Log Entry 115

The view from my new base of operations, with some of the native avian life in the distance. Those creatures are actually as big as my shuttle, but feed on some of the living clouds that drift across the skies of the planet. This world, and it's two moons are living worlds, and the life on all three share a clear ancestry, based on their genetic information.

Three living worlds, and my new home until I tire of studying the construct. Home itself is still there, and the life I left behind, the garden, is thriving. In truth, the garden has evolved well beyond what I left behind. That is however to be expected. I am at this point some 5000 plus years distant from when I left Home. 5028 years, 7 months, 3 days, and 22.6 hours. To be exact.

This world has many resources, and many forms of complex life. I stopped in the system about three months ago, shortly after discovering it on the construct map and deciding to make it a base of operations. While here on that first trip, I left an automated construction bot on this world, and some mining drones in the system. Now that they are done, I am back to do the finish work and set up shop.

There is a very large landing pad for the Viteză Furie, with enough room for several more ships, a house for me, and planting patches ready for some seed. I'll be doing a planting, and then jumping into the ADoc for some new upgrades to my existing cybernetic systems. One of the things I have traded with my friends for was some new cyber-tech. It is fantastically advanced and will seriously improve my internal power usage. If my existing systems could be considered 5th generation cybernetics, this stuff is 22nd generation. It fully integrates with the host, being me in this case, rather than just grafting onto the host as my current systems do. Based on some of what I have seen when visiting on their ships, I think they have fulled engineered organic upgrades as well, but I cannot blame them for keeping that to themselves.

This down time will give the computers time to finish working on all the data, technologies, and everything else I have scavenged from the wrecks on the construct, traded for with visitors, and pulled out of the construct itself. Once that is done, I am going to be doing a full maintenance sequence on the Viteză Furie and applying some now much needed upgrades.

The upgrades are one of the reasons I set up an aggressive mining mission on the outer, rocky world of the system. It is going to be a very serious upgrade. I will be adding some new engine tech, new hull plating, new drive tech, additional sensor upgrades, upgraded power systems, upgraded weapons systems, and more. I have spent months doing the design work so that it doesn't ruin or break the Viteză Furie, and keeping with the modular mentality of CT in the design of the upgrades. I am ensuring that every module gets the upgrades. That adds a lot of time to the effort, but it is worth it. I trust CTs instincts in the design of the Viteză Furie, and am not going to question his reasoning for doing it that way. The ship has kept me alive and done right by me so far, I am not going to compromise her now.

I am excited to see the end results.

Oddly, this system does not have a gas giant like I thought, although I understand why it seemed like that on the construct map. There is a gas ring, much like an asteroid belt, in the system. It that might coalesce into a gas giant in a few million years, and not a small one either. There is enough material to make it a brown dwarf. The fact is, this system is stable, generally. These inner worlds where I am making my home are finished forming. The outer part of the system however, still seems to be in flux. This means that there are asteroids and comets that take swipes at these worlds from time to time. One every few orbits. As such, I've set up defenses around where I have set up my home. A shield generator I salvaged from one of the wrecks that makes the Viteză Furie's shields look like so much wet paper.

That shield will protect my home, even from a direct hit. I considered putting up satellite weapons, but decided against altering the evolution of this world that much. The life here has evolved with those regular, even really massive impacts, as part of their equation. Unless the impact would seriously place my home at risk, I'm not going to intercede with one of those impactors. I still have monitor satellites in place. I might not stop them, but I do want to see them coming. The shield is absurdly strong, but it takes a time to get there, and eats power. So it is not something I am going to run unless it is needed, and it needs time to charge.

I do still miss Kotth and Lurr, and think about them often. I think about what wonders they must be exploring, and what new things they are discovering. I wonder what they would make of the construct, and all the wrecked ships. How they would interact with my new friends, or many of the other species I have not come into contact with. I do hope they are doing well.

About a month before I made the jump here to my new base, I saw something truly amazing, and a bit terrifying. I was studying one of the many Null-Zones, when more than 10,000 ships appeared in the vicinity of the construct. They were about a quarter of the way around the construct from where I was. There were so many that I stopped counting at 10,000. With that many ships, I hid inside the Null-Zone I had been studying, using my probes, satellites, and drones to watch them. They were clearly of the more angry type of species.

They made many transmissions, making threats and demands, transmitted down to the construct. When they got no response, they attacked. Hundreds of them charging towards the surface, and just as quickly chewed up and spat out by the gravity knots and anomalies near the surface. Two, out of three hundred ships, made it to the surface intact. They disgorged armored troops that were then picked off by the life forms of the construct. They live on its surface unprotected, and as such, they are very hard to hurt. Their weapons angered them more than anything, and the soldiers were shredded.

In response to that, the two ships tried to get back into orbit. Only one made it. The other ripped to shreds and then crushed by a collection of gravity knots. Once that ship had rejoined the others, they began firing on the surface. Massive energy weapons, as well as missiles, thrown at the surface, and any apparent structures. They vaporized continent sized swaths of the surface, and annihilating several wrecks I was going to investigate when the gravity knots in the area calmed down.

I suppose that the construct had enough of that, and it retaliated, and revealed to me yet more mysteries. A collection of small moons, a few hundred kilometers across, shifted from the other space they had been in, back into this space. I don't know how better to describe it. It was very similar to them being in a jump space of sorts and dropping back into normal space.

These moons were weapon platforms, and sliced up the fleet in seconds. Not a single ship survived intact. I checked. I got some fascinating data from the remains of those ships, a few pieces of interesting tech, and a few new weapons.

As if waiting for me to finish. The moment I moved away to continue my study, those moons shifted back to where they had been, disappearing from view and from normal space. The debris that was left behind from that fleet was then suddenly at the center of a massive gravity knot, crushing it all into one spot, and then crashed into the surface.

Note to self. Don't anger the construct.

I'm not sure what worries me more. The fact that there are those weapon platforms, and that the construct creators thought that would be needed; or the fact that the construct seems to have the ability to control and manipulate the gravity knots. Which suggests that some of the places and wrecks I cannot get to because of those knots, are that way because the construct doesn't want me to go there.

I can only barely detect where those weapon moons are, and unlike the anchors, they are mobile. The kind of dimensional shifting that they use is different than the anchors. They also don't have the gravity force lines connecting them to the construct, but appear to simply orbit in semi-normal patterns. At least as far as I can tell, though that's based on inference. I think there are about a hundred, but there could be thousands, or only 10. I cannot pin them down for long before they move and I lose track of them. They don't move in an easily detectable manner. I am struggling to map out their paths.

A last point. I mentioned that I hid in the Null-Zone. That is because the sphere of gravity provides a cloak for anything inside them. Unless you are actively broadcasting your presence in some way, you would have to look really hard to see something inside it, and unless you are looking through one of the gaps, any image would be drastically distorted.

Well. All my upgrades to the house have been programmed and the bots have started working. Time for me to finish up the planting and other final items, then hop into the ADoc for my upgrades.