A Day at the Omega Centauri Warp Gate

“We have a ship incoming.”

“Where is it?”

“1.2 gigameters away at vector 7.6. It just dropped out of the Hyperlane. It's accelerating … now decelerating. It's on an embarkation bearing, sister.”

“Thank you, brother.”

Steward Jessera sprints across the command module, her bare feet moving silently across the cool metallic floor. Her clothing is one of several different styles of Centauri attire. The white and cyan sleeveless tunic crosses at her waist and drapes to her knees, while a train of fabric, pinned to both shoulders, trails to her ankles and billows out while she runs. Hair flows down her shoulders, only contained by a white headband. Her right arm is covered in white and black markings, displaying the script of the Nameless. Her left arm is wrapped in blue fabric, but in the gaps one can see the colour of steel.

“Brother Micah, have they hailed?” she asks once she reaches the other end. It is quite a large room for the six brethren they have maintaining it, and was likely quite busier in its heyday.

“Yes, Sister Jessera. There is a message coming through now. It looks like a C-137 class passenger ship. They're bound for Trantrax.”

“Of course they are,” Jessera mutters. It was ever a popular destination, though her personal experience there had been less enthralling. “Do they have an embarkation code?”

“They're sending it through now. 321.545.Q9VRGFF55. It's an older code, but it checks out.”

An embarkation code could be received at any Centauri outpost to allow for passage at any Centauri-controlled Warp Gate. The cost was minimal and the process benign. Codes were only avoided by criminals and those from particularly insular empires.

“Cargo or strictly passenger?”

“Only passengers and their personal luggage. According to this.”

“Send someone out to check their manifest.”

“Brother Klyne is already on his way.”

“Klyne?” Jessera laughs softly. “Those poor bastards.”

---

A tiny transport ship zips through space away from the Warp Gate. From this distance, the structure looks truly imposing. The massive ring, with a dull white-blue orb of light pulsating in the centre, and the mute greenish hue of the gas giant Ellowa like a backdrop behind it. But Guard-Steward Klyne has seen the Warp Gate from outside thousands of times and the majesty is lost on him. He just wants to get through this job quick.

His tiny ship docks on the exterior of the large cruiser that he has just learned is called the KingQueen, whatever that is supposed to mean. As soon as the connection is made, he wastes no time entering the ship. A couple bubbly attendants greet him at the dock, ready to proffer the manifest. But they pause and stammer when they catch sight of him. He is not what they expected. He never is.

With a grunt, Klyne takes the manifest, flipping through the electronic pages. Everything seems in order, but then he stops. There is a possible anomaly on page 47. He hands the manifest back. “I need access to the cargo hold,” he growls.

Klyne is dressed in a similar manner to Jessera, with the white and cyan tunic that descends to his knees. But instead of a simple train of fabric at back, he has a full cape that sweeps around his shoulders. His feet clink as he follows the attendants down the corridor. His robotic legs have several uses, but his favourite is to let them extend, making him taller than everyone. He looks around, scanning with his robotic eyes. The eyes themselves are subtle, but on the right side of his face, the eye socket and cheek bone are visibly robotic as well. A grizzled scruff of beard covers the lower portion of his face, keeping still with his stony expression.

Once in the cargo hold, he activates a scanner on his wrist and sets about going up and down the narrow pathways, until his device starts beeping.

“I'm going to need to see passenger OBI-7271.”

In a small room off to the side of the docking bay, Klyne waited next to a small round table, with his hand on a silver briefcase. There was some movement outside, and the attendants ushered in a short, vaguely cylindrical robot that moved about on a set of three spheres.

“Obi. Can I call you Obi? Do you want to tell me why you're headed to Tantrax with 18 neutramatic hyper-flux deuterium cores?”

“brrrroooooop do beep bzzzzt”

“Oh, for personal use? Really? How long was your vacation going to be? A thousand years?”

“zzzzzt brrrrrng beep beep beep whirrrrawhirrrrra”

“I don't care if it's no big deal in Chowai Casino. It's still a controlled substance in Centauri space. You need documentation certifying where you got it from and who you intend to sell it to. Do you have that?”

“whrrrrreeeeeeee-tssssst-tzzzzzzt”

“I don't recommend you take that tone with me again. Three options. You show me your documents, you leave without this case, or you come with me back to the Warp Gate and we have a much longer conversation.”

“fzzzzzt-rrrrooop”

---

“The KingQueen is going to be short one passenger, but apart from that, everything is fine,” Klyne radios back.

“All right,” says Jessera. “Send the order downstairs to open the gate for Tantrax.”

She stands tall and resolute, feeling quite confidently in charge. For this being only her tenth citadel cycle as lead steward, things were going well.

“Uhhh, sister Jessera. There is a problem with the comms again. They're not responding downstairs.”

Jessera looks at Micah with stern understanding, while fighting the bright smile that is bubbling up inside her. “I guess I'll have to go down there myself. Won't be a minute.”

She rushes off out of the command module and into the corridor. Then she finds the opening to the elevator shaft and jumps inside, where she is suddenly suspended in the air.

Either as a byproduct or an intentional addition, the Warp Gate has a gravity well at the centre which allows all the stewards and other workers to walk about their stations normally. In the elevator shafts the normal gravity field is negated. She raises her arms above her head and swiftly descends the next eight levels. (Given the size of the elevator shaft and the ceiling height of each level, it is likely that the Nameless were of a somewhat larger stature.

As soon as the reaches the bottom level, Jessera races out, and several small robots scatter about before her, startled.

“Peace, acolytes,” she says.

The Centauri call them acolytes, though they call themselves Zharintu. They were the ancient robotic caretakers of the Warp Gate when the Centauri first found it. Upon discovery, they seemed dormant and inactive, and early scientists disassembled several of them for study. But with the activation of the gate they came to life and began trying to perform their old duties. It seems the acolytes performed the lion's share of the work in the Warp Gates, but without their Nameless handlers present, they can no more activate the complex higher functions of the Gate than the Centauri can. Yet the two sets of being had settled into a working relationship after they were finally able to establish a rudimentary communication. In Omega Centauri there had been little difficulties, but in other parts of the sector Centauri were met with greater hostility.

Jessera enters the Jump module, to see another group of Centauri waiting patiently. “Sister Bennera, the comms are down.” Then she turns her head and notices a taller, more humanoid acolyte has taken several panels off the central terminal and is doing something with the wiring.

“Yes, it's been like that for an hour,” responds Bennera dryly. “It says that it's fixing … something.”

“Well, sister, you need to activate the portal to the Tantrax gate.”

“Oh, another one,” she mutters, sliding into her station.

Bennera and two others begin entering various commands at their respecting stations, all feeding back to a central terminal that still retains its original interface. The screen displays a flood of strange characters: the computational language of the Nameless that unites integers, constants, and variables in a fluid way. The flood of symbols eventually slows until it isolates eight strange characters. This feeds a command back to Bennera's terminal which displays:

22.52.77.81
Tantrax

Then the adjacent section of the Jump module lights up, displaying a holographic map of the sector, with its 160 glittering starts. And placed strategically around those systems are pulsating blue lights, representing the active Warp Gates. Such a far flung area united so seamlessly. Yet they all knew that many more Warp Gates were out there, past the boundaries of their own explored space — if only they could just jump straight to those.

But as one particular light on the 3D starmap grows larger and more vibrant, there is a notable thrumming sound heard all around them. When the sound begins, the smaller acolytes immediately pick up their pace and scurry off into small shafts and passages, as they always do when this starts. And Reverent Hallith, who has been standing quite still on the other side of the room, in an apparent trance, becomes suddenly alert.

“And they great eye is opened once again!” he cries. “The eye which can pierce the veil of the universe. We give our thanks to our Nameless ancestors, whose bounty surrounds us! Let the quarks of eternity flow!” Then his exultations turn to a low, steady chant.

“Thank you, brother Hallith,” says Jessera. “Now I'm just going to go … observe.”

She rushes off. This was the reason she had to fight to contain her grin when the comms went down. Having to come down to give the order herself meant that she could just slip down one more level to see it happen. She jumps down the shaft, landing in the innermost level of the structure.

Down here there is nothing they have ever been able to interact with directly. The acolytes seem to have some functions, but mostly all the controls come from above. Once the destination of set, the process happens on its own. Jessera steps into the corridor. Above her head there are several tubes of xytoglass running the circumference of the structure. A swirl of vibrant lights shoot through them in a microcosmic dance.

And as she crosses the threshold, she stands on a floor of xytoglass, looking down on the interior of the gate. At the centre right now is still the dull blue-white orb that pulsates softly whenever the gate is not in use: standby mode, essentially. But now the same lights she saw shooting through the tubes are flitting through space, spiralling inwards, feeding the dull orb until it begins to grow larger and brighter.

The exterior of the ring is lined with solar panels which power all the bits of machinery within. But as for what powers the Warp Gate itself, 800 years of study has still not revealed an answer. Precision fissile blasts shoot single atoms of Ha-V into the xytoglass tubes, where they, by some esoteric process, break apart into exotic sub-particles. Then as the shoot into the magnetic field containing the inside of the Warp Gate, it appears to draw power directly from the Dark Energy which permeates spacetime in ways still not understood. 800 years of study, and still so far from answers.

Jessera wishes she were a Reverant, to get lost in the mysticism of it all, to find all the answers she needed to chants and scripture. As it was, she needed more. Most of the time. When she was able to stand in this viewing platform and witness the birth of the wormhole, she required no other answers. Her eyes wide, she marvels as the portal finally flared to life. It explodes outwards, filling about half the space within the ring. It glows white hot, but not like a star. No, it is almost grotesque: a thing of seemingly infinite strands and vertices constantly folding in on themselves.

A fifth dimensional object compressed, temporarily, into the third dimension, Scholar Tomis had once described it. Indeed, it seems with every second of its existence to be fighting against the nature of its reality. But it remains contained, as it always does. The hot white colour fades to blue, which drains away in turn, until its completely black. Light has been sucked inside, and the other end is currently shining brilliantly.

And Jessera watches as the passenger cruise ship slowly manoeuvres its way into the Warp Gate. Its bow angles down into the inner well of the circle. From her perspective she can see the ship begin to stretch like in a distorted mirror. Then, after stretching, it suddenly compresses together until it is nothing more than a speck of light, and then that light too disappears into the undefeatable blackness of the wormhole.