Soon, the pillar of light coming from the gate had dissappeared. With it, however, apparently had the flagship of the entire fleet that had gathered earlier to depart Earth, the [i]Hope[/i], the flagship of the UNE. After this had happened, the fleet had been disbanded and the leader of the Naukan Crusade, Khan Temir Zima, had given the go-ahead for the Naukan Crusade ships to officially leave the main fleet to its fate and go away. Thus, the Naukan Crusade had set sail to the south-west, to find new lands they could colonize. Slowly, the massive ships of the Naukan Crusade accelerated to full speed, and the other ships on the horizon slowly became smaller as the fleet was moving away. It had not even been an hour of travel before the sounds started. Strange scraping and knocking was heard by several crewmembers in the lower decks of the [i]Pioneer[/i]. At first, the captain of the ship wanted to accelerate, as the sounds were frightening the crew, but Temir had told him to anchor the ship instead, and had given the same order to all of the other ships. There had to be a logical reason behind the sounds, which was most likely the inhabitants of this strange new world, and there was no reason why they would not try to meet these new peoples. Soon, the four ships of the Naukan Crusade had stopped and anchored themselves. Several people went outside to see what was going on, and what they saw surprised them very much. There were strange creatures, half human, half sea creature, that emerged from the water. The fleet didn't pay much attention to them and continued on their way.

Although the general atmosphere of the people in the fleet was relatively optimistic, Walter's mood was less so. Due to the fact that he was known on the fleet a good repairman and engineer, as well as very strong, he had been sent to all of the different ships multiple times. He first had to repair one of the cooling units of the seedbank on the [i]Ark[/i] that would otherwise have caused a cascading failure and broken the entire cooling system of the seed bank. He was about to take a break and relax with a coffee in one of the dining rooms of the [i]Ark[/i], the ship that he had to temporarily call his home, when he was called again, this time to help repair one of the reconaissance vehicles on the [i]Vanguard[/i]. After that, he had been ordered to help fix some machinery at the [i]Pioneer's[/i] factory. Even though it was not fully operational yet, it still had to be checked to make sure nothing was broken on the day that the fleet would finally make landfall.

Unlike Walter's day, Angela Szarka, researcher in the laboratory of the Naukan flagship, kept getting a better day. After the fleet had passed through the gate, a massive amount of data was gathered even though the fleet had been in the new world for mere minutes at that point. The scientists and researchers had just gone through processing all of the gathered data. So far, there didn't seem to be any major differences between the new world they were currently in and Earth, except for the fact that logically this world was far less polluted and on the brink of death.