"Was there anything else you found, Kelly?"

"Not really. You guys covered everything else I think."

"Alright. In that case, guess we need to think about the immediate future."

"What's there to say? We go and explore." Kelly responded to Hawkins.

"I mean, more specifically. We're virtually out of antimatter, so we can't move the Blue Steel. Everything we do will be based on our personal ships until we can get our hands on some antimatter."

"If we turn on the Particle Collider, we can make more, but ugh. It takes ten trips with the Booty just to get enough fuel to make enough antimatter for a small jump." Sherry groaned.

"That's right. I'd consider it a last resort. Instead, I'd rather find civilization and simply do jobs until we can purchase enough antimatter directly."

"That's easy then. We might be starting from zero when it comes to money, we still have our main ships. It'll be easy to make enough money."

"Ah. There's just one issue with that."

"Hmm?" Susannah tilted her head.

"Command AI! Tell us where we are!"

"Deep space. However, the exact location is unknown."

"Explain."

"Surrounding constellations do not correspond with any known star charts."

"There you go." Hawkins shrugged.

"Wait, we're lost then?"

"And there's no knowing how far we are from civilization."

"That's...bad, isn't it?" Susannah asked, worry creeping into her voice.

"Depends. Just because we're not near any known civilization doesn't mean that we are actually far from any."

"We'll need to install fuel scoops on all our ships, in case we don't find any civilization for a while." Sherry confirmed.

"My thoughts exactly. At least we have enough to spare. Now then..."

Pressing a few buttons on his personal terminal, Hawkins activated the holographic display installed in the middle of the circle the four's desks formed.

"These are all the closest stars."

The coloured specks, the colours denoting the type of star displayed, showed their surrounding environment. All the stars which were within a single hyperspace jump of the ships they typically used.

"Does it really matter which one we go to?" Kelly asked.

"Well, I think a G type is more likely to have people living around it, right?" Sherry countered.

"Wasn't our sun a G type?" Susannah added.

"It is. And G types are the most popular stars to make colonies around due to that. Though their numbers are small...here. This is the only G type within twenty light years."

The holographic display changed, highlighting a single star out of the hundreds of specks on display.

"I guess this is where we're going to go then? Anyone against it?" Susannah asked around, but nobody spoke up.

"If that's the case, then I suppose we can start swapping out modules on our ships."

"Wait. We've been at this for a while today already. Let's have something to eat and get some rest. We can start all that tomorrow." As Hawkins pushed himself up to his feet, Susannah stopped him.

And to her words, Both Kelly and Sherry grabbed at their bellies.

"Today's been so exciting, I completely forgot."

"Yea, same. Been a long time since I last did that."

"Alright then! Let's try out the food from the auto chef!"

With a clap of Susannah's hands, everyone got up and walked over to a different partitioned room, ordered their own meals out of the free standing machine against the wall, and brought their meals to the large table set up in the dining room.

"It's kinda depressing how good this stuff is." Kelly said in between bites of the steak he was stuffing his cheeks with.

"Agreed. You'd never think that this stuff's made from grey sludge from a generic food cartridge." Hawkins delicately picked up a California roll as he examined it's impossibly neat arrangement before popping it into his mouth.

"Don't remind me. Just thinking of the description is killing my appetite." But despite what she said, Susannah's hands didn't stop as she took another bite out of her egg salad sandwich.

"It's not just the taste. All the nutrition seems to be perfectly reproduced even." Sherry downed another shot from the whisky she got along with her meal.

"Alright, I get that it can even make alcohol just as well as any food, but you should really eat as well." Hawkins pointed at Sherry's untouched plate of loaded baked potatoes with his chopsticks.

"Hey, let me have this at least. I couldn't even properly enjoy liqueur with my old body."

"That doesn't mean that your new body fixed that constitution."

"Don't say something that depressing." Sherry looked down at her half empty bottle at Hawkins' words. A few moments later, she refilled her glass and took another shot.

"I didn't know you liked alcohol that much. You never really talked about it." Susannah looked on with amazement at how much the shorter woman managed to down already.

"That's because I couldn't really drink much before. My body reacted pretty badly if I had more than one or two shots at a time. But here, it feels like I can just keep going!" Sherry raised the bottle itself, a wide smile plastered on her cherry red cheeks before she started to drink directly from the bottle.

"I know I said that the nanomachines probably help keep us healthy, but that doesn't mean that they'll protect you from a hangover."

"I'll take a normal hangover on the next day over getting one an hour after I start drinking."

Disregarding Hawkins' warning, Sherry swallowed an entire mouthful of the strong spirit, though some dribbled down her cheek as her movements were starting to get obviously sloppy.

But despite one member drinking like a fish, the four friends enjoyed their time over their meal, each grabbing their own drinks in the end due to her influence.

And in the end, having gotten such a head start, Sherry collapsed into unconsciousness as the group continued to party even after all the food was done with. While the other three felt like they could keep going, they ended up deciding to head to bed a bit early instead, not wanting to leave one of their members out of the loop.

"Hey hey, where are you going?" Kelly yelled as everyone was heading off to sleep.

"To my room. What does it look like?" Susannah shot back.

"With Sherry on your back?"

"What's wrong with that? It's like a girl's sleepover."

"With the other girl drunken to unconsciousness?! If you don't want her to be scared to be alone with you in the future, I think you should take things slowly instead."

"..."

Susannah's eyes fell to the floor as she contemplated the other man's words.

"Look, I get how excited you are, and now that you're free from everyone that denied your sexuality you can't wait to explore it, but Sherry's got even more things that are new to her than you. I don't think she'll take things very well if she wakes up being cuddled by you while naked, you know."

"...What if..." The inebriated woman's eyes swam around as she tried to come up with a compromise.

"What if you put her clothes back on after you rape her in her sleep? Is that what you really want to ask? Seriously? Even putting that aside, if you take things too fast, you'll scare her for life."

Susannah gulped, abject fear rose up in her eyes.

"Look, I know you see her as your chance. Hell, I think she's real cute as she is, and if I thought she liked me, I wouldn't hesitate to bang her too. But we've got all the time in the world. I don't think Sherry likes guys in that way in the first place, so you won't have to worry about Hawkins or me taking her from you."

"But..."

"And if you're thinking that someone we meet once we start exploring, do you even remember how long it took before Sherry would even talk to any of us through voice chat? I think you'll get plenty of forewarning before she starts to get interested in anyone else."

Though even Kelly thought that his last argument was pushing things a decent amount and things could easily change at any time, he figured that Susannah wasn't really in the right mind to doubt it. And it'll provide another strong push to keep her from going past the line of no return.

"...Alright. I got it."

While Susannah wasn't entirely satisfied, the fear of upsetting Sherry together with the thought that there really wasn't any need to hurry things was enough to be convinced that what she was trying to do was a bad idea.

In the end, she carried and tucked Sherry into her own bed while Susannah went to hers for the night.

 

*Bang bang bang!*

The next morning, two members of Section Nine were making enough noise to reach every corner of the Blue Steel if many of the sections weren't isolated.

"Hey! Hurry up!"

"Stop it! I'm going as fast as I can!"

Sherry tried to forcibly open the door, which was jammed shut from the other side.

"Well, go faster! I'm at my limit here!"

Despite Kelly's protests, Sherry pushed and shoved at the door even harder as she danced from one foot to the other.

"Just, just a bit more. Wait a bit more!"

"I can't! Nao! Get! Out! Nao! Aaah!"

*Thump*

"...Sherry?"

Only a handful of seconds later, did the door finally open. But what he saw was far worse than what he had expected.

Tears dripped down Sherry's cheeks as her eyes stared blankly at the ground she was sitting on.

"Umm, Sherry? Uhh...I'm sorry..."

Unsure if there was really anything he could say, Kelly ended up resorting to apologizing, even though knowing full well that it wouldn't make anything better. But even then, he felt like it was still better than saying nothing.

"Huh? You guys are already up?"

But to the bad luck of the two, the voice of a third member reached them. At the unexpected and unwelcome sound reaching their ears, both their heads snapped towards its source, Sherry's much more slowly than Kelly's though.

"Wha...? Sherry? Kelly! What did you do to Sherry?!"

Fury lit up on Susannah's eyes as she charged the burly man.

"Woah woah woah! It's not my fault!" Kelly backpedalled as he raised his hands in defence.

"The hell it isn't! Why's Sherry crying then?!"

"No, umm...rather, shouldn't you go inside Sherry? You can at least clean up a bit."

Without any energy, the smaller woman forced herself onto her feet and passed through the portal, closing the door behind her.

"What are you ignoring me for? What did you do?!"

The moment the depressed figure disappeared, Susannah started up her yelling once again, grabbing the much larger man's collar in her fists.

"Like I said, I didn't do anything! Really!"

"Then what happened!"

"Well..."

Stuck between trying to protect Sherry's pride and protecting himself from an enraged Susannah, Kelly ended up defaulting to self preservation as only one of these two were being directly threatened.

Kelly went on to explain his side of the story, but before he could finish, the door opened once again, revealing a teary eyed Sherry, her hastily wrung out flight suit clinging to her skin as she carried the rest of her discarded clothes in her hands.

But at the sight of both Susannah and Kelly turning towards her, the smaller woman jumped a little before the thought of going back into the washroom and hiding in there became obvious to the two observers.

Susannah on the other hand, wouldn't have it, and rushed over to hug the distraught woman.

"It's okay. It's okay. You had an accident, but it's nothing to be ashamed of."

"That's a lie. That's completely a lie."

Sherry weakly pushed back, still seriously thinking of hiding herself in the tiny room.

"No it isn't. Really."

"But I...I'm twenty two...I..."

"I know. But really, it's nothing to be ashamed about. You have so many changes to get used to."

"I didn't want to get out of bed, so I held it in."

"Yes. Our bladders are smaller and our urethras are shorter than men's, so it's harder to hold it in. Here. Go get a change of clothes and take a bath. I'll clean this up."

Susannah gave the black haired woman a gentle pat before pushing her off towards her room.

"...Sorry."

Sherry turned back and meekly nodded.

"There's nothing to be sorry about. Now go before you chill yourself."

 

"Did I miss something?"

"Nothing important."

Being dismissed so entirely by Susannah, Hawkins looked over to Kelly, but the other man just shook his head before forking a load of scrambled eggs into his mouth.

Sherry on the other hand, her face looking so red once again that Hawkins couldn't help but wonder if maybe the colour change had become permanent, slouched her shoulders as she nibbled on a slice of toast, looking as small as the squirrel she now resembled.

"Well, in that case, let's talk about our schedule."

Giving up on the matter, the tall man deftly sliced up a breakfast sausage and moved on to a more relevant topic.

"After breakfast, let's swap out the modules and do a checkup on our ships. The target system's 72 light years away, and we don't know how much exploring we'll have to do before we find any signs of civilization."

"Well, really it's just installing a fuel scoop and some extra fuel tanks, right?" playing with his fork, Kelly casually pointed out.

"Not necessarily. We should consider that things might take some time, so we should make sure to fill up on some supplies. At least a few days worth of food and drink."

"Couldn't the auto chef make emergency rations?" Happy that the event in the morning was off of everyone's minds, Sherry finally piped up.

"It can. I saw it on the list while ordering my meal, as well as bottled water. They should suffice."

"That means we're gonna to have to say goodbye to these nice meals for a while then."

"Awww. They're pretty good too." Both Kelly and Susannah already had a melancholic expression on as they looked at their meals.

"Once we start making some decent money, we won't have to leave the Blue Steel behind, so we'll be able to eat stuff like this all the time."

"That should be our top priority then. Everything here is so nice." Susannah's eyes rose to the ceiling. Even the bland steel surface of this relatively unfurnished dining room was far superior to what she was used to.

"Agreed. Just imagining how nicer it'll be once we can afford to reactivate the nanofabricator so we can make the communal areas properly livable."

"Washrooms! We need more than one washroom!" Jumping to her feet, Sherry blurted out her demand. Only to realize what she had just implied and quickly sat down, her face once again red as she scrunched her shoulders even harder than before.

"Ahem! Well, we need a lot of new equipment for sure. And for that, we need an easy way to refuel the Blue Steel. Getting a steady supply of antimatter would solve that much better than making regular trips with the Booty."

The ship that Hawkins referred to was a small cargo hauler that was left in the corner of the hanger practically mothballed. It was a cheap early game cargo hauler, but its large capacity for its size meant that the members of Section Nine still found uses for it often enough that it wasn't worth selling the cheap ship off.

While it was quite versatile, being able to swap out its vast internal modules to support a wide range of uses. For noncombat uses, it was quite exemplary. But due to its nature as such a small ship, it was still quite limited in its capacity. While there were ships with larger capacities on board the Blue Steel, they were all optimized for combat or other military oriented missions. Trying to use them as a tanker to refuel their carrier without compromising their basic flight characteristics too badly would end up leaving it so vulnerable in the event that something happened, without a better suited ship, it was just better to only use the more specialized worker class ship in this role and have the rest of the wing guard it while it used its smaller mass to get home more quickly and easily.

But of course, the capacity of such a small ship meant that the number of trips needed to take to cover the group's needs would be enormous.

In the past, they would simply perform a hyper jump to anchor the ship near a star to reduce the distance the Booty would have to travel, or to friendly space station and pay NPCs to transfer the fuel over. Neither of which were options at the moment.

However, running anything on the Blue Steel required fuel. Hydrogen and Deuterium was readily gathered from the corona of almost any star using fuel scoops by players of Stella Nova or NPCs through other means was used to power both the main reactor and engines of the ships and stations of the game through nuclear fusion.

The amount of fuel consumed by the basic operations of even a player owned carrier or space station was virtually insignificant. However, advanced modules like the nanofabricator used enough power that their meagre reserve of fuel could potentially be consumed before they knew it if the members of Section Nine wasn't careful. Hence, they agreed that its use was banned until the Blue Steel was properly refuelled.

Aside from movement and onboard equipment, for smaller ships, the same fuel was used to power the hyperdrives that allowed for faster than light travel, but the power requirements of capital class ships to make similar jumps meant that they required a more powerful fuel source to cross the void between stars. That fuel was antimatter, which could only be sourced by NPCs as the particle colliders needed to produce antimatter wasn't available to players.

And of course, the last of the antimatter reserves were used up on the last day of Stella Nova's operation, leaving the Blue Steel stranded in the void between stars.

But, as problematic as it seemed on the surface, there was a silver lining that all members were intimately aware of. Deep space was vast. Unreasonably vast. Anything hiding in deep space was virtually the same as not existing to anyone who didn't have the precise coordinates of its location.

It was a popular hiding place for criminal elements in the game when they needed to hide for extended periods of times. It was the main reason why it was virtually impossible to completely crush any well organized criminal organization in its entirety, as no matter how thoroughly their bases and ships were destroyed, and how well the surroundings systems were watched for ships moving between them, it was impossible to deal with ships hiding out in deep space unless if you got your hands on their coordinates somehow.

On the other hand, these coordinates were prized items that players would band together to do large scale missions that tended to yield prizes even greater than those from destroying any normal criminal base.

Effectively, it was one of several in game that could be constituted as a raid in other types of MMOs.

Of course, all these facts applied to the members of Section Nine in an ironic way, now that they had no idea where they even were, and what sort of civilization would be around, if any.

Once they finished eating, the group of four got to work preparing for their journey.

They each changed to outfits better suited to the rigours of exploring the unknown, gathered their personal equipment from personal manoeuvring thrusters to various personal weapons, as well as producing a week's worth of supplies, in case the trip took longer than they expected.

All this were loaded onto each of their favourite ships, which the used the carrier's basic hanger maintenance facilities to swap out some of their combat modules for fuel scoops and additional fuel tanks. The tanks which, rather than draining the already critical levels of the Blue Steel's tank, they planned on filling at the destination using the fuel scoops.

That all said, they did make sure to keep enough combat modules installed that none of them would be particularly hampered in the case that a fight broke out, as well as confirmed that each of their ammunition stores were filled to capacity.

"Alright. Has everyone finished their preparatory checklist?"

Hawkins contacted the others through his ship's comm system.

"Yup."

"I have as well."

"Same with me."

The others affirmed that they went through the checklist that they had made during breakfast and confirmed each of their preparations were all done.

"Did you double and triple check? All our lives are on the line. I doubt we can just respawn if something happens like in the game."

"Yea yea. We heard you the first time."

"I already did it."

"Me too. Just as you said at breakfast."

Despite their exasperated voices, none of the members really thought of Hawkins' insistence as being excessive. While the amount of experience each of them had in Stella Nova was so extensive that each of them could do the work ahead of them blindfolded with one hand tied behind their backs, in the end, they were risking their lives. Their actual, own lives. Not the endlessly respawning lives of their characters.

"Alright. Then let's get going."

With that said, they sent the command to open the hanger doors and each pilot took their turn lifting off, passing through the magnetic containment field and out into the vacuum of space.

"We're really doing this. We're really flying in space!" Sherry was the first to voice her thoughts as the group formed up, getting ready to make the jump through hyperspace.

"Somehow, it's everything I expected, yet so much more!" Susannah added, the sense of wonder strong in her voice.

"Woo! Take that NASA!" Kelly thrust a fist out as he yelled.

"Heh. Don't get too excited. This is going to be an everyday occurrence for us." Despite his words, the excitement could be clearly felt in Hawkins' voice.

But at the same time, all of them could tell that their words were partially just bravado. The unvoiced nervousness was apparent to them all.

"We'll be back, Blue Steel."

As if responding to Susannah's words, each pilot looked back at their mother ship, admiring the strong lines of the angled top deck and the detailed underbelly of the 1.2km long carrier as it automatically closed its hanger bay.

After giving their new home one last look, the four pilots of Section Nine synchronized their flight computers and entered hyperspace as one.