I never promised you a rose garden | Glowfic Constellation

By the time it becomes obvious that something is wrong, it's too late to abort entirely.

Star skippers do not, in theory, have to be spaceships in the conventional sense of the term. But hopping out to an untrafficked spot in the void is the best way to avoid thaumaturgical interference in a calculation as precise as jumping between star systems, so people tend to anchor the enchantments on airtight hulls with basic intrasystem propulsion.

So when the ship jerks, it shouldn't be more than a distraction; it doesn't matter what untrafficked bit of space you take off from--

Except that it most definitely isn't the case that the ship was hit by a piece of space detritus, this is a glitch in the steering, and the navigation enchantments are chained together for power efficiency.

She can't cancel the jump, at this point. All she can do is shunt all the power from everything non-essential into the safeties and cross her fingers that it works.

...

The jump is more unpleasant than a controlled jump ought to be. It feels as though the gravitational forces from every intervening star are operating on her at once. She's pretty sure that's not how it actually works, but that's how it feels.

They land, and she throws up.

When her breathing slows and she takes her head out from between her knees, she notices that they're under gravity, despite the fact that artificial gravity was definitely one of the nonessentials she cut.

She checks the exterior readings. Breathable atmosphere. Approximately one gravity of force. Temperatures well within the tolerable band, even for a complete inaugment like her. No detectable poisons or hexes. No detectable thaumaturgical field, which is very weird for an inhabitable planet unless they are way outside known space.

She tries to pull up a star chart and fails because it is whatever planet they landed on it is apparently currently the day side of it.

"What the fuck just happened?" Tanya demands.

"I'm not sure yet," Linda replies. "Do you want to try to figure it out, or to try to figure out where we are?"

"Even once we know what went wrong, we're still going to need to figure out where we are in order to get back," Elaine points out reasonably.

"But it's apparently daylight, at the moment," Linda says, frowning at her instruments. "If we sort out the glitch now, and wait until nightfall to try to astro-orient ourselves..."

"Assuming this planet isn't tidally locked," Elaine says, lips pressed together.

"No, it would be a lot hotter then," Linda points out absently. "It could have an inconveniently long day cycle, though, especially if it were currently early in it. But I think we ought to check to make sure there isn't anything in the environment that the readouts aren't picking up but that could prove dangerous on short notice."

The other girls agree with a certain level of subdued alarm, and Linda keys open the hatch. The skipper isn't meant to operate in atmo, but she can climb out fine anyway.

An alien with bright red hair climbs out of the small spaceship that appeared suddenly between two tall buildings and looks around in complete bewilderment.

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"It senses thaumo--thaumaturgical--magic energy. The whole reason skippers are spaceships is because they function best in low-thaumo environments and inhabited planets usually have thaumaturgical residue all over the place, some spells are more efficient than others but even when you have really really efficient spells any kind of populated area is going to have enough to leave a certain level of fog lying around."

"Okay. Is your spaceship damaged, ma'am?"

"We haven't yet fixed the glitch that caused the random jump in the first place but it didn't take any additional damage in the crash."

"I see. Do you think it will be a quick fix or more complicated, ma'am? And - have any of your companions left the ship?"

"No, they're staying behind while I do recon. I...think it should be a quick fix but it's one of those things that could be more complicated, I wanted to make sure we weren't in immediate danger before I dove into the guts of the enchantments. Solace-delta-prima, any updates from the others?"

"No, ma'am," a faintly artificial-sounding voice says out of thin air.

Kashi sucks in a breath between her teeth. "How quick is quick, if it's quick, ma'am?"

"Quick enough that I've been asking people for a star chart instead of just waiting until night falls."

"I... see." She does not offer a star chart. "And if it isn't quick?"

"That would really depend on how it failed to be quick. It could be still doable before nightfall, or it could be a couple of days...if it were going to take more than a couple of days we would probably just patch the glitch instead of fixing the underlying problem and take it back home to be looked at by a professional. Which is also an option if leaving it there for a couple days is unacceptable."

"It would be... complicated." She glances at the person who came in with news of the spaceship. "Go park something in front of it, for now."

He nods and scurries.

"So I am guessing that we have in fact landed in some kind of political situation. Who are you hiding us from? Shitty government? Hostile foreign power?"

"If you'd landed anywhere else in the city it would be... fine. Ma'am."

"--Oh, shit, did we land on some kind of extremely secret research project?"

"...we are not a research project, ma'am."

"...I wasn't suggesting that you were, I was just hypothesizing that there was one in this part of the city and that's why it was not fine for us to be here."

"We don't conduct research here, ma'am."

"Okay, I am not actually completely incapable of taking a hint, you don't want to tell me why it's a problem. I can respect that, we're unsolicited weirdo foreigners, you don't owe us anything. Do you need me to, like, refrain from doing diagnostic spells that will tell me things about anything outside the ship? Because that'll slow me down some if so."

"I... don't know what things the spells will tell you."

"Lots of things! I can't really say without knowing what you don't want me to know whether I have a spell to detect it...actually, no, I could have Solace-delta-prima draw up a list of the diagnostic spells in her databanks and you could check the list. It'd be a long list though."

"If you need to know things about - magical properties, the location of the planet and its moons and star, the laws of physics, the number and locations of buildings in the area, the weather, the flight plans of other spaceships and aircraft... that would all be fine..."

"The thing that I'm most concerned about is diagnostic spells that check to see whether there's any risk of sudden loss of stability of the skipper's hull, which gather a whole lot of data about the physical properties of the ship's immediate environs. Like, if I cast one of those and the ship was next to a building with another spaceship in it, I would find out about the spaceship, for example."

"We don't have any spaceships, so that sounds fine, ma'am."

"The spaceship was an example. My concern was not about a literal spaceship. You did explain that this was a poor enough neighborhood that people looked at me like I was crazy for bringing ours up. Maybe a better example would be that if there are people having sex nearby at a sufficiently regular rhythm that in theory it could cause resonant frequencies I would learn about that."

"I... can't guarantee otherwise at this time ma'am."