The way Dungeon Crafters was starting their dungeons gave me an idea. I had been worried about being able to hide the location of underground bases. When I built sanctuary I had cut an entire staircase down to it. Because no one would want to walk down a kilometer long staircase, I installed a teleporter in the colony so that you could teleport down. After that I tried to back-fill the staircase, but gave up after a hundred meters. Anyone that used even basic prospecting equipment would be able to find Sanctuary if they wanted to.

With the dungeons I had done better, and kept a record of what rock I was digging through as I dug, then replaced the rock as best I could. This could pass a cursory inspection, but any serious scan would detect the small cracks and air pockets in the one centimeter of material in a long cylinder shape.

If I could just set the teleporter to scan for something beyond the normal one kilometer range, then build there, it was unlikely anyone else would look where I had. It would take a lot of time and nanites to scan the area, but I might be able to find a secure location for a base.

I returned to sanctuary and went to my workshop. This is where I had made all of the stuff for the dungeon, and where I kept my nanite forge and other equipment. I ordered a small teleporter from the System, then deactivated its ability to connect to other teleporter before setting it up in the corner of the room. After that I started playing with the settings. That was the maximum range because the accuracy wasn’t perfect and you could could be shifted by several millimeters? Doesn’t matter, they are nanites. Long range teleportation can cause chemicals to alter sometimes, making it a bad idea to do that for living beings? Doesn’t matter, they’re nanites. If their chemistry gets messed up, I’ll lose some, but I can fix that by just increasing the number of nanites I send. It is difficult to reconstitute something properly past fifteen kilometers, resulting in the atoms not lining up properly much of the time? That’s mostly a macroscopic phenomenon. I ran the math and found that, statistically, only about half the nanites would suffer that fate.

So, adding all three overrides together, I managed to extend the range to around twenty five kilometers. The teleporter would need to send the nanites to a location then attempt to bring them back a fraction of a second later, at which point it could download their data on the location. If the nanites had been teleported into solid rock, however, they won’t be retrievable, so the teleporter can just try the next location if they can’t be retrieved. The nanites that survive appearing inside rock, maybe in a micro-fracture, will break down after a few years into their raw material, so you won’t even know the area had been scanned. Around ten percent would make it to their destination and around ten percent of those that survived will make it back to the teleporter. One percent was more that enough to work with, as it guaranteed a working location.

I bought ten liters of nanites from the System and told the teleporter to use them to scan the rock below us. Now I just needed to wait. The crust was around forty three kilometers thick here, so I would be most of the way through it, but I could cool the area if I had to. This was just a proof of concept, after all. Though maybe it wasn’t suited for Earth? The moon and Mars were both dead worlds, so they had no mantle or crust, at least as far as we knew, so it should be possible for them to build this deep there and not have heat issues. I’ve always been a fan of space colonization, and it made sense for humanity to spread out off of Earth now that we had the ability to do so, so I could use that as a cover to go there and look for such locations.

I checked my mineral and Zerka balances. I had over fifty million in rare minerals and over a million in my account, so this should be doable. The cheapest ship in the System was a personal shuttle at five hundred thousand. It could carry six people, but only had around twenty thousand meters per second of delta-v, so, if necessary, it could make it to the moon, or even Mars if you are willing to sit in a seat for six to eight months. While this would be useful if there was a space station to go to, it didn’t meet my needs. Next was a personnel transport. It could carry up to fifty people at a time, and only cost seven hundred and fifty thousand for the same delta-v. Then there was the cargo transport, which replaced most of the passenger area with a Warehouse, letting you move large amounts of cargo, but requiring that the rest of the area be taken up by fuel just so you don’t lose the delta-v, as the warehouse couldn’t lessen the mass of the items it stored.

I ignored the various fighters and gunboats, as I wanted something comfortable for the long journey, and eventually found one that might work. It was called “Settler’s Ship”. It was like an RV, but had a large amount of equipment built in for settling new worlds that didn’t yet have the System. I did, however, need to make some modifications. There were two types of FTL travel available to a ship, corresponding to the two types of teleportation. Warp drive bent space around you to amplify your speed. A teleporter bent space in on itself, creating things called ‘quantum lenses’ which would reflect the probability function of any particles across themselves, essentially letting the device amplify its range with lenses. This made the warp drive use about as much energy as a one kilometer teleport per second to amplify your speed by a factor of ten. It also meant that the warp drive could be used to teleport the ship short distances in an emergency, which was sometimes used by unarmored ships to dodge attacks. The Hyperdrive was similar to a portal, only without the actual portal connecting the two sides, since you didn’t need a safe entry and exit point. The ship could just be shifted into hyperspace directly, trusting on its hull integrity to keep it together.

For stealth purposes, Warp drive was clearly superior, as it couldn’t be detected easily outside a few AU of distance, but the Hyperdrive could be easily detected within several light-years. But Warp drive was also much slower. For this reason I removed the hyperdrive and replaced it and the slower in-system Warp drive with a more powerful warp drive that let me amplify my speed by a factor of one hundred instead of the default ten. I could have replaced it with a Warp Drive 3, at a factor of one thousand, but that would have taken up half my storage space. I also replaced the standard generator orb with a small nuclear generator, gaining five times the power, and added in several more power storage modules in the excess space. The ship only had one hundred cubic meters of storage space, but I could carefully manage my cargo and make that work. I also added several quantum entanglement orbs to its communication equipment, and installed one here in Sanctuary, so that I could talk with my second settlement and its people. The other orbs would go with me to connect to bases I built out there. After the modifications the ship would cost a little over fifteen million zerka. I sold some rare minerals and had the System start modifying a pre-made ship to my specifications.

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Now I just needed to talk to Di, to tell her where I was going. If she would be willing to talk with me. Maybe if I told everyone at the same time? I took Sanctuary’s teleporter up to the surface and looked around the parking lot for an empty space. Most of the place was taken up by new houses that were being built or which were already built, so I walked down the main road to where an interstate exit was and went down to the road. Once there I brought in one of my builders and had it build a System default landing pad. The land was pretty flat here, at least where the road was, so as long as I didn’t build a landing pad too close to the road overpass it should be safe to build on. The builder would just need to make sure not to plug the drainage area down the middle of the interstate.

An hour later one landing pad was complete, and I set up for a second one beside it before summoning the new ship I bought. It appeared on the landing pad, about eight meters long and dark red in color, a squat ship with small wings meant to make maneuvering easier on planets with atmospheres. I checked my nanite reserves. I was down over seventeen thousand nanites. Obviously, moving something that massive used a lot of energy, so I should probably just leave it on the landing pad.

I walked up to the ship and a small ramp came out of the side, unfolding as a door opened. I stepped inside and double-checked everything. There were two bunk beds, and small toilet/auto-shower which cleaned you with nanites, and a small food storage/preparation area. Near the back was the warehouse, as well as access panels for the engine, reactor, and warp drive. There was a panel for the hyperdrive as well, but it just read ‘Offline’. At the front of the ship was a small room with two seats and two sets of controls, apparently built with the idea of a copilot in mind.

Now that I had a ship, I filled the food storage with ingredients, downloaded all of the free recipes available, in AR and Sanctuary, then went to the warehouse at the back. I had previously created a modified version of the World System Core which would allow the System to be introduced to a new world, so I bought five of the original version and five of the modified ones. They were cheap at only two hundred and fifty thousand each, and normally included all of the functions of a Generator 3, several auto-miners, a Nanite forge 2, library, and settlement core, and could store one hundred cubic meters of material of any kind. The low cost was because the System sold them pretty much at cost to get people to spread it to other worlds. The Library function would carry all of the technical and cultural data from whichever world it was made on, so theoretically we could learn about the alien culture that brought the System to Earth if we wished, instead of just using their technical data. I had merely modified them to use a medium nuclear generator instead, and to not use hyperspace waves to communicate with it nanites, forcing anyone in their settlements to not use hyperspace or generator modules either. This would let them hide from anyone looking for them as long as I put them somewhere that the radio signals couldn’t get out, such as underground.

I also bought one hundred teleporter orbs. They would be spread out across the world to scan for resources within one kilometer, and to secretly look for empty pockets twenty five meters deep. Teleporter orbs used two and a half times the energy of a teleporter pad to send the same mass, but that wouldn’t matter if I partnered them with a small nuclear generator. The generators could cycle their fuel and the teleporters bring in nanites from any of the publicly known settlements. All of this stuff completely filled the cargo bay, and I had to store a few teleporter orbs and reactors in my Inventory 3 just to have enough room.

When I was finally ready, I went to the control panel for the landing pad. It had finished refueling the ship. The ship had a plasma engine that used a similar principle to how the particle cannon worked to accelerate hydrogen to 99.9% the speed of light before sending it out the back of the ship. This ship only had around one hundred thousand kilometers per second of delta-v, which meant that the fuel tank could only hold 0.03% of the mass of the ship. If I wanted to go interstellar with this ship, I would need to take far more fuel so I could accelerate to relativistic speeds. That meant going at least three million meters per second to reach one percent the speed of light, but preferably I could go even faster, as with the warp drive I currently had I would only be going the speed of light. Maybe I could upgrade it and the Warehouse module to carry more fuel and go to Proxima Centauri? The System did say that it had no System presence, but did have primitive life.

Speaking of fuel, I needed to make sure I had enough to refuel the reactor. There was enough room in the warehouse left to squeeze in fifty kilograms of uranium. I would have went with Thorium, but the System couldn’t violate the laws of physics, just exploit them in fun ways. In this case, the thorium would have to sit in the reactor for an average of a month before it was available to burn, which meant that, while thorium was fine for long lifetime reactors like those of settlements, it was useless for my ship which probably wouldn’t be out there for a month before coming back.

The second landing pad was finished now, so I took the builder and set it for the next larger size, in case anyone wanted to bring in a larger ship. Then I realized something. While I hadn’t seen the interstate being used recently, I didn’t know if it was abandoned, so shouldn’t block traffic. I had built the first two down the middle of the interstate between the entrance and exit ramps, so there were two full lanes on both sides, and you could still access the ramps. The larger one would need to take up the whole road, which would block traffic. I would need to find a better place to put it.

Still, I didn’t want people running across traffic in case the road was used, so I put up barriers and signs to redirect people to the ramps to bypass the area. If traffic got too busy, I could let them just drive by the platforms and use teleporter orbs to cross the street. I could also remove the landing pads and build more somewhere else. I would need a large area to build a proper star-port, but this was good enough for now. If I built a space station I could buy a passenger shuttle and cargo shuttle and dock them here, but it would have at least one teleporter, so that wouldn’t necessarily be needed.

Once I was finished I went into town and found an empty spot at the end of the shopping center. It was just an opening about as wide as a two lane road with dumpsters beside it, where trucks could drive behind the shops, with an area that used to be a patch of woods beside it. In that area I pulled out my builder and a miner, having the miner clear away the tree stumps that were left in the area and flatten a ten meter by ten meter area. After thirty minutes it was finished, so I had the builder make a concrete platform and set up a small portal that I bought from the System for five hundred thousand zerka.

While both teleporters and portals could send people to other locations, the fact that they worked on completely different principles meant that they were useful in different situations. Teleportation used an amount of quantum lenses roughly proportional to the distance you were traveling, making the power use curve a jagged, angled line. Portals, on the other hand, created a tunnel through higher dimensional space, where the further they could send you through hyperspace the deeper you could go, making you travel faster and making the trip more efficient. This made the power use curve logarithmic, with a bit of variation due to minor fluctuations in hyperspace and the fabric of space not being uniform in higher dimensions. The two different curves usually met at around three hundred and fifty thousand kilometers, making teleportation to distances further than Earth’s moon from the surface use more energy than traveling through a portal. While I could probably get away with building a teleporter on the moon to move people, I was also planning on building a martian colony, so I would need a portal to move between here and there.

I tested the portal by connecting it Fort Solinan’s, then traveled through to talk with Tarn. He had experience dealing with other worlds, even if they were worlds where the System already existed, so I thought he was the best source for information. He told me stories he had heard about people who had been on worlds without a planet-wide Systems, and usually without native lifeforms. He even called Silan in to talk to me. Apparently he had spent seventeen years on a dead mining planet when he was a young adult, maybe a hundred earth years ago. I stayed there talking with him until the sun set, making sure to tell them about my plans to build colonies on the moon and Mars, at which point I thanked him for the information and reopened the portal to AR.