Spaceman Roisin Gabrielle Reynard-
4 weeks later
I had expected many things from the J-school, but one thing that had surprised me was that once we got into the training segment, it was FUN. like playing video games, except that you were using your real gifts, not exactly simulations. We had a node, that allowed us to remote to the surface of a real moon, where hordes of bio-constructs, very similar to chaos spawn, waited for our remote drone drops.
It had to have been incredibly expensive. The training grounds were used by troopers as well, and we ran simulated drops with them twice a day, usually in different groups.
Nanites were as much vaporware as artificial sapience and antigravity. There was no way that an SI brain could be packed into a shell the size of a molecule or even a real cell. No synthetic intelligence was powerful enough, even at higher techs, to control thousands or millions of remotes, there simply wasn’t enough bandwidth to handle swarms on that scale.
That’s where gifts came in. Both Taxon and I had the gift of handling microswarms. Learine had something similar, but it was exclusively biological and allowed him to create powerful swarms of microorganisms that could do everything from healing wounds to tearing chaos spawn to pieces from the inside. I still wouldn’t reveal that I had true quantum control of a swarm, but decent drone control could accomplish amazing things with a microswarm, tiny hordes of mechanicals that had barely enough brain to move and wiggle their microscopic manipulators under the control of a drone pilot.
But with microswarms, you could repair things on an unbelievably small level, improvise weapons and repairs on the fly, and even make upgrades right in the middle of a fight… You couldn’t exactly ‘heal’ the way a true spiritual or life wielder could, but being able to stitch closed blood vessels, repair arteries and close wounds in seconds was more than good enough for most troopers, plus… I could give them a tiny ‘squirt’ of spiritualism to help the microswarms repair even life-threatening injuries… That and the small, rabbit-like Sensei’s training improved my spiritualism to apprentice and gave me the ‘remote healing’ trait, a fact that I carefully kept hidden.
It helped that each of the trainees was given a private room. I had to go to certain extra lengths each time my period rolled around, especially since Goblins have keen noses, but with my own tiny room, it was MUCH easier to keep things a secret, especially when I had doctored the security panels to make sure that any snoop wouldn’t get the wrong eyeful.
The biggest problem was that I was starting to go through my growth spurt. Things were…. changing, and I was already taller than most of the goblins in my class. The training was only another two weeks, and I was certain I could keep certain things restrained until that time, but I had to wonder if the presence of Warrant Officer Wasserman was encouraging my hormones to develop rapidly. It was known to happen.
The problem was that he and the sensei regularly battled us for control of our drones. It made sense, on hellworlds Chaos lords and even lesser overlords could take control of almost any nonsapient material, and in a rift, well, the rift itself fought to turn them into its tools or simply recycle them.
When Sensei Ramuel impinged his aura, it was like a cold invasion… he was powerful, but he was restraining his strength and was easy to work around, evade, and even, in some cases, fracture his concentration by suddenly overloading his aura. I respected the old rabbit, but his aura was about as exciting as eating cold, dry oatmeal with water.
The Warrant Officer, though, was incredibly difficult for an entirely different reason. His technocontrol was not great, and some of the others fought off his influence easily, but when he was working his way into my drones, it was like he was wrapping a warm, fuzzy blanket around me on a cold, drizzling day. I had to work twice as hard not to give in and just… surrender to the wonderful feeling instead of fighting for control of my drones. I simply cursed, fought on as best I could, and ignored the dreams I was starting to have at night. No, I would not bond with him. He was part of the evil, a tool of the establishment.
I didn’t know what a paladin was, but I knew damned well what an inquisitor was, and I had to wonder if he was something similar… worming his way under my skin to try and pull out all my secrets for the world to see… and he was clever, and tricky enough, that if it lasted too much longer I might just… let him. Scrotting instincts. No, I was not going to passively bond.
It didn’t help that in his own way he was extremely handsome. Compact, tight musculature, tall, incredibly confident… Sure, he’d been damaged heavily, scars all over including one that made the left side of his mouth look like he was perpetually smirking, and I didn’t LIKE all of the artificial repair parts that had to be interfering with his cultivation… a person just couldn’t have that much metal inside of themselves without screwing with their essence flow, and I knew that it was within my power to help repair, regrow, or rebuild the intrusions if I didn’t fear my secret being discovered.
“Kaxis! Watch your people.” I snapped, suddenly remembering he was two ranks higher than me. “Please, petty officer. I just regenerated three of your heavy AP drones. They are already linked into your network, and there’s an arthropod that just hid in your trooper’s line of march.”
A goblin cackle greeted my announcement, “Yeah, I saw it. Fast work on the AP drones, I was getting ready to send some bomb drones over to at least alert the troopers, but this makes it a lot easier since they are still under pressure from two hierarchs. Got it. Nothing like the taste of shredded arachnids and gravy in the morning, Alien.”
I nodded and got busy trying to support his drones. Real troopers were down there training, and while deaths were few, they still could get badly hurt. Orcs had decent regeneration when they had time to heal, and the trainers liked to take advantage of that to speed up their training times. I didn’t know if I agreed, but then again, Orcs seemed to live for that scrot.
My own drones were controlling a loose battle area to the south, and since the pressure was light, I had them scavenging debris to assemble new units both for me as well as reinforced scrap to add to Learine’s golem reserves. I couldn’t animate their cores, that was a sorcery or Earth Elementalist trick for those kinds of golems, but as long as his golems didn’t lose their cores, they could be scrapped and their cores immediately placed into a new golem body almost instantly to return to action.
Like I said, it was fun. Golems were a lot ‘looser’ to build than drones, and I’d been using my creativity to send him bodies that were… well… kind of creepy. Right now my buzzers were hauling over something that looked like a spideroid centaur with depleted-uranium pincers on its arms that could snip even a hierarch in half with one crunch. Drop-ships had limited mass capacity, but once he started losing golems, there were no rules that said he couldn’t install the cores into much more effective and heavier bodies.
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“Seriously Roisin? I appreciate the assist, I recovered two cores, but your golems are nightmares. You know I have to live inside of these things, right?”
I started to giggle and turned it into a snort instead, Golem controllers had to spend a few moments inside each of their constructs to ‘teach’ the core how to operate the new body, which meant he got to experience, firsthand, what it felt like to BE whatever artistic creations I managed to whip up. Learine bitched, but he loved being able to take his otherwise less-than-stellar golem line, rebuilt into a set of twelve terrifying death machines, and get a kill rating near the top.
“They still haven’t cleared out the wreckage from last week. If they are going to leave depleted uranium on the field, I intend to use it as part of the simulation. Besides, you haven’t lost a match in weeks. Isn’t learning to drive eight limbs worth it? It does show up on your fitreps.”
“I know, I know, it’s just creepy, that’s all. Yesterday one of the troopers took a shot at that centipede you made, thinking it was a bore worm. I appreciate your hard work but… whups! Just a sec.”
Two of my spy drones caught his new toy playing with a mongol, carefully snipping off eight of its heads in rapid order before two of its bladed portside legs stabbed through its control core, amidst a hail of fire from the troopers keeping it suppressed.
“But do you have to be so scrotting creative? I get that they are serious hardware, especially after a bad drop, but some of your art gives me nightmares.”
I was suddenly busy on my own front. The troopers directed my two AP drones, the ones I updated with DPU plating within seconds of the drop window closing, into a spawn hole, and they were fighting for their mechanical lives. We hadn’t been given a price tag for the mission, so the first thing I had done was have my swarm butcher the drop pod for bulk, which I’d used to turn the AP drones into a whirlwind of deadly scythes and flying shrapnel.
I felt that warm blanket feeling again as the Warrant tried to wrestle control of my drones away from me, and regretfully shed the feeling despite wanting to wallow in it, wasting a horde of swarmers to build an extra chem-fuel flame trap to help deal with the huge nest of squirmers that were trying to eat through the drone’s armor with their acid secretions.
Once the primary bulk in the nest was torn through by the drones, they were both badly enough damaged and out of ammunition that I sent a ‘proceed with clear’ message to the troopers, who were happily butchering the remainders of the nest up top. They were still up top, with only one trooper badly damaged enough to be considered a casualty while the goblin tech worked to rewire his heavy suit into mobility again. With a thought, I sent a loader scuttling over to the tech, popping itself open and exposing its convertor relays and nearly untouched power supply, and the tech gave me a thumbs-up before he started ripping the units out of the disposable drone to jury rig the baseline trooper’s armor.
A trooper gleefully sent a tac nuke down the tunnel, blowing the nest into fragments, my drones along with it. Didn’t matter much to me, though, since the number of drones was almost irrelevant on this size of a battlefield. I could take over and control almost every drone in the battle with only minor degradation in performance, and all I’d lose was a small part of my swarm. But that wasn’t my job.
I kept an eye on the trooper's armor and noticed that the second trooper, who’d gotten injured but hadn’t had degraded armor, was bleeding pretty badly from a torn outer leg injury. It was well within my abilities, so I sent part of the swarm that was tending the unit over to quickly restitch and mend torn ligaments and seal over the torn armor. It was an orc, so he’d probably barely noticed the injury as long as he could still walk.
“That’s six in a row, Roisin. Core cleared. This was a traditional fight from some old futurist series about an interstellar war with some giant bugs, and it was supposed to be a loss to teach you to recover from a bad situation. Congratulations, you have earned a Kobayashi. You ALSO get to rebuild a lander and recycle as much metal as you can this time… Your clever use of available resources has been noted, and of course, no good deed goes unpunished.” I heard the warrant officer’s voice come in over the comms.
Great, three solid hours down the tubes. Tomorrow’s test was on recombinant multi-discipline power supplies, which I was still a little fishy on. Converting environmental essence into usable energy via tech. The reverse was a lot easier since it required little more than a mental exercise to shift technology into sorcerous fuel… hell, every ship in existence used that principle for shielding and jump drives. I would be up late into the night studying once I was done.
And I had a Kobayashi to look forward to. It was a pure simulation exercise where you scrambled to reassemble as much as you could to fight waves of the spawn of increasingly higher difficulty. I was usually careful to try to stay under the radar, but without troopers around it was a pure exercise in tech affinity and drone repair and control, reassembling drone ships as fast as possible and cobbling together weapons systems out of scrap to fight an increasingly impossible battle to protect your stranded pod from a full-scale Chaos Lord invasion.
Simulations, though, let you play as though you had MUCH more powerful affinities. Obviously, I couldn't use my forces enhancements, so it was an exercise in pure drone control, but with the system simulating my tech affinity being ten times its real value, all sorts of fun options were available. It also helped me cement a few choices I would make someday if I ever achieved that level.
Most people hated it, but I loved it, and it was one of the few things I could take pride in excelling at. Last time I had started with a single disabled light carrier with a ‘dead crew’, and wound up taking apart two planet destroyers before a titan spawned almost on top of the carrier and ended the run. I had gotten better, and this time, I figured there was a better-than-even chance I could utilize the destroyers to build something that could actually take the titan, but I would have to get my carrier as far away as possible from the initial spawn line to have time to reassemble enough to have a chance.
I did grumble quietly about it, though, so that someone would hear my complaints. It wouldn’t do to have someone revel in a punishment detail, just like setting someone to mess crank detail wouldn’t exactly be a punishment to a soldier with a cooking affinity.
Two more weeks, and I would hopefully graduate and get my ship assignment. It was only the first step towards protecting my world from the slavers, but it was a vital step. I just hoped whoever captained whatever ship I was sent to would forgive the filing error that got a female drone pilot sent to their ship. If I was very lucky, someday I might find a bond willing to take on my personal mission as well, someone that hated the slaver worlds and ‘bounty hunters’ that exploited the empire’s policies as much as I did, but if not, my spiritualism was already apprentice… with enough work and training, When I was unmistakably mature, I could resist bonding and achieve my goals, alone.