Don't Look at Me, I'm Forging - Unscheduled Calibration
A dry, copper taste clung to the b1 Unscheduled
A dry, copper taste clung to the back of
Lind’s tongue, the universal signature of a cooling coil that had blown its seal sometime around 03:00.Her neck gave an alarming pop as she lifted her head off the workbench.
Scraps of brass filings, three burnt micro-fuses, and a half-eaten protein bar were stuck to her left cheek.
She peeled the synth-foil wrapper off her skin with a wince, squinting through the dim blue ambient light of
Terminal 4’s public workshop bays.Then her wrist-comm buzzed.Not a gentle chime.
A high-priority, orange-alert pulse that rattled against the steel surface where her arm had been resting.Cerys.
Tell me you’re in the intake queue.
Aegis shuttle doors seal in forty minutes, and if your father hears you missed registration because of a scrap-heap generator, he’ll have you transferred to the
Quartermaster corps by noon.
Kae stared at the holo-text for a full six seconds while her sleep-addled brain worked through the math.Forty minutes.It took thirty-five just to clear the orbital processing customs at
Terminal 4.”Damn it,” she muttered, her voice raspy from inhaled solder fumes. “Damn it all to hell.”She scrambled off the stool, her knees knocking into an uncalibrated torque wrench that went clattering across the deck plating.
She didn’t bother picking it up.
Why did it have to be an actual, physical academy?
Years of perfectly adequate remote netmodules, and now the
Commonwealth
Command suddenly insisted that every registered psionic engineer needed “field-adjacent tactical integration.” Translation: putting six hundred eighteen-year-olds in a pressurized tube on
Aegis-IV and forcing them to look each other in the eye.Just thinking about the small talk made her stomach coil into a hard, cold knot.People.
Rows of them.
Asking where her family’s forge was located, asking why her hands were stained with motor oil, asking why a girl with a mid-tier noble surname looked like she’d spent the last decade living under a grease trap.She needed an armor.
Not the powered titanium kind—the social kind.Kae lurched toward the tiny refresher unit in the corner of the rental bay.
She splashed cold, recycled water over her face, ignoring the dark smudges of carbon grease under her lower lip.
She reached into her canvas toolbag and pulled out her secret weapon: an old pair of thick, heavy-rimmed magnification specs she’d snagged from a junk barge two years ago.
The lenses were zero-diopter glass, completely useless for vision, but the black frames were large enough to obscure half her features.She jammed them onto the bridge of her nose, pulled her dark, straight bangs down until they brushed the tops of the plastic rims, and yanked an oversized, faded olive work smock over her shoulders.
The hem hit her mid-thigh, swallowing her narrow frame entirely.She looked small.
Unremarkable.
Like a third-shift apprentice who’d gotten lost on her way to the boiler rooms.”Perfect,” she grunted at her reflection. “Nobody talks to the temp worker.”The
Terminal 4 smelled of ozone, fresh floor wax, and the quiet, metallic stench of collective teenage panic.Hundreds of applicants lined the transit corridors, crisp in tailor-fitted dress tunics bearing mid-rim house crests or stiff military-prep uniforms.
They stood straight, palms damp, whispering nervously about psionic bandwidth quotas and combat-grade resonance tests.Kae slouched near the back of
Line 3, her hands jammed deep into the pockets of her oversized smock.
Through the thick lenses of her fake glasses, she tracked the intake pace.
Painfully slow.Up at the registration dais, senior proctors in dark blue
Astraea fatigue coats were handing out intake slates.
One of them—a fifth-year cadet with a sleek silver engineer’s pin pinned to her collar—was plowing through applicants with the brisk efficiency of a butcher quartering cattle.
Her nametag read
Dubois.”Next!” Helene
Dubois called out, her voice amplified by the terminal’s
PA system. “Line 3, step forward.
ID and primary track.”A tall boy in a pristine white jacket stepped up, swelling his chest. “Julian
Vance off-system branch.
Potential baseline previously recorded at…””I don’t care what your uncle told you over dinner,
Vance,” Helene interrupted, her eyes never leaving her data pad. “Step into
B for re-calibration.
If you blow the sensors, we adjust down.
Next!” The boy flushed crimson and scuttled sideways.Kae shuffled forward, keeping her chin tucked down.
She was third from the front now.
She checked her wrist-comm under her sleeve. 07:52.
Five minutes until the shuttle dock sealed.
If she didn’t clear this gate, her mother’s next message wouldn’t be text; it would be a direct holo-link with
Lind sitting in the background looking deeply disappointed.”Next!”Kae stepped into the small, recessed alcove before the proctor’s desk.Helene didn’t look up at first.
Her fingers flicked across the terminal interface, logging data with practiced ease. “Name and origin terminal.” “Cerys
Lind,” Kae said.
She deliberately pitched her voice low, flat, and entirely uninteresting. “Independent applicant.
Mid-Rim.”Helene’s fingers paused over the slate.
She raised her head, her sharp hazel eyes scanning
Kae from her scuffed boots to the absurdly large glasses sitting lopsided on her nose.
A faint, unreadable twitch crossed the senior’s lips.”Lind?” Helene repeated softly. “Any relation to the
Division’s command staff?””Distant,” Kae lied without blinking. “Family doesn’t keep in touch much.
I’m registered for the
Engineering track.””Right.” Helene gestured toward the glass-and-steel cylinder set into the bulkhead behind her. “Standard psionic potential check first.
We re-baseline everyone today—static ambient tests from five years old don’t mean a thing once your neural pathways start cooking under real stress.
Step in, hands on the copper conduits, release a pulse when the chime sounds.” “Just a pulse?” Kae asked, hovering near the glass door.”Just a pulse.
Don’t try to flex for the cameras, little girl.
Most of you blow out your eyelids trying to hit
S-rank and end up spending your first semester in the infirmary.” Helene leaned back against her desk, tapping her stylus against her wrist. “Go on.
Shuttle leaves in four minutes.”Kae stepped inside the cylinder.
The pneumatic door slid shut with a soft hiss, muting the ambient roar of the crowded terminal.The air inside smelled faintly of scorched copper.
Two vertical brass rails were mounted at waist height.
Kae gripped them, her calloused fingers finding the worn grooves left by hundreds of nervous applicants before her.She just needed an
A-rank baseline.
A nice, quiet, middle-of-the-road reading that would let her slip into
Class 1 without drawing the eyes of any noble houses or ambitious squad leaders.
She didn’t want a crowd.
She wanted a workshop key, a subsidized furnace allowance, and enough peace to refine her bio-metallic alloys without someone asking her to join a committee.Just a trickle, she told herself, closing her eyes.
A light nudge.
Like turning on a faucet.A low chime hummed through the glass floor.Kae loosened the tight mental seal she kept over her psionic core—the dense, swirling knot of raw energy that had burned out three cheap diagnostic rigs back in her parents’ basement.
She tried to let just a thread of it leak down her arms into the copper grips.A small thread.The copper rails didn’t just warm up; they instantly turned searing hot.Inside the cylinder, the vertical indicator strips began to light up.C-Rank…
A-Rank…Kae pulled back immediately, severing the mental flow like snapping a thread.S-Rank…The light didn’t stop.
The surge of raw, dense psychic weight she’d accidentally dumped into the system was already traveling up the heavy conduit cables toward the baseline console.SS-Rank…Outside the glass,
Dubois stopped tapping her stylus.
Her eyes widened slightly as the indicator lights hit the top of the standard column—and then the overload breaker snapped with a loud, metallic
The secondary safety bar, calibrated strictly for triple-S potential outliers, flared a blinding, violent amethyst.The terminal console let out a shrill, protesting whine before the safety relays killed the circuit to prevent the glass from shattering.Inside the tube,
Kae stood frozen, her hands suspended an inch above the scorched brass rails.Shit, she thought, her stomach dropping into her boots.
The baseline meter was old.The pneumatic door hissed open.
Cold air rushed back in, carrying the distinct smell of fried circuitry.Kae swallowed hard.
She pulled her oversized smock tighter around her chest, shoved her giant glasses up her nose, and offered
Helene a tentative, entirely unconvincing nod.”I think…
I think the machine might need a calibration,” Kae muttered, her voice squeaking slightly. “It felt a little loose.”Helene
Dubois didn’t answer right away.
She slowly walked around her desk, her gaze fixed on the quiet girl in the baggy clothes.
She looked at the smoldering console, then back at
Kae’s messy bangs and oversized frames.The sharp, bored senior who had spent three hours processing mediocre nobles suddenly smiled—a slow, terrifyingly sharp expression that made
Kae want to crawl under the floorboards. “Potential baseline:
Current operational output:
SS,” Helene read off the lingering diagnostic
HUD, her tone dangerously sweet. “And a ‘loose machine,’ is it?” “I have a nervous twitch,” Kae offered lamely, backing up a half-step.”Right.
A nervous twitch that just maxed out the primary intake array.” Helene tapped her slate, marking a hard, golden tag next to
Lind’s profile. “Section
I decide to personally escort you there.” Kae didn’t wait for a second invitation.
She turned on her heel and scurried toward the inner corridor as fast as her legs could carry her.Behind her,
Helene picked up her comm-link, her eyes following the small, slouched figure slipping into the crowd.”Marcus?” Helene whispered into her earpiece, her smile widening. “Clear a spot in the
Class 1 practical evaluations.
We just found our dark horse—and she’s wearing clothes three sizes too big.”