Star Force: Integration (SF2) Read online

  The second part of the day’s challenge was the team run, again with unlimited tries confined to a 1 hour block. What points they’d lost in the individual challenge they needed to make up here, and based off their practice runs yesterday, they figured they should be able to beat both the 0s and 1s by at least 10 seconds, which would be a huge swing in points if they could pull it off.

  “Ready?” Jason asked everyone as they stood on the start line. He received nine curt nods, then depressed the start button with a tone sounding in sync, informing the others that the challenge had begun.

  As practiced, Dan and Brian sprinted out into the lead with the long, loping steps that proved most effective in the 1/3 gravity. They came to the first obstacle, a gauntlet tunnel, staying side by side and locking arms as multiple dodge ball launchers pelted them from both sides. Using each other as leverage, they managed to stay on their feet and make good time while providing a distraction to the turrets.

  With them playing decoy, Emily, Megan and Kip slipped through in single file behind them, having to fend off only a few balls flung their way coming from behind, which when they hit only propelled them forward even more, though askew. Without having to worry about getting hit from the front, thanks to their blockers, they were able to anticipate the hits and keep their momentum throughout the 45 meter gauntlet.

  When they exited that section the course took an abrupt left turn into a monkey bar horizontal ladder over a disqualification pad. Emily took to it first and quickly made her way across, double swinging the bars thanks to the lesser gravity and her lighter frame, smallest of all the 2s but with just as much length of limbs as the rest of them. She dropped down on the far side several meters ahead of Dan and took off to obstacle three, leaving the others behind.

  The balance beam came next, and required her to walk across a 10cm wide beam for 20 meters while being targeted by two slow firing turrets, one on each side that fired randomly, never letting you know from which direction or at what time you would be shot at. With that unpredictability, it was difficult to reposition your weight to deflect a hit, and usually resulted in the trainee being knocked off onto the disqualification pad below…and in the team run, one person’s disqualification meant a points deduction at the end, which none of the teams could afford.

  Emily got to the beam early, with several seconds lead over her teammates, and had a few options available when crossing. Some previous successful attempts had been to crawl across, keeping handholds on the beam so that the balls wouldn’t knock you off. It was slow, but effective for the ones that kept falling off.

  Another tactic was to walk slowly and try and bat at the balls coming your way, absorbing the impact on the arms like shock absorbers and keeping them off your torso. The third and most popular method was to just charge ahead, jumping out and trying to leapfrog your way across, hoping to not get hit at all. Most of the time this technique failed, but when it didn’t it provided the quickest method of crossing.

  They couldn’t gamble with the team run however, given that they needed everyone across and statistically speaking it was likely that at least a couple would go down if they attacked the obstacle in that fashion.

  When Emily reached the beam she didn’t hesitate, they’d planned out each obstacle beforehand and she immediately leapt into what looked like a long jump attempt, flying through the air and landing on the center of the beam as a ball pelted her in the back, tipping her over to the right.

  Fortunately she’d already been collapsing down on top of the beam by design, so the impact didn’t knock her off. It spun her about as she grasped the beam like a monkey and swung about underneath, then crawled inverted almost all the way to the end, continually getting shot at by the turrets and swaying back and forth with each hit, but her crossed legs and arms held firm and the balls couldn’t dislodge her.

  Barely two meters from the end she held position and took the hits, providing a distraction for the turrets as Dan quickly walked across the beam, stepping over her legs and arms and jumping for the platform at the end, drawing one shot from a turret that came too late. Now that he was in the safe zone, the turrets rotated back to pick up the next closest target…which was Emily still hanging underneath. They hit her again, swaying her back and forth, as Megan made her way across uncontested.

  With the turrets distracted, the rest of the team made good time getting across with no one falling. When Randy passed over her, she knew he was the last and it was time for her to crawl back up on top of the beam. Keeping an iron grip, she continued to get hit by the annoying red balls as she swung back up and walked on her knees over the last two meters. When she’d gotten to her feet in the safe zone the others were already out of sight around the next corner on the wall climb, all going according to plan…

  By the time the group reached the pillars they were slightly ahead of pace, Jason guessed, based on the fact that Emily was in the rear but had already caught up and passed Megan and Randy over the wall jumps. Usually she lagged behind and caught up on the pillars, being the best on that particular section, but she arrived 8th in line just as Dan lifted Brian up on his shoulders in the safe zone on the far side.

  Brian held his hands up in front of the turret, messing with the motion trackers and blocking any balls being shot out, causing Dan some grief trying to balance the two of them in the low gravity, but thanks to ample practice the other day they’d gotten the ‘cheat’ tactic worked out, and effectively cut off one of the two turrets from the ‘kill zone.’

  Ivan and Jack came next, dodging the one active turret carefully until they crossed into the safe zone with Ivan drawing most of the shots. Jack got across almost totally free, but had to dodge a couple on the last few steps. Once he was in the clear he gave Ivan a boost and they blocked the second turret, freeing up the pillars for their less agile teammates.

  That meant Paul and the others who’d had the most trouble with this obstacle…but now that there were no longer any balls flinging their way they didn’t have to zigzag at all and took a straight line through the tiny pillars, crossing the whole thing in a handful of seconds. Megan was the first to make it across and she immediately hurdled the low wall and moved on to the final jump, wanting to clear it early to avoid a bottleneck of bodies that would cost them precious seconds.

  The others made a single file line across the center of the pillars, save for Emily, who literally danced around the outside of the slowpokes and slipped by Dan’s legs while Randy came across, saving the group another 1.5 to 2 seconds.

  The blockers disengaged as soon as their teammates were past and caught up to the others just as Kip landed on the far side of the long jump area in the final safe zone. Before he even landed and the turrets could readjust their aim, Paul took off and did his wall hop double jump, grabbing a hold of Megan’s outstretched hand as she pulled him into the safe zone and out of the way of Jason who was jumping straight through the middle a split second behind his teammate.

  He took a hit to the midsection, but his momentum was enough to carry him through, though he landed in a heap on the edge, with Kip hauling him out of the way of the others.

  Ivan and Jack came next, simultaneously jumping to save time with Randy jumping a second behind them. Aside from Paul he was the worst jumper in the group and the team needed to distract the turrets as much as possible so he could make it across, given that he hadn’t perfected Paul’s wall hop.

  He barely made it across, even without getting hit, but an outstretched Megan quickly grabbed him before he even made the safe zone as she was supported out over the disqualification pad by Kip’s firm grip on her waist. She yanked Randy into the clear and he ran on down to the finish line where the others were waiting.

  Dan and Brian came next, simultaneously jumping with Megan and Kip each waiting to help them across if they got hit askew. Brian did, but Kip grabbed his foot before it could dip down and hit the red pad centimeters before the end and tugged his teammate into the safe zone, where he la
nded on his face, but without a disqualification. He quickly got to his feet and ran for the finish with the others as Emily easily leaped across last with distance to spare.

  She got hit twice, but it didn’t matter. She came down on a knee, then loped her way to the finish button and slapped it down quickly, looking up at their time.

  1:33.4

  Jason let out a cheer, which was quickly echoed by the others. That was a good 3 seconds faster than any of their training runs, and the best by far over the 0s’ 1:52.9 and the 1s’ 2:12.8…it was even under Randy’s individual time from the first day.

  “You think that’s enough?” Megan asked the group.

  “It’ll be close,” Paul commented, referring to the amount of points they would gain on the 0s.

  “Should we go again?” Emily asked. “We’ve still got plenty of time.”

  “Not sure we’ll do better than that, but yeah,” Jason said. “Let’s get as much as we can here, or we might regret it later.”

  “Agreed,” Randy said, nodding. “We’ve got another ten runs easy to experiment with. Let’s see if we can tweak the order a bit, Kip was holding us up on the monkey bars.”

  “Yeah, let me switch with Jason at the start,” Kip agreed.

  “Alright,” Jason said, pointing over to the nearby start area. “Let’s get to it.”

  9

  In the end their extra efforts paid off in terms of a 1.2 second reduction and a 4 point increase for the challenge, leaving them 17 points ahead of the 0s in cumulative total and moving them up to 2nd rank out of all ten training groups. They were still over 600 points behind the 7s, but they were putting up some good scores that the lead team would be hard pressed to match later on.

  The following day Paul and the others moved outward on the discs and went through similar challenges with 2/3 gravity, with Paul finally finding his feet. Moving about seemed easy to him, now that he didn’t have such a long hangtime and his legs functioned more like normal. In fact Paul rose to the top of the individual charts, both for his team and the overall list, telling the others it felt just like the Matrix and wondering why they weren’t doing as well as him.

  When they progressed through the second day of testing, his skill with the 2/3 gravity held and he cemented his top spot, putting up an obstacle course run a good 7.3 seconds faster than anyone else and earning some much desired gains in the individual cumulative scores, and while his position of 13th didn’t change, the gaps did, climbing him up relative to the others.

  The odd thing about both the team scores and the individual ones was that no one was dominate at everything. Star Force’s training was wide and varied, and the trainees were learning the value of knowing where their strengths and weaknesses lie, and using their teammates’ attributes to cover or enhance their own. Even though Paul gained a few points on the others in the latest round of challenges, there was no guarantee that would continue to the next, and as such both he and the others sought out any opportunity to suck up additional points.

  The final third of the mission involved high gravity training on the outer levels of the discs with a maximum of 1.2 gravity on level 1. Here the obstacle courses took on new challenges as the superhuman leaps of the low gravity disappeared and became backbreaking just to execute a normal hop over a low wall. Everything felt slow and heavy, like you were wearing a weighted vest.

  In addition to the obstacle courses, there was also a second track in the station, in addition to the one at normal gravity, that ran the entire circumference of one of the discs. Paul and the others were given two days to get accustomed to ‘running heavy’ before they were timed in a mile run going with the direction of rotation, meaning the faster they went, the slightly greater gravity pull they would have to fight.

  Like Paul, several of the 2s had been in track and were accustomed to training runs ranging from easy jogs, to long runs, to medium distance/medium paced tempo runs, up to interval workouts that literally left your legs screaming in protest…but running in high gravity was something completely new altogether.

  They all had trouble at first, given that their step timing was off. By the second day they’d adjusted somewhat, but it was clear to Paul that what running efficiency they’d gained during their routine fitness workouts in Atlantis had completely vanished with the altered movements needed in the higher gravity, slowing both him and the others down considerably.

  His first practice mile came in at a 6:22, with Randy bringing up the back end with a pathetic 7:56. Emily, surprisingly, had the quickest time at 5:54, which Paul suspected had something to do with her lighter frame. All of them were rail thin by now, but her build put her a good 15lbs lighter than their group average all the way down at 117lbs, which considering she stood 6’1’’ made her appear toothpick thin. Paul, however, knew not to be deceived by her appearance…the girl had a nasty uppercut and held even with him in sparring matches, demonstrating a muscular strength that her frame didn’t show.

  She’d originally been a tennis pro from one of the European countries, Paul couldn’t remember which, and it made him more than a little embarrassed as a runner to be beat by someone outside his sport. Fortunately for his ego his body eventually rebalanced itself enough to regain some of his coordination, with his time dipping down on the last testing run to a 5:31, but still more than a minute slower than his best normal gravity mile that he’d run in Atlantis.

  Emily improved as well, down a few seconds to 5:49, as well as the others with the top time going to Brian at 5:27 within the 2s, but Kevin from the 1s had run a blazing 5:13 a few weeks ago, one that Paul doubted he could match even if he had a few more days to rework his rhythm.

  Like most challenges, this one reshuffled the points again. The 2s lost 14 to the 0s, but maintained their overall lead by 6 with the 2/3 gravity and high gravity obstacle course scores added in, however the 1s kept top honors in the high gravity, outscoring both teams by 56 points, though to be fair they did have three of the best runners out of the entire trainee class, which some of the trainers had started to refer to as the ‘trailblazers’ as they made preparations to usher in a second 100 person training unit at the end of the year.

  They’d been told that there wouldn’t be any intermixing of the two groups at all…they were even being given separate quarters in Atlantis so that they wouldn’t be crossing paths during downtime. They’d also been given orders not to discuss any of the training challenges with the newbies when they arrived, so as not to give them an unfair advantage.

  Not that Paul or the others would have…they didn’t want them beating any of their established high scores, even though they’d later been informed that due to some of the lessons learned from the trailblazers, the second class’s training regimen would be altered slightly, making direct points comparisons invalid.

  Paul didn’t know if that meant they were going to make it harder or easier on the second group, but he could see some areas where the trainers would want to make alterations after all the problems the 2s, not to mention the other teams, had given them. They’d developed a knack for winning scenarios their own inventive way, using methods the designers hadn’t intended for them. To the trainers’ credit, they never invalidated those scores, but Paul was sure they weren’t going to make the same ‘mistakes’ twice with future trainees.

  Sucks to be them, Paul thought dismissively. He and his team were full steam ahead and weren’t looking back. What the next generation of trainees had to go through was their problem, he and the 2s had their own to deal with.

  One of those problems was the lack of challenge scores to compare with, given that they were the first class to go through them. Like the current mission, not all the teams went through at the same time and those that came last in the rotation, this time being the 9s, would have the advantage of knowing how everyone else did and could train themselves with an eye towards measuring up…whereas the 0s had no clue what was a good score or not, they just had to wing it and hope for the best.


  All the teams were more or less on the same timetable, but none of them were working on the same challenge at the same time, given that they had to share facilities. When one team was on one of the paintball ranges, another would be in the pool swimming laps while another was out on the track or the shooting ranges. The trainers coordinates all sessions so the teams didn’t have to worry about anything above and beyond showing up and working their asses off, leaving only downtime for the teams to hook up and compare notes, so to speak.

  They of course did NOT give each other a heads up to other challenges. That would be cutting their own throats points wise, but they did discuss in detail challenges that both teams had passed, sharing knowledge, tricks, and stories that all around benefited everyone to some extent.

  In some regards they were all on the same side, fighting against the trainers and whatever they would throw at them next, but more than that, over the past six months they’d gelled quickly and efficiently into a team the likes of which Paul had never seen before. They were all friends, with no animosity between them, only competitive fire and a desire to one up the others for brief bragging rights, though down deep they all knew it was really because they wanted to improve, but weren’t above having some fun in the process.

  And while the other teams were brothers in arms, the 2s had become closer than family for Paul, which seemed strange from an academic standpoint…he hadn’t known them nearly as long as his own sister and parents…but they all seemed so alike in mind, body, spirit, and drive that they could well have been clones of one another, allowing them to work together easily, often knowing what the others were thinking without having to ask.

  It also made having discussions easy and free flowing. They were all on the same page, but with different perspectives and experiences that, when aired out, usually resulted in better scores for everyone. They learned and adapted as a group, watched each other’s backs, and genuinely cared for each other, though they never got sappy about it.