A Displaced Samurai

The next morning I arrived at SHOCKS to collect my air taxi. A somewhat embarrassed Magical Girl told me she was not allowed to let me take it.

I asked “What is the problem? I made it with my own resources, or at least ones captured from the Macks. I don’t see how SHOCKS would have a claim to it.“

“It seems to somehow fall under the latest policy of requisitioning all new technology for analysis by SHOCKS first.“

That made me angry. Despite all my sympathy for the defense needs of Haven, this was an unarmed air taxi. Not a new wonder weapon. I called B.S.O.D. to give her a piece of my mind.

“Good morning. Someone seems to have the glorious idea that harmless air taxis are now in need of being requisitioned for technical analysis. Could you point me to that individual for a stern talking to?”

“You are speaking to her” came the answer in a rather frosty tone.

“If you keep requisitioning my not crucial for the war effort transportation, I might stop further cooperation. Except for what we already have contracts for. I don’t intend to break those.”

I continued “Considering that you were unable to organize helicopter evac at Mount Olympus, travel arrangements by SHOCKS seem less than reliable. I think I’d better make sure I have my own.”

This time, it was B.S.O.D. who backed off. “I’m sorry for that and I see we went too far in this case. But we would really hate to lose you to a stupid aircraft accident. Will you at least agree to acquire a pilot license?”

“Good point. I’m not overly eager to die by crashing myself. So I'm willing to put in the training effort for a license for light helicopters. Because I will certainly fly the thing off pre-programmed routes again.”

That and making more of the little mortars for HANAF occupied me for the next two weeks. The Macks did not make an appearance during that time.

July, Wednesday 15th, 2048

The piloting business was finally sorted out, and I got it in my head that restoring the old Mack base for my purposes would be a splendid idea. My own slightly evil lair!

Now I was on my way to a stopover at the public car charging station in Sooke, with some progressive metal on the media player. Some called it elitist. I called it the next best thing to classical music in terms of sophistication, but with the oomph I often missed in the latter.

The charging station was not really meant for air taxis, but it would give me some spare range for the trip to Mount Olympus and back.

From there, I would need less than half of my flight range to get to the underground complex. Which needed a catchy name. After some deliberation, I settled on “Styx Base”, matching the Greek mythology theme.

On my passenger seat, I had plenty of the non-perishable but samey food from Sanctuary’s food synthesizers. Also some veterinary medicine that I knew Pepper needed from time to time. I did not know if Private Ryan was still near the base, but if so, I wanted to help him and Pepper out as much as possible. Perhaps I would find a way to save both of them.

Fortunately, the little helicopter landing pad we had improvised was still intact. I landed and climbed to the newly christened Styx Base. I found that Herbie, my Type Three, was intact and functional. For the rest of the day, I was busy enlarging the hole in the mountain so I could get in and out with Herbie.

At dusk, I walked Herbie over to the landing pad to top off the copter’s charge from Herbie's small fusion reactor. After connecting the cable, I found a note pinned to a tree. It was barely legible, but it indicated Ryan’s plan to walk over the mountains to Dungeness and hope for pickup there.

It was getting dark and my little air taxi was not equipped with night vision. So I had a simple meal, went to sleep and let the charger work. The next day, I would fly along the most likely route Private Ryan might have taken and look for him.

July, Thursday 16th, 2048

With the air taxi recharged, I followed the most likely route of James across the mountains. In Dungeness, I actually found James, dirty, sad and tired. He had made it but Pepper hadn’t. The mule had broken a leg in an unlucky fall, and James had to give him a mercy killing. All that was left for me was to ferry James over to Sooke. I had saved Private Ryan but it did not leave me really content.

In a somber mood, I returned to Styx Base to do some more work on restoring the base. The first thing was to start production of a few Type Four Macks that would be loyal to me. I used the fabricator in Herbie for that, as the one in the base was still without power.

Next I considered restoring at least part of the power grid. The things that burned out last time were the power cable to the fabricator and the voltage converter the power cable was connected to. This suggested two things:

First, there was a hidden power source somewhere that the strike teams had not found.

Second, the Macks had no concept of fuses. Those things existed for high power circuitry too, and here one of those had really been needed to protect the power grid.

Amateurs all around.

At least I could still switch the not-burned out parts of the power grid on and off. I started by shutting the main grid down. It turned out that the strike teams actually had disabled the main reactor, but things had still been running on a kind of high current batteries. The Macks must have some applications that required extreme power for a short time.

Next I entirely removed the broken voltage converter, the subnet with the fabricator would have to run on some kind of auxiliary power for a while. Fortunately, it needed the same voltage the reactor in Herbie was putting out. The Macks had some degree of standardization after all. So I could use the reactor model from the TypeThree, printing one would take an entire day though.

Three days later, I had a local power supply going and a small recycler was installed that fed into the local storage system the big fabricator drew its raw materials from. Half a dozen new Type Fours were available as guards, colored in beige instead of the off-white typical for Macks. On their flanks, they carried the coat of arms of Vanguard Command.

All things considered, my new base was semi-functional. Manufacturing, check. Guards, albeit weak ones, check. Any decent MG team would rip through them easily.

Missing - private quarters, preferably with fresh water on tap, bathroom and sewage treatment.

Missing - a helipad right at the entrance. Walking down the valley to the improvised landing pad was getting old.

Missing - communications to the Victoria internet, preferably to my shelter there.

I chose to work on the helipad first. “Elya, I need some advice on civil engineering. If necessary, I’m willing to buy some more of those Lorekeeper textbooks.”

The Lorekeeper Tome of Mechanical Engineering contains most of what you need. A supplement with the properties of typical building materials is available for five points.

What, microtransactions in interstellar education? But the price seemed acceptable. “Yes Elya, I’ll take it.”

Purchased: Supplemental data for Lorekeeper Tome of Mechanical Engineering

Price… five points

New balance… One Token and 1222 points

With a bit of persistence and prompting from Elya, I came up with a plan for the entry area of the captured base, where the strike teams had blasted a hole in the mountain.

The entry doors would be at the height of the floor of the room the strike team had blown open. Outside it, a level platform. From there a ramp would lead down sideways to the surrounding terrain, and a short bridge to a helipad built on top of an octagonal tower.

The tower was going to use masonry with blocks cut from large boulders, but also some Mack-style fiber concrete for foundations and the pad itself. I was planning to give the concrete parts a rock skin to fake the look of the masonry of the tower walls. The overall appearance would be like a medieval castle keep with a stone table on top. For the yet to be designed overall exterior of the base, I was thinking of something like the pseudo-medieval look of Castle Hatley.