Chương 99: Chapter 98 - On the fringes of reality

Selendil was quite pleased with Lilly's little discovery. They had utilized the work she had done and worked the numbers until they came up with a safe place for the ship to jump to in the middle of the turbulent spatial storms. It had been something of a surprise to notice that the spatial anomalies in phase space extended so heavily to the normal space as well.

It wasn't that rare, even if this example was a bit of an extreme one, but the readings they got from the storms made them quite pleased about finding the safe spot. The jump had taken the ship about 65% of the way to the center of the affected area, which still left Selendil quite a bit of space to cover. She was quite pleased with Lilly's work in general. The work Lilly did often went unnoticed, but she had a vital role within the crew.

Many of the personnel matters were smoothed over way before they even became an issue, and Lilly seemed to be a bit of a genius at spotting the potential problems early. Most importantly, that meant that those issues never became large enough that Selendil would need to get involved. True, the Mrrroww female was a bit of a dolt at times, but her service to the crew was invaluable.

In an interesting twist, even the tension between the Illum and the Mrrroww had settled down when Moonshadow had gotten injured and Lilly had taken over as the leader of the Mrrroww contingent. The High Ambassador might have been great as a diplomat, but as a crew member she had room to improve. In Selendil's mind, Lilly was definitely among the five most useful crew members right along with the Head Chef Zzz'tak and the Head of the Hydroponics Cherryblossom. The other two would be hard to decide.

Amaterasu definitely brought a lot just with her input, while Xiaoli was actually useful when it came to engineering issues. On the other hand, Nochehuatl had really earned his pay lately, and despite the fact that the man almost never left his little shop in the engineering department, Huang did a good job in keeping the ship well supplied and often fulfilled the complicated needs of the varied crew members. It was often those that you least paid attention to that did most of the work.

The Dashane security personnel were a bit of a weird one. On one hand, they hadn't really been all that necessary, but on the other hand, security personnel were among those people that you could only appreciate when they were truly needed. As for Khaemwaset… well, best not think about that one. As she got outside the ship, she reached out with her mind. That was a necessary part of teleportation. You had to be able to touch your destination with your mind.

The more proficient you were at the skill, the faster you could do it. Training and skill didn't necessarily increase your range though. Teleportation was a weird ability. You couldn't just reach further by putting more power into the ability. Yet it would be wrong to say that your level of power had no effect on the ability. There were some rare ability groups, or disciplines as some called them, that didn't scale on the power you used, but on the power you had.

There were many theories about the reason, but none of them were proven exactly correct. Yet the fact remained. Two identically skilled teleporters using the same ability, in the same place, at the same time, and by using the same amount of power could get wildly different results depending on how much power they had. With that being the case, she was quite eager to find out just how far she could reach.

Her mind soon reached the limits of what she had considered as the maximum range of her ability in the past, and it kept going. And it kept going. She had soon more than tripled the range, yet her mind still kept going and going.

"Is something wrong?" Nox asked her mentally as her teleport was taking a bit longer than usual.

"No. Just testing my limits and haven't reached them yet. The first attempt will always take a bit of time, but things will grow faster once I get used to it." She explained, while her mind reached further and further, her reach moving faster than the speed of light. Her mind was moving literally at the speed of thought. Finally, after looking for her limits for several minutes, she started to slowly face resistance.

She knew the resistance didn't mean that she had reached her limits, just that it would become more difficult from this point on. It was like she had been walking until this point, and from this point on she would have to jog and later run. With a thought, her position shifted, and she suddenly found herself vast distances from her original position.

"Huh. I think I might have underestimated the changes I underwent when the Great Song ended." She messaged Nox.

"I'd say you're quite right about that. You traveled more than a thousand times the longest distance you've traveled before." Nox stated in emphatic agreement.

"Yes, well, that wasn't even the maximum yet. There is a slight downside though. Even assuming I'll shave down on the time with practice, teleporting over such vast distances won't be quite as instantaneous as when I'm jumping shorter distances." Selendil analyzed. Even with practice, it would take a bit of time for her mind to reach the distance required. She reached out again, this time pushing past the point where she felt she was starting to strain.

A light barely noticeable strain slowly turned into a real strain, then into a heavier strain, and finally into a bit of a problem. However, at that point she was running into another issue. It seemed that her mere presence when she was flexing her psionic muscles so heavily was agitating the space around her. It was like space was straining at the effort of handling her existence.

'I think that will be enough for now.' She thought idly and teleported again.

"So yeah. You've definitely improved. I think two more of those and you'll arrive." Nox said a bit dumbly.

"I guess I'll call the rest back and tell them the vacation is canceled."

"Bah! Serves them right! Trying to relax while I'm working." Selendil grumbled jokingly. Nox's estimation seemed quite accurate, as two more jumps took her almost to her destination, however, what she was sensing now that she was so close made Selendil pause. Now that she got a better feeling of what was causing all these problems, she could actually tell that the cause might be something she was familiar with.

She brought up the minds of a few of the Dhar's top scientist from her library of minds and they confirmed her suspicions. She had hoped that her senses were wrong, but luck was not with her. With a growing sense of disgust, she made the last and much shorter jump right into the heart of the anomalous space, and now she could visually confirm her suspicions.

"A wormhole!" If she had a mouth, she would've spat the word out. Even as is, she managed to fill the word with disgust and something like nausea.

"Not just that." Nox commented, and suddenly Selendil's eyes were drawn to hundreds of floating objects surrounding the wormhole. It seemed like the area surrounding the wormhole was heavily defended, but there were several anomalous details about the defenses. The first anomaly was that the defenses had taken an aim at Selendil as she arrived, but had apparently decided against firing and had gone back into resting state.

The second problem was that many of those weapons seemed several generations too advanced for this galaxy. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, most of those weapons were pointed towards the wormhole, not away from it. It seemed that whoever had placed those weapons here was more worried about something coming through the wormhole than something from this galaxy approaching it. Nevertheless, she could see the remains of dozens of destroyed ships of various designs floating behind her.

This was where many of the expeditions that had managed to avoid the spatial storms had met their ultimate fate. Many of the remains still held signs of being fired upon.

"I find it rather interesting that the defenses have clearly destroyed all these expeditions, but decided against firing on me," Selendil commented.

"Try to establish contact with whatever is controlling them." This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"Will do." Nox acknowledged. Several seconds passed, a surprisingly long time for Nox.

"Master, I think I've run into something unexpected."

"Don't tell me they're controlled by an AI more powerful than you." Selendil joked.

"No. They're not controlled by an AI. At least not in the sense that we think of the word. These weapons have all been programmed to act in a specific way, but the programming isn't even enough to warrant the moniker of VI. It's just a chain of conditional commands. Here's the thing though. I'm pretty sure they were programmed by a Dhar AI. And not a station or facility AI either. I mean an AI like me." Nox explained. AI's like Nox had no central core, as they were true 'ghosts' as the Dhar called them.

"A personal AI?" Selendil asked in shock.

"Not exactly. I think we're talking about an assistant AI picked up from the Dhar colony we visited. Technically the AI would've been tied to the colony's highest administrator, but I think we're not even talking about an AI that controlled most of the colony's systems. I think this was done by an actual assistant AI usually in charge of menial tasks. Or at least that's what it used to be. It may have evolved over time." Nox gave the mental equivalent of a shrug.

"This was basically done by someone's secretary or nanny AI that has developed since waking up. It still carries some of the old limitations though, which is why the weapons were automatically programmed to not harm any Dhar. It's not like the AI expected any Dhar to show up, but such limitations are something it has to program into everything it does."

"…I have to admit. That was not the first thing that would've come to mind if someone had asked what I was expecting to find next to an artificial wormhole." Selendil was forced to concede.

"Artificial?" Nox asked sharply. Wormholes occurred naturally on occasion. They were not common, but they existed and finding one in a galaxy like this was not too strange. Creating an artificial one was another matter entirely.

"Definitely. I can sense the wrongness radiating from the wormhole. This was almost certainly artificially created. It's done in a relatively bad way though. The whole thing would collapse in a few thousand years. Whoever did this either didn't know what they were doing, or they were in a hurry." Selendil went into detail. The Dhar loathed wormholes as a general concept.

The way they messed up space and time had been a potential threat to the Dhar, and wormholes like this were especially bad as they were even more harmful to the fabric of reality than the main weapons on Dhar ships. Luckily wormholes were also inherently impossible to control. Creating a wormhole that went somewhere was doable. Not easy, but something that could be accomplished by sufficiently advanced races. Creating one that allowed travel was a bit trickier, but not impossible.

Creating one that went to a specific place was pretty much impossible. Creating one that went where you wanted, when you wanted, and allowed travel was something even the Dhar never attempted seriously. The Dhar dislike of the wormholes wasn't just for tactical reasons though. Wormholes were inherently unstable anomalies of space that often messed with the laws of physics. The problem was that strong enough Dhar could actually sense, and in the case of Keepers see, how the rules were bent inside the wormhole.

Sometimes being able to see and understand was not a blessing. More than a handful of Dhar had gone insane while allowing their minds to explore the ways in which a wormhole affected the fabric of reality. There was also something about wormholes that negatively affected them as energy beings. As a result, the Dhar had an almost instinctual revulsion towards them.

"How long has it been here?" Nox questioned, knowing that Selendil could sense a lot more than she could detect.

"I think it's safe to say that its appearance coincides quite neatly with the disappearance of the so-called Ancients of this galaxy. And I'm also pretty sure we can guess where they went. The real question is why none of them returned." Selendil speculated. At the same time, she warped the ship to her. Apparently, the weapons were programmed to not fire on Dhar vessels either. She didn't want to rely on her own senses this close to a wormhole, and the ship had great sensors.

The ship started performing detailed scans of the area and the wormhole. The unstable spatial elements made the work difficult, and the remains of the destroyed ships didn't exactly make things easier either. After two full days of searching, Nochehuatl found what they were looking for.

"Selendil. I configured the scans to look for the Void energy you've mentioned before. I've got something. One of the older ship wreckages shows signs of being damaged by a weapon using that type of energy. The ship is actually quite close to the wormhole, and I don't think it's from the expeditions. It's much older and seems more advanced. I think it's from these Ancients."

"That…complicates things. I was afraid that this might be the case, but now it seems almost unavoidable that we have to go through the wormhole." Selendil was not pleased by the news.

"Can we? I mean survive the trip. As you've mentioned, the wormhole had degenerated quite a bit from its original state. The passage would not be as safe as it would've been when the wormhole was created." Nochehuatl asked in a worried tone.

"It's doable. The passage will be a bit rocky, but I can protect us if things get too difficult." Selendil promised after considering the odds. It could become tricky if they were unlucky, but not too difficult. As they didn't really have many other options, they steered the ship towards the wormhole. As soon as they entered the passage that looked and felt like a psychedelic nightmare while passing through it, they were buffeted by the forces within.

The shields were managing to keep the forces at bay though, and they traveled quite quickly to the other side as the trip wasn't long. If they had thought the other side of the wormhole was odd, then this side was much worse. It seemed like they had arrived in the middle of a battle frozen in time.

In this case quite literally, as thousands of ships were frozen in place as their weapons were in the process of firing on identical ships and a handful of ships glowing with eerie purple energy and a design straight out of nightmares. Yet even those shots fired by the weapons seemed to be frozen in place, which was odd as some of them would clearly move at the speed of light under normal circumstances. Now the shots were floating in place as if frozen in time.

"What the heck is this?" Xiaoli voiced the question they all had.

"Selendil." Nox suddenly said in an alarmed voice." There's an active Void rift in the process of opening in the middle of the phenomenon! I didn't detect it right away because it's been frozen as well and hasn't yet managed to release that much energy. It seems like the rift was open only for a minute or so, just long enough to allow a few ships to pass through. Then whatever froze this whole place hit the rift as well. It's a very small rift, but it's there."

"How many Void beings have managed to come through?" Selendil asked, getting into a battle mindset. All other considerations would have to be forgotten as her main goal was to close the frozen rift.

"Not that many." Nox brought up a display of the whole situation, but the display seemed to be malfunctioning as it seemed like the frozen ships were hard to detect using normal means.

"Those aboard the five Void vessels, and a handful of Wraiths coming through the rift. I don't know how many Wraiths are on the ships though. Whoever was fighting against the Void beings was fighting against their own ships as well."

"I recognize those." Selendil pointed at large constructs near the rift that was a healthy distance away from the wormhole.

"Those things are used to house a large number of either civilians or prisoners of war so that they can be taken over by the Wraiths. They used a similar system during our war."

"What happened here?" Xiaoli asked again, interrupting the two of them.

"Give us a second." Nox requested as she conferred with Selendil silently as they simulated and theorized several possible scenarios based on the scene in front of them.

"I think we have a few working theories, though we might be wrong. You all remember the destroyed galaxy, right? So we're assuming that whoever caused that destruction arrived in this galaxy sometime in the past. The people called Ancients first didn't take them as a threat, but at some point, an internal struggle of some sort broke out and at least one Void Wraith among them helped create the wormhole to facilitate escape to this place. The Ancients eventually gave chase and the result is as we see."

"No offense but that's kind of a shitty theory. That's also not what I asked. What's happened here?" Xiaoli emphatically pointed at the display that was still not working properly.

"Ah. That. It seems like the result of a chrono-trap. It's a bit like weaponized large scale stasis technology." Nox finally noticed what Xiaoli was trying to ask.

"That's not really an explanation," Lilly added to the clearly unsatisfied expression of Xiaoli.

"Well, the problem is that we're talking about an experimental weapons technology that was never put into proper use as the project was abandoned." Selendil pointed out.

"Why was it abandoned? Seems to be quite effective to me." Lilly pointed at the screen again.

"It's not really though, is it?" Amaterasu interjected.

"The problem is still there even after all this time, and both sides were caught in the effect."

"Those are just the most obvious problems," Selendil added.

"It's also relatively easy to cancel the effects if you have any idea about what you're doing. Besides, such time-dilation effects are inherently unstable. I don't think that whoever employed the device was planning on both sides getting caught in the area of effect. I also don't want to think about what would've happened if the effect had reached all the way to the wormhole. It's already uncomfortably close as is."

"Where are we by the way?" Nochehuatl asked.

"I've been running scans the entire time, but the whole area is covered by a similar spatial storm like the one on the other end of the wormhole. Probably for the same reason." Selendil gave a small sigh and tried to reach the warp network in order to pinpoint their location. That's when she discovered they were outside the reach of the network.

"I don't know." She admitted.

"But we're pretty far."

"Far in space or time?" Nox asked a little worriedly.

"Space. I'm pretty sure that the wormhole was not capable of moving us temporally. At least not far enough to matter." Selendil replied immediately.

"I have another question. If we're assuming that those ships belong to the ancients, then where are the rest of them? This seems to be a big battle, but not enough to accommodate an entire race, and certainly not the civilian population even if their military was here in full force." Amaterasu's question was a reasonable one.

"I think it's safe to say that we have our work cut out for us if we want to find real answers," Nochehuatl stated, actually sounding excited.