To Frankenstein a Bird

[Wildkins]

The Freedom Liner chugged its way north, leaving the mooring point on Beaumont Spire for the first time in weeks. Being too busy to regularly fly and maintain the bloody thing, he was actually thankful that this new work would take him away from all the maintenance and work that came with running a large-scale scrap operation. Plus, getting away from the politics of house space might be a good thing, too.

Lumbering through Rheinland and into the Sigmas, it wasn't long before the re-purposed luxury liner came into the Omicrons, and only a few jumps later, the system of Omicron-81. A rather dull system, if Roberts was to be honest. As the nav system calculated the best route to the hidden shipyard, he reclined in his chair and watched the stars. For working in space almost his entire life, he didn't get to see them much - not anymore, anyway.

Before long, he was within visual range of the massive shipyard. A short communication with the dockhand via the radio, and a bit of maneuvering later, and the Freedom Liner was moored to one of the external docking ports of the Shipyard. Donning his work clothes, he headed out of the airlock with a toolbox in his hand and an objective on his mind. Moving down the corridors of the complex station, he passed Maltese mechanics and engineers, all with their signature Cardamine masks. Thankfully, he'd never had the stuff - and he was determined to keep it that way. The Maltese were good folk, but he'd heard some bad stuff about that 'crap'.

As he made his way down to the lower decks of Cartagena, he noticed a section of rooms with names plastered hastily to the sides of the doors. Sean Roberts, coincidentally, was the closest of the three, so he could only hazard a guess that the other two belonged to his colleagues. If they ever show up..., he thought to himself.

Swinging the door open, he noticed a fairly basic but nonetheless adequate suite, with a desk, bed, and basic amenities. The desk itself had a few folders and a binder on it, no doubt technical files and project objectives or what have you. He decided to take a rest in the undoubtedly stiff bed first, as he never did work well drowsy.

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The next morning, he woke himself up with a brew of coffee from the local cafeteria (he hoped it wasn't tainted with liquid Cardamine) and began to peer through the various documents. The project, as far as he could make out, was to combine various technical aspects from high-performance fightercraft throughout Sirius into one, uniform design. He'd love to have one for himself, but he doubted this was an open-use kinda deal.

Nevertheless, he took out the better part of the morning to thoroughly read over the various documents and files, as well as technical documents seemingly written by the chief engineer. Following that, he made a note to contact the other Marauders to see if they had arrived on time, and then checked to see what he was assigned to. Strangely, that had been left out of the documents, with only a note to "contact Jessica Snow for details." Since a short-range neural net address had been left, he decided to use that to contact her.

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>>TO: 'Jessica Snow'
>>FROM: 'Sean Roberts'
>>MESSAGE: Hey, Marauders team-lead here. Exactly what are we supposed to be doing?

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And with that, he waited.

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