“As you’d imagine, quite a bit is interesting,” he rumbled, still looking at the display on his computer. “It does follow a certain pattern. This cult was ignored and ridiculed as fringe until they had enough members and influence to begin causing real trouble. There were a few high-profile terrorist attacks that led to some arrests, but thanks to the cult having members entrenched in the government itself they were never able to fully break them. By the time they realized just how dangerous they’d become, it was too late.”
“Sounds familiar,” Jason said scornfully. Many of the jobs his crew had taken happened to be putting out the fires from just such scenarios. They’d put down violent insurrections, hunted down terrorists and rogue military units, and tracked escaped criminals across dozens of star systems. It never ceased to amaze him how inept some governments were at handling the most basic of functions of keeping their citizenry safe.
“So you really think Deetz is heading for your homeworld? Is he the type to go out in one last blaze of glory for revenge?” Crusher turned off his computer and looked at Jason squarely. How could he have heard that from all the way down here?
“It feels right. I can’t point to anything specific, but at this point in the game he knows his moves are limited. Just running back to Breaker’s World to lick his wounds isn’t his style.”
“You spent far more time around him than I did,” Crusher admitted. “I was locked in a stasis pod for most of that trip.”
“Damn, that was a wild ride,” Jason laughed as he recalled their first mission together, a bumbling, desperate escape from an asteroid base called The Vault. “I can’t believe that actually worked.”
“I was surprised myself,” Crusher chuckled slightly. “I’d say that plan would fail nine times out of ten when tried. Luckily we got that one chance on the first try.”
“Yeah, all’s well that ends well I guess,” Jason said as he went back to the food processor.
“You’re still hungry?”
“No. I’m grabbing something for Twingo to try to mend some fences,” Jason said as he gathered the things for his best friend’s favorite breakfast. “He was less than thrilled with my course change and speed increase. He’s down monitoring the core and engines on only a few hours of sleep.”
*****
The flight to Earth was a long one. The blue planet was well out of the shadow of the ConFed’s influence and didn’t attract a lot of attention. Nobody would burn so much fuel to get to such an underdeveloped planet without good reason. Jason knew his ship was faster than the small runabout Deetz was traveling in, but he didn’t know if they’d changed courses in time to catch up. The militaries of Earth would be no match for even an underpowered ship such as that one.
Twingo convinced him to throttle the drive back to ninety-five percent to ensure they even made it there. Running at full power for days at a time was a risk that Jason wasn’t willing to take, after the engineer had given him the odds on whether or not the engines would take the abuse. He could do nothing while they were in transit, and the feeling of helplessness made him pace around the ship like a caged animal.
“If you don’t get some rest you’re going to be useless when we get there,” Taryn finally said on the third day of the flight.
“I’m not sure I can,” Jason admitted as he made his fourth lap from the armory up onto the bridge where she and Doc sat.
“Well, would you mind pacing in the cargo bay or something? You’re putting everyone else on edge,” Doc said from the terminal he’d been working at. Jason just glared at him and walked back off the bridge without another word.
The rest of the crew seemed equally on edge as he walked around and checked in on everybody. Their prisoner/guest seemed to be having second thoughts about coming along, as Twingo and Kage filled him in on some of their previous missions. Crusher seemed especially agitated the closer they got to Earth. After he snapped at Kage for practically nothing one evening, Jason remembered what he’d wanted to talk to the big warrior about.
“So … what are Korkarans?”
“I already told you,” Crusher practically growled at him.
“You told me as much as you wanted me to know. Now I’m asking you for the rest of it,” Jason insisted. Crusher glowered at him for a moment before relenting.
“The Korkarans have a long history with the warrior caste of my people,” he said. “It isn’t a pleasant history. They’ve attacked our world multiple times for nothing more than a challenge. When that didn’t work, they attacked our neighbors and allies to draw warriors off Galvetor to challenge them in combat.”
“So it’s an honor thing?” Jason asked.
“They seem to think so. But they’ve killed many innocent civilians in the course of issuing their challenges. In recent times they’ve hired themselves out as mercenaries. They’re utterly ruthless. Believe me when I tell you that even two of these things on your planet are going to cause serious carnage.” Jason swallowed hard at that. Anything that Crusher thought was a danger was probably more akin to a natural disaster.
“Are they beatable?”
“Oh, yeah. They just don’t go down easy, but they’re still as mortal as any of us,” Crusher said. That didn’t make Jason feel any better, as he left his friend to try to get a few hours of sleep. They were closing in to within a day of the Solar System and he wanted to be ready for anything.
Chapter 16
The entire crew, except Lucky, was a collective bundle of nerves as the Phoenix entered the last stretch before their mesh-in point. Jason chose to come in just inside the orbit of Uranus so they could do a thorough sensor sweep on the way in. They could always do a short intrasystem jump if they detected Deetz’s ship already near Earth.
When they were down to the last two hours of slip-space flight time, Jason and Crusher went down to the armory to gear up. They hoped to take the synth down in ship-to-ship combat, but they’d learned to be ready for anything. Twenty minutes after they’d walked off the bridge, the pair came thumping back up onto the command deck, Jason in full armor and Crusher in his usual sleeveless attire with a hardened battle vest. The third and most powerful member of the ground team, Lucky, stood stoically on the bridge, just waiting for the time he might need to be called into action. Jason knew the battlesynth had a full range of emotions, but he supposed being purpose-built for combat gave him some level of control over his fear and anxiety. Lucky used to become far more agitated in a large crowd of civilians than in battle where he was outnumbered twenty to one.
Jason had brought De’Elefor Ka onto the bridge and strapped him into one of the seats there. It wasn’t necessarily to keep an eye on him, it was more in case they needed to abandon ship. It would be easy to forget about him in the rush. The thin A’arcooni sat with an anxious expression, continuously flexing his hands and smoothing the feathers on his scalp, but otherwise didn’t distract the crew.
As before, Jason was not happy about Taryn being onboard when the ship was about to go into battle, but he seemed to have little say in the matter. She’d kept to herself during waking hours during the flight, not wanting to distract Jason from what he needed to do. While scared out of her wits, she accepted that the lives of everyone on her homeworld outweighed her own, and made sure that his mind was on that, rather than trying to protect her.
“Twenty minutes to mesh-in, boys and girls,” Kage said from the right seat. Jason climbed into the pilot’s seat and let it adjust to his expanded bulk, and Crusher strapped himself into his usual seat. Both of them had their weaponry secured to racks at the rear of the bridge.
The Phoenix shuddered as she entered real-space, now in the Solar System. Without being ordered, Kage brought the shields and weapons fully online the moment they meshed-in, and Doc began a full active sensor sweep of the system.
“Nothing,” he reported tensely. “All I’m picking up are the human probes scattered throughout the system and the satellites orbiting Earth.”
“Keep at it
,” Jason said as he engaged the main drive. “Deetz is smart enough to hide from us at this range.”
He eased up the throttle and began to fly into the system at a relatively slow velocity. Since Earth wasn’t under attack, that meant Deetz was either in the outer system or not there at all. In the back of Jason’s mind there was a nagging doubt that he’d made a mistake and the synth hadn’t even come at all. If that were true, he would have wasted a lot of time and the trail would be completely cold.
“Contact!” Kage called. “Passive array is picking up dispersing slip-drive radiation dead ahead. Looks to be about four hours old, give or take an hour.”
“It just got real, everybody,” Jason said unnecessarily. “Let’s tighten it up and flush this bastard out. Kage, I want two anti-matter missiles prepped, medium yield.”
“Copy that,” Kage said as his hands flew over the armament panel.
The decaying slip-drive signature proved Deetz was in the system, somewhere. Since Earth had no slip-space capability, the presence of any leaked drive radiation was a giveaway. Of course, the trail could be faked and they could be flying into another trap.
“Try to get focused scans of Saturn and Jupiter,” Jason told Doc. “They’re the two gas giants we’ll be passing and he could be using their radiation to hide his ship’s signature. That dinky runabout will be tough to spot under the best of conditions.”
“Already on it,” Doc answered, steering the active sensor’s tachyon beam in the vicinity of Saturn as they cruised by it close enough to make out the ring structure.
“I feel like we’re in for another nasty surprise,” Twingo said.
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Kage agreed.
“Keep the chatter down,” Jason chided them. “Pay attention to what you’re supposed to be doing.” They flew across Saturn’s orbit without incident and Jason became even more certain they were being observed. He thought it through as they pressed on into the system. Deetz had demonstrated more than once that he could be at least two steps ahead of them. Despite that, however, they’d managed to surprise him and even pull his advantage. But, in true Omega Force style, a lot of that had been sheer luck rather than smart tactical planning. On a whim he yanked the throttle back and commanded a full stop. The drive responded instantly and the Phoenix jerked to a halt, now motionless relative to the primary star.
“Interesting tactic,” Doc murmured sarcastically.
“Let’s just wait. I’m tired of playing his game,” Jason explained patiently. “We know he’s here and we know he’s waiting for us. The next move will have to be his. Keep the sensors full active.”
They waited for a tense thirty minutes in between the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter. Jason smiled to himself as he pictured Deetz staring at his displays trying to figure out what in the hell they were doing.
“I might have something,” Kage whispered. Jason just stared at him.
“He can’t hear you,” he said.
“I know that,” Kage answered in a normal voice before hurrying on. “In the asteroid belt, twenty degrees to starboard … there’s an object that has begun to move. It was barely perceptible at first but it’s starting to accelerate.”
“He has to know that we’d be able to track that,” Doc said dubiously.
“No,” Jason said as the realization struck him, “he doesn’t. He has no idea how extensive the modifications to the Phoenix really are. The old Jepson sensor package probably wouldn’t have flagged that movement. Hell, it may not have even detected it. I’m not seeing any energy signatures coming off of it.”
“You’re right, Captain,” Kage confirmed. “No grav signature or heat bloom. He must be on reactive thrusters only.”
“Sneaky,” Jason mused, “but where’s he going? Just repositioning in the asteroid belt won’t do anything for him while we’re stopped.”
“It looks like he may be heading for that especially large asteroid nearby. Well, nearby relatively speaking,” Twingo said as he brought up the sensor feed at his own station. “He may try to use it to mask his drive signature and accelerate away. He’s literally crawling right now, so unless he thinks we’re going to be stopped for the next twenty-three years, give or take, he’s not going to be coming directly at us.”
“Let me know when he gets right behind it,” Jason said. Even with the constant acceleration it took hours for the tiny ship to make it to the large asteroid they assumed was the destination. Sure enough, the ship stopped on the far side.
“He’s stopped there,” Kage reported.
“Kill the active sensors and brace for emergency acceleration,” Jason snapped. He gave the crew less than a second to comply before jamming the throttle down and thumbing the red button that overrode the throttle schedule for the main drive, essentially slamming it from fully stopped to full power nearly instantaneously.
The lights dimmed and fluttered a bit as unimaginable amounts of power surged into the engines and the gunship tore away at over six hundred gravities of acceleration. The force was so violent that the crew could actually feel it despite the compensators and artificial gravity. The Phoenix was quickly closing the distance and was less than five minutes away when Jason commanded the active sensors back on. The array was able to see on the other side of the enormous asteroid without issue, but Deetz’s ship would undoubtedly be able to detect the tachyon bursts.
“You’ve flushed him out,” Kage said. “He’s going full active. We’re being acquired by his targeting sensors.”
“Bias the power to the forward shields,” Jason ordered. “Lock up the missiles on him, we’ll fire when he has less time to maneuver.”
Deetz surprised them all by powering up his own drive and accelerating hard towards the Phoenix. The move caught Jason so completely flat-footed that he barely had time to alter his course. Even then it was too late; the other ship closed in to such a short distance that the missiles wouldn’t be able to arm in time. He came sharply to starboard, intent on letting the other ship fly past at close range and then loop back around to open the gap up.
He never got the chance. He saw something interact with the forward shields off to the port side of the bridge at the exact same moment the engines lost power. He glanced at his indicators and saw the reactor was also down to less than twenty percent output and dropping. He realized Deetz must have installed one of his maser-based disruptors he was developing for the A’arcooni on the small ship.
This time they were ready, however, as Twingo had already implemented the shield modifications to protect them from the unique subatomic particle that the weapon utilized. It wasn’t completely effective, unfortunately, and they were still in a bad way. The engines had completely shut down and the computer was struggling to bring the reactor power back up.
“He’s coming back around,” Kage said. “Shields are down.”
“I’m bringing the nose around, get ready to fire those missiles!” Jason used the emergency reactive maneuvering thrusters to reorient the nose of the Phoenix so it was pointing at the incoming ship. They were now flying backwards since they had no propulsion to slow their flight.
“Missiles are locked! Fire!” Kage exclaimed as soon as the active sensors in the weapons confirmed they had the target locked up. Jason squeezed the trigger twice, releasing both of the missiles they had queued up. Thankfully there was enough power still for the weapons bay to open and let the missiles come out of their launchers. They streaked away and were soon out of sight as they homed in on Deetz’s small runabout.
“Missiles tracking,” Doc said from his station. “He’s launching countermeasures. He stopped one … the other is through! Impact on his ventral shields!”
“He’s turning away,” Twingo said. “It looks like he’s venting coolant, but he’s still under power.”
“Is he coming back at us?”
“No. I don’t think he expected us to still have teeth,” Twingo answered. “He’s putting a lot of distance between us now.”
> “Shit! Let me guess where he’s going,” Jason swore.
“No need to guess, Captain,” Doc said. “He’s turned on course for Earth.”
“Twingo …”
“I’m already on it,” the engineer said as he ran off the bridge towards the engineering bay. The main reactor was still running, barely, and it showed no indication that it was going to recover on its own.
Jason’s agitation grew as a minute turned into ten, and then an hour, with no indication that the power was going to come back up. He was about to get out of his seat and go check on his friend when all the bridge lights went out, winked on and off again, and then stayed on. He was still half out of his seat, waiting to see what would happen next, when he felt the low pitched hum of power surging through the ship. He turned to look at his displays and saw that all the red indicators were staring to blink green as power levels were already climbing back up over sixty percent.
“That should do it,” Twingo said as he came back up on the bridge. “Sorry it took so long, we’ll be ready to move in a minute.”
“Good work, Twingo,” Jason said as he could now see the main drive coming back online. As soon as the computer let him, Jason eased the throttle up and steered onto a course that would take him to his homeworld. Soon the Phoenix was tearing across the Solar System as her individual subsystems continued to come back online.
“Start monitoring Earth’s news outlets,” he told Kage. The Veran didn’t answer as he began scanning through the known broadcast frequencies.
“It’s not good, Captain,” he said after a moment. “Deetz is in the atmosphere attacking civilian targets on a global scale, including some of your nuclear fission reactors. Your militaries appear to be powerless to stop him.” Jason ground his teeth in frustration as he guided the gunship onto a course that would intercept the upper atmosphere at an angle the shields could handle given the speed they were carrying.
“Locate his ship and put an intercept track on my display,” Jason ordered as Earth quickly resolved from just a slightly brighter white dot to a fuzzy blue marble.
Omega Force: Savage Homecoming Page 21