Technology

A darkly glowing cube of unknown metal, found by Axel and Luna on an abandoned station. Not merely an artifact — a living thing, a fragment of the Great Source. Every use takes a piece of the bearer's soul. The black veins on Axel's skin are the first sign of it.

An artifact that can wind one critical moment back, once. The Elder of the Lisitans handed it to the Treed twins before their march on the Serki. It works a single time; after that the anchor falls apart into temporal dust.

Set it down on a planet's surface and it pumps Abilit out of the crust unattended. Level three holds up to a thousand units in storage. It carries defensive modules: try to steal one and it destroys itself, burning out five hundred metres of ground.

It modulates a magnetic field around the hull. The field turns charged particles aside, and does nothing at all against a physical torpedo. The best models hold even a laser, forming a mirror of plasma that sends the shot back at whoever fired it.

Abilit is a crystalline element, number 214. Inert, it is violet and cold to the touch. Under load it turns to plasma. Its central property is that it remembers instructions: one gram of Abilit can hold the map of an entire system.

The warp coil compresses space ahead of the ship and lets it out behind. The ship itself does not move — the space around it does. Because of that, time passes for the crew during a warp and not for anyone watching from outside. A long jump ages a captain by days.

The fuel is stabilised Abilit plasma. One litre holds the energy of a ten-kilotonne stellar blast. An ordinary warp jump needs a fraction of a drop. That drop costs as much as a working scout ship.

The hold uses spatial compression: a cube two metres on a side can carry eighty cubic metres of usable volume. The cost is Abilit. The other cost is that damage decompresses the contents in a millisecond. Pilots are advised to be elsewhere.