Building Zoids in a World of Titans

Days had passed since the meeting with Thane, and the workshop belonged to them now.

Sela had pushed the sale through faster than Alex expected, calling in a favor with Goran that collapsed weeks of paperwork into days. Foothill Row sat plain and unremarkable, the kind of building nobody looked at twice. That suited him fine. By the time the last signature cleared, the Iron Mule already sat parked against the near wall, and the Liger Zero, the Arosaurer, and the Lanstag stood lined up along the back, powered down and waiting.

Three machines, three years of work more or less, stood quiet in a building that hadn't existed for any of them an hour earlier. He ran his eyes over every seal and hatch out of habit, the same check he always ran.

"Thanks for pushing the paperwork through, Sela. It would have taken weeks otherwise."

Sela flipped a page on the clipboard, eyes down.

"Goran owes me a favor from the spring haul, and I'm calling it collected. The caravan's waiting on a manifest update, and I've got a route survey to finish before sundown."

She stopped at the threshold, one boot already outside.

"Lock up when you're done. The compound stays quiet after dark, but the perimeter sensors don't sleep."

The door swung shut behind her. Alex stood alone with the three Zoids at his back, the workshop settling into quiet, nothing but the tick of a cooling engine somewhere behind him.

Paper still warm from the courier's satchel, Ziya spread the sale manifests across the workbench. Alex crossed the floor and stood beside her, letting his eyes land on the numbers instead of the machines for once.

"How'd the Threadwhip haul turn out?"

Ziya's stylus moved down the first column.

"It came in decent, though not spectacular. The silk glands cleared about fifty-five thousand Sols."

He let that sit a moment, already weighing it against what a proper CAS frame would cost.

"And what did the rest of it bring in?"

"Venom sacs and whip-leg sensors added another forty thousand or so, and the Mire-Devourer carcass brought in roughly thirty-five thousand on top of that." She tapped the final column with the stylus. "The raw total comes to about a hundred thirty thousand Sols. After the broker's cut and transport fees, we're looking at somewhere around ninety-five thousand net."

The money was decent, enough to cover workshop rent, a few months of supplies, and a modest cushion for Vita-Alloy top-ups. Three working Zoids already needed upkeep in the background, and none of it came close to funding a new build outright. His mind ran the numbers anyway: core shell for the Elephander, actuator upgrades for the Lanstag's thruster mounts, and it'd be good to finally get Rhian a sensor suite that didn't leave her flying the Arosaurer half-blind.

"Which one are we going after first? The flying one, or the ground ones?"

Rhian didn't look up from the crate she was unpacking, both hands buried in packing straw.

Neither Alex nor Ziya had said the hunt order out loud before this exact moment, though the answer had clearly been sitting in both their heads already.

Alex folded his arms.

"We're going after the Crag-Stalkers first. They're ground-based, and the Liger Zero eats ground targets for breakfast between the speed, the claws, and Weakness Scan. It's built for exactly that fight. The Ashwing flies, and we don't have anti-air worth mentioning yet. The tail beam gun's a deterrent, not a solution. If we go after the Ashwing now, we're fighting on its terms instead of ours."

Ziya was already cross-referencing something on her datapad.

"I completely agree. The pack's a known quantity. Corrupted or not, Crag-Stalkers still follow predictable patterns, and the Ashwing's an unknown variable with the whole sky as its battlefield."

Talk turned to what they'd need before anyone went near the Ashwing at all.

"We need an anti-air CAS module, something that locks onto the Liger's hardpoints, with missile pods if we can source them and maybe a railgun if we can get the Flux Metal for the barrel. Give us reach, and give the Ashwing a reason to come down to us instead of circling all day."

Ziya's stylus moved faster now, numbers scrolling across her datapad, and her expression didn't get any happier watching them.

"A proper CAS frame with missile integration and targeting software runs two hundred thousand minimum, and Flux Metal for the railgun barrel alone is fifty thousand grams at current market. We're not sitting on a hundred and thirty thousand short here, Alex, we're sitting on a hundred and fifty thousand short, and that's before the Elephander fund even enters the conversation."

"That's how bad it's gotten?"

"That's exactly how bad it's gotten. We don't have the alloy or the machining time, and even stripping the Elephander fund down to nothing wouldn't close the gap."

Nothing in the workshop made a sound. Alex didn't flinch from it. His fingers found the edge of the workbench and tapped out a rhythm only he could hear.

"Then we build a Mark I."

Ziya's head came up.

"You want to build a Mark I? What does that even mean here?"

"A stopgap, basically. We use rough, cheap substitutes wherever it won't get anyone killed. Frame-Iron works for the mounting brackets instead of Vita-Alloy, and Pulse-Copper wiring can replace Flux Metal for the fire control loop. We sacrifice reload speed and ammo capacity, but we keep the targeting computer and the hardpoint lock. It only takes three days instead of three weeks. It just has to make the Ashwing think twice about staying airborne long enough for the Liger to close the distance."

He crossed to the schematic table and pulled a fresh sheet off the roll.

Ziya watched him for a long moment, then bent back over her datapad, cross-referencing the inventory against the spec sheet he was already sketching in real time.

"We've got the Frame-Iron brackets covered, six hundred kilos left over from the Lanstag build, plus two spools of Pulse-Copper still sitting in the Mule's storage. The targeting computer's the tricky part, though. We'll have to build one from scratch out of scrap, and it won't be pretty."

"I don't mind at all. As long as it still beeps at me when something's about to eat me, I really don't care how fancy it is."

"It's tight, but doable, barely." Ziya set the datapad down against the workbench. "You'll be hand-fitting every bracket, because the tolerances won't hold on Frame-Iron the way they do on Vita-Alloy. The Pulse-Copper will run hot under sustained fire too, so you'll need to babysit the cooling cycle between engagements."

"That's acceptable, given what we're working with."

"You said three days, and I'm holding you to exactly that."

"It'll be three days, and you have my word on it."

Ziya exhaled something that was almost a laugh.

"Fine. Mark One it is."

They settled on the plan together: the Crag-Stalker pack first, the Mark I CAS built in parallel out of whatever they already had, and the Ashwing held in reserve until they mounted and tested the module.

Rhian surfaced from the crate she'd nearly climbed into. Salvaged wire filled both her arms.

"You're already designing the Mark Two too, aren't you, the real one, before you've even cut the first bracket for this one?"

Alex paused, stylus hovering over the mounting-hole pattern he'd half-drawn.

"I might have already sketched a few ideas for it."

She snorted, one eyebrow arched higher than her face had any business managing.

"Figures. You're impossible, you know that?"

"Someone has to think ahead, and it's usually going to be me."

"Someone has to think about right now too, and that's usually going to be me, apparently." Entirely serious for exactly one second, she pointed a finger at him from across the workshop. "Don't forget the Mark One while you're off dreaming about the Mark Two."

The stylus touched paper. The first line went down clean and straight, and for now, at least, that was enough.

Advance chapters on my p@tR$0n/Najicablitz.

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