Main Hangar Bay, Ouray Base - Somewhere in the Colorado System
The Roc languishing in the launch bay had, simply put, seen better days. The dull brown, factory-issue armour had long since been blown off in more than a few places, replaced by riveted sheets of battleship grey plating. One arcing wing was bent almost completely out of shape, so much so that Siobhan doubted whether the ship would still be capable of atmospheric flight, and the less anyone said about the state of the electronics suite built into the bomber, the better. Even the weaponry was suspect - the EMP cannons slung underneath each wing seemed to alternate between firing properly and shorting each other out, and the antimatter cannon bolted onto the superstructure was a typical Xeno construction of leaky radiation and haphazard metalwork.
Still, she mused, it hadn't let her down yet - and in Ouray's hangars, her ship was one of the lucky ones. The jokes about duct tape and glue were just jokes, of course, but more than a few of her fellow pilots were patching up hull breaches with little more than metal foam, some hastily-welded plates of iron, and a few prayers before bedtime. Most of the ships on this station were more dangerous to their pilot than his or her target, assuming they managed to clear the bay doors without a catastrophic malfunction cutting their sortie short before it'd even begun. Personnel was shorter than ever, but their material concerns had never even begun to let off - it was the combination of both that was beginning to strangle them, a duet of problems that kept her awake night after night.
With an all-too-familiar twinge of worry roiling in her stomach, Siobhan at last turned away from the handrail. The hangar crew below had enough on their plate as it was, the shortage of men biting that area of things just as hard as it was everywhere else. Spaceborne operations were at an all-time low following the Alliance's dissolution - and to make matters worse, many of the faces that had wound up dead, missing, or otherwise no longer flying were irreplaceable. It was as if every species of snake that mattered had, slowly but surely, gone extinct, from the copperhead to the pymy, the herald to the mighty boa - even the unassuming grass and milk snakes had slipped off the radar. Even the memory of it tightened her chest with anger, her augmetic arm clenching reflexively into a metallic fist. It just wasn't fair. How could she even be expected to stop things from falling apart, let alone emulate even the faintest little glimmer of the old Alliance? A certain torpor had gripped each and every Xeno in the weeks and months they'd been left here now - Ouray no longer coordinated with Dryden to any reasonable degree, and transmissions from Eagen and Barrow had all but stopped reaching Colorado in their entirety. The movement wouldn't disintegrate utterly without them, by any stretch of the imagination - the Xeno movement was a juggernaut with centuries of weight and fanaticism behind it - but no one could say that it had come out the other side better off.
In fact, as she took step after step along the corridor, Siobhan felt like she was heading to the one place - the one thing, even - that could've kept her going. The Alliance might have been all but gone, but there was still one thing she had left from those days. Taking a left turn, she continued on her way further and further from the main hangar bay, homing in on a smaller, decidedly more specialised area of Ouray's maintenance facilities. The majority of their efforts went towards maintaining their snubcraft - the bread and butter of the Xenos had always been small, easily maintained ships - but it wasn't unheard of for larger ships to be employed too. Food and water had to be shipped in from Alabama when it couldn't be raided from passing convoys, and a decidedly larger hangar bay was needed to keep these comparative behemoths supplied and spaceworthy. However, it wasn't a Z-Line transport or a CT-series train that Siobhan was looking for - in fact, the ship in question was the last thing anyone would've expected to see languishing in Ouray's hangars.
It didn't take long before she found it. Even looking at the ship put a smile on Siobhan's face, even if it looked like nobody had touched it in months, if not years. Another few weeks and they'd have been pulling it apart for spare parts. It was spaceworthy, she judged, but it was a near thing indeed. She raised one arm to toggle her radio headset, running a critical eye across the worn turrets and scuffed, battered hull plating. There was a lot of work to be done here.
"Jacob, it's Shiv. Get a rep team over to me, will ya? Bay six. I got a new project for y'all."
Aboard the Retribution, Ouray Base - Somewhere in the Colorado System
"She's looked better, Shiv. I'm not gonna lie to ya. Take a look at that, and then an' imagine what she's like in the more importan' parts."
Jacob pointed to a particularly sad-looking section of armour plating, and even Siobhan could see that the poor gunship hadn't exactly aged well. The panel had come out of the factory moulded perfectly into place, of course, but decades of wear and tear had left it deformed almost entirely out of shape. Of course, Jacob and his repair team had solved the issue in typical Xeno fashion - with a rivet gun and some unsafe welding. A proper shipyard might have been able to recast the part entirely, but in the absence of any such facilities they'd been forced to make do with more traditional methods.
"I know," she snapped back, already exasperated with the progress they were - or weren't - making. She'd been down into the guts of the ship to inspect it herself, and what she'd seen had been almost entirely damning. The power conduits looked like they would've struggled to power a CT-line transport for more than half its voyage, and judging by the way the corridor lighting had kept flickering on and off, the reactor and power core were in dire straits as well. It was beginning to look more and more like her previous hopes of repairing the gunship to any reasonable degree were little more than a wishful fantasy - at least without outside help.
There was only really one place she could turn for aid, too. A knot had already formed in her stomach at the prospect - in months and years past, she wouldn't have even been allowed to consider the last avenue open to her. Stracke and Foster would've both shot it down before it had even taken off - but neither Stracke nor Foster were around to counsel her any longer. Truth be told, Siobhan felt like she didn't appreciate the idea any more than they would have, but there was no way the Xenos could solve this problem by themselves. Not without a shipyard, not without trained personnel. That was what she'd kept telling herself, anyway.
Still, the idea of owing the Legion anything at all didn't sit well with her. Locklear and his bunch were good people, but that was precisely the problem. She had long since given up any pretences of aligning her take on things with the Lord Commander's, and she had never quite been able to shake the feeling that the Legion had never quite viewed the Alliance as its equal. Foster had certainly thought so - his skepticism had, at times, almost approached outright hostility - and while Siobhan had harboured her own doubts about the Squadron Commander's more extreme points of view, with each passing day she felt like his legacy had been winning her over more and more. Had she always been this bitter? The dilemma had kept her up all night, and only a second look at the Retribution languishing in the hangar bay, little more than a fading memory of a great warship, had managed to stoke her resolve far enough.
The ends always justify the means. That was why all of them were fighting, wasn't it? She didn't have to agree with Locklear and his Legion's half-hearted methods and shaky dedication - none of them did - she needed their co-operation, not a mutual pledge of loyalty. The only snag, as far as she could see, was that Locklear himself was no idiot - it had been months since even the last communication he would have received from her, and she was certain that he hadn't forgotten the markedly more unhelpful some of her more influential comrades had held towards the Legion and its doings. An outright denial of her request was unlikely, but the terms and conditions that might be levied upon it could leave her furious yet. Hopefully, though, it wouldn't come to that.
"Shiv?" Jacob was giving her that look again, his expression one of mild concern. Had she been off on a daydream again? It wouldn't do to let the big man think she was losing it, to say nothing of the rest of the repair crew. "You wan' us to keep at it?"
"Yeah- yeah, keep on at her," she replied. "But don' touch the serious stuff if you can help it. I'm gonna see if we can't get somethin' else ta help out with that."
Something about the way her expression tightened cut the man's question off before he even asked it, and he settled for a brief nod of acceptance instead. She could tell that he'd guessed something was up, though - but right now, she had bigger things to worry about. Without another word, she turned and set off down the corridor again, trying her best to ignore the few pairs of suspicious eyes boring into her back. Whatever it took, she would get this damn thing flying again, and Liberty would tremble at her success.