I nodded, “I understood some of that. Something about batkin, and a steaming pile of what I assume means fecal matter since that’s usually terms that are used together and erroneously referred to as scrot. And stupid is, of course obvious. So what, exactly, makes me as stupid as a giant steaming pile of batkin scrot in variously unstable packaging solutions?”
She smiled, “your perceptivity is annoyingly sporadic. You were very close to the right interpretation, and yet you failed to grasp its significance. I understand you don’t intend to bond her, but please use your scrotting aura.”
I started to spread my aura. Honestly, I wasn’t used to extending it unless I was trying to fight for control or otherwise combat. But there, just there, I felt a hint of familiarity. Like a taste of honey blessed with the tiniest dash of orange and cream, a tiny drink of cool clear water in the desert after a week of treks through dry and dusty wastes.
I looked at the amazingly gorgeous green-skinned girl, who turned to look right back at me, even more quickly, and yet… despite her obvious shock, the dozen drones she seemed to be controlling still steadily handled their lots, without a flicker of loss of control.
She was… amazing. Where before she was squat and almost shapeless, now she had lively hips, beautiful yet sparse curves, a small but proud pair of breasts, shoulders that were the perfect shape to hold while you dragged her in for a kiss, and her hair, previously just an endlessly cute but impractical tuft of long blue fur, was now a shoulder-length cut that exposed a long, beautiful throat.
She was still very short, but it was woman-short. Five feet and a hint of change, just the right height to pick her up by that lightly curved bottom as you devoured that lovely slender throat.
Her face, previously squashed around her huge eyes, had stretched out and lengthened, her jawline filling out ever-so-faintly, and her eyes, her beautiful, crystalline blue eyes, were still oversized, over a cute nose resting above pert, eminently kissable lips.
What the scrot had happened? This happened in a month? It was more defined than a twin-core alteration!
“Shut your mouth, boy, you are drawing flies. And yes, I get it. Little green treasure troll to Venus incarnate between one look and the next.”
I didn’t know what a fly was, but I snapped my mouth shut. I knew who the legendary Venus was, that lore was part of the class system, and she didn’t have anything on what I saw now. No wonder Princess was so snappy and petty. Roisin’s change turned the blonde from top-shelf wine into that generic no-label white vinegar you find at the back of the supply depot after everything that people actually wanted had gotten raided.
“See, that is what I want. I want someone to just once look at me like that… or even better, I want to look at THEM like that. They could even sneer at me in disgust, I wouldn’t care as long as I got to feel what you are feeling for myself for just one second. I’d even accept the self-disgust you feel when you think about how you look at the same time.”
I glared at Taera, “Thank you so much for bringing reality into sharp relief. You couldn’t even allow me to imagine that I was NOT a dead man walking for long enough to get a hormone rush. You are a total thrill-kill.”
She grinned, “Now THAT is something I have heard many, many times. Now excuse me while I cover up my personal pain with biting sarcasm.”
“Personal pain?”
“I was being euphemistic again.”
I smiled a little, “I think I am beginning to understand you, a little.”
She shook her head, “No, you think that you think you are beginning to understand me a little, which is fine because I want you to think that you think you are beginning to understand something as incomprehensible as me. Did you think of that?”
I nodded, “Yes I did. And if you were a girl I’d be turned on by you. I appreciate wit.”
She shrugged as the door from the loading bay opened. “And if I were a girl I probably would be having more fun with this whole conversation. At least I can feel appreciation for wit, but you have left me disappointed, Mister Wasserman.”
I facepalmed and turned to greet Roisin. “Hello petty officer Reynard, I am pleased, if not totally surprised, to see you here.”
She smiled, and it was like someone turned on a shipboard illumination lantern in my head. I shut down my aura HARD before it reached out and desperately enfolded hers like a lion capturing a gazelle. Not that mine was stronger than hers, she had already proven several times that while mine was an exquisitely honed weapon for fighting evil, hers was...pervasive, and welcoming. Very bad for maintaining my intentional ostracism. And it didn’t help that now, she looked like she had always felt.
“You look very different.”
She nodded, “I am an adult. I was an adult before, but we have an extended adolescence. Chemically, I wouldn’t really grow until there were males around other than my father and brothers. It’s a survival mechanism.”
She looked down at herself, “So I stretched. I am pretty much physically as adult as I will get for a while, Mister Wasserman. Did you come this way about your malfunction? It seems to have gotten worse.”
I started to nod, but the commander interrupted, “Actually, he went on detached duty because of it for a while. I trust this will be a low-level repair, and we had an opening for a troop commander, so I jumped at the chance to get a paladin on our team. Once you get his little bug pushed, we should be ready to start tracking rifts.”
She smiled, “When, Warrant?”
I was watching the drones, which were still happily laying in supplies, seemingly without guidance. Obviously, they were SI drones, so they were perfectly capable of loading the bay themselves, but I could tell by the occasional twitch that she was still giving a few judgment nudges… without even watching them.
Taera glanced at the loads. “You will be relieved in 20 minutes. Can you be at the med bay in 30 minutes? Is there anything special you will need?”
She nodded at Taera, “Yes, ma’am. You are clearly a very skilled empath, and I trust your ability. Can you project?”
Taera nodded, “Not my best ability, but yes.”
She gulped nervously, “I don’t know the others as well as I did in my class… can you set up some kind of empathic link, feed him sensations, feelings, anything at all while I refresh the programming? I’ll need a remote programmer because I am not a surgeon, I don’t want to have to open him up or anything to get to the caliban.”
Taera looked at me, “You don’t know me. Are you willing to allow me to try and support your psyche while she reloads your caliban?”
I grinned, “Considering the stakes, I think it’s in your best interests. That’s a way safer bet than trusting your benevolent nature, commander. Right now, I’d trust you with my life and sanity more than anyone else in the universe.”
Taera sighed. “I hate being predictable.” she turned and headed out of cargo observation. The ship itself was shaped like a long, sleek shell, almost 200 feet long, which was not that big for a carrier.
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As a light drone carrier, its weapons WERE its drones, as well as its primary defense, and it was built with this philosophy in mind. Hidden in the hull were a dozen anti-missile pods, but it didn’t even hint at any of the big anti-ship weaponry ships of the line would possess… It did not need them and was honestly not built to use anti-ship weaponry. Anything that got too close could be escaped, shredded by drones, or was simply too dangerous to effectively fight, and its special mission of dropping off high-intensity delve teams or void-fighting drones was reflected in every aspect of its design.
“I do have something to tell you though, Warrant….”
I raised an eyebrow. “What would that be, Petty Officer Reynard?”
“I cheated on the Kobayashi. It wasn’t a graded scenario, and I kind of got angry that it was a full-on failure every time.”
I looked at her in surprise, “So how did you cheat on it?”
She smiled a little, “The School had a built-in failsafe that restricts the engagement range to a single AU. Sort of a cheat itself to avoid overloading the server. It’s tech 6, with limited memory. I massaged that out to three AU’s using the school’s training node and uhh… godmoded myself, a little.”
“That was still an incredible feat.”
She shook her head, “Not really when I showed Braxis,” she pointed out an older goblin still loading supplies, “How I did it, he did the same thing in only three tries, and actually improved on it. I’m not some supergenius, it’s just a matter of recognizing the patterns, and the trainers made sure I had LOTS of chances to learn the patterns. I know full well that void beasts cannot be rift-spawned, a massive cheesy move, so I decided to play back with a little cheese of my own. Sorry.”
I grinned, “Roisin Gabrielle Reynard, did you just admit to an ethics violation?”
She shook her head, “No, Warrant Officer, I just was letting you know that in the future, perhaps asking someone to win at any price might not be the best course of action for a punishment simulation and a technical affinity. There is almost always an easier way than just bulling forward.”
I smiled a little evilly, “In that case, I have a confession as well. The Kobayashi WAS a graded scenario. That test, and its variants, have existed for as long as space travel. It’s a tradition. You were told that the intent was to put you under pressure and see how well you could maintain your training and abilities in an unwinnable situation.”
“It isn’t?”
I shook my head, “No. There’s no such thing as an unwinnable situation. Nobody is trained to fail. The deck was stacked against you, right from the beginning. Usually, it’s used on command track potentials with a streak of black sheep as a way of seeing how far you will go to succeed.”
“The way to win is to cheat. Good job.”
***
“You’re done.”
Taera’s voice was biting as I opened my eyes. I hadn’t really been asleep, more like… spacing. Free-form imagining, a lot of it involving a certain blue-haired, green-skinned young woman that had caught my attention. It was weird because I was seldom prone to flights of fancy.
“Wait, what? Already? How long have I been out of it?”
Taera was standing there, as solid as ever, peering at me. “An hour and twenty minutes. We had to drag Kessler, the shaman, in here. Your spirit apparently tried to play hooky while the software was getting updated, and I wish you’d been able to see it. Braxis was stabilizing your other hardware, Reynard was cussing at the remote programmer like she caught it with another woman, and Kessler kept mumbling about it not being your time yet. You were quite the spectacle.”
I didn’t hurt. Holy scrot, I didn’t hurt. I wasn’t trying to wrestle my muscles into obedience. They were simply...responding. Not as well as they could, but I’d been dealing with the side effects of the overstressed caliban for quite some time.
I lifted my arms from the chair I had been sitting in, moved them, and then got to my feet. The sickbay was all white ceramics, but the medical machinery was withdrawn into the wall, so it looked like a plain white room with several stools and a low-back chair. The whole sensation felt… different, from normal.
I checked my reactions. I was still able to anticipate where my limbs would go, but it felt…. Hollow, less buzzy. Not bad, not good, but at least I wasn’t getting ‘pre-echoes’ of every possible move my limb could make as it moved. I opened my eyes again and checked the position I had extrapolated. Yeah. Good. I’d still be able to use my energy blade safely.
But I did lack the stabilized pre-echoes I was used to. Yes, it had been hell when a thousand possibilities had been fighting to control my motor cortex, a sign of the caliban’s malfunction, but it seemed like the energy flowed from my dantian, through my still-working meridians, and the...what the scrot?
I fell to the floor with a thump. Three of my meridians were still scorched, but I could feel the flow of essence along the meridians, seeming to skip a hollow spot and flow to my limbs. It wasn’t as… smooth, natural, or even as strong as it had been back when I had a full complement, but the flow, while it skipped along the scorched pathway, was at least as strong at my extremities as it had been back when I had been bronze, before the incident that had wrecked them.
“What the… scrot,” I murmured again, out loud, looking at my hands, where I could see a gentle flow of essence to my fingertips. There were still angry patches of black necrotic essence along the burned meridians, but there was a silver tracery of what looked like thousands of threads of some kind of… metal? Running along my nervous system in my arms, sort of like the thick strands that the caliban had run between my limbs.
My circulation was still wrong, but not even close to as wrong as it had felt with the three damaged meridians… whatever the strands were, they were picking up essence from my cycling, and running it down my arms, and my left leg, entirely unlike the way that the caliban forced essence to them when I was in the zone. No one writes a cultivation manual for someone with broken pathways, after all.
Taera was smirking at me.
“What?” I asked her, as I picked myself up off the floor.
“You now officially owe the ship seven hundred credits. Oh, and I am putting an official reprimand in your record of troubling fraternization.”
“Troubling what?”
“Fraternization. Petty Officer Reynard tried to repair your caliban for almost half an hour, and then finally gave up on it. She asked for over four hundred miles of carbon nanotube, in thirty-yard increments, and sealed axial proteins. You are well aware that that is a vital repair part for essence drive stabilization because it can safely transport essence away from the skin of the ship and is used both for cultivation chambers and engine repairs.”
“I uhh… no, I know what carbon nanotube is, because it’s used for flexible reinforcements, but axial… whatever, nope. I am enlisted, remember? Not a tech.”
Taera sighed melodramatically. “Right, jock. She couldn’t fix your caliban. Something about the way you used it was…. Way outside of its design parameters. They are meant to stabilize tech and sorcery, not channel essence as part of your circulation. You should be happy, she said you were possibly the dumbest man she’d ever met for trying to do that, it was like a water affinity trying to use fire cultivation methods.”
I nodded, “I didn’t have any choice. Wait, she couldn’t fix my caliban? Then why are my abilities working right now?”
Taera shrugged, “She cheated. She treated your heart dantian like a… power core? I don’t know what it was, it wasn’t particularly high-tech, but she’s using all that nano like… a combination of hydraulics and power cables, I guess. I don’t understand it, but she said it was technically tech 3, but that you should be good for stabilization up to tier 8. but no going into tier 2 or lower rifts.”
I felt along the back of my neck and noticed a bandage where my caliban's extra stabilizing should be. “But this… How did she know to do this? I can actually FEEL the essence in my limbs now, and it feels amazing. And what did you mean by fraternization?”
“She’s a heavyworlder. Korse was a security concern, so the fleet dropped a flare generator in their sun a century ago to keep them out of space. Apparently, they have to do something similar for automated prosthetics, and at high gravities, standard tech 3 mechanisms simply aren’t strong enough without essence flow. Congratulations, part of your system is now officially magitech clockwork, not even advanced enough to qualify as steampunk.”
Taera snickered, “And while you were having your little pornographic dreams, I couldn’t see them, but I felt them, you groped the petty officer.”