Petty Officer 3rd Class Roisin Gabrielle Reynard-

  The muffled, tinny echo of applause from the mess hall chased me down the corridor like a vengeful spirit. Or maybe it was just the phantom pressure of all those eyes—the appreciative ones from the troopers who’d seen the battlefield from my drone’s-eye view, and the hot, resentful glares from the support crew who’d only seen the reward shares deducted from the common pot. My share. A full share for a copper-rank newbie who’d spent half the raid tucked safely inside a metal shell.

  Okay, I guess I fled. The admission tasted like ash. It was the pragmatic choice, the one that avoided a scene, but it still felt like cowardice. I’d have to find Dienne-Lar later, offer congratulations for whatever honor he’d doubtless received with his usual elven flair, and apologize for my abrupt departure. My social skills were rusty enough without adding ‘ingrate’ to my list of failings.

  Did I help? Sure. Objectively, yes. My drones had provided overwatch, my micro-swarm had patched armor, and my triage had stabilized a few nasty lacerations before Kessler could get to them. But so did every single trooper. Jordan had taken a centipede mandible to the shoulder that would have sheared a lesser orc in half. Rodrick Sill had used his own body as a living barricade to plug a tunnel breach. They’d put their actual, squishy, bleeding flesh on the line. My contributions felt… clean. Sterile. A remote-control war fought from a plush chair or the back line.

  It wasn't false humility. It was a cold, analytical assessment of my own catastrophic miscalculation. I’d been so focused on surviving the moment, on leveraging my new Copper rank, that I’d failed to see the foundational cracks widening beneath my feet.

  Stages.

  The concept was a ghost from my childhood on Korse, a tin-ranked world humming with a low-grade energy most of the universe would consider impoverished. The default state of reality was ‘wood-rank.’ Essence was thin, potential was limited. Rifts were violent, terrible things, but they were also geysers of concentrated possibility, spewing forth denser essence that could be harnessed, refined, used to push past those innate limitations.

  Even the chaos beasts that prowled the void between stars were, technically, wood-stage. Their threat came from scale, from insane biology honed by eons of cosmic Darwinism, not from some refined internal power. A void kraken didn’t need to be steel-rank; being the size of a small moon and having a disposition worse than a hangry hobgoblin was enough.

  My answer to such existential threats had always been drones. Elegant, expendable, logical. But they had a fundamental weakness I’d never truly appreciated until the Kalisti rift. No matter how exotic the alloys, how potent the energy cells, their brains were shackled to wood-rank paradigms. You could forge a railgun barrel from steel-ranked ore and load it with copper-core penetrators, but the little silicon mind aiming it was still thinking in plodding, binary wood-rank terms. It could calculate a firing solution, but it couldn’t feel the battlefield, couldn’t anticipate the micro-shift in a foe’s stance that screamed ‘dodge left.’

  My one clever trick was a workaround for that. I wasn't a coding savant, but since my days in the penal battalion, I’d scavenged tin-ranked materials for my drone brains. They were a step up from standard silicon and gold, a little quicker, a little more robust. But I’d never learned the arcane arts of writing code for those better brains. In the copper-ranked rift, the disparity had been a screaming klaxon in my mind. My drones moved and thought like they were swimming through syrup while the world around them moved at double speed.

  My micro-swarm was slightly better. The individual units were more like golems, tiny spiritual kernels I could brute-force with my own willpower, my innate affinities acting as an overclocking mechanism. I could make them dance, but it was a painful, inelegant dance. It was like doing granny-style push-ups on your knees so you could boast about your high count, all the while knowing you were cheating the very purpose of the exercise. I was using my Force affinity as a crutch to pretend my Drone Control trait had the ‘Improved’ or ‘Advanced’ prefix. The System knew the difference, even if my crewmates didn’t. The effort left a psychic ache behind my eyes, a feeling of straining against an invisible, unyielding wall.

  I’d retreated to the relative sanctuary of the drone maintenance bay, the smell of ozone, warm metal, and lubricant a familiar comfort. My fingers traced the scarred carbon-fiber carapace of one of my recon drones, its sensor suite still smudged with alien ichor. I sank into my node-space, the world receding into a constellation of data streams and diagnostic reports, trying to find the flaw in my own architecture.

  “What has you in such a fluster?” asked a familiar, gravelly voice from the hatchway, slicing through my digital reverie.

  I didn’t jump, but it was a near thing. My swarm, reacting to my spike of adrenaline, buzzed a half-millimeter higher off the workbench before settling. I sighed deeply, the sound loud in the quiet bay, and slowly pulled my consciousness back into the physical world. The glow of the diagnostic holo faded from my vision, leaving the stark, utilitarian lighting of the bay.

  “Hey, Chief,” I said, not turning around. I picked up a micro-calibrator, more for something to do with my hands than any need for it. “I think I’m running up against my limits, and it’s driving me crazy. It’s like I’ve been given a race car but only know how to drive a forklift.”

  I heard his heavy, padded footsteps approach. “How do you mean?” asked Chief Braxis. I finally turned to see him, his big green ears lay back flat against his skull, his brow furrowed in an expression of genuine empathy that looked oddly out of place on his normally sardonic features.

  “I got a new class for Copper,” I explained, gesturing vaguely with the tool. “Sounds impressive, right? But my traits… they’re a mismatched bag of leftovers. Drone Control, Micro-Swarm, Triage, Enchanting… they’re all wood-rank fundamentals. I was yanked from my world before I could learn how to advance them. Now, even if you handed me a chest full of orichalcum and adamantine, I wouldn’t know the first thing about making a drone brain that could actually use it. I’m a tech-affinity adept trying to play in the major leagues with a tee-ball bat.”

  “Which traits specifically are the problem?” he asked, leaning against a rack of drone batteries, his arms crossed.

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  I let out a frustrated breath that was almost a growl. “All of them, Chief. Some are just grindwork—Triage and Endurance just need practice, pain, and time. But the technical ones… Drone control, golemancy, enchanting… they need new techniques. Formal education. Secrets the corporations and the Fleet hoard like dragons. I can’t just ‘practice’ enchanting. It takes rare materials I can’t afford and theories I don’t have access to. I’m stuck.”

  Braxis nodded slowly, a thoughtful glint in his dark eyes. “I was a little worried about that.”

  That brought me up short. “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged, a motion that made the patches on his coveralls shift. “When Captain Timur brought you on, your scores from the droner academy were ridiculous. SHE,” he emphasized the word, implying a world of command-level discussion I wasn’t privy to, “thought it was because you were some kind of prodigy, that you already had Improved or even Advanced tier skills. But when you showed me your little trick with the Kobayashi program—overriding standard protocols with your own machine-language patches—I realized you were talented, not trained. Your power baseline was just… higher. You were brute-forcing quality through raw affinity.”

  I hadn’t considered that. My “talent” was just the way I’d always interacted with machines. It was normal to me.

  “I didn’t actually approve of dumping you in a copper rift,” he admitted, his voice dropping a bit. “Not yet. You didn’t have the foundations. It was a power-leveling move, and those always leave gaps. The Captain, XO Taera, and Chief Kimmy… they wanted you advanced at maximum velocity. Foundations be damned.”

  I nodded. That tracked. Taera’s primary directive was to keep me from being forcibly bonded. Reaching Copper was a huge step toward that; it meant your average Joe Schmoe off the street couldn’t overwhelm me with sheer spiritual mass. It was a strategic play. My personal professional development was a secondary concern. Understanding the logic didn’t make the resulting skill crisis any less frustrating.

  “Is there any way to try and catch up?” I asked, hearing the faint note of desperation in my voice. “Or am I just the Crow’s most expensive one-trick pony?”

  He grinned, a flash of sharp teeth. “Sure. You might be amazed at the weird, winding paths people take to get where they are. I don’t mind telling you—because Andrea brags about it constantly—but she started her droner career as a maintenance tech… for self-driving cabs in New Mumbai.”

  My eyebrows shot up. “And she became a combat droner?” The leap from urban traffic management to void warfare seemed… substantial.

  “One of the best,” he confirmed. “Which brings me to a point. You do know the difference between a System-recognized trait and the education that feeds into it, right?”

  I looked at him, my confusion genuine. “Umm… I get my traits from my education? I learned how to fix things, so I got the Technomancer’s Touch. I learned field medicine, so I got Triage while I was still child-tier.”

  He shook his head, a pitying look on his face. “Not exactly. That’s why so many traits that do the same thing have different names. My Drone Control is an outgrowth of Jury Rig, so it’s officially ‘Improvised Drone Command.’ It’s messy, but it’s intuitive. Andrea’s is ‘Telepresence,’ a form of technopathy. Zaddoc’s is based on his clan’s crafting traditions; he hand-makes every drone, so his is something like ‘Ancestral Bond.’ The effect is similar—we all control drones—but the mechanism is tied to our affinity and our personal… flavor.”

  I was baffled. This was systems theory far beyond anything in the censored UP educational packets. “I… never got that far. On Korse, we had an extended biological childhood before our full UI manifested. Advanced System manipulation wasn’t in the curriculum. My father told me that was one of the reasons we were purged. We were being ‘denied our potential.’ The UP database was heavily firewalled.”

  He quirked an eyebrow. “I sense a hell of a story there, kid, but it can wait. What is your actual drone control trait called? The System designation.”

  I blinked. “I don’t really have one, not like that. I have ‘Remote Node,’ which extends my range and data-transfer speed for standard connections. And I have ‘Micro-Active Swarm,’ which lets me treat my micro-bots as golems. It lets me use quantum milling to fabricate new drones quickly, and those new drones respond to the Node control. It’s all… transactional. Protocol-based.”

  Braxis stared at me for a long second, then started scratching vigorously behind one floppy ear, a sign of intense goblin consternation. “So… you don’t actually use a spiritual link or a technopathic bond. You control drones using… standard Fleet comms protocols?”

  “Well, yeah. Heavily modified and optimized, but yes. Standard machine language, just delivered faster and more efficiently.”

  “You redeploy code in milliseconds…” he muttered, almost to himself.

  “Oh, no, I’m nowhere near that fast!” I corrected. “It takes me a few dozen milliseconds to compile a new instruction set. But with Remote Node, a good optical link can transfer that set to the drone in femtoseconds. The bottleneck is the drone’s own physical actuators. They’re slow. That’s the whole problem! Even with a better brain, the body can’t keep up.”

  He chuckled, a low, rasping sound. “Let me get this straight. You redesign complex machine code on the fly, under combat conditions, in milliseconds, and you claim to not be a genius?”

  I shook my head vehemently. “I’m not! I have Tech Affinity at Adept-plus. That’s not uncommon. Don’t you have it?”

  He shook his head, his grin widening. “Machinery Affinity. Common among goblins. That’s why they say a ship with a goblin always comes home. My drones run on standard coding, but I can… nudge them. Feel what they’re feeling. Override with instinct. You’re over there writing a novel in a dead language; I’m just telling a story to a friend.”

  “That sounds amazing,” I said, genuinely impressed. “And you think I’m the genius?”

  He laughed. “Right. Confirmation bias. My coding is terrible, but I can build a drone you could kick through a bulkhead, and it’d still work. So your core problem is drone response times in high-tier environments?”

  “Yes. Space is fine. The engagement envelopes are huge, and the reaction times are measured in seconds. But in a rift? It’s close-quarters, split-second chaos. I can’t build better drones because my micro-swarm can’t process higher-than-tin materials, and I can’t write code that would let a drone think at a copper rank. I’m hitting the ceiling.”

  “And I assume you don’t know how to boost your traits themselves?” he asked.

  I sighed. “I assume it means practice. A lot of it.”

  “Yes and no,” he said, holding up a finger. “Traits, unlike skills, are measured by the System. You can have a natural talent and use it until it becomes a trait. But to improve that trait, to go from basic to Improved, you need inspiration.”

  “Inspiration?” The word sounded ludicrously unscientific.

  “Yep. Education and practice set the stage, but the trait itself doesn’t level up until you have a breakthrough. A moment of profound understanding. You push it past its designed limits, or you use it in a way that’s so unorthodox it makes the System itself sit up and take notice. The physical traits are easier—get shot a lot for Durability, lift until your spine cracks for Strength. The mental ones… they’re fussier.”

  He pushed off from the rack, looking uncharacteristically nervous. “I didn’t get the chance to talk to you after the ceremony, but I might be able to help a little. Mostly because I think you’re overlooking something fundamental. Blindingly obvious, even.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh, the sound tinged with relief. “Please, Chief, tell me. I know I’m overlooking something. It’s like an itch in the center of my brain I can’t scratch. I bet it’s something stupidly simple.”

  He nodded, his ears flopping. “Right. Well, okay. Time for some brutal honesty.” He took a breath. “You aren’t a droner.”

  I just stared at him. “Huh?”

  “I said, you aren’t a droner.”