“Ah. Vytln uses this room as a workspace,” Sway said, following her gaze to the multitude of projects and machines spread out all over the room. Including what appeared to be a massive metal ball of junk all welded together taking up an entire wall.
But Grace didn't really care about that. Her attention was on the opposite side of the room. One half of the space had the actual engine room entrance, but aside from the two jutting walls, the space was open. Completelyopen!Just like that! So easily accessible! Not even a door. And it was ridiculously hot in here. It felt like Grace had just stepped into an oven.
“What happened to the shields?” She asked, giving Sway an incredulous look.
“Old.” He shrugged. “Mostly still functional, but not great. We were hoping to get those replaced as well.”
“It’s definitely necessary,” she frowned, walking closer to the engine room entrance. “If you’re leaking this badly, you could really damage the rest of the ship.”
The massive machine inside was still pumping out a ton of heat, even though it had been fully powered down. The engine was old, likely as old as the ship itself, but it appeared in good condition. Even though there were obvious parts where things had been replaced and repaired, it clearly did its job and did it well.
Still…
“When was the last time the engine was serviced?”
Sway shook his head, shrugging his shoulders at the same time. Surprising her. Those were human moves. How did he know how to do that?
She didn’t get to ask as Sway said, “Vytln does all the engine maintenance. As far as I know, we’ve never had it professionally serviced, but he keeps it working well. How much would it cost to service here?”
“Well, depends on how deep you want us to go,” she stood just on the very edge of the jutting walls. A dark line on the floor, up the walls, and across the ceiling marked where the shields ended. The lines weren’t properly glowing like they should be if they were functioning correctly. “We could replace the whole thing, but, honestly, for that price, you might as well get a new ship. But we can go over the packages when we finalize the quote in my office later. I can probably toss in a professional cleaning though. There’s a lot of stains in here. That one… Does that one look like a body to you?”
Grace cocked her head, staring at the dark smear on the floor. The bare metal in here all looked dirty and stained, but that one particular smudge really did look like a body. It had a head and arms and everything. It was kind of unnerving.
“You know, it kind of does,” Sway chuckled, drawing her gaze back to him. “There’s one up on the bridge that looks like a two headed jhila beast.”
“No way,” Grace laughed, stepping back from the engine. She was eager to get away from this oppressive heat.
“Oh, yeah. And one in my privy that kind of looks like the word ‘leave’. Which, I think, means my toilet is haunted.”
Grace was still laughing as she stepped out of the room, letting out a breath of relief. She had only been in there for a minute, but she was already sweating. At least, out in the hall, the life support had more power, and it was drastically cooler. But those shields definitely needed fixing.
The same was true for the subspace generator. That was separate from the engine – by necessity, as subspace generators needed their own, secured, shielded space in order to work. They also usually had to be placed centrally in the vessels they covered. Subspace generators created something like an area of effect bubble, and everything within that area would drop into the subspace swing. Keeping the generator located centrally gave more control over what was in that bubble.
In the center of the Humility was a secondary bridge, which rather surprised her. Secondary command centers were usually reserved for ships that saw combat, not delivery ships.
Though, she supposed, they were apparently a specialized delivery company. Maybe the extra security of the secondary command, far from any potential outside hits, was necessary.
The room itself was pretty small, with three consoles in it, all of them on standby mode. It also looked like it had been added on at some point after initial construction. The walls were of a noticeably different material from the rest of the ship, and they had rivets like they had been nailed together roughly instead of neatly built to be sealed in case of a hull breach. Sway moved the chairs away, revealing a hatch in the ground that opened manually. Sway grabbed the welded on handle and lifted the door, revealing the subspace generator.
Unlike the engine, the generator didn't create heat, radiation, or noise as it worked. In fact, the reaction was ratherendothermic, sucking in the surrounding heat and leaving the area cold. The visible chill that was coming out of the compartment now was pretty normal.
But nothing else about what she was seeing could be called normal. Subspace generators usually had a top piece that was round and concave sitting on a sturdy, solid, square base. The base housed all the electric components, while the rounded top contained the crystals nestled inside the shape. But not actually resting inside. The concave space in the center was empty. It was important as the space there created something like a bowl for the entrance into subspace to build – like water in a dish, in a way.
It was difficult to explain, because subspace didn’t work the way real space did. Honestly, Grace wasn’t sure she even had it hypothetically correct. But she did know what the generator was supposed to look like. And it wasn’tthat!
The generator she was looking at now had those basic pieces, but they were all wrong. The square base was completely broken open on all sides, all the components and wires spilling out and connecting haphazardly into the ship. It was more like a knot of cybernetic spaghetti. Just like the engine, it was obvious that some parts were noticeably older and newer than others. There was literal tape holding it together in places, cords tying things together in others, with hopes and prayers everywhere else.
The concave portion on top was gone completely, leaving the crystals completely exposed. There were twelve of them in total, each one a different shape, but all of them should be the same weight. The plates they were connected to – which should be uniform and clean – were just as varied and crazy as the base parts. Without the top, the natural concavity in which the subspace would be accessed was gone, but someone had weldedtogether a metal bowl and stuck it in the center to serve the same purpose.
But what really struck her was howdarkthe crystals were.
Subspace crystals were a very special type of crystal that could only be harvested in one solar system in all the Coalition. They were not rare within that system itself. In fact, a lot of planets and asteroids within that system were made of nothing else. But no other solar system yet known contained them.
They varied in color, but they were always clear, like quartz, with bright, shiny facets that needed no polishing. There were no impurities allowed for those that were travel grade, so the slight colors that tinted them weren’t from any mineral interference. It was more a result of the amount of energy stored within them.
The crystals existed on a rainbow color spectrum, from red all the way to purple. In actuality, they continued in both directions even further than her eye could see, but past those points, they lost their color, either turning white or gray.
Which was normal and right. A proper, healthy crystal should be white. As it began to lose energy, it began to develop a purple tint. Then blue, green, yellow, etc, until it got to red. Once it hit red, it stopped losing color and started going dark.
