Sarah McFarlen thumped into the Embassy hauling a battered green toolbox trailing a length of wire. The bar was surprisingly quiet for an evening, but it wasn't altogether unwelcome. She gave a nod the brute of an ape lounging behind the bar, a courtesy that she'd been quick to learn after her first visit to the Widerstand's favourite watering hole some weeks ago, before dragging a table to the wall and climbing atop it.
"Sorry Dutch!" She said, busying herself unscrewing a wall panel near the roof. "New toys wait for no-one. I'll clean up once I'm done, promise."
The bar light's flickered as she thumbed a switch, hauling a rough handful of wires from behind the hull plating, fingers scratching the steel shielding the bare rock beneath. It was easy to forget just how close they were to vacuum here, she thought, wiping the dust on her trousers. Less than an inch of steel sealed them off from hard nothing in places, and it was her job to keep it that way. Beautiful as space was, she had only the faintest desire to see it without an intervening window.
The projector was barely a handspan long, though fitting it in meant drilling a similarly sized hole in the intervening panel. Sarah smiled as she worked, singing an old Rogue ballad under her breath, oblivious to Dutch’s confounded stare.
" The Warlord's tastes were simple, but his methods were complex.
We found him with five partners, each of a different world and sex.
The LPI were on the way - we had no second chance.
We picked him up in the nick of time - in the remnants of his pants.
And we’re banned from Erie, everyon-"
The bar’s lights sizzled out with a fatalistic thump. Sarah’s faintly bewildered voice floated across the sudden darkness. "Oh. Drat." Somewhere, she was certain she heard a hoot of simian laughter.
"This is really sort of a personal project of mine."
- James Arland, on single-handedly engaging an enemy regiment.