Star Force: Temple Wars by Aer-ki Jyr (books to read in a lifetime txt) 📕

entire Temple, with the burning light too bright to look at as it overwhelmed them but took forever to actually get there.

Then it finally hit.

The Gjardan did not move against the massive momentum, fixed in place relative to the gravity of the Temple beneath them as its engines were well up to the task of making jumps between stars at massive speeds, so the resistance here was not so impressive on a mass level, or for speed, which was still insanely high, but well less than the speed of light. What was the problem was that it was nearly all photons, and their collision with matter or energy matrixes would stress and overload them to the point of breaking.

His ship had to soak up, absorb, or deflect them before the hull armor became overloaded and detonated as if it were a bomb itself. And that’s exactly what happened below them in the Neofan city as its minimal shielding snapped instantly. The buildings were demolecularized in such a way that they become fusion bombs of their own…which threw off even more photonic energy that went deeper into the ground, causing more and more detonations until it ran its course and the rock remaining absorbed what was left without exploding, only liquefying into a sea of magma everywhere.

But it couldn’t be seen. All the matter that had fused together was still being flung back up and hammering the underside of the ships as the firehose of energy coming from the center of the Temple didn’t relent. The underside pressure was far less, though, and thankfully for the little ships that had got to him, the hull breaches in his underside were not compromised. Had no more than two of the ships got here they would have been, and those two ships would have been damaged or destroyed with the outer layers of his ship.

But they weren’t. Their protective cocoon held through the long torrent of destruction as the little lights coming up from the city below stopped shining…but those already floating up kept moving, for they were in the Essence realm and missing the blast wave.

“As soon as we are able to drop shields, I want transmutation grapples on as many of those people as we can get. They can last a while, but there’s no atmosphere out there for them to breathe. Pull in all we can here and go chase the others that are past us.”

“Say when,” the second in command prompted. “The armor can handle some of this when it relents.”

Plausious knew what he meant and agreed. Damage could be repaired later, but the lives could not be replaced, so he watched the indicator levels of the pressure on the shields coming from the Temple center as they slowly ticked lower.

But the lights beneath them were gone already, having passed the ship by.

“Keep shields up above us, but move the ship ahead of those in the Essence realm. We can capture them from below.”

The Gjardan immediately accelerated upward, which increased the pressure on the upper shields while lowering it on the conventional ones below, with those ships in their shadow not using the Essence to block it in the same way. As they all stayed linked together in engine synchronicity, they passed through many of the Essence bubbles, with the beacon groups grabbing some while the portals reached out much further and yanked them into their controlled apertures.

When the ship rose up enough, they were able to yank sideways and get people who were moving ballisticly away from the surface and also sideways a bit, but Plausious finally gave the order to drop the Essence shields the portals began pulling people in from everywhere, though the ship was having to move about greatly to pick them up as they continued to spread out.

Some couldn’t hold the effect long enough and emerged back into the debris-filled void, being incinerated by it before they could explosively decompress or suffocate. A few were able to use biological or technological body shields to protect themselves momentarily, and Plausious worked to transmute them inside as well, using his own telepathy to reach out, identify, and coordinate with them while the ship’s crew worked frantically to save as many as possible, as well as the crews on the smaller Neofan ships.

But many of those little lights went out before they could be rescued, followed by their Cores disappearing from what was left of their bodies soon after they could not hold their Essence bubbles.

Some though, could hold them for hours, and Plausious told all his ships to split up and search for them after the maelstrom ahead of them ended. He focused on helping mentally search for them after sending orders out to all surviving ships to do the same…without looking at how many were left. The Temple comm system was mostly down, save for what was underground, and he had to rely mostly on his ship’s sensors to tell him what was out there…and they were obscured by the nebula of debris rising up from the surface and beginning to fill the outer regions of the void within the Temple and slowly work its way in towards the distant center.

The rescue efforts lasted for days as some Neofan held on that long in the Essence realm due to the fact that the air in their little bubbles was augmented by personal armor they were wearing, and some of those actually were able to survive in space after reversion if they came out late enough not to get hit with the debris field.

Plausious was adamant that they not stop looking for 3 days, with the last survivor found being at just over two days and thrown so far away from the surface that it took a massive Essence flare from him to get the Gjardans’ attention.

All the Gjardans had survived, but some of them were missing large