Omega Force 7: Redemption (21 page)

"He says he is," Doc said. "I stressed all the distasteful parts of the procedure and made sure he understood that ConFed Intel wasn't something to be taken lightly, but he insists he owes us."

"Part of me wants to turn him down flat," Jason said. "I don't think he really understands what he's volunteering for and I'd rather not take advantage of the fact he thinks he owes us. Without him we would have probably failed to rescue our Avarian princess and might not have all gotten out of there alive."

"It's up to you," Doc said. "I'm just giving you all the options and information that's available. But you may want to keep in mind that he might see it as a grave insult if you turned down his offer."

"So?" Jason snorted. "After we drop him off we'll never see him again. He can be insulted all he wants while keeping his freedom and his life by not pushing his luck with an agent."

In the end Jason was completely overruled as Jer-An pleaded his case and the rest of the crew seemed inclined to go along with it. Each had their own reasons and personal philosophies that caused them to support the Veran's decision (although Kage's motives were suspect) and Jason was powerless to try and talk him out if it.

Although he agreed to honor the decision and allow it to proceed, he refused to be a part of it. He told Doc to find someone else to play along in the infirmary, angrily walking out of the galley and back up to the bridge. He flopped down into the pilot's seat and pulled up the nav panel, entering in the course change and speed increase that would get them to Chiphae-3 within the day.

"Why do you seem so steadfastly against Jer-An's actions, Captain Burke?" Jason looked over and saw the netjere standing in the entryway to the bridge. Even in the baggy, nondescript gray overalls Twingo had provided her from the fabricator she still looked stunning.

"I'm not sure he's fully aware of what he's getting himself into," Jason said, executing the new course and watching his instruments as the engines slowly built power for the new speed demand.

"Even though he offered this himself?" she asked, walking fully onto the bridge for the first time since she'd come aboard the
Phoenix
, staring at the simulated moving starfield being projected on the main canopy. "This is quite beautiful," she commented absently before turning towards Jason.

"I think he volunteered under the misguided notion he owed us a debt for taking him off that planet," Jason said. "He may have even hoped secretly that we'd turn him down, but when everyone else got involved and was cheering him on he was more or less forced into the situation."

"You are a peculiar man, Captain Burke," she said, walking around the bridge and taking everything in before settling into the copilot's seat, a move that slightly startled Jason.

"How so?" he asked.

"You are capable of horrific acts of violence, killing and maiming whole groups of individuals as you did during my rescue, but yet you are overly concerned about the potential risks to a being you hardly know and will never see again," she said, staring at him from the seat to his right and making him exceedingly uncomfortable.

"And what is it about that you find confusing?" Jason asked.

"I am not the one confused by it," she said, turning to look out the canopy. "But I think that you are."

Jason, never comfortable with being analyzed, even by a beautiful young woman (
especially
by a beautiful young woman,) remained silent and let the matter drop. The pair spent a silent, comfortable quarter of an hour enjoying the soothing effect of the starfield simulation until they were interrupted by Kage walking onto the bridge and demanding she vacate his seat.

The netjere gracefully climbed out of the seat, gave Jason a polite nod, and walked off the bridge. Kage hopped up into his seat, pulled up a new panel on his multi-function display, and began playing a tile game that was apparently the Veran version of solitaire. When Jason discovered Kage had chased the netjere off the bridge to play a game his hands actually twitched of their own accord with the desire to strangle the life from him.

Chiphae-3 was a surprising little gem, an independent planet nestled between two competing powers that managed to thrive on its own despite being of no significant use to the ConFed. If they'd had some exportable resource or if the planet itself was in a strategic location the ConFed main fleet would have maintained a presence there to enforce the peace, but other than the indigenous species that called it home there didn't seem to be anything on Chiphae-3 that anybody wanted.

The starline that operated a logistics hub on the planet had even built an orbital facility that the
Phoenix
could have docked with and allowed Jer-An to go on his way without the hassle of a planetary landing. But Jason wasn't so sure that Crisstof hadn't put all local systems on alert for his ship, so he opted to wait for a landing slot and put the ship down on a lesser-used airfield far from the scrutiny of the main port authorities.

Once the wheels touched down he gave Crusher and Lucky the go-ahead to allow Jer-An to disembark. He didn't go down himself since the Veran he had come to consider as a friend now looked at him as his abductor, not rescuer. Doc assured him the effects were only temporary and, after a few days of confusion, Jer-An's real memories would again assert themselves. Despite the fact that the subject had enthusiastically volunteered for the procedure, Jason still looked at it as a violation of the Veran's trust.

"He's on his way," Crusher said as he walked back up onto the bridge and flopped down into one of the seats. "You still in a bit of a state about this?"

"I would think you of all people could appreciate my position," Jason said, regretting his words as he said them. He hoped his reference to Crusher's time in two super-max prisons didn't reignite hostilities between them. To his surprise, however, Crusher merely looked thoughtful at the comment.

"Perhaps," he conceded. "But this is a calculated risk. We did no permanent damage to him and, honestly, he was likely going to get picked up anyway. It's likely we've helped him more than anything."

"I suppose it's a nonissue now," Jason said, wanting to change the subject. "He's on his way and there's nothing we can do about it even if we wanted to."

"We just got our clearance to leave," Kage said. "Fairly unspecific, they just want us making orbit above a certain latitude. I'll plot a course and send it to you."

"Thanks," Jason said, feeding power to the drive. "Let's get airborne in case our little Veran time bomb blows before we're ready."

The
Phoenix
lifted off smoothly from the sleepy airfield and accelerated away to the north just as a confused and upset Jer-An reached the counter to buy a transit pass back to Ver. Jason said a little prayer that his new friend would make it home with little trouble and then tried to put the entire thing out of his mind.

"So what is our next destination?" Kalette asked. She'd been so quiet lately that Jason almost didn't notice when she was around. The First Attendant had naturally tried to make herself part of the background now that the netjere was back around and beginning to feel and act like her normal, imperial self.

"We're heading to a planet called Wy," Kage said. "It's a trader world near the fringe of ConFed space. We'll be able to land there and nobody will likely notice that we've come or gone."

"Why must we land there at all?" she asked.

"Standard procedure for us," Jason explained to her. "Before an extended slip-space flight like the expanse we prefer to land and refuel, resupply, and let Twingo do a full inspection of the drive components."

"Prudent," Kalette said with a nod. "How long with the flight across the expanse take?"

"That depends on the destination you and the netjere have worked with Doc on," Jason said. "But roughly speaking this ship can make the trip in just under two weeks."

"This is a fast ship," Kalette said in surprise. "The traders I've spoken to before say the trip is normally more than a month."

"We're not quite that much faster," Jason said. "Those traders will be doing the math to determine the most efficient speed they can achieve and not necessarily the fastest. We're just making a mad dash across space, but we'll still be in Avarian space well before the ConFed would suspect."

"But not faster than Crisstof will expect," Crusher said. "He knows how fast the
Phoenix
is and he'll warn his new buddies ... unless you already forgot that he arrived with a Fleet escort."

"We've never let Crisstof or Kellea know our actual maximum slip-space velocity," Jason argued. "They know she's faster than the
Defiant
, but they don't know by what factor. We're not going to have an insurmountable advantage due to it I know, but between the speed advantage and our little deception with Jer-An I'm hopeful that we can at least get into Avarian space without a welcoming party."

"You are still convinced that someone in my father's government is involved?" the netjere said, having walked onto the bridge during the conversation.

"You're not?" Jason asked as he pitched the
Phoenix
up to intersect the orbital vector Kage had sent to his nav display.

"Not fully," she said. "But as I have no other valid theories I am willing to entertain this one for now." Jason bit back his sarcastic response and instead concentrated on flying the ship.

"I wish we had a way to know what the
Defiant
was doing," he said after a few minutes. "Crisstof seems to be involved in a less than altruistic way. If we knew where that ship was we could take an educated guess as to how successfully our plan is working."

"I've actually been giving that some thought," Kage said as he sent the mesh-out point coordinates to him. "Give me some time to really think it out, but I believe there may be some way to track the ship's rough location by using their identification and navigation transponder."

"Just make sure that what you're doing can't be used to backtrack our location," Jason said. "Otherwise, knock yourself out."

"Great," Kage said, hoping out of his seat and racing off the bridge. Jason just watched him leave, incredulous.

"That's your fault," Crusher said with a laugh. "You should have specified that once you no longer needed a copilot he could go ... although you should be grateful he even asked first."

"I guess," Jason said as Lucky wordlessly slid into the copilot's seat and adjusted the station for himself. "Twingo, is the slip-drive ready?"

"
Slip-drive is available
," Twingo said over the intercom. "
You're clear for seventy percent power and then we'll walk it up from there
."

"Our course is clear all the way to the mesh-out point," Lucky reported. "Drive is charged and ready and com traffic indicates nobody is looking for us."

"Good enough for me," Jason said, pushing the throttle up to get a little more velocity before meshing out of the system. "Next stop, hopefully, will be the wonderfully boring world of Wy." He slapped the control to his right and the
Phoenix
shuddered her way into slip-space before settling into the steady, hypnotic drone that Jason felt comprised most of his life.

****

As the crew settled into their slip-space flight routines Jason became increasingly concerned about Kage. The code slicer had locked himself into the com room and seemed to be working around the clock on his pet project of tracking the
Defiant
. Doc assured him that he was only excited about a new and challenging project, but Jason still had fears that Kage could either over-tax himself and/or inadvertently sabotage the mission while he was digging into confidential navigation data.

Crusher bullied Lucky into the cargo bay to resume his brutal conditioning regimen while Doc and Twingo pulled their usual disappearing act into the infirmary and Engineering respectively. This left Jason to entertain two extremely attractive, and extremely bored, young women. There were only so many programs that could be watched in the lounge before the mind-numbing reality of being stuck on a small ship (a military ship at that) on a long slip-space flight began to sink in. Kalette soon lost interest in hanging out in the common area and procured a tablet computer where she could read in berthing alone.

This left Jason the thrilling and terrifying prospect of entertaining the netjere by himself. While he would normally be ecstatic about having such a beautiful female as a captive audience, there were some issues. The most obvious problem was that she was literally royalty from one of the most powerful empires in known space and he was a grubby mercenary, so there wasn't a lot of common ground for discussions. The other was that thanks to Doc's genetic manipulation Jason didn't age like normal humans. In fact, he'd spent so much time in space, and the treatments had actually reversed his physical aging, that he wasn't really sure how old he even was. Oh, he knew he was somewhere in the thirty-year-old range, but to pinpoint an exact year he'd have to sit and do the math.

The netjere, on the other hand, looked to be anywhere from nineteen to twenty-five, also impossible to tell because, despite their similarity to humans, he had no idea how Avarians matured and he assumed it was probably as bad an idea to ask an Avarian female her age as it was a human.

"So how many species are there in the Avarian Empire?" he asked, hoping to come at the problem from an angle.

"There are over twenty individual species," the netjere said, staring intently at the cards in her hand. "Are you trying to distract me from this hand, or is there a specific question you wish to ask?" Jason had actually gone to Doc earlier to ask if Avarians might be suspected telepaths since the netjere had an unnerving ability to see past what he was saying to what he actually meant.

"Idle curiosity," he said. "Am I correct in assuming Avarian is actually your species name?"

"You would be incorrect," she said. "Avaris was the planet of our birth. We call ourselves nuans, or at least that is the short, non-scientific name of our species. Is it the same with humans?"

"More or less," Jason said as looked at the card that had been upturned. "I'm from a planet called Earth and we also have a suitably pretentious scientific name for our species." She laughed lightly at that, arching back in the hard galley chair to stretch.

"I notice you said
I
and not
we
," she said.

"As far as I know I'm the only one from my planet this far from home," Jason said. "I guess you would say that we're not an initiated species."

"How is this possible?" she asked. Before Jason knew it he had spent the next two hours telling her about how he had found the gunship disabled near his home and had gotten himself pulled into the much greater galactic community completely by accident. In turn she told him of growing up in the court of her father and in so doing let him know that she was actually older than he was by a few years, if he had done the conversion correctly in his head.

While he had no delusions that the princess was simply trying to make the best of a bad situation, he had to concede that talking to her was a far more pleasant distraction during the long flight than getting beat up in the cargo bay or watching Twingo putter around on his workbench while cursing to himself.

"What the hell have you been up to in here?" Jason asked some hours after the netjere had gone to bed and he noticed the com room door was open.

"What have you been up to down there with that princess?" Kage asked indignantly.

"Don't change the subject," Jason said, crossing his arms. "Let's have it."

"You know, I get tired of being suspected of underhanded dealings anytime I just happen to work diligently on something," Kage said.

"You're stalling."

"Look ... this is going to sound bad at first, but before you get pissed just let me say that this worked," Kage said.

"Oh this should be good," Jason said, rubbing his temples and stepping into the room to sit down.

"You know my original idea to try and access the com logs of wherever we thought the
Defiant
was flying to verify her position?" Kage asked. When Jason just nodded he pressed on. "This turned out to be a lot less practical than I thought. The ConFed has never set up any sort of centralized reporting for traffic in individual systems. Each planetary government has their own unique system that I would have to break into, and that was assuming I had a place to start. Looking at projected courses the
Defiant
could have taken away from Vyrt I was left with hundreds of planets."

"I'm guessing you figured this out almost immediately," Jason said.

"I actually figured that out before I asked you if I could try this, if I'm honest," Kage admitted. "But what is the one constant we have here?"

"You're already giving me a headache," Jason said, not answering.

"The
Defiant's
navigation beacon," Kage said, ignoring him and become very excited as he explained. "On a new battlecruiser like that the beacon is really just a slip-space com node that reports back far more than just position to the receiving address. In this case, that's Crisstof's home office."