Zarah Voss's Arc

Chapter 2 of 16

Zarah's lattice needed a living web to carry charge between the cells. Thren owned that web. She had not offered it. So Zarah sat in her workshop, staring at a hundred small cells wired to no signal, when a knock came at the hatch. A woman stood on the landing gear ramp. Her upper half was green and leafy, flowers crowded her head, and her legs were sleek machines. Zarah had heard of Thren's plant partner, the one who now flew the living ship. She had not expected her here alone. "You are the metal woman," Sylvana said. "Thren talks about you. Like a splinter she cannot pull out." Zarah laughed once. "Good. Come in. Watch your step." Sylvana walked the sleek floor on her mechanical legs. She studied the cells on the bench, the dead prototypes, the cold ring. Zarah explained the problem plainly. Her power needed to spread thin, but the parts could not talk to each other. Metal wire lost too much charge. She needed something that carried current the way roots carried water. Sylvana touched a single cell. "You need denser than metal. Heavier. There is a shell in the deep water. Layered like a fist closing over itself. Inside sits a pearl." She held her hands apart, small. "The pearl is heavy the way a stone in a river is heavy. It holds charge close and does not let it leak." "A pearl," Zarah said. "From a clam." "From the deep," Sylvana said. "Down where light stops. If you dive far enough, you can take one." Zarah pulled up a schematic and sketched the pearl into her lattice. If the metal pearls could act as conductor nodes, she could link the cells without losing charge. It was worth a dive. Zarah had no dive suit or way to reach the depths of where the clams lived, she would have to free dive, but perhaps Sylvana could help her with an an oxygen supply and way to carry the pearls back.