Omega Force: Rebellion (OF11), стр. 32
Lucky crouched inside the small alcove, waiting for an appropriate target. Half a dozen crew had already walked by, but none of them were what he needed. In order to complete his mission, he would need to have full run of the ship. Everyone he'd seen so far was either a low-level technician or security, neither of which would be able to easily move outside of their assigned areas.
"I don't want any excuses. I want it done right!" The shout drifted down the corridor, the voice dripping scorn. It was the voice of authority, of someone who was used to having their orders followed at once. It was likely the exact type of person Lucky had been waiting for. The battlesynth hoped it wasn't the commander of the vessel. He needed free movement but nothing so high profile as the captain.
"It's like working with children! How are we ever going to meet this schedule if they don't do what they're told!?"
When the owner of the voice that had been spewing all the derision came into view, Lucky knew this was the person. It was a portly acaer, a species that normally kept to their own planet, dressed in smart civilian attire and holding three different portable computers. He wasn't an officer aboard the ship. He appeared to be a technical supervisor. And he was alone.
Perfect.
Lucky waited until the acaer made it almost past the hatchway to the room he was in before putting his plan in motion.
"Help! Help me!" he called out, modulating his voice to sound like a young female acaer. "Please!"
"What? Who's there? Come now, what is this?"
Lucky remained silent and let him come into the room of his own volition. The supervisor was still cautious, but his curiosity seemed to override his good sense, and he kept walking into the room. In a move that sealed his fate, he placed everything he carried down on the one workstation, including the com unit that allowed him to talk to the rest of the crew.
The battlesynth, sensing that this was as good an opportunity as he would likely get, shot out of the alcove with blinding speed. His detailed knowledge of alien anatomy allowed him to clamp down on the appropriate pressure points to disable and render the acaer unconscious in a matter of seconds. Lucky dragged the alien further into the room and then sealed the hatch so he wouldn't be disturbed.
He rolled the acaer over and placed his right palm just above the base of the neck, allowing thin tendrils composed of nanobot chains to emerge and penetrate the skin. They sought out the neural implant nearly every species in this quadrant had installed in bodies and made a hard connection, downloading the contents into Lucky's data core. The information was the parsed and any recorded memories were pulled out for context as the battlesynth's holographic generators came to life and projected a perfect likeness of the acaer so that it looked like there were identical twins in the room.
Once the illusion was complete, the force field generators went to work providing structure to the hologram. It wouldn't fool anyone if they made hard contact, but the fields would be able to make certain it didn't look unusual when Lucky brushed past something, and it didn't move. The covert reconnaissance subroutines in his subprocessors were beginning to take hold and Lucky felt his primary matrix being pushed back slightly.
His victim moaned slightly as Lucky retracted the nano-chains. He looked up into his own visage in horror, his face flushing a bright crimson as his panic response triggered. Lucky wasted no time and drove his fist into the acaer's chest with enough force to burst his seven-chambered heart. The alien flopped back, dead, while the battlesynth looked around for a suitable place to stow the body. Normally, he wouldn't have considered killing an unarmed, incapacitated captive in cold blood like that, but his infiltration modes had taken over. If the live supervisor were discovered, the entire mission was blown.
"My name is Nikain," Lucky said aloud. His aural mimic system made adjustments after comparing it to the recording of the voice he already had. "My name is Nikain." The voice pattern was analyzed again, and Lucky was happy with the ninety-six percent accuracy given he only had a short sample from the real Nikain to work with.
He removed one of the many panels in the deck and saw that it was an access to a large cable chase. Data trunk lines wove through the section for as far as he could see when he stuck his head into the opening. He dragged the body over and stuffed it down and around the larger bundles until it fell half a meter or so and landed on some insulated pipes that had frost on them. The fact the body was resting on coolant lines made it all the better to stave off decomposition. Lucky replaced the panel and tack welded it discreetly at each of the four handles, adding one more layer of difficulty if someone came looking for the inevitable smell.
Lucky picked up the various portable computers, each of the passcodes gleaned from Nikain's neural implant, and the com unit. With another look to make sure the room was sanitized, he unlocked the hatch and stepped through.
"Nikain! Where have you been? They're looking for you down in the forward magazine!"
"My com unit had to be reset, and I missed the message," Lucky said. "Thank you."
"You feeling okay? You look a