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  “They’re after the prisoner,” Nathan said, pointing down the hallway just as one of the operatives came back out and sprinted towards them, firing plasma. Nathan ducked back inside the door and reached out with his mind to send a Fornax blast into the man just as the hallway behind him exploded, sending a concussion wave of compressed air and debris down towards them.

  The operative took flight and the Regular was also knocked down, with Nathan being partially obscured but still knocked backwards by the blast and onto his butt, given that he couldn’t catch himself on his other leg. When he rolled himself over and up onto his hands and knees he saw the operative trading punches with the Regular through the doorway, then the commando slammed the enemy down onto his back and landed an elbow jab into his armored midsection.

  “Unsung sparrows migrate underne…” Nathan heard the operative say, then thinking fast he pulled a Vader and telekinetically gripped the man’s throat, pushing in on his windpipe so he couldn’t speak the detonation trigger.

  “Shoot him,” Nathan said, working hard to hold the pressure.

  “He’s not going anywhere,” the Regular said, looking around for his stinger pistol.

  “Quickly,” the Archon urged. “He’s a walking bomb and I can’t keep him silent forever.”

  The Regular did a double take from inside his helmet, then saw the man’s plasma pistol nearby and dove for it, having to release the operative to do it.

  “Un…” the man tried to say, massaging his tight throat with his hands as he stayed put, focusing entirely on the detonation phrase. The next moment a lance of blue shot out from the side of the doorway and hit the man in the chest, but the armor stopped most of it.

  “Unsung spa…rrows…”

  “In the head!” Nathan yelled.

  Gritting his teeth, the Regular walked up to the man and brought the pistol within a foot of his forehead and pulled the trigger.

  The operative flopped back onto the floor and Nathan was able to let go of his intermittent Lachka, which had been near to failing entirely. Down the hallway where Nathan couldn’t see a few other people came out of the interrogation rooms, walking over the rubble and trying to figure out what was going on. The Regular spotted them, saw that they weren’t loose prisoners, then walked in towards Nathan.

  “How bad are you hit?” he asked, kneeling down in front of him.

  “Forget me,” Nathan said, spitting out a bit of blood from where he’d bit his tongue when he got hit. “Where are the others?”

  “Down below.”

  “Find and kill them all,” Nathan said icily, but it was danger rather than vengeance driving the order. “If they speak a few words they can detonate…the triggers and explosives are inside their bodies. Kill them all, even if they’re unconscious, and do it quickly.”

  The Regular swallowed hard, not liking the order. “I understand,” he said, retreating out the door to do what was necessary. He’d seen the blast a few rooms down and he knew what kind of destructive power the Archon was referring to, even if he wasn’t familiar with The Word’s Dargomir-laced Human bombs.

  Nathan stayed put, looking down at his leg and wishing he hadn’t. There was a hole burnt straight through his calf muscle, leaving a charred little tunnel that was seeping a lot of blood. He knew if he tried to stand on it he wouldn’t be able to, and would further shred the muscle in the attempt.

  David was too far away to hear the explosion, already having gotten most of the way to the armory when it went off. Once he got there, into his armor, and back out to where the fighting was happening it was mostly over, with only a few roaming Word troops left in play, and those were being hunted down by closer teams than him, leaving the Archon little to do other than sort through the bodies, almost all of which were the enemy’s. Even with the element of surprise, Star Force’s security teams and a pair of Archon adepts that had been within response range had torn through the invaders quite efficiently, making him wonder what they had been attempting to accomplish.

  The question of who they were was quickly answered when he got a look at their plasma rifles…typical Word make, though the dark brown body armor, complete with helmet, was a new addition. It hadn’t done much to stop the stingers though, for their stun energy had soaked right through, leaving most of those down merely unconscious, with security collecting their weapons and bagging their new prisoners with hand and ankle restraints.

  “What the hell were you guys after?” he said, getting on his helmet comm and contacting Green Team. “The incursion is all but over. Security is rounding up the strays. They’re Word troops, maybe here to go after the prisoners? I don’t know what they were after, but they didn’t get very far.”

  “David…” Nathan responded, and he could tell by his strained voice that there was trouble. “They got a team through. Agent is dead and I’m hit. Their troops are walking bombs.”

  “Where are you?” David asked, his mind racing at he looked out over all the prisoners lying in front of him. Before Nathan could even respond he pulled his stinger rifle off his back and started shooting the unconscious/semi-conscious prisoners, knowing full well all it would take is a handful of words to turn themselves into living landmines.

  “Security station. Got a Regular cleaning up their team. Don’t let any more detonate, take them out with plasma.”

  “We’ve got most unconscious and I’m going to make sure they stay that way,” David told him as he continued to pump out more rounds. “I’ll warn the remaining teams. How bad are you hit?”

  “Plasma burn straight through the calf. I won’t be running anytime soon.”

  “Hang tight and we’ll get you back to Earth.”

  “I’m fine,” Nathan lied, “focus on the exploding bad guys please.”

  “Already on it. Get back to you when we’re secure.”

  Nathan grimaced, leaning forward onto his elbows and trying to hold his injured leg still as he stared down at the floor back towards his knees. Pushing past the pain he tried to slip into Sesspik mode if just to accelerate the scabbing process and cut down on the bleeding, which had now accumulated into a small puddle near his foot.

  He turtled up into a ball and stayed put, doing quick mental checks of the surrounding area now and then, but otherwise focusing on numbing his mind against the pain and healing what little he could on his own.

  The remaining Word troops were taken down without explosions before David could get out to any of the teams hunting them, then he ordered massive stinger hits on all the captives as he called in medical teams to do immediate surgery to remove their detonation triggers. The first few unconscious bodies they lugged over to the nearest medical station, however, didn’t have any.

  In fact none of them did, making David wonder just who had gotten to the security station, killed Agent, and wounded Nathan. When he finally confirmed all the potential explosive enemies were duds he headed back over to the station and saw for himself the explosive damage, as well as the dead operatives that had yet to be removed, with the onsite medical personnel attending to the Star Force casualties first, including Nathan, who’d he’d already talked to outside on the way to a med bay.

  “No armor,” he commented to a pair of Regulars standing guard nearby, having been redeployed from elsewhere to secure the now vulnerable station.

  “Look under their clothing,” one of them suggested, having been onsite for longer than the Archon had.

  David knelt down next to one that had a plasma burn in the side of the head and undid the buttons on his loose shirt. He got through two of them telekinetically, given his armored gloves weren’t so good at such tiny tasks, then just said to hell with it and ripped the shirt apart, revealing a form-fitting chest plate, not dark brown, but very pale tan that was a shade lighter than his skin.

  “Pulled security away with a diversion, then came in with these walking bombs. Well played, you assholes,” David said as he stood up, looking around the lobby and heading for the stairs. He passe
d three other bodies on the way up, then saw a fourth at the end of the hall that led through the interrogation rooms…or what was left of the hall. As he turned the corner he saw that a huge section down on the left was gone, both walls, ceiling, and floor.

  David walked down to the edge of that crater, seeing a pile of debris on the level below them where the junk had settled and deposited, marking the center of the blast zone…right where he’d dropped off Agent after his run not so long ago.

  Most of the other Word prisoners were still alive, with only three having been killed in the blast. Most of the rest were in holding cells on lower levels. Two Star Force personnel had been killed, and a third badly injured, when they were hit along with the prisoners. The rest of the people on the interrogation level had survived, some with injuries, some unscathed. None of the prisoners had gotten away, given that security had already pulled a head count, meaning that this attack had been for one purpose and one purpose only.

  To deny them access to Agent.

  That told David a lot about their operational authority and knowledge…and how little they worried about what the rest of the prisoners might know. The Word could take the hits of their minor intelligence breaches, but they couldn’t risk an Agent being compromised.

  While it had proven effective, it felt like a kneejerk reaction to David, for The Word had broken their cover and made a blatant attack on a Star Force facility, and in doing so they’d revealed the fact that they were not only a criminal organization with highly capable intelligence assets, but that they also had an army to call on, and in this system no less. There hadn’t been enough time to bring in men from Sol or elsewhere, meaning they’d accomplished this through local assets only.

  David didn’t know for sure what it all meant, aside from the fact that their agenda now appeared to be a great deal more ambitious than stirring up public dissent. There was no way The Word could challenge Star Force on a military front, which begged the question what else were they up to?

  Not having an answer to that worried David more than a fleet of warships. Those he knew how to fight, but an unseen aggressor with an unclear target was something virtually impossible to defend against, for you never knew when or where the strike was going to land.

  10

  August 1, 2430

  Solar System

  Earth

  Davis stepped out of one of Atlantis’s many elevators and walked through a sparely crowded hallway up to the rotunda that held a broken circle of workstations staffed by half a dozen people, with the pedestrian walkways splitting around either side. In the center of those workstations were two security guards, an almost unnecessary gesture given that the public no longer had access to Atlantis, but they remained there just in case, guarding the rising staircase in the center that led up to Davis’s office above.

  He passed through one of the breaks in the workstation ring, offering a few ‘hellos’ and ‘good mornings’ to his executive staff of gophers who stood ready to find, or find someone else to find, whatever he needed. They handled most of the mundane, repetitive duties associated with his position atop the Star Force ‘empire,’ allowing him to focus on new things and crises as they arose.

  Davis passed between the security guards and climbed the twisting staircase two steps at a time, just having come from his morning workout. He knew the Archons pulled doubles, even triple workouts per day but he was doing well off of just one, and he preferred to get to it first thing in the morning…that way all the time spent sitting at his desk served as rest rather than stagnation.

  When he got to the top of the stairs he walked out into a low sunrise visible through the panoramic 360 degree window that stretched the entire length around the perimeter of the circular office. His daily routine had him getting up before sunrise and running 4 miles at sub 6:50 pace, then a quartet of 150 meter strides kept under 30 seconds. He’d been doing that workout every morning for the past year and a half and knew it was time to make an upgrade, but he hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

  The pace and feel of the workout just seemed so natural to him now that it wasn’t a bother, more like stretching out his muscles every morning. He was debating between dropping down to 6:30 pace and hammering it out until he adjusted, or nipping it down to 6:45 and just eating up that little bit of improvement as he settled back into the routine. He was leaning towards the latter, but a part of him felt like hammering, so he was still undecided, which was why he was delaying making the change. Whatever he chose he was going to stick with it, so he wanted to be sure before he made the upgrade.

  Davis walked over to his desk and activated the holographic displays as he sat down, with the top of his clear table/desk sprouting colorful ‘objects’ that contained status reports, sales graphs, message bundles, and a host of other tools that he used to keep track of his ever growing corporation, which now spanned 73 star systems. Unfortunately they were still having to rely on couriers for communication between them, but the first test of their new interstellar transmitters was due to begin in less than a year, and if it succeeded they would be able to cut the weeks of message delay down to less than a day in most cases.

  The Bsidd had finally gotten around to extending the Alliance network of communication relays out to Epsilon Eridani, giving them access to a flood of data that was then being relayed back via ship to Earth. The Archons operated out of Corneria for the most part, so military intel rightfully went there, but Davis was also keeping tabs on the war effort and had welcomed the illumination provided on the fog of war.

  That said, if their own transmitter prototype performed as expected, they’d have the ability to transmit data far faster than the alliance…though at a significantly reduced range, meaning they’d have to string together a lot of relays, but they’d finally be able to keep in direct contact with each system, even all the way out to Retari where Paul and several other trailblazers were battling it out with the lizards in what he’d been told, and shown, to be nearly an even fight.

  Until then he had to rely on snail mail to get his updates, of which appeared on a specific screen…one that was flashing a level 4 notice.

  Davis frowned and brought it up first, seeing a report generated by members of his staff downstairs after receiving information from numerous divisions within Star Force. They’d summarized it for him while including the link to the raw data, one of which he pulled up.

  It was a YouTube video tagged as ‘Star Force’s assault on Tyr.’ As he watched he saw a drone cutter hovering over the city, filmed by some camera set outside on the barren moon’s surface. Then a missile sprang up from a topside launch port and arced over, coming down on the city and blasting a hole in the armored roof that sprayed out a plume of debris and bodies across the moon’s surface as the city’s internal air pressure fueled the destructive fountain.

  Davis saw other videos tagged as related, and pulled up one that showed Archons setting up and releasing chemical weapons on the civilian population in order to neutralize security checkpoints. The plumes of smoke were recognizable to Davis, for he’d already seen their use from security camera footage taken from Tyr that had been included in both Green and Red Team team’s reports.

  He pulled up other videos, listening to one analyze the attacks attributing it all to a hostile takeover by Star Force in response to some dispute with Brazil. Another said it was a test bed for Star Force’s new line of chemical weapons, and they’d needed to blow a hole in the city to evacuate the excess gas when some element of the mixture proved to be too powerful.

  Other videos had snippets of the internal damage…bloody corpses resulting from the gas, plasma-burned Brazilian guards who’d died fighting off the Archons, and pictures of the explosively decompressed civilian bodies found inside the city after the patch in the hull had allowed atmosphere to be returned to the depressurized areas.

  The footage was gruesome, and the comments being left on the videos were a mix of disbelief and justifiable outrage.

 
In addition to the raw videos that were exploding across YouTube, there were also news stories cropping up elaborating on what had, and was continuing to happen on Tyr. Given that the moon was in another star system, albeit a very close one, there was no way for the public in Sol to know what was going on over there save for the tidbits passing jumpships brought back and the tales from travelers who’d witnessed the events, few that there were.

  The summary that his staff had put together indicated that these videos and stories were sprouting up all over the Sol internet with no known source, and that the public was reacting harshly. The major news networks had held off on reporting on the story, demanding to get Star Force’s explanation before they went public with it, but the groundswell was already happening and anyone who had ever had a doubt about Star Force’s integrity was now going to have evidence to back up that suspicion.

  Davis knew that even without having to read the theoretical implications attached to the report. There had always been a lingering anti-Star Force movement, but it had never had any real teeth after the first century. Star Force had proven itself to be reliable, honest, and above all else the good guys that intervened to stop the bad…a beacon of hope and prosperity for Humanity.

  The Word had been trying to diminish that with seemingly random sabotage, but now their aim was both obvious and effective. Even as he read through the report new items were being attached to it as the story continued to grow and spread around the system through the internet and mid-tier news agencies.

  The reputation he’d built up over 400 years was being hacked apart in minutes, and he knew there was going to be a segment of the population that he’d never be able to convince otherwise. They’d throw their support to the nearly dead anti-Star Force crowd, giving them new life and resources…which The Word would no doubt gain from, in the form of a social wedge, at least, that they could subtly hammer into various cracks they discovered or would create.