Starmind Chapter 62 (Patreon)

In the days after Harvin and Nahij managed to bypass the masking ritual on Erebus Prime’s command center, they both tried to be very busy. That made perfect sense. Them being able to listen to what people were thinking in there was very exciting! But they only tried; the other Crew wouldn’t let them.

That was apparently a good thing.

“Listen, Nahij,” Simeon told Fever’s diviner the next afternoon. Nahij had a kind of unsteady, bleary-eyed intensity to her that I hadn’t seen before, except maybe on Simeon right at the beginning, when he was keeping everything running himself. She kept glancing toward the acceleration seat where she usually did her work, but finally focused on him. “Thank you,” he said. “Now, I understand that you want to get as much out of this as you possibly can. I really do. You’ve been out here for a long time, and you’re finally getting some of the best intelligence you possibly can. And I’m not going to pretend that I can order you to rest. I have absolutely no authority over you. But your partners are worried about you. So are your friends. Fever tells me that you haven’t slept at all since yesterday, while only leaving your divination trance to take care of your most basic needs — other than sleep. Is that right?”

“Well, um…” Nahij blinked slowly. She had to focus again after opening her eyes. “I ate.”

“Basic needs,” Simeon repeated. “The basic needs of your body, and nothing else. And I know that you know that isn’t healthy. But what I have to tell you as a medical professional, and which you may not want to hear, is that using divination while sleep deprived can cause long-term damage to your mind. We’re not just talking about you taking a few days to feel normal again once you do rest. You could suffer memory loss, difficulty forming new memories, severe problems with focusing, fugues and uncontrolled dissociation, transient or persistent hallucinations… in short, Nahij, if you keep doing this to yourself, you may find it difficult to function. Not just as a diviner, but as a member of the crew. And I know you don’t want that.”

He paused there, waiting patiently.

Nahij just stared at him, slightly unfocused. “He’s waiting for you to say something,” I prompted her, and she blinked again.

“I don’t,” she finally said. “Don’t want that.”

Simeon gave her an encouraging smile. “Good. Now, I would like you and Harvin to set up a schedule, where each of you can take time off your observations for sleep, hygiene, and socialization. Do you think you could agree to that?”

Nahij frowned. Pouted, almost. “Only one of us might miss something.”

“That’s a risk,” Simeon agreed, “but you’re both highly competent. In fact, Khani told me that you, Nahij, are one of the reasons Fever Dream was chosen for this mission. I’m sure that each of you is perfectly capable of keeping an eye on things. And I’m not saying that the schedule has to be ironclad. If something important happens, one can always alert the other. And I have a very simple spell I can use to let you sleep more efficiently, if you’d like. It may give you some nightmares, but it’s safe to use indefinitely. So, what do you say? You could be watching the station for sixteen hours, with four hours for sleep and another for to spend with the people who love you. That way you and Harvin would have eight hours of overlap. How does that sound?”

“That’s, um…” Nahij’s eyes slowly drifted to the door into the pilot’s compartment, where Khani had been standing the whole time. From the mild surprise on her face, she didn’t seem to have noticed him until then.

“Please?” Khani said softly.

“Okay,” she replied, not taking her eyes off him for a long moment. Then they slowly drifted back to Simeon. “Okay.”

“Great. Could I convince you to take a nap now?”

“Is Harvin—”

“I don’t know if you noticed, but Temeri forced Harvin to sleep a few hours this morning,” Simeon reassured her. “If she hadn’t, Varlanda would have. He’s on duty right now.”

“Oh. Yes, he… he was gone for a while, wasn’t he? Good. Um… I should—” she gestured vaguely in the direction of Fever Dream’s shared bedroom, but now that she’d accepted the idea of sleep she seemed to be flagging to the point where getting up from the table was hard. But she didn’t need to. Khani swept in and picked her up, right out of her chair. And she put her arms around his neck, rested her head against his shoulder, and was asleep in seconds.

“Thank you,” the pilot said to Simeon. “We can usually coax her into bed before she gets like this, but this time…”

“No thanks necessary. I’m just glad she listened,” Simeon replied. “I wasn’t exaggerating about the possible long-term effects. Not that she should have been close yet, but another day?”

“How long can Harvin stay on duty?”

“He should be good for another few hours. Let her sleep until dinner time, then see if she’ll wake. If not, then we’ll work something out.”

“Can you do the spell?”

Simeon shook his head. “Not when she’s this sleep deprived. The nightmares get worse the more sleep you need. I’m not comfortable doing that to her.”

“Right. Of course. Thank you.”

Simeon gave him a warm smile. “Again. No thanks necessary. Now take your partner to bed, and I’ll let Liri and Mel know, alright?”

“Alright,” Khani said. With a parting nod, he carried the softly snoring Nahij off to their sleeping compartment.

Crossing back into me only took Simeon a moment. The two Crews had agreed that there was no reason to keep thirty feet of docking tunnel between Fever and me, so now we lay almost hull-to-hull, with only as much of a connection as we needed to keep our thrusters parallel. It was kind of cozy!

As he stepped into my docking bay, I told him, “That was very nice of you.”

“Just doing my job,” he replied easily. “And even if it wasn’t, Khani sounded so upset when he asked. How could I refuse?”

“There! That’s the nice part! That, and offering to tell Mel and Liri so he could take a nap with Nahij. Do you want me to tell them? They’ve both been worried, too.”

Mel especially had been talking to Varlanda, who understood completely. But Varlanda had the comfort of knowing that either Simeon or Temeri could order Harvin to sleep; Fever Dream didn’t have a command structure, so when Nahij was stubborn about wanting to keep working, there wasn’t much they could do. Except ask for outside help, apparently.

I wasn’t sure why Simeon asking her to take a break had been so much more effective. Was it because he was a healer? The reminder of the long term damage she might do to herself? Or was it just that Khani had gone outside their family for help? With how close they all were, having relied on each other for everything for years, I imagined that was a pretty extreme thing to do.

Well, no matter. Nahij was sleeping now. And Simeon told me he’d rather tell them in person. He wanted to check in on Varlanda anyway, and then he and Liri were supposed to do some work on the hydroponics.

Perhaps the reason Nahij and Harvin had been so driven to keep working through their exhaustion was that, despite having listened for over a full day, they still hadn’t learned anything very useful. They repeated almost everything they heard out loud so that Fever or I could record it, noting which mind it came from, but so far all they had was operational stuff. Ships moving around and security on the station, mostly. The people in the command center were bored, or scared, or happy, or looking forward to things… just people stuff, really. Nothing about Captain Osterling, or Doctor Melervan, or the Association of Magnian Networks. Nothing that we were actually there for.

On the bright side, they hadn’t picked up anything about two ships hanging around watching them, either, so that was nice. I always kept myself oriented so that I could burn away from the station if we needed to escape, but I’d much rather not need to do that. I was quite comfortable where we were: silent, still, and safe.

*

That evening, the Autolathe finished constructing our Multi-Purpose Growth Vat, and getting it into place in the agri-bay was a full-Crew activity. Not because it needed to be, but because everyone was very curious and excited.

Ever since Bekeri started the autolathe, I’d been redistributing material to build a big transfer space on the outside of my hull, like a tunnel. It was just a little bigger than necessary to move the finished Growth Vat, and had a simple airlock that allowed access from the cargo hold. There was air inside the tunnel, but Temeri had insisted on the airlock.

Bekeri would be supervising the transfer, but for safety’s sake, I’d be doing the actual moving. Now, the Vat was many, many times too massive for me to move with my telekinesis, even with the gravity all the way off, but Bekeri and Liri had come up with a simple plan for that. If I could extrude material from any surface, they’d argued, why couldn’t I use that to push the Vat? It wasn’t like I’d never done anything similar, just on a smaller scale. It should be easy, really!

The Autolathe’s control panel pulsed green and played its happy little chime. Liri, in the artifice bay, commanded it to deliver its newly finished product, and the outside delivery hatch opened, giving Bekeri his first look at the Growth Vat. I’d seen it as it was being made, of course, so I already knew about the ten-foot tall cylinder with its mirror finish and all the various tubes and pipes and assorted gubbins. Bekeri had gone over the schematics in detail and had a general idea about what it should look like, but when he actually saw it for the first time, he was very impressed.

The Autolathe made sure that the space outside the hatch was clear, then gently pushed its product out, bringing it to a stop almost exactly in the center of the tunnel. With no gravity it hung there, massive and shiny and just waiting to be installed.

“Alright, Star!” Bekeri said, carefully placing his hand on the tank, then frowning at the slight smudge his fingers left on the perfect finish. “Let’s get this beauty up there so we can get it installed.”

“Yes, sir!” I replied, and got started. First I extruded four thick pillars from the sides of the tunnel, just behind the Vat and spaced so that they crossed where we wanted the points of contact to be. Then, from the crossing points, I extruded four new pillars, the pushers, the ends of which were shaped so they’d fit perfectly where they’d touch the Vat. I had to adjust those surfaces a tiny bit when they actually came into contact with it, but that was easy. Then, when everything was in place, I began to extend the pushers. I used a very similar method to when I’d added my new deck, creating small breaks in the base of each pusher and then kind of corkscrewing new material in there so they extended, one tiny layer at a time.

It was slow going, but it had to be. We really didn’t want the Vat to be moving at any kind of speed. It had used up a lot of material, and at just over ten feet tall and about five feet square at the base, it was massive. I mean, not compared to me, or my reactor, or my main drive or anything, but there were still enough tons of material there that letting it move at any kind of speed might mean that bumping into something could damage it. No, we wanted it to have as little momentum as possible, so that I could bring it to a completely controlled stop.

That was also why we were doing this with air in the tunnel, instead of a void. Bekeri could have suited up and gone in there without issue even if there was no air, but I wanted to use the air resistance to help stop the Vat gently. I was pretty sure that I could do it even without help, but anything that helped control the Vat without scratching it or worse was welcome.

As it happened, everything went fine. Air resistance and a light pull from Bekeri brought the Vat to a stop at the turn to get around the curve of my hull, then again below the shaft that would bring it up to the level of the work deck, and finally at the top; with no gravity, Bekeri simply used his magnetic boots to walk up the side of the shaft. Then we manoeuvred the Vat through the airlock at the top and into the space that our two artificers had prepared for it in the agri-bay.

That bit was really tricky, because disconnecting the hydroponics would be terrible for the little plants inside, but with some very careful help from the Crew I managed to get it into place without bumping into anything. Then I turned the gravity back on, at about a thousandth of Mundus normal, and Bekeri and Liri very carefully adjusted the Vat’s position and orientation as it ever so slowly sank to the floor. And then, finally, everybody could have the gravity they were used to back.

The artificers really should have gone to bed at that point, but they were too excited to get the Vat up and running. It was almost 0200 hours by the time they had everything connected and Liri switched it on; Bekeri insisted that she should have the honor, since she was the one with experience in hydroponics and food culturing.

“Listen to her purr,” Liri sighed as the soft sounds pumps and moving fluids came from the Vat. “Wait, that’s not offensive or anything, is it?”

“Purring’s a good thing,” Bekeri replied, patting her on the shoulder. “And it does sound quite content, doesn’t it?”

“It really does.”

They both watched the Vat in silence for a while, just listening. The inside of the tank had a volume of one hundred and twenty-five cubic feet, but it was actually separated into twenty-five equal compartments, each with its own fluid- and temperature controls and such. The purr, as Liri had called it, changed to a soft hum as those compartments all filled up with liquid and the pumps turned off. At that point, Liri said, “Alright, it’ll be a while before we’ve got anything to tap. I’ll see you in the morning, Bek. Good work today.” With that she touched his arm briefly before walking out of the agri-bay and sliding down the access tube.

Bekeri watched her walk out, his head slightly tilted. “Star,” he asked, “did she call me ‘Bek?’”

“She did!” I confirmed.

“Hmm. I suppose I don’t mind it.”

Bekeri walked a slow circle around the Vat, looking at it from every angle, peering into gaps between pipes and panels as though he was seeing it for the first time. “This is going to really improve morale, you know?” he said after a while. “Getting some basic taste into the nutrient paste went a long way, and the small amounts of fresh vegetables Simeon has been able to grow thanks to the hydroponics were a real treat, but now we’ll be able to get some real flavours!”

“I should be able to do a lot with texture, too! Some of the things you can culture set when you stop stirring them or change the temperature, salinity, acidity… a bunch of things, really. I could probably make you something similar to ground meat.”

“Could you really?” he asked, looking up at the Vat with longing. “What about a steak?”

I hummed sadly. “It needs to be able to go through a nozzle. Sorry.”

“That’s alright. Something with the right taste would be a wonderful start.” He patted the side of the tank, then frowned at the faint smudge his hand left behind before polishing it off with a clean rag he’d asked me for. “I suppose that will have to wait, though,” he said once he was satisfied. “Like Liri said, it will be some time. And it is rather late.”

“It’s 0208 hours!” I informed him helpfully.

“Well past when I usually retire,” he said. Then, as though knowing the time had reminded him of how tired he was, he yawned hugely, his ears flattening to his head. “I suppose I should be off to bed, then. Thank you for all the help, Star.”

“My pleasure!”

With Bekeri having gone to sleep, and Liri presumably having joined the pile on Fever Dream’s bed, that left only Harvin awake of the Crew. He was so busy, though, that he didn’t really count; I hummed at him to help his divination, but we couldn’t really talk. But that didn’t mean that I was alone. Fever didn’t sleep any more than I did. And we had something very important to discuss. Now that the Culture Vat was ready, the Autolathe could start making everything else we needed. And in my mind, one thing was more urgent than anything else.

“Fever!” I said excitedly over our comms link. “Let’s talk about getting you started with Developments.”