The only limit to the speed attainable was the power necessary to maintain the sphere’s integrity during solar entry and exit, and the vast engines that were necessary to decelerate it afterward.

With this technology, new probes were built and fired off through the sun. They each followed carefully planned routes through a series of planets and suns, eventually reaching previously inconceivable hyper-light speeds through the cosmos.

These new hyper-probes would never decelerate. As they began to pass out of the range of the huge onboard subspace tweeters that made up the bulk of their mass, another would be launched along the same path, stringing their communications out across trillions of miles, across light years, the chains of probes extending outward like ethereal tentacles, probing the cosmos and returning what they discovered via subspace. With data relayed back along these ever extending antennae, if a promising planet was discovered, or gas giant with a massive moon that required closer inspection, then the next probe in the chain could tweak its course, still following its cousin, but taking a closer look at whatever might have peaked their interest. Each pass providing greater and greater information on the systems and even the planets they passed through.

After that it was only a question of time until they found what they were looking for. Twenty years later they discovered us, and for the first time in the history of the planet the great empires united, the hope of this prize focusing their resources on the construction of the great fleet they would need to first subdue us, and then colonize our world.

A plan was formulated to build a navy capable of conquering a planet. Ships to carry an army and a colonization force of almost a million would be built to travel within the largest accelospheres that had ever been conceived. They would follow a route through two planets, then into their own sun already travelling at 5% of the speed of light. By the time they emerged they would be travelling at nearly 25% of light speed, and they would vanish from their solar system in a matter of hours en route to the next star as they built up their speed ever further, using the existential properties of the accelosphere to move past the very limitations of relativity. Eventually they would ignite their great braking engines and spend the majority of their actual journey in heavy deceleration, their passengers’ bodies immobilized against the colossal pressures.