The trek to the dam was every bit as bad as she expected it to be. In an attempt to stave off the boredom, she started reading through the Archer’s user manual, figuring the 900 page, A4 format grimoire would last a few hours even if she didn’t understand half of the maintenance sections. Apparently, Earthwerks Inc. also made the Thunderbolt. She didn’t know that. What was it with Earthwerks’ seeming inability to design a ‘Mech that had enough heatsinks, Marit thought as she worked a straw under the neurohelmet’s seal to take a sip of MRE lemonade that had gone disgustingly warm during the 17 hour road trip through the tunnels. One day, one day she would find a working, unattended minifridge somewhere and tape it into her cockpit. Lovett would complain about fire and loose object hazards in the cockpit, but it was hard to express how little she cared.

As they neared their objective for the day, she reached for the push to talk. [color=76D0FF]”Lance Leader, I’ve been thinking: breaching a dam doesn’t take much, all you need is to weaken it and the weight of the water behind it will do the rest. Now our working theory was that they’ll drive a truck full of explosives in from the South or something along those lines, but what if they load up a boat with explosives and come from the West side?”[/color] She offered a suggestion she’d been going over in her mind for the past 45 minutes, [color=76D0FF]”Should I post up by the Northern end of the dam? That way I could see the upstream water and have an easy way of getting onto the dam if they came from the South as expected. It would also help with collateral damage. I can’t accidentally hit the dam if I‘m standing on top of it.”[/color]

When the Colonel mentioned dirt roads to the South of the dam, she at first thought that played into their hands until she remembered she was on fucking Espia, where it rained 696 days of the year and a few days on top of it for good measure, so dust clouds kicked up by moving vehicles wouldn’t be a thing. And if what the Colonel warned them about was true and the lunatics got their hands on actual military hardware, would they use it and how? Distractions so the actual bomb could slip through? At least she didn’t have to worry about aiming too much. Once a lock was achieved, the missiles did their own thing, guided by gods knew what space magic, and the directions the attack was expected to come from didn’t have much cover.