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

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."

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."