Star Force: Divergent (SF74)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  She kept searching the horizon looking for trouble headed her way, both from ahead and behind her, but nothing showed up during her 34 mile stint that ended with the warning light flaring, indicating that she was almost out of power. She ignored it and got another 2 miles in before the safety mechanisms activated and gradually dropped her down into the trees against her will…which sent her ramming into snow drifts and branches alike for a few seconds before all power went out and the speeder became a dead weight that got jammed on a thick branch before it could punch through the canopy and hit the ground.

  “Worth,” she declared, forcing aside branches and crawling out of the gentle crash. Once free she jumped down to the ground and immediately began running, wanting to put some distance between herself and the speeder just in case it was being tracked. She made it some 12 miles before needing to stop and rest, with her setting up her tent-like building and establishing her defensive perimeter before taking a quick tingle shower, eating, and forcing herself to get to sleep…but this time she kept her armor on, save for her helmet, which she had beside her at arm’s reach along with her pistol.

  She expected to wake up into a mess of trouble, but Jyra knew better than to try to go without sleep, and not setting up camp would be just as bad as being forced to flee and lose it, so knowing that she could rough it in her armor alone if needed, she’d decided to go ahead and make use of the heated interior and luxuries while she had them rather than to go without out of fear. That sort of self-induced punishment would fit this mission perfectly, and she didn’t feel like indulging her own discomfort.

  The armor was cushioned interiorly, but it was by no means the equivalent of her blanket sleeve. That said, she wasn’t going to risk getting caught outside her armor, for it would take too long to put it back on even if she got a perimeter warning first. However the point was moot, because when her alarm woke her it wasn’t the danger version, but rather the time elapse she had programmed. She woke quickly and cleared her head, realizing that she’d gone the entire 7 hours without incident.

  Not trusting her luck, she pulled her helmet on and grabbed her pistol, slipping outside and having a look around before shrugging and heading back inside to relieve herself, melt and store some water, and grab a bite to eat before packing up and heading off again. Through it all she kept wondering what exactly was chasing her and if they were out there actively looking or waiting for her to get to the region where the waypoints were.

  If they wanted to track her it wouldn’t be hard once they stumbled across her trail. The speeder had avoided any footprints from the site of the message/stun bomb, but from the landing site on, the snow was leaving too good of tracks for anyone to miss. Unfortunately that couldn’t be helped unless she wanted to try and lose pursuit by climbing up into the trees and traveling from branch to branch for a bit, but that would take forever and only get her a short distance…and there was no guarantee they wouldn’t pick up her new trail again, so she just decided to move on as she normally would and wait for the first sign of trouble before deciding what to do.

  Knowing that if/when the hunters got to her she was going to be unable to rest, she took short running sessions and longer breaks, almost taunting the enemy to attack her. If they didn’t then she’d get rested up. If they did then she’d get to see who or what was after her well before she got to the waypoints and whatever trouble they represented.

  But nothing came for her, and while she counted that as good fortunate it also worried her. Something was in the works, and Jyra preferred knowing what it was and combating it rather than waiting for it to jump her unexpectedly.

  Three days later, when she was approaching within a few miles of the first of the destination waypoints, knowing that she was going to have to look around a lot since she didn’t have a precise, to the meter, position on them, a buzzing sound began to approach from in front of her…then a moment later she realized it was coming from every direction. Slipping out her pistol into her left hand she stopped running and fell silent, listening and looking for the source.

  She didn’t have to wait long before movement to her left caught her eye and a miniaturized spark drone appeared through the tree trunks…followed by another, and another, and who knew how many more, for Jyra didn’t stay put and sprinted off in a random direction. When she came up on another of the floating devices she fired a plasma lance directly into it and it agreeably dropped to the ground with the single hit. A full Spark-class drone would take a whole lot more damage, but this baby version clearly wasn’t designed the same. She’d never seen this version before but guessed they held weaponry even if they lacked shields and she didn’t want to linger around long enough to find out.

  Unfortunately the four others nearby didn’t let her go so easily, firing off pink stun blasts and catching her in the upper right arm and lower left leg as she ran, though many more shots missed due to her agility and the tree trunks that got in the way. Her form got sloppy, but between the glancing hits, her armor absorbing and then soaking the energy that got through it back out of her body, Jyra managed to stay on her feet and running until her left foot suddenly gave out.

  She tumbled to the ground, with her pack luckily having been latched on otherwise it would have been sheared off. Next thing she knew a metallic little quadruped resembling a gopher ran into her helmet and she heard/felt another stun blast. Thankfully most of her face wasn’t touching the inside of the helmet and the energy was dissipated around her head save for a patch on top. Her forehead went numb, but her arm swung accurately and punched the little thing off her before it could deliver another jolt.

  Jyra climbed to a knee and shot another one of the things before jamming her numb leg into the ground and feeling some sensation return. She knew she hadn’t taken a full hit thanks to her armor, but the slowing effect was bad enough as she limped a single, broken step that turned into a repetitive, ugly stride that gradually smoothed out as she spent most of her pistol’s ammunition on keeping a few of the little machines off her and downing two more of the floating spheres before most of her running gait returned and she was able to get moving at decent speed.

  That kept most of the machines off her, but as she stole glances behind at the sound of the persistent buzz she saw that the mini sparks were keeping pace with her, but apparently not firing until they got a decent shot. Weaving between trees as she was they wouldn’t be able to accomplish that until they were right on top of her, and at the moment there were none of the little critters nipping at her feet, but she didn’t have time to take a thorough look at the ground and assumed they were following as well.

  Forcing herself to try and outrun them, she sprinted as much as her foot would allow and eventually outpaced them as her feeling returned, though the pins and needles only added to her stumbling until she eventually beat them into submission and had her full range of motion back. Knowing that stopping was a really bad idea she ran on, outdistancing her pursuit and hearing the buzz diminish while another source grew louder to her right. Veering away from it she ran and ran, finding more sources that kept following her.

  It couldn’t be heat tracking, for her armor blocked her body’s infrared glow. It could be auditory or motion, but the denseness of the forest should let her get away from that eventually, for with the snow under her feet she wasn’t making much noise and even she couldn’t see the pursuit behind her when she glanced back. It could just be her imagination, but she had the feeling they had an advantage on her and she was quickly running through the available options of how that could have been engineered.

  A spotter up top couldn’t see through the trees most of the time, but it was possible. There could also be tracking devices imbedded in the forest in this region, but that would have meant a whole lot of them out here because they didn’t know exactly where she was going to travel through. Beyond that she didn’t think…

  Jyra had a flash of insight and a sinking feeling in her gut, then used a mix of audible, blink, and menta
l commands to search through her limited HUD options. There was nothing on the map save from the waypoints and she had no connectivity to the planetary battlemap, but that didn’t mean this armor’s operating system was any different from the others.

  Digging into the options on the run was slow going, but she managed it without running into any trees or tripping over rocks as she checked out her hunch.

  “Son of a bitch! I hate you guys…” she said, deactivating her helmet’s transponder that had been sending out a tracking signal. As soon as she did that Jyra took a hard left and ran perpendicular to her previous course, hoping to shake the pursuit behind her. She didn’t stop to try and hide, not sure if the signal had been the only way they’d kept on her scent, but with the other groups around she had to zig and zag quite a bit before she got away from that incessant buzzing.

  But still she didn’t stop, running away from the region she was tasking to travel to and just putting distance between her and the machines before eventually allowing herself to rest and taking up position behind a thick tree while she waited and watched. Jyra stayed there for more than 20 minutes before finally allowing herself to sit down and dig into her HUD options again, pulling up the log and finding that the transponder had been activated days ago at approximately the same time she’d completed the disc.

  “That stupid button turned it on…I did it to myself again!” she said inside the confines of her helmet, then forced herself to stop. Without instructions the only way to figure out what to do was to experiment, and not pressing all the buttons would have led her nowhere. There was a lesson in this, she realized, and it was that there wasn’t always a clear cut solution to follow. No protocol to trust in. Jyra had to take action and deal with the consequences, for staying put and doing nothing was a road to nowhere. When inaction wasn’t an option, well, she was just going to have to play things by ear and dig herself out of whatever trouble she got into.

  Jyra didn’t like that, but this mission was showing her the hard way that the odds of her guessing right and having a ‘clean’ run were laughable. She had to be a scrapper, and mentally kicking her own ass was only going to slow her down. The trainers had set up this ambush and she’d fallen for it, and would probably fall for more to come. If she could avoid a few it would be by prudence and luck, but when she did fall for one she had to act quickly and adapt. Self-recriminations wouldn’t help, and in truth she hadn’t made a misstep, for that would require her having known or been told at some point what to do, and in this situation she was flying completely blind.

  “Live, learn, and move on,” she reminded herself, but for the moment she just pulled her helmet off and sucked air, letting her body cool down what heat wasn’t being dissipated by the internal regulation systems as well as testing a theory as to whether or not the machines could track body heat.

  A few minutes later when the buzzing started again and grew rapidly stronger she had her answer, with Jyra putting her helmet back on again and running off out of range and into a wide circle that eventually put her back on course towards the waypoints and whatever lovely surprises they held for her.

  5

  July 28, 2896

  Epsilon Eridani System

  Corneria

  Jyra dropped the final prize in her scavenger hunt on the tabletop in front of her Archon instructor, her body still covered in her white armor but with her helmet tucked under her right arm and a slight breeze carrying in fresh snowflakes through the open doorway to the forest outside.

  “For the record,” she said with a stern look on her face. “I hate you.”

  “Have some trouble?” San-1299 said innocently.

  “Psshh,” Jyra said, closing her eyes and shaking her head.

  “Learn anything?”

  “Quite a bit, thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said, sitting in a chair within the small modular firebase that had been dropped into this section of forest.

  “How did you know I’d be here if you weren’t monitoring me?” she asked as the slowly falling precipitation outside blew in past her sweat-dampened hair and stuck in a few places.

  “Perimeter scans. I only got here half an hour ago.”

  “Hmmn…are we done, or is this just another waypoint?”

  “This mission is complete, but you are far from done, Trainee.”

  “How’d I do on time compared to the others?”

  “Time isn’t a measurement on this one, simply completion.”

  “But how did I compare?”

  San looked up at her from his sitting position. “18th overall, but if time had been an element I believe the others would have gone faster.”

  “Just curious as to how much trouble they had.”

  “That I can’t tell you. We don’t monitor you, so unless you feel like telling stories, what happened to you out there is something only you know.”

  Jyra leaned forward, setting her helmet on the table and propping her torso up on both extended arms. “So no one was controlling those little droids…or whatever they were?”

  “Automation only.”

  “You’ve programmed them well then.”

  “They’ve been in the works for a while now, first designed to test the trailblazers in a special Trial. Since then we’ve found other uses for them.”

  “You cleaning up the playground or leaving the ones I trashed out there?”

  “The ones that are active will be recovered, along with anything else we spot, but we’re not searching miles of forest to pick up pieces.”

  “Sloppy. And I will note that I found one of your earlier pieces with my boot.”

  “If you didn’t see it that’s your fault. Plenty of rocks out there too.”

  “It was buried in snow,” Jyra said in disgust, but she knew he was right. “It’s gonna get cluttered out there eventually.”

  “If we had hundreds of thousands of trainees coming through it’d be a concern, but so far we’re only through a few hundred and this program is already 22 years old.”

  “Funny. No one’s ever mentioned that before.”

  “You’re training to become the elite of the elite…outside of the Archons anyway. Not even Arc Knights are being given the range and depth of training and responsibility that you are, if you complete the program.”

  “Oh? I thought we were pretty much carbon copies.”

  “Not at all. The Arc Knights have become public knowledge, more or less. The particulars, which you’ll learn about later, they don’t know, but their role is as limited as the Knights. They’re meant to dominate hand to hand combat, and the Arc Knights do so in much greater effect. You’re being trained to fight in a myriad of other ways, often quiet ways, which is why the few Arc Commandos out there now are active ghosts and we intend for it to stay that way. That’s why you get no special armor, whereas the Arc Knights do, color-wise anyway.”

  “So you’re saying they’re just mega bruisers?”

  “They’re smart mega bruisers.”

  “And they didn’t have to go through this kind of bullshit scavenger hunt?”

  “Nope. How are your food and ambrosia levels?”

  “I’m alright.”

  San nodded. “Some of the others came in on rationing. Two came in with nothing left and in not so good condition, but they chose to stick it out rather than hit the emergency transponder.”

  “Would they have gotten a second chance if they did?”

  “Let’s just say their course to becoming Arc Commandos would have veered down another path. You don’t get a second shot at this course…and you will never mention it to anyone else, save for other Arc Commandos that have already completed it. Understood?”

  Jyra nodded.

  “Just know, that this mission was a solitary affair, so you might want to keep what happened to yourself.”

  “Why?”

  “If you want to become an Arc Commando you need to get comfortable with keeping secrets from everyone else except yourself�
�and not because the rest of us are untrustworthy. We have to be able to trust one another, from the trailblazers down to the newest tech. But the thing with trust is that we don’t have to check up on each other. Like this mission, you will be entrusted to keep secrets of your own in order to aid Star Force. What they are only you will know, but it’ll be a backup in case we’re compromised someday.”

  “Compromised? Are you talking technologically or traitors?”

  “Both, though the latter should never happen. That said, we can never be sure. Take off your right glove.”

  Jyra raised an eyebrow but did as told, disconnecting the armor piece and laying it on the table.

  San raised his own hand. “With Archons you will learn that a handshake is more than a gesture. Take my hand.”

  “Going to let me in on one of your tricks?”

  “Just one,” San said, feeling her moist hand within his. “I want you to think of an alphanumeric sequence 4 digits long of your choice.”

  There was a moment of silence, then San looked her in the eye and said aloud. “H93C.”

  Jyra went wide-eyed. “What the hell? You can read my mind?”

  San released her hand and waved his own fingers in the air before her. “It requires flesh to flesh contact for Humans, but with other races we can do it remotely so long as we’re not too far away.”

  “How?”

  “That’s a secret we will keep for now, but know that there are other races out there that can do the same. Fortunately none near the ADZ, but we know of at least one within the Nexus that has telepathic powers, and the Preema also have considerable ability in this area, to what extent we’re still not fully sure. I can tell you that it depends on the strength of the individual, and that the ‘power’ responds to training like other things.”

  “You’re afraid of someone compromising security by being brain scanned?”