Omega Force: The Human Factor (OF8) Read online

  ©2016

  Omega Force: The Human Factor

  By Joshua Dalzelle

  Copyright 2016

  eBook Edition

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  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real persons, events, or places are purely coincidental; any references to actual places, people, or brands are fictitious. All rights reserved.

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  Edited by Monique Happy Editorial Services

  http://www.moniquehappy.com

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  “So that’s him?”

  “That’s him. Do you think you can handle it?”

  “Please … one ex-Air Force puke? I’m not even sure I want to bring the others along on this.”

  “Thinking like that will get you all killed. Jason Burke has been out there for years, has survived and thrived by himself for a long time. Do not underestimate him and do not underestimate his companions.”

  “Whatever. Just give me the file and we’ll get started.”

  Marcus snatched the flash drive away from the woman in the rumpled business suit, left the printed photos on the desk, and stalked out of the Quonset hut and into the stifling heat. He walked across the black tarmac to the waiting dropship, ignoring the discomfort of his sweat-soaked shirt clinging to him and rolling the new challenge he’d been given around in his head.

  He’d been honest in that he had little fear of some former Air Force Pararescue, wannabe mercenary that had stayed alive through what appeared to be dumb luck rather than any sort of exceptional level of skill. Marcus Webb, former lieutenant in the U.S. Navy and ex-SEAL, did have a healthy respect for the environment he now found himself operating in, however, and was quite cognizant of the dangers that lurked out there. Since being recruited in the year directly following the attack on Earth through quasi-official back channels, he’d been struggling to process the things that had been revealed to him.

  He was not an existential-thinking man. He preferred direct action to solve problems in the most efficient manner while not polluting his thought processes with ideologies or beliefs that couldn’t be proven or directly observed. The appearance of alien spaceships, though, had shaken him to the core as the magnitude of the potential threat that existed beyond the stars became clear to him and those like him.

  Marcus waved at the man smoking a cigarette and leaning against one of the dropship’s aft landing struts. When the dark-skinned man noticed him, Marcus spun a finger in the air, the universal signal for “mount up.” The man nodded, flicked the lit cigarette away, and strode up the ramp, bending over to miss the low clearance of the entryway. Despite still secretly being terrified at even the prospect of spaceflight, Marcus was anxious to begin this new assignment for, despite all the fantastic and unimaginable things he’d learned since that fateful day, there was one fact that he was able to firmly wrap his mind around and hang onto like a drowning man would cling to a life preserver: the being in one of the suits of armor that had been spotted on Alcatraz Island, the one who had obviously been in command of the smaller, sleek warship, had been human.

  Marcus grinned tightly as he thought about what was to come. Jason Burke … some former Air Force flunky and the stupid son of a bitch who had led an interstellar war back to his own home planet. As if that wasn’t enough, he then vanished without a trace and took with him the knowledge and weaponry that Earth would need if a similar event ever happened again. In Marcus’ mind, that made him a traitor of the worst kind. For years after his recruitment, during his indoctrination and training, he would roll it around in his head. What could possibly make a man turn his back on his own species? As someone who had been fiercely loyal to his country, and now his planet, it was something Marcus was incapable of comprehending.

  All of that is pointless speculation now, he thought as he idly tossed the flash drive around in his hand. He’d finally gotten his wish: a go-order to hunt down Jason Burke and eliminate him before he could cause Earth any further harm. His handlers had finally given him Burke’s complete dossier and a series of recent pictures. Marcus had to admit that Jason wasn’t quite what he’d imagined him to be. The stern yet thoughtful face he’d been shown stood in sharp contrast to the nefarious, almost comical villain he’d constructed in his mind. He’d also recognized the two aliens with him, one still wearing the same mechanized armor from the original attack footage, as the two that had been with Jason during the incident at Alcatraz. Despite the media’s speculation that he’d been a hero in thwarting the multiple attacks from space, Marcus was fully convinced it was Jason who had led them there in the first place. Just because there were more than two factions fighting over a prize didn’t necessarily mean that any of them were the good guys.

  The dull throb of the auxiliary power unit of the dropship firing up was Marcus’ signal to cram the introspection and hop to. He jogged up to the squat ship, now hissing and rumbling like a waking dragon, and swallowed down the lump in his throat in anticipation of the extremely unpleasant ascent to the ship waiting in orbit. He told himself that the unpleasantness of the coming journey would make it all the sweeter when he finally caught up with Burke and made him pay for what he’d wrought.

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  “They’re not ready.”

  Margaret Jansen glanced at the plainclothes CIA officer standing next to her. She’d not heard him approach over the roar of the dropship’s chemical rocket main ascent stage. She ignored him as the ship, now just a bright speck in the sky, continued along its trajectory, growing eerily silent as it switched over to its pulse engine second stage.

  “It no longer matters,” she said, finally turning to him. “Time is not on my side.”

  “I’m not even talking about the fact they are in no way ready to tangle with Sergeant Burke and his companions,” the man shrugged. “Lieutenant Webb and his team aren’t ready to be activated and sent out in the wilds, a place that we ourselves barely understand. He’s too impulsive and his thinking is still too linear.”

  “What do you mean?” Margaret frowned.

  “Someone with the required agility of thought for this assignment might have asked how you possibly obtained such recent images of Burke, a man who hasn’t been back to Earth that we know of in the seventeen years since the attack,” the man said. “You picked a soldier for a fight that requires a strategist. Webb is an outstanding operator, but I fear you’ve both severely underestimated your target.”

  “As I said: It no longer matters,” Margaret said, letting more emotion slip into her voice than she’d intended. Feeling that she was now completely on the defensive, she wheeled around and marched back into the hut, escaping both the oppressive heat of midday and the quiet smugness of a man she openly despised.

  Chapter 1

  “I’m in position.” Jason Burke’s lips barely moved as he reported his status. D
espite his voice being lower than the ambient noise of the wooded area he was in, the audio pickup of his tactical com unit pulled the whisper out of the air and sent it to the rest of his team.

  “Copy, Strike One,” was the immediate reply. “Hold position.”

  Jason didn’t bother confirming, not wanting to take the chance that any unnecessary chatter might be picked up by the wrong people. He slowly pulled his primary weapon up into a ready position, verified the anti-glare cover was engaged on his optics, and began scanning the objective through the unit’s highest magnification.

  The building in the shallow valley below looked almost abandoned, but he knew that was a ruse. The enemy had been given ample time and warning to prepare their defenses and dig in. This would not be an easy or particularly pleasant job; frontal assaults against heavily fortified positions rarely were. He just hoped that enough of his team survived to force entry and secure the objective.

  “Strike Four has subdued the patrol along the eastern ridge,” the voice came over the channel again. “We will initiate our diversion there. Stand by.” Jason again gave no reply, instead moving his thumb up to the fire selector and activating his primary weapon. He’d taken a chance and left it inert during his stealthy approach since there was a slight chance the enemy would be able to detect its power signature. Other than his weapons, and the simple com unit, he carried no technology that could be sniffed out over a distance.

  Jason was so tensed up with anticipation he hardly twitched when the enormous explosion on the far ridgeline belched an equally impressive fireball into the sky. Too much, he thought, pressing his lips into a frustrated grimace. The point of a diversion was to be subtle and, most of all, believable. The cheerful mushroom cloud two kilometers away was anything but.

  “I’ll be damned,” he whispered aloud as he began to notice the reaction to the ridiculous pyrotechnic display. Apparently he’d once again underestimated the nature of his adversary as reports began coming in from his own team of patrols abandoning their areas of responsibility to charge at the site of the explosion, none of them wanting to miss out on the fighting.

  “Strike One on the move,” he said as he climbed up out of concealment and began moving quickly down the steep hill to where the simple, cube-shaped building sat.

  “Strike Three converging,” another voice chimed in, letting Jason know he had a friendly coming down into the valley at his ten o’clock position. The distance to the building was less than a kilometer, but trying to keep from slipping in the loose soil on the hill was making for slow progress. He was too exposed for too long and he knew it. There was little chance that the defenders in the bunker hadn’t spotted him.

  “Strike Two is down!”

  “Hold back! The response is a fake!”

  “No!” Jason shouted as he finally hit flat ground and was able to accelerate to his full speed. “We’re committed! All forces engage, now!” No sooner had the words left his mouth than a chunk of the turf ahead rippled and tore, an enemy soldier rising up out of a hide, the soil streaming off the massive arms giving him the appearance of something out of a nightmare. Jason didn’t hesitate and quick-snapped two shots, each taking the soldier in the chest. With a howl of pain he collapsed back into the hole he’d been hiding in as Jason raced by without slowing.

  He knew from his intel that the only entrance to the building was on the far side, forcing him to run completely exposed around the sides. Fortunately, the building was small: only twenty meters on each side. Jason quickly cleared around the final corner and nearly ran full force into one of his teammates, already at the steel entry door. A quick look and he saw that Strike Three already had breaching charges affixed to the hinge points and the two locking mechanisms.

  “Blow it,” Jason nodded to him, turning away and tucking up against the wall, shielding his eyes with his forearm. The blast was sharp and jolting, much more focused than the roaring blast that they had set off in the surrounding forest. He turned to help his teammate grab the door and pull it away from its frame, applying his considerable strength to snap the last stubborn bit of metal that hadn’t been cut by the charge.

  “Do we wait?”

  “We have to assume the rest of the team is either engaged or disabled.” Jason shook his head. “We go in.”

  Without further discussion or hesitation, his partner pulled a concussion grenade off his vest, armed it, and tossed it through the door. The breath-snatching whump, accompanied by sharp cries of pain and coughing, were their cue to move. Jason rolled in first, switching his ocular implants to mid-wave thermal and covering the right half of the room while he trusted his partner to come in behind him and cover the left.

  The enemy was tough. Even though the grenade in an enclosed space had knocked the hell out of them, they were already beginning to shake off the effects. Jason engaged with his energy weapon and quickly dispatched all four within his field of fire.

  “Clear!”

  “Clear,” his partner said calmly after shooting two combatants himself. “Where’s the objective?”

  “That’s a damn good question.” Jason scanned the single, open room in multiple wavelengths. Other than the bodies on the floor there was nothing in the room. This wasn’t good. “Could they have—”

  “Ungh!” Jason never heard the shot that took his partner out, but he didn’t hesitate. His enhanced reflexes and strength allowed him to spin and bring his weapon to bear on the doorway before the body had even hit the floor. He opened up with a full-auto salvo that depleted his weapon’s charge, taking out the three enemy soldiers bunched up in the door trying to get at him and scattering those behind them.

  “Get some!” he roared, pulling both sidearms from his belt and charging the doorway, firing into the group he could see forming up just beyond the opening. He knew he was done. They’d baited a trap with the bunker and his team had bit on it and hard. There was no way for him to avoid dying, but he’d be damned if he made it easy.

  Jason’s mad charge startled the enemy and allowed him the space to accelerate to a full run while still firing. He burst through the doorway and into the open, angling to the left and pouring on the speed, feeling a glimmer of hope that his incredible swiftness might see him to the tree line.

  Like his partner, he never heard the shot that took him full in the back. He actually wasn’t even cognizant that he’d been shot. All he knew was that he’d suddenly lost control of his limbs and went into an uncontrolled tumble at over forty-five kilometers per hour. His weapons went flying and he was flung into the woods, rolling to a painful stop just beyond the clearing, his breath coming in shallow gasps as his limbs refused to respond to his brain’s commands. Spine shot. Damn the luck.

  “You underestimated us, little bug.” A vicious, grinning face appeared over him. Jason’s focus, however, was on the business end of the plasma rifle aimed squarely at his own head. He could just see the slight tensing of the finger on the trigger and knew it was almost over.

  “End exercise! End exercise! End exercise!” the omnipresent voice boomed across the battle field. “Secure all weapons and stand by for evaluations!”

  “I’ll see you in the hand-to-hand arena, bug,” the Galvetic warrior spat at Jason, lowering the weapon and walking away.

  “Looking forward to it,” Jason grunted in pain, still unable to move.

  “That was your first loss, but it was impressively ugly,” a new voice said outside his field of view. “My initial feedback for you is ‘wildly overconfident.’”

  “Thanks, Mazer,” Jason said sourly. “How about turning this off so I can get up?”

  “Why did you not assume that your enemy wouldn’t use your own trick against you and move their flag from the bunker just as you did in the previous engagement?” Mazer ignored him.

  “They hadn’t shown much interest in learning from experience before.” Jason would have shrugged if he could. “I decided to see if a direct assault could shave some time off our match and put u
s over the top in the rankings.”

  “I see,” Mazer said, pushing an icon on his tablet computer that deactivated the neural restraints on Jason’s suit. The human hauled himself to his feet and greedily took in several heaving breaths of air. “This is the common theme I see during your training: no matter how realistic we make it, you still are unable to see this as anything but an elaborate game with ‘winners’ and ‘losers.’ Why is that?”

  “Racial trait, I suppose,” Jason said, still trying to adjust to Mazer Reddix being in a position of authority over him. “I’m not intentionally making light of the scenarios and it probably is the best small-force tactics training I’ve ever been through. The fancy pain suits are a nice touch.”

  “They were an unfortunate necessity.” Mazer nodded his head for Jason to follow him away from where the other legionnaires were assembling and hurling insults at each other. “When we tried to use just a scoring system most warriors would argue that it wasn’t actually a disabling wound and continue fighting. The cheating became so rampant that we developed these suits so we could try and salvage this training program.”

  “It’s been an experience,” Jason said. “I was a little hesitant at the invite but I’m glad I came.”

  “I thought it might be useful for them to have you in the mix,” Mazer said. “You’re an unknown quantity to most of them and your smaller stature caused most to dismiss you. I will admit to some personal curiosity at how you would perform when separated from Lord Felex and Lucky.”

  Jason didn’t take the comment as an insult and offered no reply as they emerged from the woods onto a wide footpath. Three months earlier, Jason had been surprised when an invitation came directly to him from the Galvetic Empire offering him a chance to train on Restaria in the Legion’s biennial exercises that lasted for six weeks. Omega Force, freshly reunited and reenergized, had been in the process of settling into their new home on a planet called S’Tora and had no pressing business, so he had accepted out of curiosity. His curiosity turned to trepidation at Crusher’s large smile and evil laugh when he’d told his hulking friend of his intentions.