by Aer-ki Jyr
A brief moment of calm followed as two of the security guards tried to get their wits about them…the first man she’d struck had been knocked out when the back of his head hit the floor.
Two quick jabs with her stun stick finished off the others and she pulled their bodies forward down the hall, then doubled back to her ambush point, laying in wait for more to come.
Taryn pulled another unconscious man inside the large office, with the heads of five other conscious ones turning around to see what was happening. They were all duct taped into their chairs in a comical board meeting, with Rafa at the head of a small semicircle.
“Got another,” she said, dropping him off and leaving to hunt down more of the administrators.
“Who’s this?” Rafa asked.
“Drayson,” one of the bound execs identified. “He’s in charge of station operations.”
“Welcome to the party, Drayson,” Rafa said as he hauled the man to his feet and plopped him down in another chair, taping him in place with a roll of the ever useful duct tape acquired from a maintenance closet. Rafa finished by giving him a destun injection, then reclaimed his position at the center of their little meeting as the man blinked his eyes open.
“What the…hell?” he mumbled when he discovered he was restrained.
“You’re here because I need information,” Rafa explained, his helmet laid beside him on the expensive table that he was sitting on as he looked down at the men strapped into their chairs. “The sooner I get it, the sooner I untie you.”
“Who are you?”
“He’s Star Force,” another administrator grumbled. “Don’t tell him anything.”
“Wrong answer,” Rafa said, hopping off the table and gently putting his foot against the man’s chest and pushing his chair over backward. The man thunked against the floor, knocking his head against the polished tile and stayed there, unable to move with his knees up in the air while Rafa casually retook his perch atop the table.
“Information,” he repeated, staring at each man in turn.
“What is it you’re after?” the newbie asked.
“We’ve had reports of mining zone incursions,” Rafa explained, ticking off the points on his fingers, “resource stripping, ghost ship sightings, hijacked shipments, a missing British ship, and an American warfleet on its way here to square off with an equally large British warfleet who think that each other are to blame. I want to know exactly what you’ve been up to and where the blame belongs before the shooting starts.”
“Our orders are to stay away from you,” one of the other administrators declared. “We’re not responsible for any of that.”
“Define ‘stay away,’” Rafa challenged.
“We keep our mining zones far from yours so our ships don’t intermix. You’re not supposed to know we’re out here.”
“How did you find us?” the Drayson asked.
Rafa walked over to the elderly man, though in truth Rafa was probably older, and ignored the newbie’s question. “Better come clean with me before I get angry. I already know you have contacts in the national zones.”
The man’s face scrunched up, and suddenly he found himself unable to speak.
“Thought so,” Rafa surmised, knocking that man’s chair over backwards as well. “Anyone else want to give it a try?”
“We’re supposed to keep our operations hidden until the time is right,” another man offered. “Which is why we keep our ships away from everyone else’s…save for making shipments, and those are only delivered to the very edge of your zones, to waiting ships. Raiding would risk exposing our operation.”
“Shut up, Haskins!” the first man on the floor yelled up at the ceiling.
“They’ve already found us,” the other administrator argued. “If there’s war brewing we need to keep out of it.” He turned his gaze back to Rafa. “We may have been defying Star Force, but we haven’t done anything illegal. What right do you have to trespass on our property and hold us captive?”
“And I had such high hopes for you,” Rafa said deadpan before knocking Haskins’ chair over, with the man giving a shocked shout on the way down. “What shipments and to whom?”
“Our partners,” Drayson offered. “Please don’t kick me over, I have a weak heart that’s already beating a kilometer a minute.”
“Names,” Rafa insisted.
“Both the United Kingdom and the Unites States worked with us to set up this mining network, along with Germany, Ukraine, Mexico, Japan…”
“Drayson!” the first man on the floor bellowed out, his face going red, more with rage than the blood flowing into his head.
“India,” the administrator continued,” Egypt, China, Argentina, and Israel.”
Rafa held his gaze for a moment. If what he were saying was true it would have serious implications. “That’s quite a list. What are they giving you…and by you, I mean your corporate alliance.”
A few sets of eyes went wide when he said that.
“Yes, we know about your conglomerate,” he said, fixing his gaze back on Drayson. “What’s the arrangement?”
“They provided us with the initial funding to start operations in secret, with the emphasis on growing our infrastructure rather than turning a profit. They continue to give us a stipend, but we’re mining enough precious metals now to compensate them for part of it. We smuggle it back onto the market through their mining ships. They quietly distribute the allotments so they don’t attract unwanted attention. The funds help buy supplies we can’t make for ourselves out here, with that list diminishing by the year as we get more self sufficient.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“16 years.”
Rafa stared at him for a moment, then stood up and walked around behind the man, with Drayson’s pulse jumping even higher…then Rafa unwrapped the duct tape from around him, pulling off some fuzz from his thick uniform jacket. He wadded it up in a bundle and tossed it aside, returning to his perch atop the table.
“Thank you,” Drayson said, rubbing his hands together gratefully.
“Tell me more about this arrangement.”
“Well, it’s all temporary. Once we grow large enough we’ll go public and break your monopoly over belt mining. Once we can sell on the open market we can use the revenue to branch out into shipbuilding, tourism, habitats…every economic section that you dominate. This whole operation was designed to break your powerhold by offering competition that no one corporation or nation could field on its own.”
“Ambitious,” Rafa offered. “Are all your corporations going to merge and play nice?”
“No, it’s strictly a co-op.”
“Who employs you?”
“Me personally? Exxtron. They all have different employers,” he said, gesturing to the other administrators with his free hand, “but we operate under the same command hierarchy. Bit of a payroll mess, but it works out.”
“So you’re not into any piracy?”
“Never,” Drayson said with obvious discuss. “We’re businessmen and this is purely an economic venture.”
Rafa raised his hands in the air gesturing helplessness. “I’m still missing a British ship. We looked for it, hard…even extended our sweeps into areas of the belt that went beyond the designated mining radius, which is how we stumbled across your mining vessels, by the way. Still found nothing.”
“Those damn Limeys,” another upright-seated administrator who’d previously been silent swore between clenched jaws.
“Say again?” Rafa asked, turning his attention to the slender, red haired man.
The administrator stared him down angrily, but his anger wasn’t directed at Rafa. “This is all their fault.”
“I’m listening.”
The man growled, turning his head aside intent on stonewalling the armored soldier, but he changed his mind just as fast.
“I know where your missing ship is. It’s safely tucked inside a slip on shipyard 3 undergoing modification.�
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“What?” Drayson asked. Several other administrators also shot the man questioning glances.
“Keeping secrets from each other?” Rafa guessed.
“The Americans and British have been raiding each other’s shipments. They always did it after we made the exchange, so it wasn’t our problem, but the Americans went and destroyed one of the British cargo runners that rendezvous with our ships outside your detection range and carry the cargo in to rendezvous with their tagged mining ships. These are probably what you referred to as your ‘ghost ships’ because they were built by us so you wouldn’t notice any unaccounted for ships. Thing was, the Limeys couldn’t report what the Americans had done, because the ship they destroyed wasn’t supposed to exist.”
“So they hatched a plan, which my superiors stupidly agreed to. They’d have one of their tagged ships go ‘missing’ and blame it on the Americans. That ship would be brought here and refitted for our use in place of a new cargo runner being supplied to them, without cost. A straight up trade that left them with a political weapon to use against the Americans, save it backfired and got you suspicious. Now here you are and I’m tied to my chair with tape thanks to their stupid national pride.”
“Wow, talk about dropping the ball,” Rafa commented with genuine sympathy. What these men had accomplished all these years was impressive enough, let alone without Star Force ever knowing about it…only to be outted by a nation more concerned with pressing a rivalry than protecting what they’d conspired to create.
Taryn walked in behind the reclining administrators carrying another body in identical uniform.
“Found another hiding under his desk.”
“We’re running out of chairs,” Rafa commented, grabbing one of only two remaining and taping the unconscious man into it.
“You have enough?” Taryn asked.
“I think we’ve got a good group here. We’re in the middle of a very enlightening conversation.”
“Really?” Taryn said, resting her stinger pistol hilt on her shoulder.
“Oh yes, you wouldn’t believe the progress we’ve made. This fellow here,” he said, tapping one man on the head, “was just informing me that they have the missing British ship in one of their shipyards…and that the British gave it to them.”
“What?!” Taryn asked, her ire rising.
Rafa held up a wait finger, then stepped back into the semi-circle where he could face all the administrators.
“Alright, now we can proceed in two ways. You can be our prisoners and we can keep kicking the crap out of your security forces and run around this station causing all sorts of trouble…we like doing that, by the way…or we can call a truce and turn our attention to the people responsible for this whole mess in the first place. I’ll let you decide.”
“Define truce,” Haskins asked curiously.
“Your cover is already blown. That’s not going to undo itself. As you said earlier, you haven’t done anything illegal. Stupid maybe, but not illegal, and since you’re not customers of Star Force you have little to lose from the services blackout you know is going to be handed down, so we might as well dust each other off and go about our business like professionals.”
“You want us to ignore all this?!” the man on the floor yelled.
Rafa walked over and tipped the man back up, his red face having gone nearly purple. “We came here chasing raiders and a missing ship. Who’s really to blame for that?”
“The Limeys and Yanks,” the other administrator grumbled.
“Exactly,” Rafa agreed. “So how about we let you get back to business and we get back to civilization before they decide to go and start a war out here.”
“You’re going to cut off our smuggling lines,” Drayson pointed out.
“Probably,” Rafa admitted.
“Agreed,” one of the men who’d been silent to this point said with a tone of finality. “I assume you’ll need access to a transmitter to call for a ship to pick you up?”
“That would be helpful,” Rafa admitted, looking at the man. “You in charge?”
“For this region, and you make a valid argument. We’re businessmen, and I’d prefer not to have to deal with a fleet of your warships. The economic fallout from this is going to be bad enough. I have no wish to see you confiscating our property the way you did with the Chinese.”
Rafa gestured with his head and Taryn walked over and untied the man, then went about picking up and untying the others. “We’ll be out of here as soon as our ship arrives.”
“Send our best wishes to the Americans and Brits,” the lead administrator said menacingly.
“No problem,” Rafa promised.
8
February 21, 2107
An SRL, Search and Rescue Light, arrived at the rebel corporate command station to pick up Rafa, Taryn, and Morgan, with the administrative staff happy to see them and their armed transport go. The smaller version of an SR had been built around the growing design parameters of the SR fleet, with their primary task no longer being purely search and rescue, but rather an ‘on hands’ presence to make up for what Star Force’s drone fleet lacked.
Personnel extraction missions such as this were a prime example of the limitations of the remote-controlled warships…they had no living quarters aboard, nor could they carry any cargo, so if you needed to retrieve, transport, or repair you needed a crewed vessel, and the SRL had been designed to accomplish these tasks on a smaller, more mobile level than the larger, full scale SRs.
The SRLs were also armed with defensive laser cupolas, a small rack of intercepts, and a single offensive laser, small grade, making them an adequate, multi-purpose platform which the SR fleet had morphed into out of necessity. A small pair of gravity discs made up the ship’s center, with forward, lateral, and aft zero g compartments designed in homage to the Defiant from Star Trek lore, right down to the compact, no nonsense design aesthetic of the interior compartments.
Morgan immediately felt better once they were aboard and she could get out of her armor. Rafa dealt with the Captain and organizing a flyby of the shipyard where the British ship was being refitted, so they could get concrete visual proof that it was actually there before they headed back to Star Force controlled space, while Taryn and Morgan were free to do what they liked. After a long, hot shower Morgan donned a tech uniform that the crew had provided for her and began going through a series of stretches/body lifts in the small fitness room, working out the stagnation that several weeks of inactivity and zero g had subjected her body to.
Unable to do anything even remotely like a normal workout, Morgan relished in being able to get even a little training in, reflecting on the mission as she did so. While she didn’t like the toll it had taken on her training, she didn’t regret coming. She’d actually found the change of pace refreshing, as well as being able to knock a few heads around. It wasn’t anything near as difficult as her sparring exercises, but it was live…and for so many years she hadn’t encountered anything that wasn’t specifically designed for her improvement, so tossing around a few inept security guards had been surprisingly gratifying.
Morgan slid her bare feet wide of her body and pressed down into a full splits, feeling her tendons tight and resistive. She’d worked her body into a state of extreme flexibility over the years and was glad she hadn’t lost all of it. In fact, after a few rounds of stretches she recovered most of her bend lengths, missing only a few centimeters here and there. Her ability to recover so quickly was odd…she’d feared it would takes days or weeks to get back into the swing of things, but apparently her flexibility didn’t fall into that category.
“Ouch,” Taryn commented when she walked in on Morgan stretched out between two chairs, hanging down from her ankles so her legs bent apart at more than a 180 degree angle with arms stretched out sideways for balance. “When did you learn to do that?”
“Took a while,” Morgan commented, having to keep focused to keep from rolling over forwards or back. “
One of the advantages of nonstop training.”
Taryn took her shoes and socks off, then mimicked Morgan’s splits on the floor, minus the extra angle added by the chairs, and with a bit of daylight showing underneath her.
“That’s as far as I can get. I’m usually up a few inches higher for target practice.”
“You shoot from a splits?”
“It offers decent stabilization when firing under low objects,” the targeting specialist said, leaning forward in her splits until her chest touched the ground. “And I prefer this if I have to be completely flat. I don’t like firing sideways when I can help it. I need to keep gravity aligned with my sights and I can pop up easier because technically I already have my feet underneath me,” she said, flexing her legs and seeming to levitate her torso up as the ‘scissors’ closed, holding her hands out in front of her as a mock weapon.
“That I haven’t tried,” Morgan admitted, holding her stretch throughout.
“You don’t do a lot of shooting, do you?”
“Enough to keep improving my scores, but most of my focus is on speed, strength, and agility.”
“It was the last time we talked. No changes?”
“Not when it’s working and I’m continuing to level up.”
“To what point? You’re making unbelievable progress on your core levels, but don’t you want to work on your tech skills? Even with your strength and speed, I heard Jason can still take you with a sword fairly easy?”
“Can’t train for everything,” Morgan said, having had this discussion with others before. “My base routines run me almost 9 hours a day, so I have to divide up the rest for skill training…and that doesn’t leave me a lot of options.”
“9 hours? Why is it taking so long?”
“I’m running higher volumes than I used to. Only so many hours in the day.”
“Why haven’t you just kicked up the intensity?”
Morgan blinked, surprised by the question. “I have.”
“No, I mean really jacked it up. If you were back in the sanctum and only had 2 hours to work with, how much higher do you think you could take it?”