Sven didn't see anything strange through his peepholes. It looked like the intersections he had sensed hadn't been close. He sat back against the wall of his refuge. They were looking for him, but they didn't know where he was. He could remain in place for a while, but eventually he would need to get a car and drive away.

He liked the book store. It promised him a wealth of information about blending in without causing problems. And he liked the thought that he could use the moving signatures of the locals as cover while he tried to build something for himself.

He also knew that the locals would mean nothing to any of his old comrades who arrived to look for him. They wouldn't care about innocents. They would only care about bringing him back.

What could he do to protect the store from attack? He didn't know offhand. Anything above the current technology this Earth contained would attract attention.

And he couldn't make it intersection proof without attracting all sorts of the wrong attention. It would be like posting a sign saying come get me.

He wished he hadn't looked at that picture book now. It had given his weapon ideas that he couldn't use now. He had most of the new weapons on rotation. He wondered how they would act when he needed them. The Asgar tended to train with specific configurations for specific tasks. Sven's own weapon before he had scanned the book had only been useful for a sword, or a shield. He couldn't use both at the same time.

He wished he had been able to liberate another weapon. Having one weapon for offense, and the other for defense, would have let him fight his way clear of most things.

On the other hand, he didn't have a chance of standing up against a squad of Asgar, or Jotuns. He could take one, maybe two, at the same time. A squad would bag him despite anything he might do.

When nothing happened, Sven began planning on how to steal dinner from the places around the bookstore. He could get in after hours with his weapon. The fact that they had alarms in prominent places didn't mean that much. He just needed to surveil the scene and pick up any alarm codes to use. Then he could enter places at will.

He decided that he needed a storage place for food so he wouldn't have to rob places continuously. He could just take enough to get him through a few days, then restock when he was out.

That meant altering the space to block off any signals from his weapon before he could use it to start changing things around. Then he could look at the electronics store for a cold storage unit.

He liked having a plan. How did he go about changing his space. He checked his weapon. It was still down. He couldn't do anything until it was ready to go.

He decided to take a nap and let the store empty out. Once he was alone, he could start altering things if his weapon would cooperate.

He settled in and pulled his hat down to shade his eyes. He went to sleep like he had been taught in training.

Sven came to hours later. He smiled when he looked through the peephole and saw the place was dark and empty. No one had blown the doors in so he was still safe.

Time to go to work.

He checked his weapon. It had settled down so that he could flip through the new shapes at will. Now he had to figure out how to use the new creations to do what he wanted to do.

The first thing he had to do was cut off the alarm code. Then he could move around the store at will as long as he didn't attract attention from outside. He dropped down to the ground floor. The keypad started beeping as he closed on it. He punched in the alarm code to turn it off. It gave him a green light.

Sven needed something to use the doors and windows to block the signal from his weapon. When he had that in place, he could work freely to move things around.

He consulted with his weapon. One of the weapons it had copied were nanomachines geared to making objects. He programmed the shooter for what he wanted. He implanted the codes at the top of the front door and at the top of the windows. His weapon recorded a bounced signal.

He walked to the back of the store and implanted another shield over that door. All he needed to do now was implant one of the boxes in the ceiling so he had coverage from above.

He realized he needed to cover the outer walls other than that over the doors and windows. He didn't want to give a signal through the sides of the buildings. Then his shield would really be obvious.

He implanted four more of the devices so that the side walls had coverage from top to bottom. He nodded when he was done. Now he could think about changing the upper room to suit him.

The first thing he needed to do was punch a hole through the roof so he could come and go without being detected by the alarm system on the ground floor. And he needed to think about erecting a wall to keep any space he wanted to use from the rest of the building.

Maybe he could set up so he could get more room from the store butted up to the bookstore. That would give him room without making his alterations stand out more than he wanted.

Once he started attracting attention, his former colleagues would follow.

And he wasn't going back now that he was on his own and doing things for himself.

Sven decided that he should put up the wall before he punched the roof hole. That way he would have his redoubt if someone came up to get something from the space.

He checked the placement of the two trapdoors. He kept the one in the bathroom. He just fixed it so it a solid sheet over the ceiling. Then he installed a lock so it couldn't be opened from the bottom.

Sven nodded at the work. He wondered why this weapon was so versatile. He checked the history gleaned by his weapon on the new addition.

The nanomachines were designed to eat things and bulk up. So what he should be doing is shooting targets with the machines so they could eat the target and turn that into a spreading mass of hungry metal.

Luckily, his weapon could take that weapon and program it to do what he wanted within limits. If it broke programming, it would start eating anything that it was next to when that happened.

He could lose his base of operations to a freak happening. He rubbed his face and decided it was the best he could do at the moment. If the Asgar or Jotun found him, he might consider using the nanomachines to eat them as a last resort.

If he had known that he might be trusting his life to something that might break at the wrong moment, he would have used some other weapon to do what he wanted to do. The green ring could do most of the same thing if he just wanted it bad enough.

He just didn't believe in the ring enough to test it.

Sven decided he needed to think about food now that he had put in some work on his new home. He knew he was taking advantage, but he didn't have any resources to blend in with the locals and secure some kind of job.

Once he had cleaned the space out and fitted it with what he needed, it would be more like home. It would be a home where he didn't have to constantly worry about going to war. He could deal with that.

He wondered if he was doing the same as the Asgar. He shrugged. He needed a place to live. He would have to defend it if he could, or move on if he couldn't. It was similar no matter how you looked at it.

The difference was that he was making this and planned to defend it on his own instead of enforcing a mandatory quota of an army that no one was sure would ever be needed. If he received word that the Jotun had decided to test the Wall again, he might go back to test the new weapons his weapon could use.

He had a feeling some of the copied devices could do things he never considered before.

Sven exited out of his hatch. He looked around. The evening sky was clear. Whatever had hit this Earth earlier was taking it easy.

He used his weapon to drop down to the ground by deploying a hook and line. He decided to walk around and see if he could get enough change off the ground to buy a simple dinner.

Once he had done that, he could consider serious means of earning the local scrip.

He had noted clumsy people dropping their coins at the restaurants' outer window and not picking them up. He figured he could salvage the coins and use that to buy dinner.

He didn't want to live off of that. He needed a serious money earner.

He considered options as he gathered up change and put it in his pocket. He checked the prices of food on the outside menus as he went. He knew the pictures on the boards would not match the reality of what he would get, but he hoped to like some of it until he got to where he could cook for himself again.

He expected the electronics store to have some kind of cooking device. He didn't want to use the fire device his weapon could copy now to cook. That could lead to unforeseen problems. He didn't want to alert the locals by burning his new home down.

He grinned at that. Someone had set fire to the training barracks one year. He had lucked out and been on guard duty when that happened. No one knew what had happened, and as far as he knew no one had come forward to take responsibility. The whole barracks had been punished for that.

Sven quit smiling at the memory of the lashes he had taken. He looked around for change and kept moving. He might get lashed to death for deserting.

He wondered how the others in his cadre were doing. He knew better than to try to talk to them. That would lead to the Asgar arriving and wrecking anything in their way.

It was better that he not talk to any of his old friends. Security would be on them, checking their movements against his. They were probably in a cell waiting for a judgment call on whether they were loyal, or not.

Calling would just remind them that he had put them in a bad situation.

And he doubted they would want to help him out after he had left them in the lurch and took off on his own. If he had told them, someone would have reported him so he couldn't leave. Then he would be the one getting the lash.

He liked his back the way it was even with the scars he had picked up. Adding on new ones didn't appeal to him.

An automobile cruised by as Sven paused in his change collecting. He watched it as it slowly rolled by. He wondered what the driver was looking for as he crept by the parking lot.

Sven also wondered how much trouble he might be drawing doing what he was doing.

He decided he needed the change to get food until he found a way to set himself up with a steady income. He couldn't stop doing what he was doing if he wanted to eat that night. He doubted the automobile belonged to the Asgar, or the Jotun. He could worry about who the driver was when the human wanted to talk to him about things.

Until that happened, he had to act as if he was beneath notice and was harmless. Then if there was trouble, he could try out some of the new configurations on his weapon.

He doubted a normal human had anything like what he wore on his hand and arm.

If they did, he was in a lot of trouble.