“My pleasure, Captain,” Lucky said. “I know you are overly fond of your railgun, but might I suggest something a little more appropriate for a boarding party?”
“Afraid I’ll shoot through the hull?” Jason asked with a grin.
“I was more concerned with something like a breach of the reactor shell,” Lucky stated matter-of-factly.
“No worries. We’ll all be taking blasters with stun capability,” Jason said, looking pointedly at Crusher, who was hefting a mainline infantry weapon. With a scowl of disgust, he put it back on the rack and grabbed two shorter plasma carbines. “We’re going in full force, but we need at least a couple of prisoners, preferably bridge crew.”
It took another ten minutes for them to fully kit up. Waiting for the still-damaged armory doors to open so they could get into the cargo bay, Jason called up to the bridge over his armor’s com. “Go ahead and bring the Phoenix to full tactical alert, Doc. I want you to target engines only if it looks like they’re accelerating to break orbit. We’ll be riding the transit beam down so we don’t damage the gangway when we’re cutting through.”
“Copy, Captain. Weapons and shields coming online, and reactor at seventy percent power and climbing.”
He could feel the power thrumming though his ship as the tactical systems came online. Walking over to a set of cabinets set against the forward bulkhead, he grabbed an unwieldy, high-powered laser that was built specifically to cut through hardened hull plating. It had started life as a shipyard tool but Twingo had modified it to be used as a breaching tool. It was fairly subtle if they picked their entry location carefully. More than once they had been on a ship for minutes before the crew realized they’d been boarded. Jason was hoping to use that element of surprise in this case. If he let Kage try to slice into an airlock control system they might be detected, and they had no idea what sort of anti-intrusion protocols might be in place.
As he walked back to his friends, he watched with a bemused expression hidden behind his own visor as Lucky tried to help Crusher cram his helmet on. The warrior had about as much protective gear on as he was ever willing to wear: a full pressure layer with a flexible protective outer layer. Attached to that were individual plates of shielding, but not the head-to-toe armor like the type Jason wore. On his back was a simple life support unit with a redundant backup.
“Captain, we’ll be in position in ten minutes. I’m opening the belly hatch now.”
A second after Doc had spoken, the lights in the cargo bay dimmed to a muted red and the circular hatch in the floor sunk and irised open to reveal the dark planet below. They were making their final approach while they were on the night-side, but the speed they were carrying in orbit would put them into daylight within minutes. The three of them stood at the perimeter of the opening and watched, transfixed, as the dull, battered hull of the traveler ship came into view. Doc was being careful and they closed the interval at a stately ten meters per second.
“I’m activating the transit beam. You’re a go, Assault Team. I’ll back off to three hundred meters aft to support you.”
“Copy that, Bridge. We’ll call when we need a lift,” Jason said as he nodded to Lucky. The battlesynth stepped off the edge into the transit beam and was gently deposited on the hull of the other ship. He walked around for a moment to see if any action would be taken against him.
“Landing site secured, Captain. You may come down.”
Jason, followed by Crusher, also floated down the beam and onto the enemy ship. Activating the mag-locks in his boots, he stepped around gingerly, expecting an anti-personnel weapon to hit him at any time. He looked up just in time to barely make out the Phoenix as she backed off. In the shadow of the planet, the ship was soon hidden from sight, even at such a relatively close range.
“I think I found a hatch, Captain,” Crusher’s voice came over the com. He was kneeling beside an irregularly shaped part of the hull, concentrating hard not to look around him. For all his ferocity, EVA operations in the hard vacuum of space terrified him, though he would never admit it. Nor would he falter in his duties either, so Jason never brought it up. He walked over to look down and had to agree that it looked like a service hatch of some sort.
Swinging the cutting tool around, he knelt down and placed the device against the hull. It reminded Jason of an oversized wood router like the kind he had used in high school shop class. He lined up the projector with the seam and activated the beam. There was enough particulate matter and wisps of atmosphere floating around the hull that the red beam was partially visible as he worked his way around the perimeter. The cutter also had an indicator to let him know how deep he was cutting and whether or not he had made it all the way through the hull.
Within a couple of minutes Jason had completed his circuit of the hatch and set the tool aside, letting it cling to the hull with its own tiny mag-lock. Small puffs of vapor continued to spurt out of the cut; the atmospheric pressure within the ship had finally pushed it up enough that he could get a grip on it with his gauntlets. Utilizing the enhanced strength provided by his armor, he slowly pulled the hatch up until it was loose enough that, in a burst of explosive decompression, it flew up and behind them into space. Shit. I hope that doesn’t hit my ship. Although the action had been completely silent to him in the vacuum of space, he had no doubt the cutting and wrenching of metal had been quite loud inside.
Motioning with one hand, he sent Lucky in first. A moment later there was another blast of atmosphere out of the open hatch. “I appear to be in a maintenance bay, Captain. There is an airlock entrance that is still functional, although barely so. You and Crusher will have to cycle through it one at a time and I will try to contain as much of the atmosphere as possible.”
Jason didn’t answer as he motioned Crusher through the hatch second. Normally the warrior wanted to be either first or last, but he gladly took the opportunity to get inside the ship, even if it meant leaving his captain clinging to the hull alone. After another blast of frozen air had passed, Jason slipped down through the hole and banged his fist against the door. It opened at once and he was unprepared for Crusher grabbing him and yanking him inside. The hatch slammed shut, which he heard this time, and he looked around the dingy room. It was filthy. Grease coated most surfaces and a random smattering of debris clung to the oily film that seemed omnipresent. He walked up and ran a hand over the airlock hatch door.
“Good ‘ol hinges,” he said. “And no active safety locks or alarms. Interesting.”
“Indeed, Captain,” Lucky agreed. “If they did not detect the drop in pressure, it is likely they don’t know we are aboard.”
“This place is disgusting,” Crusher grumbled as he poked around some of the work benches. “Who keeps a starship in this condition?”
“We’re about to find out,” Jason said as he unslung his weapon, fully away of how ridiculous that had sounded. “Time to get it on.” Lucky charged his weapons and went to full combat mode, eyes glowing red, as Crusher pulled both his carbines and held them muzzles up in a loose port arms.
They swung open the door leading into the ship and burst through, weapons ready, to be greeted by nobody but a barrage of warnings from their sensors. Radiation levels were at unsafe conditions in the area they were in, and the atmosphere was also toxic. They were safe in their protective gear, for the moment, but they would need to be decontaminated before they could reboard the Phoenix.
“Captain, with the environment so toxic it is unlikely we will find anyone down here,” Lucky said.
“Agreed,” Jason said. “Let’s begin pushing forward. The whole ship can’t be contaminated.” They moved quickly through the corridors of what seemed to be the engineering areas. The conditions were deplorable. Corrosion covered most surfaces, exposed conductors sparked and sputtered, and barely any of the displays were functional. It was just as well, as they didn’t have a good translation matrix for written A’arcooni yet, if that was even the language that was being displayed. B
ut it also meant navigating through the ship would be a bit more difficult.
The further they trudged, still not encountering any crew, the more Jason found it hard to believe that the ship was actually still spaceworthy. Eventually they came to a large, shielded hatch emblazoned with bright white script and symbols. “Probably warnings about not contaminating the rest of the ship,” Jason said. “Let’s go ahead inside.”
Lucky walked up and overpowered the hatch to gain access to the rest of the ship. This did set off alarms. White lights strobed in the passageway and a recorded voice began blaring a repeating message, but it wasn’t in A’arcooni so they had no idea what it was saying. With no idea if the alarm was for an intruder alert or a radiation alert, the team leveled their weapons and began moving forward again. At the end of the short passage they were hit from all sides by high-pressure misting jets with a chemical that their sensors said was non-toxic. Probably the decon station before going into the rest of the ship. Those jets look added as an afterthought.
After clearing the last hatch the radiation alerts went away, although the ship still appeared to have unsafe levels throughout for anyone not wearing protective gear. They paused a minute and looked at the three passages that branched out in front of them.
“Which way do we go?” Crusher asked.
“How the hell would I know,” Jason said irritably. “I’ve never been here before.”
“I was just asking—”
Crusher was cut off by the arrival of three A’arcooni technicians, decked out in hazmat suits, rushing at them from the corridor to their right. The trio stopped short and stared in open-mouthed disbelief at the assault team before turning and running the way they had come, screaming the entire way.
“Shit!” Jason didn’t hesitate as he brought up his weapon and fired three stun shots after them. The range was already too great, however, so he gritted his teeth, flipped the selector, and loosed another salvo of bolts before the three, ungainly in their protective gear, could get around the corner and sound a warning to the rest of the ship. They were dead before they hit the floor. “If they’d sounded an alarm we could be swamped,” he explained.
“No complaints here,” Crusher said. “So we go that way?”
“It’s as good a direction as any,” Jason agreed. “Let’s go.”
They wasted no time traversing the distance to the first junction. On a hunch, Jason turned left and continued to push in the direction he thought was towards the front of the ship. It was soon after that they encountered their first armed A’arcooni. The small security detail opened fire with handheld lasers of such low power they caused no damage to Lucky or Jason’s armor. Crusher tucked up behind the other two since he was the most exposed. Lucky fired twice, dropping two of the five, while Crusher tagged one more. The last two, seeing they could do nothing to stop the advancing intruders, did something Jason could never have anticipated. They turned the lasers on themselves and committed suicide.
“What the shit?!” Jason exclaimed as he rushed to the fallen aliens. He examined one closely, seeing the neat burn hole through its head, and then noticed that it was wearing a com headset. “I’d say it’s a safe bet they know we’re here now. Let’s move.”
The further they pressed into the ship, the more shocking the living conditions became. Trash was piled up in some rooms, leaving them uninhabitable, and the assault team was kicking debris around with every step. Lighting was hit or miss, and there were signs of serious structural damage along some of the corridors.
They encountered two more security teams, the last of which was armed with nothing more than projectile weapons that were comparable to Earth firearms. As with the first team, the survivors committed suicide as soon as they realized they couldn’t stop the intruders.
Even in their shock at the Kamikaze-style attacks, Jason and his teammates couldn’t help but notice the ship was surprisingly empty. They were never set upon by any significant force, which was fortunate. Even with the underpowered lasers, a concerted effort by three or four of them in the same spot could heat Jason’s armor to the point of failure. It would punch right though Crusher’s comparatively flimsy garment. The defenders never seemed to adopt any type of strategy, however, and just rushed out of side corridors or rooms, firing wildly.
“We’ve got to get to the bridge before the whole damn crew suicides,” Jason said, breaking into a jog. “Lucky, you’ll need to talk to them since we can’t actually speak A’arcooni, and it’s unlikely they have implants.”
“Of course, Captain.”
It wasn’t until they were amidships that things went from bizarre to truly horrifying. In a glassed-in room they could just make out rows of short glass cylinders laying on their sides, and racks of gear that gave off the unmistakable impression that it was medical equipment. Jason called for a halt and entered the room, moving slowly along the rows of cylinders. Within most of them was an A’arcooni infant. None of them looked healthy. He could see from his sensors that radiation levels were still dangerously high. For such delicate lives it was proving to simply be too much, and most seemed to be just barely hanging on.
As he was contemplating these innocent lives, a laser shot pierced the room and hit him in the shoulder, but caused no damage. He turned to see a panicked A’arcooni dive for a pressurized gas bottle and begin opening the valve. From the tank, flexible lines snaked out across the room to distribution manifolds and then on to each of the incubators. The realization of what he was trying to do shocked Jason to his core, but he couldn’t fire without hitting the pressurized tank and blowing it up.
“STOP HIM!!” he shouted to the others. Lucky and Crusher had already been moving to intercept the crew member when he entered, intent on capturing him while he was distracted with Jason, but now Crusher lunged with incredible speed and clamped his hand down on top of the smaller being’s own as it tried to turn the valve. With a sickening crunch of bone, Crusher pulled the A’arcooni off and tossed him across the room, smashing the glass window. He quickly re-closed the valve and looked at Jason questioningly.
“He was going to kill all the young,” Jason explained. “It’s the only reason he’d have risked his life to open that valve. Whatever is in that tank would either poison or suffocate them.”
“What is with these people?” Crusher wondered aloud, walking back towards the one he had tossed. He was too late, as the injured A’arcooni grabbed a sharp medical instrument and stabbed himself in the chest multiple times before collapsing again, dark, bluish blood streaming out of the largest wound for a moment before the alien died. Jason idly noticed that it didn’t spurt, but actually flowed out in a continuous stream.
“Doc can’t handle this many,” Jason said to them as he looked back to the helpless infants. “Lucky, make your way back to the airlock and establish contact with the Phoenix. Tell them to issue an emergency recall of the Diligent and alert them of the situation. Crusher, we’re going to the bridge to grab someone to question before he can suicide on us.” He was thankful that Lucky rushed out of the room without so much as an objection about not being there to protect him.
After ensuring the young A’arcooni had survived the attempt on their lives, and tearing the gas lines loose from the tank, Crusher and Jason pressed ahead at a fast run, hoping to gain the element of surprise. They continued to follow the corridors that seemed to be the most traveled, at least as evidenced by the foot traffic in the grime that caked the decks, hoping they led them to the command center of the ship.
For once, they were rewarded with some luck. As they rounded a curving passageway, they arrived just in time to see two A’arcooni trying to swing a massive blast door shut. Jason broke into a full sprint, his armored feet leaving dents in the deck plating, while Crusher fired on the two trying to close the door. Jason exploded onto the bridge but was unable to stop himself before crashing headlong into a console, destroying the controls and displays in a shower of sparks. By the time he got up, Crusher had down
ed another three and was advancing on the last two. One of them was still firing sporadically to try and distract them from the fact the other was frantically working the controls at his console. Jason didn’t doubt he was either trying to crash the ship into the planet or simply blow it up in orbit. He took careful aim and shot him with a stun bolt. The A’arcooni flopped against the console and crashed onto the floor. The last remaining crewmember seemed torn as he obviously wanted to end his own life but wasn’t sure if he should finish off the other first. Crusher decided for him with a well-placed shot to the chest.
“Check that the other one is still alive and then restrain him,” Jason said, still trying to yank his leg out of the demolished console. “Don’t forget to search him.”
“I think I can handle it,” Crusher said sarcastically, “but thanks, Captain.”
“Damn, you’re getting oversensitive,” Jason muttered as he looked about the bridge, trying to make sense of the controls and displays he was looking at. “I wish I could access internal sensors to see if there are any more crew members hiding onboard.”
“You think they’d actually work?”
“Good point.”
Lucky strode into the command room a few moments later. “The Diligent is on its way back at maximum velocity. I see you captured one. Very good, Captain.”
“Yeah … I think this one is the captain,” Jason said as he pointed to a dead A’arcooni with an especially elaborate uniform on. “So I’m guessing our friend here might be the first officer, or whatever their equivalent is. The others were trying to protect him until he could sabotage the ship when we came in.” The A’arcooni in question stirred slightly, so Jason shot him again with a stunner. Crusher looked up at him, his eyebrow raised beneath his clear helmet visor.
“I don’t know if they have some suicide device planted in them. I figure it’s best if Doc scans him first.”
Omega Force: Savage Homecoming Page 16