Zarah Voss's Arc

Chapter 15 of 16

Zarah caught her breath, then knelt beside the container. The yellow airbags still held one corner off the sand. The metal hummed under her palm. Somewhere inside, a cell still fed power to the lock. She could haul the whole box to her workshop and pry it there. But dragging it that far would cost her a day she did not have. First she wanted to know what she had won. If the pod held junk, she would strip the hull and leave the guts. She walked the seam with her fingers. Four latches, one on each edge, painted in bright bands. Red. Blue. Green. Yellow. Each latch clamped a lug into the frame. She pressed the red one. It did not give. A thin light glowed above it. The lock was live, and it wanted a key she did not have. Zarah did not need the key. She needed the current gone. She traced the hum to a panel below the green latch. A screw held it shut. She had no tools but the bladed heel still strapped to her boot. She worked the blade under the screw head and turned. The panel popped. Inside sat a small cell, no bigger than her fist, wired to all four latches. She knew this design. Cut one wire and the latches would jam forever. Cut them all at once and they might release. She could not cut four wires at once with one blade. So she pulled the cell instead. She gripped it, braced her boot on the frame, and yanked. The wires tore free. The hum died. The light above the red latch went dark. Nothing moved. She pressed the red latch again. This time the lug slid back with a clean clunk. She freed the blue, then the green, then the yellow. Each gave under her hand. She dug her fingers into the seam and pulled. The lid rose on stiff hinges and fell open against the sand. Zarah leaned over the open box and stared. Inside, packed in molded foam, sat a warp drive power core. Not cells. Not a lattice. A single dense mass-feeding core, the old kind, whole and unused. The very part she had crossed to Sporis to escape. She had spent months splitting power into small cells because this core could not be shrunk. And here one sat, dropped from the sky into her hands. She ran her palm along its cold shell. It was too big for her pod. She knew that. But a whole working core meant something else. It meant test data. It meant a source she could measure her small cells against, to prove they matched a real drive's output. She sat back on her heels. Her pod build had a hull now, and a way to know if her power system would truly hold. She started dragging the box toward her workshop.