Zarah Voss's Arc

Chapter 16 of 16

Zarah dragged the yellow-bagged container the last stretch to her workshop and left it by the door. The salvaged core still sat inside its foam. She lifted it out, set it on her bench, and wired it to her test rig. She wanted numbers. She wanted proof that her small cells could match a real drive. That was the whole point of hauling the thing this far. She ran the core first. The bench display woke and drew a curve. Output climbed, held, and settled. She wrote the numbers down by hand. This was the standard every engineer trusted, the dense mass-feeding core nobody could shrink. She had spent months trying to beat it. Now she had a clean reading to beat. Zarah unhooked the core and wired her own power system in its place. Hundreds of small cells, bound by Sylvana's fungal web, packed with pearl-shell conductor nodes. She braced for the drop she expected. A distributed system should lose power at the seams. She had planned for it. Her pod could still work if her cells reached most of the core's output. She fed current into the web. The display drew a new curve. It climbed past the first line. It kept climbing. Zarah leaned over the bench and read the number twice. Her cells were not matching the core. They were beating it, and not by a little. She thought the rig had failed. She swapped the leads, cleared the log, and ran the test again. The same curve rose. Her system pushed nearly a third more power than the salvaged core. She sat down hard on her stool and stared at both lines on the screen. The fungal web was doing more than binding the cells. It moved power between them with almost no loss. When one cell dipped, the others fed it through the living threads. The pearl nodes carried the charge cleaner than any wire she owned. She had built the thing to survive. Instead it outran the best core in the trade. Zarah laughed once, short and rough. For thirty years the answer had been a single dense box. Every engineer she knew swore by it. She had just proven them wrong on her own bench, with plant tissue and shells from a lake bed. Then the trouble landed. She looked from her power system to the pod frame across the room. Her hull, her frame, her drive mount, all of it was cut for the core's output. A third more power meant more heat. It meant the drive she had designed could not take the load. If she fed this system into her current mount, she would burn it out on the first burn. She pulled a fresh sheet toward her and picked up her pencil. Her power problem was solved. Now she had to rebuild the drive to survive its own strength.