Monroe-Chapter Two Hundred and Ninety-Five. The flight of the Freedom.

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In retrospect, Bob realized he should have told everyone before he portaled the IIDS Freedom into orbit.

That retrospect came in the form of Dave asking when they were going up, and his explanation that they had, in fact, already entered orbit, which generated a degree of outrage from Mike, Jessica, and Amanda that he'd found surprising. He'd told them they'd be portaling up as soon as everyone was in their quarters. As he'd waited until everyone else had portaled aboard the ship, he'd known everyone was aboard, so he'd simply opened the portal at the base of the ship, and it had fallen through directly into their predetermined orbit.

He was flying down the hallway to the Garden, while Monroe had taken the more expeditious route and simply leapt down.

That particular design decision had been made by Dave, who had argued that in space, direction was relative, and enemy's gate was down. No one had been willing to dispute that particular concept from Ender's Game, and so corridors that lead from bow and stern to the Garden had their gravity enchantments set to pull down to the center of the ship. Their rooms were oriented the same way, making stepping out into the corridor less disorienting.

The Garden had it's gravity set to the far side of the corridor, which interacted with that enchantment a little oddly. You would find yourself suddenly climbing across the ladder on the floor, rather than down it. Monroe, being a cat, simply did a little twist and landed on all four paws. The doors on the ship had been enchanted to recognized the matrix of each crew member, as well as their mana signatures. Monroe had been duly entered into that list, and had only required one demonstration from Bob before he was able to come and go as he pleased.

Bailli and Erick had been interrupted during what had likely been a rather intimate moment by Monroe, who was on a quest to locate Icy. Bob wasn't sure if Monroe had picked up Red Fang from Elli before or after, but he'd been pulled out of his ritual casting by a cranky Bailli.

Ultimately, the enchantments had been left alone. Dave, Amanda, and Jessica had all recounted their abduction and the role Monroe had played in freeing them. It was best, they'd said, to allow Monroe access to the entire ship, just in case Bob had to send him to retrieve people.

Reaching the bottom of the ladder, Bob stood up and entered the door that led to the garden.

A lot of things had changed for him in the past three years, but he thought the Garden might represent one of the largest. He'd been sketching out designs and ideas for their little biosphere, when he'd realized that while he and his friends didn't have any expertise in this field, he knew someone who did.

He wasn't sure what Amber's reaction to seeing him again would be. From what he'd heard, she was doing well, so well in fact, that she'd been asked by the King of Greenwold to teach prospective Druids, with an eye towards each of them building a biosphere in their own towns, mirroring her success.

Bob had been surprised when she'd hugged him, taking a moment before awkwardly returning the gesture. She'd been quite happy to sit down and share a meal with him, where she explained that she'd never been happier, as she was not only encouraging healthy vegatarianism (she'd lowered her vegan flag a bit), but she was teaching, which always been her dream.

She'd apologized, again, for her part in the events that had led to Bob's arrival on Thayland, but had confessed that it was hard to feel too much regret, as for her, things had turned out for the best. He'd accepted the apology, again, in the spirit in which it was intended.

She'd given her word that she wouldn't tell anyone about the IIDS Freedom, and had proceeded to give him a master's class in biosphere design.

The result was a massive garden with its own microclimate. There was a small cabin in the center where they could meet up for meals, as well as relax together outside of their time in Bob's Arcane Depths.

One of his requirements for the crew was that each of them successfully learn, and cast, the Arcane Depths ritual. Oddly, it was Bailli who had the most trouble. She tended towards quick, decisive action, and had a hard time with true ritual casting. System-less casting had not come naturally to the flaxen haired beauty. But like every other challenge that had appeared in her life, she'd powered through. She'd blown herself up twice trying to complete the ritual, proving that Bob had made the right call by having a regeneration ritual waiting for completion, but the third try had been the charm.

Not everyone was enthusiastic about building out their Dungeons, and Bob had been dismayed to discover that neither Eddi nor Wayna were terribly interested. They'd effectively built spawning pits, with mana pouring into a central pool that gave rise of dozens of monsters. To be fair, it did work with their endless swarm style builds.

The math was brutally simple. If something happened, the ship could drift, with sheilds and life support, with two people delving ten hours a day. If they upped that to twelve hours a day, they could portal to another dimension each day, although it would take two days to run the sensors to determine if they were near a habitable planet.

If something truly awful happened, they each had a life pod. The pod's would have a hanging ritual to portal them to a dimension that had been designated as their safe rendevous point. Each pod was shielded, and had three thrusters, and a single sensor. The comparison with a coffin was inevitable, but the fact of the matter was that everyone had an inventory space they could technically live in. The pods had been designed to link up together, forming a hollow cylinder.

Bob's working theory was that if they had to abandon the Freedom for some reason, when they reunited they'd be able to join the pods together and then seal the ends, providing a potential livable space in the small cylinder. His hope was that he'd never have to test that theory.

"Well, we're in space," Amanda's grumbling pulled Bob out of his thoughts as he entered the cabin.

"All of our systems are up and running," Dave added, his eyes glued to the display hovering above his wrist. "Of course, we're effectively blind with the masts folded in."

"Blind, but extremely well protected," Jessica added. "I'm not super keen about being up here without any shielding, thanks."

Bob was about to raise the masts, when he hesitated. "Everyone ok with raising the masts, without deploying the sails? Get the sensors up and running?" He asked.

Everyone voiced their agreement, and Bob entered the command on his bracer that would raise the masts, then enable the sensors. The process took thirty seconds, and he wasn't the only one to wince when the masts slammed into place.

"Ok, so we should probably slow that down a bit," Mike said.

"I'll push it out to a minute next time," Bob agreed, distracted as the sensors began reporting data. Without the transcievers and the computers, they would have been stuck with a person monitoring each sensor, but thanks to miracle of DARPA, he was treated to a three dimensional projection of the space around the Freedom. Two of Thayland's moons were visible, although both quite distant, and while Thayland took up a lot of the projection, he could zoom out. The sensors were continually adding data to the image, and as he zoomed out he began to see the entire solar system.

"Stars above and stones below," Elli whispered.

"Damn," Mike muttered, squinting at his screen.

"So we've got shields and sensors," Jessica said. "We should use thrusters to get away from the planet, then engage the sails."

Bob nodded. The sails had become a bit controversial. You could consider the masts as part of the sensor system, which helped to justify their cost, but the sails were unproven, and the additional costs of deploying and controlling them represented two thirds of the mast and sail system. The crew had been split down the middle as far as the need for them. The whole crew agreed that if they worked, it would be nice to have a stealthy way to traverse a solar system, but the necessity for that stealth was hotly contested. Mike had agreed with Bob, stating that it was better to have the capability for stealth and not need it, than to need it, and not have it. Erick had argued that they were unlikely to encounter anyone in space, and if they did, they'd likely be a powerful being that wouldn't be deterred by their stealth, if they were interested at all.

Ultimately, they'd built the sails. Now it was time to see if they worked, and if so, how well.

Ideally, they would be able to set the sails to catch the flow of mana and leave them set for hours, possibly days at a time. Not having to constantly power the rituals that controlled the lines, masts, and yards would make using the sails attractive. If they did need to make constant adjustments that required the rituals to be active all the time then they would be better of using thrusters, save for when they needed stealth.

"Ok, let's turn on the thrusters that are facing the planet, we'll get ourselves oriented pointing straight away, then turn on the ones at the back to push us away," Bob said, tapping at his display, an image of the Freedom appearing, the thrusters shown as an overlay.

"Bob," Dave groaned, "we don't 'turn on' our thrusters, we engage them!"

"We should call the thrusters 'sub light' engines," Eddi agreed enthusiastically.

"But we don't have warp engines," Wayna objected.

"We can portal between dimensions," Jessica shook her head. "That's way cooler than warp speed."

"I'm pretty sure the Event Horizon would disagree with you on that statement," Amanda shuddered.

"I wonder how fast we can make the kessel run," Jack muttered.

Bob did his best to ignore the ongoing discussions about what to call various parts of the ship, and turned on the thrusters.

"We should have recruited a real astronaut," Harv mumbled.

"Yeah, I probably should have just copied the thrusters from the space shuttle and figured out a way to magically feed them, but I wanted to avoid having any mechanically complicated systems involved there," Bob admitted.

It had turned out that the thrusters along the sides of the ship worked a little bit too well. Everyone had been sitting down, which had likely saved them from falling over, although Monroe had slid a few feet, much to the big floofers displeasure.

The good news was that they were moving away from Thayland faster than they'd anticipated, so it would only take two days before they were well away from Thaylands direct influence on the mana moving through the solar system.

"I'm pretty sure that once we've reached our destination, we'll have a long list of ways to improve the next generation IDSS," Jack said.

"Next generation?" Eddi asked.

"Well, yeah," Jack replied. "We are going to figure out what works, and once we've gotten the bugs worked out, there is no reason to let all that hard work go to waste. There are a lot of people on Earth, and by the time we come back to visit, there will be groups of them with enough crystals and a deep seated desire to get off Earth."

"I guess I can see that," Harv mused. "There seem to be quite a few groups of people who would like to get away from their neighbors."

"Exactly," Jack smiled. "We'll be able to subcontract the labor and sell off half a dozen ships based on our revised designs, making us all quite a few crystals."

Bob shook his head. If there was one thing he'd learned about Jack, it was that the man was always working an angle. His work ethic rivalled Bob's own, although he spent quite a bit of time trying to work smarter, not harder. While that wasn't a bad thing, Jack tended to take it too far, looking for an elegant solution for so long that he would have saved time by just brute forcing it by putting in the work. He also always had an eye toward profits, a trait Bob knew that he sorely lacked.

He'd made a few mistakes on Thayland. He'd been overtaken with concept of having real, actual friends, and he'd extended that label to a few people who should have landed in a different category. Namely Thidwell. Looking back, he could see that his relationship with Thidwell was entirely transactional, and he'd come out the worse for almost every agreement they'd made. He'd been lost, grateful, and naive. fre𝚎w𝐞bn𝗼v𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝗼𝚖

None of the people on the IIDS Freedom had ever taken advantage of him, with the possible exception of Bailli, who had grasped at his offer of a new arm. She'd long since proven herself a true friend.

He didn't have to worry about the people with him, and if they ran into another group of people out in the multiverse, he'd be a lot more cautious about who and how he tried to help. He was basically being chased out of not one, but two universes because he'd revealed some of the knowledge he'd gained from Trebor. That wouldn't happen again.

"So, we need to go to Earth before the update," Dave said.

Bob blinked. They had been getting ready to test the sails, and he hadn't seen comment coming.

"Why?" Bob asked. "Everyone should basically be gone at this point, I know you made sure your friends and family were all off the planet."

"We need a computer," Dave replied.

"No, we need a few racks of computers," Amanda corrected him, then turned to Bob. "Look, these armbands," she lifted her wrist and waggled it, "are pretty damn amazing. They've basically taken a SOC and overclocked the everliving hell out of it by magically cooling the whole thing down near liquid nitrogen temperatures. The problem is that the sensors are providing more data than what they can process. Blame it on our overdesigned and overengineered ship, but you've got a dozen sensor arrays pulling in data from overlapping fields. Luckily they used an intel chipset, so we can run the programs on commercially available servers, but we need two dozen systems, one for each sensor with another running backup, in order to parse the data into usability."

"We can duplicate the cooling pretty easily, and we can route the data to another set of transcievers, then have the servers relay a complete picture to our armbands, which will take the processing load off them while giving us more data. Honestly, the extra processing power will reduce the latency, giving us a better picture, more quickly," Dave finished.

Bob rubbed the bridge of his nose. "I suppose it makes sense to source it directly," he conceded. "I do have a spot in orbit we can portal to." Delivering his 'Fuck you' to the assholes who had kidnapped him had given him the opportunity to experience low orbit. "The question is, how many governments are going to panic when an alien ship suddenly shows up in orbit?"

The looks from around the table indicated that he'd somehow been alone in considering that question.

"Just keep the shields up," Jessica suggested. "I doubt they'll see us, and if they do, we should be able to take anything they might throw at us in the half an hour we're there, yeah?"

Bob sighed. He could see from the faces of his friends that they were about to make an executive decision that was bound to annoy some executives.