Star Force: Nexus (SF57) Read online

  1

  May 8, 2635

  System: Unknown

  Rimward beyond Star Force’s maps

  Kerrie-057 sat in the command chair of the Ma’kri-class warship as it and two of its twins raced across interstellar space mere seconds away from beginning their braking maneuvers against an unknown star. The three Star Force ships were following a H’kar ship and trusting in their navigational abilities, for the foursome had passed into the unknown regions of the galaxy beyond the furthest rimward border of the lizards and were now arriving at their destination. Beyond the gravity signature ahead the trailblazer had no information about where they were or what was waiting for them, and even the V’kit’no’sat had never bothered to push this far out with a mapping expedition.

  Star Force’s map was being updated with each jump the group made, but when the ships decelerated against the star Kerrie found what she had expected the least…a completely empty system. There were no gravity signatures anywhere nearby, and at first she guessed they had to be on the far side and out of sensing range, with at least one planet’s gravity adding to that of the star and seeming to disappear behind it.

  But there wasn’t, made all the more evident when the H’kar signaled with new position orders that had them moving around the star to what appeared to be another jumppoint given that there was nothing there, not a planet nor station, when they came around and into direct sensor alignment with the location.

  “What are they playing at?” she mumbled, looking at her sensor holograms closely. The H’kar weren’t the most talkative race by far, and their escort hadn’t done more than relay them coordinates with each jump, leaving the trailblazer to guess at where exactly they were going. This system had been tagged as their ultimate destination in the last transmission…yet there was nothing here.

  Kerrie felt like hitting the comm and asking what was up, but she decided to play it cool and just wait it out…then to her second surprise the H’kar ship contacted them, with a hologram of an exoskeletal monster appearing before her. A series of words that were a mix of low tones and bird-like chirps sounded, with the computer providing a text translation below the image.

  WE HAVE ARRIVED AT OUR DESTINATION. PLEASE SEARCH THE FOLLOWING COORDINATES FOR A SMALL GRAVITY FIELD AND TRANSITION THERE AT SLOW SPEED.

  With that brief snippet the hologram of the H’kar disappeared, replaced by a slew of navigational figures.

  “What have we got?” Kerrie asked, looking to her bridge crew. The Ma’kri wasn’t a full-sized jumpship, rather about a third of its size and carrying no drones, but the 6.3 kilometer long knife blade was packed with armor and weaponry that most of the ADZ had never saw before. It had been designed to mimic a Star Destroyer, giving Star Force an all-in-one battleship that could roam freely and drop the hammer wherever needed, while also being a control ship and troop transport when necessary.

  Kerrie only had a handful of troops onboard her three ships now, with most of the modular cargo bays being full of supplies. She would have brought only the one ship on this diplomatic mission, but given how far they were traveling she’d felt it was wiser to bring three. More firepower and the option of abandoning a ship and transferring the crew over to another if something catastrophic happened could be a lifesaver when going into the unknown like this. And they weren’t even a fraction of the way to their ultimate destination yet, but were supposed to meet up with a carrier that would take them the rest of the journey.

  The Ma’kri were considerably faster than the H’kar ship, though they didn’t let on as much. The rimward race had simply asked if they could maintain a certain speed, which Star Force confirmed without adding how much faster they could actually go. That said, they weren’t sure that the H’kar weren’t holding back either, but for right now Kerrie guessed that her ships were the faster and she was interested in seeing what ride they were supposed to be meeting up with…and where. She’d been expecting at least an outpost if not full blown inhabited world, but right now all they had was empty space to greet them.

  “Here,” a voice said, followed by a holographic map of the system popping up beside Kerrie’s chair and expanding outward until it shrunk to a dot…with another dot beside it 1.7 lightyears away. “Planet-sized gravity field, barely detectable, but reachable in about 2 days.”

  “Inform the H’kar of our estimates,” she ordered, glancing at the dot sitting out in the middle of nowhere. It could be a rogue planet, in which case it would make for a good hiding place for an outpost. A gravity well that far outside a system would go unnoticed without a close scan, for its effect on her ship was so much smaller than that of the other stars nearby. The sensitivity of their gravity drives allowed them to detect increasingly fainter fields as their tech progressed, but this was pushing it.

  After a few moments the H’kar ship jumped out, albeit very slowly, with Kerrie glancing at her navigator with a raised eyebrow.

  “They’re slower by 22%.”

  The Archon smirked. “Thought so. We’ll wave as we go by. Confirm jump formation and let’s get moving,” she said, standing up a bit disappointed. She’d expected to have some answers by now.

  Heading off to the sanctum to wait out the painfully slow jump, made that way by the limited gravity on which the ships could brake against upon arrival, Kerrie continued with her training, being only 3 levels away from reaching mage but with considerably less progression now that she was isolated and training alone.

  Kerrie had been in Atlantis with the others in the advanced training group for the past 3 decades and, while she’d been doing solo workouts most of her life, doing them here and now felt hollow. The environment just wasn’t the same, but she wanted mage bad and continued to get in the best workouts she could manage on her own, knowing that once this mission was over she’d be heading back to the others.

  Not all the trailblazers were there, for some were still engaged on the lizard front and attending to other missions across the ADZ, but all of them had been rotating in and out of Atlantis as they picked up the new psionics and got a bit of time in with the group no matter how short their stay was. When the H’kar had come to Sol unannounced they’d done so to deliver a message and information concerning a race called the Sety and their Nexus, of which the H’kar were a new member, Kerrie had volunteered to respond to their invite given that she was one of a handful of trailblazers who’d had extensive experience fighting the lizards.

  She hadn’t expected the isolation to hit her so hard, but adaptation was key to being an Archon and she began to adjust after the first few days…but without the others it felt akin to running without music. The movements were the same, but the energetic buzz was missing.

  So she buried herself in workouts until it was time to return to the bridge and hopefully get some answers as to where the H’kar had been leading them off through the wilds of space. She had no idea what or who was out here, nor what threat level they posed. The fact that the V’kit’no’sat had never mapped it also made her worry, because everywhere within their domain they would have knocked off the major powers. But out here they had no influence, so what was or could be waiting for them unnerved her considerably.

  Kerrie wasn’t worried about this mission per se, or the H’kar, so long as everything went according to plan…it’s those times when it didn’t that were the problem, in which case Kerrie’s three ship fleet could be completely blindsided. The H’kar had said there’d be a transport ship waiting to carry them on further out, implying that even their own gravity drives were insufficient for the task, meaning that there was at least one race out here considerably more advanced than Star Force was, speed wise anyway, and that made her and the others wonder how many potential sharks there were i
n the waters.

  The location of their ultimate destination was approximately 6,400 lightyears away, which would take them across the ‘gap’ between the Orion and Perseus galactic arms and far beyond any system Star Force had charted to date. That gap wasn’t truly a gap, but a region of space with a lesser density of star systems, all of which Kerrie’s ships would miss sitting inside the hull of another carrier ship as it supposedly whisked them away through the Nexus’s transit grid, with the furthest coreward hub being the tiny gravity well they were currently en route to.

  According to the H’kar, when the lizards were consuming their territory system after system they had executed a fighting withdrawal, moving further and further out towards the rim and discovering that the lizards didn’t want to chase them. They did follow but at a slow pace along with the rest of their expansion, not a straight line pursuit setting out for their destruction as they’d anticipated given the ferocious nature with which the lizards fought.

  Using this to their advantage the H’kar had stayed alive and ahead of the lizards, eventually moving far enough out through the Orion arm until they caught the attention of one of the races within the Nexus, which the Sety ran. A formal invitation was made after some vetting was done and the H’kar became members, setting down roots and fleeing no further. When the lizards’ growth crept out to meet their new worlds they were met with Nexus troops and repulsed, creating a firm boundary beyond which the aggressive race could make no progress.

  But that hadn’t stopped the lizards from trying. As they expanded that line in the sand had continued to get wider and wider, with the Nexus having to defend more and more systems with a greater number of troops and resources…though the battles were easy affairs. As the H’kar began to regrow their empire, this time as part of the Nexus, they became the coreward front line of the large interstellar union and had the responsibility to hold it against the lizards and several other minor threats within the local region with appropriate help now and again from others as needed.

  Over the years the threat of the lizards had gone from minor to moderate, with them continuing to spread out and in such great numbers that there was no way for the Nexus to stop them aside from a huge campaign to wipe them from existence…but as the H’kar continued to gather intelligence on their enemy and the true size of their domain was revealed the unworthy opponents that the lizards were became a nuisance that was too large to eradicate. Even if they destroyed them in 100 systems they’d expand to 200 more elsewhere, literally a race of cockroaches they could not stamp out of existence if they’d wanted to.

  The inability of them to be able to negotiate with or destroy the lizards, combined with their minor threat to the Nexus itself, had prompted a containment plan set to keep the lizards from expanding into the Nexus region and surrounding areas. More and more resources were having to be diverted there, not yet putting a major stress on the Nexus but growing as the years passed. There were other, more powerful races in both the Orion and Perseus arms, but the lizards were something new for them to contend with, for no matter how many battles they fought the inferior race would not quit, nor could they be destroyed unless you got them all…which wasn’t remotely feasible given the size of their territory.

  As the lizard problem continued to grow the Nexus was learning more about them and the areas ahead of their lateral expansion, with the H’kar handling a piece of that assignment. They’d come across contacts that were associates of Star Force’s string of rimward reaching colonies, sharing with them information about the Humans, their public maps and language, and the news of them successfully holding back the lizards…which drew the attention of the Nexus. With the lizard threat being something that was devouring system after system, someone who wasn’t falling to them as even the H’kar had was someone they wanted to get to know, hence the invitation.

  Kerrie didn’t usually like playing ambassador, but in this case she wanted to see what was out here and what the galactic competition was like…given that they’d just been invited into a bigger league. The H’kar didn’t say that they were being offered membership, but rather that the Nexus wanted to talk concerning their mutual threat. What that meant was unclear, but Star Force wasn’t going to send anyone less than a trailblazer or Davis to deal with this, and there was no way they were going to let Davis come this far out into the middle of nowhere.

  The H’kar were impressive enough, given the time they’d spent in Sol and the data exchange they’d had with Star Force, which made Kerrie all the more interested in seeing those who were supposedly superior to them. So far they’d been led on a wild goose chase across the stars, but when they finally did brake against the tiny gravity well the scope of the Nexus finally registered with her.

  “Oh…my…freaking…hell,” she whispered as the camera displays showed the ‘planet’ they’d arrived at, except that it wasn’t round…nor a planet at all. The thousands of starships floating around the area were a mere afterthought to the Archon, though the size of some of them was impressive in their own right, but the construct they were looking at had a stubby shaft in center connecting two large discs made up of radiating struts. Each ‘umbrella’ was curved slightly, making shallow cups with sections missing and all clearly artificial in construction.

  Kerrie tapped a few keys on the holographic display on her left and got a size grid, seeing that the thing was 800 miles wide on the central stub, with each pinwheel having a diameter of 12,000 miles. The entire length of the construct was over 34,000 miles long, making it 4 times the width of Earth.

  “Hold position until we’re contacted,” she ordered, seeing the other two Ma’kri decelerating behind them and knowing it’d be several hours before their H’kar escort caught up.

  “Archon, we’re detecting stellar level magnetic fields emanating from the…device. They’re directional off the arcs.”

  “Mag…” Kerrie said reflexively, then her eyes went wide as she realized what this was. “Holy shit, that’s how we’re getting out there.”

  “Care to share?” the Captain asked.

  “Ever hear of a magnetic drive?”

  “Pie in the sky rumors only. Highly inaccurate to the point of stupidity.”

  “Inaccurate why?” she asked, leading him as she kept her eyes glued on the visual and holo displays as more information was being detailed with the computer and analysts chewing on the sensor feeds.

  “Gravity is constant, but magnetic fields fluctuate.”

  “Natural ones,” Kerrie said, pointing at the planet-sized structure. “But I’d bet you a million credits that one is stable and the endpoint of a very long jumpline…correction, those two are stable. One in, one out I’d bet.”

  “If I had the credits I’d take that bet. Even if you could build something like that why would you given the black hole routes?”

  “Magnetism is more powerful than gravity,” she reminded him, still wide eyed like a kid in a candy store. The V’kit’no’sat had never built mag drives, for they didn’t need to, but they were aware of the technology and its potential…though nothing like this had ever been cataloged in the database. “And I’m curious to see just how fast this slingshot can fire.”

  The Captain shook his head. “Can’t be mag drive. There’s no way you could hit a target that small.”

  “Combo with grav drives to adjust course during drift,” Kerrie said, thinking out loud.

  “Why two? Seems an awful waste to build something that large in duplicate.”

  The trailblazer inclined her head to the side, granting that he had a point. When jumping into or out from a star there was only one jumpline available, and the more you got off it the braking line would veer and produce lateral movement. That meant ships coming and going had to move through the same region of space, risking a collision. The threat of that was minimized via beacon signals that traveled ahead and warned of ship’s incoming so they could drift off the line and allow each other to pass.

  Busy jumplines wer
e dangerous because the final braking maneuver had to occur in that tiny slice of space, but it was workable by monitoring the incoming super-accelerated signals from ships in coast phase, then the ships waiting to jump would wait for an opening, move into position, then jump on the line for a few minutes before easing off it and into drift mode.

  The process would work the same, in theory, for a mag jump…so why build two massive mag fields when one would do?

  Before she could start listing off possibilities a streak of a signal resolved itself in the clear area in front of the upper ‘dish’ that reminded Kerrie of the giant arms on the Ark from Halo, minus the greenery of the natural environment.

  “Son of a bitch,” the Captain muttered, seeing the incoming ship, then he threw a glance at the Archon. “Doesn’t mean it’s a mag drive,” he said stubbornly.

  “If it’s not,” Kerrie said, seeing that the ship was longer than a lizard assault pillar and considerably wider, “I want to know what it is.”

  The Archon turned to the comm officer. “See if you can find someone out there to talk to before it goes Death Star and uses us for target practice.”

  2

  As it turned out the H’kar ship wasn’t necessary for the next stage of their journey, though it arrived several hours later as Kerrie’s three ships were left to wait for the next 3 days until their transport was ready. During that time they got plenty of questions answered, as well as were able to monitor a very high amount of traffic coming in through the Nexus ‘grid point,’ which was a direct link to another similar massive construct some 1,539 lightyears away.

  The carrier vessel they were waiting for was one of a number of large transports that operated like jumpships on the grid, carrying other vessels back and forth exclusively. The thousands of other ships around the grid point were a mix of those awaiting transit and a defense fleet, none of which could travel on the grid themselves.