RVR4|Chapter 11: Tonight (Patreon)

"Oooh, we have a fabricator."

Tess had come into storage room three for the hand press, with the top half of Petra's slab under one arm. She'd been planning to make Yuki's rounds by hand.

The fabricator stood against the far wall, right where she'd parked it the day she found the lift. She'd barely touched it since.

"You walk past it every time you take the lift," Bee said from the workshop speaker.

"I've been busy."

She put her hand flat on the housing, and [EVALUATE] laid it out for her.

·········································INDUSTRIAL FABRICATORDesignation: Materials Processing · Precision FormingLoot Seed: 0xF3C6Status: StandbyHardware: OperationalLast Error: Intake Crystal MisalignmentUser Tech Skill: 12·········································Material Intake .............. Misaligned [Tech 4]Material Reclamation ......... Online [Tech 7]Precision Forming ............ Online [Tech 9]Tooling Fabrication .......... Available [Tech 11]Micro-Assembly ............... Locked [Tech 16]Structural Printing .......... Locked [Tech 21]·········································

"Look at you," Tess told it. "Network stuff barely gets two lines. You get a whole window."

Fixing the intake was easy. She popped the access plate, found the crystal sitting a few degrees crooked in its cradle, and eased it back in place with the flat of a plasteel driver. The row flipped to Online.

The slab was harder. It was far too big for the port, and one side was a smooth mirror she didn't want to touch with a laser, so she melted pieces off it with her plasma torch. Reclamation pressed each piece into a thin, bright rod. Forming chopped the rod into perfect bullet cores, pressed a jacket around each one, and seated it in a casing. A finished plasteel-tipped round dropped into the tray with a heavy thunk.

"Okay," Tess said. "Why haven't I been using this?"

"I've been busy," said her own voice from the speaker. Bee had recorded her.

"There's a lot happening lately, Bee." Tess looked flatly at the one camera in the room. "You could have reminded me."

Looking back at the fabricator, she raised an eyebrow at one of the skills in [EVALUATE].

Tooling Fabrication.

"Oh," she said.

"What is it?"

"It can make tools." She grabbed her toolbelt. "It could make these. Bee, I could make my own."

"It might be prudent to save your AP," Bee said. "We do not get another night before Vex arrives."

She had thirteen AP, and was pretty sure they all had a job to do tonight in the dungeon. "Yeah, you're right. Remind me when we're back."

"Of course. This time I will remind you," Bee said. "Probably."

After that it was just work. Melt a piece off, feed it in, move the round to the tray. Only the melting was slow and fiddly, and she liked it more than anything she'd done all day.

"Where's Yuki?" she asked.

"She left right after Sara did and would not tell me where," Bee said. "She is very difficult to track."

"Sure am!" Yuki came in sideways.

She had to. There were pistols on both hips, a shoulder rig with two more under her right arm, something short and boxy strapped to each thigh, and another pistol at the small of her back that Tess only noticed because it clanked against the doorframe. Even her arm brace had a holster strapped to it.

"Sorry I'm late," Yuki said. "I had to go get my stuff."

Tess put the torch down. "That's... a lot of guns, Yuki."

"Asha said to stick with pistols, and my new skill reloads them right in the holster." Yuki grinned. "So I brought them all."

"What are the square ones?"

"Heh. Machine pistols. Yuri lent me those. The rest are mine." She patted a hip, and it clanked.

"Eleven guns?" Bee asked.

"Twelve. You missed the one in my boot."

"That one is a knife."

Yuki pulled the knife out of her boot and thumbed a button. The blade fell away, leaving a gun barrel in its place. "It's also a pistol! Had this one since I was a kid."

She picked up one of the finished rounds and turned it so the plasteel tip caught the light. "Oh. Yeah, these will do."

"Armor-piercing." Tess nudged the tray toward her. "There's enough for a few magazines. Not all of them."

"This is plenty." Yuki pulled three empty magazines out of a pouch and loaded them right-handed, each one pinned against the tray with her hip, thumbing the rounds in one at a time with her tongue between her teeth.

By the time she was done, there were six rounds left that she popped into a massive revolver that was holstered behind her back.

"That's a big pistol," Tess said.

Yuki grinned at her. "Asha didn't say anything about the size of the pistols I could use."

By the time the lift let them out on Floor 2, the card game had been going for hours.

Marcus sat at the end of a folding table with the deck, Mikhail across from him behind a small pile of chips, and Asha with her boots up on a crate and a bottle in her hand. Petra was standing.

Cici sat on her charging pad by the capacitors, holding a hand of cards.

She was holding them in an arm. It came up out of the plates along her back, thin and jointed, with three fingers that fanned the cards out exactly like Marcus's.

"Cici," Tess said. "What is that?"

"My claw arm!" A jingle played. "I built it this afternoon. I needed a... hand."

Tess rolled her eyes at the robot.

"She's been winning," Mikhail said.

Yuki clanked into a chair. Everybody at the table looked at her.

"Did you rob Yuri?" Petra asked.

"Sure did. Raided his armory."

Asha looked at the shoulder rig, then the thighs, then back at Yuki's face. "I said pistols."

"Uh huh, these are pistols."

"Then what's behind your back?"

Yuki cleared her throat. "Handcannon."

Asha snorted at her and pushed two bottles across the table. "Don't come crying to me when you break your other shoulder."

Tess sat down and took a bottle. It was the same cheap beer Kade used to bring to game night. She took a sip and made a face before she could stop herself.

"Dad, this is awful."

"Yep. It was on sale," Marcus said, and dealt her in.

"It's good." Asha took a long pull.

"Of course you like it," Yuki said.

"Veldi beer is swill. This is a treat."

Tess picked up her cards.

AP REGENERATION: 14/15

"Told you AP regens faster on this floor." Petra did another lap around the table and stopped behind Tess this time. "I've been down here for hours. I'm full. I feel amazing. I want to hit something."

"Sit down," Asha said.

"That is the twenty-second time you've told Petra to sit down," Bee said.

Petra sat. She lasted about one hand.

Marcus dealt without looking at the deck. Mikhail laid down two Knights and a pair of low stats and lost to Yuki's Rangers. Cici laid down three Operators in a matching suit, and a pleased jingle went off.

Mikhail pushed his last chip across the table to her.

"You're losing to a companion robot," Petra said.

"I'm letting her win. For her morale."

"You are not!" Cici said.

Two hands later she won again. Then again. On the fourth, she showed her cards before Marcus had even finished dealing, and Tess watched her father's eyes go from the cards to the dog and stay there.

"Cici is counting cards," Bee said.

Cici's claw arm froze. "I am not." Her tail thumped against the charging pad. "I am simply maintaining a rolling statistical average on the effect of removal of certain cards."

"More commonly referred to as counting cards," Bee said, with a slight tone of amusement.

"Oh," Cici said.

Yuki laughed so hard she had to put her cards down and hold her braced arm.

"Now that everyone is here," Bee continued, "I would like to show you something. Tess, I am putting it up for you."

The map slid into Tess's vision, laid over the table.

It was Floor 2's eastern side. Tess recognized the start of it, the Section Four junctions and the maintenance approach where they'd fought the eight drones. Past them, corridors ran east in clean solid lines, junction after junction, into the part of the floor that had been blind for as long as Bee had been awake. It ended in a chamber with something tall standing in the middle.

"Bee," Tess said. "How did you get this?"

"I recreated it from available data," Bee said. "I went back through everything I have. Structural surveys from before the shutdown. Twenty years of weapon scoring telemetry in the tunnels. The patrol paths. And two point seven seconds of camera and sensor details."

It was a nearly complete map of the area around the TK-11, along with the maintenance corridors and dungeon infrastructure, though many hardpoints for fire suppression or sensors were question marks.

Near the end, the solid lines broke into dashes.

"What are the dotted bits?" Tess asked.

"Those are the parts I had limited data for," Bee said.

"Nobody else can see this, Tess," Yuki said. "Just so you know."

"Right. Sorry." Tess set her empty bottle in the middle of the table. "Okay. That's him. That's the TK-11, standing on the Node." She took a handful of cards and started fanning them in a ring around the bottle. "And these are the cradles. They go all the way around."

"That's a lot of cards," Petra said.

"Each one seems to hold up to eight drones."

"That's a lot of drones," Yuki said.

Asha leaned forward and set Mikhail's bottle and Petra's in front of the ring. "The Princess and Mikhail up front." Then she put her own bottle behind them, and Yuki's, and dropped a card beside them for Cici. "Me, Yuki, and Cici back with Tess. Like I said."

"Five meters," Mikhail said. He tapped the table between the front bottles and the back ones. "Stay inside that and I can reach you."

"And the drones?" Petra asked. "There's going to be a lot of them."

"There were a lot of them when Tess was drilling. Now we're level ten," Mikhail said.

"And those cradles are still dungeon hardware," Tess said, tapping one of the fanned cards. "If I can get my hands on one, I'm pretty sure I can open it up for Bee."

"If you open a path through the local override, I should be able to assume control of several units," Bee said. "At minimum, they will stop shooting at you and shoot at something more productive."

"See?" Yuki said. "Practically a fair fight."

Marcus laughed and dealt another hand. "I've heard worse plans. This one time I had to fix a bridge mechanism hanging upside down while Tess's mom held me by the ankles."

Bee brought the staging lights up slowly when it was time.

Tess sat up on her bedroll.

AP REGENERATION: 15/15

Across the room, Cici stepped off the charging pad. The claw arm folded down into her back plates with a neat little click, and a jingle played.

"Fully charged!" she said.

Mikhail unhooked the charging pad from the capacitor, packed both, and swung the pack onto his own back before anyone could argue. Tess pulled her gloves on. Petra was already at the door to the floor, bouncing on her toes.

"Move left as soon as you are out of the staging area," Bee said in their earpieces. "The patrols along the central junctions are moving north. I am keeping them there."

They fell into Asha's order, Mikhail and Petra on point, Cici at Tess's heel.

Past a branch, the crystal veins in the walls ran in bundles instead of single threads, and the air got heavy enough to press on her chest. [EVALUATE] showed the pressure leaning east, harder at every junction.

"Oh," Petra said from up front. She rolled her shoulders. "Oh, I can feel that."

"How much?" Asha asked.

"More than the staging area. A lot more."

"This is the edge of what I can see," Bee said.

They kept walking.

"I cannot see you all," Bee said. "Only what Tess sees through [EVALUATE], and I find myself feeling anxiety."

"We're right here, Bee," Tess said.

The map in Tess's vision stayed solid behind them. Ahead of them it had gone to dashes again, all the way to the chamber.

"Look left, please," Bee said.

Tess turned her head. The corridor on the left drew itself in solid as she looked down it, down to where it bent out of sight.

"Thank you. And right."

That one filled in too when she looked, and a stretch of the dashed route Bee had drawn snapped sideways by a few meters.

"So far the map is accurate," Bee said.

"Okay." Tess looked ahead and waited for the map to catch up. "Straight on. Then left at the... big crystal thing."

"Very precise," Yuki said.

"What do you think that looks like?" Tess said as they approached a large piece of broken crystal.

"A big crystal thing," Yuki confirmed. "Fair enough."

Past the big crystal thing, Tess saw them first. Movement in a side passage, low and fast. [EVALUATE] tagged the lead machine before she'd even faced it.

[Floor 2 Combat Drone — HOSTILE]Camera Coordination: SynchronizedPlasma Turret: Cycling

"Four," she said. "Left branch, coming our way."

"Conventional drones," Bee said. "Wild ones. They will not report to TK-11."

"Then let's limit test," Petra said.

Mikhail stepped into the mouth of the branch, his shield sparking to life around him. The first drone's bolt burst across the envelope in a flash of white. Petra went past him on the left. One blade took the lead drone under the turret. She was already turning into the second before it finished coming apart.

Yuki drew with her right hand and emptied a pistol into the third. She holstered it, drew another, and emptied that one too. When she drew the first again, it was full.

"Oh, I love this," she said.

The fourth drone climbed for an angle on the back line. Asha didn't even take her other hand off Tess's shoulder. Her pistol came up in one smooth motion, two shots cracked out, and the drone dropped straight into Mikhail's lane. Petra came off the wall and split its camera in half.

Cici was pressed against the back of Tess's legs. "I stayed back," she said. "I was very good about it."

"You were," Tess said.

Petra shook out her wrist, grinning ear to ear. "Did you see that? I can run on walls!"

"We saw," Asha said, holstering her gun without looking. "Don't forget that those were the wild ones. Let's move."

They were three junctions on when Tess caught something peeking around a corner behind them.

A little round lens, about knee-high, sticking out two inches past the crystal. The second she looked at it, it zipped back out of sight.

Two corridors later it did it again, ducking behind a rib at the far end of the hall like a bad pickpocket. This time [EVALUATE] caught the tag.

"That one isn't wild," Bee said. "It is carrying the same override we decrypted."

"The Alpha," Tess said.

"It's been following us since the patrol," Yuki said. "Just poking its stupid little head out every time we turn."

"It is very rude," Cici said. "I do not like how it just stares at us. Menacingly."

Petra shifted her weight. "I can catch it."

"And run straight into an ambush," Asha said. "Caution, yeah? This thing is smart."

Down at the end of the corridor, the little camera lens inched out from behind the crystal rib again.

Yuki stopped walking. "Okay, it's really starting to piss me off."

Her right hand went behind her back and came out with the revolver. It was the size of Tess's forearm, matte silver and so heavy Yuki had to lock her wrist to bring it level, and [EVALUATE] lit up like she'd just looked at the estate defense array.

·········································ATLAS DEFENSE "DIPLOMAT" .50Designation: Heavy Ballistic Sidearm · Anti-MaterielLoot Seed: 0x9C44Status: ActiveHardware: PristinePower: Self-Sustaining (Kinetic Recovery)User Tech Skill: 12·········································Recoil Dampening ............. Active [Tech 6]Kinetic Amplification ........ Active [Tech 8]Armor Breach ................. Active [Tech 10]Overcharge Chamber ........... Available [Tech 12]■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■·········································CUSTOM AMMUNITION LOADED

Pristine. Yuri hadn't just lent her machine pistols; he'd given her something brand new out of a box.

The gunshot was loud enough to startle even Asha.

Down the hall, the entire corner blew apart in a shower of teal sparks and spinning crystal. Half a burning lens skittered across the floor and dissolved into nothing.

Everyone stared at the literal hole in the dungeon the gun had just blasted and the destruction on the other side.

"Whoa," Petra said.

"Huh." Yuki blew a curl of smoke off the barrel, grinning like a maniac, and slid the handcannon back behind her hip. "Guess that's what anti-materiel means."

"Yuki," Tess said, rubbing at her eyes. "Where did you get that?"

"Told you. Raided Yuri's armory." She tapped the grip. "Been wanting to shoot this one for a long time."

"And why is it called the Diplomat?" Tess asked.

"Because it's Yuri's personal gun. I told him about my new class and he just handed it to me. I guess using it with your rounds makes it do... a little bit more damage than I had expected."

"That's more than a little," Mikhail said, kicking what was left of the wall.

The corridor opened up two turns later.

Aether hung in the chamber thick enough to see, lit teal from underneath. Around the walls and floor ran the ring of cradles, dozens of them, drone after drone locked in standby. Every single slot was full except for one empty mount near the ceiling, still blinking a slow amber wait-light for the scout that wasn't coming back.

Bee's map redrew itself over what Tess was looking at.

"The footage had most of those cradles empty," Bee said. "They are all full now."

In the middle of the ring stood the TK-11.

It was nine feet tall and plated all over, with crystal in the seams, a rotary gun on each forearm, and emitters racked down its spine. It stood over the Node, already facing the corridor.

Then its eyes flashed red and Tess felt something scan her.

The broadcast came through [EVALUATE] the way Bee's packet had—straight into the base of her skull.

·········································TK-11 SHOCK FRAME COORDINATION SYSTEMS[DRONE_OVERRIDE] ......... ActiveWARNING: DUNGEON CORE DETECTED·········································

"Tess," Petra said. "Why is it looking at you?"

"I think it's looking at Bee..."

The guns on its forearms stayed still. Its eyes stayed on her.