Star Force: Deceit (SF34) Read online

  The medic altered the hologram, pulling up a different patient file while minimizing the current one off to the left. “They were doing a lot of different things with the foodstuff samples you retrieved. The allergens need no trigger. This is a medical scan from three years ago on Titan. The individual developed symptoms, along with three others, on the same day and was attributed to a bad batch of foodstuffs, but no other contaminated products were discovered. It was supposed that the only bad ones were consumed, but I’ve been able to match up the symptoms with the theoretical ones that our Word allergens created in computer models…and it’s a precise match.”

  Jet rubbed his chin. “What kind of damage does it do?”

  “Nothing irreversible, unless you get a very weak individual, in which case there’s a small chance of death. It’s basically tailored food poisoning. Very nasty reaction that passes with time.”

  “And you’re convinced the trigger molecule is completely unrelated?”

  “95% sure, though there are some overlapping possibilities that we need to explore, such as trinary compounds and more complicated interactions.”

  “Do you mind?” Jet asked, pointing at the hologram.

  “Please,” the medic offered, taking a step back.

  Jet accessed the nearby keyboard and went outside Glasir’s medical database and into the master files that got shuffled around from system to system, keeping all Star Force outposts up to date on things they couldn’t get from other locations without considerable delay…such as foodstuff production statistics.

  Jet sifted through several databases until his search came in, then he ran it against several other sets of data, compiling a list and bringing it up in holo in the form of a timeline, pointing at the start of a three year spike.

  “There’s your contaminated foodstuffs, two months from the first entry. Our facilities are too well run to come up with bad batches other than on freakishly rare occasions. There’s a consistent trend of incidents starting three years ago that’s gradually been escalating, but it’s been occurring in multiple systems at multiple locations. It looks like the largest was 21 people on Orion.”

  “That’s minuscule. Probably wouldn’t have drawn regional awareness, let alone interstellar.”

  “There were four other cases in the Sirius System, each with no more than 10 people affected. If you look at any one instance it appears isolated and nothing more than a fluke…but on a whole there’s a pattern of minor incidents, like a shotgun approach. They’re either testing or going for a gradual escalation. They’re certainly patient enough for the latter.”

  “But to what end?”

  “Discrediting Star Force,” Jet said without hesitation. “They’ve been sabotaging industrial, commercial, transit, and other facilities for years. Nothing major as far as casualties, but enough to start making us appear incompetent. One of their major goals appears to be discredit us and pull away some of our public support, so staging food contamination makes perfect sense.”

  The medic frowned, then gestured to the timeline. “Even something this isolated?”

  “Word gets around, and with as much as they were producing here I’d bet they’ve got more disruptions planned. Keep working on that trigger. If we can find the lock it fits into we may be able to preempt them.”

  “One other thing. In one of the samples, a protein bar, we found a biological marker…and by that I mean a substance that is scannable. Eat the bar and it’ll show up on a specially calibrated EM reflection.”

  “What kind of range?”

  “Unlimited, depending on the strength of the transmitter and the sensitivity of the receiver.”

  “Best guess?”

  “You’d have to ask an engineer about that, but I’d say considerably more than a few meters. The reflectivity is far higher than the scanning equipment we use.”

  “Thank you,” Jet said, turning to leave.

  “The more they eat, the more visible they’ll be.”

  “Way ahead of you,” Jet said, flashing him a smile as he headed out of the med bay.

  A day and a half later Jet was back on Tyr along with Lio and Assad. The three Archons had spaced themselves around the city dressed in full armor with Brazilian security teams backing them, courtesy of Costa, as a Star Force transport ship flew in to one of the spaceports and made a slight detour, drifting out over the center of the city and holding position just above the armored exterior. There it sat, beginning to broadcast the specific frequency necessary to generate the sensor reflectivity of the tagged foodstuffs.

  Each of the Archons had a receiver of their own, plus a patch into the transport’s sensors, which had been augmented at the same time as the transmitter by an engineering team on Glasir. As soon as the invisible energy began flowing out Jet got an immediate contact on his sensor pad…along with 14 others spaced around the city, including two very large signals which he guessed were probably depots holding the laced foodstuffs.

  “Let’s go,” he told the security team, picking the closest target to his location, one that was coming in faint. The semi-armored guards followed him in a phalanx as he led them through the city, insuring that no one stopped him and he had access to all restricted areas. As they tracked the target he recognized the fact that it was moving a bit, which suggested that it was a person rather than an inert bar, and he was proved correct when they ended up in a residential area and the personal quarters of a financier.

  Security got him in through the locked door, whereupon they quickly rounded up some four people in the quarters…two parents and two children who were none too pleased to have their evening interrupted.

  “There’s no one else here,” one of the guards told Jet after coming back from a search of the other rooms to the main living area where the foursome had been watching a large vid screen.

  “What’s the meaning of…”

  Jet walked up to the wife and jabbed a finger into her chest just below the neck as he watched his scanner. “This one.”

  Two of the guards walked around behind the woman and gently grabbed her shoulders, escorting her over to the doorway while her husband tried to intervene, but Jet stopped him with a firm hand on his chest.

  “Not you.”

  “What’s going on?” the boy asked.

  “You three stay here,” Jet ordered, pointing to the kids and gently pushing the man down into a chair. “We’re going to have a little chat later, but for now these men are going to stay with you and ask you some questions. I’ll be back in a bit. Answer them truthfully and it will save me some time.”

  With that Jet turned and left the room, leaving two guards behind and trailing another half dozen in his wake.

  Their next stop was also a residential area, but in a different section of the city. This time they found an abandoned set of quarters that the logs indicated hadn’t been inhabited for the past 7 months. Upon closer inspection Jet found a concealed wall panel, inside of which he found a series of empty protein bar wrappers, each with smears of chocolate and crumbs, the sum total of which had enough reflectivity to stand out faintly on his equipment given the huge amount of signal the overhead transport was generating.

  A quick records search indicated that the previous occupant no longer resided in the city, and Jet made a note to add him to Star Force’s detain list once he got back to Glasir.

  His third target was one of the two big ones, inside of which he and the guards got into a brief firefight with the occupants of a small warehouse. Four men were captured, though two of the guards received plasma burns and had to be transferred to one of Tyr’s medical facilities…but more were cycling over to Jet’s entourage to make up for those lost, as well as to give the warehouse a thorough teardown.

  Jet went straight for one crate, inside of which he found boxes of protein bars, all of which were giving a very strong reflection of the signal, making this one of The Word’s distribution centers…though he didn’t know if they were piggybacking onto the normal oper
ations of a legitimate warehouse or running the whole facility.

  The men captured were transferred to the spaceport and held there until the three Archons returned, which would be several hours later. Jet, for his part, rounded up one more individual, this one a retired geologist, then returned to the family he’d initially broken up while the guards escorted the prisoners and warehouse holdings to Star Force dropships on their way up to the moon.

  Jet pulled off his helmet as he motioned to the guards to remain outside the living room and guard the entrance, giving him a personal audience with the husband and two frightened children whose mother he’d taken away.

  “Ira Demora?” Jet asked, reading the debriefing the guards had already completed on a Brazilian datapad. “Channa…and Demarco?”

  “Yes,” Ira, the father, answered from his large chair while the two children sat on the couch so close together they looked like they were stuck at the hips.

  “Time to talk,” Jet said, adding a dark tone to his voice. Even without his helmet his silver armor was incredibly intimidating, but the look in his eyes was even more so.

  “What do you want to know? I answered all of their questions. Why have you taken my wife?”

  Jet walked forward a step and stared down at the man, who shrunk back into the deep cushions. “The protein bars.”

  Recognition and horror flashed through Ira’s eyes, then he quickly tried to hide it. “I don’t know…what, hey!”

  Jet lifted the man out of his seat by the collar of his shirt and stared into his eyes from about a foot away. “Don’t play games. Tell me what happened.”

  The man didn’t answer for what seemed like an eternity, then he finally whispered, so low only Jet could hear. “She’s dead if I do.”

  Jet dropped him into his chair and walked back into the center of the room, halfway between the man and the couch that held his children. “We can do this here or in an interrogation room. Your choice.”

  “Will you promise me…us immunity?” he stammered.

  “What did you do?” Jet countered.

  “New identities too…please.”

  “We can protect you if you cooperate,” Jet said, guessing where this was going enough that he didn’t feel the need to remove a glove and dig for answers. “But I need it all now. The longer you delay the more time they’ll have to get to you.”

  Ira’s eyebrows raised. “You know about them?”

  “Who do you think we just kicked off this moon? Now tell me what’s going on with your wife?”

  “She’s innocent, I swear. They threatened to kill her if I didn’t cooperate. They said she had to eat a specific foodstuff that they’d provide, and that they’d be able to monitor her whereabouts 24/7 through it. If she ever didn’t eat it they’d kill her, and if I didn’t do as they said they’d kill her…so you see, I had to do what they said. I had no choice!”

  Jet glanced at the children. “Is this all of your family?”

  “On Tyr. I have relatives on Mars and Earth.”

  “Have they ever been threatened?”

  “No, just my wife.”

  “How were the bars’ delivered?”

  “A package would come, with some random item in it along with one bar. They only sent one at a time, about every 2 weeks. She had to eat the whole thing.”

  “What did you do for them?”

  “Illegal things,” he said, lowering his head. “My wife had no part in it, nor my children. Only I did.”

  “Does your wife know?”

  “Not the specifics. I wanted to shield her from it all.”

  “What specifically did you do?”

  “Mostly forgeries. Economic transactions, currency transfers. All local stuff…nothing touching Star Force’s systems. I didn’t have any access codes to those. Every now and then they’d come to me with something they wanted done, always at a random time. So long as I complied they let me and my family live in peace.”

  “Why didn’t you report it to security?”

  Ira swallowed hard. “They killed one of my coworkers to make a point. They told me who, then the next day she died in an accident. I knew I couldn’t risk telling anyone.”

  “In return for full disclosure and assisting us with backtracking your forgeries I’ll agree to relocate you and your family, complete with new identities, to a Star Force colony far from here.”

  “If you can guarantee our safety?”

  “I’ll take you somewhere they can’t go,” Jet promised.

  Ira seemed to hesitate, then started bobbing his head.

  “Yes…ok, yes. I agree. How soon can we go? My wife too, I assume?”

  “Your wife will have to be purged of the tracer first, but she’ll go as well. You’ve got 15 minutes to get the four of you packed,” Jet said pointing a finger at the bedrooms. “Leave anything non-essential behind.”

  “Thank you,” Ira said, bolting out of his seat and heading over to his children, though he made sure to keep clear of Jet by a few feet as he passed him by. He grabbed both of their small hands and walked them over to their rooms, whispering to them as they asked him questions, telling them they were about to take a trip.

  Jet put his helmet back on, then walked out to where the guards were waiting. “I need the quickest secure route to the spaceport. The Word may try to take him out in transit if they’re keeping a close watch, so I want clear hallways ahead and behind us. Pull in as many men as you need…so long as you can trust them.”

  “You think there are traitors among us?”

  “Possibly. I’ll accompany the package. You secure the route…and get it done within the next 15 minutes. After that we’re heading out, even if I have to take them off the grid to do it.”

  “I’ll have it done for you in 10, sir.”

  “Good…and don’t call me sir.”

  8

  June 22, 2430

  Alpha Centauri System

  Glasir

  A commercial transport, twice the size of a Dragon-class dropship, descended from orbit fighting Glasir’s deep gravity well enroute to the primary spaceport in the Star Force colony simply designated as ‘City 2.’ It landed slowly, extending numerous skids as it set down in the nitrogen-rich atmosphere on an exterior pad. It was one of many newer models produced by Star Force’s competitors, and was capable of making slow jumps between planets in the same system, forgoing the need to use dropships to load/unload orbital starships that accomplished the same task.

  Star Force, meanwhile, had been sticking with their familiar dropship designs and gradually upgrading their gravity drives, so that now a trip from planet to moon didn’t require a starship, and while it was technically possible to travel between planets, efficient travel would require a larger gravity drive than the craft fielded. Star Force had instead pushed their production of basic, cheap interplanetary transports of far greater size for the dropships to transfer cargo to/from that would remain purely starships.

  That was the more economical route, but for some midlevel haulers and independent operators the one-ship fits all duties platform was preferable, giving Star Force’s competitors a small niche in the market that the mega corporation didn’t care to directly compete in, making the Juniper-class transport setting down in the Star Force spaceport a fairly common sight.

  There wasn’t as much private commerce within Star Force colonies as national or independent ones, but there was still a fair amount of open market trade where the basic necessities were already covered by location production sources. Clan colonies were a bit more reclusive, but they also allowed for people and cargo to come and go as they chose, with many non-Star Force businesses operating out of Star Force worlds, necessitating that the design of the shipyards be able to accept not only Star Force-produced craft, but their competitors’ versions as well…hence the large, open air landing field.

  Given the unlivable atmospheric conditions Glasir’s spaceports were internal, with the atmosphere being kept at bay by energy fields th
at the dropships could pass through, but for the exterior landing pads there were subsurface tunnels running out to small bunkers scattered about like boulders on the otherwise smooth, flat plain…each of which contained an array of modular shield generators that would extend a bubble of normal atmosphere out to mate with the loading doors on the large transports, or in lieu of that extend smaller physical tubes out to connect gangways to the large ships’ airlocks.

  Today the shields were to be used, and once the pilot had set the juniper down in the correct position five tiny arms reached out from the bunker to the hull of the transport forming the outline of the shield conduit, then they powered up starting at the base and extended their shield walls out between them along with a plug to push out the bad atmosphere similar to an aquatics’ shield column.

  The arms glowed blue once the seal had been established, giving the offloading crews a visual indicator that all was safe, then the main cargo door/ramp detached from the ship and pivoted down exposing a cavernous cargo bay…out of which walked a half dozen passengers, followed by a procession of cargo lifters carrying crates.

  The six men dressed in civilian clothes walked into the bunker and ducked out a personnel exit that led them directly to the city interior with only a small security checkpoint to pass through, given that they’d arrived on a non-Star Force flight. Three corporate employees, one personnel division and two security were seated behind a protective clear wall within the hallway, allowing a narrow walkthrough scanning tunnel as the only way past.

  The first man went through cleanly, then began to deal with the dark blue uniformed attendant who required his ID. As he reached into a pocket and brought out his identification card the second man in line came through the scanner and waited in line.

  When the third came through and set off the device, all hell broke loose.

  The first man grabbed the attendant and smashed his head into the table while the second simultaneously jumped up and over the counter, rushing the pair of guards…both of whom were wearing stinger pistols in hip holsters. The Word operative kicked one of the gold/white uniformed men back into the wall while wrenching the other’s arm out away from his body as he reached for his weapon…then the man who’d set off the sensor leaned over the counter where the attendant was pinned down face first and aimed a plasma pistol at the nearest guard, shooting him at a range of 2 meters.