David was watching me, his gaze a physical weight as I ran a diagnostic wand over the shoulder actuator of Dirk’s suit. My thoughts were a turbulent storm, but my hands were steady. A useful skill.

  “So you want the Captain to find another rift?” he asked, his voice pulling me back to the present.

  I nodded, not looking up from the readout. “Yep. Preferably, Copper tier, planetary, a party rift instead of a full-scale raid. If she’s willing, I have enough materials squirreled away to probably fabricate one more suit before I have to start begging, borrowing, or stealing from Braxis’s emergency stash. Murphy, Steel, and Lindsay are the obvious team—their suits are dialed in. I want to go for obvious reasons. But most team rifts are calibrated for five. I don’t know who the fifth should be.”

  “What about your suit?” he asked, his tone deceptively casual.

  I finally looked up, blinking. “Huh?”

  “Your own suit,” he repeated, gesturing at the armor stands. “If you can only make one more, that means you need to make one for yourself. That’s a team of four, max.”

  I shook my head, a wry smile touching my lips. “I don’t get one. I’ll be running in an enhanced survival suit or a reinforced shipsuit. Not full armor.”

  His eyebrows drew together, a faint line of confusion and concern etching his brow. “Why the hell not? You need protection as much as anyone on the front line!”

  I sighed, setting the wand down. He wasn’t getting it. “It’s not about bare protection, David. The armor’s benefits are wasted on me. I’m not a melee fighter; I don’t need the enhanced servos or the reinforced myomer bundles. I don’t need the expanded energy cells; my own core is sufficient. Most importantly, I don’t need the weight. Yeah, I’ve got heavy-worlder strength, but next to a dedicated Copper-tier bruiser like Dirk or Lindsay? I might as well be made of tissue paper and wishful thinking.”

  I offered him a small, genuine smile. “My job isn’t to be the spearpoint. It’s to be the anchor. I’ll be planted right in the middle, where it’s nominally nice and safe, tossing out emergency triage, running field repairs, and manipulating the hell out of the battlefield with force shields and swarms. The meat shields—” I nodded at the suit labeled ‘JORDAN,’ “—will be doing what they do best. Murphy will be running sensor sweeps and resource identification. I’ll be playing support and helping dig out whatever shiny loot we find.”

  “And you’re okay with that?” he pressed, searching my face for some sign of reluctance.

  “More than okay,” I assured him, and I meant it. “I’m not an adrenaline junkie, sir. If I could gain essence by staying right here in the bay, running my swarm through sims and drinking tea, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I’m not lazy. I’ll work until my fingers bleed. But the whole ‘testing myself against the crucible of destruction’ thing that guys like you—no offense, Warrant Officer—seem to live for? It does nothing for me. It’s a means to an end.”

  I shrugged, the motion a little too casual. “I fight because I have to. Not because I want to, or because I crave power or fame. If it were up to me…” I trailed off, then decided to hell with it. Let him squirm. “…I’d be happily bonded right now, practicing the far more enjoyable and productive art of inventing children. But there are things both you and I have to do first.”

  What. He actually blushed. A faint, dusky pink crept up from his neck to his cheeks, visible even under the harsh workshop lights. I filed that away with the intensity of a master archivist.

  Hard man. Brutal Paladin. Veteran of a hundred battlefields. And actual, old-fashioned innuendo makes him blush. It was a vulnerability, a chink in that formidable armor. A valuable tool to be used sparingly and with great precision.

  “Do first,” he said, clearing his throat, the blush receding as his military discipline reasserted itself, “before… ahem… practicing inventing babies?”

  Uh oh. He was embarrassed, but he could still talk his way through it. That was dangerous. That meant he was thinking about it, too. Time to shift tactics before the heat in my own cheeks became a visible tell. “Yes. Umm… but anyway,” I said, turning back to the suit with forced nonchalance, “I need to make a suit for someone who can use it more effectively than I can. But I don’t know enough about rift party dynamics to coordinate it, or even if I should. It’s not my call.”

  He nodded slowly, accepting the retreat from dangerous ground. “Tell you what. Get with Taera and see if she can convince the Captain. As far as I can tell, Fleet isn’t calling on us for anything pressing right now. I’ll try to encourage it from my angle, because I agree that field testing is a priority. But it might be difficult.”

  “Difficult? Why?” I asked, frowning. “We’re a privateer vessel. Don’t we go where the profit is?”

  He sighed, and it was the weary sound of a man who had butted heads with an immutable force of nature. “Because in the end, the Fleet, the Church, and even this glorified pirate are all run by the same unforgiving master.”

  I tilted my head. “And what master is that?”

  “Money, Gabrielle. Cold, hard script. Even the Church isn’t entirely invulnerable to its influence. The Crow is a voracious beast. Her drive core eats credits for breakfast. Her ammunition bins require a constant stream of cash for replenishment. Solo or party rifts are not… reliably profitable enough to justify a special trip, especially not for a planetary-based Copper-tier rift. While the ship is patrolling, she’s gaining a stipend from the Fleet just for staying in-zone and on call. The Kalisti raid helped a lot, but from what Taera has told me, the ship is still feeling the pinch from her recent refit. Credits are tight.”

  I felt my shoulders slump. Of course. It always came down to money. “So what do we do?”

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  He shrugged, leaning against a workbench. “We’re going to be passing near the Adjunta and Telurdt system. But I doubt very much the Captain would authorize an expedition to their local rifts. Things are peaceful on the surface, but the historic friction between them and the UPF makes it a political minefield.”

  “Historic friction?” I prompted. My knowledge of galactic politics was mostly gleaned from the kind of news feeds that talked about sports scores and celebrity divorces between reports of planetary glassings.

  He nodded. “Adjunta and Telurdt are twin worlds orbiting Barnard’s Star. They’ve got a mess of rifts at various scales that they have to manage, but most of the activity is anchored around their mutual Lagrange point. That’s where the Hammad Boneyard is.”

  He looked thoughtful, like a professor gearing up for a lecture. “Quick history lesson. The Assad Emirate has a long, bloody history of… let’s call it ‘aggressive disagreement’ with the old Empire and now the Unified Planets. It never quite escalated into total war, mostly because the Technomancers were busy turning the Empire into their own personal playground."

  "The Emirate became a haven for those who didn’t fancy being turned into bio-batteries or spare parts. The downside is that the same independent streak also attracts a lot of genuinely nasty types. Pirates, raiders, war cults. Bribery and corruption are the standard operating procedure. The UPF is technically allied with them, but it’s a tense, distrustful alliance.”

  I knew the broad strokes. The Emirate was the nebulous, dangerous region where my ultimate targets—the slavers who’d destroyed my world—likely operated with impunity. These groups weren’t exactly focused on civic duties like rift management. In fact, they were known to lure monster hordes and instigate rift overloads to use as weapons against their enemies or to soften up targets for conquest.

  “The Hammad Boneyard,” David continued, “sitting in the gravity well between those two paranoid worlds, is a nightmare of ancient wreckage and modern scrap. A perfect breeding ground for all kinds of rifts, up to and including derelict ship-hulks. Clearing them and shutting them down is a constant, thankless task. The local mercenary groups would rather extort helpless colonies than waste time and ammo on a rift that might not pay out. It’s stupid and short-sighted, but it’s the reality.”

  “You said it’s been making noise?” I asked, my technical curiosity piqued. The boneyard sounded like my kind of place, minus the rifts, of course, all that scrap waiting to be repurposed...

  “Oracle reports from Centennial,” he confirmed. “Indicate a higher-than-usual concentration of Chaos energy boiling out of the region. That usually means a bunch of small rifts popping off at once, or one big one getting ready to blow. No Chaos beasts have spilled out yet—that would trigger a full Fleet response—but part of our mission profile is to assess and recon danger zones like that. If there are individual, stable rifts, we don’t know what they are yet.”

  “Which means if we find them,” I concluded, the pieces clicking into place, “we have to send in initial scout teams blind. Into a potentially unstable or overloading rift.”

  I nodded, a spark of excitement cutting through my frustration. “That sounds like the perfect, high-stakes environment to test the suits. Real-world conditions, unknown variables. We have already done soft tests and simulations to death, and they are performing well… even better than the metrics from the old empire’s battlesuits.” I was excessively proud of having created something NEW, and the Mark V’s had even higher performance metrics than the old empire’s assault gear.

  He sighed, and the sound was heavy with finality. He shook his head. “Taera and I had a LONG talk.” My spirits, which had just begun to lift, plummeted like a stone. I could see the ‘but’ coming from a kilometer away. “Right now, you are a tremendous, irreplaceable asset. Testing your new tools is a priority. Improving your tier is critical. But untried rifts, ones that could be Bronze-rank or higher and on the verge of overloading? It’s too dangerous. The risk-to-reward ratio is unacceptable until we get you higher than tin.”

  The words hit me like a physical blow. “So you want to send a team into those deathtraps using my suits, the ones I built and understand inside and out… and you want to leave me out of it?” I heard my voice tighten, threatening to crack.

  It wasn’t about a craving for advancement or adventure, far from it. This was about responsibility. My creations. My friends. If something went wrong in there—a systems flaw, an enchantment cascade failure—I needed to be on hand to fix it. I took that duty deathly seriously.

  He held up a placating hand, trying to be the reasonable officer. “Once we have the spawn timers charted and a solid idea of the rift’s internal environment and threat level, I absolutely want you to go in. But for the initial penetration, the first blind recon… It’s just too volatile. Rift exploration is a different kind of danger."

  "There’s no intel. It could be a trapped rift that seals until completion. It could be an overloading rift that’s masquerading as a lower tier. Or the Hammad Boneyard itself could be crawling with Emirate privateers or mercenary bands looking to ambush first-wave explorers and steal their first clear bonuses.”

  “We won’t even be taking the Crow into the boneyard proper. Not at first. We’ll be launching the full wave of assault pods to hit multiple potential sites and classify the rifts. But you need to stay here, near the Crow, and protect the ship with your drone pods. We’ll be counting on you for overwatch and point defense.”

  “We?” I asked, the word dripping with a frost I didn’t know I could conjure. The anger was coiling in my gut, cold and sharp. ‘You need to stay and protect the car, honey. It’s the most important job!’ It was patronizing. It was dismissive. It treated me like a child who needed to be kept safe on the sidelines.

  He nodded, utterly missing the ice in my tone. “Yeah, we. I can still fight, and I need to help coordinate the platoon deployments from the command pod. Even I won’t be going into any of the rifts on the first wave unless it’s a traditional, low-team entrance. I’m more valuable as a quick-reaction force to counter any raiders or infested spawn that decide our pods look like easy prey.”

  I looked him directly in the eye, all pretense of warmth gone from my face. My voice was flat, perfectly professional, and colder than the void between stars. “Very well, sir. I appreciate your forthrightness and acknowledge your orders. Please send whichever trooper you intend to fit for the fourth suit to my workshop at your earliest convenience. I should have it completed and calibrated within forty-eight hours. For right now, I have a great deal of work to do. With all due respect, please exit my deck so I can begin safely.”

  He actually winced, finally hearing the dismissal for what it was. But right now, I didn’t care about his discomfort. I just wanted him gone. I was not going to let him see the hot, frustrated tears pricking at the corners of my eyes. I turned my back on him, picking up a plasma torch with a hand that shook only slightly, and pointedly focused on a seam weld that didn’t need any attention.

  I heard his boots shift on the deck plating, a moment of hesitation, and then the soft hiss of the door sliding open and shut.

  The moment he was gone, I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. The torch clattered onto the bench. The cold anger remained, but under it was a deeper, more familiar ache. The ache of being told to stay in my lane, to be a good little asset, and let the adults handle the dangerous work.

  Fine, I thought, my jaw tightening as I grabbed a schematic slate with more force than necessary. You want a fourth suit? I’ll build you the best damned coffin this galaxy has ever seen. And I’ll make sure everyone knows who built it for them.