Chapter 2062: Decommissioned Transfer Hub

The academy group gathered at the assembly point a few minutes before three in the afternoon, galactic standard time, and most of the cadets looked considerably more alert than they had upon arrival, though a few were still stifling yawns behind their hands.

The guide led them through a series of corridors to a smaller hangar on the far side of the station, where a sleek transport craft was waiting with its engines already warm.

It was designed for short surface flights rather than the long journey they had taken from Truimal, with rows of simple seats along both walls and a narrow viewing strip running the length of the cabin.

Once everyone was strapped in, the craft lifted off and slipped out through the hangar doors into the darkness that had settled over the station during the long night.

They flew west, and they flew far.

For a long while, there was nothing outside the viewing strip but blackness and the faint outlines of ridges passing beneath them, lit only by the stars.

Then, gradually, a thin line of light appeared along the horizon ahead and grew brighter as the craft raced toward it, until at last they overtook the edge of the night entirely and flew out into daylight once again.

Ning watched through the viewing strip as the sun rose backward over the horizon ahead of them. They had traveled far enough to catch it while it was still several hours from setting, and the landscape below was lit in a warm golden light that made the red and yellow streaks of Jalun’s surface glow almost like embers.

A short while later, the craft began to descend toward a cluster of large, weathered structures sprawled across a wide plain.

The guide stood at the front of the cabin as they came in to land.

"What you’re looking at was once one of the most important transfer hubs in this part of the system. Before the teleportation matrices were built, travelers from Avelis and the other Federation worlds could arrive here, change vessels, and continue to wherever they were going without needing to pass through Truimal directly. For a long time, nearly everything that moved between this system and the rest of the Federation passed through this place."

"Why not go to Truimal directly?" one student asked.

"Because it’s dangerous. The ones coming from across the Federation come at a speed that is simply absurd. So if they wish to visit Truimal, they will have to slow down and prepare a local route while avoiding the planets, moons, and asteroids. It wasted far too much time, costing the ships upward of 2 weeks to reach Truimal and return. That is 2 weeks of fuel, food, and other arrangements they had to make for a quick stop and resupply."

She looked out the window at the structures below.

"Once the matrices were built, the hub became unnecessary almost overnight. Ships could simply teleport between systems, and there was no reason to stop here anymore. It was decommissioned, and most of it has been left as it was ever since, partly as a historical site and partly because nobody has found a use for it."

The craft landed inside one of the hub’s old hangars, which had been kept pressurized for visitors, and the cadets disembarked into a vast, echoing space filled with the remnants of a busier age.

They spent some time roaming around under the watchful eyes of the instructors.

The old departure halls were enormous, lined with rows of empty seats and dead information boards that had once displayed arrival and departure times for ships from dozens of worlds.

There were abandoned shops with their shutters half-closed, cargo platforms still marked with faded painted lines, and a long observation gallery overlooking the plain where the transfer ships had once landed and launched in a constant stream.

Ning found it more interesting than he had expected. There was something peculiar about a place that had been built to hold thousands of people and now held only the sound of their footsteps.

After a while, Lorna gathered them together in the middle of one of the departure halls.

"Your first test," Lorna said. "Stand where you are and look at your helmets. Answer the questions you’re given. You have ten minutes."

A series of questions appeared on Ning’s display almost immediately, asking various questions about things that they had only just been taught or something they had seen on the way in. Were one vigilant enough, they would have no issue answering every question.

Ning entered his answers within a few seconds and closed the display.

Around him, a few students were still frowning at their helmets, but most finished well within the time limit, and when the minutes were up, the guide led them out of the departure hall and down a wide service corridor toward another hangar at the far end of the hub.

This one was different.

It was smaller than the others, but taller, with a ceiling so high that the lights near the top looked like distant stars. The walls were lined with smooth, padded panels, and a faint hum filled the air, quieter than the life support machinery elsewhere but steadier, and with a texture to it that Ning noticed immediately.

The entire place looked much newer than it should have been.

"This is an anti-gravity training chamber," the guide said, gesturing toward the open space. "Before the hub was decommissioned, it was used to train crews and pilots who would be working in zero-gravity environments. Nowadays, we can simply use the space hubs, but it’s necessary to understand what the others did in the past. The academy has arranged for you to use it today."

Ning looked up at the chamber with genuine surprise.

He had not expected the people of this system to possess technology that could simply switch gravity off, and for a moment, he wondered whether they had discovered some way to manipulate it directly.

Then he paid closer attention to the hum and extended his senses into the walls, and he quickly understood what he was actually looking at.