by Aer-ki Jyr
The woman’s eyes widened. “Who are you?”
“Star Force.”
Masterson’s jaw dropped, then immediately clenched shut. “I have nothing to say to you.”
Morgan sighed. “As you wish,” she said, flipping on her stun stick and poking the woman unconscious again. “Note to self, don’t mention Star Force.”
She set the unconscious woman aside and reached for the next closest prisoner, injecting him with the destunning serum.
“Name,” she demanded when he started to wake…
6
January 25, 2107
Morgan jumped from the open cockpit of her stealth pod onto the hull of the cargo ship that was picking up the full material containers from the asteroid base and depositing empty ones for the collectors and processors to fill via a series of robotic arms as the boxy ship floated just over the garage. On the reverse side, Morgan latched onto a dorsal airlock and quickly made her way into the ship, letting her pod drift off. She wouldn’t need it from here on out.
The airlock cycled through, giving her access to the inside of the large ship, whereupon she sprung into action, kicking aside the man curiously staring at what should have been an inactive airlock and bouncing him off a side wall as she passed by, belatedly swinging her stun stick back and tagging him in the side of the head.
The corridors were small, not allowing her much maneuvering room in full armor as she methodically swept every corridor and room for personnel, coming across the bridge halfway through her search and disabling the Captain and crew within five seconds of entry. She looked for the robotic arm controls but couldn’t find an applicable station, so instead she checked the navigational systems, ensuring that the ship wasn’t about to drift into the asteroid or base, then pushed off the back of a chair and zipped into the hallway, finishing her sweep to disable and capture the crew of 7.
“Ship secured,” she reported over her armor’s comm before sitting ‘down’ in one of the bridge chairs and trying to access the ship’s database, only to find that it was written in Spanish.
Morgan frowned, then glanced across the control boards spread out around the bridge…all of them were tagged in English.
“Rafa, need you over here for some translating,” she added.
“Do they have a shuttle?”
“I saw something near the cargo bay.”
“We can see an edge of it from here,” Rafa told her. “Mind giving me a lift?”
“Will do,” she said, heading aft and finding a pair of small ships tucked up inside the bay alongside the cargo containers at dedicated docking ports. Morgan took the left one and slowly flew it down and docked against the top airlock. Rafa was waiting for her and climbed aboard the cramped, four-man craft…had those four men been midgets. The seats were tiny, and the two Archons encased in armor more than filled the cabin space.
Within minutes the pair were back aboard the cargo ship and Rafa began pouring through the database.
“Interesting. The ship’s manufacturer is Solaris, but the software is from Estrella Mar.”
“With a base built by Exxtron,” Morgan added. “Either we’ve got a corporate alliance or someone who likes to build hodgepodge.”
“Got their nav charts,” Rafa said, pulling off his armor’s gloves so he could type faster. “Only one other location tagged, looks like this is a binary cargo runner headed further into the belt.”
“Another breadcrumb to follow,” Morgan noted, referring to the cellular structure of this mining operation. All computer records on the base had been limited to the onsite refining of ores and extraction of precious metals being brought in by a 10 ship fleet of ‘collectors’ spread out across this region of the asteroid belt, well away from both the national and Star Force mining regions and essentially off the map. The crews from those ships would rotate out periodically, taken aboard a cargo runner that would offload necessary supplies and replacement crew when it came to pick up the processed cargo.
The excess waste material from the processing was compressed into pellets and given back to the collectors, who disposed of it somewhere in the belt, with only the precious cargos being transferred over to the runners. Beyond that the base records didn’t say, nor had the captive crew been very forthcoming with information.
“Taryn, disable base communications permanently,” Rafa told her over the comm. “We’re transferring the ship’s crew over then heading out.”
Morgan nodded and turned around, heading for the compartment where they’d stashed the prisoners.
“Where to?”
“The other end of this cargo link. That’s all the nav charts have got.”
“Someone’s gone to a lot of effort to keep all this hidden.”
“They’re unconscious right now, but I think this crew is separately employed from those on the base. The computer systems are all in Spanish.”
“We taking the pods along?”
“No, we’re playing parasite from here on out. I’m going to send a directional transmission to our fleet, calling for a delayed cleaning crew for this site. They can retrieve them then.”
“I’d better grab mine then,” Morgan said, eavesdropping on the conversation.
“I’ll get it,” Taryn offered. “We need to tether the pods outside again anyway so this lot can’t get access to them. Pick me up with your shuttle when I’m done.”
“Deal,” Morgan said, dragging two of the unconscious men towards the shuttle port.
“Transfer over some additional rations and whatever else you think they’ll need, then get back over here,” Rafa told her. “We need to leave within the next two hours if we’re going to maintain their itinerary.”
Seven days later they found another starship at their rendezvous point, a much larger vessel equipped with a crude copy of Star Force’s gravity cylinders sticking out sideways across the center with cargo compartments fore and aft of that midline. Apparently the ship they were on was only supposed to exchange cargos and return to the asteroid processing base, for there was nothing else in range except empty space.
The course the nav system had taken them on went even deeper into the unmapped regions of the belt, where Star Force had yet to probe and far from its recently deployed patrol fleet. Had the Archons activated a distress beacon, it would take several days at minimum for them to receive help, given the navigational headaches of avoiding the ever-changing asteroid positions, which usually prevented a ship from flying a straight line trajectory.
When the two ships docked to exchange cargo Rafa, Morgan, and Taryn boarded and captured the larger ship, happy to have gravity back underneath their feet again, and even happier to find a much more complete navigational database in this ship’s computer systems, documenting a myriad of outposts within the belt, spread out over an insanely large area…all of which were far from any known mining operations.
Additionally, they had been able to verify that this particular ship was crewed by employees of the Atrican Consolidate…a merger of several smaller space corporations that occurred in the 2080s to cut costs and share resources, currently #7 on the corporate power charts. The ship they were flying, however, was of Solaris make, which was odd given that Atrican also had a shipbuilding line, though not producing anything of this size.
The ship itself was also part tanker, which explained how fuel was getting out to the dedicated mining ships. After a thorough sifting of the ship’s records, it appeared that the miners and cargo haulers out in the field were contract hires rather than employees, and had been deliberately isolated from the larger network that had been built up within the belt…all without Star Force being the wiser.
To be fair, Star Force couldn’t monitor the entire star system, and with more and more infrastructure popping up around Earth, Luna, and Mars it was getting harder to track individual ships, but by closely monitoring the competition’s shipyards and tagging the vessels as they came off the line they could reasonably insure that the mandated transponder
signals corresponded to all ships in the field, with any absences immediately being noted.
If someone had been able to build ships outside of Star Force’s vision, then it was conceivable that they could be flying without transponders…and if they were, Star Force was going to be unable to track their movements. If they then could also hide the influx of raw materials coming from the belt, shrouding them in legitimate business, it was possible for someone to have built up all this in secret without Star Force having dropped the ball somewhere…but they also risked a lot just in the attempt. If and when Star Force caught them flying without transponders…which they just had…their corporate contracts would be revoked and penalties issued, which would be seen as an extremely hazardous venture and not worth exploring.
The Atrican Consolidate did a small amount of business with Star Force, mostly involving selling of raw materials on the Exchange and other secondary economic business ventures, though they had no direct contracts or purchases. They operated exclusively without Star Force tech, and were among several others to do so as a matter of principle and pr, so arguably they didn’t have so much to lose by ticking off Star Force, but whatever nation had hired them did. Unfortunately the ship records didn’t indicate who their customers were. That information was something they were going to have to find elsewhere.
Ship hopping again, the Archon trio left the cargo ship adrift and continued on with the larger ship’s assigned rounds, making another rendezvous at a different location three days down the line with the crew obliged to continue operations as normal. They cooperated, though there was nothing the smaller cargo ship could have done to help them even if they had sent out a warning, which Rafa explained to the crew beforehand, telling them they’d just seize that ship too if necessary, and give the Captain a few lumps for the effort.
After the successful cargo exchange the larger ship was due to return to port and deliver the valuable materials harvested from the belt. Each shipment it seemed contained differing amounts, looking like they were mining anything of opportunity rather than concentrating on a few compounds. Included in the ship’s inventory were small amounts of gold, silver, platinum, ruthenium, and molybdenum, along with larger amounts of iron, nickel, magnesium, tungsten, and palladium, coupled with stores of liquid hydrogen and oxygen collected during the ore processing, with data records showing another 22 materials being logged on previous material retrieval runs.
This current batch was slated for delivery to a fabrication station, which is where the Archons had the crew take them, dropping off Taryn and Morgan during the transfer while Rafa kept the ship’s crew under control, and mostly unconscious, on the freighter.
The station was more than 5 times the size of the freighter, and rivaled some of Star Force’s medium-grade orbital stations in volume, though the construction was poor. It had four sets of gravity cylinders clustered together at the center, with huge box-like zero g factory segments on either end, making it look like a weird hourglass, given that the cylinders were inset and visibly moving, unlike Star Force designs that had them behind a protective and static armored shell.
Docking ports were located along the rim of each end, and one other ship was seen to be leaving a few hundred kilometers away, apparently already finished offloading its cargo, or perhaps carrying away the finished products? Rafa didn’t know and he decided to let it pass, knowing that Morgan and Taryn would target the station’s communication systems first thing. Once those were down, the other ship wouldn’t be a discovery threat.
“Control room secured,” Morgan’s voice faintly reported in Rafa’s helmet. “And they have no long range comm gear.”
“Better to keep it hidden,” Rafa acknowledged, wondering if their ships retained that capacity as couriers or they just thought it too dangerous to be roaming about without the ability to call for assistance. “Any resistance?”
“Ha, hardly. Couple of sidearms. Taryn is out doing her thing while I get to babysit.”
“You lost?”
“Scissors again,” she moaned. “But on the upside, I found a talker. He didn’t want stunned and we had a nice long chat about his work here.”
“Go on.”
“Seems this whole station is a factory designed to build starship and prefab components, which are then shipped off to one of several shipyards they’ve got hidden out here.”
“Who has hidden?”
“Solaris, Udaris, Killman, Exxtron…just about every major competitor of Davis has its hand in this operation. My friend doesn’t know how it all got started, but says he was transferred out here through a Ukrainian mining ship along with several others. It seems they’re using Star Force’s transit network to shuffle personnel and supplies out from Earth and Mars and make the handoffs in the national mining zones where they’re outside of effective transponder range.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Rafa said, running the basic numbers through his head. “There’s no way they could have smuggled out this much equipment. They had to send some by ship.”
“I’m guessing they did initially, but he says that they make almost everything they need now from what they harvest in the belt. Only specialized components and personnel are smuggled out, with returning personnel and precious metals going the other way.”
“Enough precious metals to make this financially worthwhile, or do they have some other agenda at work?”
“It’s looking more and more like a purely economic venture. According to him, the shipyards are building more mining and cargo ships, expanding the network right now. He doesn’t know of any warships, but admits he hasn’t seen anything other than this station and the ship he was brought in on, though he does have access to manifests and shipping schedules. He also says there are no weapons components produced on the station…” Morgan said, followed by several audible puffs.
“Trouble?”
“Just a few stragglers wandering onto the bridge. There are supposed to be over 3,000 crew on the station, so it’s going to take Taryn a while to get through them all.”
“She’s going to run out of ammo,” Rafa noted.
“Then it’s my turn.”
“Gather as much intel as you can, then pull back to the ship. There’s no need to take prisoners if we’re not going to stick around.”
“Might as well secure the station if we’re calling in for backup,” she argued.
“We’re not finished yet. We still have a missing British ship to account for. Don’t suppose your friend knows anything about that.”
“Unfortunately not. So what are you have planning? Bounce around from place to place on their map and see if we find anything interesting? That could take months, and fuel we don’t have. And if they do have a warship out here I don’t want to run into it flying a cargo ship. If we abandon stealth, then we might as well do so with our fleet covering our asses.”
“Well then, we keep this a stealth mission, for now. How soon is the next ship due to arrive?”
“Hold on,” Morgan said as she conferred with her friend. “Three weeks, two days.”
“How many locations are on your nav charts?”
“More than on the ship. They’ve got six regional zones out here, but this station feeds components to all of them. The shipping fleets are reserved for individual zones, save for the big haulers. They rotate around the major installations carrying the prefab components and starship ribs...the stuff the regular haulers are too small to carry.”
“Any command centers on that list?”
“There are regional hubs that contain several stations in close proximity, including the shipyards. You wanna hit one?”
“Best place to mine data, wouldn’t you think?”
“If we can get there. Our ship isn’t supposed to have access to those areas, according to what I see here.”
“Find one that does, then make a copy of their database. When you’re finished get back to the ship and help me evac the crew, we won’t be needing them from here on ou
t and I’m tired of babysitting them.”
“Copy that,” Morgan said signing off. She turned to the young man and flipped her helmeted chin up in a ‘pay attention’ gesture. “I need as much access to the computer systems as you can get me.”
“Sure thing,” he said, swiveling around in his seat. “So what are you going to do with all of us?” he asked as he worked the keyboard. “I didn’t know we were doing anything illegal.”
“Never said you were,” she said, leaning over his shoulder to make sure he didn’t sabotage her efforts. “We’ll be gone once we’ve got what we’re looking for.”
“And that is?”
“Nothing you need to concern yourself with,” she said dismissively.
“I can help…if you take me with you,” he said earnestly.
Morgan frowned inside her helmet. “Why?”
“Why I want to leave? I’m sick of being stuck out here in the middle of nowhere. The pay is alright, but I never get to spend it on anything. I go to work, eat lunch, go to work again, go to my cabin, sleep, and repeat. I’d much rather work for you guys,” he said, almost pleading.
“We’re not exactly here on a vacation, kid. We’re flying around in a hijacked ship and you want to tag along?”
“Yeah.”
Morgan laughed, which sounded a bit menacing through her helmet’s external speakers. “You’ve got spirit, kid. I’ll talk with the recruitment division when all this is over, but you’ll have to find your own way there.”
The man frowned. “Thanks,” he said dejectedly.
“I’m an Archon. I say it, they do it. Get transferred back to civilization and I’ll get you on our payroll…if you help me get the information I need. I’d rather not have to hack it if I don’t have to.”
“You’re a computer tech?” he asked, perking up a bit.
“No, but I know my way around software and I brought some very cool toys,” she said, tapping the screen in front of him. “Now give me what you can.”