No Middle Ground (Spineward Sectors: Middleton's Pride) Read online

  “Forward armor holding, Captain,” Sarkozi reported crisply. “No breaches detected. Heavy laser battery number three is off-line…and damage control protocols have been initiated,” she continued, eliciting a sideways glare from the nearby Damage Control officer at having usurped his privilege.

  “Very good; continue firing as she passes by,” Middleton instructed. “Helm: keep our bow facing them throughout. Another two volleys and she’s done for.”

  “Aye, sir,” Jersey replied, this time with considerably less disgruntlement.

  “Captain, the enemy vessel is hailing,” the Comm. operator reported anxiously, pausing briefly before adding, “she’s offering her surrender.”

  “She’s powering down her engines, Captain,” Sarkozi concurred, a note of triumph in her voice.

  Despite the severity of the situation, Middleton arched an eyebrow incredulously. “Put her on screen,” he ordered, straightening himself in his chair just before the rugged, yet oddly handsome, face of a bent-nosed woman appeared on the viewer. “This is Captain Tyrone Middleton of the MSP cruiser Pride of Prometheus,” he said sharply using his ‘true’ first name, as protocol demanded. His father’s name had been Tyrone, and the two of them had experienced a rather severe falling out just before Middleton had gone to college, prompting him to adopt his middle name of Timothy for informal use. “You are ordered to stand down, heave to and prepare to be boarded.”

  “We will comply,” the pirate captain replied agreeably, causing Middleton’s eyes to narrow suspiciously. “We have already deactivated our engines and are powering down our fusion core while we prepare to receive your boarding party; I have no desire to see my crew suffer for my failure as their captain.”

  “Take your weapons off-line and power down your shields, Captain,” Middleton instructed in a hard voice. “Do so quickly, or I’ll have my gunners tear your ship to pieces.”

  The woman tilted her head toward someone on her own bridge, and a moment later Sarkozi nodded her affirmation that the pirate corvette had done as instructed.

  “Your name, Captain?” Middleton pressed, leaning forward in his command chair as he considered how this could all be a deception. We survived the Liberator torpedo—one of the few universally banned weapons in the Confederated Spine—so perhaps she simply has no more fight left in her? he wondered briefly. Maybe her ship is in worse shape than it appears…but even so, with reasonable maneuvering they still have a good chance to escape our weapons range.

  “Captain Meisha Raubach,” the large-nosed woman replied stiffly, breaking his silent musings. “We will surrender to your inspection and seizure teams as soon as they arrive,” she said, briefly snapping her eyes below the viewer’s pickup. “Raubach, out.”

  “Confirm their engines, shields and weapons are off-line,” Middleton snapped irritably. He was certain he was missing something, but what that was he could not yet say...

  “Confirmed, Captain,” Sarkozi replied promptly. “Their entire power grid outside of environmental now reads as off-line.”

  “They must be itching for a trench fight,” Middleton mused aloud, grasping at straws for why they would give up at this juncture.

  “Maybe they hope to sucker our Lancers aboard and then counterattack with a boarding party of their own?” Sarkozi asked, sounding respectfully skeptical.

  “Could be…” Middleton mused, feeling a growing knot of discomfort in the pit of his stomach. Something isn’t right here, he thought, angry with himself for not seeing all the angles. “No,” he shook his head in negation, “there’s no way that’s it; our Lancers outnumber that ship’s listed armed forces personnel three to one at full complement, and I’d wager we’re in better shape than she is.”

  Ensign Sarkozi nodded slowly. “True…and nobody wants a firefight on their own ship,” she continued before throwing a three dimensional representation of the Pride onto the main viewer. “The Liberator’s still lodged onto the starboard bow,” she reported as the image centered on that part of the represented ship, showing the path of the beam in bright red. “Its coring beam fired and penetrated decks three through nine at an angle of approximately twelve degrees, extending nearly sixty percent the length of the ship.”

  Captain Middleton called up the latest damage reports and had to keep himself from wincing. The latest reports showed four confirmed deaths and three more crewmembers missing whose last reported positions were along the path of the coring beam.

  Just then a pale, blue bar of lights began flashing along top of each workstation, as well as around the joint between the bulkheads and the ceiling. Middleton did not immediately recognize the emergency code.

  But when he did, he understood the pirates’ intentions all too clearly.

  Chapter III: Earning Hazard Pay

  “Biohazard detected on decks four, five and six,” the Comm. officer reported. “Emergency lockdown protocols are now in effect.”

  Middleton punched up the ship’s doctor on his chair’s comm. unit and was quickly rewarded with the image of the aging doctor’s face. “What is it, Doctor?” he asked, feeling an odd mixture of anxiety and serenity now that the final piece had fallen into place. It was terrifying to have a biological contagion aboard the ship, but he now fully understood the tactical situation and would no longer need to analyze and re-analyze each and every piece of new information. To Middleton, this was actually a significant relief.

  “Computer’s reading some kind of multi-part, auto-recombinant airborne virus,” Doctor Milton replied grimly. “It beat the standard filters because it only recombines inside the host’s body. Frankly, we’re lucky it got detected by the outdated filters in here,” he said with a hard look.

  Middleton kept his features firm despite the roiling sensation in his abdomen. “Can you treat it?”

  The Doctor shook his head as he rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Realistically the best thing we can do is lock the ship down, shut off the primary air circulation systems and hope to Murphy it’s been contained.”

  “Can we re-route the air circulation through the systems in Engineering and the Bridge?” Middleton pressed, knowing it was a long shot. The Pride’s critical areas—the bridge, Engineering, the gun deck and sickbay—had independent air re-circulation systems which, when activated, could keep those portions of the ship separate in the event of a contaminant like the one just discovered. They could also filter out and destroy any potential bio-contaminants for several days with no more than emergency power. Tapping into those filtration systems was a long shot, but Middleton had to do everything possible for his crew.

  “If we do that, we risk exposing the crew that are already protected within the high-security sections,” the Doctor shook his head firmly. “Protocols are clear on this situation, Captain; I’ve already initiated the lockdown, and now only you or I can override it. As Chief Medical Officer, it is my opinion that you should leave the lockdown in place until this contagion has been identified and treated, or run its course in containment.”

  Captain Middleton felt the urge to sit back in his chair but fought it, remaining precisely where he was so he could maintain eye contact with Milton. “How long, Doctor?” he asked after a lengthy pause which saw all activity on the bridge come to a grinding halt.

  “If this is a high-grade bioweapon, and I’ve got no reason to believe it isn’t, no more than twelve hours—barring extreme luck with the available treatments,” Doctor Milton replied matter-of-factly. “That still gives me a few hours here to determine what it is we’re dealing with…in the event we don’t have ‘extreme luck’.”

  Middleton could feel the eyes of the entire bridge crew on him as the reality of the situation sank in for them. But to him, Doctor Milton’s report was just another piece of the puzzle which explained the second corvette captain’s behavior perfectly. To Middleton’s mind, the fact that the Liberator had carried a bioweapon rather than a ship-busting bomb was good news since at least some of the crew would survive. They were
already in full lockdown, containment mode, so there was little point in worrying about the inevitable aftermath of the virus just yet.

  “I’ll leave you to it then, Doctor,” Middleton said with a short nod which Milton returned before cutting the com-link. Straightening himself in his chair, Captain Middleton turned deliberately toward Ensign Sarkozi. “Has Captain Raubach’s vessel come to a full stop?”

  Sarkozi stared blankly at him for a moment before snapping to and checking her console with a glance. “No, Captain,” she said with a note of surprise, “she’s cut her engines and stopped her acceleration, but the corvette’s inertia is still carrying it forward with only the gravity of the gas giant slowing her down fractionally, and they’ve already gone well past orbit-breaking speed.”

  Middleton had expected such, so he continued calmly, “Are their shields still raised?”

  Sarkozi glanced down and shook her head. “Negative, Captain; her shields are down and her primary generator is off-line. Aside from her forward momentum, she’s dead in space.”

  Replaying the sequence of events in his mind, Captain Middleton shook his head at his own lack of experience. Foreseeing the presence of not one, but two banned weapons in the Liberator torpedo and the bioweapon it carried, required an unreasonable amount of foresight. But he now knew that he should not have accepted Captain Raubach’s unconditional surrender as readily as he had.

  “Tactical,” he began evenly, feeling his face go red with anger, “have the gun deck transfer fire control of the forward batteries to my console.”

  “But Captain—“ Sarkozi began, but the rest of her words caught in her throat at Middleton’s hard, unyielding look. “Transferring now, sir,” she said professionally before bracing to attention several seconds later and adding, “transfer complete, Captain.”

  “Comm.,” the Captain said, his eyes fixed on the main viewer, “hail the corvette.”

  “Hailing now, Captain,” Ensign Jardine replied after a brief pause.

  A moment later, the screen was filled with Captain Meisha T. Raubach’s smug features. “We are prepared to receive your boarding party, Captain Middleton,” she said officiously, but Middleton could plainly see the outright arrogance in her visage. She clearly knew that the Pride of Prometheus would catch her eventually, but she also just as clearly knew that the Pride would be in lockdown and that sending a boarding party would be next to impossible until that lockdown was over, which could either take hours or days.

  Still, Middleton thought to himself bitterly as he leaned forward in his chair, at least we won’t have to worry about them sending a boarding party of their own. “Captain Raubach,” he began in an officious tone of his own, “you have deployed outlawed ordnance, including weapons of mass destruction in the form of an engineered bioweapon, delivered by an universally banned ship-to-ship delivery platform. Your crimes have been noted in my ship’s log and are witnessed by the members of this crew; under the Confederation War Crimes statute you are hereby sentenced to summary execution.”

  Captain Raubach stiffened visibly as she shook her head in negation, her curly hair bouncing around her oddly handsome features. “The Confederation War Crimes statutes are outdated, Captain,” she said smugly. “As Imperial citizens, both I and my crew are afforded safe passage to an Imperial outpost—as stipulated under both the Union Treaty and the United Space Sectors and Provinces Act—where our legal status can be impartially determined. We have complied with your demands by powering down our fusion reactor and disabling our weaponry—as well as our engines,” she added with a triumphant smirk, “and are even now awaiting your boarding party. I assure you we will cooperate fully with your inspection and seizure teams whenever they arrive.”

  “The Union Treaty has been dissolved, Captain Raubach,” Middleton said evenly, “and with it your so-called ‘protection’.”

  “Even if that’s true,” she countered easily, “as an officer in the Imperial Navy, the United Space Sectors and Provinces Act stipulates that I be remanded into Imperial custody before any provincial legal action can proceed.”

  “Captain Raubach,” Middleton began, feeling his collar begin to heat at the incessant back-and-forth wordplay but knowing he needed to keep calm, “are you saying that your actions here are condoned by the Imperial Navy?”

  Raubach laughed in open derision. “Of course not,” she spat with a piteous shake of her head, “I, and my crew, seized this ship and station in an act of piracy, in order to take financial advantage of the political instability in the region. But, as a mutinous Imperial officer, my superiors will naturally want me remanded to their custody immediately following my arrest.”

  Middleton felt the urge to scream at the top of his lungs, but he kept his best poker face throughout. His mind raced as he tried to devise a way to outmaneuver this woman, but it was clear that she had the legal framework on her side—which meant this had been a well-coordinated effort, likely with significant backing. “Raubach,” Middleton mused as he tried to buy time, “I’ve heard that name before. Your family’s one of the most powerful in the Imperium, isn’t it?”

  “My husband, James’, family,” she corrected with a disdainful shake of her head, looking for all the world like the cat that got the cream. “My maiden name is Tate,” she added in her insufferably smug tone.

  Ensign Sarkozi approached Middleton’s chair and leaned close to say under her breath, “In three minutes they will have left our heavy lasers’ extreme range, Captain.”

  At Middleton’s momentary hesitation, Captain Raubach snickered triumphantly. “Face it, Captain,” she said, taking a step toward the viewer’s pickup, “there’s nothing you can do now; I’ve got complete legal immunity.”

  Middleton closed his eyes and his hand hung suspended over the arm console of his chair. He knew full well that what he was contemplating bordered on a capital offense in and of itself, but even assuming the Pride caught up to the corvette and secured both it and its crew, all that would do is buy more time for the merchantmen to conclude their business at the mining facility—and Captain Middleton was now certain that said business was far from legitimate.

  Conversely, if he turned his back on the corvette to secure the gas facility and merchantmen, there was nothing to stop it from coasting further and further away until it was outside the Pride’s effective zone of control. And if there was even a half-reasonable possibility that the gas facility had been turned into a bioweapons manufacturing site—

  His eyes snapped open after he had worked his way through the situation, and he knew what he had to do…no matter how much it might cost him personally.

  “Your ‘immunity,’ Captain Raubach,” he began coldly, his fingers tapping the Captain’s fire control code into the console on his chair, “has just been revoked.”

  His finger rammed down on the firing icon, and the look on the pirate Captain’s face was one of shocked incredulity as the Pride’s forward batteries fired in unison. Captain Raubach made to protest, but the connection was severed before any sound passed her lips.

  The viewer shimmered to replace her smug visage with a real-time image of the corvette as its superstructure buckled from the combined salvo of eight heavy lasers landing in concert on the drifting vessel.

  Seconds later there was a series of explosions which cascaded through the corvette’s hull, sending sections of hull plating flying in every direction as the vessel began to topple end over end from the force of the internal ruptures. Debris went spinning off with every rotation, and after less than a minute all power signatures aboard the corvette went dark.

  There was shocked silence on the bridge, into which Middleton smartly ordered, “Helm, best possible speed to the gas collection facility; I don’t want a single ship escaping this system under any circumstances. Comm.,” he continued, bracing himself against the arm of his chair, “transmit on all channels the order for vessels in system to heave to—or, if docked, to remain where they are—and await MSP inspection. Fa
ilure to comply will result in,” he cocked a cold grin in spite of the situation’s severity, “further revocations.”

  “Aye, sir,” both men replied in near unison as they went about their tasks.

  “However,” Middleton added as he considered the matter tactically, “while they will be arrested on sight, the lives of any suspected criminals will be spared unconditionally regardless of what we find during our inspections—given that no harm has come to the surviving inhabitants of the station upon our arrival.”

  “Yes sir,” Ensign Jardine, the Comm. Officer, acknowledged. A few minutes later, he turned to the Captain and said, “The pirates agree to offer their unconditional surrender, Captain, and report that there are twenty six unharmed civilians aboard the facility.”

  Sitting back in the command chair, Captain Middleton breathed a short sigh of relief. It seemed that the heavy lifting was done with. He flipped through a few pages of directories until he came to the gas facility’s specifications and found the crew complement during normal operations was a hundred and two.

  “I want immediate contact with a representative of those ‘civilians’,” he ordered. “Once I’m satisfied as to their state, I’ll officially recognize the pirates’ surrender.”

  “Yes sir,” Jardine acknowledged.

  Middleton began perusing ship status reports, specifically those regarding how many personnel were within the areas of Engineering, the gun deck, and the Bridge. It was possible that some of the sternward areas of the Pride had been protected by the lockdown, but that was only of short-term benefit if they couldn’t re-activate the air circulation systems.

  “Patching the representative through now, Captain,” the Comm. officer reported.

  Captain Tim Middleton looked up at the main viewer just as the image there morphed into a Caprian woman’s face—the sight of which made his heart skip a beat as his mind went totally blank as he blinked in some vain attempt to dismiss what he was seeing.