Read Omega Force 7: Redemption for Free Online

their initial debrief with Crisstof. It was expected that the old man would put whatever business he had with Faulli over the lives of a bunch of grubby mercenaries no matter how much he professed to care about them personally. Jason had walked into the debrief thinking he held two aces: Crusher's status on his homeworld as near-royalty, and Kellea's habit of siding with him to convince Crisstof to agree to his demands. He walked out worse off than when he went in since now he'd been expressly forbidden to take direct action. If they did it anyway (which they would) he would not be able to innocently claim he wasn't aware he'd caused any problems.
    ****
    "How'd it go?" Kage asked as Jason walked up onto the main deck of the Phoenix and closed the hatch behind him.
    "Not well," he admitted. "Crisstof is stonewalling me, I'm certain of it, but the main thrust of it was he won't help and he doesn't want us taking action on our own."
    "I find that somewhat surprising given the fact the Guardian Archon of Galvetor has just gone missing on a mission he had convinced him to take part in," Doc said with a frown. "There could be some serious ramifications from that."
    "Maybe a lot more immediate than if Galvetor finds out," Twingo said. "Could you imagine what the company of Marines aboard this ship would do if they found out Crisstof left Crusher out to dry?"
    "We could—" Kage began.
    "Absolutely not," Jason said firmly. "I will tell Mazer when the time is right, if ever, but I don't need them tearing the Defiant apart and getting a bunch of people killed. It wouldn't help anyway. We need information more than anything else."
    "Given what I have to work with I'm stuck," Kage said. "De'Moltia is on an isolated network and I'm not able to gain access from here."
    "What do you need?" Jason asked.
    "A hard line into the prison's administrative mainframe would be fantastic," Kage said. "But barring that I could use the access codes to the Faullian governmental network. From there I could bore into the reports coming out of De'Moltia."
    "Who has those codes?" Twingo asked.
    "Captain Colleren does," Kage said. "The Defiant has had a constant, high-bandwidth connection to the surface since she made orbit. The codes were provided to her by the Faullian representative that's onboard. Normally I would just slice into the Defiant's systems and ride their connection down, but that would leave too much evidence that I was there."
    "She won't give them to me," Jason said.
    "She won't?" Twingo asked, clearly surprised.
    "Well ... I didn't actually ask," Jason admitted, "but in the debrief she made it pretty clear she was siding with Crisstof on this. Here's the problem: if I ask and she says no, we'll have tipped our hand that we're about to try something. Why is this network so hard for you to get in and out of without being seen?"
    "It's not the network," Kage said. "It's the connection from the network to the prison. There isn't much traffic on it so they have the luxury of sniffing every data packet that comes and goes without choking throughput. If I have legitimate access codes, however, I can be in and out and they won't know until the logs are audited. By then we'll be long gone and I can create enough havoc they won't know what I was actually looking for."
    "Would it be possible to steal the codes from Captain Colleren?" Doc asked. "No offense intended, Captain, but we're racing the clock right now. If Crusher's still alive we don't have long to find out where he is and try to extract him."
    "No offense taken," Jason said. "I happen to agree with you. My relationship with Kellea is secondary to getting our crewmate back, so anything short of actually harming her is on the table."
    "She has a terminal in her quarters that is connected to the Defiant's central core, right?" Kage asked.
    "I believe so," Jason said. "I've never seen her do anything but check her messages with it, but I would assume she has the capability to check on the ship's