Chapter 8: Core Mechanics
“Did we get what you needed?”
Raine and Leese’s second trip to the Core Worlds had been a bit of a nailbiter for Cato, but he needn’t have worried. With the blessing protecting their anonymity, the pair were suddenly welcomed with open arms as up-and-coming elites near the top of the heap. Getting in and out of the Core was only a problem in that they had too many people trying to clamor for their attention, and they could use proper cities rather then being dumped in some backwoods wilderness.
“Looks like it,” Cato said, sifting through the data from the combat brains. He had – with the Sydean Lineage’s permission – done a bit of work on the exact priorities of the brains to help both him and the sisters. First and foremost, he’d used their original gestalts as a framework to help curb the excess compulsions of the Bismuth transition. He couldn’t undo the changes, but he could make them less flighty and restless, more able to concentrate on things unrelated to travel and exploration.
There was also some temporary reprogramming to tilt the brains toward more concrete environmental analysis, partitioning off a piece for recording the sky, in hopes of finding out where exactly the Core was. The so-called Inner Worlds were very firmly within the Large Magellan Cloud, in a dense region where any given ten-light-year sphere had thousands of stars. It might have been possible to find the Core from those worlds, but it was a lot of sky to survey and he didn’t even know what he was looking for.
One of his greatest worries was that the Core itself wasn’t even in the real universe. That it was entirely in some basement dimension, or even originated in some superordinate or alternate reality, and so was unreachable by any way other than within the System. He was sure it used such reality alteration, as the entirety of the god-realm as described by Initik and Mii-Es seemed to be a pseudo-parallel set of basement dimensions, but if it interacted with the real universe he felt it at least needed an anchor there.
What he found was a full-on megastructure.
The telemetry from the Sydean Lineage was absolutely boggling, at least on matters of scale. The so-called war-world had a diameter somewhere north of Jupiter’s, and was orbited by multiple white dwarf stars. There was clearly some degree of System shenanigans involved with that, as the stars gave out the characteristic spectral lines of proper compact objects, but didn’t follow the dictates of gravity at all. Their orbits around the war-world seemed to be entirely aesthetic, rather than something physics would suggest.
There wasn’t even just one war-world, either. There were five of them, arranged in a Klemperer Rosette around some sort of System construct that boosted eyesight alone didn’t have the ability to fully resolve. There was no anchoring star at all, which explained why it wasn’t obvious from the basic observations the versions of himself in the Inner Worlds had managed.
It took a bit of painstaking matching of spectral signatures to figure out where precisely the Core was located, relative to various stars he could see from the Inner Worlds, but there were quite a few versions of him that had good telescopes. The versions of him closest to the Core’s location hadn’t yet had the time to move beyond the most rudimentary of industrial bases, but he didn’t necessarily have to be close to confirm his estimates. Sure enough, he found a match to the multiplicity of white dwarfs, and while he didn’t yet have any mechanisms to give him a good view, now it was only a matter of making them.