Monroe

Chapter Two Hundred and Ninety-Four. Spaceflight is expensive.

"I don't suppose we have eyes on Mr. Whitman?" President Elania Hartford asked.

"He was in Glacier Valley about three weeks ago? Maybe four weeks ago," Secretary of Defence Ed Heller replied. "May I ask why?"

"Because whenever there is a mess that is Thayland related, he seems to be involved," Elania said dryly.

"I have a high degree of certainty that this time, Bob was not involved," Ed said firmly. "One of the Old Guard, Eric Waters, sent a report indicating that the reason behind the revocation of the Divine Blessings from the Seven Gods of Light was the representatives from Parceus, the next planet over, taking over the Church and ordering the King of Greenwold to hand over our people. The King of Greenwold refused, and somehow revoked those blessings."

"Which has left us with a handful of clergy that are afraid to go back home," Elania grumbled. "Their reluctance makes sense in the context of losing their blessings."

"We're down to less than four weeks ourselves," Ed noted.

"The System warning did a lot to convince the few people who were still objecting," Elania sighed. "I won't lie, it's more than a little weird to realize that I'm likely to go down in the history books as the last president of the United States of America."

"Honestly, Madam President, you've done as good a job as anyone could have asked for," SecDef replied.

"For now, I'm presiding over a mostly empty country," she shook her head. "The last Nuclear plant goes off line tomorrow, and then it's just a matter of shutting down the natural gas plants and mothballing the grid as best we can. We should have everyone out a week before the integration."

"The Old Guard plan to keep portals open and running right up until the last minute to catch any stragglers," Ed said. "Hopefully they aren't needed."

"We were rather relieved to discover that you weren't involved in that business," Queen Elizabeth sipped her tea.

"My divine blessings from the Forbidden Pantheon were requirements to assume my position," Huron explained. "My faith has always been in Vi'Radia, so while I was impacted somewhat, it didn't keep me from my duties, and I've made certain that the Church has continued to offer healing and guidance through these trying times."

"We have given thought and taken counsel on the matter of declaring a formal relationship with the Church," Elizabeth continued. "We feel that the removal of what were, in our eyes, the overly fervent and fanatical tendencies of the Church, strengthens the case for Great Britain to offer places of worship to the Church of Vi'Radia."

"I appreciate your support, your Majesty," Huron smiled.

He'd had a rough couple of months. Korldon, as a fully fledged tier eleven High Priest, had outranked him rather badly, and he'd been forced to acede to the man's requests. His attempts to temper them hadn't worked particularly well, and he'd been resigned to watching the Church collapse around him as Korldon exerted his power.

He should have had more faith in the King.

Granted, he was still cleaning up the mess left from the King forbidding the worship of certain gods, as well as revoking their divine blessings, but the Church of Vi'Radia remained, and it seemed that not all of the relationships he'd carefully cultivated had been damaged. He'd even heard some of his parishoners praising the Church of Vi'Radia for standing up to the clergy from Parceus.

"We were hoping that you might provide insight into the process of returning our people to Earth," The Queen continued. "As the integration date grows near, we have completed the evacuation of our people, and we must look toward the future and our return."

"We will be employing several tier seven dimensionalists to open portals between our worlds," Huron replied. "Once mana has awoken on your world, it will enjoy the same natural protection ours does from being invaded by extradimensional entities, so I'm afraid that lower tier spellcasters are unlikely to have the power to peirce both our barrier and your own. Although with this 'update' and the changes it promises, I'm afraid I can't be absolutely certain of anything."

"We have been informed that part of the update will require individuals to focus on a specific set of skills, rather than allowing for the more generalist approach we now enjoy," Elizabeth replied, reaching down to pet Poro. "We have encouraged certain subjects who are likely to find themselves unable to maintain employment in fields rendered unviable by the introduction of the System to our world, to rather focus on becoming Dimensionalists, often with a side of either Conjuration for those with a more aggressive mindset, or Abjuration for those with a more nurturing nature." She smiled at her favorite Corgi. "We've suggested the same to our cousins across the pond, and I believe they've taken our suggestions to heart. I'm afraid our former colonies on the subcontinent haven't been as receptive."

Huron nodded. He had a feeling that Jason had provided that information, and that it had come from Bob. He'd wished that he'd known the depths to which Bob's knowledge reached, but recent events had likely poisoned that well completely.

"From what the King has told me, he plans to send your people back as soon as the integration is complete, with an eye toward even distribution so that he can wash his claws of the affair, safe in the knowledge that if the people of Earth chose to fight each other, he won't have given one side an advantage over the other," Huron explained.

"We have no imperial ambitions," Elizabeth waved her hand dismissively. "We would be the light that illuminates the way, but we will not force others to follow us."

Time until System Integration: 9 Days, 2 Hours, 18 Minutes, 27 seconds.

Bob looked up at the IIDS Freedom. It had taken a bit longer than they'd planned, mostly due to the complexity of the shielding, but there it was.

It towered above the beach, a black pillar that drank in the light. With the shielding turned off, if you stood right next to it you could barely make it the microscopic etchings that formed the ritual pattern for the shields. More easily spotted were the masts, which folded neatly into the hull, but were still obvious.

"We built a spaceship," Dave murmured, his fingers interlaced with Amanda's. "Ever want to make love to an astronaut?" He whispered to her.

"You used that line already," Amanda replied as she leaned into him.

"It worked, didn't it?" Dave grinned.

"I'd tell you two to get a room, but you've already got one," Bob said.

"Everyone ready to head to orbit?" Bob asked.

They'd technically finished two days earlier, but as the prospect of leaving had become an immediate concern, the group had scattered to say their goodbyes.

Bob had scheduled an email blast to go out after they'd left, and then spent the day delving.

He glanced at the display on his wrist. It was Mike who had come through for them with the mini-computers. Apparently the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency had been working around the clock for months, and this was one of the ideas they'd managed to develop into an actual product. It had been designed to allow curators to keep track of the rituals on the various floors of their Dungeons without having to go down and check each one, but the sheer versatility of the device had been quickly realized, and it was being marketed to all the governments of Earth, as well as Greenwold and Karcerian on Thayland.

Each one came with a schematic for a ritual that was designed to link into the part of the target ritual that absorbed mana and mana crystals to power itself. That ritual was designed to output light in a range of frequencies, which were then read by a transciever and that information relayed to computer. It was the first real example Bob had seen of technology being truly integrated with magic.

The practical upshot was that everyone had one of the armband computers, which had cost almost nothing when compared to the three hundred and sixty transmitters they'd needed to monitor the rituals that kept everything going on the IIDS Freedom.

Jessica had been the one to suggest, and then insist, that every aspect of the ship needed to have individual rituals. Jack had agreed, explaining to Dave, who had disagreed, that you wanted multiple points of failure, as that meant that one ritual failing wouldn't disable that ritual for the entire ship.

Bob had kept his mouth shut. He didn't know anything about ships, and his only contribution to the discussion had come at the end when Dave and Amanda had asked just how many rituals were going to be active, and how much they would cost.

The good news was that of the three hundred and sixty, the one hundred and eight which were dedicated to the ship being habitable were relatively inexpensive, costing only a single crystal each to function for the day. The shielding for the hull, along with the constant repair functionality comprised another eighty-four rituals, which required one crystal per hour to function. This paled in comparison to the sails, which required one hundred and sixty-eight crystals per hour.

The least expensive of the crystal hungry rituals were the thrusters, which were only activated as needed. They had a thousand crystals in reserve for each of the eighty manuevring thrusters, and twenty thousand crystals for each of the forty propulsion thrusters, twenty at the bow, and twenty at the stern, which allowed the ship to accelerate or decelerate rapidly. They didn't expect to need to use the supply they'd gathered, but had judged that it was better to be safe than frantically devling to meet a shortage. The two hundred and seventy-six crystals per hour needed to maintain sensors and headway while they were in motion was enough of a burden.

He'd been concerned by nearly seven thousand mana crystals per day cost of running the IIDS Freedom, but repeated delves into his Arcane Depths had alleviated that worry. It turned out that despite his assumptions, he wasn't taking in that many crystals. Watching Bailli occupy six spawns to his four was humbling. Eddi not only occupied six, but also had a crew of doberman sized raptors gathering the mana crystals and providing overwatch for everyone else in case a spawn arrived sooner than expected. That had apparently been an issue in Harbordeep. Harv and Elli, despite both stradling the line between craftsman and fighters, were the only two who went at his pace.

The only reason that he was matching Bailli's production was that she refused to delve for more than eight hours at a time. Eddi was the only one who wanted to delve for longer, but Wayna had explained to him that she was only delving for eight hours, and if he delved for sixteen or even eighteen hours, they wouldn't have any time to spend together. Eddi was a smart kid, but he was also a smart hormone drive kid, and he'd changed his tune quite quickly when he realized the ramifications of trying to keep up with Bob.

Still, even at eight hours, the crew were each pulling in an average of eighty crystals an hour, which kept them almost a thousand crystals ahead of the ships consumption.

Amanda had insisted that they take one day off everyweek, and Bob had agreed under the condition that they maintain a full weeks worth of crystals in reserve.

He was pulled from his thoughts as Jessica slid her arm under his.

"She's brilliant," she said softly.

"Brilliant, and expensive," Jack's voice cut through the sounds of the ocean as he strode down to the cove. "It cost almost as much to build this as it did the walls of Refugio."

"Why are you coming with us?" Bob asked. The question had been nagging at him.

"I wondered if you were ever going to ask," Jack laughed. "I've got Refugio setup and at capacity, with capable administrators running it, which is a step up from me being in charge," he shook his head. "I'm a builder," he said, "that's my passion. Refugio and her sister city, Haven, will do quite well without me interfering. I'm having my rather modest earnings funneled into funding another city, and the remainder gifted to the King of Greenwold with the understanding that when I come back, I'll be able to resume control of those revenue streams."

"Why leave at all?" Bob persisted.

"Because while I have a veritable buffet of lovers, Dave and Amanda are my two closest friends, and I'd be terribly lonely without them," Jack admitted with a sigh. "Also, wherever we end up, I suspect I'll be building a new city, this time under the auspices of the hotly debated and anticipated System Update. So it isn't likely I'll be bored or anything."

Bob cocked his head to the side. "You do remember the bit where I warned everyone that we might end up jumping through thousands of dimensions, travelling for years before we find what we're looking for?"

Jack waved his hand dismissively. "I doubt it will take that long," he replied. "Knowing how much it's going to cost us to travel through a solar system, opposed by the cost of opening a portal for the Freedom, I suspect we'll be doing a lot of portaling. Whenever we appear in a solar system, we should be able to determine rather quickly if there are any habitable planets. If they are in range of a week of travel, we go investigate. If they aren't we mark that particular destination as possibly having a habitable planet, as well as the distance required to investigate, and keep going. We can always circle back if it turns out that we aren't portalling to as many solar systems as we hoped, or that those we are finding don't have habitable planets."

"Especially with that portal ritual you modified," Amanda agreed.

Bob hid his grimace. That had been less a discovery, and more of asking Trebor the stupidly obvious question of if he could somehow set a portal to transport anyone who wasn't actively objecting. The short answer had been yes, although the long answer had been yes, if you don't mind almost doubling the number of flows involved in creating the pattern, and some of those weren't part of the original pattern, so the System wasn't going to be helping him out.

He'd thought to ask the question after a long day grinding as he worked his mind around how the hell they were going to get the ship through a portal in an emergency if they had to wait for the entire crew to respond to the system generated query requesting acknowledgement for portal travel. By avoiding that, they could not only portal during an emergency, they could shave a few seconds off the process of portaling in general.

Three seconds didn't sound like much, but if you were popping a portal every few minutes it added up, and Bob expected that they'd end up doing a lot more sitting in empty space than the rest of the group had thought.

Ultimately it was a wash. If they were portaling, they weren't sailing, which was responsible for over half the ships mana crystal consumption.

Slipping from Jessica's admittedly featherlight grasp, he took a few steps forward, and looked over the crew of the IIDS Freedom. "Alright, we're all here, and we're already. Let's portal into our quarters. It's time to see how she flies."