Chapter 118: Hitting Machine

Lina, it turned out, was fast. She didn’t move fast much, at least judging by what Sean had seen of her so far, but now that she had somewhere to be that she herself found interesting, she was off like a bolt, not running but still covering so much ground so quickly with her tiny legs that Sean almost had to break into a trot to keep up.

“She’s a class related to shipyards, specifically. A ground class. She’s unbelievably valuable to our people.” Itto huffed along, struggling to keep up himself. “If she’s engaged in shipyard business, the class makes her mobile enough to get more work done. She’s always been like this.”

Their destination ended up not being on Lina’s property at all, but instead a large warehouse relatively close by. Lina fumbled with the door and a small keycard for a few moments before the door clicked open, revealing a dark building interior beyond the threshold.

“Mom, what is this?” Itto said.

“Shh, son. Watch.”

Lina fiddled with something on the wall, and the lights in the building clicked on. Looming in the center of the warehouse was a ship. It wasn’t much larger than Itto’s, but it was a bit bigger, something that was hardly noticeable given that the overall design was sleeker. Sean knew jack shit about spaceships, but anyone could see that this ship was something special. It looked, somehow, heavier, more custom, and just better put together in ways he could quantify.

It seems expensive.

Itto didn’t say anything. He just stood there, looking. Seconds wore on while Sean and Lina waited for him to snap out of it, before Lina finally slammed her cane down on his toes to wake him up.

“Dammit, Mom!”

“You were stuck. It was like when you were a child. You used to stare at this for hours.”

“You told me you sold it.”

“Well, I didn’t. It was your father’s, after all. I’ve kept it up to date. It’s as fast as it ever was.” She looked at Itto, significantly. “And its identifying marks have all been changed. As far as a scan is concerned, this is a completely clean ship.”

“Mom.” Itto glared at Lina, who looked unimpressed by his intimidation.

“What?”

“You can’t give me this.”

“Give? Who said give?” She said. “If I had anything to say about it, I’d keep it. Your father left it to you, Itto. He just asked me to keep it until you had a bit of experience under your belt. I wasn’t going to give it to you while you were still a child.”

“I’m forty!”

“And you’ve finally become a man.” Lina looked at Sean, eyes twinkling. “He’s a late bloomer.”

“I can’t believe it still exists.” Itto said, staring up at it. “Sean, if we had this when we were being chased, they couldn’t have caught us. Dad was a smuggler, too. A good one. He spent his whole career juicing this thing up. It’s legendary.”

“Is that going to be a problem? That it’s known?”

Lina shook her head. “It’s legendary among smugglers. And understood to be related to my late husband. Boring people won’t recognize it, and anyone who does won’t make the connection.”

Sean suddenly felt bad for anyone who would have tried to lure Lina away from her husband while he was away, considering she apparently considered anyone who wasn’t a smugger to be inherently dull.

“I still can’t take this.” Itto said, shaking his head. “What if it’s destroyed? What if I have to ditch it?”

Lina shrugged. “What if your father had? Ships are meant to be used, Itto. It’s not a museum piece. It’s a tool.”

“But I…”

Itto was interrupted as Lina swung her cane at his head, hitting him and sending him sprawling.

“Don’t argue with me, dear. At least not in a shipyard.”

After Itto came to and relented to his mother’s wishes, Lina explained that she needed a day or so to move his belongings over, scanning as she did them to make sure that the genius on the enemy ship hadn’t been good enough to mark them, and to fuel up the ship and give it a once over.

Sean refused LIna’s offer of a place to sleep while they waited, and was surprised when Itto did the same. He was more shocked, however, on specifically how he did it.

“I’m staying with Sean.” Itto had said. “We worked it out before. We need to plan something. You understand.”

Surprisingly, she did. Whether it was that she believed the lie and the necessity of planning or understood that he was lying or why, she let it go.

“What was that about?” Sean asked. “You don’t want to see your mom?”

“I’ll see her plenty, before we leave. But if I stay there, she’s going to hit me with that cane every time I say something she thinks is stupid. And she thinks a lot of things are stupid.”

“Do you really want to stay with me?”

“I do. And before you get going, I know you have some kind of hideyhole. There’s no way you could have hidden as long as you did with the kind of heat you had on you without something special. The only question is whether it’s the kind of thing you can let someone else into.”

Sean thought about it for a moment. On the one hand, he’d have to let Itto in on the secret of his base, which he was reluctant to do for anyone. On the other hand, laying even lower would be better, and he assumed even Itto wasn’t immune to getting caught. If that happened, he’d be out of luck as far as easy-to-get rides off this rock were concerned.

And Itto didn’t sell me out when he could have. That has to count for something. Sean had a hard time feeling safe with anyone anymore, no matter what the circumstances were. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t approach things academically. If Itto was going to betray him, he probably would have before he angered an entire empire, regardless of how paranoid Sean felt at any given moment.

“Yup,” Sean said, abandoning the idea of hiding the base from Itto. “I have a place we can go.”

If there was one thing Sean liked about this planet, it was how normal it appeared to be armed here. Wearing his armor got him no glances at all. Many people didn’t wear it, especially people who were working jobs related to the ship port or commerce. Almost everyone disembarking ships seemed to, as did a good amount of the people who were just wandering around.

Having Itto at his back made him feel that much more secure, not so much because Itto was that combat-effective, but because he knew the place. If there was trouble, Sean had a feeling Itto would see it coming.

“So was your mom always here?” Sean asked. “While your dad was out working, I mean.”

They were picking their way slowly back toward’s Sean’s base, with Itto pointing out various interesting bits of the city as they passed. He might be a hometown boy here, or he might not, but he certainly knew the area.

“Not always. The city has ups and downs. Every now and again an empire or a powerful family will get their feelings hurt and will try to clear it out. Mom’s too smart to get caught up in that kind of trouble, so we’d clear out when that happened. I spent a couple years here and there, other places we could do business.”

“Did you ever go out with your dad?” Sean said. “Smuggling, I mean.”

“Never. He said he could only focus on one cargo at a time.” Itto said. “Wanted to keep me safe, I think. It’s a shame. I could have learned a lot.”

Coming back at the docks at a different angle meant seeing different things. Mostly, the people doing business near the docks did so from stands, selling food or running games for people eager to get into the action after weeks or months on a ship. Most of the games were unfamiliar to Sean, but he thought he recognized one.

“Is that a hitting machine?” Sean said. “The kind you punch?”

“Punch, hit with a weapon, whatever you like. They put up a prize if you do well enough.” Itto said. “Don’t waste your money, though. It’s a scam.”

“How so?”

“See the springs? Those are just normal springs. Special metal, but not especially enchanted. Makes it look legitimate, so people play. But inside, there’s a strut that’s enchanted as hell, and trims off force based on a percentage-per-second sort of formula. There’s a little variance person to person, but unless you can figure out how to make your strikes do more damage per second than they can do in a second, you aren’t winning anything. Doesn’t matter how strong you are.”

“Hmm.” Sean said. “Give me a second.”

He walked up to the stand and took a look. Itto wasn’t wrong about the set-up. How much you won was determined by how far you could push in the striking surface, and he could just make out the trick strut Itto had mentioned inside of the spring.

“How much to play?” Sean asked.

“5 credits.”

That didn’t mean a lot. Credits varied place to place, Sean had learned. There wasn’t much in the way of consistency with local currencies, from what he had picked up.

“And what can I win?”

“An armor enhancement token.”

Regardless of what that was, Sean was pretty sure it wouldn’t help him. From what the system had said the last time he had upgraded his armor with Brett, it was about as good as it could be. But he guessed it was worth a pretty good amount of money, and having a bit in terms of extra supplies stocked in his base wouldn’t hurt once he got to Cedarhelm’s world.

“Would you take barter?” Sean said, pulling one of his suicide slurry potions out of his bag. “I have this.”

The man picked the potion out of Sean’s hand and examined it, Sean suspected with an actual skill. His eyebrows arced slightly as he looked at it.

“A last ditch potion. Very nice.” The man said. “Sure. That’s fine. Any strike is fine. No projectiles. Nothing with a splash effect.”

Sean handed over the potion, then reached down to his pouch to withdraw his new weapon. He hefted the mace in his hand, satisfied with how it had turned out but still awed by the weight of it. Setting himself, he slowly coated it with time energy. He had no idea what it would do, but if his understanding of this game was right, almost any time effect that messed with normal physics would help him here.

Stepping forward with his lead leg, he put everything he had into swinging the mace, catching the machine’s strike plate solidly with a satisfyingly heavy thunk.

“And here we go.” Itto said, as the spring compressed. “Should have listened to me, Sean.”

The strike plate kept going and going, and when Itto gasped as it passed a certain point Sean knew that his long shot had worked, at least to some extent. Whether it would be enough for a win wasn’t clear, but that was settled as the plate moved farther and farther in, eventually settling exactly inside the edge of the marked jackpot zone.

“How’s that?” Sean said, holding up his hand for a high five. “Pretty good, right?”

His celebration was cut short by two things, the first being that Itto very clearly did not know what a high five was, and wasn’t at a height to do it even if he had been. The second was a vice-like hand closing around his wrist, wheeling him back around to face the owner of the stand.

“What the hell was that?” The man, said, his face twisted with anger. “Are you trying to cheat me?”