Star Clusters: New Arrivals Read Online Free Page B

to produce such crystals - and more interestingly, grow them in various shapes - without having to kill his fellow Petrans. Later on, they achieved several more vast advances in crystallurgy, resulting in just about every inorganic thing produced by the Petrans being a crystal of some sort.
    The various types of smaller Petran crystals could be used as superconductors, heat-resistant focusing lenses, high-quality melee weapons, powerful projectiles and similar things. Consequently, they were quite valuable to the Terrans, who found them to be a much simpler - and frequently much smaller for the same effect - replacement for the various complex processes and bulky equipment that much of their more advanced technology - from creating the alloys required to make high-quality projectiles and melee weapons (not that the latter were used a lot by either the Terrans or the Petrans except in bayonets and wristblades for their weapons and combat suits to defend against some of the lesser Xargan creatures) to providing the required components for the more potent of their energy weapons, or their shield generators or hyperdrives - required to achieve the same effect as with Petran crystals.
    However, it was the Petrans’ use of their crystallurgical advances in architecture and shipbuilding that was the most impressive - and impossible to reproduce. Unlike Terrans or Tarhedians, who assembled everything from ships to buildings from large quantities of subcomponents, Petrans grew their primarily blue ships and buildings as single objects, manipulating them on the fly through methods known only to themselves to achieve effects ranging from opening or closing a gap in an apparently seamless wall to growing furniture to limited regeneration to channeling vast quantities of external energy into their engines, energy weapons, or shields. The last of these abilities also allowed their ships to be all but impervious to most energy weapons, as the ships’ armor evenly distributed the incoming energy throughout the entire hull except the carefully insulated areas containing the crew, storing it until it dissipated into the environment or was used by the ship’s systems. Indeed, not many energy weapons could visibly damage a specific area on a Petran ship before its key systems overloaded - disabling or destroying the ship altogether - or the entire ship simultaneously melted away, and those that could usually caused one of the above anyway.
    Though most of the above information is of very little relevance to the story at this point, it was on one such smooth crystal on one of Petra’s islands that Lanis Baltor was about to wake up in a crystalline bed in a Petran infirmary. As everything around him slowly faded into existence, he vaguely thought he heard someone talking.
    “Sir, that could--”
    “He’s awake,” one of the nurses said; whoever it was that spoke before that had now stopped.
    “Ah, Mister... Beltor,” one of the Petrans nearby said to him in a formal tone, apparently having problems pronouncing his name, “It is good to see that you are recovering. Some of us,” he glanced at one of his companions, “believed that you would not even last long enough for our rescue team to transfer you to this facility. I am Major Hokka Lurvat of the Imperial Petran Army. Could you please explain what that ship you were rescued from was, and what caused this... event?”
    Lanis told Major Lurvat what happened on the Tarhedia. “What happened after I lost consciousness?” he asked upon concluding the story.
    “The Tarhedians briefly regained control of the ship, lifting it to a depth at which our rescue crews could reach it. However, for reasons unknown to us - presumably more sabotage - the vessel soon began a rapid descent and slammed into the ocean floor. We managed to take a few of them aboard the rescue ship, but...” Lurvat paused for a moment, “You are the only survivor.”
    It took a few moments for the news to sink in.