by Morgan Cole
Salvage: organics, tier 2, metals, tier 2
Cost: 50 Nanite Clusters
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"Got you!" I yelled.
The Union material was concentrated in a small square around the potbellied stove, occupying that entire corner of the shack. A quick check with the Salvage UI revealed that the stove itself was made of tier 2 metal as well, despite looking like slightly rusty black iron.
"It has to be here," I said, running my hands over every inch of the stove. My Engineering vision mode was still showing nothing but boring, empty tier 2 metal.
I wrapped my arms around the stove and heaved. I was unable to move it. I lashed out in frustration, punching the stove door. The impact stung a bit. The door squeaked as it rebounded open slightly. The inside of the stove was full of grey ash.
"Inside, of course!"
The inside of the stove was as you would expect—black and ashy. I scooped double handfuls of it out. The teenagers or whoever had been here had made no effort to clear out the ash, it seemed. It made a large pile on the floor in front of the stove.
I stuck my head through the open door and looked around. Still nothing. No hint of Union components. Just creosote and some remaining ash. I snorted in frustration, moving some of the light coating of remaining ash. Moving it just enough to expose a familiar indentation on the floor of the stove.
"Yes!" I yelled, pulling my head from the stove.
It took me a moment of patting my pockets to remember where my Link was. My parka. I uncovered Marty, who was mumbling nonsense. The heat from the flameless ration heaters had long since dissipated. I reached inside the parka and unzipped the pocket I'd left the Link in. It was where I'd left it, all of my keys still dangling from it.
The Link fit perfectly into the notch in the stove.
There was a muted click and the stove and part of the corner began to rise up. The floor beneath me began to sink at the same time. I stepped back, taking the Link with me.
A staircase formed, warm light filling the shack from below.
"Nice work, Grandpa," I said.
I picked up Marty and carried him down the stairs into the hidden outpost. The staircase closed behind us.
Chapter Twenty-One: The Northern Outpost
THE ROOM BELOW THE shack was nearly a carbon copy of the Security room below the Hab complex on the station. Bunkbeds along one wall, an empty weapons rack on the opposite wall. A comfy looking chair sat in front of a copy of the control console I remembered from the chamber.
The staircase I'd taken down was now closed off, but it was even in the same corner that the hatch had been. This was clearly another Union modular part that Grandpa had just plopped down under the shack.
The differences though were interesting. Two closed doors led somewhere. There was more to this base.
I put Marty down on a bottom bunk. The air down here was a bit chilly, so I hoped he'd be alright for a few minutes.
"Brick, I'm in the outpost. Can you do your thing, take over and get us an Induction kit?" I asked.
"Yes. Put the Link in a control slot, and leave this device in contact with it."
I looked around and spotted the familiar indentation on the control console. I sat in the chair and clicked the Link into place. The phone balanced easily on top.
"Connected. Stand by, bandwidth through this device is a little low."
Honestly, I didn't even know how he was using the Link at all. I hadn't built anything into my phone to allow that. The Link was a fantastically complicated bit of Union tech though, so perhaps it had what was needed. I'll have to spend some time figuring that out.
"I have control. This outpost is quite capable. I'm opening a new, high-bandwidth microgate and switching... Done."
"The outpost has a small stock of Induction kits, Jake. Should I Induct Marty?" Brick asked.
"What? Of course you should. Do it, Brick!" Metra shouted.
"Yes. Induct him, Brick," I confirmed. I knew Brick was waiting for my order.
A panel opened in the wall and a familiar spider bot scuttled out. It was carrying a pale orange-colored capsule about the size of a large chicken egg. My Interface helpfully labeled it for me.
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Union Induction Kit
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The bot hopped onto the bed and placed the capsule in contact with Marty's skin. Like a drop of rain hitting pavement, the capsule seemed to splash. Every trace of the material and Nanite Cluster infused Induction payload rapidly disappeared into Marty's flesh.
"The Induction process takes several hours. It will repair most of the damage to Marty's body during that process."
"I'm so glad you made it in time, Jake," Metra said.
"What's up with you and Marty, Metra? What happened while I was sleeping in the truck?"
"Huh? Nothing. We just had a good conversation. I like him, he's sweet."
"Okay, then," I said. I had no idea what that meant when she said it. With human women it often meant they considered you their new best platonic shopping buddy. Maybe it meant something different with Horgrim women.
"And what's happening with Regar and Kiril?" I asked.
"They traded us another fifty thousand Nanite Clusters for some materials and a whole lot of supplies out of the Manufactors. Things were so bad there that they filled almost all of the outpost's Nanite storage. After you two took care of the Spike, things have calmed down quite a lot."
"Did we kill the Shard?"
"Unlikely," Brick interjected. "They are extremely durable. The explosion was very powerful and it destroyed a lot of the Shard's built-up manufacturing, however."
"I guess that's good. We'll need a good source of Nanite Clusters in the future."
"They know. Regar and Kiril are still manning the outpost, but I think they don't want to do it for much longer. They've been stuck there for years."
I couldn't imagine what that was like. Year after year of constant fighting. Eating nutrient paste and drinking water. Watching your friends slowly die, one by one.
"We'll figure something out. Brick, you said this outpost was capable. What did you mean?"
Brick wasn't the simple, dunderheaded computer he'd been when I first met him. He'd gotten smarter when he'd reclaimed the processing power in the Security room. He'd grown even more when I'd removed the limitations my grandfather had placed on him retaining data. He'd been learning. I hoped doing that wouldn't come back to bite me in the ass.
All that to say, somewhere along the way he'd gained a sense of drama.
He'd led me through one of the doors and down a passageway, highlighting the route on a minimap my Interface was projecting for me. I could have just ordered him to tell me and he probably would have, but Brick wasn't a toaster. If he wanted to have some fun, who was I to interfere?
I stopped in front of an unmarked door. I'd passed through several Connector nodes and down another long set of stairs. Each node was spotless, as perfect as the day it was made. It was amazing what could happen when there weren't Ferals around to eat your stuff. Several branched off into other nodes, but Brick was leading me to one place in particular.
"Are you ready?" Brick asked.
"Yes, I'm ready."
"No low-light vision?"
"Normal vision only."
"Enter!" he said, and the door in front of me slid aside. I stepped into the darkness beyond. The door closed behind me, leaving me blind for a moment.
Light swelled from every corner, revealing a space the size of a high school gymnasium. The ceiling was far above, at least fifty feet above me. Folded up in the corners and along the walls were larger versions of what I recognized as the robotic arms used by the Manufactors on the station. They towered above me. That wasn't what took my breath away, however. It was the ship.
Sitting on several extruded pedestals in the center of the hangar was a spaceship.
It was long, graceful, and deadly looking. Curving both vertica
lly and horizontally, it must have started as a simple delta-wing design, but Grandpa had altered it. Now it looked more like a bird of prey. Longer than a city bus and twice as high, it was still a bit rough and unfinished looking. The Interface gave me some information.
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Redemption
Light Scout, design by Mattias Monde
Unregistered
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"This is amazing," I said. "Will it fly, Brick?"
"Mattias's design isn't completed. The build process stopped when the local stores ran out of critical materials. The Redemption is capable of atmospheric flight and it was planned that the vessel would have some stealth capability. It is clear Mattias wanted to be able to use this vessel without Earth's governments detecting him. While the Redemption can achieve orbit, it is unarmed and unshielded. It is also currently capable of much less performance than it would be in its completed form."
"I'm so jealous. That's a light shipyard," Metra interjected.
"Does this base have a gate, Brick?" I asked.
"Yes, it does. It also has enough power generation capacity to operate the gate and the light shipyard. As I said, this is a very capable outpost."
"Then let's just open the gate and bring some materials through from the station to finish this bad boy."
"Not going to work," Metra said. "I'm looking at the design, and the bits that are missing all require exotics and radioactives. I've used just about every scrap of what we had building my ship. Once I retake the satellite stations maybe we'll have some more."
"That is correct," Brick confirmed.
"Damn. Alright, well let's do what we came here for. Have you found the data we need, Brick?"
"Yes. Observation has been continuing since Mattias set it in motion approximately three years ago. I have a wealth of data, and none of it is good."
"Show me.”
Chapter Twenty-Two: Sol Has Got Some Issues
A VIRTUAL MODEL OF the Sol system appeared in front of me, the bright yellow ball of the sun in the center. Most of the planets were so small, relatively speaking, that they needed interface elements to highlight them. Long red arrows pointed to the Earth, Mercury, and Pluto. The other planets weren't labeled. Each planet's orbit was rendered as an ellipse. The solar system as a whole was enclosed by a translucent blue sphere reaching out beyond the orbit of Pluto. It was helpfully labeled as the Connahr field.
"Mattias seeded five hundred micro satellites into Earth orbit. Each is roughly the size of an orange and has a small gravity drive and a passive sensor package. The original purpose of the array was general monitoring of the solar system, but after the Connahr field instability, Mattias tasked it to observe both Mercury and Pluto."
"This is the solar system at the time of the deployment of the array. I will advance time to the first significant event."
The planets began to move, spinning on their axes and orbiting the sun. Earth made a bit over one complete orbit in ten seconds when the model stopped again. The Connahr field contracted, the blue sphere shrinking to around the orbit of Uranus.
"At this point the Connahr field shrunk to this size for nearly an hour."
Time moved again, so little that it was barely noticeable. The Connahr field returned to something very close to its original radius.
"After that hour, the field recovered but not fully. Over the next few days, the radius slowly decayed until it stabilized."
Time advanced again, slower than before, and the Connahr field shrank, leaving Pluto exposed before it stopped.
"Several months passed before changes were observable by the array."
Earth moved rapidly along its orbital track as time advanced. The display zoomed in, Pluto grew larger and rapidly filled the area the solar system had. Now instead of an abstract sphere, it was a real planet. Red and white, covered with craters and texture.
I watched as time sped up again and tiny grey and silver pinpricks visibly expanded across the surface of the planet. Large patches of the greyish-silver stretched out capillaries, or tentacles, to the others. The sheer scale of what I was watching struck me. These patches were the size of countries, and the capillaries hundreds of miles wide.
"This fits the pattern of a Shard bombardment. They are converting Pluto into a Feral planet. Eventually, the Shards will grow their Spikes long enough to launch Ferals that can travel through space. If the Vassago AI is active, it will likely be able to control the Ferals here once it discovers them."
"Wait a minute, I thought Shards were something the AIs used when they were smart? Now they just sort of leak in from subspace or whatever."
"Shards come through the spatial tears the same way lesser Ferals do," Brick said. "During the war, it is believed that Shards were mostly launched by AI bombardment ships, but it wasn't required."
"Alright. So that's bad news. Again, we'll deal with that when we can."
Brick resumed his presentation. The display zoomed back out, showing the entire solar system once again. Another arrow appeared past the orbit of Pluto, pointing to an area of space now outside of the Connahr field. It was labeled "Union trade node."
"Several months after the infestation became visible, this outpost lost connection to the Union trade node. This commonly occurs with unstaffed Union structures that are outside of large Connahr fields. It is safe to assume that it was overrun by Ferals and converted."
"What about the base that's projecting the Connahr field? Was there anything from it?" I asked.
"No. Mattias believed it to be unmanned, as all communication attempts are ignored. That continues to be the case. It is on Mercury and although the array was tasked to observe Mercury on several occasions there was nothing to indicate what could have happened there to affect the Connahr field."
"So we're on our own. Again. We really need to get to Mercury and we need to figure out what happened to the Union. I was thinking, Metra. Maybe you should go and visit your family on the Void Tower earlier than we agreed. We could use some good news. You couldn't stay long, though. We need you on the station, or at least linked with Brick through the gate."
When Metra and I had become partners we'd come to an agreement. As soon as it was possible, she could open the gate to her home, the Void Tower Ineffable Glory of The Conqueror. The Void Towers were enormous, cylindrical spaceships containing millions of people built by the Horgrim. I thought of them as an O'Neill cylinder turned into a spaceship, but the Void Towers were centuries older than O'Neill and his beautiful designs.
The Towers held a lot of Horgrim, who lived on them in preference to a planet or asteroid. During the war with the Elder AIs, they had been safer.
"Err," she said.
"What? Not a good idea? I thought you wanted to get there as soon as you could?"
"Jake," she said, and her voice hitched. "I feel like an air thief."
"Why?" I asked.
"I broke our agreement. I've already tried to use the gate to connect to Ineffable Glory. The connection request failed."
"Oh," I said. I felt a bit betrayed, but more sad. Did that mean whatever had happened to the rest of the Union had also happened to her family in the Ineffable Glory of The Conqueror?
"I'm so sorry, Met—" I started.
"You shut up, Jake! Just because I can't connect with my old code doesn't mean anything happened to them, I mean to the Glory."
"You're right. I'm sure they're all fine. Maybe the gate was just busy? That can happen, right?"
Metra didn't immediately reply, so Brick jumped in. "Yes, Jake, that is a possibility. At Metra's request, however, I have been attempting the connection every hour for the last eight days."
"Eight days? Damn, Metra. I thought we had a deal. What if it had opened, you had gone through, and then they didn't let you come back? We would be screwed."
"I know! I'm sorry."
"Anyway, we'll just have to figure out some other way to get to your family. If Regar's situation is any in
dication, then gates are pretty much screwed all over the Union."
"The Union database has schematics for a jump drive," Metra said. "Only exploration ships ever bother with them. They're incredibly slow compared to gate travel. Once we get some more materials—and I mean a lot more—we can make one."
I remembered seeing the listing in the database and looking it over. Metra wasn't exaggerating. The materials cost for even the smallest version was staggering. There was no way we could afford it without the satellite stations mining again, and the Refinery going full bore.
"Our next step is finding materials here in Sol, if we can. We've got to get the Redemption up and running as soon as possible so we can get to Mercury and see what's going on there. Maybe we can mine the asteroid belt or something?" I mused.
Metra snorted, the expressive sound carrying perfectly over our connection. "Not any time soon. The infrastructure you'd need to process any ore you might find is basically what we've got here in the Refinery complex, plus the Fusion node to drive it. That's a big investment of materials and Nanite Clusters that we just don't have. That's on top of getting hardware out to the asteroids to actually do the mining and ships to transport it. That won't be happening any time soon."
"Right," I said, a bit disappointed. Since I was a kid reading 60s and 70s science fiction, I'd dreamt of a Sol full of independent asteroid miners, a new frontier for Man in space. If the opportunity to make a living in outer space had ever come up I would have taken it. Thinking on it, I supposed it did, and I had.
"Why are you thinking about the most complex possible solution here, anyway?” Metra asked. “You're more of a shoot the problem in the face kind of guy. Let's get that pile of materials in your grandpa's basement. Brick disassembled the gate there, didn't he?"
"That is correct, Metra. My bots were directed to disassemble all Union tech in the area and place the salvaged materials in neat piles before self-disassembly."
"Gates aren't cheap. Those materials will give you a lot more leeway in how you can upgrade Redemption."
I hadn't been thinking of the gate as a valuable stockpile of materials, but I should have been. They didn't represent a lot of mass, but they were made up of materials that we were short on—tier 2 and 3 exotics and radioactives. It was perfect.