Unknown planet, early morning
Tony woke to the sound of yelling, echoing down the distant hallways that registered as nothing more than incoherent sounds among his sleepy thoughts. Rubbing his eyes, he propped himself up on his elbows before fully sitting up, rolling off the cot he'd commandeered after a night of card games and liquor. Dusting off the backside of his black, padded under-armor jumpsuit, he glanced over at James, who was still asleep on the bunk opposite his, before poking his head out into the hallway.
From all the way down the hall, past the common room and down the hallway toward the hangar, he could hear Edward and Sofia verbally butting heads over something or other. Curious, he jogged out into the common room, stopping to snag another MRE packet and one of many small metal flasks labeled "water" in faded black ink "Sure glad Comere found these supplies, or we'd be in a deep hole," Tony thought as he continued down the other hallway toward the hangar, unscrewing the lid on the flask and taking a deep swig of water to wash away his nasty morning breath. Re-sealing the flask and sticking it in halfway into a pocket on his jumpsuit, he tore open the MRE pack and fished out what looked like small salted pretzels, immaculately preserved "…by god knows how many chemicals that'll probably kill me before this body turns thirty," he thought.
As he stepped into the hangar workshop, Tony could see Edward and Charlotte standing before Sofia, with Daniel standing between them, all without their weapons strapped to their back much to his surprise. All eyes turned to the Terran recruit in awkward silence, with only the sound of his pretzel-munching filling the dead-silent workspace. "What, I was hungry!" Tony joked, holding up the cellophane-wrapped pretzels for the others to see. "Did I miss anything?"
"Naw, not much," Daniel sighed, stepping back to greet Tony with a nod. "We're trying to figure out what to do. Ed wants to stay and search the ship a little bit longer, Sofia wants to get the hell outta' Dodge now that the Sunderer's fixed up. Also, have ya' seen my little brother?"
"Still sleeping," Tony replied as he popped another pretzel into his mouth, his gaze wandering off toward the open door on the other side of the workshop. "I'm gonna go take a peek at that old battle bus, if you don't mind. It's through here, right?" he asked.
"Yeah, it is," Edward said. "I'll be there in a bit, if you want to give me a hand with it."
Curious, Tony swapped the bag of pretzels for the flask of water in his pocket as he continued on through the workshop, stepping out into the hangar. Across the cavernous launch bay, the massive hangar doors were open, allowing blazing-bright sunlight to illuminate the hangar. Not too far from the door, he spotted it: amidst a few broken down vehicle chassis and piles of salvaged parts, a single Sunderer stood.
As he approached the hulking vehicle, he could see just how worse-for-wear the vehicle was; the classic red, grey, and black Terran Republic paintjob was faded and scathed from long trips across the dusty, sun-beaten terrain. The tires, much to his surprise, still retained much of their tread despite the rubber pads looking aged beyond repair.
As aged as it was, Tony couldn't find a speck of rust on the ancient vehicle as he strolled around the vehicle, pausing to pull open the back doors. "Really not a lot of water around here to rust anything, I guess…" he thought as he looked over the dimly-lit interior, noticing the two sets of dusty controls for what would have been top-mounted armaments. Stepping back, he noticed that the vehicle did, in fact, still retain what looked like a sort of light machine gun toward the rear of the craft, and a large-bore, long-barreled rifle of some sort toward the front. "Huh, don't recognize those model," he thought.
"Like what you see?" Edward's voice called out. Tony glanced over his shoulder, watching as Edward and Charlotte approached. "Yeah, but I don't recognize that," he said, nodding toward the roof-mounted machine gun.
"Yeah, that intrigued me, too," Edward replied, glancing up at the roof-mounted weapons. "The back gun is a predecessor to the M20 Basilisk. I was actually trained on one of those in my early Terran days. That front gun, though, is totally new to me, which was a big surprise. I was digging around in the vehicle's ammo stores and found what looked like little rockets…"
Edward walked over to the side of the vehicle and inserted a finger into a small socket, lifting out two flat-folding handles that he used to pull open a storage compartment, with some difficulty. Inside, two links of ammunition protruded from ammo canisters built into the side-walls of the shallow compartment – massive ammo reserves that ran almost the length of the vehicle's sides, Tony remembered from basic training. One of the links held cartridges that were significantly larger than the other.
Tony watched as Edward gently pried out one of the larger cartridges from the feed links. To him, it looked almost like a normal grenade round, something he might load into his forty-millimeter M3 Pounder he carried on the arm of his MAX suit, but a bit larger in size. "See these bands here?" Edward said, holding up the shell to where the Terran soldier could see it, tapping on a pair of colored bands about the projectile's protruding head with his finger. "These are the same markings used on anti-tank warheads for the Prowler's guns, at least back in the day anyway. Dunno if that's changed…"
"But it's belt-fed from the ammo canisters, so it's sorta like an MR1 Fracture we use on our MAX suits, or the MR11 Gatekeeper that's based on it that we use on the Harrasser attack cars," Tony offered.
Edward looked up from the warhead with a curious glance. "You mean those double-barreled things I've seen Terran MAXes using?" he asked.
"Yeah, that's the one. Long-range compact missiles, dumb-fire version of the T2 Striker for MAX suits. Pretty recent invention, definitely wasn't around when I first signed up for the war."
"I thought so. The Vanu Sovereignty has had documents on it as with most other gear in the TR and New Conglomerate arsenal for quite a while, but never the actual field name for it. Good to know," Edward said as he slid the large cartridge back into the ammo feed belt of the Sunderer, pulling the heavy armored doors shut and pressing the handles back into place.
"You Vanu guys just have your fingers in everyone's pie, don't you?" Tony remarked.
"Hey, ever heard of the saying 'keep your friends close and your enemies closer'?" Edward replied as he walked around toward the front of the vehicle. "Knowing everything about your enemy and keeping them from knowing anything about you is how you win wars."
"Then why haven't you won yet?"
Tony turned around, locking eyes with his captain as she leaned up against the wide doorframe at the back of the hangar, arms crossed. "Don't believe everything he says, rookie. He's just recruiting for an easy brainwash victim to join in on his buddies' little purple spandex fetish club they call the Sovereignty."
Edward peeked out from behind the Sunderer, now pointing a wrench at the Terran lady. "Hey, nanoweave is still leagues better than that matrix steel plate armor crap you guys wear, so don't give me that shit!" He quickly returned to his work, undoing the fasteners on the front grille of the Sunderer until he could successfully pry it loose from its mount, leaning it up against the front bumper.
Tony trotted around to the front of the vehicle, watching as Edward stooped down to poke his head into the machine, peering around. "This thing should still run in its current state, after the repairs James and I did last night, but there's a lot of worn-out parts in here that would really screw the pooch if it broke on us out in the middle of nowhere. I don't want to be driving out of here in this old gal' until we scrounge up some spares, either from a supply room somewhere on this ship, or from the horde of cars outside."
A wave of chills overtook Tony as Charlotte silently slipped into his field of view, dropping down to one knee next to her partner, briefly fishing through his bag for a second, smaller penlight to better illuminate the engine bay of the Sunderer with. "God, that's so cool, how they're so friggin' stealthy even in day-to-day stuff…" he thought, his gaze fixated on the masked figure's obscured face. After a moment of thinking, it finally crossed his mind that Daniel had been in the previous room, but had yet to join everyone else in the hangar. "Where's Daniel?" he asked, looking over his shoulder. Sure enough, the combat medic was nowhere to be found.
"He went back to the crew berths to get his brother and the kids," Sofia said, pointing over her shoulder toward the workshop entrance behind her with her thumb. Turning toward Edward, she crossed her arms with a sigh. "Fine, I guess we'll stay a little longer, but I want to be out of here by midday so we have at least a chance of finding these kids' village. So, techie, how long would it take to find you these parts you need?"
"Well, mostly what we're looking for are replacements for the rubber stuff," Edward said, withdrawing his head from the engine bay of the Sunderer, but not before accidentally banging it on the top of the bay. "Hoses, tubing, tire patch kits, and preferably some extra cans of fluids — diesel or gasoline, or both, engine oil, brake fluid, and some extra transmission fluid just in case," he added, rubbing the back of his head. "These Sunderers are real war-rigs, built to take a serious beating from any direction and keep on chugging, but they're bricked pretty fast if they start losing fluids due to a leaky hose."
"So we just go tapping some of the cars down below the ship for any and all liquids, maybe a few spare tires if any of them look large enough, then we're out of here?" Sofia asked, raising an eyebrow. "Seems simple enough."
"Yeah, take a look at the engine blocks of some of the cars and see if you can find any good hoses or tubing left that's worth saving, too," Edward said. "I'm going to see if I can get James to help me scavenge a working solar panel or two off of the top of the ship, so we have some way of recharging a battery in the field, maybe strap it to the roof and wire it into the circuits from there as a permanent addition…" he added, trailing off into thought as he glanced up at the weather-worn vehicle. "Or we might just carry a few extra battery packs we can scavenge from the cars, rigged together as a jumper pack."
"Fine," Sofia said, turning her back on the Sunderer as she headed for the door. "Come on, rookie, you're giving me a hand with this."
As the two Terran soldiers disappeared into the workshop once more, Edward refocused on the massive engine before him. "Right, well, there's no obvious leaks, but I guess we should check the fluids to see what we have on our hands…" he thought aloud, reaching for a small, well-concealed pipe with a screw-on lid. Undoing the cap, he removed a long metal rod attached to the lid, carefully cupping the end of the rod with his free hand as it came free of its housing. At the end of the dipstick, a layer of dark, viscous liquid coated the flattened end of the metal rod, thick enough to cling to the rod without dripping into his open, armored palm. "Yeah, that's going to need replacing or at least serious diluting, for sure," he muttered, slipping the dipstick back into its tube and screwing it back into place. "These things are manual shift, so I doubt we'll need to check transmission fluid, but sludge in the gas tank, though…"
Stowing the small wrench he had nicked from the hangar workshop in his tool pouch, he rose to his feet and looked around at the piles of salvaged parts for a large bucket, tray, or anything he could use to catch liquid. "Hey, could you help me find something to siphon the gas tank with?" He asked, stepping around Charlotte as she rose to her feet next to him. Nodding silently, she stepped over to the nearest pile of parts and began searching.
Between the piles of junk in the hangar and the tools in the workshop, it had hardly been ten minutes before Edward and Charlotte had found a few suitably large pans and containers. Nudging one of the trays under the vehicle, he removed his helmet, got down on his knees and rolled over onto his back, setting his helmet aside as he slid his way underneath the bulky vehicle with hardly an inch of clearance between his chest armor and the vehicle's underbody. "Hey, Charlotte, go to the other side of the vehicle and get under here, you should probably see this," he called out.
Listening to the quiet tapping of her suit's padded soles against the metal floor, he waited until the young white-haired lady walked around to the other side of the vehicle. Laying down on her back next to the vehicle, she removed her suit's helmet and set it aside before sliding under the vehicle, her head tilted back so she could meet his gaze. "Yes?" she asked.
At her blue-eyed gaze, Edward's mind blanked for the briefest moment, struggling to recollect his thoughts. "Yeah, I… just wanted to show you this in case we have to do it again. There's old gas in the tank still, see?" he said, knocking on the bottom of a large, flat, heavily armored container that hung from the vehicle's underbelly. The hefty fuel tank rumbled, the sound of sloshing liquid emanating from deep inside the tank. "Anyway, a little piece of cool design work that's super handy for us right now is that, because these things were designed to run on darn near every combustible liquid in existence, the designers expected there to be a lot of sludge buildup in the tank. See this crank here?"
Charlotte's eyes followed Edward's hand as he reached for a small gear and handle protruding from the side of the fuel tank. She let out a thoughtful "hmm" and nodded in agreement.
Edward pointed toward the bottom of the tank. "That crank operates a slider on a worm drive gear system that will scrape off and shovel out most of the sludge that builds up in the bottom of the fuel tank, once we empty out the old fuel. All we need to do is force off this locknut plug over here to drain the fuel out, then run the slider back and forth a few times, then run a little bit of the old fuel back through the system to wash out any remaining crud, then seal it back up with a fresh locknut and load up new fuel. You know, there's a lot of cool stuff about these old Sunderers, the way they were designed," he added, pointing toward the heavy brackets that the fuel tank was mounted to, higher up in the cluttered underbody of the vehicle. "These fuel tanks were designed with drop-free mounts and shock absorbers. When a mine goes off under the vehicle, the fuel tank had small charges in the hull that would explode, launching this heavy plate downward and exploding the fuel, sorta like reactive armor, and cause all of the blast wave to push out the sides rather than up into the vehicle-"
"Sounds like y'all're havin' fun," a voice called out. Tilting his head back, he was barely able to catch a glimpse of Daniel and James over Charlotte's shoulder, slowly meandering their way to the vehicle in his upside-down view. As they approached, he noticed Shanna step out from behind the two brothers, holding Daniel's hand as she walked. "What're y'all up to?"
"Just about to clean out the old fuel in this tub's tank" Edward called. Reaching into his tool pouch, he withdrew the same wrench he had used earlier and gently slid it onto the locknut on the side of the fuel tank. "hey, Char, could I convince you to grab that tray and slide it over here?" he asked, nodding toward the fuel tank that stat beside him. Nodding, she reached across his arm and pulled the high-walled spill tray over toward the fuel tank, positioning it underneath the locknut.
Nodding in thanks, Edward cranked hard on the locknut with both hands, straining to get some torque on the ancient fastener from such an awkward position. After several attempts, the nut budged, then abruptly gave way as it loosened up. A gentle stream of dark brown liquid spewed forth, washing out a grainy dust and small chunks of substance that rattled as they fell to the pan below. Quickly withdrawing the wrench, Edward began loosening the fastener further with his hand, letting the liquid flow for several minutes while casually listening in as the two New Conglomerate soldiers walked the young girl around the vehicle, explaining some of its features as best they could.
After filling up and switching out full trays for empty ones several times, the stream of dirty fuel began to slow to a trickle. Waiting for the last few drops to filter out, Edward gently shoved the half-full tray out from underneath the vehicle and replaced it with a final empty tray, then reached up to grab ahold of the small crank on the side of the tank. With a couple tough twists of the handle, the mechanism loosened up. A steady stream of gooey, chunk-riddled slime began to push its way around the drain plug bolt and out of the hole, plopping into the tray like wet mud. "Delicious," he muttered, watching the dark slime flow as he cranked. Soon, the mechanism reached the end of its travel, and the rivulet of slime came to an end. "Well, that should do it for now. We can run the old fuel through a shirt or some cloth to filter out any more sediment, if we need to," he said, pushing the tray of sludge away as he screwed the locknut back into place, sealing up the tank. "Honestly, though, this thing will probably burn just about anything we put through it, so I don't think we need to even bother."
Crawling out from under the Sunderer, he scooped up his helmet and climbed to his feet, met by Daniel and James showing Shanna the driver's seat and all of the controls that surrounded it. "So, what's the final verdict?" James asked. "Is she good to go?"
"Barring a dead battery, I think she'll crank over right here and now if we top her up," Edward said, fitting his helmet back over his head, but not bothering to flip the visor down. "There's still some more work to do before we head out, to make sure she doesn't die on us in the middle of nowhere, but that's about it."
"What'cha have in mi-" James began, but his thought was cut short as Charlotte stepped out from behind the vehicle, her helmet under her arm as she walked up to join them. "Well I'll be damned, she actually has a face behind that mask!" He remarked with a laugh. "Gone this entire time and I don't think I've ever actually seen you without that helmet on."
By now, everyone was looking at the white-haired lady, who was in turn staring eye-to-eye with Shanna. "Yeah, this is Charlotte. Long story, but she keeps her helmet on most of the time," Edward said. "Anyway, I was thinking of getting you to help me salvage a solar panel from the ship's hull and get it set up on the roof of the Sunderer so we could have some portable power. Think you could give me a hand with that?"
"Sure thing!" James said, giving him a thumbs-up. "Just tell me where they're at and I'll get 'em for ya'."