Gan reckoned if they didn't have to sit in on four and a half hours of bullshit briefings tonight, then he might as well get a shower and a nap in. He slipped into his bunk still damp from the humid, opaque-grey steamer room, his hair a birdsnest of shimmering curls, and when he woke, it was at the end of a metal peg-leg kicking the cot frame. Yrma was already packed away into her flightsuit, jump-boots, and bomber; she swung the cylinder on her Mateba Model 6 to check that it was loaded, then shoved it into its shoulder-holster. Her grizzly-paws made that hand-cannon look like a regular old gun. Not how she got her callsign, but it was certainly a fitting one, in more respects than one.

Once he was dressed, Gan pressurized his suit around his wrists, neck, and ankles, and confirmed that his comparatively tiny Smith & Wesson 19 was loaded, and with .357 Magnum instead of the .38 Special he used at the range. It was. And with nothing left to do but to get it done (okay, and take a piss before strapping in), he sealed the door behind him. The other two doors also had been clamped, leading to Gan's suspicion that he was about to be the last pilot to the hangar. Unless one or another CO had snared Commander Voldova in their bureaucratic web, and she was off grudgingly kissing ass somewhere on the upper decks ...

Ordnancemen, nukies, and air officers scurried from place to place in their scramble to be done before the launch. Crawling over the mechs via ladders and cranes and cherrypickers, they reminded Gan of Hebrew slaves building a pyramid, or—as the enormously wide walls, distant ceiling, and vaguely humanoid metal titans played with his perceptions—of termites repairing their nest of mud and straw. Tiny, fragile animals crawling over the flesh of dormant giants. Giants which awakened even now, as pilots and mech-captains alike, visible through cocked-open cockpit canopies, initiated start-up codes and eased their steel beasts into loading stations and lift-hooks. Great chutes guided autocannon belts into the shoulders of Ana's FLI 'Hellion' as men on ladders shoved Chariot warheads into missile tubes. They clambered between the slats of Chlotho's A3-37 Phalanx's heat jettison ports, too, scrubbing soot and grit from the chambers. As for Gan's OW35s 'Basilisk,' cloven-footed and bent-backed, a misshapen leviathan, a ceiling-mounted crane had guided an enormous, fallopian-tube-like power cable to the charging port in the rear of the unit, and two more were still slotting copper capsules into the nape-mounted particle cannon, and tungsten darts into the flanks of the arm-mounted railguns. Gan swept his gaze across the Basilisk's loading bay; he and the person he sought out noticed each other at about the same time, the latter jogging up to meet him. They saluted each other.

"Master Sergeant Bosphorus," said Gan. "At ease."

"Lieutenant Szilard, sir!" the master-sergeant replied. "Welcome back. Your warmech is ready for final inspection. We're only loading up the ordnance, and topping off the superbattery. [i]Sir.[/i]"

Florian Bosphorus's rosy, callused hands offered Gan a clipboard, whose contents he glanced over lazily. Under the seat of his baseball cap, hairpins kept Florian's shaggy brown bangs out of his eyes; the very best tidiness he could muster for combat dress. "What are we doing about the joints?" Gan asked him.

"Sir?"

"The soot-storm. Won't all that particulate work its way into the joints and seize them up?"

Florian turned to look at the mech as if that question had only just occurred to him. "Uh, thankfully most of your joints use a closed-hydraulic system ... You can thank Apollyon Arms for that ... As for the hip rotator and the ankle servos, we can hit those with some nanospray for you. A temporary fix, but it should work long enough to get you back for maintenance."

"Do that, then." Gan peered back down into the checklist, giving it a sneering look so he'd look like he was being serious. "Projections say we'll be back in three days. Will you and the other jacks be joining us for drinks once we're dismissed?"

"Three days," Florian mumbled, "three days ... ah! Shit, that's the petty officers' poker game. Sorry, Gan; I've already bought a seat at the table."

"That's 'Sorry, sir,' while we're at our stations; but that's alright. Next time," Gan assured him with a clap on the back.

A long, quiet moment, quiet despite the mechanical hiss-whir-clang of the hangar, whistled between them. Florian dismissed himself by shouting, "Hey, blueshirt! Get the nanospray, double time!" and whisking himself away to the last of his work. Chuckling, Gan armpitted the clipboard and climbed aboard the wire lift to the cockpit, where, after giving Florian one last salute from up atop the mech, his systems check began with running the dials and dry-firing all the weapons systems. This done, it was time to jack in; so he removed his neckplate, braced against the inevitable wave of nausea, and inserted the neurolink into the port in his nape. At once sensors and actuators and gyroscopes burst to life, and, gripping the twin cyclics, Gan flexed his mech's extremities, clenching and releasing, extending each limb as far as its servos and sheaths allowed before bottoming out, taking a few steps fore and back once the handling officer directed personnel and machinery away from the platform. It was a quick inspection, Gan's check-marks added unhesitantly to the list beside Florian's; Florian and his hangar boys did good work. Other than not waiting until Gan had closed the cockpit to hit the mech with nanospray; he had to rip away from his seat and slam the canopy shut so he wouldn't get blasted with industrial-grade aerolubricant so soon after taking a shower.

Carefully directing his mech down the white line painted on the floor, pausing to let munitions carts and other smaller vehicles go by, Gan found himself checking the empty bays beside his. As expected, he would be the last one onto the catapult, except for the commander's Armageddon-class 'Sword of Damocles,' still unmanned and thus lifeless as the officers gathered by its feet and the handlers wriggled over its body; and ... ah. That must've been the rookie's mech. Unmistakably Talarius-built, with its awkward little flipper-feet and its pot-bellied little reactor torso—some kind of recon model, but Gan didn't know which one right away. Pulling his own mech closer, he figured he'd get a look at how his newest teammate handled herself; maybe throw her a thumb-up for confidence. Peering out his cockpit and into hers, he certainly wouldn't have hoped that she was chatting with someone on the radio, all giggles and smiles. She'd been cracking wise since this morning, too. If Gan was going to be working with this girl for the foreseeable future, trusting her with his life and being willing to rescue hers, too, then she was going to have to prove she was taking this seriously.

She didn't seem to have even started her systems check, either. And sure, maybe those scouter-mechs were easier to catch up—fewer weapons and all that—but ... was this really how she was gonna behave on her first day?

[i]Maybe she's already [b]finished[/b] her check ... ? I mean, I was excited on my first day too ...[/i]

Before he overthought it, Gan urged the Basilisk forward, and into the next available catapult bay. Of course, it was just his luck, after one revelation, to then immediately be placed next to ...

"HEY, GAN!" he cried from one cockpit to the next, cupping his hands over his mouth to amplify himself over the ambient industrial noise.

"WHAT?!" Gan cried back to Chlotho.

"FIVE HUNDRED CREDITS ON ME DOWNING MORE BOGEYS THAN YOU."

"WHEN WILL YOU GET SICK OF GIVING ME YOUR MONEY, MAN?!"

"WHEN I'VE BEATEN YOU!"

"Oh, great ... FINE. MY NEXT SHORE-LEAVE IS ON YOU, THEN, SINCE YOU INSIST."

"DON'T BE SO SURE, GAN; THIS IS THE ONE! I CAN FEEL IT!"

From the fist-pump he gave himself next, shouting something this time too quiet to be heard over the mechanical din, Chlotho seemed unwilling to back down from his own fruitless challenge, strapping himself in starting with his airlock helmet, and then his harness. Gan waited until he saw the commander, traversing the hangar toward her colossal Sword of Damocles, to do the same.

"Supposedly you felt it last time, too ..." he grumbled, also inaudibly.

The frame of his mech shook as something [i]clunked[/i] into his back, and then his withers; looking to his left, great mechanical claws were affixing a parachute and a jump-pack to Chlotho's A3-37 Phalanx. Ana and Yrma's mechs, already so equipped, stood idling and at the ready.