A wise man once said necessity was the mother of invention.

  He wasn’t wrong. But there was a second element that was almost as important: limitation.

  1.23781 metric tons. That was my absolute maximum weight. Any heavier, and it wouldn’t fit in my inventory, making it useless as a dungeon-delving weapon. My focus this Phase was going to be on cracking Integration itself, but I couldn’t set aside my role as one of Museumtown’s four strongest delvers—and truthfully, I didn’t want to.

  So, the weight restriction.

  It was a limitation I could work with. Essentially, it meant that the Chariot—or whatever I was going to call this thing when I finished it—was going to fit somewhere on a triangle between speed, armor, and firepower. I wouldn’t be able to armor everywhere, and it wouldn’t be as fast as a Runner or the Explorer. And, most likely, I’d have to abandon the heavy-duty hammer from the first Chariot. The weapon alone had weighed so much that I’d nearly maxed out my inventory when I’d put the old mecha suit away. This one would weigh more, even as I streamlined it. So, the hammer was probably out.

  After I finished the pneumatic-and-bearing joint system for the ankles, toes, knees, and hips, I set that aside. It was non-negotiable; the only thing I could do with it was improve its stability and speed a little, but what I had was the lightest I’d get.

  Then I made a list.

  Speed: Twenty to twenty-five miles per hour. It’d be nice if I could get going faster for short bursts, but that wasn’t necessary.

  Armor: At a bare minimum, hammered steel plating around the one-person cabin and hip, knee, shoulder, and elbow joints.

  Firepower: The rail-gun had to stay. I wanted a second shoulder-mounted weapon—a grenade launcher system, maybe. And I needed something for melee, but it had to be lighter than the hammer.

  Weight target: 1.0 metric tons. Height: eight feet six inches. Width: six feet. Tolerance: minimal on weight and width, six inches on height. Shorter would, ironically, be better.

  Once that existed, I had design constraints and goals, and I got to work.

  Much like when I’d built the Explorer, technicals, Runner, and prototype Chariot, I started with the drive system. This time, though, it was pretty simple to loop the wire and conduit around the skeletal lower limbs; I already knew roughly how to power the pneumatics and actuators that’d move everything. The Principles of Scale and Fluidity helped out with that, and before long, I had seven separate functions that interacted with each other: the foot structure, knees, and hip bend on either side, and the hips’ combined swivel.

  I left it there. It was functional, but from here on, every pound of weight I added and every weapon, limb, or slab of armor would screw up the entire system. There was no reason to go for perfection early.

  And I had a different problem I needed to tackle before I could add any of that.

  The Chariot’s controls had, quite honestly, been some of my worst work since I’d gotten my class. I could do better. I had to do better.

  I couldn’t figure out how to do better for a while, though. I wanted a pair of joysticks or a PlayStation controller. But I needed the Voltsmith’s Grasp engaged to provide instant power to different systems. Even with the levels I’d gained, I wouldn’t have anywhere near enough to run the machine I was designing without the forty-five Charge tied up in the gauntlet.

  With the prototype Chariot, I’d plugged the entire gauntlet into different sockets attached to conduits or wires and used that to move Charge through the mecha. It was clunky and awkward, and it had only worked because the Chariot was, for all its complexity, a bunch of simple machines doing limited tasks. This was going to be on par with the Voltsmith’s Grasp’s first upgrade—a masterwork that proved I was a serious Voltsmith.

  While I pondered the Voltsmith’s Grasp and how Charge would move through my newest creation, I tinkered with the wire-and-conduit system for the arms and body, and for the basic frame around the one-seat cockpit. It’d be tight—really tight. Every inch of space inside needed to be useful, because every inch of space inside needed to be armored.

  The Bio-Electric Scanner came out of my inventory at this point.

  I needed it. It’d become part of the mech if I had the power; I’d build it into the cockpit right above the viewport, like a video game radar.

  Then I yawned. I’d been working for almost two hours, and I was starting to get fried. A change of objective was necessary—something simple.

  The rail gun from the original Chariot sat against the wall. I’d disconnected it from the beat-up mecha, and I dragged it to Lab’s center and started tinkering with it. “Field-built or not, this thing was pretty solid,” I said after a minute. Then I tore it apart.

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  All three pipes stayed, but I welded tiny spacers between them. The Mana Coils had interfered slightly with the other barrels—not enough to prevent them from firing, but enough to cause inefficiency. Spreading them out a little should solve that at the price of two or three pounds of extra weight. I also spread the Mana Coils more, using clamps I hadn’t had in the field to pin them in place while I welded them down. That’d give more pop to the weapon itself.

  Then I got clever.

  One of the biggest places I could improve the rail gun was its loading system. And the Fabrication Engine’s drones were the solution there. For the cost of a couple of Charge, I could build a pair of drones programmed to load both the rail gun’s barrels and the grenade launcher. It’d operate similarly to the Runner, using unused power to keep the drones running, but I’d set their priorities higher than the last twenty percent or so of the mobility system and see how that worked. Even better, they wouldn’t need to move, so I’d only need to power the loading function, not wheels or treads.

  One weapon, mobility, and the start of the cockpit—my new mecha design was coming along nicely.

  Back in Museumtown, Jessica was redlining.

  It was bad enough having Calvin second-guessing every decision she tried to make about Phase Three, but having Bobby god-damn Richards here? That was too much.

  She sat on the stairs next to the former location of the Waypoint Beacon. Calvin sat a safe ten feet or so away, stroking his beard periodically and keeping his mouth mostly shut. And Bobby kept pacing behind them, strolling in a way that looked both smooth as a snake and like a dinosaur stalking prey.

  Objective: Occupy Viable Territory (0/1)

  Time Limit: Three Weeks

  It wasn’t much time.

  And it was vague.

  All three of them agreed on one thing: the intended result of Phase Three was the consolidation of empires.

  What they disagreed on were the mechanisms by which Museumtown’s empire would be formed. And, surprisingly, Calvin was the peacemonger of the three.

  “I’m telling you, we reach out to the Rat’s Nest and the West Side folks, get them on our side, and we’ve got a power base big enough to push into the Illinois heartland. We don’t come with weapons. We come with an offer—join us, and we’ll get you through Integration. Those piddly farm towns out there ain’t gonna survive this phase, and they know it. We offer them that deal, they’ll join up.”

  “No, they won’t,” Bobby said. He sighed and adjusted his suit’s collar. “You can say it as much as you want, but Bobby Richards has been out there. Those people don’t want an overlord, and they’re already getting those offers. Where do you think the Fireborn Crusade was aiming before all this? Because I’ll tell you one thing—it wasn’t toward Indianapolis.”

  “So, you propose we go to war, then?” Jessica asked.

  “Absolutely. Those towns out there don’t want an overlord. Doesn’t mean they don’t need one, though. They need someone to drag them through Phase Three. That someone is Museumtown—and if it’s not, it’s the Garden.”

  Jessica Silvers tried not to groan. She’d been doing a lot of that as they talked in circles over the last hour.

  “Sorta sounds like you’re pitting Museumtown and the Garden against each other,” Calvin said.

  “No, I’m not. The entire Phase is, Calvin. I’m an honest man. Here are my honest thoughts. Museumtown and the Garden are equally matched. They’re tied as the second most powerful factions on the south and west coasts of Lake Michigan. You don’t want to be third.”

  “And who’s the most powerful?” Jessica asked, trying not to guess. It was almost certainly—

  “The Crusade.”

  This time, Jessica didn’t bother trying to hide her groan.

  “I’m going there next,” Bobby said. “I’m going to try to convince them to aim south and east instead of north and west. It’d help if you had a clear plan so I could try negotiating a border between your future kingdoms.”

  “Are you familiar with the Berlin Conference?” Jessica asked.

  “I can’t say that I am, no,” Bobby said.

  Jessica looked at Calvin, who shook his head. “Nope.

  “In the late 1800s, the great powers of Europe got together in Berlin, with a globe, and they drew lines all over Africa and the Middle East. Those lines became the borders between colonies—and later, the borders between countries. Those lines also took into account nothing about the people living there. Villages got cut in half, language groups and cultures that had been at war with each other for generations on and off were suddenly part of the same governmental bodies, and it turned into a disaster that the region is still recovering from—or was before the apocalypse. I don’t want to draw lines on a map here, Bobby.”

  “Bad news for you.”

  Jessica looked up—but not at Bobby. The white-suited man had smartly kept his mouth shut. No. The voice was Calvin’s.

  And he didn’t shut up. “We’re gonna have to draw those lines. If we don’t, someone else will. Maybe it’ll be Gerry and the folks from Green Bay. Maybe it’ll be whoever grabbed the reins in the Fireborn Crusade’s territory. Or, maybe it’ll be someone worse.

  “I think Hal’s going to make all of this pointless, Jessica, but until he does, we can’t afford not to play along. I saw what happened in Milwaukee when things fell apart. Blue-beaming isn’t a joke. We can’t let that be us.”

  Jessica stiffened. Then she nodded. “I agree. And I propose we surrender to the Garden.”

  “Absolutely not,” Calvin said.

  Bobby shook his head slowly. “Why?”

  “Because—“

  “I said absolutely not!”

  “Because I don’t want to be party to the aftermath of colonization. It’d be better to form an alliance and figure out how to convince people to join us as a federation—“

  “A committee’s the only thing with more than one head and no brain,” Bobby chuckled. “Listen, I don’t care which decision you two make. Personally, if I were you, I’d be putting that Hal Riley to work building weapons and using them to expand your borders outward. Get those people under you, then make their lives better afterward.”

  “18th-century liberalism,” Jessica muttered under her breath.

  “Sure. Whatever you want to call it. I’ve been up front with you. I’m trying to drag as many people through this as I can, and that means doing whatever I have to. If you won’t do it, your neighbors probably will, and even if Museumtown makes it to Phase Four, you’ll be behind and outgunned at whatever the Consortium cooks up next.” Bobby cracked his neck and started walking down the stairs. “I’m not playing for the moral high ground. I’m playing to survive.”

  “Where are you going?” Calvin asked.

  “Gary, Indiana. I’ve got a date with a bunch of hot fire mages!” Bobby pushed the fort’s door open, and then he was gone.”

  “We should stop him,” Jessica said.

  Calvin grinned ruefully and shrugged. “How? He outguns everyone in Museumtown right now. No, we should wait for Hal, and then the three of us should decide whether to tame the land by force, by friendship, or by following someone else.”