Rissa, Amani, and Blaze were eating when Serenity looked up from Psyche’s only slightly ominous warning. Jenna wasn’t eating; instead, she was playing with her food.
Serenity blinked, surprised. “Blaze? I wasn’t expecting you here.”
Blaze flashed a grin at Serenity. “You should have. Can you guess why?”
Serenity shook his head.
Blaze chuckled. “Ita showed me the robes. I can recognize blood when I remove it from fabric, you know.”
“I’m fine,” Serenity protested. “Everything healed after I shifted back.”
“Probably as you shifted back,” Blaze agreed. “That doesn’t mean I’m not going to want to check and make certain. After I finish eating.” Blaze winked at that.
Was Blaze hinting that Serenity should get himself some dinner? Probably. Whether or not it was a hint, it was a good idea.
Serenity grabbed some dinner, then sat down with the others. Everyone else was quiet, paying attention to either the food or (in Rissa’s case) their daughter, so Serenity set himself to appreciating the food. Rissa was a good cook. She wasn’t a chef, but she knew how to make relatively simple food taste good. She’d outdone herself this time. “Rissa? This is exceptional.”
“I told you he’d notice,” Blaze commented. “Even if the rest of us can’t taste it.”
Serenity had the feeling that Blaze wasn’t here just to check on his healing. In fact, it might well be that that was just an excuse. “Notice what?”
“I figured out how to make the replicators create ingredients instead of meals,” Rissa revealed. “No one other than you really likes the taste, but if I make the right things it doesn’t matter; it’s not that strong and most spices will cover it. Meat and vegetables are also more consistent, which has some advantages for many meals. And, well, freeing up the space in the incoming shipments is one thing. Having something to trade with everyone else? That’s worth a lot. I don’t just mean money, either; it’s worth access.” A grin covered her face and her eyes glinted with glee at the last word.
Serenity was glad Rissa was here for one more reason, then. She was probably working with his mother. “Has there been anything interesting?”
Rissa’s grin became a little pained and she waved a hand back and forth. “Sort of. So far it’s mostly maps of the surface; valuable in their own way but not something we can do anything with yet. We’re negotiating an exchange of information on the items we’ve found, but that’s going slowly. We’re still not far off what we expected. Ahead, if anything. The fact that Blaze has been available to heal anyone has helped.”
Blaze shrugged. “It would be better if they’d send their healers to learn, but what can a doctor with years of training learn from a primitive without a degree? So they simply send the hard cases. I heal them and the doctors ignore me because I use magic. They don’t consider that perhaps I have more training and experience than they do. It’s irritating but it will change in time.”
Serenity tried to hide his grin about that. Blaze actually managed to sound more sad than aggrieved. Serenity was fairly confident it wasn’t an act, either; Blaze was sad for the people who would get subpar treatment because of others’ arrogance. Well, treatment that Blaze considered subpar; Blaze’s standards were high for anywhere Serenity had been.
At least, anywhere he’d been and gotten medical care. Medical care for the undead was subpar everywhere, so he’d usually just handled it himself.
Serenity looked down and realized he’d emptied his plate completely. A glance at the stove showed that there was still plenty left for another serving, so he went to get seconds. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Rissa hand something to Blaze; she was probably paying off the bet they’d made about whether or not he’d notice the food’s taste.
He’d nearly finished his second helping when Amani spoke up. She sounded a little annoyed. “You’re not going to ask, are you?”
Serenity blinked as he scooped up the rest of the sauce-covered chicken and most of the remaining rice. His attention was definitely on the meal; he still couldn’t decide if the chicken or the vegetables were better, but they both went excellently with the slightly spicy sauce Rissa had created. “Ask…?”
Amani gave him a look like he should know what she was hinting at. When he just took another bite of dinner, she huffed and looked down. “The next model is ready. We can test it tomorrow.”
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The fork froze on its way to Serenity’s mouth and he set it back down. “I thought it was going to be another week?” It had always been a rough estimate, but that was a lot more time saved than he’d expected.
Amani nodded. “It suddenly jumped forward a few hours ago; A’Atla built two days’ worth of material in an hour. I thought you knew?”
A few hours ago? The hair on the back of Serenity’s neck rose. He pulled up A’Atla’s screens to try and disprove the connection to the fight at Ea’s temple.
He couldn’t. The timing was almost perfect. It wasn’t just the model; A’Atla’s power available had jumped tremendously starting at about that time. In fact, there was a small bump that lined up well with the time he spent disarming the traps followed by a much, much larger bump that started minutes after the first monster died. He had the timestamps; it was much too close for him to ignore. He hadn’t seen anything like the mana-collection spires in the building, but it would have been easy to miss with the damage the building had taken.
The problem was that the bump was a lot bigger than when he invested his entire mana pool (or as much as Blaze would allow) into a spire. Was that because he used essence, because he’d built monsters then let them decay into whatever they became, or because of the contribution of the Night Fire mana? It could be any or all of the three but his guess was that it wasn’t simply because essence was involved. If it were, the ship would have needed to tease it back apart and that would probably reduce the efficiency.
A survey of the rest of his screens told Serenity that repairs had started on some of the long-term damage that A’Atla had delayed due to low mana levels. It was good to see, but Serenity worried that it might drain the ship’s mana too quickly; he wanted to use that mana to build the cap they were going to put over the hole draining the nexus around A’Atla.
The next time he looked, he was the only one still eating; the others had cleaned up and were waiting on him. Serenity quickly finished his meal and washed his dishes before submitting to Blaze’s inspection.
With a clean bill of health, Serenity went to find Amani. They had some planning to do; if the test was a success, he wanted to have a design ready for immediate implementation and they weren’t quite there yet. Amani’s news meant a delay in checking out the Deep Gate, but that had waited millenia. A few days wouldn’t matter.
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The first test went off without a hitch. The spherical configuration of A’Atla’s stone held up to a near-vacuum on mana with absolutely no issue despite the relatively high level outside. They could probably have left it thinner, but Serenity and Amani were both of the opinion that overbuilding was a good idea.
The idea was validated during the second test, which failed exactly as they’d feared. They cut a slice out of the sphere as a doorway; it was the same as the final slice they’d closed before with Serenity inside. This time, instead of closing the sphere before Serenity started the ritual, Serenity started the ritual to locally drain the mana and hopped out of the sphere. Amani then directed A’Atla to close up the gap. This time, the structure started to warp before it was even closed. A’Atla did manage to finish off the sphere, but only after a chunk of wall ripped free and tore through the ritual, ending it.
Something similar happening when they created the final cap could compromise the seal that kept the toxins away from the living areas. They couldn’t allow that.
The solution was easy to come up with but not easy to design for A’Atla to build. They needed a layered structure with internal reinforcement, something that would hold together even if a piece failed. They also needed a build plan that would keep the stress relatively even, especially as it got near the end of the build. Fortunately, they didn’t need to leave a space large enough for anyone to enter or leave.
They had an idea of what they needed; it wouldn’t be perfect but it should be good enough. It didn’t even have to hold for more than a few weeks. Once the stress was handled, they could add another layer outside it that was solid.
They started with an open framework in the general shape of a sphere around the deadly area. It was partly for support but mostly to bleed off the shock of anything that did come loose from the main structure as it was being built. It couldn’t completely cover the area unless they made it able to pass mana, but with foot-wide holes it would be fine.
Outside that, they added layers of small overlapping strips. They didn’t block the mana; instead, they made it follow a longer path. Once again, it wouldn’t work on its own, but a failure would hopefully crush inwards and block fast mana movement rather than coming loose and causing damage.
If the layers bonded together, this might actually stop the mana flow, but they weren’t counting on the layers staying bonded. Amani’s experience with the Vault told her that separately-created layers were a weak point in A’Atla’s materials. It was entirely possible this was the real reason the repaired ‘door’ failed, but they weren’t going to count on it.
The next several layers were wider and wider strips. Eventually, the outermost layer was fifteen large pieces with inch-wide gaps. A’Atla would fill them in one at a time, always completing the one that was farthest from other completed lines to try and keep the stress even, sort of like tightening bolts down out of order when building something to keep the bolts from warping it. It definitely wasn’t perfect but it seemed like a good design.
It seemed even better when the small-scale tests passed, then the full-size test. Despite Serenity setting up the ritual well in advance, the ball held when A’Atla finished it. Serenity couldn’t find any sign of mana being pulled towards it from the outside, even with a ritual to do exactly that. Unfortunately, there was no way to confirm that the ritual inside was still functioning correctly without breaking into the ball and they didn’t want to do that until the test finished.
The test needed to last a minimum of four days, in case building the new solid casing took longer than A’Atla’s new faster building speed indicated. Serenity wanted to wait a full week and a half, but the higher mana level was slowly dropping. He wasn’t certain when A’Atla would slow things down, but he was certain it would happen at some point.
They started A’Atla on the inner latticework; regardless of the test’s outcome, having that done wouldn’t hurt and it would speed things up. After that, it was finally time to visit the Deep Gate.