Star Force: Deceit (SF34) Read online

  “You there,” he said to one of the guards next to him. “What’s going on?”

  “We’ve been taken prisoner,” he mumbled, none too happy with the situation.

  “What are they going to do with us?”

  “They haven’t said.”

  “This is intolerable,” Aranha said, standing up.

  “I’d stay put if I were you,” someone else advised.

  He straightened his suit, ignoring the dry paint on it. “I’m the Governor,” he reminded them, drawing a few startled reactions. “They’ll speak to me.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” he heard as he began walking towards the door, stepping over the unconscious and around the seated as everyone else in the room kept relatively quiet. The Knight didn’t so much as twitch as he walked up to him.

  “I demand to know what is going on,” he asked in English, not expecting anyone from Star Force to speak Portuguese outside of their diplomatic personnel.

  “You lost. Now sit down,” the Knight said through his helmet’s speakers, which gave his voice a slightly artificial tone.

  Aranha was undeterred. “I’m the god damned Governor of this moon, and I demand to speak to your commanding officer!”

  The Knight laughed. “We’re Star Force. We don’t have commanding officers.”

  “Your Archon then,” he pressed.

  “They’ll come for you when they want, not when you want. Now sit down,” the Knight said, still holding his stoic pose.

  “I will not. I demand to speak to your leaders. I’m the Governor, and I will not be treated like a common citizen. I want to speak to someone I can negotiate with.”

  “You’re a prisoner, same as the rest,” the Knight said, unclipping his sword and flicking it on with an audible crackle/pop.

  The Governor took an involuntary step backwards, then found his nerve again…or more accurately, his ego. “I’m not moving until I speak to someone in authority.”

  The Knight didn’t even bother to speak again, he just raised the tip of his stun sword and lightly tapped Aranha in the chest, knocking him to the floor unconscious. He held his sword at his side for a moment, looking out over the rest of the prisoners who were all staring at him.

  “Anyone else want to negotiate?” he asked loudly, hiding a smile behind his faceplate. He loved being able to quote Bruce Willis movies and have no one catch on, young as they were.

  No one responded, so he flipped off his stun sword and reattached it to his armor as he returned to his stoic pose.

  “What happened next?” David asked.

  “We were told that Mars had issued a new staff to replace those that had been indicted,” the women said, held down into her chair by Assad’s strong grip on her shoulder and neck. “They were being taken back to face trial, and we were told it would be unlikely that they would be returning.”

  “What do you know of any other corruption on Tyr?”

  “There’s always the occasional rumor, but nothing concrete that I’m aware of,” she continued with intense eyes, holding back her panic and trying to work through the situation.

  “And what do you know of The Word?”

  She frowned. “I’m not familiar with that phrase…or is it a name?”

  Assad sent him the all clear signal, and David finally removed his helmet and set it on the table in the Governor’s former office that they were using as a command post for the interim government they were setting up to keep city functions running. With 13 million citizens having to be fed, they couldn’t afford to waste time and allow the city to fall into even further chaos without security in place to keep order.

  Assad released his grip on her and walked out of the room to go and fetch another prisoner, leaving David alone with her.

  “I apologize for the way we arrived, but be aware that the Brazilian government asked us to come here and reclaim the moon for them. Whether you realize it or not, you’ve been working for a rogue faction, a criminal organization that took control of this moon some two years ago. They did so very quietly, and have been inserting their personnel into the command structure at a number of levels, which was why we had to capture everyone, yourself included.”

  The woman’s eyes went wide. “This was sanctioned?”

  David nodded. “Your people are on their way to take possession back, but until then we need to keep as much order as possible, which means reestablishing as much of the current administration as we can. We’re fairly certain that you’re not part of the insurrection, so we need you to go back to work immediately, taking on as many additional duties as you can until Brazil can set up a transitional government, after which I assume they’ll be doing a very thorough background check on all personnel.”

  “Of course,” she offered.

  “We’re using this building to coordinate from. Down the hall to the right, room 1944. You’ll receive further instructions there, including a secure earpiece. Don’t lose it,” David said, walking up to her and grabbing her wrist, upon which he placed the end of a small device.

  “Ouch!” she said as it pinched her skin quickly. When he removed it she saw that it’d left a tattoo behind on the back of her hand.

  “It’s temporary, but won’t wash off with water. It marks you as having been cleared to return to service. Others will ask to see your mark, and you will do the same to those you work with. Check often, for the infiltrators are both subtle and very effective at blending in. You all have the same mark…exactly the same mark, down to the details. If there’s any alteration it’s counterfeit. I have no doubt they can duplicate the mark with time, but it’s not something they can just draw on free hand.

  The woman rubbed her thumb over the gold/white Star Force symbol that had a lot of extra icons spaced around the exterior and within the gaps of the very familiar vertical double infinity symbol, finding that it truly didn’t smudge or alter in any way, as if it was a real tattoo.

  “They’re called The Word?” she asked, remembering what he asked her.

  “That’s not a public name as of yet, but yes.”

  “Room 1944?”

  David nodded.

  “Thank you for trusting me,” she said as she stood up, then hesitated as she wanted to ask more but thought better of it and simply walked out the door.

  David put his helmet back on and waited for Assad to return, this time with a man that had also worked in the Tyr administrative ranks. The rest of Green Team was doing the same thing, handling five interrogations with two Archons each…one to question, the other to monitor via Ikrid. It was the only way they could be sure they weren’t putting Word operatives back into positions of power, tedious as it was.

  As for the lower ranking support staff, there were far too many to go through this process with, so a team of Star Force hackers were going through Tyr’s records and doing quick personnel searches…if they came up clean they were released from custody to return to their jobs. If there was even so much as a letter out of place in their files they were flagged and kept imprisoned for the time being.

  He had no illusions that they’d be able to round up all The Word operatives, given the size of the city, but they had to make sure that the leaders were clean, otherwise they could gain a foothold again and lay low, covering for others, until Star Force was gone and order restored. Then they could either start again or leave quietly.

  The Word was extremely skilled at hiding in the cracks, and Green Team knew they had to seal as many as they could, as quickly as they could, or give their enemy new opportunities to exploit in the chaos.

  Mason Watkins sprinted down one of the city’s many shopping promenades, jumping over and through a slice of vegetation in the otherwise fabricated environment, whereupon he popped over a hedge and punched a looter to the ground before roundhouse kicking another off an old man he was in the process of mugging. The third of the punks, a few inches taller than the Regular, delivered a gut punch into his black Clan Tron armor, immediately regretting it as his m
iddle knuckle broke on impact with the hard plates.

  Mason didn’t give him a chance to make the same mistake twice and swatted him in the head with the butt of his stun rifle, toppling him to the ground before shooting the other two as they got to their feet. He added a third stinger to the big guy, then turned his attention to the old man whose eyes were so wide with fear that they looked like they were going to pop out of his head.

  “Are you injured?” he asked through his black faceplate.

  “My…my ankle,” he stuttered, then reached for his wallet on the ground nearby where one of the muggers had dropped it.

  Mason retrieved it for him, then got on his helmet comm and called for a medic, as well as placing a waypoint so they could find his position…or rather, their Star Force escorts could find his position, for with so much chaos running through the city none of the medical response calls into the unsecured zones were going in alone. Several had already been jumped, with the medications they carried stolen and some of the medics beaten, despite the fact they were local Brazilians.

  After those initial reports Star Force had begun extending escorts to those response teams going out into the ‘wild zones’ while most of the troops were locking down various sectors of the city and restoring order. Mason was part of several patrols heading through the wild zones to try and discourage the looting going on, assuming that just by showing themselves in some areas that the locals would be less encouraged to misbehave as opposed to them seeing no uniformed presence at all for the better part of 2 days.

  The Regular was patrolling on his own, which was a bit irregular, but there were other Clan Tron commandos in the area that he could call on for help if necessary. They’d decided to split up to cover more ground, with these roaming bandits offering little resistance.

  “A medic’s on the way,” he told the man. “Can I help you over to that bench?”

  “Sure,” he said, reaching up and grabbing the arm of the black armor. The man stood up on his good foot and hopped over to the shrubbery that the bench was set into.

  “Thank you, sir,” he said gratefully after he’d sat down.

  “Us old guys have to stick together,” Mason quipped.

  “Ha…with the way you handled those kids, I doubt you’re half my 84 years.”

  “I take it back,” he said sarcastically. “You’re a youngling. I’ll be 124 next month.”

  The man’s face scrunched up. “Really?”

  “Really,” Mason echoed. “Now, I’ve got to go bust up some more punks. Wait here, a medical team is on the way. Tell them those three are responsible.”

  “What if they wake up first?”

  “They won’t,” Mason promised, leaving the bench and jogging off. He added a stinger to each of the downed muggers as he passed, then continued on his running patrol, spotting another broken store window down the promenade past an upturned vendor cart…with a body laying nearby.

  “Don’t you just love the civilian life?” he said to the air as he picked up his pace, heading towards the body.

  A few hundred thousand miles away on Vanir a man in the Australian colony was sitting in his apartment watching the news vids when he got an incoming message tone from his desk console. He walked over and logged in, setting aside the half-eaten bowl of popcorn he’d been working on and seeing that the message was an atypical one, in that it hadn’t gone through the regular comm network.

  Instead, it was a direct transfer, accomplished via a burst transmitter on Tyr to a private receiver on Vanir, then added to the Vanir system as a local message, disguising its origin. There was a brief message indicating that the attached data file was a movie his brother had sent to him…though that was only half the truth.

  The man downloaded the data file then deleted the message, not particularly caring if it was later traced or not. He pulled out the data chip he’d saved it on and pocketed it, then grabbed one last handful of popcorn before walking out of his apartment, never again to return.

  He booked the soonest available flight out of the system and spent the layover at a series of spaceports and starports until eventually boarding a jumpship carrying some 7,000 other passengers on their way over to the nearby Proxima System. After a two day layover there, the jumpship took most of those passengers, plus a few hundred more, back to Sol where the man offloaded onto a starport in high Earth orbit.

  Another layover there transitioned to a ferry that sent him to a resort facility in low orbit, where upon he handed over the data chip. Immediately thereafter he boarded another flight, this one ferrying him over to a low orbit starport that gave him access to the dropship traffic going down to Earth’s surface. He bought a ticket for a quick drop down to Australia and exited Star Force’s transportation network through their Sydney spaceport.

  After that he milled about in a hotel for two days before a packet arrived. Following the instructions inside, he bounced around the city to several locations picking up a variety of purchases before hopping on a train that took him over to Port Augusta. There he had a ride waiting for him…a cute blonde in a compact car that took him up the A87 highway heading for the northern coast.

  When the car arrived in Darwin two days later on some prearranged visit, only the blonde was in the car. The man had been dropped off in the Tanami desert along the side of the road at a specific point, following a coordinate trail in the navigational device he’d received back in Sydney. He hiked for three days, utilizing the backpack full of supplies he’d purchased, until he came to his destination…a small boulder set out in the open, otherwise just a random object, but one that The Word used for visual reference.

  Half an hour after he’d arrived an all-terrain four wheeler showed up and carried him off further into the desert, eventually ducking into a subsurface tunnel that took the man, his former identity now forgotten, into an underground facility where he’d be put to use with another task, one that would have him not see the public scene again for a decade or more, now that his original identity might be compromised.

  The sleeper agent had completed his singular task of delivering the data chip to Earth, and whether or not he’d be given another field assignment under a false identity was a matter of necessity. The Word much preferred using real identities, so that no possible data mining could detect anomalies. Star Force was good at such discoveries, and they needed to keep their secret operatives secret, which meant burning their original identities as needed, then recruiting more operatives as they were available.

  The ‘burnt’ individuals would then be recycled into other duties, with this man transitioning into a data analyst working out of their hidden base…having literally disappeared from the public records once he got off the train in Port Augusta.

  Normally sleeper operatives were rarely used for anything less than vital missions, let alone data transfers, but this was a special case, and well deserving of the sacrifice.

  5

  June 6, 2430

  Alpha Centauri System

  Tyr

  Drake got back to their command center in the former Governor’s complex from a 2 hour running patrol through the city, with little to report aside from overall progress. The streets had been cleaned up from the looting, though repair efforts to the stores were still lagging behind, given that they’d only resumed minimal orbital commerce at one of the spaceports, thinking it better to route through the most essential supplies while keeping a close watch on the transfers. Green Team was still convinced that there were Word operatives in play, and they didn’t want them moving cargo out, so Drake had agreed to take things slow, though as the days passed Tyr was gradually getting back to normal.

  The damage to the city’s exterior had been physically patched over, though the inside was still a mess. He imagined Brazil would contract Star Force crews to rebuild the internal structure, but that was their call given that it was their city. Star Force wasn’t going to repair it for free, above what was necessary to maintain atmospheric integrity. The sourc
e of the blast was still unknown, but fortunately no others followed it.

  The casualty lists had run high though, far more than Drake had initially estimated, topping out at 593,228. A review of the city’s computer systems confirmed that someone had directly overridden security protocols and locked open the containment walls, allowing the atmosphere to purge from a huge area of the city before a few nearby Archons were quick enough to stem the tide with physical overrides, else it was possible that more than half the city could have been compromised.

  The bodies that had been flung outside the city had been recovered, as well as those inside. The hordes of stunned guards and other personnel had been rounded up and contained, with many of them still in holding areas. Red Team had taken over several hotels and turned them into comfortable prisons in order to keep them detained while shuffling through them looking for both traitors and trustworthy individuals that they could assimilate into their makeshift government to get the city functioning again.

  The running patrol had been unnecessary, but after three weeks of no training Drake and the rest of Red Team were getting irritated. Retaking the city was their mission and responsibility, but the work they were doing now was administrative, with almost no combat remaining aside from the occasional takedown when Green Team found another operative and they made a run for it. Those didn’t last long, and most didn’t even cause him to break a sweat, so both he and the other members of his team needed to do something physical, hence the running patrols, which helped to keep the citizens in check simply by seeing the Archons in person…not to mention how fast they were moving in full armor.

  Drake finished his patrol at the base of the Governor’s complex, which appeared as a tall ‘building’ inside the city structure. There was a wide promenade/street that rose up several dozen stories with enclosed crosswalks jutting out across the gap at numerous points, but above that was a solid ceiling that was the underside of multiple residential levels. The architecture reminded one of a conventional airborne city, though it was only illusion, for the actual structure was really one gigantic complex.