Chapter 324: Evacuation
If the Rikens had abundant resources, they wouldn’t have hesitated to delay the Swarm with defensive actions, even at significant cost. But the current reality left no room for such luxuries.
“Don’t worry. We anticipated this situation long ago,” one officer said reassuringly. “We’ve already deployed solar sails across near-stellar orbits, covering an area of tens of millions of square kilometers, and we’re continuing to expand them. As long as we can keep the Swarm outside the Twin Star Defensive Zone, we won’t have to worry about energy supplies.”
The Rikens’ earliest interstellar navigation systems had been built on the foundation of solar sails. These sails not only provided propulsion for their ships but also enabled energy conversion to sustain their daily operational needs.
Harvesting energy from a star was an inevitable milestone for any advanced civilization. With shared theoretical principles, many civilizations gravitated toward the concept of Dyson Spheres.
For the Rikens, enclosing a star and harnessing its energy had no better candidate than solar sails. The technology was mature and relatively cost-effective. Using a special material with a thickness of only 0.0005 millimeters, the sails could cover vast areas. Even with low energy conversion rates, their advantages in other aspects were undeniable.
As a highly intelligent civilization, the Rikens always crafted interconnected contingency plans. The loss of Planet Izumo had long been accounted for, with stellar energy collection as the replacement strategy.
The Rikens gathered for the meeting were high-ranking officers and strategists, most of whom were already aware of the solar sail initiative. Yet the decision to abandon Planet Izumo left a bitter taste in their mouths, a lingering sense of frustration and helplessness.
The Swarm, however, remained utterly unaffected by the Rikens’ internal struggles. The 8,000 Primordial bodies pressed forward. Despite the complexities of the star system’s environment slowing them somewhat, they covered the distance in just over a month, advancing to within 10 million kilometers of Planet Izumo.
The Blades, aware from prior intelligence that the Rikens had abandoned the planet, still pretended ignorance, carrying out token reconnaissance.