“Yessir.”
“When you’re done, take the Jelly back to the airlock.”
“You’re going to leave it there?” Sparrow asked.
“Seems like the only semi-secure place for it. Unless you have a better idea?”
Sparrow shook her head.
“Right. Then get to it. And Kira? When you’re finished, go see the doc and have him look at that arm of yours.”
“Will do,” said Kira.
3.
As Kira left Control along with the other two women, Hwa-jung gestured at her arm and said, “Does it hurt?”
“No,” said Kira. “Not really. Just feels weird.”
“What happened?” said Sparrow
“One of the nightmares grabbed me. The only way I could escape was by cutting myself free.”
Sparrow winced. “Shit. At least you made it out.”
“Yeah.” But privately, Kira wondered if she really had.
Two of the Marines—Tatupoa and another man whose name Kira didn’t know—stood stationed in the airlock antechamber, keeping watch over the Jelly inside. The rest of the Marines had cleared out, leaving behind bandages and bloody streaks on the deck.
The two men were wolfing down rations as Kira and her companions approached. They both looked pale and exhausted, stressed. She recognized the look; it was the same way she felt. After the adrenaline wore off, then came the crash. And she’d crashed hard.
Tatupoa paused with his spork in the air. “You here what to talk with the squid?”
“Yeah,” said Kira.
“Gotcha. You need any help, just holler. We’ll be right behind you.”
Although Kira doubted the Marines could protect her better than the Soft Blade, it made her glad to know they were there, guns at the ready.
Sparrow and Hwa-jung hung back as she went to the airlock and peered through the diamond pressure window. The Jelly, Itari, was still sitting on the floor, resting amid its knotted tentacles. For a moment, apprehension stalled her. Then Kira hit the release button and the airlock’s inner door rolled back.
The scent of the Jelly struck her: a smell that reminded her of brine and spice. It had an almost coppery tang.
The alien spoke first: [[Itari here: How can I help, Idealis?]]
[[Kira here: We are trying to leave the system, but our ship is not fast enough to outswim the Wranaui or the Corrupted.]]
[[Itari here: I cannot build you a flow modifier.]]
[[Kira here: Do you mean a—]] She struggled to find the right word: [[—a weight changer?]]
[[Itari here: Yes. It lets a ship swim more easily.]]
[[Kira here: I understand. What about the machine that lets us swim faster than light?]]
[[Itari here: The Orb of Conversion.]]
[[Kira here: Yes, that. Can you do anything to make it work better, so we can leave sooner?]]
The Jelly stirred and seemed to motion at itself with two of its tentacles. [[Itari here: This form is meant for fighting, not building. I do not have the assemblers or the materials needed for this sort of work.]]
[[Kira here: But do you know how to improve our Orb of Conversion?]]
The Jelly’s tentacles wrapped over themselves, rubbing and twisting with restless energy. [[Itari here: Yes, but it may not be possible without the proper time, tools, or form.]]
[[Kira here: Will you try?]]
… [[Itari here: Since you ask, Idealis, yes.]]
[[Kira here: Follow me.]]
“Well?” said Sparrow as Kira left the airlock.
“Maybe,” Kira replied. “It’s going to take a stab at helping. Hwa-jung?”
The machine boss scowled and said, “This way.”
“Whoa, there,” said Tatupoa, holding up a tattooed hand. “No one told us but nothing about this. You want to take the Jelly out?”
Sparrow had to call Falconi then, and Falconi call Hawes, before the Marines would relent and allow them to escort Itari to engineering. Kira kept close to the Jelly, the Soft Blade covered in short, dull spikes in preparation for potentially having to fight and kill.
But Kira didn’t think it would be necessary. Not yet.
Although she was alert and functional, she felt weak, wrung out by the trauma of the day. She needed food. And not just for herself; the Soft Blade needed nourishment as well. The suit felt … thin, as if the energy required for combat and the loss of the material covering her forearm had depleted its reserves.
“Do you have a ration bar on you?” Kira said to Sparrow.
The woman shook her head. “Sorry.”
Where’s Trig when you need him? Kira winced at the thought. No matter; she would wait. She wasn’t about to pass out from hunger, and food—or rather the lack thereof—was far from the top of her priority list.
Engineering was a cramped room packed full of displays. The walls, floors, and ceiling were painted with the same flat grey Kira remembered from the Extenuating Circumstances. In contrast, every pipe, wire, valve, and handle was a different color: bright reds and greens and blues and even a tangerine orange, each of them distinct and impossible to confuse. Heavy studs of oversized braille marked the objects so they could be identified in the dark and while wearing a skinsuit.
The floor looked cleaner than the galley counter. Yet the air was thick with heat and moisture, and laden with the unpleasant tang of lubricants, cleaners, and ozone. It left the taste of copper on Kira’s tongue, and she could feel her eyebrows standing on end with static electricity.
“Here,” said Hwa-jung, leading the way to the back of the room, where one half of a large, black sphere, over a meter across, protruded: the Wallfish’s Markov Drive.
The quarter hour that followed was a frustration of failed translations for Kira. The Jelly kept using technical terms that she didn’t understand and couldn’t render into comprehensible English, and likewise, Hwa-jung kept using technical terms that Kira couldn’t adequately convert into the Jellies’ language. The machine boss toggled a holo-display built into the console next to the Markov Drive and brought up schematics and other visual representations of the machine’s inner workings, which helped some, but—in the end—still failed to fully bridge the language gap.
The math behind a Markov Drive was anything but simple. However, the execution—as Kira understood it—was fairly straightforward. Annihilation of antimatter was used to generate electricity, which in turn was used to power the conditioned EM field that allowed for transition into superluminal space. The lower the energy density of the field, the faster a ship could fly, as less energy equaled higher speeds when going FTL (exactly the opposite of normal space). Efficiencies of scale meant bigger ships had higher top speeds, but in the end, the ultimate limiting factor was one of engineering. Maintaining the low-energy fields was tricky. They were prone to disruption from numerous sources both within and without a ship, which was why a strong gravity well would force a ship back into normal space. Even during interstellar flight, the field had to be adjusted multiple times every nanosecond in order to maintain some semblance of stability.
None of which gave Kira much confidence that Itari could somehow redesign their Markov Drive on the fly, without the proper equipment and without understanding English or the coding of human math. Nevertheless, she hoped, despite what reason told her.
At last, Falconi’s voice came over the comms: “Making any progress? Things aren’t looking too good out there.”
“Not yet,” said Hwa-jung. She sounded as annoyed as Kira felt.
“Keep at it,” said the captain and signed off.
“Maybe—” said Kira, and was interrupted by the Jelly turning away from the holo and crawling over the bulging surface of the Markov Drive.