The small squadron was different than most Space Force squadrons. A single frigate and six destroyer hulls. They were built along the lines of fish, agile and sleek, moving through space and not-space smoothly without causing ripples or cavitation or eddies. They dropped from an esoteric not-space and into what most people thought of as space an entire light year from their target and went still.
The frigate deployed massive arrays of scanners, sent scanning drones off in a complicated web, the drones moving with their own stealthed drives. Once the drones were in position, they deployed their own scanning arrays that were sensitive enough to detect even the most exhausted photon's passage years after the fact. Every available scanner known to the Terran Confederacy was deployed, from simple visual and audio scanners (the latter not as laughable as it would have once been thought, with the return of the Black Fleet) to gravity sensors to sensors that could detect Deadspace emissions as well as track the progress of chronotrons.
The six destroyers all waited for a period of time, then moved out in sequence on their own appointed routes.
All involving a vast thick nebula.
Each destroyer made 'microjumps', coming closer and closer to the nebula from different angles, all deploying scanners.
The last destroyer, nameless, only a hull number and the crew to distinguish it from the others, made the trip inside.
The Captain, Jane Thomas Choi, sat in her command cradle, her hands clenched on the 'oh shit' bars on either side, the bottom of her boots pressed against the plate at the bottom, her body tense even while her mind was linked to the ship itself.
The ship's computer was a simple thing, barely qualifying as a Virtual Intelligence, and it had no curiosity, no wonder, it just performed the tasks as they had been laboriously encoded into it.
The three Digital Sentiences were in heavily shielded disaster frames, all designed to minimize emissions as much as possible. There was no VR network for them to lounge in, it was meatspace or nothing.
None of them minded, this was one of those missions. The ones you might read about centuries after the fact, that nobody knew ever happened, but was vitally important enough for ships to be custom built or retrofitted and the crew hand selected.
Captain Choi watched through every scanner the ship possessed while still in maximum stealth mode. From how particles caressed the hull to how the engine hummed and pinged, to how the crew reacted.
It dropped from stringspace as the engine cut out and Captain Choi held her breath. Stringspace could be risky to a ship not guided correctly. A knot could be hit, a ship could come out sideways or inverted, the ship's engine could get tangled and be torn from the hull.
But the risk was part of it.
The ship floated, dead in space, no emissions. Beyond no emissions. Most navies strived to make their ships a hole in space. A hole could be spotted. Space Force filled in the hole to the point where most particles moved across the stealth systems as if it was empty space. It didn't help the ship that the location they had dropped into was difficult at best to adjust for.
Which is why the entire crew were hardwired to one another for conversations. The crew system was completely isolated from the rest of the computer systems. Fiber optic cable only.
Months spent with only electrodes to keep the muscles toned. Specially crafted foods through a tube that were designed to prevent organ atrophy.
The crew members that moved moved in total silence, their cable connected allowing them to communicate.
Every vibration was accounted for an muted.
"Scans coming back," Captain Hooker sent from the maneuvering scan station.
Choi glanced at the former tank E/W officer. It wouldn't have been her first choice, to go outside of Space Force for a scanner technician. She had peeked at his record and had been startled. Three hundred eighthy years as an armored vehicle E/W systems tech, guiding everything from armored scout cars to heavy main battle tanks. He'd even spent twenty years as a BOLO operator.
She had realized that Space Force had figured a man who could guide his tank and fellow crewmates through burning cities and hellish atmospheres would be the man who would put together the best path for the ship to take.
"What's it look like?" Captain Choi asked.
The interior of the nebula had been cleared at some point in the past. It looked as if a nova or supernova had gone off, pushed the particles and gasses that made up the nebula into a shell around empty space.
"We've got super-structures," Hooker sent. "They're..."
Hooker suddenly reached and slapped a red button next to his cradle.
To Choi it felt like the ship suddenly inverted as the temporal reversion drive was kicked on. It wasn't "exactly" a drive in the sense that it didn't "exactly" manipulate time. Rather, it had the particles reverse motions between two set points. The set points were when the ship had started the jump and when the button was slapped.
The ship jumped backwards in space, not in time, as the temporal section was used merely to provide an instructional baseline.
All six of the destroyers came jumping back at roughly the same time. The six alerts were transferred to the frigate, and all seven ships jumped to stringspace and vanished.
The nebula sat, silent, as it had for millions of years.
-----------
Captain Choi walked into Rear Admiral (Lower Decks) Lucas's office, seeing that she was in good company with the other five destroyer commanders. She took her seat and waited.
Unlike most Space Force meetings between ship captains, this one was in meatspace.
"I've looked over the records," Admiral Lucas said, tapping a dataslate screen. "I'm going to endorse your decisions, but..."
The word hung there for a long moment.
"We have to go back in," the Admiral said.
"Sir, I assume we're going back in with novasparks and planet crackers?" Captain Sørensen asked.
Admiral Lucas shook their head. "No. We need more data. What we've found could answer some of the biggest questions we've had."
"Is the timing right, sir?" Captain Norman asked, her anxiety shown by the way his fingers kept tapping his uniformed leg.
"I've done the numbers, the angles. This place fits," the Admiral said.
There was shocked silence.
"How much mass does Confed Intel thin the Lanaktallans have amassed over the last hundred and twenty odd million years?" Captain Choi asked.
"Enough to have built it all. Every bit of it and then some," the Admiral said. "We need better scans. We need to get a look in at the whole thing."
The six captains all nodded.
------------------------
"Captain, I've been matching the surface scans taken from earlier encounters of the superstructures to planetary scans of Lanaktallan systems we've scanned," Commander Jaisley said.
"Go ahead," Captain Choi said, tapping her toes against the stress plate at the bottom of her crash couch.
"They match. For the most part. There's a hundred million years of continental drift, in some cases its only vaugely recognizable, but I've got a lot of matches," he said. "I've been able to match 42% of the cartography of the superstructures to various Lanaktall systems," he heaved a large breath. "Including Telkan-1 and Telkan-2."
Choi nodded. "Beyond that, anything else you've been able to deduce?"
Jaisley shook his head. "There's a 'dent', so to speak, in the nebula," Jaisley stated. "I've done some estimations, and it looks like I may have hit on why."
"Go ahead," Choi said. Jaisley was one of those people who were never happy just knowing something, they had to look into how and why the something was like that.
"By my estimations, a small stellar mass, probably the size of a superstructure micro-stellar, was nova sparked over a hundred and twenty million years ago. The blast wave pushed the nebula in at this point," Jaisley said. "It explains why the nebula has thicker 'banding' on the outside than the inside."
"So...." Choi started.
"STATUS CHANGE!" Commander Dechutes called out. "SHIPS ARRIVING! TWO - FIVE - SEVEN POINT SOURCES!"
"GO TO SILENT RUNNING!" Choi snapped out without thinking about it.
"BELAY THAT!" Hooker said. "I've got Confed Transponders. We go to silent running someone might run us over."
"Twelve point sources, all squawking Space Force and Confed ID's," Dechutes called out. "One's the In Quest of Answers, looks like the flagship. It's a battleship hull."
----------------------
Both the fleets hung in space as handshakes were exchanged and verified. Weapon systems were taken offline and the heavy battlescreens were allowed to spin down, leaving only basic particle screens in place.
The Admirals of both fleets met.
Each had the same question.
What are you doing here?
------------------
Dreams of Something More stared at the holotank in front of her, giving the Mantid equivalent of a smirk. Mister Rings was in her arms and she was slowly petting him with her bladearms.
"This was unexpected," Words Spoken We Fear, also known as Speaks said softly, staring at the holotank.
Dreams nodded slowly, absently petting Mister Rings, who was happily chewing on the rubbery flesh of a Pacific Northwest Mollusk and winding his tentacles around Dreams's bladearms. His rings were dark, almost blended in with his brown skin. His eyes were wide as he stared at the holotank, wondering if there was something delicious inside and why it was so interesting to his caretaker.
"So this is where Sees path has led us to," Speaks said softly.
Dreams nodded again, reaching down to touch her modified Animeland kimono, the cherry trees painted on it wavering as if a breeze had gone through them.
Dreams thought for a moment about the dark comedy that had led her here. To this place.
A simple diplomatic mission to meet a new species. One with a large area, massive population, true, but still a new species all the same. Then it had turned out that it was a new species to the Terrans but an old species, an old enemy, to the Mantid. Then the Lanaktallan had attacked the Terrans, as almost every species the Terrans encountered had a habit of doing.
I should name it the 'Behold Humanity Paradox',Dreams mused, letting Mister Rings climb around her to sit on her back. She absently handed back a Pacific Northwest Wooly Tree Snail to him as she looked at the holotank.
She could see the other Terran fleet hanging in space. See their icons. According to the Captain, the ships were nearly invisible, stealth ships.
Scouts, she thought to herself. Somehow the Confederacy discovered the location of what we had been hunting. Both of us following tracks left by others to what we did not know was our prey.
"The Admiral is ready to link us in," Speaks said. He touched the dataslate on his hip. "Each of us will sound like crazy beings to one another, except within that nebula lays our prey."
Dreams nodded again, clicking her mandibles.
Mister Rings slid off her back, using his strong tentacles to pull him across the rocks and into the stream, where he rolled several times to wet his skin before holding onto two rocks and banging the treat against another.
This is momentous, something galaxy shaking, something that changes everything we know about major historical events, the gold mantid thought to herself, smoothing her kimono. She reached up, nervously, and patted her hat to make sure the boxy flower adorned head covering was securely in place.
"Link us in," Dreams said.
-----------------
Captain Choi took deep breaths as the countdown started, holding her breath when the ship dropped from stringspace to realspace.
Stringspace was mangled there, her navigator, like the other six scout ship's navigator, had pointed out that there had been two stellar class explosions, which had tangled the strings and made it so that the navigator required a direct neural link to the navigation systems instead of any other link. That no matter which way a ship went, they slid through the tangle, adding real hours to the trip.
The ship slid into realspace silently, just appearing.
To Choi it looked like the world suddenly went white. For a moment reality was made up of strings, tightly woven or unraveling.
For a moment her mind teetered on the edge of madness as the scout ships made unprotected translations into realspace.
"Scanning arrays out. Link us up with the rest of the Task Force," Choi said. She gripped the oh-shit bars tightly and pushed her feet against the pad covering the stress plate before the kinetic gel was pulled and the pad converted to a covering.
It was silent for a long moment. She looked at the communications level graph in the upper right of her vision, projected there by her datalink. The crew was 'talking' rapidly to one another on the official and technical channels, very little on the personal communications channel. It was verging into dangerous territory for interpersonal discussions, but the crew was still on mission, even if they were silent.
The ship's morale generator tossed her a meme and she sighed.
It was a blank box with "TEXT" at the top and "BOTTOM TEXT LMAO" on the bottom.
The same meme it had been kicking out for nearly a month.
It had been a long time, this mission, for a full lockdown stealth run.
When I get back, I'm respeccing as a male and hitting the red light districts for a week straight, she promised herself. I'm taking two weeks downtime, minimum, and hitting the lotus planets and eat my fill.
"Scanner data coming in, sir," Hooker said softly. His hand reached out and slapped the red button again as wired reflexes kicked in. This time the button didn't work, cut off at Captain Choi's orders.
By Chromium Saint Peter, Choi thought to herself as she stared at the data that Hooker was threading into understandable information.
The nebula was pushed back for nearly a light year along the same plane as the galaxy. It was pushed back for a light month to the "Up and Down" of the Galactic Core.
The space was not empty, even though the space dust had been pushed away.
It was what was in the space that made implanted reflexes keep firing in half of the crew.
Massive superstructures.
"Life signs?" Captain Choi asked.
"Results aren't back. Lots of energy signatures. One of the structures is fairly active," Hooker answered. "Data right now is a year old, but I'm catching up."
"Transmit the data to the Admiral," Choi ordered.
Deep within the little scout ship, surrounded by more stealth systems than even the engines, mechanisms began changing the state of a handful of strange matter particles. Those particles rapidly fluctuated as the data was sent out.
-------------
Aboard the frigate one of the communications arrays went live, data streaming in from Captain Choi's scout ship as the strange matter particles, mirrors of the ones on the scout ship, began changing state to match the ones of the scout system.
The data poured into the frigate's systems. Where normally, aboard a ship of that class, there would be massive ammunition bays, huge guns, extensive targeting systems, data analysis systems had been installed. The gun crews had been replaced with analysts, all of whom began to do over the data.
The frigate streamed the data to the recent arrivals and the systems aboard the battleship sized diplomatic vessel went to work on the data. The two ships talked back and forth, comparing data, making estimations and guesses, as the data kept streaming in.
On board the diplomatic vessel Dreams of Something More watched as Words Spoken We Fear and 117 went over the data.
Just the sight of the data, what she could understand, made her shudder in response.
Standard operating procedure now when the megastructures produced by those massive superstructures are sighted is to load planet crackers and nova-sparks, she thought to herself. She cleaned her antenna, staring at the holotank. Every time one of the megastructures was spotted, Space Force or their predecessors descended upon the megastructure, not to explore, not to take it over, not to research or examine, but to obliterate it from reality.
The gold mantid shuddered again, 'closing' her eyes and taking a deep breath.
So who made them? The Lanaktallan? My people? The mythological third race? All of us together? A fourth race? Who was behind these horror shows that drift silently through space, moving slowly through the galactic arm on a course for the silence between the galaxies? she wondered. Who are the inhabitants? Why those terrible species? When did it all start? What is the goal of those drifting creations and their terrible inhabitants?
Who? Why? When? What?
Dreams stared at the holotank. There were massive scaffolding structures. Each 'beam' as large as a continent. The superstructures themselves were two million miles high, just under two hundred million miles wide and long. A flat square devoted to the construction of the object within. Some of them were half assembled, or perhaps half disassembled. There were smaller rectangles, the smallest being a hundred thousand miles thick and a million miles to a side along the X-Y axis.
"Look at that," Fights said softly. "That one is being layered."
Dreams shook her head. "All this does is ask more questions."
"But we know that the third race did exist, that they were here, that they took part in this," Fights said slowly.
--know base material now-- 117 transmitted.
"The same as the other structures?" Dreams asked.
--yes-- 117 said. --only good for mega and superstructures worthless for other uses--
Dreams closed her eyes. She had seen the documentaries. She had read about it.
Enough mass to build four Dyson spheres, or thousands of Dyson Swarms, or even an inverted Dyson Sphere, and they chose to build those, she thought, staring at the screen. How do those stop the heat death of the universe? How do those let you survive entropy.
She stared at the holotank, willing more answers.
--------------------
"Are they reacting to our presence?" Choi asked. On the bridge, she was silent. In a crash couch, the ship's atmosphere pumped into the tanks. She was still connected to the rest of the crew by fiber optic cable, the ship rigged for silent running.
The ship had made three more jumps since the first. They were now only a light day from the nearest active structure.
Her crew's stress metrics were stable, elevated, but stable.
"I'm keeping an eye, but it doesn't look like it," Hooker said. "I'm good at telling when the enemy has seen my tank."
Choi kept from snorting a laugh.
"My God, look, that one is only half completed," Commander Dennison said softly.
Choi looked at the scan that was put up. Continents were visible, either bare rock surrounded by oceans or vegetation covered instead.
"That one is almost completed," Dennison said. "There's no energy signatures within the megastructure itself except at the cities in the middle of the supercontinents."
"Any sign of whoever's in charge of all of this?" Choi asked.
"Negative," Hooker said. "The only space craft I've seen are obviously devoted to construction.
"How long do you think it takes to build one of these?" Choi asked.
------------------------
--1.4x10^5 years-- 117 said. --atmosphere creation at 1.38x10^5 water addition after soil after that--
"They're laying the soil, from the looks of it," Speaks said softly. "There's one that looks finished. You can see how the scaffolding is being removed.
"Do you think it's automated?" Dreams asked, staring at the holotank. It's like a nightmare, she thought to herself. Where your dream goes from pleasant to horrifying without warning.
-------------------
"Must be," Hooker said. "By the Digital Omnimessiah, the fact it's just sitting out here, automated, pumping this stuff out for a hundred millions years."
"We know where they're coming from now," Captain Choi said. "The urge to novaspark all of this is overwhelming."
"Screw answers," Jaisley said. "These things have wreaked absolute havoc and xenocide everywhere they've encountered anyone else. They're locusts."
"Got damaged superstructures," Hammond said. "Old damage. Never repaired," his hand twitched toward the panic button. "Harvester hulls. Multiple type."
"Get me readings," Choi snapped, sitting up.
Long moments stretched into minutes. Finally Jaisley spoke.
"They're dead. Long dead. I'm seeing damage to them, damage to their building cradles," he said. "Based on what readings I'm getting, they've been dead a long time."
"How long?" Choi asked.
---------------
--1.1x10^6 years-- 117 said. He was silent a minute. --last millennia of Precursor War--
Dreams nodded. "Any estimation of what happened to the object that led us here?"
--yes-- 117 answered, then turned back to the data.
"Can you share with us?" Speaks asked.
--yes-- 117 transmitted. --not classified--
More silence.
"117, what's your estimation of what occurred here that led to our mysterious object floating through space till we discovered it?" Dreams asked.
117 flashed icons for annoyance and pulled his attention from the data streaming in from the six scout ships. He accessed the holotank that sat idle and moved a simulation of what had happened, based on the best estimates the green engineer caste could come up with, onto that tank.
--there-- 117 said, and went back into the system.
Dreams watched the holotank as it came up.
It showed the satellite/space station they had discovered orbiting a stellar micro-mass with three amorphous blobs representing masses that the green engineer caste had discovered evidence of based on the structure they had discovered.
It showed an estimation of the angle of the mass driver hit that had damaged the station, sending it tumbling. The micro-mass then detonated, pushing the already tumbling space station with the blast wave, accelerating it. The micro-mass pushed against the nebula, the space dust and particles attenuating the blast until it was reflected back and away, following the path of least resistance.
"So, it looks like the first shots of the Precursor War might have happened right here," Dreams mused.
"I concur," Words Spoken We Fear said formally. "I think I may have an idea of what caused it."
"There is only enough for one," Dreams said sadly.
"Look. Harvester manufacturing cradles," Fights said. "The big ones."
"What they were originally designed to do and then they were adapted to war machines?" Dreams wondered.
--non combat design-- 117 said. --affirmative--
-----------------------
"Non Combat Harvester manufacturing cradles," Hammond said. "I'd estimate this stuff is older than most of the Precursor Automated War Machines we've seen."
Captain Choi nodded. The ship had moved to within a light hour of the Harvesters. The other five ships were examining structures, all of them under a light hour from the largest of the structures.
"Look at him. He was almost finished before those craters got put all over his hull," Jaisley said.
"Seen patterning like that. Near C Velocity cannons. From the size of them, ship of the line mass drivers," Hooker said. He chuckled. "They destroyed the engines but that's about it. Not the work of a pro, I can see a dozen points I'd have prioritized targeting on besides the engines."
"They're just sitting here. Dead. Dormant," Choi said, shaking her head. "For about a hundred million years they've just sat there."
"While the main factory has been spitting out the megastructures to terrorize the galaxy," Dechutes said softly.
"So we've got the Lanks, the Mantids, Mini-Thullus, but none of them match what we've seen on these structures," Hooker said. "So where did those come from?"
"A hundred million years of evolution?" Choi guessed. "We were tiny little mammals avoiding big ass lizard chickens back then. The things on those megastructures could have evolved from field mice into the things those superstructures hosted."
"Signal from the Admiral," Hammond said. He was silent a moment. "We're to return immediately."
"Any reason given?" Choi asked.
"We're going to novaspark it all. Planet crackers and novasparks. The diplomatic fleet carries the firepower necessary to do the job."
"Who the hell authorized that?" Choi saked, alerting engineering that they were about to slide out.
----------------
"Confederate Military," Words Spoken We Fear said. "I don't blame them. These things have been a plague on the galaxy for a hundred million years. They're reavers, locusts, they've denuded entire systems, stripped entire planets of every living thing, siphoned off atmospheres and water, even ripped up the easily accessible resources."
"This site contains answers to questions we'd barely begun to ask. It contains evidence on what started the Precursor War, who was involved, and what happened," Dreams protested. "We can't just spark and crack the whole thing!"
--can and will-- 117 said. --this place is unclean--
"It's just a place. How it is unclean? It's just a giant manufacturing plant!" Dreams protested.
"With the cradles to produce Harvester class Precursor Autonomous Machines, the superstructures needed to create those... those things..." Speaks said. His antenna quivered. "The Terrans spend blood, gallons, oceans of blood before we just started cracking them when we spotted them. They sought answers as to who built them and why."
"Exactly! We don't know!" Dreams said.
"We do," Speaks said softly. He tapped the holotank and the image of a Lanaktallan came up. "There is only enough for one."
"It has to be more than that!" Dreams protested. "It can't just be that simple! It can't be they've been delivering a hundred million years of resources to this place just to build things they aren't using, that nobody is using!"
"The groundcar, now driverless, plows into the crowd, the reason for the vehicle forgotten, the driver staring in horror, wondering what fiend had sent the groundcar speeding toward the crowd," Fights said, her voice quiet. "Terrans marvel at the automation, how all three Precursor races built automated systems that last for thousands, millions of years, functioning on automatic for the entire time."
"We created systems that can last forever, run on automatic until the end of time," Dreams said, staring at the image in the holotank. "The Lanaktallan are just as skilled as we are at creating automated systems, the Third Race must have been just as skilled, and we have the green engineer caste to perfect our own systems."
--no blame us-- 117 said. --you ask we provided had no choice not like now--
"I'm not blaming your caste," Dreams said. "If anything, the blame lies on the Queens and on the rest of our society."
"Once again, we are faced with the fact that our past has caught up to the rest of the universe," Fights murmured.
Words Spoken We Fear watched as icons for the combat ships escorting the diplomatic vessel began winking out, reappearing inside the nebula.
"No. Our past has continued to effect the universe, the galaxy itself," he said.
One of the larger superstructures vanished.
"Now the universes answer to a question nobody had thought to ask has arrived to give the universe's answer to what we have done," Speaks said, watching as the automated Harvester construction cradle vanished. "And we know, now, at this moment, what humanity is the answer to."
There was silence as another superstructure and the half complete megastructure vanished.
"What..." Dreams started to ask, choking up as another superstructure vanished. She nervously cleaned her antenna. "What was the question?"
"It was a question asked to the universe," Speaks said softly. "A question that the three of us asked the universe when we decided there was only enough for the three of us."
"How can we survive entropy?" Fights guessed.
Speaks watched as another structure vanished, the novaspark detonating the pseudo-stellar mass in the middle of the half-completed megastructure.
"No," Speaks said softly. "No, our question, posed by the three of us, was far more arrogant than that. It was a question that only a trio of species capable of creating such things with an automated system would ask the universe."
"Spit it out," Dreams snapped, suddenly tired of Speaks acting more like Sees.
They watched another Niven Ring shatter as the stellar mass exploded when struck with a novaspark.
"The universe told us that the resources were for everyone, we said that there was only enough for us, and eventually, we said there was only enough for one, laughing our question at what we thought was an uncaring universe," Speaks said softly. He stared as an incomplete Niven Ring, the pieces mostly completed but not yet connected to one another, began taking planet cracker munitions even as the superstructure itself began taking hits.
Dreams suddenly realized what the question was, even as she realized that the terrible xenospecies always found living on Nivenrings were being obliterated from the universe.
"What are you going to do to stop us/me?" She whispered as the creation engines aboard the combat ships manufactured more planet crackers and novasparks.
"Behold, humanity," Fights said.
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