Star Force: Book One

Don't drop the stopbox

"I'll say it again. Are we gonna fight, or are we gonna talk like men?"

I recognized his voice in the dark. There was no doubt anymore that this was him. It had been years since I had last seen him. Why was he back now? And why would he follow me as he did? My anxiety had subsided a bit, but I could still feel the tightness in my chest from what had just transpired.

"W-why are you here, Mitch?" I stuttered.

"Am I not allowed to come home and check in on my little brother?" He responded. Obviously, he had an ulterior motive, but what was it?

"Get in the car, Micah. We don't have much time and much to talk about on the way."

"Where are we going?" I hesitated.

His gaze fell to the ground as if he was hesitant to tell me just before he swung his right leg back into the driver's side of the charger. He completed the motion and flung the rest of his body into the vehicle without answering my question. Did I dare follow him? He had gotten in so much trouble in the past, and I knew I didn't want to be mixed up in the situations he always seemed to find himself in. But he knew me. He knew my curiosity would get the best of me and slammed his door behind him without a word.

I had to make a move now. I didn't even have time to think about what I wanted to do, but I slowly began creeping up to the car. I opened the passenger side and lowered myself in. Once the door was shut behind me, I turned to him and asked, "Do you want to explain what's going on here?"

"Give me your phone."

I pulled it out of my pocket slowly and handed it to him. Without a hitch, he smashed it on the center console and threw it out the window.

"What are you..."

Before I could finish my sentence, he threw the car in first gear and slammed on the gas. The vehicle spun around and zipped toward the road. We were going 50 before we had even left the parking lot.

"I can't let you go to Colorado," He said.

"What? I've been planning to go for years! Did you leave this town and expect me not to do the same? Why did you smash my phone? How am I supposed to communicate with anyone?"

"There are other ways out of here. And don't worry about your phone, you can get a new one later. I'll even pay for it. But right now, I need you to stay focused and listen to me," He stated.

I couldn't believe it. After all these years, Mitch returned just to stop me from leaving. What did he expect me to do? Was I supposed to go to school and accumulate the kind of debt I would never get out of? Or maybe he expected me to take some dead-end job. I could become a shipment handler and spend all my time driving around the country and making shit money. After all, they'll hire anybody these days. But I have bigger dreams than that, and he should know. I'm enlisted because of him.

"What's wrong with going?" I began to interrogate him.

"It's a lot to explain. But know this, the government is not just using Star Force to go up there to expand the satellite data networks and provide free cell service as you see on the news."

"Yeah, we also go up there to protect the existing satellite networks from foreign enemies," I rebutted.

"You sound just like a new recruit. Good for you! Media brainwashing never ceases to amaze me!"

Are you kidding me? Had he gone complete conspiracy nutjob these past few years? The Star Force had been around for almost a decade and was best known for providing free global communication systems via free cell service and wifi. Their work had shaped the future. But leave it to Mitch to call their bluff and take a stand.

I sighed. "So what is the government supposedly guilty of doing?"

"We'll talk about that when we get to Cin City," He replied.

"Vegas?"

"Cincinnati. Try to keep up."

"What's in Cincinnati?" I questioned.

"I have a contact there who will fly us over the border undetected. Once we're in Toronto, we should be safe for a while. They won't know we made it across the border."

"Whoa. Slow down! I can't go to Canada. And what are we in danger of here? I can't wait till we get to Cincinnati for you to start talking. I need to know what's going on, and I need to know now!"

Before I finished, the passenger side mirror exploded into a shower of raining glass shards that would have hit me in the face had the window not been closed. A loud bang echoed in the air behind the windowpane, and red and blue lights flicked on.

"What the fu..." My voice trailed as Mitch whipped the car around a turn. I crooked my neck backward to see the police and grabbed Mitch's arm while he gripped the wheel.

"Why are they shooting?" I screamed and ducked down lower behind my seat.

"It's Morgan!" Mitch shouted. "The piggy likes to fuck with me!"

Morgan was a lifelong mentor to me and had been there for Mitch many times in the past. How could he be shooting at us now? Mitch must have had this wrong. There's no way Sherriff Jeffery Morgan would shoot at us. Then again, why would any officer not just pull us over instead of laying down fire at the car?

"The old bastard's on Menlo's payroll!" He shouted.

"Who the fuck is Menlo?" I shouted back.

"Menlo Doyle."

"The billionaire?" I questioned.

"Yes. Menlo Doyle owns the networking markets and wants to keep it that way. I know what he's up to, and that pisses him off!"

The car raced down the road, and bullets raced passed faster. As I glanced at the clock, a bullet pierced the back window and beamed into the dash, destroying the clock and radio.

"Mitch, get us out of here!"

Suddenly, a loudspeaker began to blare from behind us, "Pull over, Morris. Micah doesn't need to be a part of this. This can be just between you and me."

So much for missing my brother and wishing they had a proper goodbye. If he were planning to kill us, he'd do it out here in the middle of nowhere so he wouldn't be seen. Lord knows the media would have a field day with a cop killing two local boys.

I could imagine the headline now, "Morris boys killed by local Sherriff." Then again, that would imply that people even cared enough to know our names. Maybe he really could get away with killing us. We were the town charity cases, after all.

Mitch's eyes were filled with intensity and focus on the terrain in front of us, but it was only a matter of time before one of these bullets hit us. Three loud bangs came from behind us, and I could hear the bullets' piercing whistle zipping past us. Two more of them pierced the trunk, and I prayed to God there was enough cover between where we sat and Morgan's gun to stop bullets."Open the gloves box and pull out the silver case," Mitch yelled.

I opened it. The case was next to a handgun and a stack of little colored books that looked like passports. It was a glass case with silver paint and a line of masking tape. The tape had the word "Stopbox" written on it in sharpie.

"Lean out the window and throw it in front of his car," he yelled at me.

"What is it?"

"Just do it!" He affirmed.

I rolled down the window and peeked out to see how close Morgan's vehicle was to us. Before I could get a clear view, the car jolted and slammed my head into the passenger side door. Morgan had hit us in the rear and was now trying to push us off the road.

"Anytime would be good!" Mitch yelled sarcastically.

I launched the box over the rear of our vehicle and right in front of Morgan's cruiser. It shattered into millions of tiny glass pieces. What was more intriguing, though, was what the box contained. Dozens of little pointy metal spikes erupted from the now-demolished case and were sucked into the cruiser's tires.

Sherriff Morgan's cruiser came to a stop. My eyes were glued to the scene that shrank behind us in the distance. The Sherriff shot at us and tried running us off the road. I couldn't believe what had just happened. Everything escalated so quickly. I sat in shock for a while as Mitchel focused on the road. Even after what I had just seen, I was still confused. I still had questions. I needed Mitch to tell me what was going on.

"So, Cin City?" I asked blankly.

"Yep."

"And your gonna tell me what's going on?"

"Everything," He replied. His attitude had shifted since the hailstorm of bullets, and he seemed much more willing to talk to me.

"Start with Morgan. You said he was on Menlo Doyle's payroll. And that Doyle knows you know about his plans for the networking markets. Explain that."

"Jeffery's been following me for years. Although, this may be the first time he's ever fired a weapon at me. I gotta hand it to him; he's getting more ballsy. Last time, he struggled just to make empty threats towards me."

"But he's a local Sherriff. You've been gone for years. How is it that he's kept track of you all this time?" I replied.

"Not always as far away as you might think. Doyle hired him to keep tabs on me from a distance."

"That's why he didn't approach you at the store?"

"You got it. They wanted to know if I'd be a good little boy and let you go off to basic or if I'd try to stop you and spill their secrets."

"Why does it matter if I know?" I questioned.

"More loose ends, Micah. Their plans for our world aren't something they would let just anyone know about. Their terrorist level threats."

"So why not just kill you?"

He smirked, "Because I have proven useful for them."

"You proved yourself useful for a terrorist?" I demanded.

"I said they were terrorist-level threats. Not terrorists. Or at least not yet."

"What are they planning to do?"

"You ask a lot of questions," He said, defending himself.

"But what does any of this have to do with the Star Force?"

Mitch sighed. "When I left the first time, they promised me all types of success and opportunities. I worked my way up the ranks fast, and within five years, I was the first officer on the ground supervising resupply flights to our boys at the station."

"That's amazing!" I howled.

"So it would seem. But these resupply flights had redacted cargo manifests. I was the first officer overseeing the mission. The only one who could go over my head was the Major on the ground and Captain onboard the shuttle. Anybody higher up than that never looked at manifests. There was no reason that anything in a cargo manifest should be redacted before coming to me. I was the one who did the redacting before it reached other people!"

"So, what did you do?" I asked.

"Well, naturally, I demanded some answers from the Major, who pretended it was all no big deal. He said they had been running redacted supply runs for longer than I had been enlisted."

"Had they?"

"It doesn't matter if they had!" Mitch seemed frustrated now. "A redacted resupply list means something unaccounted for is going up to the space station where it could be used for terrorism, data piracy, or anything else!"

I sat up in my seat and looked out the window. The stars were in full view from a clear sky. And here I was talking to my brother, who had overseen missions to send people up there.

"What do you think they sent up there?" I said.

He was quiet for a moment as he thought to himself and adjusted his grip on the steering wheel.

"A man."

"A man?" I questioned with a tone of pure shock.

"Yep."

"Why?"

"He's one of Doyle's guys. He's up there to reprogram the satellites to harvest data from the free phone service programs." He said.

"But why would that matter? What do they plan to do? Ad campaigns?" I almost laughed when I said it, but I bit my lip and held it back.

"No, Micah. They aren't planning any fucking ad campaigns. Don't be so naive. Their planning kill campaigns."

"Who do they wanna kill?" I asked.

He reluctantly shook his head and stayed silent for a moment before responding.

"They want to reduce the planet's population to a more manageable level for global oligarchy.""Global oligarchy?"

"Like a worldwide dictatorship. Menlo may be one of the richest men in the world, but money only goes so far. To him, true success comes with power. And if you knew Menlo as I do, you'd understand that when he goes after something, he goes after all of it."

Mitch's words sounded silly as he spoke them aloud. Who goes after world domination like some sort of cartoon villain? It seemed so trivial. Menlo Doyle had enough money to do whatever he wanted for the rest of his life. Was I supposed to believe he tried to enslave humanity as well? That sounded nuts. Yet even worse was the fact that Sheriff Morgan had shot at us right before Mitchel told me all of this. Maybe it wasn't so crazy to believe after all. Maybe Menlo Doyle indeed was some sort of Bond villain type of character.

"Have you tried contacting the authorities or calling the FBI tip line?" I suggested.

"Do you honestly believe that Menlo wouldn't have influence over the FBI if he had influence in the Star Force? And I'm not even mentioning what we just went through with the Sheriff. If you ask me, this is the most powerful man in the world."

As we drove toward Cincinnati, I believed Mitch's words more and more. Was I turning into a conspiracy nut? And what would happen if I didn't show up for basic? Would I be court-martialed? Technically, I could be by law. But that's only if they found me in Canada, and the Canadians agreed to extradite me, which they always did because they wanted good relations with the United States.

What was I thinking? Was I really about to go on the run with Mitch? How could I even entertain the idea of becoming a fugitive? My heart began to race. I knew this decision had enormous consequences, and there was no escaping making a choice. It was either going with Mitch and becoming a fugitive or going to the Star Force Academy and possibly never seeing Mitch again. Not to mention there was that whole plot of an evil overlord trying to exterminate most of the human race and enslave the rest.

I couldn't believe myself for even thinking it, but I was entertaining the idea of going with Mitch. If this whole thing was crazy, at least I got to spend some long-lost time with him. Maybe being court-martialed wouldn't be the end of the world. They very well might let me off easy. It's not like I committed war crimes or something by not showing up to basic training. Only time will tell what they do to me if they catch me.

"I've made up my mind," I said, trying to sound like it was a much tougher decision."What do you mean?" Mitch replied.

"I'm coming with you. I don't know what you have planned to try to stop Doyle, but I wanna be a part of it."

"Oh," Mitch said bleakly. "I wasn't really planning on offering you the opportunity to say no.""What an ass-hole," I thought. Had it not been for Morgan trying to kill us, I would have left without giving it another thought; something was going on, though. The Sheriff would have never shot at us, but since he did, I had to believe there was more to this, and I had to get to the bottom of it. If that means going to Canada, then I guess so be it.

"Listen," Mitch began, "Don't worry about the Star Force Academy. I will teach you everything you need to know when we get to Toronto. I know everything they were gonna teach you in that damn 'indoctrination camp' anyway. People's lives are at stake, and we need to train you to help save them and stop Menlo."

"What are you going to teach me?" I asked.

"Everything. Data networking, satellite programming, basic combat, hacking and security, whatever we need you for in the fight against Menlo. I know it's not all you expected, Micah, but you're in this now. You're training started the moment you got in this car. Welcome to the Mitchel Morris Training Academy!" He said over-excitedly.