Star Force: Fiddlesticks (SF65) Read online

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  May 2, 2739

  Merovingian System (Core Region)

  Low stellar orbit

  Paul’s dropship took him across from the Warship-class jumpship he’d arrived in the system on and over to the much larger mining station situated in extreme low orbit around the red dwarf star that filled the view below them. Dubbed the Prometheus, the station was a prototype that had only recently gone online with minimal production, and when Paul had got word of it finally working he’d made sure to arrange his schedule to bring him back to Earth, then made the 9 lightyear hop over to check on its progress in person.

  The star was small, some 17% the mass of Sol, with significant surface activity that altered the luminosity regularly. That turbulence wasn’t a problem to the mining efforts, and this star had been chosen in particular because of its size, proximity to Sol’s industrial base, and being within a system that was 100% Star Force territory. There were no planets whatsoever here, with a cluster of sedas taking their place that utilized natural resources from other systems to sustain themselves, though with the Canderians virtually every seda they build could exist on minimal shipments via internal recycling measures, which was why they’d been given this empty system to colonize.

  The construction of Prometheus had taken more than 18 years, and to date was the third largest orbital structure ever built by Star Force, with the other two being monstrous sedas that were literally the equivalent of small moons. Neither of those were here in the Merovingian System, making the Star Forge-class mining station the centerpiece by far.

  It wasn’t a Canderian construction, but rather one of Star Force’s mainline projects that had been on the drawing board for centuries. Unlike the V’kit’no’sat versions this one was a permanent feature, without the gravity drives that allowed theirs to migrate from system to system. This one had minimal engines, both to keep it aloft and to navigate its way around the star to access different places on its surface. Right now there was a tiny shield conduit stretching down into the star that functioned as a binary straw, and as Paul enhanced the magnification on the dropship’s cameras he could see the stream of glowing matter rising up through it.

  Likewise, there was a less luminous flow going back down with unwanted materials. That secondary filtering process was taking place within the Star Forge itself, while the primary was happening at the base of the straw through an enormously complicated series of energy shields that were pulling on various materials and keeping others back, then sending the wanted slurry up to the station for a more selective filtering process.

  Paul had been told the ‘straw’ was barely functional, but that regular harvesting had begun anyway…and now he could see for himself that it was continuing, though if it had been up to specs the tiny tendril of light would have been much thicker to the eye. He continued to watch the transfer process up until his tiny Falcon-class dropship was swallowed up inside the pillar-like Prometheus, which felt akin to flying inside the side of a Death Star, size wise.

  The trailblazer chucked his datapad aside and left it with the craft before stepping out onto the hangar deck to find Henderson waiting for him.

  “About time,” he told the level 6 tech in charge of the project.

  The man frowned heavily. “Don’t give me that lip. You have no idea how much of a handful the shield calibration has been.”

  “I’ve been reading your notes regularly,” Paul said as he fell into step beside the taller man who led him across the mostly empty hangar bay towards the station’s interior corridors.

  “Then you should know it’s a damn near miracle we got her functioning as is. The Vic’s built theirs with a lot of cool toys that we don’t have, so this beastly testament to inefficiency is naturally going to have problems popping up around the clock.”

  “Production continues?”

  “Amazingly yes, and we’ve already harvested 4.3 kilograms of solari…which triples our lifetime synthesis tally.”

  “I trust you’re putting it to good use.”

  “Not here. What they’re doing with it is out of my hands. As of yet we haven’t seen any return.”

  Paul knew that wasn’t unexpected, for the machines the solari would be used to help make had never been created by Star Force before, and thus prototypes would have to be built and tested before any upgrades to the Star Forge could be shipped out to them.

  “Corovon?”

  “Trace amounts. We’re not anywhere near that deep yet, just scraping a little off the surface layers. About half a metric ton that we haven’t bothered shipping out yet.”

  Paul’s eyes widened. “You’re calling that trace amounts?”

  “Trace as in what we’re getting from the slurry. Be impressed if you want, but you know this beast is capable of far more when we eventually get her up and running. I’m so buried in her innards I don’t even care to think how that compares to production outside this system. And on that note, the Canderians were wondering if they couldn’t have a kilogram or two.”

  “It’s in their backyard, so it only seems fitting…if you’re able to sustain the ‘limited’ production.”

  “We’re fishing, remember, so I can’t promise results, but the syphon is relatively stable now. Crude as hell, but stable.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes. Give them 1.5 kilograms then route all remaining corovon production directly to Sol.”

  “Get the cargo ships moving and I will. Right now it didn’t seem worth sending an entire jumpship for.”

  “Why didn’t you send it with the solari?”

  “I did, but we hadn’t collected more than 3 kilograms by then. This load we got when we hit a pocket of higher concentration. This is our fifteenth probe point. The ninth was the heavier corovon ‘deposit,’ though I hesitate to use that term given how much convection there is in the star. We can sink a syphon down and let it linger for a long time before saturation levels bleed off, though not as long as I’d like.”

  “How far have you repositioned?”

  “We move at least 100 kilometers each time, but all our taps have been in the same geographical area. Didn’t see the point in moving us around a lot until I got the syphon working better. Really this isn’t harvesting yet, just messing around and tinkering.”

  “I know a lot of people that are going to be very happy to hear you say that,” Paul commented, realizing that if this Star Forge even got to a percentage of its full capability it would revolutionize Star Force mining operations, which would then have repercussions throughout the empire as the new volume of materials became available.

  “You’re welcome. Are you here to look or get your hands dirty?”

  “What do you need?”

  “Some troubleshooting assistance.”

  “Happy to. What are you working on?”

  “Everything,” Henderson commented, running his fingers through his blonde hair as they reached a lift station. “It’ll be easier to explain when we get to the control room.”

  Paul stood with the master tech overlooking a large pit of a room with a fully staffed control team. There were numerous workstations all facing in around the large central hologram that had a sliver of the star at the base and the elongated Star Forge floating above it with a single tendril down to the surface. He knew it was designed to have many such tendrils operating simultaneously, but so far there was only the one and Henderson said that would be the case for many years to come given their lack of necessary equipment.

  As the level 6 techs continually progressed through the V’kit’no’sat database they had come to the mutual agreement that there were four phases left before Star Force caught up with their level of technology…or rather their previous level
, for there was no way of knowing how far they’d advanced in the interim. As it was now, Star Force didn’t exist on any one tech level, for it had pushed various lines of rediscovery faster than others, so the entire technological acumen was a mishmash of various strengths and weaknesses.

  Their comm systems were the top priority, and as such were more or less located on the highest level Star Force had managed to date. The Ta’lin’yi were also on a similar level, with the cannons and comm both being phase 5. In order to progress up to phase 4 in any way, there were solari particles that were needed in the construction of the tech, or the construction of the machines that would then make that tech, hence creating a roadblock much as arc elements and corovon had been before them.

  As it was there were still more arc elements that Star Force didn’t have access to, because the ability to synthesize them required tech that utilized solari that they presently didn’t have. In this way there was a crisscrossing of prerequisites that were needed to advance the overall tech level of the empire, with sudden surges coming across the board when they were finally made.

  Solari were the next stage of advancement in a big way, and would open up the next four phases once they got their hands on the necessary compounds. Star Force was very, very close to creating a phase 1 piece of tech that they’d been researching hard for what seemed like forever, and that was the Dre’mo’don, which was lacking one solari that was holding back its production.

  That solari was denomsi, which was an atom in the Trelpo element list. That list, like C-type elements that required corovon in their makeup, had a pair of subatomic particles called hrat and varsh added to the standard protons, neutrons, corovon, and electrons. Denomsi was made of two neutrons, a corovon, and a proton bonded with a varsh, around which a halo of four electrons were compressed, and was one of the rarer forms of solari, which was basically a catch-all term for compounds almost exclusively harvested from within stars.

  There was probably no denomsi within Merovingian, for it was typically found only in high mass stars and small black holes. Varsh bonding required some very exotic environmental circumstances, and while Star Force had been able to recycle a small amount of the varsh particles from V’kit’no’sat ‘trash’ within the pyramid, they were nowhere near close to the point where they could synthetically bond them to protons, thus denomsi was a compound that they would either have to collect directly as a raw material or wait a very long time to be able to build the type of equipment necessary to synthesize it later down the line.

  Given that it was the one roadblock to creating their first phase 1 piece of tech, primitive as it might be in comparison with the V’kit’no’sat models, it was high on both the trailblazers’ and the techs’ priority list, which meant getting to the point where they could mine the high mass stars. Prometheus was essentially the field laboratory where they would experiment and learn how to build a Star Forge that could do that, all the while collecting what they hoped would be a shopping list of solari that would help them create the higher level machines necessary to build such a device.

  Paul had seen the blueprints for the Prometheus before and knew that a lot of it was empty space waiting to be filled with newly created equipment when it came online. What he didn’t know was to what extent Henderson had gone to get the first few pieces working. His masterpiece of ingenuity reminded Paul of O’Neill’s power generator in Stargate, where the legendary Colonel had gone around collecting all kinds of stuff from the SGC, tearing it apart and picking out the pieces that he needed to then build a crude, but functioning power source to briefly give the Stargate the boost needed to travel very far away.

  He hadn’t seen that episode since before he went into basic training, but that sort of tech wizardry had always impressed him…and it was that sort of thing that Henderson wanted his help with now.

  Inside the hazy boundary of the star on the hologram the shield column could be seen penetrating a short distance, then it broke apart into seven different directions like the roots on a tree. Each of those filaments then broke apart further until they ended in small nobs. Those nobs were really shield spheres that were sifting out various compounds within the star and allowing what they wanted through into the interior of those globes…more or less.

  That slurry of material, which ranged from corovon to solari to basic hydrogen depending on the filter they used, was then collected in a small holding shield before being shunted up the primary line and into the station. Right now all seven tendrils were sifting for the same thing, that being a range of heavier materials above basic hydrogen and its plasma counterpart, but low enough that corovon and bulkier molecules would be obscured.

  What they collected was all being shunted up together without any delay, for the Prometheus couldn’t yet accommodate multiple shafts in the connecting tendril, only the two…one up, one down, and the bonding rod that ran between them. That was also made of shield energy, but used for the purpose of structural integrity and doubled as a wire connection allowing for control signals to be sent down into the completely matterless construct.

  It was those shields that operated the entire harvesting process, and those shields that were barely up to the task in Star Force’s case that were holding the whole operation up. It was a miracle that they’d gotten as far as they did without the solari, and Henderson’s work was to be credited with that. The Prometheus was a crude piece of crap at the moment, but it was marginally functional and sifting out the compounds necessary to improve it later down the line.

  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 w
e 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.”