Thren Valis's Arc

Chapter 10 of 18

The armor kept her colonies alive, but it made the ship too heavy to fly. Thren ran the test at dawn. She charged the pressure chamber, aimed the ship at the sun, and fired the lift burst. The hull tore free of the ground. It climbed. Then it slowed. Then it hung in the air like a stone thrown too weak. The burst spent itself and the ship sank back down. She caught it before it cracked the frame. The armored hull rose too slowly and stalled far below orbit. Thren walked the rows of her hull nursery, hunting for less weight or more lift. She stopped at a shelf of round pools, each cradling one test plant at its center. Most she had used already. One she had not. It carried an enormous yellow bulb, swollen and light, crowned with green leaves and held down by thick roots. She had grown it for the bulb's fiber and forgotten it. She pressed a thumb into the bulb. It gave, then sprang back. It was full of gas. She cut one open. The bulb hissed and lifted from her bench a finger's width before the leaves dragged it down. The plant made its own gas to reach the sun. It wanted to rise. Its roots were the only thing that held it to the ground. Thren saw the answer. She did not need more burst. She needed less to lift. If she wrapped the armored hull in these bulbs, they would carry part of the weight for her. The gas would fight gravity for free, all the way up, and spend no fuel doing it. She worked through the day. She grew a row of the bulbs along the fungal web and bound them to the hull's frame. She let the web feed them so they swelled fat and firm. The ship strained upward at its moorings before she even lit the chamber. She cut the pod loose from the nursery and charged the burst again. At dusk she fired it. The hull leapt. The bulbs pulled with it this time, not against it. The ship did not slow at the old height. It kept climbing, past the trees, past the cloud line, until it was a pale spot against the darkening sky. Thren watched it shrink and did not breathe. It cleared the height where it had stalled. It kept going. The ship reached orbit. Then it stopped climbing and began to drift, slow and sideways, off the line she had aimed. It was in the void now, and the sun was pulling away behind the planet's curve. Her steering flower would have to chase it. Every turn would burn acid she could not spare. She had lifted the armor at last. Now she had to hold the ship on course long enough to get home.