Back in the present, Amelia woke with a start, realizing she’d inadvertently fallen asleep in the pilot’s seat. Thankfully, she’d long since gotten the ship in position for orbital insertion and momentum was carrying her forward.

  Her head ached and she hoped it was entirely from a lack of sleep, but she knew better. She was also a little dizzy, which wasn’t helped at all by the zero-G.

  Parts of her brain were working strangely well, however, which was weird. She found herself idly performing calculations regarding how much time she had left, which came up a little short, as confirmed by the ship’s clock, but her mind soon wandered off to calculating how many stars there were in the universe, based on how many she could see through the window. Next, she ran a statistical analysis to determine how many zombie soldiers the Dead Queen had, based on the small sample she’d seen, extrapolating an estimate from the size of the monolith.

  Taking a deep breath, Amelia steadied her nerves and tried to focus her mind, but it was difficult. After a few more deep breaths, she got her mind into the correct gear.

  Without the spell-core to refresh the air, Amelia reasoned symptoms of hypercapnia and hypoxia were beginning, because there was only a limited quantity of oxygen inside Starwitch, while carbon-dioxide levels were on the rise. The headache that made a migraine sound like a fun time was surely a symptom, but adding a measure of confusion and increased worry to the list left her with a terrible conclusion, as did the results of her math regarding internal atmosphere.

  She shouldn’t have been able to do math so easily under the circumstances, but she’d suspected for many years that The Book had been enhancing her ability with math, causing her to reason it was helping her compensate for the effects of low oxygen and high carbon-dioxide, at least in that small part of her mind. She ran the numbers again, coming to the same conclusion: she was going to die if she didn’t take action. In six hours time, her attack run on the monolith would begin. The trouble was, she had breathable air for only two, but only if she was unconscious.

  Unbuckling herself from the pilot’s seat, Amelia climbed over the back and pushed off it, grabbing the ladder. She used it to reach crew quarters. Once there, she pushed off the floor, to reach one of the walls, where a series of lockers had been mounted. Grabbing hold of a little handle on the side, Amelia opened one, revealing a bulky, orange suit with a white belly and black stripes, making it resemble a tiger, because Amelia had been in an artistic mood when she made it. There was a separate glass helmet that bore a certain resemblance to a fishbowl, which had been locked into a clamp coated in rubber. The suit had been made of four layers of different materials, which had been coated with a variety of flexible resins that were good at producing an airtight seal. The whole thing was one piece, aside from the helmet.

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  Amelia put a foot into a loop in the floor and arched her toes, to lock herself in place as she worked to haul the pressure suit out, which included an air canister on the front. Despite the awkward positioning of it, Amelia had planned ahead and made sure the suit’s oxygen canister was on the front, just in case she or one of her sisters was ever forced to survive alone, because getting out of the suit to switch the oxygen canister could mean death.

  She knew each canister held enough oxygen for an hour and half when set to flow continually. Unfortunately, there were only three canisters. That added up to four and a half hours, but running them at seventy percent would provide her with six hours of headaches and dizziness, followed by twenty minutes of full flow, which would be quite helpful for the boarding action she had in mind.

  She opened the suit’s backside and removed her foot from the loop keeping her in place. As she floated and twirled around the room, she inserted her legs into the pressure suit, then her arms. She spun around as she struggled to reach the handle on the first layer of seals, drawing a little, metal device across a set of metal teeth that had been sewn into the fabric, to form a thing The Book called a ‘zipper’, though Amelia hated making them, because it was terribly intricate work. Each of the tiny teeth bore a pair of little runes, reading as ‘seal’ on one side and ‘air’ on the other, which Amelia had added, because she had no desire to take any chances with her life, even though it wasn’t strictly necessary, according to her reading. She repeated the step on the next layer, then the third and fourth.

  Pushing off the ceiling, she got back to the floor, where her boots locked her in place, because they included permanent magnets just strong enough to allow her to walk, even without gravity. Next, she removed a rigid collar from the locker and clamped it onto the neck of her suit, which was designed to bridge the gap between her helmet and suit. She took the helmet from the locker, locked it in place around her head and adjusted the handle of the oxygen canister mounted to the belly of her suit.

  With a few breaths of fresher air, her head was slightly more clear.

  She headed for the workshop, where she selected an icepick from a rack of tools and a sack of rubberized cloth. She opened the water tank of one of her steam engines and looked at the glob of water that was held inside by surface tension.

  She held a hand out to it and muttered in the witch’s tongue, using the word for ‘freeze’. It was rather costly in terms of exhaustion, but the water froze. Holding the sack above the opening, Amelia chipped with the pick, mostly catching the fragments with the sack, until she’d nearly emptied the tank. She closed the sack and the tank, then moved to one wall of the room, where she turned a handle, until a hatch opened. She dumped the fragments inside and turned the handle some more, until it closed.

  The hatch was effectively a chamber with two doors, which allowed access to the rear fuel tank, either for filling or emptying, a bucket at a time, depending on which way the handle was turned. It would have been a terrible idea to turn it the other way without gravity, but thankfully, she didn’t need to.

  She moved to the next steam engine and repeated the process; she was going to need as much water for fuel as possible, because magic could only do so much by itself and she needed a little reaction mass for her final approach to the monolith, for the sake of impact.

  As she worked, her mind wandered back to the past…