Risen: Shatterverse

A Good Idea in all the Worst Ways

A couple more moments went by with the power node looming large in my forward scans. Then I was popping out into open space.

Instantly I slammed on the brakes and readjusted my visual scanning for the sudden increase in light. It took a moment since I had been flying in complete blackout conditions this entire time, using only sensors to guide me. When they adjusted, my eyes then treated me to something I had never seen before.

It was a miniature sun, for lack of a better description. A seething ball of blue-white gas about the size of Central Park in New York in diameter, with visible coronal loops lashing over its surface and a low, audible buzz of plasma discharge. It hovered on an invisible cushion of compressed negative gravity, bracketed by curved metal frames that looked like they not only contained and held the miniature sun in place but gathered the energy it pumped out from its barely controlled fusion process.

Now like I said, I hadn't seen such a thing before. But using a miniature sun as a power source wasn't new. The Vanguard did it with their moon-sized heavy battleships, giving their primary weapons enough juice to blast entire planets apart when several of them were fired at once. While I hadn't actually seen one of those either with my naked eyes, I had seen enough archival video handed over by the Vanguard High Command that I knew what it looked like.

Yet those had all been yellow stars, the middle-of-the-road variety that provided medium power and heat to systems like Earth's. Medium power and more easily controlled, from what I had read.

This star was a blue-white, one of the most powerful in the spectrum. And, if I was to judge by the size of the collector/containment vanes which sparkled with shielding and overflowing radiation, significantly larger and more complex than the ones the Vanguard used, it was much harder to control. Not to mention, it'd make a pretty big bang if we blew the damn thing up.

The shard must've been thinking the same thing.

- Destroying the power core would cause significant damage, - it noted in Legion's typically understated way. - You will certainly also be destroyed, along with our foothold. Possibly even the entire planet. -

I glanced behind me to see several metal beasts first enlarge then claw their way out of the hole I had smashed into the hollow globe that was the power core.

- Well, I'm open to options, Legion, - I said, turning to face the beasts as they crawled along the core's outer surface. As soon as they figured out how to fly, then I was in real trouble. At least if they did, I'd have plenty of room to maneuver. The buffer space between the core's outer wall and the miniature sun at its heart was easily twice the diameter of that harnessed star. Yet again, even at full neo-shell size, I was being dwarfed by the immensity of the Collector's constructs.

- One way or another we're going to need to cut the terraformer off from its primary power source so we can bring it down. - I pulled my attention away from the beasts to focus again on the heart of the core once more.

As expected with the level of tech the Collector had at its disposal, there wasn't anything visible in the way of conduits leading away from the brackets. With a mental note of where the beasts were positioned relative to my own, I switched back to scanning to see if I could pick something up in a different spectrum.

Ah! There they were: phased magnetic conduits hiding just out of synch with the visible spectrum, channeling the star's energy output from the metal frames to indented receptacles placed at regular intervals around the star's collector/containment like giant, pulsating eels filled with scintillating light and motion. They were easily a couple hundred meters in diameter themselves but looked like threads when compared to the entire framework.