A Horus in Strange Lands (Horizon Zero Dawn SI) Chapter 28

{Scaffold control, this is Amun-Ra, beginning the last checks on scouting drones 1 through 36.}

“This is Scaffold control. We acknowledge. Awaiting the final Go, No-Go.”

I turned towards the thirty-six ships that were the size of my space shuttles, packed to the brim with my scanner technology combined with the surprisingly advanced Kharaki probe technology.

The past year on Kharak has been a truly fulfilling one for me.

The people are great. Most of them embraced me and my companions with open arms despite the knowledge of our nature, rarely showing any discrimination, although slip-ups happen sometimes since the Kushan people are very much ruled by their emotions and as such are prone to letting their excitement and curiosity get the better of them.

It’s like dealing with a whole race of excited children who say the wrong thing at the wrong time in their emotional state.

But that does not mean that they mean any harm by it.

Aside from the people, their culture is the thing that caught my interest the most.

Despite only having a properly recorded history of over a thousand years, their cultural nuances, their belief system, and their religious systems are surprisingly mature. But the most interesting thing about their culture is their Kiithid system.

Essentially, a Kiith is something like a Clan or a family, but sometimes, it can also be a nation, like in the case of the Nabaal, or even a company, like with the Somtaaw. The confusing thing is, that none of these instances are mutually exclusive, as a Kiith can be a clan and a company at the same time, or a nation and a family at the same time.

This confusing social system is what intrigued Vast Silver and me the most.

But, whatever may be the case, the one undeniable thing is that a Kiith is mostly treated as a large family by most Kushan.

Aside from these cultural anomalies, their technology is also anomalously advanced in some areas. Thankfully, these anomalies are much more tangible and easier for me to trace the origin of.

Anything that has to do with space travel, such as interstellar communications, FTL, propulsion, energy generation, and long-range probes, is very advanced. However, anything that has to do with day-to-day life is only acceptably advanced.

The Kushan, the people of Kharak, are exiles of the Hiigaran people who arrived here on prison ships while smuggling their Ancient Hyperspace Core with them.

It would make sense that these exiles did not have the time or the resources to pack their advanced day-to-day technologies and knowledge onto these exile ships before their hasty departure from their home world, making it so that their future descendants would be unaware of those things.

However, despite having a blast exploring the world of Kharak and their people’s lives, the potential future of these people has always been on my mind since the very beginning.

Unlike the humans, these people gave me and my companions the same respect as their own, treating us as equals and never trying to cheat us in any kind of deal that we had.

How can I not repay such respect and help protect them from the disasters headed their way that they are not even unaware of?

That is why, I created these drones.

Externally, these things don’t look any different from the probes that the Mothership of the Kushan would be deploying once it leaves the scaffold in the next two years. But internally, it has state-of-the-art technology from both the Kushan and myself, which included a heavily modified and very advanced Quantum communications network based on my own Polyphasic Entangled Waveforms.

Let it not be said that we wasted all the time that we spent traveling before we were swallowed by the Dimensional Vortex. In fact, the numerous technological breakthroughs we had during those times are hard to count, but relatively minor in the grand scheme of things since we mainly focused on improving what we already had and trying to make the Dimensional gate work.

The drones are also equipped with my Anti-Matter drives for achieving great sub-light speed, the new version of my fabricators that I made based on the Phased Disassembler Array that I traded with the Kushan for, and the new version of my Apep and Ausar drones, which are also equipped with the PDA system for better resource gathering and organization.

The purpose of these drones is twofold.

Officially, They are supposed to move in all the cardinal directions in three dimensions, heading deep into unknown space, paving a way for the Mothership in the void.

Unofficially, their real purpose is to scout the edges of the Kharaki system and search for any hostile forces.

This unofficial mission is something that I have not informed the Kushan about because I don’t want them to panic about a potential enemy right now.

While we did not encounter any Taiidan patrol fleet during our entry into the star system, it might have been because they were hiding with some kind of cloaking technology or they were not there yet.

It is also possible that they ignored us since we were using sublight drives instead of a Hyperdrive.

Whatever the case might be, the Taiidan patrol fleet that I remember from the games that annihilated Kharak is a sword of Damocles hanging upon these people’s heads, something that does not sit well with me.

That is why, the drones are equipped with fabricators in the first place.

Once they are out of the reach of the Kushan’s current communications range, thanks to the fact that they are still working on reverse engineering the Quantum communications system I gave them, the drones will start scanning the surroundings of this star system for any unknown fleets.

If they spot any collection of ships, regardless of their origin, they will immediately use their fabricators and resource collection drones to start manufacturing modified Uraeus Crown platforms to act as defensive systems.

Our simulations projected that it would take the drones nearly two years to cover this entire Heliosphere’s outer edge with the Uraeus Crown platforms for protection, just long enough before the Hyperspace Core is moved from Kharak’s surface and into the Mothership proper.

Originally, the Kushan were about to move the Hyperspace core to the Mothership immediately, but I stopped them and had them delay that action until the very last minute.

While I lied to them and told them that the Hyperspace core is something that I wish to study while it is still on the surface without actually performing any experiments on it, which is partially true, the real reason is that I don’t want the Kushan to lose their natural protection without being sure that their enemy is not waiting on their doorstep.

The Hyperspace Core that the Kushan have is one of the three Ancient Hyperspace Cores produced by the enigmatic ancient aliens called the Progenitors.

While we did manage to understand the underlying principles and the way that Hyperspace travel works thanks to our combined effort which took nearly three months of study, there is much about the ancient core that we don’t yet understand.

The core, and by extension, most of the Hyperspace devices in existence, work by using obscene levels of energy to create a Quantum Tunneling event into a higher realm of existence which is simply called Hyperspace.

In Hyperspace, the rules of physics, time, and distance are extremely convoluted. These anomalous properties are what allow a ship to sidestep the problem of relativity and travel nearly instantaneously to its destination.

What separates the normal Hyperspace cores that we managed to create and what is mostly used by everyone in the galaxy from what I remember in the games and the Three Ancient Cores is the distance traveled.

The general Hyperspace cores can only cover short distances at maximum power. Just a couple of Light Years to a few dozen light-years at most depending on the model.

The Ancient Cores, on the other hand, can jump for hundreds, even thousands of light years, at a time depending on how much their users understand their inner workings.

Aside from this monumental difference in range, the Ancient cores also produce a Hyperspace inhibition field through a mysterious method that I have yet to understand. This inhibition field makes it so that any ship that tries to enter or exit hyperspace in its vicinity is directly pulled toward the Hyperspace Core.

In the case of Kharak, the Core pulls any ship that drops out of Hyperspace in the star system and forces them to materialize either underground or in the atmosphere of the planet, causing them to crash into the planet and kill the occupants.

This is the reason why the Kushan were left unmolested for the thousand years they were on Kharak despite their exile location being common knowledge across the Galaxy with no shortage of enemies that would want to exterminate the remnants of the Hiigaran people.

However, the method by which the Hiigarans rigged The Hyperspace Core to the Khar-Toba ship to produce this field that covered the entire star system is something that neither we nor the Kushan were able to decode.

This means that the moment the Hyperspace core is removed from its housing within the ruins of Khar-Toba, the inhibition field will be gone.

I think this is the reason why the Taiidan empire only stuck Kharak when the Mothership launched in the game since the Kushan moved the Core just minutes before the Mothership was launched on its test run.

Naturally, the Kushan were unaware of this inhibition field until I informed them about it. While they were worried about the reason for its existence, they let it go when I assured them that they were in no danger.

As I said, I don’t want them to know about their ancient enemy just yet and ruin the little time of peace they have left before they are inevitably caught in the conflict to reclaim their home.

With the final checks on my drones complete, I once again contacted the Scaffold.

{Amun-Ra to Scaffold control. All systems are Go. Initiate launch.}

“All systems Go Acknowledged. Initiating Launch.”

The clamps on the Scaffold that held onto the 36 drones released at the Kushan’s command, releasing the drones that initiated their Anti-Matter drives, shooting towards their designated cardinal direction.

With this, I can once again turn my focus back on understanding the Ancient Hyperspace Core.