(Bridge, BSN Shinokage, Shadowgate System)
A ripple that could be felt ran across the ship. Slave-Captain Aurae Inatumal’s eyes snapped to her sensor officer. “Report!”
“Captain, we passed through a gravity eddy marking the edge of the Shadowgate system. Hyperdrive is offline. Anchor drive unaffected.”
The Captain nodded to her sensor officer. “Any signs we’ve been detected?”
“None, ma’am.”
Inatumal nodded again. That was as it should be. The Black Star Navy might be mere babes as far as naval organizations were concerned, but they had hit the ground running during the Imperial Civil War, and had honed their craft well. Each new battle taught them more.
The technique of using Anchor Drives to drop in, outside of sensor range of a system, and then coasting in at sublight speeds, on ballistic trajectories, was already becoming something of a signature for Black Star ships. Of course, any ‘signature’ had risks associated with it. The more your enemies knew what you might do, the better they could plan against it. However, the risks for an operation like this were minimal, at best. At least at this stage.
The simple fact was that space was simply too large to guard all approaches with equal fervor. It was simply not possible to guard all approaches to a sphere where even the star’s light would take five and a half hours to travel the radius. Even capitol systems of the major powers could not devote enough resources to cover that area in probes, much less defenses.
The answer most people came up with was to focus their sensors and defenses around strategic points in a system, such as inhabited planets or strategic resource areas. The rest, they covered with area sensors that could detect incoming warp trails, anchor drives, and all the rest, with emphasis on the vectors leading to nearby stars. They did this because it worked, for the most part.
The simple fact was that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line, even in space, and most of the space in a solar system was useless empty space. It just made more sense to focus your efforts on more important areas. That meant that if someone had the patience to take a slow approach, like they were, then you could sneak into a system easily enough.
Of course, sneaking into the system was easy for single ships. Smugglers, pirates, and the like lived by this. The problem was that getting an entire fleet into a defended system like that was a lot harder. Simply having more ships moving together made detection more likely.
That was where Black Star stood apart from other navies. The Black Star Navy was built with stealth in mind, especially the Reapers and Assassins that made up most of the ships in her impromptu task force. They were designed to be holes in space, and strike without warning.
“All right. Sensors, I want a full sweep of the system. Passive sensors only. Comms, get on the laser link with the task force. I want zero emissions, except for the laser links. Helm, keep us on a ballistic course into the system, as little correction as possible.”
“Aye, Captain.”
Captain Inatumal turned her attention to the sensor readings. She trusted her officers, but she also knew to look over things herself. Different eyes see different things, and a person could only look at so much data at a time and still make sense of it. And it was a good thing she was looking at the readings, or she would have sworn that her officers were lying to her when they reported in.
Shadowgate was an impossibility, in more ways than one. First off, the system primary was transitioning into a blue dwarf, a strictly theoretical type of star, since the universe wasn’t supposed to be old enough for a red dwarf to have burned off all its hydrogen and start in on helium. Not just “Oh, it is a few thousand years early,” but more on the order of “this star should have had enough fuel to keep going for at least a couple trillion more years before reaching this stage.”
Needless to say, that was unusual. What made it even more unusual was that, only fifty years ago, when Shadowgate closed its gate, the star was a red dwarf. You don’t just age a star by a couple trillion years in a couple decades! That simply doesn’t happen!
Moving beyond that impossibility, then there were the planets. Two rocky planets, and three gas giants. Not spectacular, in their own right. Except that, in the last fifty years, the system had gone from a relatively small series of mining colonies on Herdan I and II, to having signs of extensive habitation on every solid planet or moon in the system, as well as a multitude of orbital stations.
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She took a long breath, and held it. This was so much bigger than they had expected. Looking over to her first officer, she said, “Call Ensign Crusher to the bridge. We need to report this to Command. And contact the other ships in the task force. Virtual meeting with all captains and senior staff in five hours.”
“Aye, Captain.”
(Conference Room, BSN Shinokage, Shadowgate System)
Five hours later on the dot, Captain Inatumal and her senior staff were in the conference room, looking at the holograms of the senior staffs of the rest of the task force. She nodded once.
“By now, you’ve all had time to look at the sensor readings. By all the laws of science that we know, this system is simply impossible. I’m sure your science officers have been as happy to explain to you all the various ways it is impossible as mine has been.”
That got a series of laughs. Science officers were often as not cast in the same mold. After all, it took a certain type of person to be a science officer on a warship.
“Using our on-board Nomad, we attempted to call this in to Command and get guidance, since this is well outside any intelligence we had. Unfortunately, ‘attempted’ is a nice way of saying that we couldn’t connect.” She raised a hand to silence any questions. The idea that something could interfere with Nomad communications, which had, so far, been untouchable, was just another impossibility in this system.
“Ensign Crusher attempted to contact the Master, both through the Nomad network, and directly. Both times, they reported that the transmission went out, but any reply ‘timed out’, like something was interfering with the transmission itself. The Ensign disconnected himself from our reality temporarily, connecting again several times, before returning for good just before this meeting started.
“It would appear that the Shadowgate system is caught in some kind of time dilation field. Even if two Nomads are communicating, that means nothing if they are perceiving time at different rates, it seems. Currently, time in the Shadowgate system is moving roughly five thousand times faster than it is in the universe as a whole.”
Captain Knightly of the Lancelot frowned. “Five thousand times fifty years. That’s two hundred and fifty thousand years on the high end. Impressive, and it would explain all the colonies. However, that’s nowhere near enough for the sun to be like it is.”
Captain Inatumal nodded. “You are correct, Captain. Intelligence from the captured Shadowgate operatives mentioned a shield around the Gateway, but not this severe time dilation. And it should go without saying that, after their actions against the Master, they were subjected to every known means of interrogation, including having their memories stripped by mental psy users. There was not one mention of this time dilation.”
Her sister, Nimue cleared her throat. “The obvious inference is that the operatives sent out simply didn’t know about the time dilation. They may also have been given false information about the shield, as well. We have not detected any shield, or additional equipment on the Gateway that could be a shield emitter.”
Commander Aekas, Hearthstone’s wing commander asked, “So, how do they keep people out, then?”
Commander Sylcan, her science officer, leaned forward, and brought up a hollow cylindrical structure that was built around the Gateway itself. “We believe that structure 35-657 is capable of emitting some form of… temporal stabilization field. With this field, the Gateway can be used normally. Without it, anything passing through the Gateway would suffer time sheer, likely undergoing ‘spaghettification’, or worse.”
Commander Aekas nodded. “So, anyone who didn’t know how it worked could be sold the ‘shield’ idea, and it would make perfect sense to them. What kind of tactical disadvantage are we at?”
Sylcan shook his head. “Not as much as one might believe. Their ships have extremely efficient engines and weapons systems, but they are comparatively slow by our standards, even at sublight speeds, and their weapons are primarily lasers, with no sign of missiles or the like. This is likely a design compromise, due to their alternative drive system. The realities of the ‘darkspace’ dimension that they travel in also means that shields are useless while they’re in transit, and their armor is only slightly stronger than ours.”
Knightly grunted. “Of course. From their point of view they’ve gone a couple hundred thousand years without external conflict. Depending on how their system is set up, they might not have had any major wars to spark an arms race in living memory.”
Sylcan nodded. “That is our current hypothesis, yes. They have effectively spent the last two hundred and fifty thousand years as masters of their domain, any reports of the outside coming from scouts that are essentially the opposite of generation ships.”
Knightly shook his head in disgust. “And they went and decided picking a fight with Black Star was a good idea? Idiots.”
Nimue chuckled. “Their spy networks probably have carte blanche to do whatever they like, since there is no effective way to manage them from inside the time bubble. They probably saw Black Star as a rising power, one that could be suborned easier than one of the major powers. That would give them a lot more options.”
Knightly grunted in amusement. “Well, for a bunch of masterminds, they’re not that smart, then. But moving away from that, do we know why the sun is so old?”
Sylcan grinned. “Actually, we have a pretty good idea of that.” She pulled up a hologram of the star, and a massive structure that appeared to be built onto its surface. “This structure, designated 3-14, apparently penetrates into the sun itself. Consortium records noted it as a probable Precursor structure, but they had never been able to approach without automated defenses using beams of solar plasma to destroy their vessels. The weapon systems were Lost Tech, but likely involved ‘mining’ the star to some extent.”
Captain Inatumal grinned. “So, this structure is a priority target, obviously, since it is likely the source of the temporal field. If it isn’t housing the field, then it is at least supplying power for it, somehow. We’ve also found a shipyard, a multitude of defense platforms, and at least two thousand military vessels of the same type that came to Nuevo Edo, so there are plenty of targets to go around.”
Slave-Captain Thelynn of the Shadowdancer whistled softly. “Two thousand ships in one system? Are we sure that these people haven’t had any wars recently?”
Inatumal nodded. “As near as we can be. Eighty percent of the ships appear to be mothballed in what looks like a stasis field. They were probably built early on after Shadowgate closed itself off, since the chimeras that came here were worried about being attacked.”
Thelynn nodded. “And before long, everyone forgot all about the reason why they built all the ships. They didn’t get rid of them, but they didn’t see a need to replace them all. So, they just, what, take one out of storage when they need it, and rotate through them to reduce wear?”
“That is the theory, yes.” Captain Inatumal took a breath. “Now, that’s the situation, let’s go over the attack plan so we can deliver the Master’s message.”