Chapter 152
The Masters
Lucas became confused as he saw the coordinates of the battleship he had tagged. It had jumped out of the system and then jumped more than ten times within the next hour. It had finally stopped in the middle of deep space and remained there for the past thirty minutes.
Deep space is a term used for space that is not a part of any celestial body or solar system. Essentially, it was empty, a true void. There was literally nothing there. No planets, suns, comets, or asteroids. There was just… nothing.
Lucas puzzled over this quandary. There were no resources there, so no life could have possibly formed in the void of space. So, why would the battleship go there? Shrugging, he realized that there was no way to know for certain until he sent his stealth probes.
Activating their hyperdrive, he sent the probes to the battleship’s location. Unfortunately, the probes would no longer have enough power to activate the hyperdrive engines, so this would be the last place the probes could jump to.
Lucas had been ignoring his friends’ reactions to the probes’ video that he was livestreaming to them. It was quite easy, actually, to ignore them, because they were in another tank. He was just starting to receive video from the probes when he heard a thump coming from outside.
Switching video feed from the probes to the sensors on the outside of the tank, he could see Aslo standing next to it. Raising his hand once again, Aslo knocked on the side of the tank. Thump. “Lucas! Open up!”
Lucas sighed. He yelled back at Aslo. “What do you want?!”
“I wanna talk!”
“Go away! I’m busy!”
“No! I’m not gonna stop until-Hey! Hey! Let go of me you dumb ox! I’m gonna burn you if you don’t le-!”
Lucas watched as Chu Shen mysteriously appeared behind Aslo during his rant and grabbed his arms, wrapping him in a bear hug. Aslo immediately started struggling, but Chu Shen’s arms didn’t budge an inch. When he was called an ox, Chu Shen frowned, covering Aslo’s mouth with one of his hands.
Glancing up at the camera, he showed a helpless expression. “Sorry Lucas, Aslo got a little bored. He snuck out while me and Chrissa were talking and I noticed it only a couple seconds ago. Don’t worry. I’ll make sure he doesn’t come over here to bother you again until the scouting is done. See ya!”
With that said, Chu Shen hoisted Aslo’s struggling body over his shoulder. Circles of light appeared under his feet and he disappeared from Lucas’ sensor range with ten seconds. Lucas was, however, able to detect a sudden surge of heat before he lost sight of Chu Shen.
Lucas sighed. Aslo was certainly a handful. Energetic, eager for a fight, arrogant, and he got bored very easily. Not to mention dumb. He was definitely meant to fight and not lead. Turning back to the probes’ scans, Lucas started to see why the tagged battleship had went to the puzzling coordinates
It was a rogue planet. Rogue planets are planets that formed without a solar system. Without a sun to orbit around, they float aimlessly through space. Such planets have extremely cold temperatures on the surface, but a vast majority of them also have an atmosphere. This is a result of the lack of a sun to disrupt even the most fragile of atmospheres.
This particular planet looked like Neptune, a gas giant that was blue in color. The core of the planet was dark blue with swirls of a lighter blue strewn throughout the entirety of the planet. The probes could detect some metallic structures deep inside the planet, presumably by the dense core of it, where the pressure of the planet was the most intense.
The battleship was parked in the orbit of the rogue planet. The probes could detect signals between it and the metal structures below. Maneuvering itself in space, the probe moved between the battleship and the structure below. With this maneuver, the probe could pick up the signals passively without alerting the enemy and relay them to Lucas.
“(*$&^(@*#^^@)(#%**%$#)($^&&&!%@%^#$#@. @&&^*&$#@@$$#@%%[email protected]!#%).” The sounds of the transmission was harsh, like that of cymbals clashing and metal being sawed. Lucas covered his ears and immediately shut down the audio. The probe was already recording so it wasn’t a big deal for him to shut off the audio.
Running his translation software on the recording, Lucas hoped that he would get lucky. Sometimes it would take up to a month to receive an accurate translation. If they continued talking, the translation time would go down.
After he set up the translation software, Lucas started manipulating the probe so as to get a closer scan of the planet. Focusing on the area of the metallic structure, Lucas activated the scanners. Unfortunately, a visual was not available due to the thick atmosphere.
They were able to collect a 3d-image of the metallic structure from his other sensor apparatus though. From all appearances it was a communication relay. It was floating on a helium/hydrogen/methane concoction which had turned into a liquid from the temperature and pressure. The entire thing resembled an open hand with the open part pointing away from the battleship above.
Swimming in the liquid gases beside the comm relay was a blob. Tentacles stuck out of it, making it resemble a large jellyfish. Then he watched as the jellyfish reached one of its tentacles into the open sides of the comm relay. The constant stream of communication that the probe had recorded suddenly cut off after the jellyfish touched the inside of the comm relay.
Lucas positioned six probes evenly across the entire planet's surface and started locating multiple of these jellyfish things. All of them were two hundred miles above the planet’s core. Lucas watched as one went above that imaginary limit and it shuddered as though it was in pain before immediately fleeing back towards the border.
‘Ah. These creatures are very pressure sensitive. It makes sense though considering the fact that they evolved here, on such a highly-pressurized planet.’ Lucas could come to several conclusions from watching this one event and using the experience of other alien species in his own dimension.
Creatures that live in high pressure environments cannot go to a low pressure environment without dying. They simply cannot adjust to the low pressure and promptly explode. It is the same with deep-sea creatures being brought to the surface on Earth.
Since it is not such a dramatic change in pressure on Earth, some creatures can survive for weeks. However, the pressure difference on this planet compared to Earth is a magnitude of several thousand. It’s simply not comparable.
In Lucas’ dimension, such creatures living on gas giants like this were not a part of advanced civilization. The fact was that creating advanced electronics was almost impossible on such a planet. There were just too many chemicals that could interfere.
Even if they were given a spaceship, the amount of energy needed just to exit the gravity well would be too immense for almost any ship to make it off. Not to mention the fact that the sudden change in pressure from their world to the weightlessness of space would almost certainly kill anyone attempting. In order to successfully create an advanced race on planets like this, specialized equipment would need to be made. Equipment that was impossible to get to work on planets like these.
Lucas frowned. These creatures were obviously able to get around these problems since they were in space. But how did they do it? Lucas had no idea.
What he did need to do though, was stop them from destroying the Nugitraaiilain’s planet.