Star Force: Divergent (SF74)

1

July 3, 2896

Epsilon Eridani
System

Corneria

Jyra
Hemman
stood in the
hold of a
Mantis
-class aerial
transport, fully geared up as the rear hatched opened. She watched as the door
transitioned into a ramp as a gust of wind entered, but she didn’t feel the
ship’s rapid deceleration due to the IDF, though she could see the snow-covered
trees below whipping by. Those trees gradually slowed and the mantis came to hover
over a small hillside with an unnatural clearing on top.

Jyra walked out onto the ramp and stepped off, with
the Commando dropping a few meters and landing in the six inch deep snow. She
dropped into a crouch and her knee hit the ground as her foot slipped, but she
otherwise held her form as the mantis gained altitude and slowly accelerated away
with her catching a glimpse of its ramp closing before the surrounding trees
blocked her view.

“Well then,” she said to herself from inside her
helmet as her breath created a small cloud beneath her exhaust ports on her
chin. The temperature was frigid, but not as bad as she’d experienced on
Vandermen
. That mission against the lizards had her unit
fighting through snowdrifts taller than they were and a temperature so cold
that her faceplate had iced up numerous times. This was a vacation in
comparison, so long as she had her armor to keep herself warm.

Jyra set the internal controls to station keeping,
meaning they’d use power drawn from her movement to operate a combination of
heating and cooling units. Her body had gotten used to wearing the armor so
much that it felt like a second skin to her now and as a result her body’s
internal temperature regulation didn’t fight it much, but she’d usually end up
with a slightly sweaty sheen underneath the internal padding.

She took a look around, seeing nothing but a square
cut out of the forest the size of a basketball court. That had been created
intentionally, for the rest of the forest had no natural
gaps
,
but there was nothing else here. No technology or biology. The entire planet
was devoid of animal life, leaving her alone with the trees and snow hundreds
of miles away from civilization. Huge tracts of the planet had been colonized,
but there were still chunks of it that had been preserved in its natural form
for training and other purposes, with this clearing where she’d been dropped
off being the start point for her next challenge.

Jyra stood up and started walking, carrying a very
full pack with only a pistol for weaponry. That was for emergency purposes, for
most of her equipment was supplies. This wasn’t a combat mission, nor was it a
training skirmish. This was to be a survival test, with only a small beacon in
her pack as a backup in case something went wrong. Other than that she was on
her own and not under surveillance of any kind. That had been impressed on her
during her briefing four hours ago, for if she wanted to become an Arc Commando
it would require long missions away from the rest of the army and she had to
not only be able to move and survive alone, but to flourish in that type of
environment.

When Jyra passed by the nearest of the trees she
extended an armored hand out and touched the bark, seeing her white armor
matching the snow plastered on the outer side. It was colored for camouflage
rather than the standard Commando colors, as was most of their equipment. She
was meant to be as much of a ghost as possible, and even a little thing as
altering the armor from dirty white to pure white could make a difference in an
environment such as this.

Like the pistol, the rest of her equipment was outfitted
for multiple scenarios despite there being no threats here. Corneria was the
second most populated planet next to Earth and just as secure. Jyra was here to
learn rather than fight, and had spent the previous 3 years doing so after
getting the very exclusive invite to train to become an Arc Commando.

At the time she hadn’t even known there were Arc Commandos,
aside from rumors. There was no official listing of them in the public
databases, and even in the military records that she had previous access to
there was no such rank or class mentioned. The same was true of the Arc
Knights, but they’d been seen by many Commandos assisting them on the
battlefield. Arc Commandos were never seen and many Commandos believed they
were either a myth or misunderstanding, and now that she was in their training
program the veteran knew why.

When Jyra had been approached by the Archons it had
been due to her service record. 189 missions in 26 campaigns over the past 340
years and a level 203 Commando rating put her in the upper 10% of the
Mainline
army, but at present there were only 600 Arc
Commandos in existence, meaning that a lot of other Commandos that rated higher
than her had been passed over in the selection process. The Archons had
explained that some didn’t want the different duties when offered, but that
most were not fit for the special combat units that they were building and they
thought that she might be.

They were elite units, she’d been told, and that was
enough for Jyra. When she’d signed on she had immediately been removed from
combat duty and sent to Corneria only to be subjected to an entirely different
brand of training than she was used to, with this solo expedition being yet
another example.

As Jyra walked under the trees and got herself
acclimated to her surroundings she checked her HUD. In it she had only access
to a simple map, for the traditional battlemap of the planet had been blocked.
She could reactivate it if necessary, another emergency contingency, but if she
did it would disqualify her from this mission and that was something she would
never do. The very fact that she had the option, including the pistol and other
non-essential gear for this mission, underscored the mandate of the Arc
Commandos.

Combat could happen at any time, in any place, and Arc
Commandos were selected for their ability to think outside the box. In truth
all Commandos were, but Arc Commandos took it to the extreme. Her training
since arriving here had not been combat oriented, for she already knew how to
fight and had more experience doing so than a lot of Archons did. No, this
training was centered around thinking and figuring things out when one didn’t
have clear orders to follow or a clear path to attack the enemy. Normally
Archons would adapt their orders to the situation, but as Star Force grew by
leaps and bounds the Archon ranks were not keeping up in numbers.

Jyra was being training to operate without Archon
leadership, and to do that required that they learn to think like Archons…at
least as far as ground combat was concerned, specifically small unit tasks.
Archons were trained to lead all forms of armies, from large planet-spanning
conflicts down to behind enemy lines missions amounting to only a handful of
personnel. On top of that they were also masters of all 5 divisions, from naval
to aquatics, and Jyra wasn’t going to be able to match them on that. Like the
Knights, Commandos were the peers of the Archons, some would say, in their
individual disciplines because she and others would train exclusively in one area
while the Archons split their time between many…and not only were they
warriors, they were builders and diplomats.

Pretty much, they were masters at everything. And Jyra
most definitely wasn’t.

But what she was good at was solo missions, and that
was why she’d been recruited. Her combat record against the lizards saw her
posted to numerous scouting and special team operations, in which she excelled,
but her training here had gone far beyond that.

Checking her limited map she saw only a directional
marker that pointed north and a distant waypoint that was her first destination
on this cross country scavenger hunt. Jyra didn’t know where she was going,
only that she had to get to the waypoint and figure things out from there.
According to the waypoint numbers it was located some 129 miles away over
slightly rolling terrain.

“That’s one hell of a first leg,” she said,
transitioning the waypoint to her HUD permanently but dismissing all other data
before taking off at a jog through the inch-deep snow underneath the trees.
Everything was covered by it but the branches seemed to have collected most of
it, allowing her a fairly easy time setting a pace. How to navigate the
geography was something she was going to have to play by ear, for she didn’t
have a topographical map to utilize, so she started by simply heading in a
straight line until she found a reason to deviate from it.

The ‘straight line’ was actually a weave between the
tree trunks and scrub brush, for there were no trails nor anything in this
region to make them. Thankfully the cold climate and dim lighting, thanks to
the snow covered branches, had kept the undergrowth to a minimum, but that only
emphasized the desolation of the place. No one lived here, let alone passed
through. Aside from the small artificial clearing there was nothing here
different from when Star Force had first arrived to colonize the planet and
Jyra could feel the disconnect.

That ‘disconnect’ was something she’d been trained to
embrace and utilize, for most people, regardless of race, avoided it like the
plague. People naturally operated with a hive mind, some more than others, and
that left blind spots that could be exploited. It was in those blind spots that
stealth was often achieved, and the more she could learn to think as a disconnected
entity the easier it would be to identify them. That said, she’d always be able
to connect with the army and Star Force. Her 3 centuries of service ensured
that, so this training wasn’t designed to replace it, but rather enhance that
bond of brotherhood by giving her a second mode to slip into…a
mode
that could be used to protect and attack as necessary,
derived by her own judgement rather than orders.

That new mode was active, for she could feel herself
slipping into it now that she was off the grid. She’d been told that other
training missions where commandos were sent out alone had always been secretly
monitored in order for the trainers to be able to intervene if something went
wrong. If the trainees knew about that they’d operate differently, so they had
to keep it secret. This fact was entrusted to her and the handful of other Arc
Commando trainees she was working through the program with because they would
not be operating under similar procedures.

None of them were rookies, for all were combat
veterans at least 200 years old. They could take care of themselves, but there
was always risk. Star Force didn’t want to lose them to an accident, which was
why there were safety protocols in their equipment so they could break from the
parameters of the mission if deemed necessary, but that choice was theirs
rather than a trainer’s. If Jyra fell off a cliff and smacked herself
unconscious there would be no help coming, for she wouldn’t be able to call for
it.

Risk was everywhere, and while Star Force couldn’t
prevent it they could and did minimize it. Those minimizations were now
lessened, but not removed, in order to give her a chance to get away from
everyone and operate in the dark for a while. With so much population on Star
Force worlds it was virtually unheard of not to see another Human, even if just
walking from your quarters to the cafeteria. The same was true in the military,
so her being here, surrounded by miles of uninhabited territory, was a rare
thing that she’d been getting a lot of in her Arc Commando training.

Enough that she was now comfortable with it, and in
some ways preferred it. Not only was she being entrusted with this ‘alone time’
but she and the other trainees were also given special access codes to Star
Force databases, allowing them almost free reign to move about through their
cities wherever and whenever she wanted. Staying in the dark even when amongst
the masses, it had been explained to her, and to that end on a previous mission
she had been tasked with making her way through restricted areas under
security’s nose. An Archon has been stationed with security to call them off if
she was detected, so no misunderstandings could occur, but that hadn’t been
necessary for Jyra had made it through in the shadows using a combination of
guile and computer codes that security didn’t even know existed.

Her Archon instructors had explained the duplicity to
her as an invisible layer of protection. Rather than playing games with their
own people, she was learning how to back them up off the grid where potential
enemies couldn’t look. While Star Force computer and
comm
systems were difficult to hack, there was always the possibility of it
happening. If it did, an enemy could use their own systems against Star Force,
hence they needed another layer of defense…and in this case, that second layer
was
trust
.

The Archons had their own brotherhood that they held
to fiercely, and through it all they trusted one another to do the right thing.
For the Commandos it was less so. They hoped they would do the right thing, but
kept an eye on them just in case. The same was true for the other 4 military
divisions, and in most cases that oversight was unnecessary. Where the Archons
led the soldiers followed, and so long as the good guys were in charge there wasn’t
going to be any fertile ground for misbehavior within the ranks. Jyra knew this
from her time serving as a Commando, but she’d only recently come to realize
that most of her fellow soldiers were going along with the flow rather than
thinking for themselves.

With the knowledge Star Force gave their people
through training, going with the flow was a shortcut to understanding how the
universe worked. Once a person made it to that point they were unlikely to
forget, but they were only learning the knowledge that was passed onto them.
The Archons wanted the Arc Commandos to be more than that, and therefore they
were recruiting individuals who showed an aptitude to take what they’d learned
and expand upon it by thinking outside of what they’d been taught and making
new connections…essentially doing what the Archons had done to create that
database of knowledge.