Star Force: Phoenix (Star Force Universe Book 62) Read online

  The Deevim had got supplies from Star Force at a reduced pace, but it had been enough to sustain them. The ships they had acquired over the millennia were still functional, even the older ones, and those were still more than 100 times faster than anything the Deevim could produce themselves. Access to the Star Force markets had taken their Commonwealth from a two planet system and spread them out into an interstellar civilization…though to this day they still couldn’t build interstellar jump-capable ships. They should have been able to, at least slow ones, but when you could buy the futuristic Star Force ships who would bother to experiment with slow, inefficient technology? Deevim policy was to continue to study and deconstruct Star Force tech until they unlocked the secrets of it rather than experiment and build on their own…and now that policy was causing starvation amongst Sha’ni’s people.

  He was lightweight from heavy rationing, but he would be one who always had food, given his position. Others were not so fortunate, and 3 years ago an edict had gone out that no further reproduction would be allowed. Not a single fertile egg had been laid since that day, in order to reduce the growing number of mouths to be fed, but there were still far too many people for local resources to support.

  The Deevim had enough, which was the irony of it, but their planets were not constructed to operate in isolation. They required heavy transport of key items back and forth across the spacelanes for three key vitamins the Deevim required. Those were produced on only two planets in great quantities, for the environment of all the others were not suited to the production. Some internal growth facilities had been built, and were now being heavily expanded, but the demand could not be met, and all because they could not buy solari from Star Force.

  The fuel the advanced Star Force starships used required Solari, which was a common mining product in the galaxy. The problem was, the Deevim never developed the knowledge or technology to obtain it themselves. They had no Star Forge or anything like it in their systems, and had been buying all that they needed from Star Force to fuel their Star Force-built ships. Now there was none available to the public, for most of what had been coming to the local market was being diverted to the war effort. The rest was still eeking its way out to the Deevim until the Vargemma attacked.

  They had hit the Grid Point System, taking out numerous links in that transit network, through which the solari and so many other things flowed. When a link close to Gogorax went down, the shipments of solari coming to the local area stopped entirely. That was when the Deevim started squirming, for their fuel reserves would only last a matter of months beyond that point.

  They had taken drastic measures to limit travel, and a decade later almost all of their Star Force ships were sitting in orbit of their planets unable to move. Some had been sold to other non-Star Force civilizations in exchange for solari, or even for the full fuel component that the Deevim could not mass produce even if they had the solari. The fleet of Star Force-made ships that Sha’ni’s people relied upon was shrinking with every year as the price for solari through other sources skyrocketed.

  Fortunately not every ship would be shut down, for they’d managed to trade for two older Star Force models that did not require solari for fuel. They were very slow in comparison, but far faster than anything the Deevim could produce on their own. The trade had cost them 6 of the newer models, but they had no choice and the Toquari traders knew it.

  Shipyards had sprouted everywhere within the commonwealth, building insystem ships to carry goods from one planet to another, but only the home system produced the mass quantities of the three triad vitamins, and Qinia was not the home system. Every person in the other three systems, including Sha’ni’s, was slowly dying of nutrient deficiencies…and now some were not getting enough food at all as the production facilities here were being revamped to produce as many of the vitamin bearing fruit as they could, causing shortages in other areas.

  The Deevim had managed to keep everything together through the Hadarak shortages, and Star Force had been able to keep a little trickle of goods flowing out to those neighboring civilizations that required market access to survive, but the Vargemma had wrecked it all by attacking the transit hubs. And every time Star Force got one back up and running, 5 more would be taken down elsewhere.

  And Sha’ni knew the Deevim were not the only ones suffering. Many other races were but those like the Bigoda, who had taken Star Force at their warning and slowed the development rate of their people in order to make it sustainable, were not being victimized by the trade disruption. They were, in fact, profiting from it greatly, and Sha’ni did not fault them for that. The Bigoda were the only reason some of the Deevim’s main ships were still running, for they did have a Star Forge-type facility sucking solari out of their star. It wasn’t much, and they’d agreed to sell part of it to the Deevim to ensure that at least some of the vitamin shipments made it out to the other three systems.

  They were also offering some of their ships to haul cargo, at a price, though they didn’t need interstellar craft themselves. They were not willing to sell them, nor did Sha’ni blame them for that, because the Star Force-built models were able to be fully fueled and maintained by materials 100% collected by the Bigoda themselves. It was the economic model the Deevim should have selected, but Sha’ni’s forbearers had been greedy to the point of ignoring Star Force’s own warnings about relying too heavily on the markets.

  Nobody had ever expected Star Force to fall, and in truth they hadn’t, but even damage in some select areas was enough to cut off the flow of the solari…and now the Deevim were paying for it with their lives. Something as simple as three little vitamins was dooming three quarters of their commonwealth, and it was only now that Sha’ni understood the importance of logistics.

  Logistics could kill more than an invading army, and Star Force knew this. He just wished the Deevim had listened long ago. Now they had a bunch of Star Force toys the envy of the galaxy…but they had no way to power them, or even to replace parts when they rarely broke down. They’d always bought more, never thinking to build something of their own.

  The only hope now was that Star Force got the link nearest them back up and running…and that there was enough solari out there to be bought. But as word crept in of more and more Vargemma attacks, he knew in his gut that while the Deevim in the home system would survive, most of those beyond it would not, and soon this world and the others would be filled with corpses. The only question was would it be from starvation or the carnage of riots that had already begun to crop up in some areas as they saw the list of starvation deaths begin to tally…

  63,193 lightyears away…

  Mastertech Tennisonne, ever since his nearly dying in the initial Vargemma attack, had become obsessed with finding a defense against Essence weapons. He and others had successfully cobbled together the Avenger-class warship, and while it was effective…which he was proud to see from the battle reports…it was crude tech that he didn’t fully understand. Essence itself he could not touch, nor see, nor scan. It was all based off inference, like subatomic particles, but Essence was derived from another realm entirely that was beyond his study.

  Tennisonne was juggling multiple projects at once, as was normal, but not this number of projects. Star Force now had defense against Essence weapons in the form of shielding, but it required Essence to produce. Tennisonne would not settle for that. He had to find some way, some substance, that could stop, resist, or at least effect Essence that was not itself Essence altered. So far he had nothing in that department, and it was beyond frustrating, because he knew they’d never have enough Essence to defend even a fraction of Star Force’s planets if he didn’t find some other way to do it.

  Losing people in warfare was not Star Force’s way, so a solid defense had to be devised. You couldn’t count on getting to and eliminating all enemies before they struck, so he had to come up with something…but right now he wasn’t working on that except in his spare time. Weapon research to better kill the H
adarak was his number one priority, for even while the Vargemma were not yet defeated, that was only a matter of time. The Hadarak were the greater threat in the long run now that the Avengers were giving Star Force the power it needed to knock down the Vargemma and their damn Olopar.

  Tennisonne wasn’t in the lab at the moment, he was onboard a starship far from any of his normal lairs. This was field work, and it wasn’t for the sake of weapons research. That he was doing in simulators onboard the ship, but he needed to personally be here to solve another riddle presented to him a while ago, yet one that Jason had made into a far greater priority.

  That was the ‘song’ of the stars that the Uriti had noted. It had taken him forever to figure out how to even scan for such a thing, and to be honest he had to have a lot of Uriti help in that department, but eventually he had identified a resonance frequency linked to the gravitational vibration within Dulurium. It was one out of millions of substances studied, and since its discovery 3 more had been added. Ivoren, Socartum, and Senistrium.

  All four were neutron dense Arc Elements, massing more than other Arc Elements, and the differential in the gravitational tide meant one side of the hollow sphere of the atom would pull or relax a tiny fraction of a fraction of a second ahead of the other side. This created a ‘hum’ in the elements that could barely be detected, but with some refining one of Tennisonne’s linked research teams had been able to work out a decent detection sensor for close stars. Far ones were beyond their ability to sense right now, but that was just a matter of time. The dam had broken on this subject matter, and now Tennisonne had his teeth sunk firmly into it.

  Gravity, as previously unknown to Star Force, was not always a constant force. They’d known it was an emission, like light, but they hadn’t known the pattern of release could alter. Little tiny particles would be shot out like water from a hose, making a continual stream that had been the bedrock of space-based navigation from the very beginning of Star Force, and the V’kit’no’sat before them, but it seemed some gravity sources didn’t have a solid stream. Rather they surged more one moment than the next. The sum total was exactly the same amount of gravitational pull, which was why neither Tennisonne nor others had even suspected there might be more to it.

  But the Uriti could feel it. And not only could they feel it, they could use it. Anti-grav technology was like a magnet, and when gravity hit it a response would occur, like wind hitting a sail. Each collision would push the boat further on, but anti-grav didn’t just collect, it enhanced, and therein lay the key.

  What the Uriti actually did to get more speed was sync up their anti-grav with the source frequency. Acceleration completely threw that off, so making jumps while having to continually adjust was crazy hard, but they did it naturally. Much like someone riding a bike. It seemed impossible at first, but after years of practice you could do so with very little effort or focus. Programming machines to do that was a headache, but progress was being made as Tennisonne’s ship jumped from in near the star out to the edge of the system and back again, with him tweaking the equipment in between each movement.

  Most stars produced normal gravity, and finding one that didn’t was difficult. Finding one whose frequency was so stark that even his primitive equipment could interact with it had been the trouble, and so far only 9 such stars had been detected within Star Force territory, but he had a team out looking through them for more. It wasn’t something you could just look up in a database. It required a sensor-capable ship going there and measuring, but thankfully they had a way to predict which ones might or might not be. Without that they would have continued to look for millennia before finding this one.

  It was Pefaris 9, and located at the center of a neutral race’s territory not affiliated with Star Force. Tennisonne’s ship was in no danger, as they could travel through the system freely, but for courtesy sake he had informed them of the navigational experiments before he started so they didn’t get worried about what was happening…though they couldn’t do anything about it if they wanted, for their technology was woefully inadequate compared to that of his ship.

  Matching frequencies was damn hard when doing it manually, because figuring out what the star’s frequency was in the first place was not exact, but the more jumps they made the more Tennisonne was able to narrow it down. This one was spurting out gravity in a 2/2/9/4/2/8 pattern, so far as he could tell, and his new anti-grav…which had been recently added to the ship’s normal engines…was designed so it would pulse double strong then ‘rest,’ using the same energy but focusing it into its own spurts.

  If the spurts lined up, you got double the thrust. If they didn’t, and missed entirely, you got no propulsion whatsoever. He guessed that the Uriti were not precisely aligning, but they were succeeding enough to get greater than normal thrust. Tennisonne wouldn’t be happy until he did better than that, but he was on the clock, for Jason needed this technology ASAP. The creators of the Temple network also had a shadow network beyond it that utilized this technology for navigation, and anyone trying to access it without the Pulse Engines, as Tennisonne had dubbed them, would have to move painfully slow due to the low mass of the jump points, for their pulse rate was calculated to be far more than this star.

  How much energy could be jammed into a pulse appeared to be variable, and if Tennisonne was right, the shadow network employed pulses with at least 8 times the density of regular gravity…meaning you would travel the same speed using normal engines…but if you had Pulse Engines that also had an 8x effect, that meant you could compact all your thrust down into 1/8th of the time, essentially turning it off for 7 seconds out of every 8, though the cycle rate was microscopic in comparison.

  So how good your technology was depended on how much you could crunch your power spike into a small chunk of time, then turn it off and on again, over and over. If the shadow network had an 8x natural effect, Tennisonne guessed the Founder technology could match it. Tennisonne’s own crappy Pulse engine was only at 2.3 right now, which matched the star’s frequency. Most stars that were not normal were giving off readings of 1.1-1.6, which is why Tennisonne had to come all the way out to this one to get the most obvious results for him to study and tweak.

  If he sent Jason this prototype engine it would work in the shadow network, but not nearly as fast as the network was designed to allow. That meant the Founder technology could still outrun him, and Tennisonne didn’t like that. Still, Jason had wanted this ASAP, so Tennisonne was going to send him the 2.3 model as soon as he got it reliably worked out, because the Mastertech would not being going with it to troubleshoot, nor would anyone else.

  It wasn’t ready yet, and wouldn’t be according to Tennisonne’s standards, but so long as the ship in question had a regular gravity drive in addition to the Pulse drive, then there was no risk in sending it. He hoped that would be enough for Jason to use, but he wouldn’t be happy until he got his new technology up to par with that of the Founder’s tech…and he was a long way from that. Especially on the Essence side of things.

  4

  November 19, 128554

  Unexplored Frontier

  Beta Temple (exterior)

  Cal-com watched from onboard the ship carrying him across the galaxy as it inched closer to Beta Temple…which was now visible ahead of the ship as a dark grey shadow slowly eclipsing the distant stars beyond it as it grew larger on approach. Now that he was finally here, and could see it on the live monitors, a deep chill ran through him.

  The size was beyond anything he had seen before. It was literally the size of a small star system, and the entry point was still too far away to be visible. The massive, silent shadow grew larger and larger until it filled the entire forward view…and still he could not see their destination. It felt like they were going to run into the giant sphere, for they didn’t stop, nor slowed down, yet it looked like it was right in front of them.

  That was an illusion due to the size, and after a long time of traveling into infinity a spec appeared
before them and quickly grew as the ship slammed into the localized gravity field and pressed back on it, negating their approach speed just in time to avoid hitting the ship ahead of them that was passing into the breach in the Temple’s outer hull, and another one would be following Cal-com’s ship in a matter of seconds, perhaps a minute back.

  Even after a period of years, more ships were entering the Temple network. There had been a massive backlog in the prior system, where Cal-com’s ship had been allowed to skip to the front of the queue. The war inside the Temples was continually expanding, and Star Force was greatly limited as to how many ships could come inside due to this being the one and only entry point into the network.

  As of yet no barrier shield control rooms had been claimed to allow ships direct entry. Those that had been possessed were locked down, probably by the Vargemma before Star Force troops had gotten there, or some by damage incurred during the fighting. The Caretakers had rebuilt them, but in doing so they were not unlocked and Star Force didn’t have the Essence skillset to unlock them. Unfortunately word had gotten around to many Temples that this was a way to deny Star Force Temple assets, so when the fight against the Caretakers began and there was no further downside, the Vargemma were going around and destroying all the Caretaker facilities they could so that when they were rebuilt Star Force would have to earn access to them and would not be able to profit from the Vargemma’s past efforts.

  So this entry point was all Star Force had, and they were feeding all the invasion fleets through it. This also meant Star Force’s fleets were trapped inside and unable to leave if an emergency occurred elsewhere. That was a calculated risk, but an easy one to make, for it was the Vargemma that were doing so much damage to the empire…and to stop the Vargemma you had to go into the Temple network and fight them on their own turf.