Lucius Chroam quickly discovered that he wasn't quite as close to Nab's Holdout as he'd thought. Indeed, he was still technically outside the town limits. Not that the settlement really deserved the title of "town" or even its own limits. As it was, though, there was enough space between him and the closest building, that a whole shuttle managed to land about a hundred metres in front of him. Now the techpriest was not a superstitious cyborg, when compared to his colleagues. But he was a little stitious. And when the wash from the shuttle's engines began throwing his robe around, he was inspired. He was going to turn this humble transport into a slightly more dangerous, slightly less humble transport. With no heed to the fact that it belonged wholly to someone else, he waltzed right up to it, set down his case full of heavy stubber parts, made his mechanicus axe-maul disappear into his robe, and set to work.

Lucky for him, an explosion and the sounds of gunfire drew the attention of the shuttle's inhabitants, and he heard some yelling about "forming a line" and "going in" whatever that meant. Beyond the fact that it meant he had plenty of time for inventing, of course. Using his servo-arm to boost himself up, the chromed-out tinkerer sicked his utility mechadendrites on the wing of the shuttle, while his optical mechadendrite kept him up to speed on the proceedings. The shuttle had rudimentary hard-points, likely intended for fire-and-forget munitions. A skilled enginseer could probably rig them up for other weapons, but Chroam had even bigger plans.

Carefully manipulating the surprising excess available to him in the form of auxiliary systems, he began rigging up the basis of what would certainly be the most firepower this ship had ever been in possession of. The whole time, he remained in careful communication with the shuttle's machine spirit. This spirit was surprisingly helpful, even doing what it could to direct him through systems that would balance the power draw that anyone inside would doubtless be monitoring. Of course, that wouldn't last forever. He was going to need some serious energy to fire the weapon he was designing. It did help, though. Even if those still inside the vessel were paying attention, they'd have to be incredibly bored and attentive to figure out that anything was going on outside based on their instruments. Most of the time, a look out the window wouldn't help them either, since Lucius was tucked away underneath the wing.

Until someone noticed and decided to do something about the fact that there was a chrome-plated techpriest chatting in binary with a shuttle wing and creating something obviously menacing from scratch, the explorator was just going to keep working. For the moment, he was working on getting the groundwork set for his project, but even after it was operational, he could already see optimizations he was going to need to complete. It had yet to occur to him that someone might own this shuttle, and that they might not want laser-based destruction strapped to a hardpoint under the left wing. On top of that, if his invention decided it didn't want to work, he might end up on the unpleasant end of a catastrophic failure, and someone might be out a shuttle. That remained to be seen, however, as he was hoping to finish the device completely before test-firing it, just in case it did decide it didn't want to cooperate for some strange reason...