Omega Force: Legends Never Die (OF10)

by Joshua Dalzelle

  "Shit," Twingo muttered. "We've had hints and rumors about what they've been doing, but we didn't think it had gone that far."

  "Eh, everyone handles grief differently." Kage shrugged. "They're just blowing off some steam."

  "They're killing people—too many people—and it's about to catch up with them," Carolyn said flatly. "If you have any way to call them off, I suggest you do it."

  "I appreciate the warning, but how does that help our immediate situation?" Twingo asked.

  "Give us a day to try to come up with a plan to get you and it off the planet," Abiyah said. When Carolyn shot him a savage look, he pressed on. "My people owe them too much for me to walk away. Come to think of it, it's our people that owe them."

  "I'm not starting that conversation again," she said dismissively. "Let us see what we can come up with. Fair warning: I'm not putting my new ship or life at risk for whatever the hell it is you're doing with this… thing."

  "I suppose that will have to do for now," Twingo said before Kage could open his mouth and ruin the negotiations. For whatever reason, Carolyn absolutely couldn't stand the little Veran. "We'd better start filing out of here and lock the place back up."

  "You won't kill us. I've run into you guys before. Your honor code, your rules of engagement… you'll just beat on us some more, but in the end you'll pull up short before—" The rant was cut short by the deafening report of a high-power plasma pistol discharging within an enclosed space. Once Tuval's eyes cleared, he saw that his brother, who had been tied to the chair next to him, now had a smoking crater where his face had once been.

  "You were saying?" Jason asked.

  "You! You killed my packmate! I'll—"

  "You'll start talking or that's happening to you next," Crusher rumbled from behind him. "And if we do that, we'll have to go pull a few more out of your family den and start this whole process over. That's going to piss me off. A lot."

  "In other words, we won't be as nice the next time around," Jason said. "You were sent to intimidate and damage property along the riverfront. I want to know why and I also want to know where you've been getting military grade weaponry."

  "I… well—"

  "He's stalling," Crusher said, wrapping a massive hand over the squirming alien's throat. "I told you we caught this pair too easily."

  "Talk or die," Jason said flatly.

  "The job is you!" Tuval gasped. "We came to the world and baited you into coming after us."

  "Why?"

  "The money!"

  "Have we checked the bounty boards in a while?" Jason asked. "Last I saw it was only a few grand. That's hardly worth the risk of coming after us."

  "It's millions! Please! I can't breathe!"

  "You're sure doing a lot of talking for not being able to breathe." Crusher never let up his grip. "Millions? Who would pay millions for us? We haven't killed that many by accident. Or on purpose."

  "It's—"

  "Let up a bit, Crusher," Jason said.

  "—an aggregate contract. Nine buyers. We get eleven million credits if we bring your bodies in." Tuval rubbed at his throat, glaring at Jason.

  "Damn," Jason sighed. "These two were supposed to get caught. I'm sure one has a tracker stuck up in him somewhere." Crusher pulled a long, curved blade out and grinned savagely. Tuval went from his normal bright pink to yellow and vomited onto his chest at the sight of a Galvetic warrior advancing on him, intent on looking through his insides to find the device.

  "It's too late for that." Jason waved him off, hefting his favored primary weapon. The railgun was a nasty bit of work that, despite being attached to his infamy, still seemed to surprise people with its sheer destructive power. "Better grab your toys and get ready… they'll be coming."

  Jason deployed the helmet on his last remaining powered armor suit, this one a medium-duty unit that could take a decent amount of punishment and afforded increased mobility. His heavy suit had been destroyed in the same mission that—

  Best not to begin dwelling on that again… it never led anyplace good.

  "Should we just kill this vermin and then try to get to the ship?" Crusher asked.

  "Huh? Oh, yeah… I don't give a shit. Either way," Jason said as he checked over his armament. He'd actually been joking just to screw with Tuval, but apparently Crusher had been sincere with the question. The alien—Jason had never actually learned what species the family unit was from—screamed and pleaded for his life before a wet snap ended it. Jason looked over and saw Tuval's head flopped over at an unnatural angle and just shook his head at Crusher.

  "What? You said you didn't care!"

  "I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed," Jason said. "Restraint is the only thing that separates us from the animals."

  "Says the guy that locked two ryinlur in an unpressurized cargo pod on a ship that was about to launch," Crusher snorted.

  "That was an accident." Jason looked away, his lofty expression hidden by the death's head visage of his helmet.

  "Whatever. These were legal kills. The province hired us to root them out using any means necessary. So what are we thinking—" Crusher was cut off by a stout explosion that blew the door of the office building they'd commandeered out of its frame. It was a breaching charge so there wasn't much fire or smoke, but it still created an overpressure in the room that caused everyone not wearing armor to drop to their knees in pain.

  Jason wheeled and opened fire just as the first of Tuval's relatives came pouring in. He'd had the railgun in low-velocity mode so he was able to lay down sustained, suppressive fire for the split second it took Crusher to shake off the effects of the concussive blast and get into the fight. The big warrior plucked a grenade from his harness and eased around while Jason kept them pinned, tossing the charge out the doorway with a negligent lob. The munition had been set with a short fuse and it exploded before it even hit the ground.

  "Cease fire!" Crusher yelled, waving Jason off. The human swapped in a fresh magazine and cycled the weapon, checking that the cooling system was bringing the rail temperatures back down after the abuse. "Six tangos down, none within sight."

  "That means we're missing three counting the two dead in here," Jason said. "I'm going up top to look for a spotter. Don't silhouette yourself in the doorway until I clear it."

  "I've done this before," Crusher snapped.

  Jason ignored him and went back into a supply closet where a rickety ladder led up to an access door. The lock looked flimsy as hell, so he curled his gauntlet into a fist and punched directly at it, the force amplified by the armor's actuators. As expected, the lock exploded. The door flew up and ripped off its hinges, tumbling though the air and landing on the roof with a thud.

  "There!"

  Before Jason could even get his head and shoulders up through the opening, two more of their attackers turned from where they were perched at the edge. They were apparently waiting for them to exit so they could shoot them from above. The one who had spotted him threw a cylindrical object at him and he batted it away instinctively, turning his head just as it exploded and peppered his armor with debris and shrapnel.

  The grenade was a small anti-personal type and he'd flung it up and away, but it still had enough punch that when he looked again, the idiot that threw it was on the ground writhing in pain. His partner was nowhere to be found but a smoking boot left on the edge of the roof told the tale.

  "Good plan," Jason said, walking up and looking down at the gravely wounded alien. "Who's your handler? What are the contract details?" Before he could get an answer, Jason's display washed out and thermal shock alarms started blaring while his HUD lit up with warnings. He ducked and rolled up to the edge of the roof behind the short wall, his armor smoking and hissing where a plasma bolt had hit him from well outside the optimal range. Had it been a closer shot he may not have been so lucky.

  Taking a quick breath, he popped his head up for a split second and ducked back down just as another shot roared over his head. From the dispersal
of the shot and the way the plasma was streaming behind it, he guessed the range was close to two-hundred meters. Wrong weapon for that sort of work. He flicked his railgun's selector to high-velocity and grinned behind his mask… he not only had a range but his armor's combat computer had registered from where the shot had come from and was feeding him directional data.

  "We have one left, Crusher," he said over the com. "Stand by."

  "Copy."

  Jason crawled along behind the short retainer wall so he wouldn't appear in the same spot, verified the target's position from the last known shot, and rolled smoothly up into his stance. The optics on his weapon picked out the movement on a building two hundred and twenty-eight meters away and automatically adjusted his point of aim. He squeezed off two hypersonic rounds and watched as the ledge his target was kneeling on exploded. Jason could tell he hadn't actually hit the target since it was intact as it fell, but the fall from seven stories up should do the trick.

  "Target down, not confirmed dead," he reported. "Southeast from here—"

  "I've got it," Crusher grumbled. "I'll just go over to where you shot half that building down with that ridiculous gun."

  When he turned back to the fallen alien on the roof with him he was dismayed to see that he had died. Jason went through his pockets looking for anything that would give them details on who was posting up such large bounties on them.

  Nothing.

  He walked over to the edge of the two-story roof he was on and hopped off, his sabatons smashing into the street and breaking the pavement. He jogged over to where Crusher was examining the badly mangled body of the spotter. It appeared that some of the ledge had broken off after he fell and then landed on him.

  "This is fucking gross," Crusher complained. "Why can't you just burn people down with a plasma weapon like a civilized being?"

  "It's not my fault part of the building squished him." Jason retracted his helmet and looked at the mess. "Find anything?"

  "This guy was probably in charge. He has some specialized com gear and he was the only one carrying a com unit."

  "Which would be great… if we had a code slicer to get into it," Jason sighed. "Let's just get back to the Phoenix… we'll call for payment once we're off-world and we'll see if the computer can do anything with that."

  "Do you remember where you parked this time?" Crusher asked as they moved off, wanting to be well gone before people became brave enough to come out and see what all the noise was about.

  "One time… one damn time I lost the ship and I never hear the end of it," Jason griped. "If you hadn't broken my com unit, it wouldn't have been an issue."

  "I hadn't noticed how shifty you were until the others weren't around. Do you ever take responsibility for your screw ups?"

  "Nope." An insistent beeping from his com unit cut off the argument. "Huh… the Phoenix just received a message from Carolyn Whitney. It's flagged as urgent."

  "Now there's a ruthless human," Crusher said with a short, barking laugh. "I like her."

  "You would."

  "More than I like you, anyway."

  "Got it."

  Chapter 5

  "It's been damn near three weeks!" Twingo fumed. "We can't just sit here forever!"

  "I'm not sure Carolyn is wrong," Kage said. "Twingo, there was a lot of heat and we're in possession of something that could get us executed if we're caught. I'm anxious too, but honestly, maybe we should have taken it even further."

  "You lost me."

  "Maybe we should have hidden the body on this planet and then left," Kage said. "Tauless said Lucky's core systems are safe in stasis for an almost indefinite amount of time… even if we came back a year or two later it would be better than being caught with that thing."

  "Mok did haul ass out of here when things got too hot, didn't he?" Twingo was somewhat mollified. "Maybe he was the smarter one."

  "Yeah, about that… you don't think he set us up, do you?" Kage asked. "He did flee right after we stashed the body. If that other team was his, that means he has Lucky, our only battlesynth expert, and the other body that was taken."

  "Wow… thanks for adding that to my pile of things to worry about," Twingo snapped, still pacing. "But no, I don't think he screwed us, as Jason would say. It does him no good. If Tauless was able to perform the integration alone it's not like Lucky would wake up and suddenly be Mok's slave. What probably—you okay?"

  "Yeah." Kage waved him off. "I've been passing the time by trying to recompile and decrypt the data I took from that lab. It's taking a bit more out of me than I thought."

  The pair fell silent, each lost in their own thoughts. Days had stretched into weeks as they had waited for some word from the Viper about an extraction plan as well as staying glued to the local media to see what developments there might be on the explosion that took out the lab and most of the city block it sat on. The fact things were largely silent about so much destruction in a normally quiet city spoke volumes: Powerful people were interested in making sure this wasn't too widely known.

  It wasn't that the pair was wavering in their commitment, they'd come too far and done too much to turn back now. The issue was what it was costing each of them personally. Twingo especially had tried to stay above the fray when Omega Force dabbled in gross criminal conduct, but this mission to try and save his friend had led him to crossing so many lines that he'd stopped counting the number of local and ConFed laws he'd been breaking. By actually capturing one of the prototype battlesynth bodies, they'd achieved a level of success that he secretly thought they never would. Now the consequences would go far beyond what would have been a slap on the wrist for some harmless criminal mischief and a few assaults.

  Then he remembered who his friend had actually been. Whenever Twingo started feeling sorry for himself, he remembered that Lucky had grabbed a bomb and detonated it against his body to save Jason's life, and that Jason had fought so hard to not let him do it that he'd almost killed himself. Their commitment to each other and to the team was absolute. Twingo wouldn't dishonor them by being any less.

  The door chime to their rented rooms caused Twingo to nearly jump out of his own skin. Kage was so immersed in what he was doing inside his head that his eyes barely fluttered.

  "Start backing yourself out of whatever you're doing," Twingo told him. "I think this may be go-time."

  "You are correct," Carolyn said when he answered the door. "It's go-time." Twingo hid how startled he was that she could hear him though the insulated door. He always forgot that the Viper was extensively modified with all kinds of bionic upgrades that allowed her to perform her function as an assassin and spy. Jason was unbelievably strong and resilient thanks to Doc's genetic tinkering, but for the most part he was still just a human. Carolyn was more of a machine with a human brain driving it.

  "What's the plan?" Kage asked, disconnecting the hard lines from his neural interface and standing up.

  "We have transport coming in tonight to get you, and it, off-planet," she said. "No real details other than you need to be there before they show up."

  "And what's your role in this plan?" Twingo asked. He was now completely suspicious of the human standing before him. They'd moved the body three times now on the planet at her direction, and he wasn't above thinking she'd sold them out to the authorities for a reward.

  "Not much," Carolyn said evasively. "Abiyah and I will provide overwatch, keep you in the loop about movement around the building, and then once you're on your way, we'll sneak off and fly out ourselves. This way neither of us is connected to the other."

  "I'm overwhelmed by your concern," Kage said.

  "It is what it is." She shrugged. "I'm a mercenary, you're lucky I came here at all. I want no part of whatever you're into that's making you steal top secret Kheprian military hardware, and I couldn't care less about the internal squabbles of your little band of pirates and thieves. My interest at this point is to leave here unnoticed and fly as far away from you as possible… I've neve
r seen such a small group create so much chaos wherever they go."

  "Thank you."

  "Wasn't a compliment."

  "It's all prepped to move," Twingo said quietly, closing the lid on the shielded coffin he and Kage had cobbled together using scraps from around the city. Theoretically the box would thwart casual security scans and allow them to move the body up out of the subbasement of the engine overhaul facility they'd stashed it in.

  The place saw little traffic as it only worked on intra-atmospheric engines for the local cargo shuttles. It wasn't that there weren't that many shuttles, it was more that the engines used were so reliable there wasn't a need for a heavily staffed shop. The old-timer that ran the place had rented them the space they needed, accepting cash, after Twingo had talked him up about his longing for the old plasma turbines that had been popular for a time on ConFed worlds.

  "You seem like nice enough youngsters," had been his response as he pocketed the credit chits.

  "Let's get it up on the main floor and then wait for our ride," Kage said. "You think it's Mok coming back to get us?"

  "Hard to say," Twingo said. "It would make sense, but if it is there are ways he could have gotten a hold of us directly. I checked all of our dead-drop accounts… nothing. It's like he's dropped through a wormhole without a trace."

  They grunted and swore as they maneuvered the clunky coffin into the freight lift and started up towards the main floor. The shop was along the perimeter of what had once been a bustling spaceport, but once the newer facility opened to the south, the only thing left on the complex were the local scrap haulers and a burgeoning package delivery service that advertised it had a way of smoothing out pesky import control issues. What that meant was that there were fourteen square kilometers of tarmac that was barely used, and the duracrete was too dense for the weather to wear down or the plant life to break through. Twingo thought there was something decidedly eerie about an abandoned spaceport. It was like standing in the middle of a tarmac desert.