Star Force: Origin Series Box Set (37-40) Read online

  “When I was recruited I was told that I was going someplace not on the map and was delivered into the back of a truck in lower Florida, some small town I can’t remember. From there I had no knowledge of where I was being taken, but the trip lasted a total of 6 hours and 52 minutes. I timed it on my watch. There were also several transfers of the crate I was in, and it included wheeled and anti-grav transit, I could tell that much from the vibrations.”

  “When the doors finally opened again I could see no loading dock, just a hallway. When I entered, the facility’s doors closed behind me and I never saw them open again until the day of my assignment. I was taken back by crate to Florida, with a plausible cover story to explain the lost time. The training center had no windows that weren’t artificial, and while it could have been in a sealed building I got the impression that it was underground.”

  “Aside from the Master and my fellow Agents I never saw another person. Master handled all of our training and instruction, and it was important to him that we understood why we would be doing what we were doing. He needed us to believe in the cause, and said that if we didn’t we’d never succeed. So rather than indoctrinating us into a set of specific rules and procedures he encouraged us to think outside the box, stating that that was exactly what we’d have to do in the field, because outside the box was the only safe place to hide. Star Force was too good monitoring the box, so we learned to operate outside society’s perceptions and the resource grid.”

  “Do Agents have contact with one another, you notwithstanding?”

  “No. Our orders come from Master, and any personnel transfers are routed through him as well. We inform him what we need and he transfers it to us, usually before we’re assigned, but on occasion modifications have to be made. Other than that we ‘grow’ our own resources and operatives, so to speak.”

  “No one else knows about Master?”

  “Only Agents,” Sander confirmed. “And most operatives don’t know about us, we use local handlers as intermediaries.”

  “And your knowledge of this is academic, or did Master gives you files to study from actual operations?”

  “Purely academic save for the case of failures. Those he gave us full information on so we could learn from their mistakes.”

  “Were there any locations included in those files?”

  Sander smiled. “Yes there were, though how outdated they are now I have no way of knowing.”

  “Such as?” Davis pressed.

  “The largest referenced was a production center in Bolivia. It was supplying an Agent’s operation in western Brazil, but so much cargo was being moved that eventually there was a mishap and a shipment got scattered over a roadway. The Word quickly cleaned it up, but the accident and the few tidbits of information that leaked to the press were enough to cause the Brazil operation to close. The lesson we were meant to learn was to keep as much production as possible local rather than drawing on our major industrial facilities.”

  “What was the cargo?”

  “Machine parts for equipment that was not native to the region, which would have thrown up a red flag to anyone looking for anomalies. Typically large pieces are deconstructed into spare parts, shipped, then reconstructed on site so the size of the cargo is small and easily disguisable.”

  “How close could you get us?”

  “I can narrow down the location to within a few hundred miles. I had the exact location on the map given to me so I could study the transportation route in order to assess how much cargo had been excessive, but I wasn’t given any information on the facility itself, but judging by the amount coming out it was an impressive setup. It might still be in operation.”

  “How did you contact the Master from the field…or rather how were the others supposed to?”

  “Codes hidden in public documents, that way no comm link could ever be established.”

  “Can you contact him now?”

  “I was supposed to if I had set up the proper blinds, but my sudden disappearance from Pluto has probably spoiled that option.”

  Davis slowly shook his head. “Not if The Word pays close attention to Star Force operations. We have a tendency to pull people away on spur of the moment projects, particularly the Archons when the need arises. Since you were last publically seen with them we can concoct a story as to where you have been that won’t raise any eyebrows amongst your coworkers.”

  “Risky,” Sander warned. “The Word may not know as much about Star Force as you’re giving them credit for.”

  “But you think they’ve got enough eyes on Pluto to realize you’ve not reported for work?”

  “I don’t assume anything, but I can’t discount the possibility whenever there is public access to a site. I would guess The Word has no eyes in Atlantis, now that you’ve closed it to non-Star Force personnel, unless they’ve been successful with other infiltrations. They were especially keen on establishing some form of electronic surveillance, though didn’t know how to accomplish it, but they’ve had 4 decades to work out a solution.”

  “I think it’s worth a shot,” Davis said, glancing up at David. “Thoughts?”

  “We’ll need communication coming back from the Master to trace.”

  “Not a problem,” Sander said confidently. “In order for me to infiltrate the tainted personnel, I have to know who they are, and as I’ve said, Agents don’t correspond with other Agents.”

  “Sounds promising,” David agreed.

  “Alright then, Mr. Rennold. We’ll get you back to Pluto and let you start doing what it was The Word always wanted you to do. I’ll give you a secure comm line to this office so you can keep me informed without any middle men, nor extra Archons on planet. Those that are there will be informed of the situation and be ready to assist. This, if you hadn’t already been informed, is Green Team,” Davis said, gesturing to the four Archons standing around him. “They’ll be the ones hunting down any leads you give us, but you won’t be in contact with them directly. It seems The Word is already familiar with their identities, thanks to several previous encounters.”

  “Yes, I know. The Colorado facility was one of the failures we were given to study. Which means that his presence,” Sander said, pointing back to David, “on Pluto could raise some suspicion.”

  Davis raised an eyebrow as he looked at the ranger.

  “Possible, but improbable. We didn’t take public transport, and unless they’ve got operatives on Pluto that happened to bump into us in the city or gain access to ID scanner records, I doubt our presence was noticed.”

  “We’re still a go then, if you’re willing?” he said, looking at Sander.

  “I am,” he said, hesitating slightly. “Though to be perfectly candid I have to ask…why are you trusting me? I half expected to be stuck in a prison, or at the very minimum be shuttled off to some corner of Star Force’s domain where I couldn’t do any harm if I wanted to. For all you know I’m a very bold plant who’s still carrying out Word orders.”

  Davis smiled, glancing at the Archons who didn’t break their stoic demeanor. “It’s not so great a risk as you might think. You see, there’s a great deal about Star Force that you have yet to learn. Now that you’ve reached level 6 you’ve become acquainted with ambrosia I assume?”

  “Yes, and I was quite surprised. The Word had suspected some type of drug use…and ironically they weren’t wholly wrong. Though technically the ambrosia isn’t required for self-sufficiency to be achieved.”

  “No it’s not, but it helps considerably, as you’ve probably already noticed.”

  “I’m only up to a mic every week, but yes I have.”

  “You should be higher than that,” Davis commented, weaving a bit off topic.

  “The first few hours after ingestion are troublesome. I’m highly agitated, but once it levels off I see the benefits for the next 3 or 4 days, gradually diminishing thereafter.”

  A frown from Davis prompted him to type a few commands into his desktop, bringing u
p personnel records for the corporation and quickly finding Mr. Rennold’s, which included his workout logs. The Director went straight to his running mileage, seeing that it was very light and moderately slow.

  “You’ve attained self-sufficiency?”

  “I’m 74 years old and I look like I’m 30, so I assume yes.”

  Nathan stepped over behind the holographic display to take a glance at the readout and confirmed Davis’s thoughts with a pithy telepathic analysis.

  “Your workouts are very shallow,” the Director said. “You’re not pressing very hard for advancement, thus the ambrosia is not having much effect. Your body isn’t craving energy, so when you ingest even a small amount of it you overdose…that is what creates the agitation you mentioned. You need to crank up your workouts slowly until the sensation goes away, or stop using the ambrosia altogether. Its purpose is to allow you to do beefier workouts, and if you’re not trying to become a rocket you shouldn’t be taking rocket fuel.”

  “I’ll make an adjustment. I had thought so long as I maintained self-sufficiency greater workouts weren’t required.”

  “For self-sufficiency they aren’t, until you’re thrown into a less than ideal situation. If you’re just hovering at or above 100% it’s easy to tick down to 99 and start losing ground. These guys,” Davis said, thumbing his right hand towards the Archons, “couldn’t shake their self-sufficiency in a month if they tried. They’re running up like 110%, so they can take a lot of hits and not even drop below 105. Better to devote the time to building a cushion and not need it than to be a minimalist and get caught off guard.”

  “So noted.”

  “Now…back to why I’m trusting you,” Davis said, leaning back in his chair. “It’s because I know you’re telling the truth…plain and simple. If I didn’t, there’s no way we would be meeting face to face, despite the medics clearing you of any potential explosiveness.”

  Sander frowned. “But how can you know for sure?”

  “Ambrosia is one of our secrets,” Davis said, pulling a small, rubbery practice marble out of his pocket and holding it palm up before him, “but it is not the only one.”

  “What am I looking at?” Sander asked.

  “A tiny ball, nothing more. Catch,” he said, gently arcing it up above head level towards the man…who caught it in his left hand as it came down near eye level.

  “Decent reflexes,” Davis commented. “Throw it back.”

  Sander mimicked the Director’s toss, wondering what the object lesson was here…then his jaw microscopically dropped as the ball froze halfway through its arc, levitating in midair.

  The Agent’s eyes went from the ball to Davis’s face and back again. “What is this?”

  “This is me trusting you more than most of my staff,” Davis said, his face taught with concentration as he kept the ball more or less level in between them. “Give me one word as to why you’ve chosen to switch sides.”

  Sander thought for a moment, distracted by the floating ball. It could have been anti-grav or magnetically levitated, but his gut told him neither was the case.

  “Scruples,” he finally said.

  “Scruples,” Davis echoed approvingly. “It’s the sign of a man who can be trusted once all illusion is removed. You will do what’s right because it’s right, and now that you have seen the truth you will never let yourself go back to the lies.”

  Davis glanced up at David. “That’s what he told me, and I trust his judgement implicitly. Though your route to us has been an unconventional one, you belong with Star Force, and with your help we may have a chance to end The Word permanently if we can get at their leadership. Provide us a sliver of opportunity and we’ll make it happen, for as you can see, we have abilities that The Word can’t comprehend. That’s us operating outside of their box.”

  Sander’s mind was quick, and he made the necessary logical progression in a matter of seconds.

  “Telekinesis?”

  Davis nodded, slowly transitioning into a smile as he flew the practice sphere back into his palm, then returned it to his pants’ pocket. “Along with other things.”

  Termination

  1

  February 18, 2451

  Solar System

  Earth

  David walked through the tethered crates in the back of the heavy mantis as he watched the countdown clock inside his helmet pass under 30 seconds as he headed for the far end of the gigantic aerial craft. Nowadays most flight traffic was accomplished via dropships, with the mantises having become more or less obsolete…except for on Earth and Corneria. There the atmospheric-only ships had seen numerous design modifications over the centuries, with the ‘heavy’ version that David was walking through being more than 4 times the size of a Dragon-class dropship, the largest version in the Star Force fleet.

  Using a combination of wings and anti-grav, the huge haulers were a common sight in Earth’s skies, hauling Star Force cargo and personnel across the planet on a regular basis…so much so that David had chosen this particular flight to hop a ride on, for it was already scheduled to pass over his target, allowing him an unnoticed approach into French airspace.

  When the ranger reached the back of the mantis he triggered the primary boarding ramp in the aft end to begin to lower as he grabbed hold of a handle on the wall as a swirl of turbulence forced its way inside the hold and buffeted his green armor around a bit. The cargo pallets were unaffected, and aside from the pilot no one else on the combination passenger/cargo ship noticed the activity as David timed the lowering to within three seconds of the elapse of his HUD’s countdown…with him running off the back and dropping into free fall as a tone sounded, signaling he’d reached his drop zone.

  The mantis was traveling at high altitude and considerable speed, giving David some maneuvering options as he fell. Using his arms and legs as maneuvering veins, he angled his way towards the waypoint superimposed on his faceplate that marked his target coordinates in a remote area of the Pyrenees Mountains.

  The Archon feathered his jump pack’s controls a bit to adjust his descent into a more lateral approach, gaining a bit more distance while still dropping fast, wanting to get over the target before coming down to ground so he could have a purely vertical attack vector.

  His target was a castle that he’d scouted out the exterior of previously, finding it little more than a sturdy stone structure that had been reinforced with great care…including a subsurface barrier wall installed to make tunneling efforts more difficult. Every crack in the exterior had been sealed up, every window likewise secure, and there was a small security presence to keep out unwanted visitors, though this particular region of France had been preserved in an anti-urban fashion, with the large, interconnected cities far away, leaving only a privileged few the anonymity of their private retreats dotted across what little remained of the wilderness.

  Thanks to Sander Rennold’s assistance, Green Team had been able to locate the source of the Master’s codes on various public publications, such as fanfiction and photo posting sites, where they found a handler inputting the messages. Using surveillance only, they had backtracked where he was getting his messaged from…which was another handler, who was receiving secure comm signals across a nearly obscure landline that was broken up with a series of short range wireless transmitters that made it very hard to follow, unless you knew where and how to look.

  Messages were infrequent, so it took some time to follow the private message system across the French countryside, bouncing from building to building in the cities and tree to tree in the forests until the electronic bread crumb trail had led to the castle. Upon studying it for several weeks, including some up close inspections in the dead of night probing the external security systems, David was relatively sure that the Master was inside, hence his current drop on the castle while Green Team was hitting other Word facilities across the planet in conjunction with Red and Blue teams in one massive surprise attack using the intel and leads Rennold had provided o
ver the past year as he played his part and let Word operatives infiltrate Star Force.

  They were being cleaned up today as well, and with luck David and the others would gather enough intel from their raids to fold up the Word altogether, with the most critical mission being his. Bagging the Master was their top priority, and if his reconnaissance was correct, the castle was all but undefended…relying on anonymity as its shield and very atypical of all other Word facilities they’d encountered to date.

  Either that or this was a wild goose chase.

  David held off on his jump pack’s power right up until the last few hundred meters, decelerating quickly to land in the central courtyard where he pulled his stinger rifle off his armor’s back rack and shot a man and woman in civilian clothes that didn’t even notice his approach until his feet hit the cobblestones.

  They dropped hard to the ground as David stretched out his Ikrid sense to maximum range and began picking up the location of nearby minds as he ran towards the guard house. When he got there he felt two inside and disabled them both with a pair of Fornax blasts through the wall before he opened the door and shot them on the ground where they’d fallen out of their chairs. The Archon took a quick glance at the bank of monitors blanketing two walls in the room, seeing that the castle’s denizens were milling about calmly, meaning no alarm had been sounded yet.

  He took off across the courtyard and, with the help of his jump pack, leapt up to a second story window on the west wing and punched his way inside before going on a stunning spree, bypassing numerous rooms that his psionics told him were empty and going straight for the personnel. He worked his way around to the south wing, then the east, before finally getting into the much larger north wing that made up most of the castle.

  There he burst into a large communal lounge and mowed down some 8 more people, one of whom was in a wheel chair and all of which were unarmed. None of them even had so much as a Word uniform on, and for all intents and purposes seemed to be regular French citizens as David left them where they lay and headed off after the few remaining others, not wanting the Master to have a chance to escape.