Star Force: Deceit (SF34) Read online

  “I honestly don’t know. The fighting may never reach us. I don’t think it’s even hit this section of the city.”

  “Yet,” she reminded him.

  “Daddy?” his daughter asked, finally breaking her silence.

  “Yes sweetheart?”

  “I’m thirsty.”

  His wife looked up at him. “I forgot to bring anything.”

  “Neither did I.”

  His wife looked down and rubbed her shoulder. “I’m sorry, but it’ll be a bit longer before any of us get something to drink. We have to stay here so the bad men won’t find us. We’ll get some water after they leave, ok?”

  Their daughter didn’t respond, just leaned back into her mom’s chest and returned to her shell of silence.

  A beep from Morrison’s watch caused him to glance at the time, then he looked around at the hordes of people and sighed. He turned and locked eyes with his wife.

  “I’ll look around, see if they don’t have some type of emergency supplies.”

  She reached out and grabbed his arm. “No…”

  He smiled and placed his hand on hers. “It’ll be alright. Just save my spot.”

  She faked a smile and released his arm, then stretched out her legs so her right foot extended into the spot he’d been sitting.

  “I’ll be back,” Morrison said before hopping his way in between people over to a walkway that had been roped off so people wouldn’t sit down inside. He ducked underneath and headed over to a staircase, whereupon he walked down against a sparse flow of people coming up from the main entrance. His wife and daughter were on the 4th level out of 6, with the only entrance on 2, which was where he headed.

  Once he got down to that level, which was even more packed than those above and below, he bypassed by the facility staff and headed for the entrance, one of the few people actually leaving the shelter, passing through several lines of guards who gave him odd glances, but he wasn’t the only one that had left today so they paid him no more thought, intent on keeping an eye on the large promenade that Morrison took off down, hanging tight to the wall as he headed to the left.

  Two doors down he walked into an abandoned store, using a master key to get through the locked door. From there he headed into the back and unlocked another door into a maintenance area. There he climbed up a ladder to the highest level and stepped off onto a catwalk, then headed over to a section of the machine-laden corridor that ran behind the rows of stores and unlocked a specific panel.

  He crawled into the empty box and pulled the cover shut, so as to leave no trace of anything askew. On the back side he kicked out a false wall and crawled through the hole in the real wall that had been precut days ago, following a string of tiny lights that allowed him to navigate through the otherwise total blackness. Once through that he was free to climb up a series of handholds that had been welded into the side of the containment wall and up to the ‘roof.’

  Morrison had to duck down when he came up, given that the city shell was only a meter and a half above the building roof. It was a thick layer of metal and armor designed to protect the inner buildings from weaponsfire and meteorite impacts. The airspace Morrison was crawling through was auxiliary, for the wall that his entry point had been cut through was otherwise airtight, meaning that even if the city shell cracked the interior structures wouldn’t depressurize, adding an extra layer of protection to the Star Force-designed structure.

  The gap he was crawling through was dotting with support braces, but he eventually worked his way over to the top of the shelter, finding the stacks of explosives that had been placed there earlier. They were outlined in a square with a small hole in what looked like a brick wall, there were so many of them. He crawled in through the hole and to the detonation mechanism inside the mini fort.

  Wires were everywhere, but the path to the detonator had been kept clear, allowing him to crawl up and sit down cross-legged in front of the trigger mechanism. He pulled a small chip out of his pocket and inserted it into the housing, arming the manual trigger.

  “We are The Word,” he whispered, closing his eyes as he prepared himself. “The sword and shield, guardian and gardener. We are entrusted with the soul of our race, and will counter the darkness corrupting it, bringing Humanity back into the light. We are loyal, committed, penitent, and honored to acquit this duty, for ours is not to determine the bounds of righteousness, but to accept those inherent in the universe and to bring back into line those that have strayed. We do this through creation and destruction, both in ourselves and our enemies, for all are the children, no matter how far they have strayed…and all can become enemies, for none are immune to corruption. We are The Word, and we will hold to the righteous cause, no matter the effort or sacrifice required of us.”

  “We are The Word,” he repeated, placing his thumb on the trigger. He paused for a moment, checking his own conviction and finding it not lacking. Then he depressed his thumb and detonated the wall of explosives.

  His wife and daughter were caught in the blast, having the level above them crashing down in a wave of debris that killed many instantly while cracking the floor beneath them. Both of them survived the impact, with the lay of debris cradling them, though both were knocked around as they fell…only to have a whirlwind of pressure push them back up and pin them to a slanted piece of debris, shoving them down into the nook where it had lodged into another piece.

  The mother held onto her daughter as both were screaming, but the air was suddenly taken from their lungs as they and the debris were launched up through the breach in the city shell and launched with hundreds of other people and building pieces out into the low gravity of the airless moon.

  The mother and daughter’s veins popped as their bodies swelled from the sudden lack of pressure, turning them both into an instantaneous, gory mess…but they didn’t die instantly, as the blood loss and trauma of explosive decompression competed with a lack of oxygen in their lungs. Both suffered a short, but gruesome death as they were flung out over the city and slowly fell down to land on the rocky landscape or on other parts of the city shell, which did well to catch and stop the debris from penetrating to the living areas inside.

  A continuous plume of air continued to jet out the huge hole, though it reduced in volume almost immediately as the shelter was emptied, forcing it to suck more through the corridors and promenades nearby, adding more damage to the city’s population than the explosion alone could have, though the spray of Human bodies across the cityscape was gruesome enough.

  Andre-80319 was ducking behind a potted tree well down the promenade, all the way into the neighboring section of the city when the explosion occurred. He was so far away that he couldn’t even hear it over the plasma fire coming from the Brazilians who were bunkered up in some well-arranged barricades and blocking the Star Ranger’s advance. The adept didn’t have any doubts that they were going to be able to subdue them, but it was going to take some time, else they risk losing some men, for the guards were doing well to overlap fields of fire and Andre had already had his shields go down twice crossing from cover to cover.

  He was the point man in their current alignment, with the Knights and Regulars further back. His job was to get up close and lob one of two stun grenades he had on him over the barricades and inside the small fort. Andre could have winged one from where he was, but he wanted to diminish the chances of his missing by getting in closer, and the potted tree was the furthest he’d been able to get, realizing that he was going to have to make a hook shot in order to lob the grenade without getting lit up with plasma…which he could survive, but he didn’t want to take the armor damage.

  Suddenly he was tugged forward, hitting his head on the rim of the pot as the air in the promenade turned into a hurricane. He saw the pressure meter on his HUD drop sharply, with his suit’s automated systems cutting off the external air feed and going over to backups immediately.

  The Archon planted a hand on the rim to steady himself and half st
ood up, looking in the direction the air was going and was surprised to see the containment doors not lowering into place. All plasma fire coming from the Brazilians immediately stopped as they began to run out of air, meanwhile people on the other side of the archway, far back behind the Brazilians, started running out into the streets in a panic from where they’d been hiding.

  Andre didn’t wait and flung himself up over the pot, using the air flow to pull him across and into a run. He flew right past the barricade fort which had been built up against the wall on the left side of the promenade and jumped over a series of benches, landing awkwardly but staying on his feet…then he fought his way to the right and caught himself on the archway, setting his feet and moving to the side.

  There he pulled open the emergency panel and pulled the containment trigger arm…only to have it not respond. He glanced at an indicator light, which due to the Star Force design of the system he knew to be an indication of computer override, meaning someone in a control room was ordering the doors to stay open against their basic programing.

  He wasted no time, seeing the pressure dropping even further, and punched the locked panel over the emergency trigger, cracking the case enough for him to pry it off. Underneath was a clear case covering a button, which he pried off and pressed, overriding the computer override and triggering four pieces of a massive clear wall to iris out of the archway and lock into place.

  Before that could happen Andre jumped out and through to the other side, somersaulting through his landing and running forward to grab the nearest person he could. He caught a man as he was stumbling forward and literally dragged him back to the now closed wall, at the bottom of which were four rotational booths. He pushed him inside one and spun the basic air lock around, getting him on the more pressurized side then ran back and forth three times to grab additional people, though the last two didn’t survive.

  Andre carried the bloody fourth person through himself, seeing that the rest of the Star Rangers had taken the opportunity to subdue the Brazilians, though at the moment no one seemed interested in fighting. The air pressure on the good side of the wall was rising again, as it sucked air from other sections, but not nearly as fast as it should have been, meaning that there were probably other leaks that would eventually render this section airless minutes later if they weren’t sealed.

  The Archon pulled up a wider map of the city, seeing where the next closest archways were, then opened a comm to the other two Archons in his group that were nearby but not on the same promenade.

  “Manually close all containment doors,” he ordered. “Regardless of whether or not you have a breach. The computer controls have been overridden and a lot of people are dying. We need to contain this before it gets any worse.”

  “Where’s the breach?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere west of here.”

  Outside the city the nearby cutter got a good view of the explosion and maneuvered over to that location, or as close as it could get without exposing itself to still operational defensive batteries…then a decision was made and it moved in closer, drawing fire from a small plasma battery that it took out with several precision lachar blasts while it absorbed the plasma hits as it moved over top of the breach point. It fought against the outflowing air a bit, but given its mass it didn’t have trouble descending over top of the massive hole and pushing its shields out further from the hull.

  With some tricky reworking of the matrix the drone warship’s pilots used its protective bubble to temporarily seal off the breach, holding position on anti-gravs about 30 meters above the hole and sitting down in between several ‘mountains’ where taller sections of city sprung up. Thanks to the warship’s small size it was able to slide in between them without issue, though a destroyer or larger wouldn’t have been able to fit, for the surface of the city wasn’t a smooth curve, but a mottle mess of concealed structures contained beneath the protective blanket of armor, with more internal buildings added on the edges of the city with every decade that passed.

  “Carver here,” the engineer answered his comm, swinging across his office on a rolling chair to get to the terminal. There was no image attached to the signal, just a voice…and an ID signature of a very high ranking Archon.

  “We have a hull breach on Tyr,” Drake said evenly, but Carver could sense the urgency in his voice. “A big one. We’ve got a cutter temporarily plugging the hole but we need a patch job done as soon as possible, so prep a team and get over here.”

  The engineer started pulling up available units on his console, looking through what they had available on Glasir.

  “We’ve got a pair of MFSs,” he said, referring to the Mobile Field Slips that were basically a shipyard condensed down into a transport and allowed Star Force to initiate construction on fresh sites, as well as being using for repair work, given that they brought all the necessary workspace and tools with them. “I can deploy one within the hour.”

  “Do better,” Drake pressed. “We’ve got a battle going on inside, and we don’t know what caused this breach. The city has already lost a chunk of atmosphere that we’re having trouble replacing. If we get a second hole hundreds of thousands of people will die.”

  Carver frowned, though Drake couldn’t see it. “What’s wrong with the containment systems?”

  “They’ve been overridden.”

  “God dammit,” he swore as he jumped out of his chair, realizing in an instant the disastrous implications that could ensue. “You need to start manually sealing them. There’s an override panel on each of them, unless the Brazilians changed the architecture.”

  “We’re working on it. Just get here and get it sealed as fast as you can.”

  “Going,” Carver said, cutting the comm and rushing out of his office.

  Already sitting in a parking orbit around Glasir, MFS-0832 was powered down and tethered to a monitoring station without a crew aboard. Those had to come up from the planet and from nearby orbital stations, pulled off of current jobs and shoved into dropships and ferries. Carver was one of the last up, having hopped directly onto a dropship and flown up with a scattering of personnel. He took the skeleton crew he’d assembled and made a pair of jumps, the first of which was out to Aesir, then from there to Tyr to get around the curve of the planet rather than wait through orbital transition.

  They got to Tyr and down to the city 53 minutes after Drake’s call had come through, with the MFS gliding in over the city top and setting ‘down’ beside the cutter, though it was still hovering on anti-grav. Had it actually landed it could have cracked and damaged the armored shell even further.

  Carver and most of the others he’d grabbed donned armored work suits and shot out the airlocks, dropping the short distance down to the city top and running across it in low g to positions around the blast crater as the cutter held position above them. The MFS then fed down a thick cord that, between the men and several mechanical arms, they managed to stretch around the perimeter of the hole. From there they began sealing it to the surface of the shell, going around and triggering the premade segments to chemically bond, then testing all the connections before they finally gave the go ahead.

  The MFS fed power to the cord and its shield generator powered up, creating a ‘band aid’ over the breach up to the edge of the cutter’s shields. A quick reprogramming of both allowed the band aid to generate its shield through the other, with both holding back physical matter but not each other.

  A quick signal to the cutter and it slowly rose up, undoing the overlap and allowing the engineers’ shield to take over. The warship hesitated, waiting for confirmation that it was no longer needed, then moved off and overtop the MFS, guarding it against any interference from city defenses.

  The MFS moved forward and overtop of the shield ring, then reprogrammed the shield to only hold back air. Once that was accomplished the shield geometry altered, changing from a circle and arching up into a dome that intersected the bottom of the ship. The engineers outside walked o
ver the ring, passing through the shield to the walking space around the jagged crater, whereupon a slew of extendable equipment from the underside of the MFS came down and the engineers began cutting apart the rough debris and prepping the rim to accept replacement parts to put a hard seal in place.

  4

  May 20, 2430

  Alpha Centauri System

  Tyr

  Governor Gabriel Aranha woke with a pounding headache and a sore back, rolling over only to discover he had no pillow under his head…nor a bed underneath him. As he blinked his bleary eyes open he saw several people around him seated on the floor that he now laid upon, which was when his brain caught up to the present and he remembered the Star Force raid on his office complex.

  He sat up with a hand to his forehead, finding it difficult to move without sending triggering waves of pain. When he did he saw green paint plastered all over the chest of his very expensive suit where he’d been shot. He poked at his chest delicately, trying to find a wound unsuccessfully. He’d heard Star Force liked to use stun weapons, but he’d never actually seen one, and the way they’d blown through his security detachment and into the safe room he’d been holed up in he’d been sure they were out for blood.

  The Governor turned his head slowly, looking around at where he was at. It was a big, empty warehouse with people everywhere, half of which appeared to still be unconscious. Those closest to him weren’t his staff, but they all had some government affiliation based on their uniforms. Some were guards, now disposed of their weaponry…others were dock workers, secretaries, accountants, and corporate liaisons.

  Then he spotted one of the towering white suits of the Star Force guards standing next to a door with a wide clear space around him. That would be one of their Knights, not an Archon, but even more terrifying given their size. He’d watched the security camera footage from his hideout as a pair of the monsters had charged in behind shields the size of a small wall and literally ran over his personal guard. This one didn’t have a shield with him, but he did have a sword attached to what passed as a belt on his armor, and Aranha didn’t blame those nearest to him for keeping their distance.