss.”

Gnuko narrowed his eyes briefly before nodding. “There’s one thing I’m curious about,” he said.

“What’s that?” Lynch asked.

Gnuko turned to face the bouncer, who had observed the scene with barely-concealed amusement. The Lancer Sergeant then turned back to Lynch and asked, “Where did you get your nickname?”

“What can I say?” Lynch shrugged, and his female companions resumed their flanking positions with each draping herself over one of his arms. “I’m just ‘bout that action, boss.”

Chapter XXXVIII: Patching Holes

“No, no, no,” Garibaldi shouted from across the hangar deck. “You can’t twist them like that. The thermostats in these things are delicate. Get it? De-li-cate,” he repeated the word with unnecessary emphasis on each syllable. The Tracto-an operating the heavy work suit did not seem overly concerned, prompting the Chief to gesture to the hastily-constructed heat sink. “I know the thing looks big and strong, but it won’t be worth its weight in scrap if you keep jerking it around like that.”

“Problems, Chief?” Middleton asked after work had resumed on the sink.

“Oh, no, Captain,” Garibaldi quipped, “we’re smooth as silk here. Give us another week and we’ll put Thermo-Plex out of business.”

Middleton suppressed a sigh, knowing there was no way in Saint Murphy’s Blessed Bowl that the slapped together heat sinks could perform even half as well as a properly-built unit produced by a company like Thermo-Plex. “We don’t need much out of them,” he said reassuringly.

“Well, that’s good,” the Chief snapped, “because the way things are looking we might not get anything out of this junk.”

“Chief,” Middleton said, stepping toward his longtime friend with an unyielding look, “I understand this is difficult. But we have to do what we can with what we have.”

Garibaldi shot Middleton a warning look, but the Captain had no intention of backing down—especially in front of the crewmembers currently working to assemble the patchwork heat sink.

The Chief Engineer held his tongue but moved toward Middleton and lowered his voice, “Have you ever tried to take your own advice, Tim?”

Middleton was surprised at the query, and its tone, but thought it best to indulge his longtime friend. “If you’ve got something to say, Chief, now is as good a time as any.”

Garibaldi shook his head sourly. “You know that this crew’s running up against the ragged edge. Most of them are either kids, or primitives, or both,” he said with a pointed look at the seventeen year old girl operating the heavy lift suit. She was Tracto-an, and her name was Elsa; Captain Middleton had familiarized himself with each of his crew’s personnel files. “They aren’t hardened military personnel, and they need to see their Captain is in control.”

“Nobody forced them to come here,” Middleton countered. “And they know that they’re free to disembark as soon as the ship’s put to rights and we reach a safe port.”

“See, that’s not enough,” Garibaldi said strictly, and Tim Middleton was more than a little surprised to hear his friend speak to him in such a fashion. “Bah, forget it,” he grumbled as he turned to walk away.

“Spit it out, Chief,” Middleton said before the other man could walk away.

Garibaldi whirled around, and Middleton saw unpolished anger in his old friend’s eyes. “I’ve stood by without speaking for too long already: it’s time you made up with the doc, Tim.”

Captain Middleton blinked once…then twice…then a third time as he attempted to process Mikey’s declaration. “Chief, my private life—“

“Look around you, Tim!” Mikey waved his hand angrily to encompass the shuttle bay. Half of the lights were flickering, and of the forty crewmen and women working inside the compartment were only there to patch up battle damage incurred during the fight with the Dämmerung. “Nobody on this ship has a private life any more, least of all you!”

Garibaldi’s face had turned red, and Middleton suspected his own features were very nearly a matching shade. He stepped forward and said coldly, “I’m your commanding officer, Chief. If you’ve got personal matters you wish to discuss—“

“There’s nothing more personal than placing your faith and trust in your leaders,” Garibaldi snapped. “Especially when those leaders make decisions that could cost you your life. You’ve asked a lot from this crew, Captain, and we’ve given everything we have. It’s time for you to give something back.”

Middleton took another pair of steps toward his friend, but Garibaldi wasn’t backing down and soon the two men stood nearly nose to nose. “You don’t know the first thing about what happened between us, Chief. Don’t go poking your nose into places it doesn’t belong.”

“I know plenty,” Garibaldi retorted, his voice lowered to a growl, but by then the scene between the two of them had already garnered the attention of every crewmember in the hangar bay. “You think you’re the only person who’s been lied to, Tim? Do you think you’re the only person on this ship who has lost something they didn’t even know they had?” Garibaldi shook his head condescendingly, “Look around you, Captain; this crew is on the brink, and they’re here because you—because we—asked them to follow us. We’ve all lost something, and it’s high time you cut the ‘woe is me’ act and moved on with your life. At least you’ve got people left who care about you,” Mikey finished, his eyes brimming with angry tears. “Don’t piss it away, Tim. For Murphy’s sake, this crew needs to know its Captain has his own life under control, or what faith will they have that you can possibly have theirs under control?”

“That’s enough, Chief,” Middleton said unyieldingly, even though his old friend’s words had the ring of truth to them. He knew that his crew looked to him, but he had never really considered it likely that the situation between himself and Jo had become an issue for anyone but the two of them. He was also more than a little surprised to hear Garibaldi had learned the nature of his and Jo’s argument. “I suggest you get back to work,” he said, very much wanting to avoid sending his Chief Engineer to the brig for insubordination.

Garibaldi raised a finger accusingly, but Middleton gave him a look which he hoped would convey that he had received his friend’s message loud and clear.

Thankfully, the Chief appeared to understand as he wordlessly turned and made his way back to the patchwork heat sink. “No, no, no,” he barked at the crew assembling the sink, “that’s the intake side; you’ve got the blasted valves backward!”

Middleton turned and made his way to the doors. His com-link chimed as he reached them, prompting him to answer the call, “This is the Captain.”

“Sergeant Gnuko’s team has returned, Captain,” Winters reported. “He’ll be docking in an hour.”

“Thank you,” Middleton acknowledged before severing the connection. He knew he needed to give Mikey’s words a considerable amount of thought, but right then he had more important things to deal with.

Like getting his ship put back together so he could complete his mission.

“So we’ve got a meeting set up with this arms dealer, Lynch, three days from now,” Sergeant Gnuko concluded. “I’m not an expert, Captain, but it does look like this guy can get us enough gear to at least get us underway. It’s possible he can even provide everything he says he can…in fact I’d probably lay odds that he can, given his peculiar personality.”

Middleton nodded slowly, both impressed and concerned with how quickly the team had made contact with the arms dealer. “Mr. Fei, did you have a chance to check any of the merchandise?”

Fei Long nodded. “I was unable to inspect his entire inventory, but the few samples he provided were indeed compatible with the ship’s systems.”

“He even had the Artemis lasers?” Middleon asked doubtfully.

Gnuko nodded hesitantly. “He has those, and more weapons besides,” he said, giving a look to Mr. Strider. Apparently there had been an altercation of some kind during the meeting, and Mr. Strider’s leg had been broken. Before leaving Capital the team had taken him to a hospital and had the wound tended to, but he was quite clearly still uneasy about something.

“Mr. Strider,” Middleton turned to the former pirate, “how do you know this ‘Lynch’? Is there anything we should be aware of before completing the deal?”

Strider looked uneasily between Gnuko and Fei Long before leaning forward. “They call him ‘The Beast,’ and he be known by every law dog this side of the Verge, savvy?”

Middleton furrowed his brow in confusion as he gave Gnuko a look. The Lancer Sergeant nodded grimly, “His nickname fits him, sir. Apparently during the last two years he’s consolidated a considerable portion of the Sector’s black market under his banner. The only reason we were able to see him at all was because of prior dealings between him and Mr. Strider.”

“I see,” Middleton mused, recalling an entry he had read referencing a criminal figure nicknamed ‘Beast.’ It was a far from original moniker, but apparently this particular man had been pursued by no fewer than eleven separate law enforcement agencies throughout the Sector. He had somehow beaten every single case which had successfully been brought against him, and Middleton didn’t even want to think about how such a high-value target could manipulate such events to his benefit. “Do we have any other options?” he asked, and Gnuko shook his head doubtfully.

“We don’t think so, Captain,” the Lancer Sergeant replied. “Not if we want to get it all in one shot; I’m sure we could acquire the gear piecemeal from other suppliers but it would take a considerable amount of time.”

“Agreed,” Middleton grudged. He knew that dealing with a man of Lynch’s stature was risky, but the Pride was little better than a hulk in her current condition. “All right, we proceed with the deal. I’ll have Chief Garibaldi compile a list of priority equipment just in case there’s any last-minute dispute over the value of our currency. Dismissed.”

“Yes sir,” Gnuko acknowledged as he stood. Strider did likewise and left the room, followed by Fei Long, but the Lancer Sergeant remained behind. When the others had left he asked, “What kind of incidents have there been in my absence?”

Middleton slid a data slate across the table and gestured at it, “The short version is that nothing’s changed. If we don’t get Atticus’s people under control, and soon, the only options available to us are ones I can’t entertain.”

Gnuko nodded grimly as he picked up the slate. “I understand, sir. I’ll deal with it.”

Middleton shook his head. “I’ve been reading up on their culture, and I don’t think a classic approach is going to work. If we throw him in the brig and issue an ultimatum, the odds are he’ll resist and every hour he spends in confinement is another hour his people have to work themselves up into a furor that may literally tear what’s left of this ship apart.”

“I wasn’t thinking about throwing him in the brig, sir,” Gnuko said darkly.

Middleton nodded, having understood as much even without Sergeant Gnuko’s insistence. “I’m aware of your options, Sergeant, but his people aren’t likely to respond well to them. Even if he was killed—and I’m not saying that’s what we should be contemplating,” he said with a hard look that he hoped made clear that he was making no unspoken insinuations. The last thing he wanted was for the people under his command to be involved in something like the death of a subordinate, which was what Gnuko was suggesting might be necessary. “But even if he was killed, I doubt you could get them all in line before the situation deteriorated to the point of widespread violence.”

“Then what do you suggest, Captain?” Gnuko asked.

The Pride’s captain sighed as he rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Double the guards at the lift access points and make sure each guard is armed with sonic rifles. I doubt a pistol would bring down a Tracto-an.”

“Isn’t that just forestalling the inevitable, sir?” Sergeant Gnuko pressed, a hint of defiance creeping into his voice.

Middleton stood from his chair and met the other man’s gaze levelly. “I’m not against making hard decisions, Sergeant,” he said harshly. “But Atticus and his people have stood alongside the rest of us every time they’ve been called.”

Sergeant Gnuko softened his visage slightly and nodded. “I just can’t keep from wondering…was it a mistake for us to bring them aboard?”

Middleton had wondered the same thing recently, but shook his head. “No, it was the right move,” he said confidently. “But their culture is even more fascist than we had initially believed. It’s up to us to integrate them, is that clear?”

Gnuko didn’t look convinced, but he nodded and said, “We’ll follow your orders, Captain. I saw that the Tracto-ans are being rotated through the work areas like the shuttle hangar, alternating between Atticus’ group and the others,” he said, clearly thinking aloud. “I’ll head down there during Atticus’ next shift. I might be able to suck some of the wind out of them with some old-fashioned fisticuffs. Besides,” he said grimly, “I could use a diversion right about now.”

Middleton arched an eyebrow. “Walt didn’t seem to think going at them head-on was a great idea,” he said doubtfully.

Gnuko snorted. “Respectfully, sir, I’m not Walter Joneson,” he said tightly. “I’ve got to do this my way.”

Middleton held up a hand by way of apology but he threaded his voice with iron, “That isn’t what I meant, Sergeant, and you know it.”

Gnuko’s eyes flared briefly but he quickly regained his composure. “I know, sir,” he sighed, “that trip to Capital brought back memories I wish had stayed buried. I won’t let it interfere with my work, sir.”

The Lancer Sergeant raised his hand in a salute, which Middleton returned before saying, “Deal with your people as you see fit, Sergeant, but keep it above board.”

“Yes sir,” the Sergeant replied before exiting the room.

Fei Long had thought about his revenge for nearly every waking minute since Atticus had placed his hand on him in sickbay. He had considered every possible angle, every possible reaction, and after several days of perfecting his plan he knew it was time to act.

He had made a purchase during his time on Capital, unbeknownst to the other members of the team. He had logged into a local pharmaceutical procurement business’s virtual kiosk and purchased a packet of entirely legal chemicals which he was about to put to use.

He approached the ship’s laundry services area, which was attached to Environmental—the department to which he had initially been assigned after arriving on the Pride of Prometheus. Before he opened the door to enter the laundry station, he saw an acquaintance lugging a bag full of laundry that likely weighed as much as he did.

“Sun,” Fei Long greeted the man in his native tongue. He was twenty four and had been recruited from Fei Long’s home world at the same time as Fei Long and Lu Bu, “Allow me to help.” He reached up and took the bag from the man, who nodded graciously as he stopped to wipe the sweat from his brow.

The bag was even heavier than it looked, serving as yet another reminder of Fei Long’s physical ineptitude. But he wrestled the sack of soiled clothing into the laundry station after Sun Xian opened the door for him. “My thanks, Long,” the other man said after the laundry had been deposited in one of the bins.

“Of course,” Fei Long replied easily. A quick glance at the bag he had just carried showed it belonged to Engineering, prompting Fei Long to scan the bank of laundry machines until his eyes came to rest on the one washing the clothes he had come for. “We do not speak as often as we should,” Fei Long said easily as he reached into his pocket for the vial of powder he had procured on Capital.

“You are busy,” Xian replied dismissively. “How is Lu Bu?”

Fei Long nodded agreeably, “She is sleeping in her quarters under Dr. Middleton’s observation. I am told she will make a full recovery.”

“That is good to hear,” Xian said, once again wiping sweat from his brow. “Laundry detail…this is absurd. I should be working on the air cyclers on Deck Five; they have not worked properly since the battle.”

“I am confident this will be a temporary arrangement,” Fei Long assured him. “Once we have repaired the ship to the captain’s satisfaction I am certain that things will return to the way they were.”

“I hope so,” Xian grumbled. “What brings you down here, Long? I heard you were on some sort of away mission.”

Fei Long nodded knowingly as he reached into the pocket opposite the one storing the powder. “I remembered you,” he said casually, producing a data crystal.

Xian cocked is head, “What is it?”

Fei Long leaned in and lowered is voice, “The last six seasons of General Disarray.”

The other man’s hand went to his mouth. “You…how?” he managed to gasp.

Fei Long feigned indignation, “You believe this beyond my abilities?”

Sun Xian shook his head quickly, “Of course not. But…I…thank you,” he stammered, reaching out for the crystal.

Fei Long withdrew the crystal slightly. “I need something, first,” he said conspiratorially, “and I need it quickly.”

“What can I get for you?” Xian asked skeptically.

Fei Long hesitated deliberately before sighing, “I need a new adjustable micro-spanner. I broke the last one, and if I check another out under my own name the quartermaster will make me fill out two dozen forms. I dearly want to finish the last round of modifications to my attack dogs before going to sleep tonight. The ideas are still fresh in my mind, but I doubt—”

Xian held up a hand haltingly. “Fine, I will get it for you. But…I need to see a sample.”

Fei Long had expected as much, so he plugged the crystal into his data pad and played the introduction sequence to the popular—and banned, at least on Shèhuì Héxié—holo-vid series. It was entirely too predictable and formulaic for Fei Long’s liking, but that was the case with nearly all such media.

“Jessica cannot die!” Xian declared incredulously after seeing the recap of the previous season. Fei Long then deactivated the pad and slipped the crystal into his pocket.

“The spanner,” Fei Long said, tilting his head to the door, and Sun Xian nearly leapt toward the door.

He had almost reached it before stopping and turning with a concerned look on his face. “This is my station,” he said, a note of worry in his voice, “I cannot abandon it…”

“I will remain here,” Fei Long assured him. “It is only laundry, after all,” he added pointedly.

Xian looked concerned, but he then shrugged and a gleam entered his eye. “I will return in ten minutes,” he declared confidently before leaving the laundry station.

Finally alone in the room, Fei Long went to the laundry machine containing Atticus’ clothes and found that it was already finished and merely awaited placement in the individual crewmembers’ net bags.

He did not have time to fold all of the laundry, which would have been ideal, so he sorted through until he found Atticus’ articles. There were three full sets of clothing belonging to the War Leader, but Fei Long was only concerned with the undergarments.

He produced the bottle of powder and very carefully sprinkled it across the inner surface of the War Leader’s underwear—specifically the parts which would touch the Tracto-an’s groin. He knew that putting too much would possibly alert Atticus that something was amiss, but the odorless, colorless powder would almost certainly go undetected otherwise…at least until it had begun to take effect

After repeating the process with each of Atticus’ undergarments, he quickly folded them and placed the articles on the shelf with the War Leader’s service number properly presented. It was standard procedure for crewmembers to claim their own cleaned laundry, but even if that had changed Fei Long was certain that Atticus would receive his own clothing.

After all, Fei Long thought with a snicker as he began folding other clothes to cover his activities, no one would mess with Atticus’ clothes.

Fei Long pocketed the powder just a few seconds before Xian returned, proudly holding a micro-spanner—which Fei Long actually did need for his projects.

“Long, you did not need to do that,” Xian said graciously.

“It is the least I can do,” Fei Long assured him as he gestured to the half-finished pile of laundry. “Can you finish the rest?”

Xian nodded anxiously, and Fei Long traded him the data crystal for the micro-spanner before leaving the laundry station.

Chapter XXXIX: A Showdown

Fei Long awoke quickly to his alarm, having set it so that he would have time to reach the shuttle hangar before Atticus’ duty shift began there.

He quickly dressed himself, and picked up his crane feather fan from its resting place near his bed. He gripped the fan tightly in his fingers, thinking that he still had time and opportunity to abandon his plan.

But Bu had been right when she had suggested there was little—or nothing—he could do to a man like Atticus. And that realization had spurred his mind into concocting the very plan which he would now see through to its completion.

He knew there was risk involved, even if everything proceeded as he expected, but he also knew that he would be unable to look at himself in the mirror if he did not stand up for himself—and for the others who Atticus deemed ‘beneath’ him.

So he set off for the shuttle hangar with the crane feather fan gripped in his hand, with images of what may await him in less than twenty minutes flashing in his mind.

Most of the thoughts were unpleasant, but he was past the point of caring. He was going to do his very best to earn the respect of his crewmates, and if that was not enough then he knew he could accept the defeat and move on.

He entered the shuttle bay and saw that it was nearly devoid of workers. Only a pair of technicians was present, and they were apparently working to repair a power conduit which powered the main airlock doors.

Fei Long looked around, and determined that a position near the exterior doors would most likely be out of the way, and that was where he wanted to be—at least initially.

The minutes ticked by, and Fei Long sat atop a crate awaiting the arrival of the next shift of workers. The shifts were primarily broken into two groups: the group of Tracto-ans under Atticus, who were mostly Lancers; and the group of Tracto-ans which had been recruited by Bu, most of whom had suffered significant injuries prior to joining the Pride’s crew, and were therefore deemed by Atticus and his group to be unworthy, or failures, or something of that nature.

Fei Long did not care to understand Atticus’ bigoted thinking, but he would very much like to confront him on that matter. Unfortunately, he had to pick his battles and he doubted that he could weave the two conflicts into one effectively.

The doors slid open and the Tracto-an workers began to file into the hangar. Fei Long smirked at seeing they were wearing the same clothing he had helped fold, which meant he had a sixty percent chance Atticus would be wearing the contaminated undergarments when he arrived.

Atticus himself strode into the hangar in the first wave of arrivals, and he quickly made eye contact with Fei Long. Fei Long kept his expression neutral as he fanned himself laconically, and the hulking Tracto-an spat on the deck in open derision before he began issuing orders to his people.

Like a well-oiled machine, the crew began to set about the tasks before them. Most of the work looked to involve the repair of several suits of power armor—an activity which even the Tracto-ans had learned to carry out with minimal supervision—and Fei Long quietly awaited the fruit of his covert plan to reveal itself.

His heart was pounding in his ears, his skin had gone clammy, and his arms began to tremble so badly that he had to stretch them high above his head to avoid looking as nervous as he felt.

Then he saw it happen, and his lip curled into a sneer. Atticus stood from his crouch and adjusted the groin of his work suit before once again crouching down and resuming his work. Not a minute later he repeated the action, and a nearby Tracto-an made some sort of good-natured quip in his direction which Atticus received with a snarl more befitting a hound than a human.

Thirty seconds after that, Atticus began to rub his groin. He was circumspect at first but the gesture became more pronounced and vigorous with each passing second.

Fei Long began to snicker, increasing his volume in direct proportion to Atticus’ increasingly intent crotch-rubbing—which now resembled a small war between his hand and his groin, with only his pants serving as mediator.

The rest of the Lancers took notice of their leader and a few even joined Fei Long in snickering, although they were considerably more circumspect than he was.

Atticus took note of Fei Long’s delight at his expense and his brow lowered thunderously. “What did you do, runt?” he bellowed, briefly controlling the urge to relieve the sensation spreading around his manhood. He stormed across the hangar with hot fury burning in his eyes, and Fei Long briefly doubted the wisdom of his actions.

But before the other man could reach him, Fei Long stood on top of the crate and yelled, in his best Tracto-an, “If you have the courage to do so then face me as a man, the way we came into this world: naturalis!”

The entire hangar went silent, and even Atticus stopped his murderous charge just a few steps away from the crate on which Fei Long stood. But his stupefied look was quickly replaced with one of triumph, “You are not worthy of challenging me in the old ways,” he sneered, “neither are you fit to die on my blade.”

“If that’s an offer to keep it non-lethal,” Fei Long retorted smoothly, the anticipation of a few moments earlier having largely subsided, “then you have my word that I won’t kill you, either.”

A round of guffaws echoed through the chamber and Fei Long saw a Tracto-an leave the shuttle bay. Fei Long had hoped that would not happen, preferring the matter remain more or less secret until its conclusion, but he also knew the Tracto-an was unlikely to seek a security detail to stop the affair. The more likely possibility was that he had left to tell his friends of the ‘runt’s’ impending destruction at the hands of Atticus.

Atticus did not join the others in their laughter, and it was clear to Fei Long that the Tracto-an was still greatly perturbed by the sensation spreading throughout his lower half. If the label on the container was accurate, then everything in the vicinity of his nether regions either felt numb or as though it was on fire. The street name for the powder was ‘powdered heat,’ which was simply a concentrated form of muscle relaxant used by professional masseurs—in significantly less potent dosages, of course—to work out kinks in hard-to-massage muscles.

“I will not kill you,” Atticus growled, “but I will make you wish I had.”

Just a few minutes later, Fei Long had stripped off his clothing and Atticus had done likewise. A small crowd of Tracto-ans had gathered, many of whom were off-shift, and Fei Long could not help but be self-conscious as he fanned himself in an attempt to appear calm and collected.

The truth was the same trembling which he had felt in his arms had returned and spread to the rest of his body to the point where he could no longer keep from shivering as though he was freezing. The hangar was actually quite warm, which prompted him to bounce around on his feet to keep from appearing frightened—which, if he was honest with himself, would be a mild way of describing his current state of mind.

Compared to Atticus and his statuesque physique, Fei Long’s body was an artist’s lame joke. Atticus was two meters tall if he was a meter, and his muscles bulged in ways Fei Long had previously thought to only be possible in cartoons. Fei Long, on the other hand, was over a head shorter than the Lancer and possessed a thin frame which could only charitably be considered ‘wiry.’

The area surrounding Atticus’ manhood was red from his incessant rubbing and scratching, and the Lancer balanced a metal pry bar in his hand as he swung it this way and that. He presumably did so out of habit since no one in the shuttle bay could possibly think the contest was close enough to warrant a serious appraisal of the larger man’s weapon.

Fei Long looked down at his naked body and thought with no small measure of satisfaction that he at least measured comparably to the larger man in one physical aspect.

“Where is your weapon, runt?” Atticus spat as he entered the circle.

Fei Long continued fanning himself before looking pointedly at the fan. “I will need only this fan to defeat you,” he said, and for a moment he saw the familiar face of Haldis scrunch up in a quickly-concealed smirk. Atticus was none too popular with the crew of the Pride, at least not among those crewmembers whose assignments fell outside of his particular wing of the Lancer contingent.

“You make a fool of yourself,” Atticus growled. “Enter the ring or walk away in disgrace, but do so now.”

Fei Long took a deep breath and nodded as he stepped toward the ring. He knew that merely entering the ring meant he had accepted the challenge—and that once he did so there were no true rules to govern what ensued.

That last part was something he was heavily counting on.

He placed a foot inside the chalk-line circle drawn on the deck of the Pride’s hangar bay, and no sooner had his second foot touched down than Atticus charged him like an enraged bull intent on goring him to death with the first blow.

But Fei Long was ready, and with a flick of his wrist not altogether unlike that of a cowboy cracking a whip in an ancient holo-vid, he snapped the crane fan toward the charging Tracto-an and half of the feathers detached in unison before sailing through the air between the two men.

Atticus, true to his superior physical abilities, actually batted two of the feathers away with his bar before the rest landed on his body. The only part of his body which lacked one was his right arm, in which he held the crude, metal, club. The tiny threads which connected the feathers to the fan’s handle were almost invisible, and Fei Long was certain that the Tracto-an did not even notice them as he continued his charge.

When Atticus was a mere two steps from Fei Long’s position, the young man pressed a pair of buttons cleverly concealed within the fan’s handle, causing Atticus’ body to seize violently as a high-voltage electric charge coursed through his extremities.

Amazingly, he did not fall upon taking the ensuing step. For a moment Fei Long imagined that the rage in his opponent’s eyes radiated palpable heat as the distance between them closed.

Diving to the side, with neither grace nor regard for appearance, Fei Long only barely managed to keep the club from crushing his skull. The weapon bashed his left shoulder with such incredible force that had he been holding the fan in his left hand he most certainly would have dropped it. Had that happened, the paralyzing current which sent Atticus crashing to the floor after his second step would have been discontinued, and Fei Long would have been utterly at the other man’s mercy.

But he did maintain control of the fan, even as a cry of pain passed his lips unbidden by his conscious mind. He rolled to the ground several meters from Atticus’ spasming body, and quickly regained his feet with a triumphant look on his face.

There were discontented murmurs from all around the shuttle bay, but no one stepped forward to intervene. Apparently he had correctly interpreted the letter, if not the spirit, of Tracto-an law—if such a barbaric custom could be called ‘law’.

He stepped toward the hulking warrior, who had been rendered almost completely defenseless by Fei Long’s concealed weapon. “Submit,” Fei Long yelled, and even in the midst of the violent seizures, Atticus managed to swing his club clumsily at Fei Long’s legs.

The young man easily sidestepped the attack and pressed another button on the fan’s handle, causing the current to nearly double. The muscles in Atticus’ back seized more violently than the rest of his body, and the club was thrown from his grip by the involuntary contractions of his muscles.

“Submit,” Fei Long repeated, saliva flying from his mouth as he circled toward the Tracto-an’s head.

The Lancer’s body was clearly no longer under his control, and Fei Long knew that a normal person would pass out after fifteen or twenty seconds of the electrically-driven seizures. He assumed a Tracto-an would prove only slightly more capable of withstanding the current—but he had still asked Haldis to install a full three minutes’ worth of power cells into the device, just to be certain.

“If you do not submit, you will fall unconscious,” he declared, leaning down as close as he dared and meeting Atticus’ eyes as often as the other man was able to do so amid the spasms. “I doubt your people would follow a warrior who was rendered unconscious by me, of all people,” he added snidely, truly savoring the sweet taste of victory. He knew there would be consequences for his actions, and he was more than ready to accept them. “Submit, Atticus, or you will awaken in sickbay without even your precious vanity intact.”

The crowd had inched its way closer to the scene, and their expressions were a mixture of amusement and anger.

Atticus tried to say something, but whatever it had been was swallowed by his spasming throat before it could get to his tongue. “What was that?” Fei Long said, lowering the current just enough that Atticus might possibly be able to speak.

“Su—sub—mit,” he bit out, and Fei Long deactivated the weapon immediately.

“There,” he said as he leaned down and met the other man’s burning gaze with a fierce one of his own, “it would seem that you finally recognize your betters, would you not agree?”

Atticus tore the adhesive feathers from his body with a pair of swipes by his right arm and, before Fei Long could even react to that gesture, the Tracto-an grabbed him by the neck with the same hand and lifted him into the air while regaining his feet.

“I will crush the life from you,” he growled, and Fei Long felt something pop in his neck—something he hoped was not entirely important.

“You will do no such thing,” a deep, grating voice said from the crowd, and the pressure of Fei Long’s neck diminished for only a moment before once again tightening.

“Stay out of this, coward,” Atticus spat. “I will deal with you soon enough.”

“You will deal with me now,” the voice said in a commanding tone that silenced every assembled Tracto-an. Only after Atticus dropped him to the floor did Fei Long realize the speaker had been Kratos, the one-eyed Tracto-an who served with Lu Bu’s Recon Team.

“I will deal with you when I see fit, old man,” Atticus growled. “A coward who attacks me in a place of healing is in no position to dictate terms of honor.”

“Honor?” Kratos spat. “Is that what this is about? The boy beat you at your own stupid game, and even after submitting for all to see you move to strike him down? That is not honor, Atticus.”

“What would a heretic like you know of honor?” Atticus demanded, and Fei Long rolled slowly to his feet as he took several steps away from the two men. They stood very nearly chest to chest, and only then was it apparent just how massive Kratos was, even compared to the War Leader. Their heights were comparable, but Kratos was considerably thicker in both the trunk and limbs.

“More than you, whelp,” Kratos sneered.

“You are a parasite, Kratos,” Atticus retorted, and Fei Long slowly became aware of the tension rippling through the crowd—tension he had previously felt, but at only a fraction of its current magnitude. “It would be a boon to Men if I struck you down here and now.”

Kratos grinned, and it was an expression that sent chills down Fei Long’s spine. “It would be unfair for me to fight you,” the one-eyed man said through bared teeth, “even at your best.”

“I do not fear you, old man,” Atticus snapped, but Fei Long very clearly noted that neither man had initiated actual, physical, contact with the other just yet. “But if a clean death is what you want, I will give it to you here and now.”

Kratos nodded slowly before he began stripping off his clothes. As he did so, a quiet murmur ran through the crowd as the assemblage saw hundreds of scars covering his massive, herculean physique.

Unable to help himself, Fei Long noticed that while he may have considered himself at least comparable to Atticus below the belt, to compare himself to Kratos would have indeed been laughable—with the ridicule directed entirely at Fei Long.

“You can choose my weapon, Atticus,” Kratos offered as he turned his back on the other man and entered the circle. Fei Long backed well away from the circle, but the press of bodies—almost entirely Tracto-an—prevented him from egressing entirely. Blood was about to be spilled, and for the first time since awakening to his alarm clock Fei Long actually thought he had made a mistake in confronting Atticus.

“I would give you a vibroblade,” Atticus said, “but they are behind lock and key.”

“It’s a small matter,” Kratos replied, rolling his head around slowly before planting his feet and standing motionless. “I am waiting, whelp.”

Atticus gestured for one of his people to retrieve some nearby tools, including the pry bar he had used against Fei Long, and they brought them forward. Atticus settled on the bar, while sending a sturdy-looking hammer to Kratos.

The one-eyed Tracto-an accepted the hammer and held it easily at his side. The two men’s eyes never wavered from the other’s, and Atticus stepped toward the circle as he spun the bar over in his hand. “I will kill you, heretic,” he promised as his first foot crossed the line of the circle.

Fei Long turned to leave, knowing that merely by being present without at least attempting to notify security personnel of the fight would make him an accessory of some sort. But as he tried to squeeze through the crowd, the sounds of clashing metal rang throughout the shuttle bay.

Before turning to see the battle unfold he caught sight of Sergeant Gnuko, who was standing near the back of the line watching the event intently. It took Fei Long only a fraction of a second to realize that the Sergeant had no intention of interrupting the melee, so he turned back to watch the battle unfold like the rest of the onlookers.

Atticus and Kratos had changed positions inside the circle, with Atticus circling slowly around the area where the larger man had stood a few seconds earlier.

Neither man appeared to have been wounded, but Kratos stood as still on the opposite side of the circle as he had done at his previous spot. Atticus moved purposefully to his right and raised his pry bar in prelude to an attack.

The bar came down as the War Leader lunged across the circle toward Kratos, and the one-eyed warrior brought his seemingly tiny, one-handed hammer up into the bar. The impact of the weapons once again rang throughout the chamber, and Fei Long could feel the crowd tense as one. For the first time since arriving in the shuttle bay, the Tracto-ans—whether they were Atticus’ people or the so-called outcasts—were responding with absolute unity to the battle unfolding before them.

Amazingly, Kratos managed to sidestep Atticus’ follow-up attack as the one-eyed man backed across the circle until coming to a stop very near his first position. Atticus snorted and gripped the bar in both hands before squaring his stance and moving methodically toward the larger man.

This time, Kratos padded to his left with a measure of grace of which he should have been incapable due to his bulk. Atticus cut off the circle with a pair of quick stutter-steps before bringing the bar in an upward arc aimed at the larger man’s flank.

But again, Kratos parried the attack perfectly with his hammer and very nearly sent Atticus sprawling out of the circle with the clearly unexpected power of his blow.

“Your moves are as common as your name,” the one-eyed man growled as he moved across the circle, and Fei Long found he was holding his breath in anticipation—and it appeared he was not alone in doing so.

“Save your breath, old man,” Atticus snarled before lunging across the ring and, at the last moment, pivoting on his lead leg as he brought the bar around in an attack aimed at the larger man’s leg.

This time, Kratos made no attempt to parry the blow. He instead leapt into the air and delivered a crushing knee into Atticus’ upper chest. The blow would have killed any ordinary human, or at least crushed their ribcage, but the combination of superior reflexes and massive physique allowed Atticus to roll with the blow well enough that he appeared to retain at least some small portion of his breath.

“My breath?” Kratos taunted as he turned his back on the recovering Atticus in a clear display of disdain. “This is no contest,” he said in disgust as he turned just in time to see the charging Atticus barreling toward him with murder in his eyes.

The War Leader stuttered left, right, then left again before lashing out with his right leg. The kick landed on Kratos’ flank just as the larger man’s hammer clanged against the bar which Atticus had used to block the counterattack.

And while, Atticus had landed the first blow of the match—weapon strikes were considered ‘true blows’ in such duels, while punches and kicks were often disregarded due to lower lethality—it very nearly saw him thrown from the circle as Kratos pivoted his incredible bulk with Atticus’ leg trapped against his side.

But the War Leader’s balance was superb, and he crow-hopped several steps while lashing out at the larger man’s head with the pry bar. Kratos kicked his foe’s leg out with a perfectly-timed sweep, knocking Atticus’ bar off-target in the process as the smaller man was sent to the deck.

Rather than leaping on top of his opponent, Kratos shook his head in mock pity as he turned to the crowd. “This is your leader?” he mocked, his voice filling the now-silent chamber.

Atticus roared in anger as he kipped up to his feet—yet another display that would have seemed impossible for men of their size—and charged across the circle toward his adversary.

The War Leader brought the bar up, down, left, and right in a complex, but coordinated sequence of short, chopping attacks punctuated by the occasional thrust. Kratos did not parry each blow, but it was clear even to a novitiate fighter like Fei Long that the older man anticipated much of the sequence as he stepped this way and that, forcing Atticus to follow him across the circle on his terms.

The clang of their makeshift weapons became furious, with each new impact drowning out the echoes of the previous one. Atticus landed a pair of blows to Kratos’ massive chest, but the one-eyed man had yet to land a blow of his own aside from the early knee. He seemed to be fighting in a purely defensive fashion, which seemed odd to Fei Long.

But with each successive exchange, the young man became increasingly convinced that the affair was proceeding precisely as Kratos wished it to. It was a sentiment which the crowd appeared to share as well, with even Atticus’ loyal followers beginning to don anxious expressions.

The two broke apart and Atticus was clearly frustrated as he drew hot, heavy breaths. Kratos was breathing deeply as well, but his seemed more controlled than the other man’s.

“This is no contest,” Kratos grumbled as he looked down at the hammer in his hand. He then inexplicably tossed it well outside the circle and beckoned with his now-free hands for Atticus to approach.

A low, barely-audible growl rippled through the crowd, and Fei Long could do nothing but watch spellbound as Atticus attempted to seize on the opportunity with a new flurry of offense.

Atticus swung his bar upward once again, this time aiming for Kratos’ head, but the one-eyed man spun quickly out of the way and delivered a thunderous right hand into Atticus’ flank. But the War Leader brought the bar around for a follow-up, and the one-eyed Tracto-an was unable to avoid the blow as it struck the side of his head with a sickening crack.

The crowd gasped as one, but the scar-faced warrior impossibly seemed unfazed by the blow as he reached for Atticus’ right wrist with his left hand to secure a grip on the War Leader’s bar-wielding arm.

Atticus drove his knee into Kratos’ groin, and this time the older man reacted in a predictable, if muted, fashion as he staggered back a pair of steps. The War Leader took the opportunity to deliver an inside leg kick to Kratos’ right shin, and very nearly toppled the one-eyed warrior. Had it not been for Kratos’ unbreakable grip on Atticus’ wrist, he almost certainly would have fallen.

Kratos drove an uppercut into Atticus’ chest with his free hand and stopped the other man’s momentum completely, but Atticus was not yet through with his attack. He delivered another knee to Kratos’ groin, but this time the larger man trapped the leg with his right hand.

With a motion so fluid, so precise, and so perfect that it should have been recorded for posterity, Kratos dropped his body down while pulling Atticus’ right arm across his shoulders and elevating the War Leader’s leg with his massive, right arm.

Fei Long had heard Lu Bu describe the maneuver as a ‘fireman’s carry,’ since it was how a firefighter would often carry an injured person out of a burning building, but he had never seen it used in combat before.

Atticus’s body went completely inverted, and he barely managed to get his left hand between his head and the deck before Kratos drove him into the metal with more force than any human had a right to generate—or survive.

Amazingly the War Leader was not killed outright, nor was he rendered unconscious, but his arms flailed wildly as he Kratos reached for the bar with his right hand. He had never relinquished his grip on Atticus’ right wrist, and the smaller Atticus scrambled for all he was worth in an effort to escape from beneath Kratos’ bulk.

But try as he might, the larger man was simply too strong and too practiced. The contest quickly devolved to a war for control of the bar and, slowly but surely, Kratos managed to twist Atticus’ body onto his right side. The one-eyed man reared up and cocked his right hand for a crushing blow to Atticus’ head, but Atticus bucked upward with his hips and managed to knock the larger man off-balance momentarily. As he did so, Atticus turned his head sharply to the side and sunk his teeth into Kratos’ left forearm, causing a short geyser of blood to erupt from the old warrior’s body.

But in doing so he created an opening for Kratos, who still had Atticus’ bar-wielding right arm pinned to the deck. Kratos drove his forearm across Atticus’ face, but that blow was only incidental as his fist smashed into its real target: the War Leader’s right hand.

The bar fell from Atticus’ fingers after the blow landed, and a murmur went up through the crowd as Kratos released his foe’s wrist and quickly clamped both hands around Atticus’ head—tearing a not-insignificant chunk of flesh from his own arm as he did so. He drove his fingers into the other man’s eye sockets, causing the war leader to scream in agony as he tried desperately to pull Kratos’ hands free from his head.

Fei Long was unable to avert his eyes while he watched with morbid fascination as Kratos leaned forward and growled something in Tracto-an to Atticus before crushing his skull and sending a series of spasms through Atticus’ body.

Apparently unsatisfied with the kill as it was, Kratos gripped the War Leader’s head in his hands. He looked up and immediately found Sergeant Gnuko, and their eyes locked for what seemed to be an eternity before Kratos snapped the fallen War Leader’s neck with an emphatic twist that was as much for theater as effect. The resulting sound was far less dramatic than Fei Long had expected, resembling more of a sucking sound than a cracking one, and Atticus’ body quickly went limp.

Kratos stood to his full, imposing height and swept the assemblage with a disapproving gaze. “This is your leader?” he waved his hand at Atticus’ fallen corpse, making no attempt to hide his disgust. “Who would avenge him?” he asked, drawing long, even breaths as he began to pace back and forth.

Fei Long became acutely aware that over fifty Tracto-ans—and a handful of non-Tracto-ans—had filled the shuttle bay, and they currently surrounded the victorious Kratos. It would be a small thing for Atticus’ followers to bring him down, even though none was armed with any better weapons than the combatants had been.

The tension in the room heightened, but all at once it seemed to disappear as the Tracto-ans—both those who had followed Atticus and those who had not—adopted a collective look of acceptance.

“You people,” Kratos growled, spitting on the deck as he continued to pace, but Fei Long noted that the spittle landed well away from Atticus’ body, “you are all fools. Do you hear me? Fools!” he bellowed, his voice grinding like a glacier over a mountainside.

Several of the crowd actually looked ashamed for a moment before collecting themselves, and Fei Long dearly wished he had brought a recorder to capture the moment for later review.

“You are given the stars themselves,” he continued with open disdain, “and the chance to carve your names in them for all time, and what do you do? You bicker and argue like children over your lineage and past deeds. The past means nothing!” he roared. “A true warrior seeks to exploit every advantage, yet you close-minded fools,” he waved his hand, sending a spray of blood to the deck surrounding him, “carry your accursed bigotry with you like a baby clings to a doll in the darkness.”

“You are a dishonorable heretic, Kratos,” a Lancer said in a raised voice as he stepped forward.

“If your version of honor and precious dogma turns you into him,” he pointed at Atticus’ fallen body with an outstretched finger, “then I am proud to be called heretic by you!”

“We know of Blue Fang Pass, Kratos,” another Lancer stepped forward, “and we know of your continued heresy in the River of Stars. We will never follow you.”

A murmur of assent echoed throughout the chamber, and Kratos began to chuckle. The chuckle quickly turned into a mocking laughter before he retorted, “And I would never lead you! Each of you swore an oath when you joined this warship,” he said, his eyes burning with anger. “You swore your oath to your new Warlord…or have you forgotten?”

Even the two Lancers who had stepped forward looked hesitant, and Kratos shook his head contemptuously.

“You, who calls me ‘dishonorable’,” he said, taking a step toward the first man who stepped forward. “You are nothing but a coward who hides behind honor when it suits him and ignores it when it does not.”

“You insult me—“ the Lancer began, but Kratos stepped toward him and the other man took an instinctive step back.

“What of it?” Kratos growled. “Would you break your oath to satisfy your supposed honor?”

“You call me ‘oathbreaker’?” the Lancer cried, and the crowd seemed to tense at the prospect of yet another battle.

“I do!” Kratos declared. “You have all broken your oaths to your true Warlord,” he turned slowly to address the entire assemblage.

“Satisfaction,” the Lancer yelled. “I demand satisfaction!”

“And I would welcome your pitiful attempt to gain it,” Kratos said with no small amount of amusement as he turned to face the man, “for that would mean you are as weak and dishonorable as Atticus!”

“What foolishness is this?” the second Lancer asked, his tone considerably more respectful than the first. “Atticus kept to the Ways of Men; he fought and died with honor.”

“No!” Kratos whirled to face the second Lancer. “Atticus shamed himself—and all those who serve with him—by placing tradition and pride above his sworn duty!”

There was a pregnant pause, and the crowd exhaled in unison. Even the two argumentative Lancers paused and briefly looked at each other before taking half-steps back toward the crowd.

“Now you understand,” Kratos said grimly before turning to face Atticus’ corpse in silence for twenty seconds. “And it took the death of this fine warrior to make you see,” he said, his voice no longer filled with disdain. “Your bigotry killed him, and may yet kill others. Your pride…Atticus’ pride…they mean nothing on this ship.” He turned to face Sergeant Gnuko, who pressed through the crowd wordlessly with a set of duralloy manacles in hand. “The only pride which should concern you is Captain Middleton’s—your true Warlord.”

Gnuko came to stand before Kratos, and the size difference between them was noticeable. Kratos stood a head taller than the Lancer Sergeant, and the difference in their girth was even more pronounced, but Sergeant Gnuko did not appear anxious in the least as he held out the manacles.

Kratos looked down at the manacles pointedly before meeting the Sergeant’s gaze. He then placed his hands in the bindings, which automatically locked around his wrists. The Lancer Sergeant gestured to the door, “You know the way to the brig.”

“I do,” Kratos agreed before walking calmly toward the exit. The crowd parted around him, and a hushed round of murmurs made its way through the throng.

“The rest of you,” Gnuko said heavily as he turned to face them each in turn, “are confined to quarters until further notice. Move out.”

For the first time, the crowd seemed uncertain how to proceed. Then the first outspoken Lancer turned pointedly and made his way to the exit. He was followed by a pair of others, then by the second outspoken Lancer. The throng became an orderly file as they wordlessly left the shuttle bay, leaving only Fei Long, Sergeant Gnuko, and a handful of technicians who had been working on repairs to the hangar prior to the altercations.

Sergeant Gnuko turned to face Fei Long, who suddenly felt very self-conscious. The Lancer looked him up and down before shaking his head, “I don’t even want to ask how you got caught up in this, but until Captain Middleton can review this you’re also confined to quarters.”

Fei Long nodded, knowing that the worst was most definitely yet to come. But a question was burning a hole in his mind, and had been doing so since the start of the fatal battle between Kratos and Atticus.

“Sergeant…” he began hesitantly, and Gnuko gave him an impatient look before the young man turned to face Atticus’ body, “why did you not stop this?”

Gnuko also looked down at the fallen War Leader. “I thought you were supposed to be smart,” he muttered before fixing Fei Long with a piercing look. “There was no stopping this, Long…not without spilling a whole lot more blood and dividing the crew even further.”

“Then…this was your plan?” Fei Long asked numbly. The idea that he had been manipulated into unwittingly acting in someone else’s plan was simply unthinkable to him.

“No,” Gnuko said, his voice tinged with regret, “not least of which because I couldn’t have done it. But even if I had, they would never have listened to me afterward…and at least half the people who just walked out of here would never have been given the opportunity.” He looked out toward the corridor for several seconds and shook his head, “I’ve had the privilege to stand alongside some great men, and some not-so-great men. I thought Atticus was the former, but I was wrong…I have no idea about Kratos.” Gnuko shook himself visibly and pointed to the corridor, “Don’t make me put you in restraints.”

Fei Long nodded and, after collecting his clothes, made his way back to his quarters without even a shred of the satisfaction he had hoped to feel from facing, and even conquering, his greatest fears.

Chapter XL: Disappointment & Strengthening Bonds

“After I specifically said I didn’t want him killed!” Middleton fumed as Sergeant Gnuko stood at attention before him. “And don’t try telling me that you got there after the deed was done.”

“No, Captain,” Gnuko said, his eyes fixed forward.

The Pride’s commander walked around his desk and came to stand in front of the Lancer Sergeant—who outweighed him by nearly as much as Middleton’s total bodyweight—and looked into the other man’s eyes. “Look at me, Sergeant,” he said coldly, and Sergeant Gnuko reluctantly met Middleton’s gaze. “Tell me how you would deal with a subordinate who, after receiving explicit instructions how not to proceed in a delicate situation, turned around and at the first opportunity,” he yelled the last two words, “countermands those orders, resulting in the death of a crewman—an officer, no less?”

Sergeant Gnuko made as if to speak, but held his tongue instead and shifted his weight slightly before resuming attention.

“Oh,” Middleton said hotly as he feigned interest, “you’ve got something you’d like to say, is that it?”

Again Gnuko looked ready to say something, but he shook his head instead, “I’ll accept whatever punishment you deem necessary, Captain.”

“Oh, grow up, Sergeant,” Middleton snapped before pacing several times in front of the other man. “You think you’ve got me over a barrel, is that it?”

Gnuko’s brow furrowed, “Sir?”

“You know as well as I do that I can’t pull you out of rotation, Sergeant,” he laced the rank with venom as he said it, “so you think you can do an end-around on me and I’ll be powerless to stop it. There’s a word for that, Sergeant: mutiny!”

“Captain, I would never—“

“You just did!” Middleton cut in angrily. “You blasted well just did, Sergeant Gnuko, and now you’ve put me in a position I had dearly hoped to avoid.”

“Sir,” Gnuko said, meeting Middleton’s eyes with a hard look that made the Captain’s choler rise even higher, “it was unavoidable.”

“Don’t you think I know that!?” Middleton bellowed, spittle flying from his lips and landing on Gnuko’s chin. Captain Middleton took a deep breath and shook his head in bitter disappointment, “Do you have so little faith in my ability to command that you honestly think I didn’t know that?”

Sergeant Gnuko’s brow furrowed even more than before, “Then why—“

“Because by not informing me beforehand, you took responsibility for Atticus’ death,” Middleton interrupted, trying as hard as he could to contain his anger. “The Admiral already has it out for me; I doubt my career—let alone my command of this ship—survives my next meeting with the man. I could have taken that heat on my way out, Sergeant, but you took the option away from me. In case you don’t understand what that means, I’ll lay it out for you,” he added as he took a step back and felt his nostrils flare with each breath, “in doing so you have cast a shadow over the records of every single one of your crewmates—some of whom need their careers, Mr. Former-Smashball-Star!”

“I don’t see—“

“I can see that!” Middleton threw his hands in the air, feeling a powerful urge to grab something—anything!—and hurl it against the wall. He saw the data slate containing the previous shift’s report and he smashed it against the desk before doing precisely as his urge suggested.

The slate exploded into a shower of fragments against the bulkhead, and Middleton knew he needed to calm himself but he was fairly certain that was an impossibility at present.

He took long, hopefully calming, breaths as he regained some semblance of control. Thankfully he did manage to calm himself somewhat, so he continued tightly, “When Admiral Montagne learns about this he’ll be forced to sack someone, Gnuko. I’m as good as a lame duck right now; there was no need for you to get involved.” He closed his eyes as he felt his temper beginning to flare once again, “You should have trusted me, Sergeant.”

Silence hung over them for several minutes until Gnuko said, “Permission to speak, Captain?”

Middleton was tempted to deny the request, but he knew that would be unfair so he opened his eyes and nodded, “I wish you had been this concerned with my permission before this unfortunate event, but I guess that’s no reason to deny you the opportunity to do so now.”

Sergeant Gnuko fixed Middleton with the look he had been hoping to see: resolute, steadfast and, for lack of a better term, righteous. “You’re more important to this ship—and this fleet—than I could ever be.”

“You don’t know—“

“Yes I do,” Gnuko interrupted, much to Middleton’s surprise. “I am a former smashball player, Captain—and I was a blasted good one. Do you know why I quit?”

“I don’t see how this is relevant, Sergeant,” Middleton sighed bitterly.

“I’ll tell you why it’s relevant,” Gnuko said, his eyes flaring, “because I knew that no matter how hard I tried, I could never fill my predecessor’s shoes. I tried—blast me to the Pit, I tried,” he cursed, “but the simple fact was that no matter how hard I tried, I would never be as good. I’d be living in another man’s shadow, and no matter what I did that shadow would never go away. Do you know who that man was?”

Middleton felt his eyebrows rise as he began to understand. “You played for the Peregrines,” he said matter-of-factly, even though he had never actually seen that information. Apparently the Sergeant’s records were incomplete for some reason or another, and they had been unable to update them without the ComStat network—or a trip to Gnuko’s home world.

“That’s right, sir,” Gnuko replied, “but more to the point it was—and will always be—Walter Joneson’s team.”

Captain Middleton leaned back until he was half-sitting on his desk. “And what does that have to do with this, Sergeant?”

“I heard he had joined the service…some sort of specialized Commando unit, naturally,” he snorted, his voice slightly tremulous as he explained, “so I decided to do the same thing. I’d already made enough money to set my family up for life, so I thought…” He took a deep breath and clenched his teeth, “I thought that if I joined up I could maybe beat him at soldiering, sir, even if I’d never live up to him on the gridiron. But it’s pretty clear I’ve failed to clear even that bar,” he said bitterly before fixing Middleton with a piercing stare. “His shadow is even larger here than it was under the bright lights; the Pride has gone along just fine without him, and he’s twice the…well, twice the anything that I’ll ever be. There’s no chance I’ll be missed, sir.”

Middleton stepped toward the Lancer Sergeant, matching his stare with an unyielding one of his own. “If any of us believed that, you’d have been off my ship long before now. Do you think this ship is full of has-beens and rejects?”

“Sir?” Gnuko asked in unmasked confusion.

“You heard me,” Middleton said coldly, knowing it was time to be a commanding officer rather than a sympathetic ear, “because if that’s your opinion then maybe you should get off this ship.”

Gnuko bristled and squared his shoulders to Middleton, “This is the best ship in the fleet, sir. We’ve done things that others could only dream of, and overcome odds that would make any bookie blow his brains out.”

“I don’t think you believe that,” Middleton challenged, but it was all for show. He just hoped that Sergeant Gnuko’s roiling emotions would prevent him from seeing that just now.

“Of course I do, sir!” Gnuko protested hotly. “I’ve stood beside these people in the Demon’s own fire and would gladly give my life for any one of them.”

“Then shape up, Sergeant,” Middleton snapped. “You’re the C.O. of the Lancers on this ship because there is no one I would rather have—trust me, I had options.” He actually had been presented with several options which, at least on paper, had been superior to Russell Gnuko in several ways. But Captain Middleton was a firm believer in cohesiveness, and Sergeant Gnuko had proven himself to be an invaluable member of the Pride’s crew time and time again. “So either you respect my command decisions—including who I place in charge of my most critical departments, like the Lancer contingent—or you don’t, but I suggest you take forty eight hours in solitary confinement to think it over. We can talk again after you’ve done so. You’re dismissed.”

“Yes sir,” Gnuko said without flinching before snapping off a salute and turning to leave.

“And Gnuko,” Middleton said as though it was an afterthought, prompting Sergeant Gnuko to turn just before the door, “you made a hard call down there—and in the end it was probably the right one. The issue is one of trust, Russell; I already knew I could trust your judgment…but I need you to trust mine if this is going to work.”

Sergeant Gnuko hesitated before walking up to Captain Middleton and presenting his hand, “I understand, Captain…thank you.”

Middleton accepted his hand and nodded. “Now, report to the brig…but make sure things are still stable among the Tracto-ans first.”

“Of course, sir,” Gnuko said before repeating a formal salute and exiting the captain’s ready room.

Middleton sat down in his chair and briefly held his head in his hands, knowing that Kratos had quite possibly saved the ship by taking Atticus out of the picture the way he had.

But what Sergeant Gnuko didn’t know—what nobody outside of a pair of Environmental technicians knew—was that Middleton had recorded the entire scene unfold live via a concealed camera he’d had placed in the shuttle bay in anticipation of this very situation.

The only reason he had not intervened directly was because he had been reviewing shift reports when Fei Long had made his move, and by the time he saw what was happening Kratos had already stepped into the ring in preparation for the fight with Atticus.

He was genuinely disappointed that Gnuko had not called him, but he was also proud of the man for making what amounted to a command decision and standing by it. He knew that a proper military tribunal should have been convened to address the situation, but he also knew that he had more pressing matters to attend to than following the Murphy-blasted rules every time the book said he should.

He had a mission to complete, and he was going to complete it before he started second-guessing himself.

Too many lives depended on it.

Chapter XLI: Shopping

“The Captain says if you’ve been cleared for light duty then you may accompany Mr. Fei and Strider,” Sarkozi said, and Lu Bu felt a wave of relief.

“Thank you, ma’am,” she said, raising her hand in salute.

“You’ll need to check a vibro-knife out of the armory,” Sarkozi said as she signed off on Lu Bu’s request form.

Lu Bu shook her head, careful not to do so too quickly as she had been instructed by Doctor Middleton. “This one has a knife,” she explained, having completed the repairs to Sergeant Joneson’s old weapon during her recent period of convalescence. Doctor Middleton had tried to stop her from doing even that, but Lu Bu was mortally certain that she would spontaneously explode if she did not do something of value while lying in bed for nearly every waking minute.

“Ok,” Sarkozi said with a nod. “I’ve assigned two additional Lancers—Li and Chen—to the mission as well. Li is rated on the yacht’s piloting interface, so he’ll stay with the ship at all times.”

Lu Bu quirked an eyebrow in surprise, “Should we expect conflict?”

Sarkozi shook her head. “No, but with Sergeant Gnuko temporarily suspended and tensions aboard the ship ratcheting down after the,” her lip curled contemptuously, “event in the shuttle bay, the captain thought it prudent to provide additional security for your cargo.”

“I understand,” Lu Bu said, although she could not quite understand why the XO seemed to revile the ‘event’ in the shuttle bay. Lu Bu had been surprised when she had heard of them, and foremost among the surprises was hearing that Fei Long had managed to subdue Atticus—even if he had used underhanded methods in doing so.

But hearing that Atticus had met his death at the hands of another Tracto-an—specifically, one of those who Atticus and his people had held in open contempt—was no great surprise to her. Atticus had been an overbearing bigot and a fool, and history showed that men like him—including Lu Bu’s own namesake from ancient history—did not generally see old age, and their ends were categorically unpleasant.

“Good luck, Corporal,” Sarkozi said as she handed the data slate bearing Lu Bu’s orders back to her.

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Lu Bu said as she accepted the slate.

Finally, she could return to duty!

Fei Long looked at Lu Bu’s still purple-and-brown face and sighed, knowing better than to suggest that she should have remained aboard the Pride of Prometheus. In truth he was glad for the opportunity to spend some time with her; Doctor Middleton had guarded her like a hen guards her eggs ever since she had returned from the suicide missions.

They had not spoken about Fei Long’s involvement in the incident which took place in the shuttle bay, but Fei Long knew that Lu Bu would not be swayed by his words. She had her own opinion of the situation, and would reveal it in good time if she desired to do so.

“Three minutes until touchdown,” Lancer Li reported in Confederation Standard. Strider was the only member of the crew who did not speak the native language of Shèhuì Héxié, but the Asiatics had decided to stick to the Pride’s primary language during the mission.

The port looked far busier than it had during the yacht’s previous trip to the planet, and Fei Long suspected it was due to the arrival of off-world dignitaries in preparation for the athletic event scheduled to take place in ten days’ time on the planet’s surface.

The remainder of the trip passed in silence, until the airlock opened and the ramp descended from the craft’s hull. “We have landed, Corporal Lu,” Li reported, and though he was well over twice the age of Fei Long’s girlfriend, his tone bespoke a measure of respect which Fei Long had never heard given to him.

“Good work, Li,” she replied, and Fei Long marveled at how much her Standard diction and cadence had improved since he had met her on their first shuttle ride. “Li stays with yacht,” she instructed, and the older man nodded his acknowledgment. “Chen,” she turned to the smaller, wiry-looking man who Fei Long would have never suspected had been convicted of a quadruple homicide—an event involving a quartet of invaders who had apparently broken into his house and attempted violence against his family—using nothing but his bare hands, “you are assigned to Strider—you must not leave his side.”

“Understood, Corporal,” Chen replied evenly, and Strider visibly wilted at the prospect of being chaperoned around.

“Fei and I will meet docking agent to pay fees,” she continued. “Our meeting with Lynch scheduled to nineteen hundred, which gives six hours to purchase medical supplies. Li remains with ship and seals airlock while Fei, Strider, Chen and I make purchases and meet Lynch.”

“Yes, Corporal,” the two Lancers replied in unison while Strider rolled his eyes.

“Good,” she said smartly, “Mr. Strider, lead the way.”

Four hours later they had managed to secure nearly every item found on Doctor Middleton’s list, and the prices had even been reasonable. They had been forced to shop for some of the harder-to-find items—such as auto-suture packs, thoracic trauma kits, genuine combat heal, and anti-radiation medications—but had eventually brought in 90% of the items on the captain’s approved acquisitions list.

“This has been fortuitous,” Fei Long said as he saw yet another sign advertising the upcoming athletic event. A massive screen on the side of a nearby skyscraper—a screen fully a hundred feet tall and nearly as wide—showed some sort of press conference under way, with representatives for that event answering questions from the media.

The panel of event representatives was comprised primarily of former players, who each took turns answering questions and providing predictable, formulaic answers each time. The affair was essentially scripted, and Fei Long wondered how people could waste their time watching such things when they could simply wait until its conclusion to peruse the transcripts, which took infinitely less time.

“We have succeeded in securing medical supplies,” Lu Bu agreed neutrally. “But we still must meet Lynch.”

“Of course,” Fei Long allowed, “but I did not expect us to purchase so many supplies in such a short period of time.

Lu Bu seemed distracted by the image on the massive screen, and Fei Long believed he could understand why. But there was something intent, or perhaps frustrated, in her expression and he felt it prudent to inquire.

“I thought you would be pleased at the timing,” he said, gesturing to the screen. The image panned across the bank of former players and Lu Bu’s stride stuttered briefly, and Fei Long unthinkingly reached out to steady her.

She glared at him as she shrugged off his hands, “I am fine.” Her gaze returned to the image and she shook her head, “But there is something…” she began in clear frustration before switching to their native dialect, “there is something…or someone…who is familiar there, Kongming.”

Her use of his style name was a good sign, as she had barely said more than five words to him outside of their professional requirements since disembarking the yacht. He looked up at the screen and scanned the faces, unable to find anything familiar about any of them. I recognize none of them,” he said slowly.

The camera focused in on an absurdly thick-thewed man sporting a flat top haircut and Lu Bu’s eyes widened. “I know him,” she said as the man answered a question in his deep, thick voice. “He is from the picture.”

The group had come to a stop, and Strider was giving them an interested look before he, too, focused on the image of the player.

“The picture?” Fei Long asked, having no idea what she meant.

The man’s name flashed beneath his image and Lu Bu nodded as she mouthed, “Steve Inson.” She resumed her course down the sidewalk toward the nearby cargo loading zone where their goods would be readied for transport to the ship. “Come, we load the cargo onto yacht,” she said in Confederation Standard, her interest in the press conference seemingly forgotten.

“Not that I disapprove the change,” Lynch said as he looked up and down Lu Bu with a clinically appraising eye, “but where’s the boss man? I was gonna get his signature,” he said, holding up a stack of polymer sheets with Sergeant Gnuko’s youthful image printed on them above the words ‘Arake Shield Tech: Protecting Your Future.’

“He will not be joining us,” Fei Long replied as the man began to circle Lu Bu and continue his appraisal of her physique. Surprisingly, Fei Long saw nothing lascivious in the man’s demeanor; his attentions seemed to be more akin to those of a man inspecting a high-performance vehicle than to one looking at a young woman.

“Now that’s a shame,” Lynch sighed. “You got the stacks?” he asked, turning to Fei Long.

Fei Long nodded. “As agreed we have placed the objects, constituting half of the total transaction’s value, in escrow at the Capital Prime Bank,” he explained, producing a small paper strip with the confirmation number encoded. “You will receive the access codes as soon as we have taken receipt of the shipment.”

“Shipment?” Lynch repeated with open amusement. “Ain’t no warehouse cool enough to store that much jack, son—not even on Capital. Nah,” he shook his head, “if you want the gear then we goin’ for a ride.”

“That was not the agreem—“ Fei Long began.

“Circumstances change, son,” Lynch cut in as he finally tore his eyes from Lu Bu to look at Fei Long. “All the preparations planet-side have made my kind of bidness a touch more hectic than usual. But don’t worry,” he said, flicking a brief look at the identical twin-looking women who likely doubled as visual distractions and bodyguards, “we’ll take my ride. Y’all can be my guests.”

Fei Long gave Strider a look, and the former pirate shrugged lightly but his expression seemed to suggest that they had nothing to fear from the black marketer. He knew it might be a trap of some kind, but Fei Long also knew that the four of them were almost certainly more valuable to Lynch alive and unharmed so that he could receive his payment.

“Very well,” Fei Long said with a courteous nod. “Lead the way.”

“Now y’all might not think this is exactly stylin’,” Lynch said as they passed through his vessel’s airlock, “but this ship’s taken me from one end of this galaxy to the other. Sure, she might be a bit worn down,” he admitted as they passed a section of scorched bulkhead which could have only been scored in that particular fashion by blaster fire—recent blaster fire, “but sometimes the devil you know…” he trailed off as though there was no need to finish his thought.

The ship was not exactly small, but after arriving in the cockpit Fei Long finally recognized the layout as a Hornet-class Cutter. They were popular with SDF’s because of their modular design, relatively robust shields, and most importantly, incredibly fast engines. For obvious reasons, they were also favored by pirates throughout the Spineward Sectors. The most curious aspect of the craft was that the last of its kind had been built nearly two hundred years earlier.

“Now strap in and sit back,” Lynch instructed, and Fei Long noted that his female companions had not decided to accompany them on the trip.

The quartet did as instructed, and the ship detached from the ring station before lurching forward with enough force to snap their heads back into their headrests.

“Is it wise to accelerate so greatly?” Fei Long asked, remembering that there was a limit to overall velocity within Capital’s Zone of Control—which they were still well within.

“You worried ‘bout getting stopped?” Lynch asked with open amusement as he manipulated the craft’s controls. “Son, there ain’t been a ship built that could catch this baby. But even if they could, they’d have to see us first.”

Fei Long’s eyebrows rose in surprise as they hurtled toward the hyper limit. “Impressive,” he said as he sank back into his chair, taking the other man’s meaning to suggest that the craft was equipped with a robust stealth system.

“Now you just sit back and enjoy the ride,” Lynch said, “we’ll be there before you know it.”

Less than an hour later the ship point transferred. But unlike every other point transfer Fei Long had experienced, there was no call-out of events as they occurred. Instead, Lynch merely unstrapped himself and called over his shoulder, “We’re here.”

Fei Long leaned forward and saw absolutely nothing. There were of course stars twinkling in the background, but there were no stars, no planets, and no other ships that he could see.

“Where exactly is ‘here’?” Fei Long asked.

Lynch snorted. “I could tell you that, but then I’d have to kill you if your stacks ain’t fat enough,” he said casually. The craft’s bow slewed around and Fei Long saw a tiny speck off in the distance. The object grew larger and larger until he recognized it for what it was.

“You have a Hammerhead-class warship?” he asked in surprise, and the other three members of his party leaned forward as one as their interests clearly piqued.

“I got my ways,” Lynch said dismissively. “Now she ain’t all there, naturally; the boys done scrapped out the fusions plants; the forward guns and armor plating on the bow; all three drive units; and a whole list of stuff as long as my…” he grinned as he trailed off. “Well, it’s a long list, got it?”

Fei Long rolled his eyes; in his experience, those who boasted were unable to support such boasts, but in the interests of diplomacy he thought it wise to keep that particular observation to himself.

“But the stuff on your list,” Lynch continued confidently, “it’ll all be there.”

“We had hoped to inquire as to the availability of other equipment,” Fei Long said after the surprise of the situation had worn off. Lynch had somehow acquired a more-or-less intact warship and then dragged it out into the middle of empty space before picking over its wreckage. There were several aspects of that sequence which made Fei Long’s brain itch with curiosity, but he knew he had no place asking those questions.

“Other stuff?” Lynch asked incredulously. “Y’all gonna basically strip every last scrap of good stuff out of my prime piece, and you’re asking after more?” He turned around in his chair and narrowed his eyes, “If you wasn’t such a geek-lookin’ boy I’d think you was fuzz.”

“We are not ‘fuzz’,” Lu Bu interrupted, and Lynch looked over at her with an equally stony glare.

“I don’t know you,” he said before adding, “much as I’d like to, you understand. But I just opened the vault and already y’all is asking for more?”

“We are looking for communication’s gear rated for no less than twenty megawatts of continuous transmit power; no fewer than thirty Starfire missiles; Liberator torpedoes—and, if possible, the warheads that match said torpedoes…although we understand that is a tall order even for a businessman of your stature,” Fei Long said quickly, hoping to enhance everyone’s calm when he realized that Lynch’s visage had turned dark.

“Twenty megawatts?” Lynch blurted incredulously. “Y’all are hopin’ to set up your own ComStat network, is that it? And Liberator torpedoes?” he scoffed. “Those been outlawed goin’ on half a century now—and the penalty for even owning one is a date with the dark, feel me?”

Fei Long and Lu Bu exchanged a quick glance before Lu Bu leaned forward and said, “If you have, we will buy. If you do not have, we find somewhere else.”

Lynch looked silently between the two of them and said, “You know…the safe play would be to ice you four, right here, right now.”

Strider and Chen tensed behind Fei Long and Lu Bu, but thankfully no one did or said anything incendiary.

“But,” he sighed as he turned back to his controls, “y’all are catchin’ me in a generous mood. I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear nothin’ about no Liberator torpedoes…but the other stuff, I might could do some diggin’. It’ll cost you, though,” he said pointedly.

Fei Long leaned back in his chair and shared a muted look of relief with Lu Bu. “We have ample currency.”

Lynch jerked his thumb over his shoulder and said, “Best get your head bags and pressure suits on; they’re stowed behind Percy’s chair.”

Strider bristled at being called by what was apparently his given name, but the four of them quickly set about the task of donning the gear their ‘host’ had instructed them to.

“All right,” he said as they drew close enough to the warship—which had clearly been involved in a horrific battle, judging by the massive rents torn in its hull, that did not appear to have been made by any human-built weapons—“time to peek under the hood.”

Chapter XLII: A Fresh Coat of Paint

“Mr. Lynch has all of this in stock?” Middleton asked after reviewing the report submitted by Mr. Fei.

“Yes, Captain,” Fei Long replied confidently. “I have personally inspected three of the Artemis laser systems, as well as verified that the vast majority of the ship’s power grid—excepting the fusion cores—is also intact.

Middleton nodded slowly as he processed the information. It was unlikely in the extreme that a black market arms dealer would have the wreck of a substantively intact Hydra-class warship secreted away, but it was even less likely that said arms dealer would happen to present this vessel to his team when they had very carefully kept their requisition list vague enough to prevent such a man from deducing who he was dealing with.

He was almost certain that there was a message being sent to him by this Lynch person, and Middleton suspected that the deal would not be consummated until he met with the man. “Good work, Mr. Fei,” he said approvingly. “Now I think it’s time we discussed another matter,” he said, placing the data slate down and fixing the young man with a penetrating look. Fei Long had the good grace to wilt under Captain Middleton’s gaze, but that wasn’t going to placate the Pride’s commanding officer. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

Fei Long’s eyes drifted to the desktop and lingered there for several moments before he shook his head weakly. “I…I cannot find the proper words, Captain.”

“You’re going to have to do better than that,” Middleton said coolly. “Frankly I’m impressed at your ingenuity although I suppose I shouldn’t be, given your record of accomplishments during your time aboard this ship.” He leaned forward, placing his forearms against the edge of his desk while clasping his hands together—a pose he had adopted after seeing his father use it time and again to create a sense of gravity when dealing with Tim or one of his siblings. “But I thought you were smarter than that.”

Fei Long visibly bristled at that, which had been Middleton’s aim. “Captain…War Leader Atticus was…” he trailed off, and even Middleton was perplexed as to the young man’s loss of verbiage. Fei Long straightened in his chair and shook his head, “I was at a crossroads, Captain. I realize now that I made the wrong decision, but at the time it seemed important that I demand respect from the War Leader.”

“What makes you think you made the wrong decision?” Middleton asked intently, more than a little surprised at hearing the normally confident young man admit to making an error in judgment.

“Because of something Kratos said to the others, Captain,” Fei Long replied uneasily. “It was only after some hours of pondering his words that I realized they had been intended for me as much as for his fellow Tracto-ans.”

“Oh?” Middleton quirked an eyebrow. The conversation had definitely taken an unexpected turn, and he found himself curious as to the young man’s train of thought.

“Of course, sir,” Fei Long replied almost dismissively. “He addressed the assemblage in Confederation Standard, sir,” he explained, and Middleton found himself concurring with Fei Long’s conclusion.

Kratos had been an enigma ever since first setting foot on the Pride of Prometheus, and Middleton knew it was time for him to sit down and speak with the man. It would inform not only his decision as to which punishment should be inflicted on the one-eyed Tracto-an, but also hopefully provide him with an insight into Tracto-an culture.

For all his mysterious nature, it was clear that Kratos understood his new role better than the majority of his countrymen. Much as Middleton was loathe to entertain the idea, he knew that a man like Kratos might prove invaluable in the events to come.

“You understand that you are culpable in Atticus’ death,” Middleton said, rather than asked.

“Of course, Captain,” Fei Long replied stiffly. His body language suggested that he was expecting significant consequences, and Captain Middleton knew it would be in the young man’s best interests if he administered them. But for that particular moment in time, the Pride of Prometheus needed Fei Long’s expertise operating unfettered.

So Middleton decided to pull one of the oldest lines out of the book as he sighed and said, “I’m extremely disappointed in you, Mr. Fei. I had thought you, of any member of the crew, would be capable of seeing the situation for what it was: a powder keg waiting for a match. Your desire for personal satisfaction very nearly brought this crew to mutiny, and at this point I can only hope that you reflect on that decision going forward.”

Fei Long visibly paled, and the captain knew he had hit the mark precisely as he had wished to.

“That will be all,” Middleton said, and Fei Long stood silently before making his way to the door. Once there, he turned and gave one of his customary salutes with his hands clasped before himself, and then exited the ready room without another word.

Middleton sighed, knowing that if he had been a contemporary of the young man’s—or anyone but his commanding officer, for that matter—he would have congratulated him on not only his ingenuity, but also for his bravery.

Because Tim Middleton, even if he had been armed with a tazer as powerful as Fei Long’s, would have never stepped in against a man like Atticus.

Especially not in his birthday suit.

“Captain…you will join us?” Lu Bu asked in surprise.

“Yes,” he replied simply as he set down a duffel near one of the large, curved couches which Lu Bu was certain had some sort of pretentious name that she had no intention of learning. “I’d like to meet Lynch. While I’m doing that, you’ll take the rest of the team to the surface and conduct another round of requisitions.”

Fei Long nodded approvingly as Li activated the yacht’s piloting interface. “Your presence will be welcome, Captain,” he said a bit less enthusiastically than Lu Bu had come to expect of her boyfriend during his dialogue with the Pride’s commanding officer.

“Just pretend I’m not here,” Middleton said as he sat down on the couch and produced a handful of data slates which he began examining intently.

Lu Bu decided to do as he instructed and went to check that their cargo—which represented nearly half of the wealth which had initially been aboard the sleek yacht. She was incredibly nervous about safeguarding it, and having Captain Middleton along only served to heighten her anxiety.

But after a thorough round of checks she was satisfied that everything was where it should be—and that Strider had not come within five meters of it, which was easily her top concern at that moment.

The sleek craft slid out of the shuttle bay and began its journey toward the hyper limit with Li, Chen, Lu Bu, Fei Long, Strider, and Captain Middleton each passing the time as their duties required.

“You got my message, I see,” the man at the top of the staircase said, and Middleton immediately recognized him from the limited intelligence he had gathered on arms dealers operating in the Capital system.

“I did,” Middleton agreed, and the other man began to pour a pair of drinks. “And I came alone.”

“Brave man,” Lynch chuckled as he finished pouring the drinks. He offered one to Middleton, which he accepted, and the arms dealer gestured for them to sit at a nearby booth with purple velvet cushions and gold filigree on the wooden frame. “What do you think of the place?”

Middleton looked around, noting the generally dark and greasy-looking metal bulkheads. He counted nearly seventy people participating in the dancing below, which was driven by music to which he had never understood the appeal. Thankfully, that cacophony was dampened where they sat. “As a base of operations,” he said, paraphrasing an old holo-vid line, “you cannot beat a nightclub.”

Lynch smiled, exposing a grill of teeth that were made of at least as much diamond as tooth enamel. “My thoughts exactly, Captain Middleton—or should I call you ‘Lieutenant Commander’?”

Middleton had expected the other man to know who he was, so he shrugged as he took a sip of the drink. It was considerably stronger than anything he had drank since college, but there was a smooth, warm sensation accompanying the vicious bite which he had never quite tasted. “I’m not sure either one is appropriate, given the nature of our interaction,” he said, knowing it was well beyond illegal for him to be brokering a deal with a black marketer of any stripe, let alone one of the most wanted men in the Spine. “Tyrone will do, although my friends call me Tim.”

Lynch nodded approvingly as he hammered down his own glass in one go. He barely seemed fazed by it, but Middleton wasn’t about to take that particular bait. He drew another sip from his glass and felt its savage kick once again, and suspected that if he could get Garibaldi a bottle of whatever it was that his friend would pull double shifts for a month with no complaints.

“Ok, Tyrone,” Lynch said as he leaned forward. “I’m gonna cut through all the creeper dung and get down to it: y’all’s organization has been making it very difficult for a certain group’s operation out here, feel me?”

Middleton quirked an eyebrow, “My organization? I wasn’t aware any other MSP vessels were operating this far out.”

“You mean to tell me that you, all by your lonesome, have been kicking them Raubachs in the teeth up and down 23 and 24?” Lynch asked, his eyes locked onto Middleton’s, “I find that hard to believe.”

“Believe what you will,” Middleton shrugged. “I wasn’t aware I needed to convince you of anything for our business dealings to proceed.”

Lynch narrowed his eyes. “As far as I’m concerned, we already doin’ bidness,” he said evenly, “and I ain’t never backed outta no deal—I also ain’t never turned on one of my friends. But there ain’t no dealer this side of the Drift crazy enough to deal with a fed, especially when he starts askin’ around for Liberator torpedoes.” The arms dealer leaned back in his cushioned seat and his visage softened slightly, “But you and I might have more in common than you think.”

“You mean to suggest we have the same friends or the like?” Middleton scoffed, making no attempt to hide his derision at the notion.

A twinkle entered the other man’s eye. “Nah, dawg,” he said before snapping his fingers, prompting a pair of comely women wearing virtually nothing to ascend the stairs and approach, “I do you one better than that.”

One of the women slid into position beside Lynch, her eyes never wavering form Middleton as the other one—an identical twin, apparently—placed a data slate on the tabletop in front of Middleton. “What’s this?” he asked, gesturing to the slate but making no attempt to pick it up.

“That, Tim, is free,” Lynch said as he kicked his feet up on the table, “and I don’t generally give samples so you might consider it a token of goodwill.”

Middleton was intrigued, so he picked up the slate and began to peruse its contents. Inside was a host of raw information which took him several minutes to process. When he was finished, he placed the slate on the table and nodded slowly. “Ok, you’ve got my attention. What is it you want?”

“Nothin’ but your word,” Lynch said casually. “I know a man like you is good for it, but you’re gonna have to look me in the eye when you give it.”

He knew he was making a proverbial deal with the demon, but the information Lynch was suggesting he had at his disposal was simply too valuable to pass up. “I can’t make any guarantees,” he said heavily, “and I need you to understand that I’ll be court martialed just for asking this, but…” he hesitated, knowing that he was unlikely to ever find such a perfect deal again, “what is it you want?”

Lynch’s smile faded and he leaned forward, his gaze turning hard as he said, “You give me your word that you’ll stop foolin’ around at the edges and go straight at the heart of that bastard’s operation, and I’ll give you the info on that slate.” His face slowly twisted into a lopsided grin as he added, “And if you trade me that fancy ride y’all rolled up in, I’ll even throw in a couple sweeteners that just might give you a fightin’ chance against that Imperial son of a bitch.”

“Commodore Raubach?” Middleton pressed, knowing he needed to be absolutely certain of what he was being asked. “What do you have against him?”

“The Commodore and I go way back,” Lynch replied, “since before the Union Treaty. I ain’t goin’ into no details, but I’ve been waitin’ for a long time to get my shot at him.” He leaned back and sighed, but Middleton suspected it was not a gesture the man was used to making. “He took out half my fleet not a week after the Imps pulled out, and my little birds tell me he’s been a busy boy since then. His operation’s doubled in size and that ain’t good for a man like me.”

“So you’re looking for someone to do your grunt work,” Middleton concluded dryly.

“You got me all wrong,” Lynch said, a hard edge entering his voice. “I’m lookin’ for a man with the vision to see what’s comin’ around the corner. From where I’m sittin’ it looks like the Commodore’s near ready for his endgame, so if he’s gonna be stopped it’s got to be soon.”

“The Raubachs are positioning themselves to take over the Sector?” Middleton asked, hardly believing that could be true. Even with every possible ship having defected to his Rim Fleet banner—an organization which no longer even remotely resembled its original charter following the Imperial withdrawal, thanks to the Raubach family’s widespread manipulation of the Sector’s various SDF’s—the Raubachs would barely have the military might to forcibly take over three or four Core Worlds in the Spine.

“Nope,” Lynch shook his head. “That’s the thing; whatever he’s doin’ is top secret, and that ain’t exactly the man’s style.” A sneer spread across the man’s features, “He’s more iron fist than velvet glove, if you get my meaning. For him to keep his operation under wraps this long, without any information leakage…whatever it is, it’s big, and it ain’t gonna be good for the Spine when his pieces are in position and ready to move.”

“I’m supposed to believe you’d help me out of nothing but civic duty…is that it?” Middleton asked, genuinely curious how the other man would respond.

Lynch shrugged. “It’s a sight better than handin’ out turkeys come holiday time. Besides, I liked things the way they was before them Raubachs came halfway across the galaxy and started muckin’ up my yard. I gotta rebuild my community, brick by brick, but to do that we gotta get rid of the unsavory elements first.”

“Supposing I agreed to this,” Middleton gestured to the data slate, “you have to understand that if I come across your people operating in an…” his lips quirked into a dark grin, “unsavory fashion, I’ll treat them the same as I’ve treated every other lowlife I’ve run across in my time out here.”

Lynch returned Middleton’s grin with a fierce one of his own. “You got me all wrong, Tim. I’m in this for the long haul; only a monkey knocks over a single freighter when he can skim a little bit off every freighter with nobody wisin’ up.”

Middleton knew that to pursue that particular vein much further would likely queer the deal between them, so he sat in silence for several minutes as the dance beat pulsated through his skull. “I’ll say this,” Middleton finally said, leaning forward and gesturing to the data slate, “if I ever find myself in striking range of Commodore Raubach, I’ll be taking whatever shot I can. And I fully intend to get my shot,” he added darkly. “If that’s what you wanted to hear, fine. If not, we can conclude our business as planned and go our separate ways.”

Lynch seemed to ponder something during the pregnant pause that seemed to swell until it would burst. Then he cocked a grin and said, “Enjoy the beats, my man. I’ve got some other bidness to conduct; we’ll speak again when my people have gone over your down payment. Until then, enjoy all that the Tenth has to offer.”

Lynch stood and moved toward the stairway, and Middleton watched as he and his cleverly-disguised bodyguards descended and made their way across the dance floor before passing through a set of doors on the far side of the chamber.

When they had gone, the Pride’s commanding officer slammed the remainder of his glass’s contents down and only barely managed to keep from sputtering as the drink’s liquid fire made a bee-line for his stomach.

He definitely needed to get Garibaldi a bottle of the stuff.

“That is the last of the crates,” Fei Long announced, more than slightly relieved that they had managed to complete their assigned task with time to spare. He had spent a few minutes on the local extranet, and managed to secure some tickets to one of the myriad events leading up to what was, according to the advertisements, the ‘the greatest athletic event in human history.’

“Good,” Lu Bu said in surprise as she gave Strider a warning look. He had begun to stray from the loading ramp on his way toward their slip’s exit, but he reluctantly returned to the ship muttering something under his breath.

“Zhen,” Fei Long said in his native language as he turned to face Lancer Chen Zhen, “would you mind watching the ship for the next hour or two? Captain Middleton is not expecting us for at least five more hours, and I have some business I would like to conduct in the city,” he said with a brief but pointed glance toward Lu Bu while her back was turned.

“Of course,” Chen replied with a knowing look. “Strider,” the Lancer said, switching to Confederation Standard, “we will lock down the ship. Return inside.”

“What kinda dung is this, man?” Strider blurted incredulously. “The kiddies get to cruise ‘round town but I gotta stay in the ride?”

“Do not argue, Navigator,” Lu Bu growled as Fei Long approached and stood a respectful distance from her. She turned to give him a withering look, “Kongming, if you must go to the city then you may go. I have no orders to keep you in sight—unlike Mr. Strider.”

“I was hoping we might take in the city together,” Fei Long said hopefully.

“I am in no mood,” she quipped.

“Indulge me,” he urged.

She gave him a discerning look before sighing, “Very well. Chen—” she turned, but the Lancer had already begun to close the airlock door. The door closed not long after she had begun to address him, and she turned to scowl at Fei Long, who maintained his most pleasant expression. “Let’s go,” she muttered in their native tongue, and together the two teenagers set out on the streets of Capital.

They strolled out of the starport in relative silence and Fei Long quickly hailed a taxi. “Where to?” the driver asked in his strangely accented voice.

“The Market District,” Fei Long replied.

The cab driver wordlessly complied and Fei Long searched for the right words to say. He looked at Lu Bu briefly and was still deeply unsettled by her physical appearance following the near-fatal missions aboard the Dämmerung and the Droid corvette. Her face was a blotchy mess, at least to his eye, and she was still not walking properly on her surgically-repaired leg.

“Fengxian,” he said, looking out the window at a nearby sign advertising the same event which had consumed the attention of Capital’s capitol city, “I wanted to say something.”

She turned to face him, and he felt another pang of anger at the fact that he had very nearly lost her just a few short weeks earlier. “I…” he struggled to find the right words, but they simply would not come and the silence became deafening so he said, “I cannot convey to you how much you mean to me.”

Her expression was unreadable, but Fei Long knew that he needed to express the feelings he had wrestled with during the past few weeks.

“I do not ever wish for us to fight again,” he said simply, finding no clever segue or parable to tell. “I know that is likely impossible, but I have realized that—“

He found his mouth suddenly pressed against hers, and though it must have caused her at least some discomfort to do so, he returned her kiss and it was as though a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

They spent the rest of the taxi ride in each other’s arms, and Fei Long was almost upset when the driver pulled the vehicle to the side of the thoroughfare and declared, “South Market District concourse.”

Unfortunately, their destination was indeed on the southern edge of the Market District, so Fei Long produced a data link and made the requisite payment prior to exiting the vehicle.

“Where did you get Capital currency?” Lu Bu asked in a tone that made Fei Long grin. The fact that he had falsified a series of identity records and applied for a provisional line of credit had almost slipped his mind entirely. He fully intended to repay the debt at some point in the future, even going so far as to record the information—after it had been encrypted—in his quarters.

“No talk of details,” he said as he urged her toward one of the nearby structures. It was a flat, dome-shaped building which clearly served as some sort of event center, and when they passed through the doors even Fei Long’s breath was taken away.

The building’s exterior was largely made of concrete which blended in with the surrounding construction, but the interior appeared to be carved from pink marble with the most exquisite designs carved into the many columns which supported the structure’s roof.

The building’s name actually escaped Fei Long as he marveled at the vast, open space in the center of the arena-like structure. The arena itself was not large, measuring no more than fifty meters across, but the stone columns and the roof it supported were like nothing he had ever seen with his own eyes.

“Impressive,” Lu Bu said, and though she was clearly trying to undersell the impact of walking into the structure, Fei Long knew her well enough that he was certain she was just as amazed as he was. “There is nothing like this on our home world.”

Fei Long bristled at her last words, but decided to ignore them for the time being as he scanned the nearby area until finding a map which detailed the various booths set up in the arena floor below.

“This way,” he said once he had determined an efficient route to their destination.

“Where are we going?” Lu Bu asked, a note of irritation creeping into her voice.

“Please,” Fei Long said as he made a dramatic show of dragging her along, “we are nearly there.”

They arrived at the back of a very long line, and Lu Bu gave Fei Long a stern look which he politely ignored as he quickly counted thirty six people in line before them.

“Now what?” she demanded irritably.

“Now,” he said as he threw an arm around her broad shoulders, “we wait.”

Nearly an hour later, Fei Long and Lu Bu reached the head of the line and he was quite certain that his shoulder would not survive another ten minutes of waiting in line alongside Lu Bu. She had slugged him no fewer than a dozen times, and while he wanted very much to act like a man and ‘tough it out,’ he was genuinely concerned for his arm’s well-being.

“Next,” the docent called, and Fei Long produced an object he had kept carefully hidden throughout their diversionary trip. He placed it in Lu Bu’s hands, and she looked down in confusion at the rolled up sheet of polymer paper.

“I will wait outside,” he said, pointing to a nearby sign that said ‘one at a time.’

“Long,” she said in a warning tone as she began to unroll the sheet, but he stopped her by gently placing his hands on hers and meeting her eyes.

“Go inside,” he said, tilting his head toward the doorway. “You may punch me again after you have finished, if you wish,” he added, wishing the words had come out in a more playful, and less fearful, tone.

She glared at him. “I do not like surprises,” she growled, but thankfully she did as he suggested and he stood off to the side at a respectful distance from the door.

The booth was a three meter square, with canvas walls dividing it from its neighboring booths which were apparently also occupied. Lu Bu saw another docent standing just inside the canvas flap through which she had passed, and the woman held her hand out, “Official merchandise only.”

At first Lu Bu was confused, then she realized the woman was referring to the rolled up sheet of polymer in her hands. She handed it to the woman, who unrolled it and nodded before snapping a picture of it via her monocle.

“This was prepaid,” the woman said, handing the sheet of polymer back to Lu Bu along with a paper receipt of some kind, “you have five minutes.”

Lu Bu was still very much confused as to what she was doing, but when she looked up she saw a thickly-built man with a flat top haircut sitting behind a table with a pen in hand. He grinned when their eyes met and he gestured for her to approach, which she did as she slowly realized what she held in her hands—and she knew she was going to have to take Fei Long up on his offer when she was finished.

“Your receipt, please,” the man said in a deep voice, and Lu Bu approached the table before handing it to him. “Let’s see…” he mused before nodding his head, “a gift? Someone must like you,” he said with a knowing grin. “Looks like you can have an autograph, three pictures, and a—“

“You are Steve Inson,” she interrupted.

The man’s grin widened. “That’s me,” he said in amusement.

“You…played for Pe-re-grines,” she fought the last word’s pronunciation as she looked around the booth and saw neat stacks of picture, magazines, uniforms, and every other manner of memorabilia which were associated with a famous smashball player.

“Yes,” he cocked his head, his amusement turning to mild confusion. “Are you ok?” he asked.

“You knew Walter Joneson,” she said as she looked down at the sheet of polymer in her hands. On it was a picture of Joneson and Inson, standing side-by-side on a smashball field as victory confetti the color of their uniforms streamed down all around them. She stared at the picture for several seconds before handing it to him.

Inson stood slowly and his eyes narrowed. “Where did you get this?” he demanded.

“Excuse me?” she asked.

“Only two of these were ever printed,” Inson said, his eye boring into hers, “and the other one was given to my ex-wife in our divorce. Now where did you get it?”

“From Walter Joneson,” she replied stiffly, bristling at the suggestion that it had come into her possession dishonestly.

Inson furrowed his brow. “Did he send you here?” he asked, the anger of a moment earlier replace with confusion.

“No,” she replied, casting her eyes to the floor, “he is dead.”

“What?” Inson blurted. “How?” he asked after a brief silence.

Lu Bu was about to explain the particulars, but before a sound passed her lips she remembered the secretive nature of the mission and silently cursed herself for very nearly compromising mission security. “It…is complicated,” she said hesitantly. “He was soldier—like me,” she explained, hoping he would not press the issue.

“Ah,” Inson said after a momentary pause, “I get it. I heard he joined up some kind of commando unit…he must have gone out on a top secret mission and never came back. Is that it?”

“He was Lancer, not commando,” she corrected him, feeling her ears turn red at her fractured grammar which seemed to worsen with stress, “but…yes, he died in mission.”

“Were you…” he trailed off before standing and walking around the table, “were you there when it happened?” Lu Bu nodded, and Steve Inson’s serious expression softened as he began to chuckle. She gave him a curious look and he gestured to her face. “I was worried you were a burn victim or something here on a charity trip. Truth be told,” he said as he looked up and down her body briefly, “I even thought you were a man when you came in.”

Lu Bu bristled and Inson held up his hands in apology.

“I’m sorry,” he said, smacking himself lightly on the side of the head, “my mouth gets me into trouble sometimes. But still…” he said haltingly, his eyes seeming to search hers as he looked at her, “I’ve never seen a woman like you.”

“I am smashball player,” she said with equal parts resentment and pride.

“I’m sure you are,” he acknowledged approvingly. “What do you weigh…a hundred kilos? You must be a smashback.”

“Yes,” Lu Bu nodded sharply, “and lastbacker.”

“A two-way player?” he said appreciatively before sighing. “I wish we could have played together…but I don’t think that’s why you’re here.”

“I…” she began to reply before realizing that explaining why she was there would likely take a considerable amount of time. “My boyfriend gives me this…gift?” she looked around the room, and Inson laughed boisterously.

“Well, he obviously knows what you like,” he said agreeably. “It sounds like he’s a keeper, if you ask me.”

The docent poked her head in past the canvas flap, “You have thirty seconds, Mr. Inson.”

The man scowled, but before he could reply the woman had withdrawn herself from the flap and he sighed in disappointment. “I’m afraid I’m on the clock,” he said with a shrug, “contractual obligations and such. Although I’m not entirely sure why I come to these things any more,” he added thoughtfully. “My ex-wife ends up with half of the proceeds off the top, and I’m left with delinquent bills that we ran up before the divorce.”

Lu Bu arched an eyebrow, having understood roughly half of what he had just said. “I should go,” she said, turning to leave the booth.

“Wait a second,” Inson said, and she turned to see him holding out the picture she had brought, “you forgot this.”

Lu Bu shook her head, “You should keep it.”

Inson shook his own head, “No, I lost mine fair and square…according to the judge, anyway. If Walt wanted you to have this then so do I.” He proffered the picture, and Lu Bu reluctantly accepted it.

“Thank you,” she said awkwardly.

“How long are you here?” he asked just before the docent pulled back the canvas flap and gave him an annoyed look.

“We leave in three hours,” Lu Bu replied. “This one—“ she stopped herself and cursed in her native tongue before restarting, “I am glad to meet you, Mr. Inson.”

Steve Inson held up a halting hand, “My friends call me Hutch, and I’d appreciate if you did the same. Anyone who stood beside Big Walt, especially in real combat, deserves more than just respect. He wasn’t exactly known for low standards,” he added with a pointed look. “I’d like to swap stories sometime; how can I reach you?”

“I do not know,” she replied. “But this—my name is Lu Bu, and I am pleased to have met you.” A question popped into her head, which she asked without thinking, “Why would Walter Joneson give me this picture? He must know I would try to find you.”

Hutch smiled, but it was a false expression which hid something Lu Bu did not recognize. “I think I know why he did it,” he said distantly, “he knew that people like us need each other.”

“Like us?” she repeated in confusion. “What does that mean?”

He shook his head slowly, “I hope I get the chance to answer that sometime…but not here, and not now.”

With that, he turned and went back to his seat, prompting Lu Bu to exit past the increasingly annoyed docent. She looked around and quickly found Fei Long, who she walked up to and slugged in the shoulder as gently as she could while still communicating that she was displeased with being surprised. But the truth was that she was not altogether unhappy with the outcome of the event.

“I assume that means it went well?” Fei Long asked hopefully, rubbing his shoulder in a clearly-exaggerated display of dramatics.

“I believe so,” she replied uncertainly. For some reason, Walter Joneson had told her to meet with Steve ‘Hutch’ Inson but she still did not know what that reason was. But no matter what that reason might have been, she knew that the time for self-indulgence was over. “We must return to the ship and rendezvous with Captain Middleton.

Fei Long searched her features but she kept them stony and unreadable, which made his self-satisfied expression all the more infuriating. To give vent to her annoyance, she slugged him again—this time in the other shoulder—before taking his hand in her own and beginning the trek back to the starport.

Chapter XLIII: Security Deposits

“You’re early,” Middleton said as Fei Long, Lu Bu and Strider approached the table. He had sat alone at the booth for nearly eight hours without so much as standing up to stretch following Lynch’s exit.

“We have secured the rest of the medical supplies, Captain,” Fei Long said after his customary bow.

“And the other matter?” Middleton asked, referring to a secretive project he had assigned to Mr. Fei regarding the establishment of a usable communications network based on Capital in the event the Pride ever got out and actually finished its mission to seize control of the ComStat network.

Fei Long nodded easily, “I am pleased to report success on that front as well, Captain.”

“Good,” Middleton said, no longer surprised at Mr. Fei’s ability to do what he did best, “then I suppose we can expect our host to make an entrance any time now.”

Precisely three minutes passed before Lynch appeared at the same door through which he had exited. He was no longer flanked by the two women, and he strode purposefully toward the stairs as the dancing crowd parted before him without requiring instruction to do so.

There was something different about his demeanor, but the arms dealer was extraordinarily cool and collected—even in Middleton’s opinion, and he was a man who had been accused on several occasions of possessing sub-human emotional responses.

“Here’s how this works,” Lynch said, getting straight to business as he approached the table with a data slate in his hand. “Your goods check out, so we’re square on that front. But I’ve got a fully-crewed salvage ship set to rendezvous with you at these coordinates,” he waved the slate before handing it to Middleton. “Y’all should meet up with it in thirty hours; if you’s late by one hour, you lose your deposit and this deal is off. We clear?”

Middleton shook his head, “Not good enough. For all I know there’s an ambush waiting for me out there, and I’ve had my fill of those.”

Lynch snorted and splayed his arms out wide. “That’s why I’m comin’ along. Think of it as a gesture of good faith,” he added when even Middleton’s eyebrow arched. “Besides, them’s just the rules of this game. I’m all about developing long-term relationships, and I expect we’ll be doin’ plenty of future business.”

“Don’t count on it,” Middleton said shortly, which only served to make Lynch grin.

“You worry ‘bout your ledger,” he said dismissively, “and let me worry ‘bout mine. I’ve made a fine living makin’ bets on people like y’all. We set?”

Middleton wanted to argue with the man’s insistence on returning to the Pride with him, but he knew that in the end it was the best guarantee they were likely to get from him. “All right,” he stood from the booth, prompting his people to do likewise, “we’ll see to it that you’re comfortable during the trip.”

True to his word, Lynch’s people arrived at the rendezvous point precisely on schedule. The salvage vessel was a converted bulk freighter of some kind which had clearly seen better days, but Middleton knew that a full crew complement for the former cargo hauler would be well over three hundred souls.

“Scrappin’ the stuff you need off the Temperance ought to take ‘bout six days,” Lynch explained. “The salvage ship is big enough to carry it all in one go if you’re the nervous type,” he said with a self-amused smile, “but if you’re cool we can have it make a few trips so your people can get to work as soon as possible. It’s your call, Tim,” Lynch said, turning to face Middleton. “Either way, y’all should probably keep me locked in a closet somewhere. I’ve got what you might call a ‘wandering eye’,” he said as he looked around the yacht’s interior pointedly, “and I’d hate for my base nature to queer this deal at the eleventh hour.”

Middleton suspected Lynch was hinting at something, but whatever it might have been eluded him—and he was more than happy to see the man secured for the duration of their trip. “We’ll find you suitable accommodations,” Middleton assured him. “You said the wreck is that of the Temperance; would that be the Eleyna’s Temperance, out of Capria?”

“Sure enough,” Lynch replied with a nod, “and before you go pointin’ fingers, she wandered across a Bug trail a few systems over fifteen years ago. I ain’t never brought down a single ship in my life that wasn’t clearin’ her guns at me, but I’ve got what some would call an uncanny habit of bein’ first on the scene after a tragedy like what happened to the Temperance.”

“Imagine that,” Middleton said dryly as Li maneuvered the yacht into position to provide them with a better view of the hulk which a decade and a half earlier had practically been the Pride’s twin.

“One man’s loss, more often than not, is my gain,” Lynch shrugged. “I ain’t losin’ no sleep over it and neither should you, seein’ as your ship needs the gear more than the old crew does.”

“So that’s it?” Middleton asked. “What happens after they tear down the equipment?”

Lynch shrugged, “Then you give ‘em the coordinates you want ‘em to take the stuff to and they’ll transfer it over to your ship. But the salvage captain’s a bit on the tight side; he’ll only give you two days to transfer everything. You want him to hang around longer than that and it’ll cost you more than you could pay.”

“Is that a threat?” Middleton asked mildly.

“Nah,” Lynch scoffed. “It’s just the way the world works. A man loses stomach lining carryin’ so much hot gear in his hold for too long at a stretch—even one that’s been doin’ it nonstop for near thirty years.”

Deciding to push past that particular point, Middleton thought the matter through before nodding to himself. “We’ll have your people make one delivery,” he concluded. “You say the removal will take six days, so six days from now I’ll send someone with coordinates and they can rendezvous with my ship.”

“Works for me,” Lynch agreed. “Now…” he stepped forward casually, “I’ve been told something that I didn’t believe at first, but thought you might be able to clear up for me.”

Middleton made no reply, prompting the other man to snicker softly.

“You cool, you cool,” he said, raising his hands in mock surrender, “but this is just too good to pass up. A couple of my…you might call them ‘scouts,’ came across some wreckage a few jumps from here. It was from a Soyuz-class Heavy Destroyer,” he said, his light tone at odds with the intensity in his eyes. “At first I thought it was a trick of some kind, and that someone out there thought I was stupid enough to go out lookin’ for a tempting haul like that. But after seein’ your shinies,” he looked around the yacht appraisingly, “I’m thinkin’ there might have been something to it.”

Middleton could not think of any reason to deny it, so he shrugged. “You’ve got good intelligence—and it’s awfully prompt,” he added with a dark look.

Lynch shook his head. “I don’t need no embedded operatives, Tim,” he said, matching Middleton’s gaze unwaveringly. “That’s not how I do things. But any man that could take down a Soyuz—especially one captained by James Raubach IV—while commanding a bucket like that,” he tilted his head toward the wreck of the Temperance off their port bow, “would know that the commander was worth more than the ship…”

Silence hung over the compartment as Middleton’s people looked back and forth between he and Lynch. For Middleton’s part, he knew that Lynch was offering to purchase Captain Raubach for purposes which were most certainly illegal, and almost certainly unethical. “If such a man existed,” he allowed, “he would probably take offense at his ship being referred to as a ‘bucket.’ But even if he didn’t, he would have had reasons beyond the acquisition of personal wealth for capturing an enemy commander—especially if that commander’s organization had wronged our hypothetical captain in the not-so-distant past.”

Lynch sighed. “If that captain was hopin’ to get some information out of his prisoner, he’s gonna be disappointed,” he said matter-of-factly. “It don’t matter how persuasive you is; them highborn noble types know that the only thing separating them from us is their name. None of it—money, weapons, ships, or even intelligence—matters as much as that family name, you feel me?”

Middleton had not thought of the situation in exactly those terms, but now that Lynch had laid it out he thought it was possible the arms dealer was right.

“If someone was to ask me,” Lynch continued into the silence, “I’d suggest goin’ after his crew instead. They won’t know as much, but all it would take is for our hypothetical captain to make them understand he’s not a man to be trifled with and they’ll chirp till their throats are dry.”

“Wouldn’t blowing up their ship already qualify our captain in that fashion?” Middleton asked neutrally.

Lynch shook his head. “These highborns do things differently,” he explained. “I’d bet you credits to cream puffs that every single crewman on the Dämmerung was an orphan that got raised by the Raubach consortium. As long as they see their captain’s standing tall, they will too.”

“You just said he wouldn’t break,” Middleton said pointedly.

“I did,” Lynch agreed. “That’s why a man would do well to…well, I’ve said enough already,” he finished before turning his gaze away from Middleton and looking around the yacht’s now-stripped interior.

Middleton took the other man’s meaning plainly enough, but he disliked the idea of following his advice in this particular matter. Not only was he a criminal with extensive ties to the Spine’s black market, but he was one of the few men who Middleton had actually met and considered absolutely untrustworthy.

Still, when he presented the situation in the way he had, it was a compelling argument to say the least. Tim Middleton knew he would need to think on it for some time before arriving at a decision.

“We’ll take a quick look around the Temperance,” Middleton decided, “and then we’ll leave your salvage ship to do its work. You’ll come with us to my ship.”

“Fine by me,” Lynch shrugged before a smirk flashed briefly across his features, “I cleared my schedule for this, after all. Just be sure to bring me up to the bridge when my boys arrive; they’ll want to take their orders from me, if you get my meaning.”

Chapter XLIV: A Fresh Coat of Paint

Much to Middleton’s surprise, the crime lord was a model guest during his stay aboard the Pride of Prometheus. He made no objection to staying in a brig cell—having in fact suggested the possibility of such early in the process, which had set Middleton ill at ease.

A man like Lynch would know how to break out of any jail cell where such was possible, so Captain Middleton had tripled security on the brig for the week following their ‘guest’s’ arrival.

Kratos was also cooling his heels in the brig, and Middleton knew that he would need to address that particular situation before long but he also knew that he needed to put his ship to rights before doing so.

The yacht had departed twenty hours earlier, and the countdown timer on the main viewer showed that twelve minutes had elapsed since the sleek vessel could have made its fastest return jump when Hephaestion reported, “I am detecting a point transfer, Captain.”

Middleton awaited the confirmation of the ship’s identity, knowing that if it was anyone but the yacht that even Garibaldi’s diligent patch jobs to the ship’s power grid would ultimately prove useless against a determined foe.

“It is the yacht,” Hephaestion reported, followed by, “I am detecting a second point transfer, sir.” A moment later he confirmed, “It matches the ship profile you outlined, Captain Middleton.”

“Good,” Middleton acknowledged levelly. Just because they were in the system on time, and appeared to be who they said they were, did not exactly put Middleton at ease. He switched his chair’s com-link to a direct connection with the brig, “Bring our guest up, Sergeant.”

“Yes, Captain,” Gnuko replied promptly. He had been released on schedule not long after Middleton had returned from Capital, and the Pride’s commander saw no reason to belabor the matter of Atticus’ death any further. The truth was that Gnuko had served the Pride with distinction throughout his time aboard ship, and Middleton felt fortunate to have him in charge of the Lancer contingent.

Several minutes later, Sergeant Gnuko—flanked by a pair of power-armored Lancers—entered the bridge. They were accompanied by Lynch, who looked around the bridge and shook his head. “These old girls never was pretty, but they sure is tough.”

“Your salvage vessel has entered the system,” Middleton said, gesturing to the station beside Fei Long which had been set up with a headset already connected to the hailing frequencies.

Lynch approached the station and deftly manipulated the controls, prompting Fei Long to quirk an eyebrow as the man reset the channel to a seemingly random series of three, separate, frequencies before holding the microphone up to his lips, “Make ready for the transfer, but come in slow; the disc is too dense for your usual speed, Lockette.”

There was an intense wave of static which crashed over the speakers, and Fei Long quickly examined his controls in confusion.

A moment later the static stopped and Lynch said, in a markedly different accent and cadence, “You’ll do as I say, Ricky boy; don’t forget who brought you into this business.”

Another burst of static came over the speakers, and Lynch nodded.

“That’s what I thought,” he quipped in his former accent before setting the headset down and turning to Middleton. “We good.”

“Was that a polyphonic cypher?” Fei Long asked in open amazement. “How are you able to—“

Middleton’s withering look was enough to cut the young man off mid-sentence, but Lynch chuckled as he turned to the young man. “You know, you ain’t as dumb as you look.”

Fei Long was clearly offended, but he masked it reasonably well as the arms dealer turned to face Middleton once again. “We can either ferry loads back and forth, or we can have my boys splash the cargo all at once a few hundred kilometers from here and then leave the system. It’s your call.”

“Let’s ferry,” Middleton said, “starting with the high value gear first so my people can look over it.”

Lynch looked genuinely offended. “It’s packed in the way it’s packed in, but y’all can keep them heavy lasers trained on Ricky’s boat for all I care,” he waved at the screen. “Your goods is all in working order—I’d kill anyone that tried to smear my reputation that way, feel me?”

“All the same,” Middleton allowed, actually believing Lynch, which was more than a little surprising to him, “let’s ferry.”

“Suit yourself,” Lynch shrugged as he reached into his pocket and withdrew a handful of small, round, multi-colored candies which he popped into his mouth. “Mind if we have a word in private, Captain?” he asked after chewing on the candies for a few seconds.

Middleton saw Gnuko step forward, but he waved the Lancer Sergeant off. “After you,” he gestured to his ready room’s door, and the two entered the chamber and assumed their respective seats. “What is it you wanted to discuss?” Middleton asked.

“We ain’t yet concluded our first transaction,” Lynch said, “but I thought now was a good time to talk about that second matter?”

Middleton leaned back in his chair and shook his head, “I won’t give up my prisoner, Lynch.”

The burly man chuckled, “I wasn’t askin’ you to. You and I done talked that matter out; I only got a request to make along those lines. Your…acquiescence might could sway my decision-makin’ process regarding that other deal we discussed.”

“I’m still not certain what that ‘other thing’ might be,” Middleton said, leaning forward and placing his forearms on his desk. “I understand you’re being purposefully vague, but that yacht’s essentially irreplaceable.”

“I know, I know,” Lynch agreed, “but a man like me could make better use of it than you. And besides, when the fur starts to fly it ain’t gonna do you one bit of good…whereas fifty Starfire missiles might.”

“That’s your offer?” Middleton asked, surprised at hearing that even Lynch had fifty Starfire missiles in his possession.

“For the yacht? Yeah,” Lynch replied confidently. “And don’t you pretend it’s a lowball offer, neither; we both know fifty of those beauties will do you more good than a slow-cycle pleasure craft ever will.”

It was true, much as Middleton would have liked to argue the point. The Pride had enough missile launchers mounted on its hull, after their refit at Gambit Station, to stow nearly that many without compromising the shuttle bay. “All right,” he allowed, “after my people have scrubbed its computers clean and gone over it for any evidence they might have missed, you can have the yacht if you deliver fifty Starfires.”

“Smart man,” Lynch nodded approvingly. “And now, as a personal favor and deal sealer,” he leaned forward, “I want you to put me in a room with Raubach Jr.”

“I can’t do that,” Middleton shook his head. “He’s worth too much to me.”

“I just got one question to ask him,” Lynch said, his eyes burning with an intensity that Middleton knew only too well. It was a look that spoke of a deep-seated anger which the Pride’s captain had experienced himself ever since hearing Jo’s life-changing confession. “Besides, Junior ain’t the man I’ve got in my sights,” he added, “and besides, if I misbehave y’all can kill me.” He leaned forward in his chair and said, in a tone that was far from the supreme confidence he had exuded until that point, “I need this, Tim, and I don’t forget my friends…or my enemies.”

Middleton knew it was risky, but the arms dealer still held all the cards. For all he knew, the salvage ship was armed to the teeth and would prove more than a match for the Pride in its crippled state.

“I’ll need more than fifty Starfire missiles,” he said, deciding against beating around the bush any more than was absolutely necessary.

“That’s all I’ve got,” Lynch retorted, “so you’ll have to decide if you prefer one bird in hand, or two showing you their tail feathers.”

“Fine,” Middleton agreed after a few moments’ consideration. “But I will kill you if you harm him, or even if I think you’re passing some kind of coded message to him.”

Lynch’s eyes flared and his entire body stiffened and he drew several long, deep breaths before slowly relaxing into his chair. “I’m gonna forgive you for that because you don’t know my history with these people,” the arms dealer said tightly. “I wouldn’t help a Raubach even if doing so saved a hundred worlds from burning, let alone to save my own skin. Judgment’s comin’ for them, and I aim to be holding the sword when it falls on ‘em.”

Lynch stood from his chair and Middleton did likewise. “To the brig, then,” Middleton said, gesturing to the door, “but you’ll have to agree to stay aboard this ship until we’re ready to jump. Regardless of your protestations to the contrary, I have to safeguard my ship.

The arms dealer nodded shortly. “If you’ve really got him in there, this will be well worth a few more days in a metal box.”

Captain James Raubach IV had been removed from cryo-stasis by Dr. Middleton under Captain Middleton’s orders a few days earlier. Under Jo’s care, the Imperial noble had made a nearly full recovery and now found himself in one of the Pride’s two maximum security cells.

“Unbelievable,” Lynch snorted as he looked through the one-way transparent door at the captive Raubach. “I cornered this rat three times in the last few years and he gave me the slip each blasted time,” he said in confidence. “The first time he bludgeoned my squadron of cutters from long range after feigning critical damage to his engines and drawin’ them in close to a gas giant. The second time I actually got a handful of boys onto his hull, but the bastard convinced ‘em to switch sides at the last minute.” He leaned against the wall, propping himself on his forearm as his eyes stayed locked on the Raubach commander. “The third time…well, I had him dead to rights. His shields were down and we was splashin’ strikes against his hull left and right—them Soyuz-class ships ain’t all that durable once you get past the shields,” he added as his lip began to curl. “Then, as my crack team moved in to capture him, his shields popped back up to full in no more than three seconds…I’ve never even heard of anything like it. My boys never had a chance; they bounced off his shields at full speed before autocannons shredded what was left of the assault shuttle to bits.”

Middleton had experienced strikingly similar maneuvers during his battles with Raubach, but he decided to keep that fact to himself. “Ask him your questions but don’t abuse him in any way,” Middleton instructed, knowing that Sergeant Gnuko and Lancer Funar would happily put the man down if he disobeyed.

“I just got one question for him,” Lynch said, straightening himself and looking at Middleton pointedly.

The captain nodded affirmatively to Lancer Traian, who unlocked the door from the brig’s main console. The transparent door slid to the side, and Lynch stepped inside as Raubach looked up at him with only the barest hint of recognition. “You’re supposed to be dead,” Raubach deadpanned as he shifted his posture while sitting on the edge of his cot.

“What do you know?” Lynch quipped. “Still warm, the blood that courses through my veins.” The arms dealer, whose physique dwarfed even James Raubach’s—who was considerably larger than Middleton—stepped forward, causing Gnuko and Funar to flinch but Middleton held up a hand haltingly. He was curious to see what Lynch asked, but more importantly, he was curious to see how Raubach reacted. “That’s one of the things that separates us mammals from you snakes…our warm blood, that is,” Lynch added.

“Is this supposed to impress me?” Raubach asked dryly. “So you’re alive; I’m sure father will be interested to hear about it.”

“Oh, he will,” Lynch replied confidently. “But this ain’t about your father, Jimmy,” he said, straightening with visible discomfort—discomfort probably caused by being forced to restrain himself. “Where’s Alice Schillinger?”

Raubach flinched, but it came and went so quickly that Middleton was convinced most people would have missed it. Middleton was generally not that good at reading people’s body language, but he had somehow caught the almost imperceptible reaction on the part of his prisoner.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Raubach replied evenly—a bit too evenly, in Middleton’s opinion—and Lynch’s gaze lingered only for a second before he shook his head and turned to leave the cell. Captain Raubach kept his features schooled into an unreadable mask even after the door slid shut behind the arms dealer.

“That’s what I needed to know,” Lynch said. “Best put me behind bars now, boss,” he said, turning to Gnuko.

Sergeant Gnuko gave Middleton a short look, and the captain nodded before saying, “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me who Alice Schillinger is.”

“I ain’t connectin’ the dots for you, Tim,” Lynch replied without making eye contact. “If you’re as smart as I think you are, you’ll figure it out. But I will say that her mother was a friend, and I already told you that I never forget a friend.”

With that he moved toward the other maximum security cell and sat on the edge of the bed, his eyes staring intently at the wall before him.

“Close it,” Middleton ordered, and the door slid shut behind him. He turned to Gnuko and added, “I don’t trust any of these people. If anything seems off in the slightest, your people are ordered to neutralize any apparent threat. I’ll take full responsibility for whatever your Lancers take that to mean,” he said with a hard look.

“Yes sir,” Gnuko replied, clearly taking Middleton’s meaning.

With that, the Pride’s commanding officer returned to the bridge to oversee the transfer of their replacement gear.

Fei Long worked in his quarters, alongside Yide, as they attempted to disassemble one of the primary computer cores from the yacht. They had stripped all of the cogitative gear out of the luxurious craft prior to installing a much simpler system which carried no risk of carrying ‘sleeping’ programs which would jeopardize their mission.

Captain Middleton had then ordered Fei Long to examine the hardware for anything unusual, including star charts or other relevant information which they might be able to use.

Yide had assisted Fei Long in dismantling six computer cores—fully twice as many as a ship of its size had any business needing—but none of them had yielded anything of value. Their memory banks had been wiped clean by a contingency program which had probably been chronologically triggered, and thus far the equipment had all seemed to be little more than high-end technology which could be found on any Core World in the Spineward Sectors.

This particular computer core appeared identical to the others, so when Yide removed the final plate covering the internal workings Fei Long expected to find a similar scene to the six previous cores.

Instead, his eyebrows rose sharply as his eyes grew as round as saucers. “This is what they like to call a ‘smoking gun’, Yide,” he said to Yide as he leaned forward.

The uplift issued a low growl, but he too seemed fascinated at what they had just discovered inside the computer core.

Captain Middleton will need to be informed immediately, Fei Long thought as he reached for his scanning equipment, after I have written a comprehensive report, of course…I suppose Dr. Middleton could be of some assistance, as well.

Chapter XLV: Beast Mode

Two days later, the transfers had been completed. Once again Middleton was impressed at seeing that Lynch was, indeed, a man of his word. None of the equipment which had been transferred was in less than working condition; he had expected to receive nothing but rejects and gear that had already been passed over on more than one occasion.

But Garibaldi had assured him every single piece of gear they transferred from the salvage vessel was fully functional. Much of it would require service time prior to deployment, but an installation schedule had already been worked up and signed off on by the ship’s Chief Engineer, and it suggested the Pride could be up and running in less than three weeks.

“Mr. Lynch,” Middleton said as the arms dealer was escorted onto the bridge.

“We’re on a first-name basis, Tim,” Lynch said casually as he moved beside the captain’s chair. “I think I’ll be goin’ with Marshawn for now,” he added as he sliced a look over at Strider, who glanced up from his station briefly before ducking his head down and making a show of staying on task.

“The transfers are complete…Marshawn,” Middleton said, gesturing to the main viewer. The salvage vessel had already begun its trek to the hyper limit, and was now beyond the Pride’s weapon range. “Captain Lockette’s ship is standing by.”

Lynch gestured to the Comm. station, and Middleton nodded. The arms dealer made his way to the station and picked up the same headset he had previously used to contact the salvage vessel, which was named Lockette’s Rocket—a crude term for which the origin was utterly uninteresting to Middleton. This time he left the system set to broadcast on the standard hailing frequencies as he held the microphone in front of his lips, “Good work, Ricky. Let’s go A/V for this one; it might be our last call, after all.”

A moment later, Fei Long asked, “Should I put through the incoming visual stream request, Captain?”

Middleton nodded, and a moment later a man’s face appeared on the main viewer. “Ricky,” Lynch said, putting the headset down and tilting his head in acknowledgment, “I do appreciate you comin’ all this way to help me with this deal.”

“What are old friends for?” Captain Lockette asked dryly, and it was probably clear to everyone on the bridge that there was no great love between the two men.

“You said it,” Lynch said smoothly. “There’s just one thing I’m curious about, though…” he said as he stepped forward and leveled a piercing look at the screen, “how much did the twins give you to burn me?”

Lockette’s eyes narrowed before they flitted to the side—probably checking a readout of some kind—and his expression turned smug. “More than you ever offered,” he spat before straightening in his chair. “But I thought we could leave all that in the past. It is a new day, after all, and a man in your position isn’t likely to make many new friends. You should be thankful I’m willing to continue our business relationship at all.”

Lynch nodded approvingly, and his voice was uncharacteristically carefree as he replied, “True…true. We did some good bidness in the past, and my own fortunes do seem to have taken a downturn just now. But do you remember the first thing I told you when we started working together way back when?”

Lockette’s smug expression turned into a sneer. “Even you can’t reach me out here, Lynch,” he said confidently. “I’m heading on to greener pastures; I suggest you do the same.”

Lynch grinned, and Middleton felt himself more than slightly invested in observing the outcome of the unexpected confrontation. Just then Hephaestion turned abruptly and said, “Captain, I am detecting a vessel…no, it is a missile.”

“Ain’t no missile, son,” Lynch said before yawning and buffing his nails on his vest.

Lieutenant Sarkozi raced to the Sensors section and stood beside Hephaestion for several seconds before visibly relaxing, “It’s on course to impact with the Rocket, Captain. Its emissions profile suggest…” her voice went hollow as she trailed off.

By that point, Lynch was no longer looking at the viewer and had turned to fix Middleton with his steely gaze. “I told Ricky the same thing I’m tellin’ you now, Tim,” he said conversationally as the tactical icons representing the salvage vessel and the unidentified projectile grew nearer and nearer. “I never forget my friends…or my enemies. And I ain’t never been the one to turn on my friends—but I’ve always been the one doin’ the burnin’ when they turned on me.”

The tactical icon representing the streaking missile changed to indicate its true designation, and Middleton felt a surge of unbridled emotions rise to the fore of his mind. “A Liberator torpedo,” he breathed as the countdown to impact ticked slowly down until ten seconds remained.

“Don’t’ worry, Ricky…Monique and Unique will be along presently to keep you company,” Lynch said in a conciliatory tone as he turned to face the view screen. “I’ll see to that personally.”

The salvage captain’s eyes were wide as he severed the connection from his end. A few seconds later there was a brilliant flash on the view screen which coincided with the torpedo’s impact against the ship’s hull.

“Direct hit,” Sarkozi reported professionally. A few seconds later she added, “The Rocket is gone, Captain.”

“Not many ships can take a Liberator,” Lynch said casually, “especially not when they’re packin’ them ship-buster warheads.”

“I’m reading a vessel near the hyper limit, Captain,” Hephaestion reported. “Its profile suggests it is a Cutter.”

“That’d be the Mode,” Lynch explained, “my old ship. She’s been sittin’ out there for about a week makin’ sure we wasn’t interrupted.”

Middleton took the man’s dramatic display in stride, knowing that if he was speaking the truth he could have destroyed the Pride at any point in the last week.

“Mr. Fei,” Middleton said, turning to face Fei Long, “have you completed your examination of the yacht?”

Fei Long nodded, “I have, sir. I found no further data or materials we might use.”

Middleton nodded before standing and moving toward Lynch. “She’s all yours,” he said, knowing that he was making a deal with the proverbial devil. The second half of their agreed-upon payment, which was the rest of the valuable materials that had been aboard the yacht when Gnuko had brought it to the Pride, had been packaged and re-loaded onto the same vessel in preparation for the deal’s consummation. “I can’t say it’s been a pleasure doing business, but it has been productive.”

Lynch grinned, showing his grill of diamond-studded teeth. “Them Starfires is out there,” he tilted his head toward the viewer. “The Mode brought ‘em in a cargo pod, and the transponder frequency is this,” he turned and input a set of numbers to the Comm. station’s open terminal before making brief eye contact with Fei Long, “you’ll want to follow these instructions precisely, son, lest my anti-theft device goes off, feel me?”

Fei Long gave the instructions a quick perusal and nodded with his usual confidence. “That will not be difficult.”

“You a cocky one,” Lynch said approvingly after he had finished writing down the instructions. He turned to Middleton and gestured to the doors leading off the bridge, “Take a walk?”

Middleton nodded, knowing the other man was likely just as anxious to leave the Pride as its captain was to disembark him.

The two left the bridge and made for the nearest lift, followed by Traian and Vali, and Middleton gave the two likely spies—who, if they were spies, were working for Admiral Montagne, and therefore not too great of a danger—a short look as he entered the lift with Lynch. The two men looked ready to enter the lift with them, but backed off at Middleton’s look. Then Captain Middleton surprised them both by beckoning for them to enter the lift.

“You run a tight ship,” Lynch said appreciatively. “I see now why such an old warhorse made it this far.”

“You’re referring to the ship, I assume,” Middleton said through briefly gritted teeth.

Lynch snickered. “Sure,” he shrugged. “By the way…about your prisoner; you ain’t gonna get nothin’ out of him, it’d be best for everybody if you trusted me on that. I once kept his older brother in a hole for three months and he never so much as squealed.”

“Sounds like you and the Raubachs have history,” Middleton said disinterestedly.

“We do,” Lynch agreed grimly as the lift stopped its descent and the doors slid open. Middleton and Lynch exited together, followed by the Lancers in power armor. “But I did manage to get my info, though,” he added as they made their way toward the shuttle bay.

“I suppose you’re going to share your method?” Middleton asked dryly.

Lynch nodded. “You’re smart, Tim, but you ain’t smarter than me. There’s things need doin’ in this world if you’re gonna get where you’re tryin’ to go, and the higher you go the less you like what those things is. Most people bail after they get their first bitter taste of reality,” he said as they came to a stop before the shuttle bay’s doors, “but I don’t think you will. I think you’ll do what needs doin’.”

“So how did you get him to talk?” Middleton asked as they entered the shuttle bay.

“I didn’t,” Lynch replied with a snort. “And I went farther in my attempts than you will…at least I went farther back then than you will today.”

“Then I’m missing something,” Middleton said as they arrived at the base of the ramp.

Lynch sighed and rolled his eyes. He gestured to the Lancers briefly before a sour look came over his face, and he instead turned to a team of workers who were repairing the ‘new’ shuttlecraft he had provided them. It was a different model than their old assault shuttle, but this particular version was significantly faster while also sporting significantly less armor. Fortunately they had enough spare shield generators that they were able to effectively double the craft’s overall protection by installing an extra shield generator.

“Them people,” Lynch said, gesturing to the engineers, “they follow you because of what they see you do. That uniform, these badges, your title,” he gestured to Middleton’s rank insignia, “they ain’t worth nothin’. They only tell a story about who you is, where you been, and what you done. So when they,” he tilted his head toward the crew working on the shuttle, “see you standin’ tall against the world, they stand tall too. And if you don’t break, they won’t break. But if they see you fall…well…” he met Middleton’s eyes for several seconds, and the Pride’s captain understood the other man’s message perfectly—and he found the suggestion more than a little distasteful, to say nothing of blatantly illegal, immoral, and in every other way diametrically opposed to the principles for which his uniform stood. “Some might stay strong for a spell, but not all of ‘em,” Lynch added pointedly, “not even fanatics. Everybody’s got their limits.”

Middleton suspected the man was actually right, but there was no way he could simply throw away everything his career had stood for—let alone endanger the careers, and lives, of the people who had followed him this far. “Have a good flight,” Middleton said, offering his hand to the arms dealer.

Lynch nodded knowingly as he accepted the hand, “You too, Tim.” The man’s grip was vice-like, and almost certainly unnatural, but Middleton kept his best poker face as he did his best to return the favor. Lynch grinned and released his hand before ascending the ramp. When he reached the top, he turned as though he had forgotten something, “Oh, and Tim, I got a couple packages I’d like you to personally see to delivering for me—if it ain’t too much trouble?”

Middleton nodded, “I think we can arrange it.”

“Good,” Lynch said, his grin fierce as he slapped the panel inside the craft, prompting the ramp to rise up slowly, “you’ll find ‘em with the Starfires. Make ‘em count.”

Captain Middleton nodded as the ramp closed completely, and the shuttle bay’s alarm sounded. The technicians stopped their work and made for the main doors, while Middleton and the Lancers followed.

Twenty hours later to the minute, the yacht point transferred out of the system. During that time, the Pride of Prometheus picked up the cargo container which Lynch had left for them and stowed its contents in the shuttle bay.

Ten minutes after Lynch’s new ship left the system, the Pride did likewise.

Chapter XLVI: The Final Nail

“You’re certain of this?” Middleton asked, looking back and forth between Fei Long and Jo after reviewing their report.

“Yes,” they replied in unison, but Jo leaned forward and Fei Long bowed deferentially to her as she explained, “I can’t tell you exactly what it came from but that is, without any shadow of a doubt in my mind, neural tissue—and it’s still alive.”

Middleton looked down at the small container, which they had brought with their jointly-written report, and saw nothing but a lump of brownish-grey material which he would have likely classified as biologic in nature. But its composition, according to the report, read more like a list of rare elements which included gadolinium, iridium, indium, and all other manner of minerals which were generally reserved for high-end electronics.

“Is this an AI?” Middleton asked, deciding to go straight to the heart of the matter.

Fei Long shook his head, “I do not believe so, Captain. Doctor Middleton’s hypothesis is almost certainly correct, but this appears to be peripheral nervous tissue, not central nervous tissue.”

“So…” Middleton trailed off as he wrapped his mind around the revelation, “this has more in common with the nerves which connect the spine to the muscles, than it does to the nerves that make up the brain?”

“Probably,” Jo cut in before Fei Long could reply, “but the truth is we don’t have anything like this on record. To make categorical statements or to draw absolute conclusions is, I think, far beyond us at this point. But,” she allowed, “it doesn’t appear to have any spontaneous activity, and since we extracted it from the computer core it’s been…well, dormant.”

“You’ve stimulated it?” Middleton asked, his gaze switching back to Fei Long who nodded hesitantly.

“I have, Captain,” he replied more weakly than was usual for him. “It responds in as yet unpredictable ways, but I am certain that further testing—“

“This is alive,” Jo repeated forcefully. “We can’t just poke it, or shock it, or subject it to any other forms of physical manipulation without knowing more about it. To do so would be unethical, Captain,” she said, leveling a hard look at Middleton.

She had gotten much of her strength back, but she still required the assistance of the breathing mask from time to time, and after fixing him with an unyielding look she drew several breaths from the device and sat back in her chair.

“My concern is less for this…thing’s safety than it is for my crew’s,” Middleton said. “But for the time being, I’m inclined to concur with your judgment. That could change, however,” he said as he turned to face Fei Long again, “if this is the same thing you found on the ComStat hub.”

Fei Long leaned forward and Jo shot him a surprised look. “I believe it is, Captain Middleton,” he replied, casting a brief glance in Jo’s direction. “This particular specimen is more structured but the composition, electromagnetic field frequency, and location in which it was found are very nearly identical to the specimen I observed aboard the ComStat hub.”

Middleton leaned back in his chair and nodded slowly. “So…we already knew that the Raubachs have access to the ComStat network,” he said, knowing it was the most obvious conclusion to be drawn from the discovery. “But now we know that, somehow, this,” he held up the specimen container, “material is responsible for that access.”

“That is my conclusion as well, Captain,” Fei Long agreed. “Additionally, it might explain how they were able to set an ambush for us—an ambush which required significant preparation time on their part,” the young man added, and it was a thought which Middleton had shared a moment earlier. “The runtimes I detected at work in the last ComStat hub likely allowed the Raubachs to track our movements by logging the intensity, frequency, and triangulated location of my detection pings.”

“Agreed,” Middleton said, steepling his fingers after placing the specimen on his desk. Mr. Fei’s constant ‘pinging’ for ComStat hubs every time they point transferred must have tipped the Raubachs off to the Pride’s location somehow—a possibility that would require significant consideration if proven likely.

He thought for several minutes about his next question, and was actually torn as to whether or not he should ask it in Jo’s presence but he knew that she was the only person who could sufficiently answer it. He was also done with walking on eggshells around her; things were going to change between the two of them, and that change needed to happen quickly.

“Can you kill it?” Middleton asked, turning to Jo with a patient look on his face. He expected her to argue, and he even anticipated asking Fei Long to leave so they could get through their latest round of bickering, but then a funny thing happened.

“Yes,” Jo said simply, producing a syringe from her pocket and placing it on the desktop. “It’s not poisonous to humans, at least not in this quantity,” she explained, “but that dose, injected into the central mass of tissue, will kill it within seconds.”

“Irreversibly?” Middleton pressed, still somewhat shocked that she had created, then volunteered, the poison.

Jo nodded, “To the best of my knowledge, yes. The complex bonds between elements will be broken down instantly and while the base material could potentially be used to create a new growth, I see nothing in this specimen to suggest it is capable of initiating such growth.”

“But the specimen on the ComStat hub was larger,” Middleton said, looking at Fei Long, “doesn’t that mean it grew?”

Fei Long and Jo shared a quick look before the young man shook his head, “We believe that was not growth, per se, but rather…a sort of cystic process resulting from long-term exposure to the inhospitable environment of the hub.”

“Would examining a second specimen, one which resembles the one on the ComStat hub, make possible a final determination of that?” Middleton asked.

“Probably,” Jo replied with a nod. “But the truth is we need more information about this. It’s clearly not something which the Empire created, Captain, so my professional recommendation is that we contact one of the foremost xenobiologists in the Spine. I made a list from memory of the ones who I think might be able to help,” she said, proffering a data slate which Middleton accepted.

It was a short list so it only took Middleton a few seconds before his eyes locked onto one name—a name which he repeated aloud, “Alice Schillinger.”

Jo and Fei Long shared looks of alarm before Jo asked, “Does that name mean something to you?”

Middleton shook his head, “Not to me…” Each name had a brief summary of the person’s specialty, and when Middleton’s eyes came to rest on what was essentially a footnote in Jo’s entry on Ms. Schillinger, it was like the pieces of a puzzle began falling together before his eyes. “Tell me what you know about her,” he said, his mind racing as he considered the possible implications of this discovery—a discovery which very well may have remained unmade if not for Jo’s and Fei Long’s expertise.

“She’s a former Imperial,” Jo replied, giving Middleton a look that told him she knew that he knew something. “Her primary study was of exotic life form theory, specifically life forms involving rare elements as a significant part of their base makeup. Most life that we can recognize is made of the same stuff as we are,” she explained, “hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, etc.. Her theory was that, given the vastness of the universe, some life must necessarily arise based on other chemical compounds. The theory itself is nothing new,” she said as Middleton found himself nodding silently at her report, “but the extremes to which she took it most certainly were—as was the evidence she had gathered to support her claims. I attended a lecture of hers where she made the radical suggestion that such life had almost certainly already arisen in this galaxy, and that it likely moved on because it was, essentially, superior to us.”

Fei Long, who had been listening with unguarded fascination, leaned forward onto the edge of his seat and asked excitedly, “Did she mean the Elders or the Ancients?”

Jo shook her head, “She never got into the details, and frankly even I thought she was losing her mind. The woman is a hundred and thirty six years old, after all.”

Middleton’s eyebrows shot up. “I’m sorry…did you say ‘a hundred and thirty six’?” Lynch had hinted at a personal relationship with her mother, which meant that Lynch himself was most likely well over a century old!

She shrugged, “You wouldn’t guess it by looking at her. The vanity of the rich apparently knows no bounds,” Jo said with an uncharacteristic edge to her voice. “But it looks like she might have been onto something.”

“What makes you so certain the Empire isn’t responsible for this?” Middleton pressed. “It could be a recent discovery, or one the Raubachs made privately and have kept to themselves.”

Fei Long shook his head with absolute certainty. “We have only partially examined this tissue, Captain,” he said with unusual reservation, “but even if I am overstating the case by two orders of magnitude…a computer composed of this material could, theoretically, outperform our best technology by a hundredfold while utilizing identical input power and taking up even less physical space.”

“And if I’m right,” Jo added hesitantly, “then this is only the peripheral nervous tissue.”

“Your point is well-taken, Doctor,” Middleton said with a nod of agreement. The presence of this…material not only explained how the Raubachs had managed to do so much damage, so quickly, to Sectors 23 & 24.

Middleton was all too aware of the strategic value of the ComStat network, just as any half-decent commander understood the importance of prompt communication between deployed assets and their command center.

But this strange, neural tissue could also explain how the Dämmerung managed to land so many hits on the Pride when the two ships were well past the extreme firing range of the longest guns in the fight. Striking a target with a laser at extreme range was less a matter of the weapon’s beam losing power with distance—although that was actually a factor, given the precise focal point required for the impact to have maximum effect—and more a matter of accurate targeting algorithms which must be calculated and implemented in real time, over distances that were beyond the human mind’s ability to properly conceptualize.

With targeting computers operating on a scale like Mr. Fei was suggesting possible, it was entirely reasonable to assume that a turbolaser could operate at half again—or even double—its maximum rated range with relatively minor adjustments to the weapon itself.

That kind of advantage was, to put it mildly, enough to shift the balance of power in the entire Spine toward those who possessed the technology. Battles would be less influenced by total throw weight of the involved ships and more by each engaged ship’s ability to avoid, or soak up, the damage being thrown at it.

With that kind of a technological advantage, Middleton suspected that a Light Destroyer could tear apart most SDF’s all by itself if it was fitted with the same turbolasers as the Dämmerung had been equipped with. Sure, the battleships would be able to absorb the damage well enough that a Light Destroyer probably would be unable to destroy them, but what about the cruisers, corvettes, frigates, and cutters? They would be torn apart long before they could enter firing range…

Middleton snapped himself from his reverie and leaned forward in his chair. “Thank you for your contribution to this report, Doctor,” he said, looking first to Jo and then to Fei Long, “and good work, Mr. Fei. This information needs to be compartmentalized, is that understood?”

Jo nodded, “We cleared the lab when we ran the tests; the only other person who knows about it is Yide.”

“Yide?” Middleton repeated with a furrowed brow.

“Mr. Toto’s eldest son,” Fei Long explained. “He asked me to help him select a name, and I was happy to provide a somewhat fitting one from Romance of The Three—“

Middleton held up a hand, silencing the young man mid-sentence. “I’ll speak with him after we’re finished here. Was there anything else?” he asked, knowing he would need to reflect on the information he had just received.

“Yes,” Fei Long replied quickly, and Captain Middleton gestured for him to go on, “I believe I have perfected my attack drone design, Captain. It should be possible to deploy the units in lieu of the Lancer teams which had boarded the ComStat hubs thus far.”

Middleton arched an eyebrow, “In your initial report you suggested that the interference would be too much for even the droid transceivers to overcome. Has something changed?”

Fei Long nodded knowingly, “Yide has assisted me in overcoming that particular issue, Captain. The Sundered have significant expertise in the field of long-range communication systems integration,” he explained, alluding to the gunships which were controlled by cybernetic implants which interfaced directly with the director’s brain. Such implants were illegal, but they appeared to be the primary method by which the Sundered could fight back against those who would oppress them.

“Good,” Middleton congratulated. “Is there a ComStat hub in the area?”

Fei Long nodded, “I believe so, Captain. Mr. Hephaestion and I have been working on a revised method of detection and I believe we have located a hub between two and four jumps from our present location.”

“Work with Mr. Strider to come up with an itinerary and have the XO bring it to me once you’ve done so,” Middleton ordered. “Dismissed, Mr. Fei.”

“Yes, Captain,” Fei Long acknowledged, standing from his chair and giving his customary bow before leaving the ready room.

Jo made as if to follow, but when she was halfway to the door Middleton said, “We’re not done yet, Doctor.” He knew it was time for them to clear the air, and he also knew that the first step needed to be made by him.

She stopped and turned, giving him a neutral look before moving back to her seat and lowering herself into it.

Middleton looked pointedly at the syringe she had provided and said, “I understand what that meant to you, Doctor. Don’t think I take it lightly.”

She nodded curtly but said nothing, and Middleton had to fight to keep his hands from clenching into fists.

“You once said something to me,” he said as he leaned back in his chair and quoted “you said ’almost no wound is so deep, or so traumatic, that it can’t be treated. But sometimes you can’t get the help you need before it’s too late.’ Do you remember that?”

Jo cocked her head slightly and nodded, “I do…I’m surprised you remembered it, though. You were half asleep when I said it, and it’s been over twenty years.”

“Well, I did remember it,” he said as he drew a deep breath. “I remember a lot of things…” he said before his mind began to wander down paths he knew would lead to nothing good. He straightened himself in his chair and gestured back and forth between them, “Whatever this has been between us is no good for anyone, Jo. Part of that is my fault, and part of it is yours—“

“Most of it is mine,” she cut in, and he was surprised to hear her say it, “but you haven’t exactly made an effort to deal with it.”

But he decided not to belabor the point, nodding silently for several seconds before continuing, “I guess I have only one question to which I’d like the answer, and I promise I’ll move on from this recent…animosity to the best of my ability.”

She stiffened visibly but, to her credit, she kept her voice controlled as she said, “I won’t lie to you.”

Middleton drew a deep breath, which he held for several seconds before asking, “What was our daughter like?”

The brave façade which Jo had built up crumbled instantly and tears began to well in her eyes. Middleton felt his own eyes begin to water, and they sat in complete silence for what seemed like an eternity before she finally answered, “She was just like her father: smart, inquisitive, calculating,” she said, her voice trembling between sobs, “and when we fought…she never once forgave me for it.”

Middleton shook his head as her sobs intensified. “Then we’re different in that regard, at least,” he said, making eye contact with her and holding her gaze with as much compassion in his visage as he could muster. She seemed to take as much comfort at hearing his words as he took in saying them, so he added, “Tell me more about her.”

And she did.

Chapter XLVII: Cocked, Locked…

Middleton looked around the bridge and felt a measure of pride at seeing his crew working together. Just a few months earlier they had been brought together, and the majority of the newcomers were the MSP’s castoffs and rejects.

Helmsman Marcos had locked down the First Shift helmsman post, and Middleton had been so impressed with her performance—and sobriety—to that point that he had called her in that morning to inform her that the mandatory drug screenings to which she had been subjected would be relaxed significantly.

She had been resistant at first, suggesting that the system was working for her, but Middleton knew that that old adage, ‘If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward,’ applied in every facet of life. If she was going to continue to advance her career, she would need to continue her own journey and he intended to help her do so.

Sarkozi had also grown immensely during the Pride’s deployments, and Middleton no longer felt the urge to double check her tactical projections or other sensitive input. She still had a long way to go before she could command her own vessel, but Middleton himself had been wholly unprepared for the responsibilities of command.

And Fei Long, around whom it often seemed the ship’s entire mission orbited, sat at his station with his combat drone control glove active while Winters managed the ship’s Comm. system while Mr. Fei directed his so-called attack dogs, and Middleton waited patiently for the young man’s report.

Winters gave Fei Long a nod, and the younger man stood from his chair with a look of relief on his face, “The program has been uploaded to this ComStat hub, Captain. The propagation process will require several hours, during which time I advise we move to a distance of ten million kilometers for safety reasons. If the propagation is successful, we will gain Sector-wide access to the lower-bandwidth functions of the ComStat network.”

“Helm,” Middleton turned to Marcos, “make our distance ten million kilometers from the hub.”

“Ten million kilometers, aye,” she acknowledged, and the Pride began to pull away. Their engines were still operating at half their rated power, but Chief Garibaldi was confident that the remaining heat sinks would be installed in three days’ time, after which his teams could begin installing their heavy lasers.

“XO,” Middleton said, standing from his chair, “you have the bridge. Notify me if the situation changes.”

“Aye, Captain,” Sarkozi acknowledged with a nod as she moved to the low dais on which the command chair sat.

Middleton made his way to the doors and found himself hoping that Lynch was wrong.

Upon entering the brig, Middleton was met by Lancer Vali Funar. He was about to push past him after returning the man’s silent salute, but he decided now was as good of a time as any to address the proverbial elephant in the room.

“I’m curious,” Middleton said as he turned to face the man, “what were your orders, exactly?”

The Lancer’s visage hardened and he shook his head, “I don’t know what you mean, Captain.”

“Come on,” Middleton sighed irritably, “this isn’t my first dance, Funar. The Admiral sent you here with orders to what…observe us and report on our actions when we eventually rejoin the fleet? What else would he say…” Middleton mused, cocking his head slightly, “something about looking for evidence of collusion with the Raubachs—or maybe even the Asiatics, now that I’m thinking about it—and being ready to disembark the ship at the earliest convenience so you could bring him word, I’d wager. I’d also guess that he ordered you to kill me if you thought you could get away with it, but he wouldn’t have needed to give you that order now would he?”

Funar’s eyes snapped back and forth between Middleton’s during the tense silence, but the other man wilted visibly as he shook his head, “No, sir, he wouldn’t have needed to give me that particular order.”

Middleton nodded agreeably. “Good,” he said, “because if he had, I’d space you right now. I know about your covert op on Capria but you’re on my ship now, Lancer,” he said, stepping toward the man until their noses nearly touched, “and I don’t have time for any more games—no matter who ordered them. Where we’re going we’ve got to watch each other’s backs, not wait for an opportunity to put a shank into them. If you can’t deal with that, I’ll put you off the ship at the next populated world we come to and you can make your report to the Admiral.”

Funar bristled and clasped his hands behind his back, “Permission to speak freely, Captain?”

“It had better be good,” Middleton quipped.

“You aren’t the only one who’s fighting for what’s right,” he said hotly. “If the Admiral doubted your loyalty, even you have to admit that your story didn’t exactly pass the sniff test.”

“My ‘story’?” Middleton repeated icily, feeling his hackles rise at the man’s insinuation. “You mean the one where this crew singlehandedly rescued thousands of colonists aboard a settler ship? Or the one where they uncovered and neutralized a bioweapons production facility? Or how about the best one of all,” he growled, “the one where they fought—and died in droves!—on the orders of a man who holds them in such low regard that he places spies in their midst?”

“That’s not how it is, sir—“ he began.

“I don’t think you’re in any position to tell me how it is, Lancer,” Middleton snapped. “You weren’t here—they were!” he snapped, pointing toward the doorway leading to the adjoining corridor. “And more than half of the men and women that have boarded this ship to carry out Admiral Montagne’s mission will never go home, never see their loved ones, and never pursue the dreams each of them brought aboard this vessel.” Middleton straightened himself and lowered his voice, “You can take a shot at me if you like—you wouldn’t be the first, and you won’t be the last,” he said, knowing the last was truer than he would have liked, “but you will respect the men and women who serve aboard this ship. Don’t think I’m unaware of your role in the near-mutiny we had on our hands,” he said, casting a look toward the cell in which Kratos presently resided. “Intentional or not, your ‘method of inquiry’ nearly sunk this ship and everyone on it.”

Middleton had known about Funar’s questioning of those crewmembers which had been aboard during the Pride’s first tour in Sectors 23 & 24. He had tolerated it because he thought it was important to provide transparency, but he now realized it had been a mistake to let men with an agenda that wasn’t his—the Captain’s—pursue that agenda, no matter how harmless or even beneficial it might seem. He was overstating the case since Funar and Traian had largely left the Tracto-ans alone, but they had definitely contributed to the formation of divides among the crew.

Funar gritted his teeth and said, “I’m aware of that, sir. But I’m also aware of who my commanding officer is.” He straightened and said, “My orders were as you say, but the Admiral also said that if I found nothing untoward within three weeks that I was to consider that particular mission accomplished and to integrate into the crew—your crew,” he added pointedly. “You’re my C.O., Captain Middleton.”

“And Traian?” Middleton pressed, not entirely satisfied with the man’s answer but hearing the ring of truth in it.

“Tray?” Funar said incredulously. “He’s a good man, sir, but this was a one-man op.”

“You like working special ops, Funar?” Middleton asked neutrally.

The man hesitated before nodding, “I do, sir. The mission on Capria was an eye-opener for me.”

“Good,” Middleton grudged, “I’ll see to it that you’re transferred to the Recon Team immediately.” The man’s expression remained stony, which Middleton had to credit him for at the very least. “Report to Corporal Lu after this shift is complete; I hear she’s still looking for Lancers who can keep up with her. Think you can do that, Funar?” he asked with more than a hint of challenge in his voice.

Lancer Funar nodded briskly as he snapped to attention. “Yes, Captain.”

“Carry on,” Middleton said before turning to the cell holding Captain Raubach. “Open this cell.”

The doors slid open and Middleton stepped inside. James Raubach IV, whose features were sharp, dark, and far paler than any of the Pride’s crew outside the Tracto-ans, looked up lazily from his cot. “Oh, good,” he muttered, and Middleton immediately found the man’s accent insufferable. “Captain Middleton,” he said as he sat up, “you have finally graced me with your presence. To what do I owe this inestimable honor?”

“I’d think a prisoner, especially one raised with a silver spoon in his mouth like you, would have a little better sense than to begin a conversation by patronizing his jailor,” Middleton said levelly.

“Am I supposed to feel threatened here, Middleton?” Raubach asked blandly. “We both know the score so let’s just cut through the detritus and get down to brass tacks: what are you after?”

“Excuse me?” Middleton asked, genuinely curious what the other man was on about. He couldn’t believe that Raubach would actually volunteer the information he wanted, but for a moment he had to admit that he entertained the idea with more than a modicum of hope.

“My ransom,” Raubach replied in his insufferable, arrogant tone that told the story of a lifetime spent talking down to people like they were little better than house pets. “That is what all of this was about, right? I have to assume you’ve already ransacked my yacht, but my family will pay ten times that amount to see me returned safely to them. You just need to figure out what form you’d like the payment to take: cash; a colonial governorship somewhere out on the Rim; or a real ship to command instead of this old…thing,” he looked around with a sour expression.

Of all the subjects Middleton had considered during his contemplations of how this particular conversation would go, the idea of ransom was one he had never fully explored. “You seem confident your father still wants you back,” he said, trying to buy time for his mind to wrap itself around the subject matter, “but he didn’t exactly send the cavalry out after you, did he?”

Raubach’s sour expression intensified before he expertly wiped it from his face, replacing it with a courtly mask like Middleton was used to seeing in holo-vids about royal intrigue. “You have no idea what’s going on out here, Middleton,” Raubach said playfully. “You’re like a three-legged dog hopping around in search of a bone you’ll never find, digging here and there with mortal certainty that you’re getting closer. But you couldn’t be farther from the truth if you tried, and every hole you dig takes you further from your goal.” He shook his head in mock sympathy, “I’m offering you a way out of that, Middleton. If you play your cards right, in two weeks’ time you’ll be one of the most powerful men in the entire Sector. You still want to come after me then? Fine,” he shrugged indifferently, “but a man like you understands that he’s going to need more than a ship like this to make a dent in my family’s operation…whatever it may be.”

Middleton knew that he had no business verbally sparring with someone of Rabuach’s stature, so he pushed aside the subject and cut right to the point, as the Imperial Captain had suggested at the outset, “Where is your family’s base of operations on the Rim?”

Raubach’s eyebrows rose in surprise and he even chuckled before regaining control. “Well…that is direct, I’ll give you that much,” he said as he shook his head in bewilderment that may very well have been genuine.

“I’m a busy man,” Middleton shrugged, taking some measure of satisfaction in wrong-footing the other man as effectively as Raubach had done to him a few minutes earlier. “I don’t have a lot of time games.”

“So…” Raubach stood from his cot as a cat-like smile crept across his features, “what’s your plan? You’ll ride up, knock on the front door and tell them they’re all under arrest?”

“It does have the virtue of simplicity,” Middleton allowed.

“And what happens when they refuse your generous offer?” he asked with open amusement.

“I don’t know exactly,” the Pride’s captain said lightly, “but in my time out here I’ve learned that I’m more persuasive than people tend to expect.”

“That’s true,” Raubach said thoughtfully as his face scrunched up as though in thought. “But you’re also lucky,” he said pointedly, “that battleship saved you during our first encounter, and my…overextension of resources led to an unlikely sequence of events culminating in that little bitch and her gene-slaves catching a lucky break against me on the corvette.”

“I’ll be sure to tell her she made an impression,” Middleton said dryly. “She usually just blends into the crowd; I’ve taken to where I hardly even notice her.”

Raubach’s expression turned grim, and all pretense of cordiality vanished immediately. “Cut the act, Middleton,” he spat. “You know, and I know, that this is as far as you go. Take the win for what it is and move on to greener pastures while you still have the chance.”

Middleton smirked, finding the man’s arrogance and presumption to be more than he had believed possible. Even Admiral Montagne didn’t come across half this cocky!

“I’m going to ask you again,” Middleton said matter-of-factly, “where is your family’s base of operations out on the Rim?”

“Are you really that stupid?” Raubach asked, blinking as though in shocked disbelief—which, Middleton supposed, it was possible was also genuine. “You have a chance to actually make something of yourself here, and you’d throw it away…for what?”

“I take it that’s a refusal to answer the question?” Middleton asked expectantly.

“You could say that,” Raubach replied with a piteous shake of his head.

“Ok,” Middleton said agreeably. “But the next time I ask you that question, I need you to understand—and truly believe, if for nothing other than purely selfish reasons—that it will be the last time. You’ve read my dossier,” he said, knowing it was certainly true, “am I the kind of man who makes idle threats?”

Raubach made no reply but his eyes narrowed in silent calculation as he searched Middleton’s features for some sign, or tell, from which he could divine something useful.

“Think about that,” Middleton said before stepping out of the cell and gesturing for the door to be closed behind him. When it had done so, he stopped in front of Kratos’ cell and gave very real consideration to making the trip a hat trick of meetings with problematic people aboard his ship.

But he decided to put it off, and headed to the shuttle bay instead.

Chapter XLVIII: …and Ready to Rock

“Chief,” Middleton greeted his Chief Engineer upon entering the shuttle bay, “how go the repairs?”

Garibaldi nodded agreeably, “Well we won’t be putting in any vacuum time until we jump out of here, but we’ve got most of the new lasers refurbished and ready for installation.”

“That was quick,” Middleton said in surprise.

“They were in more or less pristine shape,” Garibaldi shrugged. “With six of these babies on each broadside we’re going to pack a heck of a surprise for anyone who thinks they can outmaneuver us. Not to mention those,” he said with a pointed look at a pair of massive objects which were nearly as large as their new shuttle. “I’ve got to say,” he sighed as they approached them, “just looking at ‘em gives me the creeps. But I’m guessing that they’ll end up causing someone else an even worse day than they did me and my people when we brought them aboard.”

Middleton nodded, knowing that just having the weapons on board the Pride was a violation of at least a dozen interstellar treaties. “I ordered you to bring them aboard, Chief,” Middleton said sternly. “I’m the only one on the hook here.”

Garibaldi looked genuinely offended. “Tim, so long as these things get used on the people I think they’re going to get used on, I’ll stand right beside you when the firing squad lines up,” he said grimly. “Someone’s got to stop these people, and I don’t see help arriving any time soon.”

“Neither do I,” Middleton admitted as he knelt beside the awesome weapons.

He had never before seen a Liberator torpedo up close—he had, of course, studied them extensively over the past several months for what should be obvious reasons—and even he got a chill when looking at the merciless weapons.

The casing was nearly two meters thick, comprised of overlapping duralloy plates constructed in such a way that they would actually shape the charge of the fusion warhead within, making it capable of penetrating any known man-made structure. Duralloy was supposedly incapable of serving this particular function, which made the construction of these terrible weapons highly secretive—their creator mysteriously died not long after the first Liberators were used against Imperial warships fifty years earlier, suggesting that even the Empire understood the awesome power of these weapons and wanted no part in a galaxy armed with them.

Middleton had seen footage of a demonstration where one Liberator had punched through shielding equivalent to a Dreadnaught-class battleship’s shields—which had been charged to full power—and delivered its payload through armor plating equivalent to three times that same battleship’s maximum armor thickness.

“They called the warheads ‘Nova Bombs’,” Garibaldi said, shaking his head and actually shivering as he looked at the weapon from stem to stern, “not exactly original, but not exactly inaccurate either. Now, I can understand this Lynch fellow getting his hands on the torpedoes,” the Chief said, “but I thought I heard somewhere that only five or six of the warheads had ever gone unaccounted for?”

“Five,” Middleton agreed, “at least that’s the official line, and I guess we can mark one of those off the list, which suggests we’ve got at least half of the active Liberator torpedoes known to exist sitting right in front of us.”

“There is that,” Garibaldi relented before sighing. “Is there nobody out here we can trust, Tim? Is this really going to just be us against one of the most powerful organizations in the galaxy?”

Middleton stood and looked his friend in the eye. “We’ve got each other,” he said, “and as far as I’m concerned, that’s enough.”

Mikey cracked a lopsided grin and Middleton was glad to see his old friend’s jovial personality peek through, even if just for a second. “That’d be why you’re the Captain,” he said, turning his back on the Liberators and prompting Middleton to do likewise, “you always know the right thing to say.”

Middleton shook his head silently as they walked away, knowing that in his mind nothing could have been farther from the truth.

Before heading back to the bridge, Middleton decided to stop by Fei Long’s quarters. The young man was presently stationed on the bridge, but Middleton knew that Yide, Toto’s son, had taken to pulling entire duty shifts in the young man’s makeshift workshop.

He pressed the button beside the door, signaling that he was requesting entry. A moment later the door slid open to reveal Yide, who was smaller than his father but still larger than all but the biggest Tracto-an aboard the Pride of Prometheus.

“Captain?” Yide asked, his voice markedly higher than his father’s but still well below the range in which Middleton could speak. “I did not expect you.”

Middleton shook his head, “It’s all right; I was just on my way back to the bridge and thought we should have a talk.”

Yide nodded hesitantly before gesturing for the captain to enter Fei Long’s quarters. Middleton obliged, looking around only briefly before the door slid shut behind him.

“You were present when Mr. Fei discovered the…material inside the computer core we removed from the yacht?” Middleton asked, already knowing the answer to be ‘yes’ but curious how the young Sundered would respond.

Yide nodded, gesturing to the far end of a narrow, metal, bench which had been installed along the bulkhead. “The core is here,” he explained, moving toward the core’s housing.

Middleton shook his head, “That’s not why I came. The discovery of this…thing presents a series of security issues, as I’m sure you might have surmised.”

Yide nodded, “I will not speak of it, even to my family.”

Middleton nodded approvingly. “That’s good,” he said, momentarily at a loss after the young ‘man’ had driven directly to the heart of the matter and settled it in a single breath. “If you don’t mind my asking,” he said, gesturing to the Sundered’s hairy, unmolested scalp, “are you ever going to get implants like your father has?”

Yide shook his head and snorted loudly, sounding more like a bull than a man as he did so, “The implants must be placed early in life or there are…side effects.”

“Such as?” Middleton asked, finding himself more curious than he expected to be.

“My father’s…speech…” he said, gesturing to his mouth as he apparently searched for the proper words. “A normal side effect of the implants is that they interfere with several expressive functions of the brain while leaving cognition almost completely intact. This is part of why he speaks as he does, while I do not speak as he does.”

“I didn’t know that,” Middleton said with genuine surprise. Then another question came to his mind, “Can you answer a personal question honestly?”

Yide stiffened, “If you would have me betray my family’s privacy—“

“No, no, no,” Middleton cut him off, waving a hand dismissively, “I was just curious how you find life aboard this ship. I know there has been some tension among the crew of late.”

Yide shrugged his massive shoulders. “Things are better now that the gene-mod named Atticus is dead,” he said indifferently. “But even with the…tension, life here is better than any I have ever known—but I cannot speak for my father.”

“No, of course not,” Middleton agreed. “I won’t even suggest that I could understand what your life was like before, but I can say that I hope it’s been better aboard this ship. You and your family have earned your places here,” Middleton said before giving the uplift a nod and leaving the room.

“Captain,” Fei Long said tensely, “I…I…” he trailed off, prompting Middleton to turn to him in alarm.

“What is it?” he asked tightly.

“I…” Mr. Fei said in awe as a dumbfounded look spread across his face and he gasped, “I did it.”

“Did what?” Middleton pressed.

“The ComStat network, Captain…” the young man replied excitedly, prompting every head on the bridge to turn to him with raised eyebrows as he declared triumphantly, “we have access!”

Hearing him say it seemed to have a profound effect on the bridge crew as each one sat back in their chairs and looked at each other uncertainly. For their captain’s part, he knew it was a significant accomplishment. No, he chided himself, it’s more than that; it’s an unheard of accomplishment…and the only way it will be worth anything is if it stays that way.

“Confirm that,” Middleton said, realizing as he did that only Fei Long would be able to do so.

“I have already done so, Captain,” Fei Long replied, his tone subdued but his body language still borderline jubilant. “The network I established on Capital has received and re-transmitted the test message,” he explained. “Also, I am able to retrieve limited data via the planet’s extranet.”

“And this is happening in real-time?” Middleton asked, for a moment believing it too good to be true.

“Yes, captain,” Fei Long replied quickly. “The data packets are limited to just a few megabytes of information per transmission—a paltry amount, I know,” he said in open annoyance, “but it is the only way we can be certain that this activity is not discovered.”

“How is it possible for you to contact Capital?” Sarkozi interjected warily. “Aren’t all ComStat transceivers offline?”

“Yes, Lieutenant,” Fei Long replied dismissively as he tapped away at his console’s controls, “but Capital’s system—uniquely, as far as I can tell—is set to broadcast short bursts in an effort to re-acquire the ComStat network. I have…how would you say, ‘piggybacked’ my signal to this particular burst,” he said proudly. “It is absolutely impossible for anyone who does not possess my cypher to detect the presence of the data packets.”

“What about the fleet?” Middleton asked. “Can we send and receive messages to command?”

Fei Long nodded rapidly, “My program will require some time to propagate that far across the network, Captain, but if my early estimates are correct…we should be able to send and receive—in real-time—to the entirety of Sector 23 by this time tomorrow.”

Middleton straightened himself in his chair. “Good work, Mr. Fei,” he said, knowing that it was impossible to convey in words precisely how big this particular success would be for the fleet. “First Shift,” he said, standing from his chair and seeing the heads of every bridge crewmember turn in his direction, “as of now, this information is classified.” He swept the group with a hard look, “Recent developments have been brought to my attention which require that news of this success be kept from your crewmates for the time being.”

A few of the crew looked at each other in open confusion, but none spoke up.

“I assure you,” he continued, “that I will deliver the news to them personally in the coming days, but not yet. Until then, you are all under direct orders not to divulge this information to anyone, or to speak of it—even with each other—when off the bridge. Is that understood?”

“Yes Captain,” Lieutenant Sarkozi replied promptly, causing the rest of the crew to echo the acknowledgment.

“Good,” Middleton said before nodding approvingly, “well done, people. This will go down in fleet history as the greatest triumph that nobody knew about.”

A short chorus of laughter filled the bridge before Sarkozi barked, “Back on task, people.”

“Mr. Fei, retrieve your drones as quickly as possible. Is there any need for the ship to remain in this system any longer?” Middleton asked.

“No, Captain,” Fei Long replied confidently. “This hub will act as a relay for its maximum range and we may access it any time we are within said range, and I do not foresee the propagation process failing at this point.”

“Good. Navigator,” Middleton turned to Mr. Strider, “plot a jump to take us out of this system as previously outlined.”

“Yes, Captain,” Strider acknowledged.

The Pride’s captain sat back down in his chair and watched his crew set about their tasks. He knew he needed to make several difficult decisions in the coming day, and he also knew that some of them would be none too popular with the crew.

But he had a strong sense that if he did not make those decisions, everything they had fought for would have been in vain.

He simply could not allow that to happen.

Chapter XLIX: No Going Back

“Captain,” Fei Long greeted as he entered the captain’s ready room. He had finally completed the stellar cartography analysis and was reporting his findings to Captain Middleton as he had been ordered to do.

“Mr. Fei,” the captain looked up over a stack of data slates, “you have something?”

“I do,” Fei Long agreed, carefully placing the data slate he had brought in the captain’s hands, “I have backed up this data but have not yet uploaded it to the ship’s navi-computer.”

The captain looked at the slate’s contents briefly before shaking his head appreciatively. “You’ve completed the star chart reconstruction,” he concluded.

“Yes, Captain,” Fei Long replied. “The data was, unfortunately, less illuminating than I had initially anticipated. But I do believe it will help us determine the location of several ComStat hubs far more quickly than our previous methods would have done.”

Middleton perused the contents of the slate at length before finally coming to the operative section. He sighed shortly and said, “There are over three thousand anomalies listed here, Mr. Fei.”

“Yes sir,” Fei Long replied, deciding it was best not to correct the captain; there had, in fact, been well over ten thousand total anomalies. But with a little effort he had managed to account for over two thirds of those anomalies by correcting for factors like stellar drift, updates to individual star masses, and other easily-verifiable phenomena.

The captain shook his head and said, “Update the ship’s navigation computer at once and see if Strider can help you sort through the data. We don’t have time to investigate three thousand anomalies, Mr. Fei.”

“Of course, sir,” Fei Long acknowledged, fairly certain that he had already done much of what the captain was suggesting. But, again, he thought it best to keep that particular observation to himself.

The captain hesitated as he looked at the younger man intently for several moments before taking a data slate from his desk and handing it to him. “Mr. Lynch was kind enough to provide us with a record of Rim Fleet ship movements since the Imperial withdrawal,” he explained, and Fei Long began to examine the contents of the slate. “That data is the only copy of its kind, so be careful with it.”

“Of course, sir,” Fei Long replied perfunctorily while scanning the information. He nodded as he calculated how many entries there were in the entire record, and felt a glimmer of hope that he just might be able to design a program which would cross-check Rim Fleet movements against pirate attacks and merchant routes—

“Mr. Fei?” Middleton said expectantly.

“Yes, Captain?” Fei Long replied in confusion, looking up from the slate only to realize that Captain Middleton had actually asked him a question while he had been perusing the data. “Of course, sir,” he said, nodding eagerly as he answered his commander’s query, “I am certain I can incorporate this data in two or three days’ time. From there it is a simple matter of modifying an adaptive program which will cross-check—“

“How long?” Middleton interrupted.

Fei Long bit his lip briefly. “Four days,” he replied after considering the matter. “But, Captain, I had another matter I wished to discuss which might delay that particular timetable.”

“Delay it?” Middleton asked with an arched eyebrow. “Do you have something more important on your plate, mister?”

“Of course not, Captain,” Fei Long replied hastily. “It is just…since the events in the…” he trailed off, and quickly decided against beating around the proverbial bush any longer. “Ever since Atticus’ death, morale has improved for some, but worsened for others. This would seem to only perpetuate the division of the crew.”

“An eventuality in which you had no small part, if I recall,” Middleton said tightly.

“Yes, exactly, Captain,” Fei Long agreed, “which is why I thought it might be prudent to take a few hours to address morale aboard this ship.” He produced a second data slate and handed it to his commanding officer, “I have already discussed the matter with a small group of crewmembers who have agreed to participate—pending your approval, of course.”

The captain examined the outlined program and the corner of his mouth quirked briefly into a smile as he began to nod. He schooled his features and said, “Did you have a schedule for this particular event?”

“We thought it would be best to schedule it just before our next jump cycle,” Fei Long answered quickly. “Most of the crew would be able to attend, and it would only cost us approximately two hours—“

“Permission granted,” Middleton said, affixing his signature to the form and handing it back. “That was good thinking, Mr. Fei, and I’m looking forward to attending. But until then, get to work on that data.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Fei Long said proudly, standing and bowing before exiting the room and doing as he had been bidden.

Middleton drew a deep breath as he stood outside Captain Raubach’s cell. The Pride had jumped out of the ComStat hub’s vicinity a day earlier and Middleton had ordered Garibaldi’s people to begin a round of repairs to the heavily damaged warship. They had devised a project schedule which would require three days to complete, and would see the Pride’s heat sinks fully replaced with units that would operate at the rated spec’s, and the engineers would even be able to begin work on the shield grid’s eventual overhaul.

Nearly all of the crew’s living quarters would be affected by the grid overhaul, which was certain to cause some friction as crewmen and women were forced to abandon their bunks for days and weeks at a time, but the advantage of performing the grid overhaul in this fashion was that it could be carried out even when the Pride was under way.

The heat sinks and weapon installations, however, required the ship to remain stationary for at least eight hours at a time. So Middleton had decided to get the ship’s power plants and engines back up to maximum first and foremost, and that the rest of the modifications and repairs could take place piecemeal as they made their way across Sector 24.

If he was ever going to address the issue of Captain Raubach, it was now or never.

“Sergeant,” he said, and Sergeant Gnuko stepped forward promptly.

“Sir,” the Lancer Sergeant acknowledged.

“Are the rest of the Dämmerung’s crew in the mess hall?” he asked, having ordered them transferred earlier that hour. It was the only low-security area of the ship with a large enough view screen for what Middleton was planning—a plan he very much hoped he would not need to implement.

“They are, sir,” Gnuko replied.

“Mr. Fei,” Middleton said, having given him his own orders regarding this particular matter earlier in the hour as well, “are your preparations complete?”

“They are, sir,” the young man replied matter-of-factly.

“Good,” he said before drawing another breath and saying, “open the cell.”

The doors slid open and Middleton quickly made eye contact with Captain James Raubach IV.

“Come with me,” Middleton said without setting foot in the cell, and his adversary slowly rose to his feet and obliged, giving Sergeant Gnuko a disdainful look as he walked past.

Captain Middleton silently led the enemy commander through the corridors of the ship, and they were followed by a quartet of Lancers including Lu Bu, Sergeant Gnuko, Vali Funar and Traian.

They arrived at the nearest airlock and he initiated the inner door’s opening cycle. It quickly opened, and Middleton gestured to the compartment as he said, “If you please, Captain Raubach.”

Raubach shook his head and sighed as though this was all some great inconvenience to him, but he did as he was instructed and looked around the airlock pointedly. Middleton closed the inner doors and moved to the small, transparent window built into the top of the inner door’s four segments.

“I’m sure this particular method of inquest has worked wonders in the past, Captain Middleton,” Raubach said, his voice coming through the speakers built into the bulkhead beside the doors. “But you’ll find that Imperial nobility doesn’t tend to crumple under pressure.”

Middleton looked to Fei Long and nodded silently, prompting the young man to execute a series of commands on his data pad. A few seconds later, he showed the screen to Captain Middleton and it showed an image of the mess hall, which currently held the rest of the Imperial prisoners.

Middleton turned to the Lancers, and Fei Long, and said, “Go to the mess hall and see to it that the prisoners are secure.”

“Captain?” Gnuko asked, narrowing his eyes slightly.

“That’s an order, Sergeant,” Middleton said, his voice cracking like a whip.

Gnuko hesitated before nodding, “You heard the captain. Move out.”

The Lancers slowly turned, each giving Middleton a concerned look as they did so, and when they and Mr. Fei had rounded the corner he turned back to face Captain Raubach.

“Your people have caused a lot of trouble out here, Captain,” he said levelly. “The coordinated mutinies of dozens of starships, the blatant attacks on civilian targets including at least one gas mining facility and one settler ship,” he ticked off the points and shook his head in genuine shame. “You’re a disgrace to that uniform, Captain Raubach.”

“Nothing I say in here is admissible in a court of law, Middleton,” Raubach said, wagging his finger reproachfully. “This is the very definition of ‘under duress,’ and no confession, no matter how detailed, will hold up if it’s given in here.”

“Then what have you got to lose?” Middleton asked with a shrug. “It must be tough, walking around with the knowledge of what you’ve done, what you’ve convinced others to do, and what you’ve allowed to be done.”

Raubach snorted harshly. “You honestly think any of that will matter when all is said and done?” he asked incredulously. “I never actually thought you were stupid, Middleton, but it’s becoming apparent to me that you genuinely are.” He stepped toward the window and held Middleton’s gaze for several seconds as the two engaged in a silent test of wills. “Change is coming, Lieutenant Commander Middleton,” he said, nearly scoffing as he said the rank, “and change requires difficult decisions that are way above your pay grade.”

“Like placing a ship full of colonists in peril just so you could seize a single corvette?” Middleton asked.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rabuach spat, turning his back and walking away from the window before turning around again. “The Rim Fleet is the only group operating out here that isn’t beholden to some petty inter-system politics. If we left the provincials to their own devices they’d destroy themselves,” he snapped. “But not all of them know what’s best for themselves, and we can’t be responsible for them when they won’t take responsibility for themselves.”

“So…let me see if I’ve got this straight,” Middleton began, folding his arms across his chest, “you issue ultimatums to these systems, demanding resources, ships, and whatever else it is you think you’re entitled to, and when they refuse to pay up…what happens then?”

“Typical provincial thinking,” Raubach said smugly. “You can’t even see past the nose on your own face. If they won’t help themselves then why should we?”

“The Spine was doing just fine before the Empire came along,” Middleton growled.

“Sure,” Raubach threw his hands in the air, “if by ‘fine’ you mean a median interval of less than twenty years between full-scale war for the average system under the old Confederacy, then yes—things were great.” He shook his head piteously and leveled a finger in Middleton’s direction, “My family is here to help the Spineward Sectors, Middleton.”

“I fail to see how manufacturing bioweapons—and firing them at the earliest possible convenience on a ship full of duly-appointed protectors of the peace—can possibly help the Spineward Sectors,” Middleton retorted, fighting to keep calm as thoughts of his dead crew flashed through his mind.

“You’re still bent out of shape over that?” Raubach cried incredulously. “Move on, Middleton; be glad that so many of you survived at all and move the Hades on.”

“I want to hear you say it, Raubach,” Middleton said after drawing several deep breaths.

“Say what?” James Raubach IV snapped.

“Say you gave the order,” Middleton said coldly. “I think I might actually be able to forgive you if you did.”

Raubach threw his hands in the air in mock exasperation. “You can’t use any of this,” he declared, as though Middleton was stupid or incapable of simple reasoning. “What good will it do you to hear me say something like that?”

“Say it,” Middleton said, his voice low and surprisingly calm.

Captain Raubach shook his head and narrowed his eyes, “Are we negotiating my release?”

Middleton nodded silently, and the other man searched his features for several seconds before his visage relaxed fractionally.

“All right…I’ll say it,” Raubach said, “Meisha was acting on my orders to oversee Project Purity which, among other things, oversaw various biotech operations including the development of certain hazardous compounds. She was under strict guidelines to deal with any threat to said project’s integrity with extreme prejudice.”

“And the settler ship?” Middleton pressed.

“Was attacked by some pirates from out on the Rim,” Raubach said dismissively. “We placed sleeper agents aboard their ship, as well as aboard the SDF corvette. When the pirates attacked the settlers, my people seized the opportunity to take the pirate ship and lay a trap for Manning’s people.”

“Why?” Middleton asked, and Raubach shook his head.

“There are protocols for this sort of thing, Middleton,” Raubach said. “I need certain assurances before we go any further.”

“And your crew?” Middleton asked.

“They’re prisoners of war,” Raubach shrugged, “at least for the time being. I’m sure you’ll agree that the principals have to be seen to first.”

Middleton nodded slowly for several seconds before saying, “I guess that leaves just one question.”

“Don’t test my patience, Middleton,” Raubach said as he lowered his brow thunderously.

Middleton shook his head, “I wouldn’t dream of it, I assure you.” He stepped closer to the glass and looked up into the corner of the airlock compartment, prompting a tiny, blue, light to blink twice before he returned his attention to his prisoner. “But the last time we spoke, I told you that it was in your best interests if you believed what I said.”

Captain Raubach sneered, but quickly pulled the expression back. “And here we were getting along so well.”

Middleton nodded, “There’s no reason for that to change. But I need you to answer this final question, Captain Raubach,” he said as he drew so close to the window that his nose nearly touched it. “Where is your family’s base of operations out on the Rim?”

Raubach shook his head in abject disgust. “Middleton, I don’t know what you’re playing at but we both know there’s no way you can make me tell you that.” Raubach looked up pointedly at the tiny, cleverly-concealed camera which Middleton had checked a moment earlier and said, “None of this will stand up, Captain. And even if it did, I’m Imperial nobility; there isn’t a court in the Spineward Sectors that wouldn’t hand me over to the nearest Imperial authority faster than you can unzip your fly.”

“I’ll take that as a refusal to answer the question, then?” Middleton asked casually.

Raubach moved closer to the window until his nose actually touched it and he said, “That’s right, I’m through talking to you. Face it, Middleton: I’ve got complete immunity.”

Middleton flinched as his hand had just begun to reach for the airlock’s control console and he did a double take. He replayed the man’s last words over in his mind several times, and as he did so he was reminded of a similar statement which had been made to him not long after he had first taken command.

He actually found himself chuckling, and when he realized he had begun to laugh he decided to indulge himself and the chuckles quickly turned to a full-throated belly laugh. After a few seconds he felt his eyes begin to water and he decided it was time to rein in his emotions.

“I cannot believe I am about to say this,” Middleton said after regaining his composure well enough that he could speak without his own laughter interrupting him, “but…that’s what she said.”

When he said those words, it was as if every last shred of emotion vanished from his mind and he saw Raubach’s eyes narrow. “Who?” Raubach asked.

Middleton raised his hand to the control panel and entered his override code. When the sequence was primed, he met the other man’s eyes and held them for several seconds before saying, “Your wife.”

His finger rammed down on the emergency purge icon, and the last thing he saw of Captain James Raubach was a look of incredulous outrage as his body shot away from the ship’s hull, propelled by the escaping gases which had previously sustained his life.

Middleton turned unceremoniously and began his trek toward the mess hall but was alarmed to see Sergeant Gnuko standing just a few meters away. He met the Sergeant’s eyes for several seconds before pushing silently past him and heading down the corridor toward the mess hall.

Sergeant Gnuko took up a flanking position, which he maintained when Middleton entered the mess hall and saw the view screen was still set to the video feed Mr. Fei had set up an hour earlier. The image was of an empty airlock, and one by one the heads of the Imperial crewmembers turned to face Captain Middleton with a twinge of fear in their eyes.

“All right,” Middleton said as casually as he could manage, “who’s next?”

Chapter L: A Culture of Pride

“This is everything his crew gave us?” Middleton asked, waving the data slate as Sergeant Gnuko nodded.

“They were more than willing to talk after seeing how you dealt with their uncooperative captain,” Gnuko said lightly, but Middleton knew the other man had taken no pleasure in receiving their testimonies—or in standing by while Middleton had executed Raubach in what many would have called ‘cold blood.’

Thankfully, Sergeant Gnuko had not needed to so much as look sternly at the Dämmerung’s remaining crewmembers before they had volunteered whatever information they possessed.

The majority of it had been worthless, but there had been an interesting snippet gleaned from a former bridge officer—a Tactical Officer, as it happened—who had reported that the Raubach base was almost certainly located in orbit of a brown dwarf out on the Rim, well past the settled regions of the Spineward Sectors.

The region was as close to being termed ‘unexplored wilderness’ as anywhere else in the galaxy, which made it the perfect hiding spot. The only reason the officer was confident in the location had to do with localized EM fields matching those of a brown dwarf, and he had detected those fields with local equipment during recalibration of their ship’s targeting sensors.

The Dämmerung’s Navigator, Captain Raubach, and his XO had apparently been the only crew which had known for certain where the base was located. The rest of the crew had been subjected to complete information lockdown for a week before, and after, the ship had entered the Raubach’s base system.

“I’ll have Mr. Fei incorporate this information into his projections,” Middleton said before activating his desk’s com-link and raising the young man at his Comm. station. “Mr. Fei, report to my ready room.”

A moment later, the young man entered the ready room with a data slate in hand. He had apparently prepared for the meeting, having accurately surmised the purpose of Sergeant Gnuko’s visit.

“Yes, Captain?” the young man asked as he approached the desk.

Middleton handed him the data slate, “You know what to do.”

Fei Long nodded as he accepted the slate. It apparently only took him a couple of minutes to digest the information presented, and he began to make inputs to the slate he had brought with him. After inputting those commands, he handed the one containing the information in Gnuko’s report back to Middleton. “This will take a few moments,” the young man said distantly as he focused on the slate, making occasional inputs.

Middleton had not expected him to complete the cross-check so quickly, and he supposed that if he had not learned to increase his expectations of the young man by then it was unlikely to ever happen.

Fei Long’s eyes rose in surprise. “Based on the ship’s revised star charts, Mr. Lynch’s activity log of Rim Fleet vessels, a broadly defined set of distances based on what we know of the Dämmerung’s jump drives, and placing probabilistic emphasis on the systems which were removed from our old star charts, I have found three potential matches, Captain,” he finished—surprisingly all in one breath—before offering the slate to Middleton. “But I believe the third is the one we seek.”

Middleton took the slate and examined the entries. The first system was a brown dwarf with a pair of planets in orbit of it, but the system’s location was currently beyond the galactic plane to the galactic north. Any ship traveling in the area would need special shields modifications just to protect their crews from harmful radiation. Since several of the crew reported traveling to and from the Dämmerung via unshielded shuttle—and Dr. Middleton had already checked out their collective health, finding no evidence of recent exposure to dangerous levels of radiation—Middleton concurred with Fei Long’s assessment that this particular target was extremely unlikely.

The second system, located to the galactic south, was well within the galactic plane and was otherwise a significantly better prospect than the first. However, it was located too close to a pair of trade routes, and there was a science colony nearby. The good news was that, if the third target was the correct location of the Raubach base, a direct course from the Pride’s current position would bring them close enough to this second system that investigating it would only require an additional four jumps.

But when Middleton examined the third possibility, he was forced to concur with Mr. Fei’s assessment. The brown dwarf listed had a significant planetary mass in unusually close proximity to it, and that planet was tidally locked to the failed star. This meant that a base constructed on its dark side would be protected from much of the brown dwarf’s radiation. There was very little information on the planet itself, aside from the fact that it was composed primarily of carbon and had no atmosphere to speak of.

But the piece of evidence that put this particular system over the top was the fact that, while it was very nearly outside of the galactic plane, four vessels had vanished in the last sixteen months after logging itineraries which would have taken them within a jump or two of the system. There was no strategic value to the location itself, no known mineralogical resources to speak of in the vicinity, and there were no trade routes nearby. Middleton was therefore able to rule out pirate activity as an even remotely likely cause for the vessels’ disappearances.

“I agree,” Middleton said, making a note of the system’s name and other relevant information so he could conduct his own analysis in private. “Good work, Mr. Fei,” he said, standing to shake the young man’s hand, “this would not have been possible without you.”

Fei Long seemed at a loss for words, so he predictably clasped his hands and bowed in his usual manner. “Will the two of you be attending this evening?”

Middleton quirked an eyebrow as Gnuko nodded. The Lancer Sergeant said, “I wouldn’t miss it. I can’t wait for the second half, personally; it sounds like you’ve put some thought into it.”

“It was not solely my idea,” Fei Long gushed, “there are twenty three crewmembers in all who have agreed to participate.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” Middleton said, remembering the scheduled activity which he had approved just a few days earlier when Fei Long had asked him to do so.

Fei Long nodded, bowed, and turned to leave the room.

“Sergeant,” Middleton said, leaning forward and clasping his hands, “I wish you had followed my orders and returned to the mess hall.”

Sergeant Gnuko nodded slowly, “I know that, Captain, and I knew it then.”

“This isn’t likely to end well, Russell,” Middleton sighed. “If we actually succeed in taking these people down, and if I’m extremely lucky, I’ll get court martialed and be allowed to live out my days on a penal colony somewhere. The rest of the crew will hopefully be allowed to serve on some backwater like Easy Haven for the duration of your enlistments. If not…” he trailed off, considering the varied ways the Montagnes had been rumored to dispose of their enemies—particularly subordinates who made a habit of going off-script. “I didn’t want to drag anyone else into this with me. The Admiral won’t have any choice but to make an example out of me after we’re through out here, and he’s probably not going to be satisfied with just one burnt offering.”

“I know that, Tim,” Gnuko replied evenly, “and I knew it then.” The Lancer Sergeant leaned forward and met Middleton’s gaze with a hard one of his own, “What we’re doing out here needs to be done. If the universe decides we have to burn for doing it, so be it, but if we don’t hit these people with everything we’ve got then we might as well turn around, tuck our tails, run home to mama and pray to the Saint that someone else will deal with it. But we both know that isn’t going to happen, don’t we?”

“Which part?” Middleton asked.

“Any of it,” the other man retorted harshly.

Silence hung between them until Sergeant Gnuko began to chuckle, and Captain Middleton joined him before too long. “I’m glad we’re on the same page, at least,” Middleton said when the mood was once again serious.

Gnuko stood and offered his hand, and Middleton returned the gesture. “I’ll see you in the hangar,” the Lancer Sergeant said with a curt nod.

“Of course,” Middleton agreed, and Gnuko left the ready room.

A few minutes later, Middleton decided it was time to deal with another prisoner who had been cooling his heels in a cell. So he checked on the bridge crew’s status before making his way to the brig.

“Captain,” Kratos acknowledged, standing to his full, imposing height as he broke a string of pushups which had reached three hundred—Middleton had watched from outside the cell as the man had begun the impressive feat.

He was over seven feet tall if he was a foot, and Middleton didn’t even want to guess at how much the man weighed. Looking at his face was like looking at a history of warfare, with the most prominent feature being the lack of one eye.

“I have to admit, Kratos,” Middleton began, leaning up against the doorjamb as he looked the man up and down pointedly, “I have no idea what to make of you.”

The massive man shrugged, “I am as you see.”

“Only a fool would believe that,” Middleton said coolly. “Do you think I’m a fool, Kratos?”

Kratos’ eye narrowed and his body tensed, but the moment passed and he shook his head, “No, I do not.”

“Then start talking,” Middleton said in a tone that brooked no dispute.

The one-eyed Tracto-an seemed to consider the order for several seconds before nodding. “You, of all the people I have met among the stars, may actually understand,” he said before slowly lowering himself onto the edge of his cot. “Where to begin…” he said slowly. “The people of Tracto believe in the divine will of Men. It is the all-encompassing, all-consuming, and all-important aspect of who they are. They rely on the will of Men for social guidance, spiritual support, and even for battle strategy.”

“I’m aware of your culture,” Middleton said shortly, and Kratos shot him a brief look of molten fury before visibly calming himself.

“Not my culture,” he said through gritted teeth. “I am nothing like them; they are blind fools who cling to dogmas they do not understand because they are too short-sighted to look beyond them. I,” he rammed his thumb into his chest, “see further with one eye than that entire world could ever hope to see with a million, and for that they call me ‘heretic’.”

“I saw that term on the incident report,” Middleton lied, having actually heard the Tracto-ans call Kratos a heretic while he had observed the affair in the shuttle bay. “What does it mean?”

“Even they do not know the answer to that,” Kratos snorted. “But I suppose if by abandoning their ways and customs to think freely, one can be called a heretic, then I am without question such a heretic.”

“What was Blue Fang Pass?” Middleton asked, having heard that particular phrase used as well.

Kratos shook his head, “A fool’s dream, nothing more. It was passed on to me by my father, and his father before him. It was to be a place where those who thought as I did could gather,” he explained, his visage hardening as he did. “But all of it was undone by one who could have made it so much more…and it was my fault.” He stood from his cot and turned to face Middleton, “My people forced me to undertake a pilgrimage to redeem my ‘lost honor’ after this other man had left us, and I knew then that my father’s dream was truly dead. But I stubbornly clung to it, refusing to let it go, just as they,” he tilted his head toward the corridor, and Middleton assumed he meant to indicate the other Tracto-an’s, “refuse to abandon their dogma.”

“It’s an interesting tale,” Middleton said dryly, “but I’m not sure I see the point.”

Kratos sighed, and it was a deep, rumbling sound. “My pilgrimage took me to the south lands, called Argos, and there I met a peculiar woman who was on a quest of her own,” he smirked at this last bit. “We joined forces, and together we turned back a horde of demons before slaying their wretched god…or so we thought of it at the time. I have since come to learn that it was little more than a food harvester,” he snorted. “It was not long before I realized there was no point in returning to Blue Fang Pass; the dream it had sheltered was already dead. So I searched for meaning instead.”

“Did you find it?” Middleton asked in a challenging tone, although he was surprised to hear such introspection from the man.

“I did,” Kratos replied matter-of-factly. “But soon after I had done so, my world was visited by Starborn not unlike yourselves. Their leader—Jean Luc Montagne,” he said, meeting Middleton’s gaze as he said the name, “took recruits from the ranks of the worthy, including Kratos One Eye, Avenger of the Red Dawn. I was trained in the use of their weapons and earned the command of a battle team stationed aboard the warship your people call ‘Lucky Clover’.”

This was all a revelation to Middleton, who had never once suspected that his recruiting drive might have brought former pirates on board. “I didn’t know that,” he said neutrally.

“That is why I have told you,” Kratos said in a similar tone. “Your Admiral, however, was victorious in his clever attack and Jean Luc’s forced were laid to waste.”

“What did you do?” Middleton asked.

He shrugged indifferently, “I fought to protect the ship until I could do so no more, at which point my men—and superiors—had already abandoned our pledged duty. I found an escape pod and returned to the planet’s surface, unwilling to die for those who would not do likewise.” Kratos was silent for several moments before drawing himself up to his full height, “The meaning I found was simple, Captain: to write my name among the stars, however I am able to do so, before the rot of old age finally claims me. Jean Luc Montagne promised much, but delivered little,” he explained, “but you have given me everything I desired. Do with me as you will; I will die having done more here, on this ship, than I could have dreamed possible even three years ago.”

Captain Middleton considered the tale, finding no reason to doubt the man’s honesty, and nodded to himself. “Effective immediately, you’re off the Recon Team,” he said, straightening his posture and stepping into the cell as he met the other man’s eyes. Kratos seemed unsurprised by the order, but that quickly changed when Middleton added, “The Assault Team needs a new commander, as you well know. You’ll take the post, along with a field rank of PFC, and carry out my orders until you’re dead—or I find someone better.”

Kratos’ confusion slowly slipped from his face, and he drew himself up to a rigid approximation of attention, “Yes, Captain.”

“You’re to report to the hangar at nineteen hundred hours,” Middleton added as he turned to leave the cell. “There’s a gathering planned and I’ll expect you to greet your new team members there—without killing them,” Middleton added with a snort. “Whatever your differences are, you put it best when you told them that they’re in the past so that’s what I’m going to tell you: you’re here to carry out my orders, and if you’re incapable of doing that then you can get off this ship.”

“I will follow your commands until death,” Kratos said heavily.

“Then my first order,” Middleton said crisply, “is to keep your teammates alive and ready for action at a moment’s notice. We’re going to need every able body we have if we want to win.”

“I understand…and I will obey,” Kratos said grudgingly, but for some reason Middleton believed the man meant it. He knew that putting him in charge of Atticus’ hand-picked recruits was dropping a huge, steaming mess in his lap, but Kratos had done that very thing to Middleton by killing Atticus. If the big guy couldn’t figure out how to take it, he shouldn’t have gone around dishing it out.

“The former isn’t necessary,” Middleton said with a piercing look, “but the latter is.”

Fei Long had arranged the hangar precisely as he had envisioned. His zither was set on its base near the airlock doors of the shuttle bay, and the other crewmembers who had prepared for the presentation had also set up whatever equipment was needed for their parts.

He wore his favorite, Taoist-inspired robe which he had been wearing several years earlier as the police broke down the door to his parents’ apartment and arrested him. Oddly enough, Fei Long had come to think of that particular robe as associated with freedom rather than incarceration. By giving him up to the authorities of his birth world, his parents had essentially freed him of any obligation he previously felt he owed them.

It was also the most authentic type of garment associated with his peoples’ culture that he could find which made it perfect for this particular assemblage.

He checked the chronometer he had placed beside the zither and saw that it was eighteen fifty seven hours, meaning that he would need to begin the event in three minutes.

He saw Captain Middleton enter the hangar and, despite the surprising turn of events which had taken place in the airlock with Captain Raubach, Fei Long detected no animosity, disappointment, fear, or other negative emotions from the crew as the captain moved toward the seat Fei Long had set aside for him.

But instead of sitting down, Middleton walked up to Fei Long and said, “I’ll need to address the crew before you begin.”

Fei Long nodded agreeably, “I will check my equipment one last time.”

Middleton nodded and turned to face the crowd, which consisted of very nearly every able-bodied member of the crew. Oddly, Lu Bu was still absent, and while she had not been scheduled to participate in one of the presentations Fei Long had expected to see her. Things had been tense with her ever since she had come back from the suicide missions, but Fei Long was determined to work through whatever issues may have arisen between them.

Fei Long sat behind his zither and pretended to check the recording gear which would accompany his playing. He had digitally created the various synthesized instruments which would accompany his play in order to give the full experience of the musical number he had chosen.

While he was arranging the sheet music before himself—he did not require it for himself, but reading it seemed to help him relax as he played—Captain Middleton said, “Can I have everyone’s attention?” The crew immediately snapped to attention, but Captain Middleton waved them off. “At ease; this will only take a minute.”

The crew relaxed somewhat, but there was still a palpable note of tension in the hangar which even Fei Long shared. He had no idea what the captain intended to say, but he was just as eager to find out as the rest of the crew appeared to be. Just before Captain Middleton began to speak, Lu Bu entered the shuttle bay carrying a long, narrow box which she made as if to bring to Fei Long, but stopped when she saw the captain preparing to speak.

“The past few weeks have been difficult,” the captain began. “And while I would like to take credit for this particular assembly, it was entirely Mr. Fei’s idea. I suggest we show him our gratitude,” he said, before turning pointedly toward Fei Long and applauding.

The rest of the crew joined him for a longer interval than Fei Long felt was comfortable but when the captain ceased so too did the crew.

“We’ll get on with the festivities soon enough,” Middleton promised, “but first I thought you all deserved to know that you’ve done a truly remarkable job. This is not only true for those crew who have been with the ship since its last deployment,” he said, giving Lieutenant Sarkozi, Sergeant Gnuko, and Lu Bu individual looks of gratitude, “but also those who joined us back at Tracto.”

Middleton’s gaze rested on Kratos—who had stood quietly in the corner for nearly twenty minutes—for several seconds before moving on to other members of the crew which had joined the ship recently.

“Many of us have bled for this mission,” Middleton continued, “and many of us have died. To those who are no longer with us, I cannot adequately express my pride and joy at having served with them. But to the rest of you,” he said, sweeping the assemblage heavily with his eyes, “I believe I can. I’m going to break protocol now and reveal the nature of our previous mission.”

A hushed series of whispers arose from the crowd, and Middleton stood silently for several seconds before continuing.

“We were tasked by Fleet Command with a mission that no other crew could have even dreamed of accomplishing,” he explained. “That mission was to gain access to the ComStat network so the rest of the MSP could stand a fighting chance against the droids, pirates, and whoever else would take the opportunity to prey on the people of the Spine when they—when we—are at our most vulnerable.” Shocked silence filled the chamber, and the captain allowed it to linger pointedly for several seconds before saying, “And we succeeded.”

“How is that even possible?” an engineer asked in bewilderment. “The ComStat network was destroyed when the Imperials withdrew.”

A chorus of assenting murmurs grew in volume as Middleton held up his hands haltingly, “Most of your department heads have known the true nature of our mission since our redeployment. You can discuss the facts of the matter with them after Mr. Fei’s event has concluded, but now is not the time for those particular questions.”

Middleton began to pace in front of Fei Long’s makeshift stage, and Fei Long marveled at the ease with which his commander could capture the room’s attention and hold it.

“That mission has been accomplished,” Middleton continued, “but another one now lies before us. And I’m here to say that none of you is compelled to undertake it if anything which has happened recently doesn’t agree with you,” he said severely. “Every man, woman, and Sundered,” he nodded to Toto and his family pointedly, “aboard this ship has served with rare distinction and valor. Should you choose not to go on with the ship as I take her into murky waters, you can hold your head high should we ever meet on the street afterward—I’ll probably even buy you a drink. Murphy knows you’ve earned it.”

There was some subdued laughter, but most of the crew wore expressions of concern or interest and did not join in short-lived mirth.

“But all of that is in the past,” Middleton said with a short, chopping gesture. “And now that we’ve done our duty to the fleet, it’s time to do our duty to the people of the Spine who have been maligned by those who take such a dim view of who we are, and what we believe in. You all know that I’m talking about Commodore Raubach and his Rim Fleet, who have systematically destabilized this entire Sector for some as-yet unknown purpose. But we have reason to believe,” Middleton turned and made brief eye contact with Fei Long, before doing likewise with Dr. Middleton and Lieutenant Sarkozi in turn, “that the Raubachs are developing a new weapon which will make everything they’ve done to this point seem like a polite welcoming gesture. Many of you know that even after we crippled her, the Dämmerung was able to hit us at ranges never before deemed possible.” Captain Middleton stopped his pacing, squared his shoulders to the group, and clasped his hands behind his back, “We have discovered the technology which enabled this and while the technical details are still sketchy, I am convinced that with each passing day this technology is being perfected and installed on warships under Commodore Raubach’s command. Simply put, ladies and gentlemen, this is the gravest threat the Spine has ever faced—up to and including the events which led to the signing of the Union Treaty fifty years ago, or even the Droid menace which the rest of the fleet is currently addressing.”

Fei Long had, indeed, come to appreciate the tactical value of possessing such powerful targeting computers which did not run any risk of spontaneously spawning an AI, and he agreed wholeheartedly with Captain Middleton’s grave assessment of the situation.

“With this technology on his ships,” Middleton continued, his delivery becoming more passionate than Fei Long was used to seeing from his commanding officer, “Commodore Raubach could, with nothing but a pair of corvettes and a destroyer, wipe out three fourths of the SDFs in Sector 24. The Commodore’s fleet is comprised of at least forty warships,” he said gravely. “I don’t think I need to do any more math to convey what this means.”

Captain Middleton turned pointedly to the pair of Liberator torpedoes stowed against the far wall, and the eyes of the assembled crew followed his gaze. Even Fei Long had to admit that the presence of the weapons made him surprisingly uneasy.

“I have a plan,” Middleton said after nearly a minute’s silence while still looking at the Liberators, “and that plan will put an end to these Imperial thugs’ reign of terror over the worlds we call home once and for all. But this plan will only give us one shot, and we’ll need more than weapons to execute it,” he said, turning to face the crowd again. “We’ll need a crew that can do the impossible; we’ll need people who’ve been bathed in hellfire and spat in the Demon’s eye afterward,” he said, and Fei Long felt his chest swell with pride as he noted several of the crew appear to react similarly, “we’ll need people who trust each other to carry out the mission, no matter the cost…and we’ll need the best damned ship in the Spineward Sectors to take us where we need to go. But I don’t want your answer now,” he said, holding up his hands to forestall what was clearly going to become a spontaneous round of cheers. “This isn’t the kind of decision to be made lightly; our flight plan will take us to a colony in two days’ time. I want each of you to think about what’s happened, what we’ve been through, and whether you want a part in what’s to come. If you choose to step off the ship, you’ll get my heartfelt thanks for having done what even I didn’t think was possible. But for now, let’s enjoy Kongming’s presentation.”

Fei Long was shocked to hear Captain Middleton refer to him by his courtesy name. He was not offended, since he actually did consider the man to be his peer, but he was surprised beyond words that Captain Middleton had actually learned his chosen nickname. Captain Middleton sat beside Doctor Middleton, each having taken their prescribed seats as Fei Long had hoped they would.

Lu Bu approached the makeshift stage and Fei Long gave her a concerned look. She sat down beside him and opened the long, slender box she had brought. Inside was a simple, but well-maintained, flute and Fei Long’s eyebrows rose in surprise.

“You can play?” he whispered to her, and she shot him a withering look as she gestured to the sheet music. He tilted the pedestal so she could see it more clearly and asked, “Which parts can you perform?”

She sighed, “You play the zither and I will play the other melodies.”

Fei Long excitedly removed the tracks from the accompanying background music and then stood to address the crowd. “Thank you for coming,” he said with a deep bow. “I have often been told that I speak too much,” he sliced a look at Lu Bu before giving Captain Middleton a more direct look and quirking a grin, “so I will endeavor to suppress my base nature to the best of my ability. It occurred to me recently that each of us comes from a unique place and culture. And yet, while we have served alongside each other and become closer to a true family than anything to which I have ever been a party, there are many things about each of you that I would like to learn. Tonight is an attempt to share some of who we are with each other. I will begin by inviting you to experience some small part of who I am, and where I come from, while several others have volunteered to do likewise. Now, since I have so clearly failed to accomplish my goal of not speaking too much,” a hearty round of laughter erupted from a nearby group of crewmembers, causing Fei Long to relax fractionally as he finished, “I will attempt to compensate for that shortcoming by playing a song called ‘Spirit of Heaven & Earth,’ and I will be accompanied by Lu Bu.”

The crew applauded as Fei Long sat behind the zither and activated the accompanying recording, which was keyed to begin playing when he struck the first note on his zither.

“I did not know you could play, Fengxian,” he whispered after making the last of his preparations.

“There is much that even you do not know, Kongming,” she replied before placing the flute to her lips in preparation.

There was a strange note to her voice when she spoke which he did not understand, but he knew that there would be time for questions later. He closed his eyes, drew a calming breath, and plucked the first note of the zither and his hands began to move in their long-practiced dance over the instrument’s board. Lu Bu’s entry was perfectly timed and, though her play was not as technically precise as the recording Fei Long had made, Fei Long felt a measure of peace and serenity which he had considered impossible to attain during this life.

The music rang out through hangar and, though the acoustics left something to be desired, the performance appeared to have its desired effect on the battered crew. Even Captain and Doctor Middleton seemed at peace, as halfway through the song Fei Long noted that they had discretely clasped each other’s hands.

For seven minutes and thirty five seconds, during which time Lu Bu played one of Fei Long’s favorite pieces of music with him, all was right with the universe.

Epilogue I: Up The Middle

“You have to tell him, Bu,” Doctor Middleton insisted calmly. “He has a right to know.”

Lu Bu shook her head, “The time is not good.”

Doctor Middleton sighed as she leaned back in her chair. They had not spoken of this particular subject since Lu Bu had been discharged from sickbay following her time in the cryo-stasis tube. “The time is never good,” Jo said as she clasped Lu Bu’s hand between her own. “Don’t make the same mistakes I’ve made, Bu.”

“You are my friend,” Lu Bu said, feeling a measure of annoyance at Doctor Middleton’s insistence regarding this particular matter, “but you are also my doctor. You may not tell him or Captain Middleton unless I agree, yes?”

Doctor Middleton looked wounded, “Of course not, Bu; we have several months before reporting becomes mandatory. But that’s not the point…you have to think about this very carefully.”

“This one is not stupid,” Lu Bu growled.

“I wasn’t suggesting you are,” Doctor Middleton said patiently.

“Then why do you treat me like stupid?” Lu Bu snapped. “I understand risks; you explain them well.”

“But we don’t know enough about your—“

“What happens will happen,” Lu Bu cut her off. She fully understood the gravity of the situation, but she also knew that her duties as a Lancer were important to the Pride’s continued survival. Without her contributions to the Recon Team, the ship would have almost certainly have fallen to the Dämmerung. She could not abandon the people who depended on her—it was a simple number’s game as far as she was concerned.

“Bu,” Doctor Middleton squeezed her hand gently, “I will never abandon you, no matter what happens. But you need to know that I’ve been where you are right now,” she explained, and though she dearly wanted to lash out at the older woman, Lu Bu knew that she spoke truly. “I’m telling you that if I had it to do over again, I would have made different choices…I just don’t want you making the same mistakes I did.”

Lu Bu nodded slowly as she tried to compose her words. “You are more than friend,” Lu Bu said seriously as she placed her free hand on top of Doctor Middleton’s, “you are friend, you are family, and you are elder. This one—I,” she corrected severely, “value your wisdom very much. But I must decide this.”

Doctor Middleton clearly wanted to argue further, but surprisingly she relented. “Just don’t get angry when I bring it up again, ok?”

Lu Bu smiled, “Ok.”

“Good,” Doctor Middleton said before standing, “now let’s go down to the hangar bay for the sendoffs.”

Lu Bu nodded, but before Doctor Middleton could move past her she grasped the older woman gently in her arms and said, “Thank you, Mother.”

The two embraced silently in their shared quarters for a long time before proceeding to the hangar.

“Captain, it’s time,” Lieutenant Sarkozi reported after entering the ready room.

“Thank you, XO,” he acknowledged as he sent the confirmation message across the ComStat network telling Admiral Montagne that they had accomplished their mission. He had no intention of responding to his C.O.’s inevitable call to return to the fleet to support their efforts against the Droids, because doing so would only place his crew’s careers in jeopardy if they did not at least attempt to argue with his chosen course.

They had made orbit around the colony, which was named Two Burr’s On—for some reason that only Murphy knew. The two day deadline, which he had set prior to the surprisingly enjoyable cultural displays conducted by Mr. Fei and several others, had arrived.

Middleton knew that his actions were at least indirect insubordination, but if it ever went before a court the list would be more like sedition, misappropriation of MSP property, mutiny, and premeditated murder for the summary execution of Captain Raubach.

But try as he might, he had been unable to determine a better course of action which did not amount to, as Garibaldi had put it, tucking their tails and running home to mama in the hope that she might do something about it. The Raubachs had already fitted the Dämmerung with the strange, seemingly alien technology, which meant they had very likely already done so with other vessels as well.

And, to Middleton’s mind, the Raubachs were the last people in the Spine who he wanted in possession of that type of tactical advantage. They had proven willing, or even eager, to deploy bioweapons, and people who would do that needed to be stopped—soon.

After collecting his thoughts, he made his way out through the bridge, and a glance showed that Mr. Strider and Helmsman Marcos were absent from their posts. Middleton would have gladly admitted that he was nervous about the outcome of the crew’s decision, but losing his Navigator and Helmsman were going to be tough blows to recover from.

Still, he knew it was inevitable that a significant portion of the crew would choose not to go along with the Pride for its next mission. So he kept a level head as his feet took him to the shuttle bay far more quickly than he would have expected the trip to take.

Lieutenant Sarkozi remained on the bridge, having already attested to her desire to see the mission through during a private conference he had held with her. So in a private moment outside the hangar doors, Middleton stopped and drew a long, deep breath before opening the doors and stepping through.

There was a large crowd gathered outside the shuttle, and among those present were Mr. Strider, Helmsman Marcos, Hephaestion the Sensors operator, and Toto’s entire family. There were others, most of whom were Tracto-ans who had received life-altering repairs to crippled limbs, but the faces he noted in particular stood out as losses the Pride would simply be incapable of replacing.

He estimated fifty total people in the shuttle bay, and they turned to face him as the doors slid shut. Even Kratos was present, which Middleton was not entirely surprised by, and he stepped forward before the captain could gesture for the shuttle’s pilot to enter the craft and fire up the engines.

“Captain Middleton,” Kratos said, his deep, rumbling voice echoing through the hangar.

“Kratos,” Middleton acknowledged with a shallow nod.

“It seems each of these people have something they wish to say,” the massive Tracto-an said, gesturing to the crowd. “I will begin.”

Middleton’s eyes narrowed, but he gestured for the mammoth of a man to continue.

“I have fought in a hundred and six battles in my life,” Kratos said, “and I am now an old man. Though I do not share all values of those born of Tracto, I do share this one,” he said, taking a step forward and raising his hand to his chest in an antiquated form of salute, “no man should die in his bed. I will serve you until I can no longer do so, for in that way alone can I write my name in the stars.”

Middleton looked down blankly at Kratos’ hand as he proffered it. But he regained his senses quickly enough to embrace the man’s grip, and after he had done so Kratos moved to a position behind Middleton.

Another Tracto-an stepped forward—this one a massive woman he recognized as Bernice, a Tracto-an assigned to the Recon Team—and she repeated Kratos’ salute. “I am proud to fight for your Pride,” she said in a thick accent quite different from Kratos’. Middleton assumed she referred to the name of the ship rather than his vanity, and he accepted her outstretched hand gladly, noting that it still bore nerve stimulation plugs which were required for the long-term rehabilitation of a previously crippled limb.

“You fight well, Bernice,” he said, knowing that every report he had received on her had described her in absolutely glowing terms.

She moved to stand beside Kratos, and Helmsman Marcos stepped forward next. “Captain…” she began bravely before her lip began to quiver. She visibly tried to regain control of her emotions, but after several seconds tears were streaming down her face and she decided to speak in spite of them, “You gave me a chance, sir. I…I…I’ve made enough mistakes in the past to fill ten shift reports, sir, but I won’t add leaving this ship to that list. This is home now, sir, and I’ll do everything I can to prove that I deserve the break you gave me.”

Middleton accepted her hand and shook his head severely, “No one gave you any breaks, Marcos. As far as I’m concerned you’ve earned everything you have; you can fly my ship any day.”

She nodded graciously and moved to a position beside Kratos and Bernice. The massive Tracto-an woman placed an arm gingerly around the tiny-by-comparison Marcos.

Next up was Toto, who brought his entire family with him. “You lost my gunships,” the massive Sundered growled. “I expect them you to replace.”

Middleton wasn’t entirely certain how to respond to that, or what the uplift was implying exactly, so he nodded. “It’s not exactly at the top of my list, Toto, but it is there,” he said, deciding that honesty was the best policy in this particular circumstance. “Your family has sacrificed as much as any on this ship and you’ve also contributed as much as anyone else. I won’t forget that—ever—and neither will your shipmates.”

Toto glowered at Middleton, but his wife reached up and tugged on the hairs of his side irritably as she grunted and squealed something at him in what was apparently their native ‘dialect.’ The silverback uplift replied with a decidedly less-than-authoritative tone, and the female gave him a stern look before Toto grumbled, “My wife says ‘thank you,’ and that children are safest here. She…we,” he added with a sharp look in her direction, “will stay.”

It wasn’t an A-grade sentiment in Middleton’s eyes, but Toto had proven to be a more than capable Tactical Officer and his family had done wonders with their small craft maintenance. And that was to say nothing of the assistance which Yide, the eldest of Toto’s children, had provided Fei Long in building the attack drones.

“You’re all welcome here,” Middleton said to Toto before fixing each of his family in turn, allowing his eye contact with the uplift’s wife to linger for several seconds before he added, “for as long as you like.”

The uplifts made their way to the forming line behind Captain Middleton, and next up was Strider, who looked around warily at the people around him as he approached.

“So…” the former pirate captain began, “don’t be thinkin’ I don’t know a thing or two about peer pressure, Captain Middleton. I be of a mind to hop that shuttle and disappear into the big black, you know?”

“No one is pressuring you, Strider,” Middleton said seriously. “You’ve already performed enough service, as far as I’m concerned, to earn your way off this ship if that’s what you choose.”

“Really?” Strider blurted.

“Yes,” Middleton nodded heavily, “really.”

Strider seemed to consider it before nodding. “Then I be choosin…” he looked over his shoulder at the shuttle with a torn expression before sighing, “bah, I ain’t never caused this much ruckus even when I be havin’ a squadron of ships at my command. And mussin’ the hair of some Imperial nobility?” he said appreciatively. “Sign me up, Tyrone!”

“That’s ‘Captain,’ Mr. Strider,” Middleton scolded before adding, “and I aim to do more than muss up their hair.”

“Aye,” Strider said knowingly, holding his hand down low in an odd gesture which Middleton had seen on several holo-vids about various counterculture groups.

He debated whether or not to attempt the complex handshakes he had seen, but decided against it. “Good to have you, Mr. Strider,” he said levelly.

“Ain’t be no thing, Captain,” Strider said knowingly as he awkwardly accepted Middleton’s hand and shook it. “Besides, if I know Lynch he still be lookin’ to collect on that debt he thinks I owe him—which I don’t,” he added incredulously. “I be payin’ that off already some two years ago, see? How can it be my problem if his courier be whack in the head and takes a trip into the Verge instead of—“

“Mr. Strider,” Middleton said, fighting to keep from grinning at the man’s admittedly entertaining ramblings, “get in line.”

Strider stopped mid-sentence and looked around sheepishly before grinning and doing as he was told.

And so it went with the rest of the assemblage, with only two crewmembers actually choosing to leave the Pride of Prometheus. One was Winters, the Comm. operator, who had family on the colony below and had decided that six years in the MSP had been enough. The other was a Lancer who had been injured so badly during the coolant leak in Main Engineering that he could only possibly recover from those injuries at a fully-equipped rehabilitation facility on a Core World.

Middleton tried to convince the Lancer, whose name was Dix, to remain aboard the ship. But the man was adamant in his refusal to be a burden to his crewmates, so Middleton had relented and watched them board. He had not needed to remind them of the secrecy of the Pride’s mission; each had volunteered to take it to their graves before he had even thought to bring it up, and he trusted them to keep to their word.

He waited until the shuttle’s engines fired before making his way to the corridor where, apparently, the rest of the crew who had been in the hangar had gathered—along with several department heads, including Chief Engineer Garibaldi.

“So,” Garibaldi said, clapping his hands together and rubbing them expectantly, “how do we hit ‘em, Captain?”

Middleton felt all eyes on him in that moment, and for once he had to admit that Mikey had been right about him knowing what to say.

“The same way we always do, Chief,” he replied with an unusually fierce grin that came to his face entirely unbidden. “Hard, fast and straight up the middle.”

The End

Preview of Ure Infectus, an Imperium Cicernus novel

by Caleb Wachter

Chapter I: Fear the Voters

“I fear I’ll be working late, darling,” Mayor Cantwell said in a conciliatory tone through his earpiece’s attached microphone. He had never actually intended to make it home for dinner that night, but a rather surprising visit had interrupted his other plans for the evening and had therefore provided the perfect cover story for his pre-planned extracurricular activities. “Give my love to the children…I love you too. Bye-bye,” he tapped the earpiece to sever the communication with his wife, before turning his attention back to the Professional Hammerball League representative sitting across from him.

“I trust you find everything in order, Mr. Mayor?” the representative pressed. He was a tall, muscular man around fifty years of age. Judging from his apparently unmodified physique, Mayor Cantwell deduced that he was a former professional athlete—probably a hammerball player from the same league which he now represented.

The Mayor looked over the short, plain document and he suppressed the urge to nod. The Professional Hammerball League Commissioner had struck a behind-closed-doors deal with Mayor Cantwell some years earlier, and that deal had seen New Lincoln—Mayor Cantwell’s city—play host to the Anvil. The Anvil was the largest sporting event on their entire world, and though hammerball had surprisingly failed to catch on with the nearby systems, it was ludicrously popular with the locals on Virgin Prime—collectively referred to as ‘Virgin’ by most of its inhabitants.

When New Lincoln had served as host city to the Anvil and all of its attendant fanfare, the city had been promised massive economic benefits in exchange for major renovations and public works projects which were to be undertaken at taxpayer expense. Of course, there had been certain setbacks and the event had become a PR black eye for the Mayor’s administration.

“Forgive me, Mr…” Mayor Cantwell pressed for the third time since the meeting’s unscheduled outset.

“Bennett,” the man replied in his crude, low-born accent.

“Of course…Mr. Bennett,” Mayor Cantwell nodded knowingly as he surreptitiously activated a data retrieval program to search for information about the man sitting before him. “And you fill an…” his lips twitched sardonically, “advisory role for Commissioner Heinlein?”

“That’s right,” the man with the square, chiseled jaw replied as his grey-blue eyes bored into the Mayor’s own. “I’ve served in my current capacity for thirty years, and I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

The data retrieval program activated a retinal display device, and Mayor Cantwell began to flick through the several gigabytes of data the program had retrieved on the man sitting before him. It seemed that he had, indeed, been a standout player for the Hampton Hoarkers prior to suffering an early, career-ending spinal injury.

According to the laws of Virgin, such an injury—while easily treatable with modern medicine—precluded a player from continuing to professionally compete in athletics since such an injury’s repair would involve measures that had been deemed to be performance-enhancing.

The Mayor scrolled through the first few pages of relevant data, with extra scrutiny placed on Mr. Bennett’s affiliation with the League Commissioner. Apparently he had served in an ‘advisory capacity’—which, in political terms, generally indicated that he acted as a ‘bag man’—for nearly two continuous decades. His other records were more or less nonexistent, including no traffic violations, domestic disturbances, or anything else aside from a handful of off-world visits to the nearby colonies which coincided with the Commissioner’s own travel schedule. In short, he presented a completely typical profile for the very person he claimed to be—which put the Mayor on his guard.

“Mr. Bennett,” Mayor Cantwell leaned forward and laced his fingers together as he deactivated the retinal display with little more than a twitch of his cheek, “I must admit that I was surprised—and more than a little disquieted—by this unscheduled meeting.”

Bennett fixed his gaze on the Mayor, and Mayor Cantwell—a lifelong politician who had debated some of the most powerful people in the entire system—actually felt the urge to recoil from the weight of the man’s gaze. Instead, he did as he always did in such circumstances and affixed a patently false, well-practiced smile on his lips. “Mayor Cantwell, the Commissioner has expressed…concern regarding recent allegations directed your way relating to the New Lincoln Anvil which took place two years ago. The League can’t exactly afford another Watercress incident—especially not so soon.”

Cantwell’s smile tightened, knowing a veiled threat when he heard it. “I can assure the Commissioner that these concerns stem from little more than off-cycle news fodder; I’m currently running a seventy three percent approval rating with over two thirds of my constituents having expressed a desire for my re-election to a fourth term. Tell Commissioner Heinlein that this will all blow over in a matter of days.” Cantwell’s smile broadened as he decided to make a play of his own, “But I’m afraid these numbers are inaccurate.”

Bennett cocked an eyebrow. “Oh?” he asked, his expression somewhere between surprise and wariness.

Cantwell nodded solemnly as he highlighted one passage of the coded letter—a passage which, using predetermined verbiage, confirmed the amount of bribe money he had accepted in order to secure the public works committee’s support. That committee had been the most instrumental component of bringing the Anvil to New Lincoln, and Mayor Cantwell had distributed the Commissioner’s bribe monies to several key members of that department…well, Mayor Cantwell hadn’t given all of the bribe monies to the committee.

“Indeed; I fear we miscalculated the secondary impact on our fair city’s waste disposal systems,” he explained as he tapped out a new set of numbers in an addendum to the document. “I have discussed it with the committee at some length and they assure me that this figure must be increased accordingly.”

He slid the data pad across the desk to Mr. Bennett, who accepted the pad as his jaw clenched tightly. His eyes flicked down to the figures Mayor Cantwell had added and Mr. Bennett’s eyebrows rose briefly before grudgingly nodding his head, “Commissioner Heinlein has authorized me to accept these figures on his behalf.”

Cantwell’s eyebrow cocked in a mixture of amusement and incredulity. “It would seem the Commissioner trusts you a great deal…I find it strange that we have not met until just now.”

Bennett seemed to ignore the prodding comment as he produced a small, familiar data link from his pocket and activated it. The former player input a series of commands to the uplink before speaking a series of coded phrases into it. It was all quite regular procedure and this set the Mayor at ease, since Mr. Bennett was using the exact same uplink his predecessors had used to initiate clandestine payments to a series of dummy accounts Mayor Cantwell had established throughout the sector.

Cantwell reactivated his retinal display and, with little more than a few twitches of his cheek and the rhythmic clacking of his teeth, logged into his secret banking portfolio and verified that the agreed-upon sum of money had indeed been transferred to his handful of secret accounts, and that the money had originated from the same accounts the Commissioner had used in the past.

The Mayor’s smile broadened as he reached for a DNA-locked compartment of his desk, and after opening the compartment he produced a pair of glasses and some of the rarest liquor known to the entire Sector. “I believe the conclusion of such a productive business relationship calls for celebration,” he declared as he used his implanted uplink to cycle down the auto-turrets which had been on a hair trigger activation sequence since Mr. Bennett had entered the office.

The thought had occurred to him to simply execute the man using those defensive systems, but had he done so he would have certainly been detained by public security forces. Such a detainment would have caused him to miss his appointment with a set of sisters—quadruplets, at that—who were waiting to…indulge his appetites on the other side of town.

“I’m not much for the sauce,” Mr. Bennett said with a disapproving look, and Mayor Cantwell shrugged as he slid one of the glasses back into its compartment. The League representative reached into his jacket’s pocket and withdrew what looked to be a cheap—possibly hand-made—cigar and gestured as though requesting permission.

Mayor Cantwell nodded as he suppressed a sigh, knowing that inhaling smoke was perhaps the least efficient method of delivering the desired chemicals into the body. “To each his own,” he said as he put three fingers of the expensive liquor into the tumbler before replacing the stopper on the bottle.

Mr. Bennett produced a small, petroleum-fueled lighter from another pocket and lit the cigar before taking a long, deep draw from it as the Mayor took the first sip of his drink. It burned his throat almost badly enough that he wanted to gasp, but he knew that like all things of great value in life, he needed to savor that measure of pain just as much as the pleasure which would soon follow.

“I’m afraid I’ve got a confession to make, Mayor Cantwell,” Mr. Bennett said after a polite silence had hung between them for several seconds.

Cantwell leaned back in his leather chair and swirled his drink absently, wanting nothing more than for the man to leave his office as quickly as humanly possible so he could skip over to the quadruplets’ flat and engage in his latest, sordid indulgences. “And what confession might that be, Mr. Bennett?”

Bennett took a second, long draw from the cigar before deliberately stamping it out against the arm of the posh, leather chair in which he sat. The smell of aerosolized leather preservative wafted into Mayor Cantwell’s nostrils, and his eyes narrowed at such a blatant sign of disrespect. Commissioner Heinlein will be hearing of this, he promised himself silently.

When he had ground the last of the cigar’s embers into the leather cushion, Bennett stood to his full, imposing height. Without breaking eye contact he cracked his neck first to the left, then to the right, before saying in a calm, conversational tone, “I’ve never cared for politicians.”

In a blur of motion almost too fast to see, the man who had defiled the antique, leather chair with his cigar produced a cleverly-concealed pistol…

…and blew the top half of the sitting Mayor’s head off just as the lights went out.

The Mayor’s body began to twitch spasmodically in the faint light, and the gunman’s arm ached from the vicious kick his crude weapon had produced. “Wlad,” the gunman posing as a PHL rep said after inserting his earpiece and opening a channel to his equivalent of tech support, “glad to see you got those sentry cannons under control. I need an update.” He let his eyes adjust to the darkness as he checked a small, concealed, carbon-fiber clasp which was attached to a harness hidden beneath his overcoat.

“You got it, ‘Mr. Bennett’,” the other man said sarcastically in his ridiculous, long-practiced accent. “You got six—no, eight private security dudes outside the door. I done sealed it tight, but that’ll only buy you forty seconds if these guys be packin’ what they supposed to be packin’.”

“Cut the shit, Benton,” he snapped, irritated at his operator’s chosen vernacular. The Mayor’s office had been rigged with all manner of scanning hardware, so there had been no way to get his standard gear for a job of this type into the room with him. Exiting the room was therefore going to be tricky—and hearing his operator’s archeo-slang wasn’t helping him focus.

“Thirty seconds, Jericho,” Benton said through the earpiece, his voice taking on a slightly more serious tone as he briefly abandoned his adopted vernacular, “looks like the window’s your way out.”

“Thanks for that update, operator,” Jericho quipped dryly as he flipped the emblem of his office onto the Mayor’s desk. The hexagonal insignia landed in the middle of the desk near the Mayor’s body, adding an intentionally dramatic flair to the macabre scene.

Jericho took a second cigar out of his pocket and carefully unwound the wrapper. Inside was the standard assortment of dried leaves and seeds which made up the low-cost alternative to chemstix and other, less destructive, methods of stimulant introduction. But buried within the cigar was a pair of small, brownish, metallic beads. He plucked these out of the mass of dried leaves with his surgeon-steady hands and made his way to the window.

“Twenty seconds, Jericho,” Benton reported altogether unnecessarily. Jericho suspected the big guy just liked to hear his own voice, and since the two of them had a history—not to mention that Benton was easily the best operator he had ever worked with—Jericho had grudgingly learned to deal with the other man’s peculiar idiom.

Jericho carefully placed the two beads a precise distance apart on the glass at about chest height before producing a carbon-fiber clasp from beneath his trench coat and attaching it to a nearby vertical support beam. He then took four measured steps back and turned to face the window. Jericho knew that for the beads to work their technological magic, the shot needed to be taken from a precise location. His concealed weapon only had two rounds, and he had used one of those to execute his Adjustment of the Mayor—whose body had only then stopped twitching.

He took careful aim between the two beads, knowing that if he even missed his shot by a few inches that the bullet would be deflected by the super-strong, floor-to-ceiling window of the Mayor’s lavish office. Closing one eye—to improve his focus as much as his vision—he took a slow, cleansing breath and squeezed the trigger of his relatively primitive slug-thrower.

The pistol bucked hard in his hand as the window shattered into a shower of countless pieces, and the wind began to whip violently through the office carrying the heavy, greasy smells of industry into the previously sterile chamber. Jericho dropped the spent weapon to the floor and took a steadying breath.

“Ten seconds, Jericho,” Benton reported as the sealed door began to glow near the locking mechanism as they began to burn their way through the portal. The security guards outside were apparently just ahead of schedule, and would breach the room in no more than five seconds.

Jericho hesitated for one of the few times in his life. The principles at play in his ‘safe’ egress from the office had been explained and tested—then re-tested—so many times he felt confident he could do what he was about to attempt in his sleep. But, contrary to the opinions of some, he was human—and that meant that in spite of his meticulous preparations, he still harbored a sliver of doubt.

“Man’s sake, Jericho,” Benton chided through a static-laden, crunching noise which Jericho took to be the chewing of junk food by his rotund operator, “the science is solid—solid, know what I’m sayin’!? Take yo’ leap, boy!”

The sound of the locking bolts retracting from the vault-like door was enough to spur Jericho into motion. Running as fast as he could, he cleared the window and began to fall to the street below just as a volley of energy beams erupted into the space above his head as the security force narrowly missed their mark after breaching the Mayor’s heavy door.

The rain-filled, night air whipped around his body as he fought to keep his feet pointed to the ground and his body reacted to the sensation of falling just as it had during his several test runs back at headquarters. No more than a quarter of the way to the ground, a series of sharp, repeating impacts could be felt as a the tiny cord he had attached to the beam at the window began to unwind through a series of meticulously, painstakingly designed loops which provided just under four gees of resistance at their peak.

This was the only part of the operation Jericho had taken issue with. Killing the Mayor had almost been too easy; infiltrating his office had been marginally more difficult, but still eminently do-able. It was the leaping-out-the-window-and-ensuing-insanity which had bothered him.

But his body hurtled toward the ground below in an ever-slowing descent, and before he knew it his feet met the pavement and despite his instinct to do otherwise—and due to literally thousands of practice sessions—he kept his legs straight and his feet slammed flat against the ground just as the cord attached to his harness finally broke near the fastener a hundred and thirty six feet above him.

The sensation of landing on the slick, dark pavement was far from unpleasant—in fact, it was anything but remarkable save for the fact that it was utterly anticlimactic. The impact felt like nothing worse than jumping down from a height of three meters, and Jericho could not help but marvel at the simplicity of his escape mechanism as bits of the very cord which had safely lowered him to the ground fell to the pavement all around him.

That cord—and the soles of his boots—had been meticulously crafted with a lattice-work of ablative, carbon nano-fibers which had absorbed the entire energy transfer of his fall. The devices had been relatively cheap to produce and, more importantly, had passed through the Mayor’s security scanners undetected. The boots, like the cord, were now worth little more than their weight in pencil shavings, but they had served their purpose beautifully.

“Y’all still with me…or do we need a clean-up on aisle nine?” Benton asked into the silence as Jericho took a glance up the massive, towering building from which he had just leapt and marveled at the fact that he had actually survived.

He exhaled a breath he hadn’t even realized he was holding. “I read you, operator,” he replied after shaking the imagery of the potentially lethal fall from his mind as he reached up to remove the earpiece, “I’m going dark. You’ll get your payment within the hour; nice working with you again.”

“Any time, boss-man—any time,” Benton replied with a boisterous chuckle. “Bro, I’m so psyched…I can’t believe that shit actually worked!”

Despite his operator’s pre-jump confidence, Jericho had known he had been far from alone in his trepidation regarding the use of such primitive, crude technology. “Timent Electorum,” Jericho said wryly, invoking the name of his own branch of the government—a name which also served as a warning to corrupt officials everywhere in the Chimera Sector, where Virgin Prime was located.

“True dat, bro; gotta fear them voters,” Benton agreed seriously before Jericho removed the earpiece and tossed it into a nearby drainage grate.

His latest voter-endorsed Adjustment executed, Jericho made his way to a nearby hover conveyance—which he had contracted specifically for the occasion—and the vehicle disappeared into the sprawling cityscape while law enforcement vehicles sped toward New Lincoln’s seat of government in response to their city leader’s Adjustment. Some would think of the act as little more than an assassination, but any true son or daughter of Virgin Prime would recognize it for what it was:

Justice.

If you want to read more, check out Ure Infectus on Amazon.com!