Omega Force: Rebellion (OF11), стр. 31
"Looks like we missed the party," Crusher remarked.
"Double agent," Jason grunted after pulling his helmet off. "I would've killed her on the spot, but we'll need to question her now. She led us here for a reason."
"Told you," Kage said. "Now pay up."
"We didn't bet anything, dumbass," Jason said. "I agreed with you, remember? Good job with the shockers inside the suit, though. You should've seen her face."
"Not to put a damper on this," Doc said. "But where is Lucky?"
"His beacon didn't come up when you sent out a query?"
"No…otherwise I probably wouldn't be asking where he was."
"He went off on his own to explore the other battleship in the formation," Jason said. "Since he's no longer in the system, I have to assume he made it aboard. So, to answer your question, Lucky is wherever that formation flew off to."
9
"How the hell could you let him go off by himself?!" Crusher roared. As he came stomping across the deck, Jason considered slipping his helmet back on.
"I didn't let him do anything," he shot back. "He made a case for checking out the other ship and said he could make it there and back in a short amount of time. How could I tell him that I trusted him to be on a mission only if I was right there with him to babysit? Either he's a full member of this crew again or he's not. If you're so worried, why didn't you come with us?"
"I have a condition!" Crusher bellowed.
"I'd say he has more than one," Kage muttered, likely louder than he meant to.
"Enough!" Jason's voice boomed across the hold. "Crusher, please take our guest and see she's given accommodations befitting her status as someone who I very much would like to kill. Doc, get a hold of Mok and let him know our status. Kage, I have a data dump in my armor's memory you need to start going through, while Twingo and I make sure that Lucky isn't just drifting around in this area. If he's not, we need to begin making plans to recover him ASAP."
"I'm sure she could help us get him back," Crusher nudged Fendra with the toe of his boot.
"If he's on one of those ships, and we think she might know where they've gone, then the regular rules are out the window," Jason said. "Do whatever it takes to get the information out of her. Whatever it takes." Doc just sighed loudly but didn't make any protests about Jason's insinuation that they'd resort to torture.
"What the hell are you all standing around for?" Jason shouted, clapping his gauntlets together with a deafening bang. "Get moving!"
"There's nothing out here," Twingo said after the fourth high-res pass they completed with the towed array. "The biggest chunk of alloy out there is the size of those weird green things you slice up into your beer—"
"Limes."
"—and the rest is all just the normal particulate matter that falls of a starship when it stops."
"Lucky's new body has some pretty effective stealth modes, could he just be hidden?"
"If he was rendered unconscious, he would likely revert back to normal mode," Twingo said. "And even if he'd engaged his stealth mode, he'd be the only thing in this section of space radiating heat besides the Phoenix and the thermals would have picked him up."
"I'm not sure if I feel better about this or not," Jason said, leaning back in the pilot's seat and rubbing his head. He was still in the form fitting base layer while the armor itself was lying on the deck, grotesquely splayed open from where he'd climbed out of it. "This means it's almost certain he got himself aboard that other Luex-class battlewagon, and then was trapped when it got underway."
"He might not be trapped," Twingo said. "He probably could have left at any time. I don't think you guys realize how truly frightening that Mk.2 body is. It was designed specifically for this type of covert operation and insertion within enemy territory. Now that his power issues seem to be sorted out, he's probably deep within the belly of the beast and getting his job done. You want to know what I think?"
"Not really."
"I think that before you can even scrape together a plan and wring some sort of location out of that spy chained up in berthing, Lucky will contact us first."
"I hope you're right," Jason said. "Go ahead and reel the towed array back in and I'll plot us a course out of the Cluster. This is still a pretty hot region, and I'd rather not get caught up in any skirmishes between the occupational force and the Cluster's underworld."
The towed array was basically a large pallet loaded with ultra-sensitive detection instruments, stabilized by compressed gas jets, and dragged behind the ship by a few hundred meters of cable. Since the sensors aboard the Phoenix had to be attenuated to account for the noise the gunship herself created, the idea with a deployable sensor platform was to get it away from the ship and bring the ambient interference threshold down by an order of magnitude. The array they were currently towing was actually the third one they'd had to build and install. The other two had been lost when Jason forgot they were deployed and lost one when they jumped to slip-space and another when he aggressively entered a planet's atmosphere. Since then, Twingo had programmed in safety checks to make sure a distracted pilot didn't lose a third set of incredibly expensive and difficult to obtain equipment.
"Array is retracted and stowed," Twingo said. "Ship is green, you're clear to engage slip-drive."
"We're out of here," Jason said, pushing the throttle up and aiming the nose for their mesh-out point. He didn't relish the idea of questioning Fendra about her role in this peculiar situation. She was a trained intelligence officer, and they were not. While she would be able to draw on her training to resist any methods