Nobody said Rock Hauling would be easy. Throughout settled space, terraforming is the fuel that drives the interstellar economy. For some worlds, this is easy. For others, lacking resources, or on the periphery, this is an unattainable dream. Throug...
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XIV TOMAS VII
Tomas's initial fears had mostly faded by the time they got within visual distance of the LUMAR array. For the first few hours, he'd worried about what might happen. By the sixth hour, he'd gone to his cabin and been lulled into a drugged-up sleep. When he'd woken up, three hours before it was time to meet these resistance fighters, proxy militiamen, terrorists or whatever they were, he just wanted to get it over with and get back to the mission at hand. Now, even that had given way, as he got his first close-up look at the LUMAR array.
He'd seen them before, as well as holograms, pictures, and as many depictions of them in mass media as he'd cared to, but these, probably the most important pieces of Maker technology in all two hundred-some stars that made up Solace, were still amazing to him.
They really didn't look like anything. They loitered at the very center of the lagrange point, a spot fixed in space where tidal and gravitational forces kept anything there at one unchanging point in the solar system's orbit relative to other objects, like planets and asteroids. The central hub spun slowly.
It looked like a vast, double-sided lifting claw. Perpetually self-repairing and throwing off truly ridiculous amounts of energy, nobody actually knew what the various parts of the vast arrays did. According to the Charters of Solace, -the only thing resembling international law- any state or individual actor who tampered with a LUMAR array would be prosecuted to the harshest extent possible, considering what they did if people tried to damage them.
Not many knew. Early on, before the Charters of Mutual Solace were even written, when known space was nothing like the somewhat-functional collection of icily cordial states of today, but instead an anarchic collection of planets all scrabbling for resources and to open new LUMARs with no sense of law or order, during first contact with another of what would eventually become known as the Thirteen Peoples, some idiot or another had tried to blow up an array. If it had been to halt the spread of some polity, or to quarantine a system, no one remembered. There were few records of the incident.
Not only had it repaired itself instantly, but the enigmatic alien machine had simply sent out an EMP burst so massive and widespread that everything electronic in the system down to a primitive toaster had shut down and thousands had died from the electromagnetic interference with their mental processes. Then it had grabbed every ship within range and hauled them into Middlespace. They'd never come out.
So no one messed with them anymore.
On the peripheries of the lagrange point, the individual array pylons spun in their self-contained orbits, throwing off more energy than should have been theoretically possible, with no visible source of fuel.
"Wow." Someone breathed. A moment later he realized it had been himself.
"First time seeing a LUMAR?" From her seat next to his, Dessia grinned at him. "You get used to them after the first few times you use them. Yeah, first time I saw them, probably the first ten times we went through Middlespace, I tried to figure out how they worked. Six hours of nonsensical math and no answer."
