Vargemma Read online

“You’re…oh, right. I get it.”

  “Prove it,” Greg challenged.

  “Rocket line?”

  “Good boy,” he said approvingly. “Should be able to trim some time off the trip, and the other drones can surf the nebula to get out of the way if they survive. Let’s see how this works…”

  3 weeks later…

  After a slow jump out of the system and a long coast phase, it came time for the 6 long chains of drones locked together like Legos to begin to decelerate. They all used their gravity drives to pull on the distant star as well as push against the nebula and the object ahead, but they had nowhere near enough gravity to work with to slow the speed they were approaching with. Still, they trimmed a fair amount off before getting near the nebula perimeter and the sandblasting that was about to occur when they hit the thin outer edge of it.

  No enemy ships had appeared to stop them, and Greg didn’t have eyes on what was happening, for the relay lag was unbearable given the moving position of the transmitters. Only some basic position data would creep back until one of the drones got stopped and began transmitting normally, for they hadn’t been equipped with any better transmitters than what they normally had.

  The 6 chains had launched simultaneously then drifted into a hexagonal arrangement around the jumpline facing the target so they would be out of each other’s way when the first drone on each detached like a bullet being fired from them. In reality it was the mooring beams in overload, each pushing so hard and fast they actually damaged both drones, but the kinetic energy bled off was worth it, for the now wayward drone was moving faster than before while the rest of the chain was moving a bit slower.

  A minute later the next drone was launched, and the next and next until only two remained. When those split the last drone got the largest braking push of the all and came to a near stop with its gravity drives running as high as they could to continually brake, but it still wasn’t enough. It and the other 5 nearby, the last of the Mohicans so to speak, all deployed their shields forward into braking mode, creating umbrella-like shapes that continually altered depending on how much nebula material they ran into.

  The thinner it was the wider they would get, then when it got thicker they would narrow down into cones, eventually bringing all 6 to a halt while their brothers had either deflected off the nebula onto routes through it, using the friction on the shields to navigate into new courses to avoid the thicker stuff towards the center, or they couldn’t redirect enough and got burnt up by the friction on courses sufficiently away from the target that they did not want to hit…today at least.

  That left 6 drones in holding position just inside the outer bands of the nebula. One of the drones reversed course, slowly moving back out so it could transmit in the clear while the others formed a dotted chain as the first of them headed in towards the object that was still obscured, but now visible on sensors as a giant black orb.

  No signal was coming from it, but with the nebula around it highlighting the void it stood out easily. The drones kept their distances as they relayed information, then when instructions finally got to them from Greg the first of them got closer and closer…

  The trailblazer was watching over a 9.4 hour delay, for the drones were not equipped with interstellar coms with the big, power sucking transmitters, and he was surprised there was no reprisal. There were no sensor beams being reported coming from the object. In fact it wouldn’t even reflect back the drones’ own sensors. He began to suspect that the Vargemma were so insistent on hiding that they never bothered to scan the nebula around them.

  The drone creeped its way all the way up to the null field barrier…then it began to malfunction. The second drone in line saw it cross inside the boundary, with no signal coming back and very messed up data during the passage. It took Greg’s people nearly 8 minutes before they sorted it out, in which they determined the drone itself was malfunctioning along the line of progress into the field.

  The portions of the drone within the field couldn’t talk to those outside it, meaning this wasn’t a normal null field. He waited 6 hours on the drone to come back out again, for it had been programmed to retreat on physical contact with anything solid inside, but it never returned. That suggested that this field might be an outer boundary with clear space inside that was the actual defense perimeter. The drone could have been blown apart on the other side but he’d never know it because no transmissions were getting through.

  So he did the only thing he could. He reprogrammed the second drone in line to just dip inside halfway, record what it saw, then come back out. If it got shot he’d be able to tell from the end still visible, but what happened was far worse.

  The drone wasn’t shot, but it was destroyed…at least the portion that had passed inside the field. Every bit of circuitry that the field touched was blanked. The data was lost and the hardware had to be rebooted from defaults because all software not physically encoded was lost as if someone had hit a massive delete key. That meant the first drone might not have been destroyed, but it had no way to function inside except on defaults…and the order for it to return had not been physically encoded into the hardware.

  It was the equivalent of a person getting a head wound and their memory wiped. Their genetic code was still intact, along with all the information it contained, such as how to breathe, but all the stuff learned over the years was lost, and the Star Force drones had a massive amount of data in them that allowed them to operate outside of remote control if it was lost or, for operations like this, where direct control was not possible.

  That meant any drone going in would lose whatever data it recorded unless it could physically encode that data. And that wasn’t something the drones had been built to do…ever. No field such as this had ever been encountered, nor was detailed in the V’kit’no’sat database. So this was either some advanced technology beyond them or an Essence effect, and Bren suspected the latter, but without getting an Archon within range Star Force had nothing that could detect Essence to put on a drone.

  So Greg had some physical encoding crystals built and loaded up onto three more drones, then had them stacked into chains and delivered the same way, sacrificing the other drones to be destroyed or lost as they drifted around the nebula, though some were still transmitting enough to be picked up, but their engine power was so limited here they couldn’t return to base position for years.

  Greg also had some old school thrusters added to the three newly delivered drones designed to work off the nebula material itself. That gave them three ways to navigate the gas field, first being the limited gravity from the object, second from the shield modifications that allowed them to ‘swim’ by pushing the gas around them, and now third by ionizing it inside tiny rocket thrusters and magnetically expelling the solidified particles close to lightspeed, which was by far the most efficient method since they had an unlimited amount of hydrogen gas to collect.

  That meant they were the fast 3 drones whereas the other surviving four and a half were slow as hell in comparison. One of the three gradually approached the field, then creeped into it, moving at about a foot per second for the half mile long drone. It stopped halfway in, waited 22 seconds, then pulled back out again even slower, for it was only using gravity drives to not send exhaust towards whatever was inside.

  When it pulled back out its electronics were blanked, just like before, but the crystals designed for data collection were now physically locked and the limited amount of data was now accessibly once the drone’s systems rebooted in the affected sections.

  That information got relayed through the nebula to the outermost drone holding position to send a signal back to the fleet some 4.9 lightyears away. When it arrived Greg was surprised, for there was no defense perimeter, and no hollow space at all, aside from a few mile gap in which the first drone was now sitting stationary with the front end kissing a massive wall.

  Their drone had scanned the wall, briefly, once its systems reset on the other side, but there
were no ports, weapons or otherwise, on it for hundreds of miles. Beyond that they couldn’t see, for the wall curved ever so slightly. What the drone could tell was that the field was a double blind, for it couldn’t see anything through it, nor sense the incoming signals from the outside, which the other drones were purposely transmitting for this test.

  The wall itself was a hybrid metallic compound unknown to Star Force, but the drone hadn’t been programmed to analyze it, so it just ducked back out and transmitted the brief glimpse at what lay beyond.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Bren asked him as they watched the update together, but from different ships as they simultaneously monitored any activity from the sunken ships that stubbornly would not come back up…and whose number had increased to 8 as the fleet found and scared more into Essence hiding.

  “Yeah, I think it is,” Greg said, a bit awe-inspired. “If the mass readings are right, that thing is mostly hollow. That means it’s a legitimate Dyson Sphere, and far bigger than anything we’ve ever tried to build times a million.”

  “And they don’t have it defended, do they?”

  “I don’t think so. We can probably cut our way inside, but we’ll get hit with an Essence attack as soon as they locate the incursion point. We’ll be sitting ducks if we use anything other than drones.”

  “So how do we invade that thing?”

  Greg smiled. “I don’t know. You got any ideas?”

  7

  February 28, 128538

  Kanethrol System (Novatis Kingdom)

  High Orbit

  Drilling work into the Vargemma stronghold had to be done remotely, with the work on the far side of the disruptive barrier occurring based on programming alone. An old school shuffling relay had been built inside a drone that was now sitting on the barrier, with one side on the exterior and one inside. Signals would not pass through, but crystals would. They had to be encoded with information then mechanically dragged to the other side, read, then recoded and sent back. It allowed for slow communication as to what was happening, and so far the Vargemma seemed to not even know the drones were there.

  Bren wasn’t sure if that was because they weren’t aware or just didn’t care, but the drilling through the outer layer had shown a synthetic material that was 68% the strength of Yeg’gor, but fortunately it wasn’t very thick. Only 6.3 meters of the stuff was holding back a thermal barrier, inside of which was a seemingly natural rock layer.

  That didn’t last long, for it quickly turned to magma the deeper they got. Different equipment had to be sent in, and that meant more delay and more sacrificed drones to get the equipment to the location without having to go the very slow route. Several automated supply ships had been sent that way, creeping towards the target and drifting off jumplane to avoid collisions with the faster drone linked convoys that were expediting certain equipment. So far no person had been sent, for if the Vargemma fleet appeared the Star Force ships wouldn’t have enough gravity to work with to effectively run away, let alone fight them, unless they chose to confront the invaders with conventional weaponry only.

  Bren couldn’t take that chance, so everything was grindingly slow, but eventually the breach point, which now had an airlock installed on it so it wouldn’t drain the magma out into space, had an extending column building up through the magma layer and taking the drilling teams with it to the underside of another rock layer. The Archon hoped this was the underside of the crust on the inside of a Dyson Sphere, and the colder the rock got the more he realized he had been right.

  Then the day came when the transmission of the first images came back to him across the lightyears gap, showing the drilling drone, which was no more than two meters wide, pushing out of the rock into dirt…then roots…before it popped up into air with the vision sensors kicking in and showing a tree canopy from the underside.

  Small reconnaissance drones were then ordered up through the tunnel after a multiple day delay, with them finally giving Bren the information he needed.

  It was a Dyson Sphere, with a tiny pinprick of a star at the center. The land was flatter than on any planet Star Force possessed, for the curve was so slight as to not be there at all. The drones had to float up above the trees to see what was around them, and there wasn’t a bit of technology or inhabitation visible on the surface…but up in space was another matter entirely.

  The recon drones, which were little orbs the size of basketballs, were programmed not to use active scans, but the incoming light from above, when amplified, showed them quite a bit. There was nothing directly overhead in ‘orbit,’ and within a Dyson Sphere there was no such thing as orbit, for the curve of the land was reversed and arching up rather than down.

  But the little drones couldn’t see that through the haze of the atmosphere until they enhanced the view, then they could see almost every bit of land rising up all around them and even across the vast gap of space to the other side. They were inside a giant ball with the land on the inside rather than the outside, and that ball had a radius of 58 million miles.

  Bren couldn’t believe what he was seeing. That meant the entire sphere was slightly smaller than Venus’s orbit around the sun and it had an internal surface area trillions of times larger than the total surface area of Earth.

  No wonder the Vargemma hadn’t detected their presence, and even the Uriti had not been able to see the full size of this thing, only the tiny, tiny star in the center that was really just a reactor. Multiple tubes or shield conduits, it was hard to tell given the distance involved, appeared to be sending material to the center of the Dyson Sphere for the hydrogen fusion to take place, then pulling away the resulting helium and dumping it back into the nebula that was apparently feeding the reactor its hydrogen.

  It was ingenious, because the full mass of the nebula was so spread out it wasn’t jumpable, but if it all came together into one gravity well it would become a large, normal star. The Vargemma had pulled in little pieces of it, created the reaction, then expelled the resultant waste material to avoid a large mass forming. Even now the central ‘star’ was little more than a planet in mass, and that’s what the Uriti had ‘seen,’ not the thin sphere surrounding it.

  But that wasn’t all of it, for within the massive void around the mini star was infrastructure. Lots of infrastructure, including fleets of ships looking like decorations on a Christmas tree there were so many of them. From across the gap the little drones could see massive cities sporadically dotting the backdrop of landscape, but they were few and far between, and Bren’s gut told him this place was mostly uninhabited for its size, but there had to be at least hundreds of planets’ worth of population just on those ‘orbital’ facilities, most of which were far from the exterior ‘surface.’

  He relayed his findings out through the battlemap under encryption, so only those with the necessary access could see them, then he waited for Greg to decide what to do next…but the trailblazer was mum in that regard. Other than get more information, he didn’t know what to do either after they tested a biological mass passing through the barrier field and confirmed that if a person went through their mind would be blanked the same way a computer would, meaning they couldn’t send an invasion force even if they wanted to risk it.

  It would have to be all drones with no remote control possible from here. They’d have to put someone on the outside of the field and use the crude shuffle relay to get any sort of real time interface going, and just because the Vargemma hadn’t found them yet didn’t meant they couldn’t if they attracted attention. If they used their Stargate Essence technique, they could move their ships through the solid walls of the Dyson Sphere, pop outside, shoot the Star Force ships, then pop back inside.

  Greg hoped the other trailblazers would figure something out, but if he couldn’t then Bren wasn’t too confident the others would. He didn’t rule it out, for they’d worked wonders before, but Greg was here with the most information and he was stumped as much as Bren was.

  And while thi
s probing was going on, the Vargemma were not idle. Not finding any Uriti or Ysalamir to hit, they’d progressed to harassing Star Force’s most formidable systems, including Shangri-La. They’d assaulted it, killed the inhabitants on 6 planets, then bugged out after losing one of their Olopar. Bren was glad they’d finally killed one, but the losses were not worth it. Apparently the Vargemma made the mistake of assuming Sol was the most heavily defended system in the empire…which it was, per planet. But Shangri-La was far larger, and while having less planetary defenses, they had a much larger combined fleet, and once it had collapsed on the invaders as they tried for a 7th planet kill with their heart attack weapon, it had been overloaded with kamikaze drones.

  They’d all passed through, as they’d done before, but each one had to be drawing down the Essence reserves, and eventually the other defenses were penetrated as it charged for its main attack…then the whole thing blew to pieces as more kamikaze drone strikes hit it and the kinetic impacts ripped the thing apart.

  The Vargemma fleets hadn’t stayed after that, but they had hit other systems, all Star Force strongholds. It was like they were trying to intimidate Star Force by showing them how futile resistance was, and eventually, after another 8 months of this crap and trillions of people killed across 19 systems, not to mention wildlife losses far larger than that, a demand was finally made.

  Another ship showed up in Sol and transmitted a message before it left, demanding that Star Force kill all of its Uriti and stop fighting the Hadarak in the Core, citing resistance only emboldened them and their assaults needed to be deescalated. They said Star Force could continue to evacuate people, but they could not fight the Hadarak. And failure to heed this demand would mean more systems would be hit.

  That was when Bren made the decision to volunteer himself, and only himself, for a reconnaissance mission to the barrier. Greg overruled him, but after some lengthy arguments and a few sparring matches he finally beat some sense into the trailblazer, who didn’t want anyone going if it wasn’t him.