Starmind Chapter 26 (Patreon)

“Oh, gods beyond! This is goooood!” Varlanda groaned as she floated in the middle of the pool in just her underwear, stretching the last word for several seconds. “Thank you, Captain!”

“‘Temeri’, please,” the captain murmured back. She was laying with her head on the edge of the pool, submerged up to her chin as she looked out the large window I’d put all along the curve of the space. I’d filled the room with a very low, warm light, and I was actively getting rid of the steam in the air, so the stars outside were bright and clear. “Off-duty rules are permanently in effect in the pool. New ship rule. And thank Star. She’s the one who did the work.”

“Aye, aye!” the rest of the Crew chorused, followed by a mess of overlapping thanks that filled the space and felt like they were giving my heart a hug.

They were all spread out around the pool; for once, no one was on watch. And all of them, except Bekeri, were delightfully relaxed — Bekeri sat by the edge of the water, swatting at it sceptically. To be fair, he didn't even take showers the way the others did; he used wet, soapy towels instead.

“Star,” Varlanda continued, “I’ve told you before, but you're amaaazing. How did you get the water so perfect?”

“Complete control of the mineral content and temperature!” I told them proudly. It was easy, too; I had that as a part of the water recycling functions of the waste management system. The tricky part had been figuring out what temperature they’d prefer, but Varlanda had some very pleasant memories of a spa resort she'd gone to between university and joining the astral navy. I’d guessed based on those, and then I’d cheated, increasing the temperature a tiny bit until they all looked appropriately relaxed.

Then I backpedalled a little. “Okay, not complete control. Getting it much below freezing would start getting tricky. But boiling it would be super easy!”

“No! No, thank you, Star,” Temeri groaned. She spoke into the air, not moving at all from where she lay, her eyes fixed on the stars outside. “No boiling. Vee’s right. This is perfect.”

The silence that fell over the bath chamber was broken by the soft sloshing of Simeon turning to look at Temeri with a goofy grin. “Vee?”

“Hmm?” both Temeri and Varlanda said at the same time.

“You called her ‘Vee’, Cap— uh, Temeri,” he said, and he sounded as pleased as I felt.

“Did I?” Temeri asked at the same time Varlanda asked, “Did she?” and they both sounded so comfortable and relaxed I was pretty sure neither was at all interested in the answer. “I guess I did,” Temeri said. She still hadn’t moved so much as her eyes.

“Hm-hmm,” Simeon chuckled. “That’s nice.” He slowly launched himself across the pool with a lazy backstroke, his wake making his sister bob gently on the surface. “You have any nicknames, Temeri?”

There was another long, expectant silence, which wasn’t broken until Temeri said, “Not since I was a kid.” She was silent for another while before saying, “You called me ‘Cap’ just now. I kind of like that.”

“Doesn’t that violate off-duty rules? Still sounds pretty formal. How about Ree-Ree?”

Temeri scoffed softly. But while the distance and the low light hid her pleased smile from the others, I saw, and it just made me so happy to see.

“Pretty sure she could write you up for insubordination for calling her that, no matter when or where,” Varlanda said, slowly drifting closer to the edge. “What do you say, Cap?”

“I like ‘Cap’,” she repeated, and that was that.

“Whatever you call Varlanda, she’s right about Star being amazing,” Harvin said after a while. “How long would any other ship have been laid up in a shipyard to add a whole deck?”

“Two weeks at least,” Bekeri said confidently. He’d moved to sitting on the edge, slowly kicking his feet in the water. “That’s if they prioritized her. Although that would include installing all fittings and equipment.”

“I’m finishing that right now!” I said indignantly. And it was mostly true! This was about an hour before I finished up. I only needed to move the Crew quarters and all those things another foot or so and then make sure that everything was solidly in place, and I’d be done. Mostly. There was still a quarter of the new habitation deck that needed filling, and half of the old Crew deck was a big, empty space, but still!

“Finished or not, adding the structure for a whole deck to a vessel your size in a single day is still impressive,” Bekeri reassured me. “Besides, it would take a nation-level effort of magic to reduce the mass of that vessel by several percent, so you’re incomparable by default.”

“Thank you,” I said, very much mollified by his words. Then I remembered something very important! “Oh! I can’t believe I forgot! I unlocked Basic Mana Developments two hours ago! I wanted to talk to you all before I pick a new one!”

“Ooo!” Varlanda said, waking up a bit. “That’s fun! Let’s talk about that!”

Everybody became a little more alert and nobody disagreed, so I eagerly laid out the options. “Okay! So, there are four new options. The first one is really boring: Mana Pool Capacity. Why would I even want a bigger mana pool right now? And then there’s Medium Basic Mana Crystals, which I’m guessing would need more mana to create than I can have in my pool right now, so I don’t think they’re an option yet. But the last two are interesting, and I can’t make up my mind.”

“I don’t think we should count anything out too quickly, but what are you choosing between?” Simeon said. “I’m guessing one is maximum regeneration speed?”

“Yes! The first is Maximum Mana Regeneration, which would be great. But the other is Mana Regeneration Efficiency, and that sounds really interesting, too. I’m just not entirely sure what it does.”

It was the word “efficiency” that was giving me trouble. As far as I could tell there weren’t any inefficiencies to address with my mana regeneration. The ambient mana field had a certain strength, and my mana pool was refilling as fast as that field strength allowed. Where did the efficiency come in?

“Oh, that’s simple,” Varlanda said. “Assuming it’s using standard nomenclature, your mana regeneration efficiency is how efficiently, not effectively, you interact with the ambient mana field. Most enchantments that rely on ambient rather than channeled mana have a pretty poor efficiency. Pushing the effectiveness of the interaction is easy, up to a point — you just add more effector runes — but the efficiency is all about how the runes interact with each other. It’s really tricky, and improving it is an important area in the field of enchantment theory.”

“If it’s a choice between maximum or actual rate, it’s an easy choice, isn’t it?” Bekeri said. “We want to maximize development speed until things change. We can artificially increase the local field strength by allowing mana crystals to decay, so efficiency is only a concern when we can’t afford the crystals anymore. You don’t mind setting up a few more Mana Condensation Matrices, do you, Varlanda?”

“Getting pretty good at it,” Varlanda said. She didn’t exactly agree, I noticed.

“Hold up one second, Bekeri,” Temeri said. “That assumes we have the rare elements needed to keep producing matrix blanks, and that we don’t need them, or Vee’s time, for anything else. We’re currently using… what, nine crystals every thirty-three hours? Is that right?”

“Thirty-three hours and twenty minutes,” Bekeri confirmed.

“So that’s…” Temeri was quiet for a moment. “A bit over a quarter crystal per hour. And we’ve got three Condensation Matrices running, producing a little over half a crystal per hour. So we could feasibly increase the local field strength by the same amount indefinitely, and we’d be breaking even, but that’s it. Star, how are we doing for whatever is needed for the blanks?”

“Umm…” I quickly checked the stores. “We could make another three or so blanks, but that’s it.”

“And those materials aren’t used only for blanks, right?”

“Well, no. Anything that manipulates mana, really. Some of them are going into replacement parts for the thrusters, for example.”

“Alright. Bekeri, I’m not discounting your opinion, but I think we need to be a bit sparing with our resources. Now, I think we all agree that increasing Star’s maximum mana regeneration is a given. The faster she can finish these developments, the faster we can reap the benefits. Agreed?”

Nobody disagreed, but Temeri waited until everyone had said something. When she continued, there was something in her voice that I hadn’t heard much of. She sounded almost excited!

“Good! But we only benefit from increasing it up to a certain point. If we want to optimize the rate of new development acquisition, we need to know what that point is so we can balance rate and efficiency developments. So, Star, my suggestion is that you start improving your maximum regeneration rate immediately. When it’s finished we look at how much you gained, and then we reevaluate. Is that acceptable to you?”

“Uh… sure?” I said. “That sounds great, actually!”

From over by the curved edge of the pool, where she’d drifted to after Simeon’s little swim, Varlanda giggled. “What’s this, Cap? Are you having fun?”

“I—” Temeri broke off, and I couldn’t read her; the way she smiled just a tiny bit as she sank a little more into the water, until she was submerged almost to her mouth. “It’s nice to have a simple problem to solve. Something with an objectively correct answer.”

There was only the sound of water sloshing until Simeon said, “You don't get a lot of those right now, do you? Vee and Bekeri build and maintain, Harv keeps his eyes on the sky, I mostly keep all the inventory up to date… and you try to plan for every eventuality, to solve problems that might kill us, hoping that your answers are right.”

Temeri didn't respond. She sighed, closed her eyes, and slowly slid down until her head was below the water. She stayed there until she couldn't hold her breath any longer. And after she came up again, for the rest of the evening everyone was a little friendlier with her — joking and asking her questions and generally treating her a little more like one of them, and not their captain who’d temporarily relaxed the rules.

It was the happiest I’d seen her.

Of course, eventually, at around 2300 hours, their quarters were in place. After a long day and two hours in a hot bath they were all sleepy, and the evening ended for everyone except Simeon, who had the watch.

“It’s a good thing you put in those showers right by the bath,” he told me as he walked around the big, empty space where all the living areas had been, on the old Crew deck. “If I hadn’t been able to take a long, cold shower right away to wake myself up, I’d be dead on my feet right now. That, or I’d’ve had to use one of our stamina potions. Gods beyond, Star, Vee wasn’t kidding when she called that bath perfect. My muscles feel like pudding! I’m pretty sure I fell asleep for a bit, right there in the water!”

“Oh, you did!” I confirmed. “I don’t think anyone noticed, though. It was only for a few minutes, and everyone was so focused on Temeri.”

“Right, that,” he said. “I’m a little embarrassed, you know?”

“Falling asleep is nothing to be embarrassed about. You all had a long day!”

“Not that,” he laughed. “About the captain. I should have realized earlier. She never really gets to finish anything, you know? Most of her role right now, besides making decisions, is worrying and planning. I should have seen how stressed it was making her. I mean, I knew that she was stressed, that was obvious, but I just ascribed it to specific things — like the bogeys that were after us, or not knowing how to deal with you. Then she said that thing about how nice it was to have a problem she could really solve, and it became so clear! This isn’t the kind of command she signed up for. It was a short mission with a specific purpose, and we were supposed to stay near Mundus, in constant communication. Clearly defined criteria for success or failure. No unknowns, except whether the tele Matrix would work as we hoped. Simple. And then everything went wrong, and she has no way of knowing how long we’ll be out here, or what we might run into, and she feels that she has to plan for everything. And she never gets to just be done.”

He took a deep breath, and heaved a great, big sigh. “And then, instead of talking to her about it in private, I just went and blurted out my thoughts right in front of the others. I can’t tell you just how grateful I am that she took it as well as she did.”

“I’m so happy that you did,” I told him, hoping that my tone got across just how much I meant that. “Everybody was so nice to her afterward. I don’t know if you could see, but I’m pretty sure she smiled more tonight than she has in the last ten days.”

“Did she? That’s good to hear. I thought she looked more relaxed than usual when she walked past me to the showers, but, I mean… that’s a really good pool you’ve set up for us.”

“Thank you! And yes, she smiled a lot, when nobody but me could see.” Like when she had her head half underwater. She did that a lot. “She really liked being treated as one of you.”

“I suppose it’s lonely at the top,” Simeon mused. “She doesn’t talk much during off-duty time, you know. You can tell she’s always interested, always paying attention to the conversation. But as long as it’s personal talk she doesn’t say much unless you ask her a direct question, does she?”

“Yeah,” I agreed, and then, without thinking, continued, “She never had many friends. I don’t think she really knows how to just talk to people outside the chain of command.”

“Really?” Simeon asked curiously, and I realized what I’d just said.

In my defense, we’d just been talking about how happy Temeri had been to be included. And while she didn’t really have any happy memories related to friends, as such, she did have a few where people had tried. Simple things, like inviting her along for activities or pulling her into conversations. Nothing much had come of it, I guessed, but still. She’d liked it enough for me to get those memories of hers. So of course I was thinking much more about what might make her happy, than about what she might want to keep private!

“Oh! Oh no, forget that!” I said frantically. Oh, this was bad! “I shouldn’t have told you that!”

“Star, calm down. It’s fine!”

“No! No, it’s not fine! She hasn’t told anyone that! She hasn’t told me that! I just know because… Simeon, she’ll be so upset if she finds out I told anyone!”

“We don’t know that,” Simone said calmly. “But sure, it’s not an unreasonable assumption. I won’t tell her, or anyone else, okay?”

“Do you promise?”

“I promise, Star. And don’t feel too badly, okay? It was a slip of the tongue. It happens.”

“But it would hurt her so much!” I said miserably. “You really won’t tell her, will you? Or anyone else?”

“I really won’t. But I will try to get her to talk a little more. You know, make her feel a little less like Captain Carlon, and a little more like just Temeri. During off-duty times, of course.”

That made me feel a little better, and I told him, “Thank you. I think that would be really good for her.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

*

Breakfast was usually pretty relaxed, except when there was an immediate existential threat hanging over our heads, but that morning it was especially friendly.

Nobody ever commented on Temeri getting up a whole hour after everyone else, despite her not having a watch. They all knew, though no one ever talked about it, that she hadn’t been sleeping well for our first few days together, and that she’d promised me to get more sleep. They all just moved their normal breakfast time up by an hour so she could eat with them, and that was that.

This morning was the same, and yet completely different. Harvin had been the first to suggest something, saying, “Hey, didn’t the Captain seem a bit more cheerful last night? Maybe we could just… continue treating her like that?” And the others agreed, and that was that.

It was strange, really. I’d hoped they’d make Temeri feel more included, but the way they did it wasn’t anything I would have guessed. The biggest difference that morning was that everybody was just a little more irreverent toward Temeri. Not in the sense that anyone was disrespectful to her, it was just… even during off-duty times, everyone in the Crew had always treated Temeri with more respect, or maybe more restraint, than they treated each other. They may have called her by name, but there was still very much an air of her being Captain Carlon. That morning, before anyone could reply when Temeri came into the rec room and said, “Good morning, crew,” Simeon tossed something at her from across the room.

“Morning, Cap!” he said as she startled and snatched the fruit out of the air. “Does that look alright to you?”

“Uh… um…” Temeri looked at the small, round fruit like she’d never seen one before, despite having had one just the previous day. She was even one who found the box of them in the mess on Gunship Me in the first place! “Yes?” she finally said after turning it over a few times. “Looks fine to me?” Then she added, a little reproachfully, “A little bruised now, perhaps.”

“That’s what I said!” Sim said. “See, Harv? They’re fine!”

“I’m telling you, mine was browning,” Harvin shot back.

“You still ate it!”

“I’m not throwing away fruit! Who knows when we’ll get more?”

“I’m with Cap.” Varlanda crunched through half of one of the small fruits in a single bite then said, her mouth full, “Frood’s fine!”

Temeri looked confused about the whole situation, but there was a little smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. While Harvin and Simeon bickered playfully she sat down. She took a bite of her fruit, chewed it slowly and said, a little uncertainly, “Mine’s fine. I don’t know what Harvin’s on about.”

“See?” Simeon said triumphantly, and tossed another fruit to Harvin. “Cap’s with me. Eat and be merry.”

And they did! They ate — though they saved the rest of the fruit and went back to nutrient paste. We all talked about what to do with the empty space, and we joked, and Temeri might have actually laughed, just a little.

Then the pirates or whatever they were in the Small Ship had to go and spoil it all by doing something stupid like lighting up their thrusters.