Battletech (private)

Silver nodded, tapping away at a keypad as she scanned the various documents, searching for a map. She grinned and transmitted a basic map of the complex to him. "That's all I can find. I've rerouted the systems to myself, so I can access most of the ships systems from where ever I am."

She spun and walked down to the cargo bay, Pariah hugging her as she entered. She walked up the mech and stroked its leg. "I wonder...." She bit her thumb, rubbing the blood against the cockpit. "I figured this might work, given it's something akin to lostech."

"It was a good attempt, but this thing is based on tech predating that by quite a bit, heck, it could be a prototype drone for all I know, and they have not finished its command and control station" he replied as he started knocking the hull and putting his ear to it, listening for an echo.

Though Dusk could probably assist in checking out that 'Mech, or whatever it was, but he figured somebody needed to make sure no enemies came in and surprised them.

Torchlight simply let the others do the searching, considering the only 'Mechs he really knew anything about were the ones he piloted.

Silver repeated Stream, grinning as she heard an echo. "I doubt a drone would have an empty cockpit..." She trailed off, and tapped a few commands on her keyboard. "Oh... Umm... I found something. You may want to climb off the mech." She said as she dropped down herself.

As Stream jumped off the mech, a small charging sound could be heard as the mech tilted forward and the entire front end opened up, revealing the insides to the closest individual, who happened to be Stream. Inside was an extremely sophisticated cockpit, controls lined the surfaces and what wasn't dominated by switches and knobs had a screen on it. The joysticks were sitting at the far end of a pair of arm rests, and the place where a pony would sit had several spikes jutting down the center, right were the spine would be. He whistled slightly and said "that does not look pleasant to pilot"

When Dusk heard the thing open up, he went to take a look inside, along with Torchlight. Though he didn't know much about how everything worked, Dusk had an idea what those spikes in the seat were for.

"I think those spikes allow for a neurological connection to the pilot," Dusk said.

"No way am I hooking myself into that," Torchlight said, "I don't want any foreign objects going into me." Torchlight then thought about what he said, turned to Dusk and said, "Don't even say it."

"I won't, considering if I did make a joke about it, it wouldn't be true. You're not that promiscuous."

"Well, there's one way to find out, and I'm not planning on doing it anytime soon. Plus if it did work in tandem with the pilot's brain signals why are there so many switches? In case the mech is unable to establish a connection to its user?" He said, running one of his fingers along the lowest spike, then recoiled slightly as a small droplet of blood emerged from the tip, and stated "Sharp buggers aren't they?"

"We could test it... With me I suppose. I mean, it looks pretty cool... But I'd rather not have those spikes in me..." She tapped her chin in thought.

"I think we should let some engineers take a look at it before one of us hooks into it. I'd be willing to volunteer after that," Dusk said.

"I don't care if someone checks it out first, I'm not sticking myself in there," Torchlight said.

"They should have design specifications stored on the network somewhere, think you can dig them out Silver?" Stream turned to look at her.

She nodded and went to work, tapping furiously. "Oh... Oh!" She exclaimed. "That's incredible... Shielding tech I've never even seen before..." She went silent, a clip playing. "Wow... Have a look at this."

Looking over at the clip, the above timer said 'test 45, capabilities test #4' "They've been busy, that's for sure" as he watched the demo. A tech off-screen said "Live fire testing, all personnel leave the area, all personnel leave the area this is a live-fire demonstration" as the mech began powering up. Once fully online, as was seen in the upper right corner, the mech had an orange-white glow around the hull, while a field of bluish-white surrounded it. Stream said "That's why there's no windows or obvious ways in, anyone who tried would have their hand roasted by the superheated metal there"

"Commence demonstration" The mech aimed it's weapons at the battalion facing it, over a hundred armored vehicles and a few assault mechs against one heavy mech. The one-sided fight turned into an all-out brawl, the prototype absorbing the insane amounts of damage with its shield and dishing it out with it's varied weaponry, ranging from projectiles spewing out of the turret, to the missiles lanched row-upon-row at the enemies; the vehicles disappearing in bright balls of orange-blue light, while the arms unleashed several blue beams of energy at the mechs, cutting them to pieces through their armor. As the video ended with the remains of the rest of the units, stream said "woah, nice job Silver, copy all the research data on the network onto this, make sure you're discreet about it; we've been lucky so far, lets keep it up" he produced a thumb-sized storage drive and gave it to Silver, then turned to the others and said "now then, who's gonna drive this thing?"

After seeing the footage, Dusk was actually quite excited to pilot the thing. Although the spikes were a bit of a deterrent.

"I may as well try to pilot it. I just hope those spikes in the seat don't cause me to bleed to death or something," Dusk said.

"As much as I hate to say it, I really hope Dusk doesn't die from this. As annoying as he can be, he is my brother."

"Oh, I'm the annoying one now?"

"Shut up."

Dione nodded and copied the data discretely. She frowned at the pair. "If anyone gets to pilot it, it's me. I'm the one with the broken mech after all. And," she purred. "I'm the only one who knows how to disable the spikes."

"That may be true, but we know squat about how it operates, and if those spikes are actually necessary in the operation of the mech. We'll keep it here for now and have a loader truck come in and take it back to the dropship, we'll decide on who gets it later, right now I want to have a look at the map of this place" pulling up the map, Stream looked through the complex, seeing that this hangar bay dominated about a third of the total area, with an armory and a small storage area to the west of the hangar and a research area divided into several levels off to the north, the research place taking up another third of the installation while the rest of the space was from tunnel networks, miscallaneous smaller research areas, and other small things. He said "good grief, it's going to take a while to look through this place"

"Do we have time to go through it? We still have the main objective to complete, right?" Dusk asked.

"We should at least wait until some men from the ship come to secure the place. Let's not let this fall back into enemy hands," Torchlight added.