“...so the envelope of the jump shielding sits just a little bit above the skin of the ship,” Lian says, gesturing outside at the shimmering impossibility that is jumpspace as she fiddles with the internals of the control console to get the starmap connected. “Also the shielding can't really curve at too sharp an angle, so if you wedge a small enough ship in a corner you can fit the entire thing inside the envelope.”

  There’s a pause, and Lian is riding so high on the thrill of surviving the past twenty four hours that she almost forgets who she’s talking to.

  “...Your Excellency.” She adds finally, looking back out the window as the view fascinates and entices.

  The term of respect forces her to contemplate if it still applies even as she struggles to keep the fuzzy unreality around her memories of the… events from falling away. Because right now that distance is the only thing keeping her from–

  The half melted face of the old man she passed every day. Still sitting atop everything he owns like a dragon over his horde.

  There’s the smell of ozone, and Lian yelps as she pulls two arcing wires apart before checking to ensure that didn't cause any other problems.

  …No? Good.

  Back to work.

  Unfortunately she has no guarantee this starmap will work, and her pretty rough piloting of the ship means that several small errors have popped up on the main system. Nothing life threatening, but should still be fixed if she can manage it with the limited number of spare parts she’s got access to.

  The cultivator, who Lian had honestly forgotten was there for a moment, huffs an intake of breath.

  In jumpspace cultivators are… weakened. Not nullified, but depending on a few factors the depression in ability can range from twenty to forty percent. That lack of presence is one of the most immediate effects.

  “And how do you know that?” She asks, voice raspy and clearly attempting to reinforce her voice with intent, but even compared to what she managed when they first got inside the escape pod this is weak. “How could you have learned to do this?”

  …Shoot. How does she know this?

  Lian coughs into her fist.

  As far as she knows, while the concept of reincarnation does exist, even at the highest levels of power it’s considered as more of a spiritual belief than a mechanical force acting on the world. But the cultivator has also proven able to at least somewhat detect deception. So giving a lie would…

  Would…

  …

  Lian blinks, considering her thoughts more carefully.

  What’s the downside of being honest here? Damage to their relationship? Lian is almost positive the only thing keeping her alive right now is the fact that she’s the only one who can pilot and repair the ship.

  Even still, being seen as crazy or as something alien can't be a good jumping off point for however long they’ll be living stuck in this small space together, and it will be a good while.

  In game, jumpspace transfers last at most five minutes and someone is almost never more than ten jumps away from at least a minor station, but lore and cinematics say each jump can take hours or days. Considering the challenges of hitchhiking anywhere she’s probably in here for the long haul.

  Until they run out of water at least.

  After a moment of deliberation, the scrapper comes to an internal compromise.

  “...Dont remember who I learned it from Your Excellency.” She says truthfully, looking up from where she’s screwing the cover plate back into its location. “It was a long time ago.”

  She really hopes this starmap is going to work when they exit jumpspace.

  Her answer doesn't seem to satisfy the cultivator, but she doesn't pursue it further, instead attempting to find a comfortable and dignified looking position while floating around the cabin in zero-g.

  “A very mortal failure.” She says dismissively. “Typical.”

  It’s notable in Lian’s mind that the cultivator flips between calling her a mortal, a near-mortal, and a poison cultivator depending on the context. She’s not been actively searching for a pattern, but doesn't seem to be as simple as how angry she is right now. It’s interesting to note that the cultivator has never used her… name…

  Wait.

  Lian feels herself let out a slightly hysterical snort, a sound that has the cultivator looking at her with an ire the scrapper desperately waves to dismiss.

  “N–No! Not you! I just– …I haven't introduced myself.” She pauses to take a breath, then bows her head. “I greet the Honored Cultivator. I am Lian.”

  In all the chaos she’d never introduced herself, or even managed to learn the name of the person she’d… she’d left the station with.

  There’s a long pause, one that the scrapper does not dare to break. As for anyone but the cultivator to speak would be a deeply insulting break in the social rules of introductions. For this to end, the cultivator at least must acknowledge the offer of a name, even if she chooses not to offer her own.

  After about five seconds she hears an intake of breath.

  “I greet the untitled mortal and offer a name in kind.” She says, followed by the sound of a fist hitting cloth. “I am Kaido of Silver. First disciple of my order and fourth stage apprentice to the mirrored sword art.”

  Lian tries to bow, but as she’s still strapped into the pilot’s seat the best she can do is lower her head further.

  “Thank you, your Excellency.”

  –––––

  The trip goes on in silence for a long while after that, broken a few hours later as the ship begins to shudder and whine in the same way it did when they entered jumpspace.

  So hopefully it is them returning to jumpspace, because the alternative that the jump failed is… concerning to consider.

  It takes another few seconds before its proven one way or another, but thankfully –-after a great deal of shaking that has the sound of something electronic popping and the main readout screen going dark– it’s the former, and the fascinating colors of jumpspace fade to the star-speckled black of space.

  Enough has been damaged with their hard burn and the jump that Lian decides to take the risk of detaching off the cargo ship rather than ride along for another hop. She’s not exactly sure how often ships will appear at this jump beacon, but in all honesty she’d rather die of hypothermia or hypoxia than whatever happens in jumpspace if the magnet fails, to which the control wire is just one strand of copper leading from the switch at the console to the more bulky circuit breaker for the electromagnet coiled around the airlock.

  Flipping the switch to disable the magnet, a few bursts of the maneuver thrusters have them clear the ship's hot engine vapor and floating into open space.

  After a moment to get a distance and eyeballing a relative zero velocity to the blinking red light and shining metal of a distant jump beacon, Lian spins the ship to no longer be blinded by the light of a distant star and, despite everything, marvels at what she sees.

  The stars are different.

  She’s looked out the window at the stars at every spare moment, enough that they're burned into her moment, but now the starfield is completely different. An unfamiliar sky after they’ve traveled a minimum of dozens of light years in just a few hours.

  But even the wonder of the cosmos cannot suppress Lian’s latest anxiety.

  “Alright…” She whispers, turning her attention back inside the ship and running a finger around the rim where the sensor cup is attached to the front window to ensure that there’s no gap. “Looks good.

  The flight knocked out the readout display, until it’s fixed she can't tell if it works or not. Thus, out comes the screwdriver and the scrapper gets to work, pulling things apart and using a combination of intuition and experience to find that it’s just a loose plug, which is quickly fixed.

  As she works, she accidentally nudges her ankle against something and hisses in pain, and is suddenly very thankful that with the zero gravity she’s not having to deal with what she’s now sure would be an agonizing injury. In fact, most of her aches and pains seem to be drastically reduced by the fact that she’s not being forced to put any weight or pressure on them.

  In short order everything is put back together and Lian places her finger on the breaker controlling power to the main cable leading to the starmap.

  “Well…” She sighs. “Cross your fingers.”

  Then flips the switch and first signs are good, as the box doesn't catch fire or start crackling, instead it makes a mechanical chattering noise like an old floppy drive and the readout screen flashes with code, followed by a slow bootup screen.

  “Hn?” Comes the cul– Kaido’s voice from behind. Sounding as if she was asleep?

  If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  Lian glances behind herself to check, only to see the woman where she’d been the last time she’d looked into the cabin, sitting cross legged on the ‘wall’ gripping two handholds to keep herself seated. Eyes open and looking back at the scrapper with a slightly accusative expression, only to seemingly double take at the void beyond the window.

  “We’re–” She cuts herself off. “Why did you detach this craft from a jump capable ship?”

  Lian turns around, reflexively dropping her eyes this time as the few hours of rest and no longer being in jump space has given the cultivator back her presence. An almost unidentifiable weight on reality like their every action inherently is more important.

  “There were some mechanical issues caused by how… aggressive, the drop out of the jump was. I needed to ensure everything keeps working, Your Excellency.” She says in a low, respectful tone.

  Kaido huffs, rising from the wall and kicking off to float over to the pilot’s chair.

  “I presume you’ve got your map working?”

  Lian looks at the screen as it continues to load, trigonometric equations flashing between single pixels of green.

  “I’m not sure yet Your Excell–”

  “You’re being overly formal for this context.” The cultivator reprimands with a slightly aggravated tone. “I know who I am.”

  “Sorry.” Lian quickly responds, but before she can say anything more the starmap gives a single harsh beep and the readout flashes with a map of the local area.

  It worked?

  She reaches out and fiddles with the buttons to figure out the controls and quickly picks it up, zooming in and out before panning around to get a lay of the land.

  A few seconds after that she notices a coordinate in a wavering box at the bottom left.

  “...Arm five, distal third, sector one one nine, subsector seven, star; wolf nine five three.” She mutters, panning up and down the map to see if that triggers any memories.

  The stations are not marked on this map, which feels odd, until she fiddles with the settings and finds out how to turn it on. Then she zooms out again and sees…

  One jump away, a single five pointed star marker in a sea of diamonds, below it a name.

  ‘Void flotilla 9- Entasnia’

  Lian stares at the name, waiting for an emotional connection as she learns the name of the place she spent months of her life living in and struggling to escape, be it hatred, sorrow, joy, or relief. But there’s nothing, and the fact she feels nothing makes her feel more strongly than the lack itself.

  “Where is the nearest station?” Kaido demands, leaning into Lian’s personal space to get a view of the small screen. “You will route me there as quickly as possible.”

  Lian reflexively complies, zooming out and tracing the spiderweb of jump beacons with her eyes. But even as she works to obey she’s desperately trying to figure out how to respectfully refute the cultivator’s command.

  “Hono–”

  “Miss.” The cultivator interrupts in a tone that's halfway between tired and upset. “It’s Honored Cultivator, then Your Excellency, then Miss or Lady Kaido of Silver in all following until we depart and meet in another context.”

  “Yes Miss.” Lian mutters, zooming in as she sees what the cultivator is looking for. “The nearest station on this map is eleven jumps away, Verantos. But…”

  There’s a slight pause, broken by Kaido as she looks away from the screen and at the scrapper.

  “But what? Finish your thoughts before you speak them.”

  “Sorry.” Lain ducks her head, not looking up from the screen. “My concern is whether we have the money for the docking fee.”

  Docking to a station costs money, the bigger the station the larger the fee. Getting rescued by a ship also incurs expenses, even more than managing to get to a station, and lian has exactly zero money right now. The last of her meager savings are probably just melted sludge in her secret room already.

  Her plan was always to find even the smallest of easy paydays before trying to get to a station. So the fact that she’s struggling to think of something close to where she is right now is quickly becoming… concerning.

  “Docking fee?” Kaido asks as if the thought is both strange and ridiculous. “Foolishness, get us underway, I have more than enough–”

  She stops, and Lian doesn't have to be a mind reader to understand the thoughts running through her shipmate’s mind. The realization that all her money was stored within her sect and station. Gone.

  Gone.

  The reality of memory rises like a tsunami, but Lian forces it down with great difficulty.

  Not yet.

  Taking a deep breath, the scrapper glances over to Kaido as the woman opens her mouth.

  “Then we must… We’ll find a merchant ship… or… We sneak aboard?” She trails off, staring at the map with an intensity as if she could force a solution to their problems to appear on the screen. But after half a minute of silence she gives a grimace as if tasting something disgusting and looks up at Lian. “You planned on this, is there truly no way to board the station without paying the fee?”

  Lian doesn't like this line of thinking.

  “I don't know.” She answers honestly, scrolling through the map with new intensity. “It depends on the station, there might be, but it’s almost certain that any way without paying the fee would mean losing the ship.”

  Which would mean that nothing would change for the scrapper aside from the location she’d be stuck but this time without a ship.

  Lian keeps flicking around the map, a million memories rising at the sight of every section of stars, so many she struggles to filter them for what she’s looking for.

  She needs to find something, anything she can extract value from.

  “You speak as if you know of another path.” Kaido states.

  Lian opens her mouth, zooming into a seemingly random spot of the map on a hunch.

  “...I–” She spots it, selecting the seemingly random beacon and confirming with the short description that comes up alongside the beacon. “do.”

  The scrapper points to the beacon, a mere nine jumps away with only a minor detour from Verantos.

  “We go here.”

  Kaido looks between the unremarkable beacon and the scrapper.

  “...Explain.”

  Lian takes a breath to figure out how to make what she’s about to say make sense, then slides her finger over the few sentences describing the beacon on file.

  “At this beacon it says, uhhh, here.” She points at the one sentence description mentioning her target. “It says there's an abandoned mining station from the old empire. Almost anything even remotely valuable from the old empire is more than enough to pay the fee.”

  Even more so is the fact that this mining outpost is the end point of an early game questline that normally has people jumping all over the sector for fragments of a code to access a cache of valuable materials.

  But the code isn't random, and Lian remembers it. The only reason people can't just skip to the end of the quest in game is that without properly learning the code there’s no way to input it manually.

  However, almost before Lian finishes her explanation, Kaido huffs in derision.

  “And you plan to gather this scrap without a voidsuit?” She asks. “And how do you plan to transport something even remotely valuable back in this craft, even if it were capable of traveling independently?”

  Lian blinks.

  Her words are an unwelcome splash of reality, and the scrapper realizes exactly how untenable the plan is. Not only the voidsuit, but that jump beacon is a dead end, there’s no reason for a ship to go there for her to hitch a ride unless they’re doing the same quest line or scrappers, too small of a ship for hitchhiking. And if by some miracle she solves all those problems, how does she get back?

  She takes a breath and zooms back out to keep looking.

  Alright, back to the drawing board, this time with the limitations of needing to make money at a place with an atmosphere and is regularly trafficked by ships for them to hitchhike.

  But her near encyclopedic knowledge is drawing a blank, anything that meets the criteria is either too vague, requiring a far too high level skill check, far away, or requires combat.

  Staring at the buzzing readout, Lian feels as if the walls of this tiny ship are pressing in even as the void of space becomes infinitely more vast and cold as the reality of her situation presses in, then starts flicking around the map more desperately.

  “What are you doing?” The cultivator asks, echoing the whispering voice in Lian’s mind perfectly. “This is pointless.”

  The scrapper shoves despair away, morphing it into anger, because at least anger means she can still do something even if it’s not productive.

  “W–Well what’s your plan then?” She accuses, looking the cultivator in the eye.

  Glaring back with unwavering conviction, those sun yellow eyes spark.

  “My plan is that I will board the nearest station, then I will cultivate until I can return to the Traitor and extract what I am due.”

  Going back to a station where she’s back to less than where she started! No ship, no job, not even a record of her existence! Going back means death or worse for her!

  And for the first time, looking back into those eyes, Lian doesn't flinch.

  “And living on a station costs money!” Lian retorts in a raised voice. “Not to mention the fact that sects don't exactly enjoy random cultivators wandering around in their territory, especially if they sneak in!”

  She barely has time to close her mouth after her outburst before the scrapper feels as if her soul is being squeezed in a vice. She flinches back, away from the source of the feeling, but just as quickly the feeling fades to a dim background.

  The cultivator takes a deep breath in, closes her eyes, slowly exhales, then opens them once more.

  “...Of the two routes before us only my way has even a chance of success and survival. Do you refute this?”

  Lian swallows her emotions and shakes her head.

  “No Miss. You’re correct.” She agrees in a monotone.

  Kaido nods.

  “Good. Then our path is set.” She says, turning away as if to leave, then pausing as she realizes that the space they’re trapped in together is about the size of a minivan. “Do not disturb me until we’re underway again.”

  “...Yes Miss.” Lian says quietly, keeping her breathing level and calm as she adjusts the buckles of her seat.

  Carefully, controlling every external reaction, the scrapper listens as the rustling of cloth fades to the back of the cabin and falls silent, then calmly files away what she’d learned.

  It appears the cultivator’s supposed ability to ‘detect lies’ is either substantially more fallible than implied or completely nonexistent.

  Because she is not taking them to that station.

  The scrapper grabs the controls of the starmap again and gets back to work, scanning for her way out.

  There are thousands of potential leads, each questline and pseudorandom encounter has the potential for just one detail being the break she needs, because she’s not looking for some grand treasure right now.

  It’s just more scrapper work, finding valuable things in an ocean of garbage.

  There has to be another way out of this.

  She just needs to find it.