It was only natural for everyone to want to escape as quickly as possible.
However, the sheer scale and mass of the Deep Space meant its acceleration was severely limited, capping out at a maximum of one meter per second squared.
The vessel was forty kilometers long and weighed tens of billions of metric tons. If they pushed the acceleration any higher, neither the hull materials nor the engines would survive the structural stress.
It couldn't pull tens of Gs like a nimble fighter craft; it could only crawl forward, gradually building speed at a sluggish pace.
While one meter per second squared wasn't actually slow in a vacuum, it was practically a standstill when measured against the vast, empty backdrop of space.
