Petty Officer 3rd class Roisin Gabrielle Reynard-

I was mortified. When he’d grabbed me while I was dealing with the caliban, the first thing I’d wanted to do, even surrounded by others, was just to melt into him, and let him do whatever he wanted. Even without his aura, when he’d grabbed what little I had in the breast department and tugged me into his chest, I just wanted to close my eyes and enjoy it.

No! I was not going to get bonded. Not yet. I was not a sexual creature… or at least I wasn’t until yesterday, but even the necrotic essence crawling along his pathways hadn’t bothered me much… after all, my spiritual affinity was MADE to handle that stuff.

Not as well as a necromancer, and I couldn’t just burn it away like a life mage, but necrotic essence isn’t really evil, it was just one more aspect in the never-ending tapestry of essence that made up reality. People just tended to use it for evil purposes because it was very good at it, and if you weren’t able to control it, it tended to control you.

The second reason was the caliban.

And that made me angry. I shouldn’t be, I mean, even warrant officers could be ignorant, but the way he used it was STUPID. And I didn’t understand why he couldn’t see a healer to get his meridians healed… he mumbled something about costs, but even my mother could have regenerated his meridians. I couldn’t, wrong gifts, but any foundation-stage life mage with at least condensed energy could do it fairly easily since they were scarred, not destroyed. Scrot, had his own healing gifts… why couldn’t he just grow new channels?

The caliban, as I learned, was a chi stabilizer. It allowed both natural essence, what technology, nature, physical, ranged, and other ‘normal’ affinities used, and magical essence, the stuff of sorcery, spiritualism, necromancy, and the other ‘supernormal’ affinities, to convert into a balance.

That meant that certain gifts that were strictly limited under the pressure of a ‘level boundary’ in a rift could alter their pressure by ‘pretending’ to be a higher tier of a different essence type to allow them to function. My cross-discipline sorcery did this by default, it was a standard trick for anyone who had both types of affinities. Even if you had something like physical and sorcery, and went into a low-magic, high-tech rift, you could get most of your spells working through simulating kinetics. Or running them as if you were an Elementalist or a more ‘natural’ affinity.

Elementalists were actually sort of lucky. Their affinity limited their versatility, but Earth affinity was considered as natural as it was supernatural, and they could use it as easily in a low-tech rift as they could a low-magic one.

That was how a caliban was SUPPOSED to work. It threaded its magitech cables alongside the user’s meridians to artificially alter their essence effects in either direction. Useful if you were not particularly capable of doing high-tier modifications for magical and kinetic effects in your head, or simply didn’t have high enough affinities to make something like cross-discipline traits work. It basically faked a trait that some people were unable to gain on their own, which was actually pretty useful for melee types who preferred to rely on physical effects rather than spending their time learning supertech and high-tier sorcery.

But he’d been using it to simulate a whole meridian network. Instead of altering the essence effects, he’d been running full-power essence around his burnt meridians, like trying to use an electric radio capacitor to bypass the electric system of a nuclear reactor. It worked, sort of, but the minute a secondary essence type appeared that his own life essence fought against, necrotic, every damned relay started bursting like popcorn under a blowtorch.

I knew now what his affinities were, or at least, I knew what essence types he manipulated regularly. Physical… you could tell that just by looking at his amazing, if scarred body, a body I wanted...dammit. Anyway, physical, either life or divine, and some kind of probability enhancement. Luck, fortune, foresight, probability manipulation, or possibly even quantum instability. It allowed him to safely use an energy blade, and he’d been running three types of essence through channels meant to only hold a tiny trace of a single one. It was no wonder that when the life had gotten ‘gummed up’ by necrotic, the control frameworks on the caliban had gone nuts.

I would have loved to have been able to fix it. Apparently, calibans were EXPENSIVE, but I hadn’t been able to, despite knowing what was wrong. I could have rebuilt it as a lower-tier version, but I was still tin.. rebuilding it to copper specs was the best I could do, and since the source of copper-specced calibans was well-known if rare, it wasn’t priceless like the original silver-tier had been.

So instead, I cheated. Essence circuitry was well-known, and in fact, it only took a minor enchantment, a simple tattoo, to allow his already-damaged system to convert his… somewhat lower-ranked affinities similar to the way cross-discipline sorcery did. I ran millions of microfine strands of carbon nanotube, filled with non-degrading axion proteins that could channel both essence and force, through the nasty-looking and unhealed artificial networks that the caliban had cut.

Not a perfect fix, admittedly, and I was a little ashamed at using a jury-rigged solution, but it meant that his necrotically damaged meridians weren’t fighting with his life and probability manipulating essences. Physical and necrotic essence were old buddies, so I wasn’t worried as much about channeling it, but at the very least he didn’t require a golem synthetic intelligence to try and regulate his essence through a system totally unsuited to its volume.

I didn’t know if I could help scale down his necrotic essence problem, that would take a true, and probably quite powerful, life essence user to combat without risking my own affinity corruption, and it’s possible that with his own life or divine essence, he could expel it himself once he had a core, but at least it wasn’t killing him quickly by fighting with his own internal dantians as the battlefield. If you cannot defeat, contain.

At least until he could find someone to heal his meridians, or rechannel the things himself.

I sighed. I could still feel his arm wrapped around my waist and belly, his hand grasping what little I had of a breast, and his warm chest pressed against my back. This was bad, very bad. Even if it was just lust, and I didn’t ache to wrap myself in his aura, it could still cause a bond, a bond that I was not in a position to deal with.

I also didn’t know if his goals and mine meshed…. Obviously, our auras were complimentary, and I could feel that with just a little training on both our parts, our gifts could reinforce each other amazingly. But I had a goal, and I couldn’t let it be subsumed by whatever his own goals were. I still didn’t really know what a divine paladin was. Did he have a deity he worshiped other than mine? Did that deity have certain standards and laws that differed from the church?

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

I couldn’t take that risk. And then there were fleet rules about fraternization. On most ships that wouldn’t be a problem, flight control and landing were completely different departments that only interacted during an assault, but here? He was my boss. There was also the fact that he was a silver core, the second stage, with an established foundation and the beginnings of a core, while I was barely a condensation. Trying to merge our essence flows would blow my barely-formed essence manipulation away like a match in a hurricane. The two problems were related, but different, and I didn’t dare even get close enough to socialize with him and learn anything about him because of it.

Over the last several weeks, I’d gradually been introduced to the way the drone pilots worked on The Crow. There were six of us operators in regular rotation, four drones and two golems, as well as two more pure techs who spent as much time maintaining trooper armor, both dwarves, as dealing with maintaining the 12 drop pods mounted around the ship’s axis. With twelve pods, though, that meant plenty of backup in case of bad losses, but clearly, the ship was designed for a lot more drones than it had.

Fortunately, several of us could handle multiple pods in case of emergencies, but usually, it was the other way around on a fleet ship… two droners for every pod to split the duties and replace each other in an emergency.

The whole ship was like that. Much more spacious than usual, but with only slightly better than a skeleton crew, but the skeleton crew was almost entirely made up of higher stage cultivators or people that had weird gifts like mine that gave them a lot more utility to cover multiple roles.

I actually had two ‘assigned’ pods. One of them was a golem pod for ground assault and rifting, and the other was an internal fleet pod for space action, most likely because the captain or XO knew about what I had done in the Kobayashi scenario.

The golem pod was easy. I mean, golems were basically giant lumps of jointed metal and ceramics, with no electronics, and only sorcerous senses linked to their cores. Maintaining them was more akin to keeping them entertained while they were mentally active than actual maintenance, and usually consisted of a lot of time with a rag and polish rather than tools.

Time-consuming, but mindlessly easy and just a slight drag on essence stores when their cores needed replenishing. I spent my time in the golem pod expanding their potential routines. You didn’t want to get too complicated with their baseline intelligence, but with expansion, you could dramatically improve their ability to respond autonomously by updating nested activity lists, and that also helped the controller have more options they wouldn’t have to debug and install on the fly.

The tech drones, the spaceborne ones, though, were an entirely different story. There were drones to keep them mostly mechanically maintained, but their tiny brains were bursting with fleet potential and had to be monitored for memory leaks, software overflows, and tweaked constantly since they were technically always active. Reloading a software package when they had a hard shutdown was a nightmare, in my case, it was almost better to rebuild their little brains from scratch using my swarm with custom software.

Not only did I need to maintain the fleet of drones, but I also knew damn well where my strengths lie. Scrap was my goldmine, emergency parts my diamonds and pearls. I requested and was granted, a decent supply of cheap components that were difficult to manufacture on the fly, and with my gift, I could rebuild almost the entire pod fleet from scratch if they were wiped out. Braxis complained about me creating a pod that only I could use effectively, but I could tell his heart wasn’t in it, since, if the fit hit the shan, I could use a single fleet pod as ship defense equal to a dozen more standardized models, if I had time.

The two dwarven controllers, Mick and Lacey, both silver, had their own pods, which were merged drone/golem combinations, a particular dwarven trait. Only dwarves could make an entire force of magitech artifacts, and they also handled the trooper’s heavy armor and even played blacksmith repairing the troop’s low-tech gear in traditional dwarven fashion, with an actual plasma forge and a hammer. That part of the ship was sound-dampened, for good reason, since the sounds of banging metal as they worked their high-temperature runic magic were super irritating.

And if that weren’t enough, I was also expected to help with the engines. The trapped spirit had departed the moment it was freed, to wherever the heck trapped spirits go when they aren’t forced into physical space, and the formation mage that had restarted the drive pattern was amazing to watch. I had no talent or training for true formation magic, yet, but I could still enjoy watching a real professional at work… she must have been expensive.

Faster-than-light travel was almost always done with enchantments or formation magic. Technology and physical laws really hated to yield over little complications like the light-speed barrier, special relativity, and the square-cube law, so you had to be ready to go around them if you wanted to travel via any method other than greater node gates. Supposedly, at tech nine and ten, there were non-magic methods of breaking the rules, but those were more mythical than dragons… at least there was proof of the existence of non-void dragons. Tech 10 FTL vessels? Heh. Right. You’d have to delve into a tech 10 greater Hulk successfully to see one, good luck with even finding a Hulk like that, let alone not dying.

I was actually polishing one of my golems when Dienne-lar wandered over. He was… distracting, at least physically. A high copper sorcerer, first class petty officer Dienne-lar was one of the two charlottes that ran golem pods. On the plus side, his aura was like drinking from a cold clear spring… in the middle of a snowstorm. Sure, he was pretty, but he also was nearly as petty as Princeton, fully aware of his physical attractiveness, and for some reason as I matured and became even more physically uncoordinated trying to catch up to my body’s changes, he was finding more and more reasons to try to get as close to me socially as possible.

Look, I get it, compared to others, Maenads are short and kind of goofy-looking. Oversize ears and eyes, slender compared to the lushness and large breasts that most men, even charlottes, preferred, skin of an unattractive primary color… sure, we were designed to appeal to desperate men, but there’s a world of difference between a delver that hasn’t even seen a female in a year and a charlotte who surrounded themselves with beauty as a matter of course. But for some reason, he kept trying to flirt. I really didn’t get it. The ship was full of beautiful women who would happily fall into a rack with him, why was he pushing me?

It would have been okay if it were someone like Braxis. His crude flirting commentary was just background noise, and if I ever actually took him seriously, he’d probably have a seizure and try to get the hell away from me, especially as I now towered over him. It was just his way of interacting, and aside from Princeton, no one even bothered to get offended at it. He was VERY good at his job, and when we were in port, he was considered extremely attractive to slightly older goblin girls.

Dienne-Lar, though, while a lot more subtle about his flirting, was obviously interested in getting to know me a lot better, physically, than I could tolerate. I wasn’t about to explain to him about forced bonding, but even my hints about possibly being interested in girls instead of boys only seemed to make him more excited. It was creepy, and I was starting to wonder if I needed to take it up the chain of command.

He was a copper, but if he ever tried to take it past the occasional ‘accidental’ contact and attempted verbal seduction, I bet my swarm would make sure that he couldn’t court a girl until he had expensive regeneration. It might get me cashiered, but I REALLY didn’t want to risk a bond with a male who needed a spreadsheet to keep track of his sexual conquests.

Golems were weirdly fun. Their cores were always rift-borne, usually dropped by reasonably powerful chaos spawns, but once the spawn was dead, the chaotic non-essence was absorbed by the rift itself and sent out to the delvers as advancement.

The cores contained everything that was left over. The essence of whatever creature the rift forced the chaos-spawn to assume so they could be fought. Golems, when they were active, also remembered, on some basic level, how they were treated, and could even learn from fighting. Their intelligence was around that of an animal, and they even had a few suppressed animal instincts.