Chapter 35

“The State of the Empire”

Seeing the angel-winged dress that was apparently Sachiko’s rig, Jeff had mixed emotions. On one hand, he felt a little sorry for Sachiko, he had admired her guts and fighting spirit when she chose to have the particle canisters placed in her prosthetic and it wasn’t a pleasant experience to see that drive being ignored. For his plan, however, it was a good turn of events. It was clear that the rig had been designed by a marketing company more than a mechanist, and that would give Sav an advantage when they fought. While they didn’t need to win in order to undercut the competition, doing so would definitely help.

Putting those concerns aside he made his way to the workshop. Sav completely crushed her opponents in the first two rounds in the previous day, but the quick turn-over between matches was bad for their preparations. As such, Jeff would help Diana out in the mornings and evenings before heading back to work at the trade show stall. When he arrived, Diana had already started the work and Sav was sitting by a computer watching the replay, taking notes on her performance the previous day.

There was a total of sixty-five contestants in the competition, representing most of the world’s countries. That meant a total of six rounds that needed to be fought, two of which happened on the first day. As the Kaya representative, Sachiko had received a bye for the first two rounds; mostly to bring the numbers into a tidier progression. On each of the remaining days they would only have a single match to each day, but the whole of the arena would be used, instead of sectioning it off so that multiple fights could proceed at once. That meant they would effectively have four times the moving room that they would normally have. That would give an advantage to fast rigs and long ranged attackers. In previous years, he had seen tactics that limit space get used far more often than they normally would; things like making walls, nets or strong magnetic fields.

With the adaptability of the new models, the chances of one of those traps being used increased, but, since Kaya’s rig was the only other new one out there, that was more of a benefit than a detriment. However, the costs of doing something like that had to be weighed against the benefits, as deploying a net would consume a significant amount of mass.

One of the most time-consuming parts of the new model was looking for dead formless particles. Since the particles were worn out a lot faster in the new model, and any problems with them could cause cascading errors without solid parts as a foundation, double checking their consistency was now something that needed to be done more often. Each morning they would run a test deployment of each of the individual sections and measure the weight against the calculated ideal; if any section’s weight was off, or the shape wrong, then the particles in the section and its surroundings would be removed and replaced. After the replacement was done, the reintegration process would need to be run, and the harmonics verified. Given that needed to be run, it would have been far quicker to just replace all of the formless particles after use, but doing that would rack up expenses far too quickly. That problem was increased significantly when large sections of the mass was entirely separated from the rig, either in the form of weapons or damage, and new mass had to be added to replace the lost particles.

The only people who could consider replacing the entire particle supply would be large companies with access to a particle grower, so their pilots would likely have an advantage in the near future. Not willing to waste the particles that were removed, Jeff collected them up and used the stand-by mode core to shape them into consumable items, like bullets, explosives and energy cells; things that could function even with some faulty particles. He could only marvel at the speed and complexity of that shapes made with every use, thinking that if the cost were to decrease and the secret behind the cores revealed, it would be possible to build an entire society around the formless particles.

When their morning work was done and Diana and Sav left to go practise, Jeff left also, headed towards the stall and the new customers. With the previous day’s matches now watched and aired, everyone could see the performance of the new designs for themselves. Those who couldn’t understand from just the raw data and those who were sceptical of the validity now had the proof they needed to invest. While the previous days were busy, he knew that it would only get worse as the matches progressed. By the time Sav’s match started, he had already sold out of hard drives with the complete schematics, and had to wait for more to be filled as he watched the match.

Her opponent was equipped head to toe in expensive parts; a speed type with small thrusters on ball joints throughout the rig. Each of those thrusters was set up to be able to aid manoeuvring, but could also function as a small scale plasma weapon. To control that number of independently moving thrusters with any kind of success would require a ridiculously high DC value, but the pilot was bred for that very purpose. Her home country had selected its highest DC individuals and had them have political marriages, as well as endorsed affairs, for several generations just to bring about that result. It was likely that when the pilot retired she would be convinced to have several children of her own, just to continue the tradition.

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The rig was coloured in a sunshine yellow, and its wings were shaped in an ‘x’ shape, with large thrusters at each point. The overall effect reminded him of dragonfly wings, despite the lack of actual resemblance. Less a structural resemblance an more of a motif. Looking through her records, it seemed that she fought using hit and run tactics, flying in close, avoiding hits, burning her target then taking some distance. With Sav’s previous rig, she would have been very difficult to fight, especially in the large arena, but the new rig’s adaption would likely be more than enough to lock down the match.

Any time Sav’s opponent took distance, Sav would shoot towards her with clouds of gaseous formless particles that consumed themselves in a cloud of electricity that was pulled towards any rig that got too close. If a rig was inside of the cloud, then the reaction between the rig and the cloud would centre the storm’s effect on the rig, making it all the more powerful. While similar metallic cloud weapons had existed before, the version that Sav was using was capable of being shot from a conventional rig rifle at normal bullet speeds and with greater electric charge; the benefits of the research done by a company that the Kaya group had provided with early access to the development program. Hundreds of man hours had gone into that bullet’s functionality and as such it had taken days to fully decode, one of the more difficult jobs Jeff had done.

When Sav’s opponent tried to shrink the distance and use her high mobility to orbit Sav’s back, Sav’s rifle reformed into a conical blade, like a long spearhead without the shaft, that was completely coated in thrashing, twisting and shifting blades and crushers. Even if the weapon didn’t pierce, just rubbing against it shredded the rig armour. Oddly enough, that design wasn’t one that Jeff had taken from Kaya. An acquaintance of his that had gone into the mining industry had sold him the designs for the latest drills and Jeff adapted that into the available options after reading the performance data.

Sure enough, the match ended with an overwhelming victory and the sales for that afternoon once again spiked. That set the pattern for Sav’s next fight and she soon found herself in the fifth round, the semi-finals. Much like Sav, Sachiko had likewise made quick work of her opponents and was also in the fifth round. If the event organisers had foreseen Jeff’s plan, they might have changed the seeding so that they met in the finals, but instead the two would clash in the semis. It was a match that would determine just how successful his plan would be. He had already undermined the market value of Kaya’s company with the success of the designs, but if the copy defeated the original then he could secure most of the market for the first part of the new generation. Once more third-party companies gained legitimate access the distribution would normalise, but until then he could force Kaya to take a heavy loss.

As Sachiko and Sav took to the centre stadium, the crowds let out a triumphant roar, expectations were at their highest and the sound could even be faintly heard through the barrier that kept the crowd safe from stray shots. Sachiko’s pure white, wedding dress like rig, that hugged tight against her body and had its appearance augmented by delicate angel wings, floated delicately at one side of the field. Sav’s bulky, gun metal grey rig, whose layout was like an amalgamation of ice-hockey player and elite police riot protection, stood on the grass at the other end. Almost in defiance of the outside ice, the centre stadium was covered in real natural grass. To prevent that from the inevitable damage that comes from rig combat, the protective shield not only covered the crowd and sky, but also ran along the ground. It was far from practical, but it was the kind of prestigious use of power that made the Quadrennial Games so influential.

From the opening moment of the match, it was clear that Sav had the advantage. Sachiko’s rig had easily outperformed her previous matchups, but against Sav’s rig, a rig using the same technology, it was evident how much the designers had sacrificed performance for the sake of ascetics.

The obvious differences, the kinds of things that audiences noticed, were in the speed and variety of attacks that Sav lashed out with. Her gun would never be the same type for more than a few shots before changing into something different, the types of ammunition and the direction of attack was never consistent either. Before Sachiko could adapt to anything, Sav would change it to something else entirely. That was especially the case for the very structure of the rig. One moment her shoulder-plates were thrusters and the next, just before an attack would hit, they would shift into a defensive plate structure. Her legs would go from movement, to weapon, to defence and back to movement again all fluidly matching the motions of Sav’s body.

The mechanists in the audience would have noticed quickly why there was such a glaring difference in the performance of the two rigs; mass distribution. Sachiko’s mass of formless particles was predominantly in her wings. Any time somewhere needed to access that supply, it would need to either move from the wings or cannibalise whatever was nearby and have whatever was consumed do the same until the chain reached the wings. Either way was inefficient, either costing time or processing power. Sav’s rig was different, its mass had been spread out from the get go, and the changes were linked to specific areas that only needed new particles when replacing damaged systems or generating power. Even had the pilots been equal, the purposeful way that Sav’s rig utilised the adaptability ensured her domination.

With the end of the first round it was clear who was leading. Jeff knew better than believing that Sam would have let that rig compete seriously. It was completely against his best interests, but he let out a sigh and sent her a message.

“You’re Sachiko’s mechanist; boot them out.”