Tori (Patreon)

Okay, here is the complete scene that I accidentally posted a little of earlier. Sorry again about that. Read this one.

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“Hello? Tori? Are you there?” the krakun was begging by the time she returned to the intercom.

“Yes, I’m here, Commissioner,” she said.

“Oh, thank goodness! What took you so long?” Troykintrassa said. “I was starting to think I’d live out the rest of my days buried alive in this shit-hole.”

The geroo stared down at her paws. “I’ve been injured, sir. I went as fast as I could.”

A pause. “Injured? By what’s happening today? A fire? Explosion?”

“No, I’m recovering from sulfur burns. A couple months ago.”

“Oh, okay,” he said. “You had me worried, Tori. Was afraid I was trapped on a burning ship or something. So, you dispatched a maintenance crew?”

Tori bit her lip, hating the thought of telling him a bold-faced lie. I should just walk away, just leave him without filling his head with false hopes… Then she thought about her time in the med bay once more, and realized she couldn’t do it, how she’d have done anything for even a false hope when the tables had been reversed. “Yes, sir,” she lied.

“Good! Good. I can’t wait to get out of this kerrati-infested toilet.” He continued holding the intercom button and Tori listened to his breathing. “And the trinity?”

“No, sir,” she said. “The gate is closed.” The three technologies of the trinity were designed to work together—if any one of them went down, they all did. The drive was clearly offline, so the gate and recycler had to be as well.

“Damn. Damn. Curse this whole wretched ship! I picked the wrong damned week to fill in for my worthless nephew,” he grumbled. “So, then you brought a doctor with you…”

Tori hung her head, unsure how to reply. “I… I couldn’t find one, sir.”

“You couldn’t find a doctor?” He sounded skeptical.

“I’m sorry, sir!” she whined. “The entire ship is in chaos right now. All communication is down. I left a message with one of the engineers to find one—”

“Wait a second, Tori,” he interrupted. “You went looking for a doctor, couldn’t find one, and so you went back to the drive room to ask them to find a doctor?”

Tori beat her forehead with the heel of one palm. It had been a stupid, careless lie. She should have thought through her words before speaking.

“Do you know what I did, the last time a slave lied to me?” asked the krakun.

She didn’t want to know, so she didn’t ask. “I’m sorry, sir.”

A long pause. “A maintenance crew isn’t really coming to get me out of here.”

It wasn’t a question, but it filled Tori with so much regret that the tears bubbled up and spilled out her eyes. “Sir, I’m sorry! I want to help you. I do! But I can’t. I’m frightened and alone, and I need to go find my mate,” she sobbed. “I can’t call him, and we just transferred here. I don’t know where he works, but I need to go look for him.”

“No! No! No! Don’t go!” he shouted. “Listen, Tori. I understand that you’re frightened and that you want your mate to comfort you, but this is even more important. Please. You have to listen to me. Are you there, Tori?”

“I’m here, sir,” she whispered, “but I should really go.”

“No, don’t go. Listen to me, Tori,” said the commissioner. “I don’t know what sort of game your captain is playing, but he’s way out of his league. He’s trapped me in here, held me captive. To my knowledge, that’s never happened before, but I can assure you that there isn’t a commissioner who would let him live after that.”

Tori nodded, staring at the deck beneath her paws.

“I know that it’s the crew’s duty to follow their captain’s orders, but ultimately, your allegiance must lie with the company. He’s supposed to be carrying out the company’s instructions, and I’m your captain’s boss. He’s rebelled against me, against our employer. Do you know what will happen if none of the crew stands up to him and does the right thing?”

Tori sniffed a tear.

“Tori, your captain is dead. Dead. There’s nothing that can save him now,” said Troykintrassa. “But if no one helps me, the company is going to clean house. You understand what I mean by that, right, Tori? They’ll purge every officer aboard this ship.” He paused a moment. “You said you weren’t an officer, but you probably know some officers, don’t you? You don’t want to be responsible for them getting recycled, do you?” When she didn’t reply, he added, “You can be the one that saves them all.”

She wanted to help him. Oh sure, bringing the trinity back online and leaving it online would be bad. But just because they were stuck here, it didn’t mean that he should be. If only she could bring it back up long enough for him to escape, then he could get to a doctor. They could save his life. Then they could take the trinity offline once more and stay safe from being purged!

“I can’t!” sobbed Tori. “I’m just a nobody. I can’t bring the trinity back online. I can’t call the company for help. I can’t cut through the welds on your door—”

She covered her muzzle with both paws, shocked that the words had slipped out.

“Welded? Ah, I see now,” he said. After a long pause, “It was in my drink, wasn’t it? Whatever your captain poisoned me with, it was in my drink.”

“It wasn’t the captain!” insisted Tori. “He would never have done that.”

“No, I suppose that makes sense,” admitted the commissioner. “He would have known what would happen.”

“I’m pretty sure it was Thojy,” explained Tori. “We know he murdered Nija last night, and he was probably responsible for the other poisonings as well. Honestly, sir, I had no idea that he would target you or your nephew. I don’t know what he put in your drink or how he got his paws on it!”

The words spilled from her and she didn’t let him interrupt. “We raided his apartment this morning, but he’s gone, sir. Him and his family have disappeared. I think they’ve gone into hiding somewhere. They cleaned out their shrine and left their strands behind to make it harder to track them.”

Finally, a silence stretched, Tori’s rapid breathing the only sound in the tiny metal room. “And so … your captain decided that rebellion was preferable to letting this Thojy guy be brought to justice?”

“It isn’t a rebellion—”

“It sure looks like one,” he said. “That’s how the company will see it; commissioner murdered in a slave rebellion. You do know what Planetary Acquisitions will do, right? To everyone—officers, crew, even your cubs?”

“But it’s not—”

“You won’t be able to convince them of that. They won’t even stop to ask.”

Tori nodded in silence. The reality was too horrible to imagine.

“So, the captain shutdown the trinity to keep the company from purging the ship,” he muttered. “Interesting.”

“Do you know how long we have?” she whispered into the intercom. “How long until the company can route another ship—”

“Two weeks.”

The geroo stared at nothing, perplexed. “That can’t be right, sir. Can it? Space is huge. How can the company just happen—”

“Oh, I’m certain it will take the company a century or more to get a recovery ship all the way out here. It’s not like the ship is going anywhere with the drive down, but by taking the trinity offline, your captain has only bought you two weeks of life … at best. The reactor was in poor shape to start with. He’ll have to carefully ration his power to make it that long.”

Tori leaned back against the wall and sank slowly to the metal bench that hung from it. Two weeks? Could that really be correct? Was that possible? Was that all the time they really had left? The commissioner had to be lying, trying to trick her into releasing him! She stood back up and with some skepticism, she said, “I thought the reactor had enough fuel to run for decades without—”

“It doesn’t work that way, by design, Tori. Your reactor is a titanium dioxide chemical/fusion reactor,” he explained. “Only the elemental titanium is actually fusible. The reactor mostly produces titanium dioxide, which is inert.”

Tori had no idea what he was talking about. “Sir, I don’t understand.”

“Didn’t you have to take physics, Tori?” he asked.

“I had a science class,” she said, “to filter out those with aptitude. It was pretty basic. I’m sorry, but I didn’t accel.”

Troykintrassa groaned, but she couldn’t tell if it was in frustration or just belly pain. “The reactor fuses titanium and oxygen into an isotope of zinc, but most of the titanium bonds with the oxygen to form titanium dioxide.”

He waited a long time for her to respond. When she didn’t, he asked, “Geroo like to play games with tiles, right?”

She tilted her head in confusion. “Commissioner? I don’t—”

“Well, imagine you were in a big room, and scattered all over the floor were a bunch of tiles that were all lying face up. That’s titanium.”

Tori shrugged but said nothing.

“In the center of the deck is a small hole. Over and over, you grab a bunch of the face-up tiles and throw them up in the air. Once in a while, a tile will fall in the hole. That’s fusion. Any tile that goes into the hole is converted to zinc and produces power.”

“Sir, I don’t—”

“There’s a lot of tiles, Tori,” explained the krakun over the intercom. “A lot of fuel. If you kept throwing tiles in the air, it would take fifty years before most of them went in the hole. But here’s the thing: when you pick up tiles, you can only pick up the ones that are face-up. All the tiles that fell face-down are now titanium dioxide. Do you see where I’m going with this, Tori?”

The rusty red geroo scrunched up her face, wishing she’d paid more attention in class. Instead of trying to comprehend the physics, she just focused on his analogy. “So, you’re saying that long before the tiles get used up, they’ll all get flipped face-down, and they’re out of play?”

“Yes, exactly, Tori!” he said. She thought she heard relief in his voice. “After about two weeks, most of the titanium has bonded with the oxygen chemically instead of fusing with it. The conditions within the reactor can’t break that bond and additional oxygen won’t fuse with the titanium dioxide molecules. Power output will decline and after two weeks, it won’t produce enough power to restart the trinity.”

She felt her heart beat faster. “So, how do we flip the tiles back? How do we convert titanium dioxide into titanium?”

Troykintrassa chuckled. “That’s easy, Tori. We circulate the fuel through the recycler. The recycler will break down any chemical bonds and pump both the titanium and oxygen back up into the reactor to try again.”

Tori groaned. “But with the trinity shut down—”

“Precisely,” he said. “The engineers could have designed a reactor to fuse most any atoms, but they chose titanium to zinc specifically to keep crews from leaving the company by just powering down the trinity. Any ship that keeps the gate offline so that the company can’t come and inspect, will be left with only two weeks of power before. After that, even if they change their minds, they won’t have enough power left to bring it back online.”

A chill ran down her spine and she listened to the sound of him breathing for a while.

“In two weeks, give or take, this ship is going to get very cold.”

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Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QSHZHhP1pt_FfvcBaqJq0XPjYMiTVNeTOvPXgPrRndk/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?