AN: Sorry for the late upload. It's currently 4 pm, so I'm 4 hours late. As some of you who may have read my previous works know, I am in Grad School for Architecture. Today was the midterm review, and I had been working and presenting since 10 am. Anyways, 11 Advanced Chapters on my Patreon.
https://www.patreon.com/cw/Crimson_Reapr
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The reactor was the next thing Mark had to make, and he didn't waste any time diving into the intricacies of what was essentially the heart of the ship. To put it simply, the reactor became Mark's obsession, but seeing the plans, he was rather disappointed.
The original reactor plans were... serviceable, yeah, that was the word Anahrin had used to describe them. Sure, they could power the ship, its engines, and all its systems. However, Mark didn't want something that just simply worked "good enough." He wanted a reactor that would pulse with more than enough power in case of an emergency. With every spare moment he had, Mark dug into the schematics of the reactor, studying the stress tolerances, the heat dissipation curves, and the efficiency of the plasma cofinement. His head was drowning in numbers and equations while his eyes were bloodshot as he traced power ratios well past his own exhaustion point.
He cannibalized three different reactor schematics down to their bare bones before bringing them all together. He took the magnetic confinement principles from one of the better performing reactors, layered then with the power modulation be had edited from another, and the spliced then together with systems from a third one. The result was an obviously ugly monstrosity at first, a heavily unstable and greedy reactor that would have cooked itself within a week if someone ever built it. But this was only meant to be a starting point for Mark, and from then on, he would be changing and fixing things to the best of his abilities.
He spent day after day chipping away at its flaws, rebalancing feeds, and forcing redundancies to align with his own logic. Surprisingly, the new reactor Mark was creating, a thing that would tend to take years of development with crews of scientists and engineers, was starting to stabilize itself. This gave Mark a major confidence boost and the push he needed to continue working.
While Mark busted his ass through sleepless nights in the creation of a new reactor, Anahrin was also putting in work. He threaded the ship's electronics together through the skeletal corridors of the heavy frigate, wiring and bundles of circuitry and conduits stretched throughout the bulkheads in neat lines by the drones under his supervision. He would sometimes pause mid-command and place his hands on the walls or rails, whatever was close enough for him to hold on to, as his vision blurred and his body felt like it was getting squeezed. But no matter how he felt, Anahrin kept pushing on, soldiering through his weakening state and trying to push the progress along as far as he could before his inevitable demise.
Rooms began taking shape, being bare shells that covered the wiring for now, but they had their purpose marked already. Crew quarters, a med bay, the tactical command center, and other areas had already been mapped, and their construction had already begun.
One time, Mark caught him crouched in n what would become the captain's quarters, his long fingers resting against the floor as if attempting to stabilize himself. His eyes were staring off into the distance, his chest heaving as thighh breathing was a hard task, and his mind was clearly elsewhere.
Mark leaned in the doorway of the captain's quarters and called out to him. "Hey, Ani, you doing alright?"
Anahrin didn't answer right away, taking some time to give him a faint smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. "I was just... remembering what it was like when I built my first ship. Seeing how a ship becomes something more than just pieces and empty spaces, whispering that they will be filled with others' voices." His smile faded as a shadow of exhaustion flickered across his face. "I'm going to be honest with you, I don't think I'll get to see her fly."
Mark didn't really know what to say. His words felt small against the weight of Anahrin's. He had never been good with these sorts of talks, not in his previous life, not in this one. So he attempted a comedic approach instead, "You'll be there, Ani. You'll see her lift off the sand with those two beady balls you have for eyes. I promise you'll get to see her fly."
Anahrin nodded at Mark's words, but the silence that followed said more than either one of their lips could have said.
One morning while he was pulling himself together, Malr realized that it had been ten months since the crash of his ship. He had almost made it to a year living on this desolate planet, and it wouldn't have been possible had he not met Anahrin. Hell, he had barely made it a few hours before falling over a kilometer to what should have been his death. It had been ten months since hs had met the Starthari, and if the estimates Anarhin had been given were correct, then they only had about 3 months before his body gave up on him. That meant that they had less than 3 months to make the ship spaceworthy so that Anahrin could see it take its first flight himself.
This pushed Mark to work harder, harder than was sane. He pushed the reactor through simulations until they screamed red across the console, then he tore the numbers apart and put them back together until he found a way to make them green. He re-ran calculations for plasma stability until he started to see containment rings in his dreams. He began seeing the experimental schematics he had created in his dreams, calling for him to perfect it, calling for him to make it a reality.
Anahrin Mark's progress, sometimes with approval, many times with quiet concern. "If you keep at it at the pace you have, you'll soon be driving yourself off a cliff," he warned Mark on one of his sleepless nights.
Mark slammed his hand down on the console at his warning, frustration bleeding through his words. "You think I don't fucking know that, Ani? I'm trying to get this shit figured out for you, man. You said it yourself, you don't know if you'll even get to see her fly, and I fucking promised that you will. So no, I don't give two fucks if I'm driving myself ragged trying to get this done, because I promised I would."
The silence that followed was heavy, and the tension was only cut when Anahrin spoke, his voice quiet and almost tender. "I understand what you're trying to do, and I admire that about you. Being a man of his word is a high-quality value to have. But did you forget what I had told you all those months ago? Running yourself ragged is not going to help. It is only detrimental to progress. And that's why you're spinning your wheels on the same problems. Quit your antics and get some rest, you need it."
Mark swallowed hard and nodded, unable to answer. He then walked out of the simulation room and back to the dais. He had barely lain for 20 seconds before the exhaustion claimed him, and he drifted off to sleep.
---
The frigate grew around them, and two months passed in the blink of an eye. The skeleton of beams had taken shape and become a body. Anahrin had done the vast majority of the heavy lifting, and if it hadn't been for him, then Mark doubted he would have even been a tenth of the way through the construction of the ship. Anahrin had developed the targeting systems, created advanced railguns and advanced autocannons for defense. He had created pretty much everything else that the ship was missing, all the while Mark toiled and struggled with the reactor. Mark thought he had made some headway with it, but he only ran into more walls the further he advanced.
He had lost count of how many times the simulation board had spat out red errors and it was really starting to eat at him. It was as if reality was playing a cruel joke on him. He would fire up the reactor simulation, make a doze adjustment, press run, and watch it run perfectly fine for a while before the graphs spiked just before he shut down the simulations. He woukd then had to sift through the waves of nunbes trying to figure out what went wrong this time and which threat to pull without unraveling all of his damn work.
Anahrin had begun to hang around him more often now that he had finished with the vast majority of the work. The only things that were missing from the ship where the reactor, the engines, and the amror around both areas. The engines couldn't be put into the ship without first putting in the reactor, and even if they did, then they would have to remove them to place the reactor in place. The Strathari would somehow make the silence feel instructive, never telling Mark exactly what to do, nor giving him a step-by-step. Instead, he would ask Mark questions about what he was doing, sometimes maddeningly simple ones that cut right to the core of the problem Mark was running into.
Anahrin would stare at the data with his arms folded before glancing at Mark and asking questions like "So tell me, Mark. What do you think happens if the containment fails at the third cycle?"
Mark would, of course, mutter some unintelligible answer, scratch his head, and then, hours later, realize that the entire feed loop needed to be restructured because Anahrin had seen where instability would occur before the simulation had even finished.
Other times, Anahrin would just lean against the wall and not say a single word. He would just watch Mark fail time and time again until the frustration burned out of Mark and his brain booted up. Mark hated those nights, knowing that time was running short, and yet Anahrin, instead of helping, would just watch him have a mental breakdown. It left him feeling like he was throwing himself against a wall with nothing to show for it, while his teacher was amused by his attempts. But by the end of the second week, he realized that he was starting to anticipate Anahrin's questions and thus began thinking like the Starthari, even if he couldn't quite match his precision.
The reactor slowly made its way toward stability, and though it wasn't perfect, he was starting to get close to actually having a working model. He could feel that same determination that he had when he began working on the reactor burn within him once again. The number of errors and things failing started to diminish as well, with the energy output beginning to curve into safe tolerances instead of spiking to levels that could erase half a city. The efficiency ratios crawled their way upward by fractions of a percent, which in reactor terms might as well have been major leaps.
Mark felt proud, and though he tried not to show it too much, Anahrin was too, barely giving the slightest nods of approval. Though his nods were the kind that said: "good, but not good enough."
---
One night, Mark was hunched over the console, once again watching simulation feeds dancing in neon green and red across the screen. He was extremely exhausted and had been drawn so deeply into the problem at hand, narrowing his eyes at the equations and energy curves. Anahrin had been quieter than usual for most of the evening, becoming a barely perceptible presence in the background. Mark threw his hands up in the air in frustration when he finally hit another dead end. He looked around to ask Anahrin a question, but when he did, Anahrin was nowhere to be found.
"Ani?" He called out, yet no response came. "That's odd, I guess he must've gone to sleep." Mark yawned and stretched his arms. He thought that the Strathari had begun to take his own advice about resting, so he shut down the simulation for the night and stumbled to his room, his eyesight blurring as his eyes watered.
It wasn't long before Mark fell asleep, and Anahrin sat down before the simulation console, his long fingers trembling as he keyed in commands. The room glowed faintly, painting his face with different shades of blue. His chest rose and fell, his breathing loud as if he was struggling to get air in his lungs.
He had told himself that he wouldn't do this, that Mark needed to learn, to struggle, and to build his own understanding. He had told himself that he couldn't hold his hand and do things for him, but time had become a luxury and Mark would have many more years to experiment with reactors. To be honest, Anahrin was amazed by how far Make had made it without his direct intervention. Mark had been close, so close, but in the end, the reactor wasn't something you could just fully entrust to your student, no matter how gifted they were or how adaptable their mind had become.
And Anahrin was not about to risk having the man who carried within him a part of the universe die a meaningless death because of a faulty reactor. His mind cut through the reactor schematics with a clarity and familiarity that had been born from thousands of failures and millions of successes. Every flaw Mark had left half-mended, every single redundancy that hadn't been fully aligned, and every feedback loop that had bent slightly out of range were all fixed by Anahrin. His hands moved slowly, but precisely as they weaved millennia of knowledge and practice into the design.
Hours had come to pass unnoticed, and finally, the simulation bars had ticked completely green for the duration of it. The containment had held steady across every cycle, and the power modulation didn't just stabilize the reactor. It thrummed at a capacity that was 25 percent better than the original design Mark had made. The efficiency ratios had been locked into levels that any human engineer would kill to have, and though the reactor was perfect, it was as close to perfect as anyone could hope.
A faint smile grew on Anahrin's lips as he typed in the name for the reactor "Shephard Mk 1."
Anahrin stood up from the chair, his task finished, and went to leave the simulation room. However, as he reached the door, he felt as if the world had suddenly gone vertical and something pulled at his back.
Anahrin fell backwards onto the floor, his eyes rolling back into his head as his eyelids closed. The room was left with only the sound of his labored breathing and the hum of the console.
Mark woke up to silence, something that felt wrong since Normally Anahrin would be up before him and doing something that was loud enough to be heard echoing throughout the factory's corridors, even after he had finished with the ship. If he wasn't doing that, then he would be muttering to himself in some corridor.
He sat up and rubbed his eyes before looking around and getting off the bed. He didn't pay much mind to the lack of sound and just tossed it up to Anahrin still being asleep. He walked to Anahrin's room and knocked on the door. When no response came, he activated the terminal, and the doors opened. He looked inside, and Anahrin was nowhere to be found.
A sense of unease settled in Mark's chest as he called out, "Hey, Ani, where are you, man?"
His voice echoed off the corridors, but no response came. He made a beeline to the ship and looked around, but he still couldn't find him. He then went to the room where the 8-meter by 8-meter nanoprinter was, then to the room where the 3-meter by 3-meter, but he wasn't there either. He finally got to the simulation room, and when he did, his heart dropped.
He froze as he stared at the unconscious Starthari who lay on the ground. At first, he thought Anahrin was dead, but after noticing his chest rising and falling along with the labored breathing, he sprang into action.
"Ani!" Mark rushed forward, grabbing his shoulders. Anahrin stirred faintly, his eyelids fluttering but not opening. Mark felt some relief wash over him as he noticed the faint movements from the Strathari, and he shook him a bit. "Hey, you alright, man?"
But Anahrin didn't answer. Mark frowned, and he looked around the room, his eyes catching sight of the glowing holo-display. On it was the image of a reactor that was very similar to the one Mark had been working on, yet with some visible changes. It gleamed in green across every single line with a beautiful efficiency, and most of all, it was stable.
"You stubborn bastard," Mark whispered, half furious, half awestruck. He chuckled as he looked down at the unconscious Starthari, "I always had my suspicions, but you're not beating the Tsundere allegations now."
Mark didn't know whether he should be grateful or pissed. The reactor was perfect in his eyes, much better than anything he could've cobbled up. But was the prize really worth the cost? Anahrin now lay unconscious in his arms after having spent an entire night working himself closer to his grave just to give Mark this victory.
He clenched his fists, torn between pride and despair as he looked at Anahrin's unconscious form, the lines of exhaustion along with the eye bags etched into his face. He sat there for a long time, watching the steady rhythm of the reactor readings in the simulation and the fragile rhythm of Anahrin's breathing. The two pulses, one mechanical and the other mortal, seemed to echo each other in the dim room.
It had now been almost a year since Mark had become Anahrin's pupil, and the weight of something new had finally settled on his shoulders. This ship may have been the first one he ever made. It was supposed to be an escape, a means to an end. But for Anahrin, this ship would be his last. She would be his legacy, so of course, he would do everything in his power to make sure it worked the way it was meant to.