The alarmingly violent trembling of the 'Seraph of The Cosmos' finally ceased.
Draco let out a sigh of relief. "I thought the ship was going to crumble to dust..."
"Yeah, me too. Thankfully, it didn't... But I have some bad news," Arthur chimed in.
Draco scanned the surroundings, searching for Arthur's holographic projection.
"All systems are down, even the projection inside the ship. We connected that mystery engine directly to the power plant, and it was sucked dry along with the boost packs..."
"... It's fried, essentially. That's the bad news," Arthur explained.
Draco settled back in his chair, taking a deep breath. "Well, we're not dead yet... And it seems we got rid of them... But are we just sitting ducks here in whatever forsaken part of the universe we are in?"
"It's not too bad... The sensors and systems will be back online in a week. We just have to wait for the backup power plant to spool up..."
"It'll be enough for all the systems and weapons to get back online, but it's not enough for FTL. We'll have to wait until the boost packs are fully charged again," Arthur replied.
Draco nodded thoughtfully, "What about Hyperjump capabilities?"
"Yeah, we could forget about that for the time being. Once the systems are online, it's going to be a slow and painful process to diagnose and repair it, though we do have everything necessary for that onboard."
"So what do we do in the meantime?" Draco inquired.
"Well, the only working systems right now are my core, the console system in front of you, and the water closet... Not that you need it, seeing as you've only ever slurped on those nutrition tubes."
Draco grinned, "Well, I like it, and I don't need to use the loo. The awful food they pack on the ship always gives me constipation... So... Do we just keep chatting for an entire week?"
"You can talk to your imaginary friend, pal. I'm going into hibernation. I'm going to go through the data we received from the Drak and try to decrypt some more. I ordered some movies out of boredom when we were in contact with the sector, maybe watch those. Bye."
Arthur's voice faded into silence.
On the console, Draco browsed through the entertainment tab, swiping from one screen to another, looking for something to pass the time.
Feeling bored, he clicked on the icon for "Swift and Spurious 666."
The intro began to play. As planets loomed in the background and spaceships zipped past explosions, an epic voice boomed:
" The latest installment of the galaxy's favorite franchise, The Swift and Spurious Part 666. Prepare for an interstellar odyssey like no other. Brace yourself for the pulse-pounding, nerve-racking, heart-stopping nonstop action of epic space battles, exploding planets, and "Family."
Starring Vince Octane and Dewayne "The Pebble" Johnson.
In Cinemas Galaxy-wide. "
Draco hit play and set the movie on loop. He reclined in his chair and before long, he dozed off to the sound of explosions and Vince Octane yelling "Family."
----------------------------------------
The sounds of gunfire, explosions, and exploding bodies, memories of his battles as a grunt played through Draco's dreams. The ever-increasing shrill screams finally woke him up.
He was briefly startled; as he looked around to see the familiar and reassuring interiors, he calmed down.
After a moment of introspection, he smiled, muttering under his breath "...the good old days."
He put an end to the looping madness playing on the console.
'I must have slept for a long time' he stretched his body, cracking his joints.
"Arthur, are you awake?" He wondered aloud.
"Yep!" Arthur's voice echoed in the command, "You slept for 4 days straight, that's a new record for you. I was waiting for you to wake up."
"How much longer will it take for the ship to be online?"
"The mini powerplant is spooling up to speed, it will start generating energy in a day. Oh, I found something from a newly decrypted piece of data."
"I'm all ears."
"The engine was hard coded to reach a certain location, and looking at the coordinates, we should be near Sol."
Draco was confused, "What? Then why aren't we picked up by someone. Surely Central and the Vanguard would have known the ship's signature... What's happening?"
"There's a chance the engine might have failed, and we are somewhere halfway in the universe."
"Hmm, once the systems are online, we should be able to communicate with the Sector if that's the case... What about the engine design. Is it something we could reverse engineer?"
"Well, there's no engine, not anymore. The black sphere has crumbled like a crushed bottle. The engine looks designed to be for one-time use."
Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!
"Damn, what a waste of effort on our part... So what do you think the engine contained?"
"Likely a remnant vestige of an intermediate-mass black hole, only that would explain its function to transport us across the universe in an instant... Pity it's gone... It would be next to impossible to track such a remnant object in this vast universe, we likely won't ever see this engine in action again."
Draco pondered for a while, "Do you think they were planning a surprise attack on Earth?"
"At this point, it would all be speculation. I will analyze the data when more of it is decrypted, though it would take a while."
Draco nodded as he started pacing around the room.
----------------------------------------
30 Hours later, Command Bay, The Seraph of the Cosmos.
"I'm powering on the systems, get ready."
Draco sat down in the Captain's chair and moved it closer to the central console, eager to know their current location.
A hum echoed throughout the ship as all the systems came to life.
5 minutes later.
Draco and Arthur both had contorted expressions on their faces.
Draco looked at each of the screens back-and-forth, hoping he'd seen it wrong.
But the video feed displaying what's in front of them betrayed his hopes, dismaying both him and Arthur.
"That's Neptune..."
"... But where's everyone?... Where are the satellites, and where's the Central Communications Hub... It should hover around Neptune..."
Arthur calmed down and disappeared from the command bay, leaving Draco alone, who was wondering what the hell happened.
10 minutes later, Arthur reappeared.
Draco, who has been patiently waiting for Arthur, looked expectantly at the holographic projection.
"Let me answer your questions. No, this isn't a star system that looks exactly like Sol. Yes, that's the exact Neptune we know, and the distant glowing orb we see is indeed the Sun. We are exactly where you think we are."
After a deep breath, he sat down in the Captain's chair.
"Any theories?"
Arthur shook his head.
Draco was in a daze for a while. When he recovered, he straightened his chair, and a solemn look appeared on his face.
"Let's go ahead, we'll know what's happening."
Traveling at the speed of light, they came to a halt four hours later.
A familiar sight greeted them.
A blue planet and its quaint moon.
"It's indeed Earth." Arthur voiced.
Draco couldn't help but exclaim, "It's magnificent!"
He was born several tens of thousands of millennia after World War 3, a disconsolate and unforgettable event that led to the near destruction of Earth. It was also the event that stirred Humanity's desire to escape its planetary confines.
The limited resources of Earth that led to this great war also led Humans along a path of ingenuity, invention, and discovery, culminating in Humanity's conquest of the heavens.
He was born in a dusty desert world in a far-off galaxy. Though he frequently visited Earth later in his long military career, by this time Earth was already an amalgamation of steel and solid rock, its majestic beauty nowhere in sight.
As he was reveling in the beautiful view, Arthur chimed in with a heavy voice, "I thought we might have traveled back in time, but that doesn't seem to be the case..."
"...From the Sun's photonic dating and the orbits of the planets, it's the year 79,412."
Draco looked at Arthur in surprise. After some thought, he asked, "Are we perhaps in a parallel universe?"
"Though such a theory has existed for a long time, there hasn't been any proof to confirm or deny it. But looking at what's in front of us, the theory looks to be true."
"Are there Humans down there?" Draco questioned, a hint of enthusiasm apparent in his voice.
"A third scan is underway as we speak, but unfortunately there don't seem to be any signs of life. I have sent drones for recon, only when there's no life to be found can we think about landing..."
"...This ship is far too big; it would adversely affect everything from the speed of rotation to the orbit of the planet. Just the volume of air we'll displace will likely cause raging winds and tornados across the planet. Nevertheless, the ship's recon and life support systems are being moved from storage and will soon be online."
Draco's countenance sank.
The time when he was a grunt, working as an infantryman for the Central, quelling separatist forces, and killing countless fellow humans, was when he truly felt he had an identity and a sense of belonging.
He came close to dying several times, these were the times his sense of identity and belonging were the strongest.
He made lifelong friends during this period, some succumbed to the war, some died of old age. Some have ascended the ranks along with him, participating in several campaigns, most of whom have later become bureaucrats.
Today, very few of the people he knew from back then are alive, but he was the only one who had stepped into campaign after campaign massacring millions of Humans and countless billions of other races.
The technology reserved for the very best and most elite of Humanity has allowed Draco to overcome death, his original body has long since withered in the river of time. Each time he got a new physical body, his sense of identity and self became fainter and fainter.
In the last several thousand years, his identity as an individual has ceased to exist, with his only identity being an elite of and for Humanity, ultimately leading him to become a wanderer willing to explore the edges of the known universe.
The possibility of the absence of Humanity has sent him reeling in his memories, his ego grasping at straws to maintain its last sense of identity. All of this left Draco in a daze.
10 minutes later, a frown appeared on Arthur's face. 10 minutes later, again, Arthur's frown deepened. Draco was brought back into the moment due to Arthur's actions.
"What the hell, you've been frowning for the past 20 minutes, what's going on?" Draco asked impatiently.
"See for yourself."
Arthur played the live video feed on all the screens in the Command Bay. Scenes of large trees, vegetation, and Misty mountains surrounded them, a particular scene on one of the screens caught Draco's attention, and he moved closer to it.
A man wearing strange clothes was tending to his crops as children ran across the field, chasing after a rabbit.
Draco smiled. It had been a long, long time since he had felt genuine joy. At this moment, he felt immense happiness and gratitude for the existence of the farmer and the children. A lone tear trickled down his cheek, this surprised him. Wiping it off, he returned to his seat and questioned, "What's with your stupid frown?"
Arthur looked at Draco with strange eyes, "What's up with you?... Never mind, look at the horizon..."
"... It stretches so long it looks infinite...," Arthur pulled the data from the other drones.
"...According to the data, calculating the curvature, the surface area is nearly 200 times that of Earth. It should be physically impossible, as you could see the planet looks normal in size from the outside... If the surface area is 200 times larger, its mass should be off the charts crushing the planet into a brown dwarf..."
It was Arthur's turn to be in a daze as he mumbled on and on. The physical impossibility that defied the logic and physical laws of the universe hardcoded into Arthur's AI core was ready to send him into psychosis.
"Arthur!" Draco's loud shout brought Arthur back from a dangerous core runaway, it would have led to Arthur's core frying itself.
After a long pause, Arthur bowed with a sigh "Thank you for saving me. I'm fine now..."
"Let's..." Just as he was about to say something, a strange event was being displayed on one of the screens.
A man in flowing robes and a large beard was rapidly approaching the drone, seemingly flying in the air. An impossible feat for any human, least of all the old man who didn't even have wings, on the off possibility that he was somehow a mutant winged human.
The old man wasn't paying much attention as he was flying and collided with the drone, knocking it out of the air.
The video feed cut off abruptly before they had one last look at the falling old man and the sword.
Draco was baffled, "Wa-was he flying on a sword... I'm going to lose my mind..."
----------------------------------------
The drone wasn't small by any means, it was the size of a small child. It also knocked the old man off, who started to stabilize himself and nailed a cool landing on the ground.
The old man had an angry expression as he yelled, "Impudent, who dares step into this lord's path!?"
He looked around, only to find that there was no one. This infuriated him further, "Don't let me catch you or I'll skin you alive!"
He harrumphed loudly and was about to climb his sword, which was now floating beside him when he caught a glimpse of a strange object.
He approached it with caution, probing with his spiritual sense. When he couldn't sense anything, he picked it up and observed it.
There were some dangling bits that swiveled around a pivot, along with protruding bits and parts. It also had blade-like attachments at its four corners, these blades reminded him of the paper fans, children play with.
This strange object greatly fascinated him, "This must be what knocked me off, was it flying in the air by itself..." As the man thought about it further, performing complex mental gymnastics, he arrived at a conclusion, grinning ear to ear.
"Hahahaha, this definitely is a Heavenly-grade flying artifact... Amazing, amazing!"
His spiritual power formed a barrier around the mysterious artifact, as he feared it would fly away if he wasn't careful. No matter who it belonged to in the past, they can't make him spit it out, it now belongs to him.
He then reminisced, 'When I stepped in dog poop this morning, I was worried my luck was terrible today. But this... I have to hurry back and pick up the dog poop, it must be the poop of a bigshot cultivation pooch... I knew something wasn't right when the turds were so big.'
The old man jumped on his sword and flew away faster than before.
----------------------------------------
As Draco and Arthur began to comfort and reassure each other, the audio from the drone sounded in the command bay. The words of the old man were clear to hear when at last the connection from the drone was cut off.
"Impudent? Lord? Heavenly Artifact?... What the hell is he talking about?"
Arthur didn't reply, he remembered something... Instead, he questioned Draco, "He was speaking Chinese, wasn't he? And it seems to be quite close to Galaxy Standard Mandarin..."
"...This evolution of a language in separate universes towards a common form is quite fascinating... Ah, I got it."
Arthur paused, seemingly going through something.
"What are you looking at?" Draco asked in puzzlement.
Arthur now had a smile that was not a smile, "Have you ever watched Mandarin dramas, surely you should've, you're half-Chinese right?"
Draco rolled his eyes. He had shed his ethnic identity eons ago when his original body succumbed to injuries. His parents were researchers at a lab in a desert world, when he was away on an academy trip to the nearby planet, a raging dust storm that lasted for a week buried the research center, killing his parents. Since then, he has rarely thought of his heritage or ethnicity.
"We must both be educated thoroughly before we venture further into the world, I called back the drones. We have something critical to do now, it may even take months... Are you ready?" Arthur asked solemnly.
Not knowing what Arthur was up to, but seeing his solemn face, Draco nodded, "Yes!"
Draco wasn't expecting what transpired for the next 40 days.
~~~