There was no helping it. Though she wasn't a professional psionic navigator, as the woman known as Tai'a, she was certainly the most accomplished psionic in the entire New Shenzhou sector. Even if most of her expertise lay in brawling, expertise was expertise.
She didn't particularly enjoy research and exploration, but whether out of respect for her master's lineage or her family, she had no choice but to join the exploration mission led by the Red Star Office.
With her younger cousin accompanying her, Tai'a entered the hangar in the ship's belly. A crack team of technicians was already at work, giving the sophisticated, advanced automated equipment its final checks.
Little Bai painstakingly inspected the terminals on each probe, making sure there were no flaws in their planned routes. Seeing her cousin, even smaller than she was, diligently crawling all over the place, Tai'a could only put on a stern face and carefully activate the arrays engraved on the inside of the probes' armored hulls, however impatient she felt.
The machines were about the size of orcas, with bodies that looked just like barracudas. A faint glow of psionic energy began to flow across them.
"A force-field shield?" Tai'a raised a brow in surprise. Shield-type psionic phenomena took a fair amount of energy to maintain. They were manageable when cast by psionic adepts with great stamina and mental strength, but when produced by mechanisms made from psionic arrays and zero-element materials, their endurance was hard to guarantee.
She reached out and touched the barrier of light. The glow immediately dimmed.
"Oh, it's autonomous?" That design should ensure a decent amount of endurance, but it demanded exceptionally sophisticated intelligence from the psionic array.
Tai'a could hardly believe it. Did that mean every one of these dozen instruments had been worked on