After the briefing was over, Joe slowly, but determined, made his way to the armory. He wasn't in a haste, as several days were left until he would have to have finished his preparations.
He could find the way extremely easily, his brain was quite good at mapping out environments, and soon there would be no need to look at any sort of map of the inside of this base.
The Armory had another slided security door, and a small keypad, guarded by two perssonel. "Joe Verona?"
"Correct. I would like to know where to file requests for some of the armory's equipment; specifically smoke grenades."
"Smoke grenades? Well, can I ask why?"
"To fool an enemy into thinking an NC took engine damage."
"Ah, I see. Can you give us a moment" - "Of course."
The guards turned to the door and whispered to eachother. "He's one of the NC Pilots, Sophia'd probably be pissed if we screwed up anything for him, right?"
"Yeah, she'd probably make sure we had 'accidents' or something. Let him in."
The right guard hovered in front of the keypad as the other re-assumed his position, typing eleven numbers into the keypad. "Talk to the Quartermaster, he'll set you up."
"Thank you very much." Joe responded with a smile, as he entered.
The room had two walls lined with gun cabinets, ammo boxes, spare parts, and armament maintenance equipment, alongside things such as body armor and person-sized equipment.
"Joe Verona? Why are you here, aren't you an NC pilot?", the clean-shaven, buzz-cutted quartermaster asked, an inquisitve look in his eyes.
"That is indeed the case, Mr..." Joe looked for any sort of name-tag on the uniform.
"Robert."
"Mr Robert. I came to the armory to request a smoke grenade. The purpose is fooling an enemy into thinking an NC took engine damage."
"Well what's the actual game-plan on that? Going to work with the engineers to think-up a little mechanism you can fit in near the engine that'll set off smoke? How's the smoke gonna get out?"
"Through the exhaust, quite obviously."
"Well, it'd be more convincing if it came out somewhere where it isn't supposed to and all."
"While true, the winds and turbulences created by a jet-turbine would drag any smoke towards the exhaust. At least in the first few seconds after the damage, which should be enough for the purpose."
"Eh, true that. Well, how many do you think you'll need? I only got four right now."
"A single one should suffice, the engineers can create a test-dummy-grenade off of it for testing purposes, unless you have one of those too."
"I got two of those."
"Well, I don't want to borrow half of your stock of dummy grenades just for this, so the single smoke grenade should do fine."
"Hah. Alright, go get it then, they're in that box to your left."
"Thank you, good sir."
Joe opened the box to find the small stack of grenades, as expected. He took one out and headed towards the door, after closing the box carefully again.
"You're not gonna just set them off, jackass. You don't need to be that careful."
"Well, one can never be too careful with rare goods. Better safe than sorry. And thanks again."
Joe left the armory, 'saying' goodbye to its guards with a nod and a smile. He was heading for the main NC hangar, to see where on Swarm's jetpack he could fit it best.
A bit of duct-tape, a small magnet and a small coil should do the trick of pulling the pin, if set up right. Using a rope for this would be too risky, considering the rope might get stuck in moving parts.
Verona connected one contact of the coil directly to the metal of the exhaust; it should be connected to the rest of the NC, so he wouldn't have to worry about one additional wire. However, there was no way around using at least one wire. He placed the tiny wire from the other contact of the coil so that it would likely never come into contact with any moving part.
He moved it through some gaskets into the cockpit, so in the end all he would have to do to set off the mechanism was connecting a battery to the wire and another metal piece on the inside of the cockpit.
Obviously it would fail to activate underwater, but at that point he planned to already have used it.
After quite some time of crawling through the NC's insides to run the wire, Joe was finished, and Swarm ready for his mission against the Denver-Vegas cruiser.
