CHAPTER 14
ATLAS
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
Atlas arrived in the Tac system with his action plan set in place. He was excited, giddy. He loved the mystery of it all.
About six months earlier he’d received information from Ariana that narrowed down the number of stars he needed to investigate in order to identify the location of the Atua. He wondered if he was about to learn where their home world was.
He looked out of the small port window of the escape capsule they’d traveled in. “Ship, can you signal the Lex in this system? Can you confirm our authorization codes still work?”
“Done. It’ll take a few moments for it to respond,” Ship said as the two of them waited for the reply. “Lex has confirmed Trillion’s permission settings still give us full access to this system.”
The Tac star system was the first location Trillion had visited. Through a mistake, she ended up grey gooing the whole system, turning it into resource pallets and fabricators, which he planned on using in order to do his research.
Out the window of the small pod, Atlas saw a dead mechanical world. Atlas’s jaw dropped open as he looked at one of the planets. It looked like a Death Star. Every inch of it looked to be bottled up and turned into resource pallets. “Does Lex know what happened to the Starnet, Ship?”
“It said it blew up, but it’s not sure how or why.”
That’s not good, Atlas thought. “Was any other infrastructure damaged?”
“It’s confirmed all the damage has been fixed,” Ship said. “This Lex really is more proactive. It said that the Starnet has been fixed, and it’s reestablishing the connection with the others.”
Their Lex flashed a subtle hue of red and nudged Ship. “Sorry, Lex, I didn’t mean it like that. You’re still my favorite.”
“Lex has allocated us one of the unused spacecraft.” Ship took control of the small escape pod they were traveling in and guided them into an open hatch inside of one of the empty starships in the system.
Ship drifted the probe into an open air lock chamber, and eleph-ANTs inside of the cargo hangar took hold of the probe and secured them into place. “This will be our new home going forward. We can start coordinating things from here.”
“We’ve got full access to the manufacturing capability of this system, correct?”
Ship nodded.
“Then I’d prefer to fabricate a new rocket ship. I want it to look exactly like this one, at least from the outside. But from the inside, I want our matrices stored in a different location, and I want to replace the engines with the much more powerful designs that Angelique provided us.”
Atlas had learned the hard way the issues with using the same designs for all his ships. When he was attacked by Angelique’s people, his ship had been disabled quickly. It was a simple task of disconnecting Ship and him from their spacecraft. That rendered them unable to fight back.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Presumably the Atua aliens had access to all their blueprints, so if Atlas ever encountered them in a fight again, he wanted to make sure he wasn’t easily disabled.
He was quietly confident Angelique hadn’t shared all the weaponry she had at her disposal. But she had shared everything he’d seen so far. “Can you also add the tractor beam and more laser weapons to the spacecraft you build?”
“Wow, that was fast,” Ship said, projecting an image of the spacecraft design and handing it to Atlas. “The Lex in here is fast. Really fast. It suggested we use the original shape of our first rockets. The smaller rocket ship, as we don’t need as much space for the engines. A smaller rocket will also make us more maneuverable, too.”
On the outline of the rocket, at the very bottom, sat the large egg-shaped engine. Anyone looking at it would believe that was the large engine bay.
Ship opened up the inside of the rocket ship design to reveal the insides. There was a large open cavity where the rocket engine should have been.
Ship pointed to the opening. “With Angelique’s engine designs, we fill this space with eleph-ANTs and other probes.”
“I like it,” Atlas replied. “Can you equip all the eleph-ANTs with tractor beams? That way if we get into a fight, we can drop them all out the back and they can attack the enemy vessel while we escape.”
“On it,” Ship said. “Okay, done.”
“What do you mean done? I only just asked you to do it.”
“Do you know how easy it is to manufacture things in this system? Trillion has an ungodly number of fabricators here. We can basically manufacture things in no time.”
“Are you saying you printed tractor beams to connect to eleph-ANTs? Or the spacecraft is already built?”
“Both. They have massive fabricator units in this system. All the sections are currently being connected together. We could probably relocate into it, while the components are finished welding together.”
Atlas was amazed at just how useful this system was. Through Trillion’s mistake, she had created a very powerful capability.
This boded well for what Atlas had planned next.
After the construction of his fancy new spaceship, Atlas stood in the bridge with Ship and the two Lexes in front of him. Trillion’s Lex in charge of the system manifested an orb avatar that was slightly bigger.
He didn’t know if he was just imagining things, but his Lex was acting a little strange, as if it was slightly threatened by the new Lex. It always positioned itself in between the other Lex and him. Or maybe it was more like a puppy attempting to protect its owner.
Either way, Atlas found it a little cute.
“I assume everyone’s reviewed the message from Ariana?”
Ship nodded, while the two Lexes flashed green.
Ariana had sent them a list of candidate stars to investigate, which might all be potential home worlds for the Atua.
“Perfect, so there’s a large telescope in this system. Trillion built it to study other potential planets she could visit. Let’s point it at these planets and see if we can use the transit method to identify something interesting with the planets around these stars.”
The transit method involved waiting for a planet to pass in front of its host star. As light traveled through an atmosphere, different wavelengths of light were absorbed depending on the types of gasses light passed through. Oxygen, methane, and carbon dioxide all left distinctive fingerprints on all light that traveled through them.
If they were to point their powerful telescope at Sol, and if Earth was to cross right in front of the star so that they saw this happen, Earth would show obvious signs that it was producing gases that don’t occur naturally—at least in the quantities they did. It would almost be a dead giveaway that there was life on the planet.
The biggest trouble with the transit method was that the planet needed to be at the correct angle so the planet crossed in front of the star at an angle they could see.
The truth of the matter was, if they did point the telescope toward Sol, they wouldn’t see any signs of life because Earth would not pass in front of the star at an angle they could see.
So Atlas wasn’t holding out hope for them finding much. But he had his fingers crossed they might get lucky.
“Let’s get to it, team. See if we find anything.”