Page 13 of Sway’s Peace (Delivery Service #2)

“Well, depends on how deep you want us to go,” she stood just on the very edge of the jutting walls.

A dark line on the floor, up the walls, and across the ceiling marked where the shields ended.

The lines weren’t properly glowing like they should be if they were functioning correctly.

“We could replace the whole thing, but, honestly, for that price, you might as well get a new ship. But we can go over the packages when we finalize the quote in my office later. I can probably toss in a professional cleaning though. There’s a lot of stains in here.

That one… Does that one look like a body to you? ”

Grace cocked her head, staring at the dark smear on the floor. The bare metal in here all looked dirty and stained, but that one particular smudge really did look like a body. It had a head and arms and everything. It was kind of unnerving.

“You know, it kind of does,” Sway chuckled, drawing her gaze back to him. “There’s one up on the bridge that looks like a two headed jhila beast.”

“No way,” Grace laughed, stepping back from the engine. She was eager to get away from this oppressive heat.

“Oh, yeah. And one in my privy that kind of looks like the word ‘leave’. Which, I think, means my toilet is haunted.”

Grace was still laughing as she stepped out of the room, letting out a breath of relief. She had only been in there for a minute, but she was already sweating. At least, out in the hall, the life support had more power, and it was drastically cooler. But those shields definitely needed fixing.

The same was true for the subspace generator.

That was separate from the engine – by necessity, as subspace generators needed their own, secured, shielded space in order to work.

They also usually had to be placed centrally in the vessels they covered.

Subspace generators created something like an area of effect bubble, and everything within that area would drop into the subspace swing.

Keeping the generator located centrally gave more control over what was in that bubble.

In the center of the Humility was a secondary bridge, which rather surprised her. Secondary command centers were usually reserved for ships that saw combat, not delivery ships.

Though, she supposed, they were apparently a specialized delivery company. Maybe the extra security of the secondary command, far from any potential outside hits, was necessary.

The room itself was pretty small, with three consoles in it, all of them on standby mode.

It also looked like it had been added on at some point after initial construction.

The walls were of a noticeably different material from the rest of the ship, and they had rivets like they had been nailed together roughly instead of neatly built to be sealed in case of a hull breach.

Sway moved the chairs away, revealing a hatch in the ground that opened manually.

Sway grabbed the welded on handle and lifted the door, revealing the subspace generator.

Unlike the engine, the generator didn't create heat, radiation, or noise as it worked. In fact, the reaction was rather endothermic, sucking in the surrounding heat and leaving the area cold. The visible chill that was coming out of the compartment now was pretty normal.

But nothing else about what she was seeing could be called normal.

Subspace generators usually had a top piece that was round and concave sitting on a sturdy, solid, square base.

The base housed all the electric components, while the rounded top contained the crystals nestled inside the shape.

But not actually resting inside. The concave space in the center was empty.

It was important as the space there created something like a bowl for the entrance into subspace to build – like water in a dish, in a way.

It was difficult to explain, because subspace didn’t work the way real space did. Honestly, Grace wasn’t sure she even had it hypothetically correct. But she did know what the generator was supposed to look like. And it wasn’t that!

The generator she was looking at now had those basic pieces, but they were all wrong.

The square base was completely broken open on all sides, all the components and wires spilling out and connecting haphazardly into the ship.

It was more like a knot of cybernetic spaghetti.

Just like the engine, it was obvious that some parts were noticeably older and newer than others.

There was literal tape holding it together in places, cords tying things together in others, with hopes and prayers everywhere else.

The concave portion on top was gone completely, leaving the crystals completely exposed.

There were twelve of them in total, each one a different shape, but all of them should be the same weight.

The plates they were connected to – which should be uniform and clean – were just as varied and crazy as the base parts.

Without the top, the natural concavity in which the subspace would be accessed was gone, but someone had welded together a metal bowl and stuck it in the center to serve the same purpose.

But what really struck her was how dark the crystals were.

Subspace crystals were a very special type of crystal that could only be harvested in one solar system in all the Coalition.

They were not rare within that system itself.

In fact, a lot of planets and asteroids within that system were made of nothing else.

But no other solar system yet known contained them.

They varied in color, but they were always clear, like quartz, with bright, shiny facets that needed no polishing.

There were no impurities allowed for those that were travel grade, so the slight colors that tinted them weren’t from any mineral interference.

It was more a result of the amount of energy stored within them.

The crystals existed on a rainbow color spectrum, from red all the way to purple. In actuality, they continued in both directions even further than her eye could see, but past those points, they lost their color, either turning white or gray.

Which was normal and right. A proper, healthy crystal should be white. As it began to lose energy, it began to develop a purple tint. Then blue, green, yellow, etc, until it got to red. Once it hit red, it stopped losing color and started going dark.

Grace had seen plenty of purple crystals.

Most of them were in the blue to purple range, as that was where most needed to be in order to travel safely through subspace.

Brand new ones could be white, but they didn't hold onto that long after being put into use. She’d seen a yellow-orange set once, and that had been frightening to the crew for how close to dead the crystals had become.

The captain had lost his mind on the engineers for letting it get that bad without telling him.

These crystals before her now were dim, dusty red turning gray.

Subspace crystals were naturally capable of recharging.

The process was too complex for Grace to understand because it involved subspace physics.

But she knew that subspace and real space existed right beside and within each other.

Subspace was something like the foundation on which real space was built.

The crystals in real space recharged because of something in subspace.

The lifespan of a subspace crystal could be hundreds of thousands of years.

If used sparingly, they could, theoretically, last forever.

The real danger of subspace crystals dying was that, if they went dark, they could not recharge.

They would be rocks with no special properties or energy storage capacity.

If that happened while a ship was in subspace, they would never be able to swing out.

They would become lost forever in that space beyond space and not only could they not be rescued, they’d never be found.

There were legends told of the ships lost to that very same fate, spoken of like ghost ships lost to the depths, preserved in time, but totally unreachable.

These crystals were not dead yet, but they were so close, it could happen at any time.

Grace looked up, open mouthed, horrified, to where Sway was crouching beside her at the compartment’s edge. He didn't appear surprised or concerned about the state of the crystals. He caught her stare and offered her an unconcerned smile.

“Vytln is really good at monitoring them to make sure they don’t die.”

“Sway!”

“They don’t recharge well anymore. Takes about five days for them to recharge enough to let us complete a swing. And we can’t go very far in subspace. Or fast. Though, I guess, you don’t really go ‘fast’ in subspace. That’s not how it works.”

“You’re lucky you haven’t died with these things yet!” She gasped, staring down at the dull, lifeless rocks like they might explode or attack her. “It will probably take a solid hundred years for these to even recharge back to yellow!”

“Longer, actually,” he shrugged. “There’s a formula for it. I’d say it would probably take about a thousand years for these to be completely recharged. Faster if they’re set around others though.”

“You need an entirely new set! Not one of these can be salvaged.”

“Yeah, that’s why we’ve been putting it off. A full suite of crystals is expensive. Luckily, we had a really lucrative job recently. So, we can finally get that done. We also need the shielding replaced though. On the machine and the ship. Some of our crew are getting subspace sickness.”

Grace had to recover from the shock of that too.

Subspace sickness was the body actively rejecting being forced to travel through subspace.

When mild, it just caused extreme discomfort and nausea.

But at worst, it would be lethal causing heart attacks and seizures and even internal bleeding or strokes.

But that was an old sickness. No one suffered that anymore because proper and effective shielding had been created to safely travel through subspace. It was like a sailor getting scurvy in this day and age – it just didn't happen because the fix was so effective.

Grace stood straight, tapping quickly on her tablet. Adding a full suite of crystals and a generator overhaul to the list along with subspace shielding.

After that, seeing the sorry state of the life support systems wasn’t a surprise. It was no less horrifying, but not a surprise.

How was this crew even still alive? Why would they ever risk their lives on this thing?

Sure, earning a living was important, but she couldn’t imagine ever using this ship to do it.

If it hadn’t been connected to the station’s power and life support, she would have probably turned and run out before all the systems failed.

Nothing on this ship could pass any sort of inspection as it was.

And, honestly, that just made her more determined to get this job done right. Sway and his crew were nice, honest, hard-working males. They didn't deserve a ship like this.