When the words left Jason's mouth, the room didn't just fall silent; it erupted in a howl of despair.
Even the slowest mind in the room understood the implication. Six months. They had six months left to live.
Now the Earth was gone, was the Moon also going to be gone? Then, where else could humanity go?
Some people started wailing openly, while others simply slid out of their chairs, fainting from the shock.
So many days of grueling labor, the glimmer of hope from the agricultural project, the fragile morale they had rebuilt, it was all extinguished in a single sentence.
Even the strongest among them crumbled.
Where was the hope? Leave the Moon? How?
Rely on the Victory ? Don't make them laugh. The Victory had a payload capacity of 500 tons. It was a lifeboat for a few dozen people, not an ark for fifty thousand.
These people were the elite of the human race. They knew the math, and the math was merciless.
If building an aircraft carrier had a difficulty rating of 1, landing on the Moon was a 100.
The Victory, the pinnacle of pre-collapse engineering, had a difficulty rating of 1,000.
But an interstellar ark? A ship capable of supporting fifty thousand lives in deep space? That was a difficulty rating of 100,000. Maybe a million.
Engines, materials, power generation, humanity didn't have a single technology that met the standard. This wasn't a gap of years; it was a gap of centuries.
It was impossible.
Jason frowned deeply. He had felt this wave of despair himself when he first read the report. But he had overestimated the resilience of the scientists.
Panic is contagious. As the weeping spread, the order in the room began to disintegrate. It was a total psychological collapse.
Was this how it ended? Whimpering in the dark?
No!!
"Quiet! Everyone be quiet!" Jason shouted.
No one listened. The wailing continued.
Jason hardened his heart. He stepped back and kicked the heavy steel conference table with all his Superhuman strength.
BANG!
The massive table flipped over, crashing to the floor with a deafening boom.
"I said, QUIET!"
The room froze. Everyone stared at him blankly, their eyes red, their minds rebooting from the shock.
"What are you crying for? Will tears fix the orbit?" Jason roared, his hair bristling with rage. "Is the Moon gone? Are we dead yet? No! We have six months! You should be on your knees thanking whatever god you believe in that we found out now and not five months from now!"
"What are you afraid of? Death?" Jason stepped closer to the crowd. "If you die, you die. You've already lived longer than seven billion people back on Earth! What is there to fear? It's just death!"
"Do you want to spend your last six months pissing your pants in terror, or do you want to go out like warriors?"
"We fight! Even if the road leads off a cliff, we do not sit down and wait for the end. We do not let fate choke the life out of us!"
"We find a way! We force a solution! What is the worst that can happen?" Jason screamed the final words.
"At worst, we die! And we are already dead if we do nothing!"
The scientists were stunned.
Jason was right. They had lost everything already. They had nothing left to lose but their lives.
At worst, we die.
For weeks, Jason had been the gentle, humble administrator. Now, the mask was off. This was the soldier. This was the warlord.
"Fight fate!"
The slogan took root. A sense of shared, desperate anger began to replace the fear.
If the universe wanted to kill them, they would make the universe work for it.
Faces flushed. Fists clenched. Some wiped away tears and pulled out their datapads, re-checking the orbital decay formulas.
Seeing the mood shift, Jason lowered his voice, though it remained steel-hard.
"The Moon is no longer a sanctuary. To survive, we must evacuate."
"You know the numbers. With our current industrial base, building a new interstellar ark is impossible."
"So, we use the one we already have."
The Alien Ship.
"It is large enough. It is indestructible. It can hold all fifty thousand of us."
"The only thing it lacks is an engine."
"Our mission is simple: Design and build a propulsion system capable of moving that ship. We have six months."
"If we succeed, we live. If we fail... well, the Ship is indestructible. Even if the Moon crashes into Earth, the Ship might survive the impact. We might survive inside it."
"But that is a coffin, not a life. Without supplies, without a planet, we would just starve in the dark."
Jason slammed his fist onto the dented table. "So we find a way to fly it. We need a miracle. So we are going to build one."
The room fell silent again, but this time it was a thoughtful silence.
Everyone had seen the Ship. It was terrifyingly huge.
Ignoring the dimensional folding inside, the external shell alone was a sphere with a diameter of fifteen kilometers, nine miles.
It was twice the height of Mount Everest. It was thirty-two times taller than the tallest skyscraper on Earth.
How much thrust would it take to lift a city the size of Manhattan and the weight of a mountain range?
The glimmer of confidence began to fade. The laws of physics were a harsh mistress.
The upper limit of human propulsion was the Victory. Its rockets could lift 5,000 tons.
To lift the Alien Ship? They needed to lift billions of tons.
Finally, Felix, the Chief Physicist, stepped forward. He looked grave.
"Colleagues, Captain Jason," Felix began quietly. "The Alien Ship is indeed our only option."
"However, we are overlooking the fundamental problem of mass."
"Even if the hull is made of exotic, lightweight materials, the mass is not just the shell."
Felix looked around the room. "The interior space is distorted. There is artificial gravity. We know from general relativity that gravity is a curvature of spacetime caused by mass."
"For the ship to generate 1G of internal gravity... we can infer that there is a mass source anchored at the bottom of the vessel."
"I have calculated the necessary mass to generate that field."
"One hundred million billion tons."
Felix's voice wavered. "One hundred quintillion tons. I am not trying to be a defeatist, but..."
He trailed off.
The color drained from the faces of the scientists.
One hundred quintillion tons.
For context, a standard mountain weighs about a billion tons.
The Ship didn't weigh as much as a mountain. It weighed as much as ten million mountains.
It wasn't a question of engineering. It was a question of impossibility.
Jason sighed deeply, the light in his eyes dimming.
Human power had limits. You couldn't punch physics in the face.
If they couldn't move the Ship, their only option was to seal themselves inside, ride out the collision, and pray they didn't go mad in the eternal dark.
This was the result he least wanted.