Chapter 24

  I sat cross legged on the pavement next to the lip of the fountain, staring intently at my project. Again, I’d set up an assembler array consisting of a pair of casting bowls welded to a flat work surface, the two robotic arms ready and waiting. Experience messages were flying in, too varied and too quick to really think about, not when there was science to be done.

  As of now, I no longer considered my matter conversion experiments experimental, their drones constantly working on topping off their Shaping bowls and keeping the flow of metal balls at a constant drip. Every experience message I got from that setup was accompanied by a little… I wouldn’t say itch but something akin to an itch inside of me as the associated ball bearing popped into Spatial Storage. Constance, help me, it really was near my stomach, wasn’t it? This observation would go with me to my grave if I could help it.

  The drones were coming out fast now at the rate of four or five a minute, and the little bullet ant bowl I’d set up was hard at work churning out rounds.

  My Experience rate was the only thing I really kept close tabs on, which was now at a healthy 855/min, not counting combat encounters. Those could spike me into the thousands, easily, but I didn’t want to rely on that. I knew I could kill scourge. I wanted to know if I could do more.

  Las-fire cracked and flashed in all directions, little bursts of violence that served as a backdrop to the comparatively the nerdy shit I was getting up to.

  *THOOM* *THOOM*

  The Pop Can was still putting in work, and, true to its design, I hadn’t had to check on it once. It also hadn’t had to go all out for an extended period of time yet. The scourge hadn’t worked up the courage to attack in earnest, just poking at us at times from the concealment of buildings or behind cars. Sabium’s denizens were quickly learning, however, that concealment didn’t mean shit if the thing doing the shooting wasn’t relying on sight and used enough mass and energy to punch through most things easily. Either they needed to be behind a few feet of concrete, or they were in danger of kinetic disassembly.

  In front of me, my fledgeling assembler array was hard at work on the first phase of the manufacturing process. The 24 inch barrel, being the simpler of the two parts I was using for this test, was done first. The smart card in the bowl sent a small pulse of mana to the rest of the machine that its work was complete, prompting the robotic arm on that side to reach down and gingerly remove the new barrel from the place of its birth.

  The action took another full minute, but it, too, was done before long, and the arm on its side removed the finished product from the bowl and held it up in the air. Now that the robotic arms both had their products, they went to work in unison, setting the two parts down on the work surface, spinning their hands around and bending their joints, clanking the pieces together clumsily until eventually, one piece fit into the other. Then the whole machine froze.

  I froze too.

  The arms, the parts, and I sat there for another minute silently while nothing visible took place, but I knew, or, more accurately, I hoped, that they were fulfilling their programming. They were physically unmoving, but mana moved inside their components, seeped out of the steel plane and the pads of the robotic fingers, directed and precise.

  Suddenly, as if waking from a nap, the arms jerked to life again, this time picking up the barrel and action together, hoisting them overhead and depositing the finished product on the ground behind them.

  I got to my feet and approached, hands trembling slightly as I reached out and picked up the finished product and gave it a once over. The barrel had been successfully Shape welded to the housing. The magical connections from the base of the action to the trigger function looked intact. The buffer spring seemed solid and under no immediate tension. Everything seemed in order, as good of a job as I could do myself.

  Oh, we were in business now.

  I summoned my brain box again and thumbed through for another pair of tier one production cards.

  “Legs and Base… Legs and Base… Let’s see how you handle this one,” I whispered.

  What looked like the rusted roll cage of a rover clanged down on the street next to me.

  “This the kind of thing you need?” Hall asked, wiping sweat from under his helmet. I glanced from the man to the hunk of metal, impressed. The dude was strong if he hauled that over here by himself.

  I nodded and gave him an appreciative thumbs up. “Yeah. Thanks, Hall. I’ll put it to work,” I told him.

  “How’re things looking?” I asked before Hall could head out again.

  “Freaky as hell. Feel like I’m all alone here, ya know? Usually, we’ve got twice as many people on security, and now…” He shuddered. “Did they have to be spider shaped? Was that truly necessary?”

  I considered the question. “I dunno. I guess not, but it seemed like the thing to do at the time. Wait do you guys even have spiders on the station?”

  “No,” Hall admitted. “I only know about them from holos and books, but that doesn’t mean they're not weird, especially when there’s so many of them.”

  I hadn’t gone to check on drone production in a little while, but I assumed Hall was exaggerating just a little. The bowl only really had the power throughput to produce four or four and a half drones at max every minute, so they shouldn’t have been swimming in spider drones over there yet. The little dudes were reproducing at a steady rate, though. In fact, they’d buried their big casting bowl in scrap from what Hall had told me. Luckily the fresh drones were strong enough to dig themselves out of the pile to go get to work.

  Dev’s drone buzzed overhead from left to right, taking off with an ear splitting whine to somewhere else in the city, and Hall put his hand up to his ear shortly thereafter.

  “I gotta go,” he said, his tone sober again.

  “What’s going on?” I asked

  He shouted back to me as he sprinted away. “They’re pulling more of us off the line.”

  Shit.

  That meant our plan wasn’t going smoothly. The outriders were still on their way back with their haul, and Dev had been sending teams out there to secure defensible positions. The plan was to have the scavengers roll past the fire support teams and fold them into the group as they ran toward the next position, but if they were pulling more people off the line, that meant the plan had hit a snag.

  And here I was with a busted production line.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  Infuriatingly, the new assembly process didn’t go so well. The robotic arm in charge of manipulating the legs really didn't like waiting for the required count of three legs before starting construction. It kept trying to start the process before it had enough pieces to make a functioning base. I ended up with two defective turret bottoms sporting a singular useless leg that looked more like a pogo stick than a weapon, and those were the ones the arms didn’t just cast aside when they ceased to be a component they recognized.

  Okay. Better instructions. Focus.

  I ejected the turret assembler smart card and gave it new programming, paying special attention to what would need to happen when multiple of a singular product was needed for the turret recipe to come together. I tried very, very hard not to let my hurry affect the flow of magic. All these instructions came from a picture I held in my head, a moving picture that required absolute attention to detail or things would go badly, and, suddenly, time was not on my side. People needed me again. Constance, dammit, I was not smart enough to do what I was doing.

  The next run went a lot more smoothly. The robotic arms set all the turret legs on the surface of the work area and inserted them into the base as they’d been instructed, connections aligned just so, then set about welding them.

  Okay. I think we have that part down too. It’s not a bad method, but if my programming is off just a little, we could end up with some pretty catastrophic waste. Maybe I need some kind of quality control programming. Oh, and a way to copy instructions from one smart card to another. That would eliminate all sorts of problems.

  Okay. Now for the magazines.

  —-------------------------------------------------

  You have created Portable Auto-Turret.

  You receive 450 experience points.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Experience rate: 2,403/min.

  20 minutes later, I stood up and stretched as I beheld the beauty of a job well done. Six separate assembler arrays sat in a circle, backs to one another. Each casting bowl was full of mangled metal being forged into something useful. Robotic arms were busily grasping and manipulating things until they fit together just so. The joints on the arms whirred, their fingers clicked, and the metal products clanked as they were set down on the ground for others to take. The two larger assembers that just consisted of a work surface and robotic arms, the ones putting together the final, usable turret, frantically tried to keep up with the production of the other, less complex processes.

  Two complete turrets already sat on the pavement directly behind the assembler array, well made and inspected by yours truly. I was comfortable calling these guys Mark III’s. They were designed much like the Mark II’s, multi jointed legs for support, wide at the base, thin at the top, with lower caliber but high velocity output, only they’d been miniaturized for rapid production and easy portability. It was essentially the Ralqir method, shrunk down, so I could make a ton of them.

  I summoned another casting bowl. I’d severely underestimated how many bullets we’d need. I could probably do with another tier two assembler in the setup too.

  We were going to need more.

  More.

  —--------------------------------

  *BRRRAP* BRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAPP*

  *BRRRRRRRRAP* *BRAP*

  *BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR*

  *BRRAPBRRRRRRRRRRR*

  *THOOM**THOOM*THOOM*THOOM*

  I watched with a keen eye as my drones filed past to deposit their scrap in the great heap that used to be the southwest part of our perimeter. The pile of scrap was… eight? Ten feet high? I’d moved the base of operations inside the circle about an hour ago after digging the big drone casting bowl out of a mound about half as big. That was a tough job. I had to use Spatial Storage as a sort of vacuum cleaner, sucking up this and that until I could dig down to the bottom and get my prize, and I was pissed at myself for having to resort to that. These pieces were small, maybe the size of my finger or a little bigger, and they had to go into my space one at a damned time. It had taken entirely too long.

  Another entry in the notepad.

  I’d gotten a level in Spatial Storage, though I didn’t know why. I wasn’t exactly stretching the Ability to its limits.

  Advanced Spatial Storage is now level 2.

  Drones streamed by in clumps of 6 to 10, carrying chunks of scrap as big as they were affixed to their mining pincers. Some of the older ones were down to using nubs, having burned off the cutting portions of their pincers during their many trips to and from the front. Damaged drones were carried home by their friends to be tossed on the pile like the rest of the scrap for re-Shaping and re-programming.

  My new turrets were everywhere. I’d started with a pair on the side of the perimeter with the most action, and I’d been churning more of them out at a steady rate since, plopping them down next to the few divers that remained on perimeter duty with me. There was some resistance at first, that same almost religious fear of an armed machine within spitting distance of living people, but, as with most professional warriors, the divers’ acceptance of the new toys was directly proportional to how helpful they were.

  And they were supremely helpful. Kills upon kills scrolled through my feed.

  I still hadn’t seen more than a glimpse of these “Swarmer drones” since I’d landed down here, just a mass of slithering black shapes glimpsed between ruined bits of civilization, but I sure was keeping their population in check if my combat log was to be believed. I’d reached max group bonus on those guys a long time ago.

  The two magazine loaders were constantly busy with new ammo and old, slamming bullets back into place as quickly as the little guys came in on their spindly little ant legs, and it still wasn’t enough. Guns were running dry out there too often, though the line still held.

  The scourge roared their fury over the guns. They were out there in numbers now, not enough to overwhelm us but getting there. Both times the scourge had attacked, they’d been slapped down.

  So far, my production was outstriping demand, and my experience rate showed it.

  Experience rate 5,745/min

  Level Up!

  You are now level 4!

  Achievements awarded this level:

  Ambitious: You have defeated a foe above your level. [+1 to lowest level ability]

  Nemesis: You have encountered your first Scourgeling and lived. [+1 Spirit]

  All Natural: You have spent 80% of this level with full mana. [+1 body]

  Spirit of the Warrior: You gained 51% of your experience this level from defeated foes as a non-combat class. [+3 spirit]

  Near Death Experience: You fell below 10% of your HP this level. [50% bonus experience gain for next level]

  Soulful: You have almost exclusively focused on Mind and Spirit centric skills this level. [+1 Mind, +1 Spirit]

  Dedicated: You spent most of your time dedicated to your craft this level. [+1 Spirit]

  Doing Your Part: Some of your creations have been used against agents of the Scourge. [+200% experience awarded for new designs next level]

  Inventor: You have created at least five new designs this level. [+1 Mind]

  What a level that was. 9 free stat points. I probably would have leveled two or three times before now if I were Leveling the traditional way, stacking XP until I reached the threshold, but I wouldn’t have gotten nearly as many achievements in one go. I guessed there were some advantages to my class restrictions.

  Not to mention Near Death Experience’s 50% bonus xp was going to be probably the most useful one of them all. As soon as I reached Level 4, my experience rate jumped up by half, and I had a good shot at going the distance to 5 before the day was done.

  Now, to fix the throughput issues…

  Oh. Right. I was in the middle of something.

  “Sorry, did you say something?!” I shouted at full volume to Dev.

  Dev frowned at me and leaned down to speak in my ear. “You really need to get ear protection if you wanna make a living on this.”

  “Yeah! Yeah! I know! It’s on the list!” It wasn’t, actually… until now… The mental to-do list was getting looooong.

  “We’ve got problems,” Dev continued, handing me a data pad. On it was an aerial view of the city but in a black and white spectrum that I immediately recognized as thermal. In the center was us, our little park. Each diver was a little dot of white, the barrel of their las-rifle a little miniature star. My turrets were similarly incandescent, easily spotted on the gray/black of the rest of the city. There were about twenty now in a rough circle around the park, not including the Pop Can. Around that one there was a whole cloud of generalized thermal energy, a localized warm front that was impossible to miss.

  Outside of all that was lots and lots of motion, not so much heat as we made but enough to be detectable.

  “Yeah! That’s a lot of scourge!” I shouted.

  “Obviously,” Dev replied. “But look at what they’re doing. They’ve encircled us, but they’re not attacking en masse.”

  I looked again, zooming the picture out with my fingers. She was right. There was another concentration of them out there, a swarm of creatures running, darting in and out of buildings and surging around rubble. Nearby, there were symbols of some kind, marks that indicated something not in the picture.

  “They’re friend or foe tags,” Dev explained. “That’s our missing outriders. Look here.” She pointed to a particular icon.

  “That’s the Captain. He’s folded the fire support in with the main group, and he’s trying to punch through.”

  “They still on comms?” I asked.

  “Yeah. They’ve been getting pressed, but they’re still moving.”

  “They’re getting herded,” I found myself saying. A shiver crawled up my spine, memories of being in the outriders’ position coming to the fore, unbidden. It wasn’t a pleasant place to be.

  Dev frowned again at the implication. “Maybe. The Cap is pretty good at this kind of thing. He won’t let them put him in a bad spot. He just can’t get through, and they’re already pushing the edges of their stamina.”

  “I’ll go get them,” I said. The words left my mouth without my permission, but, once they were out there, funnily enough, I didn’t want them back.

  “Just like that?”

  “Yes.”

  The gray woman’s mouth opened and closed a couple times as she seemed to think of something to say then discard it. She finally settled on:

  “I… wasn’t going to ask you to do that. You’re holding the LZ together right now.”

  I gestured around at the park and shrugged. A little grin tugged at the corner of my mouth

  “Counterpoint,” I replied. “This is all the throughput I’ve got. What you’re seeing right now is pretty much my bag of tricks until I have some time to sit down and build. Lucky thing is that I can do this and help you get your people. I’m hard to kill, and, in practice, can be in two places at once.”

  Dev’s eyes moved back and forth as her fingers twitched at the unseen strings connecting her to her drone. Her mouth formed a tight line as she put together a new plan.

  “Hmm. Alright, but I’m sending Mo with you. She can see the FoE tags, and she’s got a feed to the drone.”

  I nodded, already looking around for the walking robot hauler, spotting her over on the east part of the perimeter among the other divers.

  “One more thing!” Dev’s hand caught me around the bicep before I could take off. Then she pulled me close again and scrolled through the feed on her data pad until she got to the section she wanted. This was different from the drone cam, I thought. Higher altitude, more detailed. Multiple spectrums of color cycled on the screen until Dev found the one she was looking for, and her long finger tapped on a dark spot right at the edge of a major city.

  “See that?” She asked. I took the pad from her again and zoomed in on the area, squinting at a blob of… something, quite a few somethings, actually, some human shaped, a few of them significantly larger. Dev went on once she knew I was seeing what she saw.

  “That’s our timer,” she said with absolute surety.

  “What is it?” I asked. I zoomed in closer and closer until a singular blurry humanoid figure dominated the rest of the screen. It was… Was it carrying a weapon?

  Dev took the datapad back and slipped it into her belt. “Hard to say. Heavy hitters. Elites. We need to be gone before they get here. Don’t waste any- Hey!”

  That was all I needed to hear. Science time was over. Running and screaming time was finally here.

  “Feed my machines while I’m gone!” I shouted back at her. “Seriously, or they might explode!”

  “They’ll what?!”

  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.

  As of right now, Patreon is about 30k words ahead of Royal Road. Additionally, patrons have the dubious honor of access to my audio tracks where I do silly voices and pretend to know what I’m doing.