Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 42: Finger Cannon (Patreon)

By the evening of the next day, I had two physical rings embodied in metal. The first activation in the lab went flawlessly. Well, both rings lay on the table in front of me, so I didn't have to strain myself controlling the unstable membranes. And they literally hovered a few millimetres above the frame projecting them.

Nobody did that with real portals, because it was dangerous. The edge of the membrane was sharper than any physical blade or micron laser. A portal is a substitution of planes of reality. The front side is still here; the back side is already there, at another place in space, and the distance between them, if not zero, approaches it infinitely. Because of that substitution of planes, that same distance existed between the actual front and back of the portal's membrane. On that basis alone, a portal could rival Blade in sharpness, which was why the frame normally shielded it. But I needed that sharpness.

I took an energy bar out of my spatial pocket, peeled off the wrapper, and pushed it into the right-hand portal. Half of it came out of the left-hand one. I took it with my left hand and drew it up to the bare edge of the membrane and past it. The bar split in two. The cut was perfect, and I felt no resistance.

Maybe Blade was as closely related to Space as Gravity was to Mace?

I tossed half of the bar into my mouth and chewed, releasing my control over the micro-portals at the same time. Both membranes flickered identically and collapsed.

The launch had been decent enough, but the project was still so raw you could wring it out. I needed to make the membranes separate from the frames and make them move through space. Just the thought of the concept, two substituted planes moving through space, through that very same space, gave me a migraine. But, like everything else connected to qi, most of the work was more intuitive than rigorously mathematical.

Which didn't relieve me of the practical problems. The projector rings still had to stay close to the body to function. So either I mounted them directly on the armour as part of the equipment, or launched them like proper combat discs, held in flight by an active technique.

The second option seemed to give more control, but controlling such hulking great things would cost me at least two streams of consciousness and a mountain of energy. And on top of that, they weren't much of a weapon as they stood.

I needed field tests, not lab ones, somewhere I could injure myself or someone else. But there was nowhere on Beta-Beta-Pi to test it. There were no ranges or training halls here at all, since that didn't fall under this base's concept of useful space. So I talked to Pascal so he wouldn't take offence, and went to Artem with it.

"Pascal's still trying to add active duration to the evacuation portals, but my work on them is finished," I said. "I've got a prototype personal weapon ready. The lab tests went perfectly. I need a range to test them in motion, and there isn't one here.

"I want to leave, back to the 'mainland,' even just for a few days. Black Lotus would do."

First, Artem squeezed every detail about this personal weapon out of me, and only after admitting the concept was unsuited for mass use did he weigh my request. That took him a few minutes and a few swipes on his tablet.

"The fleet's having trouble testing your cannon. Go take a look at what's wrong there, then you can test your discs."

The base I was dropped on was on Tarassa. A very old base with a well-known location, one old enough to rival Black Lotus. Not a codename, but a dopily pompous, military-style one — The Retribution!

That was where the pomp ended, and military utilitarianism and martial superiority began. Besides the duty technician, I was met by a third-stage cultivator, a lieutenant, who, from his very first words, was arrogant and condescending. I'd felt something similar, on a much smaller scale, on my own skin while preparing the Challenger for its first jump. But back then, almost everyone knew I was Novak's disciple. This idiot clearly had no idea who I was.

"Okay, civilian, listen up," he stated, without even giving his name. "I don't have time to babysit contractors; I've got a pile of other business, so catch this. I'll take you to the spot, and you'll do your thing there. You want to take a shit or whatever else, you call, you ask permission. When I can, I'll come. Got it?"

The nerve of it took me aback, but Johnson's memory was still fresh, so I tried to act more diplomatically.

I smiled.

"You've been assigned as my babysitter because you're the least important person with the highest rank available. So you'll stick close until I've finished my work. And if you keep mouthing off, I'll shove your tongue down your throat and pull it out through your arse. Got it?"

The lieutenant's face twisted.

"Listen here, you lab rat…"

I hit him in the solar plexus. Physically, no techniques. Then I grabbed him by the jaw and lifted it so he was looking at me.

"I took part in demon hunts, I was aboard the Challenger during its first interstellar jump, I've been on Federation bases, studied at their college. I fought praxi and took part in a raid on the kalamari planet, and after that I took part in negotiations with the Federation elite. However, you'll probably find it more interesting to learn that I've had tea with General Kaluya and Admiral Lawrence more than once.

"I'm a lot more important than you, so for as long as I'm on this base, you're my slave," I said, let go of the soldier's jaw, and patted his cheek. "Got it?"

"Yes!" the lieutenant spat angrily.

"Yes, sir!" I corrected him.

"Yes, sir!" he repeated.

"Show me the way," I ordered.

The room I was led to turned out smaller than I'd expected. In the middle stood a familiar scorched frame, and behind it a freshly patched, partially melted metal wall, but in front of it, on a small platform inscribed with formations, there was room for exactly one person.

I stopped.

"Where's the rest of the team?" I asked. "The plan was that firing a shot needed a group."

The lieutenant looked at me as if I were an idiot, but didn't say what he was really thinking. "The team's in another room. It's just the operator here. That's exactly how it works on every ship."

I probably should have familiarised myself with this system before I ever started designing the cannon. For some reason, I'd relied entirely on the memory of praxi carrying out group techniques without using formations.

I asked for an ordinary technician, one who normally maintained these formations. I got the impression that nobody here knew who I actually was, and they'd been expecting some rank-and-file scientist who had no clue about fleet business. Well, they'd guessed right about me having no clue, but they'd missed the ‘rank-and-file’ part.

Judging by their attitude, the locals had already written the project off as a dead end, which stung a little. It had been a good idea! Besides, all the main components, which I'd prudently moved further away, had survived intact. Only the interchangeable ring had burned out, along with some scorched wiring.

When the technician arrived, he explained the principle: the team in the support hall one floor down fed qi through the array of formations. Nothing complicated was required of them. Here, the operator received the whole flow and finalised the technique. All control rested with him, which is why selection for that role was ruthless. It let cultivators at different stages work together in one chain, forgiving individual slip-ups by rank-and-file users as long as the operator remained perfectly precise.

No one needed to drill a hundred people to perfect synchronisation. But each such array supported exactly one group technique. This particular one had been built for Finger of Death No. 4, array version 13.571.

"Does the Point variant have problems too?" I asked the technician, and he gave me an exact copy of the look the lieutenant had given me earlier.

"The Point variant fires five-metre torpedoes with a nuclear warhead. If something goes wrong there, a hole in the wall is the least of it!" he said, and pointed through the ring at the metal patch on the wall.

Ha… I'll admit, I wouldn't want to be standing anywhere nearby.

"Then I need the records from the test firings, with all the readouts, and after that I want to watch a new test volley. Can you get everything fixed up here without me interfering?" I asked.

Which was something of an insult, in a way, since they clearly could replace the wiring on their own.

While the technicians were busy with repairs, I reviewed the data and sent the lieutenant off to organise a new volley. Still, all I got back was an angry commander, who'd come to sort out who was giving orders where they had no business doing so.

By that point, even without a test shot, I'd already worked out what had caused the malfunction. Strange that the fleet technicians hadn't figured it out. The ring stood too close to the launch formation of the array, and at the moment of firing, the resonance of Finger Qi struck the membrane. We needed to either shield the ring or move it farther away. That's what I told the commander.

Oddly enough, the newly arrived boss didn't try to throw his weight around; instead, he asked who my master was. After he heard the name of one of the First Six… the entire base was at my service, including the commander and all the chain over him. Ten minutes later, a whole crowd of technicians came running, cut a hole in the wall, and temporarily moved the ring beyond it. Half an hour later, we were already running test firings, and they turned out far more successful, though the portal cut out half a second before the technique finished, leaving us with a fresh hole. Three holes, through three walls, to be precise, which gave me another idea.

"You're scared to fire the nuclear spikes… What if there's open space behind the ring? Then if the portal fails, the spike flies off into open space."

"That's actually how ships' torpedo bays are set up," the commander said. "But the assumption was that these systems would operate from protected positions."

"Well, I didn't know you were so married to those nuclear spikes."

It turned out that, since I was Novak's disciple, they weren't all that married. They could fire plain old ordinary oversized spikes instead, but preparing and assembling the formations into array took time. They couldn't just conjure up an equivalent system for me in an instant, three days, at the fastest.

On the first day, I finished polishing Finger of Death No. 4, version 13.571, though by now it was version 10.45. I'd calculated that a shorter firing time would put less strain on the system, and it turned out one of the older array modifications had been built for exactly that.

Two days remained. I used them to test my discs out on the icy expanses of Tarassa. The commander, who'd replaced the lieutenant as my errand boy, took a lively interest in the system and was terribly disappointed to learn it couldn't be scaled up, especially after taking part in my first combo. On the second day of training, I learned to tear the membrane away from the projector discs circling me with Double Cycle. I learned to hurl the membranes, punching through blocks of ice. I couldn't manage to send a Fist projection through the paired portal after that, since they kept moving the whole time, but the commander did manage to land a spike straight into a free membrane. The spike vanished into the black film and came out through its pair, tearing a block of ice apart from the inside. The commander loved that enormously, but I couldn't keep dragging him around with me all the time. I needed a different approach.