Thren Valis's Arc

Chapter 6 of 18

The hull filled the orb now. Thren stood inside the nursery and watched her ship grow. Living walls held the pod. Vines wove a shell of leaf and stem around it. The frame pulsed as one body. But it sat rooted in the forest floor, and it would sit there forever. A ship that could not move was a monument, not a vessel. She needed propulsion, and she had none. She knew force by muscle or by fire. Neither would work here. Fire would burn a living hull. Muscle needed something to push against, and space gave nothing to push. She paced the nursery floor until her legs ached. Every idea she raised, she tore down. Sylvana came through the door then, dragging her rooted lower half over the soil. Thren had met her in the wild before, near the fleshy trees. The vine-woman never gave answers. She only pointed. Now she reached into a fold of her own leafy skin and drew out a cluster of green seed pods. Faint lines ran through their skins, and the air around them hummed. "You want to move without touching," Sylvana said. She held the pods toward two iron stakes Thren had left in the dirt. The stakes leapt and clung to the pods. Thren pulled them free. They snapped back. "Magnets," Thren said. Her pulse quickened. "Grown from a plant." She turned to the tuber cluster feeding her ship, its red orbs striped in blue, swollen with stored light. Power she already had. A field she could shape. A planet has a field of its own. Push against it, and the ship pushes off the world itself. She worked through two days. She fed the seed pods into the fungal web at the hull's base. The web carried sugar to them, and they grew, rooting into the frame. She ran the tuber charge into them through the living threads. She shaped a ring of pods around the hull's belly and waited for them to mature. On the third dawn she pressed her palm to the orb and pushed current into the ring. The pods hummed. The whole hull trembled. Then it rose. It lifted a hand's width off the forest floor and hung there, held by nothing she could see. Thren laughed out loud. Her ship could move. She cut the charge and let it settle. Her hands shook as she checked the ring. The tubers had drained fast, far faster than the beetles or spider ever pulled. One short lift had emptied them. She stared at the dead red orbs. To fly, she needed field strength. Field strength ate power she did not have. Her ship could rise, but only for seconds, and then it would fall.