Chapter 60 Time Flies_1

Cao Ge forgot the most important point; he had no way of knowing the specific time Kupa and others landed, nor whether they had already landed.

That's why Ren Fei had Murphy take control of the spaceship to return immediately.

As it was a full-speed flight, it was very fast, and it took only about forty minutes for him to fly from the Arctic to the original crash site.

The waves on the planet seemed never to cease; one wave followed another, with only a short thirty minutes between them.

When Cao Ge arrived, he saw a space shuttle being tossed around by the huge waves, almost a kilometer in height.

Cao Ge had Murphy hover there without choosing to land since there was nothing he could do if the waves didn't pass.

"It seems that person has already died," Cao Ge said, looking at the white spot amid the giant waves, resembling a small boat, and slightly shook his head.

The fifty-square-meter spaceship was an eagle in the sky; however, in water, it turned into a doomed vessel at risk of sinking at any moment.

The person Cao Ge was referring to was the man from the original story who died trying to save Dr. Brand; Cao Ge had forgotten his name, as it was too long ago.

............

Inside the Hope spacecraft.

Kupa and Dr. Brand sat in their respective seats, rocking wildly with the movement of the ship.

The drift lasted an hour, which meant they had wasted two hours of time, which equates to fourteen years on Earth.

"Hold on!!!" Kupa shouted.

The last wave passed, and the spacecraft was about to land.

If they could just get through this last wave, they would survive.

The angle of the Hope had almost reached ninety degrees and was in imminent danger of capsizing.

But this time, fortune favored them, and they successfully rode it out, with the sea surface slowly returning to calm.

No sooner had the ship stabilized than Kupa, at the pilot's seat, began adjusting the spacecraft, readying it for takeoff, but despite pressing the ignition button multiple times, the engines gave no response.

Kupa didn't blame the accident's cause, Brand, because there was no time; on this planet, time was the most precious resource, not a second to be wasted.

However, the continued lack of response was making Kupa irritable, so while continuously pressing the switch, he shouted, "CASE, what's going on?"

CASE was the spacecraft's artificial intelligence; it would receive data immediately upon malfunctions, so Kupa needed CASE to provide a reason; he needed to solve it right away.

"The ship has taken on too much water; we need to drain before we can start the engines," Kupa had barely finished speaking when CASE provided the problem.

"Damn it!!!" Upon hearing this, Kupa slammed his hands onto the control panel in fury.

"I told you, don't mind me, why didn't you just leave?" Ms. Brand, slumped on the floor, cried and blamed herself.

Brand was crying both for the doctor who died trying to save her and for the precious decades they were about to waste.

Kupa got up, crouched beside her, took her head firmly in his hands, and shouted angrily at her, "I also said, come back quickly. Why didn't you come back? You were only thinking about that damned data."

"The difference is one of us only cared about that damned mission," Kupa stood up and yelled loudly, his words leaving no room for doubt.

"And you, you only care about whether you can get home," Brand cried out.

"I just wanted to do the right thing," Brand said through her tears, obviously devastated by the failure of their mission.

"You can tell that to Doyle," Kupa said, staring at her.

Having said that, he no longer paid attention to Ms. Brand and returned to the pilot's seat, and asked CASE, "CASE, how much longer do we need?"

"Forty-five minutes to an hour, Kupa."

Hearing this answer, a look of obvious disappointment washed over Kupa's face.

An hour meant that seven years would pass on Earth, which, added to the twenty-one years, and including the days they'd flown, was roughly twenty-five years.

Twenty-five years might not seem like much on a cosmic scale, but for humans with their brief lifespans, it represented a third of a lifetime.

Moreover, before they left, Dr. Old Brand told him that Earth's last food source, plants, would also go extinct in a few decades, which meant that in an hour, Earth might no longer exist.

All that they had done would likely be meaningless.

Kupa took off his helmet in disappointment and sat down on the deck with a thud.

"The elements of life? How great a price must we pay for this?" Kupa asked, pointing at the water endlessly filling the sky outside.

"A lot, decades of time."

Kupa's eyes were tightly screwed up as he struggled to control his emotions.

"What's the situation with Miller?" he then asked.

"Judging by the wreckage of the beacon, he was shattered by a giant wave shortly after landing," Brand explained.

"Then why, after all these years, is the wreckage still at the same spot?" Kupa asked, puzzled.

"Because time slowed down, according to this planet's time, he might have landed just a few hours ago; he might have died just a few minutes ago."

"The data Doyle got was just the initial loop, repeating over and over," CASE suddenly interjected.

"We weren't prepared for this at all. You bookworms' survival skills are about on par with the Boy Scouts," Kupa muttered shaking his head.

Kupa felt utterly helpless about these issues because they were out of his field of expertise.

"Our wisdom has brought us here, to the farthest distance in human history so far," Brand retorted.

"But that's still not enough. Now, we're trapped here until there's no one left on Earth to save us," Kupa cursed.

Kupa hung his head and soon said, "Is there a possibility that we enter the black hole, go back to the past, or reclaim the time we've lost?"

At these words, Brand shook her head in resignation.

"Brand, don't shake your head at me," Kupa snapped.

"Time is relative, you know? It can slow down or stretch out, but it can't go backward, that's relativity, Kupa."

"Okay, then... those beings who guided us here, is there any chance they were talking to us from the future?"

At this, Brand seemed to hear an even more laughable joke, first laughed mockingly and then said, "Okay, Kupa, I know you want to reclaim the time you've lost, but it's impossible. They may not even be beings from a three-dimensional world. To them, time might just be a mountain that can be climbed, but not for us."

"Oh, Brand, my daughter is only ten years old, I haven't had the chance to teach her Einstein's theory of relativity..."

"I can't help you reclaim the time that has disappeared, but I can help you waste seven years less," Cao Ge's voice came through the speaker.

Hearing this voice, both were stunned and simultaneously looked at CASE.

"Yes, Dr. Miller," CASE explained.

Seeing the wave pass, Cao Ge immediately controlled the ship and began to descend.