Among Stars

Travel Plans

"So you say we need to just... let them be like that?" Mizuni asked. She was leaning onto the wall in the room with the sleeping pods. Naina was standing in front of the pods, looking at them and scratching the tip of her left ear.

"Yeah," she muttered. "Unfortunately. They're in low-power mode, and there's no way we can get them back and open without risking their lives. They need to be taken to a good medical facility with the proper equipment, and they need to be woken up in steps and their bodies regenerated slowly," she said, tapping her finger on one of the pods.

"The pods are keeping them alive, but their vital functions are kept to a minimum, and their metabolism is almost non-existent. They could exist outside the pods without medical attention, if we opened them now," she said.

"How do you know?" Mizuni asked.

"I... I was there once, in their place," she said quietly. "Many years ago, before I came to the academy. I was put in a sleeping pod for... reasons. It was supposed to be a temporary stay, but I ended up being in the pod for almost fifteen years."

"Fifteen years?!" Mizuni yelled. "How are you alive? Aren't these things rated for like maximum ten years, with recommended being maximum five?"

Naina shook her head. "No, it was an elven pod. Ours are rated for years and years more. Mine was rated for fifty, if I remember correctly."

"Oh yeah, you people live way longer than even us," Mizuni said. "I'm 42, and people still consider me a teen," she said, smiling.

Naina nodded. "Yeah, it's not uncommon for my people to live for hundreds of years," she said. "Anyway, when I was wakened from my sleep, it took the doctors a year to get me back on my feet, and almost a month until I could see at all."

Mizuni nodded solemnly. "Okay, point made," she said. "So we need to get them back to the Empire, and to a proper care. How?"

"Infinity," Naina said. "I believe she's now recharged, and the two of us with Quera can surely find a way to fly through the bubble and get back. I mean, I did get here without a pod," she said and grinned widely.

Mizuni lifted her eyebrow. "How DID you manage to come here, by the way?" she asked.

Naina smiled nervously, "So... Travelstar has an inverted-polarity hyperdrive, I took your theory on the sub-space bubbles, basically took my hyperdrive controller coils apart, re-programmed them with the parameters in your theory, applied a few facts I've learned during the years, and latched my sensor array into the drive and Quera kept it linked with the bubble," she explained. "And, well, then I just kinda hoped everything worked, and hit it," she giggled.

"You... you what?" Mizuni said with her mouth open. "You... built a sub-space piercer -- what I jokingly call a 'Donut Drive' -- out of an old hyperdrive, on the go, with no more tools than you had in your hands, and... and just flew through it?! Like without planning a route and making the calculations beforehand?"

"Uh, yes...? Sort of. I guess," Naina said and grinned nervously.

"Qenaith Culdran," Mizuni exclaimed. "And you called ME genius? Do you know that it took me two years to plan the route here, and almost a decade before that to build the theories for the drive? And they spent almost five years building it? And you build one in an afternoon? With a screwdriver?"

Naina grinned at her. "Well, if you put it like that..." she said and blushed slightly. "But I had your theories, and my decade of research. You can't leave them out."

"Fair," Mizuni said, and smiled. "Still a heck of a thing to do. Flying through a bubble, blind, with only a dynamic sensor array keeping you from blowing up," she said, and chuckled. "Did you know that just the other day -- uh, I mean, I guess it was eight years ago, but just a few days for me. Anyway, I was just dreaming about being able to travel through spbubs without planning... And then you say you just did it in an old ship?"

Naina giggled. "Spbubs?" she said, grinning.

Mizuni smiled nervously and blushed a little. "Ah. Sub-space bubbles. It's what I've been calling them for the longest time. Kinda like a nickname. Eh."

"It's super cute," Naina said and smiled at her. Mizuni's face went a couple of degrees darker, and she looked down.

"So... uh... how to get out of here?" Mizuni said, trying to desperately change the subject.

Naina leaned back, closed her eyes, and scratched the tip of her left ear.

"Well... Infinity has charged, she'll be able to fly FTL totally normally. So that shouldn't be a problem," Naina said. "Depending on her hyperdrive, I'm fairly sure together we can repeat what I did with mine. Quera can handle the sync while we're on the way. I can only see two big problems."

"And they are?" Mizuni said.

"One. I'm fairly sure Infinity's hyperdrive is of the wrong polarity. I don't know how to deal with that," she said and opened her eyes, looking into the ceiling. "Second. As far as I can tell, infinity has no scoop. I have no idea how to refuel the hyperdrive and get out of here. It'll take us way too long on FTL to reach the Empire."

Mizuni nodded. She leaned backwards and tapped her lips with her index finger. "Infinity doesn't have a normal hyperdrive, as you'd know. We have the Donut Drive, which pierces sub-space, but doesn't use hypergates. It runs on sub-space energy, so technically it can run forever. The problem is, that I don't have the necessary navigation data for a return trip. I didn't plan on doing that for decades," she explained.

"So, this donut drive of yours. It's like an inverted hyperdrive-come-sub-space-manipulator," Naina said. "Quera. Give us the data on the drive, the sub-space bubble, and the navigation data from the journey here. Then transfer our backups from Sunstar to Infinity, and give me the ZX-15 bubble data, with the Kell-3 data. And have the sheet I've been building there too," she said.

"Affirmative, Captain Melcey," Quera said. "I believe the bridge has a suitable assortment of displays for this."

"Good," Naina said and got up. "Come, Valera, let's go do some science," she said and grinned widely.