Chapter 1203
It wasn’t possible to precisely compare a large scale formation to one that operated at a much smaller scale, but it would be foolish not to test at all. Thus, Catarina prepared some experiments at standard scale. It would be trivial to build a micro scale test, but it would be so divergent in result it probably wouldn’t matter. So they were instead using a lone system as their representation for the entirety of the Scarlet Midfields.
Another confounding factor would be creating a secondary spatial distortion inside of the primary one. That would be more difficult, and much less representative of what they wanted. Thus, they had to provide security… and determine exactly who and what they were most worried about.
For Catarina, that was Everheart. He’d been helpful to the Scarlet Alliance so far, but simply presuming that would continue into the future was a mistake. It wasn’t like he’d never done anything negative to them, it just happened to net positive. It wouldn’t be strange if he was planning to seem allied with their interests for a few more centuries before he decided he was done. And even if Everheart himself never directly attacked them, it was good practice for Catarina to not become too trusting of the people around her. Close family and ancient friends being an exception.
With all that pushed to the back of her mind, Catarina watched as the minimum number of people necessary for safety finished setting up their first border formations. The more people they drew away from their normal lives, the more likely someone was to slip up and mention where they were going- or for people to get curious about their location and dig into it. Usually secret work was done in a lab, but this simply couldn’t.
When everything was set up, Catarina drew upon her energy to empower the formation. This wasn’t a system that the Scarlet Alliance had built up over long periods of time, just an average star with average planets. The formations would require much more energy than the system could naturally provide… though hopefully that was something that would scale more efficiently.
Once the formation was in place around the system- including a majority of the void space on the way to the next systems- Catarina sent a message with a standard communicator to one of her aides. The return message time was measured in minutes, which was… standard. The timing indicated that the message went around this particular spatial distortion, which was unfortunately expected. It was different from their normal barrier, and standards comms just didn’t know how to work with it. Which would mean that if this project expanded they would have to replace everything.
Maybe Uzun could come up with a software workaround, but Catarina had one with alternative hardware meant to take advantage of the new version of spatial distortion. She sent a message and got a reply instantly. No, there was a slight time delay, but it was pretty good for multiple lightyears of space between them.
Next they sent several probes through different parts of the distortion. Everything Catarina knew said that it would go flawlessly. Her desire to not have her body torn apart by space itself told her that the tests were necessary.
The best part about these tests was how quick the feedback was for the distances involved. She got a message of the probe’s arrival almost instantly- at least the ones that were meant to pass out the other side. Others had to enter the area, since they weren’t working on total isolation.