Star Force: Cascade (SF73) (8 page)

Once that part of the experiment was completed he had
the now single drone release the probe and break apart again. He had to
manually determine the break points or use a percentage program, settling on
the latter as he let it split the gel up evenly between them before sending two
off nearby into station keeping while he worked with the third, spreading it
out into a thin block wall that the destroyer then maneuvered the probe into,
testing the gel’s blocking capability.

The first impact shattered the gel, with Daniel having
to go around and pick up all the pieces before they could float off and be
lost, for there was no homing capability built into them. On the next attempt
he reduced the rigidity and saw the wall dent before being thrown off the side
of the probe by the continued movement. The drone just didn’t have the mass to
stop it, but he was hoping that the amount of water it would have to displace
behind the wall would compensate.

He brought in a second drone and combined them for the
next attempt, spreading them out into a wider and slightly thicker sail before
upping the rigidity a bit. When the probe hit it caught, denting it slightly,
and suddenly having a huge amount of drag put on it as the sail didn’t slip off
of one side like before thanks to a few hasty tendrils that Daniel manually
formed and stuck to the side like support lines.

One thing he was realizing with clarity was the amount
of mental control necessary to use manual functions. With his
Sav
and experience he wasn’t having trouble, but he knew
rookies and even veterans without
Sav
would, meaning
that the more automated functions that could be toggled by button press,
whether actual or virtual, were a must while the manual functions would allow
the higher end users so much flexibility in their tactics that he felt like the
Green Lantern, for he could shape the gel into any form his mind imagined…so
long as his mind could account for and control every particle within the gel.
That was the catch, but for the time being three drones was not enough to push
his limits.

When they got around to mass producing these things he
was going to see how many he could actually control, but for today this
successful test was a huge step forward and a major deviation from established
Star Force protocol involving aquatics. It was that deviation that he hoped
would give his Clan an advantage over the others, and eventually give Star
Force a whole slew of new tactics to use in warfare beneath the waves.

8

August 5, 2893

Merovingian
System (Core Region)

Low stellar
orbit

Administrator
Claven
walked
the decks of the
Prometheus
as he did
every day, bypassing techs at work and visually inspecting that everything was
in order. The massive
Star Forge
-class
mining station was his to oversee and arguably the most important piece of
property that Star Force had. A few other stations had been built after the
Prometheus
with more scheduled for construction,
but those were mostly empty shells still waiting to be filled with equipment.
Only his station was fully operational, and it had taken a long time to get it
that way.

Gone were the research techs and Archons that had
created it, tuned it, and filled its massive void with new factories that could
operate at high capacity in low volume. Even now those were no longer
considered new tech, so the operation of the station had been transitioned over
to a conventional staff, with
Claven
being appointed Administrator
of the station. A title that was usually reserved for a full colony.

But here in this empty system all that there was of
Star Force was the
Prometheus
and the
Canderian
sedas. He had no control over the latter,
for they were simply neighbors in this system near to Sol. They were in the
safest region Star Force controlled, perhaps even safer than Earth given that
Merovingian had nothing of value in it for anyone to come looking for. That
said,
Claven
had a full complement of troops onboard,
including a pair of Archon rangers, just in case the massive space station was
boarded.

They also had some 72 naval drones situated in a
higher holding orbit guarding the sister station to the
Prometheus
…which was little more than a disconnected piece of the
monster, for it was a warehouse/starport located at an altitude that wouldn’t
see it cooked from the stellar radiation. It was there that incoming cargo
ships picked up and delivered supplies, then a fleet of specially shielded
dropships would ferry traffic to and from the
Prometheus
as it sat so low it was nearly within the atmosphere of
the star itself.

That ‘atmosphere’ was not a clear distinction, for
there was so much turbulence that waves of material often washed over the star
forge’s shields, ironically giving the station additional power with every hit.
The stellar output was being absorbed as much as it was being reflected,
providing the station with the bulk of its power output augmented by internal
reactors. In fact, that absorption capability was the only way the
Prometheus
could function at full
capacity, for the collection probes were so large that they literally gobbled
it up. That was understandable, given that they had to resist the destructive
power of the star when actually touching it, and the fact that they were
comprised totally of shield energy themselves.

Right now
Claven
had 19
collection ‘straws’ inside the star reaching down more than 200 miles on a
standard day and up to 480 on special occasions. That was barely scratching the
surface, but it was more than enough to get a good pull on the denser stellar
material. Each of those straws fanned out at the bottom into huge collection
nets, which were comprised of clusters of tiny spheres that allowed only
certain materials or types of materials to pass through, then what was
collected was shunted up the connecting stalks and into the
Prometheus
for processing.

From there automation and the Administrator’s army of
techs sorted out unwanted material and sent it back down into the star to save
space on the star forge while anything valuable was shunted into holding tanks
and cooled to desired levels. From there it was either held or sent into
processing sectors where it would be converted into whatever products
Claven
ordered them to make. Most of the corovon they
harvested was kept raw, but right now some 13% of it was being bonded into
molecules on site to produce a variety of substances that were then shunted to
another section of the station and combined with others into armor plating,
structural beams, shield emitters, hand weapons, Archon armor, and hundreds of
other things that were more economical to build right here and now than to ship
off the raw materials to another star system for manufacturing.

The factories onboard the star forge were so condensed
and automated that the station was extra heavy, even for something of its
massive size. Any movement required a good tugging on the gravity drives, not
to mention the constant strain of having to hover above the star, for they couldn’t
suffer the lateral movement of orbit when they had shield tethers into the
star’s surface. Those tethers literally latched them in place, forcing them to
expend huge amounts of energy just to stay put and not fall into the star
themselves.

The low altitude they held also acted as a defense
against attack or curious onlookers, for the plasma gases swirling around them
made quite the problem for primitive sensors. Most races had trouble even
locating the star forge at this altitude, but Star Force’s advancements into
Pro’phad energy gave the Administrator clear lines of sight around his station
and well down into the star. He could scan deeper than he could reach at the
moment, which allowed him to move the station around as needed to find the
densest deposits to mine.

The starport above them didn’t orbit either,
maintaining a more distant hover/rotation to match the location of the
Prometheus
as the star spun about on its
axis. It too had absorption shields, but they didn’t pick up as much energy
given that they were farther away. It was more than enough to keep them in
their
laggy
orbit, but whenever a jumpship arrived to
exchange cargo they had to keep their engines on or fall away from the station,
making navigation a bit of a hassle, but one that
Claven’s
dropship pilots handled on a day to day basis with no trouble.

And the Administrator kept them busy shipping out
finished products up to the warehouses and bringing back down whatever
compounds couldn’t be harvested from the star…which were minimal considering they
only focused on products that could be entirely or almost entirely made from
the mining resources. Bits and pieces of others were brought in to add to them
but a lot of the supplies were meant for the station itself, for there were no
bioharvest facilities or any other type of personal sustenance infrastructure
on the station. They relied entirely on imports, though in a pinch the
Canderians could cover for them in the way of supplies.

Normally a station of this size would have
redundancies, but because it was located so close to the star and designed for
a very select purpose the designers had scrapped the standard protocols and
built this beast as a harvest engine with little else slowing her down. It was
Claven’s
responsibility to make sure she kept churning out
raw materials and products round the clock, and he felt it was best to get his
own eyes on his station as much as possible rather than relying exclusively on
reports shunted to his office.

He oversaw the station operations from there, along with
the rest of the 342,953 people on the station. None of them were here as
visitors, nor were any allowed. Each and every one was a specialist in their
field, for nothing less would allow them a transfer to what was considered an
extremely critical position. While some materials, such as warship armor, were
produced here because of the corovon being handy, the primary importance of
this station was its ability to collect materials that were virtually
nonexistent outside of stars. While corovon was always important, it was the
solari that the star forges were designed to go after…and it was the solari
that were allowing Star Force to take a huge leap into the next technological
level and put them ahead of both the lizards and ADZ denizens alike.

Star Force had no equal now, though rumors about the
Preema and Nexus were still abound.
Claven
knew they
had advanced technology, but he also knew about the tech that wasn’t available
to the public that Star Force was designing and currently using, a lot of which
was incorporated into this station. He was also getting regular requests from
highly placed techs and even Paul-024 himself with regards to new solari to
hunt and in what numbers they needed, along with occasional explanations as to
why.

All that was holding Star Force back in some lines of
research was available solari, whether it be for actual experiments or
sufficient bulk for prototype development. And even when they figured out how
to build something they would need to mass produce it using the solari from
this mining station and the other newer additions, none of which could hold a
candle to the
Prometheus
’s current
production quotas…which were more or less a joke, for with the swirling
currents within the star you never knew for sure how much material you could
collect or not. It was a fishing expedition, with
Claven
having the ultimate decisions about where to dip their rods.

That in itself was a huge responsibility, for it had a
direct impact on Star Force’s upper end tech production. He’d gotten good at it
over the years, but every day was a new challenge and he expected to have to
move the station in a few more hours after sucking up as much from the current
deposit of
denomsi
as they could get. The tiny
globule had disconnected from a chunk deep within the star that, honestly,
shouldn’t even be there. How this star had acquired a compound that was only
typical of high mass stars was still a mystery, and getting down to harvest it
directly was one of his standing goals, though they were far from that day.
Whenever a bit of it would break off and float up to the surface regions where
it was possible to collect it he immediately
retasked
the entire station, for it was just that damn valuable.

The
Yamcha
star forge, the third in the line to be produced, was
currently working through the headaches of mining one of those insanely large
stars, and it was from there that Star Force was getting the bulk of its
limited
denomsi
supply. Whenever
Claven
could contribute to it he felt obligated, for it was the solari responsible for
the newest and most powerful weapon that Star Force possessed…the Dre’mo’don.
Without
denomsi
it couldn’t be built, and the same
could be said of other
solaris
and technologies under
development that this star had in far greater amounts.

The Administrator had to get to them, collect and
process, then either fabricate or ship out to be used elsewhere on as regular
an output schedule as he could manage. His crew was damn good at what they did,
but this operation was always in flux due to the unknown hauls they would be
bringing in.

As he hopped into a lift car to take him down a
segment of the 94 mile long station, he selected a region where a transition
was being made. One of the factory segments was shifting from
haviti
saturation to
chori
condensation thanks to the band of the latter that they’d had the luck of
hitting, or rather being hit by, as it cycled through the subsurface currents.
The condensation process was meant for packaging, diminishing the volume
required by stacking the element in its raw form into tightly linked molecular
handshakes…that were difficult to uncouple later, but that wasn’t his problem.

There were only so many jumpships available to haul
cargo and he had to get his output compressed as tightly as he could in order
to load them up and keep from having to scale back production to match the
traffic flow. Though in truth he could get as many jumpships as he requested,
giving the importance of this operation, but after centuries of working within
Star Force he hated being inefficient and didn’t want to waste a jumpship that
could be put to use someplace else just because he couldn’t pack smartly
enough.

When he got off the lift he walked a considerable
distance through mostly empty corridors until he got to the section that had
been transitioned, according to the report, but it was good to see with his own
eyes that all was operating smoothly as he walked into the command booth with
four other men working or monitoring their stations.

“How we doing fellas?”

“Purring like a kitten,” the eldest of them said,
bringing up the large hologram so the Administrator could see for himself. Most
of the sector’s internal machinery had multiple uses and only a few specialized
components, allowing it to be transitioned from task to task in order to save
space and the diagram showed that everything was now into
chori
condensation mode, with bricks of the element being sealed inside protective
casings so they wouldn’t react with the environment and go boom…or probably
more like melt through a deck or two via various chemical reactions that would
simultaneously create a noxious cloud that would kill anyone nearby. Such
things didn’t happen under Star Force’s careful attention, but anytime you had
raw solari in such density there were bound to be violent reactions if exposed
to a ‘natural’ environment.

One of the other techs frowned at their chief. “What’s
a kitten?”

“A baby cat,” the older man explained, throwing a
glance at his age peer in
Claven
.

“Cat…like Scionate cat?” the tech asked, still
confused.

“No,” the Administrator explained before the chief
could. “It’s a race that now lives exclusively in the sanctuaries. Back in the
day they were kept as pets and would make a soft rumbling sound when they were
asleep or happy.”