'Firefly meets Battlestar Galactica'.
A merchant's daughter is captured and sold into slavery.
A genetically modified survivor of an alien attack scours the galaxy for her taken brother before he is 'disassembled'.
An alien scientist u...
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Cole kicked back from the inoscope, frustration pinching behind the bridge of her nose. She leaned in the chair, pleased how it bent with the curve of her spine. She honestly hadn't expected the Per Pacem's odd shaped seating to be comfortable. The design was cornered and hard, nothing like the Flayvines on Fey vessels, which molded themselves against the body.
Huffing through her nose, she scrubbed her fists against her eyes. It was a habit she picked up from Daisu, but she swore the pressure on her eyeballs helped her concentrate.
The Per Pacem, in truth, was full of surprises. Their first few days aboard were spent repairing and updating the ship to replace their primary mode of transport. The Era'na was a science vessel and not made to tow a ship this size through space. The first shock was how easy the ship converted to Mana. It took very few modifications. The reason became clear when she discovered the ship's original fuel source from the residue encrusted in their reserve tanks. She ran a long finger through the residue before dabbing it on her tongue.
"Sodium chloride," she grinned at the horrified expression on Daisu's face.
"I can't believe you tasted it. It's been rotting in space for thousands of years." He jerked his release line, swinging on his suspension cables to below her, probably to catch her if the taste made her pass out.
"I did smell it first; really the senses are a perfectly acceptable prime diagnostic tool."
"Still disgusting, Cole." He held up a length of wire for her inspection. "Look, whatever this compound is, it's suffered very little decay and I think it's still useable with a coat of chlorphillon."
"I wonder if the Ark in the Eos Ring Museum might have held up like this without the preservation treatment."
"If they were all built like this, why did they only preserve the one ship, what happened to the rest?" Daisu ran his fingers along the smooth surface of the tubing. He swung away, scaling back to his work above her with enviable ease.
"They call it the Great Purge at the university. All the surviving arks were ordered destroyed except for the Darwin. The Libraries went down the same day, thousands of data chips lost, nearly everything we had on human history. They applied the preservation treatment of the ship without any extensive study of the vessel. The thing is little more than an enormous decoration, so much priceless information lost."
Daisu frowned down at her. "When did that happen?"
"Before you were born, almost before I was born. The order came down shortly after New Earth 6 was colonized. Do you know what this means?"
"The Purge?"
"What? No, the Sodium Chloride."
"I'm going to assume their fuel was very salty."
"You would be right! It means the theory of how they managed long distance space travel is correct. Might explain how the ship adapts to Mana so well."
