The Outer Sphere - Chapter 206

Captain’s log:

Space: The third-to-final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Fertility. It’s continuing mission, to explore passion, and boldly go to exotic ports of call, making sexy peace with the native populations.

Stardate…Wednesday.

The Fertility made an emergency departure in the wake of an unexpected attack by forces allied with a less-than sexy deity, and many of its systems were half-finished at best, leading to several close calls. Thankfully, with Halo assisting the streamlining of the vessel, and Beladia consecrating the space as her own, we were able to escape the notice of whatever thing tried to stop us from fulfilling our mission of spreading genes all over the galaxy.

Or perhaps it’s just waiting for its chance to strike.

The last two weeks since we took off have been a rush from one emergency to another, fixing hairline leaks in our walls threatening to suffocate us, structural problems that nearly snapped the ship/dungeon/Temple of Beladia in half, a lack of gravity, boiling from the heat of the sun, freezing from the cold of space, etc, etc.

Turns out space is hard. Who knew?

Without Halo we would most certainly be dead. He…she..it… Does Halo identify as a gender? It’s obviously intelligent enough to have a sense of self-identity. Whatever, I’ll find out later. It has been a godsend.

Now that things have calmed down somewhat, the ship is gradually growing an airlock under Halo’s supervision so that we can begin to do work on the outside, shielding and magical wards. We’ll need pressurized space-suits and oxygen supplies for the work. I’m thinking some kind of moss? We may need to run safety tests.

Turns out that FTL travel is kind of a high bar. I’ve got some Space-folding Laws redirected toward the bow, but it only brings us to one-sixteenth light-speed, sadly. Getting anywhere in this universe will take a while.

Which leads back to the bigger problem. We’re stuck in one universe, and we want to be in another, so we’re directing the U.S.S fertility toward a distant asteroid field, where we can mine the supplies we’ll need to create a Gate. As it stands, there simply isn’t enough spare material to build a Gate without damaging the structural integrity of the Fertility.

The asteroid field is still about two weeks away, even going eleven thousand six hundred and twenty five miles…per second.

Freaking astronomical distances.

Morale is high. Beladia is good for that in more ways than one, and I suspect the ship’s avatar may be embroiled in a strange romantic entanglement with about half of the population, or the entire adult demographic. I chose a good diety to chaperone the core’s behavior, not a celibate one, apparently. Seems like everyone’s cool with it, though.

I’m just worried about the ship getting pregnant, like in Farscape. We need to keep her away from any other handsome spaceships in case that’s a thing… Then again, it’s unlikely that other ships would be alive enough to be receptive to her advances.

The natives have never had quite such a wide-open space to frolic around in, Or quite this variety of food, and have taken to worshiping Beladia as a goddess…which she is, so Everything’s kosher.

They didn’t, however, understand the concept that their home had separated from the planet it was on and was now hurtling through space at unimaginable speeds, and in some places there were only a few feet of rock between them and sudden decompression.

For the most part, they shrugged and kept living their lives, which had gotten substantially better.

The life-threatening Laws couldn’t be entirely deactivated, so Beladia shrunk the rooms and gradually relocated them to the bilge, around the same time that she grew a ship-wide Gravity Law that kept everyone’s feet on the floor, with the exception of a grown-up jungle gym with zero gravity at my suggestion…I mean come on, it’s zero gravity, who wouldn’t?

I can fly, but floating is something else entirely.

In these next two weeks, we’ll focus on important safety features, from most important to least, including internal force-fields to prevent air from escaping in sudden decompression, and external ones to ward off space debris from shooting straight through us. We are going pretty fast, after all. Additionally, this will include a comprehensive shaping and reinforcement of the exterior hull, which presumably still looks like a fucked-up mountain range.

We won’t know what it looks like out there until we do our space-walk.

Still, this won’t occupy more than a few day of my time, and so my thoughts turn towards our final destination. I could steer the ship towards Earth, but I wouldn’t really have much more of an advantage than I did before…aside from a spaceship the size of a mountain range, and an industrious little swarm of reality-altering stones. Aside from those.

No, I need to take my game to the next level, so if some A-hole walks through all my tricks, they can’t just wipe the floor with me.

I need to get to the next tier.

Origin is fine, btw: I’m writing in him right now. Apparently he’s tougher than he looks.

Misfortune slides off me like water from a duck’s back.

Noted.

Idea: Shrinking Law to further leverage the already spectacular interior space of Fertility. I’ll bring it up with Bel. I should be careful not to make it so big in here that different factions eventually go to war with each other, but I don’t think Bell would allow it.

Bel has recreated the invulnerability Law to protect the Core. It was mutated to uselessness by the black flames, but she was able to reinstitute it.

Once the high priority safety features have been taken care of, I’d like to focus on creating a practice arena of a few square miles with a similar Invulnerability Law, allowing me to train her in the harsh manner of Castavelle without risking damage to either of us, or the delicate bubble we’re ride in.

Alicia seems like she’s spoiling for stress relief after the last two weeks of near-death experiences…and rough sex only seems to do so much. She seems eager to punch someone, and just the other day threatened to kill me if I sang ‘love boat’ one more time, which was totally irrational. It’s thematic.

-Garth Daniels, Captain of the Fertility, signing off.

***1 Week later***

“Bum…bum…BANAAAA!” Garth hummed the iconic notes from 2001: A Space Odyssey as he performed the universe’s first space walk…probably.

“How’s the airlock?” Garth asked, speaking into the microphone just below his mouth. He was in a puffy suit mostly composed of various plant fibers, slowly floating out into the void, his stomach roiling at the sensation of constantly falling.

“It’s holding just fine, no leaks, and Bel says she doesn’t feel anything wrong.” Alicia’s tinny voice came through the speakers, also in front of his face. The speaker had been created out of  two pieces of wire enchanted to mimic each other regardless of distance. Tada, instant communications.

Crappy communications with only one bandwidth, but communications nonetheless. Garth tried to turn himself and take a look at the ship behind him, but of course, he didn’t have anything to push off of.

Silly me.

Fly.

The spell did nothing.

That’s new.

Garth consciously reached out for the mana, but found himself drawing a blank. He focused his attention on the mana around him, and was astonished to discover that most of the mana he’d grown accustomed to manipulating was totally absent.

Nothing but Space, Light and Time Mana everywhere he looked, and not particularly thick, either. This led Garth to hypothesize that most mana happened planetside.

Actually, why haven’t I noticed a decrease in mana availability over the last several weeks? And will my safety feature even work?

The safety feature was a short range teleport built into his suit that was paired with a pad just inside the airlock. Worst case scenario, he should be able to ditch the suit and go back to the ship.

The enchantment worked based on space mana, and there was space mana available, so…maybe?

Garth compressed some space mana into a plane of Force, then grabbed it and turned himself to get a look at the ship.

All he saw was a massive, jagged wall of stone that stretched to the horizon in every direction.

Almost forgot how big this thing is. Baby needs some detail work, bad.

And off to his right, he saw the center of the solar system, whatever passed for uv rays these days piercing directly into his eyeballs, causing damage slightly slower than his natural regeneration could fix them.

So, I need a space go-cart that runs off Space mana, and a better layer of eye protection on my windshield.

Garth summoned another plane of force in front of him and pushed away, getting some distance between himself and the ship.

He could make out trace amounts of mana coming off of the ship itself, wafting outward like water vapor. Is that something I need to be concerned about? Are we slowly losing mana? Running out would be a slowly starve or freeze to death kind of proposition.

It seemed like the ship itself had done a pretty good job of carrying mana along with it, but Garth wasn’t sure if that was because it had brought life with it, a critical number of sapient beings, simply enough mass, or Beladia’s presence cause the enormous ship to qualify as a planet.

Who knew?

Science! This was about as excited as Garth had gotten in a while…at least until he cleared the side of the ship and actually got a good look at it.

Once he was a couple miles away from the airlock, he began to see the ship in it’s entirety. It was a bit like the ancient Chinese myth of the turtle with the world on its back.

The ship was a massive dome shape, with cracked mountains covering the outside, arranged almost like the spikey segments of a battle-tortoise.

Aw, man, I should have named it Battle-tortoise.

Too late for regrets now.

The previously snow-covered peaks had long since sublimated, leaving nothing but bare rock and a bit of dirt. The trees didn’t look so good and…Is that a cabin? Garth sucked a breath through his teeth.

Ouch, talk about a bad day. I hope it was abandoned…or inhabited by Hitler.

“What is it? are we leaking or something?” Alicia’s voice came through the speaker.

“Cabin on one of the mountains.”

“oh.”

“Yeah, hopefully it was empty. Can you send out Halo?”

“Sure, I – oh, it already went through the airlock.”

In the distance, Garth saw Halo’s glittering form come out into the vacuum of space, the twenty-five individual rocks stopped dead once it hit the mana-vacuum, slowly drifting apart. Garth was thinking he might have to collect Halo and put it back inside when the rocks seemed to shake off their torpor and slowly come back together, arranging themselves for self-improvement.

After a couple seconds of that, it reoriented of Garth and came out to him, skimming across the distance in a matter of seconds. It seemed like it was able to move just fine after a little time to adapt to using a different kind of propulsion.

I’m so proud.

How you doing? Can you still hear me? Garth thought.

Halo changed into a green P symbol.

Alright, let’s go over what we want. How much of the exterior of the ship do you think you can Practice at once with your Space tearing trick?

Halo changed into the shape of a ship and lit up a tiny slice of the bow with green, while the rest was red.

Not a lot, huh? so I imagine it’d take a few days of sweeping around the exterior. Alright, Alicia and I are going to try designing some transportation. In the meantime, I want you to improve the mana, temperature, and radiation insulation of the outer hull so that we’re not leaking so much mana into the void. If that turns out to be a bad thing, we can always vent it. I’d rather have control over that than just leaving it alone.

Halo bobbed an affirmative and turned away.

Oh, and we’re going to be terraforming and enchanting the outer hull as well, once we’ve got transportation, so don’t make it too deep, and send a stone to check in every now and then.

Halo bobbed again, then spread out into a wide net, duplicates springing into being to fill the gaps. They weren’t actually duplicates though, it was just the artifact tearing space so that each face of it’s gemstones was equally applied to a side, rather than letting them face away.

Each trapezohedron had twenty sides, and that times twenty five, only gave five-hundred usable sides, which was paltry compared to the size of the ship.

But, under the resonance of Halo, the tiny section of rock that it could effect was rapidly changing color from dull rock, to something metallic.

It’s like filling in a canvas a pixel at a time. This is gonna take a while. At least Halo didn’t get bored or distracted by boobs or the need to eat. That would bring down the ETA drastically.

Garth put a plane of force behind him and pushed off of it, aiming for the airlock.

Macronomicon