There are some points in time where you really just have to stop and ask a question; how did this happen? What possible sequence of events could have led up to this?

If you were lucky, you wouldn't end up asking yourself that question very often. If you followed politics, you were probably asking it every single day.

In my particular case?

How in the fuck did that AC get embedded into the ceiling?!

I just-

How? That was over fifty tons of metal just in the body alone, not even counting the weapons and other attachments. The ceiling was four hundred metres high.

...

In times like this, I really wish I could still sigh.

Ezra and I had checked the place out. Good news is that there was nobody and nothing hiding in the camera blindspots, which was a relief. Better news, we'd found the remains of three ACs in the Grid.

Bad news, they were... less than recoverable. The first one was the most intact, and by that, I mean it was half the AC it used to be, and by that, I mean that the thing had been clearly cut in half by a laser blade at some point. The torso and arms were all there, and some of the electronics were in remarkably good condition since they'd clearly been there for years, but I wasn't going to make a functioning AC without a lower half. I did recover a weapon alongside it, though, a Ransetsu Burst Rifle.

The second one, clearly, had been found by others before we'd arrived. It was little more than a cyberskeleton that had been stripped to the wire, and it would break if anything even so much as looked at it funny.

The third was not an AC. It was a pile of shrapnel that had once been an AC. As far as I could tell, the thing had eaten a rocket in mid air, and then had plummeted clear to the ground.

Which was four kilometres below.

So yeah. That was less than useful.

Of all the parts of an AC, the legs might have been the easiest to build. I'd just about resolved to getting started on that when we'd stumbled upon the wreck of the fourth AC.

I... It boggles the mind to imagine how in the fuck it got up there, but it was up there. It was also the most intact AC by far.

It was a BAWS model BASHO, pretty much all of it only standard parts. The legs and arms had some scrapes, but that was the worst of the damage there. One of the hand weapons was missing, but the other was arm mounted and so still present. It wasn't actually a BAWS weapon, either, it was a VCPL Laser Blade, which was about the most commonly manufactured AC melee weapon out there on account of having been adapted from a Heavy MT weapon.

It had a shoulder weapon, a Furlong four-cell Vertical Missile Launcher that had been adapted to literally every warmachine that had ever existed. Note, however, that it had a shoulder weapon. The left shoulder had either been purged at some point, or it had never had a Part in the first place.

All in all, about ninety percent of an AC.

Unfortunately, the last ten percent that was missing were the most important parts.

The core had a giant fucking hole through the lower centre of it, just above the waist. Whatever had done it had been powerful, and either plasma or laser based. It had punched straight through, and then just about evaporated the Generator and ACS. The entirety of the piloting system was, not to put too fine a point on it, fucked, and the FCS wasn't much better off, either.

I could replace the FCS, no problem. The first wreck had one that I could slot right in. Would it be the best possible option? Nope. Definitely not.

The ACS and piloting systems? I didn't have spares for those. I had a partially damaged one in the first wreck, though, so fabricating up replacement parts wouldn't take too long- save for the minor detail that this wouldn't actually let me control it very well anyway. I was going to need a Coral interface to handle that. I had the equipment to make those, it was just going to be time-consuming.

The final problem was the Generator. Again, no spares. The first wreck's had taken even more damage than its piloting systems, closer to the heat as it was. I could fix that up, but one of the things I wasn't set up to do was synthesising the fuels for the Generator in amounts that would actually be relevant to an AC.

Modern day ICE systems were stupidly good and modern synthfuels were absolutely ridiculous, but the power demanded by an AC was still quite significant. If I dedicated everything to it, then maybe I'd be able to have an engagement every few weeks.

I was going to sidestep that problem entirely.

After all, Coral.

I was already going to have to replace the control systems with it, I may as well substitute the Generator while I was at it.

It was hardly going to be pretty when it was fixed up, but hey, it was an AC.

...

Just...

"So, how are we going to get that down from the ceiling?"

"How about we set ourselves up and then circle back around to that."

The next few days passed quickly. The first thing we did was seize control of the cargo elevators, then bring up all the equipment. From there, it was just a matter of setting everything up. We had ample amounts of free space in the interior of the Grid, we just had to find some spots that we could hook into the existing, surviving, industrial systems.

Once that was all free, though, I had to turn my attention to getting the AC out of the ceiling. That was... an unreasonably tricky endeavour. I had to use a swarm of maintenance drones to crawl along the city and latch onto the AC, while cutting the metal around it. The ceiling inevitably came loose, and the AC as a whole plummeted to the ground while the drones fired their tiny little thrusters as best as they could.

It still hit the ground pretty hard, but at least it wasn't hard enough to break anything more than it already was. The dents would buff out.

Once it was actually in our hands, I started on pulling the thing apart so I could rebuild it. It was going to take some time and there was no way around that; AC components were pretty high quality, after all. The facilities I'd brought could handle production of that equipment, but the stuff that was already in the Grid couldn't, not with how broken down it was.

On one hand, that meant I wouldn't be able to speed it up. On the other hand, that meant we had spare production, and while the Grid's equipment couldn't handle AC Parts, it could handle MT Parts perfectly well.

I did not have a whole lot of weapons on hand, so that was pretty nice. The maintenance drones could function as weapons in a pinch but they'd die if anything even so much as looked at them the wrong way. The MTs I currently had were equipped with industrial tools which, while still rather powerful, really weren't intended to be used in a fight.

There was some MT scale equipment laying around. Most of it was old, picked over garbage, though. Not a missile in sight. There were about two actually functional guns and maybe half a magazine of bullets between them.

Not stuff that we could use, in other words.

The first things that rolled off the line were a batch of laser rifles, specifically to fix exactly that problem.

Generally speaking, most MT laser weapons were a bit underpowered compared to AC equivalents, but that was actually because of the shift in design philosophy between the two. The MT was a slow, long lasting workhorse. Their lasers hooked directly into the reactor and charged capacitors from there. Their fire rate and power was less than incredible as a result, but it was basically free after the setup. ACs, demanding greater speed and strength, utilized replaceable power packs, boosting their performance to be comparable to ballistic weapons, though at the cost of having limited ammo supplies.

Since I didn't have the setup to make bullets, lasers were great for me.

After the laser rifles, though? It was all basic components. Armour, skeletal supports, structural material; anything that didn't need to be high quality and which did need to be in high quantity. Chances are I'd end up melting down half of this stuff later on, but hey. That was a problem for the future.

Things were looking great.

So, naturally, that was the point where the world decided to throw a curveball.

On the dawn of the fourth day, in one of the control centres of Grid 097, an alarm rang out.

It caught my and Ezra's attention immediately, of course. It was an alarm, that was the whole point of it.

It had given a short, three-toned low-high-low burst, repeated twice, before shutting off. A Human operator in the control centre probably also would have seen a few flashing lights, but none of the consoles had been powered for years by this point.

For us, that meant we had to do some quick digging through the systems to find out what that alert was, where it had come from, and why.

It took a minute and a half, but the answer was a simple one. It was a simple safety alert, triggered by activity on the inter-Grid transportation lines. A tram was coming in, and everything on the lines should probably make an effort to move out of the way of the multi-thousand ton machine.

In other words?

We had visitors.

We were not expecting visitors.

"Well." Ezra spoke. "That's not very good."

"No. No it is not."

My attention turned to the interior of the Grid, in the very rough garage setup where the AC was currently being stored. I already knew what I'd find, of course, but some part of me hoped that, somehow, reality would be a bit different to what I remembered.

Alas, no.

The AC was still two full days away from being completely rebuilt, the Generator and control systems still in the process of construction.

"Tram alerts are set up to run periodically as a tram gets closer. The first starts when it's five hours away." Ezra stated.

"We can't tear down our setup in that time." I considered. "We can't do any quick assemblies in that time, either. We didn't set up for that."

"Visitors were not expected." He agreed. "Not at this stage."

"No, they weren't." Were they here for us?

... No. I don't think so. No signals had gotten out of this place, I knew that much. On the interior of the Grid, surrounded by multiple layers of metal in every direction, the industrial processes weren't that easy to detect, either.

Just bad luck, then?

I double-checked the transportation network's data, looking up the schematics for the trams so I could guess how much I could expect to be potentially coming my way.

The results were less than great. The trams weren't that big relative to the rest of the Grid's transportation systems, but they were still fucking huge in absolute terms. If you crammed, you could fit at least fifty Light MTs in there.

It sure as shit wouldn't have been comfortable or effective, but even so...

How much was reasonable, there? Thirty Light MTs? Ten Heavy MTs? An AC?

... Probably not the last, at least. ACs weren't deployed like that. Heavy MTs... considering the history of the area, I'd actually be surprised if there was even one of them. They take decent amounts of logistical support and good pilots to boot.

That still did not leave things in our favour, though.

"We'll just have to work with it." I said. "There were always going to be challenges, after all."

"If only it had arrived a bit later."

We had ten MTs, sixty maintenance drones, and about five hours to set up as much of a home field advantage as we could get.

Time to get to work.