No Middle Ground Page 10

  “Tri-Locsium, sir,” the Ensign agreed with a curt nod.

  “Dismissed, Ensign,” the Captain said, standing from his chair before adding, “and good hunting.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Jardine replied before turning and making his way out of the ready room.

  Captain Middleton thought about the possibility of a saboteur and quickly concluded that, much as he wanted to keep him out of the loop this early on, it would become necessary to involve Sergeant Joneson for at least part of the operation.

  He activated the console in his desk and initiated a com-link with the Lancer Sergeant, hoping to address this latest issue as quickly and efficiently as possible.

  “Harder, you miserable lumps of meat!” Walter Joneson boomed, his voice completely filling the emptied recreation hall as the recruits engaged in the latest series of surprise drills—having been rudely awoken from their bunks just two hours after the completion of the previous day’s drills.

  Every day she had been aboard the Pride of Prometheus had been exactly as Lu Bu had expected it to be: hectic, extremely demanding both physically and psychologically, and utterly unpredictable.

  In other words, it had been a dream-come-true for the aspiring Lancer. Her hips, forearms and thighs burned from the smashball passing drills the Sergeant put them through. The ball’s weight had been maxed out for this particular drill, and it was quickly becoming more than most of the recruits could manage just to complete a throw to their assigned partners.

  “All right,” Joneson shouted as a pair of recruits on the far end of the room collapsed and began to dry heave from complete physical exhaustion. “Break into groups of five for grappling—we’re running sharks to start,” he instructed imperiously, and even Lu Bu was slightly sluggish in moving to the assigned circles marked out on the floor, prompting the Sergeant to bellow, “I said: move!”

  The nearby recruits all worked themselves into groups of five, conspicuously avoided the circle which Lu Bu had staked out as her own. The few who failed to find an alternative group quickly enough groaned collectively when they saw that they would be teamed with her, and she felt a pang of bitter disappointment as she did her best to gesture for them to join her as quickly as possible.

  “No,” Joneson snapped as those recruits neared Lu Bu’s circle, “you four go hydrate for the first round.” The looks of elation on their faces evoked mixed feelings of pride and anger in Lu Bu, but she pushed those feelings aside as Walter Joneson himself approached the circle. She felt a thrill at the prospect of wrestling with the greatest smashball player she had ever seen, but did her best to keep her excitement hidden. The other recruits were woefully inadequate when it came to physical contests, and she relished the opportunity to test herself against Walter Joneson.

  “I think it’s time you picked on someone in your own weight class, don’t you?” Joneson said, towering over her as he came to stand just outside her circle.

  Lu Bu clasped her hands before herself respectfully, nearly trembling with excitement. “This one will do as you command, Sergeant,” she said, sweat dripping down her face as she fought to keep her expression neutral.

  “Good,” Joneson said with a smirk before placing his fingers in his mouth and whistling as loudly as Lu Bu had ever heard a person whistle.

  She kept her eyes lowered until hearing a quartet of footsteps approaching, and when she looked up in surprise she saw four huge, hulking men with square jaws and long, fair-colored hair enter the rec room and approach her circle purposefully.

  “You lot are with Lu,” Joneson said with a smirk before turning his back on her and making his way to the center of the room. “Begin!” he instructed, and the other circles each saw their paired combatants square off and begin grappling for all they were worth.

  The four approaching men—who Lu Bu had learned were from a planet called ‘Tracto’—towered well over a foot above her. They each outweighed her by nearly as much as the average crewmember of the Pride of Prometheus’ total body weight, but she squared off with the first one and beckoned for him to enter the circle. Her excitement at the prospect of grappling with the great Walter Joneson had been replaced with a burning sense of outrage—and she fully intended to vent her frustrations out on these four who had, until that moment, been absent from the exercises.

  The first man, named Atticus, entered the circle with a look of disdain that only made Lu Bu’s choler rise as they circled each other briefly while assuming mirrored wrestling stances. She immediately shot toward the man’s leg and grappled with him, but he sprawled back and thrust his weight down on her shoulders as quickly as she engaged.

  She adjusted her attack by taking a quarter step back and reaching up for his now-lowered head with both hands. She managed to grasp the back of his neck with both of her hands, but he intercepted her wrists and with a display of strength she had never encountered, he slowly pulled her hands apart as a look of smug superiority filled his features.

  Lu Bu, realizing that for perhaps the first time in her life she had encountered someone whose strength actually surpassed her own, thrust her arms outward in the directions the other man had been prying them.

  Clearly caught unaware, the larger man flinched for a fraction of a second—and Lu Bu allowed his falling bulk to pass over her shoulders as she maintained balance on her lead, left foot. She spun deftly, as the man’s momentum took him over and past her, and grasped his waist with her arms after she broke his grip with a violent, downward, snapping motion of each arm.

  When she had a grip of his hips, she was surprised to see that he had already regained his composure and was reaching down to once again break her grip. Not only was he strong, but he had remarkable balance and reflexes—but she already knew that hers were better.

  Knowing there was little chance for a throw or hip-toss in what little time remained to her, she drove through the other man’s hips as hard as she could and forced his near knee to touch the ground to prevent being thrown from the circle.

  The match was over, and Atticus gave her an angry look as he stood and made his way outside of the circle. She met his gaze with a hard one of her own as one of his fellow Tracto-ans entered the circle and squared off against her.

  Her lip curled as she mirrored his posture. Finally, she thought to herself, a challenge!

  Twenty rotations later Lu Bu was still in the center of her circle, having just been pinned for the fifth time by one of the men who had been set against her by Sergeant Walter Joneson.

  She snarled in outrage and clambered to her feet, her knees shaking and every muscle in her torso seemingly on fire. In a way it was disconcerting to feel so vulnerable, but in another way this was perhaps the most exhilarating experience of her young life. The thrill of a proper challenge was something she had savored for as long as she could remember, and this was easily the most difficult exercise she could have dreamt of.

  “Come!” she gasped as her legs threatened to give out. The first few bouts had been over relatively quickly as the Tracto-ans had, rather obviously in retrospect, allowed her to win while gauging her abilities. But the last few had lasted for nearly a minute each—and most had ended in her total defeat at the hands of the surprisingly powerful men.

  But not once had she allowed them to hurl her from the circle, while it was clear to her they held her in open disdain as they had attempted to do precisely that for several bouts. Eventually they abandoned that particular approach when it became clear she would not be so easily defeated.

  Kilo for kilo, she was certain that her own physical abilities far surpassed these ‘Tracto-an’s’ abilities, but the sheer size difference between them had become an essentially insurmountable obstacle to victory for Lu Bu—not that she was dissuaded by the hopelessness of the situation, however. She viewed this as a rare—or even unique—opportunity to examine her own flaws by testing herself against these surprisingly worthy foes.

  “Time!” Joneson called out. The other groups had already
rotated three times, but Lu Bu had refused to step out and enter the ‘shark’ rotations, instead demanding to remain in the center to face the men who were already Lancers under Walter Joneson’s command.

  “Lu, rotate out,” Joneson ordered.

  “No!” she snapped over her shoulder, gesturing for the next Tracto-an to enter the circle. Much as she knew this was a chance to test herself, she found herself genuinely outraged at being defeated so handily by the Tracto-ans, and her primal desire to compete had already assumed control over her mental faculties.

  The next thing she knew, someone behind her had shoved her forward onto the mat and placed his knee into the small of her back, while immobilizing her right arm with some kind of two-on-one joint lock. “If you can’t learn to follow orders,” she heard Sergeant Joneson’s voice growl as he twisted her arm hard enough that she literally felt muscle fibers tear in her bicep, “then you can go to Gunnery like the rest of the washouts, Recruit! Maybe you’re looking for a way out?” he shouted, torqueing her arm even further to the point she was fairly certain ligament damage had occurred.

  “No!” she shouted, her voice muffled from having her face shoved into the mat, her vision narrowing as she was overcome with rage. “This one will not quit!”

  “Then maybe you’re trying to give me a reason to wash you out,” Joneson continued, cranking on her arm even harder until she heard something pop. “Looking for the back door; is that it, Recruit?” he hissed.

  Her arm flared with pain. She was certain that something had torn in her shoulder, but the knowledge of that damage was more concerning to her than the pain, which was something she had always been able to deal with.

  Just then there was a chime of some kind from nearby, and before she could scream in angry defiance, she heard the Sergeant say, “Joneson here, Captain.” A few moments later, he relaxed his grip on her arm fractionally and said, “On my way now, sir.”

  With that he released her arm and stood slowly, keeping his knee in her back for an extra second as he got to his feet.

  Rolling over with open outrage on her face, Lu Bu looked up to see the Sergeant towering over her as she fought to keep from cradling her damaged arm while fixing him with the raging infernos that her eyes had become. It was all she could do to keep from launching herself at him for damaging her arm—after attacking her back, no less!

  Walter Joneson stood there for several moments before leaning down slightly and saying in a low, deadly serious tone, “Report to sickbay and get that arm looked at, Recruit Lu. That’s an order.” He turned and made his way toward the door. “Break for chow,” he barked. “You’ve got twenty minutes to eat, and forty minutes to digest before we hit the grav-cycles. Move!” he shouted as he exited the room.

  After Walter Joneson had left, Lu Bu got to her feet and found that she actually had tears streaming down her face, which was completely unexpected. She had felt anger and nothing more. The pain in her shoulder was certainly not severe enough to provoke tears from her, and yet she could do nothing to stop them from flowing down her cheeks.

  “Blasted genies,” she heard one of the nearby recruits mutter in the tongue of her home world, followed by murmurs of assent from the nearest recruits.

  “What you call me?” she seethed in Confederation Standard, having heard this term in similarly hushed voices during the previous few days. It was a variation of a term she had heard too many times before, which she guessed was supposed to be a clever invocation of her heredity.

  The man, standing in a group with six fellow prisoners from her world, squared up slightly and said challengingly in her native tongue, “You heard me, genie. Your kind,” he gestured toward her and the Tracto-ans “are a blight on humanity’s future harmony—a disease which we should have erased when we had the chance!” The others around him nodded their assent, with one even going so far as to spit on the deck in derision.

  Without even realizing she had done it, Lu Bu leapt toward the man as her subconscious, animal instincts took control. Everyone in the room was caught unaware, and with just two powerful strides she planted the fist of her good arm into the man’s abdomen directly over his liver. Before he even hit the deck, she turned and kicked the leg of a nearby recruit so hard she felt his shin snap against her own, far more durable one. Before that man had hit the deck—howling in genuine agony—she knife-handed a third to the side of his head with her injured, right arm.

  All three collapsed to the deck, and she was just getting ready to deliver a front kick to the face of a fourth when she felt a pair of hands grasp her upper arms from behind. Acting purely on instinct, she twisted her body and slunk away from the man’s hands and squared herself.

  Before realizing she had done so, Lu Bu launched herself upward and brought her knee into the incredibly broad, powerful jaw of the last Tracto-an she had wrestled. His momentum carried him directly into the blow, as his body fell forward following the attempt to corral her with his outstretched arms.

  The Tracto-an’s head snapped sideways from the force of her blow, and she saw his eyes roll back as his momentum carried him face-first into the metal deck plates between the mats.

  But before she could recover, the other three Tracto-ans leapt on her and drug her to the ground. She fought furiously against them, but there was simply no way she could win a struggle against the three of them.

  Screaming wordlessly for several seconds, her conscious mind finally took back control and she stopped her thrashing for as she took sharp, controlled breaths. The Tracto-ans relaxed their grips on her arms and legs slightly and Atticus gave her a dire look of warning, which promised that further outbursts would be met far less gently.

  Standing to her feet, she gestured toward the three fallen men. “Walter Joneson orders this one to sickbay,” she said stiffly as she knelt to sling the man with the broken leg over her shoulder. To her surprise, no one—including the Tracto-ans—made an attempt to stop her. “Bring them,” she gestured toward the other injured recruits before making her way out of the rec room and heading toward sickbay.

  She strode past her slack-jawed countrymen with her head held high, carrying the still-screaming recruit with her.

  Chapter IX: Playing to Strengths

  The chime sounded at Middleton’s door an hour after he had concluded his discussion with Sergeant Joneson. The Sergeant had gone to make preparations for the trap which Middleton hoped to spring on whoever it was that was sending unauthorized, encrypted transmissions off-ship. With their next jump scheduled in roughly two hours, he wanted to set their trap as quickly—and quietly—as possible.

  “Enter,” the Captain called out as he reviewed an incident report involving their new Lancer recruits which had landed five of them in sickbay.

  The door opened and Jo, his ex-wife, entered the room. He refused to think of her as ‘Doctor Middleton,’ since she had kept his last name these past twenty two years without apprising him of that fact.

  The doctor had a look of pure, undiluted rage—at least, for her—on her face as she stormed into the office and shouted, “You made her a Lancer!?” The door slid closed behind her just after she finished her opening outburst, and he set his jaw at her flaunting of military protocols—protocols which she clearly held in the lowest regard.

  “Have a seat, Doctor,” Middleton said as calmly as he could manage.

  She leveled an accusing finger at him. “She is a child, Tim—a child! And you put her in there with men like Walter Joneson?!”

  Captain Middleton stood slowly and leaned forward, his knuckles pressing down on the desk so hard he briefly feared they might split open. “Sit down, Doctor,” he said, his voice turning to more of a growl than he would have liked.

  Jo looked as though she wanted to argue, rather than do as he advised. But she collected herself enough to walk stiffly over to the chair and lower herself deliberately into it, all the while holding him with her angry eyes.

  After she had sat, Captain Middleton remained stan
ding for several seconds before lowering himself down into his own chair and taking a deep, quiet breath. “Doctor,” he began tensely, “you are afforded certain privileges which others in my crew are not—including being allowed to speak bluntly to this ship’s commanding officer—due solely to your invaluable contributions toward the well-being of that crew in the absence of someone who can adequately assume your duties. But there are limits to the amount of lenience I can publicly grant you…do you understand me?” he asked with a deliberate look at the door.

  Her expression softened momentarily before hardening once again. “I’m…sorry, Tim,” she bit out, and he believed that she was—even though she still clearly had plenty of fight left in her.

  “Now,” Middleton forced himself to lean back in his chair, “I assume you’ve come here to discuss Recruit Lu Bu’s recent mishap?”

  “You know blasted well that’s why I’m here,” she spat icily. “And you’ve got some nerve calling it a ‘mishap!’ She’s barely sixteen cycles old and you’ve got her in there getting abused by those-those…” she stuttered angrily before blurting out, “those thugs?! She has no business in there!”

  Middleton looked down pointedly at the data slate in his hand before sliding it across the desk toward her. “There are three recruits lying in sickbay—and, more than a little surprisingly, one Tracto-an Lancer—who would likely argue with your assertion, Doctor.”

  Jo made as if to argue, but her mouth snapped shut briefly and Tim Middleton was reminded of many similar engagements they’d had during their younger years. He wanted to grin at seeing her so worked up, but he forced his features to remain expressionless as she continued, “Did you know that your Lancer Sergeant nearly tore her arm off to prove some sort of Demon-spawned, testosterone-fueled point?”

  Middleton, having already read the report, furrowed his brow as he quoted, “Patient Lu Bu was observed to have significant insult to each of the supraspinatus, infraspinatus, subscapularis and teres minor muscles of the right arm. These were repaired using micro-sutur—“