Omega Force: Legends Never Die (OF10) Read online

  Omega Force: Legends Never Die

  Joshua Dalzele

  Contents

  Untitled

  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

  Also by Joshua Dalzele

  Afterword

  Joshua Dalzelle

  ©2018

  Digital Edition, Rev 1

  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.

  Edited by Monique Happy Editorial Services

  http://www.moniquehappy.com

  Chapter 1

  "Bring him in here! I want to see that bastard's body!"

  "Can we get paid first? I don't want—"

  "Bring him in… now! You don't dictate terms to me!"

  Six Taukkir grunted and struggled to carry in the body of a Galvetic warrior, heaving mightily to get it up on the long table that dominated the room.

  "Damn, he reeks! Where did you find him? Inside a wine barrel?"

  "Drunk in an alley behind a tavern… it's how we were able to get the drop on him."

  When the mass of the hulking brute hit the table, the legs of the piece of furniture tried admirably to support the weight, but physics was a harsh mistress. With a final groan of protest, the two legs near the warrior's head buckled and the table tilted wildly, spilling the prize onto the floor. The racket had been deafening in the small room, but what caught the attention of all was the long, deep belch that emanated from the body. Everybody froze.

  "Totally normal," the lead Taukkir assured everyone. "When the body begins to—"

  "He's still alive!"

  "What the hell is going on? Who are you people?" Crusher groaned and rolled over, casually kicking one of the Taukkir so hard the squat alien rocketed across the room and hit the far wall with a sickening thud. The room exploded into chaos as the remaining Taukkir dove for cover and the other aliens that had been milling about in the room went for their weapons. Before anybody could line up a shot something slammed into the door, causing it to bounce in the frame.

  "Shit!" came a muffled voice from outside. The next hit on the door was accompanied by the sound of rending metal and a large impression appeared on the inside that looked remarkably like a foot. Everyone stared breathlessly, waiting to see if the door would continue to resist the assault.

  It didn't

  With a deafening boom the door was flung free of the frame, killing one of the armed aliens and seriously injuring a second. The smoke billowing into the room made it apparent that some crazy son of a bitch just used explosives on the door even though the other side was within an enclosed hallway. They just as likely injured themselves as taken down the door. Through the smoke a figure could be seen rushing into the room, tripping and falling on the debris in a clatter of weapons.

  "Damnit!"

  "Who are you?" the alien in charge demanded. Having used his own people as shields, he appeared to be only slightly disoriented from the blast.

  "I am… damnit! Hold on, I had something for this. Oh! Right. Let me go out and come back in, but this time you say—"

  "Jason Burke," the alien rumbled as the smoke cleared out enough to see. "Still so very impressed with your own cleverness, I see."

  "Not nearly as much as I was a minute ago," Jason admitted, waving to the half-dozen weapons aimed his way. "This seemed like a solid plan until just now. So how are things, Zumbal?"

  "I can't complain," Zumbal said. "I have to replace my door and hire more security, but the price of the bounty on Crusher will more than cover it. The fact you delivered yourself here as well is just an added bonus."

  "Yeah… this was pretty stupid of me, wasn't it?"

  "Yes, it—"

  "But you did sort of forget one thing."

  "What's that?"

  "The big guy there behind you wasn't actually dead when he was brought in."

  Zumbal had been standing behind his guards and completely forgot about Crusher when Jason blew the door off its hinges and came bumbling in. Now he reacted in horror as he realized his mistake, two eyes slamming shut as the other two widened and bulged. He spun just as Crusher reached out and plucked the weapon from his hands before knocking him unconscious with a seemingly negligent backhand.

  The remaining hired muscle seemed to waffle between wanting to defend an employer who might actually be dead already or simply extricating themselves from the situation and finding work elsewhere. Their hesitation gave Jason the time he needed to dive behind the smashed table, scoop up one of his weapons and draw on the one closest to the door. He squeezed off two wild shots as the guards all leveled their weapons at him, hitting nothing but the wall. At least he provided enough of a distraction for a visibly confused Crusher to get into the fray.

  With a half-hearted roar he slammed a fist into the first face he saw. It wasn't the best punch he'd ever thrown and the shooter, surprisingly, wasn't completely incapacitated. The alien did drop its weapon, however, and screamed so loud that the remaining guard twitched just enough to miss when it fired at Jason. The human felt the heat from the plasma bolt and tensed up, squeezing off three more shots, two of which hit the alien center mass.

  "Wow," Jason groaned, climbing to his feet. "What a cluster—"

  "Did you use me as bait?!" Crusher roared. "I thought we agreed that was a stupid plan!"

  "Actually we never agreed and then you passed out," Jason said. "After you fell off the barstool, I considered that a forfeiture of vote and then I was forced to come up with a plan all on my own and execute it… it's not my fault you're so irresponsible."

  "We weren't going to try to grab this scumbag until two days from now!" Crusher was still screaming and swaying on his feet.

  "Opportunity waits for no one, drunk or not," Jason said, assuming his 'lecturing" voice. "These fine gentlemen"—he gestured to the remaining Taukkir—"had a credible tip that Zumbal would be here tonight and with only a token security force. Thankfully I was sober and smart enough to put this plan together as quick as I did. You're welcome."

  "I'm going to kill you," Crusher rumbled quietly. "I know I've said that a lot lately, but this time I'm actually going to kill you."

  "Before this gets out of hand and you two demolish yet another building, can we get paid?" one of the Taukkir asked. Jason had never bothered to learn their names. They were still criminal scum, but they were bush league local players and hardly worth their attention.

  "Here." Jason tossed him a loaded credit chit.

  "These are ConFed credits," the Taukkir complained. "They're worthless anymore."

  "I'll admit the exchange rate isn't favorable at the moment, but hang onto that and maybe things will come back around." Jason shrugged. The leader of the group turned a mottled shade of purple and began making snorting noises, obviously enraged. Jason watched with a sort of detached fascination while the alien's companions struggled to grab their friend and physically re
move him from the building. Crusher just looked on with a bored expression, waiting to see if the one struggling would be stupid enough to draw down on them.

  "No problem at all. Thank you." The new spokesperson gave him a friendly wave and quickly exited the room.

  "Not as dumb as they looked," Jason grunted. "You want to do this here?"

  "We're not finished, you son of—"

  "Quit being a baby." Jason waved off the fresh string of complaining. "You weren't really in any danger. Help me tie him to this chair and let's make it quick. That Taukkir was probably pissed enough to go straight to the local authorities."

  Crusher kept grumbling but walked over and helped Jason haul Zumbal into one of the chairs. They took turns trying different ways of waking him, including slapping him around, dumping scalding tea in his lap, and were about to try electrical current when the alien's four eyes snapped open.

  "Don't move," Jason said calmly, leveling his pistol in the alien's face.

  "What is this? A shakedown? You want money?"

  "Not exactly," Crusher growled. He pulled a small tablet from his thigh pocket, selected an image he wanted from the device, and had it project it as a hologram in front of Zumbal. "Remember them?"

  "I can't say that I do," Zumbal said.

  "I'm unfamiliar with your species' involuntary reactions and even I can tell you're lying," Jason said. "But let's go ahead and play this stupid game to its inevitable conclusion. These are the daughters of a prominent councilmember you abducted when he refused your blackmail attempts."

  "Ah, yes… now I remember," Zumbal said, still not showing any real signs of fear. "You want them back? Is that it?"

  "We've already handled the recovery of the two girls… only one of them was alive by the time we got there," Jason said. "We're here for something else."

  "Please… you can bluster and threaten all you want, but in the end you're going to turn me over to the authorities," Zumbal said. "Your reputation precedes you, Jason Burke; there are certain lines you don't cross, and killing a defenseless, injured tol while he sits in a chair bleeding on his carpet is one of them."

  "That may have been true in the past," Jason smiled largely, showing his teeth. "But we're trying something new. Crusher?"

  Without a word, Crusher stepped forward and drove his fist into Zumbal's chest with enough force to collapse his rib cage and send him and the chair flying across the office. The alien gaped at them like a fish out of water, his eyes full of shock and rage as his crushed hearts continued to flutter in vain. Soon the alien began convulsing and projectile vomiting some sort of viscous purple fluid all over the room, much of it landing on Crusher as he'd leaned over to view his handiwork.

  "Holy shit, that stinks!" Jason struggled to not laugh. "I bet it really reeks if you're wearing it… like you are right now." Crusher just stared at him, not laughing, not cussing or screaming… just staring. Jason was about to set one of his pistols to stun just in case when his com unit fired off an alert that local law enforcement had been dispatched for a possible assault in progress.

  "That's our cue." He waved the device at Crusher. "Let's move."

  They ran out through the shattered doorway and down the hallway to an emergency exit that would spit them out onto the street right by their waiting ground car. The mission had been sloppy and risky, but in the end they’d taken the target out so he didn't belabor the point too much.

  Zumbal had hit their radar when they'd been hired to help settle a property dispute in the lawless Ch'Korol region of the planet. A collective of seven farming families pooled their resources and approached Jason about “negotiating” on their behalf with a property owner that had been hiring professional muscle to start chipping away at long-respected property lines. The crews they'd hired were street toughs that were big on bluster, light on real-world experience, and they had in no way been ready for the level of violence Jason and Crusher brought down upon them. Once that job had been quickly cleaned up, more people had approached them about Zumbal's facilitating off-world traffickers that were becoming bolder in how they were kidnapping juveniles.

  The pair had at first thought the easiest method of dealing with Zumbal would be directly, but the alien was no fool and his security was airtight. Instead of bashing themselves against that anvil, they began to dismantle his operation starting at the edges and working in. They made themselves a complete nuisance and soon disrupted Zumbal's operation so severely that he'd offered bounties on the two mercenaries. He figured that they must be working for a competitor and this incorrect assumption caused him to plan poorly when it came to stopping them.

  Once Crusher had killed Zumbal's younger sibling, however, things became serious. The bounty on the Galvetic warrior's head was so high that it was beginning to attract the attention of off-world mercs that would do nothing but muddy the water. They'd been drinking in a bar near the spaceport, trying to figure out a new approach, when fate intervened. One of Jason's contacts let him know that Zumbal's security detail would be light that evening at the same time a Taukkir crew walked in and recognized them. Before they could come up with a plan and try to take the pair themselves, Jason approached them with a proposition that would ensure they all survived the encounter.

  What he'd not been able to count on, however, was that Crusher had approached the evening's festivities with the same sort of reckless enthusiasm he did everything else. Before Jason could get all the moving parts of his hasty plan spinning in the same direction, Crusher had collapsed onto the table, completely unconscious. "This will still work," Jason had assured the now-skeptical Taukkir as the plan shifted on the fly to take advantage of a seemingly dead Crusher.

  "You sober enough to fly? We'll want to leave pretty quickly after that," Crusher said. He seemed much calmer than he had when he'd awoken to find himself in the middle of a firefight.

  "No problem," Jason assured him, doing the math in his head. His enhanced metabolism burned off the alcohol much quicker than a normal human's would and he hadn't tried to destroy his internal organs with the rotgut swill at the bar like his friend had. Good thing too; when climbing behind the controls of an unlicensed warship after killing a handful of aliens a few hours prior, one wanted to have their wits about them.

  "Clean getaway… probably." Jason flopped down on the couch in the lounge. "The engines are still making that horrible screeching noise when we mesh-out, though. Probably need to find—what? Still not talking to me?"

  Crusher continued breaking down his weapons on the table, something that used to be strictly against the rules, and ignored his friend. Jason drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair, trying to determine the best way to break the stalemate without giving Crusher a reason to break one of his bones. Usually just being annoying worked, but the big guy looked genuinely pissed off this time.

  "Have you heard from any of the others lately?" he asked, deciding on trying a different tactic to get his friend to talk to him. Crusher stopped what he was doing and just stared at him for a few long seconds.

  "Twingo sent me a message four days ago and inquired as to how the ship was doing," he rumbled. "He seems to think you would lie to him if he asked you."

  "Eh, I probably would," Jason agreed and popped the top off the two beers he'd brought from the galley as a peace offering. "I do think we need to get the slip-drive emitters aligned at our next stop though… that noise is really annoying."

  "Not to mention a catastrophic drive failure means our instant deaths." Crusher reached over and accepted the bottle. "This doesn't mean I'm still not pissed at you."

  "Noted," Jason said. "And if the drive shits the bed at least it will be a painless death, but I'll get it looked at. So that's all he said? Nothing about what they've been doing or why they haven't been at home?"

  "He mentioned that Doc and Tauless were going back to one of your species' planets for a short time to help out with the battlesynth integration there." Crusher leaned back and rubbed the crest on his forehe
ad. "Twingo was a little cagey about what he and the other idiot were up to."

  "Huh," Jason grunted.

  It had been a little over a year since Lucky had died. When they'd made all the necessary arrangements to close out the mission that had claimed their crewmate's life, the short time they'd spent together on S'Tora had seemed dreary and purposeless. He'd felt them drifting apart as they'd go days without seeing each other and, sometimes, actively avoided contact. Jason understood it as the coping mechanism it was, but it certainly didn't make it any less painful.

  He tried to immerse himself into the coffee business he'd started on his adopted planet only to learn that the beast had grown well beyond his control. There was now a full-blown administrative staff that handled the operation of his company, and after a week he'd been politely told that he was more of a distraction than a help. With his pride stinging and nothing else to do, he'd almost reached out to Russ Johnson, who was training Earth's new military on Terranovus, when he found Crusher waiting for him with a proposal.

  The Galvetic warrior wasn't used to extended periods of downtime and he was anxious to get back into space. He suggested that he and Jason take the Phoenix alone and skim along the various frontier worlds to see what sort of trouble they could kick up. He argued they wouldn't need the whole team since they weren't really digging up a mission to engage in, just a little harmless fun with the local thugs that might help out a few people in the process. So the next morning, without telling anyone about what they were doing or where they were going, Jason fueled the Phoenix and loaded her with weapons and booze and blasted off towards something to do other than watch people mope around the hangar without speaking to each other.

  "So, while things are still civil… what in the hell possessed you to use me as bait for your half-assed plan?" Crusher asked. While his voice was calm, Jason could see the glimmer in his eye that promised violence if he didn't answer very carefully.