Star Force: Canderous (SF16) Read online

  1

  March 8, 2258

  Epsilon Eridani System

  Corneria

  Harrison-167 jumped over a low log, skimming the bottom of his right foot on the rain-slickened bark as he sailed over a bit too low, as usual, but it didn’t trip him up. He landed in the slightly blue-tinted forest soil, his foot sinking in a good inch as he ran on, adding his newest footprints to the path that he and the other 14 Archons assigned to Clan Saber’s little corner of the planet had been pounding out of the hills surrounding their colony, which was situated at the base of a deep ravine between two ridgelines that offered significant elevation challenges for the Archons’ exterior runs.

  The reason for the extra difficulty, and the occasional boot-skimming, was that Corneria’s gravity was 108% that of Earth’s, making everything feel just a bit heavier, but not enough to cause any serious problems. Harrison had the bad habit of reverting back to his Earth-based movements from time to time, causing a bit of a neuromuscular hiccup despite the fact that he’d been on station for the past 5 years. He’d expected to have fully adjusted by now, but he guessed the occasional trips to orbit and normal gravity were enough to keep his body confused, hence the occasional coordination flap.

  Turning right sharply around the trunk of a very thick tree, Harrison climbed up three strategically placed roots and around onto a switchback that sent him further up the ravine in the opposite direction as the path zigzagged up towards the peak, on top of which sat a tiny outpost with a timing pedestal. Given the ever changing weather conditions and, more often than not, rain-soaked landscape, the footing was never the same twice, meaning the course was outside the bounds of the reliability necessary for any challenges, but the Archons still liked racing to the top and comparing times on their auxiliary workouts.

  The Clan Saber colony was small, but it did contain a full sanctum, meaning they had a proper track indoors for their normal running workouts. The trails were a bonus, as well as providing a more established route up to the top of the ravine than huffing it through the unpredictable rocky outcroppings that could stall one’s ascent and force you to backtrack if you didn’t keep an eye out for where you were going. Most of the rocky nubs had long since been covered over with soil, but enough remained poking out to be a problem if you were in a hurry…or trying to run downhill.

  Harrison was running up and over into the next valley as an extra workout today, already having logged 15k indoors at 5:40 mile pace along with the rest of his core workouts in the morning. After lunch he’d focused on his skills work, mainly swimming today with a little target practice thrown in, then his workout quota was complete and he had the rest of the day off…as was usual. Garrison duty on Corneria was exceedingly dull, which also made it a great environment to train in.

  Sucking down a few ambrosia-laced cookies, Harrison had taken to the trails for the past 2 hours, reaching the farthest point on the out and back course they’d established over in the next valley. As was typical, he’d worn a backpack with a number of heavy supplies which he deposited at the terminus along with the others that had been accumulating there over past weeks. Each time one of them came out this far they brought more with them, and once the prerequisite number of materials had been reached they’d begin building another outpost by hand…then extend the trails on further out.

  The easier way would have been to load up a Mantis and fly the supplies over, but they didn’t want to do it the easy way. Carrying it all out by trail felt better, as well as enhancing the difficulty of their runs, and allowed them a bit more personal exploration than they’d been used to back in the Solar System. Corneria was a world of pristine, untouched forests that circled the globe from pole to pole, ranging from snowy evergreens at the extremes to hot jungles along the equator. With no axial tilt to speak of and a 22-hour day, the climate remained relatively constant, though the local weather patterns were quite the opposite.

  Precipitation was frequent in the area that Clan Saber had been allotted to colonize, yet there were no oceans on the planet, only a number of small lakes scattered across the surface. Whereas Earth was a water world, Corneria was all forest…but a rain-soaked forest at that. There were dry spells, but more often than not there was moisture in the air, which gave rise to the mass of bluish ground cover that sprouted up everywhere the trees blocked the intense sunlight, blanketing the forest floor underneath the canopy and giving the soil its trademark tint through decomposition.

  Where the sunlight did break through were thin grasses, not unlike on Earth, but all the vegetation had a slightly alien theme to it, like someone had gone and tried to copy their homeworld but messed up little bits here and there. For example, the evergreen trees in the north were a dead ringer for pines…except that their needles were forked, growing in a V-shape rather than the single lines typical on Earth.

  Other similarities were abound, but the biggest difference was the lack of wildlife. To date they’d categorized exactly six species on the planet. Four were insects and the other two were types of ground burrowing grubs. There were no birds, no wildlife, no fish, no nothing on the entire planet…or at least as far as they had searched. It made the entire world feel empty and new to Harrison…quite the contrast to overpopulated Earth.

  When he finally reached the top of the ridge Harrison tagged the finish pedestal and stopped for a breather. His backpack now rolled up into a tiny pouch at the small of his back, the Archon stood on the concrete slab jutting out from the tiny building wedged in between the trees to his left as he looked out over the small clearing they’d created, giving him a good view of the valley below. Directly ahead of him was the path going on down, zigzagging to the right initially before being swallowed up by the forest again, but the main draw was the huge valley spreading out before him, at the bottom of which was the sparkling buildings of the colony as they reflected the sunlight back up into his eyes.

  He squinted away the glare and sucked in a deep breath of the fresh air. The oxygen content was higher here, rising to over 40% in the deepest parts of the forest, but the carbon dioxide was also higher, running on average at 1.2% compared with the .03% on Earth. That seemed odd to Harrison at first, given that there was no indigenous animal population to produce the carbon dioxide. Given how rapidly the plant life on Earth sucked the stuff out of the air he’d expected there to be almost none at all on Corneria.

  He was right, there shouldn’t have been any. Nor should the plant life have been able to survive without it, but what the planet did have instead was a number of geological hotspots spread around the planet spewing gasses into the atmosphere on a regular basis, including a large amount of carbon dioxide...more than the forests could soak up, meaning that the plant life here had it very, very good and grew to applicable size.

  The trees around where Harrison now stood were smaller, due to being at the top of the ridge, but further down the slope they grew to insane size thanks to the abundance of the carbon dioxide, which in turn generated the high amounts of oxygen as the forests scrubbed the carbon atoms off the gas and used them to grow tall and thick. Along with the abundance of moisture Corneria was a plant haven, and certain tracks of the wilderness even made Endor’s trees look small in comparison.

  Star Force had wisely chosen not to tackle colonizing those thicker sections right off and took to more of the shorter growths to start carving out a foothold in. Clan Saber was brought in 13 years after the initial colonization and given their choice of locations. Paul had chosen this valley as their starting point, which the planet’s Duke had quickly granted him.

  That wasn’t surprising, since Paul’s Marquis had been chosen by Davis to oversee the Epsilon Eridani System, taking a similar roll to the Dir
ector’s in the Solar System. Clan Saber had been assigned another of Davis’s ‘to be groomed’ apprentices while Hightower got promoted up to Duke and now had his hands full with the much larger colonization effort.

  Paul and most of Clan Saber weren’t on Corneria, with Harrison being the highest ranking Archon assigned. He had recently achieved Adept level 78, which put him a good 22 levels ahead of the next highest ranking member of his garrison unit, giving him defacto command of the small colony wedged into the base of the ravine along with Baron McGuiness, who oversaw the Sabers’ economic activities within the system.

  Half visible from Harrison’s position and stretching off to the east was the Sabers’ ever-growing colony ‘building,’ in that it was all one continuous structure continually being added upon. Over time Paul had adopted a light blue as the Sabers’ primary color and the normal grays of Star Force design esthetic had been replaced with the faint blue, smooth exterior that clashed with the overbearing greens of the forest, but complimented the hue of the soil perfectly.

  The colony looked like an accumulation of blue marshmallows that had fallen down to the base of the ravine and smooshed together, in so much as they filled the center without reaching up to the ridgelines. At the base the building ended abruptly, allowing a small tunnel through which the ravine’s waterway flowed…too big to be a creek, yet too small to be a river during normal weather conditions but capable of significant rise during storms. The architecture had been built to accommodate such floods and was anchored into the ravine’s walls, allowing a small arch over the middle through which one of the Archons’ trails ran.

  The top of the ‘marshmallows’ was appropriately lumpy, with several base elements of spires beginning to be built upon while both ends of the colony continued to extend down through the ravine. Currently the colony’s population was a steady 22,000, mostly comprised of construction crews and other workers with very little in the way of a civilian population present. At the moment the Sabers needed to get a solid foothold on the planet before they started building habitats, meaning that they had to replicate all of their infrastructure from home inside this one colony, which was not an easy thing to do.

  They needed to replicate it because the Clans’ standing rules of operation were still in effect in this star system. They could not trade with anyone other than the Clans, including the much larger Star Force colonies on the planet that Hightower was growing rapidly. There were four other Clans on planet, but none of them were in a much more stable position than the Sabers, with all of them working towards achieving self-sufficiency before pulling in mass colonists that they may or may not be able to support through supply shipments from the Solar System.

  As it was, those occasional shipments were what was sustaining the Sabers through this startup phase, bringing in the machinery to build their own factories and mining sites…of which two were located within the colony building and burrowing their way down into the bedrock, while another three auxiliary mining sites were located within a 500 mile radius, reachable only by Mantis or dropship…which were supplying more and more raw materials to expand their colony.

  Specialty components still had to be shipped in, but as each year passed the Sabers’ onsite production list was increased in length, moving them in a predictable manner towards the minimum requirements needed for self-sufficiency, which had been well established during the foundation of other Star Force colonies over the past century.

  Harrison took a long moment at the ridgeline outpost, not out of fatigue, but because he liked the view looking down on the colony and the surrounding forest both in front of him and behind him in the adjacent ravine. He walked over to the door to the outpost and went inside, grabbing a drink of water from the fountain and checking his run statistics on the nearby display screen, noting how long it’d taken him to ascend this side and judging his pace as ‘adequate’ considering he hadn’t been in a hurry.

  He went back outside and stretched a bit on the concrete platform, sitting down and twisting up in a variety of positions, feeling the warm, dull ache in his muscles that was one of the rewards of a good, long run. As he was doing so the view of the moon overhead came into his eye line. It was partially obscured by haze, but large enough that it was hard to miss. Nearly 3/4 the size of Corneria, the moon was almost categorized as a double planet. It too was habitable and covered in forests, but there the similarities ended.

  Dxun was aptly labeled after its Star Wars namesake. The moon had 62% gravity, a hot, humid, and oppressive climate generated from a globe-spanning ocean that had numerous, scar-like fingers crisscrossing the surface…and some of the fiercest wildlife Star Force had come across to date. They weren’t V’kit’no’sat, but they were large, savage, and mostly reptilian. Hightower had wisely decided that they leave the colonization of Dxun to the distant future, given that they had 3x the land area of Earth to work with on Corneria before they even had to think of putting down roots up there.

  That said, Harrison and Paul had had a long discussion about the planetoid before he’d been sent out here and he knew their Clan leader wanted them to claim the wild moon at some point, knowing that doing so would be a challenge. There were far too few habitable planetoids in the galaxy to pass up, especially this close to Sol, and with Hightower not wanting to go anywhere near the moon it seemed fitting that its colonization should fall to the Clans.

  That was all in the future though, Harrison knew, because they had to get their foothold established on Corneria first, then build up a significant industrial and economic base before they could start spawning other colonies within the system. That was going to take decades, but Harrison looked forward to the challenge. Corneria was a gem of a world, even more so than Earth, and both the Clans and Star Force planned to colonize every inch of Epsilon Eridani for what it was worth, given that it had 5 habitable planetoids.

  On paper, Corneria alone had the potential to hold a greater population that the entire Solar System combined, then add in the other habitable planets and nonhabitable ones, orbital tracks for stations, and the potential for the star system made it very viable that, given enough time, Epsilon Eridani would usurp the Solar System as Star Force’s primary home…though that, indeed, was thinking well into the distant future, for now Corneria was still a virgin forest and had a population of less than 5 million…while the Solar System supported over 20 billion inhabitants.

  Corneria was still frontier, and Harrison was enjoying the solitude. Archons had two modes…war and training. And given that Star Force hadn’t fought even a small war in decades, all he had known in recent years was the trials and his training.

  As he stood up from his last stretch and prepared to run down the ravine back to the colony he took one last look out over the far ridgeline, which was a bit lower than the one he stood on, at the horizon and the forested tracks beyond as the sun overhead began to start creeping towards the surface. There was something raw and powerful about the wilderness that made training here seem all the more fitting. The higher gravity was part of that, he knew, but if he had to choose between an urban setting or this, he’d choose this any day.

  Planning on spending a great many years of his life on the planet, Harrison tagged the timing pedestal and cautiously hit the descending trail in front of him, heading back down to one of the few bastions of civilization on Corneria, feeling like he had the best of both worlds and, perhaps, the best assignment of any Archon. As much as Earth was his homeworld, Corneria definitely felt like an upgrade, and at the moment Harrison was right where he wanted to be.

  2

  July 2, 2258

  Solar System

  Earth

  Jules Portman ascended the circular staircase into Davis’s office only to find an empty desk. He frowned, wondering where the Director was. It wasn’t like him to be late for any meeting, let alone one he had arranged.

  “Ah, there you are,” Davis’s voice said from behind him.

  Jules turned around and looked a
t the desolate side of the office behind the staircase to find his colleague standing next to that portion of the panoramic window that ran the entire circumference of the office.

  “Here I am,” Portman said, walking around the central staircase pit and over to his location.

  “I have a proposition for you,” Davis said, turning his attention back to the window as Jules walked up and stood shoulder to shoulder next to him.

  “I thought you might,” his friendly rival businessman said, glancing out over the cityscape. “Something wrong with your desk?”

  Davis pointed out the window. “Over there…see that thin trail of smoke?”

  Jules focused on his line of direction. “No.”

  “It’s hard to see, in the nook of the taller tower where it connects to the adjacent building.”

  “Barely,” he said, seeing a few whiffs rising up off the roof.

  “A meteor hit there a few minutes ago, I think. Probably space junk. We’ve still got bits and pieces of trash floating around in orbit from years back.”

  “Any damage?”

  “I’ve got my people investigating. I doubt any critical systems were hit, but it’s possible someone was in that section when it fell.”

  “I hope not,” Jules offered. “No armored rooftops? Bit uncharacteristic of Star Force.”

  “Atlantis is old, built well before we established our standard construction protocols. That said, the construction is still rather sturdy. I’d estimate the object was at least a meter in diameter.”

  “That large?”

  “I’m being conservative. I saw it come down out of the corner of my eye and at first glance it appeared much larger than that, but there’s no way for me to be certain. And no, Atlantis isn’t capped with military grade armor.”

  Jules nodded, realizing this wasn’t the normal space junk that typically burned up in the atmosphere upon descent. “You said something about a proposition?”