Chapter 20

  Tilly’s place was ten or so decks down from Doc’s clinic in an industrial sector where stuff got made. Sparks from welders rained down from overhead, tiny bits of debris crunched under my boots, and heavy machinery trundled around on rubber tracks, carrying people and material from here to there. The deck had high, girded ceilings with multiple crane systems currently lifting or tracking from one destination to another. Currently, one of said cranes was swinging the frame of something big and vaguely V-shaped over the rest of the workers heads. The windows to space that were on the outer sections of other parts of the station were conspicuously absent here, giving the whole thing a tin can feel that I was on board with entirely. With all the machinery and activity, I could almost pretend I was back home in a windowless hab, the noise of the machines taking the place of the wind.

  I dragged the mover full of broken things behind me, its drive system whining as the electric motor kept pace with me. One of the wheels didn’t sit right on its axle either, making the whole thing wobble and jiggle our piled junk constantly, not quite enough to throw anything from the cart but enough to shift things from time to time. We’d already had to stop a few times and adjust the stack after it had toppled.

  After we’d collected what we could from Doc’s (that I didn’t fix yet), Tilly had realized the mover was nowhere close to full, so we’d went to her next stop and grabbed their junk too. When that wasn’t enough, we went to the next place and the enxt. I never saw her consult a data pad or a list or anything. She was just going off of memory of who needed her and where. That, in itself, was impressive to me, lost as I was in a place as big as this station. My clan’s numbers only ever got to the level of a small village, and, even then, we tended to spread out and only gather for training or holidays. Remembering whose junk was ready for collection and where they were on a station of millions almost seemed like a superpower to me.

  Tilly led me through the lanes of activity toward the middle of the deck, weaving around the traffic and knots of busy people, then through passageways that led down ramps where the mover’s brakes complained as it tried to keep from running the two of us over.

  Then we came to a wall of sliding barn-like doors. I say that because the doors themselves were big and made of reinforced metal, and I could imagine pulling a tractor or rover inside to keep it out of the wind. My old shop was of a similar design if a bit more aerodynamic by necessity. The doors were lined up in a sort of morgue drawer configuration, four rows high and… lots in width, stretching on into the distance until the curvature of the station made them disappear from sight. Luckily for us, Tilly’s door was on the bottom row.

  Tilly slapped her hand on a control panel next to her door, and the seal popped open with a hiss. The motorized assists in the tracks hummed as we slid the big metal slab to the side to reveal a spacious but nightmarishly messy work area.

  Scrap metal littered the floor, jagged cuttings from one project or another mixed in with fine shavings that clumped around the larger bits like sand dunes collecting around rocks in a desert. Someone had tried to organize the more useful pieces in barrels, buckets, and boxes, but those were filled to the brim with things that were not entirely like the other. A half-disassembled transmission hung from chains over the center of the shop, the individual parts looking like they’d been through hell twice before coming here.

  I recognized quite a few of the metal working machines that were the islands of clean in the otherwise perfect sea of dirty, or, at least, what they were. None of them had been made on Proxis, so the shapes were a bit off and the labels were in the wrong places, but I could recognize the drill press, the lathe, and the planer. Those were simple enough for even an Outers bumpkin like me to identify. I was sure with closer examination I could probably even run the things… not safely but I could at least turn them on.

  “Come on then,” Tilly called, gesturing for me to follow her to the back of the shop where we unloaded all the bits and bobs from the mover, tagged and organized by owner and destination. The pile of junk to be fixed at the back of the shop was even more impressive than Isea’s closet, bigger by at least three times, and things in the ‘to fix’ pile were a mess of bent pipes, exposed wiring, snapped supports, and mangled wheels.

  Tilly set down her end of the rusted desk we’d gotten from the lawyers’ office earlier and blew out a satisfied breath.

  “Thoughts?” she asked cryptically.

  Unsure what she wanted, I simply let my instincts guide me. My eyes slid hungrily over the equipment. I would have killed for some of these things back home where I’d been forced to make do. There were more of my janky patch jobs rolling around Proxis that relied more on wire and fervent prayer than craftsmanship than I really liked to admit. With a shop like this I could have done some awesome stuff, made more stuff to last, maybe even kept the convoy rolling for longer so Barrow and his people had to work harder to catch us.

  I forced that dangerous thought out of my head. Someday, I’d have to really come to grips about how many parts of my past were emotional minefields, but today would not be that day.

  I walked over and brushed a few shavings off of what I guessed was a rotary cutter. It felt solid under my touch, real, full of potential.

  Tilly went on when I hadn’t said anything, coming up beside me and putting her hand on the machine too. “It’s not fancy or clean like the other shops, but it’s home. Might not look like much, but I make do with what I have. I keep things simple far as equipment goes, so I don’t have to call in anyone else to fix things if they shit the bed. That means going old school more often than not.”

  “I hear you there. Microchips and circuit boards are just problems waiting to happen,” I replied, thinking back on my shop again with a smile.

  That got a pleased smile out of Tilly. “Self-sufficiency means I stay working while others have to send off for delicate work. I try to keep off the materials lists when I can. No need to take when I can make.”

  I tilted my head and peered down into a bucket of what looked like old, bent hinges, some of them in such bad shape no amount of hammering or bending was going to get them to be useful again. Another bucket held sheared pins and bolts that no one would trust to hold a hanging picture, much less a hundred pounds of weight. There were some hoarder tendencies I was picking up on here, but I wasn’t in any position to judge. I had a whole pocket dimension of crap that I sucked up here and there..

  Finally, I found myself drawn toward a table sitting by itself in the corner of the room. It was a hollow cube of grooved metal with delicate looking needles attached to robot arms.

  “You’re all about simplicity, but I see a few capacitors for laser work on your stuff, and this… is this a fabricator?” I gaped as I realized what I was looking at.

  Tilly grunted with displeasure. “Worst investment I’ve ever made. Temperamental damned machine. I’ve gotten a grand total of a week of work out of it since I bought it.”

  She slapped the machine contemptuously on the control panel, and the screen lit up with her touch, awaiting commands. However, the characters on the screen were jumbled and half in code. The robot arms wiggled as they received signals from obviously faulty internals. A quick flick through my Detect abilities didn’t reveal anything particularly wrong with the machine, but what did I know about something like this?

  “So,” Tilly barked after an awkward few heartbeats of silence, following up with a loud singular clap of her hands. “You obviously know your way around a shop, but you’re a fancy pants Exotic boy. You’re here for the Academy, but you’re begging Doc for a bed. How does all that work?” she asked.

  “It’s a weird story,” I said. “You sure you wanna know?”

  “No,” she replied bluntly. “I’m a simple woman. I’ve got my work and what some might call a drinking problem, but I think I’m a pretty good judge of character too. You seem like a good enough boy, and if you’re in some kind of trouble. That kind of thing’s not going to scare me off though. I’m mostly asking for a heads up on what kind of problems you’re going to cause if I bring you on.”

  “Bring me on? I thought you just wanted help today,” I said.

  She frowned and folded her arms over her chest in that way I was starting to realize was her default manner for dealing with people. “Maybe this is me buying out competition before you could poach my business. Now, will I have any problems if I employ you? Any Exotics gonna come break down my door and magic up tastebuds in my anus or something?”

  My brain short circuited as it tried and failed to keep that mental picture from gaining any detail. Why would someone… Constance, could someone do that? I hoped that wasn’t a thing.

  Wait, was I in a job interview? I guessed I was. I’d never had one of those. I was most certainly underdressed and underbathed for it, but I decided to give it a go.

  “I was human like… six months ago,” I explained as frankly as I could. “I grew up on a little dust ball in the middle of nowhere, and I was the guy people came to if things needed fixing. I wasn’t bad, either. I kept things running around there longer than they had any right to run. Then… boom…. Congratulations, Ryan, you’re an Exotic, and you can do magic stuff. Would you like someone to teach you? Too bad. Shit’s broken. Oh, by the way, here’s a planet of perfectly nice people that will probably die if you don’t learn fast. A few years of smacking engines with wrenches should help with that, right?”

  Tilly chewed on her lip as I spoke. Her gaze was far away, though I could tell she was listening intently.

  I continued, letting the words come out as I felt them: “Needless to say, I was woefully underqualified for Exotic life, but it turns out a little knowledge of modern science and a little luck goes a long way. I saved the planet, defeated the ancient evil, kissed the girl, and came home to a prison cell.”

  My mood darkened more as I said the last few words. I thought back to my cell, my little world of bright lights, pain, and brutality. A lump at the back of my throat was suddenly there, and my words came out tight and wavering.

  “Now, I’m just trying to stay alive long enough to not have to run away from the next thing that wants me dead or to live as a lab rat. I just… I- I just…”

  The wind left my sails quickly as I tried and failed to find the words. I hung my head and sighed tiredly.

  “Sorry. That was probably too much,” I croaked.

  All of… that… hung in the air for a tense minute, the distant whine of machinery and the life support the only sounds in the room.

  “So, now you fix broken cots,” Tilly ventured, her tone soft, despite her sandpaper voice.

  “Now, I fix cots,” I chuckled darkly, relieved to be past having to tell my story. I coughed and tried to reset myself.

  “But yeah. I actually like fixing things. Before all the Exotic, savior of the world stuff, I liked fixing things. Hell, despite how much I complained about having to put things together… uh… outside manufacturer recommendations, I loved it. It wasn’t just that, though. I loved seeing my clan ride around on machines I’d worked on. I loved being… useful.”

  Tilly nodded finally then graced me with a smile. It was actually a very warm smile. “That I can understand. Maybe a little too well. Gets me into trouble, taking on more than I can handle much of the time. I do good work, mind you, but I can’t do what you did in the clinic. That’s some impossible work. Tell me about that.”

  “I can work metal, make it do things. Pretty great for a guy that likes to build, ya know?”

  “Right. Magic. Lucky you. So, if I were to take you on, what’s the first thing you would do in here?” she asked with a sweeping gesture toward the rest of the space.

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  “Is this a test?” I asked.

  “Yep.”

  “I… think I see what’s holding you back here. Or I can guess. Parts, right?” I asked, thinking of the fabricator. It wasn’t a big one, so she probably had it making some of the fine stuff.

  Tilly’s face brightened even more until she looked downright pleased. “Takes weeks to get parts from downstairs. When I saw what you did, not just bending things back into place but fixing them entirely, I thought I could use that kind of hand to clear my backlog. It won’t pay overly much, but what do you say?”

  A lead weight settled in my stomach. I wanted to take her up on the offer. I really did. Something inside of me felt uncertain, though. There were other things that I needed to do, other pressures I was going to be under. I was technically still on the run, and I had no idea what kind of trouble I was going to get into with the Exotic side of the station.

  For the longest time, I’d wanted to do just that, but I’d been stymied at every turn by some threat or another. It was so tempting, such a perfect opportunity that my mind rejected the notion that something so good could be happening to me after all the bad of before.

  Would the universe really allow me to stay somewhere and just… build things?

  Tilly seemed to take my silence as the part where she needed to sweeten the deal. “Like I can’t pay much but-” She gestured to the corner of the shop where there was a smaller, person sized door. It opened to another room carved out of the rest of the space by thin, temporary walls. Inside was a cot with a tiny hotplate and dishes stacked on the side.

  My mouth dropped open.

  “You don’t even know me,” I reminded her.

  She laughed. “No, but I just said I’m a good judge of character. If I’m wrong, and you’re able to steal one of my machines and sell it to someone on this station, you deserve all the credits you get. I know all the guys that would move this stuff for you, and they’d kick your ass just for trying. Besides, you need a place to stay, or I won’t get any work out of you.”

  She paused and looked away awkwardly, hitting the doorframe with a closed fist a few times.

  “Listen, I’m not stupid. Just… Damnit, I could use the help, and I’m willing to pay. You in or not?” The angry frown was back, but her eyes didn’t seem to be on board. She looked… scared? Guilty? More vulnerable, at least.

  I looked around the tiny room, the high ceiling, the hundreds and square feet in the machine shop beyond, the heavy door between me and everything else. I listened to the white noise of people and machines working in harmony in the distance. It felt so close to home.

  I blinked away the tears before they become a problem.

  It’s not home, but maybe we can pretend. For just a little bit.

  “Let me show you what I can do.”

  —--------------------

  “You’re a walking, talking fabricator,” Tilly breathed next to my ear for the fourth time as she leaned over to watch what I was doing. Currently, the five pieces of scrap metal were configured in the shape of a flower, and the center was slowly flattening out and incorporating the rest of the mass into the whole. As the connection completed, the Triggers in the petals received power from the battery and curled in on themselves until the flower morphed into a bulb, closing until it was sealed.

  I reached around the back and put my finger on the Automated touch sensor, causing the petals to open again. As a test, I took a bent copper rod from the junk pile and waved it around in the center of the flower. The petals closed around it just as I’d programmed them to do. Another touch to the back of the flower forced it to drop its payload.

  Tilly practically squealed with delight. “Okay. Okay. That’s great. Now let’s put it on one of the little guys.”

  We’d been at this all day. At first, I’d planned to show her a few basic things like Shape welding, State Change, and the like, the basics that I figured would be relevant to the work she wanted out of me, but the more tricks I did, the more Tilly wanted to see. She had dozens of questions every time I showed her something, like why I did things a particular way or why I chose to use a particular type of material.

  It was infectious, actually, the enthusiasm she was showing in my abilities at a deeper level than how many monsters they could kill. The grabby hand I’d just completed was actually her idea after I’d shown my drone designs to her. She liked the simplicity of pincers, but one look at how I could make metal take on different shapes without any heat or the need for joints, she had all sorts of suggestions that I didn’t mind indulging.

  We walked over to the front of the workshop where one of my spider drones (without the cannon this time) was in the process of lifting a piece of a fender twice its size into the air with its pincers. Once its center of gravity was firmly fixed overhead, it started to inch its way toward the back of the shop where the scrap bins awaited. The drone’s twin waited for us on the workbench, inert. I scooped it up and got to shape welding the new grabby hand onto its nose. I made the necessary connections from the battery of the drone to the smart card then from the smart card to the grabby hand.

  In the middle of the process, I had to consume another handful of mendau chips. I was down to the dregs on that, and I’d need to find another source of combustibles soon if the other experiments didn’t work out.

  The grabby flower hand opened and closed as the connections were made, and the drone’s legs kinked and clacked as they tried to wriggle out of my hands and get to work. I let it go. Immediately, it leapt from the top of the bench and down onto the floor where it started to scoop metal filings off the deck with its petals.

  Tilly watched the drone work, grinning, then snapped her fingers as another idea came to her. “You know, if you made the design modular, you could have the regular bots get their more specialized instructions from the type of tool they use.”

  I spun the idea around in my head for a few seconds.

  “They’d need a purpose right out of the gate and a way to receive instructions from their casting bowls on the fly,” I mused. The drones would need two separate smart cards, one that they lived with all the time that gave them their motor functions and another that would be in their specialized tool with instructions on how and where to use it. It could work, but I’d need to redesign the drones to make them more generally useful if I really wanted the modular design to be worth all the effort it would take.

  I shrugged. “Could work. Right now, they kind of wander around until they get low on power then return for recharging and reprogramming. I could probably swing a bit more control over them, though.”

  I’d done an early design for my bullets back on Ralqir that had them return to the magazine reloading station when there was a valid one active. Maybe I could do something like that, a dinner bell that I could ring that would recall all the drones for refitting and recharging.

  Tilly made a noise of agreement. “Another reason to make it modular. What if you could just toss them a new tool and new instructions all at once? You wouldn’t have to recall anything. Just toss them a new purpose and let them go about their day. The time saved would add up.”

  That was a good point. I mulled it over some more, but like all ideas it needed to simmer. I had other things going on anyway. I wandered over to the, admittedly, less sexy experiments to see how they were doing. They were just casting bowls using an Ability I hadn’t tried before, but I was curious about the results. I’d had this Ability for a long time now, and I’d never really had a chance to test it out properly.

  In one bowl there was a pile of metal shavings of varying shades of gray. I combed my hand through them and felt around near the bottom until I came upon what I was looking for. When my hand came out of the pile, I had three copper cubes about a millimeter in width, copper that I was pretty sure had not been in the bowl to begin with. I’d made sure with Detect before I put any of the material in there.

  Success.

  Trasmute: Shape may now convert one type of matter with which you have an affinity into another. The strength of both affinities will dictate the cost of conversion.

  The bowl had been full and operational for a couple hours now, and this was the result. Magical conversion from one type of metal to another. Not a bad thing to have on a space station where the nearest source of new iron was probably an asteroid or a planet of scourge.

  Tilly plucked one of the cubes out of my palm. Her touch was ginger, as if she expected them to be hot, but once she realized it was safe, she nodded with appreciation.

  “Shiny,” she said. “Good copper. Good shape. Would be more useful flattened out, though.”

  All true, but I was already staring down into the second bowl. This one, we’d filled with whatever we found on the ground. Most of it was iron alloy, steel, that kind of thing. However, now that I knew transmute had done its thing with copper, I was almost afraid to know what would be in this one. I’d chosen the material for its… well, I just chose something that was as far from copper as you could get.

  “I take it back. You’re better than a fabricator,” Tilly praised. “Fabricators use whatever atoms it’s got in the tank. You ignore that kind of--”

  She hesitated when she saw my face. “What?”

  My mouth had gone dry. “So, metal isn’t the only thing I have an affinity for,” I told her.

  “Okay, fine. Glad to hear it,” she said tentatively, probing for just why I looked the way I did.

  “Well,” I started to explain. “I also have an affinity for… other stuff.”

  Tilly’s eyebrows scrunched together. “So, what’s the problem?”

  I took a deep breath and reached into the bowl. My hand closed around something decidedly not metal, a lot of something, actually. My heart, such as it was, hiccuped.

  Then I pulled it out from under all the debris, and what I saw both excited me and terrified me. In my hand was a perfectly proportioned cube of what had to be mendau wood. It rolled around in my palm alongside several others of its kind. The wood was pale white and surprisingly dense. There was no grain to the wood either, which was odd, though since I’d ‘grown’ it from a casting bowl instead of from a sapling, maybe that had something to do with it. No rain or fire or drought to make the grains a different color or composition.

  To be sure, I transferred the little cubes over to my prosthetic and Consumed them.

  Status Gained: Engine [8 MP/sec for 7 min]

  You gain knowledge of material: Mendau Wood [833/100,000]

  Holy shit. Ryan, did you just create life?

  Well, no. Probably not. Not precisely. I’d created organic material. It wasn’t alive, per se. At least, I hoped it wasn’t. I wasn’t ready to be a dad.

  My head spun as I brought up my list of affinities.

  Affinities:

  Goblinoid F

  Iron E

  Steel E

  Magnesium F

  Mendau Wood B

  Limestone E

  Cobalt E

  Deep Lead E

  Nickel E

  Copper E

  Pex Oil E

  Osmium F

  Synthweave F

  So, I could make all this stuff. Wait… Goblinoid? Oh, hell no. How does one make goblinoid? Would it come out as a squishy little cube of green fleshy… ew… or would my casting bowl spit out little green people? Dead or alive? The chain of thought made me shudder.

  We were not going full Frankenstein here.

  Tilly had already reached into the pile and pulled out another cube and was holding it up to her eye.

  “What is this?” she asked. “It’s not stone or metal. Pretty sure it’s not bone.”

  “Wood,” I replied, my throat dry.

  She looked at me incredulously. “You’re turning my scrap into wood.”

  “As an experiment,” I said defensively. “And I can change it back, I think.”

  “Hmm,” was all she said, rubbing her chin.

  I sat down on a nearby stool and blew out a breath. This changed things, didn’t it? I could make my own materials. Wait, no. I could make anything I had an affinity for. Iron. Cobalt. Steel. Even the stuff that wasn’t naturally occurring here like Deep Lead or, as I’d just proven, magical tree matter. I could make it all.

  I could make it all and then Consume it, raising my affinities even further, bit by bit. My affinities could climb higher and higher, the process of creating the material less energy and time intensive as they did.

  My eyes drifted down to my metallic palm, to the aperture that Consumed what I asked it to.

  You’re way more overpowered than I gave you credit for, aren’t you?

  Tilly tossed her wooden cube up in the air and caught it over and over as she thought aloud. “Alright,” she began. “I think I have a good idea of what you can do now. Can’t wrap my brain around all of it, but I’m satisfied. Now, I’ve got to get my work orders done. I was originally going to ask you to do that kind of thing for me, But this is… a little bigger now, isn’t it? I feel like if I just have you going around bending things back into place or polishing rusty bolts, I’d be doing all of us a disservice.”

  “I could still do all that,” I proposed.

  “I know you could, but,” Tilly glanced over at her shoulder as my drone deposited another piece of scrap into the bin with a loud *clank.* The workshop was already looking a little cleaner than when we’d first arrived, and the scooper drone we’d designed together had already cleaned a six foot circle of the floor that looked out of place amidst the rest of the mess.

  “I think I want you to make parts, mostly,” she continued. “Screws. Nuts. Bolts. Washers. Nothing fancy, but we need them more than anything else right now. Not just me but everybody. They’re a bitch to make on my own, and we only get so many of them from the fabricator every month, and even then, there’s always delays when something critical breaks somewhere on the station. If you can set your little bowls turning steel into parts, you’ll solve my backlog problem and probably a dozen others without even putting your hands on another cot. Plus, you’ll have paid your rent for the week.”

  “I’m paying rent?” I asked.

  “Not anymore, you’re not. I want those nuts.”

  Something caught at the back of my throat and sent me into a coughing fit, while Tilly laughed uproariously. After I’d regained my composure, I reached out and shook her hand. “Deal. Think I could take up a corner of the shop to make my own stuff, though? Over there?” I asked, pointing at the corner where my room was.

  “Be my guest. Just get your work done first.”

  “One more thing. If I’m gone for a while, and the bowls start to glow purple, get rid of them fast. Space them if you can.”

  Tilly’s eyebrows shot up almost to her hairline. “Why?”

  “A slight risk of spontaneous disassembly,” I cautioned, wincing slightly at the look she gave me.

  “Okay,” Tilly drew out the word then shook her head. “Whatever. You get me those parts, and you can store uranium in my underwear drawer for all I care.”

  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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