Miliam had been relieved to finally remove her helmet, and more so to be able to hear something other than her own breathing again. That relief quickly faded when the drudge work of transporting the crystals to the engineering bay began. Aoibhe, in her oblivious cruelty, let slip that the elevator was out, a fact Miliam would have been glad not to know until it was too late to matter.
In the end, she’d been the one to transport two-thirds of the crystals, due to, to quote Aoibhe, her ‘brawny human arms.’ She’d pinched her arms and frowned when they were mostly flab.
“Alright, now all we’ve to do is wait for them to charge,” Aoibhe said as she closed the final capacitor housing. Now that there was power to the crystals, they had begun to glow as they charged, and the housings had darkened like transition sunglasses to prevent them from being blinding. “That’ll take some hours, so we’ve got time for a break.”
“So, uh, can I ask some questions now?”
Aoibhe returned to the gravity control panel and tuned it back upwards. “You just did.”
“That is such an old joke…whatever. Where are we?”
“Some no-name system merchant ships like to pass through. We’re close to Gaian Collective space,” Aoibhe explained as she led Miliam to the ship’s small galley. She handed over a ration pack and opened one for herself.
“What’s the Gaian Collective?” Miliam asked, poking her rations dubiously. It was a nondescript bar. She nibbled a bit off and instantly gagged. Aoibhe’s face screwed up in confusion.
“Humans are literally one of the founding members, how can you possibly not know that? Let’s turn this around- you mentioned casting a spell, but also seem to know nothing about magic. How does that line up?” Miliam noted that Aoibhe was eating her ration bar with a stoic indifference and wondered if she was used to it, putting on a front, or incapable of tasting.
“Well, I didn’t think it would work. I thought magic was fictional!” she asserted before holding her breath and biting off a chunk of ration bar. She chewed as quickly as possible just to get the foul-tasting thing out of her mouth.
“What was the spell even supposed to do? I’ve never heard of a spell that could teleport someone that far without a ship.”
“It was…it was supposed to…” Miliam trailed off, whispering something at the end that was too faint for Aoibhe to pick up. She felt her cheeks flush.
“What, was it supposed to make your chest bigger or something?” Aoibhe asked, not understanding what was so embarrassing. Miliam glanced down at her chest and then to the side, her blush deepening.
“Well, yes, but also, no. It, uh, was a spell to…turn me into a woman.” She said the last part so fast the words blended together, and then instantly crammed another piece of ration bar into her mouth just to give it something else to do.
“Usually that just requires a second person,” Aoibhe said dryly.
“Not like that!” Miliam all but shrieked, her mouth half full.
“Relax, I know what you meant. Not sure what was so embarrassing about a regular medical procedure or why you didn’t just go to a gene sculptor, though.”
“It was just a flight of fancy! I just wanted a distraction from how much my life sucked. As far as I knew magic wasn’t real, so there was no harm in it,” Miliam retorted, swallowing a mouthful of nasty nutrient dirt.
“Still not understanding how that got you here. Sure you didn’t pass out and get kidnapped? And where are you from, anyway?” As she spoke, she tossed away the wrapper of her ration pack, and it did an impossible arc into the trash, although Miliam wasn’t sure if it was the low gravity or magic.
“Earth,” she answered, as if it were obvious. “Where else would I- well, I guess you did say something about shipyards around Saturn. What year even is it?”
“Now I know you’re full of it. There can’t be anyone on Earth that doesn’t know about the GC in 501GC,” Aoibhe said suspiciously.
“Like, as in Gaian Collective?” Miliam frowned. “What’s that in AD? It was like, 2024AD last time I checked.”
Aoibhe gave Miliam an exasperated look. “And you think I’d know what year it is in a human calendar? All I know is humans were there when the GC was founded nearly six hundred years ago…in GC years, which are an average of a year for each of the founding member species.”
“Look, I don’t know if I teleported, time traveled, or jumped into a parallel world. For all I know I’m in some hypothetical past where humans had space travel before getting set back to the Stone Age. I just know I cast a spell, which apparently worked, and woke up in an ice-cold room with blinking blue lights.” With that said, Miliam finished off the ration bar, albeit reluctantly. It was nice to have something in her stomach, but she felt like she’d just eaten a mud pie.
“I’ve never heard of a spell that could time travel or change dimensions, but you’re pretty insistent…I guess we’ll just have to have an expert look at that grimoire of yours, once we get the salvage rights on this ship squared away,” Aoibhe said, shrugging her shoulders as if accepting she wasn’t getting any more answers right now.
“We?” Miliam asked, unsure why Aoibhe would go that far to help her.
“Aye. I’m out of a job, and we’ve got a…well, not perfectly good, but at least not-ready-for-the-scrapyard ship right here, so may as well stick with it.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Isn’t it a wreck though? Why not just find another job?”
“Mm…to answer that, I’ll need to explain something else first. How common do you think pirate attacks are?” Miliam was perplexed by the seeming non-sequitur, but answered anyway.
“Common enough? I mean, one happened here, right?” Aoibhe shook her head slowly.
“Nay. They’re vanishingly rare. Anyone with an intersystem teleport-capable ship can make money hauling even relatively small amounts of luxury goods or couriering data. The only subset of people that go pirating are those who are wanted for major crimes and somehow have a ship.” Here Aoibhe sighed in frustration. “Which is why it’s so suspicious when someone is the sole survivor of three separate pirate attacks. Forget finding a job; I’m going to be under suspicion of colluding with pirates for years.”
“So…this run down ship is the best option you have?”
“Aye, that it is. So we’re going to claim salvage rights on it and look into freelancing.”
“Why include me then? I don’t know anything about...anything,” Miliam asked, still confused.
“Well, I’m just a pilot. Gotta find a captain somewhere,” the elf replied, giving Miliam a meaningful look. Miliam pointed at herself.
“I’m the captain!?”
“Pretty sure you’re not an engineer, and you don’t know how to work the comms, or the weapons, or the barriers…so that kind of leaves captain,” Aoibhe said with a smirk. Miliam wilted a bit.
“That makes it sound like the least important job on the ship,” she pointed out. Aoibhe chuckled a bit at that.
“Ah, don’t worry, I’ll get you some textbooks or something when we get to a port. I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” Miliam perked up a bit, though it wasn’t about the possibility of textbooks about being a captain. She wouldn’t be certain ‘Captaining for Dummies’ was a thing until she saw it.
“Are there any I could get about history, or magic? Maybe I can figure out when or where I am if I can at least see a history book,” she theorized, excited at the prospect of deciphering at least some of the mystery.
“Just look it up on the system intranet when we arrive. I’ll have to get you a cheap phone or grimoire that can connect to the network. Doubt yours will work if you’re telling the truth.” Aoibhe said this casually, but Miliam latched on to a specific detail: the word phone. She was kind of expecting some magic or sci-fi alternative, like a neural interface.
“You still use phones? Don’t you have like, brain chips that hook you directly into the net, or some magic holographic window that appears from thin air and works like a touch screen?”
“Would you want a chip in your brain doing gods know what? And with a screen like that, anyone could see what you’re doing! How would that even be secured?” Aoibhe seemed incredulous at the ideas, although they’d seemed like standard futuristic fare to Miliam. She was shocked that amongst all this magic and futuristic stuff, she would find something so mundane as cellphones.
“Well, when you put it that way…no. Kind of just thought technology would have marched past smartphones by now, is all,” she admitted awkwardly. She decided to change the subject. “So, uh…where are we going? What’s it like?”
“A port in the Kappa Ceti system. It’s a major hub for trade between the GC and the Draconines,” Aoibhe replied. The system name, of course, told Miliam absolutely nothing about the location, and she still had no idea who the Draconines were.
“And…where is that, like, relative to Earth?” she asked, as if there was anything she could do with the information in the first place. Aoibhe didn’t seem to be much of a font of useful knowledge, sadly, but she was, as she put it herself, just a pilot. It might be a bit too much to expect her to have the answer to every question- the galaxy is a big place, and it wouldn’t be surprising if she only had reason to know about the local neighborhood.
“Not sure the exact distance, but I think it’s about three hops away? That would put it somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 light years.” From that, Miliam put together that Kappa Ceti was within 10 light years of the system they were in now, placing them less than 40 light years from Earth in total.
“Today is the first time I left the state, let alone the country…and now I’m over three dozen light years from home. It’s kind of overwhelming,” she said with a distant look in her eyes, trying to process the sheer scale of that distance. It was hard to comprehend, and the human brain really wasn’t built to do so.
“Suppose it would be, if you’re really from the distant past or what have you.” Aoibhe stood and stretched, her long, long arms unable to go much higher than her head. For the first time, Miliam registered that this ship must have been built with the expectation elves could be aboard at some point- otherwise the ceilings would be lower to save on space. Aoibhe hadn’t even needed to duck to get through the doors in spite of her height. “Anyway, I should go do the calculations for the jump. Not sure I trust the computers on this heap. Feel free to find the showers downstairs or take a nap while we wait for the capacitors to charge.”
“Oh, okay. Um, I hope it goes well?” Miliam watched as Aoibhe walked out, but she popped her head back in a moment later.
“Almost forgot- stay out of the starboard bunk room. I stashed the bodies in there,” she said, as if it were just a perfectly normal thing to say, before leaving again. Miliam had nearly forgotten about those. She wasn’t sure why Aoibhe didn’t just space them, but she was a little afraid to ask.
Despite being rather tired, Miliam decided to take a shower. She wasn’t sure she could sleep after being reminded of the corpses she shared a ship with- a grim reminder that this vessel hadn’t done much good for its previous crew.
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Codex Entry: Translocation Drive
The translocation drive, colloquially known as a teleportation drive, is the primary method of interstellar travel. Translocation drives have no transit time. They utilize a high level application of space magic to fold space, "tricking" it so that a ship occupies two different coordinates at once. From that point, it is easy enough to swap the coordinates a ship actually occupies, placing it at the destination in an instant. To act on two points so far apart requires a significant amount of mana, however- a ship operating a translocation drive must charge the drive before activating it.
There are two primary concerns when activating a translocation drive: distance and volume. The cost rises exponentially with distance and linearly with volume, meaning that a ship four times the size requires four times the power to teleport, but a trip of ten light years requires two and a half times as much power as a trip of five light years. Beyond ten light years, the costs spike rapidly to the point of impracticality, making it a soft limit.
While it is safer to conduct two jumps to cover ten light years, charging back to full power in between in order to leave a buffer for an emergency, there are other factors involved. The calculations for a teleportation are extremely complex and fail safes will kick in to cancel the jump if the destination is too close to a gravity well or inside an object. These calculations also require sensor data from the local star system, so they cannot be made ahead of time, and a certain amount of time must be spent in each system in order to gather that data.
For civilian crews in particular this may be a strain on personnel, so while a cautious captain will make the larger number of jumps, others may choose to make a smaller number of long distance jumps to give the crew more time to rest in between.