Star Force: Fiddlesticks (SF65) (2 page)

Right now Henderson wanted Paul’s help improvising,
not in a purely scientific way, which he knew the trailblazer lacked in
prerequisite knowledge, but in the basic problem solving mindset that the
Archons were infamous for.

“We can’t get more than 53 kilometers deep without
risking the stellar fluctuations from overloading the filaments,” the tech
explained. “The power we’re receiving from the absorption shields are
sufficient to maintain the overall structure without us having to tap our
reserves on the station, so that’s not the issue, it’s the matrix strength. The
further we stretch the weaker it becomes. The farthest we’ve been able to get a
single probing column has been 72 kilometers, and that was luck. The currents
are so chaotic that it literally snaps the matrix below 60 with the torsion
between levels.”

“And we need to get lower why? Beyond the obvious,” he
added when Henderson gave him another displeased look.

“Because we sampled
chori
on
one of the probes, but haven’t detected a single particle of it above 58
kilometers.”

Paul rubbed his bare chin with his left hand. “Just
out of reach then.”

“Are you away of how many machines this station needs
that require
chori
?”

“A lot,” Paul said, knowing the exact number was
somewhere in the dozens.

“I can’t get the depth with our current equipment. I
was hoping you might have some ideas.”

“Is there a less turbulent region?”

“The only way to find out is to send down a probe,
which means blind luck. We don’t have any sensor equipment that can penetrate
the surface. We need
Pro’phad
energy for that.”

“Which requires
hrat
manipulation.”

“And the easiest element to produce it with is
chori
. If we have to move around and just poke randomly we
can, but there’s no guarantee we’re not already in the most stable region.”

“Or the most chaotic,” Paul offered, but he realized
the dilemma. “Did the sample bring back any?”

“No. The lifting structures are quite different from
the samplers. They simply detect what’s there and transmit the data back up the
control conduit. The probe is just that conduit surrounded by an absorption
matrix and capped off with the sensor dome.”

“What about an inefficient straight line tap? Beef up
the shields as much as you can and just try to get a handful of particles,
enough to build a single piece of equipment that can then be used to upgrade
that tap?”

“Already tried it. When we reinforce the shield
matrixes we diminish the depth. I’ve pushed and pulled every angle I can think
of. 53 kilometers is the furthest I can get with
any
collection capability.”

“Have you tried stirring the pot?”

“Meaning?”

“Bring the lower materials up to collection depth.”

“The currents are already pretty rambunctious, but the
lower levels are unaffected. Different densities keep them separate. Even if I
could create a stirring mechanism near the filaments it wouldn’t pull the
deeper materials up, just move the higher ones around laterally. I’ve been
working on doing just that to facilitate the remixing of the saturation levels
around the collection points, but only on the drawing board at the moment.”

“Shaken then, not stirred.”

“Other than the Bond reference, I don’t see…”
Henderson said, cutting himself off as a thought occurred to him.

“Boom,” Paul offered, seeing the twinkle in the tech’s
eye suddenly spark.

“Shielded missile penetrating to depths then detonating,
creating a surge of heavier matter into the upper levels…wouldn’t be efficient,
and that sort of disruption would snap any shield matrixes we had in place…”

“Deploy them after. What’s it take, less than 30
seconds?”

“Depends how much we want to stretch, but most
deployment times are under 30.”

“All we need is to sniff a little bit, right?”

“4.78 kilograms of
chori
is
what we need to build heavier emitters. Get me that and I’ll get you twice the
depth. You got some spare warheads I could borrow?”

Paul smiled. “Not onboard my ship. I’ll have to swing
by the vault to pick up some.”

“What’s ‘the vault?’”

“A little place in Sol where we keep all the cool tech
that we haven’t really found a use for. Stuff we built just to build to see if
we could…or for a rainy day. Military operations don’t call for bombs very
much, especially the big ones.”

“How big are we talking? I’ve never been involved in
the munitions research.”

A slight smile crept across Paul’s face as he accessed
the nearby control station and dug his way into the Star Force files, pulling
up a restricted section and waving Henderson towards the grocery list of
boom-booms.

“Any of these big enough?”

The tech looked through the list, pulling up several
and seeing their insane yields. “Explosive junkies.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

2

May 7, 2739

Merovingian
System

Prometheus

Paul’s ship approached the Star Forge for the second
time in 5 days, having just made the short jump over to Sol and back again,
this time carrying 15 warheads and an equal number of penetration vehicles, for
you couldn’t simply shoot a missile into a star and expect it to get very far
without being destroyed first. Each of the vehicles was the size of a dropship
and heavily shielded, having been built originally to get the fat bombs to
their targets before they could get knocked out of the sky by anti-air defenses.

As soon as Paul’s warship came within range of the
Prometheus
he received targeting
coordinates from Henderson, then using the yield level they’d discussed
previously, the ship launched the remote craft with the trailblazer flying it
remotely down and into the star. He stayed with it as long as he could, but
eventually the control signal was cut off and both men had to wait to see what
would happen.

Several long minutes followed, with Paul knowing it
would take time to reach the necessary depth within the star. Had the
penetration vehicle been using standard combat shields it would have been
destroyed almost instantaneously, but Paul had some quick
swapouts
done in Sol to replace the shields with the absorption variety. Calibrated
using the data from the Prometheus, the shields were designed to soak up the
energy from this star, taking that power and redeploying it into the shield
matrix. If the calibration was off part of the destructive power would get
through and kill the bomb before it had a chance to detonate, so there was no
way of knowing if the first attempt was going to be successful or not other
than to wait for the bang.

Paul had brought 15 for a reason, and it wasn’t just
to shake up the surface levels multiple times. If some additional tweaking of
the shield matrixes had to be done, he didn’t want to have to run back to Sol
again to get some more…not that they had that many on hand. The yields were so
great that there wasn’t much cause to build them, though he’d really like the
chance to throw a few against the lizard shipyard rings.

That wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, so their
limited supply was just sitting and collecting dust when he dropped by the
vault to pick them up. Hopefully now they could be put to a more productive
use.

They weren’t all the same make, and the one he’d just
sent down to the star was a concussion model, designed to be detonated within a
medium and use the surrounding material as the destructive force. Had it been
detonated in space it would still do damage at close range, but couldn’t affect
much of anything across a vacuum, for the energy matrix had an expansion
distance of less than a kilometer. It would push through it so fast that
anything hit would be thrown out violently, but beyond that boundary line the
energy fueling the push fizzled.

That wouldn’t be an issue within the star, for the
density of material surrounding it was more than enough to trigger a huge blast
wave…if it detonated.

Paul watched the clock ticking off the seconds, not
knowing for sure how fast the penetration vehicle could descend. It had a small
gravity drive to pull it through the stellar matter, but there was no way to
know how it would respond because nothing like this had been tried before. The
only data they had was from the shield columns dipping down into the star, for
research into the internal dynamics was pointless considering the database in
the pyramid.

That meant to date Star Force hadn’t sent any physical
probes down into any star, nor could they have until the recent development of
the absorption shields. Paul was fairly certain this would work, but there was
no way to know for sure other than chucking one in and seeing what happened.

The
Prometheus
was situated 120 kilometers above the surface of the star, but stellar
fluctuations had bits of atmosphere tickling its own absorption shields,
meaning there wasn’t a definitive boundary above the somewhat chaotic
exterior…that became a lot more chaotic when the bomb detonated. It took time
for the shockwave to hit the surface, but when it did a huge bump formed,
rising up several kilometers before breaking and shooting out a shower of
stellar matter halfway up to the Star Forge before gravity started dragging it
back down again.

Paul watched and waited, seeing a shield column begin
extending down from the
Prometheus
following the retreat of the glowing stellar material. It punched down inside
it even as it was churning about, then the telemetry feed from Henderson showed
it push down even further, eventually spreading out its tendrils like a growing
tree.

He saw some of them disappear, snapping under the
strain of the turbulence, but others remained and continued to sprout more
roots. Soon a glowing tendril began to shoot up from the surface, traveling in
the lift column and eventually reaching the Prometheus where it was taken
inside and separated into its constituent components with any unwanted material
heading back down the opposite side of the giant straw.

The amounts collected were known almost instantly,
with Paul watching the feeds. Solari particles were a small minority within
stars, and it required a lot of sifting to get a significant amount of them, so
when no
chori
showed up he didn’t immediately label
their first try a failure. Rather he waited and watched, seeing a few trace
amounts of other solari popping up as it was separated from the hydrogen and
helium, which were both sent back down into the star a waste material.

In the future those would have been claimed as well,
but the storage areas for the bulk materials weren’t yet activated. When they
were they’d fill up quickly, which would require regular cargo shipments off
the station, and as of yet no regular jumpship traffic was routed here so the
Prometheus
hadn’t bothered harvesting
any of the common elements.

The analysis telemetry had registered 9 different
compounds so far, then a tenth was added as a bit of corovon was collected. It
was a tiny amount, but in its rare form. Most corovon Star Force collected was
bonded to other compounds and had to be separated from it on a subatomic level,
but most of the corovon in the star had already been separated due to the
destructive soup that made up the star…or at least the trace amounts this far
up. The deep core was another matter, but Star Force didn’t have the shield
strength to reach that far down as of yet.

It took more than eight minutes before the first bit
of
chori
was reported, and just a tiny spec at that,
but another followed some 23 seconds later, with more bits and pieces coming up
the straw and into the Star Forge.

A hologram of Henderson popped up beside the main
feeds in the command nexus where Paul was watching from and the trailblazer
mentally flipped the image to a headshot rather than a full body image.

“A few hits,” Paul mentioned.

“How long the plume stays within the radius of the
collection field is in question, but if this saturation level persists a number
of days we’ll have enough out of this single detonation. If not, we’ll need to
reposition and repeat.”

“I’ve got two more of similar yield. If it takes more
than that we’re going to have variations to deal with.”

“Keep your fingers crossed then. In the meantime head
back on over and we’ll troubleshoot the rest of our headaches, unless you need
to be elsewhere?”

“I’m going to stick around a while. I’ll be over
within the hour.”

Henderson nodded, then his hologram cut out.

Paul glanced at the updating collection numbers again,
seeing a steady trickle of
chori
being brought up and
wondering how soon the subsurface currents were going to sweep it aside and
outside of the filament perimeter.

Paul stood on the floor of a huge chamber, or rather
the lack of one. The artificial gravity was working, but everything over his
head was empty space inside the
Prometheus
…for
17 miles.

He looked up, unable to see the ceiling in the
darkened distance and knowing that this area was reserved for future
construction. The outer shell of the Star Forge was complete, as was a lot of
the interior, but there were voids such as this that had atmosphere but little
else on the 94 mile long mining station. It’d taken a hell of a lot of
resources to build it, but now that it was here those materials were going to
be returned in the form of stellar mining resources from now through infinity.
At the moment there was only a negligible trickle of exports, but that would
gradually grow and as it did so would the station’s interior.

At full strength it was estimated that at least a crew
of 200,000 would be needed, but the Star Forge had been designed to house
upwards of a million with ease, and areas such as this could be fitted with
additional residential areas if necessary. How the
Prometheus
would eventually turn out was unknown, allowing for the
adaptation that was required in any prototype. The trick of it was that you
couldn’t build multiple prototypes of this size, so you had to get all the
kinks worked out in this one effort before you got around to building any
standardized Star Forges down the road.

Paul threw a handful of small lights out into the chamber,
catching them telekinetically and spreading them out in a wide circle and
sticking them in place with the light adhesive on their backs. He flicked them
all on, bringing far more illumination to the void than the open doorway behind
him allowed, but it still got ate up by the immense distances involved, for the
chamber was over 4 miles wide.

The trailblazer closed the door, leaving only his
small lights as a source of illumination. He had his Pefbar, of course, but
that was soon about to be outranged, thus the need for a visual source of
reference. He touched a small control panel attached to his left forearm and
dialed down the gravity in the void to 5%, then gently dropped to the ground,
bending at the knees briefly before launching himself up with a Yetu-enhanced
jump.

He shot away from the floor like a missile, with the
bit of gravity gradually slowing his ascent but not before he angled into the
near wall. Paul kicked off of it, sending himself out towards the interior
where he essentially hung weightless traveling through a giant arc in the dark,
with only the small circle of lights below giving him any point of reference.

It took more than two minutes before he landed again,
so far out into the chamber that the lights appeared to be a mere pinprick in
the distance across the floor. Paul dialed up the gravity to 12% and took off
running in long strides that eventually began to reach in excess of 20 meters
each. It was an odd motion, but one that he’d practiced before…yet never had he
had this much open space to play with.

He ran in a straight line in the total dark, his back
to the tiny prick of light, and jumped on the next step, doing a triple flip in
the air before landing again. Next he threw in a cartwheel at considerable
speed, flipping over twice before getting a running step back in and righting
his motion, then jumping up again in a Hulk-sized leap that was more lateral
than up.

Using his Pefbar he could see the ground below as he
flew across it about 30 meters up and still gaining altitude. Eventually the
gravity
nulled
out his upward momentum and he began
drifting back down again, where he eventually hit and restarted his loping
run…which he halted by leaning backwards and slamming his staggered feet down,
transitioning into a skid that ground on his shoes and brought him to a stop.

He dialed the gravity down to 3%, then launching
himself straight up, letting himself pass beyond his Pefbar range of the floor
and into the darkness. He couldn’t maneuver much at all, with only the air
around him to grip, but he created some bioshield fins on his arms and legs and
used them to spin him about so he could see the tiny dot of light in the
distance.

Paul centered himself relative to it and just
‘floated’ as he continued to move upwards, closing his eyes and trying to feel
something similar to what it was to fly, and not just for fun. Five months ago
Kara had had another revelation revealing the identity of one of the elusive
tier 4 psionics, and to his and other DBZ fans’ great delight, she confirmed
that it was, in fact, a biological gravity drive similar to what the Zak’de’ron
possessed.

They didn’t need it, being able to fly with their
wings alone, but the added ability gave them insane maneuvering capabilities,
and given their insistence that their Zen’zat be able to fly as well, which
Kara could thanks to her Vorch’nas, it only made logical sense that they’d
included the biological equivalent in the hidden genetic triggers.

Paul didn’t think that he could learn to fly here and
now, but as long as he was here and had this massive chamber to play around
with, he might as well try and tickle the sensation a bit, not knowing how in
hell one was supposed to find the trigger for flight when one couldn’t fly.

So he just floated upwards, eventually coming to the
apex and slowly sinking back down again. He kept his Pefbar focused below him,
so he could see the ground coming when he got close, but otherwise put his mind
into a meditative mode and just tried to bounce around a bit inside his own
head, hoping to glean a bit of insight but not really expecting to find
anything.

When his spherical sense picked up the approaching
floor he bent his knees slightly and readied himself for the landing…which was
about at the same speed that he had jumped from. He caught himself with his
legs, then bounced off a bit when he failed to negate it all, rolling through a
light somersault and awkwardly jumping back up again.