Petty Officer 3rd class Roisin Gabrielle Reynard-
Kushiel. I really liked that name. I didn’t know what his ‘real’ last name was, but someday I’d like to find out. His attitudes towards bonding were… odd. It was like he thought it was slavery or something.
Bonding is not slavery. It could be if it was a forced bond, but my mother had explained it to me. Freedom is not the right to do whatever you want and never face any consequences. Freedom was the right to choose your own burdens. And bonding, true bonding, was both a burden and a freedom at the same time, like motherhood or choosing to join the military. It helps you and another become greater than the sum of your parts.
David’s repairs… were not going to save his life, not without finding a way to reduce the necrotic energies flowing through his channels like poison, but they helped him right now. At least his nervous system was not trying to overload itself, forcing him to spend the rest of his life in a coma with his spine permanently shut down to prevent deadly seizures.
Braxis was glaring at me, his overlarge eyes squinting as he scowled. “What has you distracted? The Kalisti rift is not training. We use it for training, but if you get it wrong, you will be as dead as any other rift. Is my mutant friend reliving her first romantic encounter?”
I shook my head. I knew full well that if there had been any sexuality, Braxis’ sharp nose would have caught the signs… but if I did allow David to bond with me, his teasing would be relentless. There was a good reason so many goblins wound up as spies. Not only were they ubiquitous and easily overlooked, but their hearing and sense of smell were top-notch. Not their eyesight, without artificial enhancement, but those giant ears and noses had a purpose.
“Then what is it? We are hitting the Kalisti rift tomorrow. You DID check the assignments, right?”
I flushed a little, “Yes, the droners are playing point defense. You, me, Andrea, and Zaddoc. It’s a copper-tiered raid rift, so the majority of the boarding crew will be training inside, along with Dienne-Lar because it’s tech three.”
He smiled a little evilly, “So you haven’t spoken with your boyfriend?”
“My boyfriend?” I didn’t think of the warrant officer as my boyfriend, but Braxis kept teasing me about it. We had both been… busy in the last few days while the ship shook out.
He laughed, “You said that cross-discipline sorcery lets you use drones in a low-tech rift, right? Well, The captain decided that that was a claim worth testing. Do you know why we use Kalisti as a training rift?”
I shrugged, “Because it’s only a copper, and the loot is crap?”
Braxis grinned toothily, “No, it’s got amazing loot if you are a resource ship packed to the gills with scut labor. At tech 3, you need a whole ship full of convicts or goblins to extract it, especially since golems are crap at resource gathering. Except that we supposedly have someone on board who can run a collector drone crew even in a low-tech rift. None of the big resource ships hit it, though, just landers and invaders like ours, because it’s a raid… Running a lander full of marines PLUS a convict labor ship is too expensive for fleet.”
I nodded slowly, “So after the raid is cleared, they want me to run a collector node?”
He shook his head, “No, you and Dienne-Lar are going in WITH the raid. Taera wants you to get to at least copper, and you said you can reconfigure on the fly. Guess who gets to pilot the lander?”
I went cold, “You want me to pilot the lander? I’m not a pilot! I can drop a drone pod fine, and pulling people out is just all emergency stuff, but a combat landing for a raid team? With like… real-life humans on board?”
He chuckled, “Dienne-Lar has done it several times, and HE didn’t break the Kobayashi program. Plus, you can actually fly it into the rift proper to waypoint 1. That would save the team at least two hours of hiking, and you are going to be using multipurpose drones… you can clear the first assault easily for the team, which is where we usually lose a newbie or two.”
I was pacing back and forth in front of entrances to pods four and six. I’d done similar several times, in simulations as well as training drops, but we were talking zero backup, no emergency training shutdowns, and I might even have to take part in the actual up-close fighting.
“But, I mean, They want me to do the first assault setup? With like, trusting me with the fortifications and initial waves and all that?”
He nodded, “Yep, and you get to do it all with multipurpose drones, instead of a full combat drop. Warrant Wasserman and Taera both assured the Cap that you can do it.”
I sighed. “Crap crap crap. I know what the approach swarm’s going to be, ion wasps, but I don’t have the slightest idea what’s inside.”
He chuckled, “And you didn’t check because you thought you knew what was going on.” he held up a security chip. “And I knew you wouldn’t. Remember, tech 3. that means that both you and Dienne-lar are going to be both running support AND playing healer.”
“Can I bring some full combat drones?”
He nodded, “One or two heavies, yeah. No munitions, though. Even if you can get tech drones working, the tech restrictions prevent non-alchemical explosives and beam weapons. Set up a mission plan, and afterward, return the security chip to me.”
I grabbed the chip when he tossed it to me and went to my berthing to begin running through the secured archives for known mob types for the Kalisti rifts.
Ugh, the damned place was really restrictive. Even with cross-discipline sorcery, beams and munitions were right out. One point one gravity, which was going to make things like gravity-related injuries a real possibility. The troops would have to go in with old-fashioned armor, without muscle assist unless they had enchantments.
The worst part was that I was going to have to really split my attention. Every drone, unless I wanted to bring golems, was going to require constant attention, or else the rift would force them into shutdown, and probably start claiming them.
I sent a trace to Dienne-Lar. “Hey, elf! Quick question… are you able to hold a set of golems in the Kalisti Rift?”
He nodded sleepily. The viewscreen showed his face and unclad shoulders, so I figured I must have woken him up. “Yeah, I’ve done it three times. It’s not a particularly strong aura, but it’s persistent. Why? Are you coming with?”
I nodded, “Yeah, the XO wants me to make copper, and I have some ideas, but I might have to mix things up a little. Braxton wants me to try to fly a dropship into waypoint 1, but I don’t want to try and keep it in one piece, run a node, and play healer.”
He nodded slowly, his artfully disheveled hair flopping. “You can play healer?”
“Yes. But if I do, I can’t stay on board the ship, run remote healing, lock down nodes, and control a full set of combat drones at the same time.”
“You can lock down a node?”
I nodded, “A remote node.”
He grinned, “Are they personal? Or can I run my control through them too?”
I looked at him skeptically. “I can let you run control through them, but if you try to overrun my aura, you know what will happen.”
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“Great astral sex?”
I shook my head, “No, The Captain gets to find a replacement for you. I am not kidding.”
He thought about it for a second. “Fine. I am lazy anyway. Tell you what. My range is almost ten miles. If you go with the troops and drop a node that I can bounce off of when they hit the heavies, I will sit on both drop-ships and let you remote half my golem team until the boss. That is, assuming you can keep both drop-ships flying once we penetrate the rift?”
I nodded, “Yes if you handle anything incoming. As long as it’s not too complicated a flight, I should be able to remote them both.”
He nodded, “It isn’t. The Kalisti Rift is a desert. I will trust you to remote both droppers, and you trust me not to try and overrun your aura if I remote through your node. I can keep the ships stable, and use half my crew to protect against lesser troops and sandworms. You tag along with the team. If you drop a node, like if you hit the big fight or your team needs heavier healing, I’ll remote in… but I don’t have triage. Anything more complicated than light trauma and you are on your own.”
I sighed. Great. “Am I... I don’t know what to do very well. Does the team have their own healer?”
He nodded, “Yeah, They have a copper and a bronze, Corporal Casparov and Sargeant Murphy. But you know that the actual fighting’s all going to be done by newbies, right?”
“Huh?”
He nodded, “This system is copper. That means that Sergeant Murphy and the new guy… Warrant Wasserman? Are only there in case shit goes sideways. They are going to stay outside of the rift. If they have to come inside, we are done, because Wasserman could probably beat the boss singlehandedly. At that point, it becomes a straight-up depower, and we have to either find a new training rift or wait a few months for it to recharge. Kalisti rift is a closed rift”
“Closed rift?”
He nodded, “Yeah, it doesn’t have an active chaos link anymore. Sometimes rifts remain after the chaos link expires. That means they won’t overload anymore, and they are great for training because of how stable they are, but they also don’t recharge as quickly. From what I understand, before the link closed, the Kalisti raid rift overloaded twice could recharge every day, and needed a defining clear nearly every year. It was damned close to turning Kalisti itself into a chaos moon.”
Kalisti was a planet-sized moon around Procil V, a gas giant. There was a heavily inhabited world nearby, which was why the rifts had formed… something about settled worlds, especially ones where the populace was disturbed, seemed to attract chaos rifts, but it was remote enough that the local populace didn’t notice for years. Unattended rifts, like chaos beasts, could eventually turn a planet into a chaos world, and by the time the empire took notice the desert world was utterly infested with chaos spawn.
The entire world was only copper level, which meant the true powerhouses barely noticed it, but when the fleet took over from the old empire after the tech wars, they crashed all the rifts except one and cleared out the chaos spawns. Unfortunately, after the desert world was stripped by corporate interests and the chaos hordes ate any local life, what was left was barely habitable. Supposedly there was a penal colony and small support settlement on the surface somewhere, but it was far away from the rift. While it was unlikely, no one wanted to risk convicts escaping into an active rift and coming out as a bronze-ranked killing machine.
One of the greatest ironies of rifts is when they overloaded, they spilled out hordes of chaos spawn that were inimical to all life… but at the same time, they also spilled out massive resources, enough that the fleet was considering allowing low-level rifts on lifeless worlds to intentionally overload, in hopes of the resource spawn terraforming the world as the fleet destroyed the chaos beasts.
To me, it seemed risky, because of the real threat of turning it into a Chaos world, as well as its unpredictability, but traditional terraforming methods took mountains of resources and millennia to have any real effect. Our technology just wasn’t there yet without using tons of special rewards from dangerous rifts and bulk custom-made microorganisms.
Then again, I’d much rather trust a Genesis pylon as a rift reward than the hazards of letting unpredictable rifts overrun moons and planets close to civilized worlds. The chance of spawning a void beast was just too high a risk. A creep or out-of-control overlord could exterminate a low-ranked population in weeks.
I finally let Dienne go back to bed and went back to working on the landing ship. I had to go light enough to use it as a troop transport, but heavy enough to help Dienne set up a serious beachhead. Supposedly a third shuttle would be used as a bulk transport, but I hadn’t worked on a raid before… would there be enough local resources to set up drone construction?
Just to be safe, I loaded on two heavy-G combat utility drones, and several cases of drone control modules… they were small and lightweight, and if I didn’t need to track down the rare materials to construct them on the fly, I might be able to put out a decent amount of drones from local materials in a hurry. I also included a very carefully marked box of dust… my swarm fleet.
I probably wouldn’t use the swarm except in a construction capacity, because ‘rogue Nanos’ was one of those collective nightmares the human race clung to just like rogue AI. It was impossible, a nano-swarm or expert system could do horrible things, but in the end, they were controlled by real people… The technomancers had simply added to the nightmares intentionally when they made their bid for power.
That was one of the reasons I was so terrified of people finding out about my forces affinity. When a cyborg was created, they lost all affinities except for natural ones and usually gained just enough necrotic affinity to keep themselves alive, sort of.
But with forces, I could overload their necrotic affinity, turning them into a true techno-undead, or reactivate something like a tech affinity. Imagine if you will, a creature that has lost all connection with life and humanity, and is capable of creating hordes of techno-zombies, fleets of necrotically-controlled microswarms that could tear apart nearly anything in moments, fully sapient and possibly genius-level intellect, and a hunger to consume all life nearly as strong as a chaos spawn. That’s what the technomancers did, and it was as much of a horror as it sounds.
And that was why people with my set of gifts tended to get disappeared as quickly as possible by fleet.
That was also why I hadn’t rid Kushiel of his necrotic contamination. Forces affinity could certainly do it with converting energy, but necrotic was… sticky. It tended to contaminate everything it touched. I simply wasn’t powerful enough yet to convert it without having my own gift infected, and I couldn’t touch it at my level without it killing me and forcing me to rise as a necrotic abomination with all my affinities, including forces, intact.
Which was why I was more than willing to accompany the raiders. I needed at least silver before I would be strong enough to save Kushiel without sacrificing myself and turning into potentially something worse than a Chaos beast. If that meant I had to raid and risk dying, so be it.
“What the hell are you doing?” I heard Taera’s voice as I carefully maneuvered the large drone into its launch bay on the drop pod.
I looked up and noticed the XO. “Getting ready for tomorrow’s raid. I had to do some refits after I found out I was going to be on-site, and I am running out of time. My fault, I didn’t realize I was going to be on the raider team itself.”
Taera looked at me disapprovingly. It was a look she was very good at. “Fine, why are you doing it at two in the morning? You need your sleep.”
I shook my head, “I have too much work to do, and not enough time before the scheduled drop.”
Taera laughed, “Go get some sleep. Or midrats first if you need to eat. If getting prepped sets our schedule behind, it sets us behind.”
“Huh?”
She looked at me sternly, “Sweety, you are going to be your team’s healer and you will be running the first entry. If you need more prep time, it’s not like the rift is going to overload. Your team will happily give you all the time you need, and so will I, if it can keep even one trooper alive.”
I looked at her oddly, and shook my head, closing the pod’s bulkhead door and locking its security seal. “Sorry. I didn’t think I was important. I figured I was just… you know, the pilot.”
She laughed, “Yes, you are important. Maybe among your people spiritual healers are common, but out here? You are worth your weight in plutonium for that alone. Oh, and one more thing…”
“Yes Ma’am?” I asked.
“Once you get started, you are going to drop your child class almost immediately. This is a copper raid. When you do, tell the team leader, Rastlin, immediately. That’s like half the reason for the raid. Use the portable node to grab a class right away, they will happily wait for you.”
I was confused, “Me? What’s the other half?”
She grinned, “Getting the troops to high copper or maybe bronze, and hopefully seizing enough resources to put us in the black for a while… Our refit was pretty expensive. And if you are able to grab the resources with a drone fleet, well, suddenly you just became three-quarters of the reason. I am not going to tell you what classes you can take, that’s up to you and one of the reasons we are not fleet, but take your time in choosing. The teams will happily wait.”