Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2058: The Field Trip

It started quietly, the way most rumors did, with a few cadets whispering over their trays in the cafeteria and falling silent whenever an instructor walked past. By the following day, it had reached nearly every table, and by the day after that, even the staff seemed to be speaking more quietly among themselves than usual.

The Mekharans had taken one of the Federation’s planets.

Nobody seemed to know which one, how it had happened, or whether the news had come from an official source or simply from someone’s cousin who served on a transport ship. But everyone agreed on what it would mean if it was true.

The war, which had dragged on for four thousand years in a slow and grinding stalemate, was about to become far more intense.

Nobody at the academy had much time to dwell on the news of the war because the morning of the field trip arrived before the rumor had a chance to settle into anything more solid than whispers.

The cadets of Batch 122 gathered outside the academy’s main entrance well before sunrise, their breath faintly visible in the cold air, each of them carrying a single regulation bag packed according to the list Lorna had sent the day before.

There were nearly thirty students in all, along with Lorna, several other instructors, and a handful of support staff, which brought their group to almost forty people standing together in the gray half-light while they waited.

A large ground transport pulled up a short while later, and they boarded it for the short ride to the nearest shuttle port on the edge of the city.

The port was busier than Ning had expected for such an early hour. Civilian travelers moved between the terminals alongside cargo workers and the occasional soldier, and the academy group was ushered through a separate security gate before being led out onto the launch field, where their shuttle stood waiting.

It was a large vessel, built to carry around a hundred passengers, with a broad body and stubby wings that looked better suited to atmospheric flight than to anything else, though Ning could see the heavy engines mounted along its rear that would handle the rest of the journey.

The academy group would fill only forty of its seats. The remaining sixty or so belonged to ordinary tourists who had purchased passage to Jalun for their own reasons, and several of them were already boarding ahead of the cadets, carrying bags and chatting excitedly among themselves in a way that none of the students had managed all morning.

As they crossed the launch field toward the boarding ramp, Ning noticed Naysha slow down slightly, her gaze fixed on the shuttle’s hull with the faintly distant look he had learned to recognize.

He glanced at the System interface linked to hers and saw the scan begin before stopping almost immediately.

<Scan unavailable.>

<Target exceeds current size restriction.>

Naysha frowned and looked at the shuttle for a moment longer, as though considering whether it was worth trying again, before she gave up and continued up the ramp with the others.

Ning smiled to himself. It made sense that the System would not allow her to scan something so large this early, and he suspected that the restriction would become one more limit she would have to work her way past in time.

The interior of the shuttle was cleaner and more comfortable than he had expected, with rows of padded seats arranged in pairs on either side of a central aisle and small windows set into the hull beside each row. The academy group was seated together near the front, and Ning took a seat beside the window with Jason next to him, while Naysha ended up two rows ahead beside her roommate.

The crew moved down the aisle, checking every passenger and making sure each harness was properly fastened across the chest and shoulders, and then a calm voice came over the speakers to announce that departure would begin shortly.

When the engines finally started, the vibration came up through the floor and into the seats, and the shuttle began to rise.

It did so slowly, far more slowly than Ning had expected from a vessel with engines that size. The ascent was gradual and steady, building speed over several minutes rather than all at once, and he quickly understood why.

A sudden climb to full speed would have placed far too much force on the human bodies inside, and the gentle acceleration allowed everyone aboard to adjust to the growing pressure a little at a time.

Even so, Ning could see a few of the tourists across the aisle gripping their armrests, and Jason had closed his eyes and was breathing very deliberately through his nose.

The sky outside the window darkened as they climbed, shifting from the gray-orange of Truimal’s atmosphere to a deep blue and then to black, and roughly ten minutes after leaving the ground, the shuttle broke free of the atmosphere entirely.

Once they were in open space, the engines changed pitch, and the shuttle began to accelerate in earnest.

The pressure of it pressed everyone back into their seats for several long minutes before easing again, and after that, the journey settled into a long, quiet stretch of travel.

Some of the cadets slept, others talked quietly among themselves, and the tourists farther back passed around snacks and pointed at things through their windows.

About half a day into the trip, the shuttle passed close to Truimal’s moon, Geer, using its gravity for navigational assist.

It came near enough that Ning could see the surface clearly through the window, a pale gray landscape of craters and ridges, and scattered across it were dozens of tiny specks of light and metal that could only be human settlements.

Some were clustered together in small groups, while others sat alone in the middle of empty plains, connected to nothing at all.

Ning already knew what most of them were.