[b]Barren Source System[/b]
[i][u]Black Hole Research and Exploitation Facility, orbit[/u][/i]

	With a snap of unseen energy, three warships shocked back into normal space with a small ripple in real-space. A single battlecruiser, flanked seven kilometers to either side by its missile destroyers, slowly spun in space to angle towards an orbital slot around the giant frame that hung in deep space some four million kilometers away. It was standard procedure; every ship was required to warp outside of orbit of any occupied gravitational well, and be challenged and verified before they could approach.

	It took a minute or so for the battlstations around the giant frame supporting EM projectors, drive field modules, and the inwards-pointing mirror, to detect the ships; no sensor could detect other ships faster than light, after all. It took another minute more for the challenge to be received by the small patrol fleet, and one more minute in addition to that as the response was beamed back to the battlestations. The code given was verified in the battlestations' networks, and then another challenge was put through the quantum entanglement communication network to Interstellar Fleet Command, back on the homeworld. It verified there, and another challenge was sent from the battlestation through the same network through to the given origin of the patrol fleet. The local fleet base there also confirmed the verification code.

	Ten minutes after appearing in-system, the ships received confirmation to approach. They were given authorization to take data from the sensor network that had detected them-- a massive array of hundreds of thousands of small passive-sensor stealth platforms that dotted the three-dimensional space around the black hole and its mortal masters. Missile platforms tracked the warships as they accelerated up to Sublight Cruise Acceleration, the speed that limits wear and tear on the device while still providing the best possible acceleration. 

	Even as they passed a network of hundreds of thousands of platforms, mass produced things, some of which have been in service for just a couple years, some for decades, the ships themselves didn't actually *spot* any of them. Even though the entire area was seeded with passive sensor arrays and defenses waiting to go active, the ships' sensors weren't powerful enough without going active to detect a single one. It was only the command network that clued them in to their existence.

	Halfway to the facility, the ships' drive fields reversed, their constant acceleration switching to a negative value as the ships slowed their journey. They had received orbital slots; from four million kilometers away, they had a route precisely planned to bring them straight there.

	Some fifty hours after arriving in their orbital slots after the relatively short trip, the ships were again ready to leave. This time, however, a dozen freighters were in tow. While the freighters each had a much greater size and tonnage, a single destroyer could've taken them all out. 

	Loaded in the freighters were one of the most prized tool that the Taybuse had created: the powercell. Using a variety of technologies, the stations that orbited the black hole and its EM Sphere that amplified all the EM waves that went in injected massive amounts of power into the power cells. While inefficient as all hell, this construct had been in service for a few decades now, and the energy bouncing around inside the sphere was carefully controlled to be as efficient as possible: the energy cells that these freighters were packed full of, more than a fusion reactor could produce with the freighter filled to the top with the most efficient fuel could produce in its lifespan-- Taybusen fusion reactors had a tendency to run hotter and wear down faster. 

	So power cells were a fantastic solution, given an energy source that didn't require all that much effort to maintain. Warships loaded powercells into their energy weapons to allow the on-board reactor nodes to focus on powering life support, drive nodes, etc. Plasma might be their most effective energy weapons, but laser turrets worked best for point defense; plasma traveled slower, could miss. Lasers didn't miss, though they took notably longer to kill something. If a warship powered all its energy weapons at once, the reactor wouldn't be able to keep up-- it would handle it for a few hours, maybe, but after that battle was over, it'd have to be completely torn out and replaced. Powercells allowed higher effectiveness. 

	The small fleet of fifteen ships left the watchful eyes of a dozen battlestations, several squadrons of warships sitting idle, and another shipment coming in.

	His Royalty's investment in black holes definitely paid off. Not only did he command the military, he supplied them with one of their most important technologies. Maybe, many a captain and politician had thought, that was the entire reason the Tayb was still in power. At a snap of his fingers... their military fleet's efficiency would drop from one hundred percent... to forty. All the admirals were in his pocket.