Aoibhe finally stood up after a few seconds, and she just kept going up, and up, and up. When Miliam got back on her feet she was forced to look up just to meet the other woman’s eyes; Miliam herself was 5’ 9”, but Aoibhe had another foot on her, minimum, maybe one and a half feet.

The pointed ears clearly spoke to her elfin identity, but she wasn’t simply a pointy-eared human. Her limbs were long, her torso thin, and her face just short of gaunt by human standards. Aoibhe’s hair was a fiery red and her eyes an emerald green- features that made her seem almost like an Irish woman had been stretched out to make an elf.

“…why are we on the ceiling?” Aoibhe asked after a moment, looking at the teleportation beacon in confusion.

“I think the ship is spinning around the middle. The front half is normal,” Miliam answer with a headshake to clear away her thoughts. “So, uh, I really don’t want to rush you, but it’s freezing in here. As much as I’d love to trade questions…”

“Aye, of course, no sense in freezing ourselves in the cargo bay. Let’s see…I thought this was a carillion ship, but it looks like it’s a retrofitted Saturn Drive Yards corvette. I know where to go, no need to show me the way,” the elf replied, immediately turning towards the hallway door. She handled the orientation flip with the grace of someone that had been doing it all their life, hardly pausing in her stride.

Miliam hurried to catch up, spinning herself to meet the floor with all the finesse of a hippo in zero g.

“How’d you know what type of ship it was?” she asked as she finally caught up near the door. Aoibhe gestured towards the wall.

“It’s written right there.”

It was. In English, no less. ‘Saturn Drive Yards’, curving around a logo showing the ringed gas giant and its moons. Miliam’s brain needed a few moments to reboot when she saw that. Had she gotten so used to seeing alien script her eyes had simply glossed over it, or was it the exhaustion?

Wait, that wasn’t the problem. Saturn had a shipyard!?

“Since when is there a shipyard around Saturn!?” she all but shouted, and Aoibhe looked at her curiously from the other side of the door.

“Where’ve you been? It’s been a good 250 or so galactic years by now, I’d say. I don’t know what that is in Earth years, mind.”

“I have so many questions.”

“Let’s get the ship working, then we can talk.”

Aoibhe shook her head like Miliam was the weird one and strode up the stairs, a task which seemed a bit awkward for her since they were spaced for human sized legs. When they reached the engineering bay, Aoibhe wasted no time going for a terminal by what Miliam had pegged as the reactor, booting it up with a simple button push. It went through a loading screen that wouldn’t have been out of place on a 21st century PC before reaching a dedicated UI that Miliam couldn’t read.

“Logs, logs…let’s see, looks like the reactor had an emergency shutdown done on it…46 years ago? Strange,” Aoibhe read off the screen, giving a curious look Miliam’s way.

“Don’t look at me, I don’t have any more of an idea how I got here than you do,” she said defensively. Aoibhe shrugged.

“At any rate, it doesn’t look like anything is wrong with the reactor itself. I wonder if there was simply no one left to turn it back on, or if they gave up because so many capacitors were blown anyway.”

“And you know how?”

“Aye, where I come from, we’re cross-trained for exactly this sort of situation. I couldn’t repair it, but I can certainly get it running long enough to reach a port,” the elf explained as she worked on the console. It didn’t seem to be a quick process, but after several minutes the reactor began to hum, and then the deck began to vibrate a bit as it came fully online. The blue emergency lights were replaced at last with bright white, causing Miliam to squint as her eyes adjusted.

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“Now comes the real problem. I can activate the gravity enchantments and inertial sinks, but I wouldn’t know how to grow new capacitor crystals even with the equipment available.”

“I think you said those power the FTL, right? Does that mean we’re stuck here?”

“Nay, it just means we need to find some elsewhere. And I happen to know exactly where to look for them.”

“…the ship you came from?” Miliam asked after thinking for a moment. Aoibhe nodded gravely.

“The problem is getting there,” she stated as she began on freeing a floor plate Miliam could only see was a hatch of some kind now that the lights were on. Aoibhe explained what she was doing offhandedly before continuing. “Gravity enchantments are on the underside of this to protect from wear and tear. Anyway, the teleporter was a one way trip, there’s no power for the beacon on the Kinzela now. But I know at least some of the capacitors must be intact, or I couldn’t have used the teleporter with the reactor failing.”

“But you’ve got this ship running, so we can just dock with it, right?”

“Were it so easy. Nay, when we were attacked, the pirates targeted the crew sections. I somehow survived because nothing hit the lavatory, and I was already suited up because I need the strength supports to function in standard gravity. But the docking bay was mangled to hell.”

Miliam suddenly felt herself become heavier, and she deduced that the gravity enchantments were now working about half a second before fragments of crystal and loose tools clattered to the ground on the rear side of the ship. Aoibhe stood while closing the hatch and smacking her hands together to clean them of imaginary filth.

“Which leaves one option: we match trajectories with the Kinzela and you jump over.”

“Why me?” Miliam took a step back, fear and confusion flowing through her. An image of herself floating in space, slowly running out of air came to mind before she realized she didn’t even have a space suit.

“Well, one of us has to stay here and keep the ship in position. It’d be nearly impossible to match velocity and trajectory perfectly, and even a slight difference in speed or fraction of a degree off could leave the ships drifting apart while we’re aboard the Kinzela. I happen to be a pilot, so unless you know how to fly the ship…”

Aoibhe trailed off, causing Miliam to gulp. Her mind raced, looking for other options.

“What if we tether the ships together? And wait, I don’t even have suit!” she squeaked out feebly.

“Tether them with what cable? As for the suit, I’m sure one of the carillions had one that will fit…mostly. Just think of the extra space as a pocket for spare air.”

“But they’re all full of dead aliens!”

“Eh, I’m sure there’s a spare somewhere,” Aoibhe said as she dipped into one of the bunk rooms, emerging moments later with a suit under one arm. “See, what’d I tell you?”

Miliam just whimpered a bit as Aoibhe held the suit up to check the fit, nodded, and started putting it on her. She felt a bit pathetic right now, as an adult, but she woke up this morning hoping to cut contact with her toxic family, not jump hundreds of years into the future and experience the vacuum of space without a space ship.

The suit was somewhere between a diving suit and a 21st century space suit, having about the same bulk as someone bundled up for sub-zero weather. That was about the extent of what Miliam could divine; she knew next to nothing about the subject. She did notice a lack of an air tank or anything of the sort, though.

“Hey, I’m gonna have an air tank, right? I’m not just holding my breath until I reach the other ship, right?” For all her complaints, Miliam still cooperated with Aoibhe’s attempts to put her into the suit, though that was mostly because she’d feel safer with another layer between her and hard vacuum even onboard the ship.

“Relax, there’s a suite of enchantments on board for that sort of thing. Just keep a flow of mana going and you’ll be fine.”

“I was already burning up after the furnace, and I just activated the beacon on top of that!”

Inwardly, she had to cringe at how whiny she sounded, even to herself, but she felt the objections were warranted, and whatever answers she got might help calm her nerves.

“With the furnace you had to power an entire array of spells, and the beacon was a single very complicated working. This is a simple suite that maintains pressure, deflects harmful radiation, regulates temperature, and recycles air, all in a small space. It’s designed so even a novice can run it,” Aoibhe calmly explained, putting the finishing touches on before preparing a helmet.

She locked the helmet into place, then lifted Miliam’s left forearm, where a number of small switches and dials were located, attached to a rigid panel. After fiddling with the controls for a few moments, she looked over her work and nodded in satisfaction. Miliam felt like a schoolchild being sent off by her mother thanks to the height difference.

“Don’t touch the controls, I’ve set up the radio so I can contact you from the bridge and give you instructions. Now, head down to the cargo bay. I’ll get you nice and close so all you need to do is jump; if you miss, I can always retrieve you, so don’t worry about getting it perfect. Alright?”

“Yes, mom- ma’am! I meant to say ma’am!”