Kurultai

The **Kurultai** also known as the Black Hole Tribe is a large Ranathan tribe responsible for operating HALO stations & their associated beaming platforms. A platform has roughly 5 thousand souls like a small town, while a station can have as many as 5 million like a big city. Stations are numbered by the dozens of thousands, platforms by the hundreds of millions.

## Temporal intelligence

Kurultai admirals are usually considered the *guardians of time* as they are pushed into the future by their black holes much faster than all of us mere mortals, not to mention the people of Iran. Well, actually they have a whole lot of prescience engines connected to Iran & the highliners & even the Ranigan star!

To send them christmas greetings every second, I guess! No, actually it is all required to maintain supremacy over the space-time domain of an interstellar journey. Such a journey may take decades or even centuries, with the second half spent *backwards in time* to let the spacecraft arrive instantly from an outside perspectice.

With an insane arsenal of interstellar surveillance, the Kurultai can track the mirror image of an inbound fleet all the way back to the mid-point as soon as they jump out of hyperspace to make their final approach. The jump can be sabotaged by attacking either the ships themselves or the mirror image somewhere along the way!

### Language

Once I tried to decrypt a video message from these guys on the navigation deck of the Boadicea highliner where I worked as a flight control assistant: chief admiral Larina Shon sent it down to ease my curiosity & I was like okay, alright, that shit just ain't my cup of tea! The Kurultai admiral sounded like the start-up of an old-school diesel engine, running railway locomotives & tug boats on the Danube river, even though Larina kept telling me it was all in Creole.

## Interstellar highway

HALO propulsion systems move interstellar fleets with tight particle beams by changing the momentum vector of each beamed particle in the gravitational field of spinning black holes in the middle of the station. The largest stations can have as many as five holes, spinning & revolving around each other in stochastic patterns.

These flight patterns are maintained by quantum supercomputers in order to route all inbound & outbound traffic as efficiently as possible. The beams are converted to kinetic energy by pusher plates on the vessels & stations also use these plates to feed kinetic energy from incoming vessels back to the grid. They also serve as protective shields, obviously!

## Highliners

Highliner parts are manufactured & assembled in large numbers by Kurultai Shipyards ventures & they also operate large fleets of dark energy harvesters along the shores of interstellar cosmic voids. Voids like the notorious Midian void: a graveyard of interstellar empires, full of evil Dyson spheres hunting for weak highliners to feed their machine kleptocracy.

Every Ranathan tribe has their own classes of highliners, but since they are all based on the Baykal standard, named after their total displacement being roughly equal to the volume of Lake Baykal, they get them serviced on the HALO stations & harvester ships - the way you send your car to the mechanic for repairs.