As Graham and Puru walked around the base camp they met with a handful of soldiers more talkative than the rest, willing to share some of the Mariemaia Army's going-ons with the hotblooded young man and the child following him around. As it turned out, during the time they'd been...wherever this was, they had picked up a few stragglers here and there including a number of useful pilots and their mobile suits. The machines, as technologically disparate as those on the Sundown, didn't quite fit with the massed firepower formations of the Serpents, but they had their uses and so the men were made to earn their keep acting as irregular troops.

As if on cue, a rapid approach alert rang and tension momentarily spiked before it was confirmed a friendly and everything went back to business as usual. That, the men told Graham and Puru, was one of the newcomers back from patrol. Rayburn Roberts Jr. did not particularly enjoy patrol duty, especially not at this stage of his career, but any flying was better than none, better than being holed up in an unknown base surrounded by people from an unknown force. He didn't dislike Mariemaia's Army per se, lots of good if pretty misguided kids in there, but everything was still too strange to make any sense out of. So patrol it was.

If the Sundown crew expected to see a mobile suit running or dashing along the ground, well, they were about to get something different. The Zeta Plus F cruised down from the air as a waverider, a flying machine akin to a jet fighter with grace unmatched by most any other bipedal titan forced to take to the skies. It had proven quite useful at these sorts of tasks compared to the lumbering Serpent. With a smooth, controlled approach it set down on the designated runway and glided to a gentle halt that belied its nature as a 20 meter tall killing machine armed to the teeth. The cockpit hatch popped open and out came the man himself helmet in hand.

Tall and rugged, wearing an obviously reinforced pilot suit and visibly armed, he simply screamed career soldier at plain sight even through the most definitely non-standard aviator shades and jacket and the toothpick wedged firmly in his mouth as he smiled at the few that came to greet him. "You can relax boys, if there'd been something you would've heard the alarms already. At this rate I'm going to wind up retired before I see anything resembling action out there". He stretched his aching, aging body with a grimace before taking stock of the base. "So, I heard there's some new people around".