To Hell and Back (Hellworlder pirates)

Ch27 The Confederacy

The Confederacy

The Astaroth cleared the berthing space and maneuverer along their assigned flight path, typically the Astaroth would just fly into the safe exit corridors of space and warp away from Femeri at speed. But the point Astarte had chosen for the Hellworlder fleet to assemble wasn't in the Orion arm of the Milky Way, it was in the core sector, and to get there she would first need to pass through what the Union referred to as the Wrethren Sector. Which meant that unless she wanted to spend years traveling through uncharted undeveloped space they would need to rely on the Unions network of massive star gates.

A physicist who worked on the ships warp fields had explained that they weren't actually star gates, the portals used by the pivotal tv series turned seven movie blockbuster saga supposedly worked via a one-way wormhole that turned people into pure energy and then somehow reconstructed said energy back into a person without any loss in mass or any changes in the delicate molecules and proteins that made a person work, somehow. These massive ship sized rings somehow connected two points in space so that passing through one side resulted in a ship coming out on the other side of the galaxy without any loss in matter, energy, or time, somehow. The physics was beyond her, all she knew is that it was a massive warp gate that met its massive power requirements via a network of arrays surrounding a nearby dwarf star, hence the apt name of star gate.

These massive nearly half kilometer sized rings were how the interstellar economy thrived. Cradle worlds a hundred thousand light years apart who should have had no business trading with each other linked up together via this network of star gates. These gates were the Unions key to galactic control, because only they seemed to understand the hyper advanced mechanics involved in making and operating the massive star gates, and they used that knowledge to exert control over interstellar society. Messages and data half a galaxy apart relied on these gates, warp field emitters and fusion reactors made in the core worlds flowed through these gates to run the mighty engines of freighters that connected distant planets. Orbital factories produced modular station sections to be shipped through these gates to create refueling and redistribution hubs like Parox in between industrial worlds. Standard food rations produced on colossal orbital hydroponics stations supplemented the growing needs of station dwelling people and less agricultural worlds. In turn, the far-flung worlds on the other side of the gates mined, refined, and shipped raw metals and chemicals to the core worlds so planetary factories produced cheap consumer goods in the mega tons. Massive twelve-kilometer freighters brought the products of the developed core worlds out to distant worlds and returned loaded with raw goods to be transferred onto smaller ships and taken through the star gates that couldn't fit the massive freighters.

And for a distant but rapidly expanding sector like Orion that meant a very long line. Expanding the rings, or making more would have been exponentially more expensive than setting up the first two had been, so the gates out of Orion were choked with traffic and the Astaroth had to wait six hours before they were allowed to traverse through the ring, the trip took only a minute or two, and the moment they passed through they were hailed with orders and flight plans from Wrethren station. A station that made Femeri seem miniscule, and the pure chaos of ships that swarmed around the station looked like a storm of metal. They followed their flight plan and joined the slow flow of traffic moving through the dedicated exit ring that was three times the size of the gate they just traveled through, and after a hour wait they once again traveled thousands of lightyears in a matter of seconds and arrived in the core sectors. A sector so densely packed with orbital factories, hydroponics, habitable worlds, and terra formed planets, that space didn't feel so large and desolate.

It was like going from the rural country to the heart of a beating metropolis, and made Astarte really appreciate just how out of the way earth was. Pre-contact humans had once wondered where all the aliens were, they had a rough estimate for how many potentially habitable worlds lay within the stars of the milky way but saw no signs whatsoever of extraterrestrial life, the fermi paradox. No one realized that earth was, galactically speaking, located within a hinterlands. Their satellites were advanced enough to make out distant galaxies like andromeda, but if you pointed every deep space telescope at a great nearby hub like Wrethren you would get a blip of undecipherable luminosity that could have come from a million other things. Even the radio signals being sent out only reached a scant 300 lightyears by first contact, given that the nearest inhabited world to Earth was Torwen about a thousand lightyears away, it would have taken many years before humans naturally discovered that they weren't alone. It had been the Union discovering primitive warp signatures from earth that had actually drawn the attention of the distant behemoth of interstellar society.