Soldiers of Fortune

by Joshua Dalzelle

  Ωmega Force: Soldiers of Fortune

  Copyright: Joshua Dalzelle, 2013

  Prologue:

  It had been nearly fourteen Earth-months since the incidents at The Vault and a sparsely populated planet, Kaldsh-4. The unintended consequences of those actions had kept the six members of Omega Force on the run, struggling to stay one step ahead of the powerful enemies they had unwittingly crossed. Through it all, the six beings, each of a different species, had remained dedicated and loyal to both the team and their new mandate. This heartened Captain Jason Burke greatly; of the six, only three could be considered trained soldiers, himself included. When the heat had been turned up on them he had feared that the group cohesion would begin to deteriorate.

  Although he would never admit it to the others, Jason was somewhat pleased with the turn of events; trying to operate while evading professional kill-teams had been an irreplaceable training opportunity for them. Not only that, but the further they fled up one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms, the further away from Earth they went. He considered protecting the secret of his homeworld’s existence and its location one of his primary functions.

  The Phoenix, the Jepsen Aero DL7 heavy gunship that Jason captained, had also not escaped without needing drastic changes. They had been forced to completely replace the ship’s com nodes and transponders, at great cost, in order to eliminate one of the methods their enemies had been using to track them. While they were at it, Jason had the ship’s engineer, Twingo, overhaul the interior to more comfortably accommodate them on long flights as well as replace the ship’s flight controls as he had never been able to fully grasp the twin-stalk system that Jepsen had originally equipped the ship with. Instead, Twingo had changed it over to a modified stick-and-rudder system that would be familiar to any human aircraft pilot.

  The last step in shedding off their past lives had been to have Kage, Omega Force’s resident code slicer, hack into as many public record databases as he could find and delete any and all records of their existence. They all assumed new, clean identities afterwards and hoped it would throw the dogs off their scent, so to speak. These steps had been moderately successful, but one issue that still remained was that they were easily identifiable based on their appearance. Jason was the only human for hundreds of lightyears in any direction and, although his appearance wasn’t that exotic when compared to other species, his mannerisms still stood out.

  There was also Lucky, a sentient synthetic being that was built specifically for combat. Synths of any variety were rare already, and a battlesynth even more so. Wherever they went, the large combat unit caused quite a stir. The other warrior in their retinue was Crusher, an alien straight out of any human child’s nightmare. At nearly seven feet tall, Crusher was heavily muscled and all teeth, claws, and unbridled ferocity. He was Galvetic, a species that only existed on one planet and employed a rigid caste system within their society. Crusher was of that world’s warrior class and was the result of millennia of careful, systematic selective breeding programs. While he was normally exquisitely courteous, Jason had witnessed the monster come unhinged in hand-to-hand combat situations, and it was absolutely terrifying. Thankfully, Crusher’s loyalty to both his Captain and Omega Force was unflappable.

  Besides Twingo and Kage, Omega Force had one other non-combatant; Dr. Jorvren Ma’Fredich, or “Doc.” Doc was their elder statesman as well as their medic, he was easily the most traveled and most highly educated of the lot. He also had a certain finesse when dealing with clients and a knack for ferreting out whether or not the job was legitimately one they should take.

  Omega Force operated under one guiding principle; to help others that didn’t have the power to help themselves. This often entailed aiding people who lived under corrupt or uncaring governments and, more often than not, necessitated the judicious application of force. It was a hard life, but also hugely rewarding.

  Chapter 1

  High in the upper atmosphere of Corran, a world under political quarantine, white hot plasma streamers heralded the arrival of an enormous intersystem cargo freighter that was beginning its attempt at making landfall. The ship was never designed for this, and there was no guarantee it was even going to work. During the subduing of Corran all the orbital platforms with tethers capable of ferrying cargo to and from the surface had been destroyed, so in order to get critical supplies planetside during the subsequent negotiations radical steps had to be taken. One of these steps was to try and land massive cargo ships laden with medical supplies, food, and infrastructure equipment.

  Now past the point of no return, the ship was engulfed in superheated gasses as it slammed into the planet’s mesosphere, its thrusters and gravimetric drives howling in protest as they worked to slow the ship’s descent. The sensors from tracking stations on the ground were blinded as the thermal signature of the ship climbed several thousand degrees and the ablative thermal shielding began to slough off in the slipstream… and this was exactly what the six beings aboard the comparatively tiny Jepsen Aero DL7 gunship were counting on.

  The Phoenix was tucked up between the aft drive pods of the plummeting freighter, fighting to maintain position in the violent turbulence created by the atmosphere breaking around the irregularly shaped hull of the larger ship. The pilot of the gunship, Captain Jason Burke, struggled mightily at the controls without the aid of the ship's grav-drive to keep it under control. In fact, all the grav generators were powered down (including deck plating) to minimize their chances of being detected by one of the picket ships in orbit.

  “Stop fighting her!” Kage shouted from the copilot seat. “Just keep your control inputs smooth and let the computer worry about keeping the interval between us and the freighter.”

  “Do you want to do this?” Jason ground out between clenched teeth.

  “Not even a little bit,” the smaller alien answered glibly.

  “Then shut the hell up and let me do it,” Jason replied, sweat beading up on his forehead from both the temperature of the ship’s bridge and the stress of the situation. While his piloting had improved exponentially over the last year, trying to dead-stick the gunship down through the atmosphere while hiding up under a freighter that was nearly a kilometer long was taxing him. With the exception of Twingo, who was in the engineering bay, the rest of his crew were on the bridge and displaying varying degrees of the terror they felt as they watched through the forward canopy. Most of them wisely kept silent, afraid to distract their captain during the atmospheric entry as they bounced around in their restraints.

  “It looks like it’s starting to shed the thermal blanket,” Kage said. The freighter had a woefully underpowered drive for what it was being asked to do so, in order to protect the ship during re-entry, the contractor had applied an auxiliary heat shield that was designed to burn away as it descended through the atmosphere. The ship’s de-orbit burn had it coming in over the Western Sea on a direct approach to Corran City Starport, so most of the larger chucks that were blasted off in the slipstream would fall harmlessly into the water.

  “I see that,” Jason acknowledged. “Get ready for the rough part.” Crusher moaned mournfully at this, the hulking alien was not all that fond of flying to begin with. Running the ship through a violent storm of superheated gas while trying to manually maintain precise spacing with another ship, without the grav-plating of the deck active, was making him miserable. He sat at one of the bridge stations, maintaining a death-grip on the console in front of him. I guess Twingo will be repairing that later. Jason kept a sharp eye on the thick pieces of shielding that were peeling away from the freighter’s hull; he wanted to try to blend in with them, but also would prefer not to fly headlong into one.

  “Now!”

  J
ason shoved the stick forward and the Phoenix pitched over sharply, falling away from the freighter. He fought to maintain control as the gunship bucked like a wild animal in the turbulent wake vortex left by the larger vessel’s passing. He ignored the curses and yelps from his crew and the litany of warnings from the computer as he concentrated on the largest piece of shielding he could find and chased it down into the atmosphere. His neural implant painted the target with a reticle that floated in his field of view thanks to this ocular implants. The ship had decelerated dramatically and was now in freefall as it pursued the large sheet of thermal shielding, the idea was to appear as just another piece of spent thermal blanket falling to the sea.

  The target decelerated much more quickly than the Phoenix, however, and ended up passing below and behind them before Jason could react. Suffering from target-fixation, he kept pushing the nose over as he followed its path and failed to realize that he was approaching the ship’s stall speed while not under power. The warning from the computer came too late as the left wing slowed enough to stop providing lift and the big gunship rolled over onto her back and began an inverted, spinning fall towards the surface.

  Other than Crusher, the crew was too startled to cry out as they were thrown against their restraints. “Activate the deck-plating!” Jason called to Kage. A split second later the pull of gravity reversed and they were slammed back into their seats as the artificial gravity was restored. The effect was wildly disorienting, but at least Jason wasn’t trying to control the ship while hanging upside-down in his harness. He reached over and flipped the four main engine controls to *ENGAGE/RUN* and watched as the switches went from a steady red to a flashing amber, indicating that the main engines were going into their startup sequence.

  The first twinges of true panic began to creep up on him as the ship fell out of control through the atmosphere and the engines seemed to be taking an especially long time to come online. The plan had been to fly in cold and use the Phoenix's lifting-body to glide far enough down into the atmosphere that the engines' heat signature wouldn’t show up on anybody’s scan when they finally engaged them. The tumble they were in had ruined that plan; if the main engines didn’t light off in time, he wouldn’t be able to power out of the stall and the mission would be cut short by virtue of them plunging to their deaths into the Western Sea.

  Rumbling signs of life from the aft section of the ship gave Jason a sliver of hope that the engines would come up in time as they descended through forty-five thousand feet. It would still be close though. The flight control surfaces were useless, so he fired the auxiliary reactive thrusters to try and get the nose pointed down to restore the airflow over the wings, allowing them to get some bite into the atmosphere and provide some stability.

  The unorthodox maneuver worked and the gunship grudgingly righted herself and pointed her nose down, allowing them to pick up some airspeed. The Phoenix wasn’t a glider, however, and they were still losing ten feet of altitude for every foot they flew forward, the nose pitched too far down due to the steep rake of the wings. He was about to offer up a silent prayer when all the engine indicators greened up at once and a healthy BOOM! resonated throughout the entire ship; the mains had come online and were providing thrust. Jason shoved the throttle forward and the Phoenix surged, picking up airspeed and allowing the wings to start generating sufficient lift to keep them in the air. They leveled out a little less than one-thousand feet above the sea and settled into stable, controlled flight.

  Finally trusting himself to speak, Jason turned to Kage, “Start feeding me navigational waypoints and get ready to bring the grav emitters back online once we’re clear of Corran City's sensor net.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kage said, still shaken up by the close call.

  The Phoenix streaked over the Western Sea low enough to whip up a foamy, turbulent wake in the water. They were paralleling the coast in a northerly direction, keeping just far enough off shore to avoid line of sight detection. Compared to the previous few harrowing hours under the freighter, flying at near-supersonic speeds at only a couple of hundred feet was child’s play. The timing of their entry looked like it was going to work out in their favor; the sun was now on the horizon and it would likely be dark when they reached their destination. Jason told the computer to maintain a constant velocity and released the throttle, now only concentrating on keeping them on course, flying towards the waypoints on his display that Kage had identified.

  “He almost kill us again?” Twingo asked, walking onto the bridge. He then stopped, frowning at the crumpled console surface in front of Crusher, who actually managed to look apologetic.

  “It wasn’t that bad this time,” Doc said. “We were almost all the way to the ground before we gave up all hope.”

  “When the grav emitters are charged, set the field for minimum null,” Jason said to Kage, refusing to take the bait. “What are you doing up here, Twingo?”

  “I can monitor engineering from up here,” the short, blue-skinned alien said in a hurt voice. "I'm always stuck down there and everybody else is up here."

  "We're not exactly having a party," Jason said. "But since you're here go ahead and start going through all these warnings the ship spit out during our entry, I can't tell which are real and which ones she's just being overly dramatic about."

  "On it," Twingo said, giving Jason an odd look. The crew had begun to notice Jason sometimes referring to the ship as if it were a person more and more. For six males that were still young for their respective species, they gossiped like old women. Doc surmised that Jason was feeling frustrated since he was cut off from human female companionship for over a year, but he admitted to the others that he didn't know what was normal for human mating cycles. Twingo couldn't help himself as his mouth started to move before his brain could stop it, "You know, Captain... some of the females we've run into out here aren't that different looking from you. I'd imagine all the hardware is compatible..." He trailed off at the look Jason gave him,

  "Twingo," he said slowly, "what in the fuck are you talking about?"

  "We're clear of the sensor net's range," Kage said, saving Twingo from having to give an awkward answer. "Emitters set to minimum null." The minimum null setting would zero out the gravitational pull of the planet in relation to the ship. It allowed them to stay aloft without needing repulsors and reduced the engine output needed to push them along, but since the gravimetric drive wasn't actually propelling the ship they were still hidden from most sensors.

  "Very good," Jason said. "Ok everyone, tighten it up. We're still in the middle of an op." He looked pointedly at Twingo at that last part. He then realized that he hadn't heard from Lucky since they had begun atmospheric entry. When he looked over his left shoulder the stoic synth was in his usual spot, to the left and behind his captain. "Lucky, how the hell did you stay planted during all that?"

  "I have mag-locks built into my feet, Captain," he said, raising one foot as if to show Jason. "It makes EVA operations much easier." As a synthetic, a race of constructed, sentient beings, Lucky didn't need to go through the rigmarole of suiting up for extravehicular activities, or EVA. He could just walk out the hatch as if he were taking a stroll down the street.

  "Yeah, and you also weigh a ton," Twingo said irritably. "You keep warping the deck wherever you drop anchor when we're maneuvering without artificial gravity. I don't know why you can't just sit in a damn chair."

  "I do not weigh anywhere near a..."

  "ENOUGH!" Jason barked over the brewing argument. It was harmless banter, but it was a dangerous distraction. "You do still remember that we're in the middle of a dangerous mission, right? Get serious, and get to work. I don't want to hear another word that isn't related to our target until we're meshing out of this system."

  "Sorry, Captain," the pair said in unison.

  It's like babysitting a bunch of damn children sometimes.

  The crew sat in silence as the Phoenix pushed north while the terminator crossed over them and
the sky darkened. Jason swung the ship west as soon as they crossed their last waypoint and bled off some more airspeed, wanting to keep the noise signature to a minimum as they headed back towards land. He also tweaked the engine configuration, closing the exhaust nozzles down to about twenty percent and putting them into a low-power mode. They would have to pass quite closely to someone to be spotted from the ground while flying thusly.

  They approached the coast right on target, their goal was a river mouth that led inland from the Western Sea. This particular river not only was close to their target, but it was too small to be used for any real commerce, just the occasional fisherman. The Phoenix ghosted up the river at only three-hundred kilometers per hour, her engines almost idling, Jason wanted to eliminate the high-pitched whistle of air moving over the hull that occurred at high subsonic speeds. Supersonic was obviously out of the question; it was important they get in and out without being detected on this job. Fortunately, the night had decided to cooperate and, as the air cooled, a dense blanket of fog had settled over the landscape.

  "Turn off in twenty seconds, fly to the indicators," Kage said.

  "Copy," Jason replied. "Ground team, go suit up and prep the party bus." Crusher and Lucky immediately left the bridge to get ready for the next phase of the operation. After another few seconds Jason banked gently north and climbed up and over the hills that lined the small, muddy river. While his eyes had been improved to see in an expanded spectrum thanks to the nanotech implants that were in him, for now he was piping the ship's sensor feed directly into his visual cortex via his neural implant. The effect was astonishing, if a little disorienting; he was able to look down through the hull of the ship and view the landscape as if he were riding in his seat out in the open. Due to the heavy fog, he had chosen long-wave infrared with a false-color overlay so he could penetrate the misty blanket and view the ground as they rushed over it. This was quite necessary as he was flying with their active sensors offline; no radar, lidar, or tachyon bursts to navigate with lest they be detected. He pushed on over the heavily wooded hills, continuing his northerly course as the Phoenix's vertical stabilizers occasionally broke through the low-lying clouds like dual shark fins.