Star Force: Fiddlesticks (SF65)

1

May 2, 2739

Merovingian
System (Core Region)

Low stellar
orbit

Paul’s dropship took him across from the
Warship
-class jumpship he’d arrived in
the system on and over to the much larger mining station situated in extreme
low orbit around the red dwarf star that filled the view below them. Dubbed the
Prometheus
, the station was a
prototype that had only recently gone online with minimal production, and when
Paul had got word of it finally working he’d made sure to arrange his schedule
to bring him back to Earth, then made the 9 lightyear hop over to check on its
progress in person.

The star was small, some 17% the mass of Sol, with
significant surface activity that altered the luminosity regularly. That
turbulence wasn’t a problem to the mining efforts, and this star had been
chosen in particular because of its size, proximity to Sol’s industrial base,
and being within a system that was 100% Star Force territory. There were no
planets whatsoever here, with a cluster of sedas taking their place that
utilized natural resources from other systems to sustain themselves, though
with the Canderians virtually every seda they build could exist on minimal
shipments via internal recycling measures, which was why they’d been given this
empty system to colonize.

The construction of
Prometheus
had taken more than 18 years, and to date was the third
largest orbital structure ever built by Star Force, with the other two being
monstrous sedas that were literally the equivalent of small moons. Neither of
those were here in the Merovingian System, making the
Star Forge
-class mining station the centerpiece by far.

It wasn’t a
Canderian
construction,
but rather one of Star Force’s mainline projects that had been on the drawing
board for centuries. Unlike the V’kit’no’sat versions this one was a permanent
feature, without the gravity drives that allowed theirs to migrate from system
to system. This one had minimal engines, both to keep it aloft and to navigate
its way around the star to access different places on its surface. Right now
there was a tiny shield conduit stretching down into the star that functioned
as a binary straw, and as Paul enhanced the magnification on the dropship’s
cameras he could see the stream of glowing matter rising up through it.

Likewise, there was a less luminous flow going back
down with unwanted materials. That secondary filtering process was taking place
within the Star Forge itself, while the primary was happening at the base of
the straw through an enormously complicated series of energy shields that were
pulling on various materials and keeping others back, then sending the wanted slurry
up to the station for a more selective filtering process.

Paul had been told the ‘straw’ was barely functional,
but that regular harvesting had begun anyway…and now he could see for himself
that it was continuing, though if it had been up to specs the tiny tendril of
light would have been much thicker to the eye. He continued to watch the
transfer process up until his tiny
Falcon
-class
dropship was swallowed up inside the pillar-like
Prometheus
, which felt akin to flying inside the side of a Death
Star, size wise.

The trailblazer chucked his datapad aside and left it
with the craft before stepping out onto the hangar deck to find Henderson
waiting for him.

“About time,” he told the level 6 tech in charge of
the project.

The man frowned heavily. “Don’t give me that lip. You
have no idea how much of a handful the shield calibration has been.”

“I’ve been reading your notes regularly,” Paul said as
he fell into step beside the taller man who led him across the mostly empty
hangar bay towards the station’s interior corridors.

“Then you should know it’s a damn near miracle we got
her functioning as is. The Vic’s built theirs with a lot of cool toys that we
don’t have, so this beastly testament to inefficiency is naturally going to
have problems popping up around the clock.”

“Production continues?”

“Amazingly yes, and we’ve already harvested 4.3
kilograms of solari…which triples our lifetime synthesis tally.”

“I trust you’re putting it to good use.”

“Not here. What they’re doing with it is out of my
hands. As of yet we haven’t seen any return.”

Paul knew that wasn’t unexpected, for the machines the
solari would be used to help make had never been created by Star Force before,
and thus prototypes would have to be built and tested before any upgrades to
the Star Forge could be shipped out to them.

“Corovon?”

“Trace amounts. We’re not anywhere near that deep yet,
just scraping a little off the surface layers. About half a metric ton that we
haven’t bothered shipping out yet.”

Paul’s eyes widened. “You’re calling that trace
amounts?”

“Trace as in what we’re getting from the slurry. Be
impressed if you want, but you know this beast is capable of far more when we
eventually get her up and running. I’m so buried in her innards I don’t even
care to think how that compares to production outside this system. And on that
note, the Canderians were wondering if they couldn’t have a kilogram or two.”

“It’s in their backyard, so it only seems fitting…if
you’re able to sustain the ‘limited’ production.”

“We’re fishing, remember, so I can’t promise results,
but the syphon is relatively stable now. Crude as hell, but stable.”

“I’ll take that as a yes. Give them 1.5 kilograms then
route all remaining corovon production directly to Sol.”

“Get the cargo ships moving and I will. Right now it
didn’t seem worth sending an entire jumpship for.”

“Why didn’t you send it with the solari?”

“I did, but we hadn’t collected more than 3 kilograms
by then. This load we got when we hit a pocket of higher concentration. This is
our fifteenth probe point. The ninth was the heavier corovon ‘deposit,’ though
I hesitate to use that term given how much convection there is in the star. We
can sink a syphon down and let it linger for a long time before saturation
levels bleed off, though not as long as I’d like.”

“How far have you repositioned?”

“We move at least 100 kilometers each time, but all
our taps have been in the same geographical area. Didn’t see the point in
moving us around a lot until I got the syphon working better. Really this isn’t
harvesting yet, just messing around and tinkering.”

“I know a lot of people that are going to be very
happy to hear you say that,” Paul commented, realizing that if this Star Forge
even got to a percentage of its full capability it would revolutionize Star
Force mining operations, which would then have repercussions throughout the
empire as the new volume of materials became available.

“You’re welcome. Are you here to look or get your
hands dirty?”

“What do you need?”

“Some troubleshooting assistance.”

“Happy to. What are you working on?”

“Everything,” Henderson commented, running his fingers
through his blonde hair as they reached a lift station. “It’ll be easier to
explain when we get to the control room.”

Paul stood with the master tech overlooking a large
pit of a room with a fully staffed control team. There were numerous
workstations all facing in around the large central hologram that had a sliver
of the star at the base and the elongated Star Forge floating above it with a
single tendril down to the surface. He knew it was designed to have many such
tendrils operating simultaneously, but so far there was only the one and
Henderson said that would be the case for many years to come given their lack
of necessary equipment.

As the level 6 techs continually progressed through
the V’kit’no’sat database they had come to the mutual agreement that there were
four phases left before Star Force caught up with their level of technology…or
rather their previous level, for there was no way of knowing how far they’d
advanced in the interim. As it was now, Star Force didn’t exist on any one tech
level, for it had pushed various lines of rediscovery faster than others, so
the entire technological acumen was a mishmash of various strengths and
weaknesses.

Their
comm
systems were the
top priority, and as such were more or less located on the highest level Star
Force had managed to date. The Ta’lin’yi were also on a similar level, with the
cannons and
comm
both being phase 5. In order to
progress up to phase 4 in any way, there were solari particles that were needed
in the construction of the tech, or the construction of the machines that would
then make that tech, hence creating a roadblock much as arc elements and
corovon had been before them.

As it was there were still more arc elements that Star
Force didn’t have access to, because the ability to synthesize them required
tech that utilized solari that they presently didn’t have. In this way there
was a crisscrossing of prerequisites that were needed to advance the overall
tech level of the empire, with sudden surges coming across the board when they
were finally made.

Solari were the next stage of advancement in a big
way, and would open up the next four phases once they got their hands on the
necessary compounds. Star Force was very, very close to creating a phase 1
piece of tech that they’d been researching hard for what seemed like forever,
and that was the Dre’mo’don, which was lacking one solari that was holding back
its production.

That solari was
denomsi
,
which was an atom in the
Trelpo
element list. That
list, like C-type elements that required corovon in their makeup, had a pair of
subatomic particles called
hrat
and
varsh
added to the standard protons, neutrons, corovon, and
electrons.
Denomsi
was made of two neutrons, a
corovon, and a proton bonded with a
varsh
, around
which a halo of four electrons were compressed, and was one of the rarer forms
of solari, which was basically a catch-all term for compounds almost
exclusively harvested from within stars.

There was probably no
denomsi
within Merovingian, for it was typically found only in high mass stars and
small black holes.
Varsh
bonding required some very
exotic environmental circumstances, and while Star Force had been able to
recycle a small amount of the
varsh
particles from
V’kit’no’sat ‘trash’ within the pyramid, they were nowhere near close to the
point where they could synthetically bond them to protons, thus
denomsi
was a compound that they would either have to
collect directly as a raw material or wait a very long time to be able to build
the type of equipment necessary to synthesize it later down the line.

Given that it was the one roadblock to creating their
first phase 1 piece of tech, primitive as it might be in comparison with the
V’kit’no’sat models, it was high on both the trailblazers’ and the techs’
priority list, which meant getting to the point where they could mine the high
mass stars.
Prometheus
was
essentially the field laboratory where they would experiment and learn how to
build a Star Forge that could do that, all the while collecting what they hoped
would be a shopping list of solari that would help them create the higher level
machines necessary to build such a device.

Paul had seen the blueprints for the
Prometheus
before and knew that a lot of
it was empty space waiting to be filled with newly created equipment when it
came online. What he didn’t know was to what extent Henderson had gone to get
the first few pieces working. His masterpiece of ingenuity reminded Paul of
O’Neill’s power generator in
Stargate
, where the
legendary Colonel had gone around collecting all kinds of stuff from the SGC,
tearing it apart and picking out the pieces that he needed to then build a
crude, but functioning power source to briefly give the
Stargate
the boost needed to travel very far away.

He hadn’t seen that episode since before he went into
basic training, but that sort of tech wizardry had always impressed him…and it
was that sort of thing that Henderson wanted his help with now.

Inside the hazy boundary of the star on the hologram the
shield column could be seen penetrating a short distance, then it broke apart
into seven different directions like the roots on a tree. Each of those
filaments then broke apart further until they ended in small nobs. Those nobs
were really shield spheres that were
sifting
out
various compounds within the star and allowing what they wanted through into
the interior of those globes…more or less.

That slurry of material, which ranged from corovon to
solari to basic hydrogen depending on the filter they used, was then collected
in a small holding shield before being shunted up the primary line and into the
station. Right now all seven tendrils were sifting for the same
thing, that
being a range of heavier materials above basic
hydrogen and its plasma counterpart, but low enough that corovon and bulkier
molecules would be obscured.

What they collected was all being shunted up together
without any delay, for the Prometheus couldn’t yet accommodate multiple shafts
in the connecting tendril, only the two…one up, one down, and the bonding rod
that ran between them. That was also made of shield energy, but used for the
purpose of structural integrity and doubled as a wire connection allowing for
control signals to be sent down into the completely
matterless
construct.

It was those shields that operated the entire
harvesting process, and those shields that were barely up to the task in Star
Force’s case that were holding the whole operation up. It was a miracle that
they’d gotten as far as they did without the solari, and Henderson’s work was
to be credited with that. The
Prometheus
was a crude piece of crap at the moment, but it was marginally functional and
sifting out the compounds necessary to improve it later down the line.