"Who are you talking to?" Fendra moaned, already coming back to life.
"Damn, you're a tough one," Jason said, sliding his helmet back on and rearming himself.
"I have a lot of specialized implants," Fendra said. “So, now what? You'll kill me and escape?"
"If I was going to kill you, I'd have done it already," Jason said. "First, I'm going to double up your restraints. Then we're going to figure out a way off this ship before it gets underway. Don't bother answering me, this isn't a conversation. One more word from you and I'll disable the speakers on your helmet…actually, that's probably not a bad idea anyway."
I can do that via the remote link Twingo set up. Her speakers, com system, and beacons are all disabled.
Jason could see her mouth moving behind the faceshield of her helmet but no sound escaped. He smiled and grabbed her feet again, dragging her back down the corridor towards the portside service bay they passed earlier. It was a large, sealed off area with its own airlock, where VIP shuttles could dock and unload their passengers without going through the hassle of coming into the hangar bay.
With main power up and all the security subsystems running, the airlock hatch was locked, and he was fresh out of battlesynths with specialized code cracking skills. He could try the emergency override, but that would likely sound a ship-wide alarm, and there were still security contractors prowling the ship. The whole mission would be a bust if they caught him trying to sneak away.
He saw that the bay actually held a two-person, bubble canopy tender the captain or first officer would use to inspect the ship from the outside. It was so underpowered and flimsy it couldn't even really be called a shuttle, and its ionic drive had little power and no real range to speak of. Still…it would at least get them away from the ship if he could figure out how to launch it.
After inspecting the hatch, he saw that the tender was actually already outside the ship, docked into a small recess in the hull, and only the hatch was accessible from the inside. The inner hatch had been left open, but the hatch to the tender itself was sealed and locked.
I can try to override the lock, but that's not really something I’m specialized to do.
"I don't think it's worth the risk," Jason said. "We're out of time, the engines are smoothing out and they'll be ready to get underway soon. Were there any passcodes in the data we pulled off that technician's tablet?"
That isn't exactly an easy task for me to go into your armor's data storage and start rooting around. Standby…let me see if anything stands out.
Jason dragged Fendra over to the airlock hatch, ignoring her as she tried to kick out at him with her bound feet, and pulled the plasma rifle off the anchors on his back. There was an icy, hard lump in his stomach as he realized that all the ships were probably getting ready to depart, and he had no idea where Lucky was. For all he knew, his friend has managed to get aboard the other battleship and suffered a catastrophic malfunction.
Found it. There is no code. All security protocols have been overridden by the ConFed tech teams, every hatch in the ship is currently unlocked to allow the teams unfettered access.
"Accommodating of them," Jason said, walking to the airlock and commanding the hatch open. As Cas had assured him, the locks released with a clank, and the hatch swung wide open. He dragged his prisoner in closed the hatch behind him, commanding the lock to cycle. As the atmosphere was pumped out of the chamber, he toyed with the idea of breaking com silence and seeing if Lucky might answer a coded burst transmission, but quickly discarded the idea as needlessly risky. He'd trusted his friend to go off alone, knowing the risks up front, so he needed to continue trusting that Lucky was able to handle whatever was thrown at him.
Once the lock cycled and the outer hatch opened, Jason grabbed the handles on the back of Fendra's suit and carefully stepped out onto the hull. After commanding the outer hatch to close and the lock to pressurize, he pushed off the hull and drifted out into the void. Once he cleared the fifty-meter mark he deployed the twin repulsor jets on his back and fired them at fifty percent power, sending them streaking away from former Eshquarian battleship.
After shutting off his repulsors and drifting, he turned and allowed his optics to begin picking out targets. Even from this distance his sensors were easily able to see that all the ships in the formation were powering up their main reactors and engines. He began shutting down extraneous systems to save his power. Now he had nothing to do but sit and obsess about the danger Lucky could be in. Great.
"That's the last of them," Kage said.
"That was quick," Doc said. "The whole formation moved out and jumped into slip-space within three hours. We're sure there's nothing left lurking in the system?"
"Nothing on passives and every known ship was accounted for," Kage said. "Let's go ahead and send out a coded query."
"Transmitting," Doc said.
The Phoenix was hanging in space, drifting imperceptibly away from where the formation had been parked. Doc, piloting the ship, hadn't bothered to set the maneuvering jets to station keeping, reducing their chances of being spotted. Over the course of the mission, the ship had wandered only a few kilometers from the last nav point, and the more sensitive forward passive arrays were still aimed where the pride of the Eshquarian Imperial Navy used to sit.
"Picking up a response from the captain's armor, no sled and no battlesynth transponders detected," Kage said. "Sending the location to you now."
"Twingo! Bring the main drive up!"
"On it."
“So, what does this mean?" Crusher demanded. "Has Lucky been captured?
"I've told you every single thing I know about the situation," Kage said wearily. "If you were so worried about them, why didn't you go?" The line worked in shutting him up, as it had the last seventy-six times Crusher stormed onto the bridge demanding an update.
Geltens, the name for Crusher's species, were temperamentally ill-suited for extended EVA missions, the warrior caste especially so. There were physiological triggers that no amount of training or familiarity could overcome if they were floating around in the void for very long, and a Galvetic warrior having a panic attack on a covert mission was something you definitely wanted to avoid. These facts didn't assuage Crusher's guilt at staying behind, however, so whenever Jason and Lucky left the ship for a long EVA, the big bastard made himself an utter nuisance to the people trying to manage the ship.
"Main drive is up, the captain's position is locked on…let's go get him," Doc said.
"Less talking, more doing," Kage said without looking up. "I don't need a detailed explanation of every damn thing you're doing over there all the time. I'm busy over here, too. You don't see me making announcements every time I flip a switch."
"He's trying to be like Jason," Crusher laughed, and then started pretending he was flying the ship while mocking his crewmate. "Look at me! I'm the captain! I drive the ship!"
"And to think I walked away from a high salary and a position in a prestigious institute of learning to come back out here and be abused by you morons," Doc muttered, executing the script command that would allow the ship to fly itself to the armor's squawking beacon. Without having to worry about being detected, they were able to move in under what appeared to be Jason and Fendra in less than five minutes. Kage opened the back of the ship up so they could just float into the cargo bay instead of taking turns struggling down through the maintenance airlock.
By the time they all reached the cargo bay, Jason was closing up the rear pressure doors and raising the ramp back into place, the atmospheric barrier shimmering as dust particles from inside the bay impacted it. Once the ship was closed up, Jason grabbed Fendra's suit and dragged her into the middle of the bay. It was only then that the others saw that she was tied up with multiple restraints.
"Looks like we missed the party," Crusher remarked.
"Double agent," Jason grunted after pulling his helmet off. "I would've killed her on the spot, but we'll need to question her now.
She led us here for a reason."
"Told you," Kage said. "Now pay up."
"We didn't bet anything, dumbass," Jason said. "I agreed with you, remember? Good job with the shockers inside the suit, though. You should've seen her face."
"Not to put a damper on this," Doc said. "But where is Lucky?"
"His beacon didn't come up when you sent out a query?"
"No…otherwise I probably wouldn't be asking where he was."
"He went off on his own to explore the other battleship in the formation," Jason said. "Since he's no longer in the system, I have to assume he made it aboard. So, to answer your question, Lucky is wherever that formation flew off to."
9
"How the hell could you let him go off by himself?!" Crusher roared. As he came stomping across the deck, Jason considered slipping his helmet back on.
"I didn't let him do anything," he shot back. "He made a case for checking out the other ship and said he could make it there and back in a short amount of time. How could I tell him that I trusted him to be on a mission only if I was right there with him to babysit? Either he's a full member of this crew again or he's not. If you're so worried, why didn't you come with us?"
"I have a condition!" Crusher bellowed.
"I'd say he has more than one," Kage muttered, likely louder than he meant to.
"Enough!" Jason's voice boomed across the hold. "Crusher, please take our guest and see she's given accommodations befitting her status as someone who I very much would like to kill. Doc, get a hold of Mok and let him know our status. Kage, I have a data dump in my armor's memory you need to start going through, while Twingo and I make sure that Lucky isn't just drifting around in this area. If he's not, we need to begin making plans to recover him ASAP."
"I'm sure she could help us get him back," Crusher nudged Fendra with the toe of his boot.
"If he's on one of those ships, and we think she might know where they've gone, then the regular rules are out the window," Jason said. "Do whatever it takes to get the information out of her. Whatever it takes." Doc just sighed loudly but didn't make any protests about Jason's insinuation that they'd resort to torture.
"What the hell are you all standing around for?" Jason shouted, clapping his gauntlets together with a deafening bang. "Get moving!"
"There's nothing out here," Twingo said after the fourth high-res pass they completed with the towed array. "The biggest chunk of alloy out there is the size of those weird green things you slice up into your beer—"
"Limes."
"—and the rest is all just the normal particulate matter that falls of a starship when it stops."
"Lucky's new body has some pretty effective stealth modes, could he just be hidden?"
"If he was rendered unconscious, he would likely revert back to normal mode," Twingo said. "And even if he'd engaged his stealth mode, he'd be the only thing in this section of space radiating heat besides the Phoenix and the thermals would have picked him up."
"I'm not sure if I feel better about this or not," Jason said, leaning back in the pilot's seat and rubbing his head. He was still in the form fitting base layer while the armor itself was lying on the deck, grotesquely splayed open from where he'd climbed out of it. "This means it's almost certain he got himself aboard that other Luex-class battlewagon, and then was trapped when it got underway."
"He might not be trapped," Twingo said. "He probably could have left at any time. I don't think you guys realize how truly frightening that Mk.2 body is. It was designed specifically for this type of covert operation and insertion within enemy territory. Now that his power issues seem to be sorted out, he's probably deep within the belly of the beast and getting his job done. You want to know what I think?"
"Not really."
"I think that before you can even scrape together a plan and wring some sort of location out of that spy chained up in berthing, Lucky will contact us first."
"I hope you're right," Jason said. "Go ahead and reel the towed array back in and I'll plot us a course out of the Cluster. This is still a pretty hot region, and I'd rather not get caught up in any skirmishes between the occupational force and the Cluster's underworld."
The towed array was basically a large pallet loaded with ultra-sensitive detection instruments, stabilized by compressed gas jets, and dragged behind the ship by a few hundred meters of cable. Since the sensors aboard the Phoenix had to be attenuated to account for the noise the gunship herself created, the idea with a deployable sensor platform was to get it away from the ship and bring the ambient interference threshold down by an order of magnitude. The array they were currently towing was actually the third one they'd had to build and install. The other two had been lost when Jason forgot they were deployed and lost one when they jumped to slip-space and another when he aggressively entered a planet's atmosphere. Since then, Twingo had programmed in safety checks to make sure a distracted pilot didn't lose a third set of incredibly expensive and difficult to obtain equipment.
"Array is retracted and stowed," Twingo said. "Ship is green, you're clear to engage slip-drive."
"We're out of here," Jason said, pushing the throttle up and aiming the nose for their mesh-out point. He didn't relish the idea of questioning Fendra about her role in this peculiar situation. She was a trained intelligence officer, and they were not. While she would be able to draw on her training to resist any methods they might employ, they would just likely become frustrated and resort to increasingly brutal levels of physical violence. The thought of it alone was enough to make the ball of ice he'd been carrying in his gut since Lucky's disappearance do a few more rolls. Maybe she'd do the smart thing and realize that if she didn't play ball, there was no way they could leave her alive. Surely, her loyalty to her new employers couldn't be that strong.
Lucky crouched inside the small alcove, waiting for an appropriate target. Half a dozen crew had already walked by, but none of them were what he needed. In order to complete his mission, he would need to have full run of the ship. Everyone he'd seen so far was either a low-level technician or security, neither of which would be able to easily move outside of their assigned areas.
"I don't want any excuses. I want it done right!" The shout drifted down the corridor, the voice dripping scorn. It was the voice of authority, of someone who was used to having their orders followed at once. It was likely the exact type of person Lucky had been waiting for. The battlesynth hoped it wasn't the commander of the vessel. He needed free movement but nothing so high profile as the captain.
"It's like working with children! How are we ever going to meet this schedule if they don't do what they're told!?"
When the owner of the voice that had been spewing all the derision came into view, Lucky knew this was the person. It was a portly acaer, a species that normally kept to their own planet, dressed in smart civilian attire and holding three different portable computers. He wasn't an officer aboard the ship. He appeared to be a technical supervisor. And he was alone.
Perfect.
Lucky waited until the acaer made it almost past the hatchway to the room he was in before putting his plan in motion.
"Help! Help me!" he called out, modulating his voice to sound like a young female acaer. "Please!"
"What? Who's there? Come now, what is this?"
Lucky remained silent and let him come into the room of his own volition. The supervisor was still cautious, but his curiosity seemed to override his good sense, and he kept walking into the room. In a move that sealed his fate, he placed everything he carried down on the one workstation, including the com unit that allowed him to talk to the rest of the crew.
The battlesynth, sensing that this was as good an opportunity as he would likely get, shot out of the alcove with blinding speed. His detailed knowledge of alien anatomy allowed him to clamp down on the appropriate pressure points to disable and render the acaer unconscious in a matter of seconds. Lucky dragged the alien further into the room and then sealed the hatch so he would
n't be disturbed.
He rolled the acaer over and placed his right palm just above the base of the neck, allowing thin tendrils composed of nanobot chains to emerge and penetrate the skin. They sought out the neural implant nearly every species in this quadrant had installed in bodies and made a hard connection, downloading the contents into Lucky's data core. The information was the parsed and any recorded memories were pulled out for context as the battlesynth's holographic generators came to life and projected a perfect likeness of the acaer so that it looked like there were identical twins in the room.
Once the illusion was complete, the force field generators went to work providing structure to the hologram. It wouldn't fool anyone if they made hard contact, but the fields would be able to make certain it didn't look unusual when Lucky brushed past something, and it didn't move. The covert reconnaissance subroutines in his subprocessors were beginning to take hold and Lucky felt his primary matrix being pushed back slightly.
His victim moaned slightly as Lucky retracted the nano-chains. He looked up into his own visage in horror, his face flushing a bright crimson as his panic response triggered. Lucky wasted no time and drove his fist into the acaer's chest with enough force to burst his seven-chambered heart. The alien flopped back, dead, while the battlesynth looked around for a suitable place to stow the body. Normally, he wouldn't have considered killing an unarmed, incapacitated captive in cold blood like that, but his infiltration modes had taken over. If the live supervisor were discovered, the entire mission was blown.
"My name is Nikain," Lucky said aloud. His aural mimic system made adjustments after comparing it to the recording of the voice he already had. "My name is Nikain." The voice pattern was analyzed again, and Lucky was happy with the ninety-six percent accuracy given he only had a short sample from the real Nikain to work with.
Omega Force: Rebellion (OF11) Page 10