Up The Middle (Spineward Sectors: Middleton's Pride Book 2) Read online

  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 B-series 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 regar
ding 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 B-series 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-o
f-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.”