Starmind Chapter 55 (Patreon)

The Fever Dream’s crew were all unsettled when I turned my attention back to them, but none more so than Liri, their Artificer. I really needed to do something about that.

“Hello, sorry about that!” I told them. “Something very important came up.”

“What were you thinking?!” Liri immediately cried, glaring at the ceiling. “You can’t say something like, ‘If you don’t get along…’ and then just stop!”

“Oh,” I said guiltily. It was my misunderstandings with Temeri all over again. “Yes, I can see how that might be worrying. Sorry about that. I was going to say that if you all don’t get along we can’t just let you move about the ship however you want. But that’s not important right now!”

“Not important?” the Artificer barked as Mel tried to soothe her. “You’re talking about our freedom! That’s flaring important!”

“Okay, yes,” I agreed, “but your reactor is about to blow up, so we need to talk about that instead. First of all, did you know?”

She didn’t have anything to say to that. At least not right away.

“Are you sure?” Nahij asked. “I can assure you that we haven’t seen any indication of danger. Liri and Fever both have been running diagnostics daily, and the reactor’s been perfectly stable, if running at terribly reduced capacity.”

“I want to speak with your Artificer,” Liri demanded suddenly, her tone flat and tense. “Whoever they are, they’re wrong.”

“Well, no. They’re not,” I countered. “So you all agree that you had no idea that your reactor’s dangerously unstable?”

“I refuse to believe that until I see some kind of evidence,” Liri bit out. “Your Artificer. Now!”

“I’m sure he’d be happy to talk,” I replied, trying not to take offence at her tone. She was all kinds of nervous, I reminded myself, and now I was telling her that she might have missed something terribly dangerous. I really couldn’t blame her for getting snippy. “I’ll check with him and the captain.”

As I did that—and both Temeri and Bekeri were happy to have him speak with the Fever Dream’s Artificer—I had a conversation with Fever.

“Hello, Fever,” I said using Mind-to-Mind messaging. “Star here. There’s something very serious going on that we need to talk about.”

“Hello, Star!” Fever replied anxiously. “Is everyone okay? I’m sure they are, but are they?”

“Your crew are fine. A little worried, but comfortable. Were you listening to me talking to my own Crew just now?”

“Oh, about the reactor?” Fever asked, again with that same anxious tone.

“Yeah. Did you know about it?”

“I did not!” it replied confidently. “And Liri didn’t say anything about it either. Are you sure that there’s something wrong? Liri is very good at her job.”

“I’m sure that she is,” I replied sincerely. “So is Bekeri, and he didn’t see anything either. But I’m completely sure that the reactor is going to blow up unless we shut it down, so I’m going to need you to do that.”

By then I’d assimilated enough of the engineering space to shut the reactor down myself, but I could only imagine how unpleasant it would be if someone did that to me.

“Oh, um, I don’t think I’m allowed to do that on your say-so,” Fever replied apologetically. “You’re not part of the network.”

“But you might blow up,” I pointed out, very reasonably.

“Yeah, but still. Sorry.”

And there was one of the major differences between what I’d been, and who I was. Fever was a Crystal Mind. I wouldn’t say that Fever didn’t care if it blew up, because its crew would be sad and that would be terrible, but Fever didn’t care about itself. If it had to make a choice between going against protocol or ceasing to exist, it would simply let itself be destroyed.

“Okay,” I said. “Who would you need orders from? Would anyone in the, uh, network do?”

“Technically, yes! But since it’s the reactor, I’d really prefer if it was Liri. Otherwise I’d need the others to agree.”

That sounded very similar to my own protocols from before. Temeri could decide on anything unless the entire Crew overruled her, but if she was incapacitated, anything engineering related would be under Bekeri’s authority or the rest of the Crew in agreement. But Fever’s crew didn’t have a captain, so authority probably fell to who was the expert.

“Give me a moment, then,” I said. “I’ll talk to your crew and see what they say.”

If they didn’t agree, I was shutting that reactor down anyway, but Fever really didn’t need to know that just yet.

The whole short conversation had only taken a moment, so Bekeri was still on his way up to speak with Liri.

“Fever is being stubborn about shutting down the reactor,” I told him as he climbed the access tube. “It wants Liri’s okay.”

“To be expected,” he replied. “Very well, we shall just have to convince her. Supply me with any information you don't expect me to have readily at hand, would you?”

“Will do!”

We had Liri come out of their quarters, and she and Bekeri sat down in the rec room. What followed was an intensely technical conversation that would probably have been terribly boring to anyone who wasn't an Artificer or a ship. Liri practically interrogated Bekeri; she was very upset about even the suggestion that her ship might be a danger to us all, and for every answer Bekeri gave her she had more questions. She really didn't like that I could detect things that Fever and her own diagnostic tools couldn't. For the longest time she acted almost insultingly suspicious, as though we had anything to gain from asking Fever to shut down their reactor. In the end, though, she accepted what Bekeri was telling her, and I was pretty sure that it was his attitude more than anything that convinced her.

Bekeri didn't take the slightest offense to her attitude. I wasn't sure that he even noticed, to be honest. He answered every question enthusiastically, sometimes immediately, sometimes pausing as though to think while I fed him information telepathically. Overall he treated the whole thing as a rousing discussion with a colleague about the mechanics of mana reactors and possible ways for them to catastrophically fail, and faced with that, with his open admissions of ignorance when he wasn't sure of something and his earnest invitations for her to theorize with him on alternative ways to explain what I was seeing, Liri's resistance slowly crumbled.

It was rather wonderful. I couldn't remember ever seeing Bekeri so animated and happy!

“So you’ll ask it to shut down the reactor, then?” Bekeri asked once Liri had reluctantly agreed that yes, it did indeed sound like a reasonable precaution.

“I suppose so,” she replied. She was slumped on her bench and sounded incredibly tired. “Shall we?”

“Does Fever have reserve power?”

“Ship’s got reserve.”

“Then by all means! The sooner, the better!”

As the two Artificers made their way down the access tube—climbing all the way down to the engineering space, where Liri looked around in awe—I quickly dismantled the wall I’d put up in the docking tunnel and informed Temeri what was going on. She was waiting to escort them when they arrived at the docking port, even though all they needed to do was to step onboard the Fever Dream.

As soon as they were in the airlock, Liri said, “Hey, Fever, how have you been holding up?” She spoke in that other, non-Sirelli language, and I wondered if Fever would only accept commands in that language. For Temeri and Bekeri’s convenience and peace of mind I translated telepathically.

“Except for the pre-existing damage, I’m great!” Fever replied enthusiastically. “Though Star claimed that the reactor’s going to blow up and asked me to shut it down, so I’m really glad you’re here.”

“Yeah. Fever, I need you to do what Star says. Switch to reserve power, absolute essentials only, then shut down the reactor.”

“Okay, Liri! Beginning systems shut-down and cut-over now.”

And when Fever said now, it meant now. All throughout the parts that I’d assimilated, commands immediately went out for non-essential systems to shut down. That included things like heating and life-support, which I thought was a little extreme, but Liri’s definition of absolute essentials was apparently pretty strict. Inside the engineering space, a decently sized crystal battery took over supplying power to the remaining systems, which were mostly limited to Fever and some basic sensors for monitoring the Fever Dream’s insides and the space immediately around it.

“Systems shut-down and power cut-over complete,” Fever announced. It sounded very pleased with itself. “I’m shutting down the reactor now.”

The command went out. I let it pass, and… nothing. The reactor kept humming.

Fever tried again. Nothing happened. Then I tried, and still nothing.

“Um… Liri, you and your friends should probably go back to the Star,” Fever said. “I can’t shut the reactor off.”

“It’s right,” I added for Temeri and Bekeri. “I can’t either!”

“What do you mean you can’t shut it off?” Liri asked apprehensively.

“It’s just not shutting off. It’s not responding to the command. Liri, you should really get back on the Star!”

“Like all the airless hells I am!” she replied angrily. “Fever, open the inner airlock door! I’m going to take a look at it!”

“Okay!” Fever sent the command. I blocked it. There was no way I was letting her run into a room with a runaway reactor! “That’s odd,” Fever said. “I can’t.”

That made Liri really upset, which I felt just awful about, but I agreed with Fever. They really needed to get back onboard me! Liri, though, was apparently a very determined and driven person, because she immediately went to the wheel for the manual locking mechanism on the door. I fused it. She really put her back into turning it, but it didn’t matter how hard she tried; she wasn’t going to budge that wheel.

Then she turned to my two Crew in the airlock with her. “Captain, Bekeri, help me open this!” she said in Sirelli before going back to trying to turn it herself.

“I’ve fused everything shut,” I told them. “You need to get back while Fever and I figure this out!”

Bekeri started to speak, but Temeri cut him off. “Artificer Liri, what’s going on?” she asked calmly, as though she didn’t already know.

“Fever says it can’t shut down the reactor,” Liri replied between grunts as she tried to turn the wheel. “And it can’t open this door. I need to get to engineering. Help me!”

Temeri paused for a while, then said, “No. No, we’re returning to Star. Let your Crystal Mind work on the problem for a while, and if it can’t solve it, we’ll come back with proper tools for opening this thing.”

“Like hell—” Liri started, but that was as much as Temeri needed to hear. With a murmured Sorry about this that didn’t sound at all apologetic she simply picked the smaller woman up over her shoulders and started marching back through the tunnel.

“What are you doing?!” Liri shouted, wriggling and even slapping at Temeri’s back. “Put me down! We need to—”

“We need to give Fever time to work,” Temeri snapped, and this time it wasn’t Careful Hostess Temeri talking. This was Captain Carlon, and Captain Carlon expected to be listened to and obeyed. “I normally wouldn’t consider it my business what risks you take, but I have myself, my crew, and my other guests to worry about as well. Star, close the docking port!”

“Aye, Captain!” I replied over the speakers and did just that. Only then did Temeri put Liri down.

“What we’re going to do now is to wait while Fever does everything it can to diagnose and hopefully solve whatever malfunction is preventing it from shutting down the reactor. While it does that, Star will remain in contact with it, and we will be ready to burn at highest acceleration if anything, and I mean anything suspicious happens.”

“You can’t—” Liri started, balling her fists, but Temeri cut her off again.

“I can, and I will. This is a question of the safety of my ship, my crew, and my passengers. Do not test me on this!”

Temeri loomed over Liri, who literally shook with silent anger. For a moment I thought she might even try to hurt Temeri, and I was prepared to cut the gravity and push them apart at a moment’s notice. Then, after a few deep sharp breaths Liri said, “But… Fever.”

“I know that you’re attached to both your ship and your Crystal Mind,” Temeri said, much more sympathetically than a moment ago. “So am I, and I will take that into very serious consideration. But correct me if I’m wrong: you’re more attached to your… what do you call them? Your Network? Yes?”

“Yeah,” Liri agreed quietly.

“I thought so. Go back to them. Tell them what’s going on, and that my goal is to preserve both of our ships. I’ll let you know the moment anything happens, good or bad. Alright?”

“Alright.”

“Artificer Bekeri, escort Liri back to her quarters, please.”

“Aye, Captain,” Bekeri replied before leading Liri toward the access tube. “I really am sorry about this,” he said in a low voice as they went. “For what it’s worth I trust the captain absolutely when she says that she wants to save your ship. Otherwise she’d be carefully putting distance between us already.”

“She just wants it for parts,” Liri growled, though there was a hitch to her voice, like she was on the verge of crying. “Stuck out here for whatever reason, you must be desperate for resupply.”

“I don’t appreciate the accusation that we intend to scrap your ship at all,” Bekeri replied sharply. “And I’ll have you know that we are not so ‘desperate’ as you seem to think. I’ll expect your apology once you’re proven wrong.”

Meanwhile, I hadn’t stopped trying to diagnose the reactor since the moment I realized that something was wrong. By then I’d assimilated it, along with a bunch more of the ship. I was even in the bridge and the crystal chamber by then. Sadly, assimilating the reactor hadn’t helped much. The problem wasn’t that the switches and such weren’t responding, but that they weren’t doing anything. There was some kind of runaway process going on that I couldn’t stop, and none of the failsafes that should have prevented exactly that were working!

After looking at it ever which way, I was left with only one option, and one that I didn’t like. I could simply wait until I’d assimilated the whole ship, then reshape it in such a way that I ejected the reactor. That was a solution to the whole blowing up problem, but a really bad one. Not only would it leave Fever Dream without a reactor, which was a bit like an organic person without a heart, but if the reactor kept running after we ejected it—which I had no reason to expect otherwise—it would be like throwing out a flare announcing our presence. Fever Dream had some absolutely brilliant solutions to concealing themselves from detection by mana sensors, but that wouldn’t matter if the single biggest source of spent mana by several orders of magnitude wasn’t on the ship anymore.

So. I felt terrible about abandoning Fever Dream and letting it blow up, even if we took Fever itself with us, and the only alternative that I’d come up with wasn’t a realistic option. I needed help figuring out what was going on. Luckily there was someone who could give me that help. No one would know more about what might have happened to the reactor than Fever. Now, to learn what Fever might know, I’d have to let on that I knew a lot more than I reasonably should, but that was just the price I’d have to pay. Having a chance to save the ship was worth the complication.

“Fever, I need to know everything about this reactor,” I told it. “And I mean everything. From manufactory spec through every repair, maintenance, and customization, to what you and Liri did to repair it after the ship was damaged.”

“Is this to help diagnose the issue?” Fever asked.

“It is.”

“Okay, I think— yes, under the current circumstances, I can do that!” Fever’s agreement was followed immediately by a stream of information, detailing all the things I’d asked for. It was an older model reactor, originally built in orbit around Nemesis and installed in a ship—not the Fever Dream—at a nearby shipyard. Fever only had spotty logs for the years between then and when it—Fever, that is—was activated aboard the Fever Dream, and by then the reactor had already been transferred to its new home. Since then, though?

This might be the most well-maintained reactor in the outer system. I had no complaints there. But Liri had tinkered. A lot. And part of that was her removing more than one of those failsafes that I thought had failed, so that she could get more effect and efficiency out of the thing.

I let that sink in for a few fractions of a second. That was… Incredibly dangerous didn’t even begin to describe it. Messing with reactors like that was dangerous enough that the cosmos hadn’t seen fit to offer me the option to do that with Developments, and Developments were basically miracles in how powerful they were. There were multiple redundant failsafes in place for very, very good reasons!

And yet… It had been three years, Mundus time, since Liri removed the last failsafe—that she’d touched, that is. She’d left the most important ones, and those had presumably failed. In those three years the reactor had hummed along beautifully, and Liri had taken excellent care of it. And she’d obviously known how risky her modifications had been, because she ran so many diagnostics so regularly that I wondered how she had time for anything else! In light of that, Liri’s snippiness when I suggested that there was something wrong with the reactor made a lot of sense.

So, yeah. Perhaps it was a bit Liri’s fault for removing some of the safeties, but mostly it was just terrible luck. The reactor had been damaged in such a way that it miraculously didn’t blow up the moment that micro-asteroid went through it. Liri had been brilliant enough to fix it, quickly and in such a way that they hadn’t all succumbed to mana poisoning in the weeks since. And because of the damage, they hadn’t been able to detect the destroyed failsafes, nor the buildup of potential energy in the reactor’s structure.

Knowing all that… it might help me fix it, or at least shut it down. I wasn’t sure. And then I got massively distracted as my assimilation of the ship reached Fever’s Matrix.