The Stargazer's War - Chapter 3.15

Chapter 3.15: Occupational Hazard

It took eight months, all told, from our arrival on the Right Eye for the conflict within the Urlitch household to finally end.  None of us had been in the room for obvious reasons, but the word was after bleeding each others’ resources for months on end, Myra had managed to catch Cassie alone and challenge her, only for Darla to appear in the aftermath and subdue them both.

Reportedly all three sisters still lived, but Myra had lost her left arm at the shoulder, and nobody had seen Cassie in weeks.

Thirty-eight cultivators had died by the conflict’s end, an outrageous death toll for what had ultimately been a maintaining of the status quo.  Xavier, thankfully, hadn’t been among them, though he’d twice taken injuries severe enough to mandate an overnight in a medical bay as he continued his campaign of honor duels at Jean Jack’s behest.

Charlotte’s father remained enigmatic in his thoughts on Xavier’s proposal, seeming to squeeze every bit of value he could from Xavier’s devotion without ever actually committing to anything in return.  Personally, I thought risking life and limb for four months in service to some nebulous political agenda was above and beyond, and Xavier deserved if not an outright yes, at the very least a definitive answer.  Jean Jack clearly disagreed.

Contrary to my expectations, Charlotte and Xavier remained, if not happy, at the very least tolerant of the state of affairs.  Xavier’s proposal had, if nothing else, earned him access to the Velereau estate, allowing the couple to once again spend time together.  That had ostensibly been the point, so I could understand his unwillingness to push his luck any further.

That said, the end of the Urlitch civil war meant Cassie—indisposed as she was—had far greater problems and better targets for her ire than Charlotte and Jean Jack, meaning at long last Charlotte could leave the estate without fear of a knife in the back.  Xavier, however, remained firmly in place as a retainer of House Velereau, a position that called for far less violence now that the open conflict had ended, but still left him subject to Jean Jack’s schemes.

For my part, I kept peacefully separate from the whole ordeal, receiving regular updates from Charlotte or Micaiah as news trickled in, but otherwise blessedly uninvolved in sect politics.  I finished the first set of macroenchanting books Harold had given me, only for him to grill me on things like loss quotients and flare redundancy before sending me off with another collection he’d dubbed ‘year two.’

I was prouder than I’d like to admit to have apparently completed ‘year one’ in only eight months.  Surely an iron core and open brain meridian had nothing to do with that.

With my work and my studies coming along nicely and things finally calming down somewhat within the sect, I was free to devote more of my attention to the two axes of my own progress: deciphering the fragment I remembered of Death, and coming up with a crucible with which to reforge my mind and advance to titanium.

The former inched forward measurably, a good two thirds of my holopad’s processing power devoted to analyzing the weave as best it could.  None of the isolated pieces I’d attempted to channel qi into seemed to do anything, and the AI was down to comparing somewhat dubious similarities at an extremely granular level to the one example of a functional technique I had: my Vac Suit.

What I really needed was another point of comparison or twelve, but I was a long way from figuring out how to convert light qi techniques to use dark qi, and divine inspiration didn’t exactly happen on command.  I hoped all the meditating would get me something eventually, but ‘hope’ very much remained the primary action in that method.

Finding a way to advance to titanium was both easier and harder.  It was easier in that Lucy and I had put together an exhaustive list of hundreds of enchanted objects, alchemical compounds, and cognitohazards that would do the job, ordered both by how dangerous the advancement would be and how useful the resulting titanium mind would be.  I found the entire process rather enjoyable, imagining everything from tripled processing speed to reduced need for sleep to practical immunity to mind-altering effects.

Reality did what reality does and ruined all the fun soon enough.  As extensive as our list was, the venn diagram of crucibles I could use and crucibles I could afford on a vac welder’s salary contained precisely zero overlap.  Getting our hands on one via Charlotte’s father seemed like the best path, but I ardently refused to go into that man’s debt, and the mere act of visibly pursuing such a thing would immediately ruin my disguise as a mere bronze.

Our best plan at the moment was to wait until Charlotte was ready to make the attempt herself, and have her pick a cognitohazard that would suit us both.  Assuming she succeeded—I preferred not to plan for the deaths of my friends—she could safely memorize and relay the meme to me.

That of course limited my options to crucibles that worked well for Charlotte, that were memetic in nature, and that Jean Jack had access to.  At least the ‘waiting for Charlotte’ part I could expedite, channeling massive amounts of qi into my Vac Suit whenever she visited just to feed her the small percentage that converted to light qi in the process.

Jean Jack almost certainly realized we were doing something to accelerate Charlotte’s cultivation, but he neither complained nor pushed the matter.  I could only assume he believed Lucy to be responsible, as Charlotte consistently returned from time aboard the soulship with a fuller core than she’d left with.

It seemed to me that with politics calming down, my holopad quietly crunching away at Death in the background, and Charlotte pushing inexorably—if slowly—towards advancement, that things had finally settled.  For once, there was no imminent danger, no immediate threat, and no indication that anything particularly exciting would happen any time soon.  For several months, all was well.

Which meant, of course, that by my fourteenth month living aboard the Dragon’s Right Eye, I expected shit to go south at any minute.  I just hadn’t thought it’d be my own damn fault.

It started, as workplace accidents often do, with a benign change.

“Mornin’ Bill,” I greeted as I sat on my normal bench to suit up.  “Just us today?”

“Ursula’s not in ’til lunch,” he replied.  “Got another doctor’s appointment.”

I nodded along as I unhooked Shiver from my back and reached for my vac suit.  “Her maternity leave starts soon, doesn’t it?”

Bill shrugged and offered a grunt that at least vaguely resembled the words ‘I don’t know.’  “Best get used to working with just two.”

“Eh, I was alone back on Fyrion and just two before that.  Didn’t have a no-at to babysit, though.”

“Lucky you.”  Bill glanced down at his holopad.  “Better get going.  Got more repairs than usual today after Ed’s whole team took yesterday off, and without Ursula we’re gonna have to move fast if we want to be home in time for dinner.”

“Sir, yes, sir.”  I flashed a joking salute.  Within minutes I’d clambered into my vac suit and stashed Shiver in my cubby, taking a moment of scowl as a yellow warning popped up on my hud.  “Oh yeah, battery’s low.  I meant to swap that out yesterday.”

Bill understandably groaned.  I’d have to take the entire suit off to get at the battery.  “How much you got?”

“Twenty percent.”

“Swap it at lunch, then.  C’mon.  We’re already behind.”

Reluctantly, I nodded and swiped away the warning.  A typical day’s work, between the magnets and the rebreather, ate about ten percent of a charge.  A half day would leave me with a fifteen percent cushion, and I could save even more if I cycled my lung meridian to cut down on rebreather usage.  I’d probably have to override some failsafes to convince the suit I wasn’t suffocating, but it’d work in a pinch.  I’d prefer the sect didn’t find out, but it wasn’t like I needed the vac suit in the first place.

We slung our gear into the back of the no-at and I climbed into the passenger seat as Bill got the finicky vehicle running.  It took two attempts to get it off the ground, Bill grumbling the whole time about the engine three crapping out and the mag anchor failing to disengage, but eventually we made it through the airlock and outside.

The first eight jobs took just over two hours, a miserable pace under normal circumstances but lightning fast with Ursula out and our no-at taking several minutes to start up every time.  By the ninth job, I’d long allowed my mind to wander as my body went through the motions of the rote labor.

I pondered the vacuum, considered the emptiness around me and how it was a lie.

True vacuums didn’t really exist.  Light, in its various forms, existed basically everywhere, although it dispersed the further it spread from its source.  This close to the Right Eye, my suit was holding out all kinds of radiation.  Gas—mostly hydrogen and helium—was similarly omnipresent.  It was so thin that on a human scale it was basically nothing, but in actuality not a bit of true nothingness existed in nature.

Then where did the infinite sea come in?  I’d first discovered it while contemplating nothing, considering my own smallness in the universe at large to mean that I was, in comparison, nothing.  Every time I touched upon it I returned to that state, to that acceptance of my insignificance, that I too was basically nothing.

But basically nothing wasn’t the same as actual nothing.  The infinite sea, like the vacuum in which it existed, was vast and cold and still and eternal, but it wasn’t, strictly speaking, empty.  It contained countless people and stars and black holes and galaxies, all in there entirety minuscule specs before the void, but it was my human mind that sought such comparisons, not some law of the threads or the universe itself.

Those were the thoughts running through my head when pain exploded up my arm.

I don’t know what hit me, but I know it was smaller than a fingernail, and that it went clean through my right forearm.

Immediately I slammed qi through eleven of my twelve meridians, leaving my brain unenhanced so I could more readily reprioritize rather than having to logically conclude why it was worth the effort to continue living with every new problem that demanded attention.

The first thing I noticed was the relief as my spine meridian converted the pain into an icy coolness.

The second was my vac suit’s response.

Space debris was a known occupational hazard of vac welding—threads, the damage it did to ships and stations was the entire point of the job.  Most suits came with countermeasures, in my case, a small energy barrier that popped up over the two holes in my suit to keep my air supply in.  A full charge could last you twenty minutes, just enough time to get to a no-at and drive to the nearest airlock.

I didn’t have a full charge.

“I’m ruptured!” I rasped over comms, my voice breathless from my lung meridian.

“Shit!” Bill cursed, clanking away from the no-at engine he’d been tinkering with to rush to the driver’s seat.

Procedure called for me to stay put, breathe as little as possible and conserve charge while Bill came to pick me up.

The no-at’s mag anchor failed to release.

I cursed.  We’d parked within walking range of three different work orders, and Bill wasn’t exactly close.  If I refrained from using the rebreather entirely, I figured I could make it to the no-at and plug into its power supply for the ride to safety.

I set off, the thunk of my metal boots against the hull resonating up my legs as I made a steady pace towards rescue.  My hud flashed an urgent message that I was consuming too much power.  I ignored it.  Even if I ran out, I could survive the hard vac just fine.  For nearly five minutes I walked, closing more than half the distance between the two of us.

Bill caught my mistake before I did.  He was cursing furiously into the comms as he tried to override the no-at’s anchor controls when he glanced up and spotted me moving towards him.  “Cal, no!  Stay put!  Your mag boots are eating too much power!”

My suit must’ve broadcast the warning it’d shown me.  I opened my mouth to tell him I’d be fine, that even if my suit depressurized I wouldn’t suffocate or freeze to death or cook in the star’s radiation, when I realized there remained one function of my suit I very much still needed.

I had maybe sixty seconds before my mag boots ran out of power and I fell into the sun.

Shit.  Shit shit shit shit.  My suit had fallen below three percent.  Even if Bill got the no-at moving right this second he wouldn’t get to me in time.  I frantically scanned the hull around me for any handles, any ridges, any corners I could grab hold of.  I found only sheer metal.

I clamped down on the panic, on the self recriminations, on the wondering if I’d have caught the error if I’d cycled my brain meridian or instead wasted precious time calculating the projected orbit of my blood droplets around the Right Eye.  I channeled qi into it now, giving myself the simplest, of most open-ended directive I had in some time.

Survive.

With an effort of abdominal strength I curled down and secured my left hand’s magnet to the hull, burning through yet more power.

Forty seconds.

My right hand reached for the welding torch at my back.  I fumbled to unclasp it.  Two of the fingers on my hand didn’t curl properly.  Bill was screaming in the comms.  I ignored him.

Thirty seconds.

I turned on the electromagnet on my left knee to free up my hand.  My power reserves dropped again.

Fifteen seconds.

I pointed the torch at my own leg, mentally preparing myself for what would almost certainly be a third degree burn.  I tried to press the switch with my pointer finger.  It didn’t move.  I switched to my middle finger.

Five seconds.

The fire of the torch and the icy chill of my spine meridian-altered pain rampaged through me as I welded my knee magnet to the hull.

My power ran out.

The twin holes on my burst as the air inside rushed out.

My hud went dark.

My magnets deactivated.

The weld, fresh as it was and hot as the sun’s radiance kept the hull, hadn’t cooled.

Gravity ripped me from the hull, and I fell towards the Dragon’s Right Eye.

A few quick calculations gave me several hours before I got close enough to the red dwarf to burn to death.  That’d be what killed me eventually, but the acceleration would seal my fate much sooner.  With nothing to slow me down, it wouldn’t be long before I was moving several hundreds of miles per hour.  Anyone trying to rescue me would have to slow me down first.

More importantly, the no-at could only accelerate so much faster than I was accelerating before the g-force would knock Bill unconscious.  I had hours before falling into the sun.  I had minutes before I was moving too fast to be saved.

Bill finally got the no-at moving and raced after me.  I thanked my luck he was willing to try.  By all rights the depressurization should’ve killed me.  I couldn’t communicate with him.  My comms had died alongside my suit.

I already knew he wasn’t going to reach me.  The no-at’s third engine wasn’t running, and without it the vehicle simply couldn’t accelerate fast enough.  The math was chillingly simple.

I spared a dark thought for the irony of it all, that after void psychos and malicious elders and a threads damned nanite swarm, a fucking vac welding accident would be what got me.  I’d grown too confident, too safe in the belief my iron body would protect me to properly respect the danger of the job.

If Ursula had been there she could’ve secured me to the hull.  If I’d replaced my suit battery before leaving instead of waiting until lunch, if we’d repositioned the no-at between jobs, if the finicky vehicle didn’t have multiple things wrong with it, if the space debris hadn’t hit me, if I’d just stayed put instead of breaking safety protocol…

If, if, if.

I needed to slow myself down.  I needed to grab hold of something.  I needed to get to Bill.

There was nothing.  No air resistance to impose a terminal velocity, no thrusters to adjust course, nothing.

But that wasn’t quite true.  There was a thin amount of hydrogen and helium and no shortage of stellar radiation, but that wouldn’t help me.

There was also the infinite sea.

It was everywhere, and if I could drink from it, if I could drift away, maybe I could swim through it.

I shut my eyes and reached for the endless wellspring of cold stillness.  I didn’t pull any into my core.  I didn’t fall away into the meaninglessness of it all.  I grasped the one thing I still had, the something in the vast nothing, and I pulled.

Unbidden, my earlier meditations came back to me.  In comparison to the infinite sea, I was nothing.  The Dueling Stars were nothing.

The distance between Bill and me was nothing.

An immense quantity of qi surged through me, more than my entire core could hold several times over.  Like a tide the infinite sea it washed through me, spreading cold comfort through my spirit before flowing back out and into an unfamiliar shape, far larger and more complex than my Vac Suit.

My eyes snapped open.

I hadn’t moved.

Bill hadn’t moved.

I reached a hand across the several thousand feet between us and grabbed hold of the no-at’s passenger seat.  I pulled myself into it.

Bill gaped.  He said something into the comms.  I couldn’t hear him.

I strapped in as Bill turned the no-at around and made for an emergency landing at the nearest airlock.  I didn’t bother plugging in.  He’d seen me depressurize.  That particular secret was out.

I spent the ride to safety visualizing the sigil that’d saved my life.  It had taken a ludicrous quantity of qi and was almost as labyrinthine as the fragment of Death I’d remembered, but it’d worked.

I’d have breathed a sigh of relief if my lung meridian wasn’t furiously guarding every bit of air in my body against the pull of the vacuum.  Instead, I simply leaned back in my seat.

I’d survived.

I’d taken a massive step towards understanding both the nature of the infinite sea and the ways dark qi moved through sigils.

And at long last I’d figured out a second technique.

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