Star Force: Nexus (SF57) Read Free

his head. “Can’t be mag drive. There’s
no way you could hit a target that small.”
    “Combo with grav drives to
adjust course during drift,” Kerrie said, thinking out loud.
    “Why two? Seems an awful waste to build something that
large in duplicate.”
    The trailblazer inclined her head to the side,
granting that he had a point. When jumping into or out from a star there was
only one jumpline available, and the more you got off it the braking line would
veer and produce lateral movement. That meant ships coming and going had to
move through the same region of space, risking a collision. The threat of that
was minimized via beacon signals that traveled ahead and warned of ship’s
incoming so they could drift off the line and allow each other to pass.
    Busy jumplines were dangerous because the final braking
maneuver had to occur in that tiny slice of space, but it was workable by
monitoring the incoming super-accelerated signals from ships in coast phase,
then the ships waiting to jump would wait for an opening, move into position,
then jump on the line for a few minutes before easing off it and into drift
mode.
    The process would work the same, in theory, for a mag
jump…so why build two massive mag fields when one would do?
    Before she could start listing off possibilities a
streak of a signal resolved itself in the clear area in front of the upper
‘dish’ that reminded Kerrie of the giant arms on the Ark from Halo, minus the
greenery of the natural environment.
    “Son of a bitch,” the Captain muttered, seeing the
incoming ship, then he threw a glance at the Archon. “Doesn’t mean it’s a mag
drive,” he said stubbornly.
    “If it’s not,” Kerrie said, seeing that the ship was
longer than a lizard assault pillar and considerably wider, “I want to know
what it is.”
    The Archon turned to the comm officer. “See if you can find someone out there to talk to before it goes Death
Star and uses us for target practice.”

 
 
    2

 
 
    As it turned out the H’kar ship wasn’t necessary for
the next stage of their journey, though it arrived several hours later as
Kerrie’s three ships were left to wait for the next 3 days until their
transport was ready. During that time they got plenty of questions answered, as
well as were able to monitor a very high amount of traffic coming in through
the Nexus ‘grid point,’ which was a direct link to another similar massive
construct some 1,539 lightyears away.
    The carrier vessel they were waiting for was one of a
number of large transports that operated like jumpships on the grid, carrying
other vessels back and forth exclusively. The thousands of other ships around
the grid point were a mix of those awaiting transit and a defense fleet, none
of which could travel on the grid themselves.
    The massive vessel that the Star Force ships were
assigned to had room for all three plus an additional 23 other vessels, each of
which was tucked away inside what looked like a lagoon. The bulk of the ship
was pointed into a wide, four- spined arrow whose tips
circled around an empty, squashed sphere of space inside of which the ships
were berthed and held steady by an IDF. The three Ma’kri were not the largest
vessels being carried, with four being larger plus a myriad of smaller ships
made up of multiple designs.
    There was no interlinking with the carrier ship, so
all the crews had to stay onboard their own ships and wait out the trip as if
they were traveling solo through the jump, which lasted only 8 days. In
comparison, had the Ma’kri attempted to travel that distance on their own,
going through one small jump after another between stars, it would have taken
them approximately 7 months to get that far, assuming they had fuel reserves to
sustain them through that many jumps.
    But when they arrived they were not at their ultimate
destination, rather another grid point. It was identical to the other, each
with two giant emitters creating the magnetic fields