Zarah Voss's Arc

Chapter 10 of 16

Zarah spread her finished parts across the workbench. The power cells sat in their ant-built seams. The pearl conductor nodes waited beside them. Every piece worked. Every piece fit together. But they fit together into nothing. She had a drive with no shell to hold it. An escape pod needed a hull, and she had no hull. Her parts were ready to become a ship the moment she had a ship to build inside. She checked the market channels first. No pod shells for sale on Sporis. No wrecks close enough to strip. She sat back and stared at her materials. A hull was just plates. Plates were just metal. Metal came from the ground. She had never mined a day in her life. Thren would have laughed at that. Zarah decided she would learn faster than her rival expected. She walked to the replicator and pulled up its patterns. The machine hummed and its screens lit blue. She fed it a design for a mining rig, heavy legs and a focused cutting head. The replicator worked for two hours. When it opened, a rugged laser drill stood on the platform, conduits coiled along its frame. She hauled it outside and set the legs into the dirt. Zarah aimed the cutting head down and fired. Blue light bit into the ground. Rock cracked and smoked. The rig chewed deeper, and she guided it by hand, watching the depth gauge climb. When she pulled it free, a clean round hole opened in the earth. Loose stone ringed the edges. She climbed down and dug ore from the walls with her bare hands until her satchel sagged. Back inside, she loaded the raw ore into the replicator's intake. The machine ground it, melted it, purified it. Slag ran off to one side. Refined ingots stacked on the platform, bright and clean. She ran the batch three times. By the last run she had a heap of metal taller than her knees. Then she stood at the bench and set the pattern for hull plates. Curved plates, thin and strong, shaped to a pod's frame. The machine pressed the first one. It came out warm. She tapped it and heard the right ring. She stacked it and started the next. The bench arms trimmed each edge clean while the replicator pressed more. By nightfall the plates lined the wall, a dozen of them, then two dozen. Enough to start the shell. Zarah lifted one and held it against the air where the pod would sit. For a year she had chased a drive with nowhere to live. Now she had walls. She set the plate down and marked the frame lines. Tomorrow she would weld the first pod together, and her finished drive would finally have a home.