Eternity deepspace
For many months, the cluster of deepspace gravitation arrays-ugly assemblies of plasteel girders thousands of meters long hung with gravity wave detectors-monitored the tiny perturbations in pinchspace caused by the passage of ships outbound from Eternity, the fourth planet of the Hammer Worlds.
Month by month, data accumulated, terabytes of numbers recording the infinitesimal displacement of pinchspace caused by the mass of transiting starships. Over time, the data took form, and soon the arrays were able to compute the vectors followed by the Hammer ships.
Some vectors were already well known-the established trade routes between Eternity and Serhati, Scobie’s World, the planets of the Javitz Union, and the Pascanici League-but one was new, a route to no place shown on any Fed chart.
A pinchcomm signal flashed across deepspace back to the Federated Worlds to report the anomaly.
Two weeks later, deepspace survey drones were dispatched to seed the mystery vector with sensorsats, spherical satellites the size of beach balls carrying a power supply, ultraviolet sensors, and a simple laser tightbeam transmitter. Working with mindless diligence, the drones laid a line of sensorsats along the mystery vector out into deepspace, the satellites strung out like beads on a thread hundreds of light-years long.
Patiently, the sensorsats scanned space for the unmistakable signature of ships dropping in and out of pinchspace, the intense, fleeting flares of ultraviolet the one transmission no ship in humanspace could suppress. Every few days, a survey drone dropped out of pinchspace to interrogate each sensorsat in turn. A handful reported ship activity. The drone dropped more sensorsats to triangulate the source. One week later, it had established the location of the ship activity: a small asteroid, not shown on any Fed survey, wandering alone in deepspace, 235 light-years out from the Hammer Worlds.
To the stealthed reconsats sent in to investigate, the asteroid’s purpose was obvious: to support a small plant mining and processing the driver mass used by starships. The survey drone noted the vectors of ships leaving the planetoid after remassing. Calling for assistance, it started the process again, seeding another vector to nowhere with sensorsats.
A month after the initial report from the gravitation arrays, the survey drone found what the Federated Worlds had been searching for so desperately. Judging by the gigantic infrared signature radiated into space from massed banks of heat dumps, a substantial industrial-scale facility lay buried inside a small carbonaceous asteroid-identified on Fed charts as Mathuli-4451-deep in the heart of the confused tangle of rips in space-time marked on Fed space charts as Devastation Reef.
When analysts examined the survey drone’s reports, their conclusion was emphatic. The Devastation Reef complex was the Hammer antimatter manufacturing facility, the linchpin of the Hammer fleet’s strategic advantage.