chapter 203

The mana surrounding me was held down tight. There were going to be no explosions as I was working on this modified version of an AI core. It wasn’t much bigger than the regular ones I used to upgrade all my crew members before they got their souls.

It no longer looked like a ball but more like a bowl. This would also be normal while I worked on the inside of it, getting everything finished, but the insides were already done with. It had been a lot of delicate work, but now the difficult part begins.

Normally, the connection port was quite small, as it didn’t need to transfer that much data. It was basically the same as a brainstem in a human, connecting to the rest of the body. For my new crew members and the tasks they would need to do, a regular connection would be wholly inadequate.

This was more going to resemble the size of the connection FH has, but her core is so much larger. There are some architectural differences, but the biggest difference was going to be the materials used and the fact that I am making them using mana-tech techniques to hopefully push their capabilities even further.

There was no need for added complexity here, as they were already going to have souls, which was a good thing, because otherwise, the way I was building this, it would probably go against the universal laws.

My sixth sense wasn’t triggering as much as I was expecting it to, but that was good news, as it meant my design work on mana tech was actually getting good. Then it screamed at me. Did the connection I made just break something?

My head whipped up as the warning didn’t seem to be about what I was building, but something from outside. What could that be? Then we felt a bump similar to what I had once felt when heavy turbulence hit an aeroplane I was travelling on.

My workshop was quite stable, thanks to being inside an inventory skill, but what happened was different as I felt the bump. All the tools on my worktable rattled because of it.

“FH, what was that?” Before she could answer, there was another bump, this one worse.

“It’s hard to tell anything about what’s going on outside the ship, but I believe it’s the current. It seems to be pulling us in the wrong direction from how it should be.”

“Wait, are we past the point where ships are disappearing?”

“Yes, Captain. Those disappearances ended about two months ago. No new ones had been reported for a while, and we’re well past that location.”

“Sound general quarters,” I ordered FH. A moment later, klaxons started. It was time to get to our stations that were assigned to us when there was an emergency. Mostly it was for combat, but for situations like this as well.

It took me little time to make it to the command centre and sit in the captain’s chair, strapping myself in. We were now constantly being rattled, as it felt like we were flying through bad air.

On the monitor there were readouts of our surroundings as the sensory AIs were doing their best to try to figure out what was going on. The conclusion right now was that the current that was supposed to take us straight ahead was now being curled towards the port side. That curve was getting more pronounced every second.

“Drop out of FTL,” I watched as we stopped feeding power to the FTL device. The space surrounding us started to flicker, as I knew it was going to when you do an emergency transfer like this out of the side dimension.

Moments passed, then seconds, yet we were still here. The ship speed that had been slowing down, as we also stopped all forward thrust, was picking up.

“What’s happening?” I heard Sam say, panic clearly evident. Others were worried as well.

“FTL transfer into real space unsuccessful,” FH announced through the loudspeakers.

“Side engines, reverse thrust now.” Immediately, they kicked in, trying their best to slow us down. For a moment there, we flickered like we were going to transfer back to real space, but we were continuing to speed up more than the engines could counteract.

“Should we flip the ship and use our main thrusters?” Bob asked.

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I didn’t know what to answer. My eyes scanned over all the screens, showing me data from all over the ship. Thanks to us being strapped in, we weren’t being flung about, but the ship was under tremendous stress. If we were to try to flip it right now, I was pretty sure we were going to lose at least one wing. FH was also already pulling from us. Even if she pushed herself, it might not be enough.

“Adjust course 18° portside.” My words rang out, and immediately the ship started adjusting course. The roughness that we were experiencing smoothed out, and a lot of the stress warnings disappeared.

“There’s no turning us around; we wouldn’t survive that.” Our speed continued to accelerate, with the side engines still struggling to slow us down. Their blades were being pushed close to red stress warnings.

“Side engines, stop trying to slow us down.” As soon as they stopped, their warnings went down, but not entirely out of the yellow zone. They were simply too exposed to the current.

We couldn’t use our main engine to speed up, as everything they expelled would be blown right back. That would do a lot of damage.

“We can’t do anything else. Do your best to follow the flow; it should reduce the stress the ship is under.” Immediately, the course corrected a bit more. The faster we were moving, the smoother everything got.

“Wait, captain, what do you mean that’s all we can do? Who knows where we’re going to end up? We have to get out of here.” Dean said, still worried, but at least everyone seemed less panicked now.

“FH, do you have any information about this anomaly we are experiencing?”

“No, captain, I have no clue what’s happening.”

I turned to Dean. “I can’t figure out anything we could do besides continually following this anomalous current. Our current options are to do that or most likely die in the attempt to get out of here.”

It was quiet for a while after that, but eventually we started to speak to each other. It would have simply been too boring to continue to stay in the command centre while being silent.

None of us knew exactly what was going on or when it would stop, but this was an emergency situation, so no one was leaving. It was too dangerous to do so. We were currently moving at an estimate of 9% of lightspeed. Fortunately, we were no longer speeding up, but the laws of this dimension should not allow even for that speed.

All of us agreed that the only thing that could have changed those laws was mana. Thanks to FH being able to manipulate mana, she managed to run a few tests to confirm that the mana density was indeed quite high.

We continued to adjust our heading, going with the flow. At least the sensor AI was getting a good workout, and if this continued for a couple more hours, they were going to be experts at figuring out how to sense FTL currents.

“Rough waters ahead,” FH announced. It had been about half an hour since this started.

“Waters?” I asked while each one of us braced for turbulence.

“The sensor AI is testing out different terminologies. They are unsure how to treat the current, as it behaves more like water than air, but not always.”

“Of course, why couldn’t things be simple?” Then it happened, another bump. Some adjustments were made to our heading, but the roughness continued for a while.

“The sensor AI concludes that we are currently experiencing two different currents merging into one.”

“Shouldn’t that be impossible? I thought that currents didn’t interact with each other?”

“It should be impossible, but it is happening around us right now.” FH’s words brought silence to the command centre.

Things smoothed out in about five minutes, then about ten minutes later, it got rough again. It was another merger.

“The current has gotten a lot wider. The sensors can barely detect the end of it to either side.”

Nothing happened for the next hour or so. None of us knew how far we had travelled. We simply had no idea how fast we were moving relative to real space.

“Red alert, extreme turbulence ahead.” FH’s monotone voice, which she used for announcements, sounded out as the entire command centre was bathed in red light.

The current was curving once again. We also seemed to be merging with another current. We did our best to stay with the current, but the ship was still thrown about as the surrounding current was extremely unstable.

It was quite literally like we were in rough waters that were pulling the ship one moment to one side and then another. This didn’t stop as we continued forward, doing our best not to go sideways in this storm.

“The sensor AI’s conclude that we have reached a location we have already been in. How the currents are merging is almost exactly the same as when we started experiencing the rough waters.”

“If we went in a circle, can we get out of it by going to the edge?”

“That area seems to be the roughest,” FH responded almost immediately.

My eyes flicked through the ship’s readings. We weren’t going to survive anything worse than what we were currently in. The side engine blades were already near red. “What about towards the centre of the ring?”

“Unknown, you haven’t gotten close enough.”

“Make it happen then.”

We slowly started to move towards the centre of the circle we were currently moving in. We couldn’t do it too fast, otherwise we could go sideways, and that would end badly.

“We are seeing an end to this current. From the data we’ve been able to gather, there seems to be no current at the centre of this sphere, like an eye of the storm. If we’re reading things right, we believe that there is a heavy mass in that area of space.”

My mind instantly went to one thing. “Is there a black hole on the other side in real space?”

“Negative, too little mass for that.”

“Is there a way inside the eye of the storm?”

“Unknown. The edges are rough as well, but not so much as the outer edge.”

This situation was bad. Currently, the ship was holding on, but eventually things were going to start breaking, as it was never meant to handle a place like this. At least we made it survive in the atmosphere, because if we didn’t, Forward Horizon most likely would already have been torn apart

“Continue to circle around. I want you to map the entire anomaly.”

What followed was three days of circling the entire sphere of this storm. By my calculations, we could survive another week of this without sustaining major damage.

We found eight different calmer entrance points into the eye of the storm. The AIs concluded that if we couldn’t control the ship as much as we could, we would have ended up going through one of them.

“FH, pull from us as much as you can. Head towards the entry point into the eye of the storm designated as C.”

The ship firmed up as FH pulled from us heavily. The entry point was quite calm. It was unfortunate that FH couldn’t make the ship strong enough to survive us going through the outer barrier of this storm.

As soon as we were through, we dropped out of FTL. The sensor AIs almost immediately registered a sun. We seemed to be surrounded by debris, and for some reason our current speed was not 9% of lightspeed or 7.7—we were barely moving at all.

“Incoming fire.” The shields activated, blocking a railgun shot that was heading towards one of our side engines.

The tactical screen updated with everything that the sensors managed to detect so far. We seemed to be in a solar system with only a sun and a lot of debris that looked like shipwrecks. But not all of them were wrecks. It seemed that at this entry point, there were people waiting for someone to come through.

“Fire back.” My words rang out. Instantly, the turret AIs responded, having been waiting for my command. Whoever just shot at us was going to feel my wrath, as this entire situation made me angry, and now I had something to vent my anger on.