Star Force: Deception (SF11) by Jyr Aer-ki

Author:Jyr, Aer-ki [Jyr, Aer-ki]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Published: 2012-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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