Omega Force 3: The Enemy Within (9 page)

“
Now!” Kage barked.

Jason squeezed the trigger twice and sent two missiles streaking out of the weapons bay towards the ground. The instant the first missile detonated
, Kage killed their transponder and Doc engaged the ship’s countermeasures suite to hide them from the sensors of both the ground control system and the orbiting ships. He slammed the throttle forward and sent the ship streaking over the impact site just as the second missile hit. The shock wave of the powerful warhead slammed into the belly of the ship, but caused minimal damage as the
Phoenix
shot away from the scene at high subsonic speed.

“
Talk to me,” Jason said as he concentrated on his control inputs. The
Phoenix
was hugging the terrain and skimming over the treetops at a scant twenty meters. The computer was doing most of the work by keeping their altitude constant; he just had to make sure he didn’t fly into any obstacles.

“
They’ve been trying to raise us on the com,” Kage said. “One of the ConFed cruisers confirmed the explosion under the clouds. They’re arguing now about who is going to dispatch a recovery team.”

“
Glad it wasn’t a real emergency while they get into a jurisdictional pissing match,” Jason muttered. He was thankful for the delay, however, since the longer they argued, the longer he had to put some distance between them and the fake crash site. Their ruse wouldn’t even fool a cursory flyover since there was no debris and the damage was completely inconsistent with a ship impacting the ground. “Just keep me up on what those ships in orbit are doing,” he said.

It was another seven
tense minutes of screaming along at ground level when Kage had an update. “The ConFed fleet commander is sending down two landers to inspect the crash. So are the Camderans. Two of the picket ships are moving out of their holding orbits to come in closer and use their sensors to scan the ground.”

“
Is it big enough for us to slip through?” Jason asked.

“
Slip is probably the wrong word, but we’ll be able to get up past the ships before they can try to pursue. I’ll let you know once they’ve repositioned and the landers are on their way down,” Kage answered.

Another five minutes crept by while Kage tried his best to gauge the ConFed
’s position by listening over the com. “We’ve got a window. You’ll have to be in slip-space the instant we come up through the holding orbit though.”

“
Slip-drive charging. Ten seconds until it’s online,” Twingo said, anticipating Jason’s next order.

“
I’m feeding the most current nav data to you now, Captain,” Kage continued. “You’ll have to let her do the flying, I don’t think I can update your display fast enough to guarantee we won’t slam into one of the cargo ships up there.”

“
No argument here,” Jason said and prepared to turn primary flight control back over to the
Phoenix
’s computer.

“
Here we go,” Kage said tensely. “It’s going to be close ... Engage now!” Jason switched over off manual flight and immediately the
Phoenix
pitched her nose up and the drive slammed to full power. Despite the compensators, they were still pressed back into their seats as the gunship shot up out of the clouds in a pure vertical climb.

Jason clenched up as the sky turned black and he could see they were heading straight towards a formation of gigantic civilian freighters loafing in a parking orbit. The
Phoenix
angled her flight path slightly to cross the path of a slow-flying cargo hauler right in front of its prow. They were through the formation almost the same instant Jason’s brain even recognized it was there. If he’d been flying manually there would have been no chance for them to avoid the larger ships.

“
Slip-drive primed,” Twingo reported.

“
Engaging,” Jason said, but when he went to hit the control that would send them streaking out of the system a hard impact jarred the ship and the slip-drive’s “READY” indicator winked out. They were still in real-space and the ConFed was moving to intercept.

“
We’re hit!” Doc called out. “Plasma burst from the near cruiser.”

“
Port emitter is depolarized!” Twingo shouted. “The drive is resetting! Try not to take any more hits.” Without another word he leapt from his seat and ran off the bridge towards Engineering.

“
Countermeasures OFF!” Jason barked. “Full combat mode! Give me everything!” Kage and Doc worked in unison to switch from
sneaking around mode
to
kick some ass mode
. The bridge lights dimmed to a muted red and he could feel the power course through the ship as the shields and weapons came online.

The cruiser tried another shot to disable them but it splashed harmlessly against the shields as the
Phoenix
clawed her way up out of Camderan-2’s gravity well. Jason nudged the nose towards the irregularly-shaped moon that was slightly off the starboard side and kept the hammer down. He wanted to put some distance and obstacles between him and the ConFed fleet to give Twingo a chance to get the slip-drive back online.

“
They’re moving to cut us off,” Doc said. “One of the destroyers in high-orbit is breaking away on a direct intercept course.” Jason looked down at his tactical display and saw the big red icon lumbering out of orbit towards them. It was picking up speed quickly, however, as its captain was pushing hard to get into weapons range and bracket them between it and the ships pursuing. “Looks like they’re also launching fighters.”

“
Oh fuck me,” Jason ground out. “Can’t anything ever just be easy?” He angled back to port and adjusted his pitch to allow the
Phoenix
to gain a little more precious distance between them and their tormentors. “Is the nav computer keeping our slip vector updated?”

“
Yes,” Kage said, his hands flying over his own panels. He was actively jamming and working other sorts of tech voodoo to confuse the inbound fighters. Jason sucked in a breath and let it out slowly as he let his neural implant fully integrate him into the ship. There was the usual split second of vertigo before he could “see” through the sensors and feel the
Phoenix
as if she were an extension of his own body.

He picked out the closest of the interceptors bearing down on them and prioritized them to the targeting system. He didn
’t want to fire on a ConFed ship as that carried some serious ramifications, but he wanted to be captured even less.

Just when it seemed he would have no choice but open fire on at least three ConFed fighters
, a new alert flashed in front of him via his neural link.

“
Slip-Drive Ready
.”

The message flashed in his field of vision twice before fading away. Jason looked down to confirm the s
lip-drive’s status on his indicators and then slapped the control to his right. His neural link was abruptly terminated and the
Phoenix
shuddered as she transitioned to slip-space.

“
Set up our dummy jumps,” Jason said, blinking and shaking his head to clear the cobwebs caused by his link being cut so quickly. Normally he would ease himself out of the link. He knew he was in for one hell of a headache for the next few hours.

“
Program set up and executed,” Kage confirmed. “We’re firing tachyon bursts at the first one to mask our vector if they’ve managed to track us.”

“
That was a little closer than usual,” Twingo said as he walked back up on the bridge. “Glad the first shot was only meant to disable the drive. They could have turned us into a vapor cloud with the shields lowered like that.”

“
Yeah,” Jason agreed. “Good job getting the slip-drive back.”

“
I’d love to take credit for it but I more or less stood down there while it sorted itself out. Good job not getting us killed,” Twingo said as he slouched into his seat.

“
It was hit or miss for a little bit there,” Jason said with a humorless laugh.

“
So what now?” Doc asked.

“
I’m guessing Captain Colleren would like to get cleaned up and changed. Then we can debrief her and figure out what the hell is going on,” Jason said, leaning back wearily into the pilot’s seat.

“
So does this mean you’re offering more than just an escape?” Kellea asked.

“
Do you really need to ask?” Crusher said as he walked by her.

“We’d been moving between worlds in a seemingly random pattern,” Kellea said as she pushed the tray away. She’d just polished off her third helping from the galley. “Crisstof was extremely secretive about what we were doing, but that was nothing new. He’s often boarded the
Diligent
and had us fly him to some secret meeting or negotiation. He did seem somewhat out of sorts, but again ... that was nothing new.

“
Camderan-2 was the fifth planet we were visiting, and at each one Crisstof would have a pilot fly him to multiple locations on the surface. He had reboarded, but hadn’t given us our next destination yet. As we waited in orbit an entire ConFed task force dropped into real-space and made straight for the planet. We still didn’t think anything of it until they began to bear down on my ship in an attack formation. I ordered the
Diligent
to break for high-orbit and try to put the planet between them and us, but it was too late. The heavy cruisers opened fire before we could get the shields up or take evasive maneuvers ... not that it would have helped at such a low altitude.” She paused to take a sip of water and steady her nerves.

“
Most of the shots took us on the aft, port quadrant and opened three decks, including some engineering bays, to space. Two more shots and the core shut itself down to prevent a meltdown and the ship began to fall towards the planet. It took four ConFed ships with mooring beams to haul the
Diligent
back up to a stable orbit. During that time, Crisstof grabbed me and Bostco and shoved us into two escape pods and launched us first. He then fired the rest of the pods without waiting for the crew to get into them to hide us as we headed towards the surface.

“I watched the media feeds as Crisstof was led away in restraints and the rest of the crew was put into detention cells. Bostco and I were separated, so I reached out to you guys. Since you’re not a part of the organization it was just a knee-jerk reaction. The thought was that they wouldn’t be tracking communications to your ship. I never meant to put you in so much danger.”

“
That’s OK,” Twingo assured her. “As many times as you’ve saved us, we owed you a few.” She smiled slightly at him and then stared back into her water glass.

“
So, there’s no truth to the allegations against Crisstof?” Jason asked.

“
No,” she said adamantly. “While I don’t know exactly what he had been doing down on the surface of those planets, I refuse to believe he’d abandon his core principles and cause so much bloodshed.”

“
We can agree there,” Jason said. “Whatever is going on, I get the feeling he’s taking the fall to either cover someone’s ass or this is a distraction. The amount of ConFed firepower used to take the
Diligent
out tells us that someone on the Council is involved.”

“
So what did cause the outbreak of violence on Camderan-2?” Doc asked.

“
I have no idea,” Kellea said. “The planet was practically on lockdown when we made orbit. Huge demonstrations then turned incredibly violent in the blink of an eye. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. Camderan-2 had been stable with its current government for centuries and then, in the span of days, the ruling party of their largest nation lost complete control. Thousands of civilians and military were dead within the first week, hundreds more afterwards until the ConFed Fleet began providing support to quell the unrest.”

“
None of this is making a lot of sense right now,” Twingo said. “Especially the convenient appearance of a ConFed task force just in time to save the day
and
arrest Crisstof. Most of the time those idiots can’t find their asses with both hands.”

“
What does that even mean?” Kellea said, her nose wrinkled up in distaste.

“
You know ... I never really figured that out. It’s something the captain says to Kage all the time,” Twingo admitted. “Given the context, I’m assuming it’s an expression of incompetence.”

“
More or less,” Jason answered with a shrug.

“
That’s disgusting,” Kellea said.

“
Anyway,” Jason continued, “It looks like we have our work cut out for us. Kage, start back-tracking the
Diligent
’s past ports of call and see if there was any unusual civil unrest at any of those locations. While you’re at it, compile a list of other inexplicably violent demonstrations and then we can start trimming that down to something usable.”

“
We have a problem,” Kage said, all four of his arms crossed. “I’m almost sure the
Lark
now has multiple warrants out for its capture or destruction. That was our last clean set of transponder codes.”

“
Do we have a good source for more?” Jason asked Twingo.

“
Not a reliable one,” the engineer said with his hands spread. “We can try some of our old contacts, but we’ve been relying on Crisstof to handle things like that for a while.”

“
Do we have any codes we can fly that won’t get us shot down as soon as we enter a ConFed system?”

“
There are two that only have local infractions against them,” Kage said. “It should be fine for the time being.”

“
Good enough,” Jason said. “Let’s get to work.”

*****

The
Phoenix
was loafing along at just ten percent of her capable speed. Anything less than that and the slip-space fields became unstable and the universe would spit them back out into real-space. Jason was using the ether of that dimensional oddity to hide in since they really didn’t have a firm plan of action. Now that the crew had dispersed to go about their individual tasks, he walked down to Berthing to check on their new passenger.

Kellea Colleren was an accomplished officer and an exceptional ship
’s captain, but the gritty and unpredictable world of small-unit ground operations had left her shaken and unsure of herself. When he knocked on the door he found her cleaned and changed, but with an all-too-familiar thousand-yard stare in her eyes. Now that the immediate danger had passed, she was crashing from a week-long adrenaline high.

“
Not exactly what you expected it to be, is it?” he asked as he sat on a bunk across from the one she had claimed.

“
I’m not sure I follow you,” she said, looking up.

“
The unpredictability of being on the other side of legal,” he said with a half-smile.

“
Ah,” she said noncommittally. She fell quiet for a moment before continuing. “How do you deal with it? I could barely breathe during our escape from Kachamar City. Is this really what your life is like? Just one big string of incidents like that?”

“
Some are quite a bit worse,” Jason answered, his hand unconsciously touching his face where his injuries at the hands of Corenntal were still healing. “You become accustomed to it, but never comfortable or complacent.”

“
I’ve been in combat before, but always on the bridge of a starship. That seems so sterile now after being in the middle of smuggling a fugitive out from under the ConFed’s nose ... especially when the fugitive was me. I’m starting to regret all the times we’ve asked you guys to go into situations like that because we couldn’t. Or wouldn’t,” she said.

“
Eh,” Jason scoffed. “We were already doing this when Crisstof found us. The six of us aren’t really suited for much else. Well, maybe Twingo could find honest work.”

“
I remember when I first saw you and the crew,” Kellea smiled a genuine smile and even laughed a bit. “I was so smug thinking we didn’t need mercenary trash getting in our way, and I would find out what was happening in the Concordian Cluster without your help.” Jason laughed too.

“
Yeah ... we weren’t too fond of the stuck-up starship captain who looked at us like she wanted to scrape us off the bottom of her boot,” he said with a wink. There was a long pause in the conversation that began to become uncomfortable. “Well ... I’ll let you get some rest. We’re going to stay in slip-space for the next twenty hours or so before we pick a destination.” He stood up to leave and she reached out and put a hand on his arm.

“
Thank you,” she said. “The fact that you came for me means a lot.” Jason patted her hand.

“
I can’t believe you ever thought we wouldn’t,” he said before walking out of the port berthing bay. He went back to his own quarters to get some rest.
I have a feeling this is going to a rough mission ...