Absolute System Control

Absolute control. I mean, how would we be able to fight against something that could have absolute control over a solar system? Other probes confirmed it, the aliens were shooting one of these devices into every star they came across. The star provided nearly infinite power to the device that generated the shield, and they could activate it wherever they found us, which meant we would be unable to leave. Trying to find the device in the star was a challenge in itself, but trying to find a way to destroy it would be much harder, the star provided its own protection to it, but the fact that the device could survive being in there meant that fire and heat were not an issue to their technology. It is possible we could just try to destroy the star, however doing so would mean we eliminate any current or future life that could be in that particular system. Our lives weren't worth that and we all agreed that we wouldn't be destroying any more stars. This just left us with having to come up with a way of destroying, disabling, or advancing beyond the device. We had little hope of doing this quickly. We sent some more probes to the system that had one of these devices active, they all stopped short of the shield and began scanning and reporting on it. We had one of the probes attempt to enter, which it could, however once it was in there was no leaving. This meant it could be set up as a trap and so we needed to make sure we could detect when one of these things was active.

Dead space, that was probably the safest place for us right now. We parked ourselves right in the middle of nothing, we had nothing to hide behind and no stars to trap us. It appeared the power needed to activate one of the devices had to come from a star. The bigger and more energy the star had the bigger the field it could generate, which meant a few of the activated systems still had planets outside of the barrier. Their ships could pass through without problem through this shield, they either tuned the shield to allow their type of travel through or, more likely, they had a device on their ships that allowed them to tune their shields to allow passage through. Our attempts to do likewise with the probe were unsuccessful, we had not found out their frequencies and as suspected, their shields had been modified and we could not find a flaw to perform scans again. Trying these tests also drew attention to the probes and a few of them had to be destroyed, luckily our technology wasn't resistant to stars and so by having them jump into the system's star we prevented them from learning about our technology. This, however, was not going to be a good practice, we were already low on resources and each destroyed probe represented a loss of potential technological advantage.

The probes on the outside of the shield were making little progress, the shield put off little energy signature and so it would be nearly impossible to detect, at least in a timely enough fashion to avoid it. The only way we would be able to successfully navigate a galaxy would be to send probes out to constantly check the path we were taking, however it would only work so long as they couldn't detect where we were in traveling. Considering the fact that they had found a way to block us probably meant they would soon have a way to sense our movements as well as we sensed their's. To prevent them from figuring this out too soon we decided to have any probe that was trapped try to remain hidden and if discovered to destroy itself, the rest we had return to the ship. We were going to try to find another galaxy to conduct our advancement in, at least, that was going to be the plan until we got a message from our small remote station telling us that it had detected a ship with a gravity drive entering the system. This meant they were about to take control of Ambri's home world, we could not let this happen. When she had heard the message I felt her pain, she cared deeply for the life that she had placed on her planet and desperately wanted it to be safe. We had the closest probes return to the system to try to prevent the star from being impregnated with their technology and then took off to join them and fight the ship.