Star Force: Origin Series Box Set (5-8) Page 6

  Paul slid around the side of the pool, trying to get some parallax on the source and quickly confirmed it wasn’t a random reflection, but rather a small light on the bottom of the pool hidden underneath the waterfall coming down from the ceiling. Too far to reach down from the edge, Paul hopped back into the pool and, holding his nose, ducked underneath the falling water and felt around the bottom of the pool.

  Where the light was he felt a bump…a soft bump. He pressed down on it and felt a click through the rubbery coating…then a ring of light lit up the wall of the pool a meter away as a hidden panel retracted, revealing an underwater passage.

  Paul looked down it for a few seconds then returned to the surface, caught another breath of air, then ducked back under and began swimming down the tunnel towards a bright light at the end.

  He emerged on the other side in another pool, this one just as shallow but surrounded by bright white ceiling lights, causing him to blink away the excessive light as he coughed some water out of his airways. Paul stood in the pool for a moment to get his bearings, noticing a different geometry to the room.

  It was square rather than round, and fortunately had a standard door at the far end of the rectangle, but otherwise it was completely barren.

  Paul climbed out of the water and dripped his way over to the door, first listening for any activity on the other side. When he heard nothing he cautiously pulled open the latch and peeked through.

  There was nothing to see. Opposite his position was a meter and a half of air then a flat wall.

  Paul poked his head outside and glanced left and right, seeing a narrow hallway in each direction, dead ending in what looked like turns.

  “Hmmn,” he mumbled, stepping into the hall and exploring to the left. Where the hall ended it actually branched out to the right. He backtracked the other direction and found a T-junction leading to other small hallways which also dead ended.

  “Get to the finish,” Paul repeated Wilson’s final instruction. “I’m in a maze,” he deduced, glancing up at the bright white lights in the ceiling. “At least it’s a lighted one.”

  As he stood a small pool of water was beginning to form at his feet, which annoyed him. Why in the world had they needed to dunk him in water to navigate a…

  Paul did a double take at the water near his feet...and the trail of beads heading back to the pool room.

  “Genius,” he declared, heading off through the branching hallways.

  8

  It took Paul over an hour to initially navigate the maze, and to make matters worse the ‘exit’ was actually a locked door that required keycard access. He was lucky enough to have stumbled across the red and yellow keycards during his wanderings, but the door had slots for five cards…meaning he’d had to go back into the claustrophobic labyrinth to hunt down the others.

  The odd thing was, he’d accidentally stumbled across a 6th green keycard stashed in a hidden panel just above eye level. It stood out because of the small grooves, hardly noticeable save for the fact that the rest of the walls were perfectly smooth. The other keycards he had found lying on the ground in obscure dead ends.

  On his way back out he got lost twice, but came across enough of his strategically placed puddles to find his way again and ended up back at the metallic door with a pocketful of keycards which he placed into their color coded slots next to the red and yellow. Once he had all five in place…nothing happened.

  Mildly frustrated Paul glanced around, looking for a slot for the green card, but couldn’t find any…and he really hoped it wasn’t somewhere back in the maze.

  Paul checked his watch…he was already 3 hours into this challenge, making it the longest by far, and if he had to go back looking again it was going to take a lot longer…and he was starting to develop a need to pee.

  He looked back at the five keycard slots placed in a circle, or more accurately a pentagonal ring in the center of the door. Each slot was colored and he’d matched them all up correctly, so what was the problem?

  Experimenting for a moment rather than start wandering the maze again searching for a possibly phantom green slot, Paul pulled out the red and inserted the green in its slot. Still, nothing happened.

  He repeated the process with the other four, then started mixing and matching colors, hoping maybe they were decoys…but then he tossed that thought away quickly enough. The colors were there for a reason. He pulled them all out and stared at the door and slots for several minutes before making another attempt.

  “Sequencing?” he wondered aloud, starting with the top red and working clockwise around to finish with the blue.

  No luck, so he tried counterclockwise, also without success.

  “Think, Paul. There’s some puzzle here. Figure it out,” he lectured himself as his frustration grew. He stared down at the green keycard in his hand, not knowing what to make of it. Maybe one of the colors was a red herring.

  “Alphabetical,” he said, starting to try every random thing that popped into his head. He was starting to feel like he was in a video game, stuck on a level he couldn’t understand…but he didn’t have the option of restarting another day with a fresh head. He had to solve this now or be stuck in here for…however long this took. Now he understood why Wilson had said they only get one shot at this. It was one shot that they couldn’t back out of if they tried, and failure meant it continued on instead of ending.

  A bit cruel, but at least Paul didn’t have to worry about failing anymore. If he didn’t succeed his present situation would remain the same, so technically there was nowhere to go except up…though his bladder did add another element to the equation, and he really didn’t want to have to pee on the floor, though that was a last ditch option if all else failed.

  Starting with the blue keycard, he inserted each one in sequence until he ended with the yellow, but nothing happened, so he revered the order, not expecting any different results. He wasn’t disappointed.

  Should he have inserted the green somewhere? That stupid card was making this whole thing a lot harder.

  The next idea he had was inserting them by spectral alignment, starting with red and working up to purple, but that didn’t work either. He tried the reverse just to eliminate possibilities at this point and was shocked when the door suddenly retracted up into the ceiling.

  Paul let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding and looked inside. There was a small room with another three doors at opposite sides of the rectangle that looked like the inside of an ice cube. The walls were hazy clear and rough, as if they had been hewn from a glacier, with a slight bluish/green hint to the otherwise pure white coloration.

  Palming the green keycard Paul walked inside and looked to see which door or doors it fitted into when the large door behind him dropped back down from the ceiling and closed off his access to the maze. He walked back up to it to see if it was motion sensitive, but the door didn’t budge and there were no keycard slots on this side to open it with.

  “Forward it is,” he said, walking up to the door on his right. There was no keycard slot on this one either, but there was a small button cleverly hidden in the rough ‘ice’ of the wall. It opened the door without any mental wrangling to reveal a small pantry containing water bottles, ration bars, and some basic equipment all displayed on tiny hooks and hoists. At the bottom was a waist-high cabinet that contained various sized uniform pouches and a selection of matching shoes.

  Paul couldn’t help but smile. “That’s better, but it looks like I’m going to be in here for a while.”

  Before he stripped out of his soggy clothes he checked the other doors. To his immediate right was a small circular staircase leading upward, which he didn’t follow, afraid of the doors locking behind him again. When he checked the third door he found a small restroom.

  “Yeah, this is going to be a long challenge,” he said, gratefully relieving himself before grabbing one of the uniform pouches and pulling the tiny sheet of flexible fabric out. It took him two
minutes to wiggle into the thing, but he was used to the process by now and got all the seams and pads settled into place in short order. Once on him, the material felt like a second skin, made to seem all the more comfortable by the soggy clothes he was ditching.

  He rung out his socks thoroughly, but like his underwear the synthetic material dissipated the water quickly enough to be mostly dry after a minute’s work. He slipped back on the ankle cuppers then selected his shoe size from those available. Glad to be free of the casual wear, Paul stood up and stretched out his muscles and joints, flipping through a back bend that he’d worked a year to master and landed on his feet, feeling ready for whatever lay ahead…which was probably some form of combat.

  Though there were no weapons present in the pantry, there was a utility belt and an assortment of gadgets, including a dart-pen, safety glasses, and several vials marked as F-02. From the coding he knew that they held the destunning serum that they used on a regular basis…which definitely signaled combat.

  Then again, he could hardly destun himself, could he? Did that meant there were others in here with him, or could he avoid stun shots by injecting himself prior to getting hit? Regardless, he pocketed all the vials along with a couple of extra ration bars and the green keycard that he was still carrying. He downed a bottle of water and two bars then hit the staircase, running up it quickly but quietly, unsure of what waited for him at the top.

  9

  The staircase led up three or four stories, tightly confined within a tube-like shaft until it ended on a small platform about the size of an elevator car with a narrow doorway leading out into an urban cityscape.

  He was still indoors, obviously, but there was a raised walkway that the staircase exit opened onto that ran a great distance both left and right, with the immediate area obscured by large concrete buckets rising up in tiers, the top of which held potted trees several meters over his head, but there was no ceiling to the walkway, it expanded up into a vast open air chamber reminiscent of a gigantic amusement park or mall, both by the futuristic design aesthetic as well as the sounds of running water from either a fountain or waterfall somewhere in the area.

  Paul opted to head to his right and quickly came to a roundabout on the walkway with a large statue rising up from the center, the base of which was so tall that it formed a wall of its own that obscured the view of the other side.

  In between the statue and his entrance point were two ‘shops’ along the outside of the walkway. Before continuing on he doubled back and checked to see what was inside, finding one locked and one open. Cautiously he pulled open the door and walked inside, with the interior lighting immediately flicking on.

  It looked like a retail store, but with no merchandise present. The front side of the shop was wall to wall glass windows, double thick with space for highlighted displays. Now that the lights were on he could see that one of them was actually a floor to ceiling aquarium, but without any fish in it.

  Most of the shop was empty floor space, but there was a solid counter and what looked like a back room, both of which Paul checked. He found nothing in the counter’s many drawers, but did find a hidden staircase in the back room, identical to the one he can came up on, suggesting that he might not be alone here after all.

  Suddenly Paul dropped to the ground out of reflex, turning about to face the entryway as he heard the distinctive sound of a paintball turret firing repeatedly.

  He eased back up from his crouch as he realized it was quite distant, but up until now he hadn’t heard a single sound other than water since he began the final challenge so the abrupt change momentarily spooked him.

  Slipping into combat mode, Paul backtracked to the doorway and listened intently, trying to determine which direction the sound was coming from. He guessed somewhere off to his left just before it cut out, so he headed in that direction, passing by several more shops until the walkway ended in a T-junction. To the right and down into the valley-like center of the massive room were a wide set of stairs, while off to the left the hallway extended back at a right angle. In the middle of it all was an open courtyard with blue paint splatters against the shop windows on the opposite side of the ‘T.’

  Sensing danger, Paul pushed himself up against the shop windows on his left and slowly approached the intersection, getting a better look at what was down the stairs. In the distance he spied a turret, but it was set at the wrong position to shoot him, more likely to target the lower walkway once one got down the stairs. Still, he doubted the stairs themselves would be completely uncovered, so he shied back along the shop, deciding not to explore in that direction just yet.

  Paul crossed over to the concrete retaining wall and began to creep back towards the intersection so he could get a sweeping look the other way, and when he did he spotted a pair of feet just around the bend. As he moved up to the corner he saw it was one of his fellow trainees lying on the ground splattered with paint.

  He couldn’t see any turrets in the vicinity, but that didn’t mean they weren’t concealed, so he had to be sneaky about this.

  Popping his head out for a split second he glanced down the stairs, happy to see no turrets sprouting from the wall or hear any shots coming his way. He repeated the process, this time looking up and finding none nearby. He chanced a step out and back behind cover, hoping to draw fire from wherever the turret was, but there wasn’t so much as a whisper whine of servos in response. Confused but determined, Paul worked his way around the corner, hugging the windows tightly until he was less than two meters away from his downed teammate and still there were no stingers flying his way.

  In a low crouch Paul tried the door handle of the closest shop, finding it was unlocked. For the moment he left the body where it was and scouted out the inside. Same empty look, but a different counter and no back room. Satisfied, Paul headed back out the door and cautiously crawled out into the middle of the hallway until he got to the body.

  Rolling the crumpled form over on its back he saw that it was Rex, and he had at least four blue stinger hits on his chest.

  Paul grabbed an arm and dragged him off the street, not worrying about touching any of the still wet paint. The stun charge would have already bled out of it by now, remaining no more than a second or two after impact...enough to splatter and ricochet, but not enough to booby-trap a body or scenery after the fact.

  Once he got Rex inside the shop he pulled him back behind the counter for some cover. He opened one of the compartments on his utility belt and pulled out the dart pen as he noticed something on a rack inside the counter. Curious he stepped over his unconscious friend and pulled out a small box, inside of which was a small paintball pistol and two clips.

  “Finally,” he said with relief, inserting the first clip so the stingers could begin charging. He slipped the second into a specialized expandable pouch on the back of his belt that made it handy for quick reloads. Altogether he had probably 40 shots, guessing at the size of the clip. It was smaller than they normally used, as was the pistol, but at least it would give him a way to deactivate the turrets if he came across one he couldn’t sneak around.

  Turning his attention back to Rex, he loaded up the dart pen with an F-02 vial and gave him the first of the six injections it carried, then stashed it back into its pouch as Rex shook himself awake, more than a bit disoriented.

  “Relax, you’re safe,” Paul said quickly, placing a hand on his chest to steady him.

  “Is it over?” he asked, half sitting up.

  “Hardly. Looks like we’re in this until we win. What got you?”

  “Rover,” Rex said, blinking away the last bits of grogginess. “New model. Whisper quiet, concealed treads. I turned around and it was right behind me.” He spied the pistol in Paul’s hand. “Any more of those lying around?”

  “Hope so, this is the first I’ve found,” he said, offering his hand and pulling Rex to his feet.

  “Have you found any of the others?”

  “You’re the first I’v
e come across, but I did hear sounds of a firefight a moment ago, so there’s definitely someone else out there,” he said as a slight whirring sound prompted them both to stop talking and scoot down behind the counter just as a rover passed into view through the windows.

  Paul noted the design changes. Now basically a geometric shape, the treads or wheels were completely covered by the side panels with less than half an inch gap at the bottom. Furthermore, the top turret was now concealed instead the cupola, which was slanted upward like a thick pyramid with the flat cap being able to swivel about.

  But most important of all…there was no target sphere on top for them to deactivate it with, meaning it was impervious to their stingers.

  “Now that’s just cheating,” Paul said as it drove on past.

  “How much do you want to bet they made them heavier too so we can’t flip them?”

  Paul considered that. “But, they do now have a blind spot on top.”

  Rex cracked a smile. “You want to ride one?”

  “Not really, but if they’d been smart they would have gave it a spherical top with a 180 degree dorsal rotation.”

  “If the stingers won’t take them out, why give us the weapons?” Rex asked.

  “I saw a stationary turret down past those stairs,” he said, pointing through the wall on their right, “and it had a target sphere on top. Must just be the rovers that they made immune.”

  “Temporary?”

  “Haven’t found out yet. Didn’t find this until I dragged you in here,” he told him, hefting the pistol in his left hand for emphasis.

  “How long have I been out?”

  “Don’t know, I just got here a few minutes ago. How much of the area did you scout?”