Chapter 382: Still On The Ship

The unexpected escape left people feeling neither the joy of a miraculous escape nor the relief of a sudden ascent, but rather a deep sense of lingering fear.

Across such vast interstellar distances, what an adversary observes is never real-time data—this was basic cosmic physics. Yet cold logic did little to quiet the terror... the terror of another barrage of superluminal missiles tearing through realspace without warning.

"The enemy must have caught sight of the Deep Space anchored to the second moon from over a month ago. After running their tactical calculations, they fired warp-capable weapons directly at the coordinates to obliterate the moon!"

What could exceed the speed of light? A Warp Drive, naturally.

Mounting a Warp Drive directly onto a missile and transformed it into a relativistic strike weapon of terrifying lethality.

"What insane industrial capacity! How much does it cost to build an independent Warp Drive... only to throw it away as an expendable munition? An antimatter payload is probably the only warhead expensive enough to justify that delivery system!" a Senior Scientist muttered in sheer disbelief.

"Thank God we broke orbit from that moon in time..."

"...Quiet, all of you! Maintain operational discipline!"

Jason heard the rising panic over his earpiece, his brow furrowing deeply. A war across the light-years had already begun without them ever seeing a hull... and the sheer violence of the enemy’s opening move was suffocating the fleet’s morale.

Worse still, Jason and his ground team were still pinned inside the atmosphere, nowhere near the safety of the mothership!

However, once he regained his composure, Jason knew their immediate survival was not yet compromised. Planet Dige’s planetary mass served as a physical shield, and more importantly... the Gaia entity was on this world.

The enemy would never dare obliterate Planet Dige itself, not unless they were willing to vaporize the very prize they had come for, or knew with absolute certainty that humanity had already extracted it.

Furthermore, once those superluminal missiles detonated, the optical telemetry from the explosions could only travel back to the enemy fleet at the speed of light. It would take weeks, if not months, for the alien armada to confirm whether their strike had found its mark.

With that realization in mind, Jason turned his attention back to Elara. Carefree and innocent, she paid no mind to the blinding artificial flare that had momentarily lit up the sky like a second sun. Her only concern was whether her new companions were truly about to abandon her.

The answer she received remained unchanged: they were leaving.

The glowing green sphere pulsed with sorrow, breaking apart and reforming as it shook from side to side in a pitiful, pleading gesture.

Yet Jason showed no hesitation. The transport’s auxiliary systems began to cycle, and the familiar blue glow of the ion thrusters flared to life. The sight sent a wave of frantic desperation through the nascent entity.

After a few minutes of turbulent hesitation, Elara finally made her choice. She would go with them—just to have fun for a little while, and then return home "in a few days"...

With that, the deal was struck.

She began drawing her dispersed collective inward, condensing her core into the massive containment vessel resting in the shallows.

Countless strands of bioluminescent algae poured into the reinforced glass tank, forming a dense, swirling tapestry of emerald and gold. It looked chaotic and untamed, yet under the surface beat the undeniable pulse of living order.

The Special Forces operators watched in stunned, breathless silence, completely captivated by the majestic sight of a planetary consciousness gathering itself into a single point.

Jason’s pulse raced with pure triumph. Against all odds... damn it, we actually did it!

He wanted to roar at the sky, letting the immense weight of the past month wash away. Every grueling trial, every brush with death... none of it had been in vain!

Success in the face of absolute extinction was an intoxicating high.

Suddenly, Austin’s frantic voice cut through the communication again. The two Titan warships were burning toward their firing solutions at flank speed, pushing their ion engines past safe thresholds and into sustained overclocking.

The two unmanned Titans were preparing to launch a blind relativistic barrage down the enemy’s projected flight vector.

Even if the Federation had not physically spotted the alien fleet, possessing their coordinates was enough.

Whether it connected or missed into the infinite dark didn’t matter, it was the only countermeasure they had to buy time!

Trapped in the chaos of extraction, Jason had no time to question the maneuver; Austin’s aggressive response was tactically sound.

He immediately turned to his operators and shouted, "Get that containment unit secured in the cargo hold! Move!"

Then, a logistical nightmare struck.

The operators discovered that the transport was already loaded to maximum volume with field laboratories and heavy machinery; there was simply no physical room for a forty-meter tank.

Without missing a beat, Jason ordered every piece of industrial equipment, scientific hardware, and field machinery to be unceremoniously dumped straight into the ocean.

Whether the ruins would ever be picked over by surviving natives didn’t matter.

The discarded gear was dropped right beside the extraction zone, and the team didn’t even dare use demolition charges to destroy it, an accidental shockwave could shatter the reinforced glass tank, and at this stage, losing Elara’s core would mean game over.

The transport’s heavy hydraulic crane deployed, extending reinforced carbon nanotube cables to latch onto the massive container.

The mechanical joints groaned under the sudden strain, the ship listing visibly as the suspension took on the brutal deadweight.

Cold sweat beaded on Jason’s forehead. He tapped his helmet nervously, realizing the gravity of their predicament: the dropship was severely overburdened.

The glass tank was colossal, and the sheer volume of water required to sustain Elara added dozens of tons of deadweight. Breaking planetary escape velocity was going to push the airframe to its absolute limit.

All the while, Jason spoke continuously over the communication to soothe the terrified entity, while the cabin monitors looped colorful educational cartoons to keep her docile.

As the crane hoisted the massive tank clear of the water, Jason noticed that the endless expanse of ocean below seemed to lose its vibrant, dynamic glow, turning dull and dormant.

In contrast, the dense cluster of algae inside the tank swirled with frantic, nimble vitality.

This confirmed it: Elara’s true consciousness was safely inside.

"Start the drives! Launch, now!" Jason roared, his knuckles white.

"Engines engaging!"

As the transport’s main thrusters flared, the cabin shuddered under brutal g-forces. The violent acceleration sent Elara into an immediate panic; a radiant green sphere condensed inside the tank, throwing itself against the glass as if trying to break free. Jason pressed his armored hand to the transparent hull, speaking softly and repeatedly: "It’s alright, Elara. It will be over soon..."

"Don’t be afraid... We are going to protect you. From this moment on, we are your family..."

Soothing words and gentle reassurances slowly calmed the frantic sphere.

As the violent turbulence smoothed out, curiosity overtook her fear. She drifted toward the viewport, staring out into the rushing sky—gazing upon a breathtaking, expanding horizon she had never witnessed in all her millennia on the ocean floor.

"Commander, we have a critical thrust deficit! She won’t climb!" an operator shouted from the flight console, sweat pouring down his face. "Can we vent some of the water?"

"We’re redlining! Overclock the engine matrices! We can’t drain the tank—wait, purge five percent of the buffer, no more!"

"Do it now!" Jason authorized the emergency power override, rapidly keying in the command cipher to bypass the reactor’s thermal limiters. Overclocking carried an immense risk of catastrophic core blowout, but they had run out of choices.

Seconds later, the atmospheric engines screamed into a supersonic speed that rattled the teeth in their skulls. The brilliant blue plasma exhaust degraded into a sputtering, unstable yellow flame, and the entire transport shook violently like an antique combustion engine coming apart.

Every operator braced against the bulkhead, their nerves stretched to the breaking point by the deafening structural groans.

"Negative, Commander! The atmospheric lift isn’t enough! We can maintain altitude, but we cannot punch through the upper gravity well with this mass! We can’t reach orbital velocity!" the pilot screamed.

Jason’s palms were slick with cold sweat. If the transport stalled and crashed from this altitude, the impact would vaporize the crew, the data, and the Gaia entity all at once.

Right at that moment, Jason glanced through the cockpit canopy and noticed the local star flare with an unnatural, blinding intensity for several seconds.

A chilling thought struck him, and he hailed the mothership’s tactical station: "Command, report! Did the enemy just launch an attack against the star?!"

"Negative, that wasn’t a direct stellar strike!"

Austin’s voice crackled back over the net. "After their initial attack vaporized Moon, the remaining superluminal missiles missed their trajectories and plowed straight into the stellar corona, triggering localized coronal mass ejections... Damn them, did they think they could flush us out of the system like that?"

"A main-sequence star is an incomprehensible mass of fusion. Even a barrage of antimatter warheads is nothing more than a mosquito bite to a star!"

Austin spat a curse before continuing, "At worst, the resulting solar storm will reach Planet Dige’s upper atmosphere in three days. We have time!"

"...Titan One and Two, execute primary attack runs immediately!"

Hearing this, Jason let out a ragged breath. The star was simply too massive; not even an advanced interstellar civilization could casually induce a supernova with a few stray torpedoes.

"Austin, what is the Deep Space’s orbital position? We need an emergency tether! Deploy an auxiliary tug and drop high-tensile carbon nanotube cables to hook our chassis.

Our thrusters can’t overcome the gravity well! Launch a kinetic harpoon drone via the electromagnetic rail array right now!"

Austin paused for a fraction of a second before his acknowledgment: "Order confirmed! Firing retrieval tether immediately!"

Climbing out of a planetary gravity well with deadweight was an engineering nightmare, but plunging down into one was effortless. A high-speed tether drone could slice through the thin upper atmosphere in minutes, provided its shielding could survive the atmospheric friction.

Moments later, several streamlined recovery drones plummeted from low orbit like kinetic javelins, trailing ultra-dense carbon nanotube cables behind them.

The Special Forces operators manually locked the magnetic grapples into the transport’s primary structural hardpoints.

Instantly, an immense mechanical pulling force from the Deep Space surged through the cables, dragging the struggling ship upward toward the stars...