the bench, I took in my other hand a larger cylindrical section of a dark, burnished alloy. I dropped the Barsoomium charge into the cylinder and welded it shut with my finger. That bit of alloy and nanotube circuitry had been milled to lock seamlessly into place on the end of a collapsible carbon nanocomposite shaft we’d built previously. The whole thing, when not collapsed, was exactly 1.4 meters long. A staff.
“So, you wanna test this thing?” I asked.
Could I stop you?
I grinned. “Nah.”
I secured the staff upright to the workbench with a vise grip before walking a number of paces away. Then I thought about what was going to go on inside that staff and took several more steps. From my pocket, I withdrew a gleaming white orb not unlike a billiards cue ball. It interacted with the ship’s gravitonic fields that kept everyone from floating off their respective floors, using its own fields to augment and direct its momentum. We’d made good credits with it once upon a time in the bars before Paige boosted its power by an order of magnitude.
“Turn it on,” I requested.
Immediately I could feel the draw of power as the staff sucked energy from the room’s wireless charging fields. It was the same energy used to charge most electronic devices on the ship, as well as my own abilities as a technomancer. It was drawing quite a bit of power for me to be able to feel it like a wind across my skin.
Cocking back my throwing arm, I took aim at a space just behind the head of the staff and threw with all my strength. that the ball came even with the staff and was suddenly flying in a different direction. It pinged off an adjacent wall, crashed through a rack of tools, ricocheted off another bit of equipment, and nearly took my head off as I ducked before it embedded itself in the wall behind me.