At the other end of the live broadcast,
everyone on Dragon Star saw the survivors still inside Moon Base One appear, and there was cheering all around.
Over half a year.
No one had forgotten these people still left at the moon bases.
These were the people who had stood on the very front line of the hive-race disaster; when they faced the hive-race threat,
they had no chance to fall back.
They could only shrink back into those underground shelters and wait for the support in the plan.
And now their wait was over.
These heroes too would come home.
"I'm the person in charge of Underground Shelter No. 3 at Moon Base One." Having come aboard the starship, he took off his helmet.
The person in charge saluted, moved, as he spoke.
The captain returned the salute too: "On behalf of Starship 001, I offer you our deepest respect. You are our heroes. We're under orders to take you home!"
As they spoke, the two could not help clasping hands.
Everything was said without a word.
"Can your shelter contact the people in the other shelters?" the captain asked the person in charge of Shelter No. 3.
"We can. This moon base has five shelters in all, each with a line of contact built in. We contact one another every so often." The person in charge of Shelter No. 3 nodded.
"Then I'd like you to tell the other shelters that we've come, and at the same time tell them Dragon Star is safe now. But tell them too not to hurry to open their shelter doors. For we have only one starship now, and our capacity is limited. This time we can only take three hundred people. But we've brought plenty of supplies," the captain said.
The person in charge of the shelter nodded and said with a smile, "It's fine; none of that's a problem. Now that you've come, we can see hope. All this time we just didn't know how things were back home. Now that we know all's well at home, however hard or tiring it is, it's all worth it."
"Rest assured. Very soon we'll take everyone back to Dragon Star. Right now we need you to do a few things. First: tell the other shelters that we've come, but have them not be in a hurry; we'll rescue them step by step; have them hold on a little longer. Then take stock of their present supplies and living conditions. We'll decide the order based on each shelter's situation. After all, other moon bases are waiting for us too. Second: your Shelter No. 3 is to choose three hundred people to evacuate, the wounded first. …"
The captain went through these things one by one.
The person in charge of the shelter wrote them all down.
After that, the person in charge went back to Shelter No. 3
and told them the news that Dragon Star was safe and the hive-race on Dragon Star had been destroyed,
and told everyone the present situation and so on as well.
At the news that most of them could not go back at once, people did not much mind.
After all, compared with the aimless waiting before, at least they could see hope now.
Before long they would also rebuild the signal tower linking them to Dragon Star, and be able to video-call their families on Dragon Star.
So staying here a while longer was something none of them minded.
Everyone gave the places to those who ought to go back.
Very soon three hundred people were chosen.
Wearing isolation suits, they boarded the starship.
And from the starship, several hundred interstellar marines came down with all kinds of equipment,
beginning to build a new beachhead position centered on this shelter's door.
After all, there was still much other hive-race life on this moon.
Having taken the people aboard, the starship returned to Dragon Star.
Under the gaze of all, it landed in the dock.
The whole maiden voyage, from first to last, took twenty-four hours.
Everything went very smoothly.
When those combat personnel brought back stood with their feet on the solid ground of Dragon Star, every one of them wept for joy.
Below the dock, many people came out.
Every family member who could be brought had been brought.
These family members, seeing their loved ones come back, rushed up one after another to embrace them.
King Zhao Chen of the Fierce Dragon Kingdom appeared on the scene too.
He personally pinned the Fierce Dragon Kingdom's commemorative medal on these three hundred-odd people.
Whether or not these three hundred were soldiers of the Fierce Dragon Kingdom,
at this moment they were all heroes.
These three hundred-odd people were greeted as heroes.
Those who were not soldiers of the Fierce Dragon Kingdom each met their own country's leaders too.
Those countries' leaders had long since prepared medals of every kind for them as well.
After that, mournful music rose.
Squad after squad of the Fierce Dragon Kingdom's honor guard went up into the starship and came down holding urns covered with the flag of the Dragon Star Alliance.
These stood for those who had died in the earlier campaign.
On the front of these urns were printed their smiling photographs; inside some of the urns there were in fact no ashes, but their clothes, or their tags.
For most of them, in this battle, no whole body could be found at all.
Of these martyrs' families, all who could be brought there were there.
Weeping filled the whole space.
Where family members were present, the honor guard handed these urns into the family members' hands themselves.
Zhao Chen and the other countries' leaders personally comforted these families in their grief, and laid their hands on the martyrs who had died for Dragon Star.
This scene, too, was broadcast live around the globe.
From the excitement before to the sorrow of this moment,
the hearts of people around the globe seemed to be linked together.
On this day, the flags of every country around the globe were lowered to half-mast in mourning.
The Fierce Dragon Kingdom, for its part, went on without pause with its plans.
First of all, the starship docks.
The Fierce Dragon Kingdom began the first phase of its starship-dock construction plan.
Besides the first dock, the other ten starship docks all began to be built in haste,
to be completed within half a year.
Besides that, there was the building of the second starship.
A single starship could not at all meet the Fierce Dragon Kingdom's present needs.
At the same time, other kingdoms applied to the Fierce Dragon Kingdom one after another to ask whether they could build starship docks.
To this the Fierce Dragon Kingdom opened up the construction technology for T1-grade starship docks outright, and if they needed it, it could also send technicians to help them build the docks.
As for opening up the technology,
Zhao Chen was not the least bit worried.
T1 starship-dock construction technology was, to Zhao Chen, only a transition.
What truly suited the sea of stars were T2-grade interstellar warships.
And the reason he had every kingdom begin building up a starship industry
was of course so that their technology would not fall behind, and in the future they could shoulder part of the industrial demand for interstellar warships.
To Zhao Chen this was vital.
And in exchange for the technology license, the first few starships those countries built after finishing their docks would all be built to Zhao Chen's requirements,
which also let them learn this whole series of construction techniques.
For those countries, there was naturally neither the right nor the reason to refuse.
From then on,
from this moment, a hundred-plus docks in all began construction all over the globe.
Everyone hoped to have starships of their own.
Time began to pass little by little like this.
The Fierce Dragon Kingdom's first starship, after finishing its rest and maintenance each day, would hurry to the various moon bases, first bringing back to Dragon Star the people in the moon bases' shelters who needed urgent evacuation, then putting up the combat personnel who would take their place.
In the third month,
the appearance of the first interstellar transport broke Starship 001's lot of endless toil for good:
the first T1 heavy interstellar transport, built purely to carry supplies and people.
In a single trip it packed up everyone in all the moon bases' shelters and brought them back,
and at the same time sent up the people taking their place.
At the three moon bases, the final phase of purging the hive-race began.
Combat mecha, working with the interstellar marines, cleared away the hive-race on the moons' surfaces bit by bit.
And on the ground, as starship dock after starship dock was completed, everyone began hurrying to build T1 starships of every type.
The most numerous were naturally the T1 Wolf-Louse-class Medium Interstellar Destroyers.
As a fairly conventional interstellar destroyer, it had the lowest construction requirements and the highest reliability.
Everyone was naturally very happy with it.
And at this moment the Dragon Star Alliance had its first interstellar fleet of its own:
the Dragon Star Alliance Interstellar Fleet.
By the rules,
the interstellar warships of every country under Dragon Star had to be enrolled in the Dragon Star Alliance Interstellar Fleet.
But the Fierce Dragon Kingdom could be an exception.
As for why the Fierce Dragon Kingdom could have this privilege, people naturally did not like to ask.
After all, all these privileges were the Fierce Dragon Kingdom's to give.
At the same time,
the Fierce Dragon Kingdom began building a space elevator, and its first starport!
Relying all the time on interstellar transports to carry supplies and people back and forth cost too much time and too many resources; it was very poor value.
Using a space elevator and a starport was the most sensible arrangement.
At the same time, the docks needed for T2 starships could be built in the starport.
T2 starships, because of their very large hulls, were very hard to build within a planet, and very costly too.
But built in the space environment, many problems could be avoided.
As for this starport,
the Fierce Dragon Kingdom announced to the world that it would be named the Dragon Palace.
Two years after the hive-race disaster ended,
the Nancy Empress came here again.
"The Fierce Dragon Kingdom really is developing so fast. In a mere few years; I can hardly believe what I'm seeing." The Nancy Empress looked at the holographic billboards before her, the maglev cars and so on.
Not long ago, this technology had existed only in their novels and movies.
And now it had already appeared in the Fierce Dragon Kingdom.
Huang Min, beside her, holding her daughter's hand, said with feeling, "Forget about you lot. Even we locals aren't quite used to this fast development. Things we've only just learned are outdated within a few months. Then there's new stuff to learn again. Luckily the Fierce Dragon Kingdom pays in full for all this learning; we don't have to pay anything, and our wages are guaranteed too. Otherwise I'd really feel I was about to lose my job."
The Nancy Empress gazed at the space elevator in the distance, joining heaven and earth, built off the Fierce Dragon Kingdom's continent.
There, the Fierce Dragon Kingdom had made an island by land reclamation, and that island was linked to the Fierce Dragon Kingdom's home continent by a sea bridge.
And that island was made specially for the space elevator.
"They say that space elevator can be handed over for use within half a year. And the first phase of the Dragon Palace Starport is expected to go into use within half a year as well." The Nancy Empress looked at that creation, like something made by the gods.
"I'd never have dared imagine it before. But now everyone says that before we're old, maybe we too will have the chance to ride the space elevator up to the Dragon Palace Starport and look at the home we live on beneath our feet. All right, never mind all that. It's rare for you to come and play with me. Though all that technology has been upgraded a lot, there's one thing that's still the real original flavor, and that's the good food we both love. Today we're going for hotpot!" Huang Min took her best friend by the hand and led her and her daughter toward a hotpot restaurant.
Inside the hotpot restaurant could be seen many holographic advertisements, showing every kind of hotpot dish.
When Huang Min and the Nancy Empress had sat down, a huge virtual ordering screen at once appeared over their seats, and beside it a gentle mechanical female voice was explaining things.
Huang Min began ordering with practiced ease.
When she had ordered, a robot waiter brought up the mixed dipping sauces and all the dishes that needed to go into the pot.
These dishes were all cooked by the robot waiters as well.
The timing, the heat, all of it was under their control.
Finally they ladled out the finished ingredients and shared them into everyone's bowls.
In the whole process, not once did the customers have to lift a finger.[1]
Watching this, the Nancy Empress felt as if she were wholly out of step with the age here.
The last time she had come, at most robots had brought the dishes over.
All of this progress was simply too fast.
"In our Fierce Dragon Kingdom now, all those mindless waiting jobs, purely physical lines of work, are nearly all being phased out by robots like these," Huang Min said, eating the delicious food.
"Then with so many jobs gone, what is everyone to do? Won't that make unemployment soar?" The Nancy Empress frowned slightly.
Huang Min said as she ate, "Keep learning. The Fierce Dragon Kingdom provides a complete course of learning; it trains your job skills according to what you're good at, and there's a whole series of advancement steps after that. So long as you want to work, you don't have to worry about your job. In this world, apart from the sick, there's no such thing as a complete fool, only people who are lazy. Of course, as for those who want something for nothing, the Fierce Dragon Kingdom doesn't keep them for nothing either; it only provides the lowest level of living security. Enough that they don't starve. But these people are looked down on by others too. The Fierce Dragon Kingdom has given such good opportunities and thought of everything in every respect; if you don't think of improving yourself and want to lie flat,[2] tell me, would such a person be respected? Most of these people end up phased out by society, pushed to the margins. But no one pities them."
When the Nancy Empress had heard all this, she had a premonition:
the Fierce Dragon Kingdom was making all its people skilled, and every job without a skill requirement would be phased out by robots.
That way, the quality of the Fierce Dragon Kingdom's people would rise enormously!