Omega Force: Rebellion (OF11), стр. 7
"Other times, you wish we hadn't tried to bring you back at all," Jason finished quietly.
"It might have been easier for all of us," Lucky said. "But, no, I want to live. I am grateful beyond my ability to express at the risks you all have taken to save me."
"We're heading back to meet up with Mok and figure out our next move," Jason said. "Tauless is there with a few other pru scientists, and he said he has some ideas. They've been studying all the tech data Kage swiped from that black site regarding the Mk.2 bodies."
"Let us hope they have found something that addresses the cascade failures that cause me to freeze up from time to time."
"Let's hope."
3
Kage is coming to wake you up.
The voice inside Jason's head made him bolt upright in his rack like someone had hit him with a high-voltage line.
"I really wish you'd stop fucking doing that when I'm in a deep sleep."
"Captain, it's Kage…you up?"
"I am now," Jason bit out. "What do you want?"
"I found something. It looks like we might have both been right."
"Assuming I had any idea what the hell you're talking about, this couldn't wait until I woke up and relieved you?" Jason asked.
"I don't think we have that sort of time, Captain. If you want to beat ConFed Intelligence to the Eshquarian fleet, you might want to shake it off and get up to the bridge."
"On my way!" Jason leapt out of the rack and grabbed his shirt and boots on the way out of the hatch.
Kage was already back on the bridge when he arrived, the lights in the ship dimmed for night hours. Jason could see the Veran had been working at one of the auxiliary terminals and had at least six incoming data streams from what he could see. The Phoenix had nine slip-com nodes, three times as many as most ships her size, and Kage had four of them tied up just to feed whatever search algorithm he was running. He looked at the mess coming across the displays and sighed.
"Okay, in a way that is both understandable and not insulting to my intelligence, tell me what you've got."
"I can do one or the other, not both. The problem with your intelligence is that there isn't—"
"You think you could do your job missing those two smaller arms?" Jason asked, taking a step closer.
"Wow you are touchy about how stupid you are." Kage narrowed his eyes. "One would think, having been this limited your entire life, you'd have more or less come to terms with it. Or was there a traumatic brain injury in the past I don't know about?"
"There's about to be another one right now," Jason growled. "Tell me what you have, or I swear to whatever deity the creepy, garbage eating little shits on your planet pray to that you'll be riding the rest of the way to Mok's in the water reclamation bilge."
Kage blinked slowly and just stared at him, probably trying to test just how serious Jason's threat was. The gray water bilge was a tank where all the moisture the environmental system pulled out of the air was dumped before being processed back into clean water. The system also grabbed all the germs, spores, dust, and whatever else clung to the water particles and dumped it in there so the tank was always utterly disgusting no matter how many cleaning cycles it went through. It was a mostly idle threat, but Jason was beginning to think that a more draconian punishment system aboard his ship might improve some of the attitudes.
"I used the connection we had to Noryant's com units to install some trackers that allow me to monitor all his communications, as well as his location. There was a spat of activity regarding the cartels after you and Crusher roughed him up, then things were relatively quiet, and I was about to write this off as a dead end," Kage said. "Six hours ago, he received an encrypted message through the commercial com system to one of the units. I wasn't able to decrypt it right away, but I was able to trace it back to the origin. It came from a terminal on a planet called V'pal Prime."
"I've heard of that place. Isn't that the planet that just had some sort of bloody coup attempt that the Eshquarians had to step in and squash…just before the ConFed squashed them?" Jason asked.
"Right you are," Kage said. "V'pal was a vassal world to the empire. The Eshquarians had a lot of nasty, heavy industry they'd moved there and, in return, the V'palians enjoyed the protection of the Imperial battlefleet…when their fleet wasn't too busy posturing along the border they shared with the Protectorate."
"One of the nasty little secrets of this galaxy." Jason shook his head. "For every pristine ConFed or Imperial world you land on, there are two more with acid clouds and dead seas that are doing all the dirty work for them."
"I didn't realize you were such an idealist."
"Realist, not idealist."
"What's the difference?"
"An idealist would give a shit enough to try and change it."
"Anyway…the origin of the message was on V'pal. Once I was able to decrypt the message header, I saw that it came from a com address belonging to one Qazvi Ba. That name shows up in the database Mok gave us access to as an alias for a high-level Imperial Intelligence operative. Her last known assignment was as an advance scout for Zeta Fleet, one of the mainline battlegroups that fled Eshquaria when the ConFed dropped the hammer." During his explanation, Kage brought up the pertinent data on the displays so Jason could follow along.
"Once I had Ba's com unit identifier, I was able to back-search other places it had been through the public Nexus links. Not only had she been