Star Force: Nexus (SF57) Read Free Page A

that the carriers
amplified and repulsed off from. One for one direction of travel and the other
for the reverse…but also to act as backups in case one had to be taken down for
maintenance or was damaged. Kerrie also learned that unmanned probe ships were
continuously sent through the grid, with them seeing 6 come in and immediately
leave on the other emitter during their short wait.
    The probes were unmanned and intended to inform one
end of the link if the other was no longer viable, for a ship that made the
jump couldn’t slow down without the other grid point being active and would
either slam into the construct or miss it and shoot off into the galactic void
unable to stop and essentially be lost in space. If a probe didn’t come through
on schedule all outgoing traffic was halted until another came in, so as to
minimize losses if a grid point was taken down.
    If one of the emitters went offline the other could be
used for double duty, but typical procedure had an ‘in’ and an ‘out,’ with
Kerrie’s carrier coming in on the top segment of the opposite grid point, after
which the Ma’kri exited the ship and waited for instructions as where to go
next, for there were three additional grid points within 2 million kilometers,
all situated in deep space outside of any system, keeping the transit grid a
private one for Nexus use.
    It took another 4 days of waiting before another
carrier became available for their use, with the Star Force warships loading up
and shooting off through another linkage, for unlike a gravity well the grid
point’s emitters were monodirectional and could only
fire and receive ships from one destination point. It seemed like an enormous
waste of material to build four different constructs in one location, but the
speed boost was very beneficial for transit once you had them up and running.
    The amount of ships at this location was even larger,
with additional stations spread out in clusters between the grid points,
indicating that the one they had originally started this journey from was on
the edge of the Nexus’s territory. This point was much more robust with
facilities, for the constructs themselves were not housing or commerce units.
Almost all of their interior space was devoted to the sole function of producing
the magnetic fields and self-defense, leaving these other large facilities,
though tiny in comparison, to service the ships coming through the grid.
    It was hard to comprehend, but there were more
stations and ships in this location than there were in the entire Solar System,
and she didn’t doubt that the local population might be the same. There were no
planets or natural objects of any kind to colonize, but there were so many bits
of floating infrastructure and ships that it was truly mind blowing. Fortunately
the Nexus was very organized and the traffic controllers had Kerrie’s fleet
stationed where necessary until their ride was ready, then they loaded up and
were taken on another link in their journey out to the next galactic arm.
    The further they went the bigger the grid points got,
with their final point containing 19 different constructs and a sea of
infrastructure, all floating in deep space away from the prying eyes of anyone
else. There they picked up an escort by a Sety ship that was half their size
which led them through a series of grav jumps through
the nearby star systems until they arrived at the capitol of the Nexus.
    It wasn’t the Sety homeworld, but a system built
specifically for the interracial community…and like the grid points it was
choked with activity.
    Kerrie had never seen anything even remotely like it
before. It was a binary system, with a main central star and a small outer one
in very high orbit. Worked into a complicated set of odd orbits were 39 planets
and 193 moons, all of which were inhabited with layers of infrastructure. There
were no natural environments visible, they’d all been erased in favor of
cityscape, but the various