Omega Force: Rebellion (OF11), стр. 28

Now that he had the power issues mostly sorted, he felt he had a solid handle on the rest of it. Some things within his body that were sending him status signals were still a mystery to him, so for the time being he just ignored it. There were times he wished his family had just left him dead. It would have been simpler for him to remain in oblivion until his backup power failed, and then his biological friends could have mourned and moved on. But once he'd returned and saw how lost they seemed to be without him, especially Jason, it pushed him to overcome the challenges he faced so that he could be there for them once again. It was hard…the hardest thing he'd ever done in his life, but he'd vowed to never fail them again.

His long-range sensors and accelerometers picked up an anomaly just as he rotated his feet towards the target and began decelerating. A new ship had arrived close to the formation and its grav-drive was easily detected by his instruments since it was the only one operating near his location. He focused his optics to where his sensors told him the point of origin was, but even his enhanced eyesight could only make out a tiny, lit speck moving against the inky black of space. The light pollution from the backlit nebula behind him wasn't helping either.

When he was close enough to the target that he had to begin worrying about landing, he ignored the newcomer and just hoped that Jason would be able to handle anything that came his way while he was gone. He calculated the distance and rate of closure before firing his repulsors again for the final decel when he was less than five hundred meters off the hull.

Lucky slammed into the alloy armor plates of the battleship with enough force that his left knee actuator signaled a mild alarm. As his damage control system went to work correcting the minor misalignment of the joint, Lucky took his bearings and made sure he'd landed where he had intended. As it turned out, he'd missed his LZ by six meters and made a note to have his sensors checked once he was back on the Phoenix.

He moved quickly to an access panel that he knew would allow him into the ship's interior after studying the layout he'd found in the other Luex's computer. It was a panel that had been added to the class after the ships had already been completed and put in service that allowed access to a liquid switching manifold that couldn't be reached from the inside. Since it turned out to be a high-fail part, they had to cut a hole into the side of the hull to get to it and then just slapped a panel over it.

Lucky studied the fasteners holding down the heavy panel that was roughly two by four meters in size and twenty-five centimeters thick. The tip of his right index finger quickly reconfigured itself so that it was the exact shape he needed to depress the fasteners and release the locks beneath, all sixty-two of them. It took him nearly four minutes to release all the quick-turn locks and then, changing the shape of his digit again, pry the stubborn slab out of its hole. Being a hasty retrofit coupled with the extreme temperature changes that happen on the outside of a ship, the panel was really jammed in there. Once it popped loose, he quickly checked underneath to make sure there weren't any switches or mag-sensors to alert the computer that a panel had been removed.

Once he was satisfied his intrusion would go undetected, he slipped into the opening and pulled the panel back into place. He tack-welded it on two corners to make sure it didn't drift off, but not so securely he couldn't just punch it out of the way if he needed to use this route to escape. He slipped past the bulky valve body the panel was protecting and moved down to where there was the relatively thin wall of a large-bore air duct that took return air from the forward sections of the ship back to the life support machinery, where it could be processed and pumped back in as fresh atmosphere. There were seven atmospheric processors on a Luex-class ship, and this duct would take him through a remote area of the amidships engineering bays that would allow him to enter the ship's interior.

Even though he wasn't able to power up the big plasma cannons in his arms, his cutting lasers worked just fine. He made two quick cuts in the metal and bent the edges in against the outrushing air. He worked quickly to get inside, and then seal the duct back, anchoring himself against the strong flow and welding in two precise lines along he cuts. Since all starships, especially big ones, leaked atmosphere constantly from a thousand different places, he felt safe the escaping air wouldn't cause any concern once he'd sealed the breach.

He released his mag-locks and let himself be carried along in the low-gravity as the air rushed back towards the processor. His internal instruments were tracking his progress, and he knew exactly when he needed to arrest his headlong rush so he could cut his way back out of the duct.

After his feet hit the deck, and he repaired the second duct breach, he was ready to begin his recon mission. Despite the obvious danger of being aboard an enemy ship with no backup and his own internal systems being somewhat unreliable, he hadn't felt this alive since he'd been awoken in a new body. The solo mission was exhilarating…he'd finally be able to pull his own weight again and prove his worth.