“Correct again. Damn, you deserve a gold star today, Joe. Yes, the devices in the star pull energy from the star’s magnetic field; that is an immense source of power. I said I detected the devices in the star’s photosphere, but they extend down at least into the convection zone.”
“Ok, so why is this a mystery? You told me the Elders were using the star to provide power; that’s why they moved gas giant planets close to the star, to replenish its hydrogen supply.”
“I did tell you that. The Elders were indeed using the star as a direct power source; these taps draw so much power they measurably shorten the life of the star. Replenishing the hydrogen supply compensates for the power being extracted.”
I thought for a moment. What could the Elders use that much power for? “Well, there is a damping field saturating this whole system, and a stealth field going out ten percent of a lightyear. Those have got to require a lot of power, right? Those Guardian things must need power too.”
“The stealth field, damping field and Guardians do require enormous amounts of power, Joe. I estimate those systems are using the output of four power sinks. Four out of twenty two.”
“Wow. Only four?” I thought of how much power the Dutchman’s stealth field drew from the ship’s reactors. Back when our ship had reactors. The stealth field surrounding the Flying Dutchman extended only eighty meters from the ship’s hull. I couldn’t imagine how much power was required by a stealth field encompassing an entire star system. “The other power sinks are, what, backups?” The Elders must have planned long-term, including installing extra power sinks for use if the active ones failed.
“No, they are not backups, they are active. They are all pulling power from the star’s magnetic field. The array of twenty two sinks is extracting so much power, they have to artificially stabilize the star’s structure to keep it from collapsing.”
“Huh. Could that be what the Elders used the power sinks for?”
“You’ve lost me, Joe.”
“The power sinks reduce the strength of the star’s magnetic field. Doesn’t that lead to less sunspot activity, something like that? Maybe the purpose of the power sinks is to regulate the radiation output of the star? Make the amount of light being produced less variable, you know? If this star is variable, I can see how the Elder would want to prevent big solar flares that might damage sensitive equipment in this system.”
Silence.
“Skippy? Hello? Crap, don’t go silent on me again, I couldn’t take it if you-”
“I’m here, Joe. You just blew my mind. Listen, Joe, this is not the way it is supposed to work. You are supposed to say incredibly, laughably ignorant things, and I pompously mock your stupidity. You going off script like that screws everything up. When did you get so smart about the internal workings of stars?”
“One of my officer training PowerPoint slides was about satellite communications, and how they can be disrupted by intense solar flares. I got curious about that, so I researched it on Wikipedia. And now you’re going to make fun of how I get all my knowledge from the internet.”
“Sadly, no I am not. I would love to do that. With anyone else, I would do that, but you have set the bar so low, anything remotely intelligent coming out of your mouth is cause for genuine astonishment.”
“Uh, thank you?” I vaguely suspected he had insulted me, but I played it safe.
“This is actually kind of cool, Joe. A discussion like this with your science team would bore me to tears, because they know just enough to pester me endlessly with annoying questions. With you, your knowledge is starting so close to zero that I can just hit the important highlights and skip all the boring details.”
“Should I thank you again,” I looked at his avatar suspiciously, “or did you just insult me?”
“Insult you?. Not that you know of.”
“Oh, good. Wait!”
“Anywho,” Skippy said quickly, “back to the subject. Your guess that the Elders intended the power sinks to regulate magnetic activity inside the star is surprisingly insightful, but completely wrong. This star has a natural roughly ten year cycle of sunspots, and the power sinks have not changed that regular fluctuation. The star’s output is not variable enough for the Elders to bother modifying it anyway.”
“Ok,” I said, disappointed. I displayed some actual knowledge, but I was wrong. “So, where is all the extra power going?”
“That is the mystery, Joe. I have no idea. However, I strongly suspect those power sinks are why this system is encased in a stealth field and is protected by the Guardians. Four of the power sinks are providing energy to the systems that protect the other eighteen power taps.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yup. The Elders very much do not want anyone screwing with those power sinks.”
“Even now? Why?”
“Again, I have absolutely no idea,” Skippy admitted. “It makes no sense to me.”
“Hmmm,” I pondered that for a moment. I was not so much pondering the mystery, because anything that Skippy couldn’t figure out would be way beyond my ability to understand. What I pondered was, how could Skippy not understand something about the Elders? Skippy not knowing what happened to the planet Newark was understandable; he said he was asleep buried in the dirt on Paradise back then, although his knowledge of the timeline was an estimate that he admitted was fuzzy. But, Skippy had been built by the Elders. Sure, his memories were jumbled and incomplete, but a star used as a power source was something I would certainly remember. If Skippy didn’t remember that particular star, his knowledge of Elder technology at least should have suggested what the Elders might have used all those power sinks for. His failure to grasp why the stellar power sinks had been built made me worry that his battle with the worm had left him mentally damaged, in addition to his reduced capabilities. The Elders had turned a star into an electrical outlet, and then protected the entire star system to make sure no one messed with the power sinks. Yet, the Elders had left the galaxy, so they had no need for power generation. “Could the Elders be still protecting those power taps because they plan to come back someday?”
“What? No, you idiot. The Elders are not on vacation. They transcended beyond the need for physical limits beyond the confines of this spacetime. They certainly do not ever want to come back here.”
“Ok, so leaving these power sinks active is like, they went away and forgot they left the stove on?”
“That is a truly idiotic analogy, Joe, but it may be that simple. Perhaps those power sinks provided the initial energy for the Elders to ascend, and the Elders did not bother to deactivate them after they left?”
Skippy’s guess didn’t make sense to me. The power sinks in the star had been operating for a very, very long time. If they had been designed to be used for one purpose, one time, they would not still be humming along now. What had the Elders left behind that required such enormous amounts of power now? “Hey, Skippy,” I blurted out excitedly when the idea hit me. “Could those extra power taps be feeding energy to the wormhole network?”
“What? No. Hmmm. Let me think about that. Nope, still no. Good guess, though, I gotta give you props for that, homeboy.”
Homeboy? When Skippy said it, somehow it didn’t sound right. It was like the Queen of England opening a speech from Buckingham Palace with ‘What up, my bitches?’.
Although I would totally pay to see that.
“Why not, Skippy? The wormholes must draw power from somewhere.” Until that moment, I had never considered where wormholes got their power from, but now that I was thinking about it, they must draw a mind-boggling amount of power from somewhere. Jumping a starship involved creating a temporary, small wormhole, and the power to do that was beyond my comprehension. I could not imagine how much power it took to keep a large wormhole open for up to half an hour. And for that wormhole to instantly fling multiple ships across thousands of lightyears of space.
Yes, Mister Smartypants Nerdface in the back there with your hand u
p going ‘Ooh ooh’ because you know something I don’t, you big jerk. I know that technically, the distance between two ends of a wormhole is almost zero. That doesn’t change the fact that by going through a wormhole, ships go from one point in space to another that can be thousands of lightyears apart. It totally blows my mind. So, shut up.
“Wormholes do draw power, Joe. They draw power from the quantum- oh, crap. Yes, shut up! Damn! Sorry, that was me talking to the pain-in-the-ass subroutine that prevents me from telling you monkeys how advanced technology works. Stupid thing. I don’t see the harm in me telling monkeys stuff like where wormholes get their power, really. It’s like, if you told a dog your credit card number, it’s not like the dog is going to be buying steaks off the internet.”
“I’ll take your word about that, Skippy.”
“Trust me. Anyway, no, the energy being extracted from the star by those other power sinks is not feeding the wormhole network.”
“Ok. Where’s all the power going, then?”
“I have absolutely no idea. It bugs the hell out of me that I don’t know. What bugs the hell out of me even more is not knowing why the Elders are still protecting the Roach Motel from being explored by other species. It makes no sense. Damn! This is truly driving me crazy. I should know everything about the Elders, and instead, I know almost nothing. Joe, something very bad happened to me, I should not have gaps in my memory. It’s not that I am missing the information, I know it is there but I can’t access it! This is not how the Elders would have constructed me; somehow my original capabilities were degraded. You know what, Joe? We need to understand why Elder sites across the galaxy were destroyed, and who threw Newark out of its orbit, and why the Elders are continuing to protect the Roach Motel. But maybe before we can unravel those mysteries, I might need to figure out what happened to me; how and why I came to be buried in the dirt on Paradise.”
“Ok, good idea, I can see that. Maybe your memories contain all the answers we need.” The I gasped because I got hit with an idea. “Hey, when we find a conduit and you fix yourself, you are going to rearrange things in your matrix, make your processes function even more efficiently, right?”
“That is the plan, yes. Being stuck in a tiny corner of myself has made me realize how inefficiently I have been using my internal matrix. That is another thing that bothers me, Joe. My internal architecture is so badly arranged that I can only conclude my current matrix is something I had to throw together quickly, in response to a severe crisis.”
“Uh huh, that makes sense. When you fix yourself and, uh, rearrange your sock drawers in there or whatever you plan to do, could that free up your memories and release those internal restrictions that prevent you from flying ships and sharing technology?”
“Oh. Hmm. I had not thought of that, Joe. I truly do not know. That would be great, huh? Which, damn it, is why it probably won’t happen. This outfit is so snakebit that if something does change, I can’t count on it being for the better. Besides, you said ‘when we find a conduit’. We don’t have a ship, Joe, Chotek is right about that. Whatever hope we had for finding a conduit kind of died with the Dutchman.”
“The Dutchman is not dead, Skippy,” it pissed me off that even the beer can was trying to squash my hopes. “And we’re going to an Elder planet. Don’t you think we might find a conduit down there?”
“Uh, hmmm. I had not thought of that, Joe. That is actually a good point. A very good point! Yes, assuming the Elders had some sort of long-term settlements down there, they likely would have installed conduits. Wow. When we get there, I will need to start searching for a conduit. That could require dropships conducting extensive surveys of the surface.”
“Skippy,” I winked at his avatar, “why else do you think I insisted on bringing extra bladders of dropship fuel, and synthesizers to make fuel?”
“You told Count Chocula that was so dropships could identify places to build settlements.”
“I did tell him that, yes. I told him what he wanted to hear.”
“Ah! You are a clever monkey, Joe. And devious,” he chuckled. “Once again, I am grateful you are on my side.”
Holding out a fist with one hand, I gave him a thumbs up with the other. His avatar gave me a fist bump. “You and me, Skippy. Together, we can get into a whole lot of mischief out here.”
“Oh, yes. Now, get your monkey butt moving, we have a lot of work to do before we can search for a conduit.”
Chapter Thirteen
After we abandoned the Flying Dutchman and set course for Gingerbread, I was in the Condor’s forward cargo compartment, floating in the zero gravity, tucked in between the ceiling and a crate that was part of our food supply. Most of our supplies were in the other dropships, which were absolutely stuffed full of every item Major Simms had been able to squeeze in. Without knowing what the conditions were like on Gingerbread, we brought all the gear and supplies we could squeeze into the dropships; and still Simms worried we would run short of something vital. Any space in the dropships that was not occupied by crates, boxes and pouches was being used for fuel. The rear cargo compartment of the three big Condors was basically a big fuel bladder. In the passenger compartment forward of the cargo bays, we were using crates as tables and beds. Condors had seats that converted to beds for long journeys, but we kept many of them folded away and used the space for stacks of supplies. With eighteen people aboard each Condor, it was not so super cramped that we were constantly getting in each other’s way but everyone appreciated an opportunity to get some rare privacy. The narrow spaces above the crates in the forward cargo bay had quickly become one of the few places aboard where we could take a vacation, as we called it. Four people at a time could take advantage of the peace and quiet back there, and we hoped to open a bit more space as we consumed food.
At first, I had been reluctant to take a turn ‘on vacation’, being concerned people would think I was pulling rank if I wanted to get away for a while. Then Sergeant Adams pulled me aside and told me everyone aboard would get a break, if the freakin’ colonel was not constantly hanging around the passenger compartment. I took the hint. Adams created a vacation schedule, so everyone got a turn. With four vacation spots and only eighteen people, we each got at least three daylight hours of much-appreciated privacy
So, I was floating above a crate, with a strap loosely around my waist preventing me from drifting around and bumping my head on the ceiling, busily working on my tablet. When I was stuck in the passenger compartment, I had been working also; it was so much easier to do the work in peace and quiet, without people looking over my shoulder.
My focus was so intent that I missed the soft chiming sound of the Condor’s speakers, indicating my vacation time would be over on ten minutes. Simms and Adams, who were taking vacation time on the same schedule as me, paused by my bunk to wave at me. “Almost time to go, Sir,” Simms told me.
“Oh, uh, what?” I could barely tear my eyes away from the tablet.
“What are you doing, Sir?” Adams finally asked. “If you don’t mind me asking. I don’t want to embarrass-”
“It’s not porn, Adams,” I hastened to say, and turned the tablet to toward her.
“I, didn’t think it was,” she replied with a wry smile, and I knew she was embarrassed for me, not about herself.
Skippy’s voice came from tablet speakers. “Yeah, Joe, what are you doing?”
“If you must know-”
“I must, Joe. Inquiring minds want to know.”
“You mean busybodies.”
“There is not a whole lot else going on around here, Joe,” Skippy pointed out.
“You really don’t know what I’ve been doing, Skippy?” That surprised me. And concerned me. If his abilities were so degraded that he couldn’t sneak a look inside my tablet, then we were in worse trouble than I thought.
“Of course I know what you’re doing, Joe. I do not know why.” To Simms and Adams, Skippy explained. “Joe has been working with the ship’s comput
er, using the Dutchman’s sensors to look at floating junk scattered all over the system. It seems like a complete waste of time to me.”
“It’s not a waste of time, Skippy. Ok, it might be a waste of time, but like you said, it’s not like I have a lot to do right now.”
“So, what, you are playing amateur astronomer now? Joe, your astronomy skills are even worse than your skills as a dancer or a lover.”
“Hey! My,” I looked guiltily at Adams, “uh, dancing is not that bad.”
“Sir,” Adams asked warily, giving me a sideways look. “How does he know-”
“What a goofball Joe is in the sack, you mean?” Skippy interjected helpfully. “Joe and I had a threesome with a hot chick on Earth.”
“You what?” Adams asked, her eyes wide with shock.
“It wasn’t my idea!” I protested. “Skippy was not invited!”
“Although it’s a good thing I joined you, Joe, since you were having, you know, issues,” Skippy hinted with amusement.
I face-palmed my forehead and gritted my teeth.
“It’s all right, Sir, it happens to all guys once in a while,” Adams said awkwardly with a glance at Simms.
Skippy spoke before I could open my mouth to set the record straight. “It’s still not supposed to happen every. Single. Time. Joe, you-”
“That’s not what happened!” I shouted, and people in the passenger compartment turned to look through the doorway. Before the little shithead could make things worse, I explained. “That is not what happened. I was not having any, uh, problem. We in the middle of-” I stopped. Talking about it to Simms and Adams made me so embarrassed I couldn’t finish.
“The festivities?” Simms suggested to break the awkward silence.
“Yeah,” I agreed, relieved she had rescued me. “We were right in the festivities, and Skippy the Idiot starts giving me advice over my zPhone. I do not need to get any romance advice from a beer can.”
“Joe usually relies on a bottle of tequila to move things along in bed,” Skippy chuckled.
Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5) Page 24
