First off, let’s talk about where this comes from! There are two parts of that: Where did Clio come from and where did this piece come from?
Clio then. Clio is the Astronautica’s replacement for Palaemon, son of Hephaestus. Palaemon didn’t actually do a lot on the original voyage. I’ve done some trimming on the crew because. Well. It took a lot of pages to just get through the crew intro.1 I don’t know if you’re aware, but Hephaestus is famous for being lame. Turns out he’s also born from only Hera, who wanted to stick it to Zeus for trying to have a baby (Athena) and muscle in on women’s territory.2 Anyway, Clio stays because I liked the idea of Hephaestus’s descendants all inheriting his lameness because of course that’s how genetics work, ancient Greeks. But it gives me an opportunity to explore how ability works in space. I also made her female because the original crew is 100% male (and 98% misogynistic) and that needed shaking up.
So where did this work come from? Well, a few days ago (as of time I’m writing this), my writing group got together in Chicago! One of us was going to a conference there to pitch her book3 and since two of us live near there, we decided to fly the last member out and all spend a few days together before the conference. We got together on a Wednesday afternoon and played some games, then spent Thursday writing, doing writing exercises, and hitting the Chicago Institute of Art, and then did some more writing on Friday before exploring the Neo-Gothic campus of Chicago University and the ISAC museum there.4 Then two of them moved on while I took drove my friend to the Dreihaus museum for her research on the Gilded Age for an upcoming book. This piece and next week’s piece were from the writing exercises. For this one, we all took a side or background character and fleshed them out, but during the writing we stopped and swapped so that the writing was a contribution from all four of us. Clio was my choice; we did a nerdy dragon for my friend who’s writing a small-town cozy with several different anthro species; we worked on a rhetoric competition in Holland (and broke the timeline– look, some of us didn’t research this); and fleshed out the background of a self-centered girlfriend who doesn’t realize she’s living in a werewolf novel. So the breaks in this section are where we passed it back and forth. (I was considering leaving them out and letting people guess but I decided against it.)
Is this canon? Not necessarily. Am I going to keep everything from it? Eh, maybe. Am I going to keep most of it? For sure. Am I going to shamelessly steal my friend’s ability to technobabble? Shamelessly.
Without further ado, meet Clio.
Clio never found her half-body paralysis to be a huge impediment to her work. Her parents were able to find her a chair early and while it wasn’t as fancy as some cybernetics, she was fond of it. Not least because it became the frequent object of her early tinkering and development ideas. But she’d always wanted to be able to work on spaceships. She’d sit at the window by the docking bay for hours and watch ships fly in and out. Her datapad was full of sketches of different types of ships, fin designs, engine boosts, solar sails, and above all, the questions. Why did a Clymetus Mark III have fins that angled when its predecessors had straight fins? How thin could a solar sail be before tearing was a risk just from the act of unfurling it? Was landing gear necessary with maglev bases? What were the technical necessities in planning landing on a planet versus landing on a space station? How could you urge more acceleration out of a solar sail or a takeoff engine?
But no one would let her into the docks. She was too young. The chair would get in the way. Where were her parents anyway? Working, usually, of course. Cleo sighed in frustration, having been turned away yet again, elbows resting on the arms of her chair with her head in her hands, when she heard a voice.
“I’ve seen you around here before, haven’t I?” She looked up to the round, smiling face of Nikolas. Everyone knew the stationmaster’s son; his curly hair and cheerful grin were as recognizable as the insignias on his uniform.
“Hello sir,” Clio said, straightening. What was she supposed to do? Should she salute? She wasn’t in the station staff though her parents were.
“Don’t bother ‘sir’-ing me,” Nikolas said, lounging on one of the chairs near the window. “It’s Clio, right? Clio Mathis?”
She nodded.
—————————-
“Are you looking for someone?” he asked, taking in her youth, her chair. She hated when people did that. But he also looked at her eyes, and that gave her hope. Did he notice how much she wanted to get in among the engineers?
She risked asking yet again. “I want to watch them work,” she said, guesturing to the men, women, and otherwise gendered entitites moving between the hulls of the great starships. Watching, that should be safe. Not asking questions or working tools, no matter how much she wanted it.
Nikolas considered, his booted shoe tapping on the floor. “It’s a little hectic down there for someone so young,” he said, and her heart sank. “But I know somewhere else you might like.”
She doubted it. No doubt he was going to send her along to be with other children, who could be mockingly cruel. Still, it was clear she wasn’t wanted here today, like all days, so she followed him anways.
He kept up a steady pace, not so fast that she fell behind, but not so slow that she felt patronized. That was kind.
He ushered her into an elevator, then swiped his identification chip to unlock the full panel of buttons. A quick tap had them shooting up to one of the floating rings high above the docks.
When the door opened again, she gasped. It was the design lab, where all the starships were created before they hit the shipyard.
—-
Instantly she wheeled further in, not waiting for invitation, mouth agape with joy, her eyes dancing from blueprint to blueprint.
“That’s the design for the Galadriel Cruiser Mk III!” she cried, pointing at a rather elaborately diagramed white form.
Nikolas, a coy smile teasing across his lips, caught up to her. “Good eye,” he said. He opened his mouth to say more, but shut it into a grin as Clio turned back to it, her own words pouring out.
“It was the grandest ship of its time! It carried ambassadors from Thebes to Lesbos! Its work was crucial in stopping the inter[somthing]ian war!”
Clio’s face drew in, agony etched in her features. “And then they pushed the ship too far. They didn’t have adequate debris filters on the back intake ports, but still had the hubris to go through the Chyrrian field. Sucked up a bunch of tiny asteroids, practically iron fillings, and without magnetic filters, they floated all through entire engine structure until they threw off the heat balances, cause a systematic pressure shift, wound up getting caught in the mechanisms, and started a fire that quickly became an explosion. Half the ship went down, the other half… suffocated.”Blinking, Nikolas said, “You certainly know your ship history.”
Nodding eagerly, Clio turned to face him. “I read about it in Ovid’s Infernos Hubris. Lots of horrific ship accidents there; he always did a splendid job of explaining exactly what mistake led to the explosion. There’s so many different protective parts on a ship!”
“Can you tell me about this one?” Nikolas asked, striding to a filing cabinet and pulling out a file filled with data and diagrams. Clio accepted the file almost reverently.
“Oooh! Is this the Selene Speeder?” she asked on opening to the first diagram.
“Yep, got it in one,” said Nikolas.“They’re always trying to make it faster, and more convertible from space travel to planetside travel, but with its small interior, it’s compromising distance in the void…” Clio trailed off as she flipped through the different entries to the file, eyes growing wider. “This is versions II through VIII! And… plans for IX?”
—
“Well, yeah, those are still in the works, but you can see, it’s only half drawn,” Nikolas said.
“Yeah, the engine has been drawn and erased several times,” Clio said, tilting her head as she adjusted the drawings on her lap. “It looks like their trying to redesign the—is that the hydrolic booster?”
“Yes, but they don’t think it’s going to work,” Nikolas said.
“But if they want to expand the interior, they have to make it fit,” Clio mulled over the piece. “I bet something like a retrofitted Howitzer style engine would do the job.”
“Retrofitted for use as a hydrolic booster?” Nikolas asked. “Now I think you’re talking over my head.”
“Well, I was asking about these the other day, it’s what they did with the Galadriel cruiser engine, became the first prototype for the Naneurotic Special.”
“That was a best seller in it’s day,” Nikolas asked. “How do you know so much?”
Clio shrugged, uncomfortable now that the attention was turned on her. “Books mostly, but I don’t know that much, I’m still trying to get my head around the mechanics of some of these. If they’d just let me a little closer.”
“You’re a little young for that aren’t you?” Nikolas said and Clio’s face fell. Why had he even bothered to bring her up here if he was just going to give her the same lines every one else did? But he continued, “I’ll tell you what, when I was in training, I heard about this program, I think it’s exactly what you’re looking for. You’d have to work for it though, they don’t let just anyone do it.”
Nikolas looked at her sideways and Clio nodded, not realizing she was holding her breath.
“It’s the future engineers program, I’ll send you the comm link to apply for it. There’s a technical portion, you have to show them you know your stuff. I think the year I was eligible they were asked to build a nano coil from scratch? It’s tough stuff. But if you’re as good as I think you are, you’ll get in. They do a lot of hands-on work with repairs and with redesigning, and most people go straight from that program to work on ships. You think that’s something you’d like?”
And Clio knew there was nothing in seven universes that would suit her better.
Intellectual Property of Elizabeth Doman
Feel free to share via link
Do not copy to other websites or skim for AI training
- That…uh…hasn’t changed actually. But to be fair I’m making it part of the story and not just saying “And here’s this hero! And here’s this hero! And this guy did this in the past!” ↩︎
- Am I simplifying Greek myths? Why yes. Get used to it. This is not going to be an epic work of perfect Greekery. You’ll have to turn to my writing group friend’s work for that. ↩︎
- Which has gone SUPER WELL! We’re all really hopeful that she’s on her way to publishing it! I’m really looking forward to being able to toot her horn and become obnoxious to my friends by trying to shove her book in their faces! ↩︎
- I’ve made notes of some ancient stuff and a few curses and other practices of the way-back years. 😀 ↩︎
