With Starscream, a Cybertronian scientist, helping out, the work of deciphering the Red Knight spacecraft technology suddenly sped up dramatically.
"My Lord, where did this technology come from? It looks like something from Cybertron. This ship has to be enormous..." Starscream studied the blueprints for the Tachyon Propulsion Chamber. He was an expert, and that was exactly why he was so shocked. Just how enormous must this ship be? The propulsion system's design philosophy was strange too. Could it be meant to move an entire planet?
Bella wore an unfathomable expression. In any case, she had no intention of telling him the answer. He could figure it out himself!
Starscream saw traces of a great deal of ancient Cybertronian technology in the Red Knight's spacecraft systems. In a roundabout way, this also seemed to confirm Bella's supposed identity as an Avatar of Unicron. It was an accidental stroke of luck...
"But Earth is still missing one crucial propulsion fuel. Without that fuel, I truly don't know how we could launch an expedition to Cybertron. The distance is simply too great..." In the end, Starscream presented Bella with a difficult problem.
Bella could obtain a little fuel from the Red Knight, but that was not a long-term solution. She could not go asking the Red Knight every single time, could she?
"What's your solution?" she asked imperiously, in the tone of a superior testing a subordinate.
Starscream really did have an idea. He pointed at Weyland-Yutani's star chart. "If I remember correctly, this world has a mineral we urgently need. It can be used as fuel for the propulsion system. There are only some primitive natives on this world."
Bella glanced over casually and realized it was the moon the Brotherhood had marked as Pandora.
After telling Starscream to keep working, Bella discussed the next steps with 006.
Interstellar exploration took too long. Once she left the solar system, her Teleportation destination became unstable. Appearing in empty space would still be manageable, but if she ended up near a black hole, she would be completely finished.
For now, they could only go by spacecraft. The journey would be extremely long. Earth and Pandora were four light-years apart. Bella did not know how much Starscream could improve the propulsion system. At best it would take half a year; two or three years, even four or five, were all possible. She did not have that kind of time to waste.
She could leave in 2006 and come back to find the Avengers had already disbanded! That absolutely would not do!
Bella gave 006 a task. "Recruit people. Make the risks clear and offer a higher salary. Hmm... bring the military in too. They can send people to participate, but we'll still operate under Weyland-Yutani's name. We won't say we're looking for minerals. We'll say this is an expedition to search for a habitable planet."
The U.S. military was often more likely to mess things up than help. Rather than let them pull tricks behind the scenes, it was better to invite them along.
This was pure frontier exploration. Bella would not have been surprised if the entire team died. On top of that, the expedition would attract global attention, making it easy to expose identities. Members of the Brotherhood therefore could not appear. Recruiting from the general public was the safest option.
"Got it. I'll take care of it right away." 006 worked quickly, but once the news went public, almost no one responded.
The entire proposition sounded dangerous. Four light-years away? Could they possibly pick somewhere even farther?
Nobody wanted to be the first to take the plunge. Once people heard that almost no one from Weyland-Yutani itself was joining and that the military was being unusually quiet too, even fewer were willing to come.
The pay was high, but no matter how people looked at it, the mission seemed like a suicide trip. Who would dare sign up?
It was not until the third day after the announcement that 006 received word that someone had come to apply. Normally, a CEO as busy as him would no longer concern himself with such trivial matters. Was the CEO supposed to personally interview every single applicant? He would work himself to death!
Still, he admired the applicant's courage and wanted to set an example, so he temporarily played the role of interviewer. When Bella heard about it, she disguised herself as 006's assistant and sat in to observe.
006 looked through the file, then sized up the Latina woman in front of him. "Miss Letty? Can you tell me what you're thinking? As far as I know, most people aren't optimistic about this trip. What do you want? A high salary? Or a huge insurance policy?"
The Latina woman named Letty Ortiz met 006's gaze for several seconds. "A company as big as yours must have a lot of connections in the government, right?"
006 said nothing and waited for her to continue.
Letty raised one finger. "I have one condition. Use your connections in the government to get my boyfriend pardoned."
"What's your boyfriend's name?" 006 took out paper and pen, ready to make a note. Pardoning one prisoner? A trivial matter.
"Dominic Toretto."
Without changing expression, 006 glanced at Bella. Who was that? The name sounded kind of familiar.
Bella looked up at the ceiling. Wasn't this the guy I personally threw into prison?
Dominic Toretto was pardoned in the end. Charlie had enormous influence inside California's judicial system. A little maneuvering was enough to get him released. The Latina woman kept her promise as well, becoming the first member of Weyland-Yutani's expedition team headed for Pandora.
The first step was always the hardest. Once the first applicant joined, more people began walking through Weyland-Yutani's doors one after another.
Some wanted money, some wanted pardons, and some simply wanted fame. Weyland-Yutani tried its best to satisfy them.
In the end, even the military sent Lieutenant Ellen Ripley and Major Miles Quaritch to join the team.
All told, they recruited fifty people. Only twenty were expected to actually board the ship in the end, but regardless, all of them now had to undergo six months of professional training.
Bella paid no further attention to Weyland-Yutani's affairs. During this period, she published a paper on trilobite gene cloning, as well as the creatures' habits and evolutionary history. Altogether it ran a little over eighty pages. That was not particularly long, and she could have padded it out further, but she was too lazy to keep writing.
She even donated the trilobite shells she had painstakingly excavated—meaning the leftovers from what she had eaten—to Stanford University. She completed her graduate studies half a year early and received a master's degree in paleontology.
To be honest, she was becoming more and more interested in biology. Every time she looked at biological cells, she felt as though she were viewing life from a God's-eye perspective and watching it evolve bit by bit.
Professor Serizawa recommended that she go to the University of Oxford in Britain for a doctorate in elemental biology.
The word "elemental" was in the name, but the field actually had nothing to do with magic. It was more like an interdisciplinary combination of chemistry and biology, focusing mainly on the thirty-two elements related to living organisms and on the effects certain harmful elements had on the human body and other forms of life.
Bella figured that once she finished studying the subject, her skill at poisoning people would probably improve by another huge margin...
Her Divine Portfolio brought her a little Divine Power every day. She used that Divine Power to strengthen her body, hoping to shape her Divine Body as soon as possible. But that created a problem: her strength and speed increased every day, and to adapt to that newly gained power, she needed constant physical training.
The whole family had recently been living in Washington, though Bella and Natasha lived on their own with their child.