There really was something incredibly strange about what was going on outside the Ship. There was a wave of energy passing through the area, seeming unaffected by the solid mass of land beneath them, and everything it touched except the land vanished.
[Full power to the Warp Drives. I don't care if it damages the ground. Get us up and out of here.] Max ordered immediately.
The Ship lurched into action so suddenly that not even the advanced gravity control could compensate, but they were moving.
"This doesn't feel like warp. I don't feel the warp bubble." Nico noted from her spot at the examination table.
She was right, the energy of the Warp field forming gave off a particular sensation, even in their new ships, and Max hadn't felt it.
Checking the sensors again, they weren't at warp, only at some level of sublight speed. They were rapidly leaving the ground below them behind, though, and with it, hopefully, the energy wave.
[We are clear of the projected path of the energy wave, Commander.] The Duty Captain informed them a few minutes later.
[Good work. Keep us moving and away from anything that might damage the Ship. If it doesn't seem right, just avoid it while we figure out what is going on.] Max sighed.
At least they hadn't gotten trapped on the surface as they had the first time they tried to leave the area. That could have been a disaster with the energy wave that moved through.
[Commander. We have an issue. I have made several course corrections, and we are still headed for a similar land mass to the previous one.] The Duty Captain informed them in a panic.
"Nico, do you have any idea what's going on? Any suggestions on how to properly navigate our asses out of this place?" Max asked.
"No idea how to leave yet. I don't even know how we got here. But I can say that it's like being in a fluid environment. There are currents here, and we are being pushed along faster than we can adjust at the moment. Once we get near that land mass, we will either get into an eddy, where we will be able to maneuver properly, or we will have to destroy it to avoid making an impact.
From what I can tell, it is the same as what happened at the first one. We couldn't leave until the current let up as that energy wave passed through."
Max sighed. "Do you at least have some good news about the corpses?"
He turned around to look and found that they were gone. Simply vanished as if they never existed. Even the parts that the team had removed for dissection were gone. But strangely, all of the weapons that they collected remained with them in the cargo hold.
"As you can see. This is a day of strangeness. The sensor logs don't show any force that made them vanish. They simply ceased to exist. Forget the vanishing act of the Arisen Army. We can at least track that. This is on a whole other level.
Perhaps it's because of this space, but maybe it's innate to the species. Remember the talk of the Energy Beings?"
That wasn't reassuring at all. But Max didn't feel that gaze on his back at the moment, so hopefully, whatever was watching them wasn't responsible for this situation.
[Captain, check the surface for any other signs of life. If there is another force there like the Galen, which we saw at the last fight, it might be better to try to team up with them.] Max ordered as they approached the distance where Nico had predicted the severe currents to change directions and begin to eddy around the object.
[No signs of anything else on the surface. Changing course to drop us out of the current.] The Captain replied, and the Cutter came to a slow stop over top of the surface.
[We are safe from the currents. I am beginning an analysis of our travel windows now.] The Captain informed the crew.
Getting drawn into another fight is the last thing that they wanted when they only had two actual Mecha Pilots and ten overeager Innu Gamers, who really shouldn't be placed in harm's way. But they didn't even know where the enemy was coming from or how it was targeting, so they couldn't even say for certain that the next encounter wouldn't be aboard their Cutter if the enemy appeared here.
With nothing threatening them for the moment, Max focused his [Optimize] skill on the Ship's shields with the intention of keeping the enemy out. The System was incredible at computing most of the time, so if there was some clue as to how to prevent the Ship from being breached, it might have already deduced it and begun to come up with a solution.
As he worked, Max went through the Ship's sensors from the last battle to see where the Galen had gone wrong and what they had done right. The Galen had seemed fairly competent, though outgunned by their larger vessels, but perhaps it was the fact that they used drones controlled from inside the Ship that caused this issue here.
If they couldn't deploy the drones, or these creatures had some defence against them, they could have been in real trouble.
It would also explain why they had sent out their soldiers unless those were androids or drones as well.
[Shield Analysis Complete] the display in front of him read.
It was pages and pages of technical data, but at the end, there was one very important line.
[All Vessels and Mecha deemed to be impervious to penetration by energy wave penetration.]
That was all that Max could have hoped for and more. Even if they were stuck somewhere when another of those waves came through, they shouldn't have to fear being turned into nothingness by the energy wave.
That didn't explain how the corpses from their cargo hold vanished, though. Perhaps that was separate from the energy wave, but it seemed like too convenient of a coincidence that the ones on their Ship vanished just as the wave destroyed the other ones.
Nico was thinking of it the other way. Her hypothesis was that the vanishing of the corpses was what had caused the energy wave and not the other way around. If they were an energy-based species, and the corporeal bodies were temporary, then a wave of energy when they reverted in large numbers would be both natural and expected.
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