"One of the ships in this fleet is operating under full power," Lucky said. "Its engines are cold so it is still difficult to detect, but the power signatures are unmistakable this close."
"What ship?" Jason asked, moving over to see.
"It is the other Luex-class battleship," Lucky said. "There is a discernible thermal plume from the main exhaust ports."
“So, reactors are up, but no engines," Jason said. "Why would they need main power available if they're not underway and with a skeleton crew?"
"Managing a formation this big is still going to be labor intensive, even with most of the ships in a deep storage mode," Fendra said. "Since they're not in orbit over a planet or moon, they'll tend to drift apart and will need have their positions maintained. Rather than fire them up to use the directional thrusters, they may be just running a fleet of tenders out of the second Luex."
"Maybe," Jason said, unconvinced. "It looks like we landed on the wrong damn ship. How much time before the Phoenix comes back around and we need to be on the sled and moving away?"
"We have another forty-seven hours," Lucky said. "I do have a proposal that would allow us to explore the second ship in that time."
"No," Jason said. "I already know what you're going to say and I'm not agreeing to this."
"What?" Fendra asked, confused.
"He's going to suggest he goes over alone," Jason said. "He can get there and back much quicker than we can because he can accelerate at rates that would kill us."
"That makes sense," Fendra said. "What's the problem."
"This isn't a debate, and you don't get a vote," Jason said. "My answer is no. We'll get the information we need here."
"Very well," Lucky said and turned back to the terminal. "Using the credential stored on the technician’s device, I have accessed this ship's logs."
"And?"
"There are entries that the ship makes automatically that are helpful here," Lucky said. "I have a complete crew manifest as well as detailed entries as to when they were removed from the ship. In addition to modifying the com systems, the technicians aboard have been updating the software in all the ship-to-ship missiles in the launchers and magazines. There has also been an extensive software update of the flight control and navigation systems."
"This makes less and less sense the more we dig into it," Jason said. "Okay, download all the logs and we'll let Kage dig into them once we're back aboard the Phoenix."
They worked in silence for a time, each digging into the unsecured terminals to see if anything jumped out as strange. So far, all it looked like was that the ConFed had gone through a lot of trouble to recover an enemy fleet intact and was now in the process of upgrading all the systems. The most plausible answer Jason could come up with was that the ConFed fleet wasn't as powerful and vast as they'd all been led to believe, and they intended to absorb these ships into their own command once all the updates had been completed. The only thing that punched holes in that was it didn't make a lot of sense to park them in interstellar space, shut them down, and then have a skeleton crew running around with tablets doing all the work.
He shook his head to clear out the extraneous garbage flitting around in his mind and concentrated on what he was looking at on the monitor. The station he was at handled internal security, and he was scanning through the different views of all the cameras still active aboard the ship to see if he could get an idea of who else was there with them. When he got to a view of the second cargo bay, he stopped, confused at what he was seeing.
"Fendra, do Imperial ships carry live animals for the galleys?"
"That's an incredibly stupid question, but I'm curious enough to wonder why you're asking it."
"Because it looks like you have enough pens in one of the main cargo holds to handle a decent amount of livestock," Jason said, moving aside and pointing at the monitor.
"Well, that's certainly not standard fleet issue," she muttered. "What is all that?"
On the display, they could see that someone had erected a series of holding cells, so many that they took up most of the deck and were stacked three-high. There was a single figure in body armor walking around, but from what they could see, the cells were empty. The cell construction looked modular, the sides all made of perforated sheets of composite with alloy doors set into the front.
"If you put two in each cell, there are enough cells to house the entire crew compliment of a Luex-class battleship," Lucky said.
"But the crew isn't here," Jason said. "And if they brought that many people here, the backup power wouldn't be able to handle the load to run the life support systems. They'd need to fire at least one of the main reactors back up."
"Captain, I feel it is imperative that we find out what is on the other Luex," Lucky said. "It is almost certain we will find the answers to our questions there rather than here." Jason tried to adjust his argument on the fly given the new information they had, but he could see no rational reason for Lucky not to explore the other ship given how much they'd already risked while looking through this one. It seemed logical to assume that whatever they were planning on doing here, they'd already done on the other ship and that was why main power was back up.
"Fine, damnit!" he snarled, ungracious in loss as ever. "You are authorized a sneak and peek. I don't want you taking any unnecessary risks. Recon only, and then get your metal ass back here. What's your problem?" His last question was directed Fendra, who stared into space with an odd look. Jason was quite familiar with Eshquarians, and he could see that she was either genuinely concerned or hiding something.
"It's nothing." She turned away from him and went back to punching in commands on the terminal. Jason thought about pressing the issue, but he didn't know her well enough to say for certain she was being evasive. Maybe it was just his natural instinct to distrust any intelligence operative no matter what.
Lucky, much to Jason's consternation, was able to interface with his armor, blow past the security protocols, and upload the data he'd collected without so much as setting off an alert. He wasn't sure if Lucky's new network intrusion toys were that good, or if he owed yet another angry message to the Disa Corporation for another underperforming system. They all left the auxiliary control room and worked their way aft so that Lucky could exit the ship the same way they came in. This type of discreet insertion was what battlesynths were designed for and though he didn't like it, Jason had to admit that he would only be a liability if he went along, as well.
The group split up amidships on deck seventeen, Lucky moving aft while Jason and Fendra decided to check out the control center for the ship's extensive communications suite. Before they parted ways, Jason told Lucky to make sure he went to their infiltration sled and took the portable slip-com node with him. It was a low-bandwidth, burst transmission system that only linked to its paired receiver in a safe house Kage had set up. From there the data could be routed through a normal slip-com node to anywhere else. The portable slip-com radio was bleeding edge tech that Jason had acquired from his friends in Earth's new spaceborne Navy.
"You feel that?" Fendra asked. They'd been slowly working their way down to the com center when a steady hum began building and a vibration could be felt through the deck.
"Yeah," Jason said. "I wonder if they're moving something down—" he trailed off as all the corridor lights came up and the hiss of air handlers started, sounding like a gale force wind after the oppressive silence. "Oh, shit."
"They're bringing main power back up," she said. "We should get to the sled."
"It's too late," Jason said. "That bit of vertigo you're feeling? That's the main engines going through pre-start. The force fields around the bays will already be active."
“So, we're trapped?"
"Not necessarily, but we sure as shit aren't leaving the way we came in."
"It's a good thing Lucky is probably long gone already."
"Yep," Jason said, checking his mission clock. "He'll be accelerating away at full bur
n by now."
Lucky reveled in the power of his new body. Trying to relearn so many basic skills was frustrating and, at times, painful, but there were also times when everything was working right…and it was glorious. He streaked away from the ship like a missile, his foot-mounted repulsors pushing him along at a steady one hundred and fifty g's of acceleration towards the target. His infiltration subsystems came alive with a thought, and active sensor-spoofing transceivers working to nullify any active scans they detected. A battlesynth was much, much smaller than the average ship buster missile so an anomaly that small was easily overlooked by even the more advanced threat detection AIs.
His old body had been a blunt instrument. Powerful, but also large and cumbersome. The Mk.2 shell his matrix now resided in was light, nimble, but just as strong. He was beginning to get the hang of commanding his new subsystems into action and letting the dedicated processors there do the heavy lifting. Much of the trouble he was having was because he still tried to consciously think about each individual action, and it was confusing the processors downstream, creating feedback loops and cascade failures that sometimes rendered him inoperable.
Now that he had the power issues mostly sorted, he felt he had a solid handle on the rest of it. Some things within his body that were sending him status signals were still a mystery to him, so for the time being he just ignored it. There were times he wished his family had just left him dead. It would have been simpler for him to remain in oblivion until his backup power failed, and then his biological friends could have mourned and moved on. But once he'd returned and saw how lost they seemed to be without him, especially Jason, it pushed him to overcome the challenges he faced so that he could be there for them once again. It was hard…the hardest thing he'd ever done in his life, but he'd vowed to never fail them again.
His long-range sensors and accelerometers picked up an anomaly just as he rotated his feet towards the target and began decelerating. A new ship had arrived close to the formation and its grav-drive was easily detected by his instruments since it was the only one operating near his location. He focused his optics to where his sensors told him the point of origin was, but even his enhanced eyesight could only make out a tiny, lit speck moving against the inky black of space. The light pollution from the backlit nebula behind him wasn't helping either.
When he was close enough to the target that he had to begin worrying about landing, he ignored the newcomer and just hoped that Jason would be able to handle anything that came his way while he was gone. He calculated the distance and rate of closure before firing his repulsors again for the final decel when he was less than five hundred meters off the hull.
Lucky slammed into the alloy armor plates of the battleship with enough force that his left knee actuator signaled a mild alarm. As his damage control system went to work correcting the minor misalignment of the joint, Lucky took his bearings and made sure he'd landed where he had intended. As it turned out, he'd missed his LZ by six meters and made a note to have his sensors checked once he was back on the Phoenix.
He moved quickly to an access panel that he knew would allow him into the ship's interior after studying the layout he'd found in the other Luex's computer. It was a panel that had been added to the class after the ships had already been completed and put in service that allowed access to a liquid switching manifold that couldn't be reached from the inside. Since it turned out to be a high-fail part, they had to cut a hole into the side of the hull to get to it and then just slapped a panel over it.
Lucky studied the fasteners holding down the heavy panel that was roughly two by four meters in size and twenty-five centimeters thick. The tip of his right index finger quickly reconfigured itself so that it was the exact shape he needed to depress the fasteners and release the locks beneath, all sixty-two of them. It took him nearly four minutes to release all the quick-turn locks and then, changing the shape of his digit again, pry the stubborn slab out of its hole. Being a hasty retrofit coupled with the extreme temperature changes that happen on the outside of a ship, the panel was really jammed in there. Once it popped loose, he quickly checked underneath to make sure there weren't any switches or mag-sensors to alert the computer that a panel had been removed.
Once he was satisfied his intrusion would go undetected, he slipped into the opening and pulled the panel back into place. He tack-welded it on two corners to make sure it didn't drift off, but not so securely he couldn't just punch it out of the way if he needed to use this route to escape. He slipped past the bulky valve body the panel was protecting and moved down to where there was the relatively thin wall of a large-bore air duct that took return air from the forward sections of the ship back to the life support machinery, where it could be processed and pumped back in as fresh atmosphere. There were seven atmospheric processors on a Luex-class ship, and this duct would take him through a remote area of the amidships engineering bays that would allow him to enter the ship's interior.
Even though he wasn't able to power up the big plasma cannons in his arms, his cutting lasers worked just fine. He made two quick cuts in the metal and bent the edges in against the outrushing air. He worked quickly to get inside, and then seal the duct back, anchoring himself against the strong flow and welding in two precise lines along he cuts. Since all starships, especially big ones, leaked atmosphere constantly from a thousand different places, he felt safe the escaping air wouldn't cause any concern once he'd sealed the breach.
He released his mag-locks and let himself be carried along in the low-gravity as the air rushed back towards the processor. His internal instruments were tracking his progress, and he knew exactly when he needed to arrest his headlong rush so he could cut his way back out of the duct.
After his feet hit the deck, and he repaired the second duct breach, he was ready to begin his recon mission. Despite the obvious danger of being aboard an enemy ship with no backup and his own internal systems being somewhat unreliable, he hadn't felt this alive since he'd been awoken in a new body. The solo mission was exhilarating…he'd finally be able to pull his own weight again and prove his worth.
8
After Lucky had gone his own way, Jason somehow found himself in the lead as he and Fendra moved further into the ship. The map projected by his armor's computer seemed to be missing quite a bit and everything around him was beginning to look the same. For all he knew he was walking around in circles and his companion was content to just let him, following along behind.
"I think we've gotten turned around. Fendra?"
Jason turned to see why his companion wasn't answering and looked right down the discharge aperture of a high-powered plasma sidearm.
"Of course," he sighed.
"This pistol has enough power to do real damage at this range, even with the armor," Fendra said. "Let's not do anything stupid…lose the gear and take your helmet off."
"Fucking spies," Jason muttered as he complied, tossing his weapons and the helmet into a corner of the small room she'd led them into. “So, what's the play here?"
"I'm not telling you anything," she said calmly. "I'm simply doing my job and holding you here until I can make it known to my superiors where I am so they can collect us both. We could be waiting a while so go ahead and march back out the way we came in and head down to the detention cells in the cargo hold."
"Not even a hint?" Jason asked. "How about I make guesses, and you tell me if I'm getting hot or cold?"
"I have the gun aimed at your head," Fendra said, sounding exhausted. "One more word and I'll just be turning over whatever is left of you inside your little shell after I burn away your skull." Jason said nothing more and kept walking, keeping his hands up where she could see them. His armor was still connected to his neural implant, so the moment he took the helmet off, all the pertinent data was displayed in his field of view via his ocular implants.
Want me to activate the nasty little surprise you guys put in her suit?
"Mhm," Jason hummed and nodded his head s
lightly to Cas's question. He had wondered if his hitchhiker was ever going to bother helping out or if he'd be forced to try and work through the menus himself. The armor interface was new enough that he wasn't as proficient as he should be at it.
"Ungh!" Fendra's grunt of pain was followed by a muffled thud as she landed face-first on the carpeted deck.
"Oh, no!" Jason exclaimed, relieving her of the large-bore plasma pistol. "What happened?! Are you okay?"
"Unngh!"
"I can't understand you," Jason said, crouching by her head as her body convulsed. "What was that? Oh! You think there's a few hundred thousand volts coursing through your body?"
"Ugh-ugh!"
"And you go on to say that you suspect we put the devices in the suit we provided because we never fully trusted you?" Jason asked. "Wow, you nailed it!"
There was one more discharge that caused her to arch her back so hard he was afraid she'd break it before, mercifully, she lost consciousness and flopped to the deck again. Jason yanked her arms behind her back and slapped on a set of restraints before doing the same thing to her ankles.
That was pretty sadistic.
"You were the one in charge of the shockers in her suit," Jason said, grabbing a boot and dragging her back into the room where he could retrieve his gear.
That was an observation not an accusation. I had to assume she was loaded up with enough toys from Imperial Intelligence that a single hit might not do it.
"And where the hell were you this whole time?" Jason demanded. "Could have used some help before now."
You're using a lot of processing power to control the armor. I needed to reduce my usage, and that meant no extraneous conversation.
Omega Force: Rebellion (OF11) Page 9