“We’re in position. Make sure you’ve got the enchantments running. Evacuating the atmosphere in the cargo bay in 3…2…1…”

Miliam was surprised to hear they had arrived; she didn’t even know they’d moved yet. She certainly hadn’t felt the ship move. As the air left the room, she made a note to ask Aoibhe how the ship’s propulsion worked later.

“Looks like the enchantments are working just fine,” she commented to fill the silence. Aoibhe had been right when she said these enchantments were lighter than the others- she hardly felt any drain from them at all. That was another subject she would need to ask about. How did that even work? What was that burning sensation when she activated the mana furnace? This strange sci-fantasy experience left her with few points of reference. Nothing worked the way she would expect.

At long last the air finished cycling out and the cargo bay door opened. Normally, Miliam thought, she would probably be able to hear the massive hydraulic mechanisms operating the heavy door, but all she could hear now was her own breathing. Even in vacuum, though, the deck vibrated beneath her feet as the door moved to reveal the Kinzela in the distance.

Aoibhe must have been listing the absolute worst case scenario when she mentioned missing the ship, because the massive freighter she found waiting for her was orders of magnitude larger than the proverbial broad side of a barn. It had a thin spine section which connected to eight enormous, separate cargo bays in two layers of four. Their doors were huge, spanning nearly the entire length of each bay, presumably for faster loading and unloading.

The crew section at the center was riddled with holes, but the cargo bays were mostly untouched- at least, in terms of damage. Each of their doors lay open, which had allowed some containers to drift free of the derelict vessel, abandoned even by the pirates that attacked the ship.

Miliam stepped up to the edge and stared for a moment, processing what she was about to do. The word ‘spacewalk’ didn’t do it justice. This was a leap into the empty void between planets, aiming for a target that was miniscule on such a scale, but admittedly impossible to miss from this distance.

Assuming she didn’t completely and utterly botch the jump.

Taking several deep breaths to steady herself, Miliam braced a foot on the lowered cargo door, which had transformed into a ramp, and kicked off, breaking free of the corvette’s artificial gravity and becoming weightless once again. Her short stints in zero-g prepared her somewhat for the experience. She wasn’t sure she could have avoided a panic attack otherwise.

Well, she still screamed until her throat felt hoarse, but that was unavoidable.

The Kinzela loomed larger and larger as she floated towards it, but the impact still took her somewhat by surprise. It was hard to gauge size out here with nothing for reference. She bounced, and her arms flailed out desperately for something to grab onto. The surface of the ship was smooth and free of handholds, but she had struck near the exit wound left by a pirate weapon, and one of her hands caught hold of a twisted structural support.

Panting heavily, Miliam pulled herself back towards the ship. Her feet made contact with the hull, giving her at least that much comfort despite the meaninglessness of the gesture.

“Focus some mana on your feet to lock your boots to the hull. It will take some practice, but you’ll have to deactivate them one at a time to step.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that before I jumped?”

“You didn’t ask. And honestly, I expected you to miss and go drifting off into space at least once before you got that far.”

Miliam let out a huff, but did as Aoibhe suggested, noticing out corner of her eye that Aoibhe had brought the ship around to put eyes on what Miliam was doing. She let go of the bar she held experimentally, finding that she did indeed stay in place even without its support.

“You’re going to want to go towards one of the bay doors to enter. Too much jagged metal around the holes to enter safely.”

“Noted,” she said shortly, focused on operating her boots. They didn’t seem to be magnetized, as she realized quickly they weren’t actually attracted to the hull itself. Instead, they clung to whatever they were in contact with as if fused to the surface, but didn’t react with so much as a centimeter between them and the metal below.

It made it easier, in a way. She could toggle one boot for just a brief moment while pulling her foot upwards, and the brief interruption in mana supply was all she needed to take a step, allowing her to lock that boot into place the moment it made contact with the hull again. That said, she had nearly reached the cargo bay door by the time she figured that out, and it was easier said than done.

She might have the timing and application of strength right by the time she retrieved the last crystal. Maybe.

The hull slanted down to either side of the door, allowing Miliam to walk down and look inside from the side instead of bending over the rim. Finding the area clear, she gripped the edge carefully, contorting her body to put one foot on the inner wall of the cargo bay before releasing her other foot and standing fully on the wall of the bay.

“Good work. You’re a natural at this,” Aoibhe said encouragingly. Whether she meant it or just wanted to help was up in the air. At any rate, Miliam grabbed her phone from an exterior pocket, the flashlight already on. Since she couldn’t operate the touchscreen in a spacesuit, she’d activated it ahead of time.

Finding the sensation of walking on the wall uncomfortable, Miliam’s first action on the inside of the ship was to move towards the floor, making the ninety degree switch to walking on proper ground. She found the room mostly empty, save for cranes and such mounted on rails on the ceiling. What containers weren’t taken were likely floating in space now. She headed for the internal door leading into the crew space to find it closed.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

“I’m at a door, but it’s locked shut. What do I do?”

“Panel under the controls. There’s an emergency release that will only activate if the power is off. Open the panel and pull the handle out, then rotate it ninety degrees.”

Quickly spotting the panel, which resembled similar ones found in elevators, Miliam opened it up and saw nothing but a single circular handle inside. She met with resistance when she pulled on it, and had to shift her stance to really put her back into the effort. It rose slowly, but when it stopped moving, it rotated smoothly into position with little trouble.

A tremor ran through the deck plates as something activated, and the door didn’t so much slide open as it did slam into its recess in the wall as if propelled by some unseen force. Miliam assumed explosives, but it wasn’t important right now.

She entered the crew section, finding it thick with floating debris. The damage to the interior was severe. Aoibhe’s survival didn’t mean the pirates weren’t thorough. The corridor Miliam found herself had been heavily ventilated by weapons fire, throwing lose fragments of hull, systems components, personal effects, and even…fuck, body parts.

Miliam retched a bit as what looked like it was once an arm floated past her. It was hard to tell. There wasn’t much left of it. None of the debris was dangerous, though, thankfully, having bled off whatever momentum it had when it bounced around the inside of the ship. She still had to shuffle some of the larger bits aside as she progressed into the ship, making her way around very frequent holes through which she could see the lower decks and outer space.

The freighter’s layout was very different when compared to the more military design of the corvette. On the smaller ship, everything branched off the hallways, compartmentalized into individual rooms. The freighter wasn’t quite so clearly delineated. Miliam had to pass through a handful of common areas on the way to the stern, passing under emergency bulkheads that never had time to close before the power to them was cut. They wouldn’t have helped anyway; the destruction was such that every room would have depressurized individually.

The cafeteria was a particular challenge, as it was outfitted with chairs and tables that weren’t bolted to the floor. They had taken flight in the confusion, and now floated idly, occasionally bouncing off each other as they slowly reached entropy and lost all kinetic energy. Some had been blasted into millions of fragments; other were intact, and food could be seen splattered across their surfaces.

More dead bodies than Miliam had seen in her life hung in the vacuum of this room, not a one of them obscured by a spacesuit. She had to thank the low lighting for making the details hard to make out, so long as she didn’t point her phone right at them. On the other hand, the whole experience was a bit spookier as a result. It took several minutes to reach the other end of the room while navigating both the holes in the floor and the floating furniture, but she got there.

As she entered the final stretch, she noticed a bay door to her right, and had to resist the urge to slap herself in the helmeted forehead as she realized she could have entered closer to the rear. At the same time, she was relieved to have found her destination.

The engineering room on the freighter was a far cry from the corvette’s own. It was arranged vertically instead of horizontally. The reactor and furnace stretched from a good four floors down all the way to the ceiling, and the walls were ringed with enclosures for crystal capacitors on every level, along the walkways surrounding the central machinery. A gaping hole in the secret revealed the entry point of the slug that shattered both essential machines, along with a number of capacitors, but many more were still intact.

“Found the engineering bay. Most of the crystals look intact. How am I getting them back, though?”

“One thing at a time. I’ll walk you through getting the first one out. Are you near one right now?”

“Right in front of me. Uh, I don’t have to worry about them like, zapping me or anything right?”

“Nay, at worst you could absorb some of the leftover mana, which would be harmless. Release the lock on the enclosure and slide the door open.” A beat passed as Aoibhe gave her time to do just that. “Next, you’ll need to remove the clamps holding the crystal in place. There’s a lever on each one that locks it into position; first, move that aside, then lift the clamp away from the crystal.”

“Alright, this will take a moment,” Miliam said as she spotted the clamps and levers at the top and bottom of the crystal. There were sixteen total, forming a cage on both ends. It was difficult to work in such little light, but the mechanisms were uniform enough that it she saw how to operate one, she could operate the rest blindly. Once she was done, she found the crystal was still held in place by something like a rigid suction cup on each end, precisely shaped to fit the facets of the crystal. “Now what?”

“Okay, this part needs to be done in the right order. First, release it from the upper conduit. You’ll need to pass some mana through the connector to de-bond it.” As Miliam started on that, Aoibhe continued. “The lower conduit is hinged. First you’ll need to remove the bolt holding it in place, and then you can pull it towards you. It should stop at a forty five degree angle. Then you can release the lower connector, but be careful not to let the crystal drift free. They’re not easy to break, but we need twenty or so intact.”

Thinking back to the size of the room, Miliam didn’t think that would be a problem. The number of capacitors seemed to scale linearly with the surface area of the ship, so the freighter had many times as many as she needed.

The crystal came loose and Miliam held it carefully, finding the sensation odd. It had no weight in her current environment, requiring only a bit of force to shift its mass instead. Not having to support the weight of the crystal was a godsend; she wasn’t sure she could lift something of this size in full gravity.

“Are you going to tell me how to bring it back, now?”

“I hope you enjoyed your spacewalk, because this one is going to be a bit harder.”

“What did I do to make you hate me?”

----------------------------------------

Codex Entry: Capacitor Crystals

Just as it is useful to store electrical power, it is also handy to have a concentrated source of mana available- particularly in the depths of space where ambient mana is thinnest. Capacitor crystals are among the largest practical storage devices for mana, as they represent the best balance between capacity and ease of replacement. While larger crystals can be grown, it is typically easier and more cost effective to replace a few crystals in an array than it is to replace a single crystal with the capacity of a smaller array.

Capacitor crystals are grown in a lab just like lesser gemstones, and would technically be classifiable as diamonds, as their structure is mostly carbon. Since carbon alone cannot interact directly with mana, spells are used during the growing process to infuse the carbon lattice with mana in a formation that prevents mana leakage from the inside. One end of the crystal allows mana to pass through into the crystal, where it is then stored until needed. The other side allows mana out, but only when a mana flow passes over it. In this manner, one connector can inject mana, and the other, when charged, allows it to be extracted.

Smaller crystals have a variety of applications such as acting as batteries for spell circles and allowing mages to cast more powerful spells than they otherwise can, but large capacitor crystals, bulky as they are, are used almost exclusively on starships. The only things that require that much mana in a short period of time are starship weapons and the long distance, high volume teleportation arrays that serve as the only practical form of FTL travel, though they can also be tapped to power barriers in an emergency.

Crystal capacity is the primary limiter of the distance a ship can travel. A ship can only feasibly carry so many crystals before other functions are impacted, so ship design requires a careful balancing act, as the further a ship can teleport, the less capable it will be in other areas.