"Got it. Two more to go and then I'm down the shaft," I said.
The last two went in a blur. This really was dumb work that could've been done by robots, but Brick had been right. Marty and I racing around the outsides of the cylinder were a lot faster than Brick's little spiders would have been.
I abandoned my floating case and sprinted toward the shaft, jumping and then pulling downward with my gravity plates when I reached the center. Rings flashed by me, each roughly twenty meters apart. Each ring was studded with sixteen of the fridge-sized harvesting devices that Metra had described. They were quite unusual for Union design, in that they weren't boxes. They were more like capsules with rounded sides and edges. As Union tech was all about functionality over form I could only assume there was some functional reason for this.
Below me I could see a mirror to the gate above me, closed and inactive. The three bottom rings looked slightly different from the ones I was passing. One of the harvesting devices on the ring closest to the top was obviously destroyed, a mangled, blackened wreck. On the ring below, two of them were gone, and on the bottom ring three. If we had more time, we could have salvaged one of the rings to restore two, but we didn't have it.
I touched down lightly on the bottom of the shaft, the hard tier 3 metal of the Solar Tap unyielding underneath my armored feet. I chose the closest intact harvesting unit and sprinted over to it, bringing up my salvage interface.
The unit was connected to the wall with bundles of thick cabling and integral supports. It wasn't like some other things in the Union, things that were intended to be removed. No gecko pads here. This was a permanent part of the ring. I manipulated the cut with my salvage interface to be a thin plate behind the unit. I didn't need to take the unit back intact, but I definitely wanted to take as much of it as I could. For all I knew, the wealth of exotics in this thing was all in the back. After I placed the edge to make a minimal cutting surface, I saw the cost and blanched.
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Power and structural connections
Salvage: Metals, tier 2, Metals, tier 3
Cost: 711 Nanite Clusters
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"Christ, why is this so expensive?" I asked.
"The power transmission cabling is extremely dense," Brick supplied.
The reserve I'd had in my suit for breaking into the station was still mostly intact. It just wasn't enough. I checked it quickly.
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Nanite Clusters: 77/500
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Even with the extra Nanites stored in my body itself I couldn't afford it.
"I don't have enough. Any of you bring some Nanites in? Can you toss them down?" I asked.
"I've got almost nothing," Marty said, up above.
"Dammit, Jake," Metra cursed.
I knew that while Brick could bring me some it would take much longer than we had. With the salvage interface still up, I brought up my Engineering vision and could see what Brick was talking about. Three huge trunks of cabling, each the size of a 100-year-old tree. They reached into the guts of the harvesting device and disappeared into the wall beyond, onto some sort of power bus that fed the Connahr field generator. I adjusted my cut to exclude the cables and the cost finally dropped to something I could afford.
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Structural Connections
Salvage: Metals, tier 2
Cost: 217 Nanite Clusters
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I had some margin—with luck I wouldn't need it.
I started the process and snatched Excalibur off my hip. With an eye on the timer, I gripped my trusty bar in both hands and energized the chisel tip. It glowed blue as the Voidcutter edge powered up.
There was plenty of space between the harvesters in the ring so I was able to see where the machine and the ring itself were connected. Nanites were flowing out of me in a thick, black rope swiftly emptying my internal storage. They settled in to their task as I settled into mine.
I slammed the point of Excalibur home, aiming for the hidden cable I could see nestled in the tight gap between the wall of the ring and the mounted harvester. The chisel point vaporized the metal as it dug deep behind the machine. My arms vibrated with the force transmitted back through the wrecking bar.
It was slow going. I had to essentially dig a path to the cables that were in the center of the back side of the harvester. Once the tip and first foot or two of Excalibur were well and truly wedged between the ring wall and the unit, I gripped it with both hands and heaved. I felt the tier 2 metal of the harvesting unit groan as it buckled. With a few more strategically placed heaves I exposed the first of the cables.
As dense as the cable was, the Voidcutter edge of Excalibur made short work of it. I slashed through the cable as quickly as I could. Halfway through I pried the harvester away from the ring again, buckling the structure and exposing more of the first cable.
I checked the time. Three minutes and change. "Shit, this is going slower than I like."
"Hurry up, Jake. The first three lenses are aligned. Five more and we're done."
Seconds later the first cable was severed and my salvage job about 60% done. I knew that even when it was done, the harvester wouldn't fall off the wall. It wasn't like this was a bundle of copper wire I was cutting—this was an ultra-dense cable with the thickness and rigidity of a tree made of tier 3 metal. I needed to cut those cables or the harvester wasn't going anywhere.
The second cable was cut with 1:40 left on the clock. The salvage job finished only five seconds before that, and then there was only the final cable.
It was the top cable, and the weight of
