Star Force: Cascade (SF73)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  Daniel telekinetically pushed one over to touch the cube and it changed shape again until contact was broken, returning to statue mode. One facet of the gel was that it could only be controlled by ‘land lines,’ meaning that physical contact had to be made. Remote control was impossible without alternate technology being inserted into it, such as the probe now was. That was something that was going to remain set, for Daniel and Lens didn’t have a clue how to program a comm system into it. Maybe someday thousands of years into the future they could, but the V’kit’no’sat database was no help with this, for they didn’t have record of any similar technologies.

  But for his goals there was no need to have a receiver built in. It just meant that if a piece of one of the drones got lopped off it’d go neutral and unresponsive, holding its shape until it was recovered or destroyed. The gel did have to be powered, and this batch had come fully charged, but when it lost power it was designed to lock into place as a solid rather than disperse as a gel or liquid.

  There were multiple versions of the gel that Lens had developed, but the stiffer versions he was not interested in. Those were being used to form the hulls of his friend’s bendable warships, but Daniel’s drones had to go far beyond that, hence the even lower armor value. The more they morphed the less rigid their matrixes were, and the more rigid the matrixes were the higher their maximum armor value.

  It was a cost of defense to include the flexibility that Daniel required, but that too was calculated. Lens wasn’t pursuing this path, nor were the Dvapp or any of the other four Clans involved in the research. The Aquamen were the leaders and handling most of the research, but what Daniel intended to make of it was something entirely new and going even beyond the bounds of what the Elarioni had built.

  3 years later…

  Daniel returned to Europa after a 3 month stint in the advanced training group getting beat up by Paul and Rio. It had been educational, but he was eager to get back to work on Project Tentacle, which his techs had continued in his absence with some late breakthroughs that had allowed them to fashion a working prototype at minimum volume, which was about equivalent to a big trash can.

  “How do we look?” Daniel asked when he came into the lab and saw several familiar faces working at various stations.

  “003 is waiting in the water, with 004 and 005 standing in their firing tubes on the destroyer.”

  “Alright, set for recording mode and let’s get to this,” he said, stepping over to the control station and accessing the neural interface. It was only a minimal drain on his cognitive processes, for the miniaturized version of a command nexus didn’t have more than a few functions that the proper ones did, and at the moment he was only controlling a single drone.

  It was sitting in the cold water outside the colony and not far from the destroyer on station there. Daniel set the spherical globe of gel into motion, traveling through the water at a troll then shifting into a more aerodynamic point as the trailblazer put it through several alterations as a general test of base functions they had established prior to his training vacation. When everything checked out he began running it through more advanced shapes, including the stretchable pylons that ended with fingers or hooks that could grasp objects at range.

  He played with the outer limits, finding what they were by triggering a line too long and too thin for the minimal currents, snapping it a third of the way out and losing control of most of the line. Daniel withdrew the rest of it that he controlled and motored the mass over to the floating section, making physical contact again and calling it back into a thicker band that he then whipped around slowly, testing its strength against the water. He didn’t have to see the data collected as it came in, knowing that the rest of his staff was monitoring that and would alert him if there was a problem, so Daniel just played with it, testing its limits and trying to seek out problems if they were there.

  After working through the lines he pulled the mass back together then spread it out into a canvas, immediately catching itself on the currents and moving about slowly in their direction. He let the material go almost totally limp and saw it scrunch up in several locations due to eddies as he caused it to get thinner and thinner in order to cover the most surface area. He had it out to nearly the size of a football field before holes began to tear in it.

  He upped the solidity to keep them from spreading, but the moving water masses began cracking entire sections off. Daniel quickly pulled back what he had control of then sent out lines to hit the now drifting pieces, regaining control and bringing them back into the single mass. Next he signaled the destroyer to launch a target buoy, with it coming out of the fixed hull of the angular craft and speeding out to his location before slowing and moving on a circular path that had it tracing a lazy circle around his location.

  Daniel paused, knowing this was the moment of truth, then had his ball of gel shoot off through the water in needle form towards the target, hunting it down and coming at it from the side in order to up the difficulty. Approaching from the front or behind would have been easier, but Daniel didn’t want easy.

  When the drone got close to the probe the needle balled up again then sprouted three tentacles from a central mass as it continued to head straight towards the target. It eventually made contact, denting under the collision speed with a silent splat, then Daniel manually controlled all three tentacles and wrapped them around the probe, flattening them out in some places into paddles that held it tight like cushions around an egg. The probe couldn’t escape the grip from any angle and Daniel locked it in by causing the pieces to solidify in their current form.

  Next he tested the gravity drive buried inside the gel, pulling against the probe’s own unit in a tug of war that saw the drone being overpowered as the destroyer upped the thrust to continue its ordered path. Daniels job was to stop it, and he was failing. The little glob of gel couldn’t compete with the much larger gravity drive in the probe, meaning in this case that traditional tech was better.

  Daniel sent a signal for the destroyer to launch 004 and soon he had control of the second globe and was simultaneously driving it over to the test area while he continued to wrestle with the probe, through thrust multiple directions as well as reconfiguring his hold on the probe to produce fins and even small sails to catch and redirect the water flow to give him more tugging options.

  It wasn’t enough, but when the second drone got to the probe it latched on as well, morphing into the first one and becoming an integrated unit. The individual pieces inside, three each, remained separate and communicating with each other via short range signals, but the gel itself didn’t care which unit it belonged to and would go wherever it was signaled. It behaved as a single unit that now had two gravity drives inside it, allowing for more pulling power as Daniel wobbled the probe off course multiple times before it eventually dragged its way back into a circular path that was now no longer mathematically precise, but rather a wibbly wobbly and ugly route, but the drones still couldn’t gain full control.

  That was solved when Daniel had the third one launched and combined it with the other two, giving him enough tugging power to force the probe off course and over to a designated location while the destroyer crew fought to prevent it. The wrestling match eventually went Daniel’s way, but the delay was considerable. He mentally noted that if actual capture missions were going to be launched, more units would be necessary for an expedient recovery process.

  Once that part of the experiment was completed he had the now single drone release the probe and break apart again. He had to manually determine the break points or use a percentage program, settling on the latter as he let it split the gel up evenly between them before sending two off nearby into station keeping while he worked with the third, spreading it out into a thin block wall that the destroyer then maneuvered the probe into, testing the gel’s blocking capability.

  The first impact shattered the gel, with Daniel having to go around and pick up all the pieces before they could floa
t off and be lost, for there was no homing capability built into them. On the next attempt he reduced the rigidity and saw the wall dent before being thrown off the side of the probe by the continued movement. The drone just didn’t have the mass to stop it, but he was hoping that the amount of water it would have to displace behind the wall would compensate.

  He brought in a second drone and combined them for the next attempt, spreading them out into a wider and slightly thicker sail before upping the rigidity a bit. When the probe hit it caught, denting it slightly, and suddenly having a huge amount of drag put on it as the sail didn’t slip off of one side like before thanks to a few hasty tendrils that Daniel manually formed and stuck to the side like support lines.

  One thing he was realizing with clarity was the amount of mental control necessary to use manual functions. With his Sav and experience he wasn’t having trouble, but he knew rookies and even veterans without Sav would, meaning that the more automated functions that could be toggled by button press, whether actual or virtual, were a must while the manual functions would allow the higher end users so much flexibility in their tactics that he felt like the Green Lantern, for he could shape the gel into any form his mind imagined…so long as his mind could account for and control every particle within the gel. That was the catch, but for the time being three drones was not enough to push his limits.

  When they got around to mass producing these things he was going to see how many he could actually control, but for today this successful test was a huge step forward and a major deviation from established Star Force protocol involving aquatics. It was that deviation that he hoped would give his Clan an advantage over the others, and eventually give Star Force a whole slew of new tactics to use in warfare beneath the waves.

  8

  August 5, 2893

  Merovingian System (Core Region)

  Low stellar orbit

  Administrator Claven walked the decks of the Prometheus as he did every day, bypassing techs at work and visually inspecting that everything was in order. The massive Star Forge-class mining station was his to oversee and arguably the most important piece of property that Star Force had. A few other stations had been built after the Prometheus with more scheduled for construction, but those were mostly empty shells still waiting to be filled with equipment. Only his station was fully operational, and it had taken a long time to get it that way.

  Gone were the research techs and Archons that had created it, tuned it, and filled its massive void with new factories that could operate at high capacity in low volume. Even now those were no longer considered new tech, so the operation of the station had been transitioned over to a conventional staff, with Claven being appointed Administrator of the station. A title that was usually reserved for a full colony.

  But here in this empty system all that there was of Star Force was the Prometheus and the Canderian sedas. He had no control over the latter, for they were simply neighbors in this system near to Sol. They were in the safest region Star Force controlled, perhaps even safer than Earth given that Merovingian had nothing of value in it for anyone to come looking for. That said, Claven had a full complement of troops onboard, including a pair of Archon rangers, just in case the massive space station was boarded.

  They also had some 72 naval drones situated in a higher holding orbit guarding the sister station to the Prometheus…which was little more than a disconnected piece of the monster, for it was a warehouse/starport located at an altitude that wouldn’t see it cooked from the stellar radiation. It was there that incoming cargo ships picked up and delivered supplies, then a fleet of specially shielded dropships would ferry traffic to and from the Prometheus as it sat so low it was nearly within the atmosphere of the star itself.

  That ‘atmosphere’ was not a clear distinction, for there was so much turbulence that waves of material often washed over the star forge’s shields, ironically giving the station additional power with every hit. The stellar output was being absorbed as much as it was being reflected, providing the station with the bulk of its power output augmented by internal reactors. In fact, that absorption capability was the only way the Prometheus could function at full capacity, for the collection probes were so large that they literally gobbled it up. That was understandable, given that they had to resist the destructive power of the star when actually touching it, and the fact that they were comprised totally of shield energy themselves.

  Right now Claven had 19 collection ‘straws’ inside the star reaching down more than 200 miles on a standard day and up to 480 on special occasions. That was barely scratching the surface, but it was more than enough to get a good pull on the denser stellar material. Each of those straws fanned out at the bottom into huge collection nets, which were comprised of clusters of tiny spheres that allowed only certain materials or types of materials to pass through, then what was collected was shunted up the connecting stalks and into the Prometheus for processing.

  From there automation and the Administrator’s army of techs sorted out unwanted material and sent it back down into the star to save space on the star forge while anything valuable was shunted into holding tanks and cooled to desired levels. From there it was either held or sent into processing sectors where it would be converted into whatever products Claven ordered them to make. Most of the corovon they harvested was kept raw, but right now some 13% of it was being bonded into molecules on site to produce a variety of substances that were then shunted to another section of the station and combined with others into armor plating, structural beams, shield emitters, hand weapons, Archon armor, and hundreds of other things that were more economical to build right here and now than to ship off the raw materials to another star system for manufacturing.

  The factories onboard the star forge were so condensed and automated that the station was extra heavy, even for something of its massive size. Any movement required a good tugging on the gravity drives, not to mention the constant strain of having to hover above the star, for they couldn’t suffer the lateral movement of orbit when they had shield tethers into the star’s surface. Those tethers literally latched them in place, forcing them to expend huge amounts of energy just to stay put and not fall into the star themselves.

  The low altitude they held also acted as a defense against attack or curious onlookers, for the plasma gases swirling around them made quite the problem for primitive sensors. Most races had trouble even locating the star forge at this altitude, but Star Force’s advancements into Pro’phad energy gave the Administrator clear lines of sight around his station and well down into the star. He could scan deeper than he could reach at the moment, which allowed him to move the station around as needed to find the densest deposits to mine.

  The starport above them didn’t orbit either, maintaining a more distant hover/rotation to match the location of the Prometheus as the star spun about on its axis. It too had absorption shields, but they didn’t pick up as much energy given that they were farther away. It was more than enough to keep them in their laggy orbit, but whenever a jumpship arrived to exchange cargo they had to keep their engines on or fall away from the station, making navigation a bit of a hassle, but one that Claven’s dropship pilots handled on a day to day basis with no trouble.

  And the Administrator kept them busy shipping out finished products up to the warehouses and bringing back down whatever compounds couldn’t be harvested from the star…which were minimal considering they only focused on products that could be entirely or almost entirely made from the mining resources. Bits and pieces of others were brought in to add to them but a lot of the supplies were meant for the station itself, for there were no bioharvest facilities or any other type of personal sustenance infrastructure on the station. They relied entirely on imports, though in a pinch the Canderians could cover for them in the way of supplies.

  Normally a station of this size would have redundancies, but because it was located so close to the star and designed for a very select purpose the designers had scrapp
ed the standard protocols and built this beast as a harvest engine with little else slowing her down. It was Claven’s responsibility to make sure she kept churning out raw materials and products round the clock, and he felt it was best to get his own eyes on his station as much as possible rather than relying exclusively on reports shunted to his office.

  He oversaw the station operations from there, along with the rest of the 342,953 people on the station. None of them were here as visitors, nor were any allowed. Each and every one was a specialist in their field, for nothing less would allow them a transfer to what was considered an extremely critical position. While some materials, such as warship armor, were produced here because of the corovon being handy, the primary importance of this station was its ability to collect materials that were virtually nonexistent outside of stars. While corovon was always important, it was the solari that the star forges were designed to go after…and it was the solari that were allowing Star Force to take a huge leap into the next technological level and put them ahead of both the lizards and ADZ denizens alike.

  Star Force had no equal now, though rumors about the Preema and Nexus were still abound. Claven knew they had advanced technology, but he also knew about the tech that wasn’t available to the public that Star Force was designing and currently using, a lot of which was incorporated into this station. He was also getting regular requests from highly placed techs and even Paul-024 himself with regards to new solari to hunt and in what numbers they needed, along with occasional explanations as to why.

  All that was holding Star Force back in some lines of research was available solari, whether it be for actual experiments or sufficient bulk for prototype development. And even when they figured out how to build something they would need to mass produce it using the solari from this mining station and the other newer additions, none of which could hold a candle to the Prometheus’s current production quotas…which were more or less a joke, for with the swirling currents within the star you never knew for sure how much material you could collect or not. It was a fishing expedition, with Claven having the ultimate decisions about where to dip their rods.