Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2059: Jalun

The information the System had placed in his mind when it built his identity included a fair amount about Truimal and its surroundings, and the moon had been mentioned more than once. Most of the settlements there were research stations, and most of those research stations were devoted to developing new weapons.

It made sense when he thought about it. Building and testing anything dangerous was always wiser when it happened far away from the people living on the planet below, and an accident on the moon would kill far fewer people than one in the middle of a city.

It was also cheaper to test weapons there, since most of what the military developed was meant to be used in space anyway, and the moon offered all the vacuum and empty distance they could possibly need.

Ning’s gaze shifted toward the seat two rows ahead, where Naysha was looking out her own window at the same view.

He remembered what the System had told him when it first presented her name. Her parents had died during research into new weapons, and while he did not know which of those tiny specks of light had been the one, there was a good chance it was somewhere on the surface sliding past their windows right now.

Naysha did not turn away from the window, and her expression did not change. But she did not look away until the moon had fallen far behind them.

Several more hours passed before the shuttle reached the edge of Truimal’s local space and began slowing slightly as an enormous structure appeared ahead of them.

It was a space hub, far larger than the shuttle port they had departed from, a sprawling station built in a rough ring around a central core. Smaller vessels moved in and out of docking arms along its sides, and at several points around the ring, Ning could see great circular frameworks glowing faintly with the steady light of active energy.

Teleportation matrices.

Ning recognized them immediately, along with the faint, familiar signature of Space Stone at their hearts. He remembered Crownus telling him that the people of Avelis had found an enormous deposit of the material on one of their moons and that they were still using it to this day, and he supposed that this was exactly the sort of thing it was being used for.

The shuttle did not dock. It angled itself toward one of the glowing frameworks and passed straight through it without slowing down in the slightest.

For a brief instant, the view outside the window flickered.

Then the stars were different, and a second hub hung in front of them, smaller than the first but built along the same design, and beyond it, much closer than before, lay a world that could only be Jalun.

Several of the tourists gasped, and even a few of the cadets leaned toward their windows.

Now, at last, the shuttle began to slow down.

The deceleration was far harsher than the climb had been. The engines fired hard against their direction of travel, and the force of it pressed everyone forward against their harnesses for a long, uncomfortable stretch.

Ning could hear people groaning across the cabin, and beside him, Jason had gone pale again and was gripping both armrests tightly enough that his knuckles had turned white.

When the pressure finally eased, Ning turned back to the window and looked at the planet growing steadily larger in front of them.

It was not at all what he had expected.

He had pictured a dull, frozen gray world after everything Naysha and Jason had said about it, but Jalun was surprisingly colorful. Broad stretches of its surface were streaked with deep reds and pale yellows, while darker bands of blue and violet ran between them in long, twisting lines that looked almost like rivers seen from far above. Bright white patches of ice capped its poles and gathered in the shadows of its mountains.

There was little atmosphere to soften any of it, which made every color sharp and vivid against the black of space behind it.

The shuttle descended toward the surface and headed for a cluster of structures built into the side of a low ridge. A massive hangar door slid open as they approached, and the shuttle passed inside before the door sealed shut behind them.

Ning felt the faint shift in the air outside the hull as the hangar pressurized, filling the enclosed space with breathable oxygen, and a few minutes later, the crew announced that it was safe to disembark.

One by one, the passengers unbuckled their harnesses, gathered their bags, and stepped off the shuttle onto the surface of Jalun.

The passengers gathered in a loose crowd beside the shuttle once they had all disembarked, the tourists clustering together toward one end of the hangar while the academy group formed its own neat cluster at the other, and for several minutes, they simply stood there looking around at their surroundings.

The hangar was enormous, easily large enough to hold three or four shuttles of the same size, with high, curved walls of reinforced metal and rows of bright lights running along the ceiling.

Thick pipes and ducts ran along every surface, and Ning could hear the low, constant hum of machinery working somewhere behind them, pushing air through the vents and keeping the enclosed space alive.

The air itself smelled faintly metallic, slightly drier and colder than the air on Truimal, though perfectly breathable.

Before anyone was allowed to leave the hangar, a man in a dark gray uniform with a station badge on his chest walked out to stand in front of the gathered passengers.

He waited until the conversations had died down, and then he began to speak in the steady, practiced tone of someone who had given the same speech many hundreds of times.

Most of what he said concerned where visitors were allowed to go and what they were allowed to do.

Certain sections of the station were restricted to personnel only, certain corridors could be entered only with an escort, and nobody was to go anywhere near the external airlocks without proper authorization and supervision.

Then he came to the part that he clearly considered the most important.