Darkheart

The Darkheart was a powerful space/time conduit in the Darkheart system constructed by the creatures which would evolve to become the Chronovores. Originally used as a healing device by the Chronovores, it was later exploited as a superweapon by Koschei.

The principle of the conduit relied on the fact the system's neutron star, which would otherwise have sufficient mass to form a black hole, had a portion of its mass relocated to another part of the system via a dimensional bridge. The result was that the mass of the star was spread over a larger area, allowing some of the properties of a black hole without having to pass through the event horizon to enter it, serving as a conduit to the space/time vortex, from which the Darkheart drew its power.

The Darkheart was used by the ancestors of the Chronovores to feed the young, sick or injured who could not feed themselves. The ancestors of the Chronovores could be found at any point in time, and so the Darkheart had the ability to transmit this energy to any point in time and space.

The power of the Darkheart could be funnelled in various different ways. The humans of the Earth Empire which arrived in the Darkheart system and founded the Darkheart colony on the isolated part of the neutron star, used the conduit to prevent themselves from ageing. This lasted from their arrival at the turn of the 31st century to the Darkheart's eventual destruction in the mid-34th century.

A consequence of the Darkheart's capability of transmitting temporal energy anywhere in time and space was the ability to alter timelines without causing paradoxes or attracting the attention of various "higher beings" (such as Time Lords or other Chronovores), and as such could be used as a weapon. Koschei schemed to use the device in this manner. As a demonstration of its power, he changed the timelines of the crew of a Federation cruiser, making all non-humans into humans unless they were too radically non-humanoid (the Alpha Centauran and Xarax crew for example were simply erased from history). As far as the affected crew were concerned, they were always human (for example, the Draconian first officer believed himself to be a human lord from the planet Draconia). The Master later offered Vernon Terrell the destruction of Terileptus, using the device. (PROSE: The Dark Path ^[+]Loading...["The Dark Path (novel)"])