When the wormhole carrier ship had decelerated into this location two years ago, the history faction had dispatched a squadron of stealthed ships on towards the Olyix outpost, each one holding an expansion portal. They’d flown into the star system undetected. Now Yirella watched through dedicated links as they slowly glided into position, closing on their targets.
‘That is impressive,’ she murmured grudgingly. Sensors on the stealthed ships were showing her detailed images of the Olyix structures. They locked onto the station itself as it orbited two-thirds of an AU from the L-class star. It was a nest of seven concentric bands, spinning slowly. Their surfaces shone an intense purple in the sun’s lemon-tinted light, as if they’d been milled from a solid block of metal.
‘So that’s an Olyix habitat?’ she said. The outermost ring was two hundred kilometres in diameter.
‘It would seem so. Given their technology level, we’re surprised they need something this large to operate an outpost like this. Perhaps it is related to how many biological server constructs they appear to use.’
‘So it’s a home for a onemind, and . . . what? A stable of constructs?’
‘Possibly. But there is no question there is plenty of activity here.’
Yirella followed the station’s orbital track. Eleven huge radio telescopes were visible, pentagonal dodecahedrons that put her in mind of a clump of symmetric sunflowers, but two thousand kilometres wide. They were spaced equidistantly around the star, allowing them to scan interstellar space for any innocent radio broadcasts from emerging civilizations.
Those she ignored. Her concern was spiked by the number of Resolution ships holding position fifty thousand kilometres from the big multi-ring station. The squadron had adopted a protective formation around a Welcome ship, a rocky cylinder thirty-five kilometres long.
Her perception enclosed it, magnifying the sight until it hung in the centre of her conscience like a detailed ghost. Its profile was unpleasantly familiar from their encounter with a near-identical ship at Vayan.
‘I wonder how many humans are cocooned on board?’ she mused.
‘Unknown,’ Immanueel said. ‘We conclude it was assigned to the new war fleet en route to us. They thought they could capture us.’
‘Most likely,’ she agreed. After examining the Resolution ships, confirming they were the upgraded version, her main interest was the star’s equator, where a loop of matter was spinning around the seething corona, partially occluded by an unnatural storm of prominences that its presence whipped up. ‘That’s got to be the generator to power their wormholes. Saints! The energy they’re producing!’
‘Indeed.’
She switched focus to the wormholes that circled lazily around the station. Thirty-seven active ones, presenting as pools of Cherenkov radiation gleaming sharply against the blackness of interstellar space. Trailing further along the orbital path, and drifting out of alignment, were eleven dead hemispheres of cold machinery, their delicate exposed elements fraying with vacuum ablation over the decades. Behind them were another two inert hemispheres slowly circling around each other in a ghostly dance.
‘Those eleven in the first clump have to be the termini for the wormholes you destroyed,’ Yirella said.
‘Yes. And presumably the remaining pair were the termini for Vayan, and the lure world where they encountered the Lolo Maude.’
‘And the active wormholes? We’re assuming the largest is the one that leads back to the enclave.’
‘The others presumably lead to the ships currently flying to the neutron star and the Signal star. They’ll want to eliminate all sources of resistance.’
‘Yeah.’
She watched as three stealthed corpus ships drifted in towards the largest of the Olyix wormholes. After their two-year flight, they were now within ten thousand miles. Dark puffs of inert molecules effervesced gently out of them, performing final course corrections.
‘No indication the Olyix have detected us,’ Immanueel said. ‘Everything is going to plan.’
Yirella had to wonder how much anxiety she was subconsciously leaking through the neural interface. Or perhaps Immanueel just knew her too well. She pulled her attention back.
All around the Morgan, specialist systems and armada warships were converging on the expansion portals that were entangled with their twins in the stealth ships. They began to form up in their designated assault sequence, and she concentrated on the five negative energy generators that would target the wormhole that led back to the enclave. If they didn’t get through, or if they failed to take control of the wormhole, the armada would have to take the long way around. They were utterly critical.
She finally understood why humans on old Earth had assigned deities to the constellations. It was pleasing to believe there was a higher power you could beg to circumvent fate. Useless . . . but pleasing.
Saints, but I wish I wasn’t so smart.
‘Here we go,’ Immanueel said.
The lead stealth ship approaching the enclave wormhole was less than a metre across. It had shed its external layer of molecular blocks in an unsymmetrical sequence, taking on an irregular shape so that any detailed scan would show a natural-appearing lump of asteroidal debris. The course it was on would take it twelve hundred metres south of the generator mechanism, approaching at three thousand seven hundred and nineteen kilometres an hour. Close, but not dangerous. The corpus expected the Olyix structures to have impact protection – a gravity distortion field if nothing else, deflecting space fragments away harmlessly.
Data zipped through Yirella’s mind, delivered by the quantum array that operated at a seemingly instinctual level. The generator was indeed sitting at the centre of an inverted gravity swirl. But there were no other active measures – yet.
The stealth ships flashed in to closest approach, their courses bending slightly as they skipped off the boundary of the gravitational deflection field like spinning stones bouncing along a lake. They curved around the hemispherical wormhole generator, one on either side of the glowing entrance, while the third followed the camber of the machinery. At two kilometres out, the portals expanded.
Five negative energy generators flew through the portals, fast. Defence cruisers corkscrewed around them, ready to ward off any
