by G Aliaksei C
But I wasn’t a trained recruiter, nor was I an empath. I was but a Corporate engineer who tried to read people well.
“You are hired. Mail me who I’m buying the suit from. I’ll send you the address later.”
“Thank you sir!”
One more assumption bites me in the ass. For someone topping a hundred years of service, not to mention age, Sylvester seemed energetic and lively, much different from my expectation of a Class 8 soldier.
Climbing down to my lab I walked down the freshly-built hall.
The digging and foam-concrete bots were hard at work for the last few weeks, expanding my home. The largest of the expansions were the greenhouse and range. In the seemingly endless greenhouse, illuminated from one distant end to another by repurposed spotlights, monitored by the ever-vigilant Fort, I was growing grass. My efforts were focused on breeding a grass that could survive the local soil and weather.
Why? Because the Corporate mind works in strange ways.
At this early stage I was simply raising generation after generation of turf as non-fertile Waste Ring dirt was introduced to the growbed. The special breed I had imported matured in less than a day, allowing for a new generation to be planted every morning, each growing on a greater ratio of Waste-to-fertile dirt. I watched the latest, browned batch growing on a distinctly red bed.
After a time of watching grass grow I opened my Menu and changed the schedule of the greenhouse bots, ordering them to stop changing the dirt ratio and work on deriving a greener batch before continuing the experiment. Absorbed in re-programming the greenhouse, I failed to hear Inna climbing down the stairs into the lab.
“Drake?” Her voice echoed down the hall.
“Here!”
The Innkeeper stood in the doorway between the main workshop and the hall for a time, looking around, then stepped in, peeking into the storage compartments as she approached.
“We were wondering where all that displaced dirt was coming from.” She stopped next to me and looked into the greenhouse. “Apparently it was so you could… grow grass?”
“You’ll be thanking me once you don’t have to buy and ship in fertilizer every time you want to grow a dandelion on your front lawn.”
She stepped into the wide, lit room and squatted, crushing a batch of dirt in her fingers.
“Interesting, this is almost half local dirt! You are growing grass that can survive Waste Ring soil?” She looked up at me. “I thought you were an engineer, not a biologist?”
“I knew one a few floors up from where I worked before…” I frowned, not looking away from my Menu, “…before I died. We had a quota together. She told me a lot about her work - she was trying to create crops that grew under a thousand rads. I figured I could make use of her work.”
“Thousand rads? Why did you have to grow crops with that sort of environment? And what’s a quota?” A tone of curiosity entered Inna’s voice. She was clearly excited to hear about the time I had come from.
“That’s about what the background level was across the Earth at the time. Though I don’t know how she expected to grow anything without sunlight.”
“And the quota?”
“You know, the children quota.”
Inna straightened and stared at me. I closed the Menu and looked back at her.
“You had a quota… for children?”
“How else would we keep up our numbers? I don’t even know how many died every day, but without a steady flow of children, the Human race would have gone extinct.”
“So you were… assigned someone?”
“One a month. We didn’t have the technology to completely raise a Human without biological support, so the child had to grow in a Human female for several weeks. Once it formed enough, it was removed and placed in an artificial incubator. It reduced development time down to seven months, and ensured that the female section of our population remained entirely combat-capable.”
“That’s…” Inna’s ancient eyes stared at me in terror.
“It wasn’t that bad. By default, fertilization was artificial. Only if both parties were comfortable with it the process could be more natural, for the sake of physical enjoyment.” The door frame creaked as my hand unintentionally flexed. “Sometimes, if both parties were willing, the pairing was preserved until one party choose to move on, or died.” I waved the Syndicate after me as I moved several doors down the hall. Inna, silent, followed.
This compartment was taken up by fabricators of various sizes and purposes. Several robotic arms extended from the ceiling, occasionally picking parts from one machine and moving them to another.
I reached in and pulled a freshly-fabricated cylinder from a tray, loading it into a flare-gun-like launcher, then ushered Inna out and further down the hall.
A few more meters and I stepped into another cavern. Lights came on, painting a hundred meters of tunnel. Leveling the launcher down the tunnel I let loose a brilliant, rocket-like charge. It streaked into the metal plate set twenty meters away, sinking into the steel. At my will the target rolled forward on its two rails, presenting me with a holed, dented chunk of metal.
Inna, once more in motion, looked down the hole.
“How did you make it sink in like that?”
“When I was walking here from your Gate Town, my suit had this grappling hook to keep the wind from carrying me where I don’t want to go.” Inna nodded, remembering the tool. “These hooks dug half a meter into stone and dirt before deploying, and I was curious about how they managed such a feat without launching me into space. Turns out, they had rather innovative powered tips. I stole the design and made high-velocity ammo from it.”
“You could make anti-armor ammo with this.”
“That’s the idea.”
“What else do you have brewing down here?”
“Oh, lots.” I willed the plate away. It would be taken to the solar furnace outside, melted down and reformed into a fresh, undamaged piece. “I have had three months to brew a soup of catastrophic composition. The spectrum is wild. I have weapons, drugs, a small biochemical quarantine I have yet to deal with, a whole new advancement in armor technology…” I spread my palms in a show of size. “And an awesome new chaingun!”
“That sounds like a smuggler cargo list on an outer Ring operation.”
I waved her out of the range and back down the hall. “Luckily there’s no laws on Hades Ring. Which is good, because I am pretty sure some of the stuff down here is very forbidden by your equivalent of the Geneva Convention.”
“If we ever get a Union Inspection, they’ll have a panic attack.”
“Fort, please add Union Inspectors to the ‘kill on sight’ list.”
The speakers down the hall came alive, and Fort’s voice, still sounding exactly like mine, echoed. “Sarcasm?”
I squinted. “Your discretion.”
Inna spoke up again as we neared the stairs leading up. “The biochemist you mentioned. Did she die?”
“Everyone I knew died!”
My attempt at levity did not falter Inna. She frowned at me, expecting to hear the full story.
I made no attempt to avoid the question further. “Her name was Vara. She was the only casualty of an emergency patrol.”
“Do you miss her?”
“No.” Inna’s frown signaled a need to explain. “I don’t grieve. None of us knew how. We hate those that take away others of our kind, we swear to avenge them. The losses fuel our rage. I hate the Imari for killing her, just as I hate the Syndicate for exterminating my family, but I don’t grieve. I remember grief, from when I wasn’t yet a Corporate. If I felt it, instead of rage, I wouldn’t be able to function. I don’t think I could even live.”
4 : Mark Five
Day 71
What can a Corporate achieve in three months?
Whatever it takes to combat boredom.
I was once taught about different ‘marks’ of weapons. The mark system did not describe the actual destructive power o
f a specific weapon, but rather the way said destruction was achieved.
Mark One, or ‘Blunt’ weapons relied on ‘breaking’ damage. A brick struck by a ‘Blunt’ weapon would fall apart into chunks. Old kinetic firearms and weak explosives were all, effectively, Mark One weapons.
The same brick struck with a Mark Two weapon would fall to dust and plasma, its molecular bonds usually releasing stored energy in the form of an explosion. Such events could be found within the heart of a nuclear explosion, or at the impact point of a powerful laser. Loss of electrons in molecular structures was often attributed to Mark Two events.
Mark Three weapons took apart the very core of the atom, ripping protons and neutrons apart, leaving them charged enough that they didn’t immediately fuse back together. A nuclear reaction, or the effect of a powerful gravity lance on matter are prime examples.
The only known instance of a practical Mark Four weapon is a U-beam. U-tech, based on a form of photon-like particle-energy with instant travel time across any distance, was largely developed by a team that I was part of during my time on Earth. Applications are plentiful - real-time sensors, weapons unhindered by the limited speed of light, instantaneous communications. Gems ran on U-tech, receiving their power instantly and without any medium or direct link from the source. U-beam weaponry was well known for being a Mark Four, a weapon that tore apart the building blocks of subatomic particles. Needless to say that if the separation of atomic nuclei resulted in a nuclear blast, then the separation quarks was many times more destructive.
Yet the peak of weapons technology always remained Mark Five, or antimatter-matter reactions. Antimatter reacting with matter self-annihilates, converting all reactant mass into various forms of energy. A gram of antimatter reacting with a gram of matter would produce a blast equivalent of a sizable, city-shattering bomb. A paperclip of antimatter in distress could be compared to the largest practical nuclear bombs ever built.
I had been keeping track of the weapons used on the Rings. With an excess of energy provided by Gems, lasers, particle beams, gravity beams and gravity-plasma weapons were common, along with more conventional ballistic and explosive variants. Teleportation-bombing, some form of electro-chemical psychic attacks, and even biochemical nukes were used. Yet no U-beam or antimatter systems were employed anywhere, even in books and catalogues. That set the tech-bar at an awkward phase where higher advancements were possible, but no one knew how to achieve them with the arcane tech provided.
I, however, knew how much of everything worked. My initial research into U-tech told me that there was no technology of any kind freely available on the Rings that would allow me to easily produce U-energy. Sometime later I discovered the Ring Rules, and their ban on such advancements.
Yet with gravity manipulation and nearly endless reserves of energy provided by Gems, antimatter was within reach. I was temporarily in charge of antimatter production for the reactors of the first Corporate starships, and knew the process to the smallest detail. Fort, who now comfortably resided in every server in the base, was very unhappy about the whole project. The idea that the biggest risk to his job was me and my project displeased him terribly.
But I loved antimatter. It was what made my name back on Earth, it was what made space travel possible in The War, and it was what would make me my fortunes here.
Sitting in a billion credits worth of equipment buried in a shaft near the Firebolter factory, I worked. Preparations would take months, and I decided that forcing myself to work overtime non-stop would be senseless.
The best part of the project was that I had no need to invent anything new. I didn’t have to spend decades developing computers, materials and power sources required to turn matter into antimatter - it was all widely available on the Rings, easily produced by even the cheapest equipment. I worked, casually and leisurely, for only a few weeks before I had a working prototype.
My morning would start with tea and exercise. Why do pushups to grow muscle when the same effect could be achieved with a few cheap muscle amplification injections, courtesy of technological utopia? Because you couldn’t. While everyone was born with no defects and never got sick, physical strength and speed was still a matter of exercise and practice, not easily enhanced by any drugs. Implants were an expensive option, but not one I was interested in.
The nights on the Waste Ring were always cold and starless, and the morning jog across a kilometer of empty space between my bunker and the village was always dark and chilly. By the time I was done chatting with the sleepy Vili at the counter and eating breakfast, the shadow strip overhead had already moved aside, lighting up the mountains counterorbit of us with red light.
Next, the patrol. Riding upon my tank like an oversized taxi I would circle around the base, inspecting defenses and checking up on facilities. Occasionally, a turret or cannon would fire, warning off some roaming Beast. The trip would finish by the time the sun overhead was fully exposed, burning away the cold of the night.
Then, and only then, I would allow myself to sink into maniacal work. Doing my best to take breaks as often as possible, I would waste away days in the shaft, assembling the Antimatter Refinery.
Today, I was trying again. This time David, who had been helping me assemble the thing, was outside as well. After I explained what the machine did he asked for leave every time I tested it, an act I did not respect but had no choice but to accept.
What fun is a test without a risk of explosion?
Fun fact, my nickname ‘brother from another department’, granted to me by the Weapons Department, appeared after an experiment with just such a refinery, where I tried to push matter at the conversion membrane at a higher velocity. It had, in my defense, worked, and the resulting anti-particle beam leveled the nearest mountain peak.
I had hopes for this particular test, though - all the known bugs were worked out, my experience with the subject so far saving me from another incident.
“Fort?”
“Commander?” The thing-in-the-wires, having far improved his vocal abilities, had chosen to continue using my voice.
“Have the square kilometer overhead cleared out, and warn everyone to brace.”
“Understood.”
Perhaps not that far improved.
It was my sixth attempt at synthesis. The first five did not explode - they simply failed to do anything. I had found just as many problems, correcting fault after fault. Eventually, I figured, it would work.
Opening the holographic controls at the main terminal, I began the process. Huge blue Gems began sinking power into the contraption at the center of the underground chamber. At the core, a blot of compressed iron in a superheated, gaseous state was fed through a membrane of what could be, in scientific terms, described as magic. Out the other side came…
“Antimatter detected!” The flashing letters on the screen seemed just as surprised as I was. “Micrograms of antimatter in storage - two.”
“Yes!” I laughed, sliding away from the containment unit, almost feeling the risk to my life increase.
I sat over the machine for two hours, watching the stored mass increase until Jim called in.
“Mr. Frost, is everything alright?”
“Don’t approach the orbit-right side of the base Jim! I am literally looking at a loosely-floating blot of death, and the containment system isn’t very well tested!”
“Understood, Mr. Frost.” He sounded incredibly unnerved.
I turned up the feeding rate after that, reaching several milligrams in the next hour, and shut everything down. A diagnostic revealed concerning results - the two Gems running the core of the process were at their limit, just short of malfunctioning entirely, and the conversion membrane was nearly exhausted. I would need to replace the costly parts before I could safely produce any more.
Antimatter was an amazing way of storing energy. My method of conversion allowed a ninety-nine percent electricity-antimatter conversion rate, meaning that almost all energy invested
into creating the deadly produce could be released by mixing it with matter. But it was also a storage method that required its own containment. The mass of the chamber that could contain antimatter was far larger than the mass of antimatter it held, and required a sizable amount of power. A failure of the chamber would result in the antimatter’s reaction.
Within my synthesized, powerful fields moved a gaseous mass of antimatter down an airless channel, pressing the mass into a more mobile chamber. The chamber sealed, hissed, and detached from the synthesizer.
I picked up the can-sized cylinder, trying not to touch the two glowing Gems on each end. With great care I plugged the container into a massive radiator, and the machine began to hum and glow, working cool the cylinder. Inside, suspended in vacuum with two gravity fields, the anti-iron vapor was radiating away at the cooling container around it. I let it sit like that for a time while I attached mobile cryo-units on the sides of the container - cooling the antimatter gas with simple black-body radiation would take far longer than I was comfortable with waiting.
Jim, Rarus, Pessi and some of the villagers gathered on the surface some distance away. They waved at me as I approached. David, however, was the first to spot the contraption in my hands.
His hands flew to his head. He grabbed it like the most fragile object in the world, slowly rocking it from side to side, eyes locked on the container. “You brought it out?”
“Of course!” I marched past the group, who collectively leaned in to look at the object of interest. That was exactly the wrong reaction, but I didn’t expect anything less from the danger-prone Hades Ringers.
“Mr. Frost,” someone asked. “What is that?”
“Bomb.”
The crowded recoiled, giving me space to climb the tank. I heard someone call into their Menu. “He’s got a bomb! Get over here, quick!”
The tank hummed, the wind rushed, and in no time I was passing the Comfort Dome on my way out towards the nearest hill. The villagers and Jims were gathering on the walls behind me.