The Astrum Vitae had only just completed its next jump when Miliam noticed something was off. It was something she was so used to by now that it had faded into background noise, so it took her a few seconds to place it. Since the ship had been reactivated there had always been a very subtle background noise; the hum of the fusion reactor running in the background. Miliam didn’t know the specifics but it must have contained some moving parts and those had stopped.

“Engineer, is everything alright back there?” she asked into the comm. He didn’t answer immediately, so she held up a finger to tell the bridge crew to wait.

“Reactor. Offline. Help. Required,” the dragonewt responded in their usual halting cadence. Miliam frowned. She wasn’t sure if Engineer meant they needed outside help to fix the issue or that they simply needed more hands.

“Uh, could you clarify that? Do you want some of us to come back there or want us to call for help?” she asked. Hopefully it was the former, because the latter was a crapshoot. Now that they were a bit over half the way to Delta Boötis, the Astrum Vitae was well outside the area where they could expect anyone to happen upon them. Far more unlikely things had happened in Miliam’s life already, though, so she wouldn’t rule it out as an option.

“More. Hands,” Engineer replied, much to Miliam’s relief.

“Alright, hold tight while I…sort out who to send,” she told them. “Eun-ji, any good hiding spots?”

“Uh, several! We could park on an asteroid in the belt or on one of the moons around the system. No gas giants this time, though,” Eun-ji reported. Fortunately their sensors could work on backup power.

“Cap’n, we’re not going to anywhere with the reactor offline,” Aoibhe cut in. “Not unless you want to use power from the capacitors. The thrusters are too slow to get us to any of these locations within the next couple of weeks.”

“Oh. Then…what would take more power? The wave drive or EMCM?” Miliam asked, looking between Min-ji and Aoibhe.

“Depends on what you want to do?” Min-ji said hesitantly.

“And how far we’d be going,” Aoibhe added. “The wave drive doesn’t use nearly as much mana as the translocation drive but our supply is kind of finite and a lot of our systems are already drawing from it.”

“Well…I figured if we can’t move we could make ourselves invisible until we know what’s going on,” Miliam suggested, looking to Min-ji specifically for her assessment.

“If it’s full-spectrum…I think even then we could sustain it for a while if we’re just sitting still and not scanning, since there wouldn’t be much to adjust and that makes it less strenuous. Especially if Eun-ji and I swap out,” answered Min-ji after checking a few things on her consoles.

“Without dipping into what we’d need for another jump?”

“Definitely!” Min-ji confirmed confidently, accompanying the answer with a sharp nod. Her cap almost fell off from the motion, as her horns kept her from securing it tightly.

“For the record, we’d only need a few minutes to get to the closest asteroid big enough to hide us, but we might want to know what the actual problem is before we try moving. We’d be employing the thrusters at the end and that involves a few more systems than just the wave drive,” Aoibhe contributed, spinning her chair around to look directly at Miliam.

“Then, Min-ji? Make us disappear, please. Eun-ji, keep an eye out and let me know if anyone shows up. Aoibhe…I guess you may as well come along since there’s not much else you can do up here,” Miliam instructed, standing up. A knot of nervousness sat in her stomach. Was that the right decision? She was prioritizing preserving power for later, but maybe an upfront-cost would be worth it for the extra cover. Which gave them the best chances of survival?

“No use worrying about it now. Let’s focus on finding out what’s wrong,” Aoibhe said, patting Miliam on the shoulder and offering a comforting smile. She’d seen through Miliam’s worries, apparently. “Let’s grab Tessa on the way down. You two are stronger than I am.”

They could always just turn the gravity down again, but Miliam supposed even then it might take some muscle to shift the mass of anything big and dense like large metal panels. Regardless, Miliam and Aoibhe picked up Tessa and headed down the hall to engineering. They found Engineer looking over the control console for the reactor.

“Hey, Engineer, we’re here to help. Do you know what the issue is?” Miliam asked as she and the others filed in.

“Stabilizer. Issue,” Engineer grunted. Miliam looked to Aoibhe for clarification, but she just shrugged her shoulders, not much more familiar with reactors than Miliam outside the basics. Tessa saw their confusion and stepped up to translate.

“Oh, I think they’re talking about the thingy that makes the little things live longer,” she supplied unhelpfully in a voice suffused with confidence.

“Muons,” Engineer provided for her.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

“Those!” Tessa shouted, pointing. “I think it’s the part of the reactor that’s magic.”

“So…can you fix it?” Miliam asked, looking back to Engineer. They blinked their eyes separately, then nodded, then shook their head. Once again, Tessa was the only one that caught the meaning.

“That’s a maybe. I think they’re saying they won’t know until they open up and that’s why they wanted help.” Miliam and Aoibhe stared at Tessa for a moment before replying.

“Okay, I know this isn’t really important by now, but why are you so good at that?” Miliam asked in bafflement.

“Oh, that’s because I hang out in here when I’m off work. Engineer is a great listener! I can talk about anything to them. Like the last sim I did. Or that time Abigail asked me to make her lunch but got a stomach ache out of nowhere when I was almost done and left! It was right after she looked at-”

“Aye, Tessa, we get the idea,” Aoibhe sighed, interrupting the excitable elf. Miliam looked at Engineer with a raised eyebrow and got a nod.

“Talk. Lots.” Engineer blinked, again doing it one eye at a time. “I….not. But listen.” They nodded twice. “Work well.”

Thinking back now, Miliam realized she didn’t really run into Tessa around the ship much. She never would have guessed the woman had struck up an odd friendship with their speech-averse engineer when no one was looking. Well, it was good to know the crew was getting along.

“Alright, go ahead and walk us through what you need,” Miliam said to Engineer, moving on to the important stuff.

Following the dragonewt’s lead, she and Tessa helped partially dismantle the reactor. Unlike a fission reactor there were remarkably few safety protocols that needed to be performed before opening it up. There were no radioactive components, so no one needed to don hazmat suits or whatever the magical equivalent was. To Miliam’s surprise, the only thing they needed to be careful of was the heat, as ‘cold fusion’ only referred to the temperature at which the reaction took place- it still produced heat, which was used to boil water.

“Huh. So even in the distant and magical future, power generation still boils down to heating up water to spin a wheel,” Miliam commented while lifting a component out of Engineer’s way. It wasn’t actually all that heavy, dragonewts just weren’t very strong.

“Less puns, more working,” Aoibhe said in annoyance as she flicked Miliam in the back of the head. Tessa, meanwhile, had burst out laughing, so Miliam took solace in the fact that at least one person was on her side. A very easily amused person, but it still counted.

“You would think they would design this thing to be more serviceable,” Miliam complained as she watched Engineer removing the bonds from the next piece. The reactor seemed to actually be one solid object for the most part, barring moving parts and places where different materials made contact. While those parts were exceptions and were screwed into place, the rest of the machine was held together by magically fusing sections of it- like welding, almost, but far more effective.

“Sometimes people don’t actually consider that when designing something, and then it somehow gets through the R&D process and becomes everyone’s problem,” Aoibhe said sourly as she stood behind Miliam doing nothing.

“If it were everyone’s problem you’d be helping too…” Miliam grumbled, though she knew she legitimately couldn’t order Aoibhe to do something she lacked the physical strength for. Still, maybe she should have left the pilot on the bridge, given that she wasn’t doing a whole lot here either.

“I’m supervising. It’s an important job. You should know, it’s normally yours,” Aoibhe replied smugly.

“How come no one ever supervises me?” asked the peanut gallery, also known as Tessa. “I’m so lonely in the missile bay…all by myself…I’ve tried talking to my console but it doesn’t talk back. Actually, that’s not so bad now that I think about it. A lot of people don’t really talk back either.”

“Tessa, people might talk back more if you pause to let them speak,” Miliam pointed out in a deadpan.

“Huh, that’s a good idea. I should try it next time I’m talking to someone. If I remember. Wait, I’m talking to you right now. When am I supposed to pause though? I’ve never really done it on purpose so I’m not sure when-”

“Found. Issue,” Engineer announced as they pulled a component from deep inside the reactor. “Mana circuit. Degraded.”

“Shit. That was too far inside the machine for the mechanics to spot in a cursory inspection, but they absolutely would have noticed if we’d had them overhaul it,” Aoibhe said regretfully, leaning over to look at the piece. It was a high-capacity conduit for mana, or more specifically, the point where a conduit running from the mana furnace would connect to the reactor’s array of spell circles.

“I thought Engineer did a full overhaul on it, though?” Miliam asked.

“Tune up. Not. Same,” Engineer told her in response. That…meant this was on her. She’d misunderstood precisely what Engineer was able to do for the reactor on their own and opted not to prioritize it in repairs because it would have put them over budget. But what could she have sacrificed? This reactor was old. So old that it was debatable if it was cheaper to replace it or have replacement parts custom-made. Maybe if she’d just had them do a full inspection to figure out which parts were in the biggest need of being replaced…

“Is it something you could fix?” Aoibhe asked, snapping Miliam out of her spiraling thoughts. Engineer shook their head.

“Orichalcum. Can’t make.” The dragonewt pointed out a specific part of the component that had a faded golden luster to it.

“We can’t make that, but what other choice are there? Are there any colonies in range where we could buy some orichalcum? Maybe if we had the metal then Engineer could replace just that part,” Miliam suggested, looking to Engineer for confirmation. They nodded. Making orichalcum wasn’t possible, but it seemed that shaping it, at least on this small of a scale, was.

“Maybe…but we’ve got a five light-year range at best right now, and our currency is worthless out here,” Aoibhe replied. “Any orichalcum would do, though, right? I hate to suggest it, but maybe we should cannibalize some parts from one of the point defense lasers.”

“I can compensate for one or two missing lasers but this ship is a corvette, not a frigate. There’s not as much redundancy in the defense grid, especially without any counter missiles, so we’ll be losing effectiveness no matter what,” Tessa chimed in.

“Mmmmm,” Miliam hummed nervously as she thought it over. Ultimately, though, she wasn’t seeing a ton of options. Orichalcum was used in all shipboard magic-powered systems, but most of them were too essential to sacrifice. Taking parts from the point defenses, which had the most redundancy, was likely the only option there. Maybe if they’d had the budget to restore the ship’s wards they could have borrowed from those, but it was too late for that now.

“…give me a few minutes to think it over,” Miliam told them.