Chapter Two Hundred and Fifty: Chemistry, Metallurgy, Mechanics (Patreon)

It was four in the afternoon when the blender exploded.

Sighing, I grabbed the fire extinguisher and sprayed the remainder of the apparatus. The fires sputtered to a stop.

The sound of pounding feet alerted me to visitors - in this case, Will Clegg. The former Royal Army engineer stared at the blackened walls of the lab. “What happened here?”

“I was trying something new,” I grumbled. “A chemical synthesis process….”

“For octanitrocubane?”

“Actually, it’s for picrocrocin.”

“Is that an explosive?”

“It’s part of the composition of saffron.”

“Is saffron poisonous to the Xeranai or something?”

“I haven’t a clue, I just wanted a decent tasting ice cream….”

Clegg stared at me as I’d grown a second head. “Why are you making ice cream in your multi-million dollar lab? Did Ben & Jerry’s run out?”

“I’m trying to create a new component for our battlesuits. A food synthesizer for long-range missions.”

Clegg’s eyes swept over the room. White fluid had sprayed over the walls, giving them a distinctively unsanitary look. “Okay, I’ll bite. Why do we need a food synthesizer on our battlesuits?”

“Because an army marches on its stomach?”

The engineer rolled his eyes. “Fine, be that way. I’ll tell the boys at the bomb squad to stand down.”

—------------------------------------------

Exploding blenders were, unfortunately, only a small part of my failed experiments in food chemistry.

There were dozens of technical challenges to overcome. In nature, even simple sugars required chlorophyll to form - which meant plants - and sunlight. Replicating the process in a suit - or on a starship - would be massively limited.

Amazingly enough, despite over three centuries of advancements in modern chemistry, human science had not yet replicated the efficiency of a leaf.

A complex framework of copper nanoparticles and boron-doped industrial diamond cathodes helped me get part of the way, using electricity to synthesize aldehydes - simple organic molecules that could be converted into more complex sugars, and hopefully amino acids.

Getting the amino acids to form was difficult enough that the first one I made pushed Chemist up by an entire level.

YOU HAVE SYNTHESIZED ALANINE, THE BUILDING BLOCK OF LIFE.

CHEMIST SKILL UPGRADED TO LEVEL 15.

The other amino acids were bad enough; I dreaded the results once I got to actual proteins and tried to fold them.

On a positive note, though, our other projects kept making progress.

I’d managed to harvest what remained of the Tauralloy from the wreckage of the Wolf Class Armour. The skin of the Greater Carnotaur had taken a beating - large chunks of it had simply been ground to paste.

Better dead Carnotaur skin than mine, but still. The material was - for all practical purposes - irreplaceable.

With what was left, I couldn’t make a new Wolf Class Mech. The best I could do was one level less advanced - a mech that called for Level 4 in Powered Armour Forging.

SHADOWCAT ARMOUR

THE LIGHTEST AND STEALTHIEST VERSION OF COMBAT ARMOUR UTILIZING MATERIALS BEYOND FULLERSTEEL, SHADOWCAT ARMOUR IS DESIGNED FOR SPEED, STEALTH, AND STRIKING FROM THE SHADOWS.

ARMOUT POINTS: 100,000

DAMAGE NEGATION: 500

LENGTH / HEIGHT: 20 FEET

EMPTY WEIGHT: 1,000 KG

MISSILE HARDPOINTS: 4.

INBUILT SUBSYSTEMS:

STEALTH FIELD GENERATOR: ALLOWS THE SHADOWCAT TO HIDE FROM ENEMY SENSORS. COST: 15 CP/SECOND.

AURA BROADCASTER: USES ULTRASONIC WAVES TO CREATE AN AURA OF CALM OR PANIC. CALMING AURA: 200 PP, PANIC BEAM: 1250 CP.

OVERHEAD LAUNCHER: ALLOWS THE SHADOWCAT TO FIRE A BARRAGE OF ROCKETS AT AN ENEMY POSITION.

The Shadowcat was a design I’d figured out before the Wolf. More efficient CP usage in stealth, and the same aura broadcaster and overhead launcher that made the Wolf a force multiplier.

The main reason I hadn’t picked it earlier?

It couldn’t fly.

The Armour Boots - which on the Wolf had space for a thruster subassembly - weren’t large enough on the Shadowcat to accommodate an antigravity thruster.

Which meant that during the next battle, I’d be land-bound. Or at least, as land-bound as Levitate and portals forced me to be.

Other than that, the Shadowcat was less armoured than the Wolf - a hundred thousand armour points against the quarter-million its predecessor had.

All compromises, due to the lack of enough Tauralloy for a Wolf-class battlesuit.

Resource constraints everywhere. Not enough fullersteel, not enough Tauralloy, not enough MP, not enough fabricators.

All I could hope for was that we had enough time.