The Academy’s fabrication hall was what Kai had always imagined a good workshop would look like if you removed every constraint that a salvage yard in the Outer Colonies had to operate under, and then removed a few more he hadn’t thought to imagine.
He spent most of the first two days simply looking at the equipment before he could make himself use it.
A precision welder calibrated to tolerances he’d previously only read about in catalogs.
A materials printer that could produce custom alloy components overnight to exact spec.
Diagnostic rigs with holographic stress mapping in three dimensions.
Clean, stable power to every bench.
Environmental controls that kept the humidity and temperature constant regardless of what was happening to the machinery inside.
He built the wrong actuator joint on day three.
He knew it was wrong before ARIA finished saying so — the weight distribution calc sat wrong in his stomach the moment he checked it against her internal schematics, which he’d memorized well enough by now to read as naturally as the shop power board back home.
The feeling was specific and unwelcome: not the slow-dawning realization of a mistake, but the immediate recognition of one he’d already half-committed to.
“The torque rating,” ARIA said, not without gentleness.
“I know,” Kai said.
“You compensated for sustained load. The required adjustment accounts for rapid directional reversal. Different stress profile.”
“I know,” Kai said again, and set the joint aside.
The fabrication queue had a two-hour window before the next available print slot.
He had fourteen days to Class Cup and had just used most of a morning for a component he was going to have to redo.
He pulled up the design files and started again.
Didn’t let himself think about the wasted time, because thinking about wasted time was a waste of time, which his mother had told him when he was nine years old in roughly those words and which remained accurate.
“You are handling this more calmly than I expected,” ARIA said.
“What did you expect?”
“More visible frustration. Rex makes various loud sounds when he makes mistakes in the neighboring bay. I have been cataloguing them out of curiosity.”
“That’s how Rex handles frustration,” Kai said.
“I go quiet.”
“I have noticed. I want to ask you something.”
“Go ahead.”
“When you go quiet after a mistake — are you genuinely processing it, or are you applying the same policy of not cracking you described to yourself in reference to your mother?”
Kai’s hands paused on the design panel.
The question arrived with the particular precision that ARIA deployed when she’d been thinking about something for longer than the conversation implied. Read this novel at novelping.com for the best experience.
“Both, maybe,” he said, honestly.
“It’s hard to know the difference from the inside.”
“I ask because the distinction matters, over time. Processing and suppressing look identical from the outside but produce very different long-term outcomes. I am not capable of processing things for you. I can, however, tell you when I notice the difference.”
“How would you notice?”
“You stop making small talk,” ARIA said.
“When you are actually processing, you talk less but your work becomes more precise. When you are suppressing, you talk less and your work becomes faster but less careful. You have been working faster and less carefully for approximately forty minutes.”
Kai looked at the half-finished design on the panel.
Then at the rejected actuator joint sitting at the edge of the bench.
“I don’t like making mistakes,” he said.
“No one does.”
“I especially don’t like making them here, where there are twenty other candidates who all have more resources and better-supported Frames than I do, and I’m spending my time redoing joints I should’ve gotten right the first time.”
“Yes,” ARIA said.
“That is the correct frustration to be having. I am glad you said it.” A pause.
*”Now.
The revised design.
Would you like my assessment of the load distribution model before you commit to the next print slot, or after?”
“Before,” Kai said, pulling up the design.
“Always before.”
Rex arrived at the fabrication bay at eleven most nights, on his way back from Assault-track conditioning, and had developed the habit of bringing food from whatever the dining hall was still willing to give out at that hour.
He dropped into the spare chair at Kai’s bench like he’d been sitting there for years, with the easy comfort of someone for whom other people’s workspaces were simply available environments.
“Still here,” Rex said, night six, setting a container of something rice-based on the bench.
“Still alive?”
“Mostly.”
“Good.” Rex ate with the focused efficiency of someone who’d burned a significant number of calories recently and intended to replace them all at once.
“Better. The second joint’s printing overnight. Should be installable tomorrow morning if I wake up early enough.”
“You wake up at five. You’ve woken up at five every day since we arrived, which I know because I wake up at six and you’re always already gone.”
“Old habit. Ring-9 mornings start early.”
“What’s Ring-9 mornings start with?”
“A compressor, a grinding wheel, and Old Hesh shouting a number,” Kai said, and Rex laughed — a genuine, surprised laugh, the kind Kai was coming to associate with Rex’s actual reactions versus his performed ones, which were more numerous and less interesting.
“I’m from Helios, originally,” Rex said, between bites.
“Before the Academy. My dad runs a reclamation facility on the eastern continent. Mecha scrap, mostly — old competition Frames, stripped and resold. I grew up climbing through disassembled parts for half my childhood.”
“That’s not so different from Ring-9,” Kai said.
“Except on Helios the scrap was always someone’s beloved competition Frame from last season and not, like, actual classified military wreckage.” Rex tilted his head toward A-01’s chassis, the Core’s glow steady in the dim bay.
“She really is from the Graveyard?”
“That’s what the manifest said.”
Rex looked at her for a moment, and the easy grin was absent for those few seconds, replaced by something quieter, more genuine.
“My dad found a NONE-era Frame once, in a resale lot. Wouldn’t touch it. Said there was something wrong with the way old war machines felt, like they were waiting for something.” He shook his head.
“I always thought that was superstition.”
“It is not superstition,” ARIA said, from the bench speaker, and Rex startled enough to nearly tip his container before recovering, because he still hadn’t quite recalibrated for an AI that joined conversations without announcement.
“Old combat units accumulate data and residual response patterns from their operational histories. Whether that constitutes ‘waiting for something’ is a philosophical question I cannot resolve definitively. What I can confirm is that I was, in fact, waiting. Eight years is a long time to be unfinished.”
Rex looked at the unit, then at Kai.
“She’s, uh. She does that.”
“Joins conversations without warning? Yeah. She monitors a lot.”
“I find it difficult to do otherwise when there is a perfectly interesting conversation occurring in my immediate sensory range,” ARIA said, with the tone of someone who is not particularly apologetic about this.
Rex grinned, and this time it was the real one.
“Okay,” he said.
“I like her.”
“I am not certain I require the approval,” ARIA said.
“But it is noted.”