Star Force: Divergent (SF74) (8 page)

“How?”

“It works like a sensor, and there’s no point in
trying to explain it now. You’ll have your own inside the hour.”

“An hour? This treatment works that fast?”

San laughed. “Remember this moment when we discuss
flash growth and ascensions later. Your tissue growth is going to be painless.”

“And yours wasn’t?”

“Like I said, things get interesting, and very
complicated, going forward.”

“I’m game.”

“Good, because you’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

8

May 12, 2897

Epsilon Eridani
System

Corneria

Jyra rode her speeder just above the treetops, save
for these weren’t covered with snowdrifts. While a lot of her field training
had been in the frozen forests of the planet, a few missions had been to the
warmer regions but none had been to the southern hemisphere’s region 3 that she
was now zipping through. The forest was denser here than anywhere else on the
planet and bordered on jungle humidity, making it impossible to fly through the
trees at any speed.

She couldn’t feel the heat in her armor, but that
wouldn’t be an issue either way today. She was no longer being sent on training
missions, for with her Tier 1 psionics being unlocked and her enlightening tour
throughout the V’kit’no’sat pyramid, her time in the program was at an end.
When she had returned to Corneria it was as a full Arc Commando with a new
assignment.

That assignment hadn’t been spelled out, though San
had insisted that this wasn’t another test. He said she’d get all the
information she needed when she arrived on site, so Jyra had grabbed a speeder
from within one of the cities that ringed the region 3 forest and headed for
the coordinates he’d given her.

It was a long way to travel, but on a speeder it was
easy enough. A few hours of zipping over the treetops brought her to the upper
third of the unused wilderness area where she saw nothing on the battlemap. Not
a city, building, outpost, or relay beacon. It was called a wilderness area for
a reason, and there was nothing here as far as the interlinked Star Force
comm
systems could tell, but San had also given her a code
to use at these coordinates, so when Jyra hit the approximate area she typed it
into the speeder’s
comm
board and transmitted it in a
single pulse.

She got an instantaneous reply, also a single pulse,
that updated her battlemap with a ghost icon…meaning that it wasn’t an active
signal, but a memory of the location the pulse had identified. It wasn’t
exactly matching the coordinates that San had given her but fairly close by and
only took Jyra another 3 minutes to get there.

The Arc Commando slowed to a stop, looking down at the
thick trees and seeing nothing despite sitting directly on top of the waypoint
that was on both her helmet and her
comm
board. She
sent out the signal again, but this time there was no response. Jyra tried
twice more but nada. The transponder was silent.

“Single use code. Savvy,” she said, looking for a
place to push down through the treetops. There was literally nothing below her,
so she flew off a hundred meters or so to the south and found a nook that she
very carefully lowered her speeder into, finding it a shallow depression rather
than a shaft to the ground.

“Crap,” she said, not seeing where to go and also not
wanting to just try and break branches that she couldn’t see through the
leaves…or could she?

Concentrating, Jyra was able to turn her new Pefbar on
and see all around her. The sense still freaked her out a bit and only
stretched a couple of meters, but it let her see each and every leaf, including
the branches they were attached to below her. Her mind was overwhelmed with
sensor detail and she couldn’t hold it for long, but she got just enough
information that when she did release it back to her normal senses she knew to
move the bike two meters to the left then depress one.

Jyra sank on her metal steed with a sea of leaves
moving in around her standard issue, dirty white armor as she turned her
spherical sight on again and plotted her next bit of movement…which was forward
a meter and a half, then to the right one. After that her head sank into the
leaves and out of the sunlight, with her continuing to navigate down through
the thick canopy until she finally got her speeder into the void below.

Very little light made it this far down, leaving it
perpetually dark with just a green glow emanating from above like a nightlight.
Aside from a bit of hardy grass there was no underbrush, just tightly packed
tree trunks that looked like toothpicks for their lack of limbs this far down.
Jyra had to move slowly, making constant twists and turns, but she was able to
find enough gaps to fly between the trees and back over to the waypoint.

“Hiding in anonymity, huh?” she said as she parked her
speeder on the ground, deactivating the anti-
grav
after extending the landing gear. She slid off the pommel seat and walked a few
steps over to the simple circular hatch just sitting on the forest floor. It
wasn’t camouflaged at all, but it was flat to the ground without so much as a
lip sticking up, meaning you’d have to be standing next to it in order to see
it, and with hundreds of miles of forest to search through, this was pretty
much as hidden as you needed.

Still, Jyra thought you could have covered it with
dirt and left a smaller marker up top.

The newly minted Arc Commando took a knee and slid her
armored fingers into the small lip near the edge, finding an overhang to give
her enough grip to lift the circular plug up a few inches but no further. It
took her a moment to realize it was on a pivot point, then she rotated it
around to expose a short shaft and ladder that bottomed out about 4 meters
below, though she had to use her
nightvision
to see
that, for the forest was too dark and her Pefbar wouldn’t reach that far.

Jyra stepped over the edge and climbed down the
ladder, leaving the hatch open for the moment, and eventually stepped off into
a small room barely wider than arms’ reach. A glowing marker on the wall was
visible, but only in
nightvision
, highlighting an
area with a simple circle. She walked over to it and ran her hand along the
wall, finding nothing there. Feeling like this was another test, she used her
knew psionics to look into the wall where she saw a small interior switch.

Jyra bit her lip. Her telekinesis, which the
V’kit’no’sat called ‘Lachka,’ was very hard to use and she had almost no power
in it at all at this point, but apparently the switch had been designed with
that in mind. Using her Pefbar to watch and control the Lachka, she reached
past the solid wall and just brushed the stick-like switch inside. It moved
slightly, but apparently that was enough, for a section of the left wall pushed
inward then transitioned to the side revealing a lit hallway that stretched on
a considerable way before dead-ending.

“Cool,” she said, walking down the very narrow walkway
that would force anyone passing another to scrunch up against the walls. The
ceiling was low too, so much so that a Knight would have to duck down…or a
Zen’zat, for they were the size of Knights.

When she got to the end of the hall it had a stairway
descending to the right, which she followed down for some distance as it curled
around itself in a boxy corners, eventually dumping her out into a wide room
that had a thick, but open door. It was what one would call a ‘blast door’ but
at the moment it wasn’t attempting to keep anyone out, and considering the two
turrets built into the walls flanking it, she was pretty sure this was a kill
box that could be used in case of attack to defend whatever was beyond this
point, for all she could see was a short hallway leading to what looked like
another dead end.

Jyra walked past the retracted blast door, seeing that
it was about 14 inches thick. Overkill, unless what was down here was
really
important.

When she came to the end of the hallway there were two
staircases headed off in either direction, but they were only a few steps deep
and allowed her the view of a large room in each. She went right, then realized
that it was actually one giant room that the hallway was blocked from view of.

There was no one here, but it was definitely meant to
be lived in. There were couches, vid screens, tables, stools, what looked like
a kitchen and storage cabinets. Jyra walked further in, then saw that on the
backside of the stairway ‘T’ was a wall with a holographic scene playing out
from Star Wars, particularly the battle of
Nephosis
in episode 19, but when she got within a meter of it the sight of Jedi fighting
off rock monsters disappeared and a real life Commando replaced the fiction.

In front of him were three colored orbs, which Jyra
knew were message prompts. She touched the green one first, for basic
information was usually colored as such.

“Hello, Arc Commando. This facility is what we refer
to as the ‘Nest.’ Archons have their sanctums, we have our nests. This is where
you will do the bulk of your psionic training, though in a pinch you can also
use the sanctums. You have code access, and if a lower level Archon questions
you being there, just show them your psionics and that should confuse them
enough to not bother you. Right now only rangers and above know about Arc
Commandos, so feel free to masquerade as an Archon in order to get your
workouts done in the field that require the special training equipment for your
psionics.”

“But usually we will come to a facility such as this
to do the majority of our training in private. This is where we develop and
hone our skills, as well as share experience and help one another when we cross
paths. The Archons have left instruction manuals on the psionics, but they will
not teach us how to use them personally. They want us to develop them on our
own, tailoring their use to our needs, and perhaps discovering a new trick or
two that we otherwise wouldn’t if we just patterned after them.”

“The bottom line is, this is Arc Commando territory
only. Even the Archons don’t come here and it’s completely off the grid. No
battlemap location, and information is acquired through a landline tap of the
closest cities so there is no signal to trace back here. We’re ghosts here, and
intend to keep it that way, so don’t ever bring guests.”

“Beyond that we are Arc Commandos and charting our own
path. Learn from those that have come before you while also figuring things out
on your own. The Archons didn’t develop their corps quickly, and neither will
we. Patience, persistence, and ingenuity will shape our legion going forward.
Add what you can and welcome to the club.”

The hologram ceased talking, so Jyra hit the yellow
button and the image of the armored man disappeared, replaced by lists of data.
She realized they were an instruction manual of sorts…and 259 pages long. Not
going to sift through that all right now, she pressed the red button and a
holographic schematic of the facility replaced the data, with her realizing
that this room was but the tip of the iceberg. It was as
big
or
bigger than an Archon sanctum, and from the look of it held numerous
training chambers, some of which were labeled for things that she wasn’t
familiar with yet, though the track and pool were obvious.

“Damn, we’ve got a halo track here?” she said with a
laugh, knowing those were only for individuals too fast to use a standard one.
Jyra zoomed in and out on the map, wondering how the hell they had built this
place without tearing up the forest above. Remembering what the man had said,
she moved around the schematic until she found the landlines, which were buried
cables stretching out in three directions from the facility all the way across
the forest to the bordering cities.

Which meant someone had dug tiny tunnels across
hundreds of miles in order to keep this place off the map. And now that she
looked at it, the upper coating of the facility was made of sensor dampening
armor, meaning it would be very difficult for orbit or aerial scans to detect
the difference between this place and the bedrock it had been carved out of.

“They certainly threw in all the bells and whistles on
this one,” she said, disconnecting her helmet and tossing it onto a nearby
couch, then thought twice and decided to shed all her armor before she started
to have a look around. The pieces of it ended up on the seat cushions as well,
then Jyra found one of two other entrance/exits to the commons room and began
walking the corridors in her casual uniform, wondering if anyone else was here.

It wasn’t until a few hours later, when she started to
rifle through the more than ample food stores that she found the ‘welcome
button,’ for that’s literally what it was labeled on the wall behind the
holographic Star Wars battle. It was oddly hidden there, for she only saw it
during a few sequences where there were gaps to see through.

She poked her head behind the active hologram, then
saw a few sentences explaining what it was for. Press the button and a signal
would go out through the entire facility letting them know someone had just
arrived, so she did just that and decided to hang out here until someone came
to her. That said, she knew there were only a few hundred Arc Commandos, so she
wasn’t sure how many there would be stationed here for training.

As she walked over and sat down on the couch, pulling
up the vid feeds from the cities and finding a movie to watch she realized her
speeder was parked up top…and she hadn’t seen any others. With a frown she
walked over to a terminal in the room and began going through the database she
had found earlier looking for some type of hangar, or at least a protocol for
what she should do with it.

When she couldn’t find anything in the search function
she went back over to the hologram and tried there, rifling through the pages
of instructions that seemed to be for
newbs
like her.
They weren’t indexed, so she had to go through them line by line and decided to
make an event out of it, for everything she came across seemed to be of
importance.

Before she found out about ‘parking’ she came to a
section that indicated they had to check in and out of the facility for it was
rarely used. If someone was here a small orb would appear at the top of the
hologram. Jyra let it go back to the Star Wars sequence just to be sure, but
there were no floating orbs on top of it, meaning that she was here alone.