Still, it was only reluctantly that he pulled on the jumpsuit Sway had found for them. The basic things were bright orange and ugly. However, they were designed to stretch to fit over most body types and shapes, but it was still a bit too tight for him. He had to rip the arms off to give his shoulders room to breathe. Haven, however, was swimming in hers, and she used the ripped sleeves of his to tie hers up in the middle so it stayed on a little better.
They weren’t the last ones in the mess hall, but most everyone else had already arrived. Garnet had, once again, set out trays of food and they were all helping themselves. Vytln and Haven did the same, getting steaming bowls of what appeared to be some kind of egg and vegetable concoction, before sitting at the same long table from last night.
Haven sat next to Goldie, who had Alred’s core on her lap. She was touching the top sadly, pushing down on it to reveal the connections that would let her plug him in somewhere. Though, without the wires to do so, it didn’t matter that they could still access them.
“Do you wanting me to look?” Haven asked gently, reaching for the core but not touching it. She waited patiently while Goldie – who looked pale and miserable, red and puffy around her eyes – sniffed, her lower lip trembling.
“What’s the point?” She asked, voice rough. “It’s broken. He’s broken.”
“It might just being the screen that’s broken,” Haven said. “And it might not beingcompletelybroken. We can still try, right?”
Goldie sniffed, devastated. Like the idea of hope hurt more than it helped. But she relented and set Alred’s core down on the bench between them.
Haven immediately got to work, doing what she did best. Poking and prodding and mumbling to herself as Goldie kept the rounded core stable. Staring at it with a haunted look in her eyes, like her entire world was destroyed and she was staring blankly at the remnants.
The sight was a familiar one. Vytln knew he’d worn that same expression himself not long ago, and he couldn’t face it again. He looked away, letting Haven tinker and learn as Trove, the last one still missing, wandered in. Like everyone else, he was wearing their new jumpsuits. The bright orange color wasn’t really flattering on any of them, but they were at least clean.
He got his own plate of food and sat to eat. The air around the table was oddly comforting. He wouldn’t call it lively or jovial. There was definitely a heaviness to the air. Goldie wasn’t the only female with puffy eyes – he realized now that it was a sign they had been crying.
He had no idea if this was morning, but it definitely felt like first meal. And his whole family was gathered at the table, healed and eating and safe. All except Alred, and he trusted him to Haven, knowing that she would do what she could to take care of him. Even as he had that thought, she was dropping some of her termites into the top, letting them carefully learn and explore.
It was only after all the food had been eaten and everyone was just lingering around, waiting, that Tanin got to his feet and addressed all of them.
“Alright. The twins and I finished looking around last night. This place really is empty. Aside from the bodies of whoever had been here before, we’re completely alone. The evac pod still has power, but it doesn’t have the ability to reach escape velocity, so it can’t take us out. Even if it did, it doesn’t havesubspace crystals, we wouldn’t be able to go far. Unfortunately, the communication doesn’t work either. It can reach the nearest communication relay, but the relay is locked down. From what I can tell, it’s keyed only to respond to Alred. I imagine he wanted to keep this place hidden, so he made sure no one else could get here. But that means we can’t contact anyone either. Without that relay, there’s no way for us to get a comm out. So, we’re stuck here.
“However, the good news is, we have enough nutrition powder to sustain us for more than a few years if we ration it properly. The water recyclers, air recyclers, and power stations all work. And this planet is lifeless. There’s nothing here but this facility and sand. So, there’s nothing to worry about attacking us.”
“Great,” Vytln grinned sardonically. “So, we can slowly die here alone after a few years. Sounds fun.”
“We are not going to die here,” Tanin said. “We’re going to escape.”
“And how are we doing that?” Trove asked, popping a brow. “Our ship is destroyed, their ship was destroyed, we can’t contact anyone, and no one knows where we are. At least on Rik-Vane, we had the ability to communicate.”
“We don’t need to communicate. We have everything we need.” Tanin leaned in, hands on the table. “We are getting out of here on our own. We’re going to build our own ship.”
The entire table went still. Trove frowned and shook his head.
“Er, captain,” Sway started slowly, “We’re not starship mechanics. I mean, Vytln and Haven are good, don’t get me wrong, but building an entirely new ship from scratch…”
“We’re not building one from scratch. We’re recycling one from pieces.” Tanin crossed his arms. “We have an entire hangar, many kilolengths long, filled with broken, decrepit ships. None of them in nearly as bad a condition as the Humility was when we first got it.”
“That’s… probably true,” Vytln said slowly, thinking about the line of old starships just sitting out in the hangar. Waiting for their turn to be broken down. And an entire starship recycling facility completely at their command. Sure, it was designed to dismantle those parts, but it wouldn’t take much for Vytln to take all those same tools and systems and use them to rebuild instead.
The Humility had basically been a death trap when they first got it. The thing had such terrible life support systems, they’d all needed to live in their envirosuits because it went out randomly and frequently. The food synthesizer had been barely functional. The subspace crystal suite had been so close to death, they flirted with never getting out of subspace with every swing.
Vytln had helped repair that ship from the ground up. He’d practically rebuilt entire parts of it. And he hadn’t had access to dozens, hundreds, of other starships to cannibalize and an entire recycling facility to put it together.
“It’s not impossible,” he finally said, voice slow and cautious.
But hopeful.
“I know it’s not,” Tanin said. “And we’re going to do it. We’ll build a new ship. Exactly how we want it designed. With everything we need for ourselves, our mates, and our younglings. And when it can fly, we’ll go back to the debris field we left behind, and we’ll find our subspace crystals and rebuild our generator so we can get out of here.”
That also wasn’t impossible. Subspace generators were extremely sturdy. The one Haven used to blow up Kldyn’s ship was probably destroyed, but theirs had a very sturdy casing and hadn’t been overloaded since it was a bomb that destroyed their ship. The generator casing was almost as good as the shelter room. It wasn’t impossible to think that it survived the Humility’s explosion.
It was a goal. A path forward. It was… exciting.
Vytln had always been limited by the Humility. What he could do with it, what he could add onto it, had been strictly determined by what the ship could handle.
