Chapter 47

Earth
Toronto, Ontario
August 23, 2019
20:56 EDT

“Here we go!” Abi said as the hangar doors slowly opened revealing the sky above us. When they were finally opened all the way, Abi began slowly rising into the air while rotating the ship clockwise until we were facing the Atlantic Ocean to the East. She began pivoting the ship upwards and then throttled the engines so we began picking up speed. I looked at her available mana and it repeatedly dropped a single digit before going back up to full as we began accelerating.

It seemed like she was going to take the quieter and slower approach rather than get us into space faster, which would create a very noticeable sonic boom over a populated area. She rapidly accelerated until we were at around twelve hundred kilometers per hour before cutting back so we maintained that speed. It would take us about thirty minutes to get far enough away from any high-density areas before she could break the sound barrier, and then it would take less than a minute to exit the atmosphere.

Knowing that we would have some time before we jumped, I excused myself while calling for Vixa to follow me. It wasn’t a very long trip as it was only down the hall, but I entered my room to show Vixa where we were staying. While I had been gathering everything I needed for the trip hours earlier, Bria showed up with a new set of water dishes and a supply of food and water.

I had just set them down on the deck when I stopped by my room a while ago, but took the time to move them over to a corner and start filling them up. It took a bit of trial and error to set up the feeding times, but I finally got it. After that all there was to do was set up her new litter box, I was done setting everything up for Vixa.

Moving on to everything else, I dragged my three suitcases over to the closet and began emptying them. The first two I opened had contained my current suit of armor and weapons, as well as the numerous spares I brought along as well. I quickly hung up the suits and put my weapons in the little cubby up top before moving onto the final suitcase.

It contained all of the clothing I would be wearing during our pseudo-vacation, as well as soap, shampoo, shaving cream and the like. After hanging up the clothing and bringing the rest of the stuff to the bathroom, I put all three suitcases back into Abi’s dimensional storage. I was about to head back up to the bridge when I remembered there was one thing I had forgotten. Walking back over to the closet I held my hand out in front of me and the formal suit my mom had made for me appeared. I hung it up in the closet as well and then left my room with Vixa following beside me.

When I got back to the bridge I could see that we were high up in the atmosphere, giving us a really good view of the Earth. I could tell that we were still burning, though our orientation meant that Abi was putting us into a stable orbit, rather than break orbit entirely. To enter hyperspace, we would need to do one of two things. We would either need to get far enough away from Earth so that the hyperspace window wouldn’t be detected or Abi would need to position herself behind a planet such as Jupiter and Saturn and then open up the hyperspace window.

I was about to ask what was going on when the engines suddenly cut off and then Abi started rotating around. When she stopped rotating, the front of the ship was facing directly at the Earth.

“Greetings. My name is Abi and I am happy to welcome all of you aboard. I know this is the first time that many of you have been into space, and indeed this may be the last time some of you will see Earth. If you would like to take a final look at your original home, or just see how Earth looks from space, then follow the blinking lights that I have just activated in each and every hallway.”

“There are two observation decks, one on deck one and the other on deck twenty-five. The blinking lights will direct you to whichever is closest to you. Unfortunately each observation room can only hold a relatively small number of people at a time, so please only stay for a few minutes before vacating so more people can enter. We will be leaving in exactly thirty-five minutes. Thank you.”

No one in the bridge made a move to leave, as we had the best view in the house, so to speak. I had no doubt that there would be lines forming on both decks as people tried to get a view before we departed.

“And I thought the view from the Moon was good,” Selalea said. “It’s beautiful.”

“Most habitable planets are, though none seem to look as beautiful as one’s homeworld,” my mom replied.

I would definitely have to wait and see if that was true. While I had spent the last fifteen years on Earth, Nedovis was my homeworld.

Since we had another thirty-plus minutes where nothing was happening, I decided to use the chunk of time to head down to the mess. I had ended up missing dinner, and with people heading towards the two observation decks, it would be the best time to grab some food.

The second I stepped a foot outside of the teleporter on the twelfth deck I was buffeted by the smell of meat cooking. Upon entering the mess, I saw that it was set up much the same way the cafeteria was back on the base, though it was slightly smaller and there was one huge difference. The entirety of the wall to the right hand side was taken up by a series of huge rotisseries. Each of them had an entire cow at various stages of being cooked as they were slowly rotated over a single massive grill.

That explained the delicious smell, and it seemed that it was a dragon-run operation. As I watched, one of the men gestured and a spit rose in the air several feet. It slowly spun one hundred eighty degrees until it was facing a table with a large tray on top of it. The man next to him then gestured and the entire cow slid off the spit before gently landing on the tray. Another half-dozen men then went to work carving it up into smaller pieces.

The man who was levitating the spit then turned and submerged it in something that looked like a trough you might see on a farm, though this one was filled with soapy water. Some of the water splashed out of the trough as the spit was vigorously shaken before being raised back out of the water. Two men quickly walked up to it and began wiping off all the soap residue with dish drying towels. When they were satisfied that the spit was clean and ready to be used again, one of the two men nodded to the man who was levitating it.

He turned back around and I saw that a frozen cow was floating in front of another man as he exited a back room. With a quick motion, the spit impaled the cow all the way through and then it was spun around and put over the fire. Another man then walked over and began slowly rotating the spit.

“Those guys really have a system down,” Mason’s voice said from beside me.

I turned and saw that he had a plate with some beef on it as he munched away. He moved the plate towards me, offering some so I grabbed a piece and popped it into my mouth. I definitely wasn’t ready for the explosion of flavor when I bit into it, expecting dragons to just eat it raw. Or roast it with their breaths, as red and chromatic dragons could definitely do.

“Damn that’s good,” I said, reaching for another piece.

He pulled it away before I could take another and then gestured to another table with a literal heap of beef on top of it. “Get your own.”

I did just that, grabbing a plate that was sitting on a cart next to it before using the long fork to put a bunch of it on my plate. When I had filled my plate, I turned towards Mason who led me over to a table. Sitting there were my friends, sisters and Tessa. It seemed like all of them had the same idea, though they beat me here. I was surprised that my friends weren’t with their parents, but then again they had seen Earth from the moon and Abi had taken us on a short trip before.

“I think the dragons might give the cooks your mom brought along a run for their money,” Mason said as he chewed on another piece of beef.

“I can definitely see that. How’s the rest of the food? The same as usual?”

Anja nodded. “There is a little less variety, but most of the stuff that was available on the base is available here. I didn’t see any breakfast foods, so it could just be that they’re going to have breakfast in the morning and then the rest of the day will be lunch or dinner foods.”

“There are also a bunch of different types of salad that were added,” Ben said. “Probably so people have a well-balanced diet with the amount of meat the dragons will be cooking up.”

“I had wondered how they were going to feed over two thousand dragons and dragonkin,” I said after I swallowed another morsel.

“Apparently this isn’t even the only area where they’re cooking. I heard someone saying that they’ve also got one of the smaller upper decks to themselves to keep their people fed. Even the amount of food they’re cooking over there isn’t more than a snack for them,” Mason replied, nodding over to the spits.

I briefly wondered which deck had been assigned to them, but then that information pretty much popped into my head. At that moment, I knew the exact layout of the ship as well. “Ah, the twenty-third deck.”

Because Abi was shaped like an arrowhead, the thirteenth deck was actually the biggest, and the rest of the twenty-four decks gradually got smaller and smaller. The usable space on the first and twenty-fifth decks were miniscule compared to the space on the thirteenth deck hence both of them being observation decks. The twenty-third deck wouldn’t give them any living areas, though it would be more than sufficient to both store and cook their food over the next two weeks.

“So I wasn’t expecting the four of you to be here, I figured that you would be with your parents, showing them around.”

“We can’t exactly show them around when we don’t even know our own way around,” Ben chuckled with a shake of his head. “The layout is much different than it was the last time we were here.”

“The last time we were here, we only stopped by the cargo bay to pick up the shuttle,” Sonja said.

“You know what I mean,” Ben replied. “Anyways, they wanted to take a look at Earth from space, so we left them to it. It’s really handy that Abi can put directional markers right in the floor.”

“How excited are they?”

“I think they’re more nervous than anything,” Anja replied. “A little over a week ago they didn’t even know that there were aliens living on Earth, and now they’re about to travel further than any human ever has. Maybe we should’ve joined them on one of the observation decks, I would’ve liked to see their reactions.”

When we were finished eating, the nine of us headed up to the bridge. There were fewer dragon council members there than there were the last time I left, and I was glad to see that Bonanem was one of those who were no longer present. There was a timer displayed just below Abi’s available mana, showing that we would be breaking orbit in about two minutes.

“Your people really know how to cook,” I said, addressing the council members who stayed.

“Ah, you’ve visited the mess, then? We were wondering where you’d run off to,” Selalea said.

I nodded. “I was planning on grabbing some pizza or fried chicken or something, at least until I smelled the beef that was being cooked the moment I stepped out of the teleporter. I think that is the best beef I’ve ever eaten.”

“As carnivores, we do try,” Pharomna smiled. “There are some dragons who prefer raw red meat, but the rest of us grew tired of that long ago. While red and chromatic dragons are able to cook their own food using their fire breaths, the rest of us had to resort to cooking the old fashioned way. Eventually we found that roasting meat on a spit is the most efficient way to feed beings of our size. Especially when black or chromatic dragons are the ones doing the cooking, as you’ve no doubt seen.”

“I suppose your people will be quite busy figuring out what is edible and what isn’t when they’ve had time to settle on your new worlds.”

“Well, not entirely,” she replied. “We used the extra shipping containers to bring along a number of different species of animals, the majority being cows, pigs and chickens. It will be a few years until they reproduce enough that we can re-introduce them to our diets, but there were a lot of people that didn’t want to give beef and pork up.”

“Isn’t that a little risky?” I asked before elaborating. “Bringing additional animals onto the planet could introduce a disease to the native wildlife, right?”

“It’s a possibility, though we’re taking some precautions. With the size of predators on the two planets it would be unfeasible to have them live in an enclosed area on the surface. At least at the beginning, anyways. Once there are a few chambers cleared out to store our eggs and live in, then Olmith’s next priority will be to create an enclosure for them underground. Thankfully your mom has been gracious enough to supply us with a few fusion power plants and portable stasis field generators so we’ll be able to keep them on ice, so to speak.”

“It’s nothing,” my mom smiled as she turned to me. “Tamara also sent a few people who helped her set up the enclosures under the base, including one of those who worked on the gryphon enclosure. They’ll spend the next few months here helping them set up a few enclosures for domesticated animals.”

“Sorry to interrupt your conversation, but we’re ready to depart,” Abi said.

“Thanks Abi,” I replied, turning my attention to the screens.

Abi was already rotating the ship and stopped again when we were facing nothing but the darkness of space. She then throttled forward and the line on the star map began to move, showing our current trajectory. Our orbit around Earth began changing from one that was perfectly circular to one that was more ovoid. After a few seconds, the oval snapped, meaning that we were at escape velocity. She wasn’t done yet, however, as the line continued moving until it was almost perfectly straight.

She could have cut the engines long ago if she wanted to save fuel, but that wasn’t something she had to worry about. Everyone aboard the ship provided her with almost unlimited energy. With the engines at full, she was rapidly picking up speed. It didn’t take longer than a minute to break through the one hundred thousand meters per second mark and there were no signs of her slowing. If she had cut the engines when we were moving one hundred thousand meters per second, then it would have taken us over ten hours to get to Mars.

We didn’t plan on orbiting Mars and didn’t need to slow down to enter hyperspace, so as soon as we were hidden she would be able to open up a hyperspace window and jump into it. As we watched, our velocity continued to increase and we broke through two hundred thousand meters per second. At the rate of our current acceleration, it would only take us fifteen minutes, if not less, to make a journey that took the Curiosity rover eight and a half months to make.

At the speeds we were dealing with, anyone who wanted to see Mars was probably a little disappointed. We flew past in mere seconds and then a bright white hyperspace window appeared in front of the ship. An instant later we jumped inside of it, and the view around the ship changed one one that I was much more familiar with.

“Huh. Every hyperspace window I’ve seen is blue or purple,” Ben said. “Is it being white unique to you, Abi?”

“Not at all,” she replied. “I am unsure of the reasoning behind it, but the color of a hyperspace window seems to be determined by the power and efficiency of the hyperspace engine that is used to open it. For most ships, that means they are blue or purple, as you said. I believe the fleet enroute to Earth is sufficiently advanced that their hyperspace windows would be a very light blue, almost bordering on white. It can be both an advantage or a disadvantage since a window is formed whenever you enter or exit hyperspace. Unless they try to hide it, it is very easy to tell how advanced a ship is with a simple glance.”

“Neat.”

“I’ve set a new timer showing how long it will take us to reach Mezotis 3 and 4. I’ll need to take us out of hyperspace about a week in to perform a little bit of maintenance. That will only take two hours or so to complete and then I’ll jump again. In total, it will take twelve days, five hours, thirty-one minutes and twelve seconds to get there, barring any delays.”

“Great! Well, ladies, how about we resume our tour?” my mom asked the remaining dragon council members.

They looked at each other briefly and nodded. “I think we’d like that,” Selalea replied.

“Alright, let’s get going,” she said before turning to our little group. “See you all either later or in the morning. Jonathan, make sure to spend some time leveling up Precognition. Abi will have enough mana to grow in size again in a little over ten days.”

“Will do,” I nodded, activating the ability right away.

She nodded as well and then led the dragons out of the bridge.

My Precognition was pretty high, though not nearly as high as Anja’s was. At level twenty four, it would cost one hundred seventy mana and reduce my mana regeneration by seventy-six percent. With my current mana pool, that meant that I could maintain Precognition for about one hundred and fourteen seconds straight before running out of mana. Three seconds later I would be back up to full mana, and then I would repeat the process.

“So did you guys check out your quarters yet?” I asked, turning to everyone.

“My parents and I dropped our stuff off in our quarters and then split up. Ships aren’t usually built with windows as they’re a structural weakness, though that isn’t a problem with Abi. They wanted to watch us depart from the upper observation deck,” Tessa answered.

“You and your parents are on the starboard side of this deck, right?”

She nodded. “How’d you know?”

“Whenever Abi goes through a growth or changes her layout she downloads a new schematic directly into my mind through our bond. Along with that, she also sent me the list of everyone on the ship and what room they’ve been assigned to,” I answered before turning to my friends and sisters. “I’m assuming none of you have been to your quarters yet?”

None of them had, so I led them off the bridge for the short walk to our quarters.

“They’re rather cramped,” Mason said as he looked around the room he and Ben would be sharing for the next twelve days.

“It’s temporary. Abi had to be able to fit well over twenty-five hundred people aboard so she limited the amount of space without making it too uncomfortable. As soon as we get to Mezotis and the dragons have departed, then she’ll go through another growth and change the layout at the same time. For the trip to Veria and then to Earth, you can probably expect quarters of a similar size to the ones back on the base.”

“That’ll be nice. What are your quarters looking like?”

We left their quarters and then headed directly across the hall to my own. When I pulsed my mana to open the door, both of their jaws dropped.

“What the hell, Jonathan?” Mason exclaimed as he walked inside.

“What’s going on?” Aleena said as she and the rest of the women walked over. The second she saw the inside of my room, she turned to me. “Oh, that’s so not fair!”

I chuckled. They could probably fit all of their quarters inside of my own and there would still be a little bit of space left over. In fact, my quarters were almost an exact duplicate of my room back on the base. The only difference was that there wasn’t an extra room that was accessed through the walk-in closet.

“When you guys have your own ships, you can make your rooms as big as you’d like,” I said with a grin. “Alright, are you guys up to game for an hour or two? I had some pods loaded on one of the lower decks. They should be hooked up by now. We won’t be able to go on a mining run, but maybe we can find a job or something.

“Nah, I’ve got a better idea. I don’t know about you four,” he said pointing to my sisters and Tessa, “but we just spent the last four days familiarizing ourselves with firearms and getting in a little bit of practice. How about we check out The Escape? I spent about two hours this morning playing it, and it is incredibly fun, if difficult. It could be some nice practice.”

We all agreed to check it out, and we made our way up to the twenty-fourth deck where a dozen of the pods had been set up in our own private room. There were many more pods set up in another larger room, though since they are for public use, you had to sign up at least a day beforehand if you wanted to play some games.

The nine of us stepped into our own pod and then appeared in the lobby. Once we were all there, Mason snapped his fingers and we were in the main menu area of the game. In the background the trailer we had seen before was playing, however Mason began going over it in more detail.

“Alright, so the way this works is that there are a dozen different prison worlds that are at different levels of development. There is no magic or psionic ability of any kind, so you need to rely on yourself and your equipment to get off the planet you’re on. There are two different game modes, aptly called Campaign and Free Play.”

“In the Campaign, you start on the least technologically advanced planet, which is basically a world in the stone age, with nothing but the clothes on your back. Your goal is to make it to the opposite side of the planet where a ship will take you to the next prison world. Along the way, you can either rough it out in the wilderness or go town to town, accepting quests along the way. Some will have you deliver items to other towns, while others will require you to gather materials, kill players and NPCs, or explore an area and report back. If you die at any time, then you need to restart from the beginning.”