Petty Officer 3rd class Roisin Gabrielle Reynard:

  Four weeks later.

  I had expected many things from J-School: brutal discipline, impossible tests, and the constant, grinding pressure of being the lowest-ranked being in a room full of veterans. Those expectations were mostly met. What I had not expected was that once we got past the introductory terror and into the actual training segment, it would be… fun.

  It was like playing the most immersive, intense video game ever conceived, except the controllers were your own mind and spirit, and the stakes, while simulated, felt terrifyingly real. Our training node allowed us to remote-pilot drones to the surface of a real, desolate moon, where hordes of bio-constructs—authorized, non-chaotic replicas of real chaos spawn—waited in warrens and craters for our remote drone drops.

  The sheer expense of it all boggled my mind. This wasn't just a sim; it was a live-fire exercise on a planetary scale. The same training grounds were used by actual troopers, and we ran simulated combat drops with them twice a day, usually with different groups. The smell of ozone, scorched metal, and the faint, coppery tang of fake blood (or sometimes very real orc blood) was pumped through the vents in our control pods, a constant sensory reminder that this was more than a game.

  The limitations of technology were what made our gifts so vital. The fleet’s R&D division had been chasing the dream of true nanotechnology for centuries. Nanites were as much vaporware as artificial sapience and antigravity. There was no way a Sapient Intelligence brain, no matter how advanced, could be packed into a shell the size of a molecule. Nor was there enough bandwidth in the known universe to allow a single pilot to consciously control millions of individual remotes. The processing power required would melt a battleship’s core.

  That’s where affinities came in. Both Taxon and I had the gift to handle microswarms, the next best thing. Since he didn't have remote creation, he had to carefully have his micro-swarms constructed by a dedicated micro-assembler, a slow and methodical process. Learine had something similar, but it was exclusively biological, allowing him to create swarms of golem microorganisms that could do everything from healing wounds to tearing constructs apart from the inside out.

  I still wouldn't reveal that I had true quantum-level control of a self-replicating swarm, but I'd found that 'decent' drone control could accomplish amazing things with a microswarm—tiny hordes of mechanicals that had barely enough processing power to move and wiggle their microscopic manipulators under the direct control of a drone pilot's will.

  But with microswarms, you could repair things on an unbelievably small level, improvise weapons and repairs on the fly, and even make upgrades right in the middle of a fight. It's not true healing, I'd tell myself, watching my mites stitch a trooper's artery closed. It's just… very precise mechanical reassembly.

  That and the small, rabbit-like Sensei's relentless training had pushed my spiritualism to apprentice rank and unlocked a 'remote healing' trait, a fact I carefully kept buried under layers of obfuscation and misdirection. A goblin with a knack for tech was unusual. A goblin with a technomancer's potential and a spiritual healing gift was a short trip to a dissection lab.

  It helped that each of the trainees was finally given a private room. The communal barracks of the 128th had been a special kind of hell. Now, I had a lock on my door and four walls that didn't have another goblin snoring, farting, or staring at me. It made the monthly ordeal of my cycle much easier to manage.

  Goblins have noses like bloodhounds, so I had to go to elaborate lengths with scent-masking powders and air scrubbers I'd cobbled together from spare parts. I'd also doctored the room's security panel firmware—a terrifyingly easy task—to ensure any remote snoop would get a looped feed of me sleeping, and not… other things.

  The biggest problem, the one I couldn't wire or code my way around, was that I was starting to go through my growth spurt. The changes were subtle but undeniable. There was a new, uncomfortable fullness in my chest that the baggy fatigues couldn't completely hide.

  My hips felt… wider. The training was only supposed to last another two weeks, and I was certain I could keep things restrained and hidden until then, but I had to wonder if the constant, pervasive presence of Warrant Officer Wasserman was encouraging my hormones to develop rapidly. It was a known phenomenon with Maenads; proximity to a strong, compatible aura could accelerate maturation. It's just biology, I told myself firmly. Not… anything else.

  The problem was that he and Sensei Ramuel regularly battled us for control of our drones. It made tactical sense; on hellworlds, Chaos lords and even lesser overlords could wrest control of almost any non-sapient material, turning our own weapons against us. In a rift, the ambient corruption fought to subvert them entirely.

  When Sensei Ramuel impinged his aura upon my control node, it was like a cold, logical invasion. He was powerful, a glacier of focused will, but he was always restraining his strength, making it a puzzle to work around, evade, and even, in some cases, fracture his concentration by suddenly overloading his aura with conflicting data. I respected the old rabbit, but his aura was about as exciting and appealing as eating dry oatmeal without sugar or milk.

  The Warrant Officer, though, was incredibly difficult for an entirely different reason. His techno-control was not as great—I could feel the clunky, artificial subroutines of his Caliban—and some of the others fought off his influence easily.

  But when he was working his way into my drones, it was like he was wrapping a warm, fuzzy blanket around me on a cold, drizzling day. It was a sensation of safety, of strength, of rightness that was almost impossible to resist. I had to work twice as hard not to give in and just… surrender to the wonderful feeling instead of fighting for control of my drones.

  I simply cursed inwardly, bit my tongue until I tasted blood, and fought on as best I could. And I did my best to ignore the confusing, warm dreams I was starting to have at night. No. I would not bond to him. He was part of the establishment that had kidnapped me. A tool of the machine.

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  It didn't help that in his own broken way, he was extremely… compelling. Compact, tight musculature that spoke of power held in check. He was tall for a human, moving with an incredibly confident grace that belied his injuries.

  Sure, he'd been damaged heavily—scars crisscrossed his visible skin, including one that made the left side of his mouth look like he was perpetually smirking at some private joke. And I didn't LIKE all of the artificial repair parts I could sense interfering with his essence flow; a person just couldn't have that much foreign metal inside them without screwing with their energy cultivation. I knew, with a certainty that terrified me, that it would eventually be within my power to help repair, regrow, or rebuild the damage if I didn't fear my secret being discovered.

  "Kaxis! Watch your people!" I snapped, then immediately remembered he was two ranks higher than me. "Please, Petty Officer. I just regenerated three of your heavy AP drones. They are already linked into your network, and there's an archanid spawn that just hid in your trooper's line of march."

  A gleeful goblin cackle greeted my announcement over the comms. "Yeah, I saw it. Fast work on the AP drones, Rey. I was getting ready to send some bomb drones over to at least alert the troopers, but this makes it a lot easier, since they are still under pressure from two hierarchs. Got it. Nothing like the taste of shredded arthropods and gravy in the morning!"

  I nodded to myself and got busy trying to support his drone line. Real troopers were down there, their life signs flickering on my display. While deaths were rare in these exercises, injuries were common.

  Orcs had decent regeneration when they had the time and supplies to heal, and the trainers liked to take advantage of that to speed up their training times. I didn't know if I agreed with the ethics, but then again, Orcs seemed to live for that kind of brutal authenticity.

  My own drones were controlling a loose battle area to the south. With the pressure light, I had them scavenging debris—wrecked drone hulls, spent shell casings, even the shattered carapaces of the bio-constructs—to assemble new units for myself and to forge reinforced scrap to add to Learine's golem reserves. I couldn't animate their cores—that was a sorcery or Earth elementalist trick—but as long as his golems didn't lose their cores, they could be scrapped and their cores immediately placed into a new golem body almost instantly.

  Like I said, it was fun. Golems were a lot 'looser' to build than precision drones, and I'd been using my creativity to send him bodies that were… well… kind of creepy. Right now, my buzzers were hauling over a monstrosity that looked like a spideroid centaur with depleted-uranium pincers on its arms that could snip a hierarch in half with one crunch. Drop-ships had limited mass capacity, but once he started losing golems, there were no rules that said he couldn't install the cores into much more effective and heavier bodies assembled from battlefield scrap.

  "Seriously, Roisin?" Learine's voice came over a private channel, equal parts awe and complaint. "I appreciate the assist. I recovered two cores, but your golem designs are nightmares. You know I have to spend a few moments psychically imprinting inside each of these things, right? I have to be them."

  I started to giggle and turned it into a snort. Golem controllers had to briefly inhabit their constructs to 'teach' the core how to operate the new body, which meant he got to experience, firsthand, what it felt like to BE whatever artistic abominations I managed to whip up.

  Learine bitched, but he loved it. His otherwise standard-issue golem line, rebuilt into a set of twelve thundering death machines, was giving him a kill rating near the top of the class. True drone controllers, rather than a code-dispatcher using swarm and node dominance like me, could also inhabit their drones directly, but tech was so… distanced from biology that they didn't really feel any different. They just accessed the system's menus.

  I, on the other hand, with node dominance and swarm control, could create seat-of-my-pants code packets that could turn entire groups of drones into perfectly-adapted killing machines, a fact I took advantage of endlessly. If only that damned Warrant Officer didn't keep trying to interrupt my swarm control with his deliciously distracting aura!

  "They still haven't cleared out the wreckage from last week's exercise," I retorted. "If they are going to leave depleted uranium artillery slugs on the field, I intend to use them. Besides, you haven't lost a match in weeks. Isn't learning to drive eight limbs worth it? It does show up on your fit-reps."

  "I know, I know," he grumbled. "It's just creepy, that's all. Yesterday, one of the troopers took a shot at that centipede-golem you made, thinking it was a bore worm. I appreciate your hard work, but… whups! Just a sec."

  Two of my spy drones caught his new spider-centaur toy engaging a Mongol-class bio-construct, carefully snipping off eight of its heads in rapid order before two of its bladed legs stabbed through the Mongol's control core, amidst a hail of suppressing fire from the grateful troopers.

  "But do you have to be so scrotting creative? I get that they are serious hardware, especially after a bad drop, but some of your art gives me nightmares."

  I was suddenly busy on my own front. The troopers directed my two AP drones—the ones I'd silently upgraded with DPU plating within seconds of the drop window closing—into a spawn hole. They were now fighting for their mechanical lives against a seething mass of acid-secreting squirmers. We hadn't been given a price tag for this mission, so the first thing I'd done was have my swarm quietly butcher the disposable drone drop pod itself for bulk material.

  I felt that warm blanket feeling again as the Warrant Officer tried to wrestle control of my drones away from me. I regretfully shed the sensation, despite a deep, instinctual desire to wallow in it, and wasted a horde of construction mites to build an emergency chemfuel flamethrower trap inside the tunnel, roasting the bulk of the squirmers.

  Once the primary threat was neutralized, the drones were both too damaged and out of ammunition to be useful. I sent a 'proceed with clear' message to the troopers, who were happily butchering the remainders of the nest up top. They'd only taken one serious casualty—a trooper whose heavy suit had been crippled. A goblin tech was already working to rewire it for mobility.

  With a thought, I sent a nearby loader drone scuttling over to the tech. It popped its own access panels open, exposing its pristine converter relays and nearly untouched power supply. The tech gave my overhead camera a thumbs-up before he started ripping the units out of the disposable drone to jury-rig the trooper's armor.

  A moment later, a trooper gleefully sent a tactical nuclear charge down the tunnel, blowing the nest—and my sacrificed drones—into subatomic particles. Didn't matter much to me. On a battlefield this size, the number of individual drones was almost irrelevant. I could take over and control almost every drone in the engagement with only a minor degradation in performance. But that wasn't my job. My job was to be Spaceman Reynard, a goblin with a knack for tech.

  I kept an eye on the troopers and noticed the second injured one, an orc who'd taken a leg wound but whose armor was intact, was bleeding pretty badly. It was well within my abilities and my cover. I sent a sliver of the swarm that was tidying up the flamethrower residue over to quickly restitch torn ligaments, seal capillaries, and fuse the breached armor plating. It was an orc; he'd probably barely noticed the injury as long as he could still walk and fight.

  "That's six in a row, Roisin." The Warrant Officer's voice crackled over the main comms, dry and laced with what might have been amusement. "Core cleared. This was a Kobayashi scenario—a reenactment of a famous last stand from some old futurist vid about an interstellar bug war. It was supposed to be a lesson to teach you to recover from a total wipe. Congratulations, you turned a certain defeat into a victory. You ALSO get to rebuild a lander from scratch and recycle as much metal as you can this time… Your clever use of available resources has been noted, and of course, no good deed goes unpunished."