Omega Force: Legends Never Die (OF10)

by Joshua Dalzelle

  The bridge broke out in a chorus of groans.

  "It was literally one of the most important parts of the briefing," Jason snapped. "How much of the rest did you ignore?"

  "Most of it," Crusher admitted. "You didn't hire me to be an analyst."

  "I don't remember hiring you for anything, you just wouldn't go away," Jason muttered before raising his voice. "The full brief is available on the computer. I suggest you watch it."

  "I'd heard rumors from some of the other professors," Doc said. "Do we believe that a new political faction has popped up and so quickly secured control of the ConFed Council to begin making such drastic policy changes?"

  "Who said it was quickly?" Kage asked. "This could have been in the works for some time. Given that we're hunting down a Fleet officer the captain thinks might have been in command of the battleship we saved near that Ancient relic, we're talking a timetable of years."

  "That species that attacked them didn't seem the sort for this type of underhanded subtlety, if memory serves correctly," Doc said. "Maybe they encountered someone else?"

  "Who knows?" Jason shrugged. "Not really our concern."

  "I don't know, Captain… this seems like a diametric shift in quadrant politics," Kage said. "Before this the ConFed was more or less a protection scheme pretending it was a government. From what Alocur showed us, they're now taking the whole thing a bit more seriously and they're not being subtle about leaning on systems with the fleet to get them in line."

  "Is this a bad thing?" Twingo asked. "Maybe a ConFed that takes its role seriously will bring a little stability to the region."

  "Why the hell would we want that?" Jason asked. "You do realize we exist to operate within that instability, right? If the fleet actually gave a shit about protecting the little guy we'd either be out of a job or actually have to start being the bad guys and work as mercenaries. What else is there for us?"

  "Grow shrubs on S'Tora or lecture spoiled little brats in climate-controlled lecture halls," Crusher said.

  "Or go back to Galvetor and get fat and lazy while pretending to be in charge of the legions," Jason said. "Oh, wait! You already did that once."

  The evening quickly devolved from there. It started as a few friendly barbs and ended up being an every-man-for-himself deathmatch where they used their intimate knowledge of each other's lives to go for the throat. After an hour Twingo left the bridge claiming he needed to check the engines, but Jason swore he saw him crying and told the others. Crusher immediately leapt from his seat and chased the engineer, intent on the kill. The move seemed to backfire since once Jason made his escape he saw Crusher sitting by himself at a galley table looking morose and drinking.

  "Wow… that got out of hand pretty quick," he remarked to Doc.

  "I'm not speaking to you!" Doc almost shouted before fleeing to the infirmary.

  "Ah, it's good to be back," Jason said, stretching while looking at the wall clock to see if he could go hit the rack and get himself reacclimated to ship's time. "Crusher, I’m grabbing some sleep. You're on bridge watch."

  "Fuck you."

  Jason was halfway to his stateroom before he realized the battlesynth was trailing along behind him. This one was much quieter than the others, almost sneaky. He turned around and it stopped, just staring at him. Jason peered into those oddly organic-looking eyes, trying to detect some spark behind the impassive face.

  "I wish you could let me know that you're in there, buddy." He waited a few more seconds to see if he had a response before choking off another sigh and trudging to his quarters. As he expected, the battlesynth followed him into the room and then, in a move that shocked and dismayed him, sat down in the chair by the desk. Jason tried not to read anything into it. Lucky never sat unless he had to when he was piloting a vehicle, but his old body was also ill-suited for furniture designed for the average biological being.

  The battlesynth's eyes never left him as he changed and climbed into his rack, dimming the lights a bit so he could sleep. Before he drifted off to sleep he was surprised at the realization that he wasn't afraid of the powerful machine sitting in the chair, staring at him. In fact, he was completely comfortable in its presence despite the lack of communication and the fact it could punch through the hull and let all the air out of his quarters while he slept. That had to count for something, didn't it?

  Chapter 10

  “Here we are… the gateway to hell.”

  “You wish,” Crusher snorted. “Hell would be a vacation compared to this place. You’re sure about this?”

  “The intel from Alocur indicted the trail of our missing officer went cold here,” Jason said. “Mok scrubbed the data through his analysts and they came to the same conclusion, so… here we are.”

  “I don’t get why we have to be the ones to go dig this guy out,” Kage said.

  “Because Alocur is a one-man-band right now without any operational assets,” Jason said. “And also because the folks that inhabit this area of space are very good at sniffing out government spies and operators.”

  The Phoenix was sitting still in space relative to the star they could barely make out through the canopy. She had meshed-in just outside the system heliopause and now they were taking stock of how they wanted to approach this first toe dip into the pool. The planet was called Niceen-3 and was considered the gateway into a region of space known as the Kaspian Reaches. It was a small cluster of stars that sat tucked between a nebula and a class four gravitational anomaly, forcing everyone to filter into the Reaches through the Niceen system. It was a wild, lawless area that shrugged off the attempts of any government to bring it to heel with seeming ease. Even the mighty ConFed Fleet with its powerful battlecruisers and numerical advantage saw their push into the Reaches grind to a halt as every system would whittle away at them just a bit and the locals would refuse to cooperate.

  The place was so insane that even hardened criminal crews would avoid it unless absolutely necessary. Mok told them how the local guilds would make sure that anybody coming into their backyard to try and turn a few quick credits without permission were made an example of. It made Jason chuckle as he realized that the problem most of the covert services had with infiltrating the Reaches was that they tended to follow the same tired playbook. They’d take in a pile of some illicit material, be that weapons or narcotics provided by their handlers, and then move it to try and fence it. Posing as smugglers or a smash-and-grab crew worked well in most places, but not here. The inevitable failures of these attempts confused most intel outfits and thus made them fearful of trying again.

  Omega Force, however, had a reputation in the underworld for not caring about money. They were also known to punch far above their weight class so they, like the Reaches, were largely left alone as they were far more trouble than they were worth to piss off. As long as Jason rolled in and made it clear they weren’t there to pester the guilds or step on any toes, they’d be allowed to pass without much more than the usual ration of bullshit from the locals.

  “We should have had Alocur work up a warrant on us before trying this,” Doc said.

  “Too easy to backtrack and see if it’s a fake.” Jason shook his head. “Besides, any warrant that would send us scurrying here would almost certainly come with a hefty reward or a kill-on-sight order. These animals might take a crack at us if we make it too tempting.”

  “They may try to test us anyway,” Kage said. “Word is getting out that Lucky is—” he trailed off and looked over at the battlesynth standing behind Jason. It didn’t move or react to the Veran’s words. “Anyway, we should have asked one of Alocur’s battlesynths to come along.”

  “They have their own mission and I didn’t have time to fly all the way back to Terranovus to ask Lot 700 if we could borrow one of their guys,” Jason said. In the reflection of his multifunction display he saw the battlesynth twitch when he mentioned Lot 700, the lot Lucky was originally from. It wasn’t much, but it was at least something.

  “So
we’re rolling in as ourselves?” Crusher asked. “I would have thought a disguise would be helpful.”

  “I think in this case our reputation will work in our favor,” Jason argued. “We’ll get a few dipshits that want to test themselves against us. A few object lessons and the rest will learn. Probably.”

  Crusher looked doubtful, but only grunted in reply.

  Without waiting for further argument from the rest of the crew, Jason pushed the throttles up and set a shallow course down to Niceen-3. The trip down to the planet would take the better part of thirty hours at the velocity he dialed up. He could get there much quicker, but discretion was the name of the game… for now. One of the issues that had been cropping up lately was that the Phoenix was becoming too notable. There were less and less Jepsen ships flying about the quadrant and the newer designs coming out of the commercial shipyards eschewed the sleek, aerodynamic shape of his ship for a more blocky, utilitarian design philosophy. It was the end of an era, it seemed, and the change was not for the better in Jason’s opinion. The thought that one day the Phoenix would have to be retired because she was too famous and too outdated almost gave him an anxiety attack.

  He detected movement behind him and saw that the battlesynth had turned and was walking off the bridge. He met the questioning looks from the others and could only shrug helplessly. He had no idea what was happening in the machine’s mind right now. The best he could hope for was that Lucky would begin to emerge soon and in the meantime it wouldn’t go off the rails and kill them all or punch a hole in the main reactor housing.

  In all his years running around on the edges of society within the quadrant, Jason had never been to the Kaspian Reaches. Its reputation among the other spacers, as well as a lack of any monetary opportunity, had kept him away. He'd heard all the wild stories about the sliver of habitable systems that was so lawless even the ConFed didn't think it was worth the trouble to impose their will. As such, he wasn't sure what he'd expected from the gateway world of Niceen-3, but the modern, clean city the Phoenix was flying over sure as hell wasn't it.

  "I was expecting a shittier version of Breaker's World," he said aloud as the state-of-the-art automated landing control system directed them to a landing pad far away from the terminal among a group of heavy cargo shuttles that dwarfed the Phoenix.

  "All a thin veneer of civility," Kage said. "I've worked out here before. Trust me: Once we're deeper into the Reaches, you'll be begging to go to Breaker's World for a vacation."

  "So why is this place so… clean?" Crusher asked. Even as he said it, however, a rough-looking crew from one of the shuttles strolled by, eyeing the gunship with interest. All of them were openly and heavily armed. The fact they were carrying such powerful armament so openly at a commercial spaceport was a good indicator that the place was a little more sporting than your typical ConFed world.

  "The Reaches are controlled by three overlapping syndicates. The guy who runs this one—nobody actually knows his name—likes to pretend that he's a businessman and not a low life criminal like us," Kage said, ignoring the protests from Twingo and Doc at the casual insult. "He's spent an unfathomable amount of money constructing this city, but the rest of Niceen-3 is a dump. The planetary government, which of course lives here in total luxury, is your usual corrupt puppet tribunal you'll find on most of these planets. The people who pretend to be in charge are nothing more than kleptocrats that make sure things run smoothly on the surface for the real people in charge."

  "This sort of system can only exist if there's a significant source of income," Doc said. "What do these syndicates specialize in?"

  "They're fairly diverse, but the main cash crop is trafficking in beings," Kage said. "A lot of people come here to escape trouble back home or fancy themselves hard cases that can make their fortune in a place like the Reaches. Many of them end up shoved into transports after being fitted with neural restraining collars and shipped off to places to do things no free being would."

  "I've heard the Saabror Protectorate recruits for Rakgata here," Crusher said, referring to the Protectorate's feared unit of shock troops that were used as the leading edge when subduing a planet. "I'm going to assume that most of them weren't volunteers."

  The mood on the bridge turned somber as each of them remembered the circumstances under which they had met. Kage, Crusher, and Lucky had all been locked up in stasis pods about to be sold to the highest bidder when Jason, Twingo, and Doc had rescued them and stolen the gunship. It wasn't a time in their lives they wanted to relive.

  "Doc, before we even drop the ramp let's make sure all our countermeasures are working," Jason said. Due to the risks of their chosen vocation, all the biological crewmembers had been implanted with a suite of countermeasure devices that would ensure a neural restraint system wouldn't work on them. He looked over his shoulder at the battlesynth, unsure what he was even going to do with it during the mission. At least nobody would even know what it was, much less how to subdue and capture it. The only real problem was that it might follow after someone just because they told it to.

  "Whoa! What the hell do you two think you're doing?" Crusher demanded as Twingo and Kage followed him and Jason into the armory and started picking through the assorted weaponry.

  "Getting ready for the mission," Kage said. He grabbed a concealable flechette carbine, going through the seldom-used piece of gear with a familiarity that made Jason suspicious. Kage had never shown any ability or inclination to be on the operations side of things, preferring to skulk about and manipulate things remotely via his network connections. Twingo sure as hell never participated in dirtside ops, but the squat engineer had pulled down a pair of heavy plasma pistols and was expertly loading them and fitting a pair of shoulder holsters to himself.

  "Since when do you two runts leave the ship?" Crusher pressed. "Leave the big boy stuff to the—" That was all he got out as Kage whirled, lightning fast, and stuffed a compact plasma pistol up under the Galvetic warrior's nose while pressing a second one into his groin.

  "Listen here, you overgrown sack of garbage," Kage hissed. "While you two were out feeling sorry for yourselves and making a sport of beating two-bit hustlers to death, Twingo and I were left holding the bag. We found Lucky's new body and we took all the risks infiltrating top secret Kheprian installations… don't tell me what I can and can't do. You got that?!"

  "Yeah… I got it," Crusher said. "I was just joking." He didn't twitch a muscle, not even to breathe, until Kage removed the second pistol. Jason watched in stunned silence as the little Veran continued to put together his kit and then stalked back out. "What the hell was that about?"

  "It looks like the team dynamic has changed just a bit," Jason said, pulling the rest of his own equipment on. He opted for his lightest armor, an unpowered suit that could be easily concealed beneath clothing. It was flexible and would stop most blades and a few shots from common handheld weaponry one would expect to find on a world like this. He shrugged into his big duster that offered its own protection against energy weapons and had active cooling so he could wear it comfortably on a hot world. To him, the coat looked absurd, but it allowed him to sling one of his smaller railguns under an arm without being too obvious about it.

  "What's next? Doc comes down and asks for a sword?" Crusher grumbled.

  "Kage is still pissed you guys just up and left like that," Twingo said. "Besides the fact we could have used your help locating that body, he also feels like you let Lucky down."

  "Which makes total sense seeing as how you two assholes neglected to tell Crusher or me that Mok had found Lucky's matrix intact… or that Tauless had been able to track down an ultra-secret Kheprian weapons program through rumors," Jason snapped, his own anger at the situation coming back. "In fact, you two should still be kissing my ass and hoping I don't toss you out an airlock for withholding that information from me. What right does he have to—"

  "I'm not trying to start yet another argument about this," Twingo said wearily. "I'
m just telling you where he's coming from, I didn't say it made sense. But the fact is that when you two were no longer around to hide behind, we found that we were able to do a lot on our own. After all we've been through, you're not going to get to step in and order us to stay behind anymore."

  "Whatever," Jason muttered. "Be at the ramp within the next ten minutes. We need to get this show on the road."

  "Are you sure it's a good idea to bring it along?" Crusher asked, nodding towards the battlesynth that trailed along behind them.

  "You seem to be assuming that I can make it do anything," Jason said. "I told it to stay with Doc and then it followed me out anyway. You've seen what happens when we tried to physically restrain it."

  "Yeah… we won't be doing that again." Crusher rubbed at his ribs. They'd tried to see if maybe they could keep the battlesynth corralled in the ship with a cargo strap loosely tied about its waist. All they ended up accomplishing was getting Crusher tossed across the cargo bay with enough force to put him into the far bulkhead. The battlesynth was still unresponsive, even when asked direct questions, but it seemed determined to remain close to Jason so he let it go for now.

  "Who's this guy we need to talk to first?"

  "She's an information broker that Mok has dealt with before," Kage said. The Veran seemed to have completely gotten over his pique from earlier and was leading them towards the inbound terminal where they'd present their false credentials and a moderate bribe to the official who would then pretend not to notice they were all packing enough firepower to start a revolution.

  "We have a name?" Jason asked.

  "Nope. Just an address to dead-drop a message and wait for her to respond with a time and place. Mok gave me a passphrase that should bump us to the front of the list and let her know that we're working for him," Kage said. "It'll keep her from getting any ideas of lying or double-crossing us. Apparently his name isn't taken lightly within the Reaches."