20:49 - Busy, busy day, lots of things happening.

After the scare with Captain Ava, Kal, and Vedod’s comms going down, Silas was on edge, BUT! He was surprised and glad to see that I can translate Ascentan. I knew taking those foreign exchange summer courses would come in handy! I was able to translate the story that the Ascentan priest told, which makes it an original account. Great for inspiration energy!

It took me about an hour to go over the recording and triple-check my translation. I handed it in to Silas, and he nodded and made a blank face that I think meant he was trying to hide that he was happy. Then he told me it was time to show me the extraction procedure.

We went back to the Archive Processing Center, and he showed me the priming process for our Inspiration extractor. A lot of it was the same with the extractors I’ve used back at university, but there were a few details different, so I’m going to go ahead and write it out here, to review.

He turned on the extractor itself, then the canistering system, and ran a check to make sure they were synced properly. (That’s different — all the university extractors fed the inspiration energy into underground storage tanks.) Then he sat down in the extraction chair and spent a long time getting it adjusted. (I don’t think that’s completely necessary. He mumbled something about Sarge not adjusting it back after the last time she used it.) He lowered the extraction cap onto his head, adjusting it for a good fit, and then booted up the extraction system to run a test.

I read him a couple of lines from the ratty old pamphlet of poems I was restoring, and the extractor set off with a lovely whir! I love the older extractors; they’re so much more organic than the sleek, silent newer models. It chugged along for about 30 seconds, and then I actually saw the flicker of inspiration energy drop into the canister. It looked like liquid lightning, so silver and shimmery! We almost never got to see the inspiration energy at the U.

“That’ll do it,” Silas said, and then he settled in to read my translation of the Ascentan story. The extractor kept on whirring for about twenty minutes. I kept myself busy working on some restoration, and by the time he was finished, we had about half a canister of inspiration energy. Silas showed me the shutdown process for the extractor and said, “We’ll add this story… ‘Celestium’… to the crew’s reading queue.”

I was wondering what the bulletin board outside the Archive Processing Center (That’s too long. I’m calling it the ACP. Or the book room! I’ll workshop it.) was for. Apparently it displays the crew’s reading assignments! Everybody uses the extractor with every story they find, so they get all the inspiration energy they can from it. Vedod’s list was long, until Silas cleared out the queue. “Those were all old artifacts,” he explained. “He did finally come in and read through all of them at once, which I keep telling him, is not the best way to do it.”

I heaved a sigh. “I hate when people do things like that!” I said. “You can’t get the same amount of inspiration from a story when your mind is burned out! It’s not an exact science!”

“Precisely!” he said, but then reined himself in. “Perhaps I should remind him again. Oh, one more thing.” He stepped back into the ACP, did something mechanically-sounding, and then handed me a teeny canister about the size of a thermos. “Here’s the slag from ‘Celestium’. Deliver it to Vedod, and you should be done for the day. Tomorrow I have some Ascentan artifacts that I want you to take a look at.”

I took the canister and saluted with a, “Sir, yes sir!” before heading back to the lower deck. Silas blinked in confusion.

Sarge is coming in, give me a bit.

21:12 — Okay, Sarge is gone, so I’ll keep going.

So I went on down to the lower deck to find Vedod to give him the slag. The canister had a sliver of glass down the side, so I could actually see what the slag looked like! It was thicker and kind of chunky in comparison to the inspiration energy, and it reminded me of blue koolassist that someone hadn’t stirred up yet. It was pretty, though. A really dark, inky blue with pewter flecks in it.

Anyway. Vedod and Kal are usually hanging around the lounge or the mess hall, but this time they weren’t. I wandered all around the ship trying to find them, and then when I gave up and headed back to my room, I heard their voices coming from their room next door. But not as boisterous as normal.

I know snooping is bad, but… Life is a story, and you have to take the opportunities fate gives you, right? I told myself that, but now I feel kind of bad about it. Anyway, I did sneak over to their door. They hadn’t closed it all the way, so I could catch most of what they were saying.

Kal was angry, but not loud angry. The kind of angry that simmers. And Vedod was using the kind of chill, intentionally level voice people use when they’re trying to be the rational one in the conversation. I don’t remember everything, but the conversation went something like this:

KAL: She has no business taking us anywhere near Scarship territory! Did she not learn her lesson last time?

VEDOD: We’ve taken plenty of risks before—

KAL: And what happened?

VEDOD: —and that was one time when things went crazy south.

KAL: Why would she even take us anywhere close?

VEDOD: But nothing happened! We didn’t see any Scarships, we didn’t even go too far across the line, and we got a couple of artifacts! We all got out free and easy.

KAL: So we got lucky. This time.

VEDOD: (sigh) Kal, I know you miss him and you still blame the captain, but it really wasn’t her fault. And she loved him too, you know. We all knew the risks of being on an Artship.

KAL: I’m not sure that girl does. She’s like a kid in a candy store. I bet she’s never even fired that rotgun she had in the Adnaxela Library.

VEDOD: You know, not everybody has to be tough.

KAL: They can’t be stupid is what I’m saying!

VEDOD: You’re not mad about the kid. You’re still mad at the captain.

KAL: I can be mad about as many things as I want! Someone’s got to watch our backs if Ava won’t!

VEDOD: (heavier sigh) I’m not talking to you like this. Let me know when you’re done being an idiot.

Then his footsteps started toward the door, and I panicked and ducked back into my room before he could see me. And that’s where I’ve been since.

22:03 — I feel really bad about eavesdropping and I can’t sleep. Going to get some water, maybe go watch the stars through the helm windshield for a while.

22:52 — Vedod was in the helm. I’d forgotten about the night-duty shift. I almost spilled my glass of water when he swiveled the pilot’s chair to see me, and he laughed, but then clapped a hand over his mouth. “Sorry! You okay?” he said.

I stuttered some kind answer and started to leave, but he said, “Wait! We should talk sometime! Since you’re part of the crew now. What are you doing up?”

I worried for a second that I was just walking around in my nightgown and a robe, but Vedod seemed pretty comfortable in his baggy flannel pants and undershirt, so I decided it was okay. I sat down on the floor, beside the art detector. He started asking small talk questions, like which university I went to and what my favorite classes were, and it felt like hard work to answer him. All I could think about was the fact that I’d been snooping and heard things I shouldn’t. Eventually the guilt pushed so hard in my chest, I couldn’t stand it anymore.

“I was eavesdropping!” I said, cutting him off mid-sentence.

He stopped talking and looked confused. “You what? When?”

“Earlier, when you and Kal were talking in your room.” I pulled my knees up to my chest and hugged them. “I know I shouldn’t have.”

He pursed his lips, but he didn’t look as angry as I expected. “What did you hear?” he asked.

“Just a little bit about losing someone to a scarship, and how Captain Ava shouldn’t have brought us into Scarship territory to get the Ascentan artifact even though we didn’t go too far, and how Kal and Captain Ava both loved the person they lost. That sounds like a lot now that I’ve said it.”

Vedod leaned back in the chair, thoughtfully gazing above my head. He played with a couple of dreads, which I then noticed were down from his usual long braid. Maybe he’d been rebraiding when I walked in. “You should know,” he eventually said. “But it’s not my story to tell. And don’t tell Kal that you were listening. He won’t take that well. If Kal wants you to know specifics, he’ll tell you, but until then… Well, there used to be one more of us, of the original crew. The captain pulled us all in from Corps and the Colonies, and there were six of us for a long time, but then we lost someone. And things haven’t been the same since. So I think that’s why some of the others are… aren’t too happy that you’re here now.”

“Is that why Silas doesn’t want me around?” I asked. My voice sounded so small and wimpy, I’m embarrassed to remember it now.

He shrugged. “Silas is Silas. Somewhere along the line, he got the idea that he’s this super-smart, insightful, hyper-competent guy, so he thinks he has to be perfect. His sense of self-worth, yada yada. And he gets all pleased with himself whenever someone compliments him, especially if it’s the captain. So having to divy up intelligence-related compliments with you, not to mention you helping him out, is all a big reminder that he isn’t a book-reading superhero. Or at least that he isn’t the only one. You’re a thorn in his ego. But he’ll get over it.”

I thought that over. “Is he… in love with Captain Ava?”

Vedod spluttered with laughter. “Oh, no. That would never work. I don’t even want to imagine that. That’s like… I don’t even know what that’s like. That’s like imagining two political opponents making goo-goo eyes over their podiums. The only reason that they don’t hate each other is because they respect each other so much.”

“I thought opposites attracted,” I said.

“In theory. But in practice…”

“Birds of a feather?”

Vedod nodded.

I swiveled my cup of water, watching the water wobble against the edges. “Thank you for telling me. And for not being mad about the eavesdropping.”

We said goodnight, and finished my water and snuck back into my bunk. I can never tell if Sarge is asleep or not. She just lies flat on her back and never moves. I hope I didn’t wake her. Either way, I’m going to sleep now.

Oh, and I dropped off the slag from “Celestium” beside Vedod’s door. Forgot to tell him to read “Celestium”. Will do that tomorrow.

03:56 — I was asleep, and then the alarms went off. I jolted awake and almost kicked my blanket into the wall, but Sarge just hopped down from her bunk, shrugged her metal arm onto her shoulder, yanked on her boots, and sprinted out of our cabin. Next door, I could hear Kal and Vedod bump around, and then their footsteps went banging out of the cabins and up the metal stairs to the upper level. I untangled myself from the blanket and hunted around for the switch for the overhead lamp. Captain Ava had showed me the different alarms, but I couldn’t remember which one was for what. I was supposed to report to the mess hall for almost all of them, though, so once I managed to find my slip-ons I ran there.

Silas came blundering out of his cabin in a matched set of satin pajamas and clunky plasteel-shell boots. I wondered if I was wrong to just grab my slip-ons. He saw me standing in the mess hall and stared at me. “What are you doing there?” he shouted. “That’s the Scarship alarm!”

I think my heart just about froze in my chest. I followed him up the metal stairs and tried to remember what Captain Ava said was the drill for Scarship encounters. I’m pretty sure it was just to report to the helm and await further instructions, which probably meant I just needed to stay out of the way.

Sarge was in the pilot’s seat, and the greenish battle display was washed across the windshield. The two rear-view holo displays hovered on either side of her head, like blinkers on an old-fashioned horse bridle, and I could see parts of the scarship in them. A thruster sticking into the camera’s view on the right, the slope of its windshield in the left.

Captain Ava was standing over the art detector, watching the displays, and Kal and Vedod were just inside the door. “There’s just the one,” Captain Ava was saying.

“But it’s got good deck of guns,” Sarge droned.

“Kal, get to the lower guns! I’ve got top. Silas, engine room. We need as much juice as we’ve got.”

Kal shoved past me, and he and Silas ran back down the steps. Vedod started to say something, but Ava cut him off and said, “Yes, you can try it. Wait for my orders.” Vedod rushed off too, and as Captain Ava started through the door, she spotted me and flinched. “Mary! Engine room, with Silas!”

“Got it!” I rushed down the stairs, through the mess hall and the blast doors to the engine room. I’d only been in there a couple times yet. It’s cramped, full of lots of pipes that do something I don’t know. Silas was at a control station, monitoring a display that showed a bunch of slidey-rulers for each thruster. “Silas! What do we do?” I squeaked.

“We don’t panic!” he said, sounding pretty panicked. “I want you to watch those dials over there!”

I ran over to where he was pointing and watched the dials. So far they were sitting at zero. “What are these?”

“Those are the guns! If they start getting into the red, use the comms to tell Kal and Ava! That means they’re overheating!”

“Gravity going down,” Sarge’s voice said over the comms, and I felt the pull under my feet decrease dramatically. My stomach flipped. My feet were still on the ground, but I felt moon-bouncy.

“Why is the gravity going off?” I asked.

“Sarge is old-fashioned. She’s used to piloting without gravity; she says it helps her feel the ship better.”

A blast cracked against our hull, and the vibration rattled through the floor. “That’s the first hit!” Silas said.

The engines behind me kicked into a new gear of whirring, and I heard muffled krak-krak-krak-krak noises through the walls, hopefully Kal and Ava firing back. The dial needles I was watching jumped to the green and hovered there. Gravity seemed to increase on my right side, then my left, then almost disappeared as my feet left the floor for a few seconds. “What’s going on?” I cried.

“She’s swerving, spiraling, whatever she does!” Silas flicked switches and adjusted output levels with the multitasking frenzy of an organ player. Another hit rocked us, and the lights flickered. Silas jumped away from his monitor and threw a switch beside the engines. Pneumatic ka-chug-chug’s sounded in the ceiling, and a new canister of inspiration energy locked into place.

“Kal, focus on the gattlers!” Ava’s voice said over the comms.

“I don’t have the angle!” he answered. “Sarge, I need you to get up!”

“If I get up, he gets shot at engines,” Sarge coolly said. “Give me sec.”

Gravity see-sawed from one side to another. I think she was weaving back and forth, and then it flopped as she rolled upside down. The guns went krak-krak-krak-krak-krak, and the needles twitched into the yellow, then orange, then back into the yellow again. I remembered lectures at the U about how inspiration energy is very efficient for fuel, but how it tends to overheat weapons. Before I didn’t think much about that, but now it worried me a lot more. If scarships were designed for destruction, how could our little artship defeat them with weapons that overload so quickly?

“Nice shot!” Ava said.

“Get ready. I am doing Gopher,” Sarge said.

Silas slapped the comms button. “Wait!” He switched a few breakers, I think rerouting power to different thrusters. “Okay, go for it!”

The ship lurched to the side, and then the pipe I was holding onto yanked out of my hand as we suddenly reversed direction. Machinery ground above my head, and then the krak-krak-krak came from a different point in the ship. The needles edged closer to red.

“Silas, they’re getting near the red!” I cried.

He craned his neck to see for himself, then hit the comms button. “You’re close to overheating. Let them cool down for a minute!”

“Sarge, maneuvers,” Ava said. “Vedod, how’s that prototype coming?”

There was a pause before Vedod’s comms came through with a lot of scuffling background noise. “Getting there! I need another minute!”

A harsh peppering came from our hull.

“The sooner the better, Vedod!” Ava said.

The guns somewhere beside the engine room went krak-krak-krak, and one of the dials jumped dangerously far into the red.

“Kal, cease fire!” Ava shouted into the comms.

“They’re riddling our hull!” he shouted back.

“That’s an order, Mr. Ten! Vedod, pick up the pace!”

“No, no, no, no!” Vedod’s voice came through. “I need Mary up here!”

Silas hit the comms. “Mary? Why?”

“She’s small!”

“Mary, report to the helm!” Captain Ava ordered.

Silas and I exchanged a shocked and confused look, and then I ran out of the engine room. Gravity rocked when I tried to climb the stairs, so I had to pull myself up on the rails. When I got to the helm, Sarge was in the pilot’s chair all alone. The scarship was in front of us now. I don’t have the best eye for ship models, but it looked a few years older than the Sojourner. It was an atmosphere skimmer, with heavy deflector plates on its hull and two wide gunner-arms on either side, and its red-and-silver plating was spotted all over with laser scorch marks. Some of that might have been from Kal and Captain Ava.

“Where’s… where’s Vedod?” I panted.

Sarge took a hand from the steering stick to point to the floor. I went on tiptoes to see over the art detector, and I spotted an open panel in the floor. I dropped to my knees beside it and peered into the darkness. “Vedod?”

“Mary!” He and his bright headlamp popped into view, making me squint. “Get down here!”

I hesitated, trying to figure out how to do that in a nightgown. Sarge took a second away from the windshield to glare at me, so I hurried up and just clambered in. It was easier than I thought, but horribly claustrophobic and dark. There was a little tunnel of space between bundles of wiring and metal-plated mechanisms, and most of that space was filled by Vedod.

“Come on!” he said, and wormed his way back to a wider spot right under the floor of the helm. A bit of thin starlight came through the tinted ruptureglass panels along the front nose of the ship, and I could see the scarship right outside. For some reason it seemed a lot closer through those windows than through the windshield. There was some kind of torpedo launcher set up in that space under the floor, with a couple feet of the barrel sticking out through a seal in the center ruptureglass panel.

“Down there!” He pointed to a skinny little space below a steel panel, where a canister of slag had rolled into the corner and gotten stuck. “Get that, quick!”

I crawled under the edge of the steel panel and stretched for it, but it was still too far away. Twisting my head to the side, I squeezed under the panel and kept reaching. I tried telling myself it was like crawling under the hedges at grandfather’s, but really, it was more like that time I played hide-and-seek with some of the boys down the lane and hid under the hover-wagon and they sat on top to keep me pinned beneath it.

Flashes of orange light lit up the little cavity, and I heard the thudding of the scarship’s laser shots only a few feet from my head. I squeezed my eyes shut and forced myself not to scuttle out of that tiny space.

“Can you get it? Mary, can you get it?” Vedod said.

“Vedod! Where’s that prototype?” Captain Ava’s voice crackled from a hand-comm somewhere behind us.

I stretched my arm and managed to touch it with my fingertips, fumbling until I managed to make it roll toward me so I could grab it. “Got it!”

“‘Scuse me!” Vedod grabbed my ankles and yanked me out of there, snatching the canister from me and locking it into the torpedo launcher. “Locked and loaded, captain!”

“Fire!” Ava said.

Vedod notched back a handcrank, and the launcher made a loud, hollow PYEW noise as it fired a bolt of something deep blue and shimmery, the same colors as the “Celestium” slag I delivered earlier. The shot struck the scarship just below the stern with a silent burst of light, like lightning scrawling through a cloudbank. At first, it didn’t seem to have done anything. Then, the scarship’s hull rippled, in a static wave, stern to bow. The floodlights along the scarship's prow flickered in symphony, as if they were hit by an EMP programmed by a Christmas light enthusiast. Then it went dark and lagged from its course, no longer weaving to counter Sarge’s maneuvers.

I stared at the scarship until Sarge steered the Sojourner away and it fell out of sight. Vedod made a borderline maniacal laugh and dove to squeeze me in a painfully tight hug, and then he rooted around for the hand comm. “Cap, it worked! It worked! The prototype worked!”

There was a lot of shouting and laughing in the comms, and I couldn’t tell one person's voice from another. “Making hasty retreat,” Sarge said, and her matter-of-fact tone cut through the rest of the chatter. “Changing our course so they cannot follow us…”

Vedod army-crawled out of the little tunnel space, and I followed him. While I was still getting myself out of the floor, Kal came stampeding in and nearly bowled Vedod over with a tackling hug. “It worked! I can’t believe it worked!”

“Have a little faith!” Vedod said.

“Are they gone?” I asked Sarge.

“They are fifteen-hundred kilometers behind us…” She flicked through a few different displays. “So they could catch up, but radar says they are not pursuing.”

Captain Ava appeared at the doorway, an uncharacteristically wide grin on her face. “Wonderful work, Vedod!”

I noticed that Kal’s grin faded when she showed up. I wonder if he was still mad about going into Scarship territory.

“What’s the analytics on that scarship?” she asked, leaning over Sarge’s shoulder.

“Atmosphere skimmer, original manufacture… Earth 89, Beizinc Incorporated. They make ships for scooping ozone and space junk from upper atmosphere. It needs frequent refuelling, so it must be short range.”

“Might be a new Scarship outpost in the area.” Captain Ava sat down at a terminal. “I’ll send in the report. The rest of you, good work tonight. I wouldn’t go to bed just yet, but the danger may be passed. You’re dismissed.”

She got on comms to talk to Silas about the engines, and Kal and Vedod went off to the mess hall. I went back to my cabin and wrote all this down before I forgot anything. Now it’s very early morning, and there’s no way I’m going to sleep now.

I’d never seen a scarship that close before, and I don’t know what that prototype was that Vedod used. But whatever it was, I think it’s important. Using slag to power a weapon? That might be almost as world-shaking as the art detector.