Starmind Chapter 17 (Patreon)

I was going to make an April Fool's post about having lost interest in Starmind, and it might be a few weeks before the next chapter, but I deemed it too cruel. Instead, please enjoy your regularly scheduled chapter!

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“So…” Temeri dragged the word out. Sitting behind the desk in her cabin, she had her slate in front of her, tapping the back of the stylus against the blank surface in a three fast, three slow, three fast pattern.

I waited a few seconds for her to continue, then said, “So…?”

Temeri stopped tapping her stylus. She sighed then said, “You don’t like weapons. You don’t like to make them, and you refuse to carry them. I understand that. I respect that.”

“That’s wonderful to hear, Temeri!” I said happily. I’d been a little worried when she so clearly wanted to have a conversation in private, but this was very promising!

Then she said, “But—” and I got worried. She went on, “We need to talk about defense.”

“Okay?” I replied. Now I wasn’t sure where the conversation was going. “I don’t mind that, I suppose. But we have a thick hull, we can probably outrun any new Bad Guys by burning mana crystals and converting extra material to reaction mass, and Bekeri’s going to build me a Phase Disruption Field Generator. We’re fine now, aren’t we?”

“We’re fine now. Right now. But what’s our orbital period around Avara?”

“Just under forty-five hours.”

“And what’s the orbital period of Erebus?”

“Seven point one six days.”

“So we’re going to catch up to Erebus in two days or so. And if they want to send out another ship to intercept us, that’ll be pretty easy. And this ship may have mass drivers, or more heat rays, or mana slug projectors. Something heavy enough to punch through your hull without phasing, and fast enough that we can’t dodge it. The only way we can be completely sure that they won’t attack us again is by leaving orbit. That’s an option, but I think we both agree that it’s not a good one. I know that you want to mine the rings for a bit and check out that strange mana signature, and I’d rather not see us drifting through interplanetary space for however long. So.”

“So…?” I asked again, much more apprehensively. “What?”

“So you don’t want to arm yourself. I respect that. I disagree, but I respect it. But how flexible are you when it comes to proactive defense?”

Not just what she said, but the way she said it, made me anxious. There was a gleam in her eye that I didn’t like at all. “I understand those words, but what do you mean by that?”

“Well, I did some thinking as I was going to sleep last night. If we continue at our current velocity, we open ourselves up to interception fairly soon. But if we slow down, the bogey that’s already behind us may maneuver to catch up. So what if we could neutralize them?”

“I don’t think I like where this is going, Temeri.”

She hesitated then licked her lips and continued. “Hear me out. I need you to really think about this. Please?”

“Okay, but—”

“Listen, Star. I just want to survive, all right? I want to live, and I want my crew to live — and I want you to live, too. But to ensure our survival, or at least to give us all the best possible chance, we need to defend ourselves! It’s us or them, Star! And if it comes down to it, who do you value more: the Bad Guys, or your crew?”

“You. The Crew. Of course the Crew is more important!”

“And if the only way to keep the crew safe was to hurt some Bad Guys or to let them get hurt, could you?”

“I— You’re my Crew!” I didn’t want to talk about this. I didn’t even want to think about it! I was not a warship; I was a science vessel, and I was not supposed to have weapons! There were rules!

Temeri pressed on. “But could you, Star? Could you hurt someone? Could you set them up to be hurt if you had to? If that was what it took to make sure that Varlanda was safe, or Bekeri, or Simeon, or Harvin. Or me, Star? Could you hurt someone to save my life?”

“Yes!” I wailed. Temeri winced, and I immediately felt terrible. “Oh, Temeri, I’m sorry! Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I’m fine. So, you could?”

“I could,” I admitted, though it was hard. “If I had to. To keep you all safe.”

“Okay. Star, I’m sorry that it hurts you, but I need you to do something that may hurt those Bad Guys. Can you do that for me?”

“To protect you?”

“To protect us,” she confirmed. “And you may even get some materials out of it. You like materials, don’t you?”

“Yeah. But I don’t want to hurt anyone to get them.”

“I know, Star. I know. I’m not saying we should go and try to take anything from someone else. I'm saying that if we have to proactively defend ourselves, it would be a sort of… consolation prize. You understand? If we have to go through all that fear and danger, at least we get something out of it.”

“I guess…” I wasn't entirely convinced, but Temeri sounded very sure of herself.

“Good,” Temeri said. Then she fell silent for a moment. She’d been slowly dragging the thumb of her left hand up and down over her nails, and she started doing that faster. At the same time she began tapping her stylus on her slate again. After a few seconds she said, “Here’s what I want to do. I want to slow down. I want to see if that bogey comes after us again. And if they do, I want you to put us on a new trajectory that puts them directly behind us. Can you do that?”

“That should be easy. But it might not be very safe, depending on which direction they approach from,” I said. I was uncomfortable with the whole conversation, but this was something I could give a confident answer to. I barely even had to think about it before my Navigational Matrix did the calculations, complete with different thrust schedules depending on when the Bad Guys might change course. Some of our new trajectories took us uncomfortably close to Avara, so I had the Matrix calculate some safer alternatives where it would be easy for the Bad Guys to follow us.

“Great, Star. That’s great,” Temeri said, seemingly ignoring what I’d said about some of the trajectories not being safe. “Now, we have a lot of spare mass, right? Extra hull, extra thickness between the levels, things like that? You haven’t converted it all to reaction mass, right?”

“I haven’t had to convert much at all to keep us topped off, no.”

“Wonderful.” Temeri took a deep breath. “Okay, Star. Here’s what I want you to do…”

  *

The rest of the Crew didn’t like the plan, but Temeri was the captain, and I agreed. They protested, and then they did their jobs.

At 1200 hours precisely, I started a de-orbiting burn. To anyone watching, it would look like we were going to a lower orbit, perhaps to put more distance between us and Erebus.

The Bad Guys took the bait immediately. I was terribly uncomfortable with baiting them in the first place, but the fact that they were so eager to get at us again made me feel a little better. And, at least this way, we ended up in a safe orbit.

Burning into Avara’s gravity, and with me slowly decelerating, the Bad Guys slowly closed in. When they were about an hour away from what Temeri estimated to be their maximum weapon’s range, I started a burn which would have put us in a very suboptimal elliptical orbit, but might, if we used Bekeri’s spell to boost the drive, let us outrun the Bad Guys again. I very much wanted to do that, but that wasn’t Temeri’s plan. And I had to trust that her plan was the best way she could think of to keep us safe, because otherwise, how could I trust her at all?

Instead of using Bekeri’s spell, I simulated a main thruster failure, making the primary spit and sputter and finally cut out entirely, as though we’d performed an emergency shutdown. Then I shut down the secondaries as well.

We let the Bad Guys close in. Every so often I’d flare one of the main thrusters, as though we were trying to get them going again with no success.

When the Bad Guys were ten minutes out, Temeri called everyone except Bekeri to the Bridge. Bekeri was standing by in the engineering section with two mana crystals ready, just in case we actually had to burn to escape. Then we attempted to contact them, both over radio and via Harvin sending a telepathic message at them, telling them that we had completely lost our drive due to undetected damage from the previous attack, that we begged them not to open fire, and that we’d offer no resistance if they boarded us.

This was, of course, carefully worded so that we’d lie as little as possible. Not that it made me any less uncomfortable, or that anyone in the Crew thought the Bad Guys would care.

It only took a minute for the Bad Guys to respond, telling us to stand by to be boarded, and that any sign of foul play would be met with immediate destruction. I hated that, but Temeri begged me to stick to the plan.

The Bad Guys passed their maximum weapons range and didn’t open fire. With Temeri in place in the pilot’s seat and everybody but Bekeri in their couches, I did the hardest thing I’d ever had to do. Not that I’d been alive for very long, but still.

I’d spent hours building up a lattice of small, carefully shaped sections of Hull that covered every part of my bottom except the functioning thrusters. They were small enough and shaped in such a way as to be practically undetectable on most sensors, and there were tons and tons of them. Now, as Bekeri cast his spell, I released them right in the Bad Guys’ path, using powerful jets of spare atmospheric gas to send them flying back and away from us. The moment Bekeri finished casting, he ran for the bridge, and the moment he was in his couch we started a maximum burn while Temeri took evasive action, maneuvering me erratically without making any meaningful change to our trajectory.

The Bad Guys opened fire, along with sending some very hurtful messages that I didn’t relay to the Crew. We accelerated hard enough that the distance soon grew between us, but they still had plenty of time to shoot at us. Temeri’s flying kept the majority of their mana pulses from hitting, but their heat rays scored dozens of deep cuts in the extra Hull I’d placed along my bottom, under the lattice. Frankly, every part of me was dangerously thin at that point, except the bottom plate.

It hurt. It hurt so much, and even though I shut down my telepathic communications entirely, Harvin muttered soothing words the whole time. Then, finally, after minutes that felt like a lifetime, the incoming fire stopped. At first I thought it was because we’d left their range, but they should still have been able to hit us with their heat rays. So I turned all my sensors on them and looked carefully and saw exactly what I’d feared.

Their energy signature was erratic, their acceleration had stopped, and there was a small cloud of faint heat around them consistent with gas venting from multiple locations. As I watched, their power output went dark.

I’d hoped that they’d suspect something. I’d hoped that they’d give up. I’d hoped that once they opened fire they’d notice some percentage of their output being absorbed by something invisible between them and us. But they hadn’t. Instead they’d hit a swarm of Hull fragments the size of a Crew-person’s fist travelling a few miles per second. The fragments, far more massive than any undetectable interplanetary debris anyone would have ever expected, had breached their own, inferior hull material. They had done who knew how much damage, venting the Bad Guys’ atmosphere and forcing their reactor into an emergency shutdown — or a non-catastrophic failure. One of the two.

All that to say, I’d killed them. I wasn’t sure how many Bad Guys had been on that ship. Maybe Harvin had said, but I didn’t want to remember.

I’d killed them.

Everything stopped.

  *

The world came back piece by piece.

There was no pain this time. That was nice.

After my sense of self, my sense of my own body and its state, the first thing to return was sound. The sounds of the things that filled me. My machinery, and my Crew.

The machinery wasn’t very interesting. It mostly hummed away inside spaces where no one but Bekeri would ever want to go. Instead I focused on the Crew. With nothing competing for my attention, I listened to the sounds of them living. The most important was the rhythmic thumping of five hearts. Hard and soft, fast and slow; I could probably tell which belonged to whom if I put my mind to it. Then there were all the other sounds: breathing and swallowing, liquids and gasses moving inside them, the occasional creak or pop of some joint. And outside of their bodies, were the soft taps and scuffs of someone walking, the clicks and taps of tools being used, and the soft scratching of styluses on slates.

I spent a long time just listening to all of those little sounds. It was calming.

I didn’t realize that no one had been speaking for all that time, until someone did.

Somewhere inside me a door swished open. “Enchantress Tell,” Temeri said, and I thought her voice was thin, somehow. Uncertain, perhaps. “Anything new? Any readings at all?”

“No, Captain,” Varlanda snapped. There was none of her normal casual friendliness or respect there. “Some minor blips in the sensor feeds. No sign that she’s even in there except that the gravity field’s still active.”

“I see. Continue monitoring her Core, and let me know if anything changes.”

“I said I would, Captain.”

“Right. Of course. As you were, then,” Temeri said. There were more steps, and the door opened and closed, and she moved down the Crew level’s central corridor.

Both Temeri’s and Varlanda’s hearts were beating harder and faster than they had a minute before.

I felt that I should talk to them. They were worried about me, judging by what they’d said, and they were both very upset. I should try to do something about that. But if I talked, if I fully acknowledged that they had something to be upset about, and that there was a cause for that…

Nope, that line of thinking was way too dangerous. Instead I focused on the sounds inside me again.

Nobody was talking. I kept track of Temeri, and I heard steps come close to and pass her, but neither she nor whoever it was said anything.

When she was alone again, Temeri sighed heavily. She muttered, “Dammit,” then sniffed once before there was the sound of a stylus scratching.

I forced myself to let my other senses return. But only inside myself. I knew that there was only pain outside, and I wasn’t ready to remember why.

It was 1921 hours. Temeri was in the rec room, writing. They should have been having dinner together, but she was alone. Harvin was on the bridge, lying in his couch with his eyes closed. Simeon was in his quarters, reading, while Bekeri was in the artifice bay, using a nozzle connected to his air compressor to remove dust from a number of mechanical components that he’d arranged on a workbench. He was scowling, which was strange because he loved dusting things with compressed air.

Finally, Varlanda was in the crystal chamber. She had my Core exposed and sat before it, perching on a stool with her spells active. But she wasn’t doing anything. She just sat there staring at my Core, legs pulled up so her heels rested on the cushion.

In the second that it took me to check in on everyone, Varlanda’s eyes widened, and she put her feet on the floor and leaned in closer to my Core.

“Star?” she asked, manipulating her spell to look more closely at something. “Come on, talk to me, girl! This can’t just be another blip! Auditory, visual, thermal, mana, they’re all rising! Star!”

“Hi, Varlanda,” I said, and my mental voice was weak and thready. It was hard to say anything at all. I wasn’t really ready yet, and I was resisting myself. But Varlanda was upset, and so was Temeri, and I couldn’t stand it any longer. “Sorry for going away.”

“Star!” She let out a shaky sigh, cancelling her spells. “Gods, I’m so glad to hear you again. There’s nothing to be sorry for! It’s all the captain’s fault! If she hadn’t—”

“Don’t!” I said, cutting her off. “Please, Varlanda. Temeri’s really upset right now, and I don’t want to think about why, but I know it’s not all her fault.”

“She made you—!”

“She can’t make me do anything,” I said, cutting her off again. Not because what I had to say was more important than hers, but because I really didn’t want her to finish that sentence. “We talked. She was very reasonable. I didn’t like what she wanted me to do, but I agreed it was the best way to keep you safe. So I did it. I…”

My mind recoiled again, but I couldn’t hide forever. I knew there were more Bad Guys out there, and I needed to be able to look outside myself or we’d never see them coming. So I steeled myself before telling Varlanda, “Can you go tell Temeri that I’m back? And maybe smile at her, if you can? I think she needs that.”

Then I activated my external sensors and faced what I had done.