No Middle Ground (Spineward Sectors: Middleton's Pride) (50 page)

The fighters had actually closed to ‘swarm range,’ meaning they were so close to the capital vessel that distinguishing their signals had become too difficult for the automatic sensors.

The Sensors operator chimed in, “I’m seeing power spikes all along the battle cruiser’s grid…if I’m reading this right, they’re—“

The background image of the battle cruiser on the main viewer showed a sequence of explosions running along its hull—right before the vessel’s reactor went critical and a miniature nova formed where the formidable warship had been.

Middleton understood full well what had just happened—and what message he had been given by it. “Verify those fighters were caught in the blast,” he said grimly.

“Verifying,” Sarkozy acknowledged before nodding her head with certainty, “all twelve fighters are confirmed destroyed, Captain.”

He leaned forward in his chair and considered his next course of action. The droid battle cruiser had sacrificed itself to cover the
Pride
’s escape, and flight was almost certainly warranted given the circumstances. But the Pride was simply too damaged to flee; if her systems were at maximum, the odds were good that they could reach the hyper limit and bug out before the destroyer could bring her down, but with a faltering shield grid and potential inbound fighters…

“Helm,” he said, his mind made up, “give me flank speed.”

“Course, Captain?” Commander Jersey asked, as though it needed to be said.

“The only way out of this mess is through it,” Middleton replied, knowing that given the two vessels’ relative courses and velocities, there was no way they could come about and create any meaningful distance between themselves and the enemy vessel. “Let’s see how these droids handle a game of ‘chicken’.”

“Aye,” Jersey replied in his usual, sour tone, “adjusting for ‘chicken’ course.”

“Captain,” Sarkozy interjected as the Pride adjusted its course to bear down on the enemy vessel, “if their primary weapon is still online—“

“Then we’re dead no matter what we do,” Middleton interrupted. “Our shield grid can’t handle even one of those shots, and we have to assume that ship has fighters like the first one. The only way we get out of here is by knocking that destroyer’s engines offline and pressing our own hard enough to escape the range of those fighters.”

“Yes, Captain,” Sarkozy acknowledged stiffly, clearly stinging from the rebuke.

“Tell the gun deck we’ll get more two shots,” Middleton said heavily after performing some mental math, “and they need to make them count.”

The seconds began to tick by as the
Pride of Prometheus
entered medium weapons range. The destroyer actually seemed to accept the challenge, as it poured its own engines on and began firing its weaponry, which was thankfully light by comparison to the
Pride
’s first, concerted volley of the run.

“Our first volley was eight for ten with five direct hits on the hull,” Sarkozy reported. “Their shields still haven’t recovered, and I’m registering multiple internal explosions throughout their ship.”

“Our own shields have collapsed, Captain,” the Shields operator reported after a short burst of incoming fire rocked the deck beneath their feet. “I’ve got multiple blown relays along the grid; working to restore the stern shields now.”

“Good work, Shields,” Middleton said approvingly. If this recent hail of lighter weapon fire was all the destroyer could bring to bear, the
Pride
’s forward armor could almost certainly absorb it before the two ships passed each other. Middleton risked exposing his engines after the pass, but the stern shield grid was currently their best defensive facing, so it was a risk he had to take.

“I’m getting a strange reading, Captain,” Sensors said nervously. “It looks like their jump engine is on a critical overload.”

“Verify that,” Middleton barked, understanding now why the droids had chosen to accept his game of ‘chicken.’

“Readings verified, Captain,” Sarkozy said with certainty. “They’ve set their jump drive to overload in three minutes.”

“Which is about how long it will take for us to pass by,” Jersey said pointedly. “Looks like they’ve thrown down the gauntlet, Captain.”

“Even if their drive goes,” Middleton said as he recalled the total energy involved in a destroyer’s jump drive going critical, “they’d have to be right on top of us for it to cause any damage to the hull.”

“But if it goes off directly in our path,” Sarkozy said in a calm, professional tone, “then the radiation will pass right through our unshielded bow and into the ship’s compartments. If they time it right…”

“Then while the ship itself will survive with minimal damage, every living thing on it will be dead within an hour,” Middleton finished for her before grudgingly adding, “clever. We’ll have to take our forward weapons off them to shield ourselves from the incoming wave of radiation, at which time they’ll launch their fighters to prevent our guns from picking them off.”

The sole, decisive advantage to having the forward batteries essentially fix-mounted was the resulting accuracy the finer adjustment mechanisms they employed afforded the gunners. Normally heavy lasers would have difficulty accurately firing on individual fighters, but at medium or even short range, the
Pride
’s heavy lasers could pick off even the individual fighters with the same degree of accuracy as they could land on larger ships at long range.

“Never played such a complicated game of ‘chicken,’ Captain,” Jersey scoffed as the
Pride of Prometheus
continued on its collision course with the enemy destroyer.

“First time for everything, Commander,” Middleton replied. “Steady on course; we’ll bank hard to port after our guns have landed on the destroyer’s hull. We don’t have any choice in the matter.”

“Aye, Captain,” Jersey acknowledged, “banking after the cannons clear.”

The recharge cycle of the forward array ticked up one by one, with battery four taking an extra sixteen seconds likely due to some damage it had sustained during the recent exchange.

“Firing,” Sarkozy reported as the laser cannons pierced the vacuum of space, and the bow of the enemy destroyer erupted in a series of violent explosions. “Ten for ten,” she said with subdued enthusiasm, “the enemy vessel has extreme damage to its forward hull and its entire superstructure is deforming violently.”

The image of the enemy destroyer, which was a battered dodecahedron with multiple large gashes opened along its many forward facings, seemed almost to explode as the stern of the craft began to deform. For a moment, Middleton thought they had caused critical damage to the enemy vessel—then he saw that what he had assumed was a cloud of fractured hull material was actually a dozen, smaller, twelve-sided vessels which fired their thrusters and took off from the ruined destroyer at what looked to be maximum speed.

“I’m reading fourteen fighters,” Sarkozy reported as Commander Jersey finally slewed the ship to present the still-shielded starboard broadside of the
Pride
.

The enemy vessel exploded, and rings of energy could be seen expanding in multiple directions a few seconds before the
Pride of Prometheus
’ warning alarms went off.

“We’ve passed into the radiation field,” Sensors reported.

“Keep our stern facing the epicenter, Helm,” Middleton ordered.

“Aye, Captain,” Jersey grouched, and for some reason Captain Middleton felt reassured by the older man’s sullen demeanor, which had been largely absent during his tenure as the ship’s XO.

“Incoming fighters,” Sarkozy reported as the roughly circular formation of fighters began to close on the
Pride
. “They’re braking against their forward momentum, Captain,” she said in obvious surprise.

“What?” Middleton asked before drawing the only conclusion he could and feeling a knot form in his throat. He thumbed the com-link on his chair and raised the Lancer priority channel, “This is the Captain to all Lancers: suit up and prepare to receive boarders.” With that said, he turned to Tactical, and was pleased to see that Sarkozy appeared to have taken the revelation in stride—either that, or she had drawn the same conclusion, “Coordinate with Commander Jersey, Ensign Sarkozy; I want our stern lasers to fire on those ships before they latch onto our hull.”

Taking a deep breath, Middleton looked at the tactical readout and knew they only had a few minutes before the corridors of his ship became a battleground.

“Captain,” Commander Jersey said in a raised voice, “the Lancers are short-handed; I’m rated for power armor and we’ve got more than enough empty suits down there in need of filling. I can’t do any more good at the helm anyway, sir.”

“Agreed,” Middleton said with a sharp nod, knowing there were only a handful of power armor-rated, duty-ready members of the crew outside of the Lancers. “Get down there and suit up.”

The previous helm stander resumed his post and worked with Ensign Sarkozy to maneuver the ship, as Commander Jersey sprinted to the bridge’s exit as fast as his venerable legs could carry him.

Chapter XLI: The Fray

“This is the Captain to all Lancers: suit up and prepare to receive boarders,” Captain Middleton’s voice came over Lu Bu’s ear bud unexpectedly. They had continued their course toward the
Pride of Prometheus
, and were apparently just within communications range of the tiny craft.

“The last vessel is gone, and the comm. blackout is gone with it,” Fei Long concluded with raised eyebrows, “but apparently, Captain Middleton believes there is more to these ‘fighters’ than first appears…interesting.”

“Interesting?” Lu Bu snapped in their native tongue. “Our crewmates are about to receive Ancestors-only-know how many boarders, and you think it’s ‘interesting’?! We must return to assist them!”

“Switch it back to Standard, you two,” Gnuko snapped.

Lu Bu turned to her new Sergeant and said, in Confederation Standard, “We must return to
Pride
and help crew, Sergeant.”

Gnuko was clearly torn. “We don’t have power armor,” he said doubtfully, “and that jump drive threw off a load of lethal radiation when it went. We’ll need to circumnavigate the danger zone, which will take an extra few minutes of maneuvering—assuming the shields on this shuttle can withstand even the less-intense rads on the periphery of the blast zone.”

“We cannot sit here!” Lu Bu objected furiously, feeling a vein in her forehead bulge unexpectedly.

“Lu Bu is correct,” Fei Long interjected. “Without the
Pride of Prometheus
, this shuttle is little better than a life pod. We must return to the ship and lend whatever assistance we are able, even if that is merely to ram an incoming fighter to diminish the threat to our crewmates. Anything else would be passive. Passivity is the path of prey, and prey exists only to feed the predator.” His eyes flashed with an inner strength which Lu Bu had never seen in his countenance, and which gave her cause to reconsider several of her preconceptions regarding the boy as he added, “
I
am not prey.”

“Agreed,” Peleus said with a sharp nod as he, too, leaned into the cockpit. “We must rejoin the battle however we are able.”

“All right,” Gnuko agreed, and Lu Bu realized he had only vacillated in order to gain consensus among the team. It seemed to her that while this was different from how Sergeant Joneson operated, Walter Joneson had wisely chosen his successor. She hoped that she could learn from her new Sergeant as she had from her old one. “Set a course for the
Pride
, Lu; push the engines as hard as you can.”

“Yes, Sergeant,” she replied with gusto before lighting the engines and initiating a maximum burn toward the
Pride of Prometheus
, which had just unleashed a flash of fire resulting in a pair of explosions among the approaching fighters.

“Two targets down, Captain, with twelve remaining,” Sarkozy reported. “We’ve cleared the lethal rad zone; recommend we bring the forward guns to bear on the incoming fighters. We should be able to take out a handful with some fancy firing.”

“Do it,” Middleton agreed, knowing that clearing the ‘lethal zone’ and clearing the zone entirely were two completely different things. But to survive what had clearly been a well thought out strategy on the part of the droids, he knew they needed to destroy as many individual units as possible before they reached the hull of the
Pride
.

His com-link flashed, and he opened the incoming packet to receive a status update of his Lancers that made him wince. In all, including those members of the crew who had been temporarily assigned, he had twenty one bodies in power armor. Seeing as Sergeant Gnuko had gone aboard the shuttle to assist with the missile deployment, command of the unit had fallen to Lancer Atticus and Commander Jersey.

Satisfied with his XO’s suggested plan to repel the boarders, Middleton acknowledged the report and wished the Lieutenant Commander a good hunt.

“I’m receiving a transmission from the shuttle,” Ensign Jardine reported. “They’re on approach and offering assistance.”

Middleton marveled at the courageousness of the people aboard the tiny craft. They couldn’t hope to influence the outcome in any fashion other than to make a suicide ram against one of the inbound fighters, and much as he hated to admit it, Captain Tim Middleton actually considered ordering them to do precisely that.

But the truth was that the four members of the shuttle’s complement were worth more to the ship if they somehow managed to re-board it, with Sergeant Gnuko, Peleus, and Lu Bu representing a significant increase in Lancer strength—to say nothing of whatever Fei Long might be able to contribute.

“Inform them to prepare for combat landing procedures on final approach,” Middleton ordered. “They are to re-board the ship; we’ll cover them with our PD grid.”

“Aye, Captain,” Jardine replied just as the first of the fighters entered immediate range, causing a set of quickly-muffled klaxons to go off.