Deception

It was a long shot, but with our distance from The Behemoth we had the best chance of pulling it off. We would have to use all our improved technology and all three control pods, it would require quite a bit of concentration and energy as well, luckily we had it in excess at the moment. The project began with just a basic layout of the ship, nothing fancy, it was enough just to create that with all its various properties that would make it believable. Then our flow of energy turned towards the little things that would make it more realistic, even going so far as to create our own energy patterns in it that were close to the feel of us, but only an expert would be able to detect the slight change. The fake ship made of mindforce energy looked spectacular as we continued its construction, I was glad we had spent so much time working on this skill, at least Ambri and I did, Nira did her best and it was enough to help us out. Once we had it as far as we could take it, for we knew if we went too far we would use up too much of our energy and it would discipate too quickly, we unleashed it beside us, it kept pace and performed all the maneuvers we needed it to but stayed close enough that the other ship wouldn't notice it yet. We then gathered up quite a bit of shared energy between us to try to stealth ourselves so that when we broke away from the fake ship, which would change course soon, The Behemoth might follow it instead of us and buy us some more time to get some upgrades done and make it to the system before it found out about our ruse.

Once the energy was gathered up we performed our mindforce cloak on the entire ship and then broke away, a few moments later the fake ship changed its course. It would be a little while before it would be safe to remove the cloak. The strain of keeping an entire ship cloaked with just our own powers soon took its toll however, and we began losing our grip on the cloak. Once we felt it begin to falter we decided to conserve the rest of our energy and let it fall away completely. I then used the sensors as best I could to see if I could find the other ship, I knew it would be difficult and we wouldn't know for absolute sure unless we stopped, but we still needed to get some distance before we took that chance. With nothing turning up on the sensors we changed our heading back towards the system that we believed had the planet we were seeking. We would not stop until we reached it, but until then we could continue working on the parts we would need to upgrade the ship when we did stop.

Enhanced Senses

The enhancements to the sensors had been completely invisible to me, without a proper interface you just didn't see what you wanted to and so the old system had seemed so good. But with each system we took down and fixed I got to see and feel quite a bit more, though we still hadn't approached the system that we desperately needed to, mostly due to the fact that it was the system we were using to try to avoid the gravity blasts in the first place, but it was coming up quickly. With the improvements so far I was starting to get glimses of the ship that was pursuing us, it was still rapidly evolving which was a bit scary for us, even with the three of us working I don't think we'd be able to stay ahead of it for much longer, our only hope would be to start fighting back. When it was finally time to replace the last set of sensors I quickly ate what I would need and got into the control pod, I knew it could be a bit of time that I would need to be here and I wouldn't have the luxury of a break once we disabled this system. My senses weren't great on their own in sensing these attacks, but at least it was something. With the gravity sensors down we were nearly blind and if I weren't the one controlling the ship we would be completely unaware of what the other ship was doing.

It was very strange being in this position, I had less than a second to react to each incoming gravity ball and several times we experienced significant slowdowns that allowed the behemoth of a ship to get closer, however the closer it came the easier it was to sense it. It too had that strange energy about it that made it so difficult to counteract the blasts he was firing at us, I began to feel that this energy was part of the entity and it was expending parts of itself to attack us, though from the readings we had on the system that had contained it, there was no shortage of energy for it to use. As it began to draw dangerously close to us I could sense a buildup of energy, I knew I needed those sensors and soon and Nira had just about finished them, I just hoped we could get them back in place before whatever it was about to fire was unleashed upon us.

The blast of its cannon, at least that's what I was thinking of it as, was tremendous. There was so much gravitational energy that I thought for sure it was creating a black hole to draw us in to. The sensors were just about online, though I didn't need them to know what was coming at us, I just hoped that with them I could find a way through the force as safely as possible. The dread of feeling this thing coming towards us caused Ambri to scream, I heard her, but very faintly, I was caught in the moment of it all and felt the sensor coming online. Things seemed to slow down, as often they do in situations where things get very intense, and my mind was suddenly filled with clarity. The precision of this sensor astounded me, I could feel every subtle fluctuation in this giant gravity ball, it wasn't a black hole at all but just a larger version of a gravity blast, and it wasn't perfect.

I was told afterwards that it was only moments and both Ambri and Nira were amazed I had navigated through it, but I had found ample time to navigate through the imperfect parts of the energy that allowed us through the blast and avoid most of the damage that we had been sure was imminent. Following these imperfections and making slight adjustments to the shield made it so that the ship only suffered a little bit of structural damage, but the drives were completely unharmed. This meant that once the blast was past us I could use the force of it to help slingshot us forward, which gave us a much greater distance than we had before. No other massive charges came after us, the entity knew we had figured out how to get through his attacks and so he needed to continue evolving his ship. He didn't slow down, but I started to feel forces leaving it to things outside of the jump and pull them in, I hadn't thought it was possible, but he was doing it. His resources were endless in a jump because of this technology, I had hoped to make this technology myself, but we were at a major disadvantage when we had to defend ourselves and our resources would run out long before we reached our destination if we continued having to improve every little system. But for now repairs were the most important thing, we could not afford to have a weak portion of the ship if we hoped to survive the next onslaught.

Sensing the New Weapon

The tiny blasts of gravitational forces kept getting closer, though the feel of them wasn't as intense as they should be for a ship that was jumping. Every once in a while there was a big one, but it was never as close as all these small ones. It appeared a new weapon had been developed and he was firing balls of gravity at us to try to either disable us or at least to slow us down. I still wasn't sure how all these little forces were affecting us so much, our shields had been designed against it and we had even implemented some of the gravity technology into the ship to try to mitigate these interferences as well. The control pod was just about finished and I would be able to control the ship more precisely with it as well as link directly with the sensors to get a better feeling of what was going on, it wouldn't be nearly as good a connection as it was with the other ship, but it would do for our purposes. The other pods would be finished shortly after this one was connected, but they would have to wait, we needed to find some relief to this new onslaught.

The sensors picked up the gravity orbs pretty well, it was like microscopic black holes coming towards you and exploding. They didn't really suck much into them, but they had enough pull to be slowly bringing our speeds down. The part that seemed to make them more effective was some sort of energy shield around them, the sensors had a hard time figuring out what this energy was and so we weren't sure why this allowed the forces to get through our shields. I did my best to get the readings from this energy so I could counteract it, but most of it fluctuated so wildly that it would be impossible to come up with a defense. I spent probably a good couple hours trying to find a pattern to it or some rhyme or reason to these things but it just didn't have one. I knew the design was purposeful, but whatever made these things had some abilities far beyond what we could currently comprehend. The biggest frustration with the task was the lack of natural senses. Before, on the other ship, the ship's sensors were enhanced by my own natural abilities, which for me were magnified when connected to the ship. I knew it was possible to get some of that functionality back, but it meant having to upgrade the sensors we had, which would make us partially blind as each one was improved.

Piecing Together the Rest of the Ship

It turned out the virus wasn't simply trying to destroy the ship, as Evan and Nasero examined the pieces of the ship that were left behind it was clear that the pieces were trying to grow into a whole new ship, however the genetics of the ship weren't complete throughout, rather each part of the ship was an organism on its own that complemented the rest, meaning that though Nira had been a single ship each part of her had its own blueprints programmed into it. This allowed her to modify only sections of ship instead of the whole thing and control all of it very precisely, there was no DNA in a piece that wasn't necessary in that component. This left the virus with nothing to work from except what it had been able to infect, which was far from a complete ship. The most important parts had never been touched and so our design was safe so long as someone didn't get to the most critical pieces to copy. This is what made the ship so unique and hard to reproduce, the single seed was capable of growing multiple organisms that coexisted together. The virus was doing its best to try to make the rest, but anything that grew beyond the normal design soon failed, it was the balance that the thing lacked. It made all of what was going on very clear, the entity, though powerful in and of itself, must have overheard or figured out what we were capable of with our ship and wanted the technology for itself. I couldn't guess which purpose it would want it for, there were so many to choose from, but knowing what it wanted made it much more important to keep the seed safe. After taking samples of the mutating virus Evan and Nasero destroyed the remnants of the infected portions of the ship, they didn't want something else growing from it and possibly learning there was another piece of organic technology it could learn from.

Our journey so far was relatively uneventful, we had been building the non-essential systems in the ship and the entity had been unable to catch us, though sensors indicated small gravity fluctuations once in awhile, I assumed it was trying to keep up with or possibly even overtake us. The construction room was made big enough for all of us to work, there was a control console for each of us and a manufacturing area that could accomodate a project of whatever size, we just had to take turns in the construction process, but at least we could design all at once. Ambri was making the ship more livable while Nira was working on the virtual garden, she had plans to make it as automated as possible so we wouldn't have to go in and out, what a change that was for us, instead of wanting to live in a virtual world of beauty we opted to stay active outside of it and endure the hardships that we were sure to face. While they both were busy with their parts I continued working on modifying our systems, we needed to find a way to detect the ship for more than just the moment it left and entered a jump and we also needed a way to hide ourselves from it.

On the Run Again

The new ship was nearly ready when Evan returned, something had changed about him but we didn't have time to stop to figure out what he had done. He helped us finish everything and once it was ready Ambri, Nira and I boarded and took it for a quick test run. The drives seemed to be fine, though we would know how well they worked only when we performed our next jump. We double checked our food supply and virtual world garden, which would hopefully grow quickly and provide us with more food during our flight. We knew it was dangerous, but we desperately needed to reach the planet this thing had come from and try to determine how to stop it. Once we had finished Nasero informed us that within 10 minutes the ship would break through our star shield, which meant that the power supplies were going to go critical and could cause the star to explode if we didn't relieve the strain on them. So with no more delays we left the system, purposely approaching the ship before changing course and jumping. It took only a moment for the ship to stop its assault and pursue us, it knew we were the ones it wanted to overtake. Lucky for us our drives seemed to have improved enough, we felt no gravitational pressure on the ship which meant we were staying far enough ahead. Nasero reported that the power supplies were now cooling down and the shield was still strong enough to protect the system, Evan would go to the star base and work on improving the output of the system.

Once everything was repaired Evan then had time to report his findings to us. I was very anxious to hear what he had discovered. As it turned out we did have the cube that was the one that contained all the research on the cubes themselves. It had been the cube that Evan came from, the original one and we had it ever since capturing the planet ship, we just needed to extract it from the rest of the stored mass. Evan had taken the time to have the cube restore itself with all its information and then rejoin with it, though not to become the cube again but instead to get all the technology and ability he had before but now in his humanoid form. It changed his density but the wonder of the cube technology had made it possible for him to retain his shape. He was still going through all the information, for it was a tremendous amount to absorb all at once within the smaller frame he had constructed for himself, but he was quickly figuring out a way to use the technology that the entity had used to create its ship against it. The cubes all had a basic programming and signal that they would respond to, no matter who gave the signal. The programming had been overcome in him when he was no longer a part of the cube, and after rejoining with the cube he was able to disable this particular function, making him immune to the same manipulations. The signals would allow someone to change the shape of the cube to suit them, which meant we didn't need to adapt to the cubes to dock but instead they could adapt to us. This also meant that with the right changes we could disable the ship that was chasing us, at least for a time. The only problem would be detecting the ship long enough to be able to send the signal, but first we would want to see if we could disguise the signal and encrypt it so that it wouldn't figure out where or what we were doing to cause the problems it would have.

Swapping Horses

It was really quite fascinating to watch, I had no idea she was capable of ever doing something like this. The ship detached the sections that were infected, removing the virus' chance of getting to anything vital. This made the ship look quite bare and unworthy of space travel, but she didn't stop it there. The genetics of the ship contained all our technological advances and needed to be protected, so instead of the ship growing back the sections it lost it instead reverted to its original shape and size, a simple seed. This she picked up and tucked away in her garments until she could find a better place to keep it. It was brilliant what she did, and once we had some time to discuss it we understood why it had to be done. With the threat of such a virus that could quickly disable the most important ship we had we needed to keep it safe. We could easily create another ship with all the technology we needed that wouldn't be susceptible to such an infection, but we couldn't recreate this ship without a lot of work, and it could possibly be that the technology couldn't be recreated. It had all been done with a series of self induced evolutions which made the ship remarkably unique, to evolve in a single generation instead of multiple. I know Nasero was capable of some changes, but I wasn't sure he could accomplish the same task that Nira had in this ship. Not to mention that if the genetic changes didn't occur in the proper sequence the living ship would simply die due to its own instability. With that done we got to work constructing our next ship, the design would implement as much of the technology that we had before as it could, including a virtual world where our food would grow, however we wouldn't be living in this one, we would simply use it as a way to get what organic resources we needed. The plan was to keep the ship small enough to accomodate us and allow us to live quite comfortably despite the lack of spaces. We would also work on developing some new drives that would allow us faster travel once we left the shielded system, I just hoped that we would have enough time before the massive ship came and started trying to find its way in, I wasn't sure that our shields would be able to hold it back for long.

While we were busy working on our next new ship Evan had returned to the base orbiting the Tirtris world, he had some sort of revelation that he wanted to follow up on after his encounter with the energy entity and needed to gleen some information from the technology that the Klatvix had. I wasn't sure what he was thinking would be relevant to what was currently going on, but I knew he wasn't one to pursue wild fancies. Still, I was curious about how quickly he left after the incident. After some time I checked in with him, he was still busy with his research, however he said he was making progress into the study of the technology. He also mentioned that his study should help us in overcoming the power of the ship it had constructed, the base of that ship being in the Klatvix technology, namely the cube. Though I wasn't sure how he would be getting more information about the cube technology as we hadn't found the research station containing that yet. Still, any advantage would be a good advantage for us. We were just finishing the basics of our ship when the presence of the war ship was felt, it had increased its mass even more and was starting to try to take down our shield, luckily we had made enough progress in our power research to upgrade the generators on it to keep it strong for at least a little while longer. Nasero kept us up-to-date on the status of the shield so that we would know when we had to leave, ship finished or not. So while Nira constructed what we absolutely needed to get going, Ambri gathered up the food we would need and the small plants that we would be growing as well as the materials that they would need to feed on. I, however, wanted to ensure we could build the rest of our ship while we led the behemoth away from this system and so I got to work on the construction system and designing a few technology upgrades to assist us in using it.

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.