by Z D Dean
“How?”
“You saw how I used my creations to help us while I was on the XES01. Now, imagine what those creations could be if they were made of pure Rua. I will be able to improve and personalize our equipment to make us the most effective. The reality is I don’t know enough about the ancient technology to know exactly how much this class will help.”
“I guess I’ll start taking notes on what I would like to change with my pilot equipment, then.”
After she left the galley to find Mara, he finished his sloop in silence while examining one of his gauntlets. Even though it only had the same shield mod as the rest of his armor, the Rua infusing it was much more intricate than the rest of his gear. Thick ropes of the energy ran down the outside of his arm, eventually branching off into a spiderweb of lines in his hand covering.
“What kind of gear will I need to start practicing with my new class?” he asked the seemingly empty room.
“Not much is known about advanced forging, but a set of forger’s gauntlets and a forger’s workbench should be enough to get you started,” the ship responded.
After examining his shields, he could see why the Groz thought the forger was a wasteful specialty. The modification did nothing to harvest any of the unused Rua, and instead, let it dissipate back into the ether. He surmised that the mod was not an anomaly and all of the Groz tech was inefficient. It made sense that there would be no shortage of energy to be used in equipment with how regularly the Groz society harvested Rua. If he wanted to practice his skills without having to harvest thousands of lives, the first thing he would have to do is make the entire process more efficient. With a game plan in mind, he ordered Ann to forge the equipment he would need to begin his work.
By the time he arrived in the forge room, there was a new workbench and a new pair of gauntlets waiting for him. The base of the bench was exactly what he would have expected. It had a flat work surface and underneath were six drawers. Above the work surface, there were screens and different devices mounted to articulating arms, and a cable that ran from the bench to the forge. After sliding the bench against the exterior wall to leave the space in front of the forge clear, he sat down at the chair that came with it. He rolled himself over to grab his new gauntlets from the forge and place them on the bench. As soon as the gauntlets hit the bench, its surface lit up.
The surface was covered in different prompts. After finding one labeled ‘analyze’, he pressed it and watched as information populated the attached screens. One showed an extensive description of the capabilities of his new gauntlets, while the other showed a perfect schematic of the inner workings of them. The three remaining screens remained blank. Although he could manipulate the information on the screens, he learned that he couldn’t make any changes to the equipment without wearing his forger gloves.
He quickly changed the gauntlets he was wearing for the ones on the bench and began the process again. As suspected, the gauntlets he was wearing before the change only had the shielding modification. This time when he hit the ‘analyze’ prompt on the bench, his view changed from looking at the bench and screens to an immersive view of the Rua schematic.
He could manipulate the orientation of the diagram with only a thought. As he moved to touch the different strands of Rua, he felt his understanding of the workings of the shield modification grow. After an hour at his bench, although he had thoroughly examined the modification, he felt he still didn’t know enough to make any changes. After removing himself from the immersive schematic, he found that the third screen now showed that he had gained a ten percent understanding of the shield mod.
He set the old gauntlets aside and replaced them with the backplate of his armor. Another exploration of the modification saw his understanding grow to twenty-five percent. He repeated the process with the other pieces of his armor until his understanding reached one hundred percent. The learning process was time-consuming, and he couldn’t even tell how much time he had spent working on his gear. After the work, he was rewarded with a notification saying that he understood the shielding modification enough to modify it or imprint it on other gear at no Rua cost.
Energized by the breakthrough, he jumped up to grab something to eat and to find his pilot. His stiff joints informed him of just how much time he had spent sitting at the workbench. After working out the kinks and limbering up, he headed out of the forge room to find Samix. He checked the galley first but found her sitting at her spot on the command deck working on something only she could see.
“You need to come with me. I want to improve your gear,” he said excitedly.
There was a pause as she finished the task she was working on before she acknowledged him.
“I thought I would have to drag you from that room. You’ve been in there for almost the whole day.”
Before she could continue, he grabbed her hand and started leading her to his workspace.
“I’ve figured out how to install the shielding mod without using the forge, which means I can put it on your armor without using any Rua.”
“Do you need me present?” Samix said, pulling herself to a stop. “I am working on a patrol path for the mission. You know, the mission we need to be executing shortly.”
In all the excitement about his specialty, he had completely forgotten about the pirate threat in the system.
“Uhh yeah, the mission,” he stammered, trying to play off his lapse of focus, but he feared Samix saw right through it. “I just wanted to get you as prepared as possible before we started.”
They had only made it to the galley door when she stepped inside and began taking off her armor. She set everything but her helmet and right gauntlet on the dining table as she spoke.
“Take these and when I’m done with the flight plan, I will bring the others to you. How long do you think this will take?”
“I’m not sure,” he said as he gathered up the gear. “But, repetition breeds proficiency. I imagine I will get faster as I go along.”
With that, she headed back to the command deck and he headed to his workspace. Once he laid a piece of gear on the bench, he was given the option to modify it. After selecting modify, he could see the list of modifications he knew. It was a shortlist now, but he could see the value of having a forger on the ship after he had learned more. He selected the shield mod and watched as an overlay of the Rua channels were placed in the schematic of the piece. He began etching the Rua channels into the gear and quickly found that his proficiency was next to nothing. Anytime his sloppy movements deviated from the layout, the portion he was working on would reset.
It took him nearly as long to implement the modification on four pieces of gear as it did for him to learn the mod in the first place. Before finishing the last pieces, he had to step away from the bench to give both his eyes and mind a reprieve from the tedious work.
There has to be a better way to do this, he thought.
Like any of the equipment on the ship, his bench could take on modifications, so he went to the forge to check them out.
To his surprise, all of the mods for the bench stemmed from one initial mod: AI assistant. The description said that the assistant could complete simple forger tasks and improve the times required to complete tasks at the station. Once the assistant was installed, the improvements focused on different areas of work: armor, weapons, or ships. The only one that he didn’t understand and couldn’t find information on was a Rua-smith specialty. All of the specialties cost well beyond what the ship could hold, so none were even relevant at the moment. He was disheartened to see that the assistant would consume almost all of the energy reserve he had on the ship.
Just as he was about to go back to completing Samix’s gear manually, he remembered the vials of concentrated Rua he had stored in his safe. He couldn’t imagine a better time to use one and headed to his quarters to fetch one. When he placed it on the forge to absorb it, he found that the vial would fill the battery past capacity. He didn’t want to waste any of t
he valuable energy, so he purchased the assistant, draining the battery to near empty, then added the vial to the battery, nearly topping it off.
Comfortable that the ship would have enough energy to take care of itself and the crew, he turned his attention to his crafting table. There didn’t seem to be a huge difference outside of a small rectangular protrusion near its edge.
“If you are the ship AI, how does this new one fit into the works?”
“It isn’t a new entity entirely. It’s more of a subroutine or subset of myself. I can even make it sound like me.”
“No, I want it to sound different. Not that there’s anything wrong with the way you sound. I just want to be able to compartmentalize my tasks,” he said, silently reprimanding himself for his attempt to placate the female sounding AI.
After returning to the bench and making a couple of initial adjustments to the new AI, he grabbed the rest of Samix’s gear and put it in a queue to have the shield mod applied. Since the AI doing the modifying was in the bench itself, he slid the gear well away from the area he was using. Just as he was about to start experimenting at improving the mod in his gear, the ship jostled. The thud of the landing gear retracting was quickly followed by the quiet yet persistent hum of the engines.
“I take it we’re heading out to the belt to glass some pirates?” he asked in the comms channel, not particularly caring who answered him.
“Yes,” both Ann and Samix answered at the same time.
“We will be taking a circuitous route to a staging area near the targets. I am moving at ten percent power to avoid others from picking up our signature. Estimated time of arrival: twenty hours,” Ann said after Samix had yielded the channel.
“I would like my gear back so I can study more flight manuals from the databases you recovered from the other ship. I plan on spending the time either asleep or studying,” his determined pilot chimed in.
“Finishing the final pieces now. Not sure how long they will take, but your helmet should be done in a few minutes,” he said as he checked the work queue.
Samix came and went as he worked doggedly at improving the shielding mod and the ship crept silently through the system towards their vantage point. Hours passed. He worried that he wouldn’t have a working version of the shield on his gear. Before long, though, he made a breakthrough. It wasn’t word-changing as only twenty percent of the unused energy would be recycled, but it was an improvement over zero. Although he thought he could improve the energy circuit design, he also knew he would have to be fresh for what was to come.
Chapter 7
After moving Samix’s completed gear from the surface of the forger station, he set his gear down to update the shielding mod and then headed to his room for a shower and some rest. On his way, he ran into his pilot in the galley.
“You said you were doing some reading from the database we recovered. How did you sift through all of the information?” he asked.
“As you know, you can access everything from your helmet. All I did was ask Ann to find anything that pertained to piloting a spacecraft and had her put it in a personal folder.”
He thanked her for her help and continued to his quarters. As he peeled off his sweat-soaked under suit, he asked Ann to find any information on forging, with a specific focus on energy circuits. By the time he had finished his gloriously hot, relaxing shower, he donned his helmet and found his file.
“As I have said before, forgers were rare,” Ann said, predicting the question Zade was going to ask about the scant number of documents. “They would never be deployed this far from the home systems. Their skills were too valuable in shipbuilding. I did find a significant amount of information relevant to weapon-smithing and armor-smithing. It approaches equipment from the purely physical angle but does reference how energy circuits are included in designs. If nothing else, it should give you a better understanding of how Rua is incorporated into physical things. I don’t know that anyone has ever approached forging from that angle before.”
“That seems like a very fundamental understanding of how forging works,” Zade said. “Why hasn’t anyone ever done it in the past?”
“If you haven’t already picked up on it, Groz society was extremely classist. Unlike your society, the Groz warriors were at the pinnacle of society. To be a warrior was to be better than all others. The next hierarchical step down was the support classes that went into battle with the warriors: medics, engineers, craft-smiths. The second to the lowest class were individuals who grew the Groz war machine without deploying to battle, and the lowest class were children, invalids, and those who didn’t contribute to Groz fighting prowess. Smiths and forgers are a part of a different status system, which meant they rarely interacted with most of the Groz population and did not share information outside of the guilds.”
He had been moving towards that conclusion on his with every new thing he had learned about the ancient race, but Ann’s concise explanation had solidified his assumptions. Groz society was a war machine. Those who contributed the most held higher standing than those who contributed less. He took a second to think about how his life would have been different back on Earth if the US followed a similar mindset. Sure, it would have made his life easier and more enjoyable while he was serving, but he just couldn’t shake the feeling of wrongness. His country had proven again and again that they had both the resources and ingenuity to battle overwhelming odds and win. The only thing they lacked was support from a citizenry, which was nonviolent to a fault. When a populace has been insulated from the ugliness of the real world is what controls the politicians, and those politicians control the military, it is impossible to create a force that is strong enough to do anything but be reactionary.
Is that a bad thing, though? he thought before thanking Ann and telling her to put the new documents in his folder.
After dismissing the AI, he propped himself up in his rack and began sorting through the documents attempting to organize them. With some effort, he had everything broken down into folders based on what they were about: Rua, weapons, or armor. He was fairly comfortable in the abilities of his rail weaponry and choose to begin his research with the documents on armor. His understanding of physics and material sciences from his engineering degree helped him comprehend the information and develop ideas about what he could do with the new medium. Three hundred pages in, his eyelids finally gave up their fight, and he drifted off to sleep, the document still open on his visor.
The voice of his pilot woke him from a restless sleep.
“Captain we have been in position for a few hours and we have movement in our sector. Two mining ships were operating when we arrived, and Ann has identified three shuttles approaching, using the asteroids for cover.”
“I’ll be right there, Sam,” he said, instantly awake.
Remembering he had left his armor in the forge room for improvements, he walked out of his room and towards the bridge in just his under suit. He stepped out of his quarters and directly into Mara. The feline woman had been waiting to talk to him. The look of concern on her face betrayed her indecision about wanting to wake him. She was standing directly between him and the bridge, a look of surprise on her face. He grabbed her by the shoulders and gently moved her out of the way.
“How are you doing, Mara? I’ve got to get to the bridge for some work.”
“Umm…I need to speak to you…privately.”
“I’ll be all ears as soon as we get the pirate recon taken care of. I don’t think things will get rough, but you might be better off in your quarters,” he said over his shoulder as he walked onto the bridge.
“She wants to be on your team. You should invite her to your quarters for a private meeting,” the attempt at a sultry tone in Ann’s inhuman voice sent shivers down his spine. They weren’t the good shivers either.
“What the fuck?” he said in disbelief, her statement stopping him dead in his tracks. “Not the time, Ann. And, what the fuck?”
“The idea
is sound. Good warriors breed good warriors who are loyal by blood. You should consider the prospect,” she responded in her normal voice.
“We need to have a serious talk about what I am trying to accomplish when this is all over, Ann,” Zade said, shaking his head and refocusing on the situation at hand. “Samix, what do we have?”
“The three shuttles have split up. One is headed towards the mining vessel nearest our position. The other two are heading towards the other mining vessel. Should we engage?”
“Not yet. Ann, is there any chance they have spotted us or that we are missing others?” he asked aloud.
“No, and no, captain. We are sitting completely silent and using passive scans. There is no way they have seen us. When we got into position, I observed the space surrounding the ship and calculated the vector of every moving object. Those shuttles are the only inconsistencies.”
“Good. After seeing the other shuttle, can you highlight the communications antennae on the single-docked shuttle when we get closer?”
“Yes.”
“Samix, can you shoot the antennae that Ann highlights before we dock?”
“I should be able to.”
“You need to, else our cover is going to be blown. I am going to suit up and get ready for boarding. Samix, fly us into one of the empty docks after knocking out their comms. Ann, as soon as we are close enough, get me a layout of the ship and location of the pirates who are aboard.”
He left the bridge at a jog to find Mara still waiting for him. After falling in next to him, she kept pace easily until he hit the brakes and turned into the forge room to gather his gear. Because she wasn’t granted access, she had to shout to him from the outside of the room.
“I want to help. I want to be part of your crew. No matter what is required of me. It is the only way to pay the debt I owe you for saving my life.”
