As the Luna Wrath shot through hyperspace, Jace and Lessa brought the damaged technique card to the engine room, where it was the brightest, and they had a free source of heat. (Of course, only once they had the first aid kyborg tend to the injuries they’d received on Braka.)

Jace pulled down a small workbench on the fore wall, and Lessa dropped the technique card down on it. It had melted and deformed, and the runes were misshapen—or filled with all sorts of black char.

But Jace pulled out one of the blank template cards and the soldering wire spool. “So…if we’re using the fancy wire spool, what do you say we modify the card? What if you give it a hyperspace aspect as well?”

“Then it wouldn’t work without you fuelling the coupling.” She tilted her head, as if considering, but she didn’t need to say aloud that it wasn’t a perfect idea.

Jace scrunched his eyebrows. “A lot of my cards started off with two aspects before you narrowed it. Could you broaden it beyond just pure Aes, and allow it to accept the power of hyperspace if needed—without breaking apart?”

“I could do that.”

“How…how do you know the runes?”

“For this one?” She tapped the old card. “I’ll just copy it, then I’ll copy the runes your old cards had on them for the central engraving ring, where the aspect can change. For your other cards, I’d use the skill tree that a Wielder projects when they have a card socketed in their core. It’d illuminate it well enough in the Split, and I could read it.”

“I…I see.” Jace nodded. “For the cards I currently have, can we enhance them more? Like, beyond what we’ve currently done?”

“I could pass a few intermediary steps, yeah,” she said. “But remember, I need you to be active and working hard. And at a certain point, that Vault Core won’t be strong enough to push you hard enough, and I won’t be able to see the runes and enhancements available. You’ll need something better. Like, the hyperdash. I don’t think I can enhance it any further without you getting a better Vault Core, or putting yourself into a worse situation.”

“And for that, I pretty much need to keep advancing.”

“Yep.”

She pulled out her soldering needle and started copying the old card’s runes onto the old template. Jace broke off a chunk of the copper spool and fed it into a slot at the back of the needle, and when it ate through all its older metal, the newer, shinier, coppery material flowed out onto the card. It bled seamlessly into the old runes, and matched with Lessa’s runic calligraphy almost perfectly.

“The base card expelled excess plasma Aes,” Lessa explained. “Plasma on stray vectors, I’m assuming, judging by these runes. It wouldn’t be useful to the main bolt.”

“That’s why we get a bigger venting flash with each shot from the turret?” he asked.

“Exactly.”

“But if all this card does is vent, and I just fuel it with hyperspace Aes, it won’t enhanced the actual shots at all.”

“Also exactly.”

Jace scratched his chin. “So we’re stuck?”

“I guess. I can always just put the card back to normal, and you can choose to not overload it.”

“Could you give it a second set of runes that purposely redirected some of the card’s Aes into the barrel, so it mixed with the plasma?”

“Sure, but that’d be like adding a single dried pepper flake to a sur-chili goulash. It would add some power, but so little it barely makes a difference.”

“Unless it was specifically hyperspace Aes,” Jace reminded her. “Then it’d have the same effect as before.”

She nodded. “Alright, then, next problem. I need a card that draws stuff in to copy from. I don’t have all those runes memorized.”

Jace turned back toward the main hold of the starship, then leaned out the door and looked up at the ceiling panels. “How about the jumpstart accumulator? That should have a similar effect, right? Just, instead of drawing the Aes out of the auras around us, it’s drawing it out of a tube.”

“And projecting it into the barrel as an aura.” Lessa nodded. “I can just reverse the rune circle and add it as an additional effect that only attaches to the hyperspace aspect setting.”

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“Perfect!”

Jace and Lessa both scrambled out of the engine room, then climbed onto the couch and pulled open a panel on the ceiling. It was right beneath the jumpstart accumulator. All they needed was access to its main function card which, conveniently, was accessible beneath a small hatch.

Thankfully, Kinfild was too busy up at the front, fiddling with the transmitter, to notice Jace and Lessa. And if his fancy senses picked up on them standing on the couch, he didn’t say anything.

Lessa soldered a circle of runes on the bottom half of the new card, then dragged a line up to the central plate. She switched to engraving, and fed a notch into the main aspect circle of the card.

“There we go!” she proclaimed. “Should be good to go.” She handed it to Jace, and he waved it in the air a few times to cool it, then stared at it until the card description appeared.

[Technique Card: Sort Excess Aes (Common) (Utility) (Compatible Class: All) (Compatible Aspects: Hyperspace, Pure)]

[Technique description: Once every one (1) second, allows the weapon to draw in hyperspace-aspect Aes from the feeder channel and vent stray-vector plasma Aes.]

“Let’s see if it works,” he said, then cycled Aes to his core, preparing to activate the card. “Should just be…”

“You’re going to activate it?”

“Why not?”

“Well…” She stroked her chin. “Well, I guess it’s not a problem. It should still work.”

He took a wide stance, just to be safe, then triggered the card. Lessa stepped back and sheltered behind the couch, as if somehow he was going to destroy them.

The card triggered, and at first, he felt nothing. He had no plasma Aes in his body to vent. But then, after a few seconds, a faint tug on his surroundings tried to pull Aes in toward him. There was hyperspace Aes all around—after all, they were travelling through hyperspace.

He didn’t activate the technique again. Clearly, it worked. If they were in hyperspace, though, it clearly considered their surroundings a viable target to draw inward—and that was the last thing they needed.

But it left him with a new idea. As Lessa closed up the ceiling panel and sealed away the jumpstart accumulator, and as Jace replaced the new card where they’d left the old one, he said, “Lessa, what if we made a card like that, like we just did with the hyperspace part, but for pure Aes? To draw it in? Perhaps that’s the pull I need to get the Aes out of the accumulator nodes.”

“Do you want to waste our resources on that?”

He pursed his lips, considering, then ran back to the engine room and assessed their stock. They still had nine card templates left, and had only used up a small fraction of the soldering wire.

“I think it’s worth it,” he said. If his core continued to degrade, or decay, it wouldn’t bode well for any of them. He needed to keep drawing Aes into it. “Plus, it shouldn’t use much more wire, right?”

“Shouldn’t. I only have to remake a small mechanism of the card. Here, come feed more wire, and I should be able to whip something up quickly.”

“I’ve got you.”

“You…do?”

“Sorry. Was…sorta an expression where I came from. Like, I’ll help.” He scratched the back of his head. No more letting slip informal phrases. Understood. “I won’t—”

“I mean, it’s kinda funny, I guess. Kinda cute.”

“Right…” Jace gulped. “Work on the card instead of talking?”

“Good idea.”

They both ran back to the engine room, and he fed Lessa’s soldering needle wire as she engraved and soldered the next card, melting more rune patterns onto it. “So…the aspect is pure, right? For drawing out pure Aes?”

“Yeah. Though, can you modify it later? I do have a few other ideas…”

“Pure aspect is just the base of giving a card an aspect alignment. It’s a phrase that tells it to look for Aes, but it doesn’t know what alignment to look for, so it just takes the most base form. If I elaborate on the phrase and give it a second ring, it gives it a specific alignment.” She stuck her tongue out the corner of her mouth as she added a second set of runes. “What other ideas do you have?”

“Well…if the starship vents hyperspace Aes after exiting hyperspace—the Aes it accumulates over the journey and taints the accumulator node’s load with—then I’d assume we could draw on it. What if I used the card with a hyperspace aspect to draw out Aes as we were travelling through hyperspace?”

Lessa raised her eyebrows. “That could work.”

“But one step at a time. I need to drain those accumulator nodes, and I need to form up a bunch of foundation pillars.”

Once she finished adding the new runes, she dropped the soldering needle down on the workbench and shook out her hand. “Split, though, I’m cramping. The card’s done, but no more new ones for the day.”

“Sorry, Less,” he said. “I don’t suppose drinking milk is good for candlefolk cramps.”

Besides, he hadn’t ever even seen her drinking milk. She probably didn’t need it, having bones made of that braided, hard wick.

But her nerves? Did she still need calcium to make them work, or was it some other kind of substance?

Or perhaps his high school-level biology knowledge was failing him, and he didn’t even need it.

“I’ll just…go have some honey or something. If we have any more in the fridge.” She massaged the side of her hand.

“I’ll clean up here,” Jace said. “Thanks for the help.”

“Glad to be of use, and any time!” She scampered out of the engine room.

Jace cleaned up the tools and put the excess card templates and soldering wire back in his backpack, then withdrew the accumulator nodes.

“Alright,” he whispered. “Let’s see if we can’t get anything out of you guys…”