ΔV Pt. 07

"It's gone!" She exclaimed.

"The tank is a vacuum once it has been emptied," Dr. Mann said. "In a vacuum, water boils – turns to steam. Once the tank is filled, it will be forced into a liquid by being confined."

"Ahhhh!" Isabella crooned. "Still, this is unacceptable. I refuse to sit here casting for years and years to fill that tank when there is a more efficient method. This is a spell constructed to destroy forest fires." She smiled, then closed her eyes. This times, she began to incant. Her palms twisted and shifted in her hands, moving and twisting as she whispered quietly. Her fingers glowed with shimmering blue lights and blue fireflies swirled around her head, forming into an almost conical shape that drew her hair up in a spectral wind. The wind neither reached nor touched Vidya – and that alone made her skin prickle with fear.

On the screen, a geyser of water exploded from nowhere. It sprayed and sprayed and sprayed, the water boiling as it gushed through the air. Water vapor was clumped together enough to be visible, and it grew thicker and thicker, a mist gathering on the cameras. Dr. Mann watched with his mouth hanging open, his beard only half working to conceal his shock.

"There," Isabella said. "How is that?"

Vidya shook her head. "How long will the spell last?"

"As long as I maintain it," Isabella said, shrugging one shoulder casually. "We fight forest fires by having several hydrasophists casting geyser spells upwind and downwind from the flames and sustaining them until the fires are out. The maintenance is easier than casting again and again and again and again and again..." She waved her hand casually. "I believe I can sustain...three?"

"We'll need to make pressure sensors, so we can indicate when the tanks should stop being filled," Dr. Mann whispered. "Uh, oh! Oh! Get us a com to the bridge – we need to know how this is changing the orbital params. We're gaining mass, they should be reading this as a change in our trajectory."

"That's free energy, isn't it?" Vidya whispered.

Dr. Mann gulped. Then he shook his head. "Not free. Our good Isabella here is providing the energies. She may be tapping into energies we have never heard of – but it is still tiring to her. It is still a cost. We have not broken the laws of thermodynamics."

"No," Vidya said, her lips twisting into something like a smile. "We're just bending them."

"Right."

The actual impact on the orbital parameters were actually relatively minimal. The increase in drag from the added weight didn't matter in a high polar orbit, where the atmosphere of the planet was already a negligible worry for a ship that would only be orbiting for a few weeks at best. What mattered for a large, floppy thing like a space station didn't really worry a heavily armored, conical hulk like the Enterprise. The real impact of the orbital parameters came when they tried thrusting with the summoned water.

It was a mere 2.1 mps of ΔV – increasing their apogee by a tiny amount and turning their orbit into more of an oval. But the important thing was that the 2.1 mps of ΔV came two hours before one of the Russian drone carriers began to accelerate at their own apogee – the moment that they were furthest away from the world of Arcadia. The name had been agreed upon in the invisible, unknown way of such slang terms, just as Stark was beginning to become the defacto name for the Earth they had all come from. It seemed a comfortable thing in a sentence now, to say that the Russian ship was breaking orbit and accelerating away from Arcadia and towards Stark.

For Vidya, the military concerns that were thrumming through the ship was entirely secondary to the scientific data. She wasn't even a aeronautics specialist – but she was still fascinated by the simple facts of it. The water worked exactly as water carted up from the surface of a planet or boiled off of a comet. The only thing about it that was different was its source and the fact that it was endless. There were already people doing math and arguing theories about the two cosmii that had been wedded together by the portal – about how one was more massive, if only by a teeny tiny amount, than the other, thanks to the water created by unknown numbers of mages throughout the history of Arcadia.

But then the entire exciting question shattered upon a simple question, flung her way after an exhausting day of studying givens and asking Isabella for clarification on this or that point of magic. It was exhausting for everyone involved – Isabella had a well of patience that shocked the humans, answering question after question after question without getting bored or distracted or irritated. But even her elven reserves had their limits, and Dr. Mann was the one who called their day off.

Isabella and Vidya stood...and then Isabella turned to Vidya and asked, out of the blue: "Oh, also, did you want me to do anything about that ghost that has been following you all day?"

Dr. Mann and some of the research team had been talking among themselves over the last bits of shop they wanted to share, and others had been heading for the door. The question was lost in the hubbub, lost among the queries about who would get what at the caff, who would bug the captain for a chance to head down to the surface of Arcadia, and the response that no one was heading down to Arcadia before the elves stopped being fucking psychipaths. Vidya didn't hear any of that.

She instead was rolling that question over in her head: Did you want me to do anything about that ghost that has been following you all day?

Isabella pursed her lips, then waved her hands at Vidya's chest – as if she was trying to shoo away an annoying fly. Her brow furrowed and she scoffed. "A likely story!" She shook her head. "I can see that even your ghosts are unbelievably horny. Humans." She sniffed. "Did you know that I swear half your sailors were admiring my ass when I was getting off the shuttle? Now, I admit it, I do have an exceptional ass, but-"

Vidya shook her head, her eyes closing. She held her hand up. "Wait. What ghost?"

"Oh, that would make sense, your mage's talent isn't trained-"

Vidya's eyes opened in a flash. "My what?"

Isabella cocked her head. "Are you quite all right, Vidya? You seem to be having trouble following very simple concepts." She frowned. "You have a magical talent – most of you humans seem too, as a matter of fact. I wonder if it is because you passed through that portal or something, highly magical phenomenon do tend to impart a magical talent to the begins that you run into. Or maybe it is because we're more closely related than we think? I do know that orcs rarely have magic talent, and with Oni, it's a fifty fifty prospect. Now, just having the talent doesn't mean you'll actually manage to do anything with it of note. It's like being able to see colors – just because you can see color doesn't make you a painter unless you actually pick up a brush, so to-"

She stopped, then waved her hand again. "Gods! Stop groping the woman!" Then, scowling. "No matter how many times you claim you are her husband, I still will not believe you."

Vidya's face went pale.

Her heart...hammered.

She heard a roaring in her ears. Like the sea.

Her voice was husky – as if she had been screaming for hours. "Is his name Sukhdeep?"

Isabella cocked her head in an oddly birdlike fashion. Her ears twitched – the tips of them lifted a tiny amount, then stilled. She pursed her lips, slightly, frowning. "Well, no, I won't believe it just because you claim that your name is Sukhdeep – you heard the woman say it." She scowled – and then her scowl fragmented into a thousand fragments. A thousand mirrored Isabellas, each of them scowling. Each of them filling one of the tears that flowed from Vidya's eyes. She drew in a ragged gasp and fell to her knees, clutching at her face. The other scientists hurried forward, crying out in alarm – even more so when Vidya let out a keening wail.

She clutched her face, while Isabella blinked down at her.

"W...Was it something I said?" she asked, her voice nervous.

Vidya grabbed at her hands, whispering. "Show him to me! Please! Please! I beg you, please, show me my Sukhdeep!" She leaned her head forward – the ragged hole in her heart, the hole that had been plastered over by wonder and by awe, was bleeding into her soul. The other scientets were milling about – so many of them knew so much about the physical world, and yet the only one of them that knew what to do with a keening woman was Dr. Mann. He knelt beside her, gripping her shoulder wordlessly. Vidya leaned into him and into Isabella, her face pressing to the elf's knuckles.

In the raw emotion of the moment, the oddest things impressed themselves to Vidya's awareness.

The harsh grating on the floor.

The constant, low roar of the air recycling systems.

The scent of Dr. Mann's hand, near her face.

And the silken, perfect smoothness of Isabella's hands. It went beyond the softness of someone who used conditioner and soap and rarely actually did manual labor and into something that defied imagination and understanding.

"I...I can..." Isabella said, her voice soft. Awed. "I've never seen such grief before, not even in the best of the performances." Her eyes shone eagerly. "T-This...this is it. This is a Telling." Her eyes gleamed and she beamed. "Oh my gods, I am going to be in a Telling!"

Vidya gaped at her. Then she screamed. "Bring me back my husband!"

Isabella didn't even look chagrined. "Note that down! Someone will be saying that again, hundreds of years from now!" She pointed at Dr. Goldberg, who looked just as aghast as Vidya felt. Isabella, though, snapped her finger and a glowing blue light surrounded her fingertips. Shimmering energies flared in the air about Vidya's head. She saw a ghostly figure appearing behind and above her. She scrambled to her feet, helped up by Dr. Mann's strength.

Turning, she could see...

A shape.

It was not a defined shape. It did not even have a face. But it had arms. It had legs. It had fingers. And it hovered, despite the spinning of the Enterprise's habitation deck. Vidya held out her hands and cupped the head, trying to stroke the cheeks she had known for so long – but instead, she felt nothing but a tingling chill.

A voice that sounded like the sighs of wind blowing through leaves filled the room. It was audible. Everyone heard it. But it sounded like it should have been imagined.

"I love you..." Sukhdeep whispered. "Find joy...beautiful...wife..."

He shimmered once more.

Then he started to blow away, like fog in a breeze. The strands slipped through Vidya's fingers and she staggered forward – and found herself stumbling towards the open doorway beyond the shape. Her eyes filled with tears and she fell into arms. Muscular. Strong arms.

"What is going on!?" Mohammad asked – he sounded shocked, as if he had just walked into the doorway and found this scene. She leaned into him, her face mashed against his chest as she sobbed more and more, clinging to him. With a movement that felt so natural that Vidya felt almost guilty, Mohammad swept her close, holding her tightly. She molded herself to him, feeling every single muscle on his chest. His whole body filled her senses – his scent, his warmth, his touch. Vidya felt her emotions yo-yoing between lust and sorrow.

Mohammad stroked her hair. "What? Tell me!"

It was Dr. Goldberg who managed to speak. The slender, sarcastic woman managed to put the truth, as bluntly as it could be put: "Dr. Rachna, it seems, has just provided empirical evidence for the afterlife."

TO BE CONTINUED