Starmind Chapter 56 (Patreon)

In the ships I’d assimilated before, there either hadn’t been a Crystal Mind in the first place, or it had already been dead when I got to it. Fever was different. Fever was running on emergency power, but otherwise fully functional. And that, it turned out, was a big deal!

I hadn’t been paying attention to the progress of the assimilation, so my first hint that something was happening was when Fever sent an emergency communication. “Star,” it said, “I’m detecting some oddities in my peripheral functions. I’m worried there may be some kind of leak from the reactor that I can’t detect. You sh—”

The communication broke off mid-word.

“Fever?” I asked. “Could you repeat that?”

I got nothing in return.

“Distant Star to Fever Dream. Please repeat.”

Fever was silent. That would have been worrying in any situation but was doubly so when communication was orders of magnitude faster than normal speech. I couldn’t see anything new with any of my internal senses, but I knew that whatever had silenced Fever must have happened almost instantly. So I checked the Fever Dream’s crystal chamber, confirming that Fever’s Matrix was powered and whole. That was when I realized that I’d started assimilating it. Not entirely; I’d assimilated about a third of the housing, and I was now spreading through the outer parts of the crystal structure of the Matrix.

My best guess was that Fever had noticed when it—what was effectively its brain—began to be assimilated, and that the small fraction of an inch that I’d taken over was enough to…

I was immediately at the edge of panic. Had I killed Fever? Technically it wasn’t even possible to kill a Crystal Mind since it wasn’t actually alive, but Fever wasn’t responding, and its last words had been to warn me that something was happening, and it was my fault! I hadn’t meant to. I couldn’t choose what I assimilated, or how fast. The only way I could have not done it was to detach from the Fever Dream entirely, and I couldn’t do that if I wanted to stop the reactor from blowing up. So it probably wasn’t my fault, but it sure felt like it.

The Matrix was still powered. All the little indicators indicated that everything was fine. But Fever wasn’t responding.

“Varlanda?” I called my favorite Enchantress as she sat with her back against the wall in my own crystal chamber. My telepathic voice felt terribly small. “How much damage can a Crystal Mind’s Matrix take before it stops working?”

She’s been reading from her slate, but stopped when I said her name. Now she laid her slate down and said, “Almost none. That’s why the housings are so strong. Why, sweetie? What happened?”

“I…” For a moment, I regretted speaking up. I felt so bad that I didn’t want anyone to know. I felt as bad as when I killed the crew of the gunship, which didn’t make any sense, because Fever wasn’t alive. But did that matter? It was cheerful, and loyal, and its crew loved it, and it sure sounded like it loved them.

But that was why I had to talk to Varlanda. Because if I was wrong, if this was something we could fix, then she was the only one who might possibly know how.

“I’ve started assimilating Fever’s Matrix,” I said softly. “And now it’s not responding.”

“Oh,” she said, slumping a little. “And you’re worried? Of course you are. Well, is there any visible damage to the structure?”

“No.”

“Is it drawing power?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, okay.” She nodded thoughtfully. “Is it radiating any more mana than normal, and if so, is that mana more intense in any particular section of the Matrix? What about heat?”

I checked. “No. Both heat and mana are normal.”

“In that case, I don’t think there’s anything to worry about. If it’s still drawing power and still radiating normally, then it must still be undamaged and operational. Otherwise it would be spewing heat or mana somewhere, depending on the type of damage. My guess would be that partial assimilation triggered it to go into damage prevention and control mode, and that it’ll wake back up once you’re done.”

“You think?” I asked, immediately hopeful. This was Varlanda, after all. It was possible that there were better Crystal Mind Enchantresses in the system, but I’d never heard of them.

“Yeah,” she confirmed. “I think so. And if not, we’ll bring it onboard and I’ll take a look at it. Just be patient, and keep working on the reactor, alright?”

“Alright!”

*

Assimilating Fever’s Matrix went pretty quick. It was slower than normal, maybe because of how complex a Matrix is, but it still went at about an inch per minute in every direction, and the Matrix was only a little more than eighteen inches in diameter. But it did give me and Bekeri enough time to discuss what I’d learned about Liri’s changes to the reactor, and for him to come up with an idea.

“Now, we’re going to want to distance ourselves a bit from the Fever Dream for this, without you losing control of it,” he said. “My suggestion would be one of those long, thin tendrils, but in a spiral shape so it can handle a little bit of movement. What you’re going to want to do is to send a power spike…”

I thought it was a pretty dangerous idea. But it was the only one we had except ejecting the reactor, and that was simply too risky, so shooting a bunch of power the wrong way into an unstable reactor was what we were going with!

Putting distance between us and Fever Dream while still maintaining contact was a tricky manoeuvre. It was made even trickier by the fact that I needed the direction of thrust to be directly away from my fellow ship, but I wanted to avoid hitting it with the exhaust of my thrusters. If I did it might start spinning, and even a very slow rotation would make things way more difficult!

After some discussion with Temeri, what I ended up with was this. First I attached a long, spiraling tendril of Hull to Fever Dream. While I did that, I also completely detached Fever’s Matrix and its attached emergency power supply so that I could send in the four porter golems and bring them onboard. Once they were done—which was tricky, since they weren’t that strong and the Matrix housing was pretty heavy—I reabsorbed the docking tunnel. I then performed a set of very careful maneuvers where I rotated so that my base was toward it before firing off the tiniest puff from all of my maneuvering thrusters, which were aimed diagonally away from my center line. Using them like that was inefficient, creating much less total thrust than the sum of their outputs, but I fired them at such low power, and for such a short time, that the actual waste was barely measurable. More importantly, the resulting thrust was in the right direction, and none of the exhaust hit the Fever Dream.

Besides, I didn’t want to go fast. I barely wanted to move at all. I could only extrude a few inches of tendril per second; if I moved any faster, it would end up stretching too much and snapping from the tension. At the speed we were separating from Fever Dream, getting to a somewhat safe distance would take a couple of hours, but Temeri and I decided it was worth the risk. I was always in contact with the other ship, meaning I was always monitoring the reactor. I’d prepared to eject the reactor already before we came up with this plan, and with Fever aboard there was really nothing stopping me from burning hard if I thought the reactor was on the verge of going critical. It was almost perfect; we were as safe as we could reasonably be.

We decided not to tell Fever’s crew yet. That was Harvin’s suggestion. While everybody’s first instinct was to let them know what was going on, at least with us distancing ourselves from the Fever Dream, Harvin pointed out that they’d probably get very worried if we did that. They didn’t know us yet, he said, and they might think we were leaving Fever behind. Then we’d have to tell them that Fever was onboard, but that brought a new problem: we’d need to either tell them that it was currently dormant, which would worry them, or refuse their inevitable requests to talk to it. We’d just end up having to either lie to them or upset them even more, and both seemed worse than just not saying anything in the first place. No, we all agreed that it was better not to tell them anything until we had something good to say.

Fever had been disconnected from me while the golems moved it, and I’d hoped that might let it wake up. No such luck. It remained dormant, with no changes in radiation or outputs. I briefly considered trying to rig something up to keep it disconnected, but that would only work as long as the emergency power supply worked. Then, even if it woke up, we’d have to risk going through the whole painful process of assimilation again. That just seemed cruel. So I had the porters set everything up in the cargo hold, then prepared to wait for the assimilation to finish, which should be pretty fast. I did not expect to find Fever’s Matrix still assimilated. That wasn’t how it usually worked, and I hadn’t been able to feel it at all while it wasn’t in physical contact with me. But then, I’d never assimilated an active Crystal Mind before, so as far as I knew it was completely normal. Varlanda advised me to not worry too much. Not yet, at any rate.

Then Bekeri and Varlanda set about connecting everything properly. That took a bit of time, but time was one thing we had plenty of while distancing ourselves from the Fever Dream. It wasn’t as simple as just poking some Hull into it; the two technicians had to actually set up a bunch of little interfaces, letting the emergency power supply draw power from my own reactor which then powered Fever. But they were both brilliant, and they got it done in a few hours.

With Fever safely installed, it was soon time to try Bekeri’s idea. The long coil of Hull could carry more than enough power, so all we really needed to do was make sure that we’d were ready to run the moment it looked like the Fever Dream’s reactor might go critical. That meant that we had to tell Fever’s crew to lie down, which made them all kinds of suspicious.

“And you’re not going to tell us why, are you?” Liri asked pointedly even as she did as I’d asked.

“We know why,” Mel said, a bit soothing, a bit unhappy as he stroked her smooth scalp. “Fever’s reactor’s unstable. We need to be ready in case— you know.”

“Yeah. And I should be over there, working on it, not lying here,” she hissed back, glaring at the ceiling as she leaned into Mel’s side.

“Don’t worry, we have a plan!” I told them confidently. “We’re actually trying something right now, and you should be free to move around again in a moment. We just need to be double sure you all don’t get hurt if something goes wrong.”

It wasn’t the whole truth, but every word I told them was true. And I fully intended to fill them in on the details once everything was clear, and we’d all gotten to know and trust each other a bit more. We just didn’t need them panicking right now. That wouldn’t help anyone, least of all them.

They all complied, after another bit of grumbling from Liri and some more politely unhappy noises from the others. My Crew were in their couches. It was time.

Just as Bekeri had detailed, I watched the fluctuations in the reactor’s power output for a particularly deep valley. When it arrived, I unleashed a precise spike of power into one of the nodes regulating mana draw. This should, if everything went to plan, reset one of the failed scripts, which would allow the node to work at least partially. And while one node working partially may not sound like much, those nodes were so over-engineered that even that should be enough to smooth out the power draw, which should in turn stop the uncontrolled buildup of potential energy in the reactor’s structure. Then we would have time to find a way to shut it down so we could return it to full functionality.

Everything did not go to plan. I spiked the power, the fluctuations got worse, and I… I didn’t panic, as such, but I did go a bit off-script.

As part of my initial idea to shoot the reactor out into the void if things went bad, I’d been moving things around a bit. Under the reactor was now only a thin wall between it and the outside, and I’d set up a kind of tube of Hull around the reactor itself. This was Bekeri’s idea. The reactor was far, far too massive for me to move with my telekinesis, but I didn’t need to. When the reactor’s fluctuations went wild, I disconnected it entirely, then capped that tube. Then I disconnected a thin sliver around the circumference of the outside wall under the reactor before doing the same at the top.

The air pressure inside the Fever Dream did the rest. The reactor just kind of popped out, along with a cloud of gas that escaped before I could plug the hole behind it. The speed at which it shot away was impressive, all things considered. The reactor was pretty massive, and one atmosphere of pressure is only so much. But the freed disc of hull on top of it was about two feet across, and one atmosphere pushing on it provided plenty of force to push the reactor out the bottom of the stricken ship and launch it tumbling into the distance. Then I watched it with absolute focus on every sensor I could, looking for any sign of it actually blowing up.

It… didn’t. It kept fluctuating, flared just on the safe side of making me dial up the thrusters, heated up enough to glow a dull red, then died entirely. No drama. No bright flash announcing our presence. Just a hot lump of fused metal tumbling away at about thirty feet per second.

“Um… it didn’t blow up,” I told the crew sheepishly.

“I figured,” Temeri said. “That’s a relief.”

“Yeah. But it didn’t exactly work, either. And I sort of shot the reactor into the void. Now I feel a little silly.”

Bekeri pursed his lips for just a moment before saying, “Star, please tell me what happened.”

So I did, and we went through what might have gone wrong, and what we could have done differently. Maybe, we decided, a different timing or power level might have worked better to stabilize the reactor. Or the reactor might have failed gracefully if I’d left it in place, letting us salvage much of it or perhaps even repair it in time. Overall, though, while this wasn’t the best outcome, no one was upset with me.

“If anything, you deserve some praise,” Temeri said. “Let’s forget about what you might have done differently to save the reactor. From what you’ve described, it was either get rid of the reactor or leave the Fever Dream behind entirely. Staying with it in place was just far too risky. You did good, Star.”

I thanked her, and I tried to sound cheerful, but it was hard. Now the Fever Dream didn’t have a reactor, and a ship with no reactor was dead in every way that mattered. No power meant no movement, no life support, no nothing. It wasn’t a vehicle, and it wasn’t a home, and to its crew, it had been both.

Well, it could still be their home. The threat was gone. I could provide power to their systems, and even run their life support directly. Once Bekeri had a look at their drive, I should even be able to use their thrusters—thrust balancing and stress under acceleration might get a little iffy, but I could handle it.

After a short talk with Temeri, I began to approach the dead ship, slowly enough that I could reabsorb the long spiral of Hull as it compressed between us. I was thinking about how to tell Fever Dream why they didn’t have a reactor anymore when Fever woke up.

There was no build-up to it. One moment it was dormant, the next it was awake and talking.

Star? it said, and I, overjoyed that I hadn’t killed it, simply replied.

Fever! I’m so glad to hear from you. Are you okay?

I can’t feel any of my systems, it replied, much more confused than worried. Did something terrible happen? Is my Crew okay?

Um… sort of? I replied awkwardly. About what happened, I mean. I kind of had to jettison your reactor. Sorry. But the rest of you is fine! And so are your crew, though they’re very worried.

That’s awful. Can I talk to them?

Not yet. But soon, I promise.

Oh. Okay.

Fever didn’t sound okay about that, but it also didn’t sound like it was going to argue. It wasn’t a great situation, but I was sure it would understand once we’d talked everything through.

Then it asked, Why can’t I feel anything?

Ah. Well, the thing is, I kind of brought you onboard myself. Your Matrix, I mean. The reactor was going all kinds of crazy, and I didn’t want to risk you blowing up along with it.

That’s very nice of you. Thank you! it said. My Crew would have been terribly sad if I blew up, I think.

Yeah, I agreed. They really would have. But the problem with the reactor is gone, along with the reactor, so you should all be able to go back onboard once we’re docked again in a few hours.

And then I’ll have my systems back? I’ll be able to watch Erebus Prime again?

Yep!

Great, it said. Then it hesitated for a long while before asking, So, um, Star? How come I can talk to you right now? I don’t have any of my comms.

And that was when it struck me that we hadn’t been using any kind of comms protocols. Not Mind-to-Mind, not text, not audio. Not even sound. We’d just been talking. Telepathically. Fever could speak to me telepathically. That wasn’t something a Crystal Mind could do.

But a Starmind could.