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  Kaen frowned and did some searching. “These are special varieties fueled by…infrared radiation.”

  “So we can power them with our Rensiek?” Darren asked, stepping up to and placing his hand on the sifter.

  “In theory, but we don’t have the calories for a lot of that.”

  “Sunlight?” Wennie wondered.

  “There’s a battery unit inside,” Kaen said, doing the data digging for the group. “It…will hold a slow charge. So however we can get it, no matter how long, and we can use it.”

  “But we have to be picky about what we use it for,” Trevor warned. “This is part of the test. We have to work real hard to power this, so our first choices are going to be damn important.”

  “So no hot tub?” Neiva asked not so sarcastically as it sounded.

  “Afraid not,” Trevor said with a sigh. “Unless you can build one the old fashioned way...” he said, having an epiphany. “Kaen, how hot can we get the equipment before it gets damaged?”

  “Umm,” he said, looking it up.

  “Specifically, can it stand up to a bonfire?”

  Everyone turned to look at their fires, which they’d made extra big more for fun than heat, but now might be far more important than they realized.

  “Easy,” Kaen said in astonishment. “You can dip these things in molten lava and it won’t damage them…just clog them, so let’s not do that.”

  “Are there any thermal vents nearby?” Darren asked.

  “Checking,” he said, searching for a map of the local area…only to pull up an empty hexagon 100 miles on each side. “Guys, I think I found what Greg was referring to. We’ve got boundaries, and on the other side of them are, I think, more zones where other Furyans are going through the same tests.”

  “How far away?” Trevor asked.

  “100 miles to the tips of a hexagon, so…” he said, doing the mental math and having to guess at the square roots until he came close, “86 or 87 mile straight shot to what is said to be a shield barrier. So we’re not making contact or getting help from them.”

  “Does it say which bloodline they are?”

  “It doesn’t say a damn thing other than draw our boundary lines, and inside it is no information other than the location of the obelisk. We’re going to have to make our own maps.”

  “Ok, so we need scouting parties. Anything in there we can draw on, or are we using dirt and sticks?”

  “Probably,” Kaen said, searching in a familiar way, for the data terminal was configured the same as the one they had in the maturia. “Yeah, there’s a drawing program, along with journals. There’s also video and holo caches, but we don’t have any tech for that.”

  “Yet,” Orio added.

  “Yet,” Trevor echoed, having been their unofficial group leader ever since they’d reached adulthood. “We’re also going to need firewood…lots of it…to charge the machinery and keep us warm.”

  “Let’s build cabins out of wood,” Saera suggested. “I don’t want to wait until we get synthetic materials.”

  “Are there any woodcraft instructions in there?”

  Kaen searched for woodcraft, pulling up a single entry that read ‘Figure it out.’

  “No,” he said in an annoyed tone. “It’s deliberately omitted so we have to experiment.”

  “Saera, you’re on cabin building,” Trevor decided. “Mikel, you’ve got scouting. Darren, we need rock for the sifter. Ores preferably.”

  He cringed. “You mean we need to climb up to the mountaintops and collect loose fragments?”

  “Unless you can find them down here, or want to hand dig down to the bedrock.”

  “Mountains it is,” he said with a fake smile.

  “We don’t have water for a year,” Ainie pointed out. “We need a filter, or to use the sifter.”

  Trevor cringed. “What’s wrong with melting snow?”

  “It tastes weirds,” she said pithily.

  “Not pure then,” someone else mumbled.

  “Never had to make our own water,” Trevor said out loud what everyone else was thinking. “Alright, we take these things as we find them. There’s no regenerator either, so if we get hurt we have to heal the slow way, so don’t take any extra risks. Charge the sifter in the fire, then run some snow through it and see what’s in it. If it’s harmless we drink snow. If not, we gotta find a way to get pure water. I don’t want us to be one of the ‘don’t dos’ future Furyans read about. Greg said the other groups made it, but they didn’t do all that well. Let’s see if we can do better, and that begins with a good start. Ainie, you’ve got water duty. Chad, we need restrooms of some sort.”

  The green haired Furyan frowned. “It is going to pile up with 100 of us, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah it is, but we’ve got a few days to figure it out. We can make due with a lot of stuff now, but we need plans and to start chipping away at them.”

  “And better clothes,” Leon suggested. “Bigger backpacks, at least, if we’re going to be carrying rocks.”

  “Add that to the list. Kaen, start making a list.”

  On and on it went that night, with the Greonis getting a lot of preplanning done before finally going to their individual tents, with some pairing up to share body heat as their bonfires burnt out before morning. They restarted them, gathering up all the loose sticks they could find before figuring out how to topple the dead trees nearby. They established a separate burn pit, digging down into the dirt to help reflect some more heat back on the center where they put the three assembled pieces of equipment, getting some charge in the other two despite not having anything to use in them yet.

  The first few weeks were rough, but they had a mission and worked at it in groups, eating their fill of the rations that they knew were not unlimited as they decided to work hard early to get ahead of the other test groups despite the urge to kick back and relax in a way they’d never had a chance to do before.

  Very little training occurred, aside from some running to keep their fitness. They wanted to use most of their calories working, and by the end of two months they had enough crude cabins to hold everyone, with fireplaces in them a month after that and a 7-man team working on collecting firework every day to fill their growing needs.

  They used the sifter mostly for water, because there was something in the air called a Ti’ko’ma that was absorbed into the snow. Apparently it came out of thermal vents from the warm planetary interior, so there was another way to get heat out there, though it might not be in their zone. Regardless, if they drank the Ti’ko’ma as well as breathed it in, it could become a long term problem, so they decided to spent the thermal energy to filter it out rather than counting on their natural healing abilities to deal with the light damage it could cause.

  Better safe than sorry was the idea, though Furyan biology was far more resilient than other races. And in that regard, there were a few out there. Small ones that burrowed under the snow and into the ground, or flew through the air. Nothing big was found, and it took some time but eventually the avians were tracked to certain trees that were producing berries, some of which were collected and analyzed…but they weren’t worth the effort nutritionally, not for the mass of food they needed, and they didn’t want the avians to starve by taking them either, for it looked to be their only food source in the area.

  But they could fly over the shield. The scouts found it, and found it to be opaque so they couldn’t see what was on the other side, but the avians were flying over it, so maybe there was different food sources elsewhere. No nests were found yet, and one Furyan was assigned to figuring out these mysteries every month as sort of a rest and free time, but the more they knew about their zone the better, and everyone else was constantly busy with manual labor.

  Darren was in charge of the teams gathering rocks, and they were getting better at picking them by eye so they didn’t waste sifter energy on mostly useless ones. In the database was the chemical recipes of many building materials, but most had at
least 20 different types of molecules in them, so Darren had a lot of hunting to do, and the more he could find the less would have to be atomically reassembled in the alchemy pod. So they could make what they couldn’t find if they could find things near to it, or wanted to provide the power to fuse or fission down other things.

  Metal is what he needed the most, but he hadn’t found any veins yet, just a few weak ores. The ‘explorer’ slot was an addition to the scouts and went looking for various resources so the collection teams didn’t have to waste their collection time, so Darren had multiple sites to hunt for rocks in prior to each day, as did the dead tree hunters.

  Their restroom was little more than a cabin with a pit under it, but it was better than just going in the snow. Fortunately the fabricator could use the crushed or chipped wood to create an obsolete tool called toilet paper that was better than using snow once the charge on their personal cleaning items ran out. They weren’t thermally rechargeable, and without electricity they were dead within the first month…deliberately so, they thought, because the database held schematics on rechargeable ones.

  So with the reinvention of toilet paper they had a crude luxury they were grateful for, but they longed for real buildings with real utilities, painfully knowing how far away from that they were…but Trevor kept them on task and chipping away at all the stepping stones enroute to that proper infrastructure, and Darren knew they’d get there eventually. They just had to do it the hard way.

  Actually, their parents had it the truly hard way, because they didn’t have sifter technology, nor alchemy, or a database full of all these designs. They had to invent it all, and that was a challenge Darren did not want to even think about. This one was a headache enough, and without his brothers and sisters he wouldn’t have a chance of making it out here. But together, they were working the problem and succeeding.

  But they had a very, very long way to go, and getting food production established was now their main priority using the seeds that had been packed in the supply crates. Though to grow them in this snowy environment meant an indoor bioharvest facility.

  And to that, nearly all of their building materials went. The wood cabins would be home for a very long time to come, but that was preferable to starving or having to hit the panic button and admit defeat.

  And if there was one combined sentiment they all held, it was that they would not use that button unless someone’s life depended on it. They were not going to be the first of their bloodline to fail, let alone of all the bloodlines. They were going to not just survive, but own this mission…whatever it was truly about.

  7

  February 3, 158400

  System 299103 (Hadarak War Zone)

  Zendi-Zorro Nebula

  Amir-060 arrived in the nebula via a scout ship as his Borg vessel was needed in combat elsewhere. He didn’t need it to travel around the war zone, for Star Force ships were faster, and as long as he avoided the Deep Core the congestion of Hadarak wasn’t sufficient to intercept him just outside the original location of the Web Wall, which was now almost completely destroyed. A few chunks here and there remained, but several of the Clans had been permanently assigned to taking it down, and while it was slow going they had accomplished a great deal over the past three millennia.

  Most of the war zone, however, was still in Hadarak hands. Their ability to spam and spread had garnered them a huge territory, but it was falling rapidly and everyone knew it. Out here it was more of a cleanup effort, but one that still required a great amount of military presence and resource expenditure…while the battles happening in the Deep Core made everything else look minor in comparison.

  That was the scale of the war, which made battles in the outer regions of the war zone that would have obliterated the original V’kit’no’sat appear insignificant to some of the distant spectators, but Amir knew better, as did most of Star Force. Every world mattered, as did every person, and how you won the war was as important as winning…perhaps even more so, which was why he had left his badass warship behind and traveled here via scout ship, for one of the Jedein had asked him to come.

  They didn’t do much talking, and whenever they did it was always of great importance. A lot of people wanted to meet them, but they snubbed almost everyone. Archons would usually get an audience just by showing up, but the trailblazers and a few other elite personnel were the only ones truly on regular speaking terms with them…at least as far as the Socani were concerned. The Jedein had more in common with the Megaloids, and conversed more with them as a result, but Amir knew that when one asked for him, they would have a good reason even if they didn’t want to share it remotely.

  So he’d broken off from the heavier fighting in the Deep Core and headed back out to the ‘safer’ regions of the war zone, ending up in this nebula that was previously unclaimed as far as Amir’s information went, but when he got to the outer edges of it he met up with the Star Force defense fleet that accompanied the Jedein wherever it chose to travel. There were so few of them that it was imperative that they not be killed, so each of them had minders if they wanted to venture out into the war zone.

  And most were, to help rescue Hadarak and transform them into non-combatants or back into Jedein in the case of the Wardens and one Lurker, though the later was becoming quite rare and very difficult to capture. The Jedein here was originally a Warden from another galaxy, and since they didn’t operate on names, Star Force had simply assigned them numbers. This one was #18, and as soon as Amir arrived he got directional coordinates of where to go inside the nebula.

  The scout ship had to reset its shields and lower its speed to pass through the thick soup, and it took four days of travel into the darkness of the nebula before he sensed the Jedein’s telepathic presence recognizing and calling to him from a distance.

  Amir adjusted course slightly to match the call, passing through various density of material, but nothing as dense as rock. All was gases, mostly hydrogen, with a few other oddities included, but as he approached the Jedein he began sensing other Cores out there. Lots of them, but small. Those would be the converted Hadarak minions that had been brought here from multiple other systems at the Jedein’s request, loaded up into Star Force cargo ships after being put into cocoons, then to emerge here in different forms of the Jedein’s choosing.

  Usually they repurposed them in the same system they found them, but this was a special project that the accompanying fleet did not know the full purpose of.

  It wasn’t long until he passed by the first of the cluster of Megaloids, though most were no bigger than his scout ship, having previously been naval minions but now were growing larger as they ate the gasses…how Amir did not know, for there was no sunlight here to charge them, and everything was dreadly cold. Some Megaloids could handle this environment indefinitely, but most couldn’t, and he was interested in seeing what wonders the Jedein had worked on this group.

  He swung the scout ship close enough for the scanners to work and saw a hard carapace, almost like a space turtle, around which was a different concentration of gasses. Amir guessed it was eating the hydrogen, fusing it inside to generate heat, then discarding the resulting helium, for the Megaloids were actually glowing in thermals and shedding heat into the surrounding area, making the entire region near them less cold, but still freezing by any sense of the term.

  Amir used a Wrangler armband to enhance his telepathic presence and made contact with those he passed by, having a conversation in thoughts more than words, and realizing they were here to construct more than helium in the nebula. They were actually fusing higher end elements that the larger Megaloids were consuming to increase the durability of their bodies to the level where they could survive inside stars where Hadarak minions could not.

  So the Jedein had turned them into little miners rather than cannon fodder for naval battles. That was interesting, for ever since the first Jedein had emerged from its transitional cocoon, it had been working to build up networks of Megaloids with
specific tasks, as if it had a master plan at work, but they always claimed they didn’t, that they were merely putting together puzzle pieces where they saw they fit together without knowing the full picture.

  Amir sensed many more puzzle pieces in the nebula as his scout ship passed by them, heading towards the largest presence that was the Jedein, both in physical size and telepathic aura, but when he got close to it he also began to sense another large presence beyond, of a type he had never before encountered.

  Welcome, #18 said to him telepathically in the Star Force language as his scout ship slowed and came into a parking slot alongside the 349 mile long Jedein…and that wasn’t counting the extended tendrils.

  Hello, he said back, using his gauntlet to boost the signal rather than using Essence to do it, for the Jedein were not that good at picking up faint telepathy, meaning that which came from Socani. For what reason did you summon me?”

  I have confirmed this nebula is sufficient as a sanctuary for the Hadarak minions, and I have constructed converters that will be able to transition them into a single form without my presence. You may begin large scale transport here of any systems you wish to clean the Hadarak from.

  What sizes?

  All can be accommodated here, save for those bound to stars. This will be a suitable home for them.

  Can you grow carriers to assist with the transport?

  Eventually, if you wish it, but they cannot be converts. Their bodies are incompatible in construction.

  We have had this discussion with other Jedein. Our ability to transport the cocoons between stars is limited. Most need to be able to move themselves, remain in place, or have others carry them.

  The carrier construction is far different than what most Heidoor are built for. They must be supplied with sustenance rather than gather it themselves, or they cannot continuously transport. Nor are they strong enough to starbathe.

  Do you see another alternative?

  If you seek to keep them alive, I do not. The obvious alternative is to save a lesser number of the expendable ones.