The printer could print almost anything.

Plastic. Metal. It could even print fabric, though synthetic fibers were optimal.

The printer was little more than the black skeleton of a box, as tall as her knee. A bulky compartment on the bottom stored and synthesized the materials, the purer, the better.

And Khadam had nothing but pure materials.

Best of all, the printer had a trove of blueprints preloaded into it, so even though the grid was unresponsive, she had so many options to choose from, ranging from basic components to some rather advanced machinery.

The only thing the printer could not create was anything sentient. That meant, no high-agency machine cores, and no living alloys. But that was more than enough leeway for her mind to run wild.

Infrasonics. Anti-gravity tools. Or maybe she should design and print out pieces for a custom-made death machine. Or maybe-

Slow down. She could almost hear Rodeiro’s gruff voice. Khadam, what comes first?

Not for the first time, she wondered where he was.

Is he still alive?

She doubted it. That wasn’t part of the plan.

The printer was heavier than it looked. She hoisted it up, and walked awkwardly down the steps to the main hold. On the stairs, she could see into the whole hold. Finder was down there, by the gate. Trying to fix the control panel that had fried itself when the gates turned to slag.

At the bottom of the steps, she put the printer on the padded floor, and turned it on. Khadam selected one of the most basic blueprints, and the nozzles began to slide back and forth within the box, building her new device layer by layer.

It was a little slow. But Khadam didn’t care. It worked.

When it finished, the printer beeped a single, satisfied note.

She picked up the device, roughly in the shape of a clam. The outer shell of plastic and steel composite, still warm from the printer.

The device - called a clasp - was a tool for faster-than-light communication. It worked by hooking into the grid, or into another clasp, and sending messages along premade paths. Beyond that, it would take a flow engineer to explain how it worked.

As long as she kept it near her, and as long as nothing crushed it inside that plastic shell, she could tap into it with her head implant, and check the grid’s status.

Still down.

Well, at least the printer worked.

Behind her, sparks were flying. There was a loud, popping crackle as Finder unsoldered something from the gate’s terminal.

“What are you doing back there?” she shouted.

His call came back slow, which meant he was deep in concentration. Or processing. Or whatever it drones did when they were focused with all their core.

“Come over here!” she shouted again.

“One- Moment-” his voice came back, jittering over the sound of sawing metal. “I’m checking to see if I can find another gate signal, anywhere.”

“Good luck. I think the grid’s really dead. I’m not even getting an emergency signal.”

“Forgive me-” he stopped for a moment. “I’d like to try anyway. Perhaps I will find something that you could not.”

She thought about that for a moment. It was possible, since he could check millions of strings faster than she could. But still… brute forcing another gate, even with a thousand drones, would take longer than the heat death of the universe.

“Come on,” she said. “I can print you something. Tell me what you want.”

“Finder dislocated himself from the terminal, and slowly started to drag himself over to her, his metal scraping roughly against the floor as his claws struggled to hold his spherical body up.

“Look,” she scrolled through the list of preloaded blueprints, reading them aloud so Finder could hear, “New rotators for your claws. Oh, new optics. A better-”

“Khadam, you mustn’t worry about me. Focus only on yourself first.”

Odd, Khadam thought. She had never met a drone that said no to an upgrade. Most of them didn’t say anything at all - but she had never heard an outright ‘no.’

“Your survival,” Finder said, now that he had finally dragged his body across the disc. “Is far more important than anything I need.”

Programming was one thing, but this was unusual... Maybe I should open his core later. Check his empathy attunement. Maybe someone had kicked it up a few notches. Dangerous. Drones with too much empathy were likely to get themselves destroyed, unnecessarily.

And yet, she sort of liked him like this. Here, all alone on a derelict ship. On a planet no one had ever heard of. Surrounded by mindless beings who were part of some kind of human death cult…

It was nice to have a friend.

“Oh,” Khadam said, smiling, “Now here’s an idea. You’ll like this.”

Finder was next to her now, and she put her arm on one of his claws. His face screen was aimed at the printer.

“Are those,” he inched closer, The pixels of Finder’s face screen became two eyes, slowly widening. “New repulsors?”

“Yup.”

“I couldn’t. Do we even have the raw materials?”

“We’re surrounded by a sea of scrap,” she gestured around the main hold, and all the broken parts, stripped wires and unmade pieces of machinery strewn across the warehouse-sized floor. “I’ve got everything I need. You saved my life. It’s not a fair trade, but it’s the least I can do. What do you say?”

His face lit up, and she knew his answer before he said it: “Okay. I would like that very much.”

***

The good news was she had more materials for the printer than she could ever need. Scrap metal, old gear, even the clothes and fabrics from the cabins could be disassembled to their elemental pieces in the printer. Anything she could get her hands on, she could feed inside the lower compartment, and let it extract what it needed. There were a few places where she had to make shortcuts, or Frankenstein molecules, as Rodeiro called them.

She had no clue who Frankenstein was, but it basically, it meant she had to change the settings, so it would combine ingredients to make something more complicated.

But the bad news was that two hours later, the first repulsor was still printing.

This will take forever.

Khadam ran through the checklist in her mind again:

I’ve got a power array. I could probably use another one. Need to figure out a way to get it outside the ship, so it can soak up the sunlight. And after that, I’ll need to find an open space for a divestation engine, which means...

The nomads.

There was no way around it.

Unless she could figure out how to make them docile - and there was little hope of that, after what she’d seen - she would have to eliminate them.

Elimination was always a last resort. Khadam hated the thought of killing, but it was necessary. Besides, after what they did to the previous inhabitant of the gate walker, didn’t they deserve it?

No.

A whole species.

Nobody deserves that.

Hopefully, if she removed enough of them, they would break and scatter away across the sands instead. Then, she could work on getting the gates up and running in peace.

And then?

And then, the protocol. That’s all there was to it. Find out if the others survived, and start rebuilding. There was work to be done, if they were going to survive.

The printer jerked back and forth, making a clicking sound as it slowly oozed out a thick liquid. It hardened, first into a transparent film, and then into glass-like metal. Finally. The last piece was printed.

“Right now, I need a way to speed this whole damn thing up-”

As soon as she said it, the idea came to her. She made a sound that was equal parts revelation, and disgust. “Ohhh,” she clapped both hands to her forehead. For once, she was glad no one was around to see her make such an obvious mistake. “I should’ve thought of this sooner.”

The printer could print almost anything.

Including the parts for another printer.

***

When Khadam climbed out of bed, her foot kicked against hard plastic. She almost broke one of the newly-made printers.

They were everywhere now. They covered every surface of the cabins, of the admin’s deck, and the main hold was littered with them. She even started stacking them against the walls, though she had to lower their speeds because they were prone to overheating.

Khadam finished assembling the last one the night before. Then, exhausted, she collapsed into bed.

By her count, she had four thousand of them, give or take a few dozen malfunctions. It was probably overkill, but the sooner she got this plan working, the better.

The idea was to overwhelm the nomads with one shot. It was the best way to guarantee her success.

Well. Worry about that later.

First, she had to start building them.

Khadam went downstairs, carefully stepping over the sea of printers. She could brush her teeth and eat and do her stretches later. First, she wanted to get these things going.

Finder was downstairs, still working on the gates. What he hoped to accomplish, she still couldn’t figure out, but he looked happy hovering at the terminal with his newly-printed repulsors, so she left him alone. The drone had installed the repulsors himself, too, so maybe there was hope he could get something working.

Khadam stood in the middle of the main hold, surrounded by a disorganized sea of black boxes.

“Hey Finder, I’m hoping this doesn’t blow out the emergency power. But if it does-”

“Yes, Khadam?”

“It was good knowing you.” She was only half-joking.

“Khadam, if you think there is a possibility-”

But Khadam was already raising her arms, and unmuting the aerisnet-

“COME OUT… God Thing… COME OUT…”

-and she impulsed a command to all the printers, all at once.

Overhead, the lights flickered. Silence was its own kind of sound, as all the internal air processes suddenly shut out. And then, the music began.

Thousands of printer arms began to jerk and whine and oscillate in place. Mechanical whirring filled the air, enveloping her in a symphony of creation.

It would take hours. Maybe a day, at this rate. But it would get done.

Khadam strolled through her printers like a drill sergeant through the rank and file. She touched at a piece of place there, or stopped and reset the printing process here. For the next few hours, all she did was walk up and down the rows, correcting all those knee-high, industrious instruments.

When her stomach growled, she took a break to find food. The kitchenette was stocked with bars that were labeled with things like chocolate or blueberry or carrots and cream. This last one was her favorite, and she grabbed two of them.

Khadam polished off two bars, licked the last of the sticky sweetness off her fingers, and stepped out of the kitchenette, and into disaster.

All the printers had lost power. All the lights were off in the main hold.

“Shit,” she said under her breath. “Finder?”

A beacon of light in the darkness. “Khadam?”

“Can you reset the breakers?”

“On it.”

“Wait! Let me take these offline first.”

Khadam unplugged the main industrial cables. Then, Finder flipped the lights back on. She had to walk through the hold, plugging each machine in one at a time, until the lights started flickering dangerously again.

At first, she thought she the system would crash again, but Finder showed her it was just faulty wiring inside the ship’s hull. So, Khadam started ripping out the bad wiring, replacing it fresh wires from the cargo holds. Even the new ones were covered with dust. Some of them crumbled into a weird pasty dust when she touched them.

How old is this ship?

After she fixed the wiring, and brought all the printers back online, she was satisfied. The power held stable through two batches.

One long nap later, her printers were out of scrap.

She had tens of thousands of them now. They were polyhedrons - spherical, with flat faces on each side.

The hedrons were light, autonomous drones, each one as large as a tennis ball.

They had two cameras, to see forward and behind. Two tiny repulsors, on opposing faces. Four black, magnetic squares, perfect for collecting iron and other elements out of the sand. If anything, the whole world being covered in sand only made her job that much easier. No drilling required.

But it was the extruder that Khadam was excited about. Each hedron could intake metals and other elements from the sand, and from a pinprick hole, they could extrude out the material in whatever shape she needed.

Thousands of tiny, flying, autonomous printers.

These hedrons were the simplest, easiest solution to all of her problems.

They could fly. They could find the materials she needed, even at an elemental level.

And, they could self-replicate.

She only had to get one past the nomads.

It was a struggle, at first, to get them all into the airlock. Khadam tried to simply impulse a command, telling them where to go. Thousands of them lifted into the air, hitting against the high ceiling of the hold, or banging into the rafters and support beams. A few of them were already broken, judging by how they flew in the wrong direction and smacked into the wall.

So, she set up a few more parameters to keep them safe. This time, when she lifted her hands, most of them managed to herd themselves into the airlock, until the whole thing was filled with spherical hedrons, waiting to be let loose.

Satisfied, she went back to the terminal nearest the airlock, so she could watch the cameras.

Khadam shut the inner door. Took a deep breath.

And pressed the button.

She could feel the metal grinding as the cargo doors shuddered, and began to split open. A gap. A bright beam of sunlight poured through.

Khadam impulsed her last command to her flying armada of drones:

“Go forth, and multiply.”

All the hedrons’ repulsors ignited, tens of thousands of blue lights in the bright sunlight. Tens of thousands of fist-sized drones lifted into the air.

Already, the nomads clawed and scrabbled, fighting and scratching at each other to get into the cargo airlock. Some of them jumped down into the widening aperture, down into the floating sea of hedrons, falling on them. Other nomads clung to the edge, grabbing them out of the sky and crushing them in their mandibles.

Hundreds of hedrons were destroyed this way, but thousands of hedrons latched onto the nomads nearest the door, and began to process the raw materials. The hedrons were stuck, quivering, sucking at the hard exoskeletons. Their small metal plates turned chitin into microscopic mush.

This only served to frenzy the nomads. They swiped and clawed and destroyed her hedrons, jumping with reckless abandon. Screaming and biting and crushing them.

But Khadam was smiling.

Her swarm was still pouring out of the cargo door, thousands of them escaping high into the air. Spewing out of the ship. Out of the basin. Fist-sized orbs, flying away from the city made of sand.

She only needed one to escape. And right now, thousands of them were flying high above the frenzied mass of nomad and drone.

They would leave - they would go miles away from this city made of sand. Away from their abandoned hives, strewn across the beaches. Far across the desert, out of reach of the nomads.

They would be back, soon enough.