Chief Warrant Officer Charlie David Wasserman-

I was in agony. I’d honestly intended to have the young goblinoid take a look at it before I’d headed out, but there’d been a rift breaking on Gallis 5, a sprite colony.

Sprites were a fairly innocuous specialty breed created by Disney genetics. The lightworlders were created before the whole ‘renewable resources’ craze had gotten canned. Biological vegetarians, they were lightworlders that had real, butterfly-like wings. Beautiful humans, they were completely and utterly unsuited to anything resembling combat and had gotten a .3 G Earth-like world by default, since any other human breed that tried to live in such low Gs other than as a retirement home would be looking at bone degradation before they could ever hope to form a twin core.

The entire planet was a glorified retirement community and vacation spot tended by beautiful, empathic fairies who would do their best to make your dreams come true… well, except for sex. Any full G human that tried to do the dirty with a sprite would wind up with a horribly injured local they’d have to explain to the authorities. Fortunately, the spot was also a colony for merfolk, who didn’t have the same problem, and who were happy to charge for a ‘unique’ experience.

Basically, they were helpless. The mer couldn’t go on land to hit the broken rift, and the sprites would get slaughtered by the score. Usually, the government would have just written it off, let the locals hire a merc group to clean it out, or let them complain to the fleet. Only the fact that the planet was favored by retired politicians, and powerful family heads for their twilight years made it a point of immediate interest.

And it was an undead rift. The one kind of rift that was guaranteed to overload frequently, that mercs wouldn’t touch if they had a brain, and the kind that only light or divine-focused combatants had a real chance to deal with. Undead cores had to be crushed, because instead of controlling chaos spawns, they enhanced them, and were corrupted from their very creation. It happened, rarely, the system usually installed a decent core, but nothing, not even the galaxy-wide SI that supposedly was the system was perfect. And I was the closest Paladin powerful enough to end the rift.

And I had. But all of that necrotic essence drove my caliban up the wall. The rift was fairly weak, barely an iron core, but the presence of so much necrotic essence overloaded my already-damaged caliban, and I wondered if I was going to have to install an essence regulator soon, driving me even further away from gold core even as the quest rewards tried to push me closer. Advancement was a natural, organic process... the more prosthetics or artificial enhancements your body possesses, technological OR magical, the more impossible progression becomes, as your essence flows try to work around or reject the inclusions.

Cybernetics, permanent enchantments, and prosthetics were a slippery power slope. They could make you powerful much more quickly and easily than trying to advance through cultivation, but after a certain point, they created a permanent bottleneck. Some people were willing to make that sacrifice, and some people, like me, were forced to do so just to keep going.

Still, that savage sparking and twitching from the caliban was an all-the-time thing now, keeping me up at night through involuntary motions unless I was deeply sedated and sending agony through my muscles at all times. I was terrified of getting addicted to pain pills, sedatives, or muscle relaxants since an addiction like that would kick me off the paladin path as surely as going to work for a loan shark as a leg-breaker or leaving a trail of broken hearts and unwed mothers behind me would.

I could probably head to one of the slaver worlds to get a regulator installed, a third-rate replacement for the sputtering caliban, but those worlds had a very special attitude towards paladins, and I likely wouldn’t even wake up from a surgery involving them.

And if I did, I’d lose the use of my energy sword, the very symbol of being a paladin, or more likely I’d use it and accidentally lop a few of my irreplaceable body parts off without the calibans’ energy control, a very real risk without enough functional meridians to help my limited precognition guide it’s movements safely.

I was heading toward my new duty assignment. It should be possible, with my babysitting plus running a group of troopers through the occasional rift, even with my handicap, so yeah, the little goblin was on my mind.

It was creepy how easily our auras had meshed… even while she was fighting me for control of her drones, her aura had welcomed me like a hot shower after a serious workout session. I knew that the danger of a bond was real, so I’d occasionally had to let her slide when I’d felt my own aura trying to slide into place like a puzzle piece in an old jigsaw, a key into its lock, or a man into a willing woman’s...anyway.

It was stupid, and crazy, because first of all, she looked like a boy. Not even a boy, but a genderless little goblin, less than half my height, big ears, a pug nose, bilious green copper-tinged skin, and huge liquid eyes that... Anyway, not exactly in my attraction wheelhouse. Nope, I couldn’t imagine her as a woman, or even a man, I had NO attraction towards males, it was more like I wanted to pick her up and pet her like a kitten. Distracting. You could enjoy petting a kitten without it getting weird.

But more importantly, I needed her help. Desperately. She had identified the tri-whatever that was malfunctioning, and even after letting the tech docs know about her observation, they’d been utterly clueless about what to do with the information.

They knew what a caliban was. It was an ultra-rare drop in a copper rift that reset once a year. But my version? It was a loot drop from a silver rift that no longer existed, a necrotic rift that I’d destroyed in my quest for the... creature that wound up infecting me with necrotic essence overload. The idea of using it as a stopgap for burnt meridians delicate enough to control limited foresight to use an energy blade? Utterly foreign to them. They could barely trace the mana circuitry in a copper caliban… a silver one was like trying to find a needle in a stack of nearly identical needles, each the width of a micron and the length of a football field.

Normal calibans were sought after avidly because they would allow a sorcerer to cast a fireball in a high-tech rift that had a magic rating of like 2, or they’d allow a heavy trooper in the latest power armor and tech 6 juggernaut weaponry to blast his way through a rift where the most advanced weapon was a crossbow. Very useful. Mine? No one knew if it was magitech 7, 8, or maybe even 9.

But Reynard had not only identified the problem… not hard with the arcing, even some of the other goblins in the class had noticed it, but had proposed a solution, and claimed that, with enough advancement, she might even be able to fix the meridians themselves! That was the sort of impossibility that took some sort of healer all the high-end cultivation resources an advanced planet could produce for a decade.

Fixing a broken foundation, repairing a shattered dantian, even fixing a broken core paled in comparison. Burnt meridians were generally a hard stop for cultivation, even lopping off the offending body part and regenerating it with powerful life essence wouldn’t restore the broken pathways. High-end cultivators have been known to remove body parts with burnt meridians permanently to keep advancing their cultivation.

Hell, most researchers weren’t even aware that the magitech HAD some kind of essence programming, let alone devised a way to recalibrate it and keep my neurology from going bugnuts from sensory deprivation while it was restored!

And then she ‘broke’ the Kobayashi ‘fight until you die’ simulation. That thing had been designed by some of the finest software developers in the galaxy to test how far you could push a recruit. It was impossible to defeat, the damned thing cheated constantly at higher levels specifically to up the ante and ramp up the pressure until it was impossible to even continue the simulation, cheating as much as necessary to achieve that goal. It was supposed to only be gotten around by either advancing past its rank, to at least copper, or by cheating.

And she broke it, and even apologized and admitted that she knew HOW it cheated, by spawning in greater void beasts without their killer auras JUST to increase the challenge, and claimed if it had been ‘real’ she would have gotten beat in no time… but she ignored the fact that the entire thing was an impossible cheat. A Chaos lord could never have the power to send out titans on a whim, they never just spawned. There was a Hulk somewhere that everyone hoped to find someday and destroy that overloaded and created monsters like the tyrants, planet killers, and creepers.

Even as a Paladin, that level of humility was staggering and made me wish I was greater than I was, and some little goblin making me feel… less than honorable simply by being honest almost made me ashamed to count myself among the paladins.

Was I thinking about her constantly? You bet your ass. She was, as Mike had joked, my last hope, and possibly the best hope for the human species. Something the church knew was that there were a lot more than just humans in the galaxy, but humans seemed to have to take on the lion’s share of fighting against the Chaos Lords and rift spawns… and we were not doing well since the destruction of the old empire.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

With a quiet hiss, the transiter docked with the breaker’s drydock. Right now, I could barely tolerate real space. Ironically enough, shadowstepper cargo haulers were a lot more comfortable than even the heartbeat spent in a node’s blink transport. Most people couldn’t handle the side effects of shadowstep transit, despite its efficiency, but with the amount of necrotic flux running through my system, it just felt like more of the same.

Could true deviation, getting taken over by a Chaos lord, really be that far off when shadowstepping was more comfortable than putzing about in real space? Well, if that ever started to happen, a solution was just a finger flick away… and I could destroy myself in such a way that there was no chance I could be brought back as a wraith.

Still, the fact that the system still labeled me as a divine paladin was extremely comforting. Destroying myself instead of deviating wasn't suicide, it was a sacrifice to prevent myself from turning into a monster, and intent mattered... I had no desire to die and was not filled with despair, I would ONLY use that option to stop myself from turning into a silver-tiered abomination.

The Crow was an interesting ship. Arguably a Valkyrie flagship, if they had one, according to the command net it had a distinguished service record second to none. In its long and storied career, even when it had been temporarily converted to a luxury liner, it had participated in the destruction of dozens of void beasts, often singlehandedly.

It was magitech 7, which probably helped, but its captains were known to be very idiosyncratic, inviting losers and known trouble cases on board and somehow binding them together into a truly notable crew, finding depths of ability in them that defied logical explanation based on their histories and backgrounds.

The fact that Roisin had wound up on this ship wasn’t even slightly a surprise. They had fingers fairly deep in a number of intelligence pies, and powerful contacts in the form of the first Captain and even subsequent captains. Yes, the first Captain was currently a councilor and part of the deep admiralty, but the second captain who had recently retired was just as influential among the corporate set and bid fair to turn public opinion against the inclusion of the slaver worlds into the UNP as recognized political entities.

And this new captain was a real mystery. Connected deeply to the church, I’d heard rumors that she was pushing to start a crusade against the slaver worlds, and ban conscription altogether… the cost/benefit analysis, especially with all the corruption that naturally gravitated towards any form of legalized bondage, didn’t add up.

Not surprising, but the planetary congress was fighting tooth and nail to keep it active, probably because of the huge cut that the system lined their pockets with. Resources retrieved by conscripts were sold and the profits were split between Congress and the fleet, with massive graft at both ends. It was no wonder the ruinous system had lasted as long as it did.

The sentry at the gate, a well-endowed six-foot-two beauty wearing black armor that emphasized her female body as much as protecting and concealing it, which meant she was likely an Amazonian, quickly accepted my identity and sent me to the quarterdeck to meet the officer of the watch.

What was most surprising was that when Mike sent over my credentials, the XO had immediately contacted me, inviting me to take a position on board the ship as the troop commander quickly, even eagerly. She was a Taer, ironically naming herself Jennifer Taera, one of possibly a dozen still alive after the gene wars. They had been the first success story, virtually immortal and with nearly complete system control, and paid for that immortality with the lack of a foundation, otherwise, they probably would own the universe by now. That immortality, throwing in the baseline’s jealousy of something they could never achieve, was one of the sparks that made the gene wars flare as brightly and with such deadly intensity.

It was almost like they’d been waiting for me for some time, and were actually surprised that I’d made it here where I was supposed to be, finally. I was simply glad I’d managed to catch the ship before it left drydock a week from now… trying to catch up to it mid-flight would have been untold misery.

There was a quick tour from a midshipman named Priscilla, or princess, or something like that… she was a feisty little house scion, utterly convinced of her own superiority, and I’d dealt with the like all my life… even the heavy-handed, childish attempts to flirt earned her nothing more than a bewildered look before the teenager dropped it.

Someone hadn’t gotten the memo that Warrant Officers, as specialist NCOs, could probably even kick a captain’s ass with impunity if they had a good excuse. The Navy rested on chief and warrant officer shoulders and had since back to the time when old Earth was circumnavigated by wooden ships, and everyone knew it.

Except, possibly, idiotic young midshipmen convinced of their own, and their family’s, importance and utterly generic beauty. I was reasonably certain I’d seen an absolutely identical set of cosmetic mods on a celebrity’s face back when I was a kid, based on some ancient sex symbol at the dawn of the information age named Monroe. I especially had zero interest in children who, based on my own haggard and scarred appearance, were trying their amateurish best to cultivate blackmail material.

“Is there a new petty officer here named Reynard?” I asked the would-be seductress as she led me sourly back towards the trooper decks. “I was asked for a fitrep on the petty officer when I arrived. I was supposed to have been here three weeks ago, and they were supposed to have gotten here last month, but I was unavoidably detained by a medical emergency.”

“The new droner? Yes, Mister Wasserman, she’s either with her new boyfriend, the goblin chief in flight control, or she’s probably in the store, getting fitted for uniforms AGAIN. Her fitrep should probably mention her penchant for wasting the ship’s stores frivolously. I understand that she’s going through some weird genejacker chrysalis, but she should just use coveralls until she’s done. Plus she eats like a pig. Like a whole herd of pigs. Ever since she grew b...height, she’s been down there every day getting fitted for new combat suits. Oh, here’s the trooper bay, Mister Wasserman. Probably better than any fleet vessel, please let me know if you need anything. Anything at all, day or night.”

Her? She’d given up her male identity already? And a boyfriend? A goblin? Had she bonded already? I was self-aware enough to realize that the unfamiliar feeling was either anxiety or jealousy. I was supposed to protect her FROM getting bonded, not drive her into the arms of a… goblin? Well, she had certainly made friends with goblins easily at the school, even when they’d teasing referred to as ‘alien’ and ‘half goblin’.