Chapter 79: Preparing the Expedition
The decision hung in the air of the Core Chamber, heavy and final. They were going to do it. They were going to build a spaceship, fly into the scary nothingness between realities, and try to rescue a bunch of ancient, god-like beings who had been lost for thousands of years.
Zara Khan broke the silence. "Well," she said, tapping a finger on her chin, her mind already working through a thousand different problems. "The first step to any impossibly complex journey is a simple to-do list. Item number one: we need a ship."
Ryan chuckled. It sounded so simple when she put it like that. "Right. A ship. Any ideas where we can find a spaceship that can survive flying through a place where reality itself is broken?"
"As a matter of fact, yes," Emma said, a spark of excitement in her eyes. "When we were first exploring the Labyrinth, we found a deep storage hangar. A sort of... Precursor garage.
There was something in there. We didn’t know what it was at the time, but based on the data you’ve shown us..."
She led them out of the Core Chamber and into the deepest, most ancient parts of the Labyrinth. They rode a silent, floating platform down for what felt like miles, past levels filled with dormant security systems and forgotten storerooms. Finally, they arrived at a pair of colossal doors that slid open with a deep, grinding hum.
The room beyond was a vast, dusty hangar, big enough to hold a dozen buildings. And in the center of it, sitting under a single, dim light, was a ship.
It was a Precursor Scout Skiff. It was sleek and beautiful, shaped like a smooth, dark arrowhead. It had no visible engines, no windows, just a perfect, seamless hull made of a material that looked like polished obsidian.
It was the most advanced piece of technology they had ever seen. It was also very, very dead. It was covered in a thick layer of dust, and a single "For Sale" sign someone had jokingly placed on it ages ago was the only sign of recent activity.
Emma and Zara immediately swarmed the vessel, their datapads out, scanning every inch of it. They ran their hands over its smooth surface with the kind of reverence usually reserved for holy relics.
"The hull is perfect," Zara marveled. "It’s a single, molecule-forged alloy. It’s designed to withstand the pressures of a collapsing star! We can work with this."