Omega Force: Savage Homecoming (15 page)

“
Don’t worry, Captain. We won’t be far,”
Doc answered.

Jason and Lucky wasted no time crossing the few kilometers of dry, baked clay to reach the habitat. It was a typical, cost-efficient dome with several support structures
attached at various places along its base. He knew the main living areas would be underground, and he hoped they had an emergency shelter that didn’t require power to lock.

The airlock door had to be manually overridden, which simply meant Lucky grabbed it and ripped it from the frame. The inner door was a bit more cooperative and could be slid back into its recess without too much damage to the mechanism. When they opened the inner door and darted in, there was an alarming lack of rushing atmosphere to greet them. Jason jammed the inner door closed anyway and turned to look into the structure they’d just entered.

No emergency lights had come on, so Jason switched through spectrums, settling on viewing the interior through mid-wave infrared with a false-color overlay. He walked cautiously into the gloomy dome with Lucky close behind. Inside had apparently been a self-contained eco system, complete with odd-looking trees stretching to the top of the structure. Then he saw the bodies.

Aliens of a species he had never encountered were strewn around, their faces contorted in the agony of their final moments. There were a few dozen within sight of where he stood. The beings only had one multi-
pupilled eye and odd, lipless mouths, but it seemed the contortions a body went through during a violent death were universal.

“Just shutting off the power wouldn’t do this,” Jason said to Lucky. “Deetz did something to let the air out afterwards.”

“I concur, Captain,” Lucky agreed. “These beings look to have suffered from sudden decompression of their habitat.”

They walked through the rest of the dome in silence as Jason became increasingly angry at the carnage around him. He was so distracted that he almost missed the blinking light near the entrance to one of the service tunnels that led underneath the structure. He walked over cautiously and saw that it was a display unit that still had power. There was also a note, etched into the metal of the table the monitor was resting on. It said, “Hello Jason. Press here,” with a line leading up to a single button on the bezel of the display. It was written in English.

“Lucky! Get over here,” he called over the coms. When the battlesynth approached, he took in the scene for a moment before commenting.

“Interesting,” he said. “How do you wish to proceed?” Instead of answering, Jason simply pressed the button. The setup was too elaborate for it to simply be a bomb. The display flickered on and, not surprisingly, Deetz’s face appeared.

“Hello Jason, as I’m certain it’s you who has found this,” Deetz began, his voice being broadcast over open com channels from the unit. “I’m sure you have many questions and are probably quite angry. Who were these people? What does it mean? Why them?

“The short answer is: I have no idea. This research settlement was a target of opportunity. It allowed me to show you just how far I’m willing to go to get what I want. It also allowed me to get further away for the time being while you stomp around and throw a temper tantrum at seeing all the innocent beings. Yes … I know all about your ridiculous idealistic crusade to help people. You steal a powerful ship like that and then you live like a pauper?
For what? You think anything you’ve done wasn’t undone the moment you left? Guess again.

“There are no heroes, Jason, only fools who don’t know any better. I hope the scene around you lets the futility of your life penetrate that primitive brain of yours. But if not, here’s a little something to speed the process.” The video cut to a recorded scene of the atmosphere venting from the dome and the aliens within writhing in agony as they gasped, trying to catch their breath. It was over in less than a minute.

“So what will it be, Jason?” Deetz was now back in the picture and continuing his speech. “Shall you continue to chase me across this section of the galaxy, letting me do this over and over? Or will you come to your senses? My terms, you ask?

“I. Want.
That. Ship. Nothing more complicated than that. I want the DL7 back, or whatever you’re calling it now. I went through a lot of trouble to get my hands on it before I met you, and I won’t let you just keep it.” He paused for a moment, looking around from wherever he was recording the message. “I’ll be in touch.”

The message ended and the monitor powered
itself off. A second later, smoke streamed out from around the edges as its internal workings were fried. Apparently Deetz was still a little paranoid, despite the murders and the false bravado. Lucky turned and looked at Jason, but said nothing.

“We’re not learning anything else here,” Jason said. “We’ll have Crisstof try and find out who these scientists were and contact their people. Let’s head back to the ship.”

The pair hustled to make it back to the pickup point on time, but the
Phoenix
wasn’t there yet. So they stood silently, looking out over the barren landscape as they waited.

*****

“Is it possible for a synth to go insane?” Twingo was asking. They were in the
Phoenix’s
meeting room having a conference with Crisstof and Kellea. Both ships were in orbit over the planet, but Jason was hesitant to take the gunship back aboard the frigate. The only reason he didn’t just mesh out was the three humans on the other ship.

“I can assure you it is,” Lucky said. “However, Deetz is not displaying the usual signs of dementia for my kind. He is sadistic and self-serving, but very much aware of what he is doing and very calculating.”

“I’ll say,” Jason said. “He’s been leading us around by the nose this entire time.”

“We’ve identified who this outpost belonged to,” Crisstof said over the link. “We’re sending a message to inform their government of what has happened. So what will be your next course of action, Captain Burke?”

“Honestly I have no idea, Crisstof,” Jason was forced to admit. “As lengthy as that message was, he didn’t really give us any clue as to where he was or where he would be going.”

“Would you permit a small contingent to come over to your vessel via shuttle? We have some information from our analysis of your sensor logs that will be useful for your tactical planning,” Crisstof said, trying overly hard not to overstep his bounds. For some reason that irritated Jason more than his trying to order them around.

“That’s fine. We’ll be expecting you at our port airlock,” Jason said with a sigh.

It was an hour later when a small shuttlecraft nudged up to the
Phoenix’s
port airlock and the hatches were opened. Jason met them alone and unarmed, too mentally exhausted to care if their plan was to try and shut them down again. He was surprised to see that in addition to Kellea and Bostco, whom he expected, Taryn and Crisstof himself were also crammed into the tiny runabout. Jason nodded to them, hugged Taryn, and led the way back out to the common area. With his own crew and the additional people from the
Diligent
, their small meeting room would not comfortably hold everybody.

Bostco walked to the lounge and used his tablet computer to link up to the main display that was usually used for entertainment. The others filed in and took their seats
in the assortment of couches and large, stuffed chairs. If not for the somber faces, they looked like a group of friends about to enjoy a movie night.

“We analyzed your sensor logs prior to the attack,” Bostco began as the monitor now displayed an overview of the system they had been in, with a green dot representing the
Phoenix
and a red dot representing the enemy ship. There were dotted track lines that showed the projected flights of each. “As you can see, they didn’t react to your presence until you were well within a million kilometers. This tells us they don’t likely have real-time sensor capability.

“Now, here, when they do spot you, they immediately move to attack. No hesitation. It would seem you’re correct in assuming they were waiting for you, but the fact they’re moving to intercept indicates an important fact about the weapon they used.”

“It’s range limited,” Jason said. “We already assumed that.”

“Yes, but we think we know what that range is,” Bostco continued. “Your attack speed was so high that we almost missed it, but the other vessel applies a high level of retro thrust right … here, and then your sensors registered a large energy build up on the hull of the enemy vessel right before you were hit.

“We’ve postulated that not only is the weapon range limited, but it’s not actually
fired
in the traditional sense. It seems the energy builds up like a static electric charge and then is attracted to nearby power sources. Your reactor drew the shot right into the ship.”

“OK,” Jason said after a pause. “Plausible. But what is it?”

“That we don’t know,” Kellea said after Bostco froze up. “We’re operating under the assumption that the energy charge is a carrier for some type of particle we’ve never encountered that can interrupt and shut down certain types of power sources, particularly atomic and anti-matter reactions.”

“Those two types of energy aren’t that closely related,” Twingo objected. “Putting aside the fact you’re assuming a hell of a lot, what sort of particle can render reactors inert within the span of seconds? There was also the failure of chemical and static charge power sources.”

“Again, we don’t know,” Crisstof said. “We’re sharing what we do know, which is very little. What happened to the
Phoenix
may not be typical, but may have been a result of your proximity. This latest attack, along with the attack on Earth, seems to indicate that this is a planetary assault weapon. Hitting the gunship could have simply overloaded everything, including Lucky’s power cells.”

“I’m hearing a lot of
could haves
and
might haves
. Do you have anything concrete other than the range numbers from when they fired?” Jason asked, thinking their trip over was a waste of time.

“We can give you the ranging data we’ve been able to determine from the shot,” Kellea said with a shrug.

“So why are you really here?” Jason said, leveling a steady glare at Crisstof.

“I understand that you’re going to press ahead with this mission, with or without my blessing,” Crisstof said, crossing one leg over the other and rumpling his expensive suit. “I’m here to ask that you remember what it is that makes you, all of you, unique.”

“I’m going to say this again,” Jason said wearily. “I have no idea why you’re so up in arms about the Torestellia incident. We’ve done far more damage on a night off just having fun.”

“I hardly call seventeen dead twarlans at a mine a fun night off,” Crisstof nearly shouted.

“What dead twarlans? What the hell are you talking about?”

“You didn’t fire on a mineral mine in the outlands near the city you were in?”

“Dalton, we didn’t fire on
anything
, including Deetz. We couldn’t open fire with the
Phoenix’s
guns because we were in the city the entire time,” Jason ground out, tired of the circular conversation. “I fired one shot out of a holdout blaster that hit an A’arcooni gunman. Beyond that, we never even flew near a mine.”

“Did Deetz have a ship on the surface?” Crisstof pressed.

“Yes, we told you that already,” Doc said, also sounding irritated. “He had the smaller, modern vessel he escaped Earth with parked on the tarmac at the same spaceport we were at.”

“I’d say the safe bet is that Deetz fired on the mine, but why?” Taryn asked, speaking up for the first time. “Since even I know it wasn’t this ship that fired. I was on the bridge the entire time.”

“What do they mine there?” Jason asked.

“Samarskite,” Bostco said after consulting his computer. Jason simply shrugged helplessly.

“It’s a radioactive ore,” Twingo said thoughtfully. “It can be refined into a few useful compounds. It’s rare, but not rare enough to attack a mine for its raw form.”

“It’s used in some reactor construction,” Bostco said, still reading. “But like Twingo said, it’s widely available for purchase.”

“We’re assuming it was Deetz that attacked the mine,” Jason said, holding up a hand. “We’re also assuming he attacked it for a logical reason. I think the scene on the planet below us underscores the fact we’re not dealing with a rational being.”

“I disagree, Captain,” Lucky said, standing near the front of the lounge area where he could cover everyone’s movements. “He has shown thus far that everything has been a calculation. We must assume that the attack on the mine, and on the surface of this world, fit into that plan somehow.”

“I’m forced to agree with him,” Twingo said moodily, “though I don’t like the implications of that. We’re being led around with some goal in mind and I doubt it’s a surprise party.”

“So now what?”
Kellea asked. Jason was glad to see that every time the other captain opened her mouth it wasn’t met with a hostile look from Taryn.

“I have no idea,” he admitted for the second time in as many hours. “We’ll go back through the message again and see if we can pick anything out of it and try to go from there.”