Star Force: Origin Series Box Set (33-36)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  The accountant logged in and immediately went to the user history, finding it clean…then to David’s surprise he accessed a backdoor and ran through the interface logs for his console, discovering several specific program accesses at times the history didn’t record.

  He sat frozen at the keyboard for more than a minute before Drake eventually put his armored hand on his shoulder, seeing the man crying in the reflection of the screen.

  “I need to get you out of here before The Word can get to you.”

  Weston sniffled. “I actually let myself believe she loved me…that she wanted me. What are you going to do with her?”

  “Star Force doesn’t kill or torture its prisoners. She’ll be taken away and questioned, then imprisoned for a very long time.”

  “Rehab?”

  “Of a sort…though The Word might label her a liability and try to take her out. For that reason we have to get you and her off the moon as soon as possible. Let’s go,” Drake urged, pulling Weston up out of his chair.

  “They’ve really taken control of the entire city?”

  “Through one means or another, yes.”

  “What are you going to do?” Weston asked as Yavari came into view carrying Mylan over his shoulder.

  Drake walked him over to the balcony, grabbing his helmet on the way then pulling a rappelling line from his back rack as they stepped outside into the view of several other nearby balconies, a few of which had people on them. He stopped for a moment, not caring if anyone saw them, for as soon as they got to ground level they’d be on the move to a nearby extraction point. The Archon looked at the balding, overweight man through his helmet, with his voice being synthetically altered by the external mic.

  “We’re going to take it back.”

  8

  May 13, 2430

  Alpha Centauri System

  Tyr

  The Brazilian technician slumped to the ground unconscious thanks to the sleep touch Quenton-1123 had just laid on him, with the Archon pulling him away from the chair, allowing Nathan to slide in and quickly access the control board.

  “Make it quick,” Quenton reminded him, “misguided underlings are already on the way.”

  “Give me a heads up when they get here,” Nathan replied, shunting power from one section of region 8 to another. The power station they were in was responsible for both the generation and the distribution of power to one of 24 regions of the city, with region 8 containing several dark zones that didn’t match up with Star Force’s original schematics. Those dark zones had previously been scouted out, finding a lot of locked doors and security cameras blocking their way, but Green Team had been ingenious enough to find their way around some of them without tipping off The Word that they knew of their location.

  At least that was the theory. How much the enemy knew of their movements was guesswork…as was their assessment of how much of the city was under their control. Their clandestine war had yet to reach the local news networks, meaning the populace of Tyr had no idea anything abnormal was occurring and continued to go about their daily lives. If The Word wanted it that way they’d oblige, save for already having issued recall orders for all the Star Force personnel on the moon, who as of now had mostly left, with the last few stragglers quietly making their way to the spaceports, not knowing themselves that there was any danger, just that they had some place to be that wasn’t on Tyr.

  Their leaving probably hadn’t gone unnoticed, so Green Team figured it was just a matter of time before a more obvious confrontation broke out, though when that’d be was also guesswork.

  David had assumed that with two years of time to play with, The Word had probably built their own little nest in the city much as they had in other locations, in addition to the factories, warehouses, research labs, and other illicit facilities that Green Team had already located within the city. His suspicions had been confirmed 7 hours ago when an offshoot of one of the dark areas lead to a subterranean structure not previously logged on schematics and outside the city’s subterranean boundaries.

  Some surveillance of their own had confirmed the flow of personnel in and out of the complex that was of unknown size, but the power usage was being logged and counter-logged within the city’s books to hide the consumption. Bookkeeping could be falsified, but power lines couldn’t be so easily obscured, though The Word engineers had done a good job of hiding them. Knowing what to look for, Green Team had followed the conduits and discovered a maintenance crawlspace that wasn’t designed for transit, but one that they could squeeze through in their armor, but just barely.

  Trick of it was, it was below the city and the complex, in the very supports that held the massive structure in place against the low gravity…and was below the artificial gravity zones that added the extra tug to keep the population at the standard 1g. Thing of it was, so was The Word’s complex, so if they could cut the power there was a good chance that the hidden base would revert back to the moon’s normal gravity that ran at .52g.

  Taking out the power would also hit the lights, security cameras, and any line-powered defense systems, assuming they didn’t have a backup power supply in place, which was possible, but David doubted that would be powerful enough to cover everything, so if they managed to cut the main power something The Word was used to having on would go off and make for a hopefully chaotic environment inside.

  Green Team wanted that chaos, for as of now they were going in totally blind.

  Quenton stepped over to the open door and looked down on the catwalks below. “They’re here. I’ll buy you some time.”

  “60 seconds should do,” Nathan said, typing away at the keyboard furiously, both the built in one and the plug-in variety he’d brought with him to help hack through the security codes, which were rather light for such an important piece of infrastructure.

  Quenton nodded his helmet and jumped over the railing on the narrow balcony outside, falling down two stories to catch himself on the catwalk below, then he hopped over again down to the floor and ran over behind a wide support pillar as Brazilian security guards began popping up from behind pieces of machinery with weapons drawn as they closed in on the only way up to the control room.

  The Archon didn’t waste time waiting for them and decided to distract by hitting first, which he accomplished by circling around the pillar and climbing up on top of one of the many support machines that fed the city’s buildings their power, water, air, and all other vital systems from below, situated far down in the bedrock. From atop the boxy machine Quenton jumped forward spread eagle, landing on top of one of the guards and pancaking him to the floor with an audible crunch of armor on armor.

  The Archon rolled off him and pumped a stinger round into the man’s back, with the energy bleeding through the blue armor and rendering him at least numb, if not unconscious. Quenton didn’t wait around to find out which, sidestepping once he got to his feet and elbowing another guard in the ribs as he brought his plasma rifle around…which went flying off and ricocheted against another bulky machine.

  Before the other guards could close on him, Quenton took off the opposite way from the control room, leading several off before cutting across the main flow of guards still coming down from whatever elevator shaft or stairwell they’d been using. He stunned several, taking a few hits against his shields that left only the barest of scuff marks on his armor when they breached…then he was lost in the machinery again as he circled back around and ambushed the guards pushing towards the catwalk from behind, catching several on their way up that, once stunned, rolled back down the steps until they flopped onto one of the flat transition sections.

  “When do we get to start bagging these guys instead of just stun and release?” he asked over the comm.

  “All in good time,” Nathan said, just finishing up. “There…power flow interrupted. Target should be dark.”

  More than a mile away, with too much metal and concrete in between to allow their low powered comms to connect, David and th
e other 7 members of Green Team lay scrunched in next to a series of pipes in single file as the power gage they had attached to one of them suddenly registered a negative, meaning that the floor above them should be as dark as the tiny space they were in now.

  “This is it,” David said at the head of the line, but several meters down from the explosives they’d drilled into the top of the crawlspace. “Detonating in 3…2…1…” he said, pressing the button on a remote trigger while he was face down against the metal base, with an arm stretched out in front of his helmet holding a loose section of plate he’d brought in with him to help catch the blast.

  That plate popped back into him with the detonation and he could see his forearm shield breach on his HUD’s diagnostics, but otherwise he was ok…which meant he had to move, and fast.

  He pushed the plate off him, seeing several indentations where debris had hit it thanks to his Pefbar, that not only allowed him to see in the dark, but to see through more than a meter of structure up into the hallway above them at the breach point. David crawled forward, pushing aside bits of debris that made it even harder to squeeze through when one of them would get stuck along his side, but eventually he got up to the blast point and began crawling up, pushing aside pointy ends of this and that and making a larger exit point for the rest of his team as he expanded upon their impromptu foxhole in the middle of the hallway.

  As the power gage had indicated, it was completely dark. David didn’t turn on his armor’s exterior lights, of which he had a few choices, but rather kept his Pefbar on continuously, seeing the area both ahead and behind him in the grainy black/white spherical vision that his telekinesis relied upon, though now it was serving an entirely different purpose.

  David jumped up, feeling that the gravity had indeed lightened, and landed more than a meter out from the edge of the hole, dragging his weapon bundle with him. He walked forward and knelt down, detaching the tether on his leg and pulling out the varied weapons, placing them on his back rack while hefting the stinger rifle in his active grip. He advanced down the hallway, with his battlemap using a low level scanner in his armor to plot out the dimensions of the corridor and share it with the others coming up behind him.

  It took a while, but all of them made it up and out before they saw any personnel…in fact, it wasn’t until they were several hallways over in the grid-shaped layout that they encountered any individuals, and the one they found was bound and gagged inside a room. David had seen him through the walls before they ever got to the door, then he paused just before his hand reached for the latch, seeing something disturbing inside.

  “Jet?” he asked the Archon directly behind him as Assad moved forward and took up a forward scouting position at the end of the hall.

  “What?”

  “What do you see inside?”

  “A prisoner…one prisoner tied to a chair and no guards.”

  “Take a good look at the chair.”

  “Damn,” Lio said, a step behind them.

  “Is the door rigged?” Jet asked, though he couldn’t see anything on the handle, latches or in the walls to indicate it was.

  “I don’t think so. Everyone move on, I’m going in alone.”

  “We can come back for this guy later,” Jet reminded him.

  “I get the feeling this is a ghost town,” David said as the others jogged by him. “See if you can find anyone else, but stay alert.”

  “Copy that,” Jet said, the last to leave him.

  David let them move on then slowly pulled the latch on the door, rotating the locking device and popping it open. He swung it out into the room and stepped through, ‘seeing’ little different than when the door had been closed, save for a bit more complexity of detail. He took a few careful steps forward, looking around multiple times for some type of trigger, like maybe a laser trip line, but he couldn’t see any mechanisms imbedded into the walls, floor, or ceiling.

  He stepped up within 2 meters of the man, whose head was sagging down. David still felt a mind there, meaning he wasn’t dead, but he was either asleep or unconscious. That wasn’t his worry at the moment, but rather the stack of explosives concealed underneath the chair. Had the lights been on he probably would have missed them entirely, but the dense bricks showed up plainly in his Pefbar sight, and now that he was closer he could see the tiny wires connecting them to the man’s butt.

  David adjusted his sight, viewing different layers right through the man’s body, including his internal organs, which the Archon always found to be a bit gross, but it was necessary to examine the device without touching it or him. After a few minutes of exertion David released his Pefbar for a moment, rested his mind for a handful of seconds, then reactivated it with a much narrower focus that required more of his power as he…

  “Contact,” Assad said over the comm, startling David enough that he sucked in an involuntary breath, then flashed his Pefbar out behind him, realizing he hadn’t been paying attention to his back. Sloppy...but necessary if he was going to avoid blowing up.

  “What have you got?”

  “Looks like another prisoner tied to a chair.”

  “Set a waypoint but do not approach. See how many more are out there.”

  “Looks like we’ve got the level to ourselves.”

  “Find the stairs yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “When you do hold up. They may have left us some other surprises.”

  “You think they’ve already bugged out?” Devin asked.

  “That’s my gut feeling, but we don’t know how big this place is either. Leave me off the comm for a few minutes. I’ve got some delicate work to do.”

  “Copy that.”

  David stood in front of the chair with the slumped man inside it, holding his stinger rifle with a reflexive grip born of many missions and long training sessions, for at the moment his mind was wholly consumed with the wires connecting the explosives to the trigger, which appeared to be attached to the man so that when he came up off the chair it would pull apart and send the detonation signal…meaning that the explosion will kill both him and his rescuer, and given the size of the bricks he didn’t want to know how much damage it would do to him once it got past his armor.

  This was definitely one of The Word’s attempts to kill the Archons, given that they didn’t have a good track record doing it the old fashioned way with men and guns. To date they’d never killed one, though there had been a few injuries in past altercations. Now it seemed they were starting to think outside the box, perhaps as a result of Green Team having rescued the prisoners they’d come across 2 days ago. They knew they wanted them alive, so they thought they’d use them as bait for a booby trap.

  That meant The Word suspected they were coming here, but he doubted they knew how they’d enter the base, so they may still have the element of surprise, along with the blackout, if anyone was still around. The others would discover that…right now he needed to get this man unhooked before he woke up and started wiggling around on the detonator.

  David could see the wires where they connected to the detonator box, which was split into two pieces. That he had to avoid separating, so he felt his way down to the other end of the wires and began pulling on them with his Lachka, trying to separate the lines from the explosives. There were 8 wires, one each connecting to the bricks stacked 4 wide and two deep and secured underneath the chair with some type of adhesive, he guessed, for he couldn’t see any other types of fasteners.

  He got the first wire out without anything going boom, and from then on he breathed a bit easier, having to take small breaks to recharge his mind and gather his strength, for the wires were stuck into the explosives quite well and it required a pinch-pull to yank them out, which didn’t allow as good of grip for his already limited telekinetic manipulation.

  The acolyte was more than strong enough though, he just didn’t want to make any mistakes, as well as knowing he’d have to repeat this process again on at least one other prisoner, so he w
anted to take this first disarmament slow and methodical, establishing a procedure he could execute more quickly down the line.

  When he got the last wire out he pulled them all away from the bricks and stepped forward, reaching a hand down underneath the chair and grabbing the bundle, then giving it a sharp jerk that disconnected it from the man’s clothes where the opposite end of the detonator stayed attached.

  The electric charge the detonator sent down the wires sparked against David’s forearm shield, notable only by a tiny indicator on his HUD. Otherwise there was no visible sign of activity.

  He activated his comm. “Prisoner disarmed. He’s still unconscious and I’m leaving him that way for now,” he said, using his HUD and menu buttons underneath a flap on his left gauntlet to drop a waypoint on the battlemap so they’d know where to come back to when they wanted to pick this guy up.

  “Five other chair-bound prisoners found,” Devin reported. “We’ve almost got this level checked.”

  “Are we the basement?”

  “Negative,” Assad reported. “I’m at the stairs, with flights going up and down.

  David glanced at his growing battlemap and zoomed out, beginning to see how big this place was. Either The Word had started the construction prior to their takeover or they’d been really busy over the past 2 years…though without anyone looking over their shoulder they could have devoted an army of construction crews to dig this place out of the bedrock within weeks, so he guessed he shouldn’t have been so surprised.

  “Finish this level, then I want teams of four. One goes up, one goes down. We tag prisoners and other items of interest with waypoints but we keep moving. Heads up for more booby traps and see if we can’t find someone who’s supposed to be down here. We can take inventory later.”

  David followed his own order, tossing the detonator across the room where it was well away from the explosive bricks on his way out the door, then he followed his battlemap over to the stairwell where Assad and Jet were waiting.