Point Zero by Aer-ki Jyr (christmas read aloud TXT) 📕

coming down to the Star Forge and coming in close enough to dock behind the shield umbrella that protected the station and provided it with most of its power like a giant invisible solar panel. Menchi always went in person to see each ship arriving for fuel, and today was no exception, despite it being a very small scout craft.

They needed fuel too, and more often than the big ships that sat in orbit waiting for a mission, and typically captains would come onboard during the refueling, given the fact that once in space you had very little personal contact with others beyond your own crew. Virtual communications could make it almost feel the same using solid holograms, but reality could never be fully copied, and Menchi liked getting to know more and more members of the grand Star Force fleet, as well as seeing some familiar faces come back again years later.

That wasn’t his job, but it was something he’d come to like over the 14,004 years he’d been assigned to this station. He’d even turned down promotion and reassignment multiple times, liking his role here immensely. He was in charge of a crew that ranged between 5,000 and 6,000 Kiritak at all times, with enough extra hull space to accommodate special projects that would see his crew numbers spike tenfold on various occasions, but mostly it was the regular fuel processing and fabrication, for the higher end fuels the more advanced Star Force reactors used were not simply harvested from the galaxy. They were carefully fabricated, some of which were highly unstable due to the size of the atoms involved.

But those larger atoms held so much more photonic ocean than the others they were worth it when you had the necessary protections in place. Deenva, in particular, had an atomic mass of over 2,000 and was held together by a very intricate sub-atomic balance, but it gave the warships the short span power surges needed for the bigger weapons without having to charge a capacitor first. That was why Star Force ships often had 6 or more different types of reactors onboard, each requiring different fuels, and Menchi had to manufacture all of them here, and thankfully Angry Widow…the star they were sucking material out of…had all the necessary components in ample enough amounts that Menchi didn’t have to move the Star Forge around to find them. The internal convection currents brought the material past the thousands of shield ‘straws’ he had sticking down into the fluid outer layers of the planet to draw material up, as well as to discard unwanted material back down.

And that material wasn’t just to make fuel. Menchi was overseer on a Star Forge, after all, and they had the capability to redesign themselves as they wished using the default factories inside to produce new factory equipment, hull plates, shield generators, etc. He could even build another Star Forge if he wanted, though he’d have to send some deeper straws down to get at the heavier elements and pockets of planetoids that had fallen into the star and were still in the process of slowly melting away in the furious slurry.

Then again, if he wanted to take the slow route he could use the alchemy processes the Star Forge possessed and turn the basic hydrogen into whatever other element he wanted, though the power costs for that were high and the volumes of product low. And that didn’t accommodate the more exotic particles, some of which had to be harvested, but the basic atomic table could be fully fabricated here as needed, giving every Star Forge an independence that Menchi liked. With the threat of the Hadarak breaking through the Grand Border, the possibility that disaster could befall Star Force was always in the back of his mind, and his ability to produce material for export without having to rely on imports was always a spot of mental relief for him.

And in fact some non-fuel factories were at work inside the Star Forge, typically for repair parts the incoming ships would need, and Menchi worked to keep a large warehouse of the most basic ones in stock, for ship captains didn’t like returning to shipyards for minor repairs, nor did they like waiting in line for slips to open when so many were occupied with new builds to fill out the anti-Hadarak war fleets that were rumored to be getting close to active status.

So many captains greatly appreciated being able to pick up some spare parts when they came by for fuel…which was another reason why many stopped by to fill up when they were no more than 20% depleted.

Menchi walked most of the way to the docking area, knowing the approach had to be a slow one for the ship along with a number of shielding tricks required to allow the ship in without backfeeding the hot atmosphere against the station’s hull. As stupid as it sounded, Menchi’s Star Forge didn’t have unlimited shielding power, so it had to use the ample amount it had wisely, though most of the power involved was used to fuel the shields themselves as well as charge the fuel being constructed internally.

He wanted a tertiary shield that covered the hull plates, but powering it and fitting the generators in would cause a lot of rebuilding at the sacrificing of other systems, and for that reason it wasn’t worth it. The collection ‘sails’ that were soaking in the energy from the star could only extend so far from the station, and building a bigger one meant more area to defend, which in turn meant more shield power consumed. Star Force hadn’t been able to build one ‘do it all’ Star Forge design to date, so they had to pick and choose what roles and equipment they put in them…which was also why the Sentinel was assigned here, for Menchi’s station had no weapons onboard at all, save for