“Solar ashes,” the MDT responded briefly.
“A pile of solar ashes?” Hao Ren was a little surprised. “From a dead star? What else?”
“Not much; no planets, no asteroid belts, and no artificial celestial objects. The drone network has compared it with the image in the vengeful spirit’s memory and found the spot where a similar starry region could be observed. It matched 99.99 % of the star chart. This only means that the vengeful spirit was looking at it from the same spot—but this spot is now empty. The nearest object is a dead star. The good news is, the dead star isn’t far from this location, just about two astronomical units away. So the Nangong couple hasn’t fallen into the sun, instead they’re on some other planet circling the sun. The only question is: where is this planet?”
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
Lily sat back in her seat and said, “Let’s check it out then.”
Hao Ren nodded. He commanded the spacecraft to disconnect from the outpost and retracted its contact beam. It faded into a silver light as it flew away and disappeared into deep space. The tiny outpost re-adjusted the angle of its crystal plates and resumed its routine operation.
The spacecraft arrived at its destination after a short voyage. The observatory platform on the upper deck of the Petrachelys extended out slowly. As the shade lowered, the scenery outside appeared before their eyes. It was dark and vast.
The MDT pointed to a direction in space with a light beam. A faint dot of light, as small as an egg, was out there. “That’s the ash, a dead star. It didn’t turn into a black hole. Its core is still emanating heat. Apart from that, there’s pretty much nothing left. This space is filled with fragments of the star—gases, shrapnel and things like that, which we can ignore.”
Hao Ren nodded. He could see that the cosmic background had an abnormal grayish-brown color. This consisted of the dust and gases left behind by the explosion of the star. Since the dust and gases had spread out so far, the spot that they were in had to be within the blast zone. If there any planets existed in the region, they would have been blown away by the supernova.
But even if the planet shattered, there would surely be debris.
The MDT emitted a series of beeps. “Checked. There’s nothing left.”
“Is it possible to widen the search area?” Hao Ren looked at the distant star. “When the star exploded, the shockwave may have blown the celestial body out of the way.”
“You think I never thought of that?” The MDY shook its body. “Let me remind you that according to calculations, the star you see now has exploded more than 10,000 years ago. Even if it blew away its own planet, it happened way back then. The star region in the vengeful spirit’s memory was only a hundred years old; during which this spot was as calm as a millpond. So, if we can’t find anything here right now, more often than not, you wouldn’t find anything here a hundred years ago.”
Y’zaks suddenly came up and said, “Unless, the planet here ran away on its own a hundred years ago.”
Y’lisabet emulated her papa’s usual style, crossing both arms and nodding. “What my papa says makes sense.”
Vivian waved her hand at the little girl. “Do you even understand what your papa said?”
Y’lisabet held her head high and replied, “Whatever my papa says always makes sense! This is the law of nature!”
Just as Hao Ren was about to say something, a ring of light suddenly appeared in the space near the spaceship. A small rectangular object emitting a silver light jumped out of the ring and approached the Petrachelys silently. Hao Ren recognized the object; it was the probe that he had released earlier. However, he damned sure it was not one of the batch. This one was one of latter generation—a cloned probe multiplied by the original probe, responsible for mapping the universe in this region. The smart drone had sensed the position of its master. It flew directly to the observatory platform. The rear section of the drone swung open on both sides before a small metal device came out of its belly. The device came into the observatory through the shield and landed before them.
Lily grabbed the gizmo but found it had some components missing. The thing obviously not made in Xi Ling Celestials.
Hao Ren was surprised. “Where does it come from?”
The MDT went up and ‘talked’ with the probe. Then it said, “It came from several light years away, in space. This thing was flying at 3% the speed of light.”
A thought came to Hao Ren’s mind. He ordered. “Track in that direction!”
The drone lighted up in blue before it flew away and disappeared before their eyes. The MDT brought up a hologram showing a real-time radar visual transmitted by the probe. The visual began with the probe rapidly pulling away from the Petrachelys and flying out into deep space. A moment later, the MDT suddenly sounded a loud whistle; a bright red dot appeared in the visual. “The probe has found a planet! However, the planet is flying away from us with the help of a bunch of thrusters, in at least eight light years away from us… ”
Everyone was stunned beyond word. Their eyes landed on Y’zaks in unison. Y’zaks scratching his big baldhead, smiling. “It really could run away on its own…”
Y’lisabet’s arms still crossed. She proclaimed proudly, “See—my dad is always right.”
The Petrachelys immediately traced the signal from the probe and caught up with the flyaway planet. What they saw had their jaws dropped to the ground.
The dim, grey planet was moving across space, alone. Neat and huge gullies filled its surface. The gullies were the marks left behind by the massive reconstruction works. In spot where those gullies converged were propellers symmetrically arranged along the axis. These propellers were as large as mountains, and they looked incredibly huge even from space. Some of them are in operation, thrusting out several hundred thousand miles of jet flames pushing the planet away in a gradual acceleration.
The technology that was driving the planet away looked ‘primitive’. It was the same propulsion technology as thruster. Technologically, it was light years behind the Coordinate Propulsion Technology of many interstellar civilisations. However, this simple and crude propulsion method had given the entire planet a jaw-dropping sense of raw power.
The Petrachelys flew parallel to the grey planet. Hao Ren looked down from the observatory at the planet below. “Why didn’t the probes detect this planet?”
“The earlier batch of drones are primarily tasked to drawing up the star chart. The larger sources of gravity and light had overshadowed the planets and smaller objects in space,” explained the MDT. “Besides, this particular planet here was traversing along the flight boundary, which was a blind spot, of the two probes. So this could be an oversight. After all, this planet doesn’t emit light, is not massive, and has very low infrared signature.”
Rollie lay on the side of the observatory and meowed in awe. Her tail swung in the air. “That’s what Boss Cat looking for?”
“What is that?” Vivian also turned and asked.
The MDT was measuring the trajectory of the rogue planet. By using the trajectory and speed of acceleration of the planet, it could trace it back to its original location of one hundred years ago. However, this required a complex calculation and the result was only an approximation of an ideal condition—stars was a constantly changing reference system. The celestial bodies in motion involved many reverse calculations. Fortunately, the time span that the MDT needed for calculation was only a hundred years. Within those hundred years, the relative position of the stars would not change much.
“Firstly, we need to assume that the planet has been maintaining its current rate of acceleration after breaking away from the star system, and we assume that it has not changed its course for 100 years and it has not been captured by other large-mass objects. Finally, after considering the perturbation of nearby gravitational sources…” The MDT muttered as it calculated. Hao Ren began to run out of patience. “Please get straight to the point.”
“Oh, this should be the planet we’ve been looking for,” said the MDT, smacking on Hao Ren’s forehead. “One hundred years ago it should be several dozens of astronomical units away from the coordinate that we originally calculated. In interstellar term, this deviation is almost negligible.”
Lily poked the waist of Nangong Wuyue. “Your daddy and mommy should be down there. Probably.”