Perhaps the prophet's words were supposed to be open to interpretation. Maybe, in her case, she was meant to go and find something out—to make a discovery and help Sanctuary. Or maybe, just maybe, a discovery that was supposed to help her rather than everyone else. It was like the words had tugged at a thread and the entire tapestry that was her life had begun to unravel.
"What did they do to you?" Jessica13 wondered aloud as she fiddled with one of the pieces from her selection.
"What are you looking at there, Jessie?" Armstrong7 asked as he strode to where she sat and worked. "Something useful or something interesting?"
"A little of both," she replied. "Look at what they did to this core catalyzer."
The man leaned in and narrowed his eyes at the piece she held aloft. "Aside from a couple of crude drawings of the various uses of a phallic shape, I don’t really see what they were doing here."
"Oh, is that what they are?" She looked at the drawings more closely. They were small and appeared to have been cut by a laser cleaner over the rust that had collected on the outer steel coating. Now that he had pointed them out, it was obvious that they had drawn crude phallus shapes going into what looked like equally crude depictions of female genitalia.
"Focus, Jessie," Armstrong growled. "You can stare at dicks on your own time. What are you talking about? What…what is this?"
"It's a core catalyzer," she explained. "It works like kind of a temporary battery and collects the power from the nuclear cores before it disperses it either into actual batteries or wherever else it needs to be. Guns, HUD, et cetera."
"Right…a core catalyzer." Armstrong7 nodded.
"Anyway, it looks like they peeled the containment off and plugged these wires into the holes. I'd say the idea they had was to make the conversion from the core to the rest of the suit more efficient, but like this, you'll burn the catalyzer out in…three weeks of use tops."
"How long did they use it for?"
"It’s hard to say for sure, but this blackening around the edges… You can see how it's already started overloading along the polarity," she pointed out. "It'll be simple enough to fix, but I need more ceramic to restructure the containment. Otherwise, it'll blow up any suit we put it in."
"Well, put it in the maybe pile," the CO said and glanced around. "The chances are any ceramic we get our hands on will be put to use elsewhere. Now, what about that one over there?"
Jessica13 looked at the piece he indicated and tilted her head as she gave it a quick scrutiny.
"That looks like one of the older cannons RIOT used to make." She picked it up for a closer look. "Depleted uranium slugs is what they're usually good for—the armor-piercing ones. It has one of the first autofeed magazines in mass production for guns that size. I think the Argonauts used to use them until they were upgraded to the Hellfire models. There’s less of a kick in the slider and less tendency to jam too."
"I thought it looked familiar," Armstrong7 said. "Any chance we can put it to good use? We could use a couple more Argonauts in the rounds."
"I know you like the Argonauts, so I'll put this as delicately as I can," she said. "Without the Hellfire model cannons, it's almost impossible to hit anything. Maybe if you ramp an S2 chamber to shoulder the recoil, but then we'd have to take this…circular saw off. Even then, if you channel the S2 over about thirteen volts, you'd still have to ground it with copper filament into the catalyzer and you risk shorting the whole firing mechanism. You basically end up with a heavy club you can use to maybe…uh, knock people around with, if you want. The chances are you'll either spray and pray or you'll have a very fancy deadweight on your arm. Even fancier if you keep the saw."
Armstrong7 narrowed his eyes and inclined his head a little disapprovingly as he studied the canon closely before he spoke. "You're not half wrong in that regard, but it's always a good thing to have cannons in reserve. Maybe we can plug them into those turrets we've tried to get operational again."
It had been a while since the turrets that used to protect Sanctuary had gone offline after a group of pirates riding a Sherlock had attacked with a long-range rifle that took the guns out. For at least a year, all they had been good for was an early warning system that required them to head up with Guardians and Argonauts every time an alarm was triggered.
Finding replacements was always a pain, but they had tried.
"Maybe," Jessica13 said. "So, maybe pile?"
"Sure," he said. "What do you make of the weapons they used?"
"Mostly basic assault rifles, grapplers, and a couple had some rocket launchers too," she said. "Not the autoloader ones. You know, only the ones with four tubes they had to reload manually. They were creative, and I’d say they had fun trying to work out how to get as much use out of as little materials as possible. They set up chest plates with aluminum sheets, and all the mechs I saw had ways to get through harder armor—the kind you see on our Guardians. You wouldn't need all this to handle your average pirate gang or to attack one peddler or another. They were readying to get through us, and… Well, they didn't get through, but they got much closer than the other attacks."
"True," he agreed, his expression unreadable. "Keep up the good work. Let me know if you find anything interesting. We need to go through all these piles quickly, though, so if in doubt, put it in the maybe pile and we'll get to it later."
She
