Where no Ark Hunter has gone Before!

Taffer leaned the back of his head on the aircraft's cold metal wall and answered, "Last thing I remember from that battle I and Vo were maintaining a lockdown of the enemy's base so that all those minions inside wouldn't come to fight. Then the building collapsed on our heads and later I was rescued by those kind and hospitable creatures who even bothered to insist on having a separate room for my online companion", he touched the back of his neck where the EGO device was inserted, "So neither I, nor Vo I think, could be of help on telling you what happened at the battlefield unfortunately".

"As for me being the leader", he smiled, "If you're not yet tired of me putting you in ganger, then I'll happily get you into trouble once again while desperately trying to keep you all alive and do something good incidentally for a change", his face became serious, "But I'm a normal human too, like you said, so if you see I'm wrong in something, please say so".

He pondered a little and continued, "Like now, for example. I think we need to set a base on the moon before we actually start to that space ship we know almost nothing of. It will be our escape or transit point if something goes wrong. The fastest way to set it up is to use a Progenitor core. As I've said someday, I know the place where we can find a dormant one. I can't control it while it's active except for the simple shutdown, but it can be pre-programmed while it's dormant to do the job when it's turned on. Given we already have a spaceship working, the fetch mission should be fast and easy, but you never know. But still it's some kind of a delay which our team might not like to take. What do you think of it?"

Lady Christianna smiled as she grabbed Atticus' two large hands in her two small ones, pulling him through the bathroom door and into the shower, whereupon she turned on the cold water of the shower full blast, it's cascade soaking their clothes almost immediately! Lady squealed in delight, invigorated by the sudden change of temperature, whereupon she jumped up to grab Atticus around the neck to bring him to her height, splashing water everywhere as she kissed him passionately. They slowly undressed each other as they kissed as young lovers do, then laughing as they took their time lathering and rinsing each other off.

When they had finished, Atticus picked up Lady's thin but lovely unblemished white body in his two strong scarred brown arms, carrying her to the bed they shared, where they cuddled in the nude face to face, smiling as they soundlessly enjoyed each others company, until Lady fell asleep, this time without nightmares!

Before she fell asleep, Lady smiled her enigmatic smile as she said with conviction, "Your Snow Angel!"

Getting two large buckets I begin to scoop the hellbug "waste" into them when both were full I take them to a small slapdash processing machine to extract the pure petrohol in order for it to be burned more smoothly.

As I saw the door open I got ready to grab a gun, until I saw Belle peak in. I relaxed but frowned, and put a scarred forefinger to my lips signaling Belle to keep quiet. I watch her turn bright red like a tomato, then quickly leave the room. I am not sure whether or not to be annoyed at her interruption and inability to knock, but do have to bite a lip to keep from laughing and waking Christiannna, because of how red and embarrassed Belle got. A few seconds after she bolted from the room, I got her EGO message. I send her one back saying, "Please do, Starr Eyes. Tianna and I would appreciate some warning, that we have visitors. Glad to see that you and Taffer made it back, though. Now get a little rest."

I then cover us up like I should have earlier, and just hold Christianna close to me, knowing one or both of us will need to talk to Belle about "us" at some point soon, since it's obvious Belle is going to make sure that happens, after finding us naked in Christianna's bed together. I think, "Man, being in love is turning out to be a hard and dangerous thing. Oh well. My Snow Angel is worth it and much more." I then cuddle closer and drift back to sleep, not caring about anything except the wonderful person in my arms.

After taking some rest, Taffer woke up and Em Dash, his EGO, informed him that there's unusual commotion throughout the base. He walked out to observe the activity and saw Belle leading the crew of her employees around the base. He greeted them when Belle introduced each of the leaders, and when it came to Chloe, he smiled and said, "We've met. Not in person though. It's always nice to see you, but you'd better knock before you enter". The last phrase put a smile at Chloe's face too because it was the exact quote of the message that appeared on her hailer after she tried to investigate an unusual activity of the Delta Bunker's radio transmitter, detected a non-EMC hardware plugged in, but could not find anything indentifying its owner or anything else interesting except the music collection because all data banks in Taffer's truck were rigged to physically turn off when untimely access is attempted. Taffer managed to trace the intruder then, and left the message on her hailer, along with a description of the vulnerability he used to send it.

When Belle finished with Taffer gathered the team in the war room for a briefing.

"First of all, glad to see you all again, alive and well", he began, "but back to the point. As Belle told us already, we're after the Ark which is located behind the moon, thus it was invisible from Earth for all these years. The only point where the spaceship reside for years without wasting its fuel, it's the L2 Lagrangian point of the Earth — Moon system"

The projector flashed and showed the schematic of the Moon's orbit and its Lagrangian points.


"Mathematics aside, the main point is that the spaceship must be much closer to the Moon than to the Earth. Which brings me to the decision that before heading to the Ark itself, we'd better build a base on the Moon from where we could observe the Ark first, retreat to it in case of something unexpected happens on board, or send life pods from the Ark there in case we need to start emergency evacuation of people who are on that Ark. Anyway, it's always good to have a relatively safe place close to our mission goal.

The downside is, building a base takes time and resources, so our mission may come to a slowdown because of it. The solution is…"

The projector flashed again and the Scrapworks facility appeared on the screen with the glowing orb in the center of it.


"The Progenitor core", Taffer continued, "The ark tech device which is designed to construct buildings and mechanisms out of scrap metal and other substances. The Moon has endured its portion of arkfalls too, so what we need to do if we have a Core is to find a good chunk of Ark debris and program the Core to build a base for us from it. As the Moon has no atmosphere, destroyed Ark fragments should be in much better conditions on the Moon than what we see left of them on the Earth."

The next slide on the projector showed the active Core and a horde of Scrappers surrounding it.

"My experience with this type of Ark tech shows that the Core, once activated, starts to work according to the program uploaded to it, and the default program is to protect itself and the territory it's located in. Once activated, it cannot be controlled by the usual EGO device, and any attempt to influence its logic it treats as an intrusion. Once its power source is severely weakened, it can be programmed again, but the loss of energy makes it less and less effective. This leads us to the conclusion that the best way to acquire the Core which we could fully use is to find one in its initial dormant state, then reprogram it to have at least a quick shutdown function. After that, it could be reprogrammed several times without the need to waste its energy on fighting".

The projector was showing the map of North America now.

"Now we came to the point where we can find one", Taffer continued as the map zoomed in to Dallas, "the abandoned EMC bunker, ten miles north of Dallas. Can't show you the interior because I didn't have the EGO back then when I was there and didn't know what that thing was other than that it was dangerous. I'm the only one alive who knows it's there and I've never heard of someone finding it, I can assume it's still there as I've left it. As I've said earlier, the bunker is abandoned and moreover it sank deeper underground due to terraforming with almost no trace outside. I assume zero resistance, at least until we get the Core. After that, someone might be foolish enough to try and take it away from us.

So basically, the only downside is it's a long way across the country. This makes me thinking we can combine our operation with the proper test of our space ship. A simple climb to stratosphere and descend at our destination would show us what it is capable of.

Now, to the team. I'll definitely need Chris to pilot the ship, and I'll definitely need Lady Christianna to help us to get inside. Everyone else is free to decide if they are going or staying here. As I see the base now have a maintenance crew, we don't really need to leave someone here to supervise and we can just go in full team. Is I've said, I expect it to be a quick fetch mission, but you never know.

Next question, weapons. Like we're giving a test to our space ship, I think we need to test our space weapons. So take the weapons you are going to take with you into space. Votan pulsers, blast rifles and blaster pistols are fine. As well as Volge and charge weapons. And also Votan and VBI rocket launchers should be fine. BMGs too. What definitely won't work properly are old Frontier weapons, Infectors and Detonators".

Taffer sighed, thinking he'll have to lay all of his favorite arsenal aside, and then continued, "Questions? Suggestions?"

"Good question, Vo", Taffer answered, "As you may see, I've found the Core once at the Scraworks, but it happened to be active and in the end it completely burned out after throwing the entire junkyard at me to fight. But at least it didn't explode like it usually happens in an open field, so Eren and I managed to reverse engineer its logic part, not to the point of re-creating something similar, but enough to enable its shutdown function or activate different behavioral patterns. Of course, the only thing we could test our programs on were the simulation model, so there's still some risk of something going wrong. In that case, I guess everyone knows how to destroy it.

On your second question — not all shotguns are out, but your FRC Scattergun definitely is. On the contrary, Lady's Crimefighter will be fine, and I've got a Breacher especially for you Vo. It's not the best of its kind like your scattergun is, and it's double-shot, so it needs some practice to be used effectively. But it's still a good weapon overall."

Belle Starr said with a smile, "Sounds like you did your homework Taffer, and have things well in hand! If you don't need me or my guns, I'll remain here and get my staff settled in! I can also help Blackgut's Dragoons get familiar with our base security systems, freeing Atticus for the mission, if he wishes to go! Furthermore here I can play backup if things go south on the mission!"

Belle knew for a fact that Atticus would want to go on the mission if Lady was going, and she wanted her friend to be free to do so without feeling he had abandoned his security chief responsibilities. Belle just hope that Lady wouldn't distract Atticus from his mission responsibilities, but knew Taffer could handle that if that became a problem, and she would back him up on that front to if necessary.

Lady Christianna had her patent deer in the headlights look in her big pink eyes when Taffer said he needed her for the mission, holding Atticus' big scarred hand tightly in both of her small alabaster ones. She wondered what Taffer could possibly need her for, and thought about asking, "Why me?", but then supposed that Taffer as mission leader had a good reason for wanting her along, and would tell her what he needed from her when the time came for it. However when Taffer mentioned that she could bring her Crime Fighter shotgun, she was so thrilled she let go of Atticus' hand, crossing her delicate hands over her chest and stepped forward saying with an enigmatic smile on her thin lips, "Ready."