Slumping into my chair, I slotted the chip. Data streamed across my screen. Ugh, the damned place was really restrictive. Even with my cross-discipline sorcery, beam and munitions were right out. The physics were just… soggy.

  One point one gravities, which was close enough to standard to be disorienting but just enough off to make things like gravity-related injuries and misjudged jumps a real possibility. The troops would have to go in with old-fashioned plate-and-mail armor, without powered muscle assist unless they had personal enchantments, which most of the newbies wouldn’t. They’d be slow, heavy, and reliant on us.

  The worst part, the truly terrifying part, was that I was going to have to really split my attention in a way I’d never had to before. Each and every drone, unless I wanted to bring dumb, clunky golems that would be mostly useless for the fine control needed for resource gathering, was going to require a constant, conscious sliver of my will to keep operational. Otherwise, the rift’s innate anti-tech aura would force them into shutdown, and probably start claiming them, turning my expensive tools into so much inert scrap metal.

  I sent a tight-beam trace to Dienne-Lar’s quarters. “Hey elf! You awake? Quick question…”

  His face flickered onto my screen a moment later, blurred with sleep. The viewscreen showed his face and unclad shoulders, the artful tattoos on his collarbone looking like vines in the low light. I must have woken him up.

  “Yeah, I’ve done it three times,” he mumbled, answering my unasked question with an elf’s intuition for annoyance. “It’s not a particularly strong aura, but it’s persistent. Like a nagging headache. Why? Are you coming with? Please tell me you’re bringing something more interesting than Braxis’s grumpy face.”

  I nodded, my fingers tapping a nervous rhythm on my desk. “Yeah, the XO wants me to make copper, and I have some ideas, but I might have to mix things up a little. Braxis wants me to try to fly a dropship into waypoint 1, but I don’t want to try and keep it in one piece, run a resource node, and play field medic. It’s too many plates to spin.”

  He nodded slowly, his artfully-disheveled hair flopping into his eyes. “You can play healer?” he asked, a new note of interest in his voice.

  “Yes. But if I do, I can’t stay on board the ship, run remote healing, lock down nodes, and control a full set of combat drones at the same time. My brain’s good, but it’s not that good. Not yet.”

  “You can lock down a node?” Now he was fully awake, his eyes sharp. “A remote node? Personally?”

  I nodded, wary of where this was going. “I can. I can establish a stabilized spiritual hotspot that can punch through the local interference.”

  He grinned, a flash of white teeth. “Are they personal? Or can I run my control through them too? My golems are sturdy, but their range is crap in a low-tech field. A booster node would be… fantastic.”

  I looked at him skeptically. “I can let you run control through them, piggyback on my signal, but if you try to overrun my aura, try to hijack the node or push me out, you know what will happen.”

  “Great astral sex?” he suggested, his grin turning lecherous.

  I shook my head, my expression flat. “No. The Captain gets to find a replacement for you. I am not kidding, Dienne. I will fry your neural pathways from the inside out. It’s a defense mechanism. It’s not personal.”

  He thought about it for a second, the humor fading from his face as he saw I was dead serious. “Fine. Point taken. No aura-jacking. I am lazy anyway. Tell you what. My personal control range is almost ten miles in a clean field. It’ll be less in there, but if you go with the troops, and drop a node that I can bounce off of when they hit the heavies, I will sit on both drop-ships and let you remote half my golem team until the boss. That is, assuming you can keep both drop-ships flying once we penetrate the rift? They’re not exactly smart-tech.”

  I ran the calculations in my head, the variables of thrust, gravity, atmospheric density. “Yes, if you handle anything incoming. As long as it’s not too complicated a flight pattern, just stable hovers and the occasional dodge, I should be able to remote them both. It’ll be like patting my head and rubbing my stomach, but I can do it.”

  He nodded, “It isn’t complicated. The Kalisti rift is a desert. Big, open, and boring. I will trust you to remote both droppers, and you trust me not to try and overrun your aura if I remote through your node. I can keep the ships stable, and use half my crew to protect against lesser troops and sand worms. You tag along with the team. If you drop a node, like if you hit the big fight or your team needs heavier healing, I’ll remote in… but I don’t have triage. Anything more complicated than light trauma and you are on your own. My golems know ‘smash’ and ‘carry,’ not ‘diagnose internal bleeding.’”

  I sighed. Great. Just fantastic. “Am I.. I don’t know what to do very well. Does the team have their own healer? A proper medic?”

  He nodded, yawning again. “Yeah, They have a copper and a bronze, Corporal Casparov and Sergeant Murphy. But you know that the actual fighting’s all going to be done by newbies, right? The coppers and the tin-rank scrubs.”

  “Huh?” That didn’t make sense. “Why?”

  He nodded, as if explaining something to a simple child. “This system is copper. That means that Sergeant Murphy and the new guy… Warrant Wasserman? Are only there in case shit goes so sideways it’s spinning on its roof. They are going to stay outside of the rift, on overwatch. If they have to come inside, we are done, because Wasserman could probably beat the boss singlehandedly. At that point, the rift’s power-balance freaks out, it becomes a straight-up depower event, and we have to either find a new training rift or wait a few months for it to recharge. Kalisti rift is a closed rift. Its energy is finite.”

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  “Closed rift?” I’d heard the term, but the specifics were hazy.

  He nodded, settling back against his pillow, his voice taking on a lecturing tone. “Yeah, it doesn’t have an active chaos link anymore. Sometimes rifts remain after the chaos link that formed them expires. That means they won’t overload anymore, and they are great for training because of how stable they are, but they also don’t recharge as quickly. From what I understand, before the link closed, the Kalisti raid rift overloaded twice, could recharge every day, and needed a defining clear nearly every year. It was damned close to turning Kalisti itself into a chaos moon. Nasty business.”

  I pulled up a stellar map. Kalisti was a planet-sized moon around Procil V, a swirling, violent gas giant. There was a heavily-inhabited garden world in the same system, which was why the rifts had formed in the first place… something about settled worlds, especially ones where the populace was emotionally disturbed or living in strife, seemed to attract chaos rifts like rot attracts flies.

  It had been remote enough that the local populace didn’t notice for years, a classic failure of colonial governance. Unattended rifts, like chaos beasts, could eventually turn a planet into a chaos world, a hellscape of mutated life and screaming madness, and by the time the old empire finally took notice, the desert world of Kalisti was utterly infested with chaos spawn.

  The entire world was only copper level now, which meant the true powerhouses of the galaxy barely noticed it, but when the Fleet took over from the old empire after the brutal Tech Wars, they’d crashed all the rifts except one and clear-cut the chaos spawns with overwhelming firepower.

  Unfortunately, after the desert world was stripped bare by the corporate interests and the chaos hordes ate any local life that might have remained, what was left was barely habitable. Supposedly there was a penal colony and small Fleet support settlement on the surface somewhere, but it was far away from the rift. While it was unlikely, no one wanted to risk convicts escaping into an active rift and coming out as a bronze-ranked killing machine, thinking he’s the new messiah.

  One of the greatest ironies of rifts is when they overloaded, they spilled out hordes of chaos spawn that were inimical to all life… but at the same time, they also spilled out massive resources, concentrated matter and exotic energies, enough that Fleet was considering allowing low-level rifts on lifeless worlds to intentionally overload, in hopes of the resource spawn terraforming the world as the chaos beasts were destroyed by Fleet clean-up crews.

  To me, it seemed insanely risky, playing with cosmological fire. The real threat of accidentally turning a moon into a chaos world, as well as the sheer unpredictability of it, made my skin crawl. But then, traditional terraforming methods took mountains of resources and millennia to have any real effect. Our technology just wasn’t there yet without using tons of special rewards from dangerous rifts and bulk custom-made microorganisms. We were stuck between a rock and a hard place, gambling with apocalypse for a chance at a new home.

  Then again, I’d much rather trust a genesis pylon—a legendary rift reward—than the hazards of letting unpredictable rifts overrun moons and planets close to civilized worlds. The chance of spawning a void beast or a psychic creep was just too high a risk. An out-of-control overlord could exterminate a low-ranked population in weeks.

  I finally let Dienne go back to bed, his screen blinking out and leaving me in the quiet hum of my quarters. The silence felt heavy.

  I went back to working on the landing ship schematics, my mind a whirlwind of calculations and contingencies. I had to configure my loadout to be light enough to not compromise the ship’s performance as a troop transport, but heavy enough with drone parts and support gear to help Dienne set up a serious, lasting beachhead.

  Supposedly a third shuttle would be used as a bulk transport for whatever we harvested, but I hadn’t worked on a raid before… would there be enough local resources to set up on-the-fly drone construction, or would I be limited to what I brought in?

  Just to be safe, I loaded on two heavy-G combat utility drones, their frames stripped down for multipurpose use, and several cases of pre-fab drone control modules… they were small, and lightweight, and if I didn’t need to track down the rare materials to construct them from scratch, I might be able to put out a decent amount of drones from local materials in a hurry.

  I also included a very carefully marked, heavily-shielded box of fine, iridescent dust… my swarm fleet. My secret weapon.

  I probably wouldn’t use the swarm except in a construction or fine-manipulation capacity, because ‘rogue nanos’ were one of those collective nightmares the human race clung to, just like rogue AI. It was practically impossible—a nano-swarm or expert system could do horrible things, but in the end, they were just tools, controlled by real people with agendas… but the Technomancers had simply added to the nightmares intentionally when they made their bid for power, weaponizing that primal fear.

  That was one of the core reasons I was so terrified of people finding out about my forces affinity. It was the affinity of pure, directed energy, the cornerstone of technomancy.

  When a cyborg was created, like the Fleet’s Marines, they lost all natural affinities except for the barest traces, and usually gained just enough necrotic affinity to keep their augmented bodies alive, sort of a grim parody of life.

  But with forces affinity, a powerful technomancer could overload their necrotic affinity, burning it out and replacing it, turning them into a true techno-undead, a perfect fusion of machine and dark energy. Or worse, reactivate a full, twisted tech affinity.

  Imagine if you will, a creature that has lost all connection with life and humanity, and is capable of creating hordes of techno-zombies, fleets of necrotically-controlled microswarms that could tear apart a city in moments, all directed by a fully sapient and possibly genius-level intellect, and a hunger to consume all life nearly as strong as a chaos spawn. That’s what the Technomancers did at the height of their power, and it was every bit the horror it sounds like.

  And that was why people with my particular set of gifts—forces, spirit—tended to get ‘disappeared’ as quickly as possible by Fleet Intelligence. I was a walking, talking recipe for apocalypse if my moral compass ever cracked.

  That was also why I hadn’t rid Kushiel of his necrotic contamination, not fully. My forces affinity could certainly do it with a convert energy ritual, but necrotic energy was… sticky. Viscous. It tended to contaminate everything it touched, like spiritual tar.

  I simply wasn’t powerful enough yet to convert it without having my own core gifts infected by its nihilistic essence, and I couldn’t touch it directly at my current level without it killing me and forcing me to rise as a necrotic abomination with all my affinities, including forces, horrifically intact. I’d become the very thing everyone feared.

  Which was why I was more than willing to accompany the raiders into the copper hell of Kalisti. I needed power. I needed at least a silver-ranked core before I would be strong enough, stable enough, to save Kushiel without sacrificing myself and turning into something worse than a Chaos beast. If that meant I had to raid a dead world and risk dying for real, so be it. It was a burden I chose willingly.