by Aer-ki Jyr
Did they lose their original galaxies? Sara asked somberly.
You might be right. In which case these might be their survivors. But again, why not take refuge in one of the Temples and just make it off limits to everyone else?
Or are they traveling this way? Passing through this galaxy to another and using the backdoor routes? No need for food or living accommodations if you’re sent as cargo.
That actually makes more sense, but there’s a lot of them here. Where are they going? Where are they coming from? And who are they?
I don’t think we can wake one up to ask them.
Then let’s at least get a closer look.
Agreed, Paul said as they walked across the room then levitated up about 14 meters to get to the lowest row.
They’re not the same, Sara pointed out. I’m seeing at least 5 different races.
Not very big either, Paul said, looking at a winged creature barely larger than a dog, but it did have an interesting crystal-like tail tip that reminded him of the Hjar’at’s Saroto’kanse’vam. Who the hell are these guys?
This mystery gets deeper the further we go, but bottom line, are we going to get anywhere near to a Temple?
The puddle jumpers came from one, they will take us there again if we find the right one. Or we could be bouncing around these automated facilities for the rest of our life.
That’ll be about 3 months if we don’t get resupplied. Let’s have a look around here, then we need to go. We don’t know how many more of these we’ll have to pass through, or how much traffic they’ll have.
Let’s see what they’re loading up first. I doubt it’s these guys, and our ship came in empty. I get the feeling these facilities all have multiple purposes piggybacking on each other.
I got the same impression, she said, turning away and flying down the chamber. There was no more time for running, no matter how much their legs ached for it. From here on out it would be flying, but at least that would give them something of a workout up until they hopped their next ride…assuming they could find one.
15,398 lightyears away…
Cora-005 and Steve-004 had found their way into the backdoor channels the same as the other Archon pairs, but they had gotten luckier than most and found a roaming mining site hopping from one asteroid field to another in the Rim. It had an insane amount of traffic, with puddle jumpers and larger ships coming to pick up the raw ore. They’d decided to follow one of the big ones, and after waiting 3 weeks they’d finally caught one leaving.
The hitchhiking ride took them another 4 weeks stuck to the outside of the large craft. Unlike Sara and Paul, they hadn’t risked cutting through the thick exterior hull and had to put up with scurrying over the surface of it beneath a 1.6 meter Essence barrier as it moved from one portal to another through a series of 6 different jumps through small rerouting facilities that amounted to little more than a block floating in deep space that had Essence stored within it.
Though they didn’t realize it at the time, but they had stumbled onto the Caretaker’s Priority Route, while most of the other trailblazers were picking their way through the normal ones that did not require Essence use aside from exit and entry to the Temples.
When the larger ship finally arrived, it came out of its Essence bubble through one of the main Temple portals, emerging into the atmosphere and then beginning to rise up into the space that was contained inside the massive sphere.
Time to get off, Steve said, jumping free of the Caretaker ship and letting himself slowly fall back to the grasslands below with Cora following close beside him. They didn’t release their cloaks until they hit ground, then they stood there, staring up at the bright sunlight and testing the air before they finally peeled back their armor into backpack-carrying vests, letting their skin breathe.
“Ah, that feels so good,” Cora said, craning her neck back until it hit the rim of her backpack.
“Better yet, I’m picking up battlemap signals…faint, but it looks like we lucked out. This is Alpha Temple.”
“You’re kidding?” Sara said, mentally interfacing with her armor to check, and sure enough, there was a faint signal getting to them with generic updates, but their suits were not nearly powerful enough to transmit back. Apparently the Paladin weren’t anywhere close to this Region…and according to the map update that followed, they were several hundred thousand miles away from the closest outpost. “I can’t believe we ended up here.”
“The Vargemma are probably chewing through so many resources trying to fight the Paladin that this Temple is getting the lion’s share of replacement shipments.”
“I wonder if any of the others are here yet?”
“We’ve still got a ways to go,” Steven reminded her. “And a lot of unfriendlies between us and the Paladin.”
“Easy peasy,” Cora scoffed as she twisted around and disconnected her pack from her armor. “We’re here. That’s what matters.”
“We need to keep moving, not set up camp.”
“I’m eating food before we do anything else. I’m sick of being fed through a Regenerator. My jaw is sore from lack of chewing.”
“We should have brought some gum,” Steve said as Cora tossed him a ration bar. It was ultra condensed, and many had already been cannibalized by the regenerator in her armor to feed her, but they’d brought enough for months, and one bite was enough to supply enough calories for a ‘normal’ person for a day, day and a half. But for an Archon, not so much.
Steve bit off a large hunk and started chewing, finding his own jaw sore from lack of use as he used his psionics and sensors to scan the area. It wouldn’t do to get ambushed right after they got here, and as pissed as the Vargemma were they might just kill them on sight and hope the Caretakers didn’t intervene fast enough to matter.
“Better?” she asked.
“Much,” he agreed, swallowing hard, for his throat also hadn’t seen use in far too long. “That transport is going for the orbital facilities, isn’t it?”
“Looks like. They haven’t been before, have they?”
“Not since the Paladin took them over. So what are they replacing?”
“More Caretaker warships? Oh shit,” Cora swore, suddenly realizing why the signal was so weak. “There are no orbital transmitters showing. It’s only surface locations.”
She pulled up her visor and did an enhancement, zooming as much as she could through the slightly hazy sky to look for certain things on the battlemap. The first few checked out, then when she spotted one of the tiny facilities that manufactured Olopar there was an asteroid field surrounding it…except it wasn’t asteroids. It was ships. And they were not Paladin.
“Steve, something’s happened since we left. I think the Paladin are losing.”
“Eat on the way, we have to get moving,” he said, reforming his armor and cloaking again as he raced into the sky and took off flying across the landscape towards the nearest friendly outpost on the battlemap. Cora chewed one more mouthful, then threw the remainder of her ration bar into her pack and followed him, resealing her stagnated flesh inside her armor, but that didn’t matter now. They had to get to the Paladin and figure out what was going on and how to reverse it, for right now the Vargemma held the high ground, and if they could find a way past the Caretaker defense protocols, their fleet could bombard every surface facility the Paladin had and wipe most of them off the face of the Temple within hours.
They were finally here, but the question was, were they too late?
10
June 12, 128549
Unexplored Frontier
Black Hole 8273
Paul and Sara had been able to get a position fix from the visible stars, finding they had traveled even further Rimward and deeper into the Frontier. Star Force had long ago sent mapping missions out to at least get a count of all star systems in the galaxy, though they hadn’t done more than pass through and log the jumplanes. What was in those systems wasn’t known, in many cases, and there were many other
non-star gravity wells out there that had not been classified, but the basic map allowed the trailblazers to plot their approximate location, especially with a black hole here, which was about as obvious of a gravity well as you could get, regardless of whether it put out light or not. Ship engines saw gravity, not light, and thus star charts were based off of gravity silhouettes.
This black hole had no known name, just a catalog number. There was no way of knowing what sort of traffic passed through here, but Paul knew it wasn’t going to be any Star Force ships. If there were, he would have tried to flag one down, but as it was he couldn’t detect any ships out there, which was very odd. Signals should be everywhere with ships transmitting heavily to warn others of their approach with the lack of stellar radiation that most races used as a natural radar to navigate off of. And if you went very close to the black hole your sensor image would bend, which meant that having beacons constantly transmitting was the safest way to navigate the usually high levels of traffic passing through black hole systems.
But there was nothing here, and Paul knew their distance from the black hole was not an issue. Even if he couldn’t see any ships, there should have been residual signals coming out from them. He detected no shield around the station to dampen anything, and it was beginning to look more and more like this was a private black hole.
Paul had no idea how that could even happen. A Star Force scout ship had passed through this location once, but what would keep the locals from using it regularly? They would have to have another gravity well to jump to, and since this one was pretty far from other black holes it would reduce the number of people capable of using it as a binary link…but even if you didn’t have the engine power to reach the closest black hole, you could still jump off a lot of other stars and use the insane gravity here to brake no matter how fast you went. You couldn’t do that in reverse, but increasing speed on half a round trip was something no naval navigator would waste. So where was everybody?
I don’t like this, Paul said, standing on the exterior of the station as he kept passive scanning for any sign of ships out there.
Maybe there’s something that’s hunting them down there. If they’re laying in wait they wouldn’t be transmitting.
You think this is a new facility?
I wouldn’t guess so, but I bet those directional arrays can move. It’s possible the whole network can shift locations with a lot of coordination, and everything the Founders built reeks of coordination.
So it’s just a massive connection between Mag Grid and galaxy?
The other station had a small gravity well and ships designed to jump off it. If the Caretakers have to go out and do stuff occasionally, they have to have non-essence access points.
But a black hole is too damn obvious, and I don’t see any warships to protect this place. How long do you want to sit out here?
Until I find a ship, Paul said defiantly.
I prefer not to run out of food, and we have no idea how far we are away from it. When the next spear leaves, we have to go with it. And we’re too far away to grab one from here.
Fine, he relented, standing up on the exterior of the station with his boots sticking to it. Back inside.
Sara nodded, invisible as she was, and the two walked back to the gap in the exterior they had come out of. Since there was no air anywhere, the station didn’t need airlocks, so the trailblazers didn’t have to hack or break into anything as they walked back inside until they got within the artificial gravity field again.
Where do you want to camp out? Paul asked.
None of them appear to be loading, so I don’t know…she said, jerking as a sound penetrated the silence of the atmosphere-less environment.
I felt that, he said, turning and heading back outside again. Paul ran in a slow jog that kept at least one of his feet in contact with the exterior hull at all times, but when he got outside there was nothing visible.
It had to be big, Sara said, looking around as well.
Did we get hit with something?
Maybe, but I didn’t see anything nearby.
There, Paul said pointing. Sara followed his silhouette’s finger and looked at the very bottom of the station where a tiny piece of it had detached.
That’s where some of the stasis pods were.
And it’s tracking for the black hole. Directly there, Paul said as he ran the navigational numbers from his passive sensors through his highly trained mind regarding such things. Do you think…
That they have a facility down there? I’m starting to.
Could they be sucking Essence out of a person in stasis?
I don’t know. It connects a person to their body, and if their minds are nearly stopped how could they use it?
But what if it regenerates when taken away regardless of the state of your mind?
Popsicle power sticks? If they could do that they’d have farms of people and no need for the Reapers.
Point, Paul said, slightly relieved. Are they hiding them then?
More importantly, are they importing them here and can we backtrack the flow?
I get the feeling we might be waiting a long time for that. There’s a lot more pods in there waiting for a ride, if that’s what’s going on.
I don’t want to try going down there, Sara said.
Neither do I. But I do want to backtrack where they are coming from.
I just want to get out of here. If this network is as big as its looking, we could be lost in it for years.
Alright, first ship out we take. Let me get some more data on this one, then we’ll camp out and hope we get lucky soon. I just wish we had time to really go through this place. We were lucky to stumble onto those pods at all.
Take what we can get and run with it, buddy. Don’t get greedy.
Wise words, he said, watching the shrinking dot that was the Caretaker ship getting further and further away, then it finally winked out of view, and not from passing through a shield of some sort. Afterimage tracking suggested it was a normal gravity jump in towards the black hole, so if this place wasn’t shielded, were was all the traffic?
That fact bothered Paul for the following 8 days as they waited impatiently for another spear ship to leave. One arrived before that, then they finally got their chance to hop a departing one. What it was loaded up with they didn’t know, for they hadn’t spent enough time inside to find out. They had to race hard to get to it before it got into a mag jump bowl, given that there were many of them. The pair almost didn’t make it, having to leap off the bowl itself towards the ship and got to the shields minutes before it launched.
They used their Jumat to punch through and glued themselves to the side, unable to get to the rear immediately. They were still underneath the shields, but that wasn’t a great place to be if they did hit something, and since they had nothing to do but wait, the pair worked on slowly crawling along the spear for the next 3 days before finally getting around to the rear and picking a place to lock on to and cut their way inside the outermost puddle jumper.
Sara alternated her time between crawling laps around that location and standing up inside the very small puddle jumper interior. She had it worse than Paul, for she was a Level 2 Saiyan with a higher metabolism. Standing still for these long periods of time was awful for her, but she and the others had chosen to endure it in order to go on this mission. Thankfully there were techniques developed by others to slow one’s Saiyan nature so it didn’t tear your body apart, but she wouldn’t be able to go Super Saiyan again until she undid the ‘Brake’ she’d put on herself.
And it hurt, constantly. Like a low level headache. Paul had one too, but not as much, because he hadn’t gone to the same depths of Saiyan potential due to his need to be in a command nexus controlling fleets for long periods of time. Sara needed to as well, but the really long naval engagements were something that she had rarely taken part in during her life, and the increased hand to hand combat potential was much more in her wheelhouse than Paul, thou
gh he wasn’t alien to it. He’d simply chosen another path, and vibrating his body off and on during the day was enough to keep him satisfied in addition to their long crawls outside, for the most part, though he was still having trouble with it. But at least he hadn’t had to use a brake, meaning he could go Super Saiyan 1 if need be.
Sara normally could, or go up to Super Saiyan 2 that had massive power potential in addition to speed, but it was her bane now, and the longer they stayed in ‘tick’ mode the more it got to her. Not enough to make her freak out, but others that didn’t have her mental fortitude would have long ago.
It took a total of 29 days for this mag jump, and by the time they arrived at a smaller transfer facility Sara was almost catatonic when she wasn’t crawling laps. Paul had to physically jab her to get her to wake up on arrival, then the walk into the facility did her as much good as it was painful, for her unresponsive vibrative state was basically running itself while her mind took refuge somewhere to ignore what was happening to her body.
You’re getting bad, aren’t you? Paul asked as he floated across a small gap, then stuck to the wall on the other side that had an open doorway several hundred meters down that they began to climb towards.
You’re only now noticing?
Did you know it would be this bad?
I’ve never tried to Brake before. Never wanted to. I figured I’d just dive in and learn when I needed to. That’s now.
And?
I’m going to lose a lot of levels doing this, but if we can get to the Paladin it will be worth it. We’ve got to stop the attacks.
How much worse are you going to get?
I think I’ve plateaued for now. It’s scary because part of me doesn’t want to move around.