Starmind Chapter 61 (Patreon)

In the next five days, many little things and two very big things happened.

With both of our Crews having committed to working together, they were all pretty focused on getting to know each other and figuring out how they could best spend their time. And while they didn’t all trust each other fully, I was still so very excited about how well they were getting along. They ate together, they worked together, they even sometimes just sat around and talked together — it was great! I didn’t even mind that my Crew spent so much more time on their new friends than they did on me. I was happy to stay in the background — as much as I could with them living inside me — watching them cooperate and answering questions or helping out as needed.

That, and talking to Fever, who was in the same situation as me. I talked to Fever a lot. It had so many questions!

Some of the little things that happened was that Varlanda and Mel got a bunch of things finished. With some help from Bekeri and Liri, when they had time to spare, the two enchanters finished another Mana Condensation Matrix, our eighth in total; a Mana Battery, since we could finally afford the thirty small mana crystals for it; and the Medical Synthesizer. Simeon was predictably excited about the last one; he’d gone through a lot of the potions we’d left port with, and Fever Dream were almost entirely out of theirs after their accident. He kept the Synthesizer running almost constantly, replenishing the stocks onboard both me and Fever over the next few days. Nahij and the others were very surprised when he showed up one morning before breakfast with a crate of potions; they probably hadn’t expected us to just give them things like that, no matter how well everybody was getting along. But Simeon and Temeri agreed that since the potions were so easy to make, only taking materials from the waste recycling system and some mana, there was no defensible reason not to make sure that Fever Dream had everything they needed. Besides, Liri and Mel had both worked on the Synthesizer. Not letting them enjoy the fruits of their labor would be downright dishonest.

I also got a bunch of Development Levels done. I finished Light-Weight Hull 3, then did a Level in each of the new Sensor Developments that I’d unlocked. Gathering information on Erebus Prime and the Order of the Ring was the whole reason we were there, after all! Then I kind of snuck in the Crew Fitness Development without talking to anyone about it. Temeri had shown Pilot Khani the exercise equipment I’d improvised for her, and while he’d been very happy to have some way of working out his muscles other than the old, worn resistance bands Fever’s Crew had been using, they’d also started talking about other things they wished they had.

I was pretty sure that they didn’t expect anything, since they hadn’t talked to me directly, but I thought that seeing what Crew Fitness gave me might let me surprise them. And it did! Some of the things it made available were too complicated for me to make myself and gave me schematics instead. I’d need to ask Bekeri and Liri to make those. But others were much nicer versions of the things I’d improvised, like adjustable weight bars and racks, padded benches, and things like that. The adjustable bars were one of the things Temeri had especially missed. I’d suggested increasing or decreasing the gravity a bit to get a similar effect, but she’d just thanked me no and said that she didn’t want me messing with the gravity just for her sake. Which made sense, I supposed; one of Varlanda or Bekeri’s tools suddenly becoming lighter or heavier while they were working probably wouldn’t end well.

I finished the Development late in the evening, which was perfect. That meant I didn’t have to wait long before everyone was asleep, so I could secretly replace all the primitive things I’d made with the new, fancy ones. I made sure to send a catalog of everything I’d gotten to Temeri’s slate, too, so she could have a look for herself and tell me what she wanted, but I hid it so it wouldn’t be obvious. I wanted the new equipment to be a surprise, after all.

And it was! That morning, Temeri stood in the door to the much improved exercise room, her hands pressed together in front of her mouth. She was blinking hard and sounded a little winded as she said, “Star, what is this?”

“Surprise!?” I cheered uncertainly. I’d expected her to at least smile!

“Did you do this for me?”

“Yes? I thought, um… since you talked with Khani about how you wished you had some better equipment— don’t you like it?”

“What?” Temeri said, then sniffed before continuing. “No, Star, I do. I love it. Thank you so much.”

“Oh, that’s a relief! There’s a catalogue of exercise machines on your slate, too, but these are most of the things I could make on my own with the Crew Fitness Development.”

“That’s very kind of you,” she said, stepping inside and looking at all the adjustable weights and benches and everything. “I’ll have a look together with Pi— with Khani, over lunch.”

Then she got started, and I knew for a fact that she smiled a lot more that morning than she usually did when she exercised. Mission accomplished!

With Crew Fitness done I moved on to Manufacturing Speed 3, followed by Manufacturing Efficiency 1. I’d chosen those in anticipation of the one really big thing that I knew would happen sometime that day. Bekeri and Liri, with a lot of help from Varlanda and Mel and even a little from Temeri, had been doing subsystem testing on the Holistic Autolathe. They barely understood what some of those subsystems did, and they were both excited to figure out “just how in all the burning void any of this can function at all,” as Liri put it, but every test the schematics suggested or that they could think of themselves came out successful. And so, at just before 1700 hours on that fourth day, the two artificers declared it ready for its first full-scale test. It was ready to make its first product.

Everyone gathered in the artifice bay, talking curiously before hushing as Temeri gave the go-ahead. Then, at Bekeri’s insistence, the captain pressed the activation button, and the hum of the Autolathe’s stand-by mode changed to a more excited one as it got to work. Mana drained from the Medium Mana Crystal set into the machine’s control panel. Small amounts of material vanished from my stores, which the artificers had linked to the machine as they built it. The assembled Crew watched with bated breath as the timer on the display slate ran down until finally, with a happy little chime and a pulse of bright green light, it reached zero.

The hatch by the control panel, tall and wide enough for any two of the Crew to walk through side by side, opened. Inside was a tray, hovering in the air waist-high to Bekeri. And on the tray was a slate, identical to the one the artificers had scanned as part of their functional tests.

“I can talk to it!” I cheered. “Bekeri, pick it up!”

He did, then grinned as I made the slate display the words, ‘Hello! I work!’

“Well, that’s nothing short of utterly amazing,” Varlanda laughed after Bekeri, in an unusual fit of enthusiasm, raised the new slate above his head in triumph so they could all see the message there. “So, I know we’ve been talking about this thing for weeks now, but what does this actually mean for us?”

Bekeri couldn’t stop grinning as he answered her. “It means, dear colleague, that we can make just about anything we have at hand or which we have a complete and compatible schematic for, as long as we have the mana crystals and the raw materials. The only limit to what this beautiful machine can make is the size of the materialization chambers; that is, twenty by twenty by twenty-five feet for the external delivery port, and six by six by seven for the internal one. New thrusters; entire Matrixes, housing included, ready for enchanting; all the parts for the Culture Vat… the possibilities it opens up are endless!”

“Excellent news, Artificer Bekeri,” Temeri said with a pleased smile. “Start with the Culture Vat, then discuss with your colleagues and prioritize according to your best judgment.”

“With pleasure, Captain.”

At the back of the group Nahij raised her hand. “Excuse me,” she said. “A question.”

“Yes, Div— yes, Nahij?” Temeri said.

“What about a reactor?”

The group went silent. When it became clear that neither Temeri nor either of the artificers knew what to say, I spoke up.

“Nahij, everyone,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think that’s going to be possible. We don’t have the kind of schematic that we’d need. We’d need to shut down and disconnect my reactor to scan it, but if we did that, I don’t think that the Autolathe would work. And while we could easily catch up with Fever’s reactor if we wanted to risk it, with the readings we’ve seen from it… it’s probably way beyond either scanning or repairing at this point.”

Nahij smiled sadly. “I was afraid of that. But I had to ask.”

“Understandable,” Temeri said, nodding sympathetically. “Rest assured that we do remain committed to restoring Fever completely. For now, though, I think that our best bet is to get you back to the friendly station further into the system.”

“Or if someone tries to board us!” I suggested. “Then we could copy their reactor.”

“I’d prefer to avoid any more boardings,” Temeri said carefully.

“Well, yes, but if we can’t avoid it—”

“Then, if we have time to do so safely, yes. That might work,” she agreed. “But let’s do all we can to avoid detection, shall we?”

“Of course, Captain!”

*

The Holistic Autolathe was a beautiful, hungry machine. I’d stored up a lot of material from our non-consensual encounters with Order ships and from our stay in Sophia, but mass wasn’t everything. How that mass was squished together was a very important factor, and we quickly began to run low on some rarer elements. Fortunately it was only the really fancy things, like components for complicated machines, that needed a lot of those, and once the Autolathe had taken what it needed for the Multi-Purpose Culture Vat we still had a decent stock. As long as we didn’t start wasting stuff we should be fine.

We decided to make the Culture Vat in one piece in the big materialization chamber. That one only opened to the outside for practical reasons, but that wasn’t a problem — I’d just make a kind of tunnel on the outside of my Hull from the delivery port to the outside wall of the agri-bay, and then we could bring it up that way. The alternative was to make the thing in pieces, which was absolutely an alternative but would also mean a lot more work for Bekeri and Liri, and they were already behind on the maintenance they wanted to do. Anything I could do to help take some of their load, I would!

The Autolathe wasn’t just hungry. It was thirsty, too. There was a compartment in the control panel where one could insert a mana crystal. The smaller upstairs materialization chamber could run on Small Mana Crystals, albeit slowly. The large chamber, though, needed Medium Mana Crystals to run at all, and it drained one entirely for every twelve hours of continuous operation. With our masking ritual taking another every twenty-four hours exactly, we were up to using three MMCs every day. It was a good thing we had three Condensation Matrices making the things. Between them, those three Matrices made about four and a third of an MMC each day, leaving us with an extra one and a third of a crystal for emergencies. Less than Temeri would have liked, but she agreed that the faster we could make things we needed, the better.

Our mana crystal situation wasn’t great, to be honest. We had eight Mana Condensation Matrices running now, but with everything we were using those crystals for, the margins were thin. Our surplus was down to less than two SMCs and that one and a third MMC per day. We’d finally accepted the thirty SMC cost of making a Mana Battery, so I could keep more mana stored for emergencies, but that had left us with only one SMC and one MMC in storage. It was going to be a few days before we were really comfortable again.

When we discussed it over dinner after turning on the Autolathe, Fever’s Crew became pretty quiet. They knew about the mana crystals already, but I figured there must have been something about discussing them the way we did, like making and regularly consuming them was a normal thing, that they couldn’t easily accept. To them, having any crystals at all was a luxury — a strategic resourse to be carefully hoarded. The fact that we left them lying out to decay throughout my body just to raise the strength of the local mana field had been completely incomprehensible to them at first, until they accepted what we told them about Developments. But they’d get used to it soon enough. Especially once we got Fever a Development Matrix and a few Mana Condensation Matrices of its own.

Actually, that gave me an idea.

“Temeri, this is just to you,” I said. No one else could hear. I didn’t want to put her in a weird spot with the other Crew. “You don’t have to answer now, but could we get Fever set up with a Development Matrix and a Mana Condensation Matrix soon? The sooner we can get it started on Developments, the better, right?”

Temeri sat up a little straighter as I spoke. Then, while still listening to Varlanda gush about how much having access to mana crystals had helped her productivity, she nodded slightly, a kind of I’ll think about it nod rather than an Okay! one. I knew that she had a lot on her mind about priorities just then, and she did worry a lot, so she might want to get everything done first that might make us more safe. But I trusted her to sneak a little generosity in there if she reasonably could, and that was good enough.

*

The other really big thing was a surprise.

The next morning, at around 0630 hours, Fever got in touch with me. “Can you start paying attention in my Crew’s bedroom?” it sent me. “Nahij wants to talk to you. She’s very excited, so it’s urgent!”

“Oh, of course!” I replied, letting myself become conscious of what was happening over there. Nahij did indeed look very excited. “I can hear you now, Nahij,” I told the diviner. “What is it?”

“Oh, wonderful! Star, please tell Harvin to focus on the station, on the blind spot about fifteen hundred feet down relative to us and on the side facing Avara. He’ll know it. Wake him up if he’s still asleep. I don’t know what’s happened, but I think that’s the command center, and I can hear it!”

I didn’t waste any time telling Harvin. At first he didn’t reply, but when I kept talking to tell him just how important it was he didn’t even bother getting out of bed; he just stopped kissing Varlanda then apologized to her profusely while explaining what was going on before getting comfortable and drifting off.

I apologized to Varlanda, too; she’d really been enjoying Harvin kissing her, and I would have much rather not interrupted them. But she understood completely. “Duty calls,” she said, smiling in a way that didn’t touch her eyes as she got dressed. “Sure would have appreciated if duty could have waited five minutes, though.”

While we waited to see what the two diviners might make of the situation, I finished Manufacturing Efficiency 1 and started Light-weight Structure 4. I would have liked to unlock more categories — I had three available: Basic Fields, Basic Teleportation, and Advanced Mana, and all of those filled me with excitement. But it was no less true than ever that speed and manoeuvrability had to be our highest priority. Especially if Harvin and Nahij found something horrible and we had to leave as soon as possible!

Thankfully, that wasn’t the case.

It was over three hours before the Order station’s command center vanished from Harvin and Nahij’s senses. Nahij looked satisfied as she woke up from her deep concentration; Harvin was grinning ear to ear. “Star,” he said. “Please ask everyone to gather in the rec room. Nahij and I have some good news.”

*

“We have the telepathic key to their masking ritual,” Nahij declared once everyone was gathered. I didn’t know what that meant, but she had a pleased smile on her face, so I knew it had to be something extremely helpful.

“How did you manage that?” Temeri asked.

“The runes of their ritual circle were damaged. Some kind of violence broke out — we couldn’t quite figure out what, but that doesn’t matter much. The important part is that their masking ritual went down for a few hours. They set people to repair it immediately, of course — a diviner and a ritual enchanter. Each had only part of the key, presumably so they can’t sell it or otherwise betray the Order, but they kept thinking about their part of the key as they worked on the runes. Entirely natural, but it let Harvin and I, working together, get the whole thing.”

“And what does you having the key mean in practice?”

Nahij looked to Harvin, as though to ask if he wanted to be the one to tell his captain, but he only grinned and told her, “Go on. You’re the one who figured out how to piece it together. This accomplishment belongs to you more than me.”

Nahij blushed, but did as he’d invited her to. “It means, Captain, that we can bypass their mask entirely. We can listen to every thought in that command center, unless the person doing the thinking is extremely disciplined and is specifically trying to prevent telepathic intrusion. We may finally be able to get some truly valuable intelligence!”

That, everyone agreed, was extremely helpful indeed.