Now came the moment. The dream-maker’s pulsing wave diminished to nothing, and for just a moment null space tugged at Yort’s psyche before the mothership slammed into the gravity limit of the target star, emerging from the inside.
If Yort were describing the procedure in layman’s terms, he would tell a young Archon that the ship within null space tunneled between the stars beneath space, as if it was a worm digging through the dirt. In this way a mothership bypassed the distance between. Therefore, when it surfaced, it did not arrive traveling inward toward the star from any combination of three dimensions, but rather outward, from the direction of another dimension entirely, as if surfacing into normal space, at speed, away.
This process must, however, be accomplished within a gravity well of sufficient power, which meant something with the mass of a star. At the same time, an arriving ship must not exit null space so close to the massive body that it was ripped apart by tidal forces, or blasted by a pulsar’s spinning beam, or irradiated by a black hole’s ravening polar jet...or simply burned up by a star’s corona.
The solution to this dilemma, worked out by the Race’s greatest physicists, was to exit as energetically as possible, like an underwater missile bursting from the sea. That way, even as the gravitic limit collapsed the wormhole field and ejected the ship into normal space, it was already moving away from the star.
Yort’s dreams softened as his ship and its fellows emerged from null space.
Automated systems, recovering their abilities more quickly than living things, engaged reaction engines and accelerated twelve motherships away from the hot yellow sun, a starburst radiating outward along the equator of the spinning ball of fusion. Unfortunately it was not possible to coordinate their random departure points, though they always appeared along the plane of the stellar ecliptic, its equator.
The motherships’ computers immediately launched spy drones, which began to gather data about the star system and feed it back to the ships’ cybernetic brains even as they spread out and formed a web of communication. When the machines’ masters fully awoke, they would already have vital information at their claw-tips.