Spineward Sectors 6: Admiral's Spine Read online

  “I’ll leave it for you to judge,” Middleton said neutrally as he took the data slate into his hands and entered the password, which populated the screen with a series of shifting shapes and colors that were frankly nauseating to look at for more than a few seconds. With the visual representation live, he turned the slate over and pushed it toward me and I irritably snapped it up without breaking eye contact with the errant Captain.

  I held the slate in my hands for several seconds before finally glancing down at its contents for just a few moments and seeing a swirl of shapes and colors blending into and out of each other hypnotically and I felt my guts tighten. “A screen saver?” I demanded as calmly as I could manage. “I expected something a little more…I don’t know,” I said, doing my best not to leap across the table and strangle the man, “substantial? Backside covering? Filled with mystery and innuendo perhaps?”

  “That,” Captain Middleton said, “is a representation of the raw data stream for the local, Sector 25 branch of a certain communications system which, until recently, was believed to have been rendered inoperable around the same time as you assumed command.”

  My eyes widened ever so briefly before I took back rigid control of my face and looked back down at the data slate’s contents more intently. This time when I looked I saw a series of numbers on the lower left border of the screen, which were constantly in flux, I vaguely recognized them as the ComStat network’s date-stamp.

  Captain Middleton leaned back and folded his arms across his chest. “Admiral, despite reports to the contrary, that Comm. system is still very much intact and in operation throughout the Spineward Sectors. If you allow us to resupply and make a few much-needed modifications to the Pride…I can give you the ComStat network.”

  My eyes flicked back and forth from the data slate as I considered the possibilities of such a remarkable statement, and wondered if I could actually trust anything the man said at this point. If I couldn’t, he’d soon be serving a stint on a Tracto penal colony on the other side of the world from the single inhabited continent, but if I could…then this new information would definitely put the fat in the frying pan.

  “Captain Middleton,” I said eventually, deactivating the slate and leaning back in my chair as a polite media patented smile came over my face, “you have my complete and undivided attention." I let the silence linger for a few seconds before adding, “Make it good and you might even walk out of here in command of your cruiser.”

  “Admiral,” Captain Middleton said, leaning forward in his chair and pointing at the data slate, “the details are going to border on the absurd—Murphy knows even I have a hard time believing what we stumbled onto during our tour out there—but I have a technician on board the Pride of Prometheus who has already uploaded a program onto a ComStat hub in Sector 23 which, while we were in the vicinity of that hub’s immediate operation, granted us the ability to capture any data that passed through it. He assures me that if we upload the program to several more hubs—believe me,” Middleton said as I opened my mouth to ask just how many more hubs would be needed, “I’ve tried to pin it down, but the truth is he doesn’t know. He says it could be two, or it could be ten; the ComStat network is just too foreign technologically even for him. But after we’ve uploaded it to enough hubs, we will gain the ability to both receive and send transmissions across it.”

  “How, exactly, did you manage to secure the services of a technician who is capable of cracking the least accessible system in the galaxy?” I asked, still not entirely convinced of this farfetched tale but at least willing to hear the man out. Too bad Steiner was out on assignment since she was my ‘go to’ girl when it came to top-secret communications department work. Her and that system analyst of hers, that Mike…I wondered if he was still onboard ship or if he’d taken off with her on the recruiting drive. I made a mental note to remember to check; I needed this information verified one way or the other as fast as possible.

  Middleton shook his head slowly and took a breath—never a good sign, in my experience. “Admiral, as I said, the details are likely to strain belief,” he began tentatively, but under the weight of my gaze he relented, “we took significant casualties just a few weeks after entering Sector 24, Admiral. It became necessary to secure replacements, and my options were limited.”

  “I don’t like where this is going, Captain,” I said in a dire tone which very much reflected my actual feelings on the matter, “repeating yourself and telling me how much I’m not going to believe something do little to add to your case.”

  “I didn’t like it, either Admiral,” the other man said, intelligently ignoring my second point in favor of desperately clinging to my first, “but it was either that or tuck tail and run. You didn’t send me out there to come running back at the first sign of trouble, so I made an executive decision—the first of many,” he added with what I took to be a weary tone as he rubbed the back of his neck. “The technician—and roughly half of my remaining crew—are from a planet called Shèhuì Héxié in Sector 24.”

  “I’ve never heard of it,” I said dryly, hoping to speed the conversation along. Before this meeting started I’d had half a mind to promote Senior Lieutenant Archibald to Lieutenant Commander and put him in command of Middleton’s ship, but now that didn’t look like that was going to happen any time soon.

  Blast this man! First he brings me a Representative from Sector 23 demanding I ride to the rescue and save the day once again, and then he doesn’t even have the decency to let me tear his head off properly and threaten to demote him before pulling a rabbit out of his hat. I was the one who pulled rabbits, not this headstrong officer who made ‘executive decisions’ that left me short a medium cruiser for the better part of a year!

  Blast and curse it; I could have used that cruiser! If I was forced to pin a medal on this man’s chest instead of stripping him of command as I had intended, he was going to suffer. I didn’t know when and I didn’t know how, but my revenge would be swift and it would be certain.

  “Well, they were…reluctant to offer more than technical support and equipment replacements,” the Captain explained, clearly oblivious to the mental turmoil his words had caused me. “I made my case to the best of my ability, but they wouldn’t have it. So with a little creative thinking—and some helpful advice from a young smashball player from that world who wanted nothing more than to become a Lancer—I managed to convince them to grant us access to a certain segment of their population which they were unlikely to miss.”

  I closed my eyes. This just keeps getting better and better, I thought to myself, feeling certain I had already deduced his meaning. “Was it prisoners or mutineers you took on as crew?” I asked, wondering exactly just how much trouble this man had gotten himself into out on what was supposed to be a simple ‘wave the flag’ run, along the border of 25 and 24—I’d said nothing at all about patrolling Sector 23, seeing as it was on the other side of Sector 24!

  “Prisoners—and I had no choice, Admiral,” Middleton replied without a hint of apology in his voice, and I was equally pleased and angered by the man’s assertion.

  It was good to have officers who believed in what they were doing and would stand up to me when necessary, but those officers became dangerous to everyone when their judgment became impaired. Like, for example, when they started to patrol along the wrong border of a border patrol assignment on their own ‘executive decision’ authority—which was looking more and more the case with Captain Middleton. I was the executive, and which border he patrolled was my decision—as was the duration of said patrol!

  “It was either that or abandon the mission,” he continued, either unaware or unwilling to risk commenting on the stormy thoughts boiling behind my angry eyes, “and I’d already uncovered what would turn out to be a full-blown conspiracy which was crippling the military strength of Sectors 23 and 24. I couldn’t turn back, sir, not without more information.”

  “Conspiracy?” I demanded angrily. “You mean you k
new about the droids for these last six months and made no effort to come back here and report?!”

  “No, sir,” Middleton said quickly, “we didn’t learn about the droids until several months later. I’m talking about the Raubachs.”

  “The Raubachs?” I repeated, vaguely recognizing the name from its affiliation with the Cornwallis family. A consortium of their two houses manufactured the CR-70 series, Corvette-class, ships which were highly favored by SDF’s throughout the Spine for their adaptability and ease of maintenance.

  “Yes, Admiral,” the other man acknowledged, “they staged a highly-coordinated series of mutinies and attacks against local military assets spread across Sectors 23 and 24. One of these mutinous officers, a Captain Meisha Raubach, had seized a pair of Corvettes and was guarding a gas mining facility which they had converted into a bioweapons manufacturing facility. We managed sneak in and deal with her—“

  “Wait, hold on,” I interjected sharply, “a bioweapons facility?”

  “Yes, Admiral,” he said with a quizzical note to his voice, “it’s all in the report, sir." When my eyes narrowed dangerously, he cleared his throat and continued, obviously doing his best to stay with the report, “As I was saying, we neutralized Captain Raubach before purging the mining facility of the hazardous equipment, materials, and other contraband. But I suffered roughly 50% losses to my crew when the pirate captain hit us with a Liberator torpedo armed with a virus, rather than the usual ship-busting charge. I’m guessing they wanted to field test the weapon’s efficacy,” he said darkly, “and we provided an optimal target. I’d like you to review that particular report, Admiral,” he added heavily, “I’m well aware that my firing on a surrendered vessel is against most conventions, but I believe I was justified in doing so based on the presence of the bioweapon and its willful deployment against my crew—“

  “Wait,” I interrupted, stiffening rigidly in my chair and feeling my stomach twist at the man’s report. Bioweapons and firing on surrendered vessels were both beyond the pale as far as I was concerned, “Just tell me how far into your mission this took place?”

  “Three weeks, Admiral,” the other man replied evenly.

  I closed my eyes and gestured for him to continue, mortally certain that I would be including ship’s counsel in analyzing Captain Middleton’s ill-fated mission logs to prepare for the inevitable actions against him—and the organization of which he was a part.

  This was exactly the headline that I didn’t need: The Tyrant of Cold Space Strikes Again! Shooting down surrendered warships and, by the time the media got its hands on things and twisted it all to Hades, they’d have me personally launching the bio-weapons—not the other way around.

  “With such heavy losses it became necessary to replenish the crew, as I said before,” Middleton explained. “After we had done so, we set out to continue on our patrol. We uncovered a scuttled weapons depot disguised as a research colony, which had been bombarded from orbit by a powerful ship of as-then unknown design—a ship which we later learned belonged to one of the three, primary droid tribes operating in Sectors 23 and 24. We engaged that vessel as it made to leave the system, and were it not for our robust forward shields and my Chief Engineer’s fastidious nature, I have little doubt we would have been destroyed before they point transferred out of system.”

  “You engaged the ship as it was making for point transfer?” I asked. “How could they fight you off while diverting most of their energy toward the jump?”

  “That’s one of the primary points of my tactical assessment, Admiral,” Captain Middleton nodded. “My people don’t have the expertise to provide a complete breakdown, but it became obvious that the droid vessels don’t exclusively employ conventionally-powered weapons,” he said before leaning forward with a grim look on his face. “They’ve managed to build and deploy antimatter-fueled weapons which are capable of generating incredible power on short notice and don’t drain their other systems whatsoever.”

  “Antimatter weaponry is supposed to be impossible,” I frowned at the conference table. “The radiation generated by them is completely incompatible with life—“ I caught myself as the word left my lips and breathed a short sigh.

  “I had the same thought, Admiral,” the other man offered. “But they’ve obviously managed to shield their sensitive components, because a Destroyer-sized vessel appears capable of using an antimatter-fueled weapon twice—and likely no more than that—during an engagement and a Battlecruiser was seen to fire three times. Those weapons hit harder than anything in the Spine, sir. Even the Pride couldn’t withstand multiple strikes in rapid succession.”

  My eyebrows rose in surprise, “You engaged an enemy BC armed with antimatter weaponry, and lived to tell about it?”

  Captain Middleton shook his head hesitantly. “No, sir…they, the Droid BC, provided cover for us to escape from three other droid destroyers. Admiral, we had a Hades of a run out there. I’m frankly amazed we made it back at all.”

  I shook my head in barely-concealed bewilderment. “Continue, Captain; you were going on about this antimatter weaponry.”

  “Yes, Admiral,” Middleton replied readily, “my people agree that the constraining issue for the droids’ use of antimatter isn’t one of containing the reaction, but rather transporting the delicate stuff through point transfers. The mechanisms required, and sensitivity of the containment systems used, would necessitate huge storage chambers with large power draws. You should have your people look at the data, but it looks to me and mine that only a few of their ships are likely to be armed with antimatter weapons.”

  “I’ll have my people examine your data,” I agreed darkly. “But about that technician of yours…” I prompted. I was trying to divert the conversation back toward something semi-innocuous, while I tried to grapple with the idea of bio-weapons, attacking surrendered ships and, the cherry on top of it all, usable anti-matter weaponry. It was like something out of my worst nightmares.

  “Sorry, sir,” the other man apologized, “he was actually placed on board my ship under a false identity, which was created by his government in an attempt to quietly get rid of him. Long story short, he’s one-in-a-billion in terms of brainpower but otherwise he’s a fairly normal sixteen year old kid who, prior to his incarceration, had been planning to hack the ComStat network as the defining masterpiece of his computer hacking ‘career’. He wrote the very program we uploaded to the ComStat hub, and personally installed it into the hub’s mainframe…I lost a few good Lancers during that op, sir, but we managed to install the program. We don’t have full network access yet,” he said warningly, “but my technician assures me his program will grant us precisely that after we’ve uploaded it to enough separate hubs. I won’t even try to explain his reasoning, sir, since I don’t understand it myself. But I’ve got no reason to doubt his assertions at this point.”

  “Back up to the Battlecruiser,” I said after rolling the man’s words around in my head a few times. “Why would one droid ship actively seek to defend you from another of them—let alone three?”

  “That’s…complicated, Admiral,” Captain Middleton said tensing momentarily before slumping his shoulders in resignation, the fight seeming to go out of him as his eyes closed, “and I accept full responsibility, sir." He shook his head for a moment before opening his eyes, “A member of my crew who we picked up from the aforementioned gas mining facility provided a means of communication with the droid Battlecruiser, and I ordered my people to utilize it even without verifying the contents of the transmission beforehand.”

  “Your technician worked out how to communicate with the droids?” I asked evenly, more incredulous at the notion than anything.

  “No, sir,” Middleton replied, “it was…my ex-wife.”

  “Really,” I said fighting to keep my incredibly out of my voice. What was this, the Love Boat in Space? “From shooting down surrendered vessels, to recruiting under-aged criminal technicians, to recruiting your ex-wife into your
crew so you could communicate with the machines if the urge took you. I really must ask,” I said my eyes boring into his, “is there a regulation you didn’t decide to discard as inconvenient on the good ship, Pride of Prometheus?”

  “Sir,” Middleton said as he went red-faced, “I accept full responsibility for the incident and have since confined Doctor Middleton to her quarters and placed her on constant surveillance, pending your review and final determination regarding the matter. She apparently had some degree of contact with the one of the droid tribes previously when they saved her life following an attack on her colony by a rival tribe. Again, Admiral,” he said, clearly uncomfortable with the subject, “it’s all there in more detail in the report.”

  “Break it down for me, Captain,” I said as neutrally as I could manage. So, the bastard thought he could needle me back by once again referencing the report, did he? He must either really hate me or be firm in his convictions…or maybe both. Either way, he was made of sterner stuff than I was used to encountering in my subordinates. In a way, it was almost nice to meet with someone who didn’t think I walked on water.

  “She sent them a transmission which said we were potential allies,” Middleton replied after a brief pause, “and that was enough to turn their guns off us and onto the enemy. That Battlecruiser went down in the fight, Admiral,” Middleton said, his voice almost a plea, “I can’t believe they would sacrifice such a powerful vessel for the sake of deceiving us. They told us, through her, that they knew they were no match for the three Destroyers and urged us to flee while they covered our escape.”

  “Let me guess,” I blinked and then my eyes narrowed as I tried to figure the angles both human and mechanical and also I think finally getting a feel for the way the man operated, “you didn’t flee?”

  “Of course not, Admiral,” Middleton said stiffly. “We had weapons we could lend to the fight and an enemy in our sights who had previously tried to destroy us. And after seeing how the MSP’s Flag Officer charged into the fray against pirates without even a single weapon to fire at them, I knew we couldn’t back down just because it looked hopeless.”