13. Indispensable
THIRTEEN
INDISPENSABLE
She saw Tavi at the main console, three simulations running simultaneously on the display while Maren stood beside him, her eyes studying every detail as she cross-referenced his projections against structural data she'd memorized years ago.
She watched Charlie, a member of the engineering team and therefore present for this meeting, as she watched and listened to the group.
Reyna noticed her fingers tapping a quiet rhythm against her thigh.
And then there was Cael, leaning against the far wall with his arms crossed.
"Alright," Reyna said, standing at the front. "The Aetherfin mission. We have five days until we're a go. Tavi, where do we stand?"
Tavi pulled up his latest simulation on the display and spoke to the group.
"Getting the Aetherfin from the research station onto the shuttle is straightforward.
The station's containment housing is modular, standard Coalition spec.
We detach it, load it onto the shuttle's cargo bay, and connect it to shuttle power.
The Aetherfin stay in zero-G for the entire transit.
Selowen and I have run the logistics. It's tight on space, but it works. "
"Good," Reyna said. "And, what progress have you made to figure out how to move those three Aetherfin to the zero-G sphere here on board?"
Tavi's expression shifted. He pulled up a different simulation, this one showing the Emberkind's internal layout. A red line traced from the shuttle bay through seventy meters of corridor to the zero-G sphere at the ship's center.
"This is still the problem, Cap. Once we're back on the Emberkind, we need to get the Aetherfin from the shuttle bay through the corridors and into the sphere.
Every meter of that corridor is standard gravity which, as we all know, the Aetherfin can't survive in.
Even a few seconds of exposure would crush their skeletal structure. "
Reyna watched as he pressed a button on his datapad and ran the new simulation on the display.
A blue field expanded from the sphere toward the shuttle bay, a single bubble of zero-G pushing through standard gravity.
At the eleven-second mark, the boundary flickered and disappeared.
Red warning indicators flashed across the display.
"I've been trying to push the zero-G field outward from the sphere through the corridor," Tavi continued.
"One continuous field. But the boundary between zero-G and standard gravity is a hard line.
Anything biological that crosses it gets torn apart by the instantaneous shift.
And every time I run the simulation, the field destabilizes at the edges.
As you just saw, it holds for about eleven seconds and then collapses. "
Reyna stared at the display, her realization catching up with reality. They were running out of time.
"As we talked about before, Cap," Tavi continued. "The software side is taken care of and should work like a dream. The physics of the boundary is the problem, and, frankly, I've run out of ideas." Tavi was staring at her, his expression leaving nothing hidden.
The silence held. Cael shifted against the wall but said nothing.
"I see," Reyna finally said.
"What if you don't cross it?"
Charlie's voice echoed through the room as everyone looked at her.
Reyna turned. Charlie had stopped tapping her thigh. She was staring at Tavi's simulation on the display, her head tilted slightly to one side, her eyes tracking the red boundary line where the zero-G field kept failing.
Charlie straightened and walked toward the main display. "You're trying to push one zero-G field through the corridor in a single bubble. That's why the boundary keeps failing. The edge is too hard. One field, one wall, one point of failure."
She reached the console and looked at Tavi. "May I try something?"
"Be my guest," Tavi replied, clearly excited to hear what Charlie had to say.
Charlie's hands moved across the interface, pulling up the corridor schematic.
She began moving pieces around on the console display, leaving it in her working hands before pushing it to the main display in front of all of them.
Then, after a flourish to press a singular button, a new simulation started playing on the display.
"Don't use one field. Use six."
Tavi's eyebrows rose. "Six?"
"Pressurization staging," Charlie said. "On Earth, when we need to move something from atmosphere to vacuum, we don't do it in one step.
We use airlocks. Each chamber brings the pressure down incrementally until you reach vacuum.
No single transition is extreme enough to cause damage.
" She drew six zones across the corridor schematic displayed on the screen.
"In this case, I don't see why you can't apply the same principle to gravity. "
She labeled each zone. "Full gravity in the shuttle bay. Then 80%. Then 60%. 40%. 20%. 5%. And then zero in the sphere. Six independent zones, each calibrated separately. Each transition is small enough that the Aetherfin drift through without ever hitting a shear boundary."
"Wait," Tavi said. "The Aetherfin can't survive in ANY gravity. Even 80% would crush them."
"They won't be in 80%," Charlie said. "The Aetherfin stay inside their zero-G containment field the entire time.
The gradient isn't for them. It's for the field itself.
When you push a zero-G bubble through full gravity, the external pressure on the boundary is massive, and that's why it keeps collapsing.
But if the gravity outside the bubble decreases in stages, the pressure differential at each boundary is small enough that the field holds.
The Aetherfin are always in zero-G. The gradient just makes sure their bubble doesn't pop. "
The room went quiet. Charlie looked up from the console. Her eyes found Reyna's before raising her eyebrows and giving her a little shrug. Reyna raised her eyebrows and nodded slowly at Charlie before turning to Tavi.
"Tavi? What say you?"
Tavi was staring at the schematic for what seemed like a long time. But then he said, "That's it." Then Tavi's eyes went wide and a grin broke across his face. "Captain, that's fucking it!"
"Language, Tavi," Selowen said from the background.
"Sorry, Sel," he replied, then turned back to Reyna. "Cap, that's the solve."
His hands were already moving across his datapad. "If each zone is independent, the software calibrates them individually. No single boundary carries the full load. The transition is smooth, continuous—"
"Survivable," Maren finished. She went very still, her violet-gray eyes sharpening as schematics cascaded through her memory. "The corridor gravity systems can support zone generation. I'd need to modify six junction points, but the hardware is already there. I can see every schematic. It works."
Tavi looked at Reyna. "Captain, this is it. The pressurization model solves the boundary problem completely."
Reyna looked at the schematic on the display.
Six zones, clean and elegant, designed by a woman from a pre-spaceflight planet using principles she'd learned building rockets.
Somehow, she was both entirely impressed but also entirely impressed but also not surprised at all that Charlie was the one to have figured it out.
Funny, that she felt that way after Charlie had only been on the Emberkind for a little over two weeks.
She took a moment to look over at Charlie, who was standing at the console with her hands still on the interface, waiting.
Her eyes met Reyna's, and, their gazes met together in the middle and held.
Acknowledgement, acceptance, and gratitude all seemed to fly back and forth between them over just a glance.
"How long to build it?" Reyna asked, turning her attention back to the display.
"Give me three days for the hardware modifications," Maren said.
"Software calibration, two days," Tavi added. "We can run parallel."
"Then we build it," Reyna said. She returned her gaze to Charlie. "Looks like you've made yourself indispensable, Earthling."
"Earthling?" Charlie quipped.
"Am I wrong?" Reyna asked, her eyebrow raised. She watched as Charlie laughed softly.
"I guess not."
Reyna studied her for a beat before speaking again. "Good work."
Charlie nodded. It was small, but Reyna caught the way her shoulders settled, the way her breath came just a fraction easier.
It was then that Cael pushed off the wall and walked out of the briefing without a word.
Three days later, the gradient passage was built, tested, and holding in every simulation. Reyna stood in her office with Tavi at her side and Admiral Vondra on the wall display.
"History does tend to happen aboard the Emberkind, Captain."
Vondra's voice resonated through the display, the vibration settling into the dark water around her.
"I wouldn't call it history, Admiral," Reyna said. "I'd call it a staffing decision based on demonstrated competence."
"You're proposing to include a human civilian from a non-contact planet on a Coalition rescue mission." Vondra's geode eyes held steady. "That has never been done before. You know very well, Captain, that it will require, at the very least, a conversation with three different departments."
"She designed the transfer system," Tavi said, leaning forward. "The gradient architecture is hers. She's the only one who fully understands the real-time calibration because she built the model."
"Tavi is right," Reyna added. "Charlie deserves to be on this mission, before we get back to the Emberkind. Anything she can use to assist in the arrival and transfer of the Aetherfin on board is vital to her knowledge. Not as a passenger. As part of the engineering team."
Vondra was still for a long moment.
"Understand, Reyna, that if this goes wrong, the Coalition will want to know why a human from Earth was on board a Coalition rescue shuttle."
"If this goes wrong, Admiral, the Coalition will have three dead Aetherfin," Reyna replied. "I'd rather explain the staffing choice."
"You make a... good point, Captain," Vondra said.
"Does that mean she can be a part of the ground team?" Tavi asked.
Vondra turned her eyes to him. "Yes."
"Alright!" Tavi exclaimed, jumping off his chair and throwing his fist in the air. Reyna stifled a laugh.
"I'm glad to see you agree, Tavi," Vondra voiced.
"Sorry, Admiral. I just know we've got the right person for the right job now. It's a good feeling when you know in your bones a mission is going to go well."
"I can understand that perfectly," the Admiral said with generosity. "But I have one condition."
Reyna sighed internally. "What's that, Admiral?"
"You, Reyna."
Reyna pinched her brows together in confusion. "Me?"
"You will need to attend with the ground team.
I can't in good conscience send a person of a race that has never traveled through space before down into the 'belly of the beast' without proper protocol and care.
" Vondra paused as her formation seemed to lean closer to the camera and enlarge on the display.
"You're the highest ranking officer on board the Emberkind, and with this new knowledge I have, we need 'all hands on deck' for this mission. "
"New... knowledge?" Reyna asked.
Something in the resonance shifted. "There's something you should know.
We recently received data that the station's backup power is degrading faster than our initial projections.
Our latest readings suggest you have approximately one hour from arrival before the zero-G field fails entirely. That window is shrinking."
"How much faster?"
"As the data we’ve been sharing shows, the decay curve has shifted from linear to exponential in the last forty-eight hours. You may have less time than the projections suggest. And even those could be incorrect by the time they are communicated to you and the ground team."
Beside her, Tavi's fingers were already recalculating on his datapad.
"One more thing, Captain," Vondra added.
"I want you to understand the reason for the Aetherfin being on that station.
As you know, they were the research subjects for the study of the Aetherfin Biology Institute's newest studies.
" Vondra paused here, and Reyna could feel the moment get heavier.
"Those researchers left, Reyna, and the funding was redirected based on their leaving.
The station was scheduled for decommission, and the Coalition moved on.
" Another pause. "Until we received a reading from the station just before I called you that day the Emberkind was assigned this mission.
Reyna, no one had filed for the creatures' relocation. "
Reyna's jaw tightened. Beside her, Tavi's mosaic markings deepened in color.
"They were left to die," Reyna said flatly.
"That seems to be the case, Captain."
Reyna heard Tavi breathe out a heavy sigh before he started speaking. "What a bunch of no-good, jack-napping, Punfort-breeding—"
"We'll get them out, Admiral."
Gratefully, Reyna's interruption seemed to quiet Tavi, but she understood his anger. She felt it right alongside him. Gratefully, the Admiral didn't seem to worry about Tavi's outburst.
"I know you will." Vondra moved away from the camera again, resuming her position where she initially started. "Tasks are confirmed. Your Coalition link will be active through the whole mission. Good luck, Captain."
At that, the display went dark.
Reyna sat, looking at the blank wall. Abandoned research subjects on a dying station with less time than they'd calculated to be available.
"Cap?" Tavi was watching her.
"You know what to do, Tavi."
"Yeah, I do, you know that. But you're going with us now, yeah?"
"It seems so."
"Then, wouldn't you like to do the honors?"
His expression was focused on her with almost admiration.
As much as Reyna hadn't ever planned to captain a Coalition vessel in her lifetime, having been perfectly content serving as Elena's First Mate until their space adventure days were over, it was always a nice reminder that, gratefully, her crew trusted her. Most of them, at least.
"No, thank you, Tavi. This is your gig," she said, smiling at him. "Go get the team together. We launch in four hours."