Omega Force: Legends Never Die (OF10)

by Joshua Dalzelle

  "How did you manage to just randomly find that?" Crusher asked suspiciously.

  "With all this computing power available, I put in an alert if any small ships docked with or landed in the station," Kage said. "I sort of expected this. I assumed they put a tracker on the Phoenix before we left Nott… our ship is just as recognizable as theirs."

  "Shit," Jason muttered. "What's the other bad news?"

  "Our target isn't on Torus Station anymore. He left about … half a year ago. I've got him getting on a commercial transport and that's the last entry for him. I'm doing a data dump now for the starliner docking orders and passenger manifests for that time. We'll need to analyze it on the Phoenix because someone is aware I'm snooping around and I'm getting some push-back."

  "After the data dump, purge the station servers of anything you found on the target," Jason said. "Don't leave anything for Jurg and his band of assclowns."

  "Are those clowns that—"

  "It's just an expression, don't overthink it," Jason cut off Crusher.

  "Data is copied… images of the target are purged," Kage said. "You ready for bad news number three?"

  "Why not?"

  "The purge action kicked off an automated anti-intrusion protocol. I didn't see it because it was dormant and, honestly, they seemed pretty lax about security and I was moving fast. We'll have trouble getting transportation out of here and we'll damn sure have trouble trying to get through dock security and back onto the ship."

  "Tell Doc to disconnect and move away," Jason sighed. "We'll find another way out of here."

  "That doesn't sound promising," Crusher grumbled. "Come on… we need to get to where we stashed the party favors before any security or mercs show up."

  The trio rushed out of the room and ran smack into a security patrol that had been walking slowly towards them, apparently intent on seeing what the alarm in an obscure network access closet was about. When a wild-eyed Galvetic warrior leaped out in front of them, brandishing two wickedly curved blades, whatever training they may have had for their job was promptly forgotten. Crusher roared and lunged at them, a tactic that was met with partial success. One turned and fled as if his life depended on it, the other fainted and collapsed into a heap where he stood.

  "You are so easily entertained." Jason stepped over the prone alien while Crusher giggled and followed behind them.

  They made it to the side exit without further incident other than hearing calls over the PA to clear the area where they were. Everything seemed to be smooth sailing right up until Jason kicked the door open and ran out into the open just as two members of Chenyx Six had apparently been affixing a breaching charge. He'd hit the door with enough force to send one sailing, but the other stayed on his feet… and he was the one holding the detonator.

  "Move!" Jason shouted, angling away and accelerating to clear the way for his friends. The three of them were down off the wide steps and sprinting towards where they'd stashed their gear just a split second ahead of the detonator button being depressed. The blast was mild, just a shaped charge that was meant to cut through the locks and hinges as quietly as possible, but it did still manage to kick the door back into the face of the alien Jason had knocked down. Apparently it not being seated into the frame made it somewhat unpredictable once explosives were applied.

  "Ha! Nice shot… assclown!" Crusher shouted from behind the dubious cover of the discarded work containers and the laser boring machine. Jason looked up and saw that the door had probably killed the first alien—Jurg was really going to be pissed now—and the sapper that had been a bit trigger happy was now fumbling for a weapon, looking incensed at Crusher's insult.

  Before the alien could pull his concealed weapon, Crusher lined up with a plasma pistol and hit him center mass from a range of nearly sixty meters, an extremely impressive shot with that weapon. Jason pulled fresh powerpacks for the railgun, squeezed off a low-velocity test shot, and then waved for his friends to follow him down a side alley and over before the rest of the Chenyx Six could make it around the operations center to see what had happened to one of their entry crews.

  "Kage, I need a way out of here!" he shouted over his shoulder.

  This station is equipped with over two hundred Class IV escape pods. If you were to utilize one, it could be flown away and retrieved by the Phoenix.

  "Not bad," Jason muttered. "Kage! Find the closest escape pods!"

  "What the hell good does that do? You're not going to blow up Torus Station, are you?"

  "No. Well… probably not. The pods are Class IV. We can actually fly them away for a distance," Jason said, pulling up when it was obvious they weren't being pursued.

  "Huh," Kage grunted. "That's… actually another good idea. There's a cluster half a click that way."

  They slowed to a brisk walk, not wanting to attract undue attention now that they could hear alarms blaring in the distance around the operations center they'd just made a mess of. As it turned out, three heavily armed aliens in a nice part of the government district drew attention whether they were running or crawling, so they took off again as fast as they could.

  "Keep cover, the security for these pods is automated." Kage popped off an access cover and let a few silvery tendrils of nanobots flow from his palm into one of the connectors to give him a hard circuit into the machine.

  "How the hell did Chenyx find us so fast even with the tracker on the ship?" Crusher asked while they scanned the surrounding areas. "That makes no sense. Kage spots them as they hit the hangar level and they made a direct line for us?"

  "Unlikely that it's pure coincidence," Jason agreed. "Could the smuggler they captured have given them that much detailed intel before we got to him? You know… the one you blew up?"

  "I like how we keep dragging out all my mistakes over and over," Crusher said sourly. "It's possible the guy who sold the ConFed shuttle knew that he was heading here first."

  "It's also plausible that the operations center would be the logical place to go if you were going to—oh, damn," Jason trailed off. "That wasn't a multipronged assault, that was only two guys sent to get the information Jurg wanted. They were using breaching charges because they're morons and have one mode, but that makes far more sense than our blind escape evading one of the better hit teams in the quadrant."

  "If what you're saying is true, then we probably should have questioned the live one," Kage said. "They may have had a few more clues we were missing."

  "Thanks," Jason said dryly. "What's taking so long?" As if that was the magic passphrase, the security gate popped and then slid aside with a slight squeal from its unoiled rails.

  "Nothing." Kage smiled. "After you."

  Jason and Crusher stepped into the staging area while Kage relocked the gate and then gestured for them to take the path furthest to the right. "There's a long transfer tube you'll slide down that has some grav assist to keep you moving once you drop past the main gravimetric generators."

  Jason just nodded and hopped into the tube with his feet together and his weapon held against his chest.

  The asteroid that Torus Station was built into was, more or less, an enormous chunk of nickel-iron. There were enough impurities in it that it wasn't worth the cost to mine it for anything useful, but there were enough people enamored with living inside hollowed-out asteroids that the local government was still able to lease it out. Since the asteroid was small and hollowed out in such a way that the levels were stacked like a building, artificial gravity had to be employed to keep everything anchored down. The chutes to the escape pods passed through nearly seventy meters of solid iron and put them on the bottom side of the station's grav generators, so low-powered grav plating had to be added along the way. Jason didn't mind it so much except for the jerk it gave him every time he passed over one.

  "This isn't a very efficient system for escape pods," Jason commented once they were all standing down in a dimly lit vestibule right outside the main airlock hatch.

  "More for
show than anything else," Kage said. "Having all these advanced pods in place helps when selling property here and keeps the local inspectors at bay. In reality, having to travel five minutes to the pod during a catastrophic station failure means you'll probably die like everyone else."

  "All the more reason to get the hell out of here," Crusher said and cycled the airlock.

  The pod blew free of its moorings and launched them out free of the asteroid. Kage disabled the tracking beacon and then hooked into the limited com system so that he could try to raise the Phoenix.

  "You know… that seemed way easier than usual," Crusher said with a yawn. The other two just looked at him like he was insane for tempting fate in such a flagrant way.

  "There's the pod," Twingo pointed out.

  "I have it," Doc smacked the engineer's hands away. "Just tell me where, don't actually point on the display. The ship should be able to recognize the standard airlock on the front of that thing and adjust her orientation automatically."

  "Did you also see that there's a ship that left the station's main hangar and is moving on a direct intercept for the pod?" Twingo asked.

  Doc looked at the sensor feed and scrunched his nose up. "Station security?"

  "Not in a ship like that," Twingo said. "Hang on… yep, the profile has been changed, but that's Jurg's ship. They must have followed us out. Kage mentioned Jason thinks they put a tracker on her."

  "No… they're going straight for the pod," Doc said. "They're bypassing us like they don't see us."

  "That's not good," Twingo said. "How rusty are you, Doc?"

  "Why?"

  "We're going to full combat mode. Powering up weapons, shields, and warming up expendable munitions. Is Lucky still sitting on the floor in the galley?"

  "Last I saw," Doc confirmed as he flew through his checklist to bring the Phoenix up to full power. "You better get in the copilot's seat, I'll need a hand with this."

  "You never did answer my question."

  "I don't think you want to know the answer," Doc said grimly.

  Chapter 19

  "It looks like Jurg is going for a grapple," Twingo said. "That gives us a little more time than if he just fired off a fusion missile at the pod."

  "How do you want to handle this?" Doc asked for the third time. He had calmed down some and seemed to be finding his rhythm again with the Phoenix though all he'd done so far was maneuver so that he had a clear shot without endangering the pod.

  "No warning calls, no warning shots," Twingo said. "I doubt we'll disable him at this range with anything less than an XT missile and all that will do is bring that ConFed trawler in for a closer look before we can get the crew out of the pod and mesh-out.

  "Line up for a lateral run with the main cannons. The plasma bolts aren't very fast, but Jurg isn't a great pilot so he probably can't juke out of the way in time."

  "At this range—"

  "At this range, scaring him off is just as good as destroying him, maybe more so," Twingo said calmly. "I know the plasma bolts lose cohesion as the field emitters lose charge, but it should still be enough to knock the hell out of them. A few energy blasts splashing off shields won't bring anyone out to investigate. An expanding cloud of debris will."

  Doc grumbled but took Twingo's advice, accelerating hard to get ahead of the seemingly oblivious merc ship. Jurg's craft was an infiltrator, not a gunfighter, so the Phoenix had an obvious advantage, but both of them knew appearances could be deceiving. He pulled almost parallel with the fleeing pod and then swung about as hard as the ship would let him, knowing that Jurg would see them coming after the abrupt maneuver.

  "Release helm control to the tactical computer and let it line your shot up," Twingo said. "There you go … almost … clear to fire."

  Doc squeezed and held the trigger. The six main cannons along the leading edges of the wing roots began belching brilliant red bolts of superheated plasma while the computer adjusted fire by angling the ship over slightly. The plasma cannons were a devastating weapon, but severely range-limited. By the time the first bolts splashed against the transport's shields, they'd lost much of their destructive energy, but they made a hell of a light show. The ship was engulfed in streaming zero-g flames as the shields flared to absorb the thermal shock.

  The results were immediate. Jurg yanked his ship off course to take him directly away from the approaching gunship even while Doc reversed his angle to turn into the fleeing transport. Doc squeezed off a few more shots to try and really sell the illusion that he was pursuing with an intent to destroy before throttling back and bumping into reverse a bit to slow their relative velocity.

  "He's out of here," Twingo said. "Sensors show they're at full burn still and accelerating."

  "He gave up fairly easy," Doc said.

  "That's because he knows he can find us again at will and bide his time until he has the advantage," Twingo said. "The guys were right… there's a tracker on this ship somewhere."

  "How close was he?!"

  "Less than three thousand kilometers," Twingo said. "He was definitely trying to capture you."

  "Damn," Jason said, rubbing his jaw. "This is weird. Good job chasing him off, but we need to find that tracker and pronto."

  They decided the best place to hide was in plain sight while Chenyx Six was still able to track them and the Torus Station security was whipped into a frenzy. Jason put the Phoenix back into formation, the same one with two ConFed ships, and then watched the sensors as Twingo and Kage scoured the ship for the tracker. It wasn't an easy job since the device was made to not be found, and it required more than a few EVA excursions out onto the hull. They even had Jason deploy the landing gear while they were outside to check it over.

  After thirty-eight hours of exhaustive work they'd still found nothing. They were all frustrated and tired, and tempers were wearing thin. The Phoenix was still floating in formation, now directly behind the ConFed trawler, so close that Jason could just make out the bluish flare from the drives. He knew he wasn't the most technically savvy of the bunch, but he was a born problem solver. If, after damn near two days, they still hadn't found the tracker on the Phoenix then logic dictated that it likely wasn't there. In an epiphany born of exhaustion and caffeine, he realized that the clue wasn't that Jurg kept finding them, but that he seemed to know specifically where Jason was. He'd been coming directly at him once they'd launched in the escape pod.

  "Cas… what are the chances that Jurg stuck a tracker in me while they had me chained to the chair?" Jason asked when he was alone. "Wouldn't you have noticed that?"

  Not necessarily. As I have tried to explain, I exist as a fragment within your neural implant. I am not fully integrated into your systems, and while you are unconscious or asleep I am quite unaware of the world around us. I also cannot detect tactile sensations, so if something was surgically implanted while you were unconscious I would have certainly missed that.

  "Interesting," Jason said, ignoring the sarcasm. Cas would sometimes seem all-knowing, so it was easy to forget just how limited the accidental intelligence really was.

  "What's interesting?" Doc asked, walking onto the bridge.

  "It's interesting that you walked onto the bridge at the exact moment I was about to ask that you give me your most invasive, nastiest, intimate examination of your life." Jason smiled widely.

  "You know what? I put up with a lot of—"

  "I'm actually being serious, Doc," Jason said, holding up his hands in surrender. "I think the tracker we're looking for may have been put in me when Jurg had me captive."

  "That would make more sense than it being on the Phoenix now that I'm thinking about it," Doc mused. "It'd have to be something that's able to transmit in slip-space, but this stuff is getting smaller and smarter all the time."

  "And we can assume that Jurg has access to all the latest and greatest as one of the assassins many governments will turn to first when they need someone offed," Jason said.

  "We'd better get starte
d," Doc said. "We can't just sit here behind this ConFed ship forever."

  "Please, come in and sit, Alocur. I thank you for coming."

  "Saditava Mok," Alocur said with a half-smile. "Or should I call you—"

  "You would be wise to refer to me by the name I have given you," Mok said coldly.

  "Of course," Alocur said smoothly. "I must admit to being surprised by this invitation. I would assume the situation in the Empire consumes your full attention."

  "The Empire will have to handle its affairs without my help, I'm afraid," Mok said. "The ConFed struck with such speed and precision that there's not much to be done for my former homeland at this point, and certainly not by someone like me."

  "You may be surprised."

  "Yes," Mok said slowly, staring at his guest with an intensity that would have wilted most. "So I've asked you here because, at the request of a mutual acquaintance, I've been making discreet inquiries into your background. Imagine my surprise when I learned you're not actually with Kheprian Intelligence anymore."

  "No more than you're still with Eshquarian Intelligence, Mok," Alocur said. "I'm still a patriot and I'm still doing my duty just as you do… in your own twisted way."

  "Fair point, if somewhat inaccurate." Mok shrugged. "So… who do you work for? Why are you running around tracking retired Fleet officers while simultaneously dabbling in highly illegal battlesynth research programs?"

  Alocur seemed to size Mok up before answering. "The rumors of your affinity for this merc crew I've hired have a little more truth to them than I would have thought," he finally said. "Let me assure you that I am not using Omega Force as cannon fodder. I legitimately hired them because, despite outward appearances, they're probably some of the best in the quadrant at what they do. If that will assuage your fears some, perhaps we can discuss the details of why finding this officer is so important.

  "One mighty empire has already fallen and these are just the opening moves, my friend. I promise you it won't be the last. If my suspicions about you are true, then you could be a powerful ally in the days to come."