I followed him, letting the shadows and scent of warmed electronics absorb me. Pach flicked on a vent fan and a row of white pin-lights. They illuminated a tight channel curving into darkness. He eased about a yard inside, then pointed. "Right here."
I watched while he pressed a panel until it clicked and lifted. Behind it was a frighteningly complex swirl of black wires, delineated by dim points of light reminiscent of the tree in the cockpit above. Navigational calculations, and the communication array that both supplied and confirmed them, were kept partially separate from the other tech on any starcraft. This process had its own generator, its own backup, its own records. In some ways it was a ship within a ship.
It pulled from every sensor, including those that reported the biological state of the pilots. And it updated its framework of hyperspace from every free satellite, node, and ship it passed. It could weigh the inflection and urgency of spoken commands. The tree above us wasn't really a tree, of course. It was a map.
It had been my privilege to see a few of these up close before. I knew I would again. But it never ceased to amaze me. I traced my finger just above some of the less-familiar shapes in the ribbon of wires. Behind all this, I knew, lay the fierce heart of the hyperdrive. Not unlike the secret I had tucked in the safe a handful of kilometers away.
"I redid the wiring in the lower left, the input console," Pach said. His voice was hushed, and I know he felt the same. "It's what I wanted to test out today. It works with the port computers and with my tech, but it needs to work with yours and Eli's."
"Is he coming in here?"
"He'll be in the port station in a little while, at the centre link-up terminal. That's where I'd like you to work during the race. We'll get it calibrated tonight."
I nodded. Working separately was best, as we wouldn't have each other's visual cues on race day, either. Eli would be the ship's main navigational and bio-monitor. I'd act as nav backup, separately analysing the proposed route and blending my corrections with Eli's. We'd form another set of input for the drive to use. All this would be routed to Pach's inner sight while he flew.
Backup nav was always a ground-based position during races, simply as a form of insurance if anything happened to Eli. Most of the people in this role would work from state-of-the-art linkups on Roxi, where the race would conclude. Pach trusted me to do it from Southport.
"Let's start from the bottom," I suggested. "Back and forth through both of us to the ship a few times."
Pach nodded and closed his eyes. His tanned face went smooth in concentration. I let my focus relax into one of the nearby shadows. Seconds later, the ship offered consent to link. It looked and felt like a six-pointed star on the black of my inner sight. I accepted and gave access to my public record. It was a formality, but one we'd have to do on race day.
Pach spoke through the machine. It relayed the message to me, his Linear acquiring just the barest flattened affect. I responded the same. He spoke directly to me, sounding like himself again, and I sent the message through the ship towards him. We went through every permutation of this we could think of, faster and faster, trying to increase the complexity of the pattern and simulate a bit of the urgency and confusion we were likely to deal with.
It trailed off after awhile, and both of us rubbed our eyes. Pach sucked down the last of the juice in his packet, and started folding its foil into a shape as he talked. "That was good. None of the latency it had before." He looked up. "Ah, brilliant timing. Eli just got on. You ready?"
I rolled my shoulders to stretch them. Suddenly I felt oddly shy. "Sure."
"We'll do the hardest bit down here, then recheck a bit in the cockpit later. I know there's a few connections I still want to tweak in here." He pulled a tiny fingerlight from his pocket and gestured towards an eddy of black wires.
I got comfortable against the metal of the panel behind me and tilted my head back against it. The rapid crescendo of the ship's ignition thrummed in my skull and in the air around me. (Jessyn,) Eli greeted me. I hailed him back. The slightly antiseptic taste of the port's tech underscored his voice.
(All in?) Pach asked, and the shape of the conversation widened out. (Great. Drive's on, link whenever you like. I'll run some false routes to Roxi. See if your corrections blend and send them to me.)
Eli and I confirmed, and with a deep breath, I touched my connection out towards the drive above us. In all the times I'd practised this, in school and at Southport, I'd never done so while seated inside the brain of the spaceship. Pach had one of the best-harmonised drives I'd ever encountered. Its flow, which I could see in my inner sight and almost feel down to my fingertips, immaculately matched the vibration of the ship around us. The tiny swirl of Roxi emerged in the centre of the "tree's" branch pattern, in the drive's layout in my mind. The Yanakoya's imagined track, roughly represented by the tree trunk, bent inefficiently towards the symbol of the moon. I flexed my right hand, running the calculations of a course correction, and spoke the resulting equations into my channel with Eli.
His math had been slightly different, I could see when the drive course corrected itself into the combination of our suggestions. Still, far better than the mess of a course Pach had set up as the example. Dimly I was aware of staring, half-lidded, into the shadows of the engine. But all I saw was the drive map in my mind.
The destination shifted, Roxi's symbol churning and resolving into Sahr, the system's furthest moon. Right into the difficulty, then. I got through five of the required calculations and pushed my work towards Eli. We were remarkably close, and the ship easily read the combined course and straightened half of the map's path. Then we both dove into the rest of the problem. By the time our combined advice -- with a bit of near-silent arguing in Linear -- made its way into the drive, the map showed exactly the complex pattern of ellipses and angles that would bring the Yanakoya to the edge of the system.
I felt my body only as a shell for an analytical voice, and for the tense, exhilarated camaraderie of the three of us. Eli and I waited for the next problem, but none appeared.
(Pull out for a break,) Pach said quietly in Linear. (Got a screwy wire here.)
I opened my eyes, feeling Eli blip out. It was hard to believe it was the same day, and I laughed.
Pach grinned. "Doing amazing. Go get some air."
Outside, the clouds had blown over to the western horizon, leaving the sky above radiant. The activity around the other ships seemed to have resolved into either knots of mechanics under a hull, or teams standing together discussing their plans. I sighed a few times just to clear my lungs of engine air. That whole experience had felt strangely more intense than I remembered. More physical, almost. Perhaps it was my emotional investment in the race. That gripped me deeper than any test flight could, let alone a simulation course. I'd have to step up my practice this coming week. This would be an endurance run.
The thought of the grey drive in my safe, and the image of it nestled in a bed of twisting wires, lifted my heart and evaporated any tiredness. Soon. I knew what shape she'd take, had known it for years. It was time to make it real.
(Jess?) Pach called.
I dropped back down into the engine. My eyes adjusted to the dark. Pach pointed into the wires. "Hold this for me?"
I touched the powered-down drive wires as gently as I could. He poked a micro-screwdriver and the fingerlight into their depths. The only sound was the ship's thrum, and both of us breathing. "There. Should do. Eli says he'll be right back."
I sat back on my heels. There was a lot I could say, about the delicate intensity of his ship, and the awe I felt at even having the chance at this place on his team. It all felt like a tangle in my chest, and I couldn't find a beginning to start with.
"You alright?" Pach said to me, a look of friendly worry on his face. I was so used to looking up to him, as port test coordinator, that I forgot he was only a few years older than me.
"It's a lot," I said.
It was all I could think to say.
Pach laughed in agreement, but when he saw that I didn't smile, he grew serious. He scanned me up and down with what I thought of as that coordinator look. For a brief moment, he was as clear and purposeful as the drive beside him. What he saw made him relax. "Jessyn," he said. "I wanted you specifically on this. Make your nerves work for you."
"It's good and bad nerves," I said.
"No such thing. It's all you, part of your resources. You can't use half of it any more than I could use half this drive." He ran his fingers lightly over the cables. Then slid the panel over it, hiding its pattern. "What's inside us puts these ships to shame. Don't you forget that."
He held my gaze for a long moment, until I felt the charge of eagerness and confidence glow inside me again. Slowly I nodded. "Alright," I said. "We can do this."
Pach lifted the carved silver pendant around his neck and kissed it. "We'll do more than that. I watched you and Eli. There's nobody else I'd rather lean on."
I sat in silence and tried to take it in.
"Relax for a minute," he said, standing and patting my shoulder. "I'll get us a couple more drinks. Then you can take a turn in Eli's place. See what that's like."
He was merciless.
I tilted my head back against the metal paneling once more, feeling the ship's low vibration in my bones. The more I wanted something, the more I feared it, and fed on my own fear until it doubled the excitement. The pattern was obvious, as if it had lifted out of some drive map inside me, a clear line through chaos. I didn't even try to imagine its destination.
If it had brought me here, I trusted it.