Friday, October 16th

I was back at Styx Base. Wendy with me, because Victoria still seemed unsafe for her. With Wendy’s help, I had recycled most of the wreckage in the base and from the broken Type 21 lying around near the river. The rest still had some promise for reuse or reverse engineering. I just had not gotten around to it yet.

So I needed materials from elsewhere. There had not been a major Mack incursion for some time, perhaps they would be obliging soon again? It was time to reactivate the Mack trap, but with some upgrades.

I disassembled the teleport gate from the Type 21 that had held it so far and moved it into a sort of fixed turret. It was mounted on a fibercrete foundation and a barbette that could point it in any horizontal direction. Lining it up with the sender of a teleported unit was a technical necessity. From afar, the whole thing resembled a squat, overdimensional cannon. I called it the ACF, the Advanced Capture Facility.

As Wendy and I were assembling the equipment inside, she asked “What is all that stuff?”

I replied “The big slabs are internal armor, made of the lonsdaleite I told you about. It is still the best armor material at my disposal, and it helps to keep the Macks from getting out.”

“These are the emitters of a Nanite Annihilation Field. It prevents Magical Girls, including the enemy ones, from using most of their special abilities. How that works, I understand only at a surface level and Elya was not forthcoming with answers. And here we have…”

Wendy interrupted “Who is Elya?”

Oops. I had given away more than I wanted. Damn. But here it was again, the old trust problem. Lie and dissemble to people I considered friends to hide things, at the risk of being exposed later? While not in a romantic sense, Wendy had grown on me. Working together on upgrading Styx Base for a while now, we had developed a comfortable sense of comradeship.

I took the leap of faith again. “You may have heard that I have an implant in my head, very loosely comparable to the uplink Magical Girls have?"

“Yes, why?”

“Mine has a name, Elya. She is more than a simple database and software appliance. Elya has intelligence of her own, and she is the gatekeeper to more advanced technology than I have let on so far. The limitation is that I have to earn access, mostly by killing Macks.”

Wendy was perplexed. “Database? Software appliance? What Arina told me was nothing of the kind.”

“Yes, what MGs have is mostly an uplink so their operators can help them use their powers. Elya is designed more for solo operators. In my home universe, we Vanguard can directly buy equipment for points. The whole blueprint and fabricator stuff is a workaround because hardware purchases are not available here.”

“Oh. So if I help you kill more Macks, you can earn access faster, get better equipment and kill more Macks?”

“Yes. The keyword is “help”, I get some points for other people killing Macks with my weapons, but for the full payout it has to be me or Elya pulling the trigger. But helping me upgrade the base is a nice way of giving indirect support.”

I continued explaining. “The hydraulic cylinder is to crush the Macks, It can handle all small Mack units I have seen so far.”

Said cylinder was lurking behind the aperture of the gate, ready to lunge into the chamber and smash the metal pests against the massive door at the other end.

“It also has a blender function. See those slits here? Through these OmniCutter blades can extend and cut the captured Mack apart.”

“Damn I love that. I hope I get to see it in action.”

By the time the new trap was ready, I was almost out of metals. That I could finish the project at all was thanks to the generous use of the carbon-based Lonsdaleite, which I could essentially make from fallen trees.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

I would try not to use the crusher on Dark MGs, as they were victims themselves. But anything else was fair game. Maybe I would try to get the energy sources of the Battlecats intact.

In the meantime, I recycled some of the local rocks. They contained a few percent titanium by weight. While not very effective, it gave me some of the metal.

Monday, October 19th

The big fabricator was ready, but now waiting for a Mack emergence was as boring as it sounded. To pass the time, I gave Wendy lessons in driving Herbie and tinkered with analyzing some residual nanites I had found in the discarded Mack bodies of Arina and Wendy.

The one I got involved with first was the nanites for the “Flame Arrow” blaster the Mack girls had integrated in their forearms. Searching some residue in the “Scraper” analyzer gave me lots of fragmented and partly vaporized nanoscale spheres. I finally found some intact enough to get more information and guess at their purpose. As I was browsing my Lorekeeper nanotech textbook, Elya piped up:

I see you are trying to guess at what these little spheres do. Would you like some help with that?

“If you are willing to give some hints, yes please!”

These are large Buckminsterfullerenes with a payload inside. The observed range of the “Flame Arrow” indicates that they are very dense, otherwise they would be stopped by air drag within centimeters. My best guess from the data you showed me is that these are microscopic artificial mass balls.

“What is an Artificial Mass ball, and what does it do?”

Being heavy. It also explodes after a short time.

“Succinct and only a fraction of what I wanted to know. Can you tell me more about the mechanics of the payload, and how it is stuffed inside these tiny carbon balls?”

The residue inside suggests this is a short lived container of a hyper-compressed oxygen and hydrogen mix, held together by a tiny pseudo-black hole field. When the little spheres burst, they release a considerable amount of heat. Stuffing is done by a very specialized little matter reconfiguration machine.

So, not really a nanite in the sense of most sci-fi novels. But it served the purpose well enough, apparently. SHOCKS seemed to be lazy about their classifications and just call all this stuff nanites.

What I found in the “vaporizing blast” projector was a lot closer to what I expected from a nanite. It was a nanoscale mechanical shredder, powered by a similarly hyper-compressed ball and equipped with a primitive sensor to guide it deeper into the target. Here we actually had a molecule-sized motor and some cutting blades. Still no real programming, but some hint of robotics at least.

I also found another thing that had me baffled for now. Elya teased me with

Once you get to Class 3 shielding systems, I might have an explanation for you. And there are other things you have not noticed yet.

I postponed investigating that for now, as I had other plans and Class 3 stuff would probably wipe out all of my points and tokens, if I could afford it at all. And I had other plans for now.

So Wendy and I went back to speculating about Mack technology, having nothing else to do. Styx Base being so remote and difficult to access was showing its downsides.

Half an hour later, Elya alerted me to a new development. The Arcane Feeler was picking up hyperspace activity, but the signature was different from the usual teleportations.

Smelling a rat, I told Elya to move some of my Macks to the ACF and handled the rest by remote control. I stayed deep in the base myself, in case the Macks would send some explosives for a change. While they had never done so in Haven, I halfway expected something like a small nuke.

For a highly advanced nation or whatever they were, it would be an obvious way to get rid of Humanity’s last strongholds. Of course, I would not complain about ongoing incompetence on part of the Macks. Perhaps Elya knew more about it. “Elya, what can you tell me about sending weapons of mass destruction through the teleporter?”

Radioactive substances tend to explode in the primitive teleport systems the Macks are using on this world. The energy sources of the Dark MGs and Battlecats are a carefully crafted exception unsuitable for big explosions.

Chemical weapons might work, unless the molecules are fragile and very large. The latter also gets in the way of using the teleporter for biological weapons or yourself. Your DNA would get shredded.

Ugh. Good that I never tried traveling by Mack teleport. But now it was time to try and catch something. With Wendy looking over my shoulder, I pointed the ACF at the estimated source of the signal and powered it up in capture mode.

It took a bit of experimenting, but eventually I was able to redirect a teleported object to the ACF. It looked like... a big ball of scrap?

Still wary, I remotely used the hydraulic cylinder to push it around a bit and cut it up with the OmniCutter blades. The parts that fell off still looked like scrap on the inside. Eventually, I opened the ACF door and pushed the chunk of scrap out.

My Fours dragged the smaller parts out. Obviously those spikes were still useful for spearing stuff and then pulling it around.

I managed to steal two more chunks out of whatever transport system the Macks were using, then they seemed to shut it down. Wendy and I spent the rest of the day collecting and recycling scrap.