I was still keeping my actual traits to myself, but that was pretty much normal. NO ONE liked being forced to share their traits, which was why the conscription bands were so invasive.

Force sage had given me energy expansion, which I was hugely grateful for because it dramatically increased the well of energy I had to work with while crafting and linking enchantments. If my energy pool didn’t regenerate like mad I could NEVER have crafted three of those suits of armor in two weeks… I could sort of understand why traditional magitech smiths demanded an entire year, but I was lucky enough to have talented teammates helping me.

Without Dienne-Lar, Braxis, Murphy, Kessler, and even Braddoc’s occasional grumpy help, I’d probably have spent months toiling away JUST to build the Mark two prototype, but for some reason the other droners were more than willing to throw in with the project. It was pretty amazing, until I realized that except for upgrades, updates, and maintenance, a droner’s job was actually pretty boring interspersed with moments of terror in combat.

As a rank 6 Force Sage, I had also unlocked stasis, which was super amazing because it let me lock things in place temporarily, almost like they were frozen in time. Super useful for a technician, since I could lock a system while it was active, swap out an offending system, and then release the stasis to see what happened. It was also useful for like… saving lives, but that was less important to me on a day-to-day basis.

And matter conversion? Boy, it was almost easier to explain what it did NOT do. First, it allowed me to increase or decrease the tier of simple materials. By absorbing energy, I could turn copper-tier steel into tin-tier steel, or by burning energy I could do the reverse. It was probably worth carrying some higher-tier material to convert to lower-tier in case I ran low when I was healing or building to refresh my energy supplies in a big hurry.

Slightly less important, I could move materials along the periodic table. Again, more energy to push it up, regain energy by pushing it down, almost like my own magical fission reaction! The bad side, was that both reactions were by default very small scale, and the energy costs increased exponentially as the volume increased.

But I discovered, almost accidentally, that like most of my traits, I could channel it through my now copper-tier swarm. So while converting an ounce of zinc into copper would produce enough overflow that I might burn out my abilities, currently, my swarm could convert a microgram each easily, giving me a nice, comfortable flow of energy from converting a cheap metal into a more expensive one lower on the periodic table.

THAT ability I would be keeping to myself. My swarm had grown, and I could see how similar the terraformer class was to force sage, even if it wasn’t my class yet. I knew I didn’t have the ability yet, but down the road I could absolutely see molecular recombination, meaning being able to separate something like water into hydrogen and oxygen and back, or even being able to recombine materials like carbon into denser structures like diamonds or nanotubes.

Yeah, if I were a slaver, I’d pay ANY amount of money for a slave that could, given a bit of time, convert almost any material into any other material. All the more reason to stomp those bastards out, but for right now, it would be best not to put temptation where people could see it. My only real limits were my essence storage capacity, time, the fact that I couldn’t advance anything past copper tier yet, and the fact that if the fleet found out about it they’d probably assemble an army of mercenaries to track me down and lock me in a box forever.

No, I wasn’t even going to tell David. I knew why, I think he wanted to bond with me but that stupid necrotic essence still made it impossible, but as long as it was a problem, his life didn’t have any room for ME. Sure, it had room for Petty Officer second class Gabrielle Roisin Reynard, Reynard the Droner, Rose the gearhead, but not for Gabrielle the woman.

It meant he had too many loyalties. As much as I liked him, I knew it would still be possible for him to push his own desires down deeply into his soul and turn me over to the fleet or the church for ‘the good of the universe’ if a good enough excuse showed up to satisfy his honor.

Sure, I cared about the fate of the Universe, even though it hadn’t treated me particularly well, I still lived here and every breath was a gift. I was not brainwashed enough to believe that someone else could make better decisions about my future than me and perhaps my eventual bond if, in the words of the immortal Manboobs, he ever ‘got his head out of his ass.’

I wasn’t ready for bonding yet either, not until the necrotic essence was taken care of and I was closer to his gold rank, but I knew I wanted to, and I wanted… no, I needed him to admit he wanted to, was willing to, and would when we could. Until then, I couldn’t trust his loyalties or his discretion.

David was watching me as I checked over the suit again while I thought things out. “So you want the captain to find another rift?”

I nodded, “Yep. Preferably copper, something planetary-based, a party rift instead of a raid. If she’s willing, I have enough materials to create probably one more suit before I have to start begging, but I am not sure who would fit with a team. Murphy, Steel, and Lindsay are obvious, since I already got their suits ready, and I want to go myself for obvious reasons, but most team rifts are set up for five people. I don’t know who would be number five.”

“What about your suit?”

“Huh?”

“Your own suit. If you can only make one more, that means you will need to make your own and that means four people max.”

I shook my head, “I don’t get one. I will be running in an enhanced survival suit or a ship suit, not armor.”

He narrowed his eyebrows, “Why the hell not? You need protection as much as anyone!”

I sighed, “It’s not about protection. I would barely get anything out of the armor except bare protection, since I am not melee-focused, I don’t need the enhanced energy supplies, and most importantly I don’t need the weight… I have heavyworlder strength, sure, but compared to a copper-tier like Dirk or Lindsay I might as well be made out of toilet tissue.”

I smiled a little, “I will NOT be on the front line, I will be staying in the middle, where it’s nice and safe, tossing out emergency triage, repairs, and manipulating the field with my force shields and swarms.”

“Meat shields like Dirk and Lindsay will be protecting me, Murphy will be running advanced sensor and resource scans, and I will be playing support and helping dig out any resources we find.”

“You are okay with that?”

I nodded, “More than okay. I’m not an adrenaline junkie. If I could stay on the ship and just run my swarm and still gain essence I would. I am not lazy, but the whole ‘testing myself to destruction’ thing that guys like you, no offense, warrant officer, live for does nothing for me.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

I shrugged, “I fight because I have to, not because I want to, or crave power or fame. If it were up to me I’d be happily bonded right now and practicing the art of inventing children, but there are things both you and I have to do first.”

What? He blushed! I would have to remember that. Hard man, a brutal warrior, but actual innuendo can make him blush. I would have to be careful not to overuse it, but knowing that some kind of a sexual hint made him turn pink could be a valuable tool.

“Do first, before ahem… practicing inventing babies?”

Uh oh… he was embarrassed but could talk his way through it! Danger. Time to shift before I was the one blushing. “Yes. Umm… but anyway, I need to make a suit for someone that could use it more effectively than I can, but I don’t know enough about rifting to coordinate it, or even if I should.”

He nodded slowly, “Tell you what. Get with Taera and see if she can convince the captain. As far as I can tell, the fleet isn’t calling on us right now. I’ll try to encourage it from my angle because I agree that testing is needed, but it might be difficult.”

“Difficult? Why?”

He sighed, “Because in the end, the fleet, and even the Crow, are run by the same force.”

I smiled a little, “What force is that?”

He sighed, “Money. Even the church is not entirely invulnerable to its influence. The Crow is very expensive to fly, and solo or party rifts are not… profitable enough to justify a special trip, at least not for a planet-based copper-tier rift. While the ship is patrolling, she’s gaining a stipend from the fleet as long as she stays in-zone and on call. The raid rift helped, a lot, but from what Taera has told me the ship is still in a tight spot from her refit.”

I sighed, “So what do we do?”

He shrugged, “We are going to pass near Adjunta and Telurdt, but I doubt very much the Captain would authorize an expedition to their rifts. Things are peaceful now, but the historical friction between them and the fleet might make it too risky. The thing is, the Hammad boneyard has been making a lot of noise recently. Very risky, but very much within the ship’s mission parameters.

“Historic Friction?”

He nodded, “Adjunta and Telurdt are twin worlds around Barnard’s star. They have multiple rifts on different scales that they have to keep control of, but most of them are anchored around their Lagrange point, where the Hammad boneyard is.”

He looked thoughtful, “Quick history lesson. The Assad Emirate has had a long history of… not exactly warfare with the Empire and eventually the Unified Planets, but it hasn’t been friendly, especially after the Technomancers turned the Empire into their own private fiefdom.”

I nodded, I knew the stories, and the Emirate was home to my eventual targets. It was damned close to a lawless zone, or rather, they allowed a lot of really nasty types to shelter within their territory. Bribery and corruption were the rules there, and it was not helped by the fact that multi-system corporations liked to ply the divide between the two cultures for profit. The Unified Planets were technically allied with them because despite weathering the Technomancer war the entire territory was darned close to a haven for pirates, raiders, and war cults. Such groups were not exactly focused on clearing out the dangers of rift overloads and were even known to lure monsters and overloads to inhabited worlds as weapons.

I didn’t know the twin worlds in particular, but considering their proximity to Unified territory they were probably the focus of a lot of low-level conflicts, from Jihads into UPF territory to crusades in the other direction, as well as internal warfare… This meant that the Hammad Boneyard, in the Lagrange point between the two worlds, was probably a nightmare of wreckage and ancient scrapheaps, a prime spawning ground for several different types of rifts, up to and including hulks.

Clearing those rifts, or keeping them under control, was one of the major reasons that the UPF was even allowed to stick its nose in occasionally. Mercenaries had more valuable things to do with their time, like conquering territory for planetary warlords, oppressing local populations, and extorting settlements rather than spending the time and effort clearing the more dangerous rifts. Stupid, I know, but in the end, even the most threadbare of mercenary outfits could extract more profits from wiping out settlements or kicking the crap out of helpless colonists and stealing all of their scrot than risking lives and equipment cleaning up a rift.

“What do you mean making noises?”

He shrugged, “Oracles on Centennial have mentioned that there’s a higher than usual Chaos energy concentration coming out of there, which means either several small rifts or a single big one. No Chaos beasts have appeared yet, which would bring a full task force, and part of our mission is assessment and recon on danger zones like that, but if there are individual rifts, we don’t know what they are yet.”

“That means if we find them, we have to send in an initial group into a potentially overloading or unstable rift.”

I nodded, “That sounds like a perfect opportunity to test the suits.”

He sighed and shook his head, “Taera and I had a LONG talk.” My spirits started to sink as I could almost tell what he was going to say before he said it. “Right now you are a tremendous asset. Testing your new tools is of course a priority. Improving your tier is also truly important. But untried rifts, ones that could be up to bronze rank and overloading, are too dangerous.”

“So you want to send a team into the rifts using these new suits, but you want to leave me out of it?” I almost choked as I said it. It wasn’t that I craved adventure, far from it, but these were my suits. It was my responsibility to be on hand in case something went wrong, and I took my responsibility very, very seriously.

He was trying to be conciliatory, “Once we have the spawn timers charted, and an idea of what’s in the rifts, I absolutely want you to go. But for initial penetration, it’s just too dangerous. Rift exploration is dangerous on a different scale from raid rifts. Not only is there no clue what we will face, but it could be a trapped rift that locks until completion, an overloading rift that’s a much higher rank than the sensors indicate, or the Hammad Boneyard itself could be infested with pirates or mercenaries trying to get first clear bonuses by killing off explorers.”

“We won’t even be taking the Crow into the boneyard. Not at first. We will be launching the full wave of pods to hit and classify the rifts, but you need to stay here and protect the Crow with your pods. We will be counting on you.”

“We?” I asked, more and more angry as he unconsciously patronized me. ‘You need to stay and protect the car! That’s the most important job!’. Like I was a child.

He nodded, “Yeah, we. I can still fight, and I need to help run the platoons. Even I won’t be going into any of the rifts, though, I am more of a threat to any raiders or infested spawn that might decide the invasion pods are too ripe of a target.”

I looked him in the eye. “Very well sir. I appreciate your forthrightness and acknowledge your orders. Please send whichever trooper you intend to fit for the fourth suit and I should have it completed within forty-eight hours. For right now, I have a lot to do, and with all due respect, please exit my deck so I can get to work.”

He winced a little, but right now I just wanted him GONE, and I was not going to cry in front of the cold-hearted scrot-head.