Unknown planet, late at night

"God, how far could these guys have gone?" Tony moaned, the heavy stomps of his suit along the ravine's dirt road briefly drowning out his voice with every step. "We've been hiking for hours after the sun went down and still no luck catching up. Can't we take a break for a moment-"

"Can it, fuckwad," Sofia barked behind him. "We're all just as tired as you, but those vehicles are our top priority. Besides, you're the one with a MAX suit to carry your gear for you."

"It has servos, yeah, but that doesn't mean I'm not fighting a half-ton battle suit just to move…" he muttered. Despite the suit's interior padding, his legs and arms were sore and bruised from pressing up against the suit's innards to move its steel appendages throughout the day. "Goddamn it."

Ahead of him, he saw Charlotte quickly turn around, then grab Edward by the shoulder and spin him around. "Off the road, now!" he called, sprinting for a small dip just off the roadside. Newfound panic-driven energy filled Tony's legs as he pushed against the heavy suit's interior, stomping off the road and down into the ravine to take a knee. "I can't go prone in a suit like this or I'll never get back up," he thought, turning his head to look down the road from the way they had came. Just as Sofia ducked down next to him, light flooded the ravine wall just a hundred or so yards away, the sound of roaring engines reverberating in the air. He bent down as low as his suit would let him as the vehicles rounded the corner, roaring down the road. "Please, don't see me," he silently mouthed.

With three bright flashes of passing light, the vehicles rushed past, kicking up a cloud of choking, blinding dust as they went. "Let's go!" he could hear Edward say, spurring Tony to stand up once more. Watching as the two Vanu soldiers and his commanding officer took off down the road, he took a deep breath and fought hard against the suit, jogging off after them with thundering steps.

"I can still hear the engines," Edward thought as he ran, small clouds of dust rising from his every step on the packed-dirt road. "That means they've slowed down to get around some rough terrain, or they've stopped."

Following the road around a bend some one hundred yards from where they had hidden, he quickly peered around a corner, only for his eyes to widen in surprise. Before him sat the decrepit hull of a massive spaceship, a metallic shaft nearly two football fields long and thirty yards wide. Along the length of the craft, a white dust covered the ship's surface, the light from a series of gas torches on the ground running the length of the ship accented the pitting from hundreds of years of sandblasting from the desert environment. Below the midsection of the ship, where cubic cargo pods like the one Edward had seen submerged in the underground pond dangled haphazardly from the ship by their damaged supports, a collection of rust-covered cars had gathered like some apocalyptic auto show.

"A den of them," Sofia said, looking over the cars. "Should be easy to steal a few vehicles."

Finally catching up to the group with his slower MAX suit, Tony stopped and stared in awe. "That's what we're after?" he asked, the speakers under his helmet buzzing. "It's huge!"

"You bet," Edward said, looking over the ship's brick-like keel. "Old Earth ship. That's a Colonial IDA Frigate armed transport ship. They ran alongside the colony ships two hundred and fifty years ago, carrying more sensitive or dangerous cargo the Terran Republic didn't want any rioting civilians to get their hands on. Classified documents, mining lasers, military hardware, anything and everything that would kill you or land you in a jail cell for so much as looking at the wrong way."

Sofia glanced over at Edward, a skeptical frown on her helmet-obscured face. "So your telling me that thing could be loaded with weapons and gear?"

Edward silently rolled his eyes and gestured to the craft in frustration. "If she ended up here at the same time we ended up in deep space not far from Auraxis after the wormhole incident, then that corroded tub of a ship has been sitting there for more than two hundred years. I'd be damned if it housed anything more than a couple dozen pipe-gun-toting shitbucket roadies and a few thoroughly irradiated cans of centuries-old Beanee Weenees," he said. "But yes, I suppose that there's a one in a million odds that it still has something of value in it that we could salvage…" he sighed, "so I assume that means you want to make the TR proud and run in there guns blazing, Mrs. Gung-ho Warrior?"

"Damn straight, you snarky asshole," Sofia snapped, removing her light machine gun from the mount on her back. "Come on, Tony, on me." Checking that the path was clear of any enemies, she sprinted out from cover, making a beeline for the nearest of the rusty cars for cover. As wistfully as he could manage through his sensor-laden steel helmet, Tony looked over toward Edward one final time before jogging to catch up with his squad leader.

Edward glanced over at Charlotte, who simply stared back at him from behind her suit's mask with what he knew to be utter apathy. "Me, snarky? I mean, excuse me for coming to the conclusion that, with no medical supplies and limited ammunition, the idea of shooting up a downed ship full of apocalypse hobos isn't a good idea…" Charlotte only replied with a mild shrug of her shoulders, as if to say she couldn't be bothered to care about such squabbles. "Yeah, you're right, I sorta had it coming to me," he added, shaking his head. "Sorry. She just drives me insane. Reminds me why I left the Republic so long ago."

Charlotte nodded toward the two Terran soldiers, now kneeling behind the truck bed of the nearest vehicle as they scoped out the makeshift entryway into the decrepit spaceship, where a massive hole had been rent in its armored hull by the crash landing. "Yeah, I guess we should go help them, but I don't like this one damn bit," Edward muttered. Removing the plasma rifle from his back, he held out the weapon to his partner. "You'll prefer this if things get hairy," he said, gesturing for her to hand him his own anti-materiel rifle that hung slung across her back.

Nodding, she took her rifle back and exchanged it with his own, handing him the heavy bolt action. Pulling the bolt back to ensure a cartridge was seated and ready to fire, he attached the heavy rifle to his own back and drew his auto-pistol before joining the two Terran soldiers where they hid, kneeling behind the chassis of the nearest car-like vehicle.

"About time you decided to join us," Sofia snapped.

"So, what's the plan?" Tony asked, looking toward Edward.

Sofia glanced over at her subordinate, then slapped him over the head with the back of her armored hand, a dull clank of steel on steel ringing out in the night. "Hey, dipshit, I'm the commanding officer here. You're under my orders, with or without contact to HQ, got it? I make the plans here, not this spandex fucker."

"Yeah, but I thought he might know the layout of the ship or something…" Tony replied, completely unfazed by his commanding officer's backhanded blow.

Sofia looked to Edward, simultaneously annoyed and contemplating the thought that he might be useful, but the Sovereignty engineer frowned. "It's been more than fifty years since I set foot on one of those ships, so my memory's hazy. We're going in at the back of the crew compartment," he said, pointing toward the front third of the ship, forward of the cube-shaped cargo pods, "…which isn't too terribly complex. That section where the hole in the armor is happens to be a large common space surrounded by crew quarters, so a pretty open fighting space, but who knows how these guys have set up camp in there. Anyway, that pushes right up to the second main bulkhead, which connects through to the hangar engineers' workshops. That fills up the space between the first and second bulkhead," he added, pointing toward the middle of the ship's front third, then pointing toward the very front of the ship in the distance. "Forward of the first bulkhead is the actual hangar itself, just a huge empty space with lots of airlocks for moving gear in and out."

"Any armories in there?" Sofia asked.

"That'd be on the second floor up, between the first and second bulkheads. Assuming the ship's not powered, it would take an unholy amount of explosives to get through the blast doors to go from floor to floor, or from one section to another. To get from that armor breach to the armory, I'd guess there's… maybe three proper blast doors plus several normal ones?"

"Uhh… what are bulkheads, again?" Tony asked.

Sofia began to turn on him, but Edward stopped her with an outstretched hand. "It's like a firewall, a section of the hull armor that divides the ship's interior, so if something like an asteroid punctures the hull, it doesn't depressurize the entire inside of the ship. Damage control kind of stuff."

"Ah, gotcha."

Edward felt Charlotte tap on his shoulder for his attention. Glancing over at her, he found her propped up against the rear of the vehicle they were hiding behind, her plasma rifle in hand as she peered down its scope toward some distant target. "Movement," she softly said.

Peering up over the edge of the rusted car, Edward followed her rifle's line of sight to try to find what she was seeing, but wasn't able to identify what might have caught her attention. "What do you see?"

"Vehicle trunk, twenty meters," she said, her voice almost a whisper.

Looking at the vehicles ahead of them, he thought he saw one of the cars shake on its stiff suspension for the briefest moment. "On it," he replied, checking the safety on his gun. "Moving up."

Stepping out from behind the car, Tony and Sofia stood up and began to follow him, but Edward stopped in his tracks and spun about, gesturing for them to be quiet. "Tony, we're trying to be stealthy, here. Stay with Charlotte," he said.

"Fine by me," he said, taking a knee next to the purple-clad sniper once more. "You guys have fun."

Moving from cover to cover, Edward and Sofia slowly approached the car he'd seen moving, far underneath the dilapidated ship's hull. It wasn't long until they were hardly ten feet away, peering over the hood of another rusted car. Just like Charlotte said, the car shook intermittently as a thumping rang out from the trunk of the vehicle. "Someone's trapped in the trunk," Edward muttered, slowly rising to his feet. To his surprise, a loud bang rang out from the trunk that caused him to jump in his skin. He felt Sofia grab his hand and haul him to the ground as the trunk was kicked open from the inside, denting the rusted metal.

Motioning for him to be quiet, Sofia removed the light machine gun from her back and began to rise up from her cover, but Edward pulled her back down by the shoulder, motioning for her to wait for a moment. From the open trunk, they could hear two distinct voices groaning and grunting as the occupants piled out of the vehicle, taking a moment to stretch before laughing and high-fiving each other.

"Talk about a rough ride," one voice said, his words slightly slurred by a deep southern drawl. "Still a better night's sleep than riding shotgun in a Harasser, though."

"I hear ya," the other man said, his voice deep, rich, and equally accented. "alrighty, let's get one 'a these pile-a-shit vehicles runnin', shall we?"

The first man laughed. "Gimme thirty seconds and I'll have one 'a these scrap heaps purring like a kitty,"

"Dibs on driving, though."

"Go fuck yourself. I hotwire it, I get to drive it."

"You, driving? Hell, Ma never even trusted your dumb ass with a shopping cart at the grocery, much less a car. I'm driving."

Back behind the car, Sofia looked to Edward and pointed toward herself, then pointed up, then made a finger-gun. "No, let them get in the car first, then we rush them," Edward whispered. "They'll have their hands busy."

He could tell that behind the dark helmet visor that covered the upper half of her face, Sofia was rolling her eyes in annoyance. It wasn't long before the sound of a car door opening and closing rang out, spurring the two to their feet. Before the two vehicle thieves could even crank over the engine, Edward and Sofia were at the vehicle's sides, the barrels of their guns only inches from the heads of what appeared to be two New Conglomerate soldiers.

"Hands up behind your head," Sofia growled, careful to keep her voice down. "No sudden movements or I put a whole lot of bullets through all three of you."

"No love lost between you two, I s'pose. Who won the bedtime argument?" The young man in the passenger seat said.

Slowly raising his hands, the man in the driver's seat chuckled, his deep laughter reverberating from the speakers under his full-head helmet. "Well I'll be damned… fifty years of fighting, and this is the first time I've ever been caught carjacking. Scratch that one off the bucket list, James," he joked.

"What're you smoking, Dan? I thought that list went up in smoke when I crashed my first Valkyrie…"

"Shit, you're right. Make a new one, we'll start it again."

"Both of you chucklefucks shut up and get out of the damn car," Sofia snapped, yanking the door open by its rusty handle. The blue armor-clad soldiers slowly stepped out of the car, careful to keep their hands behind their heads all the while.

"What's your names?" Edward asked, leveling his automatic pistol at the driver's chest.

"I'm Daniel, that's my brother James," the driver said, nodding toward his friend. "We found ourselves stuck out in the desert and came up on some of these rusty cars. Couldn't get enough time with one to steal it before these other guys showed up, so we slapped a few bricks of C4 on the underside of these junkers and hitched a ride. Why ain't ya pulled the trigger yet, spaceball?"

Edward looked toward Sofia, who didn't dare take her eyes off of the man named James, then back toward Daniel. "Because we have an offer to make you."