The drive stuttered, again, a shiver so small it may as well have been subliminal passing through Anesidora 's hull. Despite how small the vibration felt, Carina knew it was the product of titanic energies, forces well beyond human comprehension, struggling against one another deep inside the Anesidora as the ship's systems manipulated the fine structure of spacetime. She opened a link to the engineering deck, watching as the telepresence fog shifted and danced through a dozen colours and patterns and forms as the connection stabilised. Then, the pastel blue walls of the engineering room whispered into existence, Saeltza hanging from one of the reaction mass pipes which circumnavigated the cramped space, his small, simian face lost in what could almost be meditation.

"Saeltza? We need to talk about the drive, again."

"There's nothing much new to talk about," he said, eyes still shut. "It's a displacement drive. We may as well be ants trying to troubleshoot an internal combustion engine. We're out in the Periphery, lightyears from any kind of civilised system. We'd better just hope that the Anesidora can limp on a few dozen more lightyears."

"It's not the drive itself that's broken, that's what you told me," Carina replied, pinching the bridge of her nose. "You're saying you haven't made any progress on fixing the housing?"

"Fine, I'm an ant trying to fix the supports holding the engine in place. Better metaphor?" Finally his eyes, impossibly ancient, opened a crack. He looked tired. Exhausted. Burnt-out. "It's only gotten worse since you last asked. The matter bound to the void bubble inside is held in place by a self-repairing nanoscale structure, it helps to dissipate heat and absorb shocks and, somehow, integrate with the ship's control systems. The self-repair mechanism has gone wrong, hurt by what happened at Lysaidon." Lysaidon. The memory still burned in her mind, the furious glaring eye of a star's death cutting into her mind's eye. "It's growing tumours almost as fast as I can strip them off. Every time I try and strip it back and regrow the support mesh, it gets corrupted. I'm an engineer, not some kind of doctor. I couldn't fix modosophont nanotech, let alone whatever magic our transapient sponsor is using. All that's changed is that we're running out of feedstock and raw material "

Snapshot from Decisions Decisions

• Carina Rush
• Carina-Vela Outer Volumes - Text by M. Alan Kazlev
  Large region of space in the outer volumes, not affiliated with any of the main empires. The Andian Mission today remains a highly regarded support organization here.
  
• Echir-{n}
• Sandberg, Anders