Starmind Chapter 52 (Patreon)

Hello, and apologies! I meant to post this last night, but I had a lovely night out with my wife and I just plain forgot. Enjoy!

//AB

Staking out Erebus Prime was surprisingly boring. Nobody knew that we were there, so while we stayed vigilant, there was nothing to be actively scared of. There was nothing in our direction, so no one approached, even by coincidence, and whoever was in that hidden ship that Harvin had detected didn’t look for us again. The closest we came to danger for a while was when Harvin caught a faint trace of that Diviner; his best guess was that she’d been wondering if she’d been wrong, but then she got distracted and never got around to trying to find us again.

That left everyone but Harvin with a lot of time, and just like Temeri had said, she left them to do what they thought best. In Bekeri’s case that meant working twelve hours per day on the Autolathe; in Varlanda’s, preparing Matrix blanks for the Medical Synthesizer, a Mana Battery, and another Mana Condensation Matrix in between rounds of studying and doing maintenance on my Core and the Matrices we already had.

Simeon could only do so much with the hydroponics, which left him with a lot of time to fill. He spent some of it on making sure the others ate and drank, bringing them snacks that I could have easily just teleported, but most of the time he spent on one of the sickbay beds, reading The Aspiring Florimancer’s Primer. For something intended for beginners—young students of magic, even, judging by the language and how many cute illustrations there were—it was surprisingly thick! But, again, there were a lot of illustrations, and a lot of diagrams that I had no idea what they were, but Simeon studied very carefully.

“It’s really very interesting,” he said during lunch on the third day of our stake-out. “I knew that there would be overlap between healing and druidic magic; I just didn’t realize how much!”

It was the first time he’d brought it up with the others, other than mentioning that he’d be trying to learn some druidic magic, but I knew that he wasn’t just making conversation; he really wanted to tell everybody about it. There was an energy to him that I hadn’t seen before he started studying his book, an enthusiasm that wasn’t out of character, but which just hadn’t been there before. Simeon was usually optimistic and talkative, but now he was truly excited about something.

“How so?” Bekeri asked curiously, taking a break from lapping from his bowl of savory, spicy flavor paste. “I mean, obviously salveomancy and florimancy are both forms of vitakinesis, so they must necessarily have things in common, considering—”

“But what specifically?” Simeon asked, smiling as Bekeri worked his way into a little lecture.

“Well. Yes. Vee’s magic and my own—” he said, pausing to nod to Varlanda, at the end of the table, “both focus on solid materials and mana conductivity, but with very different specializations. I imagine it’s something similar?”

“Yes!” Simeon agreed, pointing his spoon at Bekeri. “They’re both about manipulating the vitality of living things; which, as you said, is obvious. I’ve just never bothered to learn just how similar the underlying techniques are. It’s no wonder so many druids make competent first responders! If I’m reading the diagrams right—and I’m going to be trying some things this afternoon to see if I am—forcing a plant to grow isn’t all that different from actively keeping someone alive by circulating mana the right way. Of course, I doubt it’s quite that simple or there wouldn’t be any split between different disciplines of life mages, but I’m pretty confident that I can push a plant to mature without blowing it up!”

“Gods of the void, that would be great,” Varlanda sighed, shoving a big spoon of paste into her mouth and swallowing quickly. “This is lightyears beyond what we used to have, but I’m looking forward to those eggplants you’re growing. Love me some eggplant.”

“She’s not kidding,” Simeon confirmed. “She’d eat them right off the bush when we were kids. Tried to blame it on the goat when grams came asking.”

“Grams didn’t have a goat!” I added helpfully.

“No, no she didn’t!” Simeon laughed, as Varlanda’s ears turned a soft pink. “Didn’t stop Vee from trying! After the first few times Grams would just sigh and mutter something like, ‘Looks like Haperly’s goat got loose again…’”

With a great groan, Varlanda covered her face with her hands. “Gods, I thought I was getting away with it for ages!”

“Wait, you kept doing it?” Temeri asked, eyes wide. “It didn’t make you sick or anything?”

“Well, no?” Varlanda said.

“Is that… I’m sorry, I truly don’t mean to be offensive in any way, but is that an elf-blooded thing?”

“Uh… not at all offended,” Varlanda replied, glancing at Simeon, who shrugged. He looked as non-plussed as she did. “But no. You can just… eat them. Though most people prefer them cooked.”

“Oh.” Now it was Temeri’s turn to blush. “I just never… I don’t think I ever saw a raw eggplant. They always came in a dish. Or in a jar at the commissary.”

Simeon leaned over slowly and patted her gently on the shoulder a few times. “You haven’t missed anything,” he told her. “They’re better cooked.”

“Hey, she should try it!” Varlanda said.

“With a bit of salt on!” I agreed.

“Right! Thank you!” Varlanda said, patting the wall. With her other hand she measured out about a quarter inch between her thumb and index finger. “Slice it about yea thick, and sprinkle some salt on it. It’s great! But maybe don’t just take a bite of one,” she added. “Not sure what I was thinking when I did that.”

*

The first bean sprout that Simeon tried to mature by magic blew up. So did the second one. He wasn’t at all discouraged, telling me, “I’m pretty sure I know what I did wrong!”

The third one blew up, too. It was really weird to see a tiny little stalk with two tiny leaves just go Pop and turn into green goo.

After that Simeon went back to the book. He didn’t mention his trouble during dinner, and no one asked.

He tried once more before bed that night. This time, two new little leaves grew in record speed above the first two. Then the sprout blew up.

Simeon was ecstatic, and barely stopped talking about it until he went to sleep.

*

I was good at doing more than one thing at a time, so while I helped the Crew I also kept an eye on every sensor I had. I also tried to listen to every wide transmission anyone made anywhere nearby.

That was much less interesting than it might sound like, since nothing was particularly useful. Most of the transmissions I picked up were either people asking very nicely—or sometimes not so nicely, if they were big and important—to dock with the station. Many others were people being incredibly rude to each other for various reasons, though a lot of the rudeness seemed to be confusingly friendly. People kept laughing after they called each other terrible things, or threatened to do something horrible to each other. It was all very strange.

No matter what we all did, one thing always got done: my Developments. I honestly felt a little embarrassed about it sometimes. The Crew all had to work really hard studying and practicing to get better at things, and all I had to do was feed mana into my Development Matrix. But then I focused on the important thing, which was that every Development helped us all, a little or a lot, and that made me feel better about it. It was worth being a little self-conscious about how easy I had it if it meant making things easier for everybody.

On the first morning after we arrived at our station, I unlocked Basic Thruster Developments. That gave me access to two new options: Thruster Effect, and Thruster Efficiency. They were both pretty simple. Effect increased the maximum safe output of all my thrusters, and Efficiency decreased the power and reaction mass necessary to achieve any given level of thrust. That was important, because the Effect Development didn’t increase output for free; making use of that extra maximum thrust would cost us, and the drive was near capacity as it was.

Over the first three days after our arrival, I picked up two levels in each of Effect and Efficiency, increasing my maximum thrust by about fifteen percent at no extra costs. That way I should be able to burn at somewhere between ten and eleven Gs with Bekeri’s help, which was very good for a mid-sized ship like myself. It wasn’t quite enough to knock Temeri out if she was in her couch and I was compensating, but I was getting there!

After that I wasn’t sure what to do. There were just so many Developments I wanted, both to improve myself and to help the Crew: more mana, faster manufacturing, and better furniture were only a few of my options, and all were equally attractive. So I asked for help. It was around 2100 hours on that third day—around the same time as Simeon had some small success with his plant magic—and Temeri was reading in the rec room when I asked her what she thought I should do.

“Well, if you can’t decide, do you have anything that would help with our mission here?” she asked without looking up from her slate. “Reducing your mass or increasing your maximum thrust even further wouldn’t be a bad choice.”

“You just want me to knock you out,” I accused her jokingly.

“I want you to be able to,” she said. “There’s a very big difference. But couldn’t you just put all the options in an updated list and send it to my slate? Let me see what you have.”

“That’s brilliant!”

Why hadn’t I thought of that? I did as she’d asked, and her eyes scanned down the list until she reached a line almost at the bottom. Her eyes opened wide and she sat up straight, saying, “Sensors! Definitely unlock sensors!”

Before I even knew what I was doing, I’d started the Development. Then the embarrassment came. It was so obvious!

“I, um… I hadn’t really considered that one,” I admitted. “I guess I’m not very mission focused.”

Temeri smiled, patting the wall the way the others sometimes did. “That’s alright, girl. You just focus on taking care of us, and I’ll worry about the mission. Now, this will take a little while, correct?”

“A bit less than twenty-six and a half hours.”

“Alright. So it’ll be night when it finishes. When it does, if you want my opinion, go for anything that increases the sensitivity of your sensors. Resolution and refresh rate would also be good. Honestly, I can’t think of anything that wouldn’t help, though pure sensitivity would probably be most helpful.”

“Aye, aye, Captain!” I confirmed. Those two little words, “most helpful,” filled me with purpose. It was so nice to just know what to do!

*

The fourth day started very much like the others. Breakfast with some small talk about things the Crew had read or music they’d listened to, or about what they planned to do that day. Temeri was with Varlanda, who planned to get the new Mana Condensation Matrix finished and online; between her and Temeri, they could run the regular fabricator and make a housing without Bekeri’s help. And Harvin was planning to look closer at some hotspots of mental activity on the surface of Erebus. They corresponded to surface installations that Tammeron’s intelligence said were used for some of the Order’s more sensitive projects, and he thought he’d have a better chance of picking up something useful there than from the ships in orbit.

He still didn’t dare focus closely on the station itself. There were too many people to get anything clearly, he said, and probably quite a few high level Diviners. The risk of detection just wasn’t worth the small chance of getting anything valuable.

Then, around 0900 hours, just as everyone was really getting into whatever they were doing, things got very scary very quickly.

It began with Harvin’s face screwing up in concentration. “Someone…” he muttered. “They… that Diviner. Looking… she’s looking for—” Then he sat bolt upright, eyes wide and hands gripping the sides of his couch, and he exclaimed, “The captain! Get the captain! She’s seen us!”

Only a few seconds later, before Temeri and the others even made it to the access tube, a comms beam hit us. It was too weak to have been aimed at us directly; my guess was that they only knew roughly where we were, and were sending in a limited cone. When I told Temeri, as she was still climbing, she agreed.

“Everybody, to your couches!” Temeri commanded. “Star, is Bekeri by the drive yet?”

“He’s standing by,” I confirmed.

“Contents of the message?”

“No message. Just a request to establish a connection.”

“Any movement?”

“None. Nothing I can see, anyway.”

Temeri drummed her fingers on her armrests, her eyebrows scrunching together, and she said, “Alder, any changes?”

“She knows we’re here,” he said, and his voice was almost entirely clear. He didn’t even need to go deep to feel the other Diviner now. “She’s sending, too. No words, but pushing calm and patience. Trying to get us to talk.”

“Which would reveal our exact position,” Temeri said sourly. “Which may not even matter, since they know where we are close enough to shine a beam on us. Damn it! Star, tell Bekeri to stand by for immediate drive boost, and prepare to activate the Phase Disruption Field Generator. Then establish a comms link. Let’s see what these people want before we bug out.”

“Captain,” Harvin said, “you should know… there’s some urgency to what that Diviner’s pushing at me. She really wants us to talk to them.”

“Thank you, Alder. I’ll keep that in mind. Star?”

I’d gone through the whole dance of connecting with the other ship in the time it took Harvin to speak his first sentence. Narrow light beams searching out comms arrays on each other's hulls, identifying which protocols we had in common, all that. And since we had each other’s locations exact to less than an inch in any direction now, we were also painting each other with limited active sensors, the ones that wouldn’t scatter all over the local volume and give us away.

Their ship was smaller than me by a fair bit, but I guessed they had four to six crew; I was built as a science ship, after all, and had extra space and facilities compared to any military ship. They also had two of what I was sure were weapons, one fore, one aft. That was awful. I didn’t like that they were prepared to dish out violence. But those weapons looked a lot like what the Gunship had used to shoot phase-cycling mana pulses at me, which was good. We should be able to defend ourselves against those while running away.

I noted all that while Temeri spoke. “Ready whenever you are, Captain,” I answered her.

“In that case, send the following, then open two-way communications: This is Temeri, captaining the Star. We have no desire for violence, but will defend ourselves if we must. To whom am I speaking?”

The voice that replied was male, deep, and drawling. Relaxed—almost a little sleepy. “Captain Temeri, a pleasure, I hope. Khani here, speaking for the Fever Dream. Captain, I’ll get right to the point. Would we be correct in thinking that you’re here to keep an eye on the station circling this hunk of rock?”

Before answering, Temeri turned to Harvin. She didn’t need to tell me not to transmit as she asked, “Are you getting anything, Alder?”

“Something, Captain. He doesn’t sound it, but there’s that sense of urgency again. Bit of hope, maybe, like he said. He’s hard to pin down, though. A few others on that ship, but they’re too murky to make out, except the Diviner.”

Before Temeri answered this Khani fellow, he spoke again, beginning with a soft laugh before saying, “Talking to your Diviner, Captain? No worries. Take your time. We all do it, even if we don’t usually admit it.”

For some reason, Varlanda thought that was funny enough to snort softly, and Temeri blushed from the tips of her ears all the way down to her neck. Her voice was steady, though, when she replied.

“I was,” she admitted. “And we are. Can I assume from your own stealth measures that you’re doing the same?”

“You can, and we are. And, Temeri… sorry, Captain, can I call you Temeri? We don’t much stand on titles, you see.”

Temeri waited a beat, scowling before her face smoothed and she said, “I’d prefer you didn’t. Not yet, at any rate.”

“Alright, as you wish, Captain.” There was a pause, and I guessed that Khani was listening to someone because when he continued he said, “Right, right. I’m sure you want to know why we risked breaking cover to contact you.”

“I must confess that I’m curious, yes.”

“Well, Captain, the thing is, we’re in a bit of a bind. And you’re the first ship we’ve dared contact. Captain Temeri, on behalf of my network, I want to ask for your help.”