Star Force: Perquisition Read Free Page A

added, “I would assume there would be multiple
civilizations of the same variant, else this entire project, whatever it is,
could fail if one was wiped out. You might just find redundants nearby.”
    “I didn’t say it would be easy.”
    “What is?”
    “We’ve both got our challenges then,” Clark cemented.
“Keep us notified of your progress and we’ll see what we can do about getting
you some more variant samples.”

 
 
    2

 
 
    July 19, 2969
    Nexus Grid
Point 146
    Parking Orbit

 
    Trey-555 sat in the command chair onboard his Ma’kri -class warship as he looked at the
visual and tactical displays of the ship traffic around them. Most of the
thousands of ships were parked as they were, but there was a steady flow of incoming
and outgoing traffic on the single jumpline used to get to the neighboring star
system from the grid point, for its gravity was too weak to make an
interstellar jump from.
    That said, it was the biggest space station Trey had
ever seen by far. Looking like a pair of sunglasses with two huge discs connected
by a thick stalk in the middle, the overall length of the construct was 4 times
the width of Earth, but it was very flat and didn’t have half its mass. It was
enough to make slow jumps off of if you knew where to look for it, with most
non-Nexus traffic wandering about the galaxy never stumbling upon its location.
    Which was odd, given the traffic involved. This was
very much a public place, though one for only those in the know. There was
nothing here for anyone who didn’t belong, no planets, moons, or even
asteroids…just a massive construct and a flotilla of ships and other craft
nearby it. Some of those craft were stations supplying fuel and other services
to customers, some were defense stations, but most of the dots on the
holographic map were ships waiting for their turn to ride the ferry to the
other end of the line and deep into Nexus territory.
    And to think this was only a ‘small’ grid point.
Others had more than 1 station, for each link operated like stargates ,
save these were always activated. They made for one massive highway running in
a straight line, with bigger hubs having multiple ones coming in and out
requiring multiple constructs to generate the insanely large but stable
magnetic fields that the specially designed Nexus jumpships could use to
accelerate and decelerate far faster than gravity would ever allow. This was
the first time Trey had ever been to this location, and only the 4th time Star
Force had sent a ship. Typically involvement with The Nexus was facilitated by
the H’kar, but Trey’s mission was going to take him far beyond their borders.
    Information digging within The Nexus was dicey, but
Star Force had made several inroads previously thanks to Director Davis’s
efforts that had allowed them to do a racial search throughout their massive
territory. The source admitted that The Nexus’s records were incomplete and
that they had not fully cataloged every star system within their domain, but it
had also noted that the database available to Star Force was not the full one
that The Nexus used for internal matters. It was enough, however, to give Trey
a location in which to seek out more wayward Protovic.
    He wasn’t the only one on this chase, with Archons
pursuing leads across the ADZ and beyond, rifling through historical records
and stories trying to hunt down any mention of the Protovic and their variants.
As it turned out there were many breadcrumbs to follow, with Trey being
informed of 3 locations suspected of having Protovic. His was the furthest,
being located in the Perseus galactic arm and far beyond where Star Force had eeked its own quiet Tether out to. It was now beyond the
Orion arm in which the ADZ and lizards, Voku, and Preema domains existed,
having passed through the less dense star clusters separating the galactic swirls
and branched out quietly into systems within The Nexus dominion without making
any