by Simon Archer
“We can’t be sure until we’re actually mining out the ice, master.” Queenie threw up her hands helplessly again. “While the planet weighs about one hundred sextillion tons, which is more than enough to fill these oceans,” she shot a glance at Gobta, “the planet is mostly a gas giant, and we don’t know how much of the ice is actually easy to mine, assuming we can take it all and not totally disrupt the planet itself.” She looked back at me. “Something you expressly forbade.”
“The same goes for the moons,” Gobta added before Queenie could say more. “Though we have a bit better of an estimate there since those aren’t gas giants. We think half of their weight is probably ice, and each moon weighs about one sextillion tons.” He shot a glance at the Ant Queen. “Either one would still give us more than enough ice to fill these oceans and has the added advantage of not being horribly toxic.”
“That assumes we mine out every last chunk of ice, and again, sharktopus below the surface?” Queenie sighed.
“I think we both know that the correct answer is to get the easiest chunks of ice, bring them here, and then go from there?” I said.
“Yeah…” Gobta said as he scratched his cheek and looked away. “The thing is, that will only get us half what we need, so if we go that route, we’ll need to mine some of the other, less lucrative planets.”
“The Hobgoblin King is correct, master,” Queenie said with a sigh. “We wouldn’t have enough even if we collected the nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane ice contained within the ice ridges in the glaciers of the last planet in the system--”
“It’s not a planet,” Gobta was quick to point out. “It doesn’t dominate the neighborhood around its orbit.”
“It is a planet since it has its own orbit and was made spherical based on its own gravity,” Queenie said in a way that made me think they had also had this argument before.
“It’s okay,” I said before the two could lunge at each other. “I’m not a planet either.”
“Of course you are not a planet, master.” Queenie gave me a confused look before looking at the Hobgoblin King who merely shrugged in a way that suggested he had nothing.
“Anyway,” I waved off the current conversation because, despite the common beliefs of certain space-faring arena games, jokes weren’t better when explained, “unless you two plan on, I dunno, dragging an entire planet or moon here, something I have expressly forbidden, we need to just collect the easy ice.” Only as I said it, an idea occurred to me. “You know, I remember reading an article where NASA found lots of pockets of frozen ice just out there in space.” I tapped my chin in thought. “I know we looked at comets and asteroids and stuff, but have we looked for frozen clouds?”
“No, master.” Queenie shook her head. “We barely completed the surveys of the planets, moons, and larger celestial bodies. There is much left to explore.”
“Okay, then.” I nodded. “Gobta, can you coordinate bringing the easiest ice here, prioritizing the ones made of water, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide, while Queenie begins the search for frozen pockets of ice in space?” I smiled. “Because for that, we can just toss it on down and don’t have to mine.”
“Your will shall be done, my liege,” Gobta said with a bow before hustling off to coordinate with the miners.
“I am sorry, master,” Queenie said when he had left. “I should have thought to check the surrounding space.” She sighed. “I was just so excited when I surveyed the ice giant because it contained more ice than we needed.”
“And it still may be what we need to finish up here,” I said as I moved in and kissed her on the forehead. “But I don’t want to completely ravage any planets if we don’t have to, because, eventually, we’re going to colonize every single planet and moon in this solar system, even the gas giants.”
Queenie took a step back as I spoke, her multifaceted eyes wide. “But master, how is that possible?” She shook her head. “On the big gas giant, there are many layers of gasses, and none are at all close to habitable, and the core is not big enough--”
“So, you’ve been wondering why I’ve been really big about using as little as possible from the actual planets, and instead have focused our efforts mostly on asteroids and comets?” I asked, and when she nodded, I continued. “Well, terraforming a gas giant would normally be impossible because it’s really hard to survive there.”
“I am not following, master,” Queenie said with a helpless look.
“Well, you and I have no problem surviving there.” I smirked. “So, what we will do is go to the core and add mass to it, enough to support more, then we add layer after layer of rock and metal to it until we actually have a real planet’s surface.” I shrugged. “It’s basically what we did here,” I stomped my foot for emphasis, “but many times over.”
“Ah!” Queenie’s eyes got bright with understanding. “So we will need a lot of material if we wish to terraform those planets, and if we use it all on planet’s like this one…”
“Yup, that becomes a lot harder to do.” I smiled brightly at her, and she flushed slightly.
“Thank you for explaining it to me.” She gave me a determined nod. “I will find the ice clouds, so we do not need to ravage any of the planets.” Then she leaped into the sky, and as I watched her go, I smiled.
Sure, we hadn’t even completed this planet yet, but we would soon enough, and then? Well, then we would do the moons and the other easier planets. I grinned. Then we would do the gas giants. It was something I had theorized about doing in Terra Forma but had never actually been able to because of the limitations of the game itself.
Here, though? Well, here I was a god, and I was going to try my hardest to terraform every last planet and moon that I could because at the end of the day, Zaxcs was coming and the more habitable worlds we had, the stronger I would be when I faced him.
Still, first thing’s first, now that the Ares was sculpted, and the ice would be on the way, I had one last thing to do to make it really habitable. I had to fix its orbit. Currently, the planet was in an elliptical orbit around the system’s star. While that meant that the vast majority of its seven hundred day trip around the sun was well within the Goldilocks zone of the system, the band of space where the heat of the star would allow water to remain liquid, there was a hundred and fifty day period where the planet would be a few million miles outside of that.
So, basically, I needed to change the elliptical orbit of the planet to a more circular one so that it wouldn’t have those two periods of time where it was outside the band of space where it could easily sustain life.
That had been impossible to do when I’d first entered this solar system because I’d been level one and the aura requirements to change the planet’s orbit had vastly outstripped my meager Aura pool. Now though, I was a level thirty Godling, and I had enough Aura to do just that.
So, I took a minute and focused on my godly toolbar, and as I did, the skill I wanted popped up into view, only unlike before it wasn’t grayed out because I didn’t have the Aura requirements. Now, it could be used, and for a mere cost of just over half my Aura.
Smiling, I took a deep breath and focused my will as I selected the skill. As I did, the entire orbit of the planet beneath my feet filled my vision as a shimmering blue line that stretched out of the planet in either direction.
Then I reached out and grabbed hold of that image, and I compressed each side of the ellipse until I had a more circular orbit that stayed in place while keeping an eye on the Aura requirements to shift the orbit. Casting the spell had taken just over half my Aura, and with each tweak I did, I felt more energy drain out of me, which was why I hadn’t tried this earlier. If I had tried this when I’d first come back from the training dungeon, I may have had enough Aura to cast the spell, but I wouldn’t have had enough to create the perfect orbit. Worse, if there had been an issue with the orbit after I was done, I might have to try again, and I knew from experience that every single time I altered the orbit of a planet, the
chance for everything to go tits up increased dramatically.
No, in Terra Forma, it was always better to do things in one shot because recovering from a mistake could be difficult, if not impossible.
Fortunately, I was smart and had waited until I had double the Aura I needed, so now, it was just a matter of spending the time to make the orbit of this planet perfect, and since my followers were busy finding ice for Ares, I had nothing but time.
3
“Well, that took a lot less time than I thought,” I said when I’d finished adjusting the planet’s rotation because Gobta hadn’t even delivered the first spec of ice. A quick look through the godly tether linking me to him let me know that he was still scraping surface ice off the two moons orbiting the large gas giant and had another few days of that before he’d be ready for me to move the ice here.
A look at Queenie told me something similar. She had moved into the asteroid belt to locate water ice but so far hadn’t found much worth noting, and what she had found had been marked. So, I spent the next few hours grabbing those asteroids, transporting them to Ares, stripping off the ice, and then moving the rock back into space for later.
That said, even all that had barely been enough to give me a modest lake where my smallest ocean was supposed to go.
“Guess there’s nothing to do about that but wait for Gobta,” I said as I looked around, and as I did, my eyes settled on the moon orbiting Ares. “Hello, there.”
A moment later, I stood on the surface of the moon, and as its information popped into my head, I smirked. This was the reason I’d chosen to start with this planet because, despite being close to a quarter of the size of Ares, it was a lot less dense, especially after all the work I’d done on the core of my own planet.
This would make it perfect for creating useful tides on my starting planet, but that was also one of the problems with terraforming it. See, if I increased the mass of the moon so that it had the gravity to hold in its atmosphere, well, that would change its density and throw off everything I’d done on the starting world. Some of that could be solved by just moving the moon further away to compensate, but that wouldn’t fix the problem of the tides drastically changing if I succeeded in restarting the moon’s dynamo and increasing its rotation.
That was a whole other ball of wax to contend with, but as I stood there, I realized I had a great idea because I was a god and wasn’t limited by pesky things like technology.
“Hey, Queenie,” I said as I tugged on the link between us with my mind. “Got a second?”
“Yes, master. Do you wish me to come to you?” It was always a little weird when I heard her voice in my mind via the link, but not so much that I wanted her to travel across the solar system to have a conversation.
“No,” I said with a shake of my head that she couldn’t see. “I just want you to tag all the asteroids with a ton of iron in them.”
“That will not be a problem, master. I have already marked many of them on my personal map in case you needed to know for later.” As she spoke, the information about several of the asteroids in the belt she’d been surveying popped into view. “Will that be enough, or will you need more?”
“That should be fine,” I said with a laugh as I looked at the numbers suddenly swimming around in the minimap. “I only need a trillion or so tons.”
“Would you like me to have that amount brought to you, master?” she asked, and while it was enticing, it wasn’t like I had anything better to do. And besides, I could teleport.
“Nope, I have it. You’ve been a lot of help already. Let me know if you find the water.”
“I will, master.” With that, she went back to work.
I did too, and after only a few minutes of teleportation, I’d transported my trillion tons of iron as well as some nickel and molybdenum close to the star and put it into my tungsten dish. It was strange because when I’d used this dish to melt down gazillions of tons of rare metals, it had seemed small, but now, with just over a trillion tons of iron ore in it, the dish seemed downright massive.
Then I spent the next little bit making a bowl full of molten stainless steel that I then transported to my moon.
Taking a deep breath, I called upon the same power I’d used when I’d sculpted the planet earlier and visualized a giant shell around the moon. Then I poured my molten steel into my Auric mold. It was slow going because, well, liquid, and I had to take care to control the cooling with my cold power, but eventually, I’d encased the moon in a one-meter thick shell.
“What is that?” Gobta asked, surprising me as I put the finishing touches on my shell world.
“It’s the beginning of a shell world,” I said as I turned to find him standing there covered in frost. “See, I can’t really change how the moon rotates or its mass or anything and not affect the planet we’ve been working on.” I gestured to my left where my red planet loomed large and in charge in the distance. “But I was thinking about it. If I put a big shell around the moon, I can then do stuff inside, like heat it effectively and keep the atmosphere inside.”
“Not to say this is a bad plan, my liege,” Gobta said as he moved over and rapped his knuckles against the shell, “but what if a big rock hits it? Then everything inside will die.”
“Well, yeah, that is a problem.” I laughed. “Right now, the shell is just a meter thick sphere of steel, but in the future,” I spread my hands wide, “it will have another seventy meters of dirt and rock on top, which should keep the random space debris from puncturing it.”
“Ah, so it is like when you fill castle walls with earth to make them harder to penetrate.” The Hobgoblin King nodded, clearly pleased. “So, will you need additional water for the moon as well?”
“Yeah, but it’s not a hurry unless you’ve found a lot of water.” I gestured toward Ares. “That’s the priority.”
“Well, that is why I have come,” he said before forming his face into a very carefully neutral expression. “I have scrapped most of the easily accessible nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water-based ices up and placed them in orbit around the planets. You should find them marked on your map.”
I looked, and sure enough, there they were. Little packages of ice floating around a couple of moons and planets.
“That’s a lot less than I’d thought it would be…” I said with a sigh. It was less than a third of what we needed our planet, and we still also needed an atmosphere.
“Yes.” He frowned. “Most of the ice we found is either badly contaminated with hazardous chemicals, like acid that could burn through a man, or are made of methane.” He shrugged. “However, I believe there are a number of celestial bodies still waiting to be identified. If you wouldn’t mind, I would like to assist Queenie.”
“That will be fine,” I said, but before he went to do that, I decided to utilize the workers I’d assigned to him since I’d be turning my attention to the ice he had marked on my minimap. It wasn’t much, but it was definitely enough to get started, while this was mostly a side project. “While you’re doing that, can you have your minions begin bringing dirt and other regolith to the shell? They need to add around seventy meters of the stuff.”
“Is there any specific composition required for the dirt?” Gobta asked as he looked around. “There several asteroids and assorted space debris we can use around here to do it quickly, but if you require more specific materials…?”
“Whatever will be fine. It’s mostly there to act as a cushion for space debris while having enough mass for the gravity of the moon to act on it and keep it in place.” As I finished speaking, he nodded to me and then his eyes went a bit distant, which let me know he was ordering his minions around through the godly link.
“It will be done, my liege,” he said with a bow. “Will there be anything else?”
“Not until you find me some water,” I replied and left him to go do that while I spent the next few hours gathering the accumulated ice and adding it to my smallest oceans.
I
t was a little hard to do because I tried to keep it separated. I placed all the water ice in a separate section from the carbon dioxide and nitrogen ices, so that I had an idea of what we would have once I was done.
Only, as I was doing that, I had a wonderful, awful idea.
“Hey, Gobta,” I said as I placed the last of the Hobgoblin King’s ice in the third ocean and watched it not melt. While the planet was a fair bit warmer than it had been, it still didn’t have much of an atmosphere because we hadn’t added any gas. “Can you shoot me the detailed planetary survey specs you did earlier when looking for ice?”
“Yes, my liege,” he replied in my brain from his location millions of miles away from me. The godly tether between us pulsed, and a moment later, a ton of information hit me like a dump truck. Fortunately, I knew what I was looking for because I remembered something from my cursory survey of the system I’d done when I’d selected this planet.
A second later, I was looking at the specs for the third planet in the system. Like the planet I was currently on, it inhabited the Goldilocks zone, but just barely. Unlike my current planet which was at the very outer edge of the zone, this planet was at the inner edge and only required minor adjustments to its orbit for it to remain within the habitable space.
The problem had been, and still was, the atmosphere. Unlike my current planet which had no atmosphere, this planet had way too much. About ninety times too much, in fact. That was in addition to not having a moon at all, having a slower rotation than necessary, and having a partially cooled dynamo. All those problems were fixable, of course, but it had been too difficult to deal with when I’d been lower level. Hell, for all I knew, they still were.
The thing was, right now, what I needed was atmosphere, and maybe there was a lot easier way to get it than combing the solar system for ice to melt down.
I appeared on the planet I’d dubbed Aphrodite a moment later, and as I stood there on the rocky surface, I realized how hot this place was. I mean, I’d known it was toasty intellectually of course, but it was totally different now that I was standing on the surface and enjoying the balmy eight hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit day.
