Chapter 63: Hornet’s Nest? |
Derek slowly walked towards the bridge, going through his two freshly upgraded [Skills].
Starship Upkeep (epic, Level 10)
This Skill represents the ability to do maintenance on a starship.
…
Now, you may also maintain Skill-empowerments added during the creation/construction, at the cost of mana (may be expensive).
Expensive.
Yeah. Undestatement of the century. Physically replacing the power conduit that had broken when Ye-in had accidentally punched the wall instead of the heavy bag had taken barely twenty minutes. Bringing it fully up to the previous standard, restoring all the countless [Skills] empowering the ship, provided by everyone from foundry workers to the yard foreman, had taken an hour’s worth of mana regeneration.
Not to mention that after a single repair, the loss in effectiveness he’d prevented was “only” around twenty percent. He shuddered to think about what it would have cost to make a more complete repair of something larger.
But it was also yet another way to stave off needing to go back to the yard for repairs to make up for the slow loss of effectiveness.
Knowledge Conversion (legendary, Level 10)
Convert knowledge into experience.
…
Conversion rate is increased.
Granted, this time, the threshold bonus was the exact opposite of flashy, but it didn’t need to be.
The ability to directly level [Skills] from book learning had been overpowered even in its base form, making it faster just made it that much more useful.
Derek entered the bridge at a leisurely pace, plopped himself down onto his chair, and watched the swirling chaos on the main viewscreen, as well as the small number ticking down in its top-right corner.
Apparently, he was early. Still three minutes to emergence. Also, he was alone on the bridge, so there was that.
Ye-in entered thirty seconds later, Mimi a minute after that, and Atticus stormed with a shout of “sorry” with less than ten seconds on the clock, plopping into his seat and finally cancelling the [Alcubierre Bubble] that had been his turn to maintain, dropping them into interstellar space in a burst of light.
“Huh. I think we’re early,” Atticus announced, highlighting the nearest star on the screen. “But that’s where we’re heading, right?”
“Yeah,” Derek agreed. The navigation might have been a bit off, but not by much. Ten more minutes of FTL would take them the rest of the way there. It was a little weird to think about, but they’d have crossed that same distance in barely a second at their previous pseudo-velocity, now forced to spend almost six hundred times that making up for a navigational gaffe that had happened weeks ago.
On the other hand, being a little cautious and trying to not go for perfectly accurate, least-time courses that required absolute precision was just good business when weighed against the damage that careening into a zone with sufficient gravity to disrupt [Alcubierre Bubble] could do.
The effects of that were … well, survivable, but still far from pleasant. Also, wrecking your ship in an unknown and unexplored star system was a truly terrible idea. Not that that had stopped people from cutting it too close and overshooting …
Yet ten minutes of tense silence later, the darkness of regular space returned, the vista of the target star system expanding before them.
A relatively standard yellow dwarf took pride of place, slightly off to the side of the screen, orbited by a surprisingly large Mercury-equivalent, followed by nearly half a light hour entirely devoid of planetary bodies, though there was a ragged-looking asteroid belt stretching there, with a trio of gas giants beyond that.
It was pretty. Normal, with no adventure leaping out to offer itself, and certainly lacking in the sorts of outstanding qualities that would have made it memorable, but it was nice. It … huh.
“Okay, that can’t be right,” Derek said flatly, staring at the main screen.
“What?” Atticus asked.
“I …” Derek sighed. “I think there’s a missing planet. The orbits don’t fit. And that’s why the asteroid belt’s coming apart, it’s getting pulled towards the gas giants because the second planet’s gone!”
“Hm,” Atticus replied, beginning to tap away at his console. “I’m getting the feeling we should have programmed ‘realize there’s a planet missing’ into the sensors. This might take a bit.”
“We do, it’s not active by default,” Mimi said. “The folks back home came up with way too many ‘contingencies,’ I don’t think even the mainframe at Squidworks could run them all. Also, those aren’t very good without an expert to run them, so we should probably get a second opinion.”
“Well, then it’s a good thing one of our comm nodes is connected with a station full of them, isn’t it?” Atticus asked, then turned to Mimi. “Anyone in particular I should be reaching out to?”
“Not sure,” she muttered, chewing on her lower lip. “I’ll see who’s available. Send me the sensor data?”
It was only then that a new icon flickered into place in the corner of the screen.
‘Astrographics Mismatch. Update maps?’
“Oh, now you notice,” Derek sighed, causing Mimi to immediately leap to “her” ship’s defense.
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“We don’t have any up-close survey data,” she pointed out. “Everything we have is from deep space telescopes and the like. The computer has to do a lot of checks before it’ll flash an actual error. If it didn’t, that alert would be permanently active.”
Derek grimaced. “And there’s that. But can you program it to actually show immediately what the mismatch is without anyone having to click anything?”
After all, something like “MISSING PLANET!” along with a highlighted location of where it was supposed to be might be sufficiently time-sensitive that having to dig the associated report out of the computer would cost them. For example, just what had caused a goddamn planet to vanish.
After all, if something could do that, what was to say it couldn’t also sneak up on a starship that could pick out individual asteroids on the other side of a star system? That delay might be fatal.
Although …
“What exactly is the mismatch to?” he asked.
“All available sources,” Mimi told him. “Long-range scans from observatories, what our own sensors before that final jump, extrapolations from both of those, and then it has to make sure the original observation wasn’t distorted, or the object in question isn’t just behind something.”
She tapped a few commands into her console, then nodded happily. “It was still there during our break.”
Or, at least, the light that had reached them was sufficiently old that it was still showing the planet in question.
“This was recent,” Ye-in said. “Recent enough for us to get a good resolution if we look at it via old light?”
“Depends on when it happened …” Atticus trailed off, staring off into the distance as he rolled the problem over in his head. “But we should leave ASAP.”
He glanced back at Derek for confirmation, who nodded, and without further input, the Dragonfly jumped back in FTL.
Though he wasn’t all that confident in their chances of success, at least as far as seeing the thing that did it went. Their sensors were built to observe things on a star-system scale, and find stars when in interstellar space, with some information on the orbiting planets, as long as the star in question wasn’t that far away.
Unless whatever had hit the planet was absolutely gigantic, or had shown up only yesterday, they weren’t going to see jack squat.
“So, what do you think did it?” Atticus asked.
“World Item?” Derek suggested. “They can have global effects, create small planets, and even destroy them. Wouldn’t it make sense that an alien race might have something that can hide one?”
After all, every sapient species had twenty World Bosses in its summoning tables, each of which had its own unique World Item, and as far as anyone knew, there was no overlap between either of those lists, even if there was the occasional similarity.
“Shit,” Atticus commented, neatly summing up what, most likely, everyone else was thinking.
“I mean …” Mimi said, trailing off. “Wouldn’t a World Item have done a better job? How long did it take Derek to see something had gone wrong by eye?”
“It’s not like I don’t have advantages,” Derek pointed out.
“But that [Skill] of yours didn’t show you anything we couldn’t have figured out otherwise. It was just faster,” Mimi replied. “It’s too obvious. A stealth-focussed World Item would have been infinitely more subtle.”
“Infinitely?” Atticus asked with a raised eyebrow. “How’s that work?”
Mimi’s face flushed, before her body took on a forced-relaxed posture, the glare in her eyes giving lie to that. “You know what I mean!”
“It could still be a World Item,” Ye-in said. “Something that fakes a planet’s departure while only cloaking it. Do you think we can figure out where it would be if it only ‘vanished’ and send a drone after it, something along those lines?”
“And do we even have drones?” Atticus added.
“We have two each of sensor and communications relay drones, basic scouting platforms, and one atmospheric scout capable of functioning in moderately severe weather,” Mimi said. “And I have the schematics for thirty others, but those will take three to four days to make.”
A small list popped up on the side of the main viewscreen, listing everything from long-term observation (spy) machines to deep water scouts that were designed to survive any pressure that could realistically be found in a planetary ocean, should they, for whatever reason, want to go diving down there.
“We do know the planet didn’t just fly out of the system,” Derek said. “That, we’d have seen in the shape of the asteroid belt.”
“Poofed out of existence and not even dust left … do we know what the Eye of Balor looks like when it hits something?” Ye-in asked.
“If anyone’s ever used one, it’s classified to hell and back,” Atticus replied. “I’ll ask Mom if she knows anything.”
The Eye of Balor being the planet-cracking World Item that humanity had been farming at every opportunity just so every instance of it could be locked away for everyone’s safety and to deny potential rogue actors a shot at earning it by slaying Balor of the Evil Eye. And as far as Derek knew, no one had ever used one, not even to see what it looked like.
“And I’ll ask Isaac,” Derek added.
As he did that, Atticus canceled [Alcubierre Bubble], dropping them back into normal space, the black being replaced by the multicolored swirl of the warp bubble a moment later.
“Planet’s was already gone, two days ago.”
The process repeated several times, each instance revealing a view of a star system already down a planet until …
“Oops, too far,” Atticus said, starting the process of moving them closer again.
That turned out to be the final jump his mana pool would allow, though, leaving Derek to take over casting the [Skill], eventually followed by Ye-in, and then finally running Mimi’s pool dry before they’d finally managed to find a spot that, barring a major miscalculation that had somehow gotten past all them and the ship’s computer should have them see the planet vanish at some point in the next fifteen minutes or so.
And as for the most worrying part … nothing had changed during any of the jumps. There had been zero preparations made for the vanishing of an entire world.
“Mom says they haven’t used any, and that she’s seen all the Eyes in the vault during penetration testing,” Atticus suddenly spoke up. “I …”
The pilot might have continued talking after that, but if he did, Derek didn’t hear it, the sound of his surroundings, along with all other thoughts in his head, seemingly blotted out by the scintillating wall of energy that had blocked their view of most of the star system before vanishing, leaving them staring at almost exactly the same view they’d had previously, except they were now missing a planet.
“Do we know how close that was?” Derek asked.
“We’re too far away to see, we’ll have to triangulate,” Mimi said, flipping a course direction to his personal console. Derek took a moment to look it over, then pulled the ship along the indicated direction, away from the system and slightly to the side, once again putting them ahead of the light that showed what had happened to that world while also granting them a different angle onto it.
For all that light moved at nearly three hundred thousand kilometers a second, FTL travel was, by its very definition, faster.
But what they saw was not the same thing they’d seen mere seconds ago. Oh, the planet still went away, buuuuuut …
“Okay, where the fuck did the energy bubble go?” Atticus neatly summed up all their thoughts as they watched the planet simply, you know, blink out of existence, without even the faintest hint of just what the hell had just happened.
“Maybe it’s only visible from specific angles?” Mimi suggested, sending Derek a new course, one which would let them see the vanishing planet again, this time from the original direction.
A brief warp later … nothing.
“What are the chances that we saw the bubble at the last possible second before the light became too diffuse for our sensors to pick up?” Derek asked.
“Infinitessimal,” Mimi said flatly. “And it was too bright when we did see it; it’d have been a lot fainter if it were about to drop below our detection threshold.”
“Well, clearly we won’t get anything out here,” Atticus decided. “Unless anyone’s got a better idea, I think we should head back to the system and see if we can find something with the drones. Maybe it really just went invisible?”
“Yeah, let’s,” Derek said half-heartedly, his mind already elsewhere while the world around them once more dissolved into the tri-color malestrom of the [Alcubierre Bubble], staring off into the distance until they re-emerged into the now quite freaky star system.
And then, suddenly, finally, the penny dropped. The adventure his [Skill] had said was to be found here? It had moved.
And that’s when the monster caught his eye.
Son of a …