บท 22: Chapter 22: Planetary Spatial Manipulation
The room door was knocked a few times, and a communication droid walks in with a box. It put the box on the table and raised it's hand to show a hologram of Lady Lily.
'Please get yourself acquainted with the communications gear and follow the droid towards the briefing room for further meeting. There is about to be some action soon so please take your time to make any adjustments you need.' Lady Lily said coldly, and the hologram flickered once before disappearing.
Zel went ahead to open the box to reveal a collection of essential tools for his arms and a series of communication gadgets. It's all quite simple to put on, and he also found a stack of ultra strong cables and mini motors underneath. It's the exact make and model like the ones he typically use for his red 'adventure' arm.
Interesting. Zel's face remained still and his left hand reaches for the standard sized electric screwdriver. Rather than a show of care, this feels more like a show of power and intelligence. Zel made all the mechanical arms himself with very specific selections of every single components, and it's extremely unlikely that people would know what exactly he uses.
But they know, somehow. All of it.
He wouldn't be surprised if that's someone's artifact, or merely creepily great intelligence gathering from the people around. Regardless, this is a rather not so subtle way for Lady Lily to say: We know what you do and how you do (and don't pull anything you will regret).
Zel dissembled the joints of his arm with his shoulder and puts it on the table. With a few screws and pulls, the cover to the chamber easily slides off and exposes the interior. He did the same to the communications box and another small metal container within the box that carries many common components.
It's time to pull an Iron Man and get to work.
Zel thought to himself, under the watchful eye of others and possibly Lady Lily, he needed to do something to both get out of here and make sure his bounty doesn't get any worse than it is already. Thankfully, his bounty mostly cam from the Wild Space and it practically doesn't exist in the settled regions for the three species and the galaxy is big enough that no one would really go that far for a mere one hundred thousand credits except for those with a special passion or motivation.
Living with a bounty isn't the most difficult thing to do if one is always keeping watch of their actions and surroundings, but it gets exhausting really quickly.
It didn't take that long for Zel to have finished the changes in his arm from the general purposed grappling and cable settings to the ultra-strong ones Lady Lily has very kindly provided. He got up, signalling towards the droids that he is ready and followed it as it leaves.
The briefing room this time was not the meeting room Zel was in, instead it's the very first room for him when he saw before leaving the hanger bay. There are already quite a few people in full space combat suits and just adjusting their weapons and making sure everything goes as expected.
The spacesuit for Zel is already there ready for him to quickly put on, and that's what he did.
'Communications check.' When Zel slid on the helmet and let the suit's communication system sync up with the ones he attached to his body just prior, the others spoke lightly in the comm channel. The sound is a bit sandy and noisy, but within a few repetitions it got quite a lot cleaner and clearer.
'Check.' Zel responded and started toggling around the different communication channels. All seems pretty good.
'What's his status?' Lady Lily sat at her wooden desks and overlooks multiple camera monitoring holograms. Sir Deva sits grumpily next to her at about an arms length in total silence and locked his eyes on Zel who's fluently checking all the equipment on him.
'Normal, ma'am. He didn't do anything curious to the gear we provided or anything else.' One of the two people that would go along with Zel into the ship reported, 'It would appear he will simply do as he was told.'
'Noted.' Lady Lily finished this conversation and turned her attention away from the monitoring channels. All parts of this plan have smoothly fallen into place. The ship they are on are currently hidden behind a myriad of asteroids away from detection as well as the cleaned up space routes. Asteroids typically won't affect anyone travelling in the worm holes as the curvature in space due to acceleration gates will simply pass through the rocks like leaves floating on the pond.
She has ordered for some ships to leave and take position on either side of the ambush to ensure there is no escape, but this is supposed to be an extremely subtle job that will go undetected until it's way too late.
'We are a few minutes out. Get ready.' Lady Lily spoke into the communication channels of Zel and the other two officers, then she turned and looked at the giant men sitting quietly next to her, 'Sir Deva, you can get ready as well. I trust that you will be able to pull that ship out of worm hole travel near the designated locations at the perfect time?'
'Of course, my Lady.' Sir Deva stood up and blocks out some light in the room with his giant frame. He headed outwards to get ready, but stopped right by the door.
'Got doubts?' Lady Lily was definitely expecting him to say something, but he decided to speak up nonetheless.
'What's the connection between you and that wild space punk? What so special about him?' Sir Deva asked with his deep and masculine voice. Beneath the seemingly calm ocean surface are the turbulent ocean currents and the dark unforgiving depths.
'Nothing unprofessional, and nothing special.' Lady Lily lips curled up slightly and answered vaguely.
'Understood.' Sir Deva didn't look back and stormed out of the room.Meanwhile, Zel uses the excuse that he is fine-tuning his artifact to shut off all the electronics in his suit and separate himself from the outside word.
'Yo, artifact. So here's the plan...'
'Got it?' Zel finished the briefing and got the artifact's hesitant approval. He wonders whether other bearers will have to negotiate with their artifact when it comes to 'borrowing their greatness' to save the 'pathetic human asses', but at least now he knows exactly what to do.
'I am ready.' Zel switched on his communications channel with the other two as well as Lady Lily, 'Waiting for instructions.'
'Stay alert, Sir Deva is about to engage.' Lady Lily replied with a simple message. And it's at this time that he saw Sir Deva entering the room, puts on a simple face mask without any gear and headed straight out the door into the slightly depressurized and cold hanger bay. Nobody really reacted as he marched into the cold with a vest, military trousers and pure manliness.
He boarded a ship with a pilot and left for the cold and open space away from their hiding point. Sir Deva stands tall at two meters and has his own extra large ship, being the third in command.
In a normal spacecraft he would have constantly grazed his head along the ceiling or have to remain crouched all the time. Some spectate that he might simply stick his head out and break the ship with his shiny hairless scalp if his needs were not accommodated, killing everyone but him of course.
But despite his background, despite all the hard work he has put in to get to this stage, to earn the artifact and everything else he had, Lady Lily always seemed to be so far away. Their quarters are next to each other, being the second and third in command, but the distance between the minds always felt way larger than the distance between their physical bodies.
Sir Deva took a deep breath to center himself and calm the raging ocean within him into a placid pool. Lady Lily assigned the single most difficult task within this whole raid to him and him alone, fully trusting in his ability to handle the artifact and deliver what the organization required.
'Keep the ship stationery.' Sir Deva ordered his pilot as they roamed out towards the edge of the typically routes of the worm hole and put on a specially made processing enhancer in the form of a helmet with a visor.
The processing enhancer is extremely similar to the helmet that Rydel was spending all his time working on and swiftly interacts with his brain to deliver the information he requires at the perfect timing.
It is one of the organization's bread and butter technology and quite a few years ahead of what Rydel is trying to piece together. Only three people has it and it's all highly individualized to work with how each one of them think and act, but again, this is used mostly for extremely difficult manuvers and actions rather than during normal operations or combat.
Activate the timing sequence. Sir Deva ordered in his head, and the visor quickly shows a count down as well as a not-to-scale representation of where the cargo ship is.
Sir Deva has about a few minutes to wait and prepare for the procedure, and he simply locked his eyes on the target.
The wormhole created in between two acceleration gates are extremely stable in almost all conditions. Any spacecrafts made after the wide usage of acceleration gates will have a synchronizing part within the ship's main engine to ensure the space craft will safe within the wormhole and not fall out before reaching the final destination.
However, just because there are acceleration gates placed on the populated space ports doesn't mean that only two acceleration gates are needed to travel between two places that are far apart. At times some systems that are way furhter away from another requires multiple accelerations gates to be placed along the length of the journey.
The default synchronizing properties for the spacecraft's engine requires that no massive gravitational fields exist near the wormholes as they themselves are already unnatural curvature within spacetime.
Any additional bending will cause the wormholes to become unstable and cut the journey short, ejecting the ships out of the high speed travel. This is where Sir Deva comes in.
He raised both of his arms to in front of him and formed a triangle using his thumb and index fingers. He pointed the center of the triangle at the region of space where he planned to pull the ship out.
'Get ready. I am moving in.' He talked into the communications channel.
'Something is happening!' Back on the ship of our old friends', Cellica immediately notified the pair when the ship carrying Sir Deva moves out of the formation and stood still to the side of the space route that both the cargo ship and their ship is travelling on, then the light given off by an artifact activating shines straight through that little space craft into Cellica's eyes, 'they have a bearer doing something! It's a different one again!'
'What is he or she doing?' Rydel got up to the front view window and asked as there is really nothing to be seen out in the space. The animation created by the ship's computer to represent the locations and distances of the cargo ship helps to visualize everything though.
Cellica concentrates the power of her artifacts and locks on that region of the space. White pulses started dashing towards her eyes beneath her silky smooth skin and the frequency only increases the more concentrated she became.
At this moment, she is nearing the maximum amount of information that she can accept and process at once.
There was nothing except the light the artifact gives off initially in her visual field, then a tiny black sphere giving off strands of radiation appeared. The frequency of that radiation gradually increases with time as the sphere gets bigger and the direction of the ejection slowly fixated to be directly normal to the plane of their travelling.
The light around the black sphere became strangely bent and curved into a deformed circular loop, almost like it's being reflected along the surface of a rubble, but Cellica is fairly certain that's not how light usually behaves.
'You have got to be kidding me...' Cellica immediately realized what is happening. She doesn't have any sort of measurement instruments on hand, and even if she does there wouldn't be any need. Now violent bursts of infared frequecy radiations are coming out of the sphere. There is no mistake.
A black hole is forming, out of absolutely nothing, and the radiation are the Hawkin radiation that is given off as a result of it's formation. This sudden emergence of mass and destruction completely obstructs the wormhole and snapped it shut like a tight knot around the neck of a plastic bag.
The cargo ship within the space craft's detection wobbled slightly, then disappeared from the ship's range. The wormhole that supported the travel of the bearers ship also started oscillating and began to collapse upon itself as the very fabric of space around all of the bearers began to tear, with little energetic pockets popping in and out of existence.
'What is going on here?' Dolon looked around confused and had her hands on the control should anything unexpected happen.'They made a black hole, somehow, and it's cause the wormhole we are in to collapse!'Cellica shouted, 'be prepared to exit at any time now! Does this ship have cloaking?'
'Yes, at least the most basic ones at these stage. A full shut down is required for complete cloak!' Dolon quickly answered and understood what Cellica is getting at. If they are forcibly pulled out of the wormhole travel by the black hole, then there is a high chance that they could be seen by the people behind it, and the whole information gathering mission will lose its purpose before turning into a full confrontation.
At that stage, they will not only expose themselves to the unknown organization but also risk all of their lives being in the middle of an attempted heist that came not too long after an unsuccessful first attempt.
On the flip side, If they can remain silent and cloaked when exiting the wormhole, nothing should be able to pick them up and the intelligence gathering mission would not only go on, but they would be able to see exactly how the organization operates and subsequently figure out who they are and what they can do with the artifacts, if they are lucky.
It all hinges on this one moment.
'Do it!' Cellica yelled, and Dolon immediately cutoff all systems within the spacecraft and enters cloaking mode. The surface of the spacecraft slowly changes and merges with the endless darkness of space while the stars in the background slowly reverts back from rays of light dashing across and rotating about the ship to becoming more stationary.
And finally when they exited into normal space, they are completely cloaked, though the ship was spinning rapidly out of control.
The cargo ship was not far from them, being about the size of a potato wedge on the front cockpit window, and the small ship containing Sir Deva is a distant white dot.
'Cellica! Can you see anything?' Rydel turned around and looked at Cellica. She is drenched in sweat from overusing her artifact and started wobbling around as the dizziness started to hit her like a train. Rydel went over and put his arms around her as she is about to fall over to one side.
'Are we safe?' Cellica said quietly and Rydel nodded affirmatively. As far as they know, they came out of the wormhole cloaked, so they should be undetectable from anyone.
'Good...good...' Cellica smiled slightly as she started to shift all her body weight onto Rydel's arm and leaned back, 'let me sleep for a bit...Overuse...overdose...'
Rydel put her gently on the ground and activated his glove to grab a blanket from the nearest bed room. He put it around her and picked her up. She is breathing steadily, so it's nothing too serious except for extreme fatigue. Rydel has been there once or twice during training and it's usually nothing too severe.
'Do you mind looking over at what's happening now for a bit?' Rydel asked as he leaves the room, 'I will just tuck her in a bed.'
'Yeah.' Dolon turned to face forward at the ship as the door closes behind Rydel, 'yeah sure, go make the girl feel comfortable. The good ol' Dolon will do all the hard work here. Yeah that's fine.'
'Now, let's get a bit closer to see what's happening.' Dolon turned on the silent gaseus boosters which are tiny nozzles placed at the edges of the ship. With careful manipulation, they should be able to slow down their spin and get close without anyone noticing. With that in mind, they started moving closer towards the cargo ship.
'What is this power...' From the moment Sir Deva has departed the 'mother-ship' of the organization, Zel has been looking out of the view port to the side of the equipment room to see what exact he is doing.
Lady Lily has mentioned that his artifact's ability is to move things, so Zel is curious to see what this implied telekinesis power actually is.
He uses it well. The artifact within him sounded rather impressed and also nervous as it watches the display of shear will, power and control from within Zel.
The artifact is certainly not one of the easier artifact to use and master, but he seemed to be at least moon, or even a small planet level righ now...
'What do you mean?' Zel asked, 'Did you know about his power already? Why didn't you tell me anything?'
No, kid. Don't try to use me as a dictionary. The artifact replied disappointingly. I don't remember anything in particular, but I can see one artifact used well when I see one.
'I can't argue with that...' Zel swallowed slightly, he wasn't sure exactly if it is truly a spatial manipulation artifact, but it definitely has an effect on the surrounding space, as evident by the cargo ship floating aimlessly in front of him.
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