Star Force: Divergent (SF74) Read online

  “52 miles. They’re making this too easy,” she said, closing the lid on the canister and leaving it on the lake shore as she grabbed her pack, intending to get another couple hours of running in before she stopped for a rest. Not knowing what would be at this waypoint she’d conserved energy so she could run or fight if necessary, but now that that appeared to be unnecessary she might as well get a move on.

  It was already dark, so she took to the forest again using her nightvision before eventually stopping 18 miles later and setting up camp. She took a longer rest there then hit the next section in the daylight and made it all the way up to within a kilometer of the 2nd waypoint before stopping again. Maybe it was another navigational marker, perhaps it was something else, but she might as well find out with a fresh set of legs than when exhausted, so Jyra pulled out her tent canister again and repeated the process that was now becoming routine.

  She ate and went to sleep, then woke up hours later when it was dark and packed up, traveling the last kilometer on foot and ready for action when the waypoint guided her to an anonymous bit of forest that had a speeder bike laying on the ground.

  “Hello,” she said, cautiously approaching and looking for any booby-traps when she noticed the crate sitting behind it with another databurst module on top inside a clear case sleeve. She pulled the coordinates from it, finding that there were actually 18 different waypoints updated, all of which were scattered around her current position and not in order. No further information was given, and it seemed to her that this was a collection mission now. For what she didn’t know, but having the speeder meant she could avoid having to run out to all of them…which was fortunate, for they were spread over an area with a radius of 130 miles.

  Jyra flicked the ‘on’ switch but the speeder didn’t respond, drawing a sinking feeling from the commando. She tried again but nothing, then pulled open the front panel and saw that the bike was in mechanical disarray with missing components and disconnected wires…including a burnt out chunk that functioned as the cooling unit for the gravity drive.

  Her eyes flicked to the crate.

  “You had better be spare parts,” she said, opening it and sighing with relief when she saw that was just the case. Apparently she had to repair the speeder or submit herself to hiking the insane back and forth distance, for which she probably would have to ration her supplies. That wasn’t doable when one was physically propelling oneself across miles of forest, meaning that if she didn’t get the bike fixed she was in a world of hurt.

  Mechanical repair wasn’t something Commandos were heavily trained in, but they were taught the basics of how to tinker with their equipment in the field. That underlying knowledge had been expanded upon heavily in her Arc Commando training, giving her more options for situations just like this. She didn’t carry a full tech rating, but repairing speeders was one of a handful of tasks that she had been taught how to do, along with bypassing the control interface to circumvent any locking mechanisms if necessary, though today that didn’t seem to be an issue. Star Force speeders were typically free use and had no key sequences required, but a lot of civilian craft did, including those that Star Force produced and sold on the open market.

  Those didn’t have weapons, but this one did. A single sammy barrel mounted on the front of the bike. Jyra knew it was more powerful than a sniper blast, but not as potent. More for blowing away a chunk of mass than punching a small hole through armor. Why this was an armed variety made her wonder if combat wasn’t forthcoming on this mission…or more likely some type of impediment that would difficult to remove without the weapon.

  Didn’t matter now, for if she couldn’t repair the bike she wasn’t going anywhere with it, for the gravity drive would overheat even if she got the power supply hooked up, and it was missing several conduits to both the drive and the controls, which was why she hadn’t been able to turn it on. Going back to the bike she pulled out all the damaged components and made a mental list of everything that was missing, then starting fishing items out of the crate and assembling them up until her gloved hands became too thick to get into some of the smaller areas.

  Jyra disconnected her right glove but kept her left on, allowing her thin fingers to slip into certain crevices and keep working up until the cold started to numb her touch, then she switched hands, putting her glove back on and taking the other off. She kept switching back and forth until she got the bike working, then started it up and ran it through some basic diagnostics ensuring that all functions were operational.

  With it floating half a meter off the ground she closed the access panel and grabbed her own pack, which she’d taken off when she realized it wasn’t going to be a quick fix. Checking her internal clock she noted that she’d spent some 4 hours working on the bike, most of which was due to a number of unforeseen problems with components that appeared to be intact but were really sabotaged in a subtle manner…and then she had to fix two pieces that she didn’t have replacements for.

  Whoever had set this up had made it difficult on purpose, but Jyra thought she finally had everything working and was glad to hear the faint hum of the cooling device and no extraneous noise, suggesting to her that it was, in fact, now working properly. After reattaching her pack she slid onto the small seat that could accommodate two people in a crunch, she gripped the control bars and elevated the speeder up through a small gap in the canopy that she had to search around for, passing through the snow-covered branches and dumping a lot of it off onto the ground as she pushed through…then she was above the treetops looking out at the snow-covered landscape that showed little bits of green in between the white dunes covering the branches.

  Highlighting the nearest waypoint, Jyra accelerated the nearly silent bike in its direction and began covering ground in a blink of an eye compared to her having had to run it on foot. Skimming the treetops also allowed her to make a straight line path rather than the weave she had to make around trees and up and down over hills on foot, making her appreciate the speeder for all it was worth as she headed for the waypoint.

  Knowing not to run up on top of it, Jyra stopped early and landed, choosing to approach on foot and finding another beacon…but this one was coming from underground. It was two meters down, but there was no visible way to get at it. Frowning, Jyra pulled her pack off and got a small cubical rectangle out that unfolded into a shovel. She began digging, immediately finding the ground frozen and having to chip away at it until the soil softened with depth, but even then it was still firm and didn’t look to have been recently dug up anytime soon.

  When she got down to the depth that the beacon was coming from, for she could measure it to the inch on her HUD, she found absolutely nothing. It took her a moment to dig a little deeper, then she tossed the shovel out of the hole and angrily climbed out of it.

  “Shit…I’m so stupid,” she said, looking around in the trees above her and in the scrub brush nearby. At first she couldn’t find anything, but eventually she stumbled across a tiny box stuck in the side of one of the tree trunks some 20 meters off, virtually unnoticeable, and Jyra knew it was a signal misdirection device. The actual beacon signal was coming from somewhere else, but with this one transmitting a counter signal it had altered the calculations her helmet was making and caused it to indicate a position that was where neither device existed.

  Knowing that she could do the math and use the false point and the actual one of the disrupter to determine the true location of the beacon, she input a waypoint on top of the tiny device and had her helmet do the calculations…which resulted in a third waypoint that she walked over to, finding a ditch that was almost completely filled with snow. She scooped it out with her hands like a dog digging down through sand and eventually found the book-sized box at the bottom. Pulling it out she headed back to where she’d dropped her pack and subsequently retrieved her shovel before kneeling down and opening the box.

  Inside it was two foodstuff packets, a small amount of ambrosia, and a puzzle piece-li
ke component that she guessed would interlink with others found to form something, but at the moment she had no clue what it was, for it had no buttons or markings of any kind.

  Jyra sighed. “Scavenger hunt indeed,” she said, looking over to the spot where she’d dug that unnecessary hole and wasted so much time. “Guess that’s my punishment for being stupid…all self-imposed.”

  Grabbing the items and stowing them in her pack, Jyra took a moment to rest and clear her head before getting back on the bike and heading towards the next waypoint, plotting out a course that would mean the least amount of travel, for her power cell on the bike hadn’t been fully charged and if she wandered around too much she’d end up finishing this hunt on foot. That was another facepalm moment that she was glad she spotted before it’d bitch-slapped her…and she assumed there were probably many more coming her way with equal subtlety.

  It was becoming clear this mission wasn’t about overcoming obvious challenges, but rather in picking up on the small ones that could easily go unnoticed. Warning herself to be extra observant, Jyra took off back up through the treetops then accelerated heavily until she could feel the tug of the air against her helmet and torso and held that velocity. The bike could go faster, but the last thing she wanted was to get knocked off it by the turbulence and fall down through the forest only to go on a multiple mile hunt for the bike that would cut thrust and coast to a stop when her hands left the controls.

  And anti-grav craft had a tendency to coast a really long ways before coming to a stop…not to mention this bike didn’t have a homing beacon, so all around it was better to keep it fast, but not too fast.

  Jyra got through three more locations before calling it quits and setting up camp. Each was different, with one going so far as to have her climbing through the snow in the treetops to find a case that had a vague beacon that was highlighting a region rather than a point. It took her more than two hours to find it, and had she not been wearing armor she would have been frozen stiff by that point crawling across branches that held the snow aloft and even having to dig tunnels through some of the deeper sections.

  She fell four times, counting on a branch to be there then finding a way to slip through where she thought her body would catch. If there was an easy way to find that one she missed it entirely and ended up slipping into her blanket sleeve more frustrated than tired. In each of the boxes, though, there were bits and pieces of supplies, which gave her the impression that this mission was going to last long beyond this current scavenger hunt.

  Taking that into consideration she decided to pull back on her pace a bit and work through the upcoming waypoints with a bit of ease rather than urgency. Knowing that these challenges were more brain oriented than combat, she told herself to take the advantage of the lack of schedule and work in some down time…else she’d go crazy with frustration at not being able to find these damn boxes in any predictable manner.

  She’d gotten in a brief workout before heading to sleep, going for a run outside of armor and doing some flexibility drills out in the snow as long as she could stand the cold, then warming up inside and doing some mediation work to further cleanse her mind enough that she could get to sleep without running things through her head nonstop. Without the long runs to drain her of energy she needed the release of the workouts, not to mention to maintain her fitness levels, which were going to take a significant hit if this mission dragged on as it was with her riding the speeder and not doing much more than looking around and small activities like digging and crawling.

  Tomorrow…which would actually occur at night…she was going to start with a workout then head off to the next waypoint, hopefully do three or four then set up camp again and rest/train for a few more hours and continue splitting it up in that fashion going forward. If she tried to plan out a timetable going forward she was going to get frustrated, for these waypoints were meant to keep things unpredictable.

  In order to counter that she had to let go of expectations and just play it out as events progressed. Not what she wanted to do initially, thinking of this mission as partially a race, but an Arc Commando had to adapt more than other soldiers, and to be prudent she stopped assuming there would be a finish to this mission and prepared herself for an unending one…which meant she had to sustain herself through training and supplies, to which end she began rationing her ambrosia usage, having a gut feeling that she was going to be maneuvered into a situation where she’d potentially be forced to run out and have to face that headache as well.

  A little prudence now could possibly circumvent that, and she’d rather run low now and work through partial doses rather than have none at all later.

  Then again she could just be getting paranoid, and that was yet another part of this mission, she was sure. Not knowing what was coming didn’t allow you to prepare for it, so it was left to guesswork and improvisation…both of which were unpredictable.

  “Live in the moment,” she whispered to herself as her head hit the inflated pillow, “and be ready for anything.”

  For now that meant getting to sleep, so she put all other concerns out of her mind and slipped off into blissful rest, grateful to have a warm structure to sleep in rather than roughing it in her armor.

  4

  July 9, 2896

  Epsilon Eridani System

  Corneria

  Jyra slid the last component into the plate-sized disc that she’d been assembling from all of the puzzle pieces and immediately saw the thing light up with power. Three gold lights appeared along with a countdown timer of 2:28. Frowning with both uncertainty and displeasure, the Commando realized this was another test and that she’d probably only get one shot at it. There were only three buttons on the entire device, each of which sat below the lights, so she pressed one and received a small hologram of a rotating triangle. Recognizing it as a prompt to level the device, she put the disc down on the ground and the triangle disappeared, immediately replaced by a foot and a half tall image of a metal skeleton.

  “Oh no,” she moaned as it remained motionless. After a few seconds of it doing nothing she pressed another button that removed the hologram but put nothing in its place. Seeing the countdown continue, she didn’t have time to think it over so she pressed the third button and a holographic map appeared marking a series of locations.

  On impulse she brought up her helmet’s empty map, save for the now useless waypoints, and aligned it with what she was seeing before placing new waypoints of her own at approximately the same spots as the map indicated, leaving her with 26 seconds remaining. Jyra hit the other buttons again, bringing back the metal skeleton and removing it with the ‘empty’ button. She tried a few combinations but got nothing new, then tossed the disc away from her and stepped behind a tree.

  A moment later it exploded with energy, a bit of which hit her arm that hadn’t gotten tucked in behind the trunk. She felt a slight tingle of stun energy, then her armor pulled it out of her body and returned her limb to full functioning status, but armor or no, had she been holding that device when it went off she would have been rendered unconscious.

  Jyra walked out of cover and looked at it, still lying on the ground where she had left it but with the three lights now gone. She assumed it was dead, and knew from previous examination of the pieces that it contained nothing of use, but something in the back of her mind said to take it with her. She had no obvious reason to do so, but if she ended up needing it later she didn’t want to have to spend hours or days searching the forest for this position.

  It wasn’t going to fit in her pack, and worried that it might contain a hidden transmitter she decided to simply put a waypoint on this position on her map and leave the device where it lay. If it turned out she did need it later she’d know where to come to, assuming no one was out here and came to mess with it. That metal skeleton was a message, telling her that she was now going to be hunted and that her mission was to avoid capture. She also figured the stun blast was a way of giving her hunters a head
start and she was glad she had gotten behind the tree when she did.

  But there was still the matter of that second button. It had done nothing, but it did cancel the other two, as if it was supposed to be doing something…or was doing something that she didn’t see.

  “I bet they had me transmitting my position,” she said in disgust, knowing that she had to get moving quickly. Investigating the points on the map was a priority, but getting out of here soon was paramount. She didn’t want to lose the speeder just yet, but it was almost out of charge and none of her supply drops had had any additional batteries or a portable recharger in them. She could cannibalize her personal power supply to run the speeder for a short while, but she didn’t want to give up her living accommodations just yet, so she was going to preserve that power supply unless she ran into a pinch.

  “Doing it to myself again,” she said as she ran over to the speeder that she’d parked a kilometer away before retrieving the last component from a box hidden in a camouflage blind that she’d only managed to find by tripping over it. She’d spent some 3 hours looking and had wanted to set up camp again, but she couldn’t here and maybe not at all going forward if what was after her was what she thought.

  It could be trainers, but odds were they were drones, fitting in with this being a solitary test…and she bet there were going to be more of them than she had shots in her pistol for.

  Jyra hopped on her speeder and took off, easing back up through the trees and into the clear air then heading towards one of her new waypoints, knowing that she wasn’t going to get even close to it, for it was located some 149 miles off, but fortunately all of them were clustered around that region within a radius of 20 or so miles. She hadn’t had time to study it intently, but intended to get as much distance out of her speeder as possible.