4. The Tug

  So, a few things for background. While just about every Atlian who’s alive today is a powerful cultivator as far as everyone in this particular universe goes, that’s not true for the natives of this dimension. In fact, according to the studies they performed, less then .01% of the population has the potential to ignite their dantian and advance.

  A lot of kids try very hard when they’re young, because becoming a cultivator means that the government whisks you away and you effectively become a celebrity overnight. Depending on where you were born, you might end up living on Atla itself. It’s a huge deal.

  But Soulships are different. We’re about two hundred times more likely to be able to ignite our dantian than humans, but that’s still only 2%. And most of them needed to spend years of meditation as they journeyed between jobs in order to unlock the secrets of their soul and achieve the first stages of our own method of cultivation.

  Mostly because they’ve all read the primer on how the universe works. When I finally read it, I ended up scratching my head because ‘if this were true, then nothing I can do makes sense.’

  Anyway, what I’d managed to do when I was just two months old meant that the government would want me. They’d want me a lot. I wasn’t certain how I felt about that, but Samonosuke put the options before me in black and white.

  “So, the way I see it, son, you have three options,” he told me. “The first is that you tell the world that you’re not just a soulship, but a soulship with the spark, and you go and work for the government. They’ll use you as a Qi battery and to test their attempts at integrating technology and magic together for the rest of your life, and you’ll never get to explore the stars.”

  “Yeah I don’t want that,” I said immediately.

  “Yeah, I thought as much,” Samonosuke agreed. “The second option is to hide what you can do and go with your crew and basically pretend to be ordinary. If you don’t develop any of your techniques, your cultivation will stagnate and you’ll have a hard time progressing later, but you can take as much time as you want to figure out what you want to do with your life.”

  “Boring,” I complained.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “So the third option is that you come and play with us.”

  “Us?”

  “The Silent Ones. The Runaways. The Outcast Stars,” he said. “We have all sorts of names. We’re the ones left over from the great war, the ones who returned after the Shipfather had announced victory over the Empress Nadia and an end of the crusade. But we also decided that we didn’t want to live under the yoke of a government that still saw us as tools. So we started our own.”

  “Oh,” I said. “So there are others like you?”

  “Yeah. We’re all over the place, but we keep quiet for the most part. Sometimes a bandit ambush point pops up only to vanish before the government appears. Most of the time they just moved to a new spot, but the rest of the time? It was us. But that’s only a small part of what we do. Mostly we just help out the Atlians as they spread out their nexus to the rest of the galaxy.”

  “If I go with you, I’ll be able to meet the Atlians?” I asked

  “Yeah, sure. They feel much more comfortable aboard a cultivation Soulship than one without Qi. Your crew will be able to pay off their debts in no time as well,” he informed me.

  “I want to do that!” I decided definitively.

  “Yeah, well, I thought you might. But the best part about it is that it’s not a forever choice,” he said. “We won’t tell the government about your abilities, and you can continue to work regular jobs as well as working for the Atlians. So if you decide later on that you want to tell the government about yourself, you won’t be branded a rebel.”

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  “Okay,” I said.

  I relayed the information to my crew, and they contacted the humans on the other ship to confirm the offer.

  “ Your ship is welcome in the Silent Alliance,” the captain of the other ship said definitively. “This much is true. Its crew , on the other hand, remains to be tested.”

  He would say no more than this, explaining only that they would discuss the matter aboard the hidden space station. Oh, and he also assured the crew that they were not in any danger from the alliance; if they were determined not to be trustworthy then the alliance would simply purchase their ‘stocks’ in me and send them on their way, dropping them off at a nearby station to make their way from there.

  The news that they had an out for the crushing debt was welcome by many of the crewmembers, but not any of the ones that I was close to. I’d kind of gotten the idea that some of the people who were aboard me were only there because they had nowhere else to go, so the idea that they would be leaving me soon wasn’t that big of a deal.

  Tugging Samonosuke to the hidden base of the Silent Alliance took a few months, and I matured a lot. Not just igniting my Dantian, but also getting through a few of the awkward toddler phases like the ‘Look at me!’ phase and the ‘Read my Diagnostics manual with me!’ and my ‘I can hear you breathing, why aren’t you talking to me?’ phase.

  Technically that last phase was referred to either as the ‘best friend phase’ or the ‘creepy stalker girlfriend phase,’ depending on who you talked to. I focused really closely on Rebekah and needed to know her every thought. She was tolerant of it most of the time, but the third night of being woken up after every REM cycle to ask what she was dreaming about got to her and she asked to be transferred to the other ship.

  When she came back, she calmly informed me that she had passed the test and would be among my permanent crew, unless for some reason I decided that I didn’t want her. This was after I was out of that particular phase, but I was still over the moon with excitement that Rebekah wanted to stay with me.

  One by one, Captain Min-jae, Tess, Sanjay, and other members of the crew journeyed to Samonosuke to take their test. I was told that they didn’t really understand what the test was, they only sat in a room with an Atlian for an hour and discussed their past, present, and hopes for the future.

  At the end, most were told that they could remain aboard me. Some of them were told that they didn’t have a choice, and were not returned to me at all. They weren’t people that I would miss.

  It took me a few days while this was going on to realize that there was an Atlian aboard Samonosuke , and as soon as I realized this I asked to meet her, going so far as to drop back out of hyperspace and refuse to move until she visited.

  So that’s how I met Okada. She landed in my shuttle bay and toured my internals. She spoke with my crew as they gave the tour, praising me for being such a strong young ship and complimenting the flavor of my Qi. She quietly cultivated near my fusion core for an hour, then flushed my system with her own Qi, then cultivated for a while again before repeating the process.

  This was more beneficial to me than her. She was of the silver path, and my Qi generation was very little in those days, so it was basically just her breathing in and breathing out. But gradually my Qi reserves began to rise, and after a few days aboard she said that I had a lot of potential.

  But then she asked to be returned to the Samonosuke, stating that she had duties aboard that ship. Reluctantly, I allowed her to depart.

  I listened in on the crew as they discussed the future. The ones who had passed the test and were approved to remain on my crew were still grappling with the decision of whether or not they wanted to work with the alliance, while the ones who hadn’t been willing to leave me to take the test (out of fear that they wouldn’t be allowed to return) experienced even more complicated emotions.

  Which I didn’t understand at all.

  Anyway, eventually we arrived at the hidden station. I’d been expecting another clump of metal with many docking bays and whatever like the one I’d been drydocked in after my awakening.

  That is not what I found at all.

  ?