Freedom, Humanity, and Other Delusions (Death's Handmaiden Book 3) by Niall Teasdale (best summer reads txt) 📕

Bowels or not, the Yosozume’sengine room was as clean and tidy as the rest of the ship. Nava had half expected to be turned away at the bulkhead hatch, but her ketcom opened the door without trouble and she climbed the ladder down onto the first engineering deck to find a world of polished metal and clean plastic. There were also people, most of them seated in gimballed workstations which allowed them to ignore any changes in the orientation of the ship. Nava had never seen the engines of a sorcery-based spaceship before – which was why she had gone to look – and she had been entirely unsure what to expect. What she was seeing looked like the engineering in any other large vessel, or a power station, or maybe even a chemical plant. There were a lot of cables connecting sealed units and not a lot of signage to indicate what was what.

‘You’re Nava, right?’

Nava turned to find herself looking at one crew member who was not at a station. A tall, slim woman wearing blue coveralls, she had a monocle display over her left eye and the air of someone with authority. Brown hair and hazel eyes and the general look of European ancestry. Her skin was paler than was typical for Shinden residents.

‘I’m Nava, yes.’

‘Gretchen Greyling Sonkei, chief engineer.’

‘Good… afternoon probably, Chief Engineer.’

‘Gretchen,’ Gretchen corrected. ‘Even the captain only goes by Captain when he’s talking to people outside the ship. Never seen engines before?’

‘Was I that obvious? No, I’ve never had the chance to get into a spaceship’s engine room. I think I could have persuaded one of my friends to come too, but he’s still feeling woozy.’

‘Space sickness sucks. Have you got any clue about what you’re looking at?’

‘Honestly, no.’

Gretchen pointed upward at what appeared to be a solid wall with various cables emerging from it at various points. ‘Up there, well, behind there really, is the reactor and the quintessence aggregator. They need to be tied pretty closely together on these compression-type fusion units, but then the excess quintessence powers pretty much all the other sorcery-based systems on the ship.’

‘Okay.’ Nava knew the basic principles of most of the engineering, if not the details. Compression-type reactors used telekinesis generators to create the intense pressures required for efficient nuclear fusion. They also used barrier technologies to help screen everything outside the reactor from the radiation the reactor generated, and energy-transformation sorcery to improve the efficiency of the heat-to-electricity conversion. Traditional reactors used heat to pressurise water which drove turbines; sorcerous reactors worked more like magic thermocouples. ‘So it’s not a great idea to go in there?’

‘Well, it’s actually pretty safe, so long as you limit your time. The barriers block most of the radiation, but the wall’s there for what gets through and in case of a reactor breach. It’s the high-speed neutrons that really cause the trouble. We use a helium-three reaction, so there are plenty of neutrons. Basically, if they weren’t contained, they’d irradiate the entire ship. They still put a limit on the lifetime of the reactor before it has to be entirely overhauled.’

‘Mm. What about the jump and manoeuvring engines?’

Gretchen gave her a grin and waved a beckoning hand. ‘Come with me.’

They went down a deck to where the jump drive was located. This turned out to be a pair of semi-circular projectors with cables connecting the two together through a central synchronisation unit about the size of a family car. There was not much to see, really, but what was there was big and impressive.

‘Of course, it’s basically a big teleportation device,’ Gretchen said. ‘The really clever bits are getting the two field projectors to work together, it gets really messy if they don’t, and making sure that the whole ship and its contents are covered by the field.’

‘It gets messy if they aren’t?’

‘Right. It’s not a good idea to leave the forward section here and send the rest a hundred light years away. It means the schema the drive implements is a bit more complex than a typical teleportation-type spell. Plus, most people aren’t capable of teleporting across interstellar distances. You can only do it with mechanical assistance, both the physical movement and the specification of the target coordinates. Not that I do the latter. If needed, I can make a jump, but the navigation isn’t something I’m trained in.’

Nava nodded. Even nodding felt a bit weird when her head was twice as heavy as normal. ‘And the main engines are based around telekinetic sorcery?’

‘Correct. Physics says it’s not possible, but physics says that a lot when it comes to sorcery. The engines in the ship push on the ship to move it forward. Shouldn’t work. It’s like flying by grabbing your feet and pulling.’

Nava gave a shrug. ‘My metaphysics isn’t quite good enough to explain it. Chess might be able to. He’s the one I said was too sick to come down here.’

‘Metaphysics nerd?’

‘I wouldn’t call him that to his face… He’s aiming to go into academic research when he graduates.’

Gretchen gave Nava a quizzical frown. ‘Then, if you don’t mind me asking, what’s he doing here? You’re going to end up in combat. Nerds don’t usually do well in combat.’

Nava gave another shrug. ‘He volunteered. Also, he’s been in combat a couple of times now and he doesn’t flinch. He’s good at recon. Frankly, with him along, we can gather information without putting any of us at risk. And I trust him.’

‘Huh. Well, there’s no better reason than that.’

236/8/8.

They were in microgravity again. There had been a short time about eight hours ago when the Yosozume had stopped accelerating to turn around and start decelerating when they had been floating, but this was going to be around thirty minutes of hanging on to things to keep from drifting away from a solid surface.

That was the theory. Nava, Melissa, and Nobuyuki were flouting the dictates