Star Force: Origin Series Box Set (5-8) Read online

  Gemini

  1

  March 3, 2045

  Paul skidded his ‘mongoose’ to a halt, jamming on the breaks and grinding the four massive tires against the floor of the ‘Mario Kart’ vehicular course as he landed himself on top of a pressure-sensitive panel, which lit up blue beneath him. Off to his left in the distance a short bridge extended across a narrow ‘ravine’ in the city-like landscape, with Jason zooming across on his own mongoose a moment later.

  As soon as he was across, Paul twisted the four wheeler’s hand controls and accelerated away down one of the many road-like paths, with the bridge immediately retracting now that the mongoose was no longer sitting on the activation switch. However, another of the symbol-tagged panels on the floor lit up in front of Paul, glowing a bright green, indicating a defensive pickup which he immediately raced towards…all the while keeping an eye on the location of the three rovers maneuvering their way through the course.

  When Paul’s widely spaced tires crossed over the green symbol it deactivated and was replaced by a small dot on a screen between his handlebars, indicating that he now carried a ‘block’ weapon that he could use on any of the square panels covering the course…but not on the medians that outlined the roads, some as expansive as a parking lot while others were less than two inches wide and standing a foot tall.

  Spying one of the rovers on a parallel road to his left, Paul cut a sharp turn, feeling the pod-like center portion of the four wheeler mechanically tilt into the turn along with the thick tires, enabling much more maneuverability than the standard civilian versions. The trainees had nicknamed the vehicles ‘mongooses’ after a similar off-road transport in Halo, though with one major difference…in the video game the mongooses had a tendency to roll over, often coming back up after multiple spins to right themselves. The reverse was true of the Star Force mongoose, which had been designed wide and low to the ground to prevent flipping while affording maximum speed and maneuverability.

  That maneuverability was limited to 40% on Paul’s vehicle, which had an elongated seat with side handles that could accommodate a second rider if need be, but at the moment Paul’s one and only teammate on the course was zipping about in his own mongoose, given the mission requirements of the Tandem Challenge.

  A month ago all ten teams had entered the final stage of their training, having completed all tier 1 individual challenges and their tier 2 subcategory prerequisites. Most of the trainees had already progressed onto tiers 3 and 4, but those were deemed as ‘extra’ and not required for graduation, given that it wasn’t expected for the trainees to master every discipline, but they did need to acquire a certain level of basic proficiency in everything, along with a moderate level of skill in each subcategory grouping. With those requirements met, and the last of the team challenges completed, all members of the first class had transitioned into the Tandem Challenges.

  Half of the Tandems required teammates, while the other half required pairing with non-teammates, with the scores going towards both individual and team totals. Every challenge required passage with at least 3 separate pairings, with the highest score for each individual being recorded for themselves and their team.

  Paul and Jason paired up as often as they could, finding they worked together slightly better than with anyone else, and this vehicular challenge was no exception, the point of which was to slow and deter the three target rovers as they made their way around the course sufficient to get their slower moving rover to the finish first. It was a game of the tortoise and the hare, with the trainees trying to give the tortoise every advantage possible.

  When Paul turned towards the side of the road he had approximately three meters of road to work with before he hit the median. He lined himself up and accelerated up to his truncated maximum speed and hit a button on his left handlebar…

  Hydraulic lifts in each of the wheels jumped his mongoose up into the air enough to clear the lip of the median, allowing him to ‘hop’ over the boundary and cut ahead on the course…something the rovers could not do. The slow, computer controlled rolling boxes had to meander their way through the designated paths while the mongooses could cheat their way across, so long as they timed their jumps right.

  Paul landed awkwardly, half bouncing out of his seat as he skidded into a right hand turn and tore off down the road, racing to get ahead of the nearest rover. He traveled fifty meters up then drifted right before jerking his way back left and making an angled hop up onto the two meter wide median, then bounced down on the far side just ahead of the rover.

  The mongoose’s tires spun aggressively to keep from hitting the rover, which would result in a speed penalty, and clawed away at the smooth floor tiles as it gained speed and a small lead over the armored box that reminded Paul of a white metallic soccer ball.

  Up ahead the pathway turned left as a portion of the median jutted out, constricting the road down to a square and a half wide. Paul slowed as he approached the bottleneck with his right hand thumbing the handlebar controls to select the green icon on his screen. When the mongoose passed over the square Paul had in mind he pressed the activation button and the green icon on his screen disappeared…transferring to the tile on the floor, which two seconds later rose up a meter high, effectively blocking the road save for two narrow gaps on the side large enough for a person to walk through, but not the meter-wide rover.

  The device’s proximity sensors stopped it from hitting the roadblock, bringing it to a halt inches away where it spun about in place and began backtracking to the nearest intersection where it would take the shortest available path to the finish.

  Meanwhile, Jason was on another section of the course off limit to the rovers thanks to the ravine where he activated a second bridge that was now behind the enemy rovers…but just ahead of the trailing friendly. As he sat on the activation panel, Jason saw their rover, as well as one of the others, immediately change course as soon as the bridge was extended, with both sensing a shorter route to the finish, but the enemy rover had a much larger distance to travel backwards than the friendly rover did to cut back into the offshoot.

  Jason waited patiently for it to arrive and cross the bridge into the island-like shortcut, then he motored off the activation pad, dropping the bridge before the other rover arrived. Sensing the way was now blocked, it reversed course and began retracing its original path, now significantly delayed and lagging behind the friendly rover as it sputtered on ahead.

  Zigzagging around the friendly, Jason passed it by and moved on forward, looking for where Paul was. He saw him heading for one of the binary power up ‘bumps’ at the top of a tiny ramp…whose corresponding activator was on the ‘island’ that Jason was just about to move off.

  Pulling a hard, spinning right turn Jason shot into an offshoot of the road that led to a dead end a few dozen meters away in a circle-like roundabout, in the center of which was a tile with a large ‘3’ on it. When Jason’s mongoose slid to a halt on top of it the ‘3’ glowed white, while at the same time a purple symbol on top of the bump in front of Paul glowed to life.

  Paul gently ramped up and over the bump, with his tires making contact with the flat top. As he came down the opposite side the speed indicator on his mongoose changed from 40% to 50% as it registered the speed boost. He cranked the now higher throttle up to its maximum as he leveled out and raced to get ahead of the rovers.

  He meandered through the crisscrossing, twisting roads that offered multiple avenues of advancement, but no straight line paths to the finish, until he met up with Jason as they hopped off course onto a large, parking lot-like median, on top of which were additional symbols.

  Paul angled towards on
e that looked like unintelligible calligraphy and Jason swung in line behind him, picking up the timed power up a moment after Paul ran over and activated its two second timer…not nearly long enough for him to swing around and get it himself, but more than enough time for his trailing partner to snag it.

  On the screen between Jason’s handlebars a yellow icon lit up, which he quickly highlighted and activated…decreasing enemy rover speed by 10%. It was one of the more valuable power ups on the course and gave the trainees additional time to get out ahead of the herd and throw obstacles in their way.

  The two mongooses hopped back onto the roads and went off chasing additional power ups, some of which enhanced their speed, allowed them to throw or take down blocks, and even a few that altered the medians to change the layout of the course. Altogether, by the time the rovers hit the halfway point on the horse-shoe shaped course, the friendly rover had pulled into the lead and the pair spent the rest of their time and effort on slowing down and blocking the others, often sending them on longer adjuncts while the slower moving friendly rover took the shorter paths.

  The point of passing the challenge was twofold…get the friendly rover to the finish first, and get it there with as big of a lead as possible, for the amount of the lead determined the points scored. When Paul and Jason’s friendly rover finally crossed the finish line all the power ups on the course disappeared, as did any items still in the mongoose display screen inventory, and the trainees had to drive back to the finish area and wait to see how long it would take the enemy rovers to get to the finish now that they were no longer able to interfere with them.

  Paul maneuvered his mongoose back behind the line and parked it in one of the slots next to half a dozen others before sliding off and walking over to the score board, which displayed not only this challenge score, which was ticking upwards with every second that passed now that the friendly rover had finished, but also scoring data from every other challenge with the team and individual lists covering the interactive screens.

  As their challenge score increased, he and Jason watched their team total ticking up at the same time, extending their lead over the 7s by small amounts, making it more and more evident that the 2s just about had the team title locked up. When the first of the enemy rovers finally arrived and stopped the clock, their team total registered a good 2,873 point lead over the 7s, and another 654 points back to the 6s, though those numbers could be deceiving, given that some of the teams hadn’t yet completed the same challenges, and this one scored a base 300 points just for completion, meaning that the 7s couldn’t be confident in their advantage over the 6s, but the 2s still had a comfortable margin on everyone else, and appeared to be padding their lead.

  Paul glanced over at the individual ranks as his score was also being updated there…only to notice that Morgan’s lead over him had grown by 143 points since the last time he’d checked. Frowning, he touched her name on the screen and brought up her challenge stats, discovering that she’d outscored him on three challenges by small amounts, and a not so small discrepancy on one of the obstacle courses…and since he’d already passed all those challenges, there wouldn’t be any monster point swings to be gained, meaning she really was pulling away from him again.

  Paul backed up the screen and touched the third place trainee’s name, bringing up Travis’s stats and noting that he’d just passed a challenge that Paul hadn’t gotten to, yet he was still trailing Paul in points, which was a good sign. Ever since the naval challenges had concluded, he and Morgan had been the top pair by a comfortable margin, but his lead had been wobbling a bit since they’d entered the final phase of their training and he wasn’t sure if he was going to lose the 2nd spot or catch up with Morgan to claim first.

  The Tandem challenges were unusual compared to everything that’d they’d gone through before, and as such they were hard to predict the outcome of. Most of the time he and Jason would outscore almost everyone else…but then again they, more often than not, had similar strengths and weaknesses, meaning when they teamed up in their weak areas they ended up with below average scores, but since they were required to mix and match with the pairings they usually found someone else to hook up with that offset their weaknesses.

  Almost satisfied with his individual point total, Paul switched the screen over to the Tandem subcategory and saw that he and Jason were still at the top of the list for highest scoring pair across all disciplines…in fact, their recent run had bumped them up another 112 points ahead of Kerrie and Tom, who’d already been through the rover herding challenge at least once by now, meaning that gain was due to the time and not the mere completion.

  “Try again or move on?” Paul asked.

  “Move on,” Jason said, satisfied with their first attempt. “We can come back later if we need to.”

  “You want to hit the relay next, or one of the sharpshooters?”

  “Save the relay for last, it’s going to wear us out.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Paul said as they left the scoreboards and the other waiting trainees behind while walking out into the connective hallway between vehicular courses. “But everyone else will probably be thinking the same thing. Do we want to run it with them or pace on our own?”

  “Hmmn…good question. Depends who’s there.”

  “How about we duck in last thing and see, and if we don’t like the group we hit it again tomorrow morning?”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Jason said as they passed Megan and Rafa in the hallway, with an exchange of nods to both. Ever since the team phase had ended the trainees had been intermixing far more than they ever had before, which was odd considering they were still competing against each other for points. “Pistols, snipes, or grenades?”

  “I hit the grenades this morning with Ivan and we sucked.”

  Jason nodded. “Let’s work on that then. We can’t afford any weak scores for the team…and you need every point you can get if you’re going to catch Morgan.”

  “Not so sure I will now.”

  “You’re closer than anyone else…plus you’ve been holding off on those 5 naval challenges.”

  That was true. Paul had been saving those for last, figuring he could make up some points there if he could only keep even or pull a little closer to Morgan on the rest. The trainees technically had an unlimited amount of time to get through the Tandem challenges, but they’d been tentatively scheduled to take two months for completion, and Paul had been using that timeframe to apportion his time, now that all trainer-scheduling was a thing of the past. He and the other trainees were free to train and test however and whenever they wanted.

  “Yeah, but she’s been pulling away a bit. If she gets any further ahead I’m not sure I’ll be able to catch up.”

  “All the more reason to trim up your weak areas,” Jason reminded him as they stepped into a lift terminal and summoned a ‘car’ with the press of a button. The doors to their left immediately opened, as one had already been waiting at one of the three stations.

  “How are you with the grenades?” Paul asked.

  “Fair…but I need some work too.”

  “What’s fair?”

  “56th,” Jason said, referring to the previous individual challenge that he’d completed months ago as they walked inside.

  “Wow…we’re going to be at this all day. I was 48th.”

  “It we have to, but I don’t think it will take that long. These Tandems are more about coordination of skills rather than specificity, and we’ve had plenty of practice at that.”

  “Point,” Paul conceded as the doors closed and the elevator shot them off through the inside of Atlantis towards another of the restricted training areas that didn’t even show up on the civilian maps of the city.

  2

  Two weeks later…

  Morgan held her end of the rope tight as it looped around a metal pole three times before extending down through an eyelet and angling off to the left where Zak was standing on the edge of a drop-off wit
h the rope in hand. He walked back two steps and adjusting his grip upward before running forward and swinging downward off the ledge over a large red disqualification mat.

  He passed within a meter of touching it, then swung back up to the far side, deftly getting a foot on the opposite ledge and stepping up onto it with a precarious balance.

  Morgan smiled when she saw him catch it on the first try and toss the rope back behind him, then head off to a monkey bar catwalk that would take him over to the activation panel. Zak was one of the best climbers out of all the trainees and had an impeccable sense of balance and timing, which was why she’d requested that they team up for this ring-out challenge. As she loosened her grip on the rope and quickly unspun it from the pole she congratulated herself on another successful pick, then pulled the rope up through the eyelet as quickly as she could, looping it around her right elbow in a bundle.

  As soon as she had it collected she turned around and ran down a small ramp, made a left turn through a short tunnel, then arrived on the platform opposite her destination…which was even now extending a long, thin balance beam over to her. Zak was standing next to the activation button one level down, just below the opposite platform, and remained there as Morgan began to walk across, keeping the button depressed.

  With the rope bundle held in front of her as a counterbalance, Morgan smoothly walked across the beam, ignoring the two story drop-off below. When she got to the far platform she took three quick steps forward and jumped into a twisting slide that deposited her one story below next to where Zak had just been.

  Morgan slid onto the balls of her feet coming off the slide and rolled into a jog as she stood up and took off down a rail-less sidewalk that led to a ladder, on top of which was a zip line. When she got to the top Morgan unslung the rope bundle from her elbow and carefully grasped either end of the thick loop, placing one half of it over the line. The cords were thick inside her tiny hands, but she managed a decent grip and kicked off from the platform, sliding down the angled zip line slowly.