A few steps on, Zhao Chen halted, and fixed a doubtful eye upon that interstellar warship beyond the floor-length window.
For some cause, in that little stretch of time just now, he had felt as though some change had come over this warship; and yet looking closely now, he could see no change at all.
"This way, your lordship." Ah-Yin, ahead of him, turned her head to look at the Zhao Chen who stood unmoving.
"Mm." Zhao Chen quickened his step and followed.
Very soon the two of them came into a small chamber before the dock, like a chief control room.
But within, the space seemed rather a room of scientific research.
"Did you not say we were to see your mistress?
"Why bring me here?
"And that warship outside — what is the case with her?" Zhao Chen looked at the Ah-Jin who had appeared within the room, and beside her no one else.
Within the whole room were the three of them only, and the machines still at their work.
"You have seen our mistress already," Ah-Yin said.
"I have seen her?" Zhao Chen looked about him again, and said in surprise, "How is it I did not see her?"
Ah-Yin raised a hand and pointed at that warship standing beyond the glass. "There."
"Aboard that warship?" Zhao Chen took it so before he thought.
"That warship is our mistress," Ah-Jin said at this time.
Zhao Chen was checked.
He was digesting these words.
"You… were saying just now… that that warship… is your mistress?" Zhao Chen was astonished past measure.
It is very hard to set that interstellar warship together with the grinning little girl Zhao Chen has met several times.
"Yes." Ah-Yin nodded.
"Wait… what in the end are you two saying?
"How is it I do not understand?" Zhao Chen waved his hands again and again, feeling as though the two sides were not speaking the same tongue at all.
"Do you set it out to him in particulars," Ah-Jin said, and went on handling the equipment before her.
Ah-Yin stood beside Zhao Chen and went on, "That interstellar warship is our mistress's body.
"The T6 nano starship Luoshen."
The nano starship Luoshen?
Zhao Chen looked at her, hesitating.
"We mechanical lives may have many kinds of body.
"And the mistress's body has all along been this nano starship Luoshen.
"What has met with you is her consciousness," Ah-Yin explained.
"Something like… that sort of high-order artificial intelligence?" Zhao Chen thought of the Little Dragon Girl aboard his own Dragon Emperor.
"It may be said so, but her powers are more.
"For aboard that nano starship Luoshen there is no crew whatever: the mistress is the starship, and the starship is the mistress." Ah-Yin's eyes went to that nano starship Luoshen, and within them was nothing but reverence.
"Then why does she not come to see me now?" Zhao Chen digested this word by word.
"Because in the fighting upon the gate's other side, the mistress was wounded.
"She is at present in repair; and in the course of it she enters a state like the sleep of you carbon-based lives.
"But before entering that sleep, the mistress bade us summon you, to tell you certain things, and she left a speech for you besides," Ah-Yin explained.
And only at this moment did Zhao Chen find why he had felt something amiss about this hundred-meter warship before.
He cried out, "She is repairing herself?"
For at this moment he marked that a wound upon her hull which he had plainly seen before was now grown somewhat smaller — and he could be certain it was truly smaller, and no error of his eyes!
Ah-Yin nodded. "Yes. The nano starship is one of the technologies the Gaia Empire was developing in its last period, and none of them were ever set store by.
"The mistress built the only one there is, and that a trial piece.
"Its power then was this: that by using interstellar nano-material it may build its hull as it pleases. Do not, because you see her but a hundred meters long now, think that is all — let her but judge it needful, and she may spread out into a super-giant hull above a hundred kilometers long.
"And at the same time, in the state of sleep.
"The nano-material can repair itself."
A warship that holds its own intelligence, that may grow great or small as it pleases, and that can repair itself besides.
Of T6 grade…
Only there is no knowing what rank her fitting-out of firepower holds within the T6 grade.
But those technologies alone are already such as overturn everything.
Even within the T6 grade of technology, it is a terrible existence.
"After the Gaia Empire became history, the mistress never ceased her study of herself either.
"She has been trying without cease to evolve herself, and to bring her every power to the utmost.
"And she did indeed succeed: her several performances are vastly raised above what they were at the first, and yet she cannot break through the frame of the technology that now is," Ah-Yin said in her recollection.
"Her fighting strength… how great is it?" Zhao Chen asked.
"Fighting strength? That is not easily reckoned, for the mistress is at present the Machine Race's only T6 warship in service." Ah-Yin shook her head.
"Take my Hades for comparison, or the quasi-T6 Destroyer-class Heavy Interstellar Battleship.
"You should have the combat data upon both!" said Zhao Chen.
Ah-Yin thought a moment and said, "Against quasi-T6 Destroyers, let the enemy's ships be as many as they will, they cannot destroy the Luoshen.
"That the Luoshen should destroy them is a matter of time only.
"As for your Hades — the Sword of Hades is some little threat to the Luoshen, but not much.
"Unless there were ten Hades using the Sword of Hades upon the Luoshen at once.
"Then there might be hope of wounding the Luoshen grievously."
Zhao Chen fixed his eyes upon that hundred-meter warship standing silent within the dock.
"So is this the whole of the secret you would tell me?" Zhao Chen asked.
Ah-Yin shook her head. "It is not.
"There is the war upon the gate's other side besides."
The war upon the gate's other side?
Zhao Chen felt his own breathing grow somewhat quick.
"Be at ease; shut your eyes." Ah-Yin raised a hand, and set her fingertip at the place between Zhao Chen's brows.
And thereafter everything before Zhao Chen's eyes altered; the surroundings of the research room where he had stood vanished away.
Zhao Chen and Ah-Yin were like two things adrift, standing within a stretch of darkness.
"The Gate of Gaia is one of the topmost technologies of the Gaia Empire's last period.
"It broke the barrier of the universe, and successfully set up a passage to other universes.
"And it discovered besides a power that had all along sought to interfere with our universe.
"This was the first time they faced that power directly.
"Mighty, terrible, and uncanny." Ah-Yin snapped her fingers.
All at once the darkness before them was lit.
Zhao Chen saw a great sheet of interstellar warships, the fashion of their hulls exceedingly old, yet the bulk of them very great, and the weapons they carried of T5 grade at the least.
Of one color throughout, T5-grade warships; and further back, T4-grade warships.
Upon the hulls of these warships there was one device only.
Which stands for the Gaia Empire.
And facing this throng of warships stood a fleet of pitch-black.
As though it had come sailing out of the darkness itself.