Irene checked the maintenance logs one more time. Everything was up to date. She worked extra hard for the last four months, running though work that should have taken a single person a year. She used maintenance robots as a second pair of hands to complete jobs that required multiple people. The maintenance robots could take care of a lot of the ship’s requirements by themselves. Their automation was part of Agatha’s legacy. In addition many jobs just weren’t required very often anymore. The air filters didn’t need to be cleaned yearly when there was no one living on the ship.
Irene clicked over to the ship’s security systems, initiating a last scan to ensure herself that no one else was on board. She checked the status of the ship floor by floor. Nearly all of them were offline. She spent most of the morning purging the food systems in the main gallery and the water lines on the level with her apartment.
Essential systems like the computers that were running the automated farming, mining and manufacturing systems were still live. She was leaving Engineering control powered as well as medical. The lifts were online, but Irene planned to lock the last car into its safe position at the bottom of the shaft and switch off the power for them before she left.
She was leaving. Four months of laboring alone in the empty colony ship taught her that there was no future here. She either needed to move out to the eastern villages or go back into the structure. She picked the structure. She spent the last three days checking in with the village elders and her siblings living there telling them all that she was leaving. She keyed them into the security systems so they could continue to use the ship's medical and manufacturing facilities and access the farming warehouses until the systems failed.
They would fail eventually. Irene logged out and shut down the monitor. Its functional lifespan would be longer if it was left unpowered. She picked up the sheet of plastic she prepared and taped it to the top edge of the monitor. On the sheet of plastic was printed detailed instructions on how to get the current list of error conditions in the system. It started with how to power the monitor back up, included the username and password for the main engineering account and ended with how to access the built in library that would walk a novice through how to do a repair.
She tried to get someone from the villages to come and learn these simple steps, but everyone claimed to be too busy. Irene knew how a small simple problem could bring the entire system down. She hoped if that happened these instructions would help.
She picked up her backpack and made her way out of the engineering control center for the last time. She took the lift down to the power distribution floor and sent the lift on to its safe position. She flipped the last of the power breakers. She climbed the stairs back up to the airlock doors. The doors were another thing she left powered. She wanted the ship sealed to stop wildlife from gaining entry, but she needed to allow access for the villagers. She already left signs inside the doors directing them up to the medical center using the stairs.
A maintenance cart was waiting for her at the bottom of the west terrace. She programmed it to drop her off at the edge of the western fields and return to the garage. She was ninety percent certain it would work. She would walk the rest of the distance to the entrance. As the cart pulled away from the Speedwell, Irene felt odd. The colony ship was her true home her entire life. She couldn’t quite believe that she would never see it again.
It was the twelfth planetary winter since the landing of the Speedwell.
Irene found The Heights on the way in and spent a couple days with her friends. She was on her way to Londontown. This was her destination partly because it matched the pattern she followed the last couple years. Partly it was because Mary confessed she left three children behind in Londontown when she parted ways with Irene at Moscow.
Mary appeared completely unmoved by that fact, certain her spouse would see to their care. Irene wanted to make sure the children, a boy and two girls, were alright.
She was surprised to find one of Greg’s toll booths on the way to Londontown. She thought those were only on the border with Paris. The booth was set up on a main hall, it was easy to work her way around it using lesser halls and camouflage.
As she neared Londontown, she started scavenging. Londontown was chronically short of scrap and crafting tools. Only those with magic would brave the halls and rooms. Residents without it hunted and gathered in the Green, bringing in food. Unfortunately the Londontown elite hung on to power with the use of healing magic. Eventually everyone ended up injured in the halls. Once addicted to heal, they were easily controlled, but they also lost most of their drive. Once they gathered enough to buy their heal for the day they stopped scavenging. They also sold their finds to the crafters in the shops, looking for a fast turn around. Irene would sell her materials to the crafters in the upper apartments.
Irene cleared the room of six badgers. That was a large number of the animals for a single room. She pulled the badgers out into the hallway, which gave her only quick glances of the room. By the time the sixth animal emerged, Irene was certain this was a suite of rooms. When nothing else emerged from the room when she opened the door, she wedged it open and made entry.
It was a single large room. It was deep enough that Irene thought it might reach all the way to the next hall, although there was no door on the far wall. Irene studied the room's contents. Each room in the structure told a little story. Most of the rooms around Londontown were office themed. The rooms closer to the entrance were housing. Unfortunately everything close to the entrance was in very bad shape. Here near Londontown the occasional salvageable item could be found.
This room looked like a bunk room of some kind, which didn’t match the office theme. A row of six broken platforms ran along both the right and left walls. Their shape matched the shape of beds in an inn room. Each bed was damaged in a different way. As Irene walked along the length of them she got this rather strange idea that she could piece together one or two full beds from the remnants.
The suburbs of Chicago all used bits and pieces found in the debris to build items they used in everyday life. Things like hide stretchers and fire grills. They also used larger pieces piled and interlocked together to make barriers. Irene noticed a long time ago that there were a lot more pieces that possessed the same type of connecting ends, than what the suburbs used. The scavengers from squares sometimes found complete pieces of furniture; desks, tables, shelves. The squares were all located deeper into the structure where things were more intact. The salvaged furniture was sold in the markets for high prices. Irene wondered why she never considered putting together the larger, more complex furniture from pieces.
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The beds were constructed on an iron frame with wooden slats across the top. She thought they would make a better softer base for a pallet than the floor. Irene went through the first pile and disconnected all the sections that looked broken in any way. Scraps of tan fabric and fiber scrap tangled with the splintered and dry rotted wood were the remnants of a mattress. Irene picked up all the fiber scrap and stuffed it into a gathering bag. She moved all the broken bits to a pile by the door. She repeated this procedure on the next bed. On the last bed of the line, she discovered the bed was turned over, with a large swath of fabric on the ground underneath. It was easier to disassemble it than try to flip it over.
As the weight came off the fabric below it, it began to puff up. Most of the iron pieces were ruined, but the wood slats were all intact. When Irene moved all the wood over to the first bed structure in order to rebuild it, she realized the pallet or mattress below was also intact. It was covered in a heavy tan fabric that was stained with dirt. She brushed the surface with her hand and most of the dirt came off of it. She thought with a better brush she could get it clean. It was an incredible find. She didn’t think she had heard of anyone finding a mattress before.
There was no way she was leaving it behind. It was light, just bulky. She rolled it up as tight as she could and winched it even tighter with a piece of rope. With effort she got it down to something she thought she could carry. Now there was the problem of carrying the frame. She started out playing with the beds as an experiment, but now she felt committed. She would get even more for the bed if it came with the frame.
She picked up the mattress roll and set it just inside the door. She started stripping the frames of ruined parts on the other side of the room. When she finished all the bed frames were a lot smaller. She started consolidating the pieces until she built one complete frame. There were a lot of pieces left. She kept working on it until she constructed most of a second frame. She was short wooden slats.
She made one last circuit of the room looking for wooden pieces. At the last position where she picked up the mattress she noticed the floor tiles were different. The floor down the center walkway was the usual tile found in halls, which was made up of different sized octagons and triangles of grout. These tiles were square. She checked under each of the beds. None of the tiles under the beds were octagons.
The tiles under the first bed on the left from the door were triangles, while the one on the right was pentagrams. It was a spell or maybe two spells. Tier three spells were six symbols with a precise timing between the symbols. Irene thought that tier four spells were twelve symbols, but since she was only tier three, she wasn’t certain. Agatha theorized that tier four spells were cast with both hands.
Irene cleaned everything off the floor and dumped it into the hallway. She even broke apart the newly assembled bed frames. She stuffed the small pieces that held the wood pieces to the iron into her second gathering bag. All the large pieces went into a stack in the hallway.
She studied the floor. She pulled a notebook out of her pack and sketched the layout in the room. The beds were equally spaced down the length of the room. Irene noticed that the size of the octagonal tiles varied between the spell number tile sections. That resulted in a different number of tiles between the sections, she thought it might be an indication of timing. She recorded that information too.
Finally she thought about the room again. Where a spell encoding appeared was often a hint of what it was and this room was obviously special. The question was what kind of spell went with a bunk room? Irene considered if it could be some kind of sleep or refreshing spell. She couldn’t decide. She wasn’t even certain if the spell ran from front to back of the room, or the other way. Read front to back the two spells were from the ice and fire trees. Back to front they were in the electricity and sound trees.
Standing at the door looking to the back of the room, there was something vaguely familiar about it. She thought about it for a while, trying to figure out why. Finally she decided that it reminded her of single housing on the Speedwell, only single housing was filled with bunk beds. It was more like the medical center. Not the main treatment center with its privacy rooms, but the recovery ward. Now that Irene thought of that, the arrangement was similar to how the hospital in Chicago was set up.
Three five was the coding for a tier one healing spell. The tier two and tier three versions of the spell started with those same two numbers. If this spell was tier four, cast with both hands and read front to back, the first two symbols cast would be three five.
Spell hints tended to only show up where there was someone who could learn them. A heal spell here, this close to Londontown made sense. Londontown was known for its healers. It meant that one of them was tier four. Irene thought that was likely. Most of the wizards in the landing generation started reaching tier four a few years ago. Really specialized wizards were an exception to that. Learning magic out of only one tree limited a wizard to tier two. Irene, with all the time she spent outside the structure was trailing behind. Wizards in general remained rare in the population. Most people with magic were warriors.
If this spell was the tier four heal, the next question was how to target it. The lower tier heals were targeted by touching the patient with your off hand. If this tier four heal was cast with both hands, she couldn’t touch the patient during the cast. She could touch the patient before the cast, or touch them with one hand while she made the start symbol with the other. Would that work?
Before she could even begin trying to learn it she would need to reach tier four. It was all just hypothetical for now.
Irene decided to head straight to Londontown. She would rent a room and secure her finds. She put a mark on her map where this room was. Someone told her a long time ago that if you took something from a room it was replaced in six days. Irene did a long series of experiments in the rooms close to the entrance and knew it was more complicated than that.
She picked up her rolled and compressed mattress and swung it over her shoulder before going over to study the bed frame pile. That was the moment she realized she made a mistake. She couldn’t tell how much of the pile was one frame. She was going to either have to put the frame back together again, or take the whole pile with her. She decided to take the pile.
She sat her bundled mattress back down. This was going to take a while. She put together a kind of skid using broken wooden pieces as its runners. Since she was already short on wooden slats for the second platform she didn’t want to risk damaging the ones she found. It made a nasty sound as she pulled it over the floor tiles. She cast muffle to hide the sound. She threw the badger carcasses on top. When got close to the back gate of Londontown, she stashed the skid inside a room. She didn’t want to drag the heavy bulky item into the square without a plan. She picked up her mattress and one of the badgers before heading into Londontown.