Omega Taskforce Series: Books 1 - 3: A Military Sci-Fi Box Set

by G J Ogden

  Sterling frowned. “So, you’re saying this isn’t a warship at all?” he asked, quickly beginning to grow frustrated. “It’s just some kind of giant aperture construction tool?”

  Sterling waited eagerly for engineer’s response, which was not immediately forthcoming. He could feel his pulse quicken. If he’d come out all this way and risked his crew only to take snapshots of what was essentially a giant road building machine, he was going to be majorly pissed off.

  “I am not entirely clear on the function of the array as yet, Captain,” Crow eventually replied.

  “That’s not good enough, Lieutenant Commander,” Sterling said, gripping the side of his console.

  “I shall expedite my analysis, sir,” Crow replied, a little gloomily. “Besides the tunneling array, the vessel is heavily armed and armored,” Crow continued, trying to offer something of worth. “However, they are mostly defensive armaments. The vessel alone appears to have very limited offensive capabilities.”

  Sterling sighed and shook his head. “Keep scanning, Lieutenant Commander, and let me know as soon as you figure out what this thing is,” he said. Sterling then tapped his interface to sever the link.

  “It normally takes an entire fleet of construction ships to assemble a new aperture route, and they’re all easy pickings in a warzone,” said Banks, speaking out loud. “Perhaps the Sa’Nerra are looking for a quick way to create their own route to Earth, avoiding the gatekeepers and Fleet forces that defend the lane to the solar system?”

  Sterling considered this for a moment then realized that Commander Banks’ suggestion made sense. If the Sa’Nerra could open an aperture directly into the solar system they could bypass the first, second, third and fourth fleets in a single leap. This would leave them only the Earth Defense Fleet and Perimeter Defense Taskforce standing in their way. The plan wasn’t without problems, however, not least of which was creating an aperture to Earth in the first place.

  “It’s a strong suggestion, Commander, but I still sense that we’re missing something,” said Sterling, tapping his finger on his console again. “The gatekeepers and COPs in the solar system would need taking down quickly in order to make that work. I don’t see how the Sa’Nerra could surge enough ships in quickly enough to have the firepower to pull it off.”

  “This is odd,” said Banks, frowning down at her console. “One of the moons inside the ring gap seems to have a hole cored straight through its center.”

  Banks then threw up an enlarged image of the moon on the viewscreen. It wasn’t a large moon, measuring a little over two hundred kilometers across at its widest point, and was pockmarked with craters so that it looked like a giant potato. Then Sterling saw that Banks was right. Cut directly through the moon’s center was a perfectly spherical hole that measured five kilometers in diameter.

  Sterling’s finger-tapping had now grown to a level where the tip of his nail was throbbing from the repeated knocks against the hard metal of his console. He was about to activate his neural interface and ask Lieutenant Commander Crow for his opinion when the entire shipyard began to move.

  “Standing by to withdraw, Captain,” said Ensign Keller, the rising intonation in his voice betraying his anxiety.

  “Hold position, Ensign,” ordered Sterling, firmly. “Let’s just see what it does.”

  The shipyard and its titanic contents moved with all the grace of an oil tanker. However, contrary to Sterling’s expectations, it was not nearly as lumbering and slow as its size suggested it should be.

  “That’s about as fast as a Dreadnaught turns,” commented Commander Banks, also apparently having noted the vessel’s surprising agility. “It must be packing an enormous number of thrusters and maneuvering engines in order to move like that.”

  Sterling continued to watch as the giant ship’s cylindrical aperture was aimed at the shepherd moon that orbited inside the ring system. Commander Banks’ console then chimed an alert and his first-officer’s brow furrowed with concern.

  “I’m reading a massive power spike, Captain,” said Banks, studying the readings intently. “But the energy signature is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

  Sterling turned his attention back to the viewscreen, noting that the front section of the modular shipyard had peeled away from the bow of the ship. The door to the bridge then opened and Lieutenant Commander Crow stepped inside. The inquisitive engineer looked excited, which Sterling knew probably meant bad news.

  “I believe I now know what the aperture array in the ship is for,” said Crow. The engineer then hurried over to one of the auxiliary consoles on the bridge and accessed his engineering systems. However, before Crow could continue, a distorted ripple of dark energy erupted from the end of the Sa’Nerran vessel’s aperture array. It was barely visible against the darkness of space, but set against the backdrop of the ring system, it was like a powerful heat haze or mirage effect. The ripple extended out into space, expanding at it did so until it hit the shepherd moon. Sterling watched in astonishment as the moon then slowly disintegrated. It was as if a titanic space creature was taking bites from it like an apple. Then in a matter of seconds the moon was gone, leaving no trace of it behind, not even a single speck of moon dust. With the shepherd moon gone, the ripple of energy emanating from the giant vessel’s aperture array shut down.

  “As I was about to say, Captain,” Crow said, breaking the sudden, awed silence that had fallen over the bridge. “The aperture array is not designed to build tunnels through space. “It itself is the weapon.”

  “I can see that, Lieutenant Commander,” replied Sterling, still struggling to believe what he’d just witnessed. “The question is, what kind of weapon is it? And how the hell did it just destroy a moon?”

  “I would need days to study this data more in order to answer that question, Captain,” Crow replied. The engineer then shuffled on the spot and rubbed the back of his hands, anxiously. Sterling could tell he was working up the courage to ask one of his unreasonable requests. “However, in order to truly understand the workings of this incredible machine, I would need direct access to it.”

  Sterling cast a sideways glance to Crow. “You want to go on-board the alien shipyard?” he asked, not sure if he’d understood Crow correctly.

  “It may be our only opportunity, sir,” replied Crow, only indirectly answering Sterling’s question.

  The familiar sound of Banks’ console chiming an alert then turned Sterling’s attention to his first-officer’s station.

  “You’re not going to believe this, but I’ve just located the Imperium,” said Banks, a twinge of excitement in her voice. “It appears to be docked to the shipyard.”

  Banks tapped a sequence of commands into her console then a moment later an image of the Fleet Marauder Imperium appeared on the viewscreen. It was tucked inside a hexagonal docking port at the far extremities of the shipyard. Sterling then noted that there were similar docking ports of varying sizes all across the enormous structure. However, while the dock had fully-enclosed the Imperium it was not pressured and the fleet vessel was still exposed to space.

  “Are there any Sa’Nerran ships in the adjacent docking pods?” Sterling asked, glancing across to Banks.

  “No sir,” Banks replied, smartly. There are dozens of Sa’Nerran vessels docked in other parts of the station, but in that area it’s just the Imperium.”

  Sterling sighed then peered out at the viewscreen again. After the Sa’Nerran shipyard had reorientated itself to destroy the shepherd moon, part of it had brushed up against the inner ring in which the Invictus was hiding. He then heard Banks’ voice in his mind.

  “Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?” Banks asked. However, she didn’t sound concerned. If anything, she sounded hopeful that Sterling had the same thing in mind as she did.

  “It’s like Crow just said. We may never get another chance to see this thing up close,” Sterling replied in his mind, though he was still staring at the Imperium on the viewscr
een. “And if we can get more data and take the Imperium back home with us, then all the better.”

  Sterling closed the link to Banks then turned to Lieutenant Commander Crow, who was still looking at him expectantly.

  “Lieutenant Commander, how long would you need inside that shipyard in order to extract some meaningful data?” Sterling asked.

  The question appeared to shock Crow and for several seconds the engineer’s mouth just hung open. The ever-inquisitive officer had evidently been expecting his captain to deny the request.

  “Sometime today, please, Lieutenant Commander…” Sterling pressed, trying to snap Crow out of his daze.

  “At a rudimentary level, their computers speak the same language as ours.” Crow spoke with fervent excitement. “It’s all just ones and zeroes when you boil it down to the fundamentals,” he continued. “If I can get access to a computer interface, I can brute force my way in and download the encrypted data. Then the supercomputer clusters at F-COP might be able to decrypt some of the information and get access to the raw data. We’d obviously have no understanding of the written content, but images, schematics, raw numbers… this we can understand.”

  “How quickly could we decode the information?” asked Commander Banks.

  The engineer shrugged. “It could take weeks or even months to make any sense of it,” Crow replied. “But it could give us the edge we need to defeat this new weapon, before it’s used in anger against us.”

  Banks let out a long low whistle and glanced over at the shipyard on the viewscreen. “Something tells me that once Fleet sees what we’ve just seen, they’ll find a way to speed that process up,” said Banks. However, she was as much talking to herself as to Crow.

  Sterling nodded. He’d already made up his mind what to do next. He stopped tapping his finger against the side of his console and turned to Ensign Keller.

  “Ensign, can you get us close enough to that shipyard to attach a docking tunnel onto the Imperium?” Sterling said to his helmsman.

  Keller looked like Sterling had just asked him to fly the ship blindfolded. “A docking tunnel, sir?” the helmsman replied, eyes wide.

  “Yes or no, Ensign, can you do it?” Sterling pressed, maintaining the firmness in his voice.

  Keller turned back to his helm controls, his fingers again moving like a blur for several seconds. Then he turned back to his captain and simply said, “Yes.”

  Chapter 19

  High risk, high reward

  Sterling felt a solid thump resonate through the deck, letting him know that their docking tunnel had latched on to the Imperium. With his usual skill and deftness, Ensign Keller had managed to navigate the Invictus to within docking range of their sister ship without being detected. This feat was aided by the fact that part of the enormous alien shipyard was still nestled just inside the shelter of the planetary ring system. However, Sterling was acutely aware that there was no guarantee the flying shipyard would remain in its current position for long. The safe thing to do would have been to withdraw and take what information they had back to Admiral Griffin. However, playing it safe wasn’t Lucas Sterling’s style.

  Despite this, Sterling would have been the first to admit that their plan to enter the shipyard bordered on gung-ho bravado. He may have been willing to take risks, but he wasn’t reckless. However, on this occasion the reward was worth the inevitable cost in lives. Fleet was losing the war and it was clear to Sterling that the titanic ship was being built in secret for one purpose alone - to hammer the final nail into humanity’s coffin. If he could find out more about the vessel and its powerful aperture-based weapon then he had to try. And if he could liberate the Imperium from the clutches of the Sa’Nerra in the process, so much the better. Even if that were possible, Sterling held out little hope that Captain McQueen or her crew had been spared the mind-altering effects of the Sa’Nerran neural weapon.

  The docking seal turned green and Captain Sterling entered his command override codes to force the Imperium’s hatch to unlock. Sterling tapped his finger against the control pad as he waited, glancing across to Commander Banks, who was at his side as always, plasma rifle in hand. Behind Banks was Lieutenant Shade and five of her commandos, some of whom had only just joined the Invictus crew while they had been docked at F-COP. He met each of the commandos’ eyes in turn, failing to recognize any of them. This was despite knowing for certain that at least one of the commandos had fought at his side before.

  Perhaps it’s better this way, Sterling told himself. There was no point in forming a connection when in all likelihood there would be a different group of commandos at his side for the next mission. So long as they did their jobs, it didn’t matter what their names were. Suddenly, the image of Ariel Gunn sprang into his thoughts, causing his muscles to tense up. Sterling pushed the memory of killing his friend into the deeper recesses of his mind, as he had trained himself to do, and the tight feeling in his gut subsided. Sterling then looked beyond the squad of commandos and saw Lieutenant Commander Clinton Crow at the rear of the formation. Like the rest of them, he was wearing standard Fleet combat armor. However, while a plasma pistol rested in a holster on Crow’s hip, the engineer’s real weapons were inside the metal case he carried at his side.

  “We get in and out as fast as possible,” said Sterling, finger resting on the button to release the two docking hatches at either side of the tunnel. Then he looked to Lieutenant Commander Crow specifically. “As soon as you have what you need, you signal us,” he said. Crow nodded, but Sterling hadn’t finished. “No dallying, no poking around in other systems, no diversions because you found something fascinating to investigate. Do you understand me, Lieutenant Commander?” Sterling knew of Crow’s love of exploration and discovery, and wanted to pre-empt any possibility of the engineer faffing around and indulging himself while all their lives hung in the balance.

  “I understand completely, Captain,” said Crow. Sterling held the engineer’s eyes for a moment to make sure there wasn’t a “but” coming. However, for once Crow had seemed to get the message.

  Turning away from his engineer, Sterling then signaled Shade to get ready to move. His weapon’s officer acknowledged the command then focused ahead, waiting for the hatch to open. She looked like an Olympic relay runner, waiting impatiently on her marks for the baton to be passed.

  Sterling hit the button and the hatch released. Air hissed through the gaps and moments later the door had retracted into its housing. Shade was the first to move through, leading her troop of commandos into the docking tunnel. Sterling and Banks entered next with Crow picking up the rear.

  “Ensign Keller, we’re moving inside the Imperium now,” Sterling said through a neural link to his helmsman. “Make sure you keep the engine running…”

  “Aye, Captain,” Keller replied without delay. “Waypoint markers are locked in and I’ll be ready to move as soon as you return,” the ensign continued.

  Sterling could sense the young officer’s restlessness in his mental voice. Like all pilots, Keller wasn’t comfortable with just sitting still and waiting around.

  Shade and the commandos pushed on through the hatch at the far end of the tunnel and boarded the Imperium. Sterling heard the weapons officer call out “clear” in his mind. They’d all created an open neural link to one another shortly after they’d assembled at the docking hatch. Like a group of people all talking over each other in a bar, the overlapping voices could sometimes feel overwhelming. However, Sterling and the others had learned to filter out the noise and concentrate on a specific person. And right now, it was Lieutenant Shade that Sterling was intently focused on.

  “The ship appears to be in low-power mode, Captain,” said Shade, coming through strongly in Sterling’s mind, as if she were standing right beside him. “I’ve yet to come across any crew.”

  Sterling stepped through the docking hatch, following the route they’d planned to cut through the Imperium and onto the shipyard as quickly as possible.

&
nbsp; “Standby, we’ve found something,” said Shade. Her voice in Sterling’s head fell silent for a moment, during which time he felt his pulse climb, like mercury rising in a thermometer. “There are crew still in their bunks on this level,” Shade finally added. “They appear to be unconscious. There is no visible corruption to their neural implants, but there are devices attached to the bunks. It doesn’t look like Fleet tech.”

  Sterling quickened his pace, briefly glancing behind to make sure Crow was still with them. “Keep them covered, I’m on my way,” he said to Shade, hurrying through the narrow corridors of the ship on instinct, since he knew the layout of the Marauder-class like the back of his hand.

  Sterling and Banks arrived at the door to the crew bunk and the commandos stepped back to allow them both through. Sterling frowned at the two enlisted crew members, lying in their bunks, still fully clothed in their Fleet uniforms, including their boots. Their hands were pressed together on their stomachs and their heads were positioned neatly in the center of their pillows. It was like they had been placed in a death posture inside a coffin, ready for funeral guests to pay their respects. Sterling’s attention was then drawn to the two Sa’Nerran devices attached to the bunks, close to each crew member’s head.

  “Crow, what do you make of those?” asked Sterling, beckoning his chief engineer over.

  Crow hustled up to the door, placed his tool case down outside then removed a PDA from its holder on the engineer’s left hip. While Crow scanned the alien devices, Sterling glanced across to Shade and the other commandos. They had moved up to the port-side docking hatch, which was already open, leading inside the Sa’Nerran shipyard.

  “It’s almost certainly an adaption of the Sa’Nerran neural device that we’re already familiar with,” Crow said, snapping Sterling’s attention back to his engineer. “I’d have to study one in greater detail to know more.”