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

  “Interesting,” Davis mewed. “I hadn’t considered that angle.”

  “Neither had we,” Jason admitted.

  “If you want, I can have the project director meet with you and explain things in person, or give you a guided tour if you want to spare the time. Our underwater operations are quite extensive. They not only provided over 80% of the raw materials to build Atlantis, they’re also the source for most of our orbital infrastructure, though recently we’ve been having to rely on more and more purchases to meet up with demand. Hopefully when the Lunar mining operations hit full stride they’ll be able to pick up the slack. Having to buy materials significantly cuts into our profit margin.”

  Jason glanced at the others, then back down at the camera. “I think a few of us could spare a few hours for a tour, if the travel time to and back would fit inside half a day.”

  Davis smiled. “Less than that. Your dedicated rail system connects to the processing facilities at the base of Atlantis. You can be there within minutes, then transfer over to several connected complexes via larger rail tunnels. The others would require submersible travel, but everything we’ve mined has been within a relatively close distance to Atlantis, so I think you could get a good feel for our operations without skipping a day of training.”

  “That was our concern,” Jason admitted, smiling out of respect at Davis’s ever growing empire. “Why has the seafloor operation been kept quiet?”

  “To keep the politicians at bay. Some of them are still fuming at us building Atlantis outside of their legal reach, and if they knew the full extent of our seafloor operations they might try another push to lay claim to the oceans. The less they know the better.”

  “You really managed to hide it from them? That amount of resources should be impossible to hide.”

  “More or less. The American and Russian militaries know, we assume. They’ve had some of their subs snooping around, but they haven’t made any official inquiries. As for our bookkeeping, we order so much material from outside sources that it’s not that hard to cover. A lot of our purchases go through Pegasus, so the exact amount of commerce isn’t up for public view. So far we’ve managed to keep it hidden, and with the Lunar resources thrown into the mix it should be even easier to hide in the future.”

  “Our compliments to your accounting staff,” Jason offered. “How soon can you arrange for a tour?”

  “Tomorrow morning, if you like?”

  “Afternoon would be better,” Jason said, exchanging a few glances. “Party of four or five?”

  “I’ll make the arrangements,” Davis agreed. “Destination point 22 on your network. I’ll have Heston meet you there at a time of your choosing, just let me know a couple of hours ahead of time. Anything else you need?”

  “We have a few projects in the works, but nothing we’re ready to pass on just yet, but you should let your construction crews know that we’re writing out a Christmas wish list.”

  “They’ll be ready when you need them. Goodnight, Jason.”

  “Goodnight, Director,” he echoed as Davis signed off.

  “So,” he said, looking around at the others. “Who we sending?”

  4

  The next morning Greg, Lens, Roger, and Leo completed their core workouts as usual, but cut out all others so that they finished their day’s training just before 11:30, then hit the showers, caught a quick lunch, and met up at the transit terminal and piled into one of the small monorail cars. As Davis had instructed them, they keyed in point 22 on the control board and zipped off through the dark tunnels traveling down to the very foundation of the city.

  Their arrival point was much smaller than they expected, only a short track with one other car on standby up on a small platform, on which stood a man dressed in a black/red Star Force uniform waiting for them.

  “Welcome to the underworld,” Heston joked as they stepped out of the pod car wearing their simple white with red stripes adept uniforms to the view of a huge chamber stretching out laterally for nearly a quarter mile in all directions, interrupted by massive support columns bracketing piles of crushed rock being tended to by a myriad of dozers, trucks, and other earth moving equipment.

  “Wow,” Greg said as he walked forward and shook Heston’s hand. “This is all below the waterline?”

  “Mostly. The ceiling is just above at low tide. I’m John Heston, Director of Mining Operations.”

  “Greg,” he said, then gestured to the others, “Roger, Leo, and Lens.”

  Heston shook each of their hands. “Davis said not to ask who you are, but to give you as much clearance as he has, so where would you like to start.”

  Greg showed his appreciation for his easy acceptance of their secrecy with a curt nod. “What are we looking at here?”

  “Off to the right where you can’t see are the processing factories. To the left are the receiving areas where we bring in the raw ores, pre-dried so we don’t unnecessarily haul around tons of excess water. This is our storage floor. Some of the piles are unprocessed, others have already been sorted and/or broken down. On the far side of the room is the package and prep center, where we send the raw materials through a final screening and apportion them for transport to a fabrication center, either here in the city or in orbit. That’s where my realm ends and the manufacturers’ begins.”

  “Do you have a map room?” Liam asked.

  Heston nodded and began walking down the short staircase off the platform. “Just around the corner is our main control room. We have diagrams of all internal facilities as well as the seafloor outposts. We also have an active sonar grid to keep track of everything in the water. You wouldn’t believe the size of some of the critters swimming around out there.”

  “Oh?” Lens asked as they skirted around to the right.

  “We don’t operate in the deep water…yet, but there’s some not far off from here and sometimes the big ones come up for a look and scare the crap out of my pilots, so we try to give them a heads up whenever we can. Visual range is moderate to low, so if something comes up at you it’s going to happen fast. I’ve had it happen twice to me, and the second time wasn’t much better than the first.”

  “Are we talking whales?” Greg asked as they passed through a small door in the otherwise solid metallic wall.

  “Whales are big, but not that scary. The giant squid are what really freak you out. Had one grab hold of a scraper once…took more than two hours to get it to let go. After that we started deploying armed escorts with stun arms, but most of the time our people are left alone. It’s more the idea of what might happen that scares people, with just enough random incidents to give the fear credence…here we go,” he said, thumbing an icon at the bottom of a wall mounted display screen that superimposed an image of Atlantis over the data sheets it had been displaying.

  “What’s the biggest you’ve seen?” Roger asked, curious.

  “Well, the biggest we didn’t actually see, but we did get a sonar silhouette that was longer than a football field and atypically shaped. We still don’t know what it was, but we have the image on file if you want to take a look at it later.”

  Greg and Roger exchanged glances.

  “This is a map of our internal facilities,” Heston said, pointing at the schematic of Atlantis as it cleared to show the ‘basement’ that housed the mining areas. “We’re here.”

  The adepts looked over the map, realizing that nearly a third of the city’s understructure was dedicated to the mining operations.

  “And it goes where from here?” Leo asked.

  Heston altered the screen and the manufacturing areas were highlighted. “We have full fabrication facilities for everything from structural beams to computer chips, but in some cases it’s more economical to ship the raw materials into orbit and have the components for orbital infrastructure manufactured there, especially the larger pieces that would be difficult to fit in a dropship, but we make every piece of equipment that my division uses here in Atlantis, includi
ng the outposts themselves, though some of the fabrication for those has to occur onsite. We had quite a learning curve to overcome while building the city, but now we’ve got the process smoothed out considerably.”

  The map of the industrial zones occupied the rest of the Atlantis understructure.

  “You know, for once I’d like to see a full, complete map of the city,” Roger mildly complained. “It seems like we keep finding new areas that Davis keeps hidden.”

  Heston tapped the screen. “This is the full version. The maps given to the general public are limited to keep these areas private. After all, they’re here for a vacation and don’t really need to know what goes on down here.”

  “May I?” Greg asked, pointing at the map.

  “Knock yourself out.”

  Greg chewed on the inside of his lip as he toggled the map controls, playing a hunch. He zoomed through the city’s internal structure to their training zones and parks…and not finding them. Instead the areas were mislabeled as a variety of unimportant service and storage areas, none of which actually corresponded to the internal architecture.

  He tossed a glance at Lens, but didn’t say anything to Heston about the ‘oversight.’ “These areas run beneath the entire city?”

  “And beyond,” Heston said, stepping forward and readjusting the map, with Atlantis shrinking to half its size. “The docking module actually sits on the seafloor outside the city. It houses and services all our underwater craft, as well as serving as the transit hub for our rail lines,” he said, zooming out again with a spider web-like grid of lines popping up and traveling many times the width of Atlantis away from the city.

  “Some of our outposts are connected by the tunnels, which allow us to transport much more ore back than we can by ship, so they link all of our larger facilities and we’re continually expanding the tracks to others as we spread out our infrastructure base, all of which currently sits within a radius of 100 kilometers of the city.”

  Heston pressed another button and smaller ‘cities’ appeared at the vertices of the rail lines, as well as a scattering of unconnected dots.

  “Where’s the deep water you spoke of?” Greg asked.

  “Here,” Heston said, zooming out the map half again. “There’s an inlet on the western side that comes within 30 kilometers of our furthest mining sites, though we’re scheduled to add two more this year within 20 kilometers.”

  “How many submersibles do you have?” Lens asked, studying the map intently. “And how big are they?”

  “SUV up to a blimp in size, with the larger ones numbering less than fifty, though we have well over 1000 of the small craft. None of my people work in suits, everything is done from a pressurized cabin via controls.”

  “And the armed ones?” Roger asked.

  “They’re midsized to small utilizing a contact arm with a stun dart on the end. On contact an energy discharge occurs, numbing or rendering the target unconscious. I have no idea how it works, except that it’s not an electric charge or harmful to machinery.”

  “We’ve worked with stunners before,” Greg said, almost offhandedly. “What are your larger submersibles used for?”

  “There are two types…cargo haulers and mobile platforms. The first is self-explanatory, the second is what we use for exploratory digs and recovery efforts in lieu of building new outposts. They’re small scale mining units that we can float around wherever we like, land on the target, dig down to recover samples or seafloor nodules, then reposition to other sites on a whim.”

  “What types of materials do you mine?” Leo asked. “I can’t image you collecting every element and compound required to build this city?”

  “No, not everything. Certain select materials have to be acquired from other sources, true, but the bulk of the construction materials comes from us. The rest are purchased using the currency exchanged for the gold, silver, diamonds, and precious gems we recover on a fairly regular basis.”

  Lens raised an eyebrow. “You’re not talking sunken pirate ships loaded with treasure?”

  Heston laughed. “No, no…there’s plenty of interesting deposits laying around on the surface surrounding hydrothermal vents. The stuff comes up from the high pressure regions in the crust or lower and spills out into the region over the centuries. A great deal of our mining endeavors are just to sift through the silt and pick the stuff up.”

  “Are there active vents nearby?” Greg asked, a bit concerned.

  “All extinct. We can’t afford to risk mining around active sites, let alone build a city in an area where a lava plume could rise up beneath it. No, this area is tectonically stable. The deposits came from thousands of years ago and have been waiting around to be picked up ever since.”

  “I’m surprised you haven’t cleaned out the area already,” Roger commented.

  “There’s a lot of seafloor out there, but we have sifted through everything close by, which is why we keep expanding our perimeter. Silt recovery is phase 1 of our operations. Phase 2 involves digging down to the bedrock, setting up a dome to keep the backflow from recovering the site, and coring out samples to see what we’ve got to work with in the upper crust. If we find something of value we start sectioning off the area and cutting out segments, which we then transport to a crush dome where we pulverize and dry the material to then be shipped back to here for processing.”

  “Phase three involves gas or oil capture, of which we currently have 2 sites. Since Atlantis runs on hydrogen fuel cells, the oil is used in the creation of polymers and the gases are used for similar indirect manufacturing purposes. Phase 4 involves the creation of permanent outposts in the craters resulting from phase 2 mining. These either house the crushing and drying apparatus, vehicle sheds, or storage areas. Phase 5 sites are outposts that harbor the deep drilling apparatus, which involves drilling a series of thick shafts more than a mile deep and pulling up all the constituent materials for processing…then moving a few dozen meters to the side and repeating the process.”

  “Phase 6 is our newest endeavor, which involves deep drilling to set up permanent mining facilities below ground, similar to the method used beneath mountains on land. Large chambers are hollowed out and material recovered. Trick is, we have to keep ours air tight, so we’re building a habitat at the same time as we’re digging. After a while we’re going to have a series of catacombs in the bedrock that we can use for storage or any other purpose we like.”

  “Is there a phase 7?” Lens asked when he stopped talking.

  “Not yet implemented, but phase 7 is deep water excavation. Underground the extreme pressure is mitigated by the density of the rock, but in the open water it’s a greater concern. We have equipment that can go deeper, but we’re not fully set up for that yet, and until the probing missions are completed we’re obligated to wait.”

  “What kind of probes?” Greg asked.

  “Unmanned and manned exploratory vessels to chart the deep areas. They’re not due to begin mapping operations for another six months. Davis wanted sufficient deep water escort vessels should we encounter more hostile wildlife.”

  “How deep are we talking about?”

  “In excess of 800 meters. Atlantis sits on a plateau only a few hundred meters deep, our mining operations operate on that plateau and then gradually sink down to 600 meters at the deepest, then there’s a sharp drop off down to more than a mile. That’s where the big critters live.”

  5

  Roger took a step closer to the map, looking at the deep region immediately west of Atlantis. “Has there been any reconnaissance of these areas to date?”

  “Just some deep sonar when we were scouting out the area before the city was built. It gives a generic topography, but nothing very detailed, and no help geologically.”

  “Have you run across any skeletons…large ones?”

  “Oh yes, we’ve dug up quite a few, and not all of them have matches in the scientific catalogs. Fortunately Davis gave us permission to dispose of them after
a quick photo session, otherwise we’d never get anything done with the scientists nosing around, treating a 100,000 year old dead critter like it was the most important thing on the planet and telling me to put everything on hold while they took their time tucking it into bed.”

  “Any of the big ones?”

  “Not whole, but we did find some scattered bones that came from something gigantic. I suspect we’ll find a lot more when we get down into the deeper water. Things have a way of settling in the deepest areas in the water with the currents sweeping the trash about.”

  Suddenly the rim of the screen began flashing purple along with a whisper-quiet alarm clicking like a Geiger counter.

  “Speak of the devil,” Heston said, walking over to a nearby console and grabbing an earpiece from the hand of the woman working the station. He put the earpiece on while the woman directed the comm signal to all submersibles currently in the field. “Heads up boys, we’ve got a big one coming up out of deep water. Sector 12 and heading northeast. All craft working the immediate area shut down and make like a rock and wait for your escorts to arrive.”

  Heston gestured to the woman who adjusted the comm line to reach the four escort craft currently in the water. “Target is a category 4. All of you better head that way in case it wants to cause trouble.”

  Someone answered back through the earpiece, but the adepts couldn’t hear.

  “Not a squid,” Heston answered the pilot, looking at the sonar image that had been superimposed over the map. “I don’t recognize the silhouette, but it definitely doesn’t have tentacles. It’s thick bodied.”

  Another pause.

  “Will do,” Heston said, taking off the earpiece and handing it back to the woman. “Prep another two escorts and dispatch them immediately.”

  “On it,” she said, putting the earpiece in and typing away at her control keyboard.