Paying the Price (Book 5 of The Empire of Bones Saga) Read Free Page A

he only had normal human strength. Well, maybe a little less. He was only seventeen and a bit on the scrawny side.
    His latest creation sat on the table in front of him, looking like the prop from an old play. He’d taken some artistic license with it, admittedly. That old pre-Empire vid Kelsey had insisted he watch had influenced both his stylistic choices and some of the programming he’d designed for it.
    As a weapon, it looked…short. But, that was kind of the point. Thor’s hammer was a unique sort of thing.
    After she’d raved about the rather primitive special effects and acting in the vid, he’d sat bolt upright that night with the idea fully formed in his head. It was straightforward engineering using the newly discovered grav technology from the mobile weapon systems the AI had been using.
    Since they had both power generation and grav capability all wrapped in one package, the real challenge had been making a shell that could protect the controls and designing the programming to make it work.
    That had taken four months of cutting his sleep cycle short. An hour or two stolen between working like a dog to get the new ships up and running. He couldn’t complain, though. Everyone had put in the same amount of hard work and it was about to pay off in a big way.
    Captain Black had come into this project late. While Carl could design the parts, he wanted someone with more experience in building a robust weapon to do the final construction.
    The staff here had really come through. He’d never have thought of some of the things they included as a matter of course. And some of the design changes they suggested were brilliant. They had access to the highest technology of the Old Empire and they’d been working with it their entire lives. He had a lot of work to do just to get into their league.
    They’d created a custom shell for the hammer that was both a stunning replica of the weapon in the vid and virtually indestructible.
    The Old Empire had been working with some very cutting edge hull metals using partially collapsed matter. While nowhere in the same neighborhood as something like neutronium, it still weighed a wickedly large amount. Without the built in grav generator, he’d never be able to pick it up.
    And with the grav generator working to keep it somewhere, not even a Marine Raider could move it if the wielder didn’t want them to. That also fit with the myth behind the vid.
    That left the control functions. A normal set of Fleet implants could only work within fifteen meters. That’s why the Old Empire used headsets to amplify them.
    That was a surmountable problem. One that he was able to rectify by learning how the headsets worked and building an additional transmitter that they could add to an existing set of implants. Since it was going to go inside a person, he’d spent a lot of time working the bugs out. It had to be perfect.
    Then Captain Black’s people had gone over every aspect of it and suggested a number of modifications. That only proved to him that he still needed a lot of polish, even though they were uniformly complimentary of his work, calling it ground breaking.
    Once he was done with this project, he’d submit the long-range communicator to Admiral Mertz. He’d already worked up a modification to add it to the basic implant set for future recipients. Those would give someone the range of a headset. They could even give it to people that already had implants with an outpatient procedure.
    Still, that wasn’t enough range to control the hammer, so he’d created one with even more range for Princess Kelsey. Rather than present her with an untested device, he’d had Doctor Stone implant it inside himself. It was too large for the cranium, so it went in his torso behind his lungs.
    He figured it wouldn’t interfere with anything there and Doctor Stone agreed.
    The matching equipment in the hammer linked and communicated with the wielder via a channel so heavily encrypted that he