RVR4|Chapter 5: Unique (Patreon)

"How long do we have?" Petra asked.

"He is in the front hall," Jeremy said. "The Duke is walking him through the receiving rooms. That will take some time, because the Duke intends it to."

Nobody moved. The elevator doors had closed behind them and the Guild Hall's cool stone air was doing nothing at all for the dust. It was on her face, in the collar of her armor, drying in the creases of her gloves. The mag-lev board hovered at her waist with the BFD-3600 strapped across it and a crate of spare parts wedged behind the drill. Every one of them looked exactly like what it was.

"Some time," Marcus repeated, standing from his position at the table. "That's not a number."

"Twenty minutes. Possibly thirty." Jeremy took his hand off the table. The leather of his glove had gone shiny where he'd pressed it. "It will be less if he stops being polite."

Asha snorted. "So, twenty."

"Then you will change on the way up." Jeremy said it without emphasis, which was the reason nobody argued with it. "All of you. Armor into the lockers, nothing on you that came off that floor. Miss Rivera, your overalls are in the third locker where you left them."

Tess looked down at herself. Plasteel chest and shoulders, dust in every seam, a chisel still hanging off her belt.

"Right," she said. "Yeah."

"When he speaks to you." Jeremy's voice didn't change register, but the room turned toward it anyway. "Answer what he asks. Do not answer what he does not ask. Never lie about anything that is already written down somewhere, because he will have read it before he came into the room and he will already know the answer." He looked at each of them in turn, the way a man counts chairs. "And when you have finished speaking, he will leave a silence. It is not an accident. Do not fill it."

Mikhail's mouth moved a fraction. "That's an interrogation technique."

"Yes. It is."

Tess waited for him to say anything else. He didn't. He straightened a cuff that didn't need it. The garbled block from a minute ago sat behind her eyes where she'd filed it, wrong fields, wrong order, black slabs where a level and class should have been.

Nobody had time to ask.

The lift was the size of a small room because it was one, shelved on three walls and stacked with maintenance stock that she'd put there herself. Seven people, a robot dog, and a mag-lev board fit into it with room left over. The floor started upwards without complaint.

Petra had her forearm plate off before the lift had even stopped moving.

It became, immediately, a bad situation. There was nowhere to go and everyone was undoing buckles at once. Mikhail turned to face the shelving with the resigned dignity of a man who had done this in worse places. Yuki got out of her rig in about nine seconds and spent the rest of the ride watching everyone else struggle. Tess got her chest plate into the third locker, found her overalls folded where she'd left them, and pulled them on over the underlayer with her elbow in somebody's ribs.

Marcus and Jeremy just stood with their backs turned.

"Bee." Petra got her second vambrace off and dropped it. "Entry logs. Tell me we're clean."

"There is nothing to clean." Bee came through the lift speaker, unhurried. "The Guild elevator does not touch the Network. No one has entered a record of you anywhere today, because there is no system on this planet besides me that watched you do it."

"So he can't see this afternoon at all," Petra said.

"He cannot see any afternoon. All he has is that you entered Floor 1 multiple times with Yuki and Mikhail not long ago." A pause. "The difficulty is that you all look like you just finished a dungeon run."

Asha had her armor stowed and was pulling a sleeve straight, in her own clothes now, entirely unbothered.

"Asha." Jeremy didn't turn around. "You have been contracted as a trainer and field medic for Lady Petra's team. Officially, as of eleven days ago. Lady Sara had it put forth about an hour ago, when the System Manager arrived at the gate." He adjusted the other cuff. "That is about as much cover story as we have."

Asha considered this for a moment.

"Works for me," she said.

"That's it?" Yuki said. "That's the whole plan?"

"That is a document." Jeremy watched the floor numbers that weren't there. "The rest of it you will have to say out loud, and I would rather it were not rehearsed. He can hear rehearsed."

Tess buckled the last strap on her overalls and rubbed her forearms down with a rag. It moved the dust around. She caught herself in the dark of the shelving glass, gray band across her hairline where the mask had sat, and decided to leave it. She'd looked worse walking into Tak's for noodles.

They finally finished their changing efforts and stepped out of the storage room into the workshop.

Warm air, low ceiling, old ferrocrete and machine oil. Petra put her blades in the long case under the north bench and left the case unlocked, because a locked case was a decision and an unlocked one was just furniture. Yuki kept her rifle on her back and smiled when Jeremy shot her a look. Mikhail set his father's vibroblade beside the case, unclipped the MK-IX emitter off his harness, and stood holding it.

Jeremy didn't follow them in. He stopped at the garden door with one hand on the frame.

"I will be attending the Duke. He will bring the System Manager down here before long, because it is the last thing on the property worth showing and he is proud of it." He straightened his cuff a final time. "Be ordinary when we arrive."

The door closed behind him.

Tess parked the board along the back wall under the window, where it looked less like contraband and more like a side-project.

Cici trotted a circuit of the room and sat down in the middle of the floor.

"I have decided to be extremely normal," she announced.

"You're the furthest thing from normal," Tess said.

"I am a dog. Companion frames are normal. This is a well-established fact."

Mikhail was still holding the emitter. He'd been holding it for a while.

Tess put her hand out.

He gave it to her without saying anything, which was the entire conversation. She carried it to the bench under the good light and got the first honest breath of the last ten minutes.

The housing had taken four direct hits and looked it. Scoring across the top plate, one mounting lug bent maybe two degrees out of true, and a discolored halo around the forward vent where something inside had run far hotter than it was supposed to. She turned it over. [EVALUATE] had been standing at her shoulder the whole way up and she finally stopped holding it back.

·········································PERSONAL SHIELD MK-IXDesignation: Personal Defense · Energy DispersionLoot Seed: 0xB2A7Status: DegradedHardware: Emitter Assembly DamagedPower: 4 / 14 AWLast Error: Emitter Coil DesynchronizationUser Tech Skill: 12·········································Shield Envelope ............... Online [Tech 4]Energy Dispersion ........... Online [Tech 6]Kinetic Absorption .......... Online [Tech 7]Threat Prioritization ....... Available [Tech 10]Adaptive Frequency .......... Available [Tech 12]Overcharge Protocol ......... Locked [Tech 15]·········································

She read it twice.

Two modules had moved to Available with her new class, and she had completely forgotten.

"Huh," she said.

"Bad?" Mikhail asked.

"No." She pulled her tool roll out and unrolled it on the bench. "Sit down, this'll take a bit."

She got the top plate off in ninety seconds. Underneath, the emitter assembly was four crystal coils seated around a central resonance element, and the whole point of it was that all four ran on the same beat. The third coil had lost its seat. Not far, a millimeter maybe. The housing had taken a plasma hit right over it and the mount had bent, and a coil that was a millimeter off wasn't a coil anymore. It was a coil arguing with three other coils.

"There you are," she said.

Petra drifted over. "That fast?"

"You should know me by now." Tess got the loupe down and went in with a pick. The mount had cracked at the base of the bend, a hairline running maybe four millimeters. "The mount's cracked, so even if I set it back it'll walk again the first time he takes a real hit. Need to pull the coil, replace the mount, reseat it, then retune the whole array or it'll fight itself."

"Do we have a mount?"

"We have a crate of parts on the board over there that I packed for a maintenance tunnel, so probably not." Tess was already standing. "But I can make one."

Behind her Yuki said, "Nine minutes."

Tess found a length of stock in the crate, cut it, and spent four of the nine minutes at a fabricator with a file, making a bracket. It was good work. Her hands were steady in a way the rest of her wasn't. The headache had gone from a pressure to a note she could hear if she listened for it, and every time the workshop door creaked in its frame the whole room looked at it.

[Workshop Door — Operational]Hinge Pin: Wear Within Tolerance · Latch: Sticking

She was seating the new mount when Cici's head came up.

"Footsteps," Cici said. "Three. One is the Duke. One is Jeremy. One I do not know."

"Positions," Petra said, and then, immediately, "dammit, we don't have positions!"

Marcus picked up a socket set, walked to the end of Tess's bench, and started laying tools out in the order she'd want them. Yuki leaned against the rack with her hands in her pockets. Her eyes went to the door, then the window, then the side door into the garden, and came back, and she let her shoulders down. Asha sat down on a stool and looked at her nails.

The door pushed open the rest of the way.

"...and this is the workshop, which is the oldest building on the property and the only one that's never needed a thing done to it," Amos was saying. "Which tells you what they built and what we build."

He came in first and smiled when he saw everyone.

The large man stopped in the doorway.

He was tall and still, in a gray uniform with no decoration on it whatsoever. His skin was a white-gray, and several cybernetic implants sat at his temple and cheekbone. He had his hands clasped behind his back as he examined the room the way Tess looked at a junction box. Left to right, top to bottom, and then again.

"Ah," Amos said, "there she is. Told you she comes back through here." He didn't miss half a step. "System Manager, Tess Rivera. Tess, this is System Manager Vex. He's auditing the planet and he's decided the best way to do that is to walk around it."

"Duke Tertian."

"I'm not wrong."

"You are not wrong." Vex crossed the workshop. He didn't come at her directly, he came at the bench, and he stopped at a distance that was exactly correct and slightly too close. "Miss Rivera."

"Just Tess."

"Tess Rivera." He looked down at the bench, at the opened housing, at the four coils and the loupe and the little pile of swarf from the file. "I have interrupted you."

"You have." She set the driver down. "It can wait."

"It cannot." He nodded at the assembly. "The mount is at temperature. If you leave it, it will set and you will do the work twice."

Tess looked at him.

"...Yeah," she said. "It will."

"Then continue. I would prefer to speak with someone who is doing something. It produces better answers." He clasped his hands behind his back again. "There has been an injury."

He said it to the room. Petra's forearm was bare now and the burn ran up it in a sealed red line, and Asha hadn't been fast enough to get a sleeve over it.

"Training," Asha said.

Vex turned.

"I run their sessions." Asha didn't get off the stool. "Twice a week, longer if they're sloppy. Today they were sloppy. Live emitters, full contact, because half-speed teaches you half-speed and then something real hits you and you're dead." She tipped her chin at Mikhail. "His shield ate four in a row before it quit, which is three more than it should have and one more than I told him to take. She burned her arm going in under it." A shrug. "So he's over there with a broken emitter, she's over here with a new scar, and I'm going to hear about both for a week."

"And Miss Rivera repairs the equipment."

"Girl repairs everything," Asha said. "It's a whole thing."

Tess kept her eyes on the bracket and didn't say one word, and understood, in the part of her that was counting seconds, that Asha had just done in nine sentences what the rest of them couldn't have done in an hour.

BEE: I have updated her file to reflect eleven days of exemplary service.

Vex looked at Yuki. She'd been watching him since he came through the door, the same attention she gave an uncleared corridor, and she didn't stop when he caught her at it.

"I'm not staff," Yuki said. "I've run with those two for a while. If they get better, I get to keep them."

"I see."

Something moved at the very edge of Tess's awareness. A faint prickle, like the air before a static discharge. It settled on Yuki first, then Petra, then Mikhail, and Tess understood exactly what she was feeling and kept her thumb on the coil.

Vex's attention moved past them and stopped on Marcus.

"Marcus Rivera," Marcus said.

"Yes." Vex was quiet for perhaps a second and a half. "Level Eleven Engineer. Medical leave from your previous job, eleven years." He tilted his head. "You have not filed a discharge from that leave."

Marcus turned a socket over in his hand.

"Haven't gotten around to it."

"I see." Vex looked at him a moment longer. "It is a long way from Meridian to a repair shop in Sector Seven."

"It's a long way from anywhere to Sector Seven," Marcus said, easy as anything, and set the socket down in the row.

That was all of it. Tess watched her father's hand rest flat on the bench top for a second before it moved. She'd been standing four feet away for it.

"You have worked in the dungeon," Vex said to Tess.

"I have." She got the new bracket in and started walking the coil back into its seat. "Repaired the Aether Distribution Node, then the Floor Control Node before Senna banned me from runs. Had to find other work."

"You repair dungeon infrastructure," he said.

"I can."

Then the prickle came back and settled on her, heavier than it had been on the others, or she was just closer to it. It went through her like a hand passing over the back of her neck.

She kept her thumb on the coil. She didn't look up. She counted the seat down by feel, quarter turn, quarter turn, until it sat.

When she did look up, Vex was watching the coil.

Something had happened to his face—the corner turned up just a millimeter, the way a needle moves when you tap the glass—and then he was already asking about something else.

"That is an industrial drill."

Everyone in the room didn't look at the mag-lev board.

"It is." Tess reached for the retaining ring. "BFD-3600. It's Asha's."

"Grandmother's," Asha said.

"Three generations," Tess said. "Focusing array was shot, power cell housing was cracked, half the connectors were the wrong spec." She set the ring and torqued it down. "It's most of the way there."

"Twenty-four aetherwatts is outside the legal spec."

"Not for crystal." Asha shrugged. "Mining dungeons take more power."

"Indeed."

He didn't ask a second question about it. Tess got her breath back somewhere in the space where the second question should have been. Then Cici got up, crossed the workshop with her whole body wagging, and sat down on Vex's foot.

The room stopped.

"That was involuntary," Cici said, without moving. "I want to be clear that I did not decide to do this. My companion programming has extremely strong opinions about people who are tense."

"I am not tense," Vex said.

"I have nine sensor reports that say otherwise. You are the tensest thing in this room and I included the vise."

"Cici," Tess said.

"I am helping!"

Amos made a sound that he converted into a cough. Vex looked down at the small mechanical dog sitting squarely on his boot. Tess, watching him for anything at all, saw him decide she wasn't worth a second thought.

"It is a therapy-class companion unit," he said.

"Found it a few years ago, took a long time to get it working again," Tess agreed.

"See? I am helping by being the subject of conversation!" Cici said.

And it was somewhere in there, while he was looking down at the dog, that Tess made the mistake she'd been not making for four minutes, and let [EVALUATE] go where it wanted.

·········································SUBJECT: VEX — SYSTEM MANAGERAffiliation: NetworkRegistered Class: ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■Registered Level: ■■·········································Registered Skills ......... ■■■■■■■■Class Verification ........ ■■■■■■■■Biometrics ................ ■■■■■■■■·········································SECONDARY ARCHITECTURE — PL-1Host Interface .............. Nominal■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ ■■■■■■■■■■ ■■■■■■■■·········································

It looked an awful lot like what she had seen with Jeremy not fifteen minutes ago. It couldn't be a coincidence.

BEE: I see it too. Secondary Architecture is not something I am familiar with.

Tess turned the retaining ring the last eighth of a turn and filed it, the way she filed the hairline in the mug and the drift in the Hall clock and the servo on her bedroom door, in the place where things went when she had no idea what they were.

"Can you repair it?" Vex asked.

"What?" She looked up. "The shield. Yeah. Yeah, it's basically done."

She reached in with [INTERFACE], and the workshop went transparent.

·········································INTERFACE — ActiveConnected: MK-IX Personal Shield (0xB2A7)AP: 15/15Tech Level: 12Access: Root·········································

The array came up around her hands as structure. Four coils, one of them brand new to the geometry and pulling half a degree off the others, and the resonance element in the middle trying to average four different arguments. She spent an AP and walked the third coil onto the beat, and felt more than heard the whole assembly drop into phase, the way a badly loaded machine goes quiet when the load finds its center.

Then she looked at the two lines at the bottom that weren't locked anymore.

She could leave them. That was a real option and she considered it for about as long as it took to consider it. But Mikhail had walked into four plasma bolts today with an emitter that whined. He'd stepped in front of Petra twice, and he'd do it again tomorrow.

She spent two more AP.

"Mikhail." Her voice came out normal, which surprised her. "You've got Threat Prioritization now. It'll pick the highest-yield incoming and weight the envelope toward it instead of spreading flat, so you can stop stepping into things sideways, it'll do that part for you. And Adaptive Frequency's live, so if something's cycling on you it'll retune between hits. Give it about a second and a half."

Mikhail came off the wall.

"Seriously? That's a huge upgrade."

Tess shrugged. "So was my class evolution."

She handed it across the bench. Mikhail clipped it onto his harness and thumbed it, and the field came up around him in a clean unbroken skin with no whine in it anywhere, held for two seconds, and dropped.

"Thank you," he said.

Vex had not moved but he mouthed something before speaking.

"Hmm," Vex said. "Well done."

He took something from his uniform, a flat gray tab about the size of a thumbnail, and set it on the bench beside her loupe with two fingers.

"That is a secure communication chip that goes directly to me. I would appreciate it if we spoke again." He straightened. "Duke Tertian, thank you. Your property is in better repair than many of the recent worlds I've visited."

"That's the nicest thing anyone's said about it in forty years," Amos said.

"It was an observation." Vex looked at Tess one more time, and there was nothing in it she could hold onto. "Miss Rivera. I look forward to speaking again."

Tess didn't know what to say but Cici got off his foot.

Then Amos was walking him out, talking about the lintel over the garden door, and Jeremy went after them. The door swung shut behind the three of them, and the workshop was quiet.

Yuki let out a long breath through her nose. "That went... fine?"

"Yeah..." Petra said, and didn't sound like she believed it.

Asha got off her stool, crossed to the window, and watched the path until she couldn't anymore. Marcus put the socket set back in its box, one socket at a time. Tess sat down on the bench she'd been standing at for twenty minutes. Her hands had a small tremor in them that hadn't been there while they were working.

The gray tab sat next to her, but she didn't touch it.

"He asked about the drill and let it go," she said.

"He asked about a lot of things and let them go," Marcus said.

"Asha, that was..." Yuki shook her head. "Where did that story come from?"

"Nowhere." Asha was still at the window. "Made it up. Only true part was the shield."

"It was all true," Mikhail said. "Except we train in the dungeon."

Asha thought about that.

"Huh," she said. "Guess it was."

"We didn't level," Petra said. "That's what today was for." Her voice was perfectly steady, which was how Tess knew. "We were supposed to hit ten before he got here, take back the node." She looked up. "And now he's here. So when exactly are we going back down there?"

The shield worked. The relay was at eighty-one percent. Tess had a gray communications chip on her bench and a list of questions in her head that kept getting longer.

"Soon," Tess said. "We'll figure it out."

Marcus was at the window. He hadn't moved since the path emptied.

"He's going to come back," he said.

The path down from the workshop ran between two hedges that had been cut by someone who understood hedges.

Vex walked it slowly. Behind him the windows of the workshop were still lit, and he did not turn around to look at them, because a man who turns around has told the room something.

PL-1: Well, she was lovely.

"She was not what I expected."

PL-1: That's not what you're supposed to say. You're supposed to say something clipped and then I make a joke about it.

Vex pulled the reading he had taken off the bench and held it in his vision while he walked.

·········································SUBJECT: RIVERA, TESSRegistered Class: Technician (stale)Observed Class: MECHANICIAN·········································Class Matrix Query ........ NULLRegistry Precedent ........ NONEObserved Level ............ 10Observed Tech Application . 12·········································

PL-1: Okay. I've been sitting on this for eleven minutes and I'd like a medal.

"Just say it."

PL-1: I've never heard of Mechanician. A primary class stat shouldn't scale past a level, either. That's the whole architecture. Level gates the stat, the stat gates the application, and you don't get to apply twelve when you're standing at level ten. It doesn't happen. It can't happen, unless the class is...

Vex waited.

PL-1: ...unless it isn't a standard grade. Not even rare would do it. Which would legitimately make it a Unique.

"As I theorized."

There were two hundred and ten registered Unique classes across Network space. Vex had encountered two in the last decade, and both had been aboard capital vessels, surrounded by people whose entire function was to keep them alive and productive. Neither of them had been nineteen years old. Neither of them had been standing in a shed on a dying world with a file under her fingernails, mending a shield for a man who called her by her first name.

PL-1: So what do we do?

"We observe and report. Validate the Unique class and let the Administration know. She'll be working for the Network within the week and I will likely be promoted somewhere far more preferable."

PL-1: Just like that?

"She has committed no offense. Her unique class could be an incredible addition to the Network's efforts." Vex reached the end of the hedges and stopped. "She can repair legacy equipment and dungeon infrastructure which is an asset. Assets are not seized, they are negotiated with or acquired."

PL-1: Aw c'mon. You liked her.

"My feelings about the girl are inconsequential."

PL-1: That's going to be a problem.

"It is going to be extremely useful," Vex said, and walked back toward the house.