Chapter 21

  I was set to depart from Tilly’s several days later, and, true to my word, was going to leave behind more parts that she knew what to do with. Tilly was pleased as punch with my work, though she liked to joke that she didn’t recognize her own shop anymore now that my drones had been over it with a fine toothed comb, leaving behind nothing but smooth decking and the deeper oil stains. I told her that if it made her feel any better, I could bring back more junk from the surface to give her the old aesthetic back, but I’d never gotten a real yes or no on that particular hypothetical.

  I probably could have left earlier, if I were being honest, gotten started on the Dean’s plan for Skill grinding immediately after putting my bowls and drones to work on the problem and instructing Tilly on their use. The thing was, I just wasn’t ready to do that. It was nice to have a place to stay and some honest work to do even if the work only took up the minority of my time. The feeling came upon me gradually, miniature warm surges of happiness with every job I did for Tilly outside of being her personal fabricator. I fixed dents, straightened rails, patched holes, cleaned rust. I did it all and did it with a smile.

  Purpose. I had a purpose outside of how many things I could kill.

  I felt like I’d been running from one thing or another for my entire Exotic life and killing the things that couldn’t be outrun, and this was the first place where I was just asked to be me. In fact, Tilly insisted upon it, going so far as to say I shouldn’t even try my hand at diving, screw the consequences. I appreciated that, not so much the advice but having someone more interested in advocating for me. Tilly might have been abrasive at times in what I was starting to believe was a mask she put on to keep others at arm’s length, but she was unequivicably on Team Ryan now that she’d accepted me.

  With every day spent just being allowed to exist without some external threat battering down the door, my body felt lighter, and my soul started to uncurl from that fetal position it had assumed the day it had been kicked, the day I lost Vince. That’s not to say I didn’t have other, more recent emotional baggage to sort though and problems to solve. This was just the first time I had a moment to breathe with only myself in the wringer if I came up short. That was a nice change.

  My road to recovery got a bit smoother the day Tilly showed me where to get coffee.

  Oh, yes. Sabium had coffee. In fact, they had several genetic lines of coffee, selectively bred for increased yield and intense flavor, stuff that went a long way to satisfy a lot of people. It tasted a little more bitter than what I was used to. Maybe it was in the way they roasted it. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I spent more money on coffee than I did on food, and I had plans to use my first surplus of funds to get a little coffee brewer for the shop.

  Could I make one of those? I bet I could. One that didn’t explode if I didn’t keep it running every day? Maybe.

  Despite my love for the work and the much needed time to unwind, I didn’t forget what I needed to do. I had fights coming up, and Constance bless it, I was going to be prepared this time.

  The first thing did was go over my options I’d just received after my little training (read: torture) session with Thadeus Marshal. My Mana Manipulation had gone up like crazy during that whole nightmare, and the System was asking for a moment of my time.

  I had two separate choices on the same Skill, something I’d only ever had happen once before. To make things easier, I grouped my choices together to look at everything all at once.

  Choice 1:

  Externalized Control

  Manifestation

  Body Infusion

  Choice 2:

  Advanced Manifestation

  Structure

  Sensitivity

  The standouts of the group were Manifestation and Advanced Manifestation.

  Manifestation: Condense your mana and give it physical form outside of your body. Size and intensity of a given Manifestation greatly affects the rate at which it drains MP. Lapses in concentration, mana type, or fluctuations in ambient mana can affect the Manifestation.

  So, that was neat. I could do that thing Garret had been talking about when he’d taught me how to breathe, shaping my mana into something more overtly useful. He’d used this method to do simple stuff like light camp fires, detect hidden messages, and guide crossbow bolts, but he’d also spoken about Wardens that could do some really impressive tricks after years and years of practice, rivaling their master’s Dominion for power if not ease of use.

  The Advanced version of the Ability was pretty much the same, except it added the additional verbiage of:

  …Each simultaneous Manifestation slightly increases the rate at which this Ability drains MP.

  Externalized Control was an option that let me sort of… offload some of the cognitive strain it took to make my mana do things. The wording was sort of vague, but I got the impression that it was meant to keep my mana flowing without me really having to pay as much attention. I only got the option because I also had Split Mind, which was a nice reward for all the practice I’d put in, I guessed. It would certainly be nice to be able to break out of curses like the one Death’s Touch had put on me without having to focus on it so hard. If I could just keep my mana careening around my body with the right kind of shape, Thadeus’ little Taps would never have been able to stick to my channels in the first place. There were probably other uses for it too, such as finally not having to suppress my aura manually, but after the whole curse thing, outside threats were foremost on my mind.

  Body Infusion was another Ability. It let me sort of pump mana into my muscles and organs to strengthen them, probably even repair them given enough levels and MP.

  Meanwhile, Structure and Sensitivity were straight buffs to my personal mana type, one that made it more… forceful was how I would put it. The other, Sensitivity, gave me further control, a thing I already had a pretty good handle on and I’d given up a lot to acquire. I wasn’t tempted to take either of those. Who knew what kind of weird crap my mana would get up to if I kept changing it? I was just getting used to the last major upheaval in my magic circulatory system.

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  That, pretty much, put the only real choice in focus: Body Infusion or Externalized Control.

  In the end, it was Body Infusion by a nose.

  Don’t get me wrong, I would have loved to not have to breathe and center myself all the damned time to keep my aura from blanketing half the station and giving all the Exotic children a fright, but Body Infusion intrigued me as a possible avenue of research. Muscle wizard shenanigans sounded fun, but I was only passingly interested in that kind of thing. The actual reason I took it was because I wanted to know if it worked on my machines.

  The answer to that was… kinda?

  I sacrificed quite a few newly minted screws to the press to find out. I would Automate my victim (the test screw) and tell it to cast Body Infusion on itself at the exact moment external force was applied to it. Then I would bring down the wrath of Tilly’s press in an attempt to squish it flat. I started out slow and light and increased the pressure on the screw over time, keeping a careful eye on the amount of force the press was putting out.

  The results were inconsistent.

  One of the problems was that I was telling an Automated screw to infuse itself with mana, which it already was… infused with gobs of mana… that was Automate’s whole thing. So I was telling it to do something it was already kind of doing but not in the way it was already doing it. It was a strange mental picture to keep in your head, and my failure to do it properly every time caused no end of problems.

  In the end, the screws that were successful Automated Body Infusions took about ten percent more force to flatten. Not particularly ground shaking just now, but the experiment proved it could be done. I’d work more on it later.

  Advanced Manifestation was even more difficult to quantify. All I’d managed to do with it so far was making a little blue gray cloud appear above my hand, but said gray cloud netted me another level in the Ability so… yeah. I had that going for me. Even doing something as unimpressive as summoning magical fart clouds was hard. It felt like forcing all the air out of my lungs and then asking said air to dance a little jig. It was expensive, difficult, and exhausting, and I would have much rather been working on my other projects. Regardless, I put it on my mental to-do list as something to try every day.

  On the more practical side of things, I saw more success, and, lucky me, I had someone to whom I could brag a little.

  Tilly’s forehead wrinkled in concentration as she inspected the machine I was leaning against like it was a shiny new rover. “It’s certainly big. So this is what you’ve been working on in your spare time?” She asked.

  “Most of it and some of my sleepy time,” I confessed with a tired grin. “I mean once I had the drones and the bowls going, I didn’t have a lot going on.”

  “Yeah. I know. It’s disgusting how easy this job is for you. Just surprised at the size is all. I didn’t think I had this much scrap or that you had this much time on your hands.”

  “Oh, no. None of this is yours,” I insisted. “I had some things tucked away that I… invested… in this particular thing. As for time, believe it or not, I’ve built something like this before, just not in this particular form. It took some long nights and a lot of coffee, but I think I nailed it.”

  “Yeah, you look like you haven’t slept, but I’m starting to think that’s just how you work. Save some productivity for the rest of us, son.”

  I grinned wider at the backhanded praise, not smugly. I wasn’t a smug guy. I did feel a great satisfaction at having this particular design come to life, though.

  The source of my good vibes, the thing I was leaning against, was a six foot tall, segmented cylinder with a fluted base for stability and a swiveling bucket-shaped head on top. The chassis (or armor if you wanted to get specific) was a white, pearlescent metal that the Marshals had generously donated to me on the day of my release, while the internals, such as the magazine springs, the robotic feeding arms, the ammo sorter, the battery banks, the backup batteries, and the Shaping chambers were made of just regular steel with a smattering of a deep lead and cobalt alloy for the magic intensive bits. The chunky twin barrels that stuck out of the swivelling bucket top, on the other hand, were a dull yellow gray from the copious amounts of osmium I’d used in the alloy to keep the melting point high. When I got a hold of some tungsten, I’d probably replace those to push the melting point even higher. There was always room for improvement.

  I slapped my hand on top of the bucket head in my best impression of a showman.

  “This baby is the pillar upon which my excursion tomorrow is going to be built. Mobile heavy weapon support.”

  This time, Tilly gave me a look like I’d gone insane. “Mobile? You’re kidding. This thing is bigger than my mover. You’re gonna come back with a hernia if you come back at all.”

  “Au contraire, Miss Tilly. Zat is ze best part,” I said in a terrible old Earth accent.

  “Don’t do that. It’s Tilly. I told you.”

  “Sorry.”

  Then I sent a pulse of mana through the sensor at the top of the machine.

  The barrels disappeared first in a familiar flash of white, followed by the top half of the bucket, exposing the spiral magazine that was already in the process of absorbing all of the loaded bullets one by one. They disappeared near the turret’s action in lightning quick miniature strobes of light. Robotic arms kept the spring tight against the rounds as they crowded forward toward the action where a tiny, automated semi-cylindrical bumper made them disappear even faster than the action could ever fire them. Once they were all gone, the bottom part of the bucket disappeared as well, then the magazine loader arms below that, then the six conical shaping chambers down below, one by one. It all happened in the span of eight seconds until all that was left was the wide steel base of the turret that wobbled slightly as all the weight that was just pressing down on it disappeared

  “Ta-da,” I said, waving my fingers proudly over the empty steel base. For good measure, I picked it up and made it disappear too.

  “Well, I’ll be damned. Where is it all?” Tilly asked, her mouth only closing to form the words before it dropped open again and stayed that way.

  “Got an upgrade to Spatial Storage a little while ago, making it an ability. That means my machines can use it.”

  “Is Spatial Storage the place where all the other stuff has been coming from?” Tilly asked.

  I blinked. Had she been thinking I was conjuring all the metal and bits from nothing this whole time? I guess I hadn’t really explained things as well as I could have, or she hadn’t really been concerned with the particulars.

  “Yeah. It’s a kind of pocket dimension. I’ve got all sorts of stuff in there,” I explained.

  Tilly scowled. “Don’t look at me like that. I don’t know how this works. So, what? It’s gone now. Can it come back?”

  I wobbled my hand back and forth. “Kinda. It’s still a manual process. I can get the constructs to put stuff away but getting them to “recognize” things in my Spatial Storage hasn’t been going well. Like, I think they have access to my Spatial Storage just like I do, but, for some reason, they can’t seem to pull things back out. Maybe because they use my aura, and my aura doesn’t reach there or something. I don’t know. The other theory is that maybe I’m trying to get the constructs to bring things out of storage without telling them exactly what the ‘thing’ is. Like I’m not specific enough.”

  Tilly was still frowning as her eyebrows rose, fell, then scrunched together in sequence. Then she threw up her hands. “I’m just gonna pretend I understood that. Whatever. You’ve got it in there somewhere, then?” She waved her hand at my stomach of all places. How many times did I have to tell people I hadn’t eaten the things I kept?

  I really didn’t want to get into that again.

  I just nodded, choosing to focus on the satisfaction of my new design having worked. The dry runs I’d done last night had been messy before I got the sequence right. I’d had to sweep up the spilled components with a dustpan. The more complex you made a thing, the harder it was to disassemble without breaking it, and this was one of the most complex machines I’d made.

  This new turret had its own ammo manufacturing and magazine loading capabilities with their own smart cards and battery banks. Its targeting card could be swapped on the fly as well, if I came up with better rules of engagement for it in the heat of the moment. Additionally, it came with a cooling system that did a lot to bleed off excess power generated by the batteries, so that it didn’t turn into a bomb if it wasn’t used for a bit. That had all been a head scratcher to fit into one design, but the fact that I’d made all of this stuff in some capacity before made things come together eventually.

  Even so, I’d made sacrifices. It didn’t fire quite as fast as some of my other turrets, choosing, instead, to use a higher caliber bullet and relying on that increased stopping power and less ammo breakage to keep from having to shape thousands of rounds an hour. The shaping chambers would have run dry on power if they’d had to do that. This thing was going to be good at blasting monsters in fits and starts, not so much at stopping the tide from coming in.

  What was important was the set-it-and-forget-it aspect. I wanted to throw this thing up and use it as a strong point to help establish myself. Then, my other toys could have their time to shine. I couldn’t test them, though. Not here. Much too dangerous.

  That would have to wait for tomorrow. For my first dive. Sabium better be ready, because I was coming.

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