Getting to Safety

Despite the fact that we couldn't detect or see the ship that was chasing us, it was quickly apparent to us that it was there. Gravitational forces, despite our technological improvements, were affecting the ship. Something was forcefully trying to make us stop. I was amazed that whatever this thing was could modify a gravity drive so quickly in order to be able to keep up with us and still be able to perform other gravity functions from the same drives. Each tiny modification we did made it a little easier to continue fleeing this thing. It was clear to me that we would not be able to outrun this ship with our current drive, however, I figured we might buy ourselves some time if we could use a wormhole gate and so I changed our course from the area we believed it came from to one of the stars we controlled. I notified Nasero that we would need a gate built very quickly to accomodate the ship at the system we were heading towards. He informed us that it shouldn't be a problem as there were plenty of resources available as well as a small army of drones and probes to get it constructed for us. We continued on and just hoped we would be able to make it through and close the connection again before this thing could make its way through as well. We also had to hope that the drones and probes could pull the gate back into the star once we were through to prevent this thing from learning our technology to perform such a task.

As we closed in Nasero opened up the wormhole, we would only have a few precious moments to get through before it closed and we had to leave our jump to do it, so our timing had to be perfect. What made it easier was that the feel of a wormhole was something unique and we could sense how close we were to it. Once we were about to hit it we left our jump and went into it, however we hadn't quite made it through when we sensed the massive ship leave its jump and fire upon us. Somehow in its pursuit the thing that was controlling that ship had absorbed a lot of mass and constructed a battle class ship. We made it through safely and the gate closed, the probes even reported that they got it safely into the star and were pulling the technology through the smaller gate as it was disassembled, they would only have a few moments to get everything done and then they would need to activate the self destruct sequence, which was simply the command to turn off the shields in the base, to ensure that the entity couldn't get to any of the remnant technologies.

Things seemed to be going well, the ship didn't make an attempt to enter the star after any of the technology and so we had only minor resource loss when we allowed the sun to consume the star shield base. With that taken care of the only problem we had to deal with was figuring out what we were hit with and how bad the damage was. From the feel of it there wasn't a lot of damage, but I know we had been hit by something. Nasero had brought us to our first base, the one near Ambri's home world. We landed in one of the docking bays and sealed it off from the rest of the complex then disembarked and checked out what had hit us. From the looks of it the blast hadn't been to destroy us, but mearly to disable or possibly attach something to us, but it was hard to tell. The section that had been hit was charred and there were some holes from where the heat of the blast had melted through. It was surprising that our shields had done nothing against it, I had thought we were pretty thorough in testing our defenses. There didn't appear to be any fragments of anything, though I knew that didn't tell me everything. Back on board the ship I started checking all the diagnostics information and quickly learned that the ship was dying. Whatever hit us had contained a virus and it was consuming the ship, it hadn't hit any major systems as of yet but we needed to do something quickly. When Nira heard what was going on she quickly kicked me out of the captain's pod and went to work isolating the problem. When she had finished what she was doing she quickly hurried all of us off the ship. I wasn't sure what she had done but I figured it would save the ship in the long run.