Walking down the corridor to the right of the commons room, Tony secured his helmet back on his head as he went. "So what did you need me for, captain?" he asked.

Ahead, the hallway came to an abrupt left turn. Rounding the corner, Sofia pointed toward the end of the hallway, at what looked like a sealed blast door that had suffered many attempts at being forced open. "The scum that were squatting here wanted to get this door open, and so do I. That's on you," she said, gesturing toward the soot-covered blast door. "I'm guessing a round or two from that grenade launcher of yours would make short work of this," she said, glancing down at the revolver-like device mounted over his suit's right arm. "That Vanu freak said that there's a hangar in the front of the ship section. These doors are still sealed, so there might still be valuable hardware toward the front of the ship for us to use."

"I'm on it," Tony said, raising his right arm toward the distant door. "May want to clear out if you want to avoid catching any shrapnel, captain," he added, looking back toward Sofia.

"Just hit it, private," she growled.

Shrugging to himself, Tony leveled the grenade launcher at the door toward the end of the hallway and pulled the trigger inside the right glove of his suit. With a guttural thunk, a heavy grenade sailed down the hall, impacting the heavy door and unleashing its explosive payload in a fiery blast that sent shrapnel flying in every direction, shattering the nearby ceiling lights. "Now, let's see…" he muttered to himself, walking forward toward the door. To his surprise, the door stood strong; not even a dent to show for his effort. "Guess they don't call it a blast door for nothing," he thought.

Behind him, he heard footsteps echoing down the hall. "What are you guys doing?!" He heard Edward exclaim. The man quickly breezed past Tony, drawing his flashlight from his tool pouch as he reached the security panel next to the heavily armored doors. "…Ah, thank god you didn't break this, or we would never get this thing open…" he muttered. Tony pushed forward against his suit, joining his friend at the sealed door.

"About time you showed up. I've got questions for you," Sofia commanded, stomping past Tony up to the purple armor-clad engineer as he worked over the security panel. "You see those hostages we saved? They said there's Terran Republic forces here. If we're not on Auraxis, then explain that, moron."

"Hold up," Tony said, raising a hand as he stepped back from the security panel. "Charlotte and I just got back from using one of those rustbucket cars to haul out all of those bodies from the common room back there, so you need to fill me in. Did they say anything about these Terran forces?"

"She said they were working with these raiders somehow," Tony offered, "and that they're pretty hated, more than the hobo guys themselves. Not much more than that, though."

"Then nothing changes, we're still stranded on another planet. We've just got a lot of people with a lot of guns that may or may not want to kill us," Edward said, returning his attention to the security panel as he withdrew a screwdriver handle, exchanging its cross-shaped tip with a flathead tip. Holding the screwdriver vertically on top of the case, he set the flat-head tip against a seam in the panel's metal case that protruded from the wall. "Tony, if you could give that a good tap, that'd be great," he said, waving the heavily-armored soldier over.

"Sure," Tony said, stepping up to the panel. Balling up his right hand into a fist, he gave the handle of the screwdriver a quick tap. The force of the exosuit's heavy arm drove the screwdriver clean through the metal case, parting the case along the seam cleanly as the bladed tip forced its way into the metal shell. "Thanks," Edward said, working the screwdriver free in a wiggling motion to fully separate the case. Inside, the panel looked like a jungle of wires and circuit boards, "…although I couldn't tell if that's on purpose or from the crash-landing," Tony thought as he watched the Vanu Sovereignty soldier probe over the wires with his screwdriver in curious silence.

"Better hope the power lines are still connected to this, or we're not getting through any time soon," Edward said as he exchanged his screwdriver for a pair of wire cutters. "Those wimpy grenades weren't going to be anywhere near enough to get through here."

"Wimpy?!" Sofia exclaimed in disgust. "Bullshit, these are armor-piercing high-explos-"

"Yeah, and these are solid beta-crystal titanium-3-gold doors, nearly a meter thick of material four times harder than pure titanium," Edward interjected cooly. "Maybe you didn't hear me when I explained to Tony what a firewall is, but that's the same stuff the ship is armored with, designed to withstand nuclear EMP torpedoes with over a gigaton of TNT-equivalent blast yield at point-blank range. Yes, this isn't as thick as the ship's hull," he added, gesturing to the door, "…but you could fill this entire hallway with RDX-40 or whatever's in those grenades and all you'd succeed in doing is fucking up the paint job and screwing over the electronics so bad that you wouldn't ever have a chance of getting this door open ever again. It's designed that way. So please, let me do my job."

Inside his suit, Tony was happily listening to his new Vanu friend ripping his captain a new one, grinning from ear to ear. Silently watching as the scientist worked over the door's internal wiring, a thought popped into his head. "Hey, Ed… can I call you Ed?"

Edward didn't bother to look up from his work. "Sure, I don't care."

"Why does this ship still have power? I mean, batteries run out just from old age, right?"

"Yes, they discharge over time, but I suppose there are a few hypotheses for explaining that," Edward said, interspersing his words with the muted click of his wire clippers as he worked. "One, the batteries in this thing are ridiculously large, enough to power this ship's internal circuitry and weapons for a good long while. I could easily see the ship crash-landing with a full battery, and with no need for any of the ship's weapons, the battery could probably last a hundred years just running the lights no problem. Two, the ship usually has backup high-efficiency solar panels mounted to the hull, connected to the ship's batteries to power life-support functions if the ship's disabled. Those could have been trickle-charging the ship's batteries for the past few hundred years until these raiders took up residence, if they survived the crash. The third…"

"Yeah?"

One final, definitive snip of the wire cutters. A small noise-maker circuit in the security panel's jungle of wiring let out a klaxon-like buzzing noise, followed by a loud *kerchunk* of a heavy lock releasing inside the silver-colored door. "We pray to god that whichever ship technician signed off on the idea of rewiring the thorium nuclear reactor that normally powers the engines, and only the engines, into the ship's standard circuitry got enough sleep the night beforehand."

"So we're sitting on a nuclear bomb?"

"If the reactor's damaged, yeah, but the ship engineers would have known that, I'm sure," Edward said, rising to his feet as he stowed his tools back in his pouch. "I'm more worried that they're trying to do the electrical equivalent of using thermite to toast a marshmallow. That sounds like something Terran Republic engineers would try to do, even on a good day."

"Fuck off," Sofia added.

"Hey, I used to be a TR engineer, so I know it's true," Edward laughed.

After what seemed like an eternity, the heavy blast doors slowly slid open, their ancient locks crackling with hardened grease coming loose after hundreds of years. Beyond the doorway stood a high-ceiling room packed with motionless machinery, frozen in a dust-covered state where they held wide varieties of parts that at one point had been the subject of a determined engineer's devoted attention. Carts of tools were scattered around the room, drawers hanging open haphazardly like a child's dresser in a messy bedroom. "Looks like someone was having fun," Edward muttered as he stepped into the workshop, his eyes tracing the path of the catwalks around the perimeter of the second and third stories of the room in the pale blue-ish white light of the LED floodlights above, the workspaces beyond the metal paths like dark caverns that ringed the room.

"One more," Sofia said, nodding toward the far end of the workshop where another blast door stood, next to a massive hangar door that spanned the almost the entire width of the workshop's back wall.

Edward glanced over at the Terran captain, staring through his helmet's visor with an eyebrow raised. "Left something in the hangar airlock?" he asked.

"A steel rod to shove up your ass. Just get the damn door open and stop pissing me off."

Edward turned to Tony. "Okay, I've got to ask, how the hell do you live with this lady?" he asked. The exosuit-clad man simply held out a hand with his thumb and pinky extended in either direction and held it up to his mouth, simulating chugging a flask of alcohol.

"Figures," Edward said, turning back to the hangar workshop in front of him. High above, he could see the half-dismantled remains of a slender jet aircraft hanging from a ceiling lift just below the third catwalk, suspended by the heavy-duty chains hooked to its airframe. "A first-generation Mosquito. Haven't seen one of those in a long time," he thought, looking over the vehicle's exposed turbines where the metal plates of the jet's once-sleek frame had been removed for servicing. The vehicle's stubby, stick-like wings were nearly useless at low airspeeds, but that was hardly what the craft was built to do; its powerful turbines, he knew, could rotate down to allow the craft to perform vertical takeoffs, or even simply rotate downward a few degrees to compensate for the insignificant lift the wings provided at a slow cruise, but its true purpose was in high-speed pursuit. Then, the realization hit him: "You're hoping there will be a few vehicles out in the hangar airlock we can use, aren't you?" he asked, turning toward Sofia.

"That's the plan, soldier. Get a move-on."

Edward trekked across the room, weaving between the carts of tools that were strewn across his path. To his surprise, the security panel next to the door lit up as he stepped close. "Biometrics are still working. Tony must've only just broken that last panel right then, or maybe the squatters broke it before him..." he thought as he looked around the room. For a brief moment, he reached for the panel, ready to disassemble it, but quickly withdrew his hand in second thought.

"Is there a problem here?" Sofia demanded.

Edward looked around the room, then back to the frame of the heavy blast door. "There's a very good chance that, since this door hasn't gone into lockdown mode, because, you know, people didn't try to blow their way through with explosives, that there's going to be some self-defense mechanism if I try to tamper with it right now. I don't know for sure, but this ship was carrying military hardware like that Mosquito, so I wouldn't put it past them… So we preferably need a keycard."

Sofia reluctantly nodded. "Alright, Tony, help him with that. I'm going to check on that NC rebel doctor and his shit-eating brother, make sure they aren't screwing with those kids too much. Be back in ten."

The two men watched as the Terran Republic captain jogged down the hall, their eyes not leaving the back of her helmet until she rounded the corner at the end of the hall. "Seriously, what a nut case," Edward muttered, shaking his head.

"Yeah, she drives me nuts, too. Can't even keep track of how many decks of cards she's confiscated, even in our down time," Tony replied. "Anyway, what are we looking for?" he added.

"A small metal keycard with a computer chip in it," Edward said as he walked over to the nearest tool cart. "They'd have the previous owner's picture on it, so they'll be easy to identify once you find one. The real trick will be finding one, since most engineers kept theirs on them at all times, you know, to get around the ship…"

"And you're sure you don't want to try hacking your way through that door like the last one?"

Edward pulled out the drawers of the first toolbox he came across, rummaging through their contents in hopes of finding a keycard stashed by some negligent engineer. "Hey, you're the one with a bulletproof exosuit here. If you want to have a go at that panel, be my guest, but give me time to get the hell out of the way before a bunch of automated turrets pop out of nowhere and rip you a new behind. These were heavily guarded military ships, remember, and we're right next to the fighter launch bay, one of the easiest places for enemies to board a ship."

Tony raised a hand in defeat. "Fair enough… hey, I had a thought for a sec there. If the keycards were with the engineers at all times, wouldn't we be more likely to find one in the crew quarters?"

"Sure, you might find one there," Edward agreed, shutting the last drawer as he finished with his first toolbox cart. "While you're at it, send that NC guy my way, the one that isn't a doctor. I think he's a light assault, right? I thought I remember seeing the jetpack module on his back armor, so if that's true, tell him to come check these upper levels for me," he added, gesturing toward the catwalks high above.

"Sure, be back in a bit," Tony said as he turned about, stomping down the hallway. It wasn't long until even the booming footsteps of the heavy mecha-suit against the ship's metal floors was distant and echoing, leaving Edward to his thoughts. "Now, where would a keycard be…" he thought.