Although the Wurger was now battle-ready once again, there was much work to be done, from handling Shellhead’s corpse, claiming his portion of the loot, to hopefully assisting in repairing the turrets. He glanced over at one of the puppet frames that littered the workshop. It was unfinished to an even greater extent than any of the Hollow Men; he had not even completed the underlying frame, only the lower half and two-thirds of the torso, chiefly the thick, wide spinal support. To the eyes of a layman, or even an unlearned puppetmaster, it might appear just a bit different from a typical Hollow Man; a fair bit larger and wider, a difference here, a difference there, nothing unheard of, every puppetmaster had his own customizations and bespoke parts. Only he, who had inherited this design, knew enough to be entranced by it. It drew his eye, and from there drew him in, pulling at his thoughts, almost speaking to him.
“You were nearly not strong enough last time. What of the next? Will the Wurger suffice? Why leave things up to chance? Your talent is not good enough to behave like a protagonist. Just complete me and let the sailors fix their own damn ship.”
He heard no such voice in his mind, merely attributing stray thoughts to the puppet to make it easier to dismiss them. No. Not today. He couldn’t afford to be pulled into another spiral. Singlemindedly pursuing progress on this project had been the true reason he had become careless enough to poison himself.
Zanma called Carter down to his workshop, sat down at his workbench, and started inspecting one of the pearlescent slabs he had made in the last week, so that it would appear he was busy and merely calling him over as an afterthought. He questioned the surgeon-technician on the current affairs and state of the ship, then moved on to the state of Shellhead’s corpse, and the other loot.
“All locked up as you had asked. Though I must admit, the body is starting to smell already. I ought to have known and frozen him instead, since he’s a crab…” Carter answered.
“It’s fine, I don’t need the organs,” Zanma said. It was possible to harvest useful materials from the bodies of dead evolvers, but he had neither the expertise nor the tools to do so. So the exoskeleton would have to do. “Take him to the deck, I’ll dissect him there and just toss the leftovers overboard. Unless the shipbeast wants to eat them, I suppose. How’d the counter-raid go? It’s alright, tell me the whole thing, I have time.”
“The two surviving hardsuit wearers were waiting for us. Turned out to be mercs with one of the professional outfits running out of Outer Rim Six near Axis Fulcrum. Offered us a deal. We get most of the valuables onboard, they get to keep the ship, and they make it easy for us, told us about a few nasty traps and the like. Paid fair and square for the ship, too — with money they looted from the ship to begin with, I’m sure, but that’s neither here nor there. There was barely anyone left aboard regardless, wouldn’t have been a serious fight with our numbers. The Captain’s call, can’t afford a detour to port, can’t afford having the survivors know your path, and he didn’t want to stack more bodies than necessary. We tossed a couple of Gokaku’s loyalists overboard, locked up the rest in the pirate ship’s brig, the two mercs took care of the rest, that’s about it.”
"Efficient," Zanma said. He meant it as a compliment. Carter seemed to take it as one. “Did you inventorize the loot as you went through it?”
“Of course. Of course we did,” Carter answered nervously, already bringing out a PDA as he answered, having clearly anticipated this question; he couldn’t help but pay attention to the PDA, with how ridiculously overbuilt it was. The thing was a slab of tarnished grey alloy shod with a dense cluster of mechanical buttons and projector lenses, with a handle built in. Subtle deformations pitted the back in a cluster as if it had been sprayed with an automatic c-prop gun, and had stopped the burst.
It wasn’t that Zanma distrusted Carter, or the Captain, or even either of the Captain’s sons, but there was no accounting for those with whom he had no personal accord. The PDA sputtered to life and from its projector lens sprung a crystal-clear hologram. Not just a written inventory, Carter had composed an entire presentation on the loot, photographs included. The vast majority the loot from the pirate ship consisted of trade goods, obviously looted from the pirates’ previous victims. Based on the value estimates that both Zanma and the Captain agreed upon, Zanma claimed the vast majority of the compact valuables — ingots of printer stock and various valuable alloys, with additional compensation for the rest of his share paid out in secular currency from the Captain’s own pockets. Useless where he was going, but they would serve him along the journey. He also claimed a small portion of the various objects found aboard the vessel, regardless of whether they were trade goods, not for their material value but because he thought they had potential to be used as stage props; this batch included several instruments and some sound processing and amplification equipment. Zanma wondered if the pirates had robbed a passenger ship and took even the band’s equipment, or if there was a band in some coastal city waiting for an order that would never come. Looking at the market values of everything, he took the smaller portion of the spoils, but he was willing to pay for convenience, as well as to make this gesture of goodwill.
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Next order of business, Zanma fired up four fresh Hollow Men for the dissection of Gokaku, carrying it out on the rear deck so that the stench would drift away as the ship sailed. The pirate really had begun rotting nearly immediately after death, just like a crab. The metacarbonate rod hadn’t left much of his insides intact to begin with, but the decay had already begun liquefying his internal organs, bloating his exoskeleton. Zanma sat in the same spot on the superstructure from which he had carried out their battle as he cut the pirate’s chitin from his cadaver, plate by plate. The underlying layer of connective tissue wouldn’t hold up without embalming reagents that, once more, Zanma didn’t have.
He took the greatest of caution when carving out the strange storage pocket on the left leg, which as he had suspected turned out to be an organic small-capacity spatial-fold storage device; one with no security functionality, not that it would’ve needed it since it had been part of Gokaku’s body. It had just about enough space to hold Gokaku’s smasher gun, some ammunition, an oversized vibrosword cutlass so wide it was almost a machete, and a few valuables. Tiny, tiny valuables, and yet the most precious spoils out of the entire haul. Small, matte-black rectangles. Heavier than their size would suggest, thrumming in his hand with the promise of vast and untapped potential. He quickly stowed them away inside his earring, to inspect later.
Gokaku’s smasher gun and cybernetic arm were both of interest, but as props more than for practical purposes, to be joined with the corpse puppet later. Given the size required to properly replicate Gokaku’s large frame, the puppet would inevitably be a purely performative type, not a “True Puppet.” His pincers were nearly complete swords as they were, and testing them even briefly proved they far surpassed any of the conventional vibroswords in Zanma’s collection in terms of cutting power. Their pearlescent surface had a faintly psi-resonant characteristic, but it paled in comparison to real “Tridacna Pearl.” He decided to make replicas of them to use on the puppet of Gokaku, and use the real ones for himself.
The collected rotting waste of Gokaku’s cadaver was deemed too hazardous to feed to the shipbeast and tossed overboard, where it churned the waters and dissolved into a noxious cloud of steam before it even got out of sight.
Repairing the turrets went more easily than anticipated. The actual housings weren’t too damaged, so plugging up the holes and replacing the guts was all it took. Between what the Etsutensoku had onboard, what had been plundered from the pirates, and a few miscellaneous, easily-replaced components from his own collection, he managed to rig up a shell-firing cannon for the rear turret, and a molybdenum cone launcher for the front turret; an ancient mining and hunting implement, able to smash apart hull as easily as rocks and chitin. With a bit of tinkering, some puppet sensors and linkages, he got it up to a standard he was satisfied with, well beyond anything the sailors had expected. He had no particular reason to do this, beyond the feeling of responsibility for the destruction of the original turrets.
Finding privacy, he finally took out the precious, black rectangles, all eight of them. They were precisely three centimeters long, half as wide, and two millimeters thick, small enough to fit on a fingertip. Each had a lighter-coloured and reflective section, showing numbers. A 10, with 207 and 800 in smaller text below, sized to be the same width as the 10. It was the weight, 10.207800 grams, the same density as elemental lead.
This, this was it, this was the single most universal currency in all the world; with this, you could buy anything, even if nobody was selling.
This was Changestone. Substrate Condensate. Programmable matter. PolyMat. Myriad names for the same thing, a substance that could be transmuted into anything, so long as you could instruct it on the properties of your target. In practice, the value of its potential was so great that very, very few people ever used it for its intended purpose. These were chits, the smallest common denomination. Bringing them together, they would self-align as if magnetized and merge, and separating them was just as easy. The purpose of those numbers was to openly tell the chit’s remaining transmutable mass; as they were spent, they would get shorter and shorter, and when they reached half their original size, they would instead start becoming lighter, hollowing themselves out. After all, anything smaller than a half-chit would be exceedingly easy to lose. This was all assuming gradual spending, rather than a larger transmutation that would burn up multiple full chits.
Beyond chits were Slats, made up of 10 full Chits, having dimensions of 75x30x4mm, then Bricks, Slabs, and Pillars. Probably further, even more absurd denominations, but Zanma wasn’t aware of them. Eight chits, nearly a full Slat, had no doubt composed most if not all of Gokaku’s savings. He never mentioned this to any of the sailors, not even to Carter or the Captain, he was no fool.
In fact, Zanma spent the rest of the journey recovering and working on his puppets. He decided to set aside all work with liquid TPR until he could get better protective equipment; he already had a substantial stock of finished plates and miscellaneous fragments regardless, so he could tinker all he wanted. He had wanted to put on a puppet performance, but the sailors insisted he should rest and recover. He could sense that much of it stemmed from true concern, but it was unmistakable; all but the Captain, his two sons, and Carter were noticeably uneasy around him.
At the end of the day, he didn’t mind. He had known this would happen, and so had expected it.
If nothing else, at least there were no further incidents along the way.
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