Omega Force: Legends Never Die (OF10)

by Joshua Dalzelle

  Other than the initial entry point, nothing else seemed amiss within the building. The door Kage's team had picked opened up into an unsecure storage area just off the main factory floor. The dim nighttime lighting softly illuminated heavy fabricators near the center of the cavernous space, so large that they cast the smaller, feeder machines in shadow.

  "You have anything, Twingo?"

  "Nothing up here," Twingo replied. His squad had come in through an emergency exit that led into the administrative guts of the building. "And I do mean nothing. This looks like an elaborate ruse… lots of desks and terminals, but from the dust and general sterile feel to the place I have a feeling nobody actually works back in here."

  "Interesting. That would back up what Mok's people found when they did the audit," Kage said. Just as Twingo's answer was coming back over the channel the horrendous shriek of metal tearing filled the factory and one of the enormous fabricators tilted wildly before falling in their direction. "Shit!"

  Kage dove and scrambled as the machine smashed and bounced off others before slamming into the floor with enough force to break the duracrete. Sharp debris peppered him as he used all six limbs to get traction. Dust billowed out from the impact site, obscuring everyone's vision and sending them all into coughing fits.

  "Kage? Kage! What happened?!"

  "Stand by," Kage said, rising to his feet and counting how many of his squad had made it. He was short three; presumably what was left of them was a fine paste underneath a machine that weight hundreds of tons. There was no shouting or weapons fire, the previous silence of the place replaced by a sharp ringing. "Someone knocked over one of this place's main fabricators. Three of my people are down."

  "Moving to you now," Twingo's voice said. "Team Three, converge on Kage's location. Copy?" There was no response from the third team, the one that was to try to make a stealthy incursion through the building's subbasement and kill the power right where it came off the main reactor, physically breaking the link so that it couldn't be reinitialized remotely.

  "The trackers for Team Three have just gone offline," Kage said. "Let's assume that—" He was cut off by a barrage of weapons fire coming from near where the fallen fabricator had stood. His team all ducked and assumed a defensive posture, but nothing came their way and the noise, while sustained, seemed to be fading. "What the hell? Twingo, get your ass up here! We're moving around to try to get eyes on whoever else is in here with us."

  "Copy."

  In the months following Lucky's death, and once Twingo and Kage agreed to embark on a damn near impossible quest, the pair had been forced to "grow up," for lack of a better term. They'd been part of a mercenary crew for years, but for the most part had never been forced to get their hands too dirty since there were three others that seemed to relish that sort of thing. Now that one had died and the other two had just up and left, Twingo and Kage had had to find the courage within them, take up arms, and be the pointy end of the stick. What had been surprising was just how good they seemed to be at it. Apparently watching Jason and Crusher cut a bloody swath through the underbelly of the quadrant had taught them a thing or two.

  "Sir, look."

  Kage walked up to where one of his squad was standing near the toppled fabricator's base. Instead of a solid alloy plate to anchor the enormous machine, what they found was a wide, shallow ramp that led underneath the building.

  "Clever," Kage said. "The entrance to the actual production facility was from inside that big bastard." The other three in the room would be more than capable of keeping production numbers of drive components high enough to avoid suspicion. It also meant that whatever was down there was something meant to be kept a strict secret. "Twingo, we found an entrance to what has to be the secondary production facility. We'll move ahead, you come in behind us… don't shoot me in the ass."

  Kage motioned two of his team in ahead of him before going in himself. He looked and saw that the bottom of the fabricator had been fitted with an armored hatch-style security door that the opposing team must not have felt like messing with. He saw where they'd cut through the floor anchors and had used hydraulic rams to get the machine to tilt enough before letting gravity do the rest. The people who were running the facility would kick themselves in the ass for not thinking of such an obvious vulnerability in their security… assuming the building was left standing once they were done.

  He was barely halfway down the ramp when the first two members of his team were engaged. Plasma shots streaked from the tunnel ahead, hitting the ramp and forcing his lead element back. Kage pulled a tiny drone off his belt, one of four he was carrying, and tossed it in the air once it had synched up with his neural interface. It raced down the ramp, buzzing between his shaken troops and down into a long, wide access tube, feeding him real-time telemetry as it went.

  "Painting targets, stand by," he mumbled as he used the drone's video feed to identify and bracket four hostiles that were standing near where the tunnel veered off to the right. There was no cover and it didn't look like they'd been expecting anyone, just a precautionary rearguard. "Targets one through four updated. I think two micro-Pixies should do the trick."

  "Loading… firing." The weaponeer was dispassionate, almost clinical as he fired two missiles down the ramp. The "micro-Pixie" was an even smaller version of the diminutive missile that Kage and Twingo had designed for use aboard the Phoenix. It had been his idea to begin carrying standoff weaponry once they started raiding these secret production sites rather than opting for projectiles and blades like Jason and Crusher seemed to prefer. The smart little munitions zipped away, their exhaust note a high-pitched whistle that almost made them seem cheerful… right up until they both proximity detonated and painted the walls with what used to be four dumbstruck guards.

  "Clear," Kage said, checking the drone feed again. "Trying this one more time, Twingo."

  "Copy. Almost to you."

  The team advanced quickly down the ramp, weapons up and the air tense now that they'd made contact. Kage held his hand out to retrieve the small aircraft and clipped it back onto his belt where it could recharge. The little drones packed so much tech into such a small package that he could normally get only thirty or forty minutes of flight time per charge if the air was calm. They'd been Twingo's idea and the basic chassis and flight hardware had actually come from a children's toy, then he and Tauless started modifying them for tactical use. One thing Kage wasn't a fan of was that each of them was also a suicide bomber thanks to the explosive charge they'd added. It made him nervous lining them up around his waist.

  Just as he was about to pluck another one off to scout ahead of the turn, a thunderous explosion rocked the facility. The pressure wave sent them all tumbling. Kage checked the chronometer on his neural implants and realized he'd lost consciousness for a few seconds and was still struggling to clear his head when he sensed movement to his right.

  Five beings, all clad in black, rushed by them, rolling something big between them on a cart. They blew by his downed team without a second glance and sprinted up the tunnel ramp with impressive speed. Kage became vaguely aware of more weapons fire from near the mouth of the ramp as well as a distant, tinny voice in his ear over the com. Once he picked his head up he realized it wasn't his hearing that was off, it was that his earpiece had been flung out from the impact.

  "Now I see why Jason wears armor," he groaned, pressing the small device back into his ear.

  "… the hell are you at? We've been engaged and had to withdraw. Kage?!"

  "I'm here," Kage said, taking in a deep breath and coughing to clear his throat. "I'm here… what's happening?"

  "Somebody came up out of the hole in the floor laying down fire," Twingo's voice came back, sounding relieved. "They took down two of my team."

  "Where are they now?"

  "Blew a bigger hole in the wall they came in through and left. Should we pursue?"

  "Negative," Kage said after a moment of thought. "Mok isn't orbiting nearby a
nd we have no way to track them. Just come down here and we'll see if anything can be salvaged from this debacle."

  "This is definitely the place," Twingo said. "This is amazing… they made access through the door here to get in, but must not have been able to drag whatever you saw back through it and just blew the damn wall out. Lucky you were so far back and just got tossed on your ass instead of scrambling your brain."

  "Still hurt like a bastard," Kage complained. "Take a look at this, Twingo… these are stasis pods." The specially designed synth-type pods were obvious in their differences from the type that would hold a biological being. He turned to his friend and nodded, both of them too scared to give voice to what they hoped to find.

  They were well past all the support equipment and were into the side chamber when Kage heard Twingo suck in his breath and saw his ears flatten against his head. He pushed past his friend and looked to see what had startled the engineer and had a similar reaction of his own. Along the wall there were five holding cradles, three of which had battlesynths in them, hanging lifelessly. These were unlike any battlesynths Kage had ever seen. The original versions had all been unique individuals, but these were something else entirely.

  "This… isn't what I expected," Twingo said.

  "Me either," Kage said. "This could be… problematic."

  They stared at what were undoubtedly prototypes for a new breed of battlesynth. Just their very existence was highly illegal and in direct violation of about two dozen interplanetary and ConFed Council treaties. But here they were… and they looked nothing like their friend, Lucky. They'd hoped to try to resurrect Lucky by placing his stabilized processing matrix into a new prototype body that Tauless had learned about through his underground contacts. The assumption was that the new generation would be similar to the old.

  "They're… smaller," Twingo said. "Almost like a cross between a regular synth and a battlesynth."

  "Look how different the faces are too," Kage said, stepping up and trusting Mok's tactical teams to set up a perimeter. "Do you think they already had matrices ready to go for these guys?"

  "I couldn't say, buddy, but it looks like we weren't the first to have this idea. That cradle there had something ripped out of it… I'll bet you a thousand credits they stole one of these and—"

  "Sirs! We must leave immediately!" One of the troops Mok had provided—Twingo had never bothered to learn their names—was waving frantically. "This entire place has been wired with explosives and rigged to blow!"

  "Well, that explains why they didn't bother with these three," Kage said. "Just snag one and blow the rest up."

  "We must—"

  "Start pulling your team out and make contact with Mok," Kage instructed. "We're not leaving without what we came for."

  "This one!" Twingo said, already disconnecting the umbilicals off one of the completed bodies.

  "Get it on a cart and get moving," Kage said, slamming his palm down onto one of the terminals and letting the thin tendrils of nanobots stream from his hand and work into the device. He shoved down through the connection much quicker than was prudent or safe and began ripping huge chunks of data from the servers. The body was important, but without as much technical data as they could grab it wouldn't amount to much.

  Twingo grunted and cursed as he pulled the levers to rotate the holding cradle horizontal and rolled another of the ubiquitous cars up under body. After a moment of frantically hunting for the release, the new battlesynth slammed onto the metal surface with a thud.

  "We have to go now, Kage!"

  "Ten more seconds," Kage muttered. He was using the full power of his neural implant suite, tearing data from the computers with a brute force method he rarely employed. He wasn't trying to parse or search, just look for anything that was encrypted or secured and yank it out. He'd have to recompile and decrypt it later if they made it out before the explosives triggered.

  He was just grabbing one more block of files with tantalizing names when Twingo grabbed him and physically dragged him away from the terminal. The nanobot chains connecting him snapped, the severing of the connection more painful than the breaking of the tendrils themselves. Kage had ingested so much data so fast that he was in a bit of a stupor and stumbled after his friend once they were out of the lab areas.

  "Exfil coming in hot," Mok's voice broke in over the open channel. "Breaching the northernmost corner of the building." Kage knew that was where his team had come in. There was no place to land the shuttle that Mok had procured for the mission so he surmised the gangster planned on blasting in through the roof.

  "Mok's going to blow the roof and then use the transit beam to get the body up first and then all of us," Twingo confirmed a moment later. By the time they, and the three operators that had hung back with them, ran up the ramp and into the main factory above, Kage could just make out the cradle with the new battlesynth body floating up the wavering blue light of the transit beam. Just as he stepped into it himself he could feel the deep reverberation within the factory floor of the first charges going off under them.

  They'd barely made it out and had taken some losses but finally, after all this time searching, they had what they'd been looking for. As the heavy transport shuttle climbed up sharply and angled away from the industrial district, an enormous gout of fire shot into the air and the entire building was consumed in an explosion that leveled the buildings nearby and tossed the shuttle about in the air like it was a toy.

  "No way that was just the bag charges that other team left," Twingo was yelling to Mok over the sound of the engines. "They must have had the building rigged to blow and the bombs triggered a failsafe."

  Mok said something else but Kage was no longer listening. He was staring at the battlesynth body lying serenely on the floor. Despite being less bulky and angular than the previous generation, it still exuded menace. There was no doubting that it was dangerous, but right now it was also lifeless. The task ahead of them almost broke his resolve… finding the body had seemed like it would be the hard part, but now that they had it he knew that wasn't true. Extracting Lucky's essence from the remains they had and trying to reintegrate him into this new unit could prove too much for their combined skills.

  "I wish Doc was here," he said, still staring blankly at the inert battlesynth. Twingo and Mok looked at him strangely before resuming their own conversation.

  Chapter 4

  "I feel like you're leaving out a lot of detail," Carolyn said flatly as she stared at the second generation battlesynth body, shuddering as she did. Unlike most living beings in the quadrant, she'd seen what a squad of battlesynths could do when deployed against a target. It was terrifying.

  "Well, yeah," Twingo said. "I skipped over all the drudgery of the skulking and searching as well as listening to Mok complain constantly about the amount of money he was spending on bribes to get information. We hit four locations before that last one, all on seemingly solid intel, before we finally found what we assume is the last secret development lab. If we'd been one day later it'd have all been for nothing."

  "I don't believe in that sort of coincidence," Abiyah disagreed. "That other team was tracking you the entire time, letting you do all the hard work and then slipped in ahead of you. It's likely that by the fifth time, after nothing but failures, you were careless in your initial recon of the building."

  "I'd like to disagree with you, but you're probably right," Twingo said. "But either way, once—"

  "I'm still a little mushy on why you need us?" Carolyn interrupted. "Why is it even here?"

  "Oh, right," Twingo said evasively. "Well, we sort of got on the radar of Kheprian Intelligence… we think."

  "You think?"

  "Whoever was running that covert lab isn't exactly happy that it was destroyed, and they caught our scent before we could switch ships and get the body clear and off-planet," Kage said, moving closer and ignoring the look the Viper gave him. "We're assuming it was someone within Kheprian Intelligence that was running
the program either with, or for, the Covert Service."

  "You guys should have come to us first." Abiyah shook his head. "The other team fed you to the dogs." When the two Omega Force members looked at him blankly, he went on. "They tracked you to the body, likely because they didn't have the resources you were bringing to bear by involving Saditava Mok… or perhaps they were unsure of his involvement and his reputation scared them off. Then, probably to create enough of a distraction to get their own body off-planet, they must have fed your ship's description to someone they knew would want to talk to you about it."

  "Damn… we've been really sloppy about this," Twingo said.

  "And now you've dragged us into it." Carolyn glared at her partner before continuing. "This thing is radioactive, guys… I'm not sure I want to be involved. Why don't you call and interrupt Jason's frontier rampage and have him blast in here and grab you in that flying tank?"

  "We, ah… we haven't really—Kage?"

  "Well the thing is—"

  "Save it." Carolyn cut them off with an angry wave of her arm. "Let me guess, you haven't been able to get in touch with them. Would you like to know why?" The pair looked at each other, unsure as to how they should answer.

  "Well, as long as you're offering," Kage said.

  "Your pals, without the benefit of Lucky's voice of reason, have decided to indulge their bloodlust, and from what I've heard, it's getting messy," she said. "They've been connected to a string of brutal interdictions and people are beginning to take notice. I've got three contracts for the pair of them sitting in my queue right now.

  "It might not be today, it might not be tomorrow, but someone is going to take them out soon. They've become violent and reckless and even along frontier worlds that's only tolerated for so long."