Star Force: Origin Series Box Set (1-4) Page 21

  Davis smiled. “Well put.”

  “Thank you…oh, and as far as the new programmers…they went and made a list for that too.”

  “They did? How?”

  “Seems they did a little internet research and compiled a list of names based off the video games they like.”

  Davis chewed on his lower lip for a moment. “I don’t like using non Star Force personnel, but if our people aren’t up to the task maybe I can lure a few of the commercial ones over to our ranks. Actually,” he said, glancing over his shoulder as if a good idea just manifested itself off to his right, “if we can pull this off we’re going to have to create dozens of games worth of scenarios for subsequent classes to run through, which is more than enough work to keep them employed for the next 10 years creating the ultimate video game. I think under that heading I can attract a professional crew…and I have no doubt with the trailblazers running the show they’re going to give us a lot of ideas to flush out.”

  “You want them designing the challenges for the second class?” Wilson asked.

  “Why not? We chose them for their improvisational skills.”

  “I want to reserve final judgement on what gets added to the training lexicon,” Wilson insisted.

  “Of course,” Davis said, nodding.

  “Sounds like a plan, then.”

  “How are they dealing with Vermaire?” Davis asked, changing subjects.

  Wilson smiled slightly. “They’ve come close a few times, but he’s learning as much from them as they are from him, and I think that’s really getting under their skin. They’re used to adapting to the scenario, not having the scenario adapt to them. Personally, I’d bet they don’t take him down prior to graduation…and the second class hasn’t got a prayer.”

  “Still underperforming?”

  “They’re doing well enough, but they’re not nearly as good as the others.”

  “That’s to be expected,” Davis reminded him, “we had to water down the prerequisites just to get a second class. We were barely able to field 100 of them the first time.”

  Wilson shook his head. “It’s more than that. The second class has had a year to get it together, but they’re not gelling the same way. They’re meeting all the necessary standards, but the first class came together within a few weeks and have been damn near telepathic ever since. We’re not seeing the same thing with the next generation, sadly, which makes them less fun to pick on.”

  Davis laughed slightly. He knew competition was a key component in training, but he’d never expected the trainees or the trainers to carry it so far. “Do you think we should reconsider keeping them separate? Maybe social intermixing would do them some good.”

  “Absolutely not,” Wilson said, nixing the idea immediately. “They may all be trainees, but they’re separate groups. They’re not going to mix any better than oil and water, and to be frank, it would probably just slow down the first class, which we don’t want to do, even if it would help the second.”

  “They’re going to have to work together later,” Davis argued.

  “Yes, but that’s later. Right now I want each group focusing on their own training. Bringing in others would be a distraction.”

  “If you say so, I’ll trust your judgement there, as long as the second class is meeting with your expectations?”

  “My expectations have been attuned to the first class, so no, they’re not. But they are passing the benchmarks we established, though at a slower rate. I estimate it will take them 4 years to graduate, whereas we’re looking at two and a half for the first class.”

  “How goes the prep for the third?”

  “I think we could handle three groups simultaneously with the current personnel, but I want to get my trainers experienced before we dilute the squads with more newbs. Besides, doesn’t look like we’ll even have a full set by the time the first class graduates…unless the numbers have changed recently?”

  “Unfortunately no,” Davis said, referring to their A7 recruitment efforts, which technically were A7b now, though that was never posted. “We’ve only got 22 candidates on standby at present.”

  Wilson nodded. “I don’t suggest lowering the standards any more than we have, otherwise we’ll run the risk of washouts, and that’ll pull down an entire class on the morale front. Better to have a cohesive group fighting their way through and succeeding than to have a Darwinian approach with individuals.”

  “I didn’t want to diminish the requirements the first time,” Davis reminded him, “but we sucked the talent pool dry. It was either that or wait another 10 to 20 years for it to replenish.”

  “I’m confident the second class will make it through, and a few of them are as individually skilled as the others, but it’s the team aspect that’s really lacking. I suggest we hold off on the third class in favor of quality over quantity.”

  “You think that’s why the trailblazers are so cohesive?”

  “Honestly, I think they’re sort of a fluke, but yes, I do think that’s part of the equation. The rest I doubt we’ll ever really know.”

  Davis considered that. “Do you want to increase the standards again?”

  “Ideally yes, but not if we don’t have the people to choose from.”

  “We’ll table that discussion for later down the road then. Do you have that programmer list?”

  Wilson fished inside a hidden pocket and pulled out a datachip. “It’s rather long,” he said, handing it to Davis.

  “I’m sure it is,” he said, knowing how thorough the trailblazers had become. “How’s the rest of their training proceeding?”

  “Some of them are reaching tier 4 in their individual challenges,” Wilson reported with a note of respect, “and their academic schedule is nearly complete. They’ve still got a lot of team challenges left, but they’re passing them on the first or second try now, so I think it’s just a matter of scheduling now to get them to the final phase.”

  “I haven’t checked in a while. Who’s currently on top?”

  “The 7s have a narrow lead over the 2s, but the 6s have had a very good month and are closing in on both. Morgan is still the top trainee and I don’t see her relinquishing that spot. Her point lead has been steadily growing over the past 5 months.”

  Davis chuckled in amazement. “I still can’t understand how a girl is beating out all the guys.”

  “I’ll admit I’m a bit surprised too, but I’m actually glad. Physically speaking, males and females are nearly identical, it’s cultural differences that attribute for most of the discrepancy.”

  Davis’s brow furrowed thoughtfully. “I believe we had a similar discussion a few years ago about the odds of any women making the cut? You referenced something about Track?”

  “The Decathlon used to be a male-only event. The women had a shorter Heptathlon in its place…7 events to our 10 because they didn’t think the women could handle the full load. When the change was eventually made their scores were low, which is to be expected with new events, it takes time to adjust, but they eventually came up to respectable levels when some of the men and women began training together.”

  “But there was still a male bias, correct?”

  “Still is,” Wilson confirmed. “Women’s competition is inferior to the men’s.”

  “Then how do you explain Morgan?”

  Wilson laughed loudly. “That is the question of the century, and I’ve been turning it over in my head many a day. I don’t have a straight answer for you, but I think I can narrow it down a bit.”

  “Please, I’m all ears.”

  The three time gold medalist began to speak, then stopped himself as he noticed an odd expression on Davis’s face. “You know something, don’t you? Something from the pyramid?”

  Davis smiled. “Perhaps. Go on.”

  “Well, I was going to say that I think if the women actually competed against the men their scores would improve. Historically, the tougher your competition, the better you become, so women
having their own sports division separate from the men actually does the elites a disservice.”

  “Which we don’t have to worry about here,” Davis pointed out.

  “No, but that was your policy from the beginning with all Star Force personnel,” Wilson remembered, beginning to connect the dots.

  “So it was.”

  “Also, I might add,” Wilson said, continuing on, “when young, say age 10 or 12, boys and girls sometimes compete against each other in individual sports and there’s not much of a difference in ability until they ‘mature’ later, or so the theory goes.”

  “You don’t agree?”

  “No, I think it’s mostly cultural. The guys work out, the girls socialize, so it’s no surprise who improves physically. The girls that do work out and dedicate themselves to improving end up beating over 90% of the guys anyway, but then they’re written off as flukes not symbolic of the whole.”

  “That could explain why women aren’t grossly inferior to men,” Davis countered, “but how can they pull even, or even exceed the men?”

  “You’re having fun with this, aren’t you?” Wilson asked suspiciously.

  “A bit. Please continue,” he prompted with a touch of sarcasm.

  “Alright…common knowledge says that testosterone is the key to muscle development. Men have it and women don’t…but in truth both do, the women just have less. But I know from experience that the best throwers have smaller muscles than the rest, but those muscles are superior when comparing fiber to fiber. The world record holder in the Shot Put beat out three druggies, discovered after the fact, in the 2028 Olympics even though his testosterone levels were less than half that of the cheaters. Scientists have never been able to explain why, but I think it has to do with the type of training he was doing.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Women tend to be smaller than men, on average, which is why they have shorter hurdles in Track, though that’s always seemed unfair when you have the 6’8’’ Marshal twins towering over most of the men and they get to run the short hurdles.”

  “Still a bit of sexism in the sport then?”

  “Yes, and that only adds to the misconception,” Wilson said, eyeing Davis. “Now, what do you know?”

  “Among the V’kit’no’sat’s Human slaves, there was no gender division…not a single reference in all the data that we’ve been able to decipher. Even the visual records show no height discrepancies. That’s not to say all the Humans were the same height, but there was no gender trend evident. Some of my people even went so far as to check every image on file and compile the statistics, which were dead even.”

  “Really?” Wilson said, not sure what else to say.

  “It’s still a mystery as to why,” Davis continued. “One that I’m interested in figuring out, and Morgan is the first clear sign that it may be true of present day Humans as well.”

  “Some sort of gender degeneration?” Wilson asked.

  “Possibly,” Davis admitted, “but if it is, it clearly isn’t irreversible.”

  “So are you saying that if we have to fight Dino-slave Humans, we’ll be going up against women that are as strong and fast as the men?”

  “So the records seem to indicate.”

  “Then why are you surprised by Morgan being at the top?”

  “I guess you could call it a combination of cultural bias and experience. Reading about ancient history is one thing…seeing it happen before your eyes is another. Then again, I’m not so much the athlete as you are, so maybe I’m a bit more ignorant as to the physical potential of the Human body.”

  Wilson raised an eyebrow. “I thought Vermaire would have opened your eyes by now.”

  Davis sighed. “I’m still half expecting him to crash and burn.”

  “It’s been seven years,” Wilson countered.

  “Call me a pessimist, then.”

  “Ha,” Wilson laughed. “You, a pessimist?” he said, spreading his arms wide, gesturing to the city they stood in. “All of this says otherwise.”

  “Well, it is raining,” Davis pointed out.

  2

  The next day…

  “Down on your left…” Randy said over the comlink, “…in the rocks.”

  “On it,” Jason said, tilting his skeet to port while kicking up the vertical jets to gain more altitude. As his T-shaped aircraft rose up over the ridgeline a small outpost came into view, with a pair of turrets guarding a small helipad. One was pointed away, the other to the right. Both began to swivel around to target Jason’s skeet as soon as he came into view.

  He fired a charged up laser shot into the nearest one, hitting it just below the twin barrels swinging into alignment, but not destroying it. Jason managed one more shot then rolled to starboard and ducked back down into the valley, skimming over the angled rock wall and dropping out of the turrets’ line of sight.

  “Stay low,” Randy said, spotting from his skeet circling high above the simulated battlefield. “The terrain dips after the next bend right in front of the turrets.”

  “Trench skimming as ordered,” Jason acknowledged, dropping his skeet down over the bottom of the valley and the perfectly flat stream running through it. He slowed his forward speed and added thrust to the three vertical jets, located within on each prong of the ‘T’ in the narrow fuselage. The wingtip engines continued to pull the skeet forward through the valley in a slow hover, staying low and safely out of sight as he rounded the bend.

  “Get ready,” Randy advised as two more skeets were approaching the outpost from opposite directions perpendicular to Jason’s position.

  Laying belly down within the skeet’s simulator cockpit, Jason glanced up at the charge indicators for his primary and only weapon on the aircraft. Both capacitors were reading full charge, meaning he’d get two shots before having to wait out a brief period for the skeet’s fuel cells to supply enough power to refill the power reservoirs that fed the nose-mounted laser.

  “Now!” Randy half yelled into the comlink.

  Jason pressed down the pedal behind his right foot at the back of the straddle-couch he was ‘riding’ like a motorcycle. His chest was pressed flat against the slight forward incline of the pads while his legs were hanging over the sides slightly with his feet pressed back against the throttle controls.

  Both wingtip jets kicked up their fan blades and pulled the skeet forward while Jason used the right joystick to alter the engine balance and spin the aircraft to the left with the help of a small fan blade in the tail, pointing the clear nosecone toward the rocky wall of the canyon. When he neared a collision, Jason jammed his left foot back hard and kicked in the vertical engines at maximum thrust, launching his skeet up along the angled wall towards the outpost.

  Thanks to Randy’s timing, Jason was halfway up the canyon when Paul and Kip’s skeets crisscrossed overtop the outpost, firing off both capacitor charges into the turret and missing each other by a few meters before pulling up and rolling evasively. The turrets tracked them and fired multiple chain gun spurts in their wake as the fighters danced across the sky then ducked back down into the vast canyon network.

  The outpost suddenly flashed into view at almost point blank range as Jason came up over the edge and found himself face to face with one of the turrets…which was still tracking his teammates and pointed away to the right. Jason emptied both capacitors after quickly cutting his forward thrust and managing a sloppy hover barely 50 meters away. His precision firing, thanks to a small swivel angle on the laser mount, hit the turret in the cupola where the gun barrels extended and not the concrete shell below that was already showing a large hole thanks to the strafing run.

  The invisible laser shots cored through the thin armor plates, as well as melting the base of the left barrel, continuing inside and penetrating the magazine. Several rounds exploded from the laser-induced heat and popped the top of the turret off in a muffled explosion.

  Before the second turret could swing around and bathe him in tungsten
rounds, Jason reversed the direction of the idling wingtip engines with a flick of a hand switch and pressed down hard on the right foot pedal, launching him backwards into the canyon. He eased up the pressure on his left foot pedal and sank back down out of sight as the remaining pot marked turret swung around to fire on him.

  As it did so Ivan, Kip, and Megan’s skeets came in from behind, fired, then peeled off in a variety of arcs, all staying away from a straight passover which would have placed them directly in the turret’s firing arc.

  Simulated concrete blew apart and a sizeable hole appeared in the armored cap of the turret, but its barrels still swung about, trying to track Megan as Paul circled back around and made a second, more precise strafing run. His single shot hit one of the barrels and when the turret tried to fire on him as he passed nearly straight over the target and rose up spinning into the sky, its slagged barrel reacted poorly to the rounds trying to pour through and detonated the top of the turret in a shower of debris.

  “Second turret destroyed,” Randy reported. “Convoy clear to proceed.”

  “Convoy acknowledges,” one of the trainers in the control room replied. “Proceeding to next waypoint.”

  Randy glanced down at the small digital display situated between joysticks and saw a small line of dots start to move again up the road that led past the outpost they’d just neutralized.

  “Heads up 2s,” Emily’s voice said over the comlink. “We’ve got incoming. Six VTOLs from the northwest.”

  “We’ve got them,” Dan said as he, Brian, and Jack accelerated towards the targets. “Stick with the convoy. They may be trying to distract us again.”

  “Six on three isn’t good odds,” Jason said, lifting up out of the canyon. “Paul, let’s go.”

  “Already ahead of you.”

  “Good luck,” Megan said, splitting off from Paul and heading back to Emily and the convoy with Ivan and Kip.

  “Split them up,” Randy said, still in his high altitude observation position.