Conflagration

Fangs' New Tooth

For Lyssa, the next few days of her captivity settled into a routine. She would wake up with the Fourthers (and against her own complaints) before dawn. A group of mercenaries (her new friend, Matty Moss, among them) would come from their camp on the outskirts of the village to escort her to the steam barge. Then, the steam barge would chug her the several kilometers to the service platform in the middle of the sprawling lake. The rest of the day, until the sun began to sink over the western peaks, Lyssa would oversee the repairs on the hardpointer and work on her modifications to the Heavy EVA suit.

All had gone well over those few days. The repairs had gone sufficiently slowly enough to satisfy Lyssa, yet not so slowly that Sgt. Scalps had bothered to intervene. Scalps, in fact, seemed to be bored with the whole process. He and the other NCOs spent much of their days inside the platform's small shack gambling or telling war stories and dirty jokes.

Unfortunately, as Lyssa had initially assessed, the plane's APU control unit was fried beyond repair. Without its control computer, the Auxiliary Power Unit couldn't run. The APU was basically just a small engine that ran a generator to provide (amongst other things) power to start the hardpointer's three main engines. Without the APU, the only way to start the engines turning was to connect the hardpointer to another plane and transfer that plane's power output. It was for that reason that one of the Third Law's AF-28 Darklander fighters was parked atop the hardpointer's back with its landing gear secured to three of 788NC's hardpoints. A magnetic feed cable ran from the side of the fighter's engine to 788NC's station umbilicus terminal. Now, all they needed to start the engines was the control card.

But there was more to making the plane fly again than just getting the engines running. Before 788NC could fly again, repairs would have to be made to the damaged belly skin and the leaking fuel tank would need to be repaired.

Lyssa, unwilling to get back into that scary water again, had found an alternative way to repair the belly skin and fuel tank. She had set the maintenance mech into "bot" mode and programmed it to do the repairs. Maintenance mechs, when set to "bot" mode, could be programmed to function without an operator and do basic repairs autonomously. In addition to keeping Lyssa out of that water where she just knew something was watching her, handing the task off to the mech's A.I. meant that she could set the mech to do the job very slowly and very accurately. Not only would the repairs to the belly skin be done to factory specs, but they would also take a long time to complete.

What occupied most of the hours of Lyssa's days were the modifications to the Heavy EVA suit. The other mechanics didn't believe the HEVA suit could be modified to operate inside the tenebricite shadow, but they weren't senior mechanics with the Mechanics' and Machinists' Guild. Lyssa was. So fuck them.

The HEVA suit was basically a middle ground between a standard EVA suit (basically just a space suit for normal Extra Vehicular Activities in space) and a full-on mech suit (which was as much a piece of heavy machinery as a space suit). The HEVA suit, with its heavy-duty exoskeleton could withstand extremes in pressure, acidity, radiation, heat, and cold which would be fatal to the wearer of a standard EVA suit. This was important, as according to Lyssa's calculations the pressure at the bottom of the lake would be around 115 atmospheres. This was within the operating limits of the HEVA suit's tolerances but well beyond the capacity of any standard EVA suit.

Though the HEVA suit wasn't anywhere near as massive as a mech, it was still quite heavy. The HEVA suit's builders had designed powered assistance servos into all of its joints. This made it easier for the wearer to move around. With the servos functioning, the suit could be worn by almost anyone, even someone as small as Lyssa. With the servos inoperative (as they would be at the bottom of the lake) it would take a strong man to move around in the suit.