The Shield Wall of the current mining district rose in front of me.

Duracrete pillars were embedded into a trench a thousand feet into the underlying rock. Immune to corrosion, only the most mindless battering over years and decades could drive a hole into them, allowing the hungry wurms outside access to the endless tunnels and pits of the mining area beyond.

It had a Shield-dome over top of it to keep out the alkaline winds and monitor the air quality, although the mines weren’t quite at the sprawling size of the mega-city it fed ceaselessly. The mines meandered over several thousand square miles, and when an area was worked out, the tailings for another area filled it in, and the shield wall was moved into another direction. The wurms would flood energetically into the new zone, and more than a few would be pulped by Thunder Bombs laying in wait down below to thin their numbers, providing ready meals for wurmlings coming in later.

The great double monorails and their ceaseless loads of rendered mountains were heading in and out almost constantly, but I was approaching along the ground. They still needed some sort of ground access to explore the area, and I made my way across the sandy ground, barely stirring up a trail, my Disk gliding along behind me with my spoils.

The doors I was heading for were located conveniently beneath the monorail, since that was the easiest overland access. I brought up my Band, still perfectly functional despite corrosive dust and more corrosive wurm-guts thanks to my Vajra, and I established Node contact, quickly flitting through the numerous channels to Wall Security. A bored man’s face popped up in my Virtual File.

“Hello? What’s a Termite contacting us for?” the bored man on duty asked.

“Oh, I’m outside your land access under the rail. Could you open the postern for me? If not, I’ll just climb the wall, but it would be nice if you could turn off the point defenses for a minute or three while I do?”

“You’re outside-?” he trailed off, then got a look on my broadcast location. “Emperor! What happened? You’re... you’re on the sand lake!”

“Skating across it, actually. The wurms can’t see me, I’m not in ground contact. So, about that door?”

“I’ll alert them you are coming! Is there a vehicle coming? Do you need a rescue team?” He sounded amazed.

“Oh, no, everything’s perfectly fine. You can check with Sergeant Shek at Janus South Access 4, I set out by myself yesterday on foot. Nobody else along.”

“You... ran here?” The man, one Corporal Ahfung, was in disbelief. “Across the sands?”

“Skated here, across the sands. Took a couple rests, did some sightseeing... you know, the usual. Sorry for the delay. I heard you had a wurm problem inside the walls, so I was sent over to take care of it.”

“I... see.” Clearly that side of things wasn’t that unusual. “I’ve cleared you for entry down there, Exterminator Rantha.” See, no longer a Termite.

“Thanks! I should be there in about two minutes.”

------

I skated up to the huge doors, big enough to admit a major-ass landcrawler, and went inside the smaller door cut into the larger one. This was black durasteel, had some E-iridium mixed in with it, even tougher and stronger than normal durasteel, capable of defying the cutting power of adamant, although it didn’t have that same power itself.

The smaller door was more like a garage, which could be quickly filled in by sliding a plug of metal there in the event of attack. As I closed in, cameras in shielded mountings on the side naturally caught sight of me, and lifted it slowly up to let me in.

I coasted past the two-foot-thick door, the force screen snapping over me, and came slowly to a halt about ten paces beyond. The men in suits waiting there had tubes in hand, presumably for spraying me off from the corrosive dusts outside.

I waved at them. “No need for the spray, boys. I’ve got no dust accumulation whatsoever on either myself or my Disk here.” I flicked the air, and the humming force-screen over the contents shimmered up at the impact.

They were staring at my Disk, kind of gaping at it, but the hardass in charge said, “Protocol says that we-“

“-are to clean incoming personnel and equipment to remove stray particles and dust from them in order to eliminate random corrosion of equipment, et al,” I waved my hand. “I have no such things to eliminate, therefore if you start spraying me down, it’s because you are an asshole, and I’m going to punish you for it.”

There was a tiny lilt in my voice. The hardass looked at me, looked at the stuff on my Disk, and slowly decided that not getting on my bad side was a good thing. “Uh, understood.” I was standing there with my arms and waist bare, as well as my calves and half my feet, as well as my face. Not even any breathing equipment from the abusive mix of gases called an atmosphere out there... with temperatures that spiked to 80 degrees C at noonish, and plummeted to -50 at night.

Which meant I was resistant to some serious rads, heat, and cold, as well as corrosion.

“So, where’s my liaison for the wurm contract?” I put a holo up. “Supervisor Choken?” His image and ID rose up in front of me.

“East Side Fill.” I watched his eyes flicker as he sent out with his implants. “Uh, he’ll meet you there.”

“Great! Are you escorting me, or you going to provide me a map?” I asked calmly. I could probably crack their system, as maps of the mines were naturally classified. Also, ‘East Fill’ could be another hundred miles away, easy, across some very broken terrain. “Also, where is your Teleport Focus?”

That made them both blink. The mere fact I was asking meant that I was very, very dangerous, as only a Nine could Teleport, and disrespecting a Nine was very dumb, indeed.

“Uh, let's get you a temporary clearance, Lady Rantha,” he said unconsciously, responding to my accent and posture despite me not looking anything like a noblewoman. That was what a 44ish Charisma did for me, without me even trying, which was extremely useful in this very class-conscious society. However, Nines and Tens were treated like nobility regardless. You just didn’t mess with people that strong, especially if they were psions.

My Band bleeped, and the map of the mines, minus a lot of sensitive and unnecessary details, was downloaded. I glanced over it, located the areas I needed to be in, and nodded to the two men. “Okay, I’ll head out now. The supervisor should be able to track me, I’ll let him know when I’m almost there.”

My Band plotted out my course to the closest Teleport Focus about a mile away, and I skated off, my Disk and its load trailing off behind me.

The fact was that I could not teleport, a sad but true fact of life about being a Null. Powered were the ones that got all the good stuff. Now, a proper Foci just needed to be fueled with the right amount of psionic energy, and could send a person or group along to their destination. If it was really well-built, and the destination was another Foci, that range could be close to a thousand miles.

Unfortunately, Nulls couldn’t grant energy to objects, either. Otherwise... heh! Artificers would have conniption fits compared to us.

But, but, but-! We could grant power to someone bonded to us, doling out our Reserves and Matrix energy to supplement their own, which was a hideously useful resource for any Powered person who accepted it, doubling or tripling their own native energy. Null Psions worked off Constitution and possibly Wisdom as a Stat, and tended to have incredibly high Con scores, meaning lots of bonus energy...

I had the maximum possible base Con of 18, and I’d Nogged my Wisdom up to the same level. Both were sitting on a base 48 right now, which was +95 PP each, plus Depth of Will Mastery for another +20 (the Depth was used to support my Soulblade Class abilities). My Bonus PP were each higher than the base Reserve of a Psion, which I’d also bought up to the maximum. 298 PP was enough to make a senior Psion piss themselves, and meant my Psionic Null could extend out quite some distance...

Now, that’s all it could do, without a Bond.

When I’d gone into Habberblok the first time, I’d naturally been chatting with the irked spirits as I went around, and I’d made them an offer. If one of them wanted to be Chalice’s Item Spirit, I could take them out of there and they could be my Item Familiar, and beat on the kind of shit that had killed them, see the galaxy and beautiful, exotic Warp Demons, and kill them all.

One of them had taken me up on it. She was a rebellious ganger girl with a snarky streak, and she really, really wanted to beat up the Warp Gods.

So, she became Chalice, my Sword, which was Soulbonded to me. Which meant...

Yes, I could give Chalice all sorts of PP.

Chalice was a Psychic Weapon, getting stronger the more PP I had in Reserve, so there was a limit to how much she and I could expend before it started cutting into her combat capability. We had also given her a PP Reserve of her own of 9, meaning she was continually empowered to +II even when I wasn’t holding her, meaning I didn’t have to have an active and visible Essence infusion for her to be active.

Naturally, Chalice was an unlimited glutton of Karma and goldweight equivalent, satisfied mostly with Nexal Stones and Naming Karma. However, I didn’t have an unlimited amount of things I could kill for either of those purposes, nor an unlimited influx of money.

Her Construction Karma from Sama Sr. was used to make her Psibane and Psychic, which was huge enough as it was. She was +VII against the vast majority of stuff I wanted to fight, just laying hand to hilt, and the Greater Soulbound we’d slowly put in place jacked that to +IX against everything, and +XI against psionic and phrenic stuff.

The rest of the Karma first went to make her Indestructible, because that was a thing. We were in a situation with mega-damage weapons all over the place, and even being made of Tempered, Hardened Orichalcum simply wasn’t going to cut it if a hovertank cannon hit her. 30k of nexals that ate up, which was a lot of hunting.

Vivic was a bonus of my being a Ghost Knight, so I got that for free, as well as Ghost Touch. While there were endless Arsenal effects to slowly add in, the big thing was to work on her Item Familiar extraordinary powers.

The model, of course, was her Big Sister Tremble. The ability to Detect Bane was exceedingly useful, and one of the ways that Chalice looked at the world. Getting that ability to Valence V, and a two-hundred-meter unidirectional or a hundred-meter omnidirectional range was the ultimate goal, but that was a long way away at the moment.

Happily, using that ability to find stuff to kill was enough to trigger Naming Karma, even if I killed stuff with something else, so Chalice was always looking. Her current ability was at II Valence, so only forty/twenty meters, but that was still plenty of warning.

The extraordinary ability to Teleport was the other ability I wanted, since we were Bonded.

That particular ability cost 15k in goldweight equivalent for each time a day I wanted to use it. Or... it cost 7-15 PP every time I wanted to use it, depending on how far I wanted to go.

I had kept this ability very close to my chest once it was developed. It let me flit around the city to anywhere I’d been, following my lived-line. The 7 PP level only had a range of seventy meters, but that was enough to remove myself from any combat situation to somewhere close by, as long as there was no Interdiction in place. It also let me leave Habberblok, or return from close by, without being seen, which really irritated the people who wanted to follow me.

Chalice being able to leave a minor illusion behind of me when I did that, which lasted for up to a minute, was just her way of playing mind games with others...