Petty Officer 3rd class Roisin Gabrielle Reynard-
Okay, I guess I fled. I’d have to apologize to Dienne-Lar for missing whatever honors he got, but the glares of some of the people who didn’t actively participate in the raid, as well as the appreciative looks of some of those who did, made me intensely uncomfortable.
Did I help? Sure, but so did every single trooper, and a lot of their contributions were much more important than mine, as well as putting their own personal bodies at much greater risk. It wasn’t me being humble, I screwed up badly and just finally realized what I’d messed up.
Stages.
Yes, I knew about them. My homeworld, Korse, was a tin-ranked world. Most of the universe was at default grade, also referred to as the wood stage. It had something to do with the amount of essence available, and certain professions made excellent use of the essence released by rifts that was much higher density than the default.
In general, even the chaos beasts that patrolled the spaces between worlds were technically only wood-stage. Of course, their sheer size might go a long way towards making up for their stage, to the point that they could even destroy higher-ranked worlds. I had a particular preference for drones since, when fighting void beasts, drones were second to none.
But drones had a particular weakness. No matter how powerful the materials they were crafted from, They were still driven by practices and programming, communications, and science, that were wood-ranked. You could create a rail gun from metals gathered from a steel-ranked rift, and use projectiles that had a similar rank, but in the end, the artificial little minds controlling the firing platforms didn’t have any special abilities, increased speed, or processing capacity higher than wood.
One of my tricks was based on that fact. I wasn’t a great coder, but since my training school, I’d tended to use tin-ranked materials for my drone brains. They were much better than the silicon and gold circuitry used by most drones, but I had never learned any special coding techniques for higher-ranked brains, and even in that copper-ranked rift, the difference in potential had shown.
My cloud was slightly better since the individual units were controlled much more like golems than drones, which allowed my innate power to use them far more brutally and effectively in higher-stage areas. My weakness was my training, though, since higher stages required improved versions of my actual traits. I was using forces as a crutch to treat my abilities as if they had the ‘improved’ prefix, even though they didn’t. It was painful, like doing granny-style push-ups instead of real push-ups just so that you could brag about doing 100 push-ups, knowing full well that you were doing them wrong.
“What has you in such a fluster?” asked a familiar, gravelly voice behind me.
I sighed deeply, and slowly pulled myself out of the mind-space of my drone node. “Hey, chief. I think I am running up against my limits, and it’s driving me crazy.”
“How do you mean?” asked Chief Braxis, his big green ears laying down as his brow knit in empathy.
“Well, I got a new class for copper, but my traits are eclectic, and don’t match my new class at all. I was kind of pulled from my world back when I was wood, and I don’t know how to advance my trait training at all. I mean, realistically, I was still just learning… but now, even if I get better materials and gear, I simply don’t have the ability to use them effectively.”
“Which traits?”
I sighed deeply, “All of them. Some of them will just take a ton of practice, like triage and endurance, but both my drone and golem skills take new techniques and education that I just don’t have. And don’t even get me started on enchantment, I have just barely touched it, and as you are well aware, it takes a huge amount of training and tremendously expensive materials, and maybe even access to corporate-controlled documents to advance.”
Braxis nodded slowly, “I was a little worried about that.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged, “When Captain Timur brought you on, your scores at the droner academy were ridiculous. SHE thought it was because you were already trained to improved or even advanced tier skills, but when you showed me your little trick with the Kobayashi program, I realized that you were talented and not as much trained. Something about your abilities was giving you a much higher power baseline than someone who was starting from zero.”
“I didn’t actually approve of dumping you in a copper rift. Not yet at least. You didn’t have the foundations yet, and it was basically power-advancing you. The Captain, XO Taera, and the Chief Engineer all wanted you to advance at your maximum possible rate, foundations be damned.”
I nodded, that made sense. Taera was concerned about my having a forced bond, and as a copper tier, ‘normal’ men had zero chance of forcing it. Heck, as a copper tier heavyworlder with some basic combat training, physically forcing me might be impossible without some serious drugs or other pressure, the kind of pressure that I understood the slaver worlds were masters at providing. It still left me in the lurch with my job, though.
“Is there any way to try and catch up?”
He grinned, “Sure. You might be amazed at some of the weird classes that are floating around here. I don’t mind telling you since Andrea brags about it, but she started her droner career as a maintenance tech… for self-driving cabs.”
I was a little surprised, “And she became a combat droner?”
He nodded, “Yes, you do know the difference between system-recognized traits and education, right?”
I looked at him in confusion, “Umm… I got my traits from my education?”
He looked at me in surprise, “Not exactly. That’s why so many traits that perform the same function have different names. Mine is an outgrowth of jury rig, so it’s improvised drone control. Andrea’s is telepresence, and Zaddoc’s is based on his family crafting tradition, that’s why he hand-makes all of his drones, I don’t remember exactly what he calls it.”
I was a little baffled. “I never really got that far. Among my people, we tend to have a long childhood before we gain a full UI, so I was never really trained in advanced system manipulation.”
“You train in manipulating the system?”
I nodded slowly, “My father told me that it was one of the reasons our planet was annexed and purged. My education was mostly handled by connections to the Unified Planets educational database, which was pretty heavily censored.”
He quirked an eyebrow, “I sense a story there, but it should probably wait. What is your drone control trait?”
“I don’t really have one. I have remote node, which helps the distance and speed at which I can use standard transactional connections, and Micro-active swarm, which allows me to use micro-golems. It allows me to create new drones quickly with quantum milling, and, of course, that responds to node control as well.”
“So you… wait, you control Drones using standard protocols, and you don’t actually use a spirit sorcery spell to control golems?”
I shrugged, “I don’t know how to cast spells. The UP doesn’t transmit stuff like that to its shielded educational units, especially on an interdicted world.”
He scratched his head vigorously behind one floppy ear. “So you don’t control the drones at all?’’
“Sure I do. Standard transactional connection, plus on-the-fly machine language recoding. I’m no coding genius, but with transit protocols in the femtoseconds you can respond pretty well instead of counting on their slow little brains to interpret and respond to standard drone coding.”
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He laughed, “You redeploy code in femtoseconds…”
“Oh no, I am nowhere near that fast! It takes me milliseconds to build new instruction objects. But with remote nodes, a good optical network like our drones transfers the new sets in femtoseconds. That’s why I actually have a problem. Even with a decent brain, the drone body response systems activate incredibly slowly.”
He chuckled, “Still, you redesign machine code objects in milliseconds, and you claim to not be a genius.”
I shook my head, “I’m not. I have tech affinity at Adept Plus. That’s not uncommon. Don’t you have it?”
He shook his head and grinned, “Machinery affinity. One of the more common Goblin affinities. That’s why they say that if a goblin is on a ship, it will always come back. My drones come with standard coding, but I can override them on the fly.”
“That sounds amazing, and you think I’m a genius?” I asked, genuinely impressed.
He laughed, “Right. Well, I guess it’s just confirmation bias. My coding has always been terrible, but I can build damned near indestructible drones. So your problem is with drone response times?”
I nodded slowly, “Yes. Microgravity drones are more than adequate because the response times in open space, even in a close-in fight, are very slow. But I can’t rebuild drones that use higher than tin tier materials because my microswarm cannot handle them, and drone topography can’t handle the materials because both of those are standard traits.”
“And I assume that means you don’t know how to boost your traits?”
I sighed, “I assume that means practice.”
He sighed, “Yes and no. Traits, unlike true skills, are measured by the system. If you have a natural or inheritable talent and wind up using it, it can become a trait, but to improve the trait you need inspiration.”
“Inspiration?”
He nodded, “Yep. Education helps, but if you don’t get inspiration, the trait doesn’t improve. Stuff like durability is easy, just survive more damage. Endurance or Strength just means you keep pressing yourself past your limits. All traits require you to press them past their limits or attempt to use them in unorthodox ways, but the more physical traits tend to be a lot less… complicated about it.”
“I didn’t get the chance to talk with you after the ceremony, but I might be able to help a little bit, mostly because I think you are overlooking something,” he said, looking a little nervous.
I laughed, “Please tell me you aren’t expecting me to be offended. I KNOW I am overlooking something, and that’s what’s driving me crazy! I bet it’s something stupidly simple that I just haven’t considered.”
He nodded, his ears flopping, “Right. Well, okay, time to be blunt. You aren’t a droner.”
“Huh?”
“I said you aren’t a droner. Sure, you have technology affinity, but you don’t have technological control. That takes machine affinity or technopathy like Andrea has. You can enchant a drone, which is a totally awesome use of cross-discipline sorcery, but unlike what your… fake band stated, you don’t have drone control. That scrot fooled marines, but it doesn't fool people who work for a living.”
“I don’t follow.”
He sighed. “You are brilliant with technology, innovative and creative, but you can’t… umm… link with machines. You link with nodes, and use those nodes to transmit and receive information faster than anyone I’ve ever seen, but when you are changing a drone, can you FEEL what the drone is feeling? Control it like you would your own limbs without reprogramming it?”
I shook my head, “No, that’s not how drones work.”
He sighed, “That’s how technopathy works. That’s how I knew you didn’t really have drone control, because drone control lets you treat the drone the same way you would another living creature, albeit a very simple, stupid living creature. Most droners are actually crap at coding because they don’t NEED it. They can simply tell the drone what they need, let the drone FEEL their needs, and the code adapts itself to those needs… so when you have a higher-ranked droner, the code adapts to their stage naturally because of their gift.”
“No one WRITES copper-level code, or any programs higher than wood-level, because above that level the coding is more like a form of magic than technology… some people are able to UNDERSTAND the higher-ranked code if they are incredibly talented and have brains like a supercomputer, but asking someone to create code without having a technopathic or machine-empathy talent means you wind up with wood-level machine code.”
“Offended yet?”
I nodded, “Yes, I am, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t right. So what paths offer… uhh.. stuff that can improve coding ranks?”
He shrugged, “Not so much paths as affinities. Machine affinity can, because it sets up empathic links with machines, compared to technological affinity that improves your ability to conceptualize higher-ranked technologies. Obviously, technopathy can, since it’s got nothing to do with creating new technologies, and everything to do with mentally controlling it.” He looked thoughtful. “A linguistic affinity paired with a technological affinity probably could let you create higher-ranked code, and there might actually be a sort of code-based affinity out there somewhere, but I bet it’s mostly used by the private sector.”
“So basically, I am useless when it comes to rifts.”
He laughed, “You don’t remember that part where they gave you an award for helping out with the healing and fighting? But no… See, you build MAGNIFICENT drone bodies. You already started working on your copper technology boosts, and you are more than capable of directly controlling golems.”
I winced. “So you think I should focus on golems? But they are so….”
He grinned, “I think you are thinking of things the wrong way, still. I am not going to tell you, but I will give you a hint… what’s the difference between a golem mind and a drone brain?”
“Golem cores are actually living minds. I can directly interface with golem minds using spiritualism.”
“You don’t like your spiritual affinity much, do you?”
I sighed deeply, dropping a wrench into my belt. “It’s not logical. You can never be certain what a golem's mind will do, even if you have a good idea of its spirit. For things like healing, it’s amazing, but I hate the idea of creating cyborgs or half-living… things.”
I thought about it for a second. “You are thinking I should start working on higher-ranked drones with… golem brains?” The idea was both repellent and exciting at the same time.
He grinned, “Way to go out into left field. Not a bad idea, since you are the only one that could make them work, but think simpler. Who else is fighting in a rift besides you?”
“The Marines.”
He nodded, “And what will kill a high-ranked marine in a low level rift?”
“Bad tactics, arrogance, poor gear choices, poor reflexes, running out of stamina or energy, lack of attention to detail.”
He glared at me.
“What?”
“You have enchanting now. How can you help your fellow delvers?”
“You think I should focus on enchanting? Will the captain support that?”
Braxis groaned, “Okay, are you actually not getting it? Or are you messing with me?”
I sighed and shook my head, “I guess I am not getting it. I mean, please, I am from a world where the average technology, with certain exceptions, is around tier four at best.”
“Oh. Right. Okay, You created a functional replacement for Chief Wasserman’s Caliban, right?”
I nodded, “Sort of? It doesn’t have the functionality of a real Caliban, since I am not a silver-level enchanter or anything like that, but for what HE was using it for, motor control and energy transfer, it works a lot better than the purpose he was putting to the Caliban.”
“So, could you create a vessel that a human could control, that responds to their neural feedback and gifts as if it were their natural body? But one using drone infrastructure so it doesn’t drain their energy like crazy or require a path interface?”
I looked at him nervously, “You mean like a… drone suit? Like a cyborg but not… you know, undead?”
He nodded, smiling, “Exactly like that. That’s one of the reasons so few of our marines use enchanted armor. It either has built-in essence stores, and is fantastically expensive, or it drains enough personal essence that only the most powerful of warriors, like the chief warrant officer, can use it effectively. Technology, like drones, uses standard ranked power supplies, that’s why they are so cheap and replaceable. The old empire used exo-suits, which are similar, but they couldn’t channel gifts or affinities, so they mostly used it as a way for unranked warriors to keep up with much higher ranks.”
“That worked?”
He nodded, “Yeah, one of the old copper-ranked exo-suits could easily put a wood-ranked warrior at the same fighting level as a high copper.”
I thought about that. “So, I could still be a droner in vacuum fights, but I could focus on golem-enhanced higher-tier drone suits and then play more of a support role in personal rifts.”
He grinned, “We call them exo-suits if they are around the same size as a normal warrior, or mecha if they are larger.”
“I have never heard of doing that, but I could certainly give it a shot. One problem, though.”
“What’s that?”
“Who would we get to test them?”
His smile turned malicious. “I have a few ideas.”