Wonders of the enemy homeworld

With mr. Firth on sick leave for his frayed nerves, I took the liberty to join an exploratory ARC fleet into a Drifter home system. The fleet's mission was firstly to see if any of the "connection harmonics" might have been captured by Drifters and still could be found in their battleships in their home, and secondly to see if there are any new types of anomalies in the system.

My role was to scan down the signatures in the system, something that the Indagatrix does well. It was my first excursion into a Drifter wormhole. Even though I have seen and read about them, seeing it by one's own 'eyes' or ship scanners is a different thing. 

The most awe-inspiring site is the location where Tyrannos Tekton is operating on a vast debris field. It seems to be incapsulated in some sort of spacetime distortion bubble, that creates a dome of light and curtain clouds above and below. The debris are remnants of some megastructure, and electric discharges can be seen between them. 

There was a vast number of wormholes in the system, well over fifty. It took a little while before they were all triangulated. These link to systems in our cluster that have a Jove observatory, and are created artificially. In addition there are some other anomalies. Among them structures that might have been jump gates of some sort, like this one:

The ring now contains a violent, untraversable wormhole. As the Drifters meddle more and more with space and time in their systems to create paths into our worlds, rifts like this might proliferate, and end up engulfing their entire system... Perhaps to find ways of undoing such damage, they have research facilities on ultrahigh-energy physics, using an array of accelerator rings hundreds of kilometers long, one feeding the next, in a pulse that traverses them.

Ah, how I'd like to see how close they can get to the ultimate scale where the quantum foam coarsens spacetime itself! To be allowed to design and perform experiments on such a machine! Clearly, the core empires want to invade the Drifter worlds not merely to punish the Drifters, but also to reap the benefits of their science and technology.

As for the fleet - it did not find anything new happening in the Drifter world, nor did it find any of those harmonics. 

Actually that is not a bad outcome as far as I am concerned: if the fleet had retrieved some and not brought them all to the MIO, I would surely have gotten some insistent questions.