Magitech Snippet I

A faint glow blossomed in the vacuum of space. A momentary flicker of ultraviolet, and a flash of x-rays strong enough to kill any natural life form within a thousand yards. But there was little life in the vast emptiness between the stars, and the disturbance was quickly masked. A bubble of attraction spun out to enclose the glow, red-shifting the x-rays far down into the useless low-frequency bands that no Dominion magic ever bothered with.

The glow rippled, bulged, and then faded into a barely-visible ball of shadow as the wormhole terminus stabilized. Dark pseudopods tipped with bulbous sensory organs cautiously extended to probe their surroundings. They found nothing. No nearby matter. No life. No detection webs, or magical traces. None of the inevitable radiation leakage from operational power taps. No gravity waves, or any other indication of space folds other than its own.

Wait. No, there were ripples, the faint trace of distant warp drives. But the readings made no sense. The nearest ones tracked across the sky too quickly to be more than a few tens of light-years distant, yet were much fainter than any known drive system would be at such a close range. The entity contemplated the anomaly for long days in emotionless puzzlement, before finally deciding it needed more information.

The mouth of the wormhole stretched, and spat out a dark oval object that raced quickly away into the endless night. A moment later a second probe was launched, then a third. They were stealthy devices, camouflaged and non-radiating, operating on stored magic and deeply shielded against all divinations. Still, it was a risk. The entity watched alertly, waiting with the endless patience of an artificial mind for any sign that its actions had been noticed.

A week passed, as the probes drifted steadily apart at a speed of barely twelve miles per second. A snail’s pace for any ship, but stealth was more important than speed. The entity had waited seventeen thousand years for its activation. It could wait a little longer.

Finally it judged the distance sufficient, and sent the activation signal. The dark pods split open, discarding their shrouds to reveal the transparent liquid within. Each ball of liquid began to spin, swelling quickly into a hollow globe seventy meters in diameter. Then they began to shed a soft infrared glow as their sensory enchantments activated, analyzing every trace of radiation that impinged on their surface.

The fourteen million miles between them provided enough parallax to turn the nonsensical warp traces into a map of all starship movement within three hundred light-years. The entity considered the results in astonishment.

There were ships, yes, but they were terribly slow. Most of them plodded along at a few hundred times light speed, and the power signatures were tiny. Obviously civilian vessels, but even the largest couldn’t mass more than a few million tons. A few tracks showed the distinctive wobble of active teleport interdiction fields, and the entity tentatively classed those contacts as military vessels. But either they all operated under heavy stealth at all times, or they were pathetically underpowered.

Then there were the planets.

Where once there had been a sector with tens of thousands of inhabited worlds, now a bare dozen showed substantial populations. There were no interstellar gates, no soul forges, not even broadcast power. At the furthest edge of detection range was a single system that showed signs of something resembling a modern industrial base, but even that would barely have qualified as a minor outpost for the Dominion.

The entity would have laughed, if it had currently possessed a mouth. The chaos attending the Master’s discorporation must have been even greater than predicted, if the collapse of his Dominion had left so few traces of civilization behind. There were bound to be successor states somewhere in the galaxy, but the immediate area was clear of anything resembling organized opposition. Its mission didn’t require the kind of large-scale conquest that might draw the attention of distant powers, so the risk of significant opposition developing in time to be an issue was minimal.

It turned its attention to nearby space, and quickly picked out a half-dozen worlds that carried the taste of sentient souls. Yes, those would do nicely. They were sparsely inhabited, but it should only take thirty million sacrifices to power the beacon. That left plenty of spare capacity to cover the inevitable breakage.

The wormhole rippled again, and spat out a ring of dark purple crystal just nine feet across enclosing the black ball of a smaller wormhole terminus. Three nacelles spaced about the ring sprang to life with a brilliant violet glow, and the delivery vehicle vanished into the distance. In a week it would reach the most densely populated of those nearby systems, and a few more days of approaching under cloak should see its cargo safely delivered to the surface of the planet. Then the operation could begin.

The entity considered, juggling scenarios. There was no knowing what defense plans any given world might have, and this operation was too important to tolerate any risk of failure. A second delivery vehicle flashed away from the wormhole, aimed at a slightly less populous world a few light years further away. Then, after a few minutes of consideration, a third aimed at a much smaller colony in the opposite direction. It didn’t have a fourth, so that would have to do.
Created and programmed in the eternal stasis of the old Dominion, the fact that it's scan was subject to light-speed delays never struck the entity as significant. After all, how much could possibly have changed in the space of a few centuries?