Soldiers of Fortune (6 page)

             
Thirty minutes later, the
Phoenix
was tearing through slip-space towards their destination (and payment) to drop off the Vongaard family. It would be a four-day flight at the speed Jason had chosen, quick enough that their passengers wouldn't become restless but not so fast that they burned an excessive amount of fuel and ate away at their profit for the job. He sat on the bridge in his seat for another hour to monitor the ship's systems during the beginning of the long flight and to unwind a bit in the relative quiet the command deck offered. Kage, as was usual, seemed completely absorbed by his own displays. In truth, he was hooked into the computer via his own unique neural implants and was probably only vaguely aware of his surroundings. As a Veran, Kage had the ability to partition off sections of his over-sized brain and dedicate those to parallel functions. The "sectioning" of his brain made him an especially effective code slicer.

             
Jason leaned back further into his seat and watched the indicated velocity on his display creep up towards their final cruising speed. It was all abstract to him; they were moving at nearly a thousand times the speed of light in relation to objects in normal space, but within the cocoon of slip-space energy, the ship was motionless. He was getting a firmer grasp on the principles involved, but much of the technology on his ship may as well have been magic to him. He figured he had as long as he needed to get himself up to speed; he had no plans on settling down anytime soon.

             
Standing and stretching, he nodded to Kage (who either didn't see him or chose to ignore him) and walked off the bridge. As he expected, Lucky turned and followed him out. "I'm heading to bed, Lucky," he told the synth. "Keep an eye on everything and wake me up if anything goes sideways on us."

              "Of course, Captain," Lucky replied as he posted up against one of the forward bulkheads. The vantage point would allow him to monitor the only entrance to the bridge as well as the only passageway that led to his Captain's quarters. Never requiring rest, he would remain at his post for as long as necessary and control access to either of these areas. Although the Senator and his family seemed harmless and the job had seemed legit, past experience told them things weren't always what they "seemed" to be.

              Jason stripped off the CIS uniform and tossed it carelessly into the corner of his room. The cleaning bot that handled his quarters would find it and feed it back into the fabricators. He walked into the attached restroom, or "head,” and turned on the shower. A set of misting water jets that did a remarkable job of cleaning him off. He stepped over to the sink and stared at himself in the mirror. Sometimes, when the light was just right, he could see the glint of the nanotech implants in his eyes; a series of auxiliary retinas he could access to see in an expanded spectrum. He knew that these interfaced with his neural implants, basically a series of powerful computers that were tied directly into his nervous system that allowed him to access information over data networks, send instructions to the ship, and understand all of the alien languages being spoken around him.

             
As his eyes moved down to his torso, he couldn't help but reflect on the other changes he'd made to himself. He had paid to have his skeleton modified to increase its strength by having the large bones clad in a type of bio-compatible carbon fiber that had been threaded in over the course of days. He had also let Doc, a geneticist by trade, tweak his genetic make-up to work in conjunction with the available nanotech to increase his physical strength by an order of magnitude. If the isolation hadn't caused him to begin to lose touch with his humanity, each new tweak and twist to his body certainly did. "Bah," he said aloud and turned away from the mirror, entering the shower stall.

             
He wasn't sure why he was feeling so moody about being separated from his own world. Perhaps it was because the Corranians looked so very human, perhaps it was something else. During his last visit home, during which he had given all his worldly possessions to an old love, he had also left a discreet payload in orbit that he had not bothered trying to access as of yet. It was a small, stealthy com drone that was capable of intercepting all Earthly broadcasts, and even access the internet, and send them via slip-space transceiver directly to the ship. So, as he dried himself off, he ordered the computer to activate the com array and download the contents the small probe had stored up so far, mostly television and radio broadcasts.

             
After donning a pair of loose basketball shorts and a t-shirt, he grabbed a beer and flopped onto the bed. A quick look through the data package contents from the probe brought a smile to his face. "Computer, dim lights and play Top Gear, UK version. Newest episode first," he said.

              "Acknowledged."  As the first notes of "Jessica" by the Allman Brothers announced the beginning of his favorite show, Jason leaned back and suddenly didn't feel so far from home anymore.

Chapter 3

              The remainder of the flight proved to be uneventful; the Senator's family were perfect passengers, neither making a fuss nor getting in the way of the crew as they went about the daily operations of flying the ship through slip-space. Not surprisingly, Doc and Senator Vongaard had become quite friendly and were often seen in conversation together in the common area. Saffreena, Hallis Vongaard's wife, spend much of the time reading off a tablet computer (Kage took it upon himself to hack into it to make sure there was nothing on there that shouldn't be) and didn't interact with the others very often except for mealtimes. The oldest daughter, Calleeá, was quiet and sullen, often emerging from their quarters in crew berthing with red, puffy eyes. During the long, boring flight it had begun to sink in for the young woman that she would never be able to return to her life or her friends. For a teenage girl of any species, this was devastating.

             
Seleste, the youngest daughter, surprised them all by instantly bonding, and wanting to spend time constantly with, the two most fearsome members of Omega Force: Crusher and Lucky. For their part, the pair of soldiers were exquisitely gentle and kind with the young girl, answering her questions and even submitting to playing games with her at the galley table. It was a startling visual at first, but Jason and Kage soon got used to it. At the threatening look from Crusher, both wisely chose to forgo the obvious jokes that came to mind.

             
"It is quite the visual contrast, is it not?" Senator Vongaard asked Jason when they were on the bridge one evening. "I think the night we had to escape Corran frightened her more than she’s letting on, and those two represent a sense of security. Who could possibly hurt you with them standing watch?" He shook his head with a smile, obviously amused.

              "For Crusher, the fact that she's not terrified of his appearance is a bit unique. I think he’s enjoying being around someone so innocent and who doesn’t run the other way screaming when he walks into a room,” Jason said, equally amused.   

             
Some days after their dramatic escape from Corran, the crew all sat on the bridge, as did Senator Vongaard, as they neared within hours of their destination. As was their usual procedure, the ship was cleaned up, weapons were inspected, and everyone was at their station and alert while they waited for the slip-drive to disengage and pop them back into real space.

              “Eshquaria System transition in ten minutes,” the computer announced. Everyone on the bridge involuntarily sat up straighter in their seat and looked forward despite the canopy still being blacked out for slip-space flight. Jason tensed up in the pilot seat as the seconds ticked down, even though they were hired to do this job by someone from Eshquaria, and Doc swore it checked out, this would be the first time they would meet their employer, or even set foot on the planet.

             
The system was controlled by a sovereign government, a type of representative democracy, but it still maintained official commerce relations with the ConFed government without submitting to the overarching authority of the ConFed Council. The Confederated Systems were more a wide-ranging alliance than a true governmental body, each system still handled internal affairs as they saw fit in order to simplify the logistics involved due to interstellar distances. It reminded Jason of the United Nations from Earth, but with more teeth. Maybe NATO would be more accurate, but the ConFed was heavily involved in regulating commerce and social issues as well as defense. It seemed to work okay for what it was, but he was so new to the subtleties of galactic politics that he usually only understood the broad strokes from the newscasts, and even then Doc had to paraphrase them for his benefit. From his perspective, it looked like the ConFed skimmed an enormous amount of wealth off the top and used it to build an incredibly powerful fleet that answered only to them. Ostensibly this was to provide for the common defense, but Jason had his doubts.

             
The
Phoenix
shuddered slightly as the slip-drive disengaged and the universe, who abhors things not being in their natural order, popped them out into real space with a flash of dissipating slip energy. A quick glance at the status display confirmed that they had meshed in-system precisely on target and were drifting down the primary star’s gravity well towards Eshquaria, the main planet in a system made up of three habitable worlds, five habitable moons, and a handful of large industrial and commercial orbiting platforms.

             
Jason engaged the ship’s autopilot once he confirmed their position, leaving the manual flight controls in their stowed positions. Eshquaria’s traffic controllers were notoriously insistent on accurate approaches to their planet since the space traffic was normally quite heavy. He didn’t feel they’d appreciate him practicing on the new flight control system in their clogged shipping lanes, so he sat back and simply monitored their progress instead. “Twingo,” he called out, “are we running with clean codes?”

              “Of course we are. I’ve got us covered, Captain,” Twingo said casually from one of the bridge stations. They’d spent an incredible amount of money to refit the
Phoenix
with a set of switchable transponders, complete with all new registry codes from various worlds around the galaxy. After some of their more memorable missions, they had been pursued heavily by law enforcement agencies from half a dozen different planets. They’d had to adopt the old smugglers’ trick of rotating transponders in order to stay a step ahead. There was one transponder which they kept “clean” that identified the
Phoenix
as a light courier freighter.

             
The DL7 slipped easily into their designated approach lane which would put them on an orbital insertion vector that bypassed most of the holding and transfer orbits. This would queue them up for a quick atmospheric entry. Jason was happy about the clout their employer seemed to have on the surface; while he didn’t mind cooling his heels above a planet, the longer they were airborne the more likely it was that someone would get a good visual of the
Phoenix
and realize she wasn’t just some light freighter and raise an alarm.

             
Luck stayed on their side and they passed unseen, and largely ignored, through the Eshquarian traffic and began their descent. Like their approach, entry was rigidly controlled and they were ordered into a tight, spiraling descent through the atmosphere that was almost directly over their intended landing zone: a small, commercial spaceport near the coast of the southern continent. This maneuver would be impossible without a gravimetric drive to control their speed and angle of attack, but even with it, there was still considerable friction heating over the hull. They continued down in the lazy, eighty-mile wide spiral as the thickening atmosphere began to buffet the gunship slightly. 

             
With the ship's computer actually doing his job, Jason was free to enjoy the view of the planet as they descended. Eshquaria was very much like the other Earth-type planets he had visited since he started working in space. It had brilliant blue oceans and rolling green landmasses, just like his home. The more of them he saw, the more he realized Earth wasn't really all
that
unique. Instead of being upset at that, he found it oddly comforting that humans fit snugly into a "norm", albeit many, many years behind technologically.

              "Heads up, Captain. We're approaching the handoff," Kage said.

              "I've got it," he said testily. The handoff was when the autopilot would kick off since it wouldn't be receiving instructions from ground control on their final approach.

              "Really? It looked like you were daydreaming."

              "That's what humans look like when we’re anticipating something," Jason replied. Both Doc and Twingo gave him a look that clearly showed how much they disbelieved that statement. Jason ignored them as the flight controls extended up from the console and the floor in preparation of the transition to manual flight.