Gateways by Aer-ki Jyr (world of reading txt) 📕

much as to Star Force. Paul could take his ship all the way down to the surface without touching it and be fine inside his inertial dampening fields as long as the engines provided the anti-grav necessary to keep them from being pulled into it. If a touch was made, and a bit of the black hole material passed inside the dampening field and was no longer gravitationally compressed, it would explode outward like a bomb and expand exponentially.

Likewise, if a part of Paul’s ship stuck out past the inertial dampening field, the black hole’s gravity would rip it off, pull it down to the surface, and flatten it against the compressed material that would then eat it apart like acid as the molecules were deconstructed under the pressure and turned into atomic soup.

It was such a hazardous environment that Star Force had only been able to travel down inside smaller black holes with specially built craft, and only then just to dip their toes in it, metaphorically speaking. But this one was so massive they couldn’t even do that, and it still amazed him that the Uriti could go down there. Their Yeg’gor actually thrived in this environment, with the more pressure the better, and the Veloqueen liked it as well with their technological armor somehow not being negatively affected.

But down there was a line that Paul could not cross, and the continuing battles in this system he couldn’t take part in. There were Wardens down there that the Veloqueen were going after, hoping to capture and bring back up into space. Possibly some Lurkers too, but the main threat was the Spice Lords. They were the mirror opposite of Paul, for they could not come out of the black hole into space or they’d die. They had to have the pressure and the energy of the black hole, for it wasn’t cold. It was hotter than stars, with its gravity keeping all the sunlight and heat in as it tried to expel from the surface only to be yanked back down in giant fountains that Paul’s fleet was just riding above.

Yet go deeper and it got far, far hotter. Physics down there worked completely different when the subatomic particles didn’t have room to breathe, and he only knew what those few who could go down there had told him. He didn’t like being out of the loop, but today he found it a relief as some of the Star Force fleets were already beginning to depart the system.

They’d been resupplied and repaired here many times over, so they were still fully combat capable, but another gateway assault wouldn’t be possible for a long time. So many drones had to be replaced that it was impossible to launch another one now, so as the V’kit’no’sat gradually replaced them here the trailblazers and Grand Admirals would disperse their ships to smaller system battles or other assignments, then meet up again down the road to do this all over again at an even tougher target.

That was the way of galactic war, and millions of years of enemy prep work couldn’t be undone quickly. The Hadarak growths were all gone now, destroyed by combat or consumed by the Hadarak to grow more minions when they ran out of other sources of food. Paul and the others actually had to kill the minion swarms many times over as they were continually being replaced here, as well as getting reinforcements from the outside, but with each growth they took down the Hadarak’s ability to grow more diminished.

It had been a long chess game of attrition, but Star Force knew how to play it better than the Hadarak now…though only by a small margin. They needed better weapons, more tactical options, and a faster way for the Jedein to capture and reshape enemies into neutrals in order to achieve faster conquest.

The Wardens captured here would eventually turn into Jedein once their minds were freed and their biological birthright was allowed to fulfill itself, and that in turn would increase the Alliance’s ability to rescue even more, but it was a slow snowball effect, and nowhere near what was required to take vast amounts of territory from the Hadarak. Hence the carnage would continue for a long time to come.

As for the Spice Lords, the Veloqueen were the ones that were going to have to deal with them and all the other Megaloids living within the massive black hole, and because the material it was made of was so ‘sticky,’ movement inside was slower than within a star. That made the volume of it effectively much larger, so large in fact that you couldn’t explore it all in your lifetime and there were probably Megaloids down there that had never met a Hadarak.

It was not empty down there, and the Veloqueen were now going to be the dominant force within it…or so they claimed. Already, in other systems, races stronger than the Veloqueen had been found living in them alongside the Spice Lords, but the Veloqueen packs appeared to still have the upper hand if combat was required. Paul didn’t get detailed updates about what went on down there, and if the Veloqueen were misbehaving he’d never know about it. He didn’t like that part, but it was out of his hands.

The Uriti would tell him what they observed, but they moved even slower than the Veloqueen down there, and only went into the shallow end of the ‘pool.’ The deepest areas were where the Spice Lords lived, and to date none had ever surrendered, but few had been killed. The Veloqueen told him it was too costly to fight them directly in most cases, so various forms of containment was used to monitor and prevent them from spawning armies of a different sort down there. Armies not of the Jedein line that the Wardens were. And armies that the Veloqueen were right now having