Zachary turned his head to look properly at Nal as he began to speak. Kaa'is took control with the repairs, guiding his hands and moving the metal parts and tools underneath the carriage. The military would be bound to respond if one of their patrols went missing, and if that patrol had radioed in that they had found him before they were killed reinforcements might be here sooner, so Kaa'is did not want to loose any time.

"My name's Zachary Mason. I'm an engineer. This carriage is new, though. Finished it around the time of the announcement." When Nal mentioned fixing a shuttle, Zachary's face lit up. "Ah, yes, I can fix a shuttle for you. You're in luck. Before the cataclysm I was working on designing a new shuttle engine for my PhD. Fixing a shuttle should be no trouble." The flicker of a plasma torch underneath the carriage stopped and a short length of pipe with a plasma bullet hole in it dropped out. "Who knows," Zachary added, "After we get out of here I might even be able to finish off that PhD."

As he got another length of piping and was heating the end with a blowtorch and hammering it to make it narrower, he said, "Give me five minutes and this carriage should be able to move again, and then you can lead me to your base or wherever."

In those few minutes he welded the pipe in place and then jury-rigged the controls to a functional state. The result looked much the same as it did before, but the difference came when he pulled the start lever and the carriage, with groaning metal and shuddering pipes, rose slowly off the ground. Once it was there it stopped groaning and shuddering quite so much, but it still looked quite precarious. Zachary returned the heap of scrap to the trap core. Then he got in the driver's seat and the carriage lurched down alarmingly with the added weight, although Zachary was not fazed as with his machine reading he was keeping a close eye on its performance. He could tell that if he pushed it much faster than a walk his repairs would probably fail and the carriage would stop abruptly, but until then it would work well enough.

"OK, ready when you are," Zachary said to the Mercenaries.