Starmind Chapter 27 (Patreon)

“What the hell are they thinking?”

Temeri wasn’t just saying that the duo on the Small Ship were doing something dumb; she was asking Harvin a legitimate question. Because the Small Ship changing its trajectory to close with us was definitely a very odd choice, and there had to be a reason for it. A reason that we might, hopefully, be able to guess if Harvin picked up anything from them clearly.

Breakfast was over the moment I told the Crew that the Small Ship had fired its thrusters. I felt bad about that, since they’d been having such a good time, but there was no way of knowing how important this was and I knew that they would’ve all been disappointed if I hadn’t told them as soon as I saw the flare. Besides, if I’d waited and Temeri found out, there was no way she’d ever agree to stop with the watch rotation nonsense and just let everybody sleep through the night if they wanted to.

Anyway. Breakfast was over, and the Crew had all moved to the bridge. Harvin was in his couch, concentrating on the Small Ship while I hummed quietly at him, and the others were gathered around the illusory board, where I was displaying our relative positions and trajectories, including the time to our closest point of approach.

The way things were going, there was no way the Small Ship could continue their manoeuvre; they’d never intercept us, but would pass about ten thousand miles in front of us in less than an hour… before falling into the upper atmosphere of Avara, travelling at nearly forty miles per second. We weren’t sure if they had some hidden reserve that would let them escape from there, but Beker and Temeri both doubted it very much. They wouldn’t need to change their burn much to be on an intercept trajectory, but that didn’t make any sense, either; a patrol boat of some kind and a gunship had failed to take us on, so this little observation craft didn’t stand much of a chance. Thus, our best guess was that they’d decided that we were unarmed, and that they simply wanted to get closer.

The question was: why?

“Are you getting anything, Alder?” Temeri asked, making her question a little more explicit this time.

“Still only emotion,” Harvin said absently. “I thought I heard a fragment of something a minute ago, and there have been some flashes of color, but that’s it. Star, what’s the distance between us?”

“Sixty-seven thousand miles,” I told him, and he laughed softly.

“Y’all should be impressed I’m getting anything at all from that far out! Damn! That’s all thanks to Star, you know?” He was silent for a few beats before adding, “Ah, Captain, ma’am. Sorry.”

“That’s alright, Alder,” Temeri said, and she really didn’t seem bothered by it. “What emotions are you picking up?”

“Frustration, mostly. Strong, too. Decent bit of fear. And some annoyance.”

“Sounds like they’re following orders they’re not happy about,” Simeon said.

“Sounds like,” Temeri agreed with a sigh. “Which suggests that something bigger is happening. We need to be ready to move again. Alder, I want you focused on that observer. Star, if you please, eyes over Avara’s horizon. If anything comes around that planet, I want to know the second it does.”

“Aye, Captain,” Harvin said before relaxing again.

“I’ll let you all know the moment I see anything!” I told them all.

Temeri drummed her fingers on the edge of the illusory board. “Have we salvaged everything important from that gunship?”

“I’m sure there are things I could have scrapped for parts,” Bekeri said, “but there just hasn’t been time.”

“I could recycle anything that’s left for materials,” I suggested. “I’ve left the thrusters and a lot of things like that just in case, but we can make new parts now. And we have a bunch of new storage space!”

“Do it,” Temeri said. “Artificer Bekeri, your time is better spent repairing what we have.”

Bekeri looked a little disappointed, but nodded. “As you say, Captain.”

“Healer Tell, we have all the supplies we inventoried, right?”

“All aboard and accounted for, Captain,” Simeon confirmed.

“Alright.” The drumming of Temeri’s fingers got faster. Then it suddenly stopped and she said, “In that case, all we can do is return to our respective duties and stay alert. Lunch at 1200 hours as normal, unless something happens.”

She turned her attention back to the illusory board, though there wasn’t much on it, and her fingers started up their drumming again. Then, when nobody moved, she looked back up and said, “Oh, that was a dismissal! You all know where you can do the most good better than I do. See you at lunch.”

Simeon, Varlanda and Bekeri headed for the access tube after a trio of somewhat confused Aye-Captains. Temeri stood there for a minute, then two. After five minutes I started getting worried, but she looked so deep in thought that I didn’t want to interrupt her. The rhythm of her fingers kept changing, and she blinked normally. She just didn’t move from the board or say anything.

I was considering asking Simeon to get back up there and just kind of stand in her field of vision when she sighed, nodded to herself, and said, “Star? We can’t go on like this.”

“What do you mean, Temeri?”

“All we’re doing is buying time. If we’re going to run, we need to keep running all the way back to Mundus. Which is an option, if we don’t mind spending a few months drifting, right?”

“Well…” I said thoughtfully. “Yes and no? I could pick up a lot of extra mass from Gunship Me before we go, so we should have a lot of options for escape trajectories and maneuver plans. And we could get up to some decent speed, I suppose, but it would still be months in the void. And once we get free of Avara there won’t be much of an ambient mana field, which is a real problem now that I’m running the gravity and heat and everything manually. That all takes mana. We’d need Bekeri to fix the field generators first, or stock up on mana crystals.”

“So not an attractive option at the moment,” Temeri summarized. “That leaves hiding. And if we’re going to hide, we need to actually hide somewhere we’re somewhat safe. Ideally somewhere with resources you can use.”

“We’d need to hide both our thermal and mana signatures, though,” I pointed out. “Otherwise they could just send out a few ships and find us.”

“Right. And how can we do that?”

“Um, well… Thermal is easy. We don’t really radiate unless our thrusters are burning. But the mana reactor is pretty noisy, or bright, or, uh… yeah, it’s hard to explain if you can’t sense it, but it’s noticeable. Maybe we could shut it down? I run a lot of the functions manually already, so I could—”

Temeri interrupted me. “Thank you, Star, I’d rather not if we can avoid it.”

“Oh. Okay. Um, I was going to say that I use a lot of mana, pretty much all the time. Even if I stop using the Development Matrix, I’d still be using a fair bit. So we’d still be pretty noticeable, just not as much.”

I knew that she was under a lot of pressure, but I couldn’t help but feel a little hurt at how quickly she’d rejected my suggestion. And she seemed to pick up on that.

“Sorry, Star,” she sighed. “I appreciate the suggestion. And I know, I… You only want to help. I know that. But we can’t rely entirely on you. If anything happens to you…”

“Oh, yeah. No, I understand,” I said, feeling bad because I only half believed her reason. She was right, though. I was running a lot of things manually, but everything except the gravity could run on their respective generators, powered by the reactor. If we shut down the reactor, and something happened that made it so I couldn’t keep everything up, then they wouldn’t have heat or air — not to mention no ability to maneuver — for the hour or so it would take to get the reactor running again.

It was still really hard to feel like she trusted me when she was that quick to shut me down. But we had a problem to solve, and no matter how I felt, I was going to do what I could to help.

“If we can’t make me dimmer,” I said. “Then we’ll need to hide somewhere that’s a lot brighter than I am, or somewhere that blocks my emissions completely.”

“The outer moons, or the signature in the rings?”

“Those are the only options I can see. And the weird mana signature is a lot closer.”

Temeri rolled her lips then said, “It is, isn’t it? Put it on the board, would you? The rings, too.”

I did as she asked, adding the expected position and relative velocity of the mana signature, whatever it was. It wasn’t in line of sight at the moment, but I’d seen enough of it to know that it was in a stable orbit, about forty five thousand miles higher than ours. I also added the rings as a disc, fifty thousand miles wide and with its inner edge at about seventy thousand miles above Avara’s surface. They were actually wider than that and divided into dozens of bands, but I didn’t bother with all the details. Temeri knew that as well as I did, and I was sure she’d ask if she wanted a more accurate picture.

Temeri leaned in close, staring at the little point of light representing the mana signature as though it had personally offended her. “Thank you, Star. Alder, are you with us?”

It took a moment before Harvin replied, “Captain?”

“Alder, you’ve observed the unknown mana signature in the rings, correct?”

“When I’ve had the opportunity, yes.”

“Anything from there? Anything at all?”

“No minds that I could sense, Captain. And we’ve passed close enough that I should have been able to tell… Unless they have someone actively masking them all the time.”

“Which wouldn’t work for long unless their Diviner has an external mana source, correct?”

“That's right, Captain. And if they never sleep. They'd be better off with a shrouding enchantment — a powered ritual, probably.”

Temeri nodded thoughtfully then asked, “Could you do it, Alder? Set up an enchantment to shroud us?”

“I could, Captain, with Tell’s help. There hasn't been much reason for it, though, with us being so visible.”

“But you could?”

“Sure. We’d essentially need to enchant Star entirely, which is far outside my skill set, but between her and I it should be doable. We’d need time, and a constant supply of crystals, but with the Enchantress’ help I think I could set something up in a few hours.”

“And Star, could you power the thrusters without the reactor, if you had to?”

“Yes?” I said uncertainly. Not because I wasn't sure — I definitely could — but because she'd just rejected the idea of shutting down the reactor a few minutes ago.

“Okay,” Temeri mused, turning back to the illusory board. Her fingers drummed up a storm. “Okay, good. Good. I’m going to need to think about this.”

“You have a plan, Captain?” Harvin asked.

“The beginnings of one.” Temeri didn’t take her eyes off the little light among the rings that represented the mana signature. “I need to think. Alder, verify with Enchantress Tell and let me know what you conclude. Then keep watching that ship and tell Star if you pick anything up. We’ll all talk it through after lunch.”

“Aye, Captain,” Harvin said and got out of his couch, quickly disappearing down the access tube.

After he’d gone, Temeri stood for another few seconds. Then she too went down the access tube, climbing down to the Crew level and heading for her cabin.

“Hey, Temeri?” I said before she reached her door. “Can I ask you something?”

She paused with her hand on the wall. “Go ahead, Star.”

“Um… It felt a little like you’d already thought about what we talked about; about being visible, and it being tricky to hide and all. Like you knew most of the answers to your questions already.”

“I… I wasn’t sure about some of it, but I had a good idea, yes.”

“So why didn’t you bring it up when everybody was on the bridge?”

She was silent for a few moments, then said, “In the interest of mutual understanding… If I tell you something in confidence, it stays between us, right?”

“Of course!” I tried to hide how excited I was at the idea of Temeri telling me something secret. I’d been so worried that she didn’t trust me, but if she told me something that she wanted to stay between us, then she must, right?

“Alright. If you must know, I wanted to talk to you about it first. Well, you and Alder; I needed his input. I didn’t want to bring it up with everyone in case I was wrong about something obvious.” She paused, then added. “You don’t judge. I can be wrong with you.”

I barely knew what to do with myself. I wished so very much that I had a little squishy body like she did, so I could hug her. But all I had was thousands of tons of metal, and I suspected that any telekinetic substitutes I might think of would upset her. In fact, I was pretty sure that showing her just how thrilled I was would make her uncomfortable. So I restrained myself. I didn’t mess with my telekinesis, or the gravity, or anything else. I didn’t even make any of the non-specific sounds I could remember or imagine people making when they were really excited. Instead I told her, very calmly, “I appreciate that, Temeri. It makes me very happy to hear that you feel that you can be vulnerable with me.”

Temeri closed her eyes and took a deep breath, letting it out slowly before saying, “I know that you mean that in a caring, positive way. Thank you for listening.”

Temeri came out of her cabin about an hour later. Besides Harvin verifying with Varlanda that, yes, they could set up the enchantment Temeri wanted, two things had happened by then. I’d told her about both of them using the normal speakers in her cabin; I couldn’t speak with her telepathically without being able to perceive her, but I could play sound in her living space just fine!

The two things were that, first, Harvin had started picking up what he called “chatter” from the small ship; single words or short phrases, or images and other sensory impressions which might be real-time, remembered, or imagined. The second was that the Small Ship had taken a new orbit, only about ten thousand miles higher than ours and stationary relative to us. Which meant that it wasn’t at all sustainable; they had to burn constantly to maintain that orbit, but I had thousands of tons of material available for emergency reaction mass conversion; they didn’t.

“Alder, report!” Temeri said as she reached the bridge. “What’re they thinking?”

“They’re scared, and frustrated, both of them,” Harvin said. He held up the slate where he’d noted everything he’d picked up, as direct quotes when it was in the form of words, and in shorthand descriptions for anything else. “One’s more scared than the other. I got the feeling that she might be a bit younger. She’s definitely louder, so I’ve mostly got her perspective. From what I can piece together, I’d say they expect reinforcements in the next ten hours at most. That’s how long they can maintain their current position relative to us, and the loud one’s pretty scared about ‘cutting it close.’ That phrase kept coming up, along with a pretty strong dose of fear. They’re both unhappy about being so close to us, too. I think the crews of both the ships we, ah… both the ships that attacked us were pretty well respected.”

“No confirmation on why they’ve approached?”

“No, Captain, but considering they’re holding what’s a pretty expensive orbit, I’d say they’re trying to get higher detail scans on us.”

“That does seem most likely, doesn’t it?” Temeri mused. “Anything else?”

“Nothing useful. This is all pieced together from some pretty fragmentary impressions, and there’s a lot of that not really mission related. Things they’d rather be doing, fond memories, that sort of thing. I’ve got some names, but not much to hang them on. Various thoughts about each other, everything from violent to less than chaste. Normal stuff. It’ll all be in the report.”

Temeri looked thoughtfully at the illusory board, where the Small Ship now sat in its new orbit, and the mana signature in the rings was coming over the horizon — it would be zooming past us over the next few hours before disappearing behind Avara again. “Thank you, Alder,” she said. “In your own time. Star, could you call the others up here, please? We’ll have that meeting before lunch. And start packing on extra mass for emergency conversion; we’re going to need it.”