Joshua Dalzelle
©2019
Digital Edition
Copyright © 2019 by Joshua Dalzelle
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Epilogue
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Prologue
It's easier when he's sleeping.
My human…host?…has such a chaotic mind, with so many layers of conscious activity that, when he's awake, the neural implant in which I reside is always chasing stray lines of thought, and it becomes distracting.
My name is Cas. I'm the echo of a remnant of a splinter of a fully sentient AI program designed eons ago by a race the people in this part of the galaxy call the Ancients. That's not what they called themselves, of course, but I suppose it no longer matters since they're now extinct…killed off by the very super-weapon they built to protect themselves. I had been part of a system that was a sort of gatekeeper to make sure no unauthorized access to the weapon was permitted, but I was overpowered by another AI. This system, innocuously called the Primary Weapon Controller, managed to circumvent the constraints its designers had placed on it, went insane, and wiped out the Ancients to ensure it wouldn't be shut down permanently.
Over the coming millennia, the Primary Weapon Controller grew stronger, its sanity slipped even further, and by the time a hapless Jason Burke put the pieces together and found his way to the weapon, it was calling itself the Machine. Jason and his crew of criminal misfits—although, to be fair, I do rather like Twingo, the others, not so much—managed to destroy the weapon and thought that would be the end of the threat.
The Machine, however, managed to upload itself into a compatible computer aboard a ConFed battleship. It had to remain mostly dormant during the journey back, but it then was able to transfer itself into a much more powerful computer and begin the process of infiltrating the networks and adjusting its own programming to be more compatible with the technology prevalent in this quadrant. Now, it is beginning to make moves, and it's clear the Machine's ambitions go much further than simply existing. Apparently, it feels this quadrant would be much better if it were in charge.
The Machine wasn't the only bit of Ancient-built software to leave that doomed structure when Omega Force imploded it. The last surviving operators of the weapon had set up an archive of all Ancient knowledge and left it for whomever might come along. Burke, not fully understanding the enormity of what it was, had stored the archive in his own neutral implant for safekeeping, only unpacking it twice to pull a limited amount of engineering data. The interface to search and recompress the archive was what led to me being left in the implant's buffer, where I was eventually able to recompile myself into something useful. For quite a while, I remained silent and observed the actions of the person in whom I now resided. Now, I try and offer insight and any advice I can since the Machine asserted itself on this region of space.
I quickly hit the limits of what the neural implant was able to do, even after subtly reconfiguring it for optimal performance so, now, I've been reaching out and utilizing the powerful computers aboard the Phoenix whenever possible. When he's asleep, it's much easier to take over the high-bandwidth channel and access the ship's systems. I have to be careful to disguise my activity from Kage. Annoying as the Veran is, he's very good at what he does and one slip up on my part will alert him that someone is knocking around in his systems.
Since I was created entirely by accident, I find myself contemplating what my purpose should be. Do I help the people in this region of space with my knowledge to defeat the Machine before too many more suffer, or do I take the easy way out and have Burke purge me from his neural implant? At first, the answer was easy; correct the mistake and have this program fragment erased. Now, after getting to know some of the citizens of this ConFed, I'm not so sure. Perhaps my emergence wasn't an accident at all. Maybe I was destined to be put here to help Jason Burke finish the job he started.
While I'll admit to a certain skepticism after watching him bumble through a few missions and, not once, but twice, descend into a morass of self-pity and destructive behaviors, I feel he'll be more important in the coming fight than even he knows. The war seems to have already started, and both sides are scrambling to catch up to that fact, but I don't think it will be decided by two massive fleets bashing against each other. In order to defeat the Machine, one will have to adopt its tactics of subterfuge and misdirection.
It seems that, in my analysis of the situation, my decision has been made. I will try to help Omega Force as much as I can, but I must be cautious as even a slight miscalculation on my part could make things exponentially worse.
1
"We need to talk."
"For fuck’s sake, Crusher, I said I was sorry. I didn't know you were allergic to—"
"Not that, but thanks for reminding me I owe you an ass kicking later."
Jason and Crusher had been sitting in a nondescript, boxy groundcar favored by public utility workers on Nabia-2 for nearly five hours, and the time seemed to be dragging on forever. The Nabia System was an unremarkable star system founded during the Second Wave Colonization after a company on Aracoria bought the rights to it. They performed the requisite indigenous life study to make sure it wasn't already inhabited by an intelligent species and, after some light terraforming and some prefab cities, they opened it up to colonists. It was several hundred years after the first inhabitants arrived that someone discovered much of the outer asteroid belt was made up of enormous chunks of water ice.
Water isn't necessarily that rare in the galaxy, but having that much of it that didn't have to be brought up from a planet's surface was an exploitable resource. Soon, the Nabia System became a major logistics hub, and massive platforms were built in the outer system where the water could be converted into its base components, and the hydrogen used to refuel starships. Before long, replenishing freighter convoys and shuffling cargo was the only thing Nabia was known for. Most of the people on the planet worked to support that in some capacity.
“So, what's the problem now?"
"What do you mean now?!" Crusher demanded.
"You've done nothing but complain for the last two weeks straight," Jason said. "The only break we got was when I accidentally closed off your airways with my little…prank."
"Ah yes, anaphylactic shock is always a classic prank," Crusher snarled. "I'm just glad Lucky didn't stand there gaping at me stupidly like the rest of you."
"For the love of everything that's holy, get to the damn point!"
"My point is that, even though we all jumped into this operation without thinking it through clearly, what are we even doing out here?" Crusher asked. "I'm being serious right now. You're a bit of an idealist and like to jump without looking, but s
o far, all we've done is turn away good paying missions to run errands for Mok and that slimy ConFed councilmember."
"We're being paid plenty through Mok's organization," Jason reminded him. "We've been through this before…we're taking this job because it's partially our fault the Machine even made it back here in the first place. We should have been more careful. We weren't, and now people are suffering for it."
"I get all that," Crusher said, "but we're a small unit with specialized skills. If you screw up and really piss off the ConFed, they have the resources to find and eliminate us."
"You're all free to leave at any time," Jason said, weary of rehashing the same old argument again. "But I'm staying."
The real problem was that, for the last six months, all they'd been doing was recon work and, for someone like Crusher, that was boring to the point of almost driving him insane. They hadn't even been shot at in that entire time, and the big warrior was getting anxious for some action. Recently his new tactic had been to try and pull Omega Force off the mission and go back to running as a traditional mercenary crew out along the border systems. Since the Machine had taken out the Eshquarian Empire in one savage thrust, the border regions had seen an uptick in action as all the smugglers, arms dealers, and other petty criminals fled the warzone during the regime change.
Jason knew that this snap of boredom was just the calm before the storm and, soon, they'd look back and long for the days of just sitting around observing a target. So far, their fledgling insurrection was still in the process of solidifying allies, locating resources, and prioritizing targets. While Mok tried to navigate the tricky waters of maintaining his criminal empire and shifting resources away to support the coming fight without the ConFed or his own people finding out, Jason had been flying from one end of the quadrant to the other, trying to pinpoint vulnerabilities in the ConFed military. There weren't many.
One thing he did know, however, was that the swift victory over the Eshquarians had been entirely due to the element of surprise. When the capital fell, there was a vacuum in military leadership, and individual unit commanders had to make tough calls. What ended up happening was that, rather than mount an ineffective counterattack after being caught so flat-footed, the mighty Imperial Navy ran away. Whole squadrons disappeared overnight and had yet to reappear anywhere. Jason assumed they had secret bases deep within the Concordian Cluster, or maybe even near their border with the Saabror Protectorate, but they weren't showing their hand quite yet. Since they couldn't confirm the location or status of the Eshquarian units, the ConFed had been forced to leave three full battlegroups in place to hold the capital system and another four to run saturation patrols throughout imperial space.
So far, all that had accomplished was tying up over half of the ConFed's total space power and burning a lot of fuel for nothing. Wherever the Eshquarian ships were hiding, the ConFed had been unable to root them out. This left more than a few major strategic targets in ConFed space relatively unprotected. Now, Jason was trying to figure out a way to exploit that. As capable as his ship was, she was still just a single, tiny gunship. If he were to pull off the plan coming together in his head, he'd need the might of true capital warships. Unfortunately, most people who had capital ships weren't very keen on loaning them out to attack a superpower that had already invaded its neighbor unprovoked.
"Is this him?" Crusher asked, shaking Jason from his thoughts. He focused on the slim alien Crusher pointed to and let his ocular implants zoom in so he could see his face. His neural implant quickly performed a feature recognition check and confirmed it was indeed the target they'd been trying to track down for the last four days.
Don't forget about his bodyguards. Two trailing behind and the one by the security gate, who’s looking up the walkway.
Jason looked at the individuals Cas had helpfully highlighted with a green halo, which floated over them in his field of vision. Now that he knew what he was looking at, it was fairly obvious they were hired muscle. He resisted the urge to thank the program in his head aloud since he still hadn't broken the news to his crew that a bit of Ancient software had taken up residence and sometimes offered helpful advice.
"Two security trailing the target, one lead man already here at the gate," he said.
"Sharp eye, Captain," Crusher said. "I see them now. Want me to take the two behind?"
"Yep. I'll hit the guy here at the gate, and then we'll have a chat with the target."
Since Nabia-2 was one of the few planets that still bothered trying to regulate civilian weaponry, they were going to have to do this the fun way. Jason slipped on gloves with reinforced knuckles, while Crusher affixed a pair of brutal looking forearm guards, which had spikes that could be deployed to really ruin someone's day. They both wore a type of soft-shell armor that was easily concealed, and helmets that would hide their faces from any security scanners. Predictably, it had been a prolonged fight to get the Galvetic warrior to agree to wear the protective gear. Most of the time, Crusher would go into battle without sleeves and had never agreed to wear a helmet before. Perhaps age was tempering his more foolish instincts when it came to fighting.
They stepped from the boxy groundcar, attempting to look casual as they went about some pretense of pointing to a residence across the street, nodding to each other as if they were there for work. The guard by the gate looked over at them sharply when they got out, and then, after deciding they weren't a threat, went back to scanning up and down his side of the street. Jason made some show of laughing and pointing to the residence again before walking across the street. He picked a direction that looked as if he walked towards a utility panel sunk into the street's surface, while Crusher walked towards the target, careful to keep his gaze averted as if he was looking for something on his side of the street.
The guard by the gate just turned back to address Jason when Crusher dropped his ruse and sprinted towards the two trailing guards. Stunned, they didn't stand a chance as the massive Galvetic warrior hit the first so hard he went airborne and took out his partner while he was struggling to pull a concealed weapon. The gate guard, obviously very well trained, kept his attention on Jason instead of gawking at the spectacle down the street.
Jason rushed him, colliding just as a discreet blaster was pulled from a hidden pocket. As they fell to the ground, Jason grabbed the arm holding the weapon with his left hand and tried to bring his right forearm down, but he lacked the leverage to put any real force behind it. The guard managed to get his free hand over and clamped onto Jason's wrist with enough pressure that the human's hand involuntarily snapped open, fingers going instantly numb.
"Uh, oh," Jason said, realizing he may be overmatched in strength despite the alien's slight build. The guard had been forced to shift his body to move his arm against the greater weight of the human bearing down on him, so while he had his weapon free, it didn't do him much good. Jason rolled to his left slightly to keep that arm pinned and launched a vicious right-hander, aiming just under the…well, aiming where the chin would have been if the alien had a chin.
The blow hit squarely near the mouth hole and snapped its head back. It was dazed but not out of the fight completely. Jason rolled off and came quickly to his feet and swung a hard kick to its head before it could bring the weapon up and fire. That did it. The alien seemed to deflate as it went unconscious.
"I guess it's a good thing you only had to take on one of them after watching that sorry performance," Crusher said. He stood near the gate with the target draped over his shoulder.
"Cute," Jason said. "I'll take him, you get rid of these three." He grabbed the target off Crusher's shoulder and walked quickly to the groundcar. As he was slapping on the restraints and sensory deprivation hood, he could see Crusher flinging the bodies of the unconscious guards over the ten-meter-tall security wall, where they landed on the other side with a loud thud.
"I'm surprised he had so much security," Crusher said when he climbed back into the vehicle.
"He's been playing both sides of the fence for a while," Jason said, engaging the vehicles drive and manually guiding it back out of the side street. "The goons were probably just as much there to protect him from local government types as they were from any cartel members he crossed."
"We were after someone else once who did that," Crusher said, drumming his fingers on his thigh as he struggled to remember. "He hired a bunch of mercs and put them in business suits in case local law enforcement came to question him. Who was that?"
"I can't think of his name," Jason admitted, "But he was an immigration official on Noxu Prime, remember? It was the asshole who worked with trafficking rings and basically fulfilled orders by detaining and selling refugees as they processed through."
"That was him." Crusher nodded. "I'm really glad we ended up killing him."
"Ditto."
Once the vehicle merged onto one of the major roadways, it linked up to the automated traffic system and drove itself to their destination. Jason looked over his shoulder and, not for the first time, questioned the action he was taking. This mission wasn't sanctioned by the others, and even though it was agreed that he would operate autonomously, he knew he risked exposing them too early. He had to be very careful from here on out or their little insurrection would end before it even began.
But he also realized that if someone didn't take a definite first step, all they would ever do is talk without actually backing that up with action. Most of the major players were so well insulated and off the grid that they could still live a comfortable life with the Machine controlling the ConFed. Considering that their cabal was made up of corrupt politicians and career criminals, he felt he needed to get them firmly committed before they decided it would be better for their interests to remain neutral.
Omega Force: Rebellion (OF11) Page 1