by Aer-ki Jyr
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 why 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 out 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.”
“Sure,” he said, beginning to call up directories. “You think you could do me a favor and let me see your face?”
“Trying to get me id’d by the security cameras?”
“Ha, those things are junk. They’re not even turned on. Just placebos to keep the staff from going bonkers from all the boredom.”
Morgan walked over to the reflective panel on the upper wall and punched her armored first into it, shattering the glass and crushing the camera beneath.
“Whoa!” the tech said, reacting to the sound of the breaking glass.
Morgan walked back over to him and pulled off her helmet, loosing her short, dark ponytail and sucking in a deep breath of air while hefting her stinger rifle in her other hand. “Better?”
“God you’re hot,” he said appreciatively, then turned back to his computer screen and got to work finding all the information she wanted.
7
February 17, 2107
Two quick pistol shots and the security guards coming around the corner down the hall were down before they even saw Taryn, a stinger to each of their chests as they came into view. The marksman specialist led the other two Archons past their fallen bodies and around the corner, shooting a third less than three meters away and knocking his stunned body aside with an elbow before it could even hit the ground. Morgan and Rafa jumped over him and followed Taryn deeper into the corporate rebels’ region 4 command center, headed for the administrative wing.
Their arrival hadn’t gone unnoticed this time. Instead of waiting weeks to hitch a ride on a scheduled transport, the trio had hijacked a smaller, faster ship at one of the agrostations supplying foodstuffs to the workforce and took it straight into the midst of the 8 stations that constituted the regional hub. Several other ships were parked nearby, but none of them were armed so their unannounced entry didn’t draw any fire, only attention.
They’d been met at the airlock by security, which they’d quickly overrun, but not before someone had
triggered a station-wide alarm…and given that this station housed more than 15,000 people, it had a decent-sized internal security force, though nothing the Archons couldn’t handle.
With surprise no longer on their side, they’d decided to take the straight forward approach and capture whoever was in charge of this mess and demand answers. A quick review of the station’s blueprints at an information terminal showed them that the administrative offices/quarters were housed on the top end of grav cylinder 26…of which they were now at the bottom end, making their way through the labyrinth of tightly packed corridors on the huge, but claustrophobically designed station.
Taryn shot another sidearm-bearing security guard over the shoulder of a startled bystander, her stinger shot passing less than three inches over the man’s blue uniform and hitting the guard in the ear ten meters back, spinning him around and landing him on the floor, where he received a second shot for good measure.
Up ahead there were a wide set of doors where the hallway spread out double wide, announcing their transit into the administrative section. Morgan fell off the group and took up station there, ensuring that no one got in or out, allowing Taryn and Rafa to begin terrorizing the execs. She had only her stun stick and her fists as weapons, having given Taryn all her stinger ammo. The woman was a far better shot, and had trained with targeting as her primary objective, making her one of only a handful of Archons who could surpass Morgan in any category.
Hearing footsteps approach, she slid back behind the edge of the doorway. The inner hallway was a good half meter wider on each side, giving her the perfect hiding spot. When the footsteps came closer she let the first man come into view and pass her by, then she struck out with her right arm and wacked the second in the upper chest, knocking him off his feet as she ran forward a step and grabbed the first man by the neck, wrapping her arm around and dragging him backwards onto the floor before jumping into a kick and knocking down a third man behind the others with a well placed boot to the gut.