The cabin doors slid open, and a row of green indicator lights flickered to life along the pristine white corridor, guiding Daemon Kane toward the lift that led to the bridge.
The nurse who had been waiting by the door lowered her head and hurried back inside the medical bay to clear the room.
The Administrator has awakened.
All units, please adjust your work schedules accordingly.
The Administrator has awakened.
The Mainframe’s announcement continued to echo down the long hallway.
Despite the broadcast, the corridors remained largely deserted.
Daemon walked for quite some time before finally spotting two figures in black uniforms standing guard by the lift doors.
As Daemon approached, both soldiers snapped to attention and delivered a flawless salute.
“Good morning, Administrator!”
Daemon felt a brief flash of awkwardness, but he gave them a brief nod in return.
Seeing his response, the two soldiers squared their shoulders and threw their chests out even further.
The lift climbed for roughly ten minutes before reaching the bridge level.
Fortunately, the lift was equipped with display monitors to pass the time, alongside a terminal that could handle various administrative duties, though Daemon still had no idea what his immediate tasks should be.
He stepped out into a vast, sprawling command hall.
Two more soldiers stood guard at the entrance, their faces stone-faced and resolute, snapping into a sharp salute the moment he crossed the threshold.
In the center of the command deck, a massive holographic projector cast a star map into the air, though the vast majority of the chart was entirely dark and unmapped.
Countless consoles and stations ringed the room.
To run a command deck of this scale efficiently, it would require at least a hundred crew members working in perfect tandem.
Currently, barely a dozen people were scattered across the hall, tending to the controls.
“Attention!” an officer called out.
Every single person on the deck stood up in unison, saluting toward the entrance.
“Good morning, Administrator!”
Daemon nodded, keeping his posture steady as he walked toward the colossal panoramic viewport.
A green world dominated the frame.
Unlike the familiar deep blue of Earth, this planet was covered entirely in thick, sprawling vegetation, giving the entire sphere a distinct emerald hue.
Wisps of white atmospheric clouds swirled across the planet’s surface, indicating a stable and healthy ecosystem.
Yet, the green world was not the most striking feature outside the viewport.
The true spectacle lay directly behind it, where an unimaginably colossal planet loomed.
The smaller green world looked like a stray pebble resting beside an elephant’s foot.
The background planet was a smooth, pale blue sphere, broken only by a few dark, swirling storms that made it resemble a giant glass marble.
It was a gas giant.
“Is that our target for colonization?” Daemon asked.
Yes, Administrator.
The central holographic display shifted, shrinking to reveal the layout of the stellar system.
The Mainframe explained,
The current system is a binary star system, featuring two stars orbiting a common barycenter.
There is only one true planet in the entire system, this gas giant.
Additionally, this gas giant hosts nine moons, and we are currently positioned adjacent to one of them.
There is one other moon with a temperate climate, but its surface water coverage exceeds ninety-five percent, making it entirely unsuitable for land-based colonization.
“Nine moons orbiting a single gas giant,” Daemon muttered, searching through his own knowledge.
“Alright.
So our only real option is to make do with this smaller moon for now.
At the very least, give me a breakdown of our current status.”
A young man in a deep blue military uniform, looking to be around twenty-five or twenty-six, stood up from a circular briefing table nearby.
He saluted Daemon before speaking.
“First, we must secure a fuel supply.
The atmosphere of that gas giant contains vast reserves of helium, which can power our ship reactors.
We need to construct a refining station near the giant.
The mothership’s storage bays contain pre-fabricated modular components for this, and the hangars hold small engineering vessels to handle the assembly, but those ships require pilots.”
“So you need my authorization to wake them up?”
“Yes, sir.
After you emerged from hibernation, the Mainframe awakened fifty of us to handle the initial preparations.
That includes ten security personnel, five administrative clerks, five analysts, five communications officers, five maintenance technicians, and ten flight crew members to handle basic ship functions.
We also have ten medical staff ensuring our health.
We require your clearance to awaken more personnel.”
“Very well.
What is your name?” Daemon asked, noting the young man’s organized, efficient manner.
“Jenson, sir!
Member of the strategic planning division,” he replied, standing tall.
“Excellent name.
If there are no objections, you will serve as our temporary chief of staff from this moment on,” Daemon said.
The young officer’s face lit up with a sudden wave of pride.
He snapped another salute.
“Yes, sir!
I will ensure the mission succeeds!”
“Alright, let’s take a look at the personnel in storage.” Daemon walked over to the central command chair at the apex of the bridge and took his seat, guided by the Mainframe’s interface.
A massive holographic screen instantly unfurled before him.
The monitor listed the frozen populace, divided into six hundred thousand civilian colonists and fifty thousand operational crew members, each with their own distinct skill sets.
Given their immediate needs, the logical choice was to pull from the fifty thousand crew members who already understood the inner workings of a capital ship.
The personnel files were divided into distinct tiers: standard, elite, master, and three final classifications covered entirely in question marks.
Each tier carried specific prerequisites before an individual could be revived.
The master-tier files, for instance, were filled with absolute luminaries and industry leaders in their respective fields.
If someone woke an individual of that caliber only to deposit them in a barren wilderness without so much as a basic tent, they would likely refuse to work entirely.
As a result, the conditions listed beneath their names were quite demanding.
Most of these terms were stipulations the individuals had set themselves prior to entering cryogenic sleep, locked into their contracts before the voyage began.
Curious, Daemon opened one of the master-tier profiles.
It belonged to an expert astrophysicist.
His revival conditions required a three-story private villa, a personal swimming pool, a cutting-edge laboratory, and a super-radio observatory built on a plateau at least three thousand meters above sea level.
He clicked another file.
This one belonged to a pioneer in quantum mechanics.
His profile demanded a dust-free cleanroom facility, top-tier experimental equipment, a particle collider stretching at least fifty kilometers in length, two personal assistants under the age of twenty, and a velvet mattress measuring no less than five meters across.
Daemon stared at the screen, a bit taken aback.
My friend, there is something seriously wrong with you.
There were a few more practical requests.
A master-tier sociologist simply required that the colony’s population exceed ten million before he was awakened, caring little for personal luxury or food quality.
Still, the sheer scale of the demands made Daemon close out the master-tier directory entirely, skipping over the elites as well.
He had absolutely nothing to his name right now.
If he woke those people up, they would either resign on the spot or simply waste away in frustration.
It was basic logic.
For the initial phase of colonization, standard-tier personnel like basic laborers and technicians would perform perfectly fine, needing only a handful of elites to direct their efforts.
Waking a master-tier physicist when there was not even a proper roof over their heads, let alone a specialized lab, would be completely pointless.
They would have nothing to do but teach basic physics, and the colony did not even have a school built yet.
Most of these experts were already in their late fifties or sixties; wasting their remaining productive years on basic colony clearing would be an absolute tragedy.
Their pre-voyage stipulations made perfect sense.
By comparison, the standard-tier crew members had virtually no prerequisites.
Daemon scrolled through the listings, finding that most simply required basic rations, a standard bunk, and steady work.
Only a few had small requests, like wanting a mixed-gender work environment or expressing a strong preference for standard wheat noodles.
Before confirming the selections, Daemon paused, turning his mind toward the AI.
“Mainframe, am I the only one who can authorize the revival of these crew members?
And do these people work strictly for me?”
Yes, sir.
You hold absolute executive clearance over this vessel.
Every single crew member and citizen was personally vetted and selected under your oversight, and they maintain absolute loyalty to your command.
Daemon nodded in silence.
He quickly navigated to the engineering department within the standard-tier directory and selected ten full squads for revival, each comprised of ten personnel trained to operate a single engineering vessel.
Following the Mainframe’s prompts, he added two ten-man maintenance teams to handle logistics.
Once he began adjusting to the interface, Daemon fell into the role with surprising ease, perhaps due to the subconscious learning protocols the Mainframe had mentioned.
Managing a small-scale workforce distribution felt entirely intuitive.
He then authorized twenty agricultural workers to tend to the mothership’s hydroponic bays, having noticed that a significant portion of the onboard crops had withered due to neglect.
It was no wonder the Mainframe had warned him that resources were dangerously low.
With the most critical assignments handled, Daemon leaned back into the command chair, crossing his legs as he let out a long breath.
“Mainframe, give me a full structural breakdown of this mothership.”
Acknowledged.
The central hologram shifted to display a complete, three-dimensional blueprint of the vessel as the Mainframe began its report.
Origin civilization: unknown.
Manufacturer: unknown.
Current executive authority: Administrator Daemon Kane.
Technical specifications: Total length: 41.37 kilometers.
Maximum width: 10.92 kilometers.
Gross mass: 373.07 billion metric tons.
Armament: five primary mass drivers, alongside a point-defense network utilizing 377 small electromagnetic rapid-fire cannons.
Total internal capacity…
As the computer droned on with precise figures, Daemon’s mind ground to a complete halt.
He was staring at the holographic projection of the massive ship, completely frozen in shock.
The vessel was shaped like a giant, elegant crescent moon, or a massive curved banana, carrying an incredibly fluid, aesthetic design.
Near the upper-middle section of the curve, a distinct recess broke the silhouette, lined with a dense array of viewports.
That recess was the command bridge where he currently sat.
Daemon was not shocked by the sheer scale of the ship, even though its length could easily span the distance between two major metropolitan cities.
He was terrified because he recognized this ship.
“Homeworld,” Daemon whispered, his voice cracking as the realization hit him.
“This is the Kushan mothership.”
He had played the classic space real-time strategy game extensively during his school years, captivated by its sweeping, cinematic narrative and the way it revolutionized the genre.
It was an unmistakable design.
But why was a fictional vessel from a strategy game sitting beneath him in reality?
If the Kushan mothership truly existed, then that bizarre dream from before was completely real.
The galaxy he had been dragged into was Star Wars, and he was sitting inside a relic from an entirely different universe.