Starmind Chapter 21 (Patreon)

Three hours later, I had to practically scream into Varlanda’s mind to bring her back to reality. She’d been in a state of complete focus ever since she got started, and even if everyone hadn’t been awake and getting ready for breakfast, it would have been time for her to take a break.

“What… what’s the time?” she asked.

“A little past 0700,” I told her. “Everyone else is waiting for you in the rec room. Simeon made real food!

Varlanda wasn’t really listening though. “Did I do this?” she muttered, looking at the stack of crystalline layers she’d just been working on.

“You’re the only one working here,” I reminded her. “He’s fried things, Varlanda! You love fried things!”

“...Fried?” Varlanda looked up at the Matrix before her then turned toward the column holding my Core. “Sim made fried dough balls?”

“With syrup and yeast powder on them!” I confirmed. “He found some flour on New Me!”

“Oh! That’s been a while! Thanks for telling me!”

There was a round of cheers from the men as Varlanda joined the others in the rec room. Temeri, though, only looked up and said, “‘Morning, Varlanda,” and went back to her slate.

“Good morning, Temeri! Gents,” Varlanda replied, not stopping before she reached the heaping plate of fried dough next to Sim and the pot he was using as a fryer. “Sim, tell me those are still hot!”

“Hot enough to blister your fingers,” her brother said, smacking her hand as she reached out for one of the pastries. “Sit!”

“Come on, Sim!”

“Sit!”

“You should sit,” I told her. “Harvin tried to steal one before, and Simeon threatened that he’d only get cold ones.”

“Fine. Fine!” Varlanda huffed and sat down.

“I didn’t know you could be such a child,” Harvin laughed at her.

“She loves fried doughballs!” I said, as Varlanda flicked Harvin on the side of the head with her finger. This was something I remembered very well! “Their mom always makes them for breakfast whenever there’s a holiday!”

“But Vee can’t cook or bake worth a damn, so now she only gets them when we’re home — or when someone is kind enough to make them for her,” Simeon added. Then he said, “Open!” as he picked up one of the doughballs and tossed it at Varlanda, who caught it with her mouth. She got a round of polite applause for that.

There was a single, choked laugh from the edge of the bench. Everyone looked at Temeri, who was reading on from her slate with a perfectly straight face.

Simeon thought for about two seconds before he said, “Temeri! Open!” and tossed a doughball at her, too. She looked up just in time to catch it — I may have nudged it slightly to help.

She got her own round of light applause for that. I’d never seen anyone look surprised while chewing before.

“Temeri… Captain, a moment of your time?” Bekeri asked as they were cleaning up after their terribly unhealthy breakfast.

“Temeri, until clean-up is done,” Temeri said. “But of course.”

“In private?”

“Sure. Simeon, Harvin, Varlanda, I think Bekeri and myself can finish here.”

It really was impressive how Temeri could make a simple statement sound like a command. The others quickly cleaned their hands and left, though Varlanda didn’t look very happy about it.

Then Bekeri said, “You too, Star. If that’s alright.”

“Oh! Um, alright,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment. Then I set about figuring out just how large of an area around the rec room I had to stop paying attention to in order to not hear them anymore; it was surprisingly large! My ability to detect vibrations in the air was very good. I ended up just restricting myself to Gunboat Me and the areas where the other Crew were, hoping that nothing important and noisy would happen anywhere I wasn’t listening.

“You’re awfully quiet, Star,” Varlanda said as she settled in at the nearly finished Matrix again. “Is anything wrong?”

“I’m feeling a little left out, I guess,” I admitted. “Bekeri didn’t want me listening when he talked with Temeri.”

“Oh? Any idea what he wanted to talk about?”

“Um… he wanted to bring some things over from the gunship,” I told her. Which was entirely true, just not the whole truth.

Unfortunately for me, Varlanda was far too intelligent to be fooled. “Odd,” she said. “That doesn’t sound like something he’d need privacy for.”

“It really doesn’t,” I agreed.

“And there’s nothing else you want to tell me?”

“No?”

She fiddled aimlessly with her deposition wand for a bit. Then she sighed and said, “I’m sorry, Star. It’s really not fair of me to use you for gossip. If you know what they’re talking about and don’t want to tell me, I’m sure that it’s for a good reason.” She picked up the mana crystal I’d given her earlier. It was smaller, duller in color, and lined with fine cracks, but she still looked satisfied. “You know what? This should have enough mana left in it for me to finish up. Give me… three hours, at most, I’d say.”

 I didn’t bother trying to hide my relief. “Oh, that’s great! I can’t wait to see what the Manufacturing Matrix will let us do once it’s active!”

“I think we’re all excited about that. And I’m looking forward to the next project! Bekeri finished preparing the blank for the Phase-Disruption Field Generator, right?”

“He did!”

“Love to hear it.” She settled in properly, looked over her annotated schematics, and selected a thick stack of crystal layers. “I’d better get to it, then. If I’m still working in three hours, let me know that it’s time for a break, would you?”

“I will! And, Varlanda?”

“Hmm?”

“Thank you. For not pushing.”

“Of course, Star. I shouldn’t have tried to get you to tell me in the first place.”

“Mmm, maybe. But thank you anyway.”

*

Bekeri and Temeri both looked more relaxed when they left the rec room. I still felt disappointed that Bekeri hadn’t wanted me there, but I told myself that maybe things wouldn’t have turned out as well if he’d felt too embarrassed to talk openly. That made it easier.

For the next several hours, Temeri took Bekeri and Simeon with her on a tour of Gunship-Me. She insisted on full suits again, just like on New Me, even though I’d told her that the gunship was full of good air and had nothing dangerous onboard. That didn’t change her mind, though. Protocol said to suit up properly and to arm herself when boarding an unfamiliar vessel — which it wasn’t even! It was me! She could be so stubborn sometimes!

At least she relaxed on one thing. I’d helpfully gathered most of the food and other things that they wanted to bring over in the gunship’s cargo hold so they could easily go through it. There were still some things in the artifice bay that I couldn’t move, but Bekeri had plenty of things to look at in the engineering spaces and such anyway.

“This is quite a haul,” Temeri said, looking at this and that. “Can you say for sure if anything’s contaminated, trapped, or otherwise unsafe to bring aboard?”

“Everything’s safe!” I told her. “Just like the rest of me. No diseases or strange life-forms or explosives or anything else!”

“In that case… Bekeri, Tell, what do you say?”

“I say we trust the near-omniscient being and ask her to bring it over,” Simeon said. With the way he was going through a collection of potions that I’d gathered, he probably didn’t notice her flinch at “near-omniscient,” but I did.

I really wished that she’d see how useful it was for me to know everything that went on. We’ll get there, I told myself. She just needs more time.

Putting things away was a lot harder than gathering them in one place. The problem was doors. Lockers, chests and cupboards, they all have doors. Generally with locks and latches. On Gunship-Me I’d just recycled them, but we needed the ones on my main body. And while my telekinesis was very good at lifting things, it acted upon the whole thing at once. I couldn't just work on a point. Meaning that if I tried to lift or push down on a handle, I did so on the whole handle — resulting in a little rotation and a whole lot of trying to break the thing out of its fitting.

I did fiddle a bit with using a sealed bag of flour as an intermediary, which sort of worked, but then I decided that it was a lot easier to just ask Harvin for help. He didn't mind at all. I knew that because I asked him three times.

“Really!” he insisted the third time, as he unlocked and pulled out one of the drawers in the galley area of the rec room. He said it with this little laugh that put me immediately at ease. “It’s nice to be able to do something for you, for once. Even if it is just helping you help us.”

“You really don’t have to, though. I’m just happy to have you all here. Besides, you keep an eye on the void for us!”

“That’s nice of you, but you could do that just as well, if not better. You know that.”

“No, I really don’t. I can’t sense minds, Harvin. You can.”

That made him pause. He looked up at the ceiling for a moment, quirking his head a little. Then he said, “Are you sure?”

Was I sure? That was such a silly question! “I think I’d know if I could sense minds. Wouldn’t I?”

“Not necessarily. You can speak to us telepathically. You must be able to sense and connect with us somehow.”

“That—” I started. Then I stopped to think. That was a good point. I did feel a connection whenever I talked to them. All at once or one at a time didn’t matter; I still felt connected. It was one of the reasons I liked talking to them so much! That, and I didn’t like to feel lonely. “See, now I’m not sure,” I finally told him. “I can’t feel where any of you are. I have to see you, or hear you, or pick you up with gravimetry or mana sense or something like that. And I can’t hear what any of you are thinking.”

“Star, you’re… what? Nine days old?”

“Sort of? Or I’m as old as any of you are.”

“Sure. That’s fair. You have some of our memories and all. But, okay… what do you remember of me learning to use telepathy fully?”

“Not a lot, really. I mostly remember really emotional things, usually happy ones. So… Oh! I remember how happy you were when you read someone’s mind in the next room for the first time!”

That brought a huge smile to Harvin’s face. “Oh, yeah. That was such a good day. I didn’t think I could do it, because I couldn’t see her; I could barely feel that she was there at all. But, what about further back? Maybe a year earlier? I loved playing Tiger Tail with the other kids, and I never won because they kept dodging me too quickly, but then…”

“But then one day you started winning! You started guessing which way they’d juke!”

“Except I realized after the fifth or sixth time that I wasn’t guessing. I was listening! I wasn’t hearing what they were thinking; that took a few more months of practice. But I could tell what they intended to do. I’d been able to send since I was little, but this was the first time I was aware of hearing anything. And that’s how everyone starts. It’s like being a kid, really; first you make a lot of noise. Then you learn to listen.”

“And you think I can learn to listen, too?”

“It seems likely to me,” he said. He smiled thoughtfully. “Besides, a goddess needs to be able to hear her worshippers’ prayers, right? Even a little one.”

I laughed. “You’re funny, Harvin, do you know that?”

“If you say so, Star. You know what, though? Godling or not, I may be able to help you learn to listen.”

“Oh, that sounds fun!

“Does it? I was thinking it would be useful. But you know what? If you think it’ll be fun, I’m glad. We can try once I’m off duty, how about that?”

“That sounds great!”

*

“Matrix sealed… physical connections made… opening the mana channels now, and…”

Manufacturing Matrix active! Materials and manufacturing analysis now available.

New Construction options: Teletic Fabricator, Holistic Autolathe

New Production options: [...]

“And that’s it!” Varlanda finished triumphantly. “Can you feel it?”

“I can! And I can make… a lot of new things!”

A lot of things! A lot of them I didn’t even know what they were until I looked them up, and most I couldn’t make. Those all had a note that they were too complex, and that I couldn’t make them until my Manual Production skill was higher. But it was nice to be able to make things that weren’t Hull, and I could still make a lot of useful things — like plates, and mugs! And a lot of simple tools and clothes and pretty much anything that wasn’t made of too many materials or parts, really.

There were some weapons in there, too. Things with sharp edges and spikes, and things that only had one use, which I wasn’t ever going to make. I couldn’t remove them from the list, but at least they were easy to ignore.

While I chatted with Varlanda about how many little quality of life things I should be able to help them with now, I was also reporting to Temeri and telling Bekeri that I had some new things for him to build. They were still with Simeon on Gunship-Me, so he got to join the conversation, too. He didn't really contribute much, though.

“Teletic?” he asked. “What does that mean? Is that even a word?”

Temeri shook her head. “Couldn't say, Enchantress Tell. Artificer, what's your assessment?”

Bekeri's ears were as perked up as I had ever seen them. “Well, the autolathe is far too big for any of our bays, so we'll need to find a way around that. That, and we have the same problem as with the phase-disruptor: there are a lot of parts that I don't recognize and don't know if I can make. But, the fabricator! It’s not actually that big, and I should be able to build it using the tools I have! I can even tell you what it does, I just… don't quite understand how it does it.”

“And what is that?”

“Well, it's a fabricator, but I’ve never seen anything with specifications like this!” With the way Bekeri waved his slate around, I couldn't see how Temeri could possibly read anything, but she didn't seem bothered. “It should let me fabricate all kinds of components, given time and materials!”

“Such as the components you’re missing for the phase-disruptor?”

“And the thrusters, I hope. I must tell you, Captain, I’m very excited about seeing it in action!”

Temeri nodded slowly. “Excited enough to make it your top priority?”

“Absolutely, Captain!”

“Star, do we have the materials necessary for Artificer Bekeri to build this fabricator?”

“We most certainly do!” I told her, pulled along by Bekeri’s excitement. “I’ll need to recycle the gunship's reactor for some of the heavier elements, but I was going to do that anyway.” I was about to get to it so that Bekeri would be able to start on the fabricator immediately, when I remembered about radiation. “Um… you all should not be in this part of me when I do that.”

“Good thinking, Star,” Temeri said flatly. “Bekeri, Tell, anything you want to take a look at before we go back and let Star do what she needs to in order to disassemble the reactor safely?”

“Nothing that can't wait, Captain,” Simeon said. Bekeri agreed, eager to get back to the artifice bay.

“In that case, let’s finish up here and head on back for lunch. Bekeri, once we’ve eaten, I want you and Enchantress Tell to get to work on this fabricator. The sooner we can get a full complement of thrusters running, the better.” She paused then added, almost as an afterthought, “And Star? Wait until we’re back onboard before you pull that reactor apart, please.”

“That’s very funny, Temeri!”

Temeri didn’t laugh.

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Star! Don't dismantle the reactor yet, Star!