Chapter 55: Heading Off |
They’d already have been off for a couple of hours ag, but then it had turned out that Isaac had finally been released from his duty of watching over the wreckage of the alien starship he’d wrecked. And he was available for lessons.
You know, Derek would have thought that having an [Aura] of his own would allow him to sense his brother’s.
Yeah … that hadn’t happened. And that was with Derek knowing where it was supposed to be, at least if Isaac was even remotely following the book. The book which he had written.
A diffuse web of incredibly thin overlapping strands, any given place only being around tenth [Aura], if not even less, yet still entirely saturated, spread out across hundreds of meters, with several spheres wrapped around the outside to finish it off, each too thin to provide any information about what apssed through it, yet the fact that they were layered would let him get the direction of anything that passed through them, at which point, anything that drew the eye would be more closely examined.
It was a construct more complicated than many of the computers that had existed at the time of its creation, held in place entirely effortlessly, and simultaneously so thoroughly suppressed that it might as well not be there … or it straight up did not exist, and the instructional book on [Aura] usage was largely fiction. But Derek doubted that was the case; if Isaac’s magnum opus had been filled with falsehoods and exaggerations, someone would have called him out on it by now.
By comparison, when Derek tried to let out his own [Aura], it splashed outwards with all the force of a burst balloon, quickly dispersing until it reached its natural “limit” of twenty-five meters in all directions, showing him a whole lot of spaceship, and a whole lot of nothingness outside, but when it struck his brother, it simply … went away. Oh, sure, it was relatively obvious there had been something there while he was paying attention, but Derek was pretty sure that if he hadn’t been looking at his brother, he could have easily completely missed the disturbance in the field that should have shown him everything.
“Can you teach me how to do that?” he asked.
Isaac shrugged. “Which part?”
“Being invisible to [Auras],” Derek said, causing his brother to shake his head.
Derek grimaced. “I guess that’s what we’re here to do.”
“Sure.”
***
Several hours later, Derek had a headache and was trying to recall whether or not Isaac had actually started pounding the information into his head with a sledgehammer, or it had simply felt like it. All told … all told, he was perhaps one percent of the way towards mastering [Aura], but at least he felt comfortable unspooling it without accidentally seeing something he did not want to see. Which was something.
Also, he had a list of exercises to do to improve further.
But the thing that was currently rattling around his head was Isaac’s response to the question of how long it had taken him to master his [Aura].
“I had some … advantages that are hopefully unique. There’s no comparison to make.”
It had come across as sincere. Not merely true, but like … it had given Derek the impression that it was something rather foundational to his older brother. And, well, and that was the first, last, and only scrap of information he’d get on … whatever that had been about.
“So, where to next?” Isaac asked.
“Go exploring,” Derek told him, the unspoken “obviously” deafeningly obvious.
“Good luck,” Isaac replied. “And if you run straight into an alien armada, a World Boss, or some kind of cosmic anomaly … well, I’m sure you can handle it.”
“Cosmic anomaly? Are you sure you haven’t been watching too much old Sci-Fi?” Derek asked.
“What do you think R’lyeh is?” Isaac shrugged. “The closest we’ve ever come to describing it is ‘weird,’ and the only thing we know for certain about it is that it exists.”
“Wonderful,” Derek sighed, finding his tone surprisingly devoid of sarcasm. That sounded like an adventure. Of course, it sounded like it’d be dangerous as hell too, but that was par for the course.
“So, you need anything else before you head off?”
“I think we’re good,” Derek told him, suddenly finding himself wrapped in a hug.
“Seriously, don’t die out there, we literally just met,” Isaac told him, then let go.
“I don’t intend to,” Derek sighed. “And that goes for you too: don’t …”
He found himself trailing off. Telling the man most of the world knew as “The Sage” to not do anything stupid felt rather presumptuous.
“Too late,” Isaac grinned, obviously having understood anyway. “But it’s good to know Mom and Dad haven’t shared any of my … youthful indiscretions.”
“I guess I’ll just have to ask our sisters,” Derek shrugged.
“Tanja and Viktoria don’t know any of those stories,” Isaac laughed. “Anyway … good luck, godspeed, and plenty of adventure.”
And with that, Derek’s older brother stepped back out through the wall of the starship behind him, vanishing off into the void, speeding out of his [Aura’s] range in an instant.
So that was that, then.
***
“Shall we?” Derek asked from his captain’s chair.
“To infinity and beyond!” Atticus’ reply was half laugh, half shout, and undermined any seriousness this moment might have had, and the entire bridge was filled with chuckles.
Choosing against even trying to salvage the dignity of the proceedings, Derek simply triggered [Alcubierre Bubble], and the Dragonfly leaped into interstellar space, vanishing from normal reality in every way that mattered.
“I guess that’s one way to do it,” Mimi commented. “I need to check some things in engineering, then I’ll be right back.”
Derek watched her leave, then turned to the others. “So, that’s at least half an hour to make snacks.”
“I don’t think that’s long enough to make any of her favorites,” Ye-in said. “And that’s too long to just go with popcorn.”
“I mean, we do have magic …” Atticus pointed out.
Forty-five minutes later, they were all back on the bridge, the opening scrawl of A New Hope scrolling across the main viewscreen, and they had popcorn. Oh, they’d tried to make something else, but that hadn’t gone well. In fact … well, let’s just say that the only reason the kitchen was both clean and intact was that Derek had made a point of studying housekeeping magic. The arcane had a whole host of uses, but mucking about in the careful chemistry that was baking was surprisingly harder than even warping space.
… Or at least that was what Derek tried to tell himself, because that had been a rather spectacular failure of a rather mundane task.
Anyway, watch the movie, enjoy the movie, and try not to think about how easily near-Death Star level destruction could be wrought in real life …
***
A few days in, Derek found himself sitting cross-legged in one of the two main airlocks, staring out into the malestrom that was the [Alcubierre Bubble], the blues and reds of reality twisted until it stopped making sense altogether, bleeding together in a mesmerizing curtain of light.
It was also dangerous as hell to wind up in, which was why he’d made sure to wait to do this until he was the one maintaining the FTL [Skill], that way, if he, somehow, managed to fall out of the Dragonfly, he’d also wind up outside of the range of the enchantment in its superstrucutre that expanded [Alcubierre Bubble] to the entirety of the ship, causing it to fail well before he had the opportunity to get torn to pieces.
Of course, winding up ejected into normal space wouldn’t be good, mainly because it’d waste all the FTL pseudo-velocity they’d built up by staying at faster-than-light speeds up until now, but it was better than winding up dead by several orders of magnitude, by any measurement you’d care to use.
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Around him, his [Aura] spread, at first only sensing the metal and plastic of the Dragonfly’s hull, then dropping out into the bubble of vacuum outside, and finally brushing up against the edges of the chaos beyond.
Derek flinched back.
As strange as the phenomenon looked, feeling it was something entirely different. It was … it was as though someone had taken an entire section of the universe and wrenched, tilting it along an axis that seemed to exist within the context of said twist, making everything around it slide down an ineffable incline, falling for reasons that made zero sense in any other context …
He reached up and rubbed his temples, not that it was likely to actually help, nor was it truly pain that had made him withdraw, but the ache of staring into that mess was … well, it existed. Somewhere.
Though perhaps more importantly, it wasn’t anything close to debilitating; in fact, it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as he’d feared it’d be. Even if it was, perhaps, time to try something else before repeating that. Just in case the effect unexpectedly compounded.
He still kept his [Aura] up, though, as trying to maintain control of it even when focusing on other things was one of the main ways to train it. Another was the plastic ball in the pocket of his hoodie, a simple creation of the fabricators in engineering, made up of several layers of differently-colored plastic, of which he was only meant to skim the surface of, only enough to locate it but not actually get intrusive. Not that the ball had a concept of privacy … but people did. And learning to detect them without seeing anything “sensitive” was one of the most essential components of having a sensory [Aura] active in inhabited places and not getting your teeth kicked in.
But the new focus of his efforts was his eyes …. once he was done modifying them with [Aspect Integration], drawing upon the senses of two of the nastiest monsters of the cosmos, the Void Dragon and Cosmic Leviathan. Both were perfectly adapted to living in the emptiness that existed everywhere outside of those tiny islands of life that were planets, infinitesimal compared even to just their own solar systems, and they had the senses to match.
Space was simply too big for regular ol’ light perception to be helpful, not when most things were so far away that they looked like mere specs, which was why these creatures had instead been equipped with the ability to track other things. Space-time. Gravity. Exotic phenomena that had not yet been categorized by science. Or at least if they had been, no one had told him about them.
And thus, he stared out into the malestrom, the white of his eyes dyed the darkest black, his iris shifted to take on an equally stark azure, as he tried to understand what on Earth was going on out there beyond “the [System] makes it work.”
It … was beyond him, that much was clear within a few seconds. But at the same time, there was some kind of logic there. Some fragments of physics and magic that he could do something with. A basic idea he could build on. A small fraction of the warped reality that lay before him. Not small, tiny.
Yet it was a start. Using spells to replicate [Alcubierre Bubble] in its entirety would be both prohibitively difficult and likely pointless, considering spells were, on the whole, less effective than automatically triggered and channeled [Skills] that were stabilized by the [System].
Smaller parts, on the other hand, might be incredibly useful. For example, creating a slower-than-light movement spell to throw the Dragonfly around at speeds far greater than what her drives would allow. Or replicating the nigh invulnerability created by the warp bubble and turning that into a personal shield …
Oh, Derek was under zero delusions that this trick was unique to him, that he was the first to come up with this idea, but he was likewise pretty certain that very few people would have been able to pull this off at his current Level. Also, no spells based on them had ever made it onto the open market or into university libraries, which meant he’d have to make his own.
Eventually.
For right now, though, he was more concerned with building an understanding before he put things into action. Not to mention that working on it within the warp bubble wasn’t exactly what he’d have called a stellar idea.
So he’d just keep going on until they eventually decided to return to the normal universe.
***
They had not really made any plans about where to go, beyond “away,” with the amount of time likewise undetermined, it largely being based on how long it took for them to go stir crazy. Which wound up being fifty-seven days, roughly twice as long as Derek had expected. But then again, one of the big priorities when it came to choosing who to come out here with had been compatibility on a personal level.
Hell, if they’d packed more board games, they probably could have easily gone another month … but he supposed that was a lesson to remember the next time they stopped in port.
So, a mere thought tore apart the veil of chaotic energy wrapped around the starship and dropped them back into normal space. In the middle of bum-fuck nowhere, the nearest star almost three light-years away, and the star system they’d jumped from almost a thousand light-years behind them.
Because they hadn’t had any specific places to head to, they’d simply chosen a course that wouldn’t see them run into any stars or significant sources of gravity for much longer than they’d ever endure in FTL. And, once they knew where they were, a general long-range scan of their surrounding star systems should let them find out the most interesting spots to head to.
Which mostly boiled down to sitting in space for a couple of hours while the sensors and computers did their jobs, while they supervised with a bare fraction of their attention.
Something that, for Derek, amounted to floating twenty meters away from the Dragonfly, making the void around him crackle with energy, space twisting and folding and beginning to slowly gain a red glow as the sparse light from distant stars began to be drawn into it … and then came apart in a burst of mana. Just like it had the last twenty times.
Then, before he could try again, his phone buzzed, the vibration of his pants noticeable, unlike the ringtone, which was swallowed by the surrounding vacuum.
Of course, the same would happen to any conversations, so he merely took it as a sign to come aboard. Because the computers had found something.
And not even sixty seconds after he’d come aboard, the Dragonfly vanished in a burst of light.
***
There were four questions that needed to be asked when entering a new star system. And those were, in descending order of priority:
Were there threats present to the ship or the galaxy as a whole?
Was there a habitable planet there, inhabited or not?
Could you find unique resources in this star system?
And, finally, was there any cool shit not covered by questions one through three present?
In this case, the answer to question one was a resounding no, while question two could be answered with an equally resounding yes, question three was a “probably not,” and as for four … question number four was sufficiently broad that a full, complete, and exhaustive answer would take literal years. But upon the initial scan, it seemed like this star system “only” had a single habitable world, the closest planet to the star, in fact, due to this place not having an equivalent to Mercury or Venus, and said world was accompanied by a reasonably dense asteroid belt, and a couple of gas giants.
As for the planet itself, it was going to be rather hot by human standards, being slightly closer to the starward edge of the Goldilocks zone, which, combined with an axial tilt slightly greater than Earth’s, resulted in a strip of desert wrapping around the world’s equator, with rainforests on either side of that scorched wasteland, eventually bleeding into savanahs and then more temperate climes, all the way up to the poles which, based on their current scans, had weather comparable to central Europe, which was apparently as cold as this world got.
It also had a fairly even split between land and sea, though the two were quite intermingled, not quite to the point of being fully intermixed, or all the land being nothing but a bunch of islands, but this place could easily wind up setting a new record for having the greatest number of continents for an Earth-sized world, though that may vary, seeing as the defintion of “continent” could be surprisingly open-ended.
All told, it was a fairly standard human-habitable world. Not perfect, after all, only terraformed worlds and Earth itself could reach that lofty designation, but an above-average portion of the surface and oceans had conditions that humans could enjoy without major alteration.
So, what to do … why, live out his Robinson Crusoe fantasy, of course!
You know, minus the “last survivor of a shipwreck” part.
“Atticus, take us in,” Derek ordered with a broad grin. “Long, slow approach, I want a proper scan of the surface, we don’t want any nasty surprises.”
What he wasn’t saying was just how badly squigged out he was getting at the black splotches on the planet’s surface.
The scanners were saying those were jungles, the black color likely coming down to some ungodly effective chlorophyll-equivalent that had evolved in the local plantlife, which was why much of the planet was looking relatively dark, but something about that world made his mind think of old sci-fi horror movies, or just horror movies in general, some kind of suffocating, all-consuming mass of slime or something.
It wasn’t, or rather, if it was, it would have shown up as some kind of anomaly on the sensor readout, but it hadn’t, so it was probably fine.
Besides, once again, they weren’t throwing themselves straight at the surface; they were taking the time to scan literally everything … though that was only part of why they were being so thorough. The other reason was far simpler and more selfish: they wanted to find the coolest place to land.
And that was a lot harder than one would assume. Not because the place was boring or simple, quite the opposite, in fact. There was way, way, way too much to choose from.
This was a goddamn planet, slightly smaller than Earth but with far more land surface area, and … well, just look at all the cool stuff humanity’s home had.
Ayer’s Rock and the Great Barrier Reef. The Himalayas and Bikini Atoll. The Grand Canyon and the Great Salt Plains. The Serengeti and every rainforest.
And the various laws governing space exploration were clear: you could not claim planets or star systems without clear intentions to properly colonize in the near future, and the capability to follow through.
However, there were still several benefits to be gained by finding new worlds.
Money, to start with, either the standard payout when adding one’s discoveries to the governmental nav charts or by selling the location of a habitable world to a given group, corporation, or other entity capable of using said information.
Then there was the fact that the person to hand in such charts would be able to make a name suggestion that would at least be considered, though after several rather unprintable ones had gotten through, the vetting process had been made rather thorough to avoid a repeat performance. You know, after the names Hellhole, Cesspit, and Trashheap had wound up etched upon the starcharts for all eternity. One would think that someone would have sounded the alarm after the first one …
Oh, the planets in question absolutely deserved those titles, Hellhole in particular being, in all ways that mattered, Venus’ omnicidal cousin, hellishly lethal in a way that would take a World Item to even begin to fix.
But it was the third benefit that Derek was looking forward to taking full and complete advantage of right now. The ability to claim sections of the planet, and put whatever the hell you wanted there, with almost no restrictions, the main ones being “no ongoing damage to the environment outside” and “nothing that threatens the planet itself.”
So, no building fusion reactors unless you were going to be there to babysit them, no leaving behind automated factories that actively polluted the surrounding area, etc.
Though, for once, Derek was going to conform, to do what everyone else did: find a cool place, build something cool, and then go on to find somewhere else to have fun.
Not that Derek expected to be leaving this place anytime soon. The black and white planet beneath them was about twice as far from Earth as the furthest known colony, even if someone started running out here the very instant he sent off the report, they’d still have months all on their lonesome.