Traitor GIT: A LitRPG Adventure (Traclaon Armageddon Book 2), page 55
That meant everything he needed to complete the quest was already on board. Excluding Fiona, of course, and the fact he was in control was a relief.
While possessing this skill was a godsend, it still concerned Eric that he had gotten it without noticing. Particularly the fact that Meditative Perfect Recall had also failed to pick up on when it was acquired.
Casually, he went over in his mind every time that Guidance had stirred, but between now and when he reached soul capability level seven on HC#002. It had been happening a lot. In fact, Guidance often stirred without actually doing anything and not like when it had assessed Toro or avoided Traitor GIT and his Scouting Touch, those movements had a reason. However, there had been shifts without a notable action to go with them. Eric remembered when he had been reducing his body mass and frantically fixing his soul, there had been two times he had felt it activate, but because it had done nothing, he had driven the occurrence out of his mind.
How many? he wondered.
His internal processor dinged.
Unexpected movements were registered thirty-seven times.
Once more, Eric smiled because that upgrade to Meditative Perfect Recall was going to be useful. Now, whenever he wanted a small piece of information, he didn’t need to dive into the boon to get it.
Once more, someone’s soul crossed his space. This time, it was Diane, which meant that they would jump within two minutes. With a sigh, he put away his tools and climbed up on his bed and relaxed while he waited. There was no technical reason to do so, but he preferred to be in a comfortable position whenever a jump occurred.
The time clicked down, and then reality distorted.
CHAPTER 67
Immediately after the jump, Eric went to the airlock and was surprised when Omeka met him.
She glared at him. “What are you doing here?”
“I was going.”
“Nope. Diane might be happy to babysit you, but I’m not.”
“What’s happening?”
She looked at him. “We’re speeding up and Diane is taking every second jump, so I’m doing meet and greet until she recovers from jump sickness. She might babysit you later, but I’m not willing to do the same.”
With that, she exited the airlock. Eric sat down to wait, and soon enough, Diane came along.
The next seven stops occurred like clockwork one after another.
It was about time.
Diane’s soul passed over Eric, and he tried not to react as he lay on the bed. This was it. They were jumping to Station Gamma in the Kepler Belt that had been given the ridiculous name because, at the time, someone had thought they would use the Greek alphabet to name the stations. The trend hadn’t lasted since there were only twenty-four letters and hundreds of significant stations in the belt.
Gamma wasn’t necessarily important, but it was by far the largest of the string of places that were visiting on their supply run. Most of the crystals and rare metals they had taken on board each of the previous crappy mining stations were to be unloaded.
Reality distorted.
Eric lacked access to sufficient sensors to track the accuracy of the jump, but considering that Diane had made it, the odds were that it would be closer to a forty-minute drift than a twenty.
Like he often did, Eric left his apartment, checked the apparent gravity, and then oriented to the front of the ship and a porthole that would let him observe where they were going. Then he looked out, searching for the asteroid they were targeting. Their destination was large, having a diameter of almost ten kilometers. The sun, fortunately, was behind them, so unless they were a long way away, he should be able to see it.
There was nothing there.
Then his processor pinged, and when he went into soul space, it showed him where to look. He could see the asteroid they were targeting. It was a speck of light no bigger than the stars outside.
Apparent size of the asteroid shows jump was missed by two thousand kilometers.
Velocity miss of fifty kilometers per second.
At existing gravity, it is expected to take fifty minutes to arrive.
Eric winced at those numbers. He couldn’t help himself. It was a bad jump given that no gravity wells were involved, starting velocities had been similar, and relatively speaking, it had been a short jump.
Quietly, he settled down to watch.
Forty minutes later, the station was close enough to see in more detail. It was a standard small scale spinning design. A single long axis linking to evenly balanced stations on either side with a very slow spin, which gave the perception of gravity for those on the station without noticeable distortion as you moved through the structure.
Eric studied it. Multiple large ships were docked and numerous smaller ones. Each of the habitat spaces were a few kilometers long and five or six stories high with a width approaching four hundred meters. He wasn’t sure how many people the station held, but with normal population densities, it was most likely in the tens to hundreds of thousands. Just in terms of ship traffic, there were over eighty vessels already berthed, and in his view, other ships drifted in.
This was a station that legitimate traders or captains didn’t visit.
Once they got close enough, he left the porthole and went to the main airlock to wait for Diane. Fifty minutes gave her about an even chance of leaving the station when they docked, though it was possible he would be forced to linger here for up to half an hour. How quickly she recovered seemed to vary more than most.
As he waited, he reminded himself of what he had to do. Buy his chocolate and drone, and then come straight back to the ship. Relax and joke with Diane; it was important to let nothing slip through.
Prior to the update of his quest, he had been uncertain of the validity of this plan. Now he knew he had no choice.
He also wouldn’t push on the drone design. He would get one that was as cheap as the previous ones. While having twenty to thirty drones following him to fix up things looked ridiculous and each drone was incredibly limited collectively, they made things a lot easier.
All the crew, including Diane, laughed at him when they saw the stupid things faithfully tottering after him like a clutch of ducklings. However, they no longer complained. Even Shrumpet seemed to appreciate having everything working in the common area and that her personal air conditioning in her cabin had been fixed.
The ship shivered as they connected to the station, and there was a surprisingly large jerk that made him also lose his balance.
“What the…?” He cursed before he could help it.
There was soft laughter behind him. “The station wanted some extra angular momentum. Giving it to them lowers our berth cost slightly.”
“Diane, you’re here early.”
“I recovered from the jump sickness fast and I figured you would want your chocolates.”
Eric pouted. “Can only purchase two boxes. I’ll still make sure you get half,” he finished hurriedly, in a nervous tone.
Diane patted him on his head, and his handheld dinged. “I have transferred five credits.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“Kid, just buying my own.”
“You know you’ve already given me more credits than what you’ve eaten.”
“Don’t accuse me of giving you charity,” she growled. “I don’t do that shit.” They exited as usual into non-pressurized space, but Eric was used to it. Diane escorted him to a small waiting room in the docs. “Kid, you know I don’t like it, but I have to tell you. You’ve got a terminal. Don’t move from here.”
Eric nodded and went over to send instructions. Within ten minutes, the boxes were delivered. Each one was about the size of his hand, and he quietly he moved the poisoned one to the top and the second at the bottom of the stack.
Guidance requires this, he reminded himself.
Plus, based on her record, she was a horrible person. Only not to those around her.
Omeka abruptly appeared. She looked at him, annoyed. “Don’t know why Diane keeps going out on a limb for you. Back.”
He had his stuff, so he said nothing and followed while his mind whirled. The public interactions that the videos were capturing differed significantly from his first timeline. It was like the actual Toro had been accepted into the team, but he was kept on the outer. What did Toro do initially to create trust? Internally, he screamed. From what he remembered, there hadn’t been an opportunity for him to do anything before his restrictions had been put in place.
They were passing a scanner terminal and Omeka snatched all the boxes out of his hand and put them through the machine.
“Hey, delicate.”
Omeka’s look was almost a snarl, and then she turned back to study the readout. “Fine.”
She grabbed the five boxes and tossed them at him. He tried to catch them, but he couldn’t get their hands up in time. They bounced and his grasping hands only hit on a corner of a box, and then air. Then they all crashed into the ground. Omeka laughed while Eric scrambled to collect them.
The carefully placed ordering of the chocolate boxes was gone and…
He shut his eyes to strobing lights, and then his feet landed on the hard concrete.
“Did you?”
“Yes, sir.”
A projection of Eric in the corridor appeared along with the scattered boxes. He was holding boxes four and three in the wrong order and the two he hadn’t collected now had labels on them.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course, sir.”
Time rewound in the hologram, and it played forward. From above, he saw the boxes being thrown to him. Each of them labelled, and then how they spread out. Slowed down like this where the boxes landed was pretty clear, but in actual speed, it was a chaotic event, and he would have accidentally switched three and four around.
“It’s certain, sir.”
“How much is simulated?”
The hologram started up and only disappeared for a few moments during which the order of the boxes could not have been changed around. But Eric knew for a fact he hadn’t seen this much of it.
“Soul Scouting, sir.”
“What?”
“I told the processor we needed visual, and it used your Soul Scouting link to give it to me.”
“Good thinking.”
“Thank you, sir.” There was amusement in the man’s voice.
He returned to the real world and grabbed the boxes of chocolate. The order was reversed, but like before, the poisoned boxes were on the top and bottom. The dark chocolate salty caramel, Diane’s favorite, was spiked in both boxes.
Omeka was smirking at him when he stood. “Hurry up.”
Eric said nothing and did as directed.
Once within the ship, he dropped Diane’s chocolates off at her room and sat morosely on his bed. As always, he started building his new drone. Mentally, he stopped himself from looking up at the fiber optic cable that GIT had installed on his second day. The wire was encased in soul-tainted material with a simple lens that grabbed the light and sent it to GIT’s room with an analog signal. Once there, it was displayed. It was almost impossible to intercept the video signal. Of course, an electronic film over the top of the camera could negate it. If the lens captured the wrong image, then the un-hackable setup would not matter. Eric, of course, had done nothing. It was an annoyance, not a threat, and there was always the risk that one of GIT’s robots could check on the camera while he was out. That was the threat, not GIT watching him while he slept.
How a man such as GIT had put together the robots and security he possessed remained a mystery. It was one Eric knew he was unlikely to ever solve. Paranoia and a little technology knowledge had let him build a solid framework, and then GIT had gotten lucky, as the physical chip being used wasn’t one that Eric’s current augments could hack by bypassing the software.
The image of him sitting on his bed played in GIT’s room, and because of everything else he had seen, Eric had been very cautious about his hacking threads, so while he didn’t know it for a fact, he was sure those images that were being displayed were being recorded by a more sophisticated AI that would run behavioral routines over him. Any change in what he did would be noted, which was why Eric carefully built routines that would be useful in the future.
While he made the drone, he watched Diane’s movement through the station. She was still within his range. She seemed to haggle for supplies with an outer merchant who was clearly uncomfortable in the higher apparent gravity of the station. The transaction completed, they shook hands, and Diane exited.
On the corner of his screen, three streaks of gray entered. Diane threw up a hand to block the first, and her hand almost disintegrated as the object, which was clearly a fast-moving drone, collided with it. Then translucent full-body Armor rippled over her. The one on her hand was rebuffed and the other four bounced away. Then her soul Blade crackled into existence. She moved like fighters in the movies did when you sped up the speed to five times and there was cracking of electricity as the attacking drones were turned to scrap.
Then she ducked back into the shop she had just left. Her Armor gone, her hand spouting blood. The whole fight had taken less than two seconds and med bots were already reacting. The outer shop owner hit a security button, and the door slammed shut, sealing Diane safely within his shop.
The wound was clearly not fatal. Eric’s internal frown deepened. She had survived. He wondered if Zhong had contingencies in place or if that attack had been the extent of his strike. He wouldn’t blame Zhong if that was the case. Diane’s reaction had been eye-opening fast.
He kept building the drone in front of him while monitoring Diane. She stayed in the shop until Shrumpet and Tobias reached her, and then the three of them rushed back and got safely on board the White Sparrow. There were no additional attempts on her life.
With the drone three-quarters finished and the time ticked over to when he usually ate, he got up to get some food. As always, he was staggering his mealtimes to let him eat an hour before everyone else to give him some privacy, and while he was sure they appreciated the fixes around the ship, they still, excluding Diane, didn’t make him feel welcome.
When he entered the common area, Eric recoiled in surprise. Diane was on the couch with one hand a bloody mess with Ithiel busily treating her.
“What happened?”
Diane looked wanly at him. “Nothing, kid.”
Ithiel tsked, his face annoyed. “Some of Diane’s more colorful history caught up with her.”
“You were shot.”
“Baa,” Ithiel said dismissively. “You need to better understand what’s out there. This,” he waved at the mangled hand, “was a drone attack.”
“I don’t think whoever did this was smart enough that they could smuggle guns onto Gamma,” Diane said weakly.
“More fool them. It’s easy,” Ithiel said. “However, these amateurs clearly couldn’t.”
“They don’t look very amateur to me.”
“That’s because you don’t know what you’re talking about, Toro,” Ithiel snapped. “Hell, I’ve seen you tinkering with your drones. Do you really reckon if you got a mining drone to someone’s shoulder that they’d survive?”
“What would happen would depend on the defenses. Can’t soul?” Eric waved his hand in the air.
“Good answer,” Diane said with a smile. “This almost got me, but I got my Soul Armor out in time, and then my Blade, and that was the end.”
Ithiel grunted. “You’re just lucky she was incompetent. If a drone had landed properly or if all five had hit simultaneously instead of being staggered. If you were that slow to get your Armor up.” He shook his head and ran a finger across her throat.
“Guess I was lucky.” Diane winced as the medical bot started tugging and realigned her hand.
“Are we in danger?” Eric asked distractedly as he tapped his food order into the dispenser.
Privately, he regretted not ordering a proper meal on the station, but the Toro identity had only spent on drones and chocolate and was a tight arse for any other type of cost. Even though the ripples had caused significant divergence from his timeline, Eric was still trying to be true to Toro’s ideals.
“Nope, Tobs and Shrump are roasting the bitch good,” Ithiel said in satisfaction.
“Bitch.”
“Yeah, kid.” Ithiel’s face was a picture of concentration as he worked through hand replacement options, clearly balancing functionality against cost.
“Ex-lover, ex-business partner,” Diane said. “The psycho came after me for the second.”
Ithiel snorted. “How much did you rip her off?”
“I did no such thing. It was her poor decision that made the company fail. It was only right that I took,” Diane laughed, “its remaining assets.”
Ithiel chuckled harshly with her. “These things are costly.”
Diane focused on what he was doing. “Go chrome. It’s not pretty, but it’ll get the job done.”
“Yeah,” Ithiel agreed. “Captain’s going to be furious.”
Eric cleared his throat. “Can I get you anything?” Eric held out the sludge that had come out of the machine toward them.
Diane wrinkled her nose. “Thanks for the offer, but while we’re attached to the station, I’ll order something appetizing in.”
“Is your hand?”
“It’ll be fine, kid.” Diane smiled. “It didn’t hurt much, and the replacement is going to be better.”
“I’m getting it as a rental.”
She wrinkled her nose, then shrugged. “The replacement will apparently be a clone. So identical to the one I lost.”
Eric sat down and started eating while pondering what had happened. It wasn’t like Zhong to make mistakes. It sounded like he had been working through an intermediary who had underestimated Diane’s ability.
He washed his plate, and then returned to his room and went to work on the drone.
