Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 14: The Rigged Portal (Patreon)

Rene burst into my room as if storming a fortress.

"Right!" he announced from the doorway, surveying us both with the look of a general accepting an enemy garrison's surrender. "Who here is making financial decisions under the influence of consciousness-altering substances?"

Rene stuck his hand out to Bao, who shook it without a word.

"I'm not making any decisions," I said. "I refused to do that until tomorrow."

"By tomorrow the whole hype will die down and nobody'll offer you that kind of money," Rene said.

"So do I need to make financial decisions right now, or don't I?" I asked him irritably.

"You need to shift all the responsibility off your far-too-relaxed head and onto my working one!" he said. "Get your tablet out," he ordered, already flicking his fingers through the air in his own interface.

By the time I'd found my tablet, a message had already dropped in with a link to a fresh thread.

Auction of Federation goods. Bids accepted until 17:00.

Under the heading was my list, along with a few question posts already, none with actual bids yet.

"What's this?" I asked.

"That's the link you're about to post under your original message in that old thread that stirred up all the noise. ‘Sale has been moved to a separate thread for convenience: [link]. All questions to the thread's author, he's handling the sale.'

"Can you type that out?" Rene asked.

"I can!" I grunted, though I wasn't entirely sure, and honestly, I couldn't be bothered.

Somehow, though, I managed.

"There, now leave me alone!" I said.

"Leave you alone now? Hand the goods over!" Rene insisted. "Or am I meant to trade thin air?"

I sighed and started laying my goods out from my spatial ring onto the table, but there wasn't enough room, so we moved to the bed.

Bao watched in silence for a while, then finally asked.

"Do you trust him?"

"He's an arse!" I replied.

"The question was whether you trust me!" Rene corrected me indignantly.

"Yeah," I waved him off.

Bao watched a little longer as my goods migrated into Rene's spatial pocket, and as he ran out of room and had to start stacking the spatial rings I'd brought back from the Federation on his fingers and stuffing them full too.

"Ten percent of the profit?" Bao asked.

"What, want to make a counter-offer and steal my bread?" Rene asked.

"I brought goods back too," Bao said.

"And…" Rene prompted him. "You need to say it out loud."

"Will you take on the sale?"

"Of course!" Rene agreed, blooming into a Cheshire-cat grin.

Bao laid his goods out on the floor, so as not to mix them up with mine.

In the end, both of us had only one large pocket, so once Rene had filled them, he had to keep them separate, my spatial rings went into the right pocket of his jumpsuit, Bao's into the left.

And the new thread from Rene blossomed with an extra message:

"Besides Sullivan's goods, another cultivator who also recently returned from the Federation will be selling their own Federation inventory. At the seller's request, the name stays anonymous. If you have similar goods to sell, message me privately and we'll set up a joint listing. My commission is 10% of net profit."

By the time I checked, the first offers to take everything wholesale had already appeared.

Rene left less than an hour later, taking most of my possessions with him, and all my excess anxiety along with it. He took Bao with him too, promising to drop him home.

Bao still had another spatial pocket full of goods waiting at his place.

I passed out almost instantly.

I woke at six, before my alarm, fresh, energised, feeling like I'd spent a week lazing in the sun, broken up only by the odd bit of light exercise to keep the body toned. Federation chemistry worked flawlessly: first it relaxed you down to the state of a happy pig, then by morning it turned you back into a functioning human being.

You could get hooked on something like that. If not for the price and the availability.

I tidied up the room, cleared away the remains of last night's little party, got myself in order, and by eight I was already standing at the Portal Division. Fully prepared for the fact that today someone would try to dump something unpleasant on me.

I wasn't disappointed.

Shako said little, mostly barking commands with gestures. Walk over there, go on ahead… Even at the work site itself, a standard portal, the same kind I'd arrived through into Black Lotus, he simply pointed at it with a finger.

"Work out what's wrong with it."

"Reason it was taken out of service?"

"Technical fault," he said.

How informative.

"What kind of fault, exactly?" I tried to clarify.

"You're here precisely to work that out!" Shako snapped, and walked out of the room, leaving me alone with the portal.

Before I started digging into the hardware, I pulled up the activation logs.

The portal wasn't holding a stable connection. That alone was something to work with, run a few standard tests and procedures, but somehow I didn't believe that the prax, after yesterday's fury, would just hand me a standard job.

I dug deeper into the logs and found sharp spikes of drain in the Space Qi accumulators during activation. Given that no connection had actually been established, that was odd. Very odd.

That qi had to be going somewhere, or at least towards something…

The diagnostic protocol, run in safe mode, turned up one burnt-out fuse. The fuse had been warped, along with the entire block around it. And yet the panel covering it was in perfect condition.

Granted, panels are built tough, but I couldn't feel any distortion in it, not the faintest shadow of Space Qi. As if it were brand new. As if someone had replaced the panel without replacing the fuse.

Why would anyone do that?

I spent until lunch running discharge models, and during my break I left the division's grounds and immediately called Zola.

"Hi," she answered, displeased. "Going to pry doctor-patient confidentiality out of me again?"

"Close," I said. "I've just been assigned to repair a portal, and something about it is clearly not as simple as it looks. Can you tell me if any portal technicians with Space Qi injuries have come into the medbay recently?"

This time Zola didn't bother playing innocent.

"Give me a few minutes to check the records."

A few minutes later, Zola reported back that they had one, who'd caught a wave of distorted space in the chest. Part of his muscle tissue had to be excised, and he was currently regenerating in a pod.

For some reason, I was sure that technician had been working on that exact portal.

Had that bastard prax decided to send me after him?

I had the information now, I could go for lunch, or go back to work and confront the prax outright…

I decided to take a different route and called Bao.

"Hey, what's your master up to right now?"

"No idea. Why do you ask?"

"Will I be interrupting anything if I call him now?"

"Are you in trouble again?"

"Not exactly, but I'm about to arrange some."

"Let me handle it," Bao said, and hung up.

I knew Johansson a little. Back in my first year, he'd helped me out a great deal. And he was one of the few people at least partly initiated into Novak's schemes.

He called me back himself a few minutes later, and I laid out the whole picture for him. We sketched out and settled on a rough plan for my next moves.

I even managed to grab a couple of sandwiches before heading back to the division.

Shako was practically waiting for me at the entrance.

"Where the hell have you been?"

"At lunch, which ends in five minutes," I replied calmly.

"What's the story with the portal?" he snapped, still just as unpleasant. "Or is Black Hole's qualification not up to a job like this?"

"The portal's fine. I ran the diagnostics, we just need to swap the block with the fuse and it'll be ready to go. You can sign off on the work in ten minutes."

"Can't wait!" the prax couldn't resist a bit of sarcasm.

I went back to the portal, swapped the block… didn't quite make it in ten minutes, and called the prax over.

"You've already tested it?" he asked, surprised.

"No need, I'm confident in the result. Come and sign off on the work."

"I said test it!" he ordered.

"I'll test it with you here. Or is there some particular reason you don't want to…"

"I don't trust cocky green rookies!" the prax snapped, then added, "Coming now!"

He walked into the workshop with that same heavy, irritated stride and immediately crossed his arms, staying near the door.

"Well? Show me your work."

"Not coming any closer?" I asked.

"I can see fine from here," he replied.

I stood directly opposite the portal, right where, presumably, the lad whose chest muscles were currently regrowing in a pod had once stood. Not that it mattered. Black Hole had taught me a couple of tricks for a rainy day. And I knew exactly what was about to happen, a discharge of Space Qi, almost like lightning, would strike towards the source of the highest qi concentration, towards my own core, since the accumulators were far too well insulated.

I pressed the activation button on the tablet and wrapped myself in a thin field of Space Qi that evened my outer signature out to match the room's background. Now, the highest concentration source in the room ought to be the prax.

The portal woke up. Darkness thickened in the ring, but before it could solidify into a full membrane, the panel I suspected had been freshly replaced buckled inward, got pulled into the ring's wall, then spat back out.

The tablet reported a sharp drop in the accumulators, and an uncontrolled whip of Space Qi tore free from the deformed block. It struck, missing me entirely, straight into the prax's chest.

His body was wrapped in a silvery dome of a defensive formation, which shattered like an eggshell, but it did its job, it protected the prax.

He flinched back in fright, jumped away, and immediately summoned his armour.

The portal shut down, and the prax pointed a finger straight at me and shouted, "You!"

"Oh dear, looks like my qualifications weren't quite up to the job after all," I said.

"You knew!"

"Knew what, exactly?" I asked.

He raised his finger and froze.

"So what exactly did I know?" I asked again.

"That this would happen! You rigged the whole thing!"

"And how could I possibly have known that, when there was nothing pointing to it?" I asked calmly, setting the tablet down and walking over to the deformed outer panel lying on the floor. I picked it up and turned it over in my hands. "I could've known there was a danger if I'd seen the aftermath of that kind of failure. But the panel was in perfect condition. Unless, of course, someone replaced it to hide the true extent of the damage," I said, looking the prax dead in the eye.

He finally got hold of himself and dismissed his armour back into his pocket.

"This job can be dangerous," he said, more calmly now. "But it's odd how the discharge went right past you and hit me instead!"

"The job's dangerous," I confirmed. "You need to be ready for anything. So I got ready. Same as you did."

The prax's teeth ground together. "Fix it," he ordered, and turned towards the door. It opened automatically, and behind it already stood a pair of armoured cultivators from the Hall of Order.

"The job's dangerous," I repeated. "Which is exactly why every incident like this needs to be thoroughly reviewed. So it doesn't happen again."

Johansson, in red-and-black armour, stepped forward.

"Second Space Qi incident on the same equipment in three days…" he shook his head. "You're going to have to work very hard to talk your way out of this one, sharp-tooth."

"I'm your best specialist!" the prax said.

"You're here to teach technicians, not maim them!" Johansson said.