Recordings from the Holocron of Kira Keldav – Session 15

   As usual, this consists of Kira’s player log with additional information added so it can serve as a general log as well.

   We spent our time occupying ourselves as we waited for our ID’s and for our ship to be repaired. I got a hair cut and some hair dye for whenever I do finally take on my ID. Purchasing another ID for the ship was also straight forward.

   When I got back from them I found Ben and Shipwreck arguing about stealing lightsabers. This plan wasn’t a smart one to begin with, but I really took issue when they began smacking each other and calling each other stupid. I have enough damn issues to deal without my party acting like children. One of them protested that they didn’t start it. I don’t care who started it, I’ll end it.

   OK, it WAS – as Ben was insisting – a stupid idea, given that it was based on the false assumption that some lightsabers were inherently more powerful than others. It was impractical anyway, given that most lightsabers were in the hands of powerful force-users, but that was still no reason to act like children.

   The new ID’s included:

•    Matthias (Kira). A mislaid Apprentice of Hedi Master Groas. Matthias was given to a wandering Hedi Master at a young age by his family. Matthias has largely spent his childhood trying to learn about the Force while keeping his Master out of trouble as they travelled from world to world. His Master would frequently disappear for reasons that are poorly understood for lengthy periods of time only to turn up again at the oddest times. Unfortunately, his Master has not been seen in the last two years and presumed missing or dead. Matthias is now alone in the galaxy with no idea who his family is or where his Master has gone this time.
•    Dan Jabu (Ben). A professional construction welder and inspector from the edge, who had been cast adrift from an elderly rim freighter and had been fortunate enough to be retrieved by a ship from considerably closer to the center of the galaxy.
•    Sun Low (Lazlo). A professional pilot in-between jobs and traveling to find work. Low has done some work around Coruscant and the Core Worlds, on everything from in-system taxis to freight. Low has picked up a lot of the relevant information from Handell, and can supply lots of random details about his experiences and contacts in case he needs to “prove it”.
•    Artian (Handell). Handell simply got a different name. It wasn’t like there weren’t plenty of tramp freighter pilots in the galaxy.
•    Veria Oshan (Telera). A rebellious daughter of a an outer-rim Jedi, Veria was not herself a Jedi – but had been raised by one, knew the basics of using a lightsaber, and
•    Morganthi Oso (Khadim). A mercenary-bodyguard-bounty-hunter-thug, with very few details. In the middle of a Sith War there was no shortage of such individuals knocking around the galaxy – although even cosmetic changes to the armor couldn’t do all that much to disguise it’s origins if a search was run in the archives. Fortunately, there were millions of sets of armor scattered around the galaxy – almost all in the hands of various mercenaries.
•    Lin Vardul (Alys). A trader and smuggler from the Sith world of Colanth – a barren piece of rock with nothing to hold anyone competent enough to get off. Lin left as soon as she was able. She worked on passenger liners for a while (and stole) until she had enough money for a ship down payment. She’s roamed Sith space ever since. When asked why she doesn’t go to Republic space, she states that you can get away with so much more in Sith territory. Lin is not a nice person. While she certainly doesn’t display the ruthlessness of a Sith, she won’t lift a finger to help others unless there’s something in it for her. She’s a hard bargainer and a hard drinker. Mostly, she answers to the almighty credit.
•    GR05-ER (10-CH) picked up a gardening program, made a few cosmetic adjustments, and made sure that his “documentation” accounted for most of his weapons systems – or at least what could easily be scanned of them past his more subtle antidetection screens – as gardening and other tools. After all, there were trees aboard.
•    Saldian (Shipwreck). A sensor officer from the Sith-space merchant fleet who had been cashiered for fighting and insubordination, Saldian had been putting his expertise with sensors to work as a treasure hunter – and, according to some of the information in his background, might not be above generating his own wrecks and treasure hordes with a little outright piracy.
•    The kids just got papers with new names. There were trillions of stray kids in the galaxy.
•    They gave the Asrai some new paint, a selection of interchangeable transponder identities, and a new set of papers as the Karias, a tramp freighter/treasure hunter out of Sovanin, an obscure little planet near the edge of the civilized galaxy which had – in a series of natural disasters – recently lost a lot of records.

   The Furipedes seemed to have completed the repairs to the ship by the time that the ID’s were ready. I had to admit that I was impressed with the quality of work they did. Ben was less than enthused and insisted on checking over every system personally. Still, having a maintenance crew of hundreds at virtually no expense was a very attractive notion…

   We ended up taking off to complete a full test flight operation to satisfy Ben. Power production was up 43%, and the hyperdrive was showing a 22% efficiency improvement. I don’t know a lot about ship systems, but those numbers sounded real good to me. I think hiring some of these to work as maintenance crew was prudent. It did manage to catch Ben’s attention that these were no amateurs.

   Test flight completed, we grabbed our passengers, the rest of the crew and headed off to the Furipede world. The hyperspace jump was uneventful and one of the smoothest I have ever ridden. I could get used to this.

   We dropped out of hyperspace far outside the orbit of the planet. That feeling of foreboding came back again and I think Handell sensed it too. Scans of the planet revealed several dozen massive objects in various polar orbits around the planet. Several hundred thousand tons or more. What was really odd was the fact they were only 15 meters in diameter.

   That limited the options to neutronium, condensed matter, and monopolium. Anything incorporating that much of any of those was not something to idly mess with. Also ominous was the fact we could pick up massive power outputs coming from the things.

   Right, best not to get too close to those things. Unfortunately we didn’t know for sure was defined close with these things. We ended up falling back on the simplest solution and chucked rocks at the things at various distances to see what happened.

   Watching one of the satellites suck the rock inside and then emit an intense burst of neutrinos was not comforting to say the least. Ben’s jaw dropped and he was muttering something about “total conversion systems”. I had no clue what he was saying beyond that the amount of power these things had available was immense.

   Ben was shocked not because the principle was unknown, but because it was hugely expensive. A hypermatter reactor used a stream of normal matter “fuel” to extract power from the dark energy field of the cosmos, losing the matter to neutron conversions. A neutronium-fueled hypermatter reactor was far smaller for a given power output, needed far less maintenance, and needed a lot less matter for “fuel”. Of course, they were bloody dangerous; if you lost shielding on the neutronium supply it would go up in a total-conversion blast. Since there was no shortage of normal matter in the galaxy to use for fuel, and the system cost about a thousand times as much as an (already grossly expensive) hypermatter system, no one ever used them – unless you wanted a system with a massive power output which could run practically forever with little or no maintenance.

   How old were these things?

   I also managed to get a sense of life onboard those things during the process. I would say it felt like there were six very faint life presences onboard each one. A maintenance crew in stasis? Since we determined that there were none orbiting that were nonfunctional and that the number of Orbs was smaller now than in the past (at least according to Handell and Shipwreck, who said that their current coverage left quite a few temporary gaps, which didn’t seem likely to be how they were designed), it seemed likely that the things were self-destructing when they became nonfunctional.

   Based on what explanations I was getting from Ben, this was a fantastic level of expense to go to. Why in the galaxy would someone go to this level to keep something quarantined? If it is the creatures on the planet that pose the problem, then surely just blowing it up had to be much simpler. It was about the only thing in the system…

   Attention turned to the star we were orbiting. The life-presence in the star seemed to be very old, tired and dying. Sensor scans gave us 50 to 60 years estimate on how long until the star went nova; it had apparently left the main sequence some time ago. That should be enough time to work an evacuation I think.

   Handell felt he could give us 48 hours on the surface by diving between the satellites sensor cones. He would really rather we kept it to 36 hours though. I agreed, we didn’t want to be on the receiving end of a major bombardment from whatever kind of weapons the blasted things used. Dropping in low, we hovered over the surface and let the Furipedes on board out to find the rest of them. It wasn’t a good world for poking around in person; too much radiation.

   Eventually, a couple of “individuals” appeared. In reality this was several thousand of the things amassed outside the ship. This was a bit unnerving to say the least. Shipwreck determined they were sending out radio signals of some sort either to communicate or coordinate themselves. With some fiddling we were able to get the ship’s radio to read and translate it enough that we could follow along – or at least supplement force-based communications. It still took hours for even the simplest things.

   Apparently a ship had landed a few months back. The occupants had poked around for whatever reason (probably looking for artifacts to sell), and one or two of the Furipede collectives had seized the opportunity to sneak aboard. Out in space, the (presumed) smugglers had gotten disabled – probably by trying to cut it too close on their escape past the satellite systems – and drifted until they’d been salvaged and brought back to Nar Shadda. There they’d started hijacking more vessels via fragments of themselves to come back here and evacuate the planet. The offer to assist as long as they were willing to tolerate being put into stasis for the journey was accepted. I even offered to make our fabrication facilities available to the Furipedes in exchange for helping expand them. The Furipedes seemed agreeable – and apparently had traditions or memories of working as maintenance staff long ago. They were aware of the force, but generally couldn’t use it themselves; for one of them to be force-sensitive, most of their subunits would need to be – which was incredibly unlikely.

   How old were the standard technologies? And how old could a collective entity get to be anyway? They know about the stasis field technology, and were willing to tolerate the insanity risks. They even knew what caused it; it was when there was an accidental personality-exchange across timelines. It usually wasn’t a problem for them, since a few units with confused memories could easily be straightened out by the rest.

   Wait, what? Oh never mind.

   Ben, however, started calculating madly… That had to mean that probability-time was one of the accessible hyperspace dimensions – and that said some very odd things about where ships with malfunctioning hyperdrives might wind up.

   That got us into a discussion on the Furipedes origins and biology. They were silicon based instead of carbon based which I don’t think surprised any of us given what we already knew. They seemed to have an incredible tolerance range; radiation, temperature, atmosphere – although they apparently couldn’t breed too effectively over most of that range. Oddly enough, Jarik couldn’t tell us much about their biology or tolerances.

   How could that be? The medical knowledge training imparted was supposedly universal. Why didn’t it apply? For that matter, why did droids have to have programs for each species and each variant? Was this some sort of artifact having to deal with the panspermia origin to life in the galaxy? That would explain why this species didn’t seem to be included as these Furipedes have no common ancestors with us.

   What about other silicon based species? Records indicate there are no silicon based species, but numerous reports of energy beings? What is going on here? Either someone has been on a major genocidal campaign and managed to eliminate all traces of any silicon based life or something else is going on here.

   Wait, panspermia is a theory about life in this galaxy. Is it possible that these things are from outside the galaxy and thereby immigrants long ago? What memories the Furipedes had of that far back indicated they had been on a long journey. Well an intergalactic trip would take a long time even with hyperdrive.

   When I learned what range of conditions these things could survive, I got worried. Furipedes were more versatile than most bacteria. Given the number of uninhabited worlds available to them, they could quickly outnumber the rest of the sapient species in the galaxy put together. That, and the competition for resources likely to ensue at that point wouldn’t bode well for the carbon based life in the galaxy.

   Do I just leave them here? Unfortunately the cat is out of the bag as we’ve already confirmed other ships have been here picking these things up. Never minds the fact there is a population already on Nar Shadda that may well prove impossible to dig out completely. Probably best to move on to damage control then.

   In that case, let’s try to portray ourselves as cooperative and lay down some ground rules on what’s an acceptable place to inhabit and what is not. Suitable worlds without an existing biosphere should work nicely for the time being. Hmm, where do we know of one we can use?

   It occurred to me that there was a planet that seemed semi-suitable in the Archegyph system. Alright, we took a shipment of Furipedes to Archegyph II and left another batch with the base there to work on ramping up capacity. Hopefully between them and technicians we hired back on Alderaan, we can get something going soon. While Ben made noises about evacuation logistics, I felt it best to let the Furipedes work it out and prioritize production.

   At Archegyph, there was a message drone waiting for them – with the first batch of selected entries from the Jedi archives on odd force phenomena. The entries there included:

•  
  •    On a world called Shelvor, roughly ten thousand years ago, the Sith had apparently been running an experiment in which they attempted to take non-sensitives, force them into psychic rapport with a group of Sith, and imprint force training and Sith powers on them. Most of the subjects had died, it had apparently worked once or twice, and then something went seriously wrong, killed the Sith, and wiped out the population of the planet. There had been a few reports of people turning into some sort of super-predators, but no one had come back from attempting to visit for some centuries – by which point it was a dead world. It was STILL uninhabited.
  •    Valorin Tivell – an asteroid colony named after it’s extremely wealthy founder – had been the location of an experiment in attempting to negate Sith powers. When it was next visited, it seemed like the place had aged roughly half a million years, and everyone and everything there was long dead. Worse, most of the records were gone, apparently also due to the passage of time.
  •    A planet called Kahranoth had powerful predators, that reportedly either negated or hid from the force and could paralyze people at range – right through vehicle armor. They would then pry out their victims at leisure. As icing on the cake, they were very strong and fast. (Ben promptly proposed transparent gerbil balls for that, with lift generators on a deadman switch to take you out of range if you got paralyzed; the group told him maybe later).
  •    On a colony world called Morharlwell, now well within Sith space, Jedi researchers had been learning to suppress their force abilities. However, when the colony was hit by a major natural disaster, the Jedi had come out to “assist” as Sith – and had kicked off the 18’th Sith War roughly 11,000 years ago. The Jedi actually had a theory on that one; they felt that the feedback-driven nature of the dark side meant that it would recover from a suppression-effect much faster – so if a Jedi was practicing power-suppression, and then – possibly out of pure reflex – attempted to draw on his or her powers, he or she might well fall to the dark side with the very best of intentions. Since then, that field of research had been banned. There might be something there – but the Jedi did not feel it was worth Sith War to find whatever it might be.
  •    Quite recently, a mere eighty years ago, a private foundation – the Shar Research Group – had been working with some members of one of the non-jedi traditions at an island-based research center. Whatever their research had been, it had resulted in the sudden death of all the plant and animal life on the island except for a few massive fungal growths, melted patches of sand on some of the beaches – with footprints in them – a weird aura which had prevented the place from being resettled, and the disappearance of everyone at the station. The planet was well within the Republic borders at least and – at a mere eighty years – there might be some evidence left.
  •    There were several other items on the list – worlds with force-dead spots, dangerous force creatures or force negators, and some non-jedi force experiments that had wound up killing everyone in the area – but those four looked like the most promising possibilities.

   Of course, they already knew about the odd behavior of the Force near black holes. (They seemed to warp the ability to target things with the force near them, were impossible – or at least endlessly confusing – to probe, and were reported to negate some aspects of the force).

   Ben was still excited over the fact that the stasis field modulated force presences. That was almost the first technological-force interaction known, although – come to think of it – it was very hard to reach ships in hyperspace with the force too, even if major disturbances could be sensed there.

   And there was always the possibility of checking out the Sith Archives some more.

   At which point our first batch of notes from the Jedi arrived. Most interesting or likely to prove productive leads were the predators of Kahranoth and the Shar Research Group. The predators sounded to be more than a bit of a handful with their Force negation powers, intense strength and speed. On the other hand, they sounded like a prime candidate for what we knew of Anti-Force powers.

   The Shar Research Group had the advantage over the other experiments in several respects: it was in Republic space, seemed to match what we knew of Anti-Force abilities, and was very recent – being only 80 years ago. All the other experiment sites were either very old or sites likely to have suffered bombardment during one of the wars. We may have to try them later, but living specimens and recent experiments were worth investigating first.

   Since we couldn’t come up with any easy way to handle the predators at the moment that didn’t involve giant rodent balls, it was off to the Shar Research site first.

   Basic scenario that we got was that the island the group was working on was found with all the plant and animal life dead. Footprints were melted into the beaches and massive fungal growths were found all over the place eating the remains. An aura of despair permeated the entire place. All this happened on a fairly normal Republic world called Jageroth. Well, at least there we wouldn’t suffer for lack of support should we need it.

   The Landing was fairly smooth, with only minimal issues with the Port Authority. I did get the officials recognizing my name in connection to Mrs Beasley’s rantings on the network; apparently she was getting onto the galactic networks as a semi-comedy act. Surprisingly, that got me some sympathy as I told them she wasn’t acting, she actually believed that stuff and would call the police on me over it. We let our passengers from Nar Shadda disembark after consulting with the authorities.

   The authorities gave us a run down on their investigation of the island. Well that gave us a rough outline of the island and where to go, including where to find one of the bodies. Plus the authorities informed us about the predators inhabiting the island as a warning. Alys got that twinkle in her eye that I knew meant her attention was now elsewhere. We elected to start off at the beach where the footprints were and proceed from there on foot. We got transport there and began our investigation.

   Alys was pleased… Massive eight-legged land-and-sea going predators with climbing claws! In packs! And they were even edible, even if they were supposed to be rather strongly flavored! This might have attractions beyond solving mysteries!

   The footprints were not hard to find in the sand; the police at the time had set up a barrier to preserve them as a sort of monument to mystery… Tracing the footprints to the corpse we heard about was another simple matter of following the glass indentions. Some measurement work managed to identify the crumbling skeletal remains (also preserved locally as part of an investigation that had gone nowhere) as probably being one of the researchers – albeit with some pretty odd distortions. Strangely, it didn’t look like the skeleton had burned, despite all the evidence of massive thermal energies. High speed regeneration maybe? But that would still leave indications of burning on the remains then. The research station had had a shuttle too, even if it hadn’t been found. Where could it have gone?

   I was about to direct the group towards the research center when Lazlo suddenly announced he was going to contact dead spirits in the area. I was certainly against the idea as who knows what sort of vampiric creature he might be able to attract if what I think happened here occurred. Alys moved to inject him with the Force suppressant but Lazlo scared her off with a swipe and a growl.

   We better keep an eye on this one, he seems intent on using those abilities of his regardless of the cost. It’s only a matter of time before he does something really catastrophic. My attention on the matter was broken when I detected that Lazlo was successful. Whatever monstrosity he stirred up knew we were here and was coming fast.

   I pulled out my lightsaber and shield and fell into a defensive stance as this burning human ran out of the forest towards us. He grabbed Lazlo and proceeded to shake him violently before flinging him into a tree. The figure then began to gesture wildly and looked to be saying something inaudible. He didn’t look like he was burning, despite clearly being on fire.

   Attempts to communicate led to the conclusion that while it was likely whoever this was could potentially understood us, we were moving at such different time rates that effectively talking to each other was quite impossible. Gesturing and accelerating myself seemed to help a little, but the gap in speeds was too great to overcome like this.

   Our burning guest then proceeded to leave, come back, and then fell asleep on the ground in front of us. Well, this was certainly unexpected. How in the galaxy did the investigation team miss this? Alys and Lazlo went off to hunt the local wildlife while Ben and I remained behind to figure out what was going on.

   Our burning friend stopped burning as he fell asleep. Indeed, once he was asleep, the air around him turned cold and began to freeze on him. Oddly enough, this didn’t really produce the sensation of cold to the touch despite it being composed of frozen atmospheric gases. Within minutes we had a large block of ice encasing the person.

   Well, that explained how he might have been missed; the block looked a heck of a lot like just another chunk of rock and it didn’t register anything but the faintest of lifesigns – about what you’d get from lichen. Add a handful of dust and dirt, and you could spend months looking around and never notice it. Tracing him back by following the lines of flames, it looked like he’d been “asleep” in a small valley with a stream.

   Is this some sort of hibernation sequence thing, like he has spent all the energy he had keeping himself accelerated and must now regain it from the environment? Had that killed all the plants and animals? But why would it spare the fungi? They had metabolisms too, they were just slow. I had no clue, but Ben and Shipwreck went to work making sensor scans and making theories. They found another one in a hydroponics facility inside the lab and also found notes on what sort of experiment they were trying to run.

   The experiment looked to be trying to mimic Force speed acceleration techniques in normal people. Using a Force sensitive, they would try to synchronize the normal person’s biorythms to their own. Well I would say they succeeded, but failed to maintain control over the whole thing.

   While this was certainly interesting, it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. I could learn what I needed to by studying this and inferring what I wanted to know, but it wasn’t going to be straight forward at all. Well if it was easy, someone else would have figured it out a long time ago. Sadly, I am just not good at this sort of thing.

   Ben took to the problem though with a great deal of enthusiasm. He had the second person in the hydroponics facility dragged back to the first and began running all sorts of scans and experiments on them. After conferring with Alys, I called the local authorities to inform them we found survivors. At first they were a little incredulous that it was even possible. I told them to come and see for themselves.

   Meanwhile Ben was analyzing… It looked like, when they were awake, their personal timerate ran at many thousands of times normal. When they lost consciousness, it went the other way – to perhaps one one-hundred thousandth of normal. That neatly explained why they hadn’t been found; something had happened, one or two minutes later they were utterly exhausted, they’d gone to sleep (very effectively disguised as rocks) – and then they’d be ready to wake up again in eighty or ninety years. Right about now in fact. When they woke, the abrupt rise in molecular energies would blast away the frozen air – and they’d be free to act.

   And then Lazlo, who had learned some special techniques for probing minds in stasis, had poked one of them and brought him up to consciousness – and the man had headed for the potential source of help, and been badly frustrated when Lazlo just stood around like a statue.

   While Kira was fuming over the stupidity of the universe and Ben was analyzing, Lazlo and Alys went hunting – and were ambushed by one of the predator-creatures swinging down from a tree while holding on with it’s back legs. Who would have thought that a sea-creature could climb like that?

   Worse, it was a lookout for the pack. This had wound up with them bagging a trophy or two, but Alys in sick bay again with massive bits to the leg. Fortunately, Jarik had been ready to provide medical advice over the communicators again.

   Jedi from a neighboring world came by as well. They thought we were a bit crazed to be poking around here and claiming to have found survivors. One day, people are going to learn to take what I say seriously, and then I am going to pull the practical jokes.

   Ben surrounded the second guy with stasis field generators and clocks and then had Lazlo wake him up. The field generators were labeled with buttons saying “to slow down time, press here”. Once awoken, he began to turn on stasis generators left and right until he had about two thirds activated. That got him to a more normal timerate compared to us and we got to explaining and exchanging stories.

   It seemed that they’d run their experiment – variation number two hundred or so – and the sun had gone out, or become nothing but a dim reddish spot. They had – not entirely unreasonably – interpreted this as an attack by a Sith superweapon or some sort of catastrophe. Most of them had gotten aboard their shuttle and headed for the spaceport, including (unfortunately), both of the force-sensitives and their chief scientist with the project database. Slightly beyond the shoreline, the shuttle had suddenly flattened and then shattered like glass, to fall slowly into the sea.

   The five who’d stayed behind for the next run had found that the bizarre interface-barrier contracted as the plants died; so they’d rigged the hydroponics setup with a fusion generator. Time had passed; one went a little mad and dived into the ocean to swim for it. He’d apparently died there. One had walked off into the woods and vanished one day; presumably he’d gone outside the interface-zone and fallen asleep. One had suicided. Finally, the last fellow had turned down the lights a bit on the hydroponics (well, the plants did better with a brief break from the light) and gone to sleep one evening – and suddenly woken up with the group around him and a lot of buttons to push after an instant or two of fearful jostling.

   OK, so EVERYTHING on the island had gone into high-speed – and remained there as long as there were enough living things to maintain it. But with the sun only supplying energy at the normal rate, and without rain, the plants died, the high-speed area contracted, and finally – at some critical point – the last fellow had passed outside the maintained area and dropped into stasis-sleep while the plants died in the hydroponics area and the last of the field (or whatever the hell you called it) faded.

   There was much consternation, claims that we were crazy, pointing to calendars and finally acceptance. This too, seems to be a recurring theme with us rescuing people stuck in stasis or whatever after however many years have passed. At least the Jedi and the authorities believed us now when we said there were survivors.

   More experiments passed that made little sense to me but seem to matter a lot to Ben. I was sent up in the Asrai to feel the strength of the background Force. I had to admit I was surprised to find out the strength varied somewhat depending on how close I was to the planet and the local star. Ben also determined that our friends were not connected to the local Force background at all. Well that was interesting, but I wasn’t sure what that meant.

   He eventually muttered something about hyperspace interfaces and asked to take one of the two guys onto my ship for an experiment on taking them into hyperspace. Sensing something bad was likely to occur from taking a hyperspace anomaly into hyperspace, I elected to remain behind. Hours later, I learned the experiment was a success and that person was “cured”. Problem was, my ship’s hyperdrive was destroyed in the process and the Asrai would need to be towed back to port since the fusion plant had overheated.

   I just got the damn thing fixed and he’s broken it again! Even after the Furipedes souped it up. The Jedi were willing to pay to have it repaired, but it was the principle of the matter. Never mind that once it was fixed it was time to destroy it again to “cure” the other guy.

   We got the other guy “cured” and the hyperdrive repaired a final time on the Jedi’s tab. Ben was muttering again about hyperspace and subspace interactions which I understood none of. Alys apparently had her fill of the local wildlife and Lazlo was going to need an eye kept on.

   I really want to find a way to disable those Orbs around the Furipede world so that we might capture it and learn what we can from it. I also think the predators of Kahranoth are the best bet I have for learning what I want to learn about the Anti-Force. But I need to find a way to capture one despite how deadly they are. Requiring multiple Jedi to kill them is not reassuring, as capturing is usually more problematic than killing.

   The image of using giant neutronium shells from the Orbs to protect ourselves against the predators was an amusing thought though.

   Ben, meanwhile, was reviewing his hyperspace physics… Hyperspace had four temporal dimensions, one of which did not allow movement (possibly correlating to the arrow of time) and three which did. At least one of those looked to be involved with personal time, and another with probability lines. While planet-bound clocks usually agreed pretty well, hyperspace travel involved minor time-shifts depending on the engine tuning, which also affected the subjective duration of the trip and the arrival time. Speed, of course, had nothing to do with time…

   Subspace, on the other hand, had four physical dimensions, and no time – although it did have sequence with respect to normal space. That was why subspace communications were fast, but needed a lot of relays; they lost power with the fourth power of the distance.

   The stasis generators affected a fixed radius that depended on the design of the radiating element and on grids (made of metal doped with monopoles and tiny crystals) which constrained the effect and acted as a resonating chamber. How much the field slowed time depended on the power input and how well the grids resonated – but the field only affected living creatures.

   Could that possibly have any relationship to the old Red Shift problem? There were traces of a “Red Shift” at six billion light years, it started becoming really noticeable at eight billion light years, and it became REALLY massive from there on out to the observation limit at about fifteen billion light years. No one had ever explained it.