Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2079: Using the Emulator

Several cadets glanced toward Jason, who shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

“First,” Lorna continued, “the crew was not killed by an attack. There’s no sign of weapons damage anywhere inside the ship, and no sign that anyone ever boarded it before we did. It wasn’t disease, either, and the life support systems were functioning normally right up until the end.”

She brought up an image on the display behind her. It showed a long, jagged graph that climbed almost vertically from the bottom of the screen to the very top in a single sharp line.

“This is from the ship’s engine logs,” she said. “It shows the engines’ output during the last moments the crew was alive. The ship was almost completely still at the beginning of this record, barely moving at all, and then within a few seconds, the engines went to full output.”

She traced the near-vertical line with one finger.

“No gradual build-up. No slow acceleration. Straight from almost nothing to everything the engines could produce.”

A few of the cadets frowned. Others seemed to understand immediately.

“You all remember the shuttle that brought us here,” Lorna said. “Remember how slowly it climbed out of Truimal’s atmosphere, and how long it took to reach full speed once we were in space. That wasn’t the pilot being cautious. Modern ships accelerate gradually because even with our inertial compensation systems, the human body can only withstand so much force at once. Push it beyond that, and the body simply cannot survive.”

She lowered her hand.

“Long-haul carriers from that era had only the most basic inertial compensation, nothing like what we use today. When that ship went to full output from a standstill, the force it produced was far beyond anything a human body could endure. The whiplash killed everyone aboard almost instantly.”

The room was completely silent.

Ning watched the cadets’ faces as they absorbed it. Several had gone pale, and one of the girls near the front had pressed her hand over her mouth again, the same way she had when the boarding team first found the bones.

“The final log entries were badly damaged,” Lorna went on, more quietly now. “But enough of them survived for the outpost to piece together what likely happened. The crew was running from something. The logs are too degraded to say exactly what, and the outpost won’t confirm anything they can’t prove, but given where the ship came from and the timing, the most likely answer is Mekharans.”

She paused.

“In the last few minutes before the engines fired, the crew switched on the interference generator to hide the ship from whatever was pursuing it. They set the autopilot on a course for the nearest Federation system, which happened to be ours. And then they pushed the engines to their absolute limit.”

She looked out across the room.

“They knew. The logs make that clear. They knew what that kind of acceleration would do to them. They knew it might kill them, and they did it anyway.”

Nobody spoke.

“They chose that risk over being caught,” Lorna said. “That’s what the commander wanted you to know.”

She let the silence stand for a long moment, and then she dismissed them.

The cadets filed slowly out of the communal area toward the cafeteria, most of them far quieter than they had been an hour earlier, and for once, nobody seemed to have anything to say about the ship at all.

Ning walked with them, though his thoughts were elsewhere.

He thought about the crew of that carrier, sitting at their stations, knowing what was coming behind them and what was waiting for them if they fled.

They had made the decision deliberately, in the last few minutes they had, knowing with certainty what the engines would do to them, and that whatever they were running from was worse.

He wondered how desperate a crew would have to be to make that choice.

He wondered what they had seen behind them, and what it would have meant to be caught, that dying instantly in their seats had seemed like the better outcome.

And he thought, not for the first time since arriving in this galaxy, that a war which could drive people to that kind of decision was one that needed to end, however difficult that might be.

Dinner was quiet that evening.

Afterward, the cadets went back to their rooms earlier than usual, and the corridors of the station were empty well before the usual hour.

In the room she shared with her roommate, Naysha waited until the other girl had fallen asleep, her breathing slow and even on the far side of the room, before she sat up on her bed and put on her helmet.

She opened her recorded schematics and selected the simulator pod.

Naysha took a breath and selected yes.

The room around her vanished.

In its place, the familiar cockpit of the Rank 1 Mecha formed across her vision, exactly as she remembered it from the academy, with its controls, its displays, and its fuel and ammunition counters glowing in the corners. Beyond the cockpit, the asteroid field stretched out in front of her, filled with tumbling rocks and drifting wreckage.

It looked real.

She reached out, and her hands closed around controls that were not there.

And yet, somehow, the System translated her movements as though they were, and the Mecha responded exactly as it had in the simulator pod at the academy, its momentum carrying it forward through the field as she adjusted her course.

It even felt as though the loose wire in the right-hand control were still loose, and Naysha nearly laughed out loud before remembering her roommate was asleep a few meters away.

She began to fly.

She ran the simulation once, finishing with a score that would have pleased her a month ago, and then immediately ran it again.

On the second attempt, she focused on the opening routes, practicing the small, early corrections Ning had taught her, while on the third, she worked on conserving her ammunition through the middle sections.

She failed, made mistakes, and started over, again and again, with nobody watching and nothing recorded against her.