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

respectfully, “if they’re willing to risk an engagement with us, wouldn’t that indicate there’s something of great value to them aboard the station—something we should deny them access to? I doubt they’re going there to re-stock on H3 before beating feet, sir.”
    “Your logic is sound, Ensign,” Middleton agreed with a nod of his head, “but pirates without warships are far less dangerous than pirates with warships. Without knowing for certain what’s aboard that station, I have to deal with the threats in order of apparent priority—that means the corvettes first, the merchantmen second, and then the station and its contents.”
    “What’s to stop the second corvette from hightailing it out of here, sir?” Sarkozi asked, glancing at her Tactical team briefly before returning her attention to the Captain.
    “Greed, Ensign,” Middleton replied confidently as he ran silent calculations to confirm their next likely engagement time with the enemy—assuming the pirate captain was as capable as he, or she, appeared. “If they were going to leave they would have done so already. You’re right; there’s something on that station which is valuable enough to tilt their fight or flight response toward the former, even in the face of a superior foe. Still, we’re now officially on the clock; if we play games for too long out here those merchies will escape with whatever cargo they seem so desperate to reclaim. Then there’ll be no way to stop that corvette from doing likewise, what with her speed advantage.”
    “So we have to force the engagement here and now,” Sarkozi said with a knowing nod before turning back to her Tactical team and performing some calculations. “By my numbers, the merchantmen will reach the station in just under an hour—seventeen minutes before we reach extreme range of our forward array,” she reported, confirming Middleton’s own calculations. “If the remaining corvette follows this course toward the nearest gap in the rings,” she continued, throwing a hypothetical trajectory up onto the main screen which seemed to match the corvette’s current course, “they’ll reach an interdictory position in forty two minutes—eight minutes prior to our reaching firing range on the merchantmen, sir.”
    The Captain punched up the technical specs on their forward heavy laser array, and after finding the frequency bands the weapons operated in, made a note which he forwarded to Sarkozi’s console. “We don’t want to give the merchies that much time if we can help it, Ensign,” he said confidently. “Make the modifications I’ve outlined to the forward array and report when you’ve finished.”
    “Yes, Captain,” she replied, turning to her console and going over his note as a smile crept across her face. “I can have those modifications ready in eight minutes,” she reported hungrily.
    “Do it,” he ordered, turning to the Sensors officer. “I need the primary sensors modified to deal with the unusual amount of iron in that ice ring,” he explained. “We’re going to need to use the primary sensor array for targeting, so we’ll need tactical-level accuracy; the weapons’ own targeting systems can’t cut through the rings’ interference. Can you do it?”
    The Sensors officer looked at her console for a few moments as she got readings on the ice ring’s composition. “I think so, Captain,” she replied hesitantly, “but based on the interference, as well as our current velocity, we’ll have to slave the weapons to the sensors so they can fire as soon as a target lock is acquired. The firing windows are only going to open for a fraction of a second—too short for human reaction times.”
    Slave-rigging the computers to command fire control, even temporarily, was a breach of standard operating protocol—one that required the Captain’s authorization to make. Ever since the AI wars, humanity had been distrustful of allowing machines to have too much control