"Lucky? Is that you?"
The battlesynth stared at him for a long moment before finally nodding. That simple gesture sent a flood of emotion through Jason despite the fact he'd still not spoken. He took a step backwards and the fire in his side from the needles flared up, causing him to grit his teeth.
"Captain?" Crusher asked over the channel.
"I'm good," Jason gasped. "We're good. On our way up. Make sure Doc knows those other shuttles are still out there."
"No, they're not," Kage said. "Once the last of the strike teams was routed, they broke off and climbed for orbit. I don't think they were here to engage, at least not after you downed one with a handheld weapon. They were only supposed to contain outbound traffic from this area."
"That's not good," Jason muttered. "Come on, Lucky… we need to get on the roof."
Lucky grabbed the back of Jason's tactical harness with his left hand and pointed up to the roof with his right. Not understanding at first, Jason made the mistake of agreeing before clarifying. "Yeah, we need to—AHHHHHH!!!"
Lucky fired his repulsors and picked Jason up by the harness, rocketing both of them up to the roof. Normally this would have been fine, actually preferable to hoofing it up the stairs, but with his injuries Jason almost blacked out from the pain. He landed gently on the roof, but his legs were rubber and wouldn't support his weight. Once he collapsed in a heap, he saw a giant boot step into his field of view.
"You lost one of my favorite guns."
"Shut the hell up, Crusher," Jason moaned. "Cas, can you do anything with this pain?"
Stand by.
"Who the hell is Cas?" Kage asked.
Oops.
"I didn't say 'Cas,'" Jason said. "I said 'My ass, can you do anything with this pain.' I was talking to myself."
"Did you suffer a head injury?" Kage asked after a moment.
"Can't rule it out," Jason said as the pain began to ebb away with Cas manipulating the receptors via the implant and his army of nanobots. "Where the hell is the ship?" Even as he said it, the sound of engines could be heard over the wail of alarms through the small community, but they weren't his engines.
"They just don't quit, do they?" Crusher growled.
"Who is it? Is that your ship?" Venda Seh asked, his family huddled near him.
"Kage, get them to cover," Jason said. "That's not our ride… that's the other team that's been hunting you and I don't think their goals align with yours of staying alive." The unusual transport that Chenyx Six flew descended out of the clouds on a direct course. Since the tracker had been removed, and it had taken them this long to catch up, Jason had to assume the merc crew was working for the ConFed.
"Doc, Jurg's crew just showed up," Jason said as he keyed his mic, but he couldn’t hear his own voice in the helmet. When his suit overloaded, it must have taken out the com. "Kage, let Doc know we have a hostile over the objective! Crusher, give me my weapon back."
Before Jason could bring the railgun to bear, the ship roared over the building, opening up with the forward cannons and ripping up a section of the roof near the edge of the east wing. It was obviously meant as a warning.
"Jurg is transmitting on an open channel," Crusher told him. "He's demanding we hand over the Seh family."
Jason didn't respond right away, trying to line up the quick little ship for a shot, but there was no way he could hit it while it was flying so erratically.
"Tell him to piss off and then tell Doc to hurry his ass up," Jason said before turning to Lucky. "You think you can give him a little surprise when he comes back for another run?"
Lucky nodded again and moved off apart from them. Jason could see the telltale shimmer of his shields coming back up.
"Now he's saying we only have a few minutes to hand them over before the ConFed opens up with that battleship," Crusher said. "He's making a deal to split the bounty with us, eighty/twenty."
"Tell him sixty/forty since we did most of the work for them already," Jason said, making a show of lowering his weapon and nodding to Lucky.
"Seventy/thirty? We get thirty?"
"Deal. Go ahead and toss your weapon down but make sure he knows the Phoenix is showing up soon. Probably."
Jason heard Crusher's profanity-laced response to lock in the deal and saw the transport swing about slowly, ceasing its evasive maneuvering. He was tempted to try and snap off a shot at it, but if he missed they'd be sitting right in the sights of its big guns. He stretched, feeling the tightness in his side, and discarded his now useless helmet along with the railgun.
"Here he comes," Crusher said. "He wants the family moved out and then us moved away."
"Too bad," Jason said. "Tell him we don't trust him to pay up and that we can just as easily make our own deal with the ConFed for them."
"He says we don't know his contact so it wouldn't do us any good," Crusher said.
Jason just smiled as they got Jurg to admit it was the ConFed that hired them. Likely Intel Section as they were famous for contracting outside help if for no other reason than plausible deniability. It also made it easier to kill off an inconvenient asset when they were nothing but grubby mercs or bounty hunters.
He held his breath as the transport moved in and settled to a hover fifty meters away from the rooftop. He could see Jurg pointing at him and gesturing to where Kage was with the family, looking agitated. Jason just smiled and shrugged, shaking his head. The merc captain stood up in his seat and could be seen shouting something, completely ignoring what he assumed was a programmable kill-bot milling around near the damaged section of roof.
"Now, Lucky!" Jason shouted. The words had barely left his lips when Lucky turned and fired his repulsors, flying in a shallow arc that landed him on the top of the transport with a clang. Jurg was looking about inside his bridge and shouting at his crew while Lucky wasted no time executing his plan. He ran to the starboard pontoon and opened fire with his cannons directly into the ship's engine. The emitters exploded in a flash of blue plasma and the ship began to list to the right and sink.
Jurg opened fire, but his guns were now trained at the sky as his ship spun away from the building and continued falling to the ground. The left engine was still operational so it didn't lose all lift capacity, but the asymmetrical gravimetric fields couldn't keep the boxy ship aloft and it was slowly spiraling downward.
The ship hit the ground so gently that it barely kicked up any dust. Jason heard Lucky firing a few more shots before he flew back up over the lip of the roof and landed near the Seh family. By the time Jason and Crusher got to the edge, the crew of the ship was already climbing out onto the dorsal surface.
"Burke! You coward!" Jurg screamed at him.
"Having a bit of engine trouble?" Jason called down, stepping back as one of the crew fired a plasma pistol at him. He just laughed and walked back while Jurg kept screaming insults, then switched to pleading.
"You can't leave us down here, Burke! That battleship is going to open fire any minutes Take me with you and I'll give you the entire bounty! Burke?!"
"Tell Doc to approach from the south side," Jason said to Crusher and waved everyone else over to him as the sound of the Phoenix finally arriving became louder and more pronounced. "Come on, everyone! We need to get the hell out of here before the Solas decides to do this the easy way."
By the time they were all filing up the ramp and into the ship, Kage warned him that the chatter over the com in orbit was that the Solas was descending into a parked position over top of them.
Chapter 24
"What the hell were you doing?! I could have walked here faster than that!"
"There were—"
"Move!" Jason cut Doc off and moved into the pilot's seat. Whatever Cas was doing to mask the pain was becoming less effective, and he saw stars as he shifted his body and the needles dug in a little further. "Is everybody in and secured?"
"Yes!" Kage yelled as he ran onto the bridge and hopped into the copilot's seat. "We have to go now
! Go, go, GO!"
Jason crammed the throttle to the stop just as proximity alarms began blaring and the sensors were washed out by a blinding light: The Solas had opened fire. The Phoenix roared off ahead of the pressure wave caused by the powerful orbital cannon hitting right in the middle of the city. The building they'd been over was on the outskirts, so they had a head start on the spreading destruction, but Jason didn't want to climb up higher and risk being picked up by the battleship's sensors.
"Kage, find me a big, sturdy building that's well outside the maximum effective radius of that weapon," he said, concentrating through the pain on keeping the big gunship skimming over the buildings. His right display showed a view from the rear of the ship, and all he could see coming at them was a wall of fire and debris. Knowing this was a heavily populated city made the bile rise in his throat. It was one thing to hear about the ConFed's new campaign of atrocities second-hand, but seeing the brutality up close was quite another.
"I see what you're thinking," Kage said, his four hands a blur on his control panels. "Stand by, I have a suitable site coming up. Fly to the indicators."
Jason angled over to starboard, keeping his bank shallow so he didn't shed off too much precious velocity. As it was, the ship was being pushed and buffeted by the leading edge of the shockwave, but they were already going as fast as he dared to push it so close to the surface. After a few minutes that seemed like a few hours, the wall of death began to flag and the flames gave way to billowing clouds of dirt and debris, allowing the Phoenix to shoot well ahead.
"There," Kage said, highlighting a building on Jason's display. For some reason he was having trouble integrating his neural implant into the ship. "It looks empty too… lucky us."
Jason could see that the massive structure was built out over the water and looked like a production facility for surface vessels. Given Thalia Prime's economic stature it was likely they still utilized oceangoing ships to move large cargo. The building appeared not to have any doors where it met up with the river that would eventually take ships out to sea, and the Phoenix's sensors weren't picking up any energy barriers.
"Verify dimensions."
"Verified," Kage said. "We'll fit with room to spare. Set an altitude of five meters off the water and you'll be fine."
After double-checking the hard limits he'd set into the computer, Jason quickly descended towards the river, pulling up hard to a stop and spinning the Phoenix about before using the thrusters to push her backwards into the cavernous building. Relying on the external video feeds, he eased her back as far as he could so that the nose was well out of sight from anyone looking down from orbit. He debated putting the gear down and landing but decided to lock the ship into a hover with the engines running so that they'd be able to act in an instant if they were spotted.
"Is this really a better idea than running?" Twingo asked.
"They'll be tracking ships that left the blast radius," Jason said. "And those other cruisers will be identifying everything leaving and intercepting anything that looks suspicious. We'll wait here until they move on."
"They may sterilize this whole system," Crusher said. "They can't afford any ships leaving and telling about this."
"I believe they can," a new voice said from the bridge entrance. Venda Seh walked in on shaky legs and looked at the monitors of Doc's station that were displaying remote images of the destruction. "I've been waiting all these years for it to find me, but I never realized how much danger I was putting my neighbors in. You should have surrendered me, Captain."
"It's a little late for that now," Jason said, not in the mood to be charitable after seeing the scope of the destruction wrought for this one person. "I just hope what you know is worth the lives given to get it."
"It's something we both know, Captain." Venda turned to Jason. "Do you know what the being that's taken control of the ConFed calls itself?"
"I don't," Jason said, dreading what he would hear next.
"It calls itself the Machine… and it's exactly what you fear it is."
Jason felt lightheaded and he released the controls of the Phoenix before he accidently put her into a wall. It couldn't be. He'd destroyed the Machine. If it was gone, crushed into oblivion, how could it be here, now, in this quadrant?
"It reached out to us when you were still within the construct and we had just arrived at the edge of the system. At first it wanted us to come down and disable what you had done, but there was no way to traverse the system that quickly. After that it became … irrational … and demanded that we do something to save it, but it never really said what that should be."
"We were under the impression the Machine AI—which was actually just one of the AIs aboard the construct that had gone haywire—was destroyed," Jason said. "Lucky and I had gotten to its processing core and destroyed it. Once it was gone, we were able to leave. It had relinquished control on the station. From what I’m hearing now, that wasn't the case."
"From what we were able to tell after the fact, the first communications from it were a ruse to gain access to our systems," Venda said. "From there it uploaded itself into our computers in sections. Once you saved us from that other species and we fueled your ship and went our separate ways, we began to notice strange anomalies within our various subsystems, but they were so minor at first they were just written up and ignored. By the time we were pushing back into ConFed space, however, I knew that something was seriously wrong."
Jason, Venda, and Kage were sitting on the bridge while the others rested. The Phoenix was still sitting at idle, hovering within the building while the skies darkened from the airborne debris. It had been two full Thalian days since the attack, and during that time they'd been monitoring whatever com traffic they could to find out what might be happening outside. Three hours prior they'd begun hearing from search and rescue crews, so Jason assumed the ConFed ships had moved on. He planned to wait another five hours to be sure before emerging from hiding and pushing out of the system.
"When did you become aware that you had a stowaway?" Kage asked. His choice of words made Jason uncomfortably aware of the personality hitching a ride within his own head.
"When we arrived in Aracoria to refuel and make some provisional repairs before pushing on to Filban Major, it locked me in my quarters and began to… negotiate," Venda said. Aracoria was home to one of the ConFed’s largest production shipyards, but Filban Major was the hub for Fleet operations. If Venda took the Machine there, it would have jumping-off access to damn near anywhere within ConFed space.
"I was first threatened, and then I was given assurances. It told me that all it wanted to do was streamline the government for the benefit of all, that it was compelled to perform its task of organizing chaotic systems. It wanted me to be its representative in the military and told me that it had already begun the process of ensuring the compliance of those within key positions of the civilian government. At first, it didn't seem like a bad deal."
"I'll bet," Jason laughed mirthlessly. "But I can understand your position. If the system is already hopelessly corrupt, how much worse can a single actor make it, right?"
"That's generally what my thinking was," Venda admitted. "Then there was the fact that it already knew everything about my family and threatened to have them tortured to death if I refused. Then it showed me that it was already securing the resources to do so. It was terrifying how quickly it moved to consolidate its own power.
"We'd returned to port and I was finally able to get off the Matav, but the Machine was already busy infiltrating Filban Major's computer systems and propagating through the ConFed Unified Defense Grid. I tried to report the incident through the shipyard's maintenance system to see if the engineers could purge the alien presence, but it was too late. Worse still, the Machine knew I'd tried to stop it."
"So you decided to activate your emergency escape plan," Jason guessed.
"Indeed," Venda said. "I'd always assumed it would only be necessary should I accidentally
cross some powerful Councilmember by killing one of their relatives in the line of duty, but I was happy I'd participated in the program nonetheless."
"So why does the Machine want you dead? It just wiped out an entire city to get to you," Kage said. "Do you know of some vulnerability?"
"Nothing of a technical nature," Venda said. "Well, not really. I know that it can only exist on certain types of computers in this region. The core aboard the Matav was the latest quantum-type from Khepri, and even it was only barely suitable. It can easily reach out through connected systems, but it can only exist as a sentient being on processing cores that are compatible with itself."
This is true.
"The biggest threat I am to the Machine is that I know that it is, essentially, a piece of software," Venda continued. "It has quickly and decisively secured power through fear and bribes, playing the puppet master while everyone assumes this is just the normal ebb and flow of power within the Core Worlds. If people were to learn that the sudden brutal shift in policies was being driven by a corrupt bit of programming? I don't think it would take long before the Machine found itself purged. It is for these things I know, that nobody else does, that I think this Alocur you spoke of has been pursuing me. Either that or I have willingly played into a trap."
"Where do you think it actually resides right now?" Jason asked. "We did some checking… your old ship was decommissioned and scrapped."
"I couldn't possibly begin to guess," Venda said. "It's far too clever to have only a single copy of itself residing on an obvious system, and there are many of the new quantum cores being installed throughout the governmental systems."
Jason didn't respond. The shock of learning that the corrupted AI from the Machine had returned to ConFed space was wearing off and was now replaced with the dull ache of guilt. It wasn't just the guilt of having led the way to the infernal thing in the first place, but for allowing any ship to return and risk even the knowledge of the Ancients to make it back. Even now he was looking out the canopy at the aftermath of wholesale destruction and the slaughter of innocents because he'd taken action and denied the Machine something it wanted. Even hearing Venda's story he wasn't able to convince himself it had been worth it.
Omega Force: Legends Never Die (OF10) Page 20