Redemption : A LitRPG Space Adventure (The Last Enclave Book 2)

by Morgan Cole

  "Shit. That's too bad," Marty said.

  "Now, how do we fix this, Brick?" I asked.

  "The quake misaligned the gravity lenses that focus the Tap. The misaligned beam destroyed approximately 30% of the generation capacity. After the lenses settled, the new alignment was completely incorrect, reducing the energy output to approximately 5% of its full capacity."

  "Then we just need to realign the lenses, replace the generators, and we're good?" I asked.

  "Realign the lenses, yes. We do not have the materials to replace the generators. We will not need to if we correct the alignment. The remaining capacity of the Solar Tap is enough to restore the Connahr field."

  "Great. Let's do it. How do we do this?" I asked.

  "And here we come to our major problem. In order to realign the lenses we must shut down the Solar Tap. We must shut it down, realign, and reactivate it within 10 minutes."

  "I hate timed quests, Brick," Marty said.

  I nodded in agreement. "Why are we on a timer?"

  "That is an estimate. The Solar Tap, as depleted as it is, is providing the majority of power for the Connahr field. When we take it offline, the Fusion plant will be unable to support it. The energy storage will drain in seconds and the Connahr field will shrink to approximately one-third its current size. It will be covering just outside the orbit of Venus."

  Just outside the orbit of Venus would mean it would essentially be completely useless. "Okay, that sucks. But we can live with it not covering the entire solar system for the few minutes more it might take us, can't we?" I asked.

  "That is only one aspect of the timer, as you call it. The other is the Solar Tap satellite. As it is stationed in the coronasphere of your sun it requires power to maintain its structural integrity. It gets that power through its connection to the Solar Tap."

  It dawned on me. As soon as we closed the gate, the little gate satellite in orbit would lose its power connection and soon after, the awesome power of our little sun would turn it into a cloud of Union-flavored molecules.

  "Well, timed quest it is."

  "Brick, can we even do this in ten minutes? I don't want to speak for Jake, but I don't know how to align a gravity lens," Marty said.

  "Thankfully, neither of you will have to figure it out. Just do what I tell you and we'll get this Tap back online," Metra said, as she entered the control room through the suddenly open door.

  She was wearing her basic armor, eschewing her more minimalistic set to come out to the base.

  Marty broke into a big beaming smile, which she returned immediately. He walked over and gave her an awkward hug. Their armor clanked against each other.

  "How did you get here?"

  "The gate, dummy. Now, are we going to fix this thing or what?"

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Repairing the Solar Tap

  ONCE WE STARTED DOING it I realized there had been absolutely no chance that Marty and I would've been able to do this without her. She had brought along two floating cases full of instruments as well as four oversized versions of Brick's spider bot. Each one of them was the size of an armchair, long folding limbs tucked in close. They were quite creepy at that scale, if I had to be honest.

  "Now, we’re going to have to be as quick as we can. Everyone knows the plan, so follow it. Each of you has your own share of the alignment instruments. Put them where they need to be, connect them to the network, and initialize them. While you are doing that, I will be setting mine and directing the bots to where they need to be. They will do the heavy lifting."

  "Metra, while your Metrabots are powerful, I am not 100% confident that they are fully capable of the work involved," Brick said.

  "Metrabots? Seriously, that's what you called them?" I asked.

  "I had to call them something. They're not just scaled-up versions of Brick's bots you know. They're much more capable, in every way."

  "Still, a bit much don't you think?"

  "What would you have called them, Jake?" she asked, irritation in her voice.

  "I don't know, Spiderbot V2? Mega-spiderbot?"

  Marty shook his head. "We're not letting you name anything else, Jake."

  "Whatever. I don't want to argue about the name," Metra said. "Brick, the bots are fine. Their capabilities should be in excess of our requirements. Now, as I was saying, get in there, do your jobs right, and let's get this done. The faster, the better."

  Marty and I nodded seriously, each of us picking up one of the floating cases. Metra had her own, more of a satchel, slung over her shoulder. She didn't have as many instruments to set as we did, but the ones she had were the most important. With that and directing the bots she'd have plenty to do.

  The three of us were standing in front of a towering, heavily armored door. It was similar to the high-security bulkhead that sealed off the Habitation complex on Pax, but this one was all about keeping a potentially disastrous failure of the Solar Tap from the rest of the base. We had actually come through a series of them to get here, and now we were in front of the last one.

  "All right. Brick, shut it down and when the chamber is cleared, open this door," Metra ordered.

  "Acknowledged," Brick came back a moment later.

  Five seconds passed and then ten. I was beginning to get a bit antsy and was almost going to ask a question when like a sheet of water falling, the door disappeared into the wall, revealing the Solar Tap behind it. Metra ran in, and we followed.

  The Solar Tap was larger than I'd expected it to be, which was surprising. On the map Brick had shown us, it had clearly been huge. My brain hadn't digested that and it boggled at the scale. We entered a circular area the size of a minimart parking lot. A domed ceiling came to a peak thirty meters above us. Mounted at that peak of the dome, pointed downward, was a gate not much bigger than the one I'd found in my grandfather's basement. The difference was, this one was perfectly round. The round frame was empty, showing only the grey metal of the dome behind it.

  "Get your sensors into place,” Metra ordered. “I don't know how many of the gravitational lenses are out of alignment. We might be tight on time."

  In the center of the room there was a giant hole. I knew from studying the schematics of the Tap that this was where the gravitationally focused beam went. Lining the sides of the shaft were the energy harvesters, arranged in rings.

  "Metra, you said that the energy of the beam isn't fully expended. What happens to the rest of it?" I asked as I raced across the room to my first sensor location.

  "Not really the time, Jake. If you must know, it goes out the expulsion gate at the bottom of the shaft."

  "Wait, there's another gate down there?"

  "Of course there is. What, did you expect that the concentrated beam would just keep going into the core of Mercury? I think it would crack this planet like an egg. It certainly wouldn't be good for it. The energy concentrated here is much more than Mercury would see normally."

  I reached the first of my eight placement sites and cracked open the case that I'd been dragging along behind me. The sensor that I needed to place was typical Union tech—an anonymous grey box with no features. If an Earth corporation had made this it'd be studded with LIDAR sensors, or cameras. Something other than a featureless metal box. Union tech didn't work like that. No lenses, laser, or dishes needed. That kind of technology was for us plebs on Earth.

  The Interface highlighted the exact spot I needed to place it and I slapped it down on the wall. It was the work of a few seconds to make sure it was in exactly the right position and alignment that Metra specified. The ghost image of the sensor and the sensor were perfectly matched when I engaged the gecko pad on the back with a thought. Once it was attached firmly, I released it and the Interface brought up its controls.

  ╠═╦╬╧╪

  Lens Calibration Sensor, designed by Metra

  Control(s) available: Initialize

  ╠═╦╬╧╪

  I quickly hammered the initialize button. A progress bar appeared,
filling in slowly, but visibly. Each sensor would take a little bit over a minute to make itself ready. Once it had started I hurried toward the second placement spot.

  "This really seems like something Brick's bots could've done without us, Metra." Marty said.

  I saw him on the other side of the shaft from me, placing his second sensor already. He'd started near the door, so it felt like he was cheating a little bit.

  "While my bots could place all of the sensors, at their current scale and strength they would be much slower than you two. As time is of the essence, Metra made the correct decision."

  "Yeah, Marty. Listen to Brick," Metra said, absently.

  She was at the lip of the pit in the center of the room, looking down and pointing some kind of handheld sensor. Her four Metrabots were equally spaced around the pit. Each of them was stretching two of its forelimbs into the space above the pit. Those limbs were thick, studded with additional sensors and manipulators I had to assume Metra had fitted for just this kind of work. Ultimately, the Metrabots were just another eight capable arms for our genius engineer to use.

  "I confirm that roughly 30% of the Tap's capacity has been disabled. I see at least three rings down there with chunks out of them," Metra said.

  She had tried to explain why the Tap had catastrophically failed to Marty and me in words that we'd understand. The lens-focused beam from the sun needed to pass exactly down the center of the shaft. Each of the rings—ten in total—would harvest some of the energy. If that beam was misaligned or improperly focused, the energy could harvest unevenly and eventually one or more of the harvesting units in the ring would overload. Once one was overloaded, the whole ring was gone. Sure, the components were still there, but you couldn't use it anymore.

  In our case it had been both problems. The quake had caused the beam to sway and burn out some of the harvesters, and when it had stopped, the lenses weren't focusing the beam properly anymore.

  I was setting my fourth sensor when something occurred to me. The timer in my HUD showed eight minutes remaining before we had to turn the Solar Tap back on.

  "Hey, Metra, about those dead rings down there. We don't need them, you said. What are they made out of?"

  "They're a pretty simple design, but they're quite expensive. Lots of tier 3 exotics. Why?" she said, and then spoke again. "Hold on, we don't have time for your screwing around, Jake."

  I set my fourth sensor in place, hammering the activate button. "Come on, we need the exotics. Do we have the margin or not?"

  "What a stupid idea, Jake. Yes, I'd say you have about a two-minute margin. Two minutes to get to the bottom of that shaft and free one of the units. You know they're quite large, right?" she asked.

  "No, I can't see into the pit. What are we talking about? Pickup truck or microwave oven?" I asked.

  "I don't know what either of those is. Each unit is approximately 1.5 meters x 1 meter x 70 centimeters."

  I mentally translated from Metric to SI in my head.

  "So the size of a small fridge then. It's not heavy, is it?" I asked.

  "They're fairly massive, but Mercury's gravity is low and you are in powered armor that can fly, Jake. Seriously, what a dumb question. Anyway, if you're going to do this hurry up and place the rest of your sensors. If you're still in that shaft when I have to turn on the Solar Tap we might as well just give up and leave the system because the Connahr field will be gone."

  I was glad to hear that she wasn't just going to turn it on anyway. That was something people in movies said. Sure, not turning it on would mean the Connahr field was screwed, but it's not like this Solar Tap was an irreplaceable resource. I expected we could rebuild the satellite if we really needed to. It would just take a lot more time.

  "Got it. Two more to go and then I'm down the shaft," I said.

  The last two went in a blur. This really was dumb work that could've been done by robots, but Brick had been right. Marty and I racing around the outsides of the cylinder were a lot faster than Brick's little spiders would have been.

  I abandoned my floating case and sprinted toward the shaft, jumping and then pulling downward with my gravity plates when I reached the center. Rings flashed by me, each roughly twenty meters apart. Each ring was studded with sixteen of the fridge-sized harvesting devices that Metra had described. They were quite unusual for Union design, in that they weren't boxes. They were more like capsules with rounded sides and edges. As Union tech was all about functionality over form I could only assume there was some functional reason for this.

  Below me I could see a mirror to the gate above me, closed and inactive. The three bottom rings looked slightly different from the ones I was passing. One of the harvesting devices on the ring closest to the top was obviously destroyed, a mangled, blackened wreck. On the ring below, two of them were gone, and on the bottom ring three. If we had more time, we could have salvaged one of the rings to restore two, but we didn't have it.

  I touched down lightly on the bottom of the shaft, the hard tier 3 metal of the Solar Tap unyielding underneath my armored feet. I chose the closest intact harvesting unit and sprinted over to it, bringing up my salvage interface.

  The unit was connected to the wall with bundles of thick cabling and integral supports. It wasn't like some other things in the Union, things that were intended to be removed. No gecko pads here. This was a permanent part of the ring. I manipulated the cut with my salvage interface to be a thin plate behind the unit. I didn't need to take the unit back intact, but I definitely wanted to take as much of it as I could. For all I knew, the wealth of exotics in this thing was all in the back. After I placed the edge to make a minimal cutting surface, I saw the cost and blanched.

  ╠═╦╬╧╪

  Power and structural connections

  Salvage: Metals, tier 2, Metals, tier 3

  Cost: 711 Nanite Clusters

  ╠═╦╬╧╪

  "Christ, why is this so expensive?" I asked.

  "The power transmission cabling is extremely dense," Brick supplied.

  The reserve I'd had in my suit for breaking into the station was still mostly intact. It just wasn't enough. I checked it quickly.

  ╠═╦╬╧╪

  Nanite Clusters: 77/500

  ╠═╦╬╧╪

  Even with the extra Nanites stored in my body itself I couldn't afford it.

  "I don't have enough. Any of you bring some Nanites in? Can you toss them down?" I asked.

  "I've got almost nothing," Marty said, up above.

  "Dammit, Jake," Metra cursed.

  I knew that while Brick could bring me some it would take much longer than we had. With the salvage interface still up, I brought up my Engineering vision and could see what Brick was talking about. Three huge trunks of cabling, each the size of a 100-year-old tree. They reached into the guts of the harvesting device and disappeared into the wall beyond, onto some sort of power bus that fed the Connahr field generator. I adjusted my cut to exclude the cables and the cost finally dropped to something I could afford.

  ╠═╦╬╧╪

  Structural Connections

  Salvage: Metals, tier 2

  Cost: 217 Nanite Clusters

  ╠═╦╬╧╪

  I had some margin—with luck I wouldn't need it.

  I started the process and snatched Excalibur off my hip. With an eye on the timer, I gripped my trusty bar in both hands and energized the chisel tip. It glowed blue as the Voidcutter edge powered up.

  There was plenty of space between the harvesters in the ring so I was able to see where the machine and the ring itself were connected. Nanites were flowing out of me in a thick, black rope swiftly emptying my internal storage. They settled in to their task as I settled into mine.

  I slammed the point of Excalibur home, aiming for the hidden cable I could see nestled in the tight gap between the wall of the ring and the mounted harvester. The chisel point vaporized the metal as it dug deep behind the machine. My arms vibrated with the f
orce transmitted back through the wrecking bar.

  It was slow going. I had to essentially dig a path to the cables that were in the center of the back side of the harvester. Once the tip and first foot or two of Excalibur were well and truly wedged between the ring wall and the unit, I gripped it with both hands and heaved. I felt the tier 2 metal of the harvesting unit groan as it buckled. With a few more strategically placed heaves I exposed the first of the cables.

  As dense as the cable was, the Voidcutter edge of Excalibur made short work of it. I slashed through the cable as quickly as I could. Halfway through I pried the harvester away from the ring again, buckling the structure and exposing more of the first cable.

  I checked the time. Three minutes and change. "Shit, this is going slower than I like."

  "Hurry up, Jake. The first three lenses are aligned. Five more and we're done."

  Seconds later the first cable was severed and my salvage job about 60% done. I knew that even when it was done, the harvester wouldn't fall off the wall. It wasn't like this was a bundle of copper wire I was cutting—this was an ultra-dense cable with the thickness and rigidity of a tree made of tier 3 metal. I needed to cut those cables or the harvester wasn't going anywhere.

  The second cable was cut with 1:40 left on the clock. The salvage job finished only five seconds before that, and then there was only the final cable.

  It was the top cable, and the weight of the harvester unit was causing the whole thing to sag down onto the wall.

  I slapped my left hand onto the refrigerator-sized capsule and engaged the gecko pad. I lifted it away from the wall. I strained my muscles and the power joints to bend and buckle the metal that remained just a bit more. I needed enough clearance to get my right hand and Excalibur behind there to poke at it and sever the last cable.

  It was going to be far too close for my comfort. Using Excalibur with one hand and only my Engineering vision mode giving me any visibility on the thing I was cutting was hard. I triggered my salvage interface with a thought and highlighted the cable. I mentally adjusted the cut, giving it the other side of the cable from me.