A thoughtful gleam flashed through He-El's eyes as he slowly rose into the air. His black cape billowed behind him as he crossed half the planet and arrived at a hole that led straight into the depths below.
The hole was two kilometers wide. Looking down, it was lifeless and abyssal, its walls smooth and crystallized, with weak magnetic field readings.
Standing at the edge of the sinkhole-like opening, He-El raised his head toward the gray-brown sky and had already guessed what had happened. A resource-harvesting ship had emerged from the gray-brown clouds, drilled straight through the mantle of the wandering planet MT745, and sucked up its planetary core like a straw, drawing it aboard.
The magnetic confinement and gravitational technology involved were highly advanced and mature.
He-El's expression turned grave. His gaze swept over the smooth crystal formations in the hole's walls, where nanomachines were already collecting samples. He contacted Zero and began comparing the geological age detected through previous isotope tests with the geological age of the area damaged by outside forces, calculating when the intruder had extracted the planetary core.
"Approximately ten to twenty years ago," Zero reported after calculating the likely time of the core's extraction.
He-El's heart jolted.
That recently?
He had only appeared in this star system five years ago. In other words, the ship that had extracted the planetary core might very well have passed right by him.
In the vastness of the universe, even passing within five light-years of one another counted as absurdly close.
How far was five light-years?
One light-year equaled 9,460,730,472,581.94 kilometers—9.46 trillion kilometers.
In The Three-Body Problem, the Trisolaran fleet traveled at one-tenth the speed of light. Including acceleration and deceleration, reaching Earth would take 450 years.
Without warp travel, faster-than-light spacecraft, or curvature engines, even a single-digit