"I guess now is a bad time to admit that these deep space EVA ops terrify me," Fendra said.
"Really? I think they're sort of fun," Jason said. "Relaxing."
"You're apparently as sick in the head as Mok seems to think," Fendra muttered.
After they'd been adrift for twenty minutes or so, the sled fired the two ionic jets that were mounted on outriggers to either side of them, accelerating them smoothly along now that they were well clear of the Phoenix. They needed just a bit more relative velocity so they could make smooth course corrections as they closed in on the target. Jason just hoped Fendra was as tough as she seemed because the deceleration and landing promised to be nothing short of brutal.
"Wake up, Captain."
"I am awake!"
"You've been snoring over the channel for the last four and half hours," Fendra said.
"We're approaching our first decel maneuver," Lucky said.
"I’m ready," Jason said, double checking his safety tether and commanding the armor to lock his arms out stiff.
A minute later, the jets on the outrigger pylons rotated around began firing short bursts to start shedding off speed. He watched on his helmet's HUD as the computers calculated their rate of closure, time to intercept, and what their relative velocity will be at the time of capture. If the jets were able to keep scrubbing off their forward velocity, the impact when the grapples fired might not be as bad as he initially feared.
It was sometime later when a boxed reticle appeared in his field of view, and he saw a small speck against the brightly lit gas clouds of the nebula edge. As they plodded along, the speck took shape, and his armor's limited optics were able to zoom in and show him the dark outline of Luex-class battleship, named after an Imperial admiral who had been dead for nearly a hundred years. Luex had the distinction of commanding in the last major battle the Eshquarians had fought when they liberated five planets from the fledgling Saabror Protectorate.
"There's something spooky about a starship without engines or running lights going," Jason said over the open channel.
"Agreed," Fendra said.
It seemed like from one moment to the next the ship went from being a misshapen blotch on his optics to a monolith looming out of the darkness. His multispectral optics were able to make out some detail, but the ship had been powered down so long that the hull was a uniform cold that made it nearly impossible for the thermal sensors to differentiate between surfaces. Since they were parked in interstellar space, there wasn't even the energy from a local star to warm the alloy.
Despite how far humans had come technologically, much of their brain had evolved millions of years ago and sometimes wasn't suited for the tasks being asked of it. The distances and speeds involved in the maneuver were far greater than anything Jason's visual cortex and stereo-optic eyes were designed for, so by the time he could actually detect they were closing on the ship, they were already at such close range that he had little time to react before the sled fired the grappling anchors and began a violent braking maneuver to slow them as much as possible before they grabbed.
In the blink of an eye, he went from thinking the ship was hours away to watching the hull rush by beneath him. The mag-anchors at the ends of the flexible, nano-chain cables slammed into the hull and locked while the ionic jets shook the sled mightily at full power. When they ran out of line, the flexible cables stretched and absorbed as much of their kinetic energy as possible before rebounding and yanking them the other way so violently that Jason's vision grayed out around the edges. He commanded his gauntlets to lock onto the handles in case he passed out, not wanting to trust the safety tether with his life.
They were bounced around twice more, each rebound less energetic than the one that preceded it, until the sled drifted lazily in space near the leviathan, the arresting cables slack. Lucky checked on his biological charges, and then commanded the winches to begin retracting the cables, drawing them down onto the hull.
"Let's never do this again," Jason groaned. Everything hurt, and his armor was flashing a couple amber alarms telling him that the stunt had screwed up the calibration on his spatial orientation system. "Fendra? You dead?"
"I'd like to be." The voice over the com sounded strained.
"The g-loading of the arresting maneuver was well within the accepted limits of your species, Fendra," Lucky said.
"What about mine?" Jason asked.
"Technically, you could have been killed. However, Doc assured me your bio-enhancements and armor would be sufficient to allow you to survive."
"Thanks," Jason said drily. "How close did we come to the target zone?"
"We will anchor the sled twenty-six meters away from the area we were targeting," Lucky said.
"Not a bad shot," Jason said, impressed.
They were winched the rest of the way down and dismounted the sled that had been their home for the two-day flight out. Jason stood on the battleship's hull and stretched before unhooking the support umbilicals that brought external power, air, water, and a disgusting nutrient paste into his armor so he wouldn't be using his internal systems the entire time they were adrift. He smiled to himself as he thought of Twingo having to clean out the waste reclamation modules once they returned.
It only took them a few minutes to gather all of their gear off the sled, make sure it was anchored solidly, and then march off towards the stern of the ship. On big capital ships, the engines weren't actually mounted directly to the hull. They were cradled inside the structure on large, shock absorbing pylons. Normally, the gaps between the body of the engine and the hull of the ship would be protected by a security force field to keep out unwanted guests who were insane enough to attempt a boarding there. Even if the fields weren't in place, the radiation and errant power discharges that arced around inside the area would quickly fry anyone before they made it to the service hatches.
When the ship's main reactors weren't powered up, and the engines were long-dormant, however, the space made a handy point of entry that was far easier to breach than trying to cut through meters of hardened starship hull alloy. Lucky moved quickly to the airlock for the maintenance hatch of the number six engine bay and ripped the access panel free so he could get to the wiring beneath. The external hatches weren't part of any sub-systems that were powered up while in a deep storage mode, so it was a relatively simple task for the battlesynth to find the right signal and power lines he needed and splice into them. Less than a minute after he started, the light pipe that ringed the hatch lit up weakly in green, indicating the airlock was open and clear.
Still observing com silence, Lucky opened the hatch and motioned them in before following and closing it behind him. The airlock was large enough for ten people so there was plenty of room for them to spread out as Jason pulled out a compressed gas cylinder and Lucky went to work on the inner access control panel. Once the battlesynth had applied power to the inner hatch, the light around it sputtered to life and glowed red. Jason opened the valve on the automatic regulator attached to the cylinder and stepped back as atmosphere fogged up from the tap and swirled about the chamber. A moment later, the light around the inner hatch blinked to amber and, finally, as the pressure matched to the interior of the ship, went green.
Jason closed the valve and pulled off his plasma rifle so he could join Fendra, covering the hatch as Lucky opened it. It seemed unlikely they'd been detected, but it was possible that a passive sensor caught their sled coming in and there was an armed party waiting on the other side of the hatch. He looked at Lucky and made a chopping motion with his left hand.
"Clear," Fendra said aloud when the hatch opened and nobody was there to greet them.
"Scanning," Lucky said, stepping through and allowing his sensors to take in the environment. Jason moved past him, weapon up, and cleared around the corner. The corridor led into a cavernous engineering support bay loaded with shelves of parts and work benches with partially disassembled components and tools strewn about. His multispectral
optics, now able to see perfectly within the confines of the ship, let him quickly clear the space and move out into one of the main access corridors.
"Looks like all the hatches down here were opened before they killed the power," he said. "That should make things easier. I'm not picking up any residual thermals or anything that indicates someone has been down here recently."
"I concur," Lucky said. "I can detect no trace emissions and only a faint power signature coming from somewhere ahead of us, which I assume is the backup generator that's maintaining the life support systems."
"Heat and air are stable and comfortable," Fendra said. "Gravity is down to about a third of Eshquarian normal but still enough for anyone stuck out here for an extended stay. What's first?"
"We try and find a powered-up terminal and access the network," Jason said. "Honestly, if we could pull this off without having to capture and question whoever is on this ship, all the better."
"That's…wildly optimistic, but we'll try it your way first," Fendra said.
"You say that as if you have a choice," Jason said. "You're a guest on this op, remember that. If you're here for some other reason we aren't aware of, you'd best come clean now or you'll be staying here permanently."
"No need for the hostility, Captain," she said calmly. "Though I commend you on your natural distrust of newcomers. That will keep you alive longer than if you just blindly accepted things you were told. To answer directly, no…Mok didn't give me a secondary set of orders—not that I take direction from him anyway—and I haven't received instructions from my handlers since shortly after the Fleet Masters were all captured."
"You are making too much noise," Lucky admonished. "Please refrain from unnecessary talking from here on out."
"Sorry," Jason said.
"Sorry," Fendra repeated.
They moved through the labyrinth of corridors in the engineering spaces up to the plusher, comfortable decks where most of the crew lived and worked. The ship seemed to go on forever as they plodded up the carpeted corridors to finally reach an auxiliary control room outside of the powerplant area where monitors were lit up and there seemed to finally be some signs of life.
"This is a security station for monitoring the people working around the powerplant as well as controlling access to the computer banks that are a deck below us," Fendra said. "It looks like the only stations that are active are one controlling the backup power cells and then two others that look like they access the secure banks directly."
"Someone has modified these stations to access the computer banks below us," Lucky said. "They have advanced search algorithms running and are copying data to a remote storage device."
"Doesn't look like anything useful here," Jason said. "Let's keep moving forward and up."
They moved on, the progress slow without access to the ship's lifts and moving walkways to whisk them to where they needed to go. It wasn't until they'd climbed up, into the area Jason would have called "Officer Country" if he'd been on a human ship, that they saw signs of life. The corridor lights here were dimly illuminated, and Jason's thermal optics could pick up the faint outlines of footprints where someone had recently walked. His adrenaline spiked as he followed the footprints. Before, it had been just an interesting excursion in what appeared to be an abandoned, dark ship. Now, he was an armed intruder, boarding a ship with a hostile party to take what he wanted by force. It was times like these he realized how badass his life would sound if he were describing it to his fourteen-year-old former self. Of course, the reality of that life was a bit bleaker.
"Who are you people? Are you with the security team?"
Jason spun and saw a bipedal alien holding a steaming mug of something and holding a tablet-style computer with data cables dangling from it.
"You're not supposed to be up here on the Ops Deck," the alien went on. "Who's your supervisor?"
"Apologies," Jason said, approaching and keeping his weapon down at his side. "We were turned around in the stairwells."
"Wait, that armor doesn't look like regular issue…who are you? That's it, I'm calling for—" He never got to finish as Jason walked up and thumped him in the forehead with his gauntlet. It was a solid hit that knocked him clean out but didn't even break the skin. The degree of fine motor control in the new armor was impressive.
"Thank God for oblivious tech nerds," Jason said. "You'd think if you were working on a captured enemy fleet hidden in deep space, you’d have a little bit better situational awareness about you."
"Let's move him into one of these side rooms," Fendra said. "You can gloat later."
7
"You figure out what's on his tablet?"
"His what?" Fendra asked. "Ah! That's an odd name for a miniproc."
"Miniproc? Short for miniature processor, I'm assuming?" Jason asked while they secured the tech to a chair and closed the hatch to the room they were in. Lucky stood watch by the door as they worked.
"Probably. That was actually the name of a product so popular it became what they were all known as," Fendra said. "There…he isn't getting out of that."
"A bit overkill for a tech geek…so, what're we going to do with him?" Jason asked. "If we question him, it'll be a bit tough to leave him alive. The whole point of this excursion is to get in and out without being seen."
"Leave that to me," she said, pulling a device from her kit and jabbing into the arm of their captive. "This will do a quick and dirty DNA scan and then synthesize the appropriate drug cocktail to keep him knocked out and erase his short-term memory. He'll wake up and just think he hit his head."
"That's technically true," Jason said, rapping the knuckle he'd cracked the engineer with on the table.
"While we are waiting for the drugs to take effect, perhaps I could scan through his handheld computer," Lucky said.
"We need to agree on one thing to call this," Jason said, waving the tablet at his friend and then tossing it to him. Lucky caught it without even looking and plugged one of the trailing data cables into a socket that appeared near his waist on the left side. Jason looked on with interest. Lucky's old body had no provisions for this sort of thing. In fact, not having any external data access was one of the major security features that prevented anyone from tampering with a Mk.1 battlesynth if it was ever rendered unconscious.
"Anything good in there?"
"Very much so," Lucky said. "This device is loaded with com protocols and encryption routines that are apparently critical to the operation of this fleet."
"Com protocols for what?" Fendra asked. "Command and control, or the more mundane stuff?
"Apparently both," Lucky said. "Judging from the correspondences I found, the technician's function is to reprogram the encrypted communication systems on this ship. There are access codes and decryption routines for telemetry, command and control, and tactical channels."
"Let's not worry about questioning this guy…just give him the knock-out juice and let Lucky download everything on that tablet," Jason said.
"Are you certain that's wise?" Fendra asked. "He could provide valuable context."
"Doubtful," Jason said. "He's a tech doing a job. He'll know enough to do that job and little else. The ConFed isn't going to brief low-level workers on all the details of whatever nefarious plan they've cooked up for this captured fleet. The less evidence we leave that we were here, the more useful these com protocols will be." Fendra looked unconvinced but adjusted her device to administer the appropriate drugs.
"This will leave a trace if someone does a full toxicology screen on him," she said. "It's unavoidable. Hopefully that souvenir you gave him with your metal glove will be as far as they investigate."
"Lucky?" Jason asked.
"Transfer complete," Lucky said, handing the device back to Jason after disconnecting it.
"Let's stage him in here and leave the hatch open," Jason said. "We need to move forward and see if there's anything else worth peeking in on. The com protocols are helpful, but we still d
on't know much more than we did before we boarded."
"Agreed," Fendra said. They quickly moved out of the small room and moved forward again.
Jason waved her into the lead as she was the person with the most familiarity with that class of ship. She had them take a narrow corridor off the main passageway they'd been following until they came to a security access point that was powered up and locked.
"I'd hoped this hatch would be unlocked," she said. "It leads up to the Auxiliary Tactical Control Center that's just below the main bridge. If the terminals there are powered up, we should be able to see everything they can on the bridge without risking a direct confrontation."
"What's this secondary center for?" Jason asked as Lucky nudged past him and looked at the access panel on the bulkhead.
"This ship is designed to either operate alone or as the anchor point for a larger taskforce. When it's in a formation, the secondary tactical center would be used to relay commands out to the other ships."
"I believe I can defeat this lock without alerting the bridge," Lucky said and placed his right palm over the biometric reader. Jason watched with fascination as the appendage seemed to change shape, color, and even its texture as it became the hand of another being. It was a few seconds later when there was a soft double-beep, and the hatch lock released with a metallic clang.
"I didn't know you could do that," Jason said.
"It is one of the more fascinating features of the Mk.2 body," Lucky said. "We are fortunate the technician whose hand I mimicked was put on the access list for this hatch."
"I had heard your outfit operates on dumb luck rather than careful planning and skill most of the time," Fendra said.
"We like to stick with what works," Jason said.
They moved quickly up to the auxiliary tactical center, passing a few other alcoves that looked like they were specialized com suites along the way. Their luck held out and not only was the center empty, but most of the terminals were powered up and operational. They split up and began scrolling through the different functions, looking for anything out of place that might indicate what the ConFed had planned.
Omega Force: Rebellion (OF11) Page 8