I predict that the Solarian League will survive.

PeterZ wrote:Hold the phone! There was a report about another "killer" hyper bridge. Which system was that in? I bet it is one of the 4 termini leading into the secret network. That killer terminus is 3 of the 4. Torch is #2, Felix #1 is the junction, Darius is #4. Either that or Felix connects to 4 location and I recall only three bridges from Felix.

Torch of Freedom
Chapter Fifty wrote:Felix was an uninhabited star system little more than ten light-years from Mannerheim. The dim K2-class star was brighter than SGC-902-36-G, and it did have one marginally habitable planet, although that was about the best anyone was ever likely to say about it. The planet itself, which had never been assigned any better name than "Felix Beta," was a fairly miserable piece of real estate, with a gravity 1.4 times that of Old Earth, an axial inclination of thirty-one degrees, and a miserly hydrosphere of barely thirty-three percent. With an average orbital radius of right on six light-minutes, it was a cold, arid, dusty, windstorm-lashed, thoroughly wretched lump of dirt, but the Alignment had been considering it as a potential site for further development anyway, because of its proximity to Mannerheim.
The Republic of Mannerheim openly abhorred and despised the genetic slave trade and the outlaw Mesan transstellars which promoted it . . . which was one of the things that made it so valuable to the Mesan Alignment. The fact that Mannerheim's system-defense force was one of the most powerful of the entire Solarian League, and that there was absolutely nothing to associate it with Manpower or the Mesa System's government, didn't hurt, either. As such, it would have been handy, the Alignment had thought, to tuck its secret arsenal away someplace everyone knew was absolutely useless yet was simultaneously close enough to Mannerheim for the MSDF to keep a protective eye on it. Of course, there had been downsides to the proposition, the worst of which was that it would also have been close enough to Mannerheim for someone to innocently stumble across things the Alignment didn't want anyone stumbling over. The chance of someone actually doing that had been remote, to say the least, of course. When it came to concealing things, ten light-years might as well be ten thousand, unless there was something to prompt some busybody into making the trip in the first place.
What no one had expected—until the survey team the Alignment had sent to Felix under cover of the Jessyk expedition completed a thorough analysis of the system primary's emissions—was that there would have been plenty of reason to make the trip, if only anyone had known that Felix was associated with a major wormhole junction. Not on anything like the scale of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, perhaps, but still considerably larger than most, with no less than four secondary termini.

They led to several interesting places (including the Darius System, which actually had been chosen as the site for the MAN's arsenal), and the Alignment had kept the Felix Junction's existence as "black" as they had the entire colony in Darius.

In fact, although the Alignment had known about it for better than two T-centuries, the MSDF had first become aware of it less than ten years ago. Officially, at least; many of the senior MSDF officers who knew about the Alignment had also known about the Felix Junction from the very beginning. As far as the bulk of the MSDF was concerned, however, Mannerheim had discovered the junction only eight and a half T-years ago, and the decision had been taken to keep its existence a secret because it had only two secondary termini . . . and because the Republic intended to make sure that when its existence became generally known, it was also firmly established as belonging to Mannerheim.

Weird Harold wrote:The Darius Terminus is one of four destinations from the Felix Junction. I know of no hint anywhere that it is possible for two junctions to be linked.

PeterZ wrote:Darned! Forgot about the secret Felix junction. The MAlign hasn't gotten the legal claim on it and is trying the obtain it. I forget just how secret Felix is. Is it like the SKM's situation where the information is out there, but just hidden or is it still truly secret? The ownership of the system is established, knowledge of the WHJ isn't.

If the GA twigs on that search and investigates it as some long shot chance to find the MAlign's Bolthole, that is likely the best shot of discovering Darius.

robert132 wrote:I didn't know about the "secret" Felix junction to begin with. *Harumph!*

So what we have here is a junction with at least one known tramline that leads straight to the dude with the scythe and stench of death as far as anyone other than the MA is concerned, and NO data on where the deadly end of the line is. Or is there data that has just "gotten lost" over the centuries that might still turn up?

Don't mind me, just wondering out loud.

kzt wrote:Yeah. I'd always assumed Slmoes was supposed to be how our heroes found out about this, but David told us flat out that he never even heard of them, as he had no need to know and wasn't trusted with that sort of knowledge anyhow.

JohnRoth wrote:"The Twins" have two termini. One is the link to Darius and the other is the link to Torch. "The Twins" is an anomaly: there is no other known system that has two termini that are not part of a junction. It's anomalous in a number of other ways as well.

Weird Harold wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:"The Twins" have two termini. One is the link to Darius and the other is the link to Torch. "The Twins" is an anomaly: there is no other known system that has two termini that are not part of a junction. It's anomalous in a number of other ways as well.

Not Quite.

The Twins are two separate wormhole bridges located nearly on the hyperlimit of an un-named star. One leads to the Congo system (Torch). The other is a terminus of the Felix WHJ.

To get to Darius from Torch, you would need to transit from Torch to Twin B, From Twin A to Felix, and from Felix to Darius.

JohnRoth wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:"The Twins" have two termini. One is the link to Darius and the other is the link to Torch. "The Twins" is an anomaly: there is no other known system that has two termini that are not part of a junction. It's anomalous in a number of other ways as well.

That's what I thought I said.