While Miliam was busy looking for capacitors, Aoibhe wasn’t idle in the pilot’s seat. She’d filled Miliam in on the most obvious repairs needed, but she would have to do a deeper investigation to determine if anything else was busted. And beyond that, she had questions of her own.
Miliam’s story didn’t make sense. She’d cast a spell and wound up on a derelict in space, supposedly, and yet seemed to know nothing about magic. That last part in itself was utterly bizarre in the modern day. Magic was integral to society. Faster than light travel was outright impossible without it. It shouldn’t be possible for anyone from a spacefaring species to not know about it.
Once Miliam was onboard the Kinzela, Aoibhe decided to access the ship’s logs and figure out what, precisely, was going on, in addition to checking for damage. Carillion ships were a pain due to their over-fondness for using analog switches for everything conceivable, but even they couldn’t get away from electronic logs.
There wasn’t any security on the system, which itself was strange, though Aoibhe had her suspicions about why. Checking the logs, she found that the ship had suffered an impact decades ago, followed by an emergency shut down of the reactor. That tracked with her observations. The impact appeared to have overloaded the barriers and destroyed the ship’s elevator. That took the magic-based systems offline including gravity.
Aoibhe absent-mindedly provided mission control as Miliam progressed into the freighter, tracking her progress via the suit’s transponder. Once she was inside the crew section, Aoibhe went back to her investigation.
Simply connecting the dots told Aoibhe that any engineering crew on board had perished then and there, and the survivors couldn’t operate the reactor. Inconceivable for a trained crew…which led to her next deduction.
This was a pirate ship.
The evidence was there to support it. A skeleton crew. Jerry-rigged control interfaces. Components that were poorly maintained even before the incident. The ship’s wards were offline, which only made sense if they were triggered when the ship was captured and the new crew didn’t know where to find them.
It would explain the blown capacitors, as well, in an oblique way. This part was speculation, and could be up to simple incompetence, but it had been known for centuries that a mana surge occurs when a ship’s barriers are overloaded, as the power directed to the barrier suddenly has nowhere to go. The number of safety features that had to have been degraded or bypassed for a surge to shatter over half the crystals…incompetence didn’t begin to describe it.
She was far from certain, but Aoibhe suspected that meant the ship’s engineer wasn’t formally trained and didn’t know the purpose of all of the safety features involved.
Aoibhe looked up as Miliam called in again, this time reporting she’d reached the engineering bay. She had to give Miliam one thing: for all her seeming lack of familiarity with magic technology, her queries were reasonable, and she didn’t need to be told the same thing twice. Once given instructions, the mysterious woman was able to follow them.
Moving past the older logs, though, Aoibhe found an additional oddity. Only just before she’d made contact with Miliam, the ship’s emergency power activated, noting only that life had been detected on board. The timing didn’t quite line up with the attack on the Kinzela, either. At first Aoibhe suspected stasis of some sort, but she found no evidence of a stasis device on board, nor any record of the mana needed to power one while the ship was dead in space.
Moreover, Miliam had left a grimoire laying around on the bridge. Aoibhe had only glanced at it long enough to determine she couldn’t read it. That wasn’t a surprise. There were as many ways of writing spells as stars in the sky, and she had never needed to know many besides the most prevalent fay standards.
Giving up on finding answers to that particular mystery, Aoibhe made a list of the repairs needed to get this derelict to port. Only one jump would be enough; this system was a common stopover point between Gaian Collective and Draconine Freehold space, one jump from the former and two from the latter. Anything that failed after that single jump wasn’t a problem.
The list was relatively short, and the capacitors were the main concern. She worried somewhat that the jump itself might overload the capacitors again, but the jump would be done by then, and the wave drive could get them to port with only the mana furnace to run it. Some minor repairs were needed to ensure the capacitors would charge properly, and there was some danger of the life support failing before they were at capacity, but that was the extent of the truly troublesome stuff.
Which wasn’t to say the ship wasn’t otherwise a mess. The point defenses were entirely offline, the missile tubes were dry, and the ship’s sole lance had, she suspected, suffered a meteor impact. There were no rations besides three ancient MREs. The magic circuits powering the ship’s basic barrier were fried, so they had no defense against space debris except the ship’s plating, which had a hole surrounded by stress fractures on the exterior of the elevator shaft.
Her to-do list finished, Aoibhe checked in with Miliam again, finding that she was almost ready to make the first return trip. She’d expected that she would need to adjust the corvette’s position each time Miliam jumped to and from the freighter, but Miliam had apparently solved that problem herself with a tow cable used to load freight in zero-g.
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Once Miliam was aboard and had secured the cable, and Aoibhe had ribbed her a bit for forgetting about momentum, Aoibhe decided Miliam would be able to handle the rest on her own and chose to inspect the ship more closely. First she headed to engineering to adjust the gravity down to a more comfortable level.
She considered getting some out of suit time, but instead she just broke the seal that maintained its internal pressure. In high gravity that pressurization helped circulate her blood, but in standard gravity, it could cut off circulation close to the skin.
That done, Aoibhe decided the first order of business was to collect the former crew’s bodies and put them in one place. It was morbid work, but it was best to have it done before they reached a port. The authorities were going to have to process their salvage claim on this corvette simply to avoid suspicions of hijacking, and having the bodies of the actual pirates would prove their claims.
No one went into piracy if they were welcome in civilized space. Aoibhe had no doubt that even after decades floating out here, there would be record of their crimes.
The first body was the one formerly seated in the pilot’s seat, which she had shifted to access it. She dumped it in the bunk room where she’d found Miliam’s suit; there were already two more in there, locked in an eternal struggle to the death. Another was in the cargo bay, but that one would have to wait.
Instead, Aoibhe searched the other rooms. She found the captain on the upper deck, surrounded by emptied bottles of mold suspended in water that carillions favored as an intoxicant. The cloister was empty, unsurprising given how easily the corvette’s barrier had failed. The next body was in the galley, having apparently gorged themselves on the ship’s entire stock of rations as their final act.
Her least favorite was the one in the shower. At least the rest had suits on. Water had frozen to this body, and it was beginning to thaw with the life support reactivated, so she hurried to get it sorted away before it created even more of a mess.
That task sorted, Aoibhe set to work cleaning up the engineering bay ahead of Miliam’s return with the final replacement capacitor crystals. It was nice that the housings for the crystals were all intact, but they were full of fragments, some of which were practically dust clinging to the inside of the connection points.
Still, that wouldn’t be a problem. Aoibhe thumbed her grimoire on and punched in the combination of a simple telekinesis spell. The spell circle appeared in her mind’s eye, and she filled in the missing variables with practiced ease before sending mana into the device in her hand to activate the spell.
The crystal fragments arced up and out of the housing, curving just right to draw the bits out of the connector in addition to grabbing the larger chunk along the bottom of the chamber. Aoibhe wasn’t too concerned about them once they were clear, so she left them on the floor while she followed up with a burst of air to blow out any fine particles remaining, depositing those on the floor too so as not to breathe them in.
Neither spell was draining, but they were a bit tedious when repeated twenty times over. It was better to have the capacitor housings clear when Miliam finished her own task, though, since Miliam would be able to help install the new capacitors but not clear the chambers out. At least, not without a brush and a dustpan. Aoibhe designated a corner for the waste and piled up the ruined crystals there.
Fortunately, Miliam’s task was plenty time consuming itself. Aoibhe cleared out the chambers one by one, wishing she had a wind or kinetic magic specialist on hand to clear them all out at once all the while. At least the gravity was comfortable. How long had it been since she’d spent time in standard gravity?
A cursory inspection ensued when she’d finished, making sure the housings were all undamaged. It was the housings with intact crystals that were damaged, ironically enough. Their magic circuits were degraded, and that damage had led to them not being fully charged or having an open channel for a mana surge to pass through.
The worst part was that it wasn’t even a difficult fix. Aoibhe just needed to unplug the circuits and rerun the cables using spares. That required pulling up some deck plating, but this was a standard maintenance job, and those plates were designed to be removed. Though, a real engineer could have simply mended the cables in situ. Still, she only needed to cast a spell built into the plates to separate them where they were fused to the frame below, and they lifted away.
Surprisingly enough, the trackways below weren’t a rat’s nest, but she was more inclined to chalk that up to a lack of ever attempting such maintenance than actual competence on the late crew’s part. More tedious drudge work ensued as Aoibhe ripped out the thankfully-well-labelled failing cables and replaced them from the ship’s spares. She was just fusing the final deck plate back into place when she received word from Miliam.
“I’ve got the last batch of crystals. Anything else we need from the Kinzela before I drop my tether?” she said, sounding dead inside from the repeated trips into open space. Aoibhe had to admit that in spite of her cowardice, the woman had gotten the job done, and probably deserved a break by now.
Not that she’d be getting one before the crystals were installed.
“Nay, that’s it. Drop the tether and I’ll re-pressurize the bay. Once the crystals are installed, we’ll have all the time in the world to rest while they charge.”
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Codex Entry: Corvettes
Other than unarmed couriers, corvettes are the smallest ships capable of FTL travel. These ships range from 100m-150m in length, with a full third of their volume being taken up by their reactors and FTL drives. The FTL drives alone make corvette-sized ships an order of magnitude more expensive than intra-system craft with similar armaments or storage space, but they have enough advantages over larger craft that they remain in service across known space.
In the civilian sector, corvettes are used as short-haul freighters for time sensitive goods as well as for transporting people and data from system to system- while corvettes are significantly smaller than the average passenger liner, they make up for in speed what they lack in capacity, making them the transportation of choice for those in a hurry. Civilian ships typically trade out their armaments for additional storage or passenger space, but they are also commonly employed as escorts for freighter convoys to guard against makeshift pirate vessels.
Not all militaries employ corvettes, but many find them useful for point defense and patrol duties. In terms of point defense, it is cheaper and more effective to employ a screening element of corvettes than it is to outfit capital ships with point defense weapons, as even the smallest corvettes can mount a dozen point defense lasers and more than a score of counter missiles in exchange for a dearth of ship-to-ship batteries. Additionally, though corvettes are expensive compared to ships lacking FTL capacity, they're still significantly cheaper than even destroyers in both price and crew requirements.