Thren Valis's Arc

Chapter 7 of 18

The dead tuber orbs sat cold in Thren's hand. One lift had drained them dry. She stared at the red globes, their blue stripes gone dull, and knew the shape of her failure. The pods needed a flood of power in a single burst. The tubers gave a slow trickle. She could not close that gap by feeding them more light. A trickle would never fill a bucket that emptied in seconds. She needed a store that released fast, not slow. She walked the nursery, hunting for something that held energy under pressure and let it go all at once. She stopped at the vine-woman's gift shelf, where a strange pitcher plant sat in a clay pot. Its glossy leaves framed a gleaming pouch. Smoke curled from the rim. Thren dipped a wire into the fluid and it hissed away to nothing. Corrosive. Violent. Energy simmering just under the surface. She had ignored it because it burned. Now she wanted the burn. Thren cut the pitcher open and studied the sac inside. The fluid pushed against thin walls, held back until something broke the seal. Here was pressure kept ready to spend. If she could store the tuber charge inside such a sac and dump it all at once, the pods would get their flood. But the acid ate every material she tried. It chewed through wire, root, and leaf plate alike. She needed a wall the acid could not break. She thought of the shielding sample she kept for study, a lattice of leaf plates fused into hard overlapping plates, layered like a woven shell. Sporis life already bound its own tissue there, tighter than any wire she owned. She pressed a drop of acid to a shard of it. The fluid pooled and sat. It did not eat through. The plates held. Thren worked through the night. She grew a chamber from the shielding lattice, sealed tight, lined with the corrosive sac's inner skin. She ran the tuber charge into it slowly, letting the fluid build its pressure the way the pitcher plant built its own. The chamber swelled. She capped it and waited. Then she fed a single trigger thread from the chamber to the pod ring. At dawn she pressed her palm to the orb and cut the seal. The chamber dumped its whole store in one shove. The hull did not creep up a hand's width this time. It leapt. It rose past her head, past the nursery beams, and hung there, steady, while the tubers still held charge to spare. Thren counted. Ten seconds. Twenty. The lift held. She cut it and let the ship settle, her chest tight with something close to fear. The chamber had worked. Her ship could store the burst it needed to climb.