This easy victory was by design, of course. A Copper raid, scrubbed clean of any Bronze or higher participants by the XO’s orders to prevent ‘advancement fade’—the way higher-ranked individuals sucked up all the juicy experiential energy, leaving crumbs for the newcomers. The three most dangerous parts of the raid were, in order: the initial entry with its attack waves (which Dienne and I had cheated by landing us neatly at waypoint one), the infamous ‘bat cave’ (a natural labyrinth packed with traps, hazards, and flying nasties), and finally, the boss fight.

  My job was to trivialize the bat cave, since this version of the rift didn’t have sand worms. I planned on building a series of disposable combat and engineer drones to scout ahead, trigger traps, and soak up damage. Dienne would stay back with the landers. His job was twofold: to clear out any stragglers from the waves and, more importantly, to be a physical anchor. Rifts were greedy things; they’d absorb any unattended matter, including our ride home, if given half a chance. Having a living, breathing consciousness in close proximity kept that particular horror at bay.

  His golems, meanwhile, were already busy with the grisly work of battlefield salvage, stripping the scorpitaur carapaces and harvesting the high-tensile protein-carbon fibers from the voles’ tentacles. Once we hit the boss chamber and I dropped my portable node, he’d remote in and take control of the half of his golem force I’d be piloting through the cave. It was a good plan. Efficient.

  I’d been frustrated by the lack of mineral resources on the plain—no sand for silica, no loose stone for ceramics. But the briefing packet had promised the bat cave was a treasure trove. Everyone was holding back their big, energy-consuming abilities for the boss, which meant my drone horde would have to carry the weight. I was okay with that. Every drone that died was a trooper who didn’t.

  Once the official third wave was confirmed over, the raid reformed. There were minor injuries to see to: a few acid burns, a shallow claw wound. I directed my micro-swarm to the damaged armor, the cloud of shimmering, dust-sized particles flowing over pauldrons and greaves, knitting molecular bonds back together with a faint singing sound. A couple of the newer troopers flinched away from the cloud.

  “It’s just my power’s visual effect,” I explained, keeping my voice calm and professional. “Not creepy nanites. Promise. They won’t disassemble you. Probably.”

  The truth was, my swarm was by far my most dangerous ability. It was the heart of my Technomancer’s Touch, the key to my enchanting, and a weapon of terrifying, subtle power. So far, none of the local fauna had shown a hint of sorcerous ability or area-of-effect attacks. A little arrogance crept into my heart. With my new energy levels, my drones, and my swarm… I probably could have soloed both the bat cave and the waves.

  We started marching. I hefted my case of drone cores and the portable node, feeling the weight of my responsibility more than the physical burden. We moved into the mouth of the bat cave, a dark, jagged maw in the cliff face.

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  And my arrogance was promptly, and thoroughly, disabused.

  No. There was no way in the nine hells of a corrupted star I could have soloed this.

  The danger wasn’t in epic, set-piece battles; it was in the quiet, insidious treachery of the environment itself. It was anticlimactic yet deadly. I was placed at the center of the formation, a precious asset to be protected. The troopers moved with a practiced, weary vigilance.

  “Pressure plate,” a trooper would murmur, and the column would flow around a seemingly innocent stone tile.

  “Acid drip,” another would call out, pointing to a glistening stalactite. A golem would be sent forward to take the corrosive hit, its stone skin sizzling.

  My swarm was in constant motion, a shimmering haze ahead of and around us. It was my true eyes and ears. It felt the hair-thin tripwires I could never see, detected the faintest chemical smell of unstable compounds, and mapped the hollow, echoing emptiness under thin layers of rock. I directed it to reinforce a crumbling ledge here, to disassemble an unstable stalactite there. It was mentally exhausting, a constant, low-level drain of concentration.

  The flying enemies were the least of our problems. They were just lumpy, gas-bag floaters with stubby wings that spit globs of weak acid. The first few that dropped from the stalactites got a trooper’s crossbow bolt through their sacs for their trouble. Once we learned to spot their camouflaged hiding places, my swarm would simply flow over them. It was a little gross—stripping off their valuable, acid-resistant skin and delicate wing membranes in seconds, leaving behind a lump of muscle and gore that plummeted to the cave floor with a wet slap.

  But the packet hadn’t been kidding about the mineral deposits. We stopped every few minutes while I went to work. I’d plant a drone control module on the ground, and my swarm would flow into the walls, scooping out raw veins of iron, copper, and tin. In moments, the metal would flow and form around the core, assembling into a new, roughly humanoid drone. We left the more valuable silver and glittering gem deposits for proper mining ops later. No sense being greedy.

  Soon, our twenty-five-man raid was marching along trailed by a small army of clanking, lightweight drones and Dienne’s silent, stoic golems. It looked impressive. It felt powerful.

  But I was getting secretly, profoundly frustrated. The drones were… stupid. Slow. They had the combat instincts of a brick. They were shields, nothing more. Expendable obstacles. I can feel the metal. I can command forces. I could make them so much more. But that would mean showing my hand, revealing the Force Sage lurking behind the Support Pilot facade. So I played my part, building my army of useful idiots.

  “I don’t like that smell.” Trooper Lindsay announced. She was a full-figured woman who, based on Kushiel’s gossipy comments, was currently sharing Dirk’s bunk. My senses had been so tied up in structural analysis and mineralogy that I’d filtered out the ambient scents.

  She was right. The damp, mineral smell of the cave was now undercut by a sharp, medicinal tang. “It smells like iodine. What do you think?” she asked Trooper Caldwell.

  He sniffed the air, his helmet likely running its own analysis. “Yeah, that’s the same smell that the centipede things in the second wave had. I am thinking that’s probably what the boss is, so we need to worry about the fact that it’s probably able to climb walls and attack from any angle. Venomous claws, but no acid spit.”

  The cave tunnel finally opened up ahead, widening into a vast, lit cavern. A fissure in the high ceiling hundreds of feet above let in a shaft of hazy, alien sunlight, illuminating a chamber the size of a small starship hangar. The air was warmer here, and occasional puffs of breeze drifted down, carrying that iodine stench more strongly.

  This was it. The boss chamber.