Vargemma

by Aer-ki Jyr

  He noted that the nebula would also provide problems, but his armor could withstand the sand blast if needed, but Candancen stopped him there and asked about what was in the nebula. The Uriti answered that the overall mass of the nebula appeared as a very weak gravitational field, but there was a spot within it that pulled much harder but not enough to be a planet or star given its weakness in relation to its size.

  It was spherical, but not pulling in the surrounding nebula like a star would. He said there was some clumping around it, but he did not know what it was, for it didn’t match any known behavior of material. It had Corovon in it, but not enough to justify that size.

  “Wait,” Candancen said aloud from the small chamber she was isolated within as her gauntlet linked her to the Uriti through her command ship’s transmitter. “You can smell Corovon?” she asked, though in a telepathic shorthand quite different from English, but over all these years she’d learned to overlap the two in her own mind, and sometimes she ended up talking to the air in order to help her mind translate it into the appropriate mental images.

  Corovon has a different gravity pull, he responded.

  Candancen hesitated a moment. Getting information out of the Uriti was always like an Easter Egg hunt. They’d never just respond to questions with free information, and important facts often slipped out randomly during other conversations, such as just now.

  As far as Star Force and the V’kit’no’sat knew, gravity was an emission that spread out from a source similar to light, but based on how much mass it had and could not be blocked by other objects. All gravity was the same, as far as they knew, and Corovon pulled the same as everything else. So as interested in that object as she was, she took a moment to explore this further.

  “How is it different? It pulls at the same rate, doesn’t it?”

  Acceleration is constant. Source is different flavor.

  “Flavor?” she asked herself without translating as she thought. “What can it do differently?”

  It can talk. This one does not.

  Candancen’s eyes widened as a possible epiphany hit her. “How fast can it talk across stars?”

  We cannot talk, only listen.

  “Who speaks?”

  Stars and Masters.

  “Who are the Masters?”

  Those who speak with meaning. Stars speak with change.

  “What do the Masters say?”

  They have not spoken to me.

  “Have they spoken to the others?”

  No.

  “How do you know what the Masters sound like if you have never heard them?”

  We know.

  Candancen bit her lip. Sometimes it felt like she was talking to an annoying computer, but the truth was Uriti minds were just so damn different it was hard to get them to overlap enough to communicate…but then again that was her job, not Jaws 04’s.

  “Does the object in the nebula hum?”

  I feel it. Pattern does not change. It does not speak.

  The Wrangler snapped her fingers. She was finally getting somewhere.

  “What do stars say?”

  They say what is in them. They say what season they are. They say what will happen. They say what has happened. They say what is happening. They say who is in them.

  “Who is in stars?”

  We are. When we are inside, they sing.

  If Candancen had been holding a cup of red she would have dropped it. After all this time hunting for Hadarak and being unable to scan very deep within stars, Jaws 04 was telling her that the Uriti could tell if they were in there or not…but wait.

  “Do they only sing if there is Corovon?”

  Not all stars sing. Some are always silent. Some are never silent. When we enter, star will speak if able.

  “Ok, so not a total detector, but still…” she said to the air, frustrated but relieved to finally be learning this. “Does anything other than Corovon sing?”

  Yes.

  “What else?”

  Many things. Different songs.

  “Does Star Force sing these songs?”

  You hum Corovon and…

  Jaws 04 couldn’t explain what else because they hadn’t established telepathic identities for the concept, so Candancen got a slew of images and feelings that were hard to sort through. He had to send them at least 15 times before she started to piece them together and she was grateful for his patience. Eventually she picked out what it was, or at least what she thought it was. The other Uriti had talked to each other about it, and it seemed some ships hummed beyond Corovon, and the ones that did were some of the Borg vessels.

  And Candancen knew that some of them carried Materia and some did not. That was her best guess, and she was willing to bet a planet that captured Essence hummed somehow. They’d always known that Magicite got heavier with more Essence in it, but they’d never guessed it was a different kind of gravity being added, just more of the same.

  “Does the object in the nebula sing this song?”

  No.

  She frowned. If the Vargemma were there they’d have all kinds of Essence bottles laying around.

  “Does anything move there?”

  It is dark beyond.

  “Behind it?”

  The stars beyond sing, then they do not, then they sing again.

  “As you move through this system?”

  It blocks their song.

  “Son of a bitch,” the Wrangler said, guessing to some kind of high level cloaking device, possibly shielding against something that Star Force didn’t even know existed, let alone had a way to detect…except apparently the Uriti could. “How far away is the object?”

  She got an approximate position, but as Jaws 04 suddenly moved away from the remains of the Stargate outpost to get some parallax on the target, the object got narrowed down enough for her to overlay on the already mapped exterior of the nebula…and it was well within the boundaries.

  “Conventional ships making a jump there would get incinerated by the friction,” she said to herself. “But a Stargate effect bypasses the mass. How cute.”

  “How fast could you go to get to the object and stop before you hit it?” she asked, taking a wild chance that he would answer something intelligible, but to her surprise he fed her a clean acceleration profile based on the mass of the object as far as he could sense, then he gave her a second one that was much more favorable.

  “What’s the difference between the two?”

  One is with song, the other is not.

  Her eyes went wide, and she actually fell backwards from her standing position onto the knee-high padded pedestal that others liked to sit on when engaged in telepathic conversation, though she rarely did, but the full implication of that simple statement would change everything for Star Force going forward.

  “You stupid Uriti,” she said to herself and not him. “You’re a lot more advanced than we thought. Thanks for the early birthday present.”

  Candance’s euphoria at the recent revelations dimmed quickly as Jaws 04 sent her a warning.

  The glowing ones are coming. Do we fight or run?

  “Where?” she asked, immediately linking into the battlemap network as she mentally switched gears and sent an alert to the bridge and the overall fleet.

  They come from the object.

  “How many?”

  The glow overlaps. Many sparks.

  That meant a fleet popping into the Stargate Effect would have a surge with the push to get them here, then coasting with less Essence use. Good thing this Human wasn’t as stupid either, because she was able to translate that explanation clearly.

  “Get back to the carrier, we are leaving now. They are coming to kill you.”

  Thankfully Jaws 04 didn’t argue, instead turning and heading towards the carrier as Candancen recalled it and had it race to his position while she got updates from him but couldn’t see the approaching glows herself…but she doubted she would until they were right on top of her. Thankfully the Uriti
seemed to be ultra sensitive to Essence too…which was why even a little flash across a star system was enough to get their obsessive attention. Fortunately Jaws 04 wasn’t reacting that way. Whatever Bahamut Zero had told them in his message seemed to have knocked out the ‘pursue and destroy’ command encoded into their genome.

  When she asked him about that as he reboarded the carrier the explanation was simple. Their orders were to destroy the glowing ones, and if they could not they were to warn. And Jaws 04 had just warned her. Apparently Star Force was seen as their masters now, and Candancen really wanted to know what Bahamut Zero had said to them to make that change.

  So they were still just as obsessed, but when their ‘masters’ were here they deferred to them. She wondered if the ‘masters’ were the Lurkers or something else.

  They are not, he said as the doors on the carrier were slowly closing and the ship was already accelerating back towards the star with her escort fleet paralleling it as the system defenders were reforming to take on the Vargemma when they arrived…wherever they arrived. They are destroyers. We no longer follow their orders. We follow orders of the masters. Old masters abandoned us. Old masters demand we be destroyed. You save us. You protect us. You are our masters now.

  “When did that change occur?”

  Masters must glow. Only those that glow can defeat others that glow. We cannot defeat old masters. We cannot glow. You can glow. You save us. You teach us. You are masters now. The herd will fight when you decide. We wish to fight the ones that glow.

  “So do I, but we have to learn more about them first. If I glow now, will you attack me?”

  No. We do not attack masters. Only threats to master. All who glow are threats to masters. Masters are not threat to masters.

  “Simple enough,” she said, causing an Essence rush around her body just to check. She was low because of the training she’d been doing during the interstellar jump…which was the only time she could practice her Essence skills without Jaws 04 attacking her, or so she’d thought. Apparently that wasn’t an issue now, for he didn’t move as the doors finally closed on him. “Well that’s a relief…”

  Candancen cut off mid-sentence as she got hit with a massive burst of Essence…so big it nearly overwhelmed her, but it wasn’t weapon grade. It was just raw Essence, and felt like she was dipping her hand into fully charged Magicite, though this was much more powerful than the few times she’d actually done that during her Neo training under Wilson’s direct care. He had some of the largest Magicite repositories in the empire, but this was far more potent.

  It didn’t last long, and suddenly she was within a ball of Essence several meters from her body’s perimeter, but as she absorbed it, and absorbed it easily, it slowly shrank down until it pulled back within her body and left her so high it felt like she’d eaten a box of ambrosia in a single bite.

  But that overload faded, and what she realized was that her depleted state was now completely gone. Jaws 04 had just refilled her using its own Essence like the Hadarak had done for the Lurker when it nearly killed Paul.

  “Thanks,” she told him as they coasted through their microjump as a fleet towards the central star in the system and another chunk of the mystery of the Uriti was revealed. “This is fucking awesome!”

  6

  July 30, 128537

  Kanethrol System (Novatis Kingdom)

  High Orbit

  Bren-5288 was the commander of the massive fleet stationed outside the front doorstep of the mysterious Vargemma domain. The Stargate station was destroyed, but Star Force wasn’t leaving. The Vargemma hadn’t done anything since the station self-destructed, but now with a Uriti in the system they had come out of their hole.

  He couldn’t see it, despite his Essence skills, but apparently the Uriti could and indicated the enemy fleet was on their way out of a distant nebula, which apparently contained their stronghold. Yet after the Uriti left no attack came, though they did get close enough for him to see them. It was little more than a series of flashes on the edge of the system…on the very deep edge of the system far beyond where the Stargate station had been…and based on what they had learned thus far he guessed that was them turning around, for no ships appeared on sensors.

  But in order to turn around they had to have a beacon here to send them back. They also had to have some surveillance in the system to know the Uriti had arrived, and then left again. That meant there were scouts in the system, and now that he knew that he intended to find them.

  The fleet launched all its drones, some 4.2 million of them, and began scouring the system as Bren played a game of chess with the unseen enemy. He made it look like general scanning, but what he was really doing was maneuvering ships into specific areas with Archons onboard that could sense Essence, then he moved drones and his own command ship out to the area where he had seen the enemy fleet turn around.

  When he did, he saw two more flashes. He mentally recorded the approximate position of them and moved closer. It took a while to search the area, but eventually one of the other Archons found them sitting there in the Essence realm and otherwise invisible.

  Bren moved right over top of them, barely 30 miles away while not risking them reverting back inside his own ships. There was just a little Essence rush marking their position, and he assumed that was what held them there. If it ended they would pop back up, and they probably thought they could hold here until his ships left then come back out…but they’d need someone with eyes to tell them when, if they didn’t have a way to sense out of the Essence realm.

  So there were probably other scouts here, but they couldn’t all be hiding this way. So how were they avoiding detection?

  If they didn’t have a good cloaking field then they’d have to stay at distance to avoid being picked up. That meant they needed to be flushed out, and if they were hiding very far away from the star that was a lot of ground to cover. Fortunately he had an insane number of ships to do it with.

  When he gave the order the patrols moving around the star in an orderly fashion suddenly shot out in all directions, leaving the innermost part of the system empty and expanding out spherically like a balloon inflating. Bren moved his own ship out as well, abandoning the ‘sunken’ ships while leaving behind a few probes that hopefully wouldn’t be noticed from the far away spotters.

  It took more than a week before those probes reported back, and when they did they were quickly destroyed…but not before they got sensor scans on the pair and what type of cloaking devices they were using.

  They weren’t bad, and were more than null fields. These could actually produce a mimicked image of what was behind them, but not a very good one. It was fine for distant starlight, but get in front of a planet or the star and they wouldn’t be able to defeat good sensors.

  So they had to stay back and observe from afar, and when this pair saw they were exposed they immediately ran further out into the system where the gravity was getting painfully weak, then they split up, but Bren could still track them because some of the nearest drones…who were supposed to be too far away to track them…were equipped with Ghostbane sensors. Bren wished all his ships were, but the expensive sensor was only equipped on special occasions and was a bit cumbersome.

  Standard warships didn’t carry them on the drones, but the newer versions of the warships themselves had at least a low powered version. Most of the warships here were old, but still more advanced than most of what the other races in the galaxy had. The top line ships Star Force produced had mostly been sent to the Core to fight the Hadarak, though Bren had some here, just not enough. But now that he had some of his Ghostbane-equipped hunters on the scent, these two Vargemma ships were not getting away.

  That meant he had two chases going on, for they’d split up, then another drone got lucky enough to pick up a fluctuation in a cloaking field. It was minimal, but the Star Force crews were being meticulous as they searched the system and finally they’d hit pay dirt. This one didn’t run, rather going su
nken and hiding, but a probe drop nearby would reveal him when he came back up, and Bren’s fleet had all the time in the world to wait.

  As for the two that were exposed, they were eventually run down and hit with disabling weaponry, ripping their cloaking fields off and letting the sensors get a good look at them just before they too disappeared into the Essence realm.

  The ships were not the same model, and didn’t look to be even from the same race. One was elongated similar to how Star Force warships were, but the other one was a ring with three orbs in the center with what looked like thin icicles rising off them, but the ring remained a perfectly smooth white hull.

  They were still hiding, all three of them, by the time a Borg vessel arrived in the system with new orders for the fleet.

  “We’ve got three sunken ships at different locations pinned down,” Bren reported to Greg-073’s hologram. “Scouts to relay information to the main fleet would be my guess. We still haven’t been able to pick up any transmissions, but they are talking to each other unless they have a way to sense us from the Essence realm. I’d guess there are more out there watching that we haven’t found. I assume you got the Uriti update?”

  The trailblazer nodded. “That’s why I’m here. It’s time to go say hi.”

  “How? That gravity well isn’t big enough to jump to fast enough, and if we go the slow route and they have a way of getting to use, they can pick us apart during the 5 month coast phase, at best. Not to mention the nebula friction.”

  “We’re not waiting that long.”

  “You bring some special toys?” Bren asked.

  “Nope. Just a special brain. Observe,” Greg said as he assumed command of the fleet with a thought, retasking hundreds of drones to a low stellar orbit jumppoint enroute to the nebula.

  “Kamikaze?”

  “Not when we don’t know what’s there, but we will be losing most of the drones…even if they don’t attack.”