Star Force: Temple Wars by Aer-ki Jyr (fox in socks read aloud .txt) 📗

Temple’s infrastructure network to the heart of the giant sphere where the artificial star was located. In truth it was an emitter where hydrogen was fused, being drawn from a gigantic reserve waiting in a storage tank hidden within the spherical emitter…but there were cracks between the emitters where access could be made, and through those breaks replacement hydrogen was delivered by the Caretakers, collected from outside the Temple.

Also within that inner structure was the mechanism to trigger the cleansing of the Temple. The command pathways had already been blocked by the former Reignor Plausious, for he had the activation codes for it along with many other things the rest of the Neofan lacked, but so did the true Reignor, and he had given his Hand certain codes to use, along with orders on when to use them.

This Temple was now lost, and those within it were now enemies of House Atriark, including the Vargemma that could not be quickly replaced. But allowing them to assist Plausious would be the greater travesty.

The cleansing mechanism could not be activated remotely with Plausious’s block in place, but it could be activated manually if the comm link to the block was cut. That meant there would be no escape for the Hand and those with him, for there were no portals here, but at this point it didn’t matter. This insurrection had to be put down, and he had long ago resolved to die for the Reignor if necessary.

Today was going to be that day, and now that they were entering the construct through the gap between the fiery emitters and sensing no one here, there was nothing that Plausious could do to stop them.

Nothing at all.

10

The Temple had multiple ways to cleanse the unwanted population, first and foremost were the Caretakers that would isolate and destroy individual targets. Second were the regional emitters, which could, when given enough Essence, send waves of energy over the landscape delivering different types of attacks, the largest of which would disintegrate thousands of square miles of surface down to the bedrock.

That last ditch attempt would be if a certain area was so infested with a problem…potentially Hadarak…that it needed to be wiped clean and rebuilt again. It wouldn’t penetrate the deeper rock layers, and definitely not the outer shell of the Temple itself, but everything on the surface would be gone, and the amount of Essence required for that was massive. Sending a Lian’no burst to stop the hearts of everyone in a certain area was far more economical, but the designers of the Temple wanted multiple methods of control established for both known threats and unforeseeable ones.

The emitters for the destructive area of effect weapons had been removed by Star Force, then rebuilt by the Neofan after they took possession of Installation 0193. Those had been deactivated by Reignor Plausious when he arrived in the Temple and could not be reactivated except to go to the region itself and attempt a manual override with the same level of codes.

But that would only affect one small area, after which Plausious would stop any further attempts in other regions, and the vast void of space inside the Temple would not be affected, for they were designed only for the surface and the thin shell of atmosphere and space above it.

However, there was one other mechanism in the Temples that had never been used in any galaxy. It had been tested, twice, when the first Temples were being constructed to insure it worked, but it had never been put into practice. Launching a disintegration attack across the entire surface of the Temple would require more Essence than anyone could even dream of producing except if every land surface was full of denizens, and no Temple in the history of the entire network had even come close to filling half of one.

But like with all Essence weapons, upgrading an existing physical or energy attack was much easier, and the artificial star in the center of the Temple offered one such possibility.

Or rather, not the emitters themself, but the hydrogen stored there. Its gravitational force was minimal and nowhere near what an actual star would possess, but if that hydrogen could be forced to fuse together…let alone in a 6 stage process…the amount of energy released would equal an extremely large surge of photonic energy that would then spread out greatly as it tried to reach the distant surface.

Add Essence enhancement to that and, properly calibrated, you could incinerate the entire surface of the Temple down through the dirt into the upper layers of bedrock, destroying all people, trees, bodies of water, and even buildings if it was calibrated properly. Too much would destroy the Temple itself, and that was not permissible, which was why the Temples were only allowed to store a maximum amount of hydrogen inside so an enhanced explosion would not have enough power to crack the gigantic shell…but it would destroy all infrastructure within that was above the bedrock, including all the spacebound facilities hidden in cloaking fields, as well as the hydrogen storage facility and the stellar emitters.

Everything would be gone, including whatever problem had risen to such a level that the Temple would be required to induce such a massive self-inflicted wound to remedy the situation.

Plausious had also deactivated that mechanism, but once inside it the Hand of the Reignor, using Truven’s codes, was able to bring it back online and began siphoning Essence out of the many wells spread throughout the Temple, using the Vargemma’s own donations over their long history here to end them.

There was no resistance. The Caretakers did not respond to Neofan as threats, nor were they barred from any area within the Temple. None of Plausious’s people were here, nor were any Vargemma, nor had they been. This was one of those places that nobody went unless something broke, and even