“That what the big explosion was?” Bastard blinked as things came together.

  “Yes.” And then the white-armored figure whipped a hand up and whirled around.

  For a second, for a split-second, Bastard thought he saw something up in the plume of smoke, something like a bat or a bird. But then it was gone, only eddies in the plume showing that anything had been there.

  “Did you see that?” Yulian asked.

  “Something. Not sure what it was,” Bastard said, squinting up into the night sky. “Gone now.”

  And it went out of Bastard’s mind for most of the night.

  Only just before he nodded off to sleep did he think back to that moment with any real clarity. Only then did his exhausted brain show him the flash of firelight on metal.

  He thought about telling Yulian, decided it wasn’t worth getting up to do, and completely forgot about it by the morning.

  FOUR

  “What do we have?” Cade’s voice echoed in the distance.

  “Give me a second,” I replied as I piloted the drone through the tree stumps and sped away to the west. Only when I’d put a mile between myself and the white-armored fellow, did I turn and start a leisurely loop back to the northeast.

  Hopefully the deception wasn’t necessary, but better safe than sorry. If he had seen my direction of departure and cared to follow, then he would expect me to be based in the west. But it was no guarantee; whoever that guy was, he had advanced technology. I had no clue if he could track me without eyes. If he could, I was screwed, so there was no point in worrying about it.

  Seventeen minutes later I felt confident enough with the drone’s autopilot that I could jump back out and return to my core.

  “Sorry Charlie, didn’t mean to keep you waiting.”

  “Charlie?” Cade asked, looking confused.

  I looked around my newly-cleaned storm drain, to see Cade waiting. Hiram and Donna peered out from behind the pair. At least she wasn’t carrying a lantern anymore, the lights I’d bade my nanoswarm to construct were doing a decent job of illuminating the place.

  The airlock system I’d made to keep the light from being visible outside had cost a pretty penny of feedstock, but it was necessary. The last thing I needed was a band of raiders checking out a strange light in the hills.

  “Everythin’ all right? What do we have?” Cade repeated. “You been quiet. Hiram came and got me hours ago. We tried to check in with you, but you weren’t answering.”

  That was strange. “I heard you about nine minutes ago. You’re saying you were talking earlier?”

  “We were. Four or five different attempts.”

  “Argus, check the—” my words died on my non-existent lips. Argus was gone. He couldn’t check the logs for me. “I’m going to chalk my lack of notice down to my corruption.”

  “Corruption?” Cade frowned.

  “Long story. I’m here now, that’s what matters. No, no,” I corrected myself. “What really matters is that someone is fighting the Jaspa. And there’s a man in high-tech white armor leading them.”

  That got their attention. I pulled up the footage on the monitor and showed the highlights of four or five hours of action.

  “The smoke that attracted me was here, from this crater. Looks like an explosion, but I’m not sure what did it. There weren’t any cannon or bombs in use during the rest of the battle.”

  “I know what did it,” Hiram said. “That’s black powder smoke. Did you get a close look at the crater?”

  “Only one, back when they moved up to siege the gate.”

  Hiram rubbed his temples. “The Jaspa buried powder charges, and set tripwires combined with strikers. God forgive us, we taught them that trick.”

  “Looks like it caught a few of the attackers.” I showed a flash of the medical tent, and a shot of a guy being dragged in, footless and screaming.

  Hiram turned away, shaking his head.

  “It’s not your fault, big guy,” I tried to reassure him.

  “You do not understand. Our faith is not one of violence. They would not have these traps if they had not taken the trick from us.” His shoulders heaved, and Donna reached out to put her hand on his shoulder. He flinched, but let it lay where it was.

  “Well it could have been worse. The guy in charge was savvy enough that there weren’t too many casualties.” I flicked through shots of the attackers and the defenders. Not too many of the latter, only about fifteen Jaspa all told. “So who are the attackers? Who has a beef with the Jaspa?”

  “Wish I could tell you for certain,” Cade shook his head. “But it could be anyone local. The Jaspa are always pushing out, always grabbin’ for more. So that ain’t a good question. What is a good question, is who can afford that many shooters and that many guns? Those guys are putting a lot of lead in the air. That ain’t cheap.”

  “I might know,” Hiram said. “This fort was southwest, you said?”

  “About an hour’s flight from the farm with the herb gardens.”

  “Southeast of my home... It must be the Highbinders. They have a town there, in the middle of a vast cemetery. We shunned them for their desecration, but many go there to trade and find work. I would imagine these are mercenaries. The Highbinders are rich enough to afford an army this size.”

  Hiram was fast turning into a valuable asset, for his knowledge alone. Even barring the chemistry skills. I was very, very glad I’d managed to recruit him out from under enemy noses.

  I turned to the other highly-valuable asset in the room. “Cade, we’ve got some rich merchants smacking around the Jaspa while the raiders are on the back foot. What do you think about the enemy of my enemy?”

  “I think they sure as shit ain’t our friends,” Cade responded, instantly. Good to see that the saying was still alive and well, even in this new ruined era. “But they ain’t necessarily our enemies. Best we stay out of it, though. No sense in risking any resources or people on someone else’s war.”

  Cade had made great gains when he helped me with my war. But this was different. “I’d tend to agree. Besides, if they can afford a commander with that sort of technology, our own contributions probably wouldn’t be as highly valued. Damn near every one of those attackers had a gun. We’ve got what, six or seven?”

  “Nine, but one’s busted,” Cade said. “Need to fix it when we get a proper workbench made. But yeah, we ain’t got the people to bolster their ranks or the assets to make a difference.” He was frowning as he said that, though.

  Again, there were words left unspoken. There was an asset that could make a difference for the Jaspa’s enemies, and that asset was me. But it would be the height of folly to reveal myself to an unknown quantity who had already proven themselves quite capable of violence.

  I was the opposite of a trusting soul on a good day, and I wasn’t sure how good this day was going to be. “No assets worth risking,” I muttered and watched Cade relax, just a fraction. He knew the score.

  “What do we do?” Donna spoke, and the translator did its job.

  “Nothing, yet,” I told her. “I’ll keep an eye on them from a distance and see how it goes. We’ll stick to the original plan to grow and fortify, and if they come this way then we’ll deal with it as best we can. If they’re mercenaries like Hiram thinks, then they won’t go after us for fun; no pay in it. They might raid us if we look weak though, so it’s best to avoid drawing their attention early.”

  “We should do more than that,” Cade said, tugging on his gray goatee. “Hiram, you know where the Highbinder town is?”

  “Roughly. It should not be hard to find, if it is as large as has been described to me.”

  “We can send you in there quietly to do some trading. Jus’ a wandering merchant, or something like that. And maybe you can ask some questions on the sly or listen quiet-like...”

  “I can’t spare him right now,” I objected. “And that’s a hell of a lot of useful skills out there in the field, at risk. Maybe he tells someone how to get there, and somebody who’s less critical to our survival takes a whack at it.”

  Cade chewed his lip. “I could go myself.”

  “Elder, no,” Donna said. “You are brave, but you are old.”

  The girl was blunt. I could respect that.

  “In any case, that’s a gutsy move that we don’t need yet. If we do, then we can figure out the details and make sure nobody gets into something they can’t handle.” I could respect Cade’s willingness to risk himself, but it revealed a tendency to gamble that I knew I’d have to keep an eye on. This guy was my co-leader. I couldn’t have him making snap decisions on bad odds.

  “So for now we do nothing.” He definitely sounded sour.

  “Nothing except observe,” I reminded him. “We need time before we start putting anything on the board. Keep watching my old lair, I’ll keep digging. And about that...”

  I opened the doors I’d installed behind me. “Tell me what you think.”

  I’d sent my swarm digging through the blockage at an angle, just a tiny tunnel about the diameter of a quarter. I’d had visions of a century of water behind the block, sweeping out and washing me away. But I needn’t have bothered. Something had diverted the flow long ago, either another cave-in or pipe collapse upstream. There was an empty pocket behind the wall that had been filled with mold and rusty remnants, which had made for some tasty feedstock.

  Some quick re-purposing had turned them into basic quarters. Concrete floors, plastic-coated walls, and a hole in the floor with a plastic curtain around it for basic biology. I had the bandwidth to claim about sixty feet by thirty without impacting my other plans, so there was no reason to hold back on space. It’d be a tight squeeze, but we could get the entire tribe in here if worse came to worst.

  “So quickly...” Hiram muttered, as he paced into the room. Lights in the ceiling clicked to life as he went... not many. My feedstock had been low by the time I was done with this.

  “Hours,” I told him. “I had to make another nanobuilder swarm to get it done in a reasonable amount of time.”

  “It’s a start,” Cade said. “But I see a very big problem.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Ventilation. The air ain’t movin’. You get more than a dozen folks in here, it’ll get hard to breathe in very short order. And hot, too.”

  “I could poke holes in the ceiling, run channels up above...” I mused over the idea. “No. No, that’s too simple. And any hole big enough to help with that would be big enough for wildlife to fall into or risk being noticed from above. All right. Time to get technical.”

  My standard systems came with basic air circulation capability, but I doubted they could handle all forty-odd people at once. So I put in for a simple air handler.

  Insufficient subroutines for this task!

  Requirements: Fabrication 1, Infrastructure 1, Organic 1

  I sighed. Of course, it wasn’t that simple.

  I saw variations of this message whenever I tried to make something that my existing capabilities couldn’t cover. In this case, though, I was fortunate. Both fabrication and infrastructure were categories under construction, and I’d well-exceeded their requirements. Organic, though, that was under storage. It was about the only subroutine under storage that I hadn’t touched, and that gave me a silver lining of sorts; I could get an improvement out of this.

  “I’ll work on that,” I promised Cade. “Come back tomorrow, and you can grade me then. Hiram, before you go, one question; have you finished looking over the fields?”

  “I have,” he said, pointing at the screens. “It is not the same as being there myself, but the situation seems simple enough. They have fall crops ripening, but most are still three weeks away from a good harvest. Assuming the Jaspa do not return, we should be able to reap enough from the farms to survive winter.”

  “If we keep hunting,” Donna told him.

  “That too,” Hiram nodded. “But it isn’t as simple as coming back in three weeks. The crops will need tending and protecting if we wish to get the best results. Insects and wildlife will account for some loss. Others will need water and some simple fertilizer, one last round of the stuff in about a week.”

  “That ramps up our risk of being noticed,” I pointed out. “Even with mercenaries doing their thing. Especially with the mercs doing their thing. Armies travel on their stomachs. I haven’t known a single one that would pass up a good foraging opportunity in the field, given the chance.”

  I said it and knew it to be true, but I had no memory of any armies at all. I had led men and waged war, this I knew. But it was all digital ghosts in the halls of my somewhat broken digital brain. And that was assuming that it had really happened, as opposed to being an airy fiction to begin with. Part of me was based on a hero that had never existed... at least, if my worst enemy was to be believed.

  That was a pretty big if, now that I thought about it. I filed that one away for future reference.

  I had to deal with the now. “All right,” I told my trio of allies. “I’m going to see about ventilation, and a few other things. Scoot on out, and I’ll get on with the magic core stuff.”

  They scooted— scat? I couldn’t say. I took small comfort in the fact that English teachers were a dying breed in this post-apocalyptic world.

  Well, around these parts anyway. Who knew what the rest of the world looked like? I’d see it someday, perhaps. Once I was confident enough and knowledgeable enough to reactivate my severed gridnet connection and access what was left of the online world.

  Once they were gone, I quickly slotted my recently-gained circuit into organic storage. And even as I thought of the blueprint I wanted and began to build, words whipped into my interface.

  Organic Subroutine is now 1

  You have unlocked a Storage Improvement!

  Three options are available at this juncture:

  Armored Storage – All containers are reinforced against violence and disaster.

  Maximized Storage Space – Construction automatically finds the best way to maximize storage space, allowing an average of 10% more capacity than otherwise generated.

  Whitelist – Storage is only accessible to people and entities that you add to a preset permissions list.

  Tough, tough call.

  I wracked my brain on these for a few minutes, feeling the loss of Argus keenly. Armored Storage would better protect the people in the rooms I made. And it’d slow down any raiders who tried to destroy my feedstock containers. But to be honest, if things got to that point I would be in a bad spot. And I already had the Sturdy Construction improvement. This would double-layer the improvements, true, but diminishing returns would be diminishing returns. I’d be turning down the other two choices permanently. Was it worth it?

  Maximized Storage was more interesting. Space was at a premium down here, due to the fact I had to commit bandwidth proportionate to the space I grabbed. Ten percent would add up over time, allow me to do more with less. But...

  ...I wasn’t up against a toxic waste dump, like last time. My probing mining attempts through the area had found nothing save for rocks and dirt and a few pipes that clearly had an origin miles away. Given time, I could expand without too much threat from internal regions. And I was trying to plan for the long game, now.

  That left the Whitelist.

  I was many things, but I wasn’t a trusting sort. This would allow me peace of mind as far as securing my valuables and preventing sneaky bastards from trying their sneaky bastardy on me and mine.

  But...

  Me and mine could be counted on ten hands worth of fingers. And I had Cade and Donna to watch and handle anyone who went against the grain or showed signs of kleptomania. I didn’t have to worry about outsiders coming and going, not yet or possibly not for years.

  And thinking it over, it wouldn’t give me peace of mind; it would give me an extra layer of security. It would slow down a dedicated attacker, but if push came to shove and more TNT came to my doors, it wouldn’t do a thing to help the situation.

  No. Even given my bent toward paranoia I didn’t think it was a good choice. And it was a mere level 1 improvement... any of my core enemies could probably rip through it like a wombat’s rump through a water balloon.

  Wait, what the hell was a wombat?

  I lost a minute or two trying to remember but got nothing.

  With a sigh, I turned my thoughts back to the other two options and decided that Maximized Storage was the way to go. Even if I did have a large amount of space to expand into, time was still a factor. As such, the incremental gains over time would be helpful whenever things came to a head... which would hopefully be far, far into the future. I made my choice, and crossed non-existent fingers.

  Maximized Storage Selected! Upgrading existing structures...

  Boom. Darkness.

  I came to slowly, systems flickering back to life one by one, feeling like I’d had a drunken headbutting competition with a semi-truck. Okay, so it seemed like my corruption was still doing a number on me. Hopes that I was finally past this fled, banished and exiled from the realm of my contentment.

  Voices.

  “You wake? You woke?” The translator program hiccuped, and got back on track. I focused bleary optical sensors on an Arcadian wearing an open, furry vest. I’d seen his face, but no name came to mind.

  “Who are you?”

  “I am Rauph. Please send your flying thing out to speak with Juscade.”

  Juscade... that was what they called Cade, I remembered. I checked the timestamp and winced. Almost a full day... “Can he come here instead?” I asked, setting the nanoswarms to the next stage of construction.

  “No. Things are coming from your lair. Things that glow in the darkness.”

  I tried to breathe a sigh, remembered that I didn’t have lungs.

  No matter what I did, trouble always found me...