Star Force: Origin Series Box Set (25-28)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  “Press on or tidy up?” Nathan asked.

  “These guys are good at covering their tracks, so let’s probe as far as we can while we’ve got them off guard.”

  “I’m down with that,” Assad said, reattaching his pistol to his armor rack and hopping onto one of the skiffs. Nathan followed him, leaving David on the dock until the other Archon got the engine running, then Green Team’s leader hopped on the back of the four person transport as it pulled out and around the end and slowly motored off down the tunnel under the glare of four bright spotlights on the arch overtop the skiff.

  A few moments later the dock area was silent, exposed to the surface via the lift and the staircase, with numerous unconscious bodies up top and below for any 4 am maintenance worker or security guard to stumble across.

  6

  The underground waterway was mostly natural, but David could see bits here and there where it’d been hollowed out wide enough to allow for easier passage. Multiple loops and switchbacks made their route seem erratic, but as they progressed the Archon’s armor created/updated their battlemap with an exact record of their travels, which was showing a gradual progression to the southwest.

  There were also sporadic hollowed-out turnarounds where opposing traffic could slide off to let others pass by, suggesting that this tunnel saw a fair amount of traffic, yet the Archons came across none as they zigzagged their way through the claustrophobic tunnel for more than 2 hours. Eventually the rough rock ceiling smoothed out into concrete and they found themselves in a spur with four opposing tunnels and an exit on the right side that led to a large underground lagoon.

  Assad flipped the lights off and brought the motor down to a minimum crawl as they looked out across the dozens of small watercraft docked against a very manmade structure. Gone was the natural rock, with the ceiling being comprised of flat, solid lines and the perimeter of the loading area lit by small lights in what appeared to be standby mode for the larger ones above that were currently deactivated.

  “Bring us in,” David said over the comm, and Assad trolled them out of the spur and across the lagoon.

  “Two doors,” Nathan noted as they approached. “No guards.”

  “You take right,” he said, pulling out his stun stick and flicking it on. David’s stun gun was out of shots and hanging uselessly on his armor next to another, along with a stun rifle that held 52 rounds, but that was the full extent of his ammunition. The stun stick had hundreds of hits in it, making it by far his most useful weapon…if they were fighting in close.

  “Neutralize tangos on contact,” he continued as the skiff nudged up against the dock and he and Nathan jumped up and off onto a clear section of the platform. “Keep them off the comms.”

  Nathan ran across to the rightmost doorway and ducked inside, wielding his stun stick in his left hand and a stun gun in his right. His door was only man-sized while the other was built wide for cargo passage. Befitting its smaller nature, inside and to the right he found another circular staircase that led up, which he took to two steps at a time.

  Meanwhile David headed for the cargo door, pausing long enough at the entrance for a look inside and so Assad could catch up behind him. There was a short tunnel that connected to a cross hallway with a large lift on the opposite side. He signaled for Assad to head right down the tunnel while he took left and the Archons split.

  David immediately came up on a small room with a man inside to his left, prompting him to skid to a halt and jump inside, jabbing the man into unconsciousness before he could properly react. A quick look around the room suggested that it was a quartermaster’s station, inside of which there was a schematic of the cargo areas and the transport lines coming from nearby production areas.

  The facility was huge, and David guessed there was probably more to it than was showing here, given that there weren’t any residential or service areas marked, just industrial ones. Not wanting to linger he ran back outside and continued down the hallway just as a loud and ominous alarm sounded.

  “Sorry guys,” Nathan said amidst the sound of plasma fire. “That was me. Ran into a nest of them…and more are pouring out from everywhere, but not all are armed.”

  “Take them all down,” David said as a couple of people popped out of nearby rooms in front of him. He sprinted ahead and wacked one across the forehead with a halfhearted tap of his stun stick as he passed by, then he chased the other back into the room she’d come out of and poked her in the thigh as she panickly jumped across a table trying to get out of reach.

  “Security teams coming down from above,” Assad reported. “All with plasma pistols and shields.”

  David ran down the hallway and into one of the cargo areas, then sprinted down the side wall until he came to a door that the schematic had said led into a factory area. As soon as he was inside he ran into workers moving about everywhere, some running for cover and others not knowing where to go or what to do.

  The Archon took after them indiscriminately, slapping and poking them with his stun stick as rapidly as possible and littering the floor with bodies as he worked his way around the largely mechanized assembly line that appeared to be making rifles. Of what kind David didn’t know, for there were so many people running about that he had his hands full containing and stunning them all.

  When he got through most of them he began tracking down the fleers, following them into other compartments until a security detail finally got to him and they had a brief shootout. David pulled out his stun rifle and went to work on the soldiers, knowing better than to let multiple plasma-wielding shooters take him on while he tried to close to melee range. He had to time his shots well to get them past the guards’ shields, but the spraying effect of the energy weapons usually hit some part of their bodies, disabling them enough for a second shot to down them completely.

  David took the last of them hand to hand, saving precious stun ammo, and wacked him with his stun stick across the face. The Archon let him fall and kicked aside another shield so he could poke the man laying underneath, remembering that he’d only got a partial hit in on him. When the shield moved to the side a waiting pistol underneath it fired up at David’s silver armor, but it moved aside quick enough that the blue plasma streak hit the ceiling, then the Archon’s stun stick came in and finished off the devious guard.

  “Report?” David asked as he poked a few more to make sure they were down.

  “I’m in…their security station,” Nathan said. “I’ll have it locked down in a minute or so.”

  “Rounding up strays,” Assad added. “There’s a lot of people down here.”

  “Have you seen where the strays are headed?” David asked, heading back out into the halls.

  “Everywhere and nowhere. I haven’t come across any other exits aside from the dock.”

  “Me neither, but let’s not assume. Fill out the battlemap as soon as possible.”

  “Already working on it,” Assad confirmed.

  David ducked into another processing area, stunning five more personnel that were taking cover behind various pieces of equipment before having to run down 3 more that tried to escape. Several of them pleaded with him to spare them, but he wasn’t in a mood for conversation just yet, nor was he going to take the time to tell them that he was only using stun weapons…so for the time being he went around taking down anyone he saw like some villain out of a horror movie. His victims would have time to sort out what happened later, when they woke up and realized they were still alive.

  To date no other entity, corporate or national, had been able to duplicate Star Force’s stun technology…nor had they offered it up for sale. There had been some discussion on that policy within the Star Force ranks, but it had been decided to keep the technology in-house rather than let it out to the public in the hopes that the bad guys would try stunning some of their victims rather than outright shooting them.

  That said, attempts had been made to create stun weapons independent of Star Force…all of which had fai
led. The energy used wasn’t part of the electromagnetic spectrum, thus it was off the scientific radar of the rest of the planet. Star Force had learned of it from the pyramid database, along with a myriad of other types of energies, and that also was something they weren’t keen on sharing with the public. Star Force had mastered the basic stun energy early on and had been tinkering with it for nearly 400 years, making their stun stick/sword and stinger technology extremely efficient, as well as providing directed energy stun weapons for building security…ones that could run directly off a power grid.

  David had been part of a Green Team mission 160 years ago to recover a stolen stun stick from an illicit research facility that had been organized and funded by the Japanese, and though they’d had possession of the item for several months David’s team had recovered it, or rather its disassembled components, along with the data the researchers had been collecting…only to discover they couldn’t make anything out of it, given that it functioned in a field of science that the rest of the planet hadn’t discovered yet.

  There were dozens of other attempts to steal and replicate Star Force weaponry, almost always taken from building security forces in spaceports or starports. Every time it happened Star Force would track them down and make a mess of things enough to get the point across that they weren’t going to tolerate being stolen from. That, along with additional penalties handed down to the nations responsible had led to them backing off and surreptitiously using third parties to try and gleam some of Star Force’s weapons technology for their own uses…but they had to do so covering their tracks, for more often than not Star Force found out anyway and put the economic smackdown on those involved.

  Nowadays the attempts still occurred, but were always by individuals or small organizations…ones that had more to gain than they had to lose, and ones that were frankly stupid enough to try. The national intelligence divisions from Earth and the various colonies around the Solar System were well aware of the tendency of unannounced, unsanctioned, and unwelcome Archon strike teams popping up randomly inside their territory to chase down what Davis often referred to as ‘mischief’ or ‘misbehavior,’ but they didn’t publically protest, because they almost always had their hands dirty and Davis had no qualms about exposing them publically if they tried to put diplomatic pressure on him.

  So there was a fragile understanding that teams like David’s were going to violate territorial borders on a whim, and in exchange Star Force was going to keep those missions quiet…often with the national authorities coming in after the fact to clean up a criminal element that they also wanted brought down. Still, no Archon team had ever been discovered, save for after the fact, and David knew they always had to stay a step ahead of the local authorities and militaries in order to keep themselves safe, for a lot of the nations’ understanding hinged on their inability to stop Star Force, and give them the upper hand, even once, and you’d probably see that understanding quickly redefined.

  So as David and the others went around the incredibly large subterranean base rendering the security and workers unconscious he began to wonder what the next step was going to be. In the past they’d had tech to recover, or could call in a specialized team to make a quick sweep of a location or confiscate computers and such…but if the water tunnels were the only way in and out they were going to have to do whatever it was David decided on their own.

  Davis had wanted the base discovered and exposed, but he hadn’t stated any objectives beyond that…though he had said he thought this was an extensive organization, which meant more than just this one base of operations. That then was their mission objective, because The Silence was undoubtedly going to shut down this operation now that their cover had been blown. Green Team needed to give the Director threads to follow in order to rout out this organization.

  As David made his way through the facility he monitored the others on his battlemap, seeing more and more floors being added to the updating schematic until everything had been filled in. There were no exits leading up from the upper portion of the base, no other tunnels dug through the rock, just the waterways, though there was no way of knowing where the others led unless they could find a schematic inside the base.

  “Damn it,” Assad said over the comm. “Computer terminal’s been wiped. It’s completely dead. Some type of emergency purge function.”

  “Nathan, circle back to the dock. See how many boats got away.”

  “Already been through there once. I counted 2 missing.”

  “Anyone seen any more stragglers?” David asked.

  “Not for a few minutes,” Assad answered as he searched room to room looking for a functioning computer.

  “I’ve got a couple of stunned bad guys in a very nice office,” Nathan reported. “And it looks like one of their laptops is still working.”

  “Hang onto that,” David urged. “Did either of them have a plasma pistol?”

  “One did.”

  “Pull it apart and tell me what you see.”

  Nathan looked around on the floor until he saw the weapon up against the wall where he’d kicked it out of the way underneath a large gator head mounted to a finished wood plank.

  “Standard magnetized barrel,” the Archon said, detaching the pieces much like one of their own weapons would break down into, though the design was different. “Loading chamber, magazine, trigger assembly. Doesn’t appear to be a power pack in the weapon. The barrel must be permanently magnetized inside a sheath.”

  “That’ll eat it out eventually,” David commented as he picked his way through another factory, this one where they were making plasma ammunition shells.

  “I don’t think this one has been fired…ever,” he said, checking the mag. “Full rounds, 10 total.”

  “Disposable barrel?”

  “That’d be my guess. If this is a knockoff of one of our weapons, they sure dumbed down the design. Looks more like they knew how ours worked and mixed the principle with the construction of the heavy models the Americans and Russians use, with the power cell replaced by the rounds.”

  “I’m looking at the ammunition assembly line now,” David said, still on the lookout for roaming personnel. “Weak stuff, but they’re making a lot of it.”

  “Did you take a hit?”

  “Barely scratched the armor. Thermals must be lower than normal. Actually, this looks like a weapon built for flesh.”

  “Soft targets?”

  “That’s the feeling I’m getting,” David said, working his way out of the ammunition factory and into a short connective hallway to another production line.

  “Security?”

  “Civilian maybe…no ballistics either.”

  “These weren’t made to come after us,” Nathan said, reassembling the pistol without the mag inside, which he laid on top of the very ornate desk one of the men was ‘napping’ on, still sitting in his chair.

  “They don’t have a chance against us,” David said unnecessarily. “But there are others they can exert influence on. Davis said they’ve been around for a long time, and having some quiet muscle to throw around at key points in the system where we’re not looking over their shoulder could be useful.”

  “Even more so if they’re packing plasma,” Nathan added, referencing the unanimous national bans on the weapons aside from military applications. Many nations had outlawed firearms entirely, while some still permitted bullet weapons. Star Force protocol banned travelers from carrying firearms through their transit network, save for individuals with passes. On Star Force colonies the general citizenry was forbidden from owning/purchasing/carrying firearms and most bladed weapons, though former security/military members were permitted passes to carry/own Star Force sold weaponry, given that they already had extensive training and experience with the weapons.

  All the personal weapons were itemized and registered with the security division wherever the individual resided, with a lot of individuals carrying stinger pistols out of habit, just in case they came across
trouble or security needed backup. A few non-experienced citizens were also allowed to carry weapons, but only after going through long training programs that most didn’t have the fortitude to make it through. Carrying weapons was a privilege on Star Force facilities, one that had to be earned, and many countries had adopted a similar approach to their laws.

  The Americans had not, but they still outlawed the ownership or production of plasma weapons, which was probably why The Silence had gone to such great lengths to establish this facility, giving them a quiet, secure location to build as many as they wanted, just so long as they could keep feeding the base the raw materials it needed. Then they could ship out the finished weapons via trucks and distribute them across the planet or off…though they’d have to go through non-Star Force transport lines to smuggle the weapons through, unless they were really, really good at it.

  “I’m going to keep searching,” David said, coming into a factory that apparently made the security shields The Silence’s troops were carrying. Several had dumped off the finishing end of the line, apparently before the entire unit had shut down, and David could see a few stacked on top of each other, but hovering in place where they should have touched. He grabbed a couple of them and pushed them together, feeling a slight resistance that indicated they were magnetically active…which he knew was a defense against plasma weapons.

  “Assad, keep nosing around and keep an eye on the docks, we don’t know what else is down those other tunnels. Nathan, wake up one of your guests and start asking questions. And by the way, their shields are magnetized, so maybe they are playing a bigger game here than roughing up some civies.”

  “Will do,” Nathan said, walking over to the desk and pressing his forearm against the bare neck of the man slumped over in his chair and held it there, letting his armor’s stun-neutralizing material slowly suck out the residual energy from the man’s body.

  7