“Sure; I’d be happy to help you test our FTL, since it’s your first trip. OPS, what makes sense here?”

She confers with the crew. 

“Easiest jump would be to travel about 50 light-hours coreward, and then come back; should take about an hour round-trip.”

“If you’d be willing, that would be great!” she agrees.

She stands, stealing one last cookie from the plate.

“Shall we go now? We can keep discussing things on the way.”

“No time like the present!” 

Amethyst leads them back out of the conference room and to the docking bay.

“So how do FTL engines actually work?” she asks, walking backwards through the clover.

“Practically, we have a giant engine with exotic matter, and use that exotic matter to ‘punch a hole’ into the nearest hyperspace conduit, whereupon we get sucked in. The exotic matter gets converted to very radioactive waste and also releases a lot of heat in the process; most of the engine is actually heat dissipation. The basic design hasn’t changed for centuries – I bet you could buy a very nice textbook from PACNA from anytime in the last 150 years and not be missing much.” 

She frowns. That sounds like their engine is pretty inefficient, if it’s dumping so much waste heat. There’s got to be a better way.

“I see. Is the heat dissipation the limiting factor on the speed of your jumps? I can almost certainly put together a better engine by adding a fixity field for heat control and disposal of the radioactive waste,” she replies.

“It’s more of an “all-or-nothing” thing – the heat dissipation gets you into the stream, and then you move at the stream’s speed. But you could certainly make a much smaller engine if you could deal with all that waste heat!”

They arrive at the shuttle bay, and Amethyst lets them lead the way into their ship, because it’s only polite.

“I mean, separately I also think the fact that your engine is generating waste heat is a sign that it’s not all that efficient. But that’s just a supposition. I haven’t studied what’s going on with local physics to say whether there’s a thermodynamic minimum that just happens to be surprisingly high,” she responds.

“Welcome aboard. OPS, please ask COMMS to relay the broad details of our current situation to TCN command.”

Will Amethyst try and stop them from doing this, or otherwise intervene in their journey to the main ship?

She is too busy speculating about FTL engines to be paying too much attention to their messages, and she wouldn’t want to stop them anyway.

“Thank you, captain,” she says, ducking slightly through the shuttle door. When nobody happened to be watching her, her dress changed into a nautical blue-striped Breton shirt and slacks.

As the shuttle pulls out of the hangar bay, it is clear that the outer skin of the station has become much more complete in the time they have been talking, although it includes so many windows and gently twinkling lights that the difference is not apparent at first glance.

Their journey is uneventful and soon Amethyst and company arrive at The Indomitable Victory. 

“Captain Aboard!”

“Welcome to my humble ship. It’s not much, but it’s got a great crew, and we try to do our best. If you’re ready, we can get you on your first hyperspace jump!”

“By all means, captain!” she agrees. She bounces a little, because it’s not every day that you travel faster than light for the first time. She also inspects the ship around her in perhaps more detail than the crew would expect — you can learn a lot about a ship by looking inside its walls.

The cute Terran “battleship” rips a crude hole into hyperspace and disappears. It’s going, and the odd ‘first contact’ message, are dutifully forwarded to greater minds. The sunlight and vacuum of space continue to feel delightful against it’s tiny walls! These little observation missions are really quite fun~! 

… on further consideration, the most recent happenings here are quite atypical. They are marked as “possibly important”.

“What the fuck!” Amethyst exclaims, hands jumping to her face as though reaching for something that is no longer there.

“Uh. So, it looks like fixity fields might not work in hyperspace,” she tells them. “The good news is I’m still in contact with the rest of me. Can everyone please look away from me for a moment?”

She seems visibly distressed. Perhaps her tech doesn’t actually work in hyperspace? Or perhaps they’re about to actually fall for the old ‘OK now look away’ trick. 

“Let’s give the woman some privacy.”

The crew attends to their consoles.

“Sorry, I just needed a moment to get into my space suit, just in case,” she tells them. When they look back up, she is wearing what looks like bright silver knight’s armor, with a transparent visor across her face. A rich purple fabric shows through the gaps between the armor plates.

“That is really a quite stylish space suit!” 

She wants one for herself!

“Where did it come from?”

“Thank you!” she says, pivoting a little to show it off from different angles. “I designed it myself. As for where it comes from … I can explain it to you, but I’m not sure that will result in you being less confused. The simple answer is that I have two sources of new-to-you physics — the fixity fields, and another set of powers that is simultaneously more robust and less general. The second set of powers is where I get my ability to be in multiple places at once, and it can also be used to manifest personal protective equipment. But only when people aren’t looking.”

She looks apologetic about the quality of that explanation. “It has a pretty arbitrary set of rules like that. Anyway, I normally use fixity fields for decompression-resistance. So since they don’t work here, I had to switch into my backup gear.”

She squints at OPS’s face, relaying her expression through one of her selves that still has a working HUD. “I can make you your own suit when we get back to the Canopy system, if you’d like.”

“Captain, I think I like her!” 

“Ha! She certainly is full of surprises! Sorry about the unexpected tech problems! Are you still in contact with your other selves? Do you want to go back?”

“I am! There’s no apparent lag, or anything like that,” she assures him. “And I don’t feel any particular need to turn around yet — we can go back and continue our discussion there if you’d like. But I don’t think there’s any reason not to go a bit further to check for any possible range issues.”