Starmind Chapter 47

I got it done in time, so here's the first chapter of book 2! Now, since I'm writing this as a book, there will be some reminders and such here and there. If you read this shortly after chapter 46 they may seem a little bit forced, but I hope not.

Enjoy!

--------------------------------------------------

I usually liked Acting Captain Lucilla Tammeron. She wasn’t my captain — that was Temeri, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. But Tammeron was very nice to my Crew, she’d never once even suggested that me being a ship made me less of a person, and Temeri always became so cheerful whenever Tammeron visited, or when Temeri went to see her so they could work on something together. So yes, I liked her. I knew that I liked her. In general. I just didn’t like her very much tonight.

“But why isn’t she coming back?” I whined to Varlanda as the Enchantress laid down some rune scripts on a new Mana Condensation Matrix — it would be my sixth once it came online. “She always comes back, no matter how tired she is!”

“Well, I’m sure she has a good reason,” Varlanda said. She sounded far too amused for my liking, and I didn’t understand. “What did she say?”

“Just that she’s sorry, but she wants to stay on Sophia tonight. And she wouldn’t say why!”

It wasn’t even that long of a walk! Sophia’s command center wasn’t more than half an hour away at a relaxed walk, and I knew for a fact that Temeri could do it in twenty minutes if she wanted to.

“Wants to, not needs to? Right.” Varlanda laughed, a soft chuckle that barely left her throat. “Did you ask anyone else?”

“I asked Simeon, and he just told me that Temeri’s an adult and that’s her choice. He wouldn’t even go talk to her!”

“No, I’m sure he wouldn’t,” she said, laughing properly this time. Then she took a deep breath, settled herself, and put her tools down. “Okay, sweetie. So. You remember how you were confused for a bit about why Harvin and I were sharing a bed?”

“Yeah, but I understand that now. You’re helping each other get to sleep!”

“Well, there’s more to it than that, but yes. And you know that Harv and I only do that because we like each other?”

“Right.”

“Well, Captains Carlon and Tammeron like each other. And with us leaving the day after tomorrow, the captain can’t very well spend tomorrow night away. So my guess is that they wanted to, well… spend the night together before we leave. In Captain Tammeron’s bed, I assume.”

“Oh.” I pondered that for a moment, and a few things came together. “Oh! This is a courtship thing!”

Varlanda laughed again. “Yes, Star. It’s a courtship thing.”

“And it has a lot more to do with liking each other than with helping each other sleep, doesn’t it? Harvin was trying to explain this to me, but I don’t think I really understood.”

“Right again, Star. I think most people would want to sleep with someone they like as much as I like Harvin even if neither of them has any trouble getting to sleep.”

“And most people wouldn’t ask someone to help them like that unless they liked that person a whole lot, no matter how hard it was for them to get to sleep,” I stated confidently.

“Exactly!”

“I’m getting pretty good at this organic mortal courtship stuff, aren’t I?” I asked proudly. The question was rhetorical. I knew that I was.

Varlanda just laughed and went back to work.

I still had a lot to learn. I had a bunch of archives to draw from, but having them wasn’t enough. If I’d still been a simple Crystal Mind, I would have just known anything in my archives, but now I had to actively read and remember things, and that was hard! I’d only been alive for thirty-six days. Anyone would agree that thirty-six days wasn’t a long time to learn everything there was to know.

Especially not about things that I could only barely relate to, like what organic people sometimes did with certain people they really liked. I had a few related memories that I shared with members of my Crew, like Harvin’s first kiss, but that only helped me understand that they thought kissing was nice. It didn’t tell me why or when two people might want to kiss, and it wasn’t like I had lips of my own to mash against someone, even if I wanted to.

It was all very confusing. And even if I could accept Varlanda’s explanation, that still didn’t make me any happier about Captain Tammeron keeping Temeri away all night. Temeri had a perfectly good cabin aboard me. They could just as well sleep together there!

In fact, I should suggest just that!

“You’ve been silent for a bit,” Varlanda observed before I could get in touch with Temeri again. She’d stopped working again, and her eyes were a bit narrower than usual.

“I was thinking.”

“About the captains?”

“Yes…” I answered. There was something in her tone that made me want to not tell her, but I wasn’t going to lie to Varlanda.

“Star, whatever you were thinking, please don’t talk to the captain about sleeping with Tammeron. I beg you. You know how private she is.”

“But, I was just thinking—” I started, but she cut me off.

“Oh no, I know that tone. I’m serious, Star. Please don’t. The captain will be terribly embarrassed, I can promise you that, and Sim will find out somehow and he’ll think I put you up to it. Please, Star. For the captain’s peace of mind, and for the sake of the peace between me and my brother, leave it alone. Let Temeri just enjoy herself without worrying what anyone thinks of her.”

“But why would Temeri worry about that?”

“That’s… I’ll explain some other time, alright? I promise. For now, please. Let her be.”

I wanted to object and try to explain to her, but in the face of her literally begging me I had to give in. Varlanda had spent the last week speculating about if there was “something going on” between the captains. If she suddenly didn’t want to talk about it, I had no choice but to take her seriously.

“I won’t say anything,” I promised reluctantly.

“Thank you.”

“How’s the Matrix coming along? Are you almost done? It’s getting close to dinner time.”

“Just about done,” Varlanda said, cheerful again now that I’d promised. She picked up her tools again and refreshed her spells. “Another hour at most, probably less. I’ve picked up some tricks doing the last five!”

“Okay. But if you’re not done in an hour I’m sending Harvin down to get you! I don’t want you forgetting about dinner again”

I didn’t want to bug her too much, but Varlanda was the kind of person who could get stuck in a project and forget about little things like eating, drinking, and sleeping. Over the last week she’d been keeping herself very busy, and in her enthusiasm for whatever she was working on that day, she’d almost missed a few meals. And those meals together were important!

Of course, so was the work. In the past week, she and Bekeri had finished the Phase-Disruption Field Generator, which should hopefully keep any phase-cycling mana pulses that might get shot our way from simply slipping past my hull. Then they’d built a Hydroponic Growth Chamber, which would let the Crew grow some nice, fresh food using samples from Sophia’s agricultural deck — not a lot with just the one Growth Chamber, but it should help with morale and we were planning to expand pretty soon.

Once those two projects were done they’d moved on to doing their own things. Bekeri, being my Artificer, finally had time for two things he’d been looking forward to. First he’d replaced or repaired all my damaged thrusters, and then he’d started work on something he’d wanted ever since he first saw the schematics: the Holistic Autolathe, which judging by the schematics and specification should let us make entire machines and large components at a time, instead of piece by piece, like Bekeri did it now. The Crew and I were all looking forward to the possibilities that would bring!

Varlanda was a little bit all over the place. Besides sometimes helping Bekeri, she’d spent a lot of time doing maintenance on Sophia’s systems, since she was my Enchantress and they didn’t have an Enchanter anymore. She’d been working together with Harvin, too, to get something Harvin called a planar shifting ritual working. That would dump all of my spent mana into the astral plane and stop me shining like a literal, tiny star if anyone looked at me with mana senses. And, of course, she’d spent a few hours here and there working on the Matrix that she would hopefully finish before I had to make good on my threat of telling Harvin that she was missing dinner again.

Speaking of Harvin, my Diviner had been doing very little divining lately and a whole lot of ritual work. Besides the planar shifting ritual he’d been working on for me, he and Varlanda had also been working on Sophia’s original, much larger version of the same. Apparently a whole lot of scripts and runes had “burned out” because no one had maintained them, and he wanted to have it working properly again before we left. And then there was the shrouding ritual that he and Varlanda had set up. That was an important part of keeping us safe when we went out into the void again, since it would make it much harder for other Diviners to detect our minds. The first version that they’d set up had worked well enough, he said, but he wanted to iterate on it to have it as effective as he could make it.

For the first several days Harvin had covered the walls of the rec room in diagrams and notes. That hadn’t been a great arrangement, though. He was a calm person, but he got very annoyed when someone brushed against anything. At Temeri’s suggestion I’d ended up making him an office—pretty much just a room with a lot of wall space and a bench in the middle—and that had worked out a lot better.

Then there was Simeon, Varlanda’s brother and my Healer. There wasn’t really any work for him to do aboard me, but pretty much everyone on Sophia's crew was still recovering from their injuries. They’d all been hurt badly enough when the Order of the Rings boarded Sophia that they’d had to go into stasis, and losing most of your stomach or a limb or something like that was apparently not something that Simeon could just cast a spell and heal. Acting Captain Tammeron had lost both her legs, and even though she’d been the first one out of stasis she was still a little unsteady if she had to stand or walk for too long. I always turned the gravity down when she visited. She appreciated that.

Come to think of it, I thought, that might be why Temeri didn’t want to bring her here to spend the night. I should—

I should not ask, I reminded myself. I’d promised Varlanda.

Anyway, Simeon spent almost his whole days on Sophia, mostly in its med bay helping Angash, Sophia’s own Healer. He’d leave after breakfast and return right around dinnertime, which was sad for me but very good for Sophia’s crew, so I just shipped up and accepted it. He’d told me that was a very adult way of thinking, which made it a lot easier to do.

Finally there was Temeri. Since she was the captain most of her job was to plan and make decisions. She spent every other day with Tammeron on Sophia, and while I’d never liked that, I’d seen how excited she’d been whenever she left, so I hadn’t wanted to say anything. She’d told me that they did a lot of planning and going over what Tammeron and Sophia knew about the Order of the Ring, who’d killed or kidnapped everyone else from Sophia’s crew, and I’d just figured that she really liked doing that. It was important work since it would help us both in our surveillance mission and when we returned to Mundus, and Temeri was a very responsible person. And I was sure that they did do what Temeri said, but after what Varlanda had just told me, I was pretty sure that they’d been doing a bunch of kissing, too. Which, now that I thought about it, explained her eagerness to meet Tammeron a whole lot better than just being excited about the work.

Thinking about that was dangerous. I practically vibrated from the effort of not contacting Temeri on her comms medallion so I could ask her. But I remained strong, and I kept my promise to Varlanda. I was a good ship, and good ships, I had decided all on my own, didn’t embarrass their captains if they could help it. That didn’t stop the other Crew from speculating, though.

It began when Simeon returned for dinner and didn’t have Temeri with him. Bekeri and Harvin were both waiting in the rec room while Varlanda put the finishing touches on integrating the new Mana Condensation Matrix when our Healer walked in.

“Hey, Sim,” Harvin said. “Is Cap freshening up first or something?”

“She’s not coming tonight,” Simeon said, getting a cup and going to the water dispenser. “Star, some of Cap’s ersatz lemonade, please,” he said, holding the cup under the nozzle.

“Sweet, sour, and weirdly fruity coming up!” I said, dispensing a cup of water and altering it as it poured.

“Not coming?” Bekeri asked, tilting his head. “She always comes for dinner, no matter how tired or busy she is. What’s wrong?”

“Oh, nothing’s wrong,” Simeon answered. “She said that she has some things she wants to go through with Captain Tammeron and not to expect her back until tomorrow, that’s all.”

“It must be important, then,” Bekeri mused. “Something they absolutely had to do before we leave.”

“I bet,” Harvin muttered, raising his own steaming cup to his lips. “Vee’s going to love this.”

Simeon smiled and patted the wall with his free hand. “Oh, I suspect that she already knows. Doesn’t she, Star?”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “I asked her when you didn’t want to talk about it.”

“And what did she say?”

“Not to embarrass Temeri.”

Bekeri tilted his head the other way, knitting his eyebrows for good measure. “Embarrass the captain? Why would— oh.” His ears strained towards the ceiling as he came to the same conclusion as the rest of us, and he looked from Simeon to Harvin and back again. “Are you sure?”

“As sure as I can be without doing something unforgivably unprofessional,” Harvin sing-songed. “But I don’t need to go into Tammeron’s mind to know what she’s thinking when Cap’s around.”

“Really?”

“Temeri smiles a lot when Tammeron comes here, or when she goes there,” I added. “Oh! And her heart rate goes up sometimes when anyone mentions her!”

“Star, that’s the kind of thing you shouldn’t share with people,” Simeon scolded gently.

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Still,” Harvin went on, “you’ve been up there enough, Beks. Surely you must have seen them together.”

Bekeri’s upper lip curled at Beks, showing off his pointy teeth for a moment before he relaxed.

“Not ‘Beks?’” Simeon asked. “We workshopped that one a bit this morning.”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

Harvin patted Bekeri’s shoulder. “We’ll come up with a nick-name for you yet.” 

“There’s really no need.”

“Nonsense! You’re the only one who doesn’t have one,” Harvin insisted. “Even ‘Star’ is a nick-name. But really? You didn’t even suspect?”

“I knew they were friendly, but… ah, well. Good for them, I suppose.”

The rapid thung-thung-thung of the ladder in the access tube announced Varlanda’s arrival. She zipped up the rungs, then half jogged, half skipped into the rec room. “Star told me you’re talking about the captains!” she gushed, her eyes bright with excitement. “Finally, right? And we’re sure?”

“What else could it be?” Harvin asked. “I’m not saying that they’ll necessarily do anything, and honestly I’d rather not speculate, but, I mean… we’ve all seen them.”

Everybody looked at Simeon, who’d been mostly staying out of the conversation. He was stony-faced for a few seconds. Then he sighed, smiled wryly, and nodded. “We’ve all seen them. I think we can safely say that we’re out of the realm of pure speculation, at least.”

“I’m still not sure what you’re all seeing,” Bekeri said, “but I’ll take your word for it. Good for them, I suppose.”

“Yeah,” Varlanda said, smiling as she lounged against the wall. “You know what this means though, right?”

“What?” I asked.

“We’re going to have to plan seriously for taking everyone with us when we return to Mundus. I know we’ve had our doubts about that, and I still do. But I like Cap right now, all happy and relaxed. If those two get serious, we can’t very well leave Tammeron.”

“And Tammeron won’t leave her crew,” Simeon continued for his sister. “Right.”

“That’s assuming they all want to leave,” Bekeri pointed out. “If we find that some of their colleagues can be rescued from the Order, they may want to stay here.”

“They may,” Varlanda agreed. “And for all we know, Cap just needs to get it out of her system. She could have left a trail of broken hearts behind her as long as Avaras’ orbit. That, or they end up not working together, or we’re completely wrong about them, or a dozen other things. I’m just saying, we should have a plan in place. The captain—Temeri—shouldn’t have to worry about leaving her new… whatever Tammeron is to her, behind when we go.”

On that, we all agreed. Temeri had been very sad and scared when we first ended up out here, and because of that she wasn’t always very good company. But everybody liked happy Temeri. Besides, seeing Temeri happy was just so nice!

After dinner, they all went back to work for a while. Varlanda went with Bekeri to install some components of the Autolathe, Harvin went back to his diagrams, and Simeon was still familiarizing himself with the Hydroponic Growth Chamber. Then, not too long thereafter, one by one they went to bed. It was still early when Harvin joined Varlanda in her cabin. They all needed to get plenty of rest.

Tomorrow would be a busy day.