Star Force: Origin Series Box Set (37-40) Read online

  They had a total of five years to work together towards graduation, at which point the team would either be advanced or failed, as a group, based on their challenge performances, both man to man and against the various automated courses. If the team passed, then the individuals would all face their own final trials. If completed they’d earn the position and status as a Regular, the ‘lowest’ level of Star Force’s superhumans.

  But Rio knew it wasn’t low by any standard. It meant he’d be one of the elite, and he was sure going to have to earn it, given the way they were being trained. If he didn’t make it after 5 years he’d be recycled back into a newly formed team and get the chance to go through it all over again, hopefully taking his experience and skills and adding to them enough to make it through a second time.

  Sla had told them about one particular commando that was a friend of his, and how he’d gone through three times before finally making it, but once he did he became one of the most steady and reliable commandos in his former unit. Shooting stars burned out, he explained, but it was the steady progressor that climbed their way up the ability ladder, and it was the steady progressor that Star Force was interested in.

  Hitting a plateau was the one thing nobody wanted, with those that appeared ‘gifted’ often doing so. No commando got to being what they were by luck, privilege, or favor. They had to earn it, over and over again, so there could be no mistake about their skills and their ability to continually increase them.

  Which was what Rio was focused on. He was competitive, for sure. All of them were. But he didn’t get hung up on the rankings like others did. He was focused on improving…fast or slow, but always improving. That was the one thing that kept him going, despite all the craziness of their training schedule. Ignoring the big picture and focusing on taking tiny steps forward. Between that and the support of his teammates, he figured he had a decent chance of graduating along with the rest of them in this go through, but if he didn’t, he’d already decided to stick it out as long as needed, 100 years if necessary. He wasn’t going to quit. He was going to become a commando, one way or another.

  “You ready?”

  “I hope so,” Rio said, running a finger under the tight neckline of his training suit. “I’ve only got three days left.”

  “Anxiousness will slow you down,” the trainer warned. “You need to relax a hair, and do it by living in the moment. All that matters is moving…not the implications of what happens if you fail.”

  “Got it.”

  “Step up.”

  Rio did as instructed, mounting the small pedestal that would start him on the 3rd of 5 trials…the only one left for him to pass. This was his 17th attempt, and he wasn’t very confident in his luck changing this go around.

  As instructed he put those thoughts aside, focusing on his body position as a clear tube dropped down around him, sealing him in. He focused on his breathing, timing it right as he heard the countdown tones and dropped into a crouch. When the final one sounded the top of his tube opened and water poured down, flooding him. Patiently he held still, feeling his buoyancy manifest as he held his breath with his right hand pinching his nose until the water settled, then he launched himself up, pushing off the floor, and grabbed the top rim of the cylinder for additional leverage.

  Carrying as much momentum with him as he could, he swam up some 20 meters until he broke the surface on an indoor lake, blowing out a bit of water and jerking his head around, getting his bearings.

  There was a dock to his left, shore to his right, and jungle straight ahead…but he chose none of them. Swimming about, he headed behind him and across the long part of the lake to a wall that appeared unclimbable, but from previous experience he knew it contained small handholds, something he’d learned by watching one of his friends go through the trial.

  It was a long swim, about 300 meters in length, but when he got to the wall he had to swim around even more until he found the right spot. Digging his fingers into the small indents, he pulled himself out of the water and began scaling the wall, making sure not to slip and fall back down as he had before, knowing he was on the clock.

  He had to get to one of the exits within 12 minutes, and Rio didn’t want to waste seconds here.

  When he got to the top he held position, glancing down the walkway that was on the other side. The placement of the turrets changed with each trial, so one couldn’t map out the best way through with successive tries. He spotted one to his far right, but that was it, and it was doubtful it could hit him at this range.

  Rio launched himself up and over the wall on his ambrosia-enhanced muscles and ran across the walkway to a small building, ducking down outside the front door where a low wall gave him some cover. A few stingers followed him, but the turret wasn’t able to land any. Rio held still in a crouch behind the wall for a moment, then crawled across the doorway and around the corner of the building, chancing a look around the wall, then running out around it and into the jungle shrubbery.

  He knew he had to move fast, for the exit he was making for was around the other side of the lake. The closest ones were well guarded, as they all were, but the outside of the dome wasn’t a smooth wall, and he’d learned that there was a rimward entrance to one of them that avoided most of the typical turret nests…but it meant a lot of running with little time to do it.

  And he couldn’t run straight line either. He had to zigzag, pausing to listen and look for turrets…not to mention a scattering of trainers with stinger rifles and snipes. They roamed about wherever they pleased, which was why Rio had chosen to swim for the wall. They would have seen him do so, which meant they would be repositioning around the perimeter towards those exits…all the while he was running the opposite direction. With luck, he should be able to slip by them, but so far his plan had failed 3 times.

  He’d gotten nicked by a turret each time, which slowed him down enough to make him easy pickings for the trainers…especially when he got hit in a leg. No, his problem was he was rushing too much, which he knew was counterproductive. Like his trainers had been drilling into his head for years, he had to survive in order to succeed…and this time that meant going slow and ‘safe’ despite the hounding of the ever counting clock.

  Tree after tree he passed, ducking down occasionally to get his bearings and line of sight on his next sprint. He found three new turrets enroute, but spotted them far enough ahead that they couldn’t blindside him. Adjusting his course each time, he moved around them, trimming what seconds he could off his trip until he got up to a section of sand bisecting the jungle that had two turrets up against the wall and several other pairs dotting the stretch all the way down to the lake…meaning the only way to get by these was move back down to the lake and take a swim, or take your chances running across.

  Rio took two seconds to plot out his path, then sprinted out onto the sand, immediately drawing stingers his way. He jumped up and fell into a somersault, coming back up on his feet and running sideways…then skidded to a halt in a baseball slide before shooting off another direction, messing with the motion trackers as much as he could. Give the programming a straight line trajectory to follow and predict and you were as good as dead…meaning a direct sprint across the gap was a no go.

  Rio got past the halfway point in the sand clean, then caught a stinger on his left thumb. His entire hand went numb, but his wrist on up still worked, meaning he was still almost completely mobile. The next somersault was awkward, but he managed to keep his momentum and get near to the edge of the sand, resisting the urge to sprint the rest of the way and throwing in another right angle pivot, rolling across the sand and then jumping back to his feet at an angle, with two stingers peppering the ground where his body would have been had he moved directly toward the trees.

  Four more powerful strides and he was up to a sprint again, which he carried into the brush that shredded the stingers flying at him, making a shotgun-like effect of paint splinters that blanketed his back. He felt little patches of nu
mbness pop up, but his torso motion wasn’t affected, nor were his legs that had escaped the paint shrapnel.

  And then Rio was through, with his mind not lingering on that fact as he moved off closer to the dome edge, running away from his target exit and slightly backwards as he came within a few meters of the sand he’d just crossed, only all the way up near the wall. Carefully he snuck around a rock outcropping and ducked past the turrets, then climbed up out of the trees and ran through a narrow trench between the rocks that protected him from view on either side.

  He was in the clear for turrets, he hoped, then caught a glance of paint splatter in front of him as a stinger from behind overshot. Pushing his speed as much as he could on the rough terrain, he ducked close to the side rocks, trying to disrupt the firing line of the sniper he knew was behind him. With little else to do aside from cross his fingers for luck, he ran through the trench and eventually made it to the far end, coming back out into the trees, having bypassed the thickest of the permanent turret fields.

  Ducking down on reflex, he dropped beneath a pair of stingers flying through the air and rolled to the right, taking cover behind a tree. He held position and got his bearings, then sprinted off to another tree further on. Two more and he was past the turret and nearing the exit, which he knew would be guarded by multiple defense points.

  When they came into view he held up, thinking fast how he was going to get through them. The others had used multiple tactics, none of which seemed especially good, so he chose a really bad one…in that it was slow. Backtracking a few meters he found a tree he liked and started to climb it, getting up as high as he could, then jumping from one tree to another, cringing as he could practically feel the seconds ticking off the clock.

  Five tree hops later and he was past the turrets, which was the moment of truth. He grabbed a branch and swung his legs over, dropping to the ground in a crouch and sprinting for the finish inside a cave as the turrets rotated around when they picked him up on their motion trackers. He threw in a zigzag motion a couple of seconds later, not wanting to give them a stable target, then felt his right shoulder go numb a split second before he stumbled forward and fell to the ground, tumbling into a somersault that took him through the blue energy field that marked the finish.

  Without his right arm working, Rio pulled his legs up to his chest then rocked forward, rolling up onto his heels and standing up as he heard the triumphant finish tone sound, indicating that he not only succeeded in passing the trial, but completed all trials…meaning he’d just earned his commando credentials.

  An uncontrollable smile broke out on his face as a medic appeared and walked over, injecting him with a destunning serum that brought his arm back to life, along with all the other little numb spots covering his body.

  “Thanks,” he said, rotating his arm around and confirming that it was back to normal.

  The medic nodded and walked off, with Rio following him out of the cave exit and into the hallway beyond, transitioning from naturalistic environment to the urban landscape that made up the bulk of the training center. A few steps out he found Sla waiting.

  “End of the road,” he said, grabbing his shoulder and steering him to the left. “Come with me.”

  “Is there more?” Rio asked with a frown.

  “There’s always more…something that you need to remember, commando. Time to find out where you’re going next.”

  Rio didn’t ask any further questions, simply walking with the man over to a lift that took them somewhere else within the facility, somewhere that he’d never been before. When the doors eventually opened Sla led him out into some sort of a control center, a single, empty room with a bank of terminals ringing a holographic pad…a small version, making for an intimate room that reeked of importance.

  “When a commando is minted, as you’ve just been, assignments are given here. There’s a complicated selection process that you don’t need to concern yourself with the details of, but it’s all highly automated. Unit commanders make their preferences early, with priority ratings, then when you finish I come over here and input your ID tag,” he said, typing in Rio’s number, “and we see where you end up.”

  Sla took a step back and looked at where the hologram was…or rather should have been, for it was displaying nothing.

  “Wait for it,” Sla said, picking up on Rio’s thoughts. He’d overseen so many mintings that he was familiar with all the various reactions, and Rio wasn’t anything new.

  About 20 seconds went by, then a holographic icon popped up, drawing a raised eyebrow from Sla.

  “Well, well…look what we have here,” he said, seeing the rare headband icon emblazoned a meter tall in between the two men. “You’ve been recruited by Clan.”

  “Clan Metal Gear?” Rio asked, recognizing the symbol.

  “One of the better commando Clans at that. Most new commandos get assigned to colonial mainline units. About 18% go out to the Clans. You might not stay there forever, there’s a bit of mixing going back and forth, but apparently someone values your skillset enough to put in a bid for you. Take a moment to appreciate that, then dispense with the good feelings. You’re about to leave kidsville and get your eyes opened to what experienced commandos are capable of.”

  Rio locked eyes with him. “Looking forward to it.”

  6

  August 26, 2464

  Solar System

  Uranus

  Rio rode the dropship down from the starport, seeing the greenish/blue atmosphere of the planet grow in size until it swallowed up the vid screen view, and still their destination wasn’t visible. Braking against their own orbital momentum coming off the starport, the dropship eventually slowed to a near hover, matching the drifting motion of the Snake Pit that was riding the upper atmosphere below them, partially obscured in the gas giant’s haze.

  The colony wasn’t on the surface of the planet, because the planet had no surface. It was layer after layer of gasses, mostly hydrogen and helium, that transitioned down into a blender-like mantle of gas and ices. This gave it no true surface to land or build on, with the center core of the planet being made of rocky material…material that Clan Metal Gear was convinced contained significant corovon deposits.

  Trace amounts of Herotol, a gas whose atomic structure included a single corovon along with 8 protons and 4 neutrons, had been discovered in the atmosphere of Uranus, and the Clan had been adamant about probing for deposits within the core. Davis had eventually granted them permission to try, and Clan Metal Gear had built the Snake Pit to facilitate those ongoing efforts.

  The city/colony floated on anti-grav engines…a lot of engines, with backups for the backups, to keep it afloat and away from the dangerous interior. With pressures and temperatures rising the deeper one went into the planet, the more exotic the stages of matter became, with bits of liquid hydrogen mixed in with the rock, all of which was in a molten state. The thick ‘atmosphere’ contained the heat, preventing there from being a solid center, resulting in mud-like layers of material, sorted out by their densities and magnetic properties.

  The corovon, if in its pure form, would have sunk to the center of the planet…in theory. There was no way to scan that deep, so the Metal Gears’ efforts were more exploratory than mining, and so far they hadn’t been able to penetrate anywhere near deep enough to get at the center of the planet, but they had been recovering other compounds that contained corovon, in small amounts, which made the facility worthwhile in the interim as they continued to upgrade their technology and devise ever more interesting techniques to get at the core.

  Though Rio couldn’t see them, coming down from atop as the dropship was, there were thin tethers dropping off the bottom of the circular city that connected down to mining probes that were collecting material at varying depths. Hydrogen and helium collection were being harvested en mass, then exported out to the rest of the Clan, along with methane and other gasses in the upper atmosphere.

  Over the years many of those tendri
ls had snapped, due to the winds, but the Clan had kept at it, devising more flexible and robust connections, allowing them to sway about without breaking. None of them were manned, but the underside of the city was covered in tendril mounts, letting the miners within the Snake Pit fish for whatever resources they wanted, when they wanted, with 12 currently deployed, two of which were deep probes.

  Those probes were designed to penetrate the non-gaseous layers, coming into contact with liquids and ices, though those ices were not ‘solid,’ being churned up and moved about in a high pressure environment. Those probes were out of the prototype stage, and were reliable enough to pull in a slew of material into their ‘bulbs,’ which sat at the opposite end of the tethers. Those bulbs were miniature processing centers, sifting through the mix of material and discarding what they didn’t want. What they did want they shot up the tendrils to the city, where the more or less pure material was collected and put to use.

  Power and control lines were located in the tendrils, meaning that if one got cut the only way to deal with the situation was to reel it up, fix the damage, and send it back down…which took hours, if not days. When powered, small anti-grav units in the bulb assisted with the lifting, but if they went out the Snake Pit had to physically haul them up, and if they tried to pull them in too fast the tethers would snap and they’d lose the bulb altogether.

  That had happened several times in the beginning, before the engineers got a handle on the stresses and somewhat predictable nature of the turbulence in the planet. Those bulbs were now floating somewhere in the mantle, they assumed, but with no onboard power there was no way to locate them, though if they did have an active tracking beacon it was unlikely that it would have been detectable from the city’s location. Another probe might have been able to pick it up within a few kilometers, but without power another probe could pass within 1 meter of the lost bulbs and not even know they were there.