Chapter 14

  Down. Brightside was down.

  Not technically. Space made concepts like up and down iffy things, all relative and meaningless from the right perspective.

  Where Brightside really was, was past the artificial gravity well the station used to help everyone walk around and keep the majority of their bone mass. That meant wherever you went in the station, the other side of it was down. That made the trip to the bottom easier at least, not that Isea thought so. He was having a hard time with his bruised ribs and now swollen face, but, despite his initial misgivings, he soldiered on with me, much more easily once we were done with stairs and we joined a flat-ish pedestrian passage.

  There weren’t many people here, now that we were out of the service districts, and those we did see were dressed in uniforms such as maintenance techs, janitorial staff, and the like. Windows to the outside became much less frequent until they disappeared altogether, and the floor gained a gentle slope, just this side of curved but so incredibly subtle, you barely noticed.

  We came upon our first security checkpoint shortly thereafter, a row of steel and reinforced glass booths with door frame-type structures on either side of them, though they were in severe disrepair. Multiple dings, dents, and downright structural damage could be seen even from far away, and, up close, I saw that the electronics had been ripped out and the metal stripped from most of them. Mounts where I guessed security cameras were supposed to be were just hollow holes with mangled metal mounts where someone had forcibly ripped the important bits off.

  “Where’s security?” I asked Isea.

  “Not on this side of the bridge. They haven’t used this one in years,” he replied as he slipped inside the bent door frame and into the open on the other side.

  “Doc mentioned that they aren’t really popular over here,” I remembered.

  “That’s an understatement. They generally leave us to fend for ourselves, which suits us just fine.”

  “Catch your own bad guys, do you?” I asked.

  “We police our own pretty well. Have to, considering how limited we are where space is concerned.”

  I swallowed, not knowing if my next question was going to be taken very well. “Anyone ever going to police Mel? He seems like he needs a visit from some kind of authority.”

  Isea’s look soured further than it already was. Then, he shook his head. “No. Nobody’s coming for Mel. Believe it or not, Mel and his crew do a lot of things that keep things running around here. You just don’t want to cross them.”

  “Like you.”

  “Like me.” He coughed and clutched at his ribs again. “But I guess that’s over now, isn’t it? Thank you, by the way. When you whipped out all that money, I think you short circuited his brain.”

  “Was what I gave him a lot?”

  Isea’s mouth dropped open and he grabbed my arm as he came to an abrupt halt. “You don’t know?”

  “I already told you I wasn’t born like this, right?” I shrugged and spread my arms. “I’m just a kid from nowhere. Pretty sure I’m still in my origin story.”

  Isea shook his head, disbelieving. “Insane. Let’s just say Mel’s going to have to find a way to break that thing into credits. You can’t just slap those things down somewhere to pay your tab. Only a handful of folks on our side of the station have probably even seen one of those coins. Brightside’s right over the bridge, but it's a million miles away too, ya know?”

  The ‘bridge,’ which we were on, was a walkway of sorts, shaped like a wide rectangular box, except the whole thing was bent slightly so that everything had a slight curve going down, giving the land an artificial horizon both in front and behind. It was wide enough to probably drive several rovers from back home side by side comfortably and tall enough that it never felt ‘close’ in that way caves or catacombs felt. There was also a constant breeze in our faces, which did a lot to keep the windowless hall from feeling claustrophobic.

  According to Isea, we were currently walking around the gravity well in a way that would keep our feet firmly on the ground and our lunch in our stomachs. It had to have been precisely designed, because my Climbing skill never once was in danger of activating itself. The walk was considered a smooth hike in a singular direction by the System. Every once in a while, the floor under our feet vibrated as an unseen vehicle passed on a track underneath our feet.

  We saw our first pair of guards a few minutes in, walking casually side by side, hands on their belts where they kept their weapons. I kept Isea between them and me, so as not to show my face, trusting Stealth to do the rest. I was the guy that could hide in plain sight, apparently, but if I could keep from testing it until the very last minute, that would be swell.

  The real test came at the checkpoint, much like the abandoned one we’d already passed back at the beginning of the bridge. This one was active with uniformed but unarmored personnel in the booths, cameras mounted up high, and a bustling but business-like atmosphere, queues of people heading through and coming back. They all shuffled through the doorway openings slowly, with their hands out and chin up to appear as open as possible, so that meant they were probably scanners of some kind. Meanwhile, the guards in the booths waved people on through while keeping their eyes scanning from faces to the data pads they held in their hands. Two pairs of guards in full riot gear stood off to the side ready to assist with problems but generally looking bored, despite their eyes being hidden behind tinted visors.

  Isea and I shuffled into the crowd and chose a lane to pass through. For my part, I focused hard on ‘hiding in plain sight’ as Gray Man phrased it and keeping my head down. I was just one of the crowd, one of them. One of the humans. I could remember how to do that, right? I was human like six months ago. I couldn’t have forgotten how to be normal in that time, right?

  It occurred to me that I was probably never ‘normal, even less so now that I had a metal arm and weird blue eyes and magical superpowers.

  Damnit. I couldn’t take the risk. I was going to be discovered. There were too many eyes and surveillance, and their job was to focus on me specifically as I passed through. No way my Stealth skill was up to that.

  That meant I’d need to improvise. I hated improvising.

  My mind raced, and it only came up with one plan… half a plan.

  Reaching into my jacket pocket, I summoned another one of Philipe’s stupidly valuable coins. Then I bumped Isea with my elbow.

  “Hide this,” I whispered, pressing the coin into his palm.

  In the most obviously suspicious gesture he could have made, he looked down at what I’d given him and turned extremely pale. “What? No. Why?”

  “And go in front of me.”

  “What am I- I can’t take that,” Isea protested, trying and failing to back away from me, since I had him by the good wrist.

  “Put it in your splint. Insist it’s not yours.”

  “Because it’s not!” He whispered harshly. “Hey! Smith!”

  I wasn’t listening anymore. I was on to phase two.

  My next maneuver was to pretend to tie my shoes, but instead of actually doing that, I touched the floor and gave it a good push with my mana. I was close enough to the booths now that I could detect the wiring in the floor and the circuitry in the booths.

  Shape 10 mp/s.

  Shape 30 mp/s.

  Shape 40 mp/s.

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  I wasn’t shy about pouring on the mana. I had to assimilate quite a bit of metal to get a real feeling for what I was dealing with here. Apparently, the floor was a series of interlocking panels, probably designed in such a way to accommodate for temperature changes and gravitational fluctuations, which was bad for me since I could only Shape one of them at a time. That sucked.

  It was still my only option, so I started to Shape. As I’d done in my cell, I set about joining the disparate parts together, taking one molecule and intertwining it with another on the next piece of the floor, essentially Shape welding them until they were considered one piece by the System or my magic or whatever governed these types of things. I did it once, twice, thrice, each time having to back out when it was my time to shuffle forward in the queue. Then I would have to get back down and resaturate things.

  It was hell on my mana, and I wasn’t in a position to Consume anything. Too much attention would be drawn by something like that. Already, I could feel my body in the beginnings of a full on Crystalized Channels shit fit. Every time I got down and fed more mana into the floor, it was harder to get back up again, such was the pain in my gut and the firestorm in my veins.

  The first part of my little plan went off while I was currently in the middle of Shape welding the panel under the booth. The alarm on the scanner blared, and lights strobed briefly overhead. Security was there in a flash.

  “Sir, could you empty your pockets please? All of them. Where did you get this? Of course it’s not illegal. We’re just asking questions. Are you sweating, sir? Perhaps you should come with us.”

  I didn’t look up to see what was happening with Isea. I was too busy emptying my soul into a trick I really shouldn’t have attempted. My breathing was up, and I was sweating in my jacket. The world swam as my inner ear decided to get in on the action too.

  My original goal was the wiring in the floor that I’d assumed to be the power supply, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get to it. The shielding around the cabling was proving to be too much to penetrate in the little time I had, so I switched tactics.

  Forget cutting the power. Just disable the scanner.

  The circuitry was going to have to be my consolation prize, and it was going to only be in one booth. I only had mana for that much. One last push bottomed me out, and I saturated my floor panels, the outer shielding of the booth, the chassis for the electronics, and then about fifty separate microscopic connections on the circuit boards. With a flick of my will I reshaped said microscopic tracks, nudging them together until they merged into one, glorious, messy short circuit.

  I nearly passed out from the effort it took.

  MP 0/314

  Instead of passing out, however, I rose, wobbling, to my feet and rejoined everyone in the line.

  What I’d done produced almost immediate results. Thick smoke billowed up from the floor of the booth, thick enough to obscure the guard inside with the exception of rapidly flailing limbs. The door in back of the booth burst open, spilling its occupant out into the open, coughing and waving her hands in front of her face.

  Relieved but exhausted, I leaned on the frame of the scanner that I hoped I’d just disabled. I was tapped out, only barely able to pretend I could stand up straight. The fire in my channels had grown angry, volcanic.

  I needed to Consume something. Right now. I’d never gotten this low on MP with Crystalized Channels before, and I felt like it was killing me. A quick check of my HP told me I was full, but it was only a small comfort. The pain was that bad.

  “What happened?” One of the riot gear clad guards asked. He had Isea pinned up against the side of the booth, not physically but very clearly detaining the poor kid.

  The booth guard gagged and held up her hand while her airway cleared, but she was okay after a few deep breaths. “I don’t know *cough.* Something’s fried in there.”

  “You okay?” I asked the woman I’d smoke bombed. I wobbled forward with at least a little genuine concern.

  She waved me away. “Yeah. Yeah. It just… ugh. Nasty stuff.”

  “Well, okay. If you’re sure. Less work for you, I guess.” The pain I was in gave my voice a choked, raspy quality. I waved my hand in front of my face as if the smoke had gotten to me too.

  “If only,” she laughed, though not a genuine one. Good. I’d been shooting for ‘likeable but forgettable.’

  She grimaced at her smoking booth then looked me up and down appraisingly. Whatever she saw, she seemed to dismiss. “You go on through, sir. Have a safe night.”

  “You too,” I said, waving and committing to the monumentally difficult feat of pretending to walk casually while my body immolated itself from the inside.

  As I wobbled drunkenly away from the checkpoint, I could still hear snippets of Isea getting the third degree. I really hoped the coin wouldn’t get him arrested. It wasn’t technically illegal to have, right? They’d said as much.

  I left the checkpoint behind and strolled (agonizingly) slowly further over the bridge until I was over the artificial horizon from the checkpoint and through the exit into what I assumed was the Brightside part of the station. The bridge spilled me out through a set of heavy security doors and into a truly enormous space. I was in a cylindrical room, if one could call something so big a room. It had to be as big as a stadium, only hundreds of times taller. The roof was no longer there, replaced, instead, by open air that stretched up and up into the sky. Along the outer part of the cylinder, multiple tiers of walkways, balconies, gardens, and platforms stretched on into infinity, or at least until the humidity in the air made things too hazy to see.

  The first thing I did was find a quiet corner where I could have a seat, bringing my legs up to my chest and resting my head on my knees, somewhere out of the way, somewhere I could recover. In this case it was behind a garbage bin in front of a maintenance door. Sitting down didn’t feel any better. At least I wasn’t in danger of falling down anymore.

  Then I set about summoning a log of mendau wood, my last good sized one, and Consumed it. I did the deed inside the flap of Dad’s jacket. It burned, but I didn’t mind. I was already burning. Something about that made me giggle. Was this what being delirious felt like?

  Instantly, I started to feel… different. Not 100% better but less on the edge of death. I still felt like hammered shit and ready for a long nap besides. That wouldn’t be so bad, right?

  Status gained: Engine [8 MP/sec for 30 min.]

  My Mendau affinity was high enough that the buff would have me topped off in a minute or so. All I had to do was wait, while sweat ran down my face, and my body shivered.

  I concentrated on deep breathing and thoughts of peace and eventual relief. It wouldn’t be so bad to fall asleep. I could barely keep my eyes open anyway.

  “Hey! You! Wake up!”

  An annoyingly hard object tapped on the back of my head.

  I lifted my head to find two security personnel standing over me. These were the armed type, patrolmen or some version of it, I guessed, with light armor that clacked together at the joints as they pressed closer to me. One had his baton out and above my head, while the other crouched down so he could look into my eyes.

  “Have a rough night, big guy?” he asked, but he didn’t wait for an answer, instead, giving me orders. “Hold still.”

  “Not feeling well,” I mumbled.

  He leaned in close and grabbed a fist full of my hair to keep me from flinching away. He reached up to touch a spot on the side of his helmet, but his hand paused just before making contact.

  Belle had a button on that side of her goggles too, didn’t she? Yes. She did.

  A slight tremble in the guard’s fingers and the tiniest stretching at the corner of his mouth were his only tells, but they were enough to set off my paranoia.

  Oh, no. I’d failed. I was caught already. I was barely in the neighborhood of my goal, and I was caught.

  “Tell you what? Let’s get you to a doctor, and then maybe we’ll get you a ride home, eh?” The guard asked as he pulled me up by the collar of my jacket.

  MP 314/314

  “You were about to run my face through some kind of database, weren’t you?” I asked.

  The guard shared a cryptic look with his partner. Their tinted visors didn’t give me a whole lot to work with, but the silence told me something.

  “But you didn’t,” I said. “I think I know why.”

  *TWANG*

  The guard’s baton extended its length by half, and the end buzzed with electricity.

  “Hey! Excuse me! Hello?” Isea’s voice called from behind the two guards. The two of them turned the slightest bit in the direction of the intrusion. That was all the chance I was going to get.

  A SpewerTM appeared in my hand, and I rammed it into the side of the unarmed guard’s head.

  *BOOF*

  The little shotgun barked, the concussive force of the propellant cube rocking the Marshal Exotic’s (at least I hoped he was an Exotic) head to the side so violently it rebounded back and forth limply like his neck was made of rubber.

  Then, before the other guard even registered he was in a fight, I whipped the Spewer to the side with as much force as I could muster, clubbing him directly in his visored face. He staggered, but the single blow wasn’t enough to bring him down, another tell that these two were Exotics. I reached forward and grabbed the stunned man by the chin strap with my prosthetic…

  Iron Grip [0.1 MP/sec]

  …and slammed him into his friend. The two heads cracked together, the plastic material making deceptively light *clack* sounds as the helmets collided. They both dropped, bonelessly to the floor shortly thereafter.

  Unarmed Combat is now level 9.

  You have defeated Petre Walshman.

  You have been awarded 0 experience points. [50 capped for non-lethal, -40 non-combat class, -50 class restrictions]

  You have defeated Maximo Cartriem.

  You have been awarded 0 experience points. [50 capped for non-lethal, -40 non-combat class, -50 class restrictions]

  I panted and wiped sweat from my brow. That short burst of activity had exhausted my scant reserves, not my MP but my body’s. I really would have liked a chance to recover. (Thanks Crystalize Channels.) Even so, I silently thanked Constance that these guys were Exotics, and I hadn’t just murdered a regular human using my full strength.

  “Get the door, will you?” I requested of Isea, whose mouth was open in shock and disgust. Then I bent down and took hold of the Marshals’ ankles and began to drag them.

  “What the hell, Smith?” Isea gasped. “I thought you were gonna make a break for it or something! Are they-”

  “They’re both fine. The gun wasn’t loaded. His helmet took the worst of it. Now, come on. We need to get as far as we can before they sound the alarm.”

  Because, after that happened, I had no idea what I was going to do.

  Hey. Thanks for giving In my Defense a chance. New chapters will be posted Tuesdays and Thursdays, eventually ramping up depending on the amount of interest we can generate here.

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