Star Force: Origin Series Box Set (1-4) Page 14

  That said, he couldn’t take an entirely straight line to the target. There were still many underwater obstacles in the way, visible only to his echo-location device, two of which he accidentally brushed up against. They held firm on their floor-mounted tethers, of which Paul also had to be careful to avoid. They didn’t show up on the echo-location device save for extreme close range.

  When he made it over and down to the pedestal, he saw an empty slot in the top for the cube he held alongside another identical one. He slid the orange cube in, with its light cutting out upon contact and the other simultaneously activating with a neon green glow. Four more hoops lit up the same color.

  Paul swam off and through those as well, cradling the green cube as he swam. After completing those four ‘hoop loops’ a green square illuminated on the underside of the starting platform. Upon reaching it and setting the cube inside the empty slot, a blue one activated and he repeated the process three more times. When he finally finished with the yellow cube hoops, the top of the rover lit up and he swam back over to it and replaced the cube in the single empty slot on top.

  When he did so all the hoops in the pool lit up and Paul, now without the cube to cradle, jetted off at maximum speed towards the nearest one, passing through it and another almost in alignment on the opposite side, with each deactivating as he passed through. Going for maximum speed, he began knocking off others, trying to line up ‘strafing runs’ that would hit two or three at a time, avoiding the painfully slow turnabout that would cost him several seconds for each reversal.

  As he swam about in a hurry, the lazy rover redirected from its predictable lap path and swam up a bit towards one of the hoops Paul had deactivated. When it passed through it, the green hoop lit back up…meaning Paul would have to pass through it yet again.

  “What the…” Paul muttered inside his breath mask when seeing the stupid rover turning the hoops back on. He had a small pocket of air directly in front of his mouth and nose, plus two expandable pouches just below each ear that would puff out as he exhaled, making his respiration almost normal inside the mask…as opposed to the ‘sucking air through a straw’ feeling of the original scuba equipment.

  “Damn it,” he said, speeding off to the next hoop, mentally plotting out the quickest route to get to the remaining ones. The rover seemed to be picking hoops randomly, which meant Paul wouldn’t have a straight-line path to go through to deactivate those for a second time. He was quicker than the rover by at least double speed, but he knew that forethought would be required to get all the hoops deactivated as quickly as possible. If he didn’t plan out his attempts, he’d chase individual ones at random and end up adding a lot of unnecessary time to his run.

  He was also worried about the power charge on his thrusters depleting before he finished, in which case the rover would become almost as fast as him, or maybe even faster if Paul had to hand swim the rest of the course. Either way it would mean additional minutes to his time, which was something he couldn’t afford and would have to quit the challenge and restart again…something that had become taboo for the trainees.

  Selecting the best course available to him Paul swam off, both arms extended before him, and rose up to the blue hoop almost at surface level, bending at the waist in a V-shape and grabbing the hoop to pull himself through and redirect his line of momentum back down towards a sweeping, descending turn of three almost aligned hoops of various colors.

  He deactivated those in quick succession, then turned around in one of the slow 180 degree turns, passing through one of the deactivated ones in the process. As he did so, it turned back on as well.

  “Doh,” he criticized himself, learning another wrinkle in the new challenge and swimming back through to deactivate it for a second time.

  2

  Staying ahead of the rover proved harder than he thought. The device was slow enough, but it maneuvered in whatever lines it wanted, thanks to four omni-directional propulsion pods. Paul, on the other hand, was using long, high speed turns to zip about, which ironically took more time to pull through than the rover doing a direct, thrust-reversing turnabout.

  It wasn’t until halfway through the set that Paul realized going full out wasn’t the quickest way and began feathering the throttle experimentally, saving full thrust for any long segment, but otherwise being as nimble jumping from hoop to hoop as he could be.

  He also took a cue from the Rover and tried a few direct reversals, either reversing thrust with the hand controls or just moving his arms from in front of him down to his sides and accomplishing the same thing. It killed Paul to do it because he felt so inefficient, but towards the end of his run he realized that staying as close to the hoops as possible was key and his big turns had just been wasteful.

  Paul followed the rover through the last hoop and deactivated it before the stupid machine could get to the next one. As soon as he did the floodlights came on and suddenly Paul could see everything in the crystal clear water with his good eye…the other one was still obscured by the echo-location device.

  He swam back up to the start platform and found a short, four rung ladder and climbed out of the water and back on top, prying his finger up under the edge of his neck-wrapping breath mask. Once he had a leverage point he stretched the thick, yet pliable material until he had a hole big enough to fit his head through, then wiggled his way out of it. He detached the O2 line and carried the black mask in his hand as he walked across the arch-like gantry back to the control station where a trainer and four of his peers were waiting for their turns.

  On a small scoreboard imbedded into the wall his finish time was displayed in red numbers.

  7:43.3

  Paul sighed. That was more than four minutes over par, hence the red numbers.

  “Wow, that sucked,” Jack said as Paul walked up.

  “Thanks,” he offered sarcastically.

  “Any suggestions?” Larry asked, about to make his first attempt.

  “Trim your lines and stay as close to the hoops as you can,” Paul said, sitting down next to Kevin and Steve as he pulled off his tank vest.

  “And pick a better line than he did,” Jack added, who’d already made par on the course another day and was coming back to try and up his score. “He was all over the place.”

  “Will do,” Larry said, heading out and closing the door behind him. On the wall of the control room was an array of display screens, all of which showed the underwater hoop configuration shifting to new, randomized positions as the trainer reset the course.

  “024…are you sticking around for another go?”

  “Yeah, sure, why not? I’m not due for my next session for another hour and a half.”

  The former Navy Seal nodded approvingly. “Give it some time and you’ll get the handle of it. Took me a while to figure out those damn gadgets you all made, but nifty little things they are none the less. Wish we’d had those back in the day,” he said as the lights in the chamber went out and all the underwater cameras switched to nightvision mode as they watched Larry stumble his way into the pool.

  “Did I look that bad?” Paul said as Larry obviously struggled for some type of balance underwater in the pitch dark.

  “Pretty much,” Jack jibbed him, being the only one of his teammates present. The rest of the 2s were off tackling other individual challenges, with each of them progressing through their personal lists at their own rate. Some of the harder challenges had to wait until prerequisites were finished first, but otherwise each of the trainees could move through hundreds of different scenarios in whatever order they wanted. Given that they all had to share the same facilities, they tried to spread their attempts out as much as possible.

  Paul had taken to his strengths first, primarily running and agility drills, but he’d also gained an aptitude for some of the martial arts. After digging as deeply into those as he could, which took time regardless of how skilled he thought he was, he spread out his allotted training time to focus on his worst areas, in whi
ch all forms of swimming qualified.

  When looking at the posted scores of everyone else, he’d realized that he needed to gain more points in his weak areas than he conceivably could in his strengths, both because his strengths were lesser in number, and because he needed to diminish the points’ gap put on him by his teammates in his weak areas.

  After a year of training his individual rank had leveled out at 15th overall, with considerable point gaps above and below him. When looking over his options for advancement he’d concluded that his efforts would best be spent in tackling his weaknesses first and getting those out of the way early, not to mention trying to scrape up more points in the challenges he’d already made par on, such as Jack was attempting to do on this one.

  Paul still hadn’t gotten through half of the challenges yet, but he was nearing the end of the level 1 list, with this swimming challenge and three others remaining, along with a pair of marksmanship drills that he didn’t think he’d have a problem with. One trick he’d picked up from talking with the others was to pick one or two disciplines at a time to focus on instead of spreading out training sessions over multiple weeks. It seemed that they all learned better when there was less downtime in between bouts, hence Paul had been doing a dreadful lot of swimming in recent days.

  But better to bite the bullet now rather than have it hanging over his head for latter.

  He watched Larry on his run with interest, trying to learn what he could from it and the others that he observed before it came around to his turn again. Jack succeeded in trimming four seconds off his previous best and left satisfied. The others each took two tries and called it quits for the day, leaving Paul alone on the course and able to make multiple back to back runs, only stopping to swap out equipment for fully charged units.

  After five attempts he succeeded in making par, but only barely. Still, it was a pass, and opened up another level 2 underwater challenge, one that he would not be tackling for some time. He needed points, and while passing additional challenges did give him and others a points surge, it didn’t last when the rest of them went through the same challenges later.

  Those trainees who at first sought out only to pass just above par on as many challenges as they could found themselves with an early points lead that eventually faded when the rest of the group got deeper into the challenges and the fast starters found they couldn’t easily pass the level 2 challenges…not without first sharpening their skills on the level 1 scenarios.

  All in all, Paul was pleased with his progress and his current ranking, but not satisfied. He knew he’d have to do better just to graduate from the program, let alone maintain his rank. There wasn’t a single slacker out of the 100 of them, and if he or any of the others started to take it easy they’d be passed up in good order. All of them were making steady progress up the charts, and if he was to keep pace with the others he had to continue improving on a daily basis.

  Today had been a success, and with the par time achieved he vaulted 302 points higher, but that was still 135 behind Kerrie, and based on her progress…which Paul watched intently…she was nearing the completion of another challenge of her own, which would boost her lead over him yet again.

  After finishing up his swimming challenge, Paul caught a quick shower then met up with the rest of the 2s as they ran through a cross country obstacle course in one of the 37 training ‘parks’ located inside Atlantis, each mimicking a different style of Earth terrain.

  Paul and the others ran through one of several forest environments that dominated the parks, this one consisting mostly of tightly packed evergreen trees and no open grassy areas…on top of which it was snowing lightly, thanks to the climate controlled indoor environment. The size and scope of the training parks were jaw-dropping, and fit in with the overly ambitious design of the city which, on the surface, was sitting in 102 degree weather…while here inside, Paul and the others were running through two inches of snow!

  The point of the drill was two-fold. First was the basic problem of navigating through dense forest. There were markers spaced out designating the route they had to travel, but in between each of the two-pole ‘gates’ were long stretches of forest without any premade paths to follow, so the trainees had to gage the quickest routes, as well as avoid getting lost.

  The second point of the drill, as always, was time. Navigating your way through a forest environment was one thing…doing it quickly was something else entirely, especially given the irregularly spaced snow packs falling down through the trees in almost random locations, meaning they didn’t have an even amount of snow on the ground to adapt to. Some areas were bare dirt while others had a half foot of snow to deal with.

  The trick of the team run was to get everyone through the course as quickly as possible, but to do so in a way that was advantageous to the slower runners, else it would just be a challenge for the slowest person on each team. Paul was the second best runner in the 2s, after Jason, and both of them had been assigned to pace the slower runners. Jason had Ivan trailing him, while Paul led Megan, picking the route they would run while she only had to focus on keeping up with him.

  By the time they’d finished their run…of which they only attempted once today, due to the high energy expenditure involved…they’d gotten their team time a good twelve seconds faster than Megan’s best individual time, putting them 7th out of the 10 teams at present.

  That wasn’t going to be good enough for the 2s or Paul, who knew that the better his team did, the more points he’d score in his individual ranking. Star Force philosophy valued teamwork as an important individual skill to possess, thus 10% of the points available in the individual trails came from a trainee’s team score…meaning someone couldn’t ignore their teammates and hope to climb up the individual ranks on their own.

  Paul didn’t think any of them would have done that anyway, but the points spillover, which worked both ways, served as an ever-present reminder that they were a part of a larger endeavor, and the stronger they became as individuals the stronger the team would be and vice versa as they learned from each other and explored how they could surpass themselves by teaming up, such as on this cross country run.

  Thoroughly exhausted after trouncing through the snow in skimpy bodysuits, Paul and the others retreated to the communal shower rooms back in their residential quarters, finding that the 4s had beat them there and were already occupying 10 of the 40 stations. The 2s took up ten more of the enclosed mini-bathrooms that had everything from a shower, toilet, mirror, sink, bench, and drying unit to a hamper chute that led down to an automated collection shaft that took their snow- and sweat-soaked clothing over to the laundry, which was also automated, save for folding the clean and dried clothes and returning them to the trainee inventory, which had to be done by hand by the quartermasters.

  At the far end of the long ‘shower hall’ was a wide wall with numerous closets and drawers filled with fresh clothes and racks of sandal-like casual shoes, which they all shared. Paul grabbed a set of clothes and shoes in his size and retreated into one of the open shower stations as the 5s came in and began claiming their own stations.

  15 minutes later Paul walked out in a fresh set of clothes and headed over to the cafeteria while Frank from the 6s took his shower as he and most of the other teams were waiting their turn at the end of the training day. He was a bit sore from slipping on the snow, but he was originally from Indiana, so running on the white stuff wasn’t exactly new to him.

  The rest of the 2s met up and occupied two of the 5 seat tables in the cafeteria and were halfway through their overly stuffed food trays when the 7s came in with obvious looks of frustration on their faces. They weren’t talking to anyone else when they came in, which was normal for the teams since downtime was their only chance to mingle…which suggested to Paul that their ill mood was probably a result of their recent team challenge, of which the 7s were the first scheduled to tackle.

  As per mutually agreed protocol, teams wouldn’t discuss ne
w challenges with other teams that had yet to pass them, so as to not give them an advantage in the points war, but while that was true the trainees always had individual challenges or past team challenges to discuss, or even their unofficial video game tournaments to talk about…so it was immediately obvious to Paul and everyone else in the cafeteria that something was wrong with the 7s.

  As they walked by the 2s enroute to the food stations, the 7s said nothing at all, but Greg looked over at Paul and gestured with two fingers pointed up at his eyes as he walked by.

  Paul frowned, now sure that something was up. In their hand signal code, created entirely by the trainees to give themselves the ability to communicate during challenges without the trainers being aware, the ‘two fingers over eyes’ gesture meant ‘keep your eyes open,’ suggesting there was danger or mischief at hand.

  “Wonder what that’s all about?” Emily whispered after they were out of earshot.

  “What challenge did they just run?” Dan asked the others.

  “G-2C,” Jason answered. “The same we go through in two days.”

  “Bunker defense?” Brian asked, based on the identification code. “I wonder what the trainers have up their sleeve this time.”

  “If it’s got the top dogs spooked, it must be something big,” Megan pointed out.

  “Guess we’ll find out in two days,” Paul said, biting a chunk out of his extra-large, blue iced sugar cookie…one of three on his plate, along with a stack of other sugar and carb-heavy foods. The amount of calories they burned through in a day was more than 3 times the norm and Paul and the others found themselves eating as often as they could, with sugary snacks being the lifeblood of their daily diet.

  “Yeah,” Jason said distractedly, still looking at the 7s as they filled their trays. Something was definitely up.