Ceres Chaos [Exosuit Progression]

Over the next few hours, Zhang and Ceres detailed out the plan to melt the mawsie armour shell, getting into action straight away in the workshop.

As for the onlookers, many eventually returned to their jobs, while those who were fasting or children who had nothing to do watch on with fascination as Ceres worked hard under Zhang’s orders. Some of the children played around the workshop but were careful to avoid disturbing them.

Ceres felt slightly off being ordered around by Zhang – did he not win the bet and made Zhang the helper? Why was he the one being pushed around now?

“Don’t give me that angry look, boy. I got no HANDS! Of course, you’ll be doing everything until you make me a new pair of arms, preferably one that can withstand the heat for a bit. Until then, you’re my number one slave HAHAHAHAH!” Zhang laughed maniacally.

Having no other choice, Ceres got to work preparing the electric arc furnace for operation. He double checked the graphite electrodes and ensured there were no undetected holes or cracks in the furnace. Zhang couldn’t move around by himself, so Ceres had to regularly carry him around or sometimes even up a ladder to check the furnace or the metal 3D printer.

Zhang looked in awe as Ceres effectively lifted his wheelchair with a single hand while climbing up the rungs next to the furnace with his other hand, not even bothering to carry Zhang up from the wheelchair. “Boy, your body is extremely unusual. You should go for a medical checkup soon. How are you ever going to find a girl like this?”

While Ceres ignored the last shot, Ceres agreed that he should check his body more carefully later.

Whatever happened to him in that weird vat needed to be thoroughly inspected – he was still plagued with the monochrome vision that highlighted other lifeforms in different shades of colour.

He felt like his body did not truly belong to himself either. Yet it was not the time to worry about such issues – the town’s defence and prosthetics were more important. He had all the time in the world when travelling to Rockhold to make sense of it all.

Ceres decided to prioritize making Zhang’s prosthetic first before the instructor, as Zhang was critical to speeding up the process.

Checking the furnace one last time before firing it up, Ceres and Zhang both wore welding masks to prevent them from going blind. They ran a test with the graphite electrode while informing Xi at the geothermal power plant to supply power, ensuring that the electric arcs were generated as intended.

“Well, I hope that the mawsie armour’s melting point can be reached by the furnace, else we are in a whole another world of hurt. Considering they can survive high pressure lava, I’m a bit skeptical this furnace can melt it.” Zhang mentioned.

Regardless, Ceres began to load up a single corpse worth of mawise armour, dumping it into the furnace. The electric arc furnace’s lid slid into position, a low rumbling noise emitting from the furnace. At the outlet spout of the furnace, Ceres fashioned a simple graphite mould with a rectangular shape. He intended to see if the mawsie armour could be fashioned into ingots, making it easier to work with and store.

Ceres retreated with Zhang to the furnace’s control panel. Near the furnace, they had built low knee-height walls of graphite and other refactory material around the furnace in the event it cracked or spilled, ensuring the damage was contained.

“Okay Xi, beginning first test.” Ceres spoke into the radio on the wall. In front of the control panel, Ceres had stacked a makeshift barricade made from metal containers up to human height. There was a chance of explosion as well – the mawsie armour was a completely unknown composition after all.

[“Confirmed, stand by.”]

The town’s in-built lights around the cavern began to dim, as electricity was prepared to be allocated to the workshop alone to prevent overloading of the entire power grid.

As the electric arc furnace roared into life, loud sounds of thunderclaps due to the arcs between the graphite electrodes began to deafen the surrounding area. The townspeople were already warned prior to it, but it still disturbed the environment greatly. Ceres wondered whether if the process were to scale up, how badly would the noise affect the environment?

Time passed as the furnace shuddered, while the arcs from the electrodes continuously produced a consistent stream of loud thunderous claps. On the control panel, the temperature of the furnace had already far surpassed the temperature of lava.

Ceres began to lose hope that the mawsie’s armour could be melted as he stared intently at the outlet spout of the furnace, looking for the signs of any molten metal. This was his first time trying to melt a unknown metal.

“Boy, I can smell it. Tip the furnace into the mould, quick!” Zhang suddenly shouted from his wheelchair, the decades of expertise kicking in.

Ceres quickly tipped the furnace using the control panel, only to cry out with joy – the mawsie armour had melted!

The molten form flowed out slowly into the mould, forming a perfect rectangular blob of white puddle of sizzling metallic liquid. As the metal finally cooled, Ceres and Zhang went forward to inspect the now cobalt blue metal ingot.

“I see now, this is why the mawsie armour is so strong!” Zhang exclaimed out in excitement. “Look closely, can you see the tiny beads embedded in the blue metal?”

Ceres was previously mesmerized by the shade of blue, but upon closer inspection there were indeed tiny black crystals embedded all across the surface, slightly jutting out. He seemed to recall having seen them in the trashyard in Zone 17 before, but couldn’t recall it. “What are those?”

“That’s one of the exotic metals we mine, Sturore. It enhances the hardness of any metal it comes into contact with, having high applications in defensive uses. However, normal iron, aluminium, titanium and copper are unable to bond well with this exotic metal.” Zhang explained.

Ceres was shocked. He had experience scavenging exotics from the trash yard back in Zone 17, but the only one worth collecting he had found was Floa, an anti-gravity exotic. Sturore was one of the more well-known exotics of Athen, though it was not unique to the planet and relatively abundant. This was his first time seeing it for real in an ingot.

Most of the trash he had dealt with usually had all the exotics stripped out of them before it reached his hands. Only consumer goods would have wasteful people throwing away stuff like anti-grav clothes. Seeing as Sturore only had military applications, it made sense why Ceres almost never saw it in the trashyard.

“Then why do people buy it if it doesn’t merge with normal metal?” Ceres asked curiously. Many exosuit parts were composites of normal iron in some form or another in his experience, he had never seen it being applied in an exosuit on riots.

“I personally don’t know what our buyers actually use it with, but now that we found out this mawsie armour can integrate it perfectly, we can easily produce our own high-quality metal armour!” Zhang was not flustered, but instead his hope surged.

“Has no one in this town killed a mawsie before?”

“We have killed one or two before, but only on expeditions. And we always didn’t have the carrying capacity to haul the heavy corpses back that far of a distance. You think we have a portable electric arc furnace with us?”

Logistics was a persistent issue underground. With no proper wide-tunnels or roads, it was hard to transport stuff around already. Ceres recalled how he had to carry the grodaw container and trek on foot, while evading mawsies. He couldn’t imagine killing a mawsie corpse and carrying it that far either - his stamina was not unlimited.

While Ceres was thinking, Zhang was essentially shouting now as he inspected the metal ingot with inspiration.

“Think of all the new combat armour we can make! Our expeditions will no longer suffer terribly and have better defences than the Chosen. We can even make boots or leggings that can survive lava!” Zhang excitedly ranted, before Ceres grabbed him on the shoulder.

“Okay, calm down. Let’s finish this ingot up first before we consider our next move.”

Ceres got to work polishing the ingot and testing its yield stress and other material parameters. He noticed that even with his basic tools, it was extremely difficult to erode or even shave off a layer of the ingot, as though it was an impenetrable object. It took great effort to even slightly dent it with a basic steel drill.

“Working with this metal is going to be a pain if we’re making it manually,” Ceres sighed. Did he need to create an entire set of tools first out of mawsie armour manually before being able to make the prosthetics? He thought about using his previously improvised spear as a tool.

“What are you talking about? We have a metal 3D printer here! Just melt a new one and pour it in quick!” Zhang waved his stumps in exasperation. Ceres internally facepalmed, forgetting that he could easily pour the molten form into any shape he wanted. Even if he did not have the metal 3D printer, he could make graphite moulds in the shape of a knife, drill bit or saw and go from there.

“Let's show this off to the chief first,”Ceres decided, lifting the heavy metal ingot with one arm. One downside to the metal was that it was quite heavy, and Ceres still had to find a way to make it light enough to be usable as a prosthetic. He didn’t want half of the town to accidentally crush themselves with their own arms.

Pushing Zhang in his wheelchair along, he went up to the instructor’s office. As he entered the building, his eyes and Rebecca’s met. Seeing the ingot in his hand, Rebecca was slightly taken aback, no longer picking a fight with Ceres as she cursed, focusing back on her work. Ceres didn’t try to start a conversation, merely smiling to himself.

“Instructor, I have your ingot,” Ceres knocked on the door politely, but there was no response.

“Maybe the damn surface dweller finally died in his sleep. Good riddance. That’s what he gets for sending my daughter away,” Zhang chuckled.

“Instructor? Instructor I’m coming in!” Ceres feared it was true and opened the door forcefully.

Instead, all he saw was the instructor groggily waking up, apparently sleeping on the office desk with his drool still clinging to his face. His eyes sleepily scanned Ceres and Zhang’s face, finally recognizing them before hastily wiping away the drool.

“Look, if you didn’t have most of your limbs and was forced to sit here for hours on end, you would sleep too. Anyway, seems like you have some progress on the prosthetics.” The instructor tried to divert the topic quickly, motioning to Ceres to place the ingot on the table.

The office table creaked under the intense weight of the metal ingot, while the instructor was impressed as Ceres explained its capabilities and the exotic metal. “This could be a potential trading material. Why haven’t I heard about our metal production capabilities before? We could mass produce this metal ingots and sell them off for profit.”

Zhang erupted into fury: “This is exactly why I hate surface dwellers! All you think about is ‘how can I make money from this’ or “how can I profit from this’. My DAUGHTER is potentially dying in an expedition, yet the first thought to your mind is to squander it away to other undeserving degenerates! Why don’t WE try to make our own equipment and weapons first to SAVE ourselves, huh?!”

“Idiot, with the profit made we can use it to buy more lifesaving stuff like air filters, replacement electronics and so on. Maybe even boost our nutrient paste dispensers. Can our town survive solely on new weapons and armour? This metal doesn’t even augment anything regarding ranged weapons, so we can’t use it to hunt either. If you don’t sell this metal, chances are we’ll have to ration even more!” The instructor retorted.

“The main problem is that I’m not sure if we have a renewable source of this metal,” Ceres joined the conversation, raising an important point that cause both Zhang and the instructor to pause.

Nobody considered how to obtain this metal in the long term. It wasn’t everyday a hundred mawsie corpses were going to turn up on demand to be harvested, and Ceres wasn’t staying here permanently either. Who else in the town could kill that many?

“If it’s a limited supply, then we should hoard it ourselves and augment our defences and weapons with the best we can! Build better town defences and barricades!” Zhang stated his stance clearly.

“Even if you had this metal in your combat armour, a human can’t overpower a mawsie one on one! Right now, all our facilities are degrading due to the lack of replacement parts, but all of our trading budget is almost on food, and we’re still running out on food resources. If we want to survive, we need to focus on restoring our facilities first! I suggest we sell half of the current supply of mawsie armour on the next trade convoy.” The instructor tried to compromise, but Zhang still shook his head.

“Selling half of our current supply is like telling our children to die on an expedition!”

“Not selling half means everyone dies a slow gradual death!”

Ceres pondered as Zhang and the instructor argued. He had no doubt that the current high population of mawsies is unnatural and had no clue on how long it would last. Would the town eventually kill off every mawsie? If so, selling off half of the known supply would cripple the town’s own armoury and equipment.

Yet, the town was already gradually failing. Its facilities were in need of maintenance, and with the current food shortage, they did not have enough trade value to acquire all the things they needed, having to settle for less.

Ceres understood why the instructor was so inclined towards selling off the metal. Building a set of prosthetics for everyone did not matter if the town’s facilities like the geothermal power plant collapsed due to lack of replacement parts. It was more important to solve the life-threatening issues first.

But then again, the mawsie horde is also a life-threatening issue. Ceres already saw first-hand how inadequate the town’s defences were against the large number of mawsies, and he could not assume that there would not be more. And there was also the issue of the Chosen, which Ceres kept hearing about.

The underground cavern system was massive, spanning the entire planet, so Ceres naturally didn’t fall into the trap of thinking there could only be this many mawsies.

What if there were more than a thousand mawsies? Could the town gate and barrier hold it back? Selling off half of the new metal’s supply would also limit the amount of potential firepower that the humans had.

Even if they obtained new exosuit processors, nerval spines and electronics, only a few guards would be able to wear the exosuits into battle due to the lack of new metal. Their melee weapons would also be largely ineffective as they are now. Assuming the expedition of 75 returned to town, Ceres was sure that half the metal supply was insufficient to outfit all 75 of them with exosuits and spears.

Suddenly, the solution came to him in a flash. If the whole problem stems from the root cause of a limited supply, why not ensure the supply is consistent?

He looked up to see Zhang and the instructor about to come to blows, except they were both disabled. Zhang had somehow climbed up onto the table ready to pummel the instructor with what’s left of his arm stumps, while the instructor desperately tried to force Zhang’s face away with his remaining arm.

Ceres had half a mind to see who won: a paranoid old guy with no arms, or an ‘criminal’ instructor with nothing but his remaining arm.

“There’s no need to argue!” Ceres finally came to his senses and grabbed Zhang back and held him back in the wheelchair, while the instructor huffed and panted, having experienced a ‘life-or-death’ battle.

“There’s a simple solution to all of this madness! We just have to domesticate the mawsies!”

M.G.Driver

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