Omega Force: Savage Homecoming (5 page)

“I’m still not thrilled about leaving it down there, but there’s little we can do at this point,” Jason said. “Keep running scans and see what you can find out. Could we track the exit vectors the other ships used?”

“No, that’s the strange thing,” the engineer explained. “I can detect a fading slip-drive signature that matched up with the smaller ship Deetz probably flew out on, but I can’t find a trace of the other two ships. It’s like they just disappeared.”

“Unlikely. Keep looking.”

“Jason,” Taryn said timidly from her seat, still in the restraints. “What about us?”

“Oh, damnit,” Jason said, abashed. “Let’s take care of this language barrier while we appear to have some down time.” He walked over and released their seat restraints and motioned for them to follow him. “Doc,” he said as he walked by. Doc also stood and walked off the bridge.

“
OK, this is going to be painless. I promise,” Jason said with a smile once they were all in the infirmary. “Doc here is going to fit a device into one of your ears– whichever you would prefer–and code it so that you’ll be able to understand the rest of the crew. They can already understand you since their implants can decipher English from their time with me.”

[
Just try to relax, this won’t feel like anything,
] Doc said in his melodic dialect and tenor voice. Jason had gotten so used to understanding what he was saying he’d forgotten how soothing his native language was. Doc pulled three devices that looked like miniature hearing aids from a cabinet. He walked up to Ed first and pointed to one of his ears, then the other, questioningly.

“Oh,” Ed said as he understood.
“This one.” He indicated his left ear and sat still, cringing slightly as Doc gently inserted the device and let it fit itself to the human’s ear. He repeated the process with the two women and then stood back, punching some commands into a tablet computer.

“Can you understand me?”
he asked them.

“Oh
… my … God …” Taryn was staring at him with her mouth hanging open. “That is so strange.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Doc chuckled. “Now for the unpleasant part, unfortunately; I’m going to need to scan each of you and synthesize an inoculation
. The human immune system is fairly robust, but there are microbes on this ship that you simply have no defense against.”

“Alien germs?”
Jess said in alarm.

“Essentially, yes. But don’t worry, this room is sterilized continuously,” Doc assured her. “This will go quickly since I have so much data on human reactions
, thanks to the Captain.” At the title ‘Captain’ the Brown family turned to him and stared.

“I’ll leave you here in Doc’s capable hands for the moment,” Jason told them. “I’m going to go shuck myself out of this suit and then we can sit down and figure out what our next move is.” He ducked out of the infirmary before any of them could protest
, and made his way to the armory to get out of his combat gear.

Twenty minutes later
, he returned to the infirmary to see the Brown family in various stages of distress as Doc’s cocktail of antibodies and nanobots churned through their systems. “You’ll feel like crap for a few days,” he said sympathetically. “But it beats the alternative.”

“I’ll take your word on that,” Taryn said with a weak smile. “I feel like such an ass! You’d even told me about all this and I stood there screaming like a ten
-year-old when I first got sucked up in that … thing.”

“You should have seen Jason when he first met Crusher,” Doc laughed as he checked their readouts. “It was all he could do to not wet himself
, and that was even with Crusher chained up inside a box.”

“Oh yeah
… and where were you?” Jason shot back. “As I recall, you and Twingo wouldn’t go within ten feet of him.”

“This is all so much to take in,” Ed admitted as he leaned against the examination table. “I can’t believe this is the life you’ve carved out for yourself, Jason. I don’t suppose you’d care to talk about it?”

“Soon, Ed,” Jason assured him. “I’ll sit down with you all and explain everything.” He had begun to gravitate towards Taryn, but he stopped himself short of reaching out for her. It had been a few years since he had seen her last, and it had been a couple more years before that time. He wasn’t sure what, if anything, she felt for him past friendship, if even that anymore. “Are they ready?” he asked Doc.

“Looks like it,” Doc said with a nod. “They
adapted quite rapidly thanks to all the trial and error with you.”

“Don’t remind me. If you guys will follow me we’ll get you something to eat and drink
, and you can meet the others now that you can understand them.”

“You have beer?” Ed asked hopefully.

“We do indeed,” Jason assured him before activating the intercom. “If the situation is still green we’re having a family meeting in the galley.” He walked out of the infirmary and into the common area in time to see the crew congregating around one of the high top tables in the galley area. He led the Browns out and stood near the head of the table.

“Gentlemen
–and you too, Twingo–this is the Brown family. They’re personal friends of mine; this is Taryn, her father Ed, and her mother Jess,” he said, introducing them each in turn. Then he gestured to the crew, “This is my crew. The blue one is Twingo, the ship’s engineer; the lighter blue one is Doc, ship’s medic; the four-armed one is Kage, our resident hacker—”

“—slice
r—”

“Whatever. The big guy with the waving dreadlocks and the huge biceps is Crusher
, and the metallic one is Lucky. They’re our ground assault team,” Jason rounded out the introductions. The crew all waved back politely as their name was called. Taryn had been turning a brighter shade of red as they were introduced.

“I’m so embarrassed!”
she said as she put her hands to her face. “I’m so sorry I reacted as badly as I did.”

“Think nothing of it, my dear,” Twingo said, ho
pping out of his seat to approach her. He took her hands in his and led her around to an open seat. “Grab a seat, all of you. What would you like to eat?” At that the family turned again to Jason.

“I’ll grab it,” he said, making his way to the food processor. Remembering how he had felt after he had been inoculated
, he picked a light fare for his guests and set the trays before each of them. Once everyone had grabbed their own food, the conversation tapered off as they ate. Sitting next to Taryn, Jason couldn’t help but reflect on the bizarre twist his life had taken the last few days.

“The
Diligent
is slipping into orbit over Saturn,” Kage reported. “They said to meet them whenever we complete our intel gathering here.” Jason snorted at that.

“What intel?”
he asked rhetorically as he watched the International Space Station go streaking by below them at over seventeen thousand miles per hour. The
Phoenix
was using her grav drive to park in a low, stationary orbit over the eastern coast of the United States, something the primitive station couldn’t do. “Tell them we’ll be there shortly.”

They had stayed in orbit for the last two days (ship’s time) and tried to glean as much as they could from the wreckage below. Despite their best efforts
, they were no closer to ascertaining who it was that had attacked Earth than they were when they first saw the news broadcasts. The fact that Deetz appeared to be leading them only heightened the mystery.

While monitoring the media coming from the surface
, Jason had begun to fear the environment was too hostile for the Browns to go back home. He convinced them to stay on board, and he planned to deposit them on the
Diligent
as Omega Force hunted down Deetz and these unknown ships. They had reluctantly agreed, and Jason left it alone at that. What he didn’t tell them was that they might never be able to return to Earth. The public in general was a panicky, fickle beast that would care nothing for the nuances of the situation. All they knew was that Taryn was somehow tied to the alien attack, and that was as far as their reasoning would go.

The damage on the surface had been shockingly light. Deetz had blasted a few tracts of land with particle beam fire, and there had been some casualties, but there were fewer deaths than one would expect
from a severe hurricane. Only one oddity stood out from the whole incident, and it was one they almost missed: all of Earth’s nuclear reactors had been rendered inert. Powerplants, ships, weapons … all shut down somehow. The only reason they caught it was because of the massive brownouts in some regions due to reactors being shut down. Besides being impressed at how Deetz had accomplished this from orbit, Jason was certain this was an important clue, he just didn’t know why.

“All hands, prepare the
Phoenix
to break orbit,” Jason said over the intercom as he started to change the gunship’s configuration from silent reconnaissance to intra-system flight. He thought for a moment before keying the intercom again, and doing his best airline pilot impression, said, “If all new passengers would like to come to the flight deck, we will begin our tour of the inner planets on our way to the crown jewel of the Solar System: Saturn.”

Taryn, who was adapting to the situation surprisingly well, came bounding up on the bridge a moment later. She was dressed in the standard gray utilitarian uniform they all wore while shipboard.
She fills it out a lot better than Twingo. Or Crusher.
Her parents were close behind, along with the rest of the crew. Everyone took their seats except for Taryn, who leaned against the pilot’s seat and put her arm over the headrest, sending Jason’s pulse up. “Can I help you?” he asked.

“I want to watch you fly the ship,” she said with an impish grin, tugging on his right ear as she leaned in closer. He looked up and saw his crew watching him with a disturbing degree of interest. Twingo elbowed Doc and even Crusher was nodding his approval. Sighing and deliberately ignoring them for the time being
, he turned the
Phoenix
to point away from Earth.

“Are we clear?”
he asked Kage.

“Hang on, Captain,”
the Veran answered. “There’s an unbelievable amount of debris in orbit I’m trying to track. So your species does realize that your little dumping ground is going to be problematic if you ever decide to explore beyond your planet, right?”

“Eh
… we’re a little shortsighted at times,” Jason admitted. “Just tell me when we can push out of here; I’m sure Crisstof is getting impatient.” While running in a low-observability mode they couldn’t use the navigational or combat shields, so the fast-moving debris in their low orbit could potentially damage the ship.

“There’s a
carcass of a chemical booster engine coming by in two seconds that’s got a bunch of small stuff trailing after it, and then you’re clear.”

Once the debris cleared
, Jason throttled up and the
Phoenix
smoothly climbed up out of Earth’s gravity well. He had already programmed in his nav points so he hammered down for a quick flyby of Mars before heading to Saturn to rendezvous with the
Diligent
. The nostalgia of the situation wasn’t lost on him; it had been his first time in the gunship, with Deetz in command, that he first saw the other planets in his own star system.

He indulged his passengers with not only a flyby of Mars, but a quick burn through the thin atmosphere and a nerve-tingling flight at low level up Olympus Mons before pushing back out into space and towards the outer planets. Ed and Jess gritted
their teeth and endured the flight, but Taryn was simply wide-eyed and thrilled at the close encounter.

“That was incredible!”
she cried in delight.

“Wait until you see what’s next,” Jason told her with a grin. He felt a certain amount of guilt at enjoying himself so much after the Earth had just been attacked and the implications of that, but being around humans again, around her again, was intoxicating.

“Navigational shields up,” Kage reported. “Saturn is putting off some nasty radiation. Orbital insertion in five minutes, we’ll catch the
Diligent
in … eight minutes.”

As they approached the gas giant
, a few people on the bridge sucked in their breath at the sight, not all of them human. Saturn was stunning as her roiling atmosphere became visible to the naked eye.

“
Phoenix, we have you on sensors. Fly the approach as directed and prepare to board the hangar deck via platform alpha. Welcome back, Omega Force,”
the call from the
Diligent’s
com officer came over the intercom as Jason swung around and chased the much larger frigate, dipping low along the rings as he did.

“Who’s Omega Force?” Taryn asked.

“We are,” Crusher answered with pride from where he stood near the canopy.

“I’ll explain later,” Jason said quietly.

“You keep saying that,” she whispered back. “It seems you have a lot of explaining to do.”

The
Phoenix
touched down gently on the
Diligent’s
aft landing pad and was lowered into the hangar bay. After parking the ship and shutting down the primary flight systems, Jason led his crew and passengers out through the cargo bay and down the main ramp onto the frigate’s hangar deck.

“Captain Burke,” Kellea Colleren started as soon as
he stepped off the ramp. “I’m sorry to hear about the attack on your—Oh! And who is this?” Captain Colleren was clearly not referring to Ed or Jess; she was looking right at Taryn, who had walked up to stand close enough to him to be touching.

“Uh
… Kellea, I mean … Captain Colleren,” Jason stammered. “This is my … this is Taryn. She’s from Earth.”

“I figured that part out. Thank you, Captain,” Kellea said with a little frost in her voice before she turned to face the rest of the crew. “Welcome
back everyone. You know your way around, so let’s just say we’ll meet up in the port-side conference room in two hours.” With that she turned and marched away from the group.

Jason’s relationship with Kellea was complicated. When they had first met
, she’d looked at him like something she would like to scrape off the bottom of her shoe, but after his crew’s successful thwarting of an attack on a heavily-populated mining settlement that had nearly killed them, she had warmed up to him. Over the last year the beautiful captain and the human mercenary seemed to be more than just business associates at times, but she would just as often turn a cold shoulder to him.

“It seems you have a
lot
of explaining to do,
Captain,
” Taryn practically hissed into his ear before marching away herself to catch up to her parents. Jason just gritted his teeth and followed along, but not before he could hear Twingo, Kage, and Crusher giggling behind him.

The dining facilities aboard the
Diligent
were a thing of wonder to a mercenary crew that lived aboard a small gunship with only a single food processor and few stores onboard. Large buffet lines stretched along either wall of the mess deck, and everything appeared to be quite fresh. Crusher sighed lustily at the sight and made his way towards the omnivore line (vegetarian was along the opposite wall). The rest of Omega Force knew to crowd in behind the Galvetic warrior as nobody in their right mind dallied in line when in front of him.

Taryn, having recovered from her earlier peevishness, watched in awe/horror as the crew fell upon their heaping trays of food in a wordless assault. Even the normally proper Doc was making odd groaning sounds as he shoveled food into his mouth. Once they
had gorged themselves, they sat back and drowsily reflected on their current situation.

“So I assume we’re now declaring war on Deetz,” Doc said, cutting to the core of the matter.

“Do we all agree it’s in our best interest to neutralize him?” Jason asked, seeing nodding heads all around. “Lucky? You’ve been quiet about all of this so far.”

“I have been conflicted about my emotions on this matter, Captain. I feel a certain amount of responsibility for Deetz being able to perpetrate such an attack on a helpless population
, as I advised you to let him go.” The battlesynth was sitting in a chair at their table, a rare sight as he normally preferred to stand.

“The decision was mine,” Jason asserted
, “the blame, and the guilt, stops with me.”

“Not entirely,” Lucky disagreed. “I understood what you were asking me that day and I tailored my response so as not to have to destroy another synth. Had I been less of an idealist, I would have told you to destroy him while he was restrained.”

“We were all idealists back then, bud,” Jason said, slapping him on the shoulder. “That’s not the point. The question is: what do we do now?”

“Kill him,” Crusher said simply.

“Kill him,” Lucky agreed. “He’s proven too dangerous to be left alive.”

“Ok
ay,” Jason nodded. “Now for the easy part; how the hell do we find him? Despite being a conniving, evil bastard, he is still frighteningly intelligent and resourceful.”

“I suppose we should wait to see if Crisstof dug anything up on the attackers,” Kage said as he picked at the remains of his meal. “That should hopefully give us a starting point.”

*****

“What we have is very thin,” Crisstof Dalton began, standing at the head of the long table in one of the
Diligent’s
conference rooms. “We downloaded the sensor logs from the
Phoenix
and we concur with Twingo; these ships appear to be at least four or five hundred years old. They also seem to employ some other method of FTL travel than the slip-drive; there were no slip radiation trails leading out of this system when we arrived, save for the small ship that escaped your initial counter-attack.”

“This much we know already,” Jason said. “Were you able to cross
-reference the ships to any particular builder?”

“None of the known yards in th
is part of the galaxy built those ships,” Crisstof continued. “But, we may have found something. There were markings along the hull that we weren’t able to identify as any known language within travelling distance, so we expanded the search parameters to include stylized symbols, links to splinter societies, and anything else it could find. The results were a massive data dump but one hit looks promising, though I’m hesitant to bring it up.”

“Why?” Doc asked.

“Because, frankly, it’s absurd; the writing is a close match to the written language of a species we know as the A’arcooni. The problem is that the species was cataloged centuries ago and was in a post-industrial revolution stage, much like your own species. There was no indication they were working on ships of that level of sophistication then, and given the age of the ships they would had to have been building them during the survey missions.” Crisstof splayed his hands wide. “While interesting, I don’t see how it helps.”

“So the A’arcoon
i government isn’t a member of the ConFed? Let’s suspend disbelief for the moment and assume that somehow they built these ships without being noticed,” Jason said, mostly thinking out loud. “Why wouldn’t they have modern ships if they were already building this type way back then? And why would Deetz be associated with these people? There have to be any number of mercenary outfits that would agree to attack Earth if only for a chance at a hold full of precious metals.”

“
You might be surprised,” Kellea spoke up for the first time. “While the ConFed may be corrupt on many levels, they do not tolerate attacks upon primitive species, no offense intended. Any outfit with enough muscle to move in on an entire planet wouldn’t likely be foolish enough to risk bringing the ConFed fleet down on its own head.”