Since the first time primitive Homo sapiens looked up to the stars millions of years ago above the Earth, mankind's exploration of the mysterious universe has not stopped.
All the way to today, Hawk has taken a crucial step.
Humanity, at last, has moved a whole light-year away.
Although, there is only one human left in the universe, Hawke.
Here, in the Oort Cloud, here, one light year, about nine and a half trillion kilometres, from the sun. Looking at the sun here is not as bright as looking at Sirius on Earth. The Sun, truly, has become an ordinary member of the countless stars.
In the distance, a dark meteorite chunk of about ten cubic metres flashed by, rapidly racing towards the sun.
Hawke laughed bitterly. For he had observed that the meteorite's orbit, because of the influence of the mass of his own fleet, had been altered. In a few thousand years, according to the calculations, it would enter the inner solar system and, after giving off a spectacular comet tail, would be vaporised by the Sun.
Here, hundreds of billions of meteorites are scattered in the vast darkness, and their total mass, it is estimated, could reach about ten times the mass of the Earth. They are the remnant waste from the creation of the Sun, and instead of being lucky enough to coalesce into one big planet, like the Earth or Mars, due to the influence of the big planets like Jupiter, they were expelled from the inner solar system in the gravitational battle billions of years ago, to this lonely place, where only a few meteorites, can get the chance to encounter the Sun again.
This is so far from the Sun. So far that the rest of the stars may also have an effect on them. It is expected that in a few million years a star, which humans call Gliese 710, will pass them at close range, when a part of the Oort Cloud will be captured by it and another part, possibly expelled by it to the inner solar system.
Hawke commanded a village-class ship and nimbly approached a chunk of meteorite, about a few dozen cubic metres in volume, capturing it within the hull. These meteorites contained certain traces of the early formation of the solar system and were useful to Hawke in his study of the evolution of the stars.
Apart from the two meteorites Hawke had observed, the Oort Cloud remained as empty as the rest of the area. Without stopping for a moment, Hawke continued through it at high speed.
The Oort cloud was the final boundary of a star's sphere of influence. Beyond the Oort Cloud, there would be no more stars in the grip of the Sun's gravity. The Sun will have no power over this place, except for a faint starlight.
Perhaps, in five billion years' time, when the Sun dies, the planetary nebula she has formed may spread to this place.
Countless hours rushed by, and more than two thousand years had passed since Hawke had left the Oort Cloud.
At the end of sixteen hundred years, all the replacement parts that Hawke had stockpiled were used up, and so, over the next four hundred years or so, fifty of the village-class ships were abandoned. Their parts were removed and fitted to the rest of the ships, replacing their damaged parts. These fifty Village ships were left as empty shells, and without their power systems they would have no ability to continue to follow the hordes, and Hawke had no additional ability to take them with him. Abandoned, they would have to drift along a fixed orbit through the endless universe for eternity.
Abandoned along with these fifty village-class ships were two village-class ships. The three county-class ships have also undergone an overhaul, but still have the capacity to continue their voyage.
The entire voyage, which had already covered forty percent of the distance, was a distant four light years. If Hawke's target had been the chosen star Alpha Centauri, Hawke would have reached his destination by now.
Alpha Centauri, commonly known as Proxima, is a triple star, with three stars moving chaotically around each other. According to observations, there would not be any stable large planets there, so although it was the closest, Hawke did not choose it.
In the course of two thousand years, Hawke passed through at least four large gas clouds, and with each one, Hawke's speed was reduced, and then Hawke had to accelerate and make course corrections.
Each acceleration and course correction consumed a large amount of fuel. But thanks to Hawke's initial reserves of as much as possible, the fusion fuel reserves were optimistic enough to sustain Hawke's voyage to the Sky Court IV star system.
The gas clumps, the largest of which was a light-year long and a dozen light-days wide, took Hawke more than twenty years to navigate through it.
In the universe, the number of such large gas clumps was quite a lot. Even more, the solar system was born from such a cluster of gas. It was billions of years ago that the cluster began its slow contraction towards the centre, disturbed by the explosion of a nearby supernova. Eventually, at the centre of the cluster, the material grew denser and hotter, triggering a nuclear fusion reaction that gave birth to the primordial sun.
The powerful stellar winds of the primordial sun blew away the dust that surrounded itself, which then slowly coalesced into planets that developed over billions of years before stabilising and becoming what they are today.
If a star had exerted some influence on this mass of gas at this time, a star might have been born here too in the endless future.
It was a pity that Hawke did not have such an ability, otherwise Hawke would have been interested in creating a star.
This gas cloud reduced Hawke's speed from five hundred and sixty-three kilometres per second to five hundred and six kilometres per second, and shifted Hawke's course by a thousandth of a degree.
Interstellar navigation must be absolutely precise, with a precision required that is more precise than beating a mosquito on the moon on Earth. Because the distances are so long, the slightest initial error is magnified countless times over. If this thousandth of a degree of error were left to chance, Hawke would have swept past his destination tens of billions of kilometres away.
Luckily, Hawke has a pulsar navigation system. After recorrecting his course with the signals from the six pulsars, Hawke continued to speed towards Sky Court IV.
Here, five light-years from the Sun, and five and a half light-years from Sky Court IV. Halfway through the voyage, time, three thousand seven hundred years had passed since Hawke had set out from Saturn.
The number of village class ships lost increased to one hundred and thirty-five, and the loss of the country class ships, to eight. However, the three county-class ships remained the same, and everything was functioning normally. The reason for this was simple: the County-class ships were the most valuable, and usually, Hawke removed the parts from the Village and Country-class ships and installed them on the County-class ships. It was by sacrificing the smaller ships that the health of the larger ones was exchanged.
Hawke's fleet, like a group of refugees fleeing from disaster, kept dying of freezing and starvation along the way, and then being mercilessly abandoned.
Nuclear fusion, although the most efficient source of energy at this stage, and the materials used to build the ships, although the embodiment of Hawke's highest material technology, they are still somewhat powerless in the face of the long hours of light. Until new breakthroughs are made in Hawke's technology, these attrition, are inevitable.
Here, five light-years from the Sun, its luminosity wanes further, finally dying out into the stars, no longer finding any character. The luminosity of Sky Court IV, on the other hand, is getting brighter all the time. Even, with a few less gas clouds to obscure it, here it looks brighter than the Sun.
During these nearly four thousand years, Hawke's technology has been developing, but only on a technical level. For example, Hawke has an updated model for the construction of photonic computers, and it is expected that when the model is perfected, Hawke will be able to create new computers that are tens of times faster than the current photonic computers in terms of computing speed, but much smaller in energy consumption and size, such as more efficient fusion application technology, and Jupiter spirit-enhanced materials for internal mechanisms. Now Hawk can use some kind of strong magnetic field to simulate the process of Jupiter Spirit's reinforced materials, but not as efficiently as Jupiter Spirit.
The other most significant breakthrough is in the area of laser application technology. Laser application technology can be divided into two aspects, the attack side is the traditional sense of laser guns, laser cannons, etc., and the defence side, is the legendary shield technology. In his mind, Hawke had already made a preliminary deduction about the energy shield technology, which was nothing more than using a strong magnetic field to bind high-energy photons to form a protective film outside the ship's hull. It was just that the concrete verification would have to wait until the four star system of the Celestial Court was sufficiently replenished with material.
In contrast, there was still no breakthrough at the basic physical level. But Hawke was not in a hurry. He believed that it was only a matter of time before a breakthrough in fundamental physics theory could be made after reaching the Tian Yuan IV system, obtaining sufficient material replenishment, and building the large particle collider around Tian Yuan IV.
There was even a vague speculation in Hawke's mind that if the Large Particle Collider had really found the Higgs boson and thus verified the Higgs field, Hawke would have the hope of obtaining a nearly infinite source of energy, and by then, all the difficulties that hindered Hawke's voyage would fly into oblivion.
Here, too, the greatness of the theory of relativity and quantum theory can be seen. Even now, with the ability to navigate interstellar, Hawke, who has advanced over human technology by an unknown number of years, is still, in the final analysis, eating the old theories of relativity and quantum theory.
The endless voyage continues. The Murakami-class ship, which was in the lead, suddenly detected a little unusual fluctuation.
It was a burst of radio waves that had some sort of pattern to it. Hawke could confirm that this burst of radio waves, was not emanating from himself.
The wave immediately attracted Hawke's full attention. But because the wave was so short-lived, Hawke had no way of locating the source of its emission. After thinking for a while, Hawke made a decision.