The aft cargo bay on the side she’d entered from was almost as empty as the fore bay, but fortunately Miliam managed to find a bag after a bit of searching around in the dark room. She left the capacitor crystal floating near the door while she brought the bag back, so she’d have a shorter trip to the engineering chamber for the rest of the crystals.

Unfortunately, one bag wasn’t going to fit twenty crystals, and she probably couldn’t move one that had so many in it even if it could. This one would have space for maybe four, and being as it was the only one she’d found, it would have to be emptied on the other side and brought back with her each trip.

The corvette was a much smaller target than the freighter had been, so she took it upon herself to improvise a bit. A bit of searching revealed a spool of utility cabling attached to the wall of the cargo bay. Being as she had never worked on a space freighter before, Miliam had no idea what it was actually intended for, but she found a clasp on her spacesuit to attach it to, so she’d at least be able to reel herself back in with a bit of effort.

It was one thing to have Aoibhe claim she could retrieve her if she missed, and another entirely to put it to the test. Better to have a backup. And besides, once she got the cable to the other ship, Miliam could secure it in the cargo bay and give herself a reliable way to go back and forth.

“Everything okay over there?”

“Just peachy. I’ve got a bag for the crystals, and I found a cable I can use as a lifeline. Just give me a few minutes to fill it…and a few more to build up the courage…and I’ll be on my way back.”

“Don’t feel like you need to rush yourself. Better to be slow and safe.”

“Would there be any tools on board I could use to maneuver out there?” Miliam asked, surprised she had only thought of the question now.

“Sure are, but they’re not simple. Even I’m not rated to operate them.”

Well, there went that idea. Miliam decided she had no choice but to give up and headed back for three more crystals. Releasing them became more tedious than difficult pretty quickly, and by the fourth, she was already spending more time carrying them to the bay and returning than she was getting them out of their housings.

That was all just stalling though. There was no reason she had to get them all now. It’s not like she was planning to jump to the corvette with the bag in hand; that would only make the task harder when she could carry it more safely while attached to the cable. Miliam just really, really did not want to go back out there, with no ground beneath her feet, air to breath- no anything at all.

Drifting in space was fucking terrifying and only the very real fear of a slow death from thirst and hunger onboard the corvette kept her moving. Sure, she had the possibility of dying while drifting in space the same way, but doing nothing made the other option a guarantee.

Finally, with nothing else to distract her, Miliam found herself at the edge of the cargo bay staring towards the distant corvette.

“Any chance you can pull the ship closer?”

“Not without the wave drive damaging the freighter. Normally we’d use maneuvering thrusters for that, but it looks like the crew used up the fuel for them during their last battle.”

Wave drive. Another term to ask about when things calmed down. Whatever it was presumably answered the question of why there were no visible drive nozzles on the rear of the corvette.

“You look pretty small from here. How am I even supposed to aim myself?”

“Don’t worry about it; just jump and I’ll match your trajectory. The reason I’m so far out is so that the wave drive won’t kill you while I reposition.”

“The wave drive could kill me!?” Miliam shrieked, suddenly a whole lot less willing to make the jump.

“Relax, I’m twice the safe distance away from you. I’ll have plenty of time to reorient before I need to shut off the drive, and I can always pull away further if I need the extra time to get into position.”

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Okay. I’m trusting you. I found a cable so I can pull myself back to the freighter if I need to, so don’t worry about taking too long, just get it right the first time.”

“Aye, good thinking. Ready?”

Miliam took a deep breath. She’d unspooled the cable while they spoke so that she wouldn’t lose speed from the energy needed to unspool it in flight, and she’d hooked it to her suit, with some of it looped around her hand for good measure. She was as ready as she would ever be.

“Ready.”

With that one word, she jumped off the freighter. The first jump had been nothing compared to this one. There was no real doubt that she would make it that time, as big as the freighter was. Aoibhe must have pulled the ship as close as safely possible that time, to boot. But the corvette was a lot smaller, and a lot narrower. This time there really wasn’t a good orientation for the ship to be in when she makes the jump; even jumping towards the long side would leave a lot of margin for error in two directions.

Aoibhe seemed confident though, so all Miliam could do was drift and wait.

Her view of the corvette blurred and bent a bit as it began to move, shifting its position in all three axes at the same time. Even staring directly at the ship as it moved Miliam couldn’t spot any kind of propulsion causing it, a fact she could only chalk up to the magitech she knew so little about.

Seconds stretched into minutes; Miliam glanced at her phone with her free hand and realized she’d neglected to check the time before jumping, so the clock told her nothing whatsoever. Her breathing quickened the longer the trip went on, but she did relax a bit when the corvette stopped moving, signaling that Aoibhe had gotten into position.

Bit by bit, the corvette’s size increased as its distance shrank, until finally, Miliam felt the pull of gravity upon entering the cargo bay. She dropped to the ground with a sigh of relief and lay there for several minutes, just letting her breathing return to normal and basking in the feeling of having a definitive ‘down.’

“I’d come down to greet you, but it’s best not to open the inner door while the bay is in vacuum. Are you all good?”

“Yeah…just catching my breath…enjoying gravity…having a love affair with the floor…that sort of thing…”

When she finally felt like her pulse had dropped from 200 beats per minute to whatever was normal, Miliam forced herself onto her feet and looked around for something to attach her life cable to, pulling it taut while she looked. There were plenty of hard points around the bay for securing cargo, so she just picked one and looped the cable through it several times before attaching it to the next one over, figuring that would be plenty secure.

With the cable attached to the ship, Miliam could no longer attach it to her suit, but she was able to fight a short, double sided cable laying around the cargo bay to use instead. With it attached to the cable on one end and her suit on the other, it would be just like riding a zipline.

“Secured my line. Heading back out, try not to move too much or it might snap.”

“Aye, I’ll keep steady.”

Now that there was a line to follow, Miliam found that a lot of the fear that had been slowing her down had faded. She got a running start and leapt out of the bay at a far higher speed than previously, one hand outstretched near the cable just in case. The line, and her connection to it, held, and she zoomed through space all the way back to the freighter.

“Are you sure you should be going that fast?”

“It’s fine, the cable is secure and I’m secured to it with a cargo cable.”

“And how do you plan to land?”

“I, uh, didn’t,” Miliam admitted dumbly. “In my defense I was never trained for zero-g.”

“Your defense isn’t going to protect you against sudden deceleration.”

Aoibhe’s words were downright prophetic, although the result wasn’t hard to foresee. Miliam came in towards the Kinzela’s cargo bay fast, just barely managing to brace her feet to catch the deck plating. It helped, but not as much as she would have liked. She bounced off the deck before her connecting cable hit the end of the line, whipping her into the bulkhead next to the cable spool.

Fortunately she bounced off that too, only mildly disoriented by the impact.

“I’m okay,” she muttered dazedly.

“And what did we learn?”

“Sir Isaac Newton is a bitch.”

“Who?”

“Never mind.” Miliam supposed it made sense a space elf wouldn’t know about foundational human scientists. She wondered who their equivalent was, if it was even a single person that discovered the same theorems.

At any rate, having learned her lesson, Miliam was a lot more conservative on the way back. Not that she could have gone quite as fast while hauling four massive, in the physics sense, crystals with her. Even if they were weightless, it took a good bit of work just to get them up to a useful speed, but her lower velocity on the next trip allowed her to lock her boots to the floor the moment she landed, which in turn allowed her to just barely lower her burden to the floor gradually rather than instantly.

It felt easier than she expected.

“Huh, I thought they would be heavier.”

“Probably because I set the gravity to a little under three quarters of what you’re used to. Fay can’t survive a full Earth gravity without assistance, and a single Tir Tairngire gravity would be only half of that, which is unhealthy for humans.”

“Well, it made moving the crystals easier. Maybe you could drop it down to your standard while we’re moving them?”

“Aye, that’s a fair idea. I would have struggled to carry even one at this level. I’ll alter the settings while you’re getting the next set.”

Miliam went ahead and unloaded the crystals onto the bay floor, as she was going to need the bag to retrieve the rest. She was done in moments, and went back towards the door.

“One down, four to go.”