"What about the base that's projecting the Connahr field? Was there anything from it?" I asked.
"No. Mattias believed it to be unmanned, as all communication attempts are ignored. That continues to be the case. It is on Mercury and although the array was tasked to observe Mercury on several occasions there was nothing to indicate what could have happened there to affect the Connahr field."
"So we're on our own. Again. We really need to get to Mercury and we need to figure out what happened to the Union. I was thinking, Metra. Maybe you should go and visit your family on the Void Tower earlier than we agreed. We could use some good news. You couldn't stay long, though. We need you on the station, or at least linked with Brick through the gate."
When Metra and I had become partners we'd come to an agreement. As soon as it was possible, she could open the gate to her home, the Void Tower Ineffable Glory of The Conqueror. The Void Towers were enormous, cylindrical spaceships containing millions of people built by the Horgrim. I thought of them as an O'Neill cylinder turned into a spaceship, but the Void Towers were centuries older than O'Neill and his beautiful designs.
The Towers held a lot of Horgrim, who lived on them in preference to a planet or asteroid. During the war with the Elder AIs, they had been safer.
"Err," she said.
"What? Not a good idea? I thought you wanted to get there as soon as you could?"
"Jake," she said, and her voice hitched. "I feel like an air thief."
"Why?" I asked.
"I broke our agreement. I've already tried to use the gate to connect to Ineffable Glory. The connection request failed."
"Oh," I said. I felt a bit betrayed, but more sad. Did that mean whatever had happened to the rest of the Union had also happened to her family in the Ineffable Glory of The Conqueror?
"I'm so sorry, Met—" I started.
"You shut up, Jake! Just because I can't connect with my old code doesn't mean anything happened to them, I mean to the Glory."
"You're right. I'm sure they're all fine. Maybe the gate was just busy? That can happen, right?"
Metra didn't immediately reply, so Brick jumped in. "Yes, Jake, that is a possibility. At Metra's request, however, I have been attempting the connection every hour for the last eight days."
"Eight days? Damn, Metra. I thought we had a deal. What if it had opened, you had gone through, and then they didn't let you come back? We would be screwed."
"I know! I'm sorry."
"Anyway, we'll just have to figure out some other way to get to your family. If Regar's situation is any indication, then gates are pretty much screwed all over the Union."
"The Union database has schematics for a jump drive," Metra said. "Only exploration ships ever bother with them. They're incredibly slow compared to gate travel. Once we get some more materials—and I mean a lot more—we can make one."
I remembered seeing the listing in the database and looking it over. Metra wasn't exaggerating. The materials cost for even the smallest version was staggering. There was no way we could afford it without the satellite stations mining again, and the Refinery going full bore.
"Our next step is finding materials here in Sol, if we can. We've got to get the Redemption up and running as soon as possible so we can get to Mercury and see what's going on there. Maybe we can mine the asteroid belt or something?" I mused.
Metra snorted, the expressive sound carrying perfectly over our connection. "Not any time soon. The infrastructure you'd need to process any ore you might find is basically what we've got here in the Refinery complex, plus the Fusion node to drive it. That's a big investment of materials and Nanite Clusters that we just don't have. That's on top of getting hardware out to the asteroids to actually do the mining and ships to transport it. That won't be happening any time soon."
"Right," I said, a bit disappointed. Since I was a kid reading 60s and 70s science fiction, I'd dreamt of a Sol full of independent asteroid miners, a new frontier for Man in space. If the opportunity to make a living in outer space had ever come up I would have taken it. Thinking on it, I supposed it did, and I had.
"Why are you thinking about the most complex possible solution here, anyway?” Metra asked. “You're more of a shoot the problem in the face kind of guy. Let's get that pile of materials in your grandpa's basement. Brick disassembled the gate there, didn't he?"
"That is correct, Metra. My bots were directed to disassemble all Union tech in the area and place the salvaged materials in neat piles before self-disassembly."
"Gates aren't cheap. Those materials will give you a lot more leeway in how you can upgrade Redemption."
I hadn't been thinking of the gate as a valuable stockpile of materials, but I should have been. They didn't represent a lot of mass, but they were made up of materials that we were short on—tier 2 and 3 exotics and radioactives. It was perfect.
I was relieved to have something to do after the deluge of bad news. Metra was right, I preferred simple solutions and this was about as simple as they got. Go back to Grandpa's house and pick up the materials. The question was, how to get there?
It took very little time to find the skill implant I wanted in the outpost's library.
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Piloting—Redemption: This skill grants all the necessary familiarity and skills required to pilot the custom Scout design designated Redemption
Skill Implant created by Mattias Monde.
Cost: 1 Nanite Cluster.
Implantation Time: 170 minutes
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I paid the cost and queued it up. I glanced through the rest of the listed skills and saw
