Book 6. Chapter 32: Jackpot
Drakonis flexed his armor’s hands open and close. Each repetition came with a very faint mechanical whining from deep within the finger joints. Black smoke danced and twisted through his fingers, sinking through the small open seams, fading away.
He flexed one more time, and there was no sound at all that came from any of it. His eye glanced down at his cradled helmet, looking at the interior visor panels. “Armor shows all green. I’m set to go.”
“Good.” I reached out, slapped his shoulder once or twice, and stood back up. “Now, do you need me to give you a pep talk or something? I charge extra for that.”
“Har har, the funny surface savage.” He rolled his eyes, lifting the helmet and clicking it shut over his head. “How much time do we have in total?”
“Splitting up the cells evenly, we’ve got just about a day and some change of power.” I said, tapping the bag, the power cells inside clinking against one another. “At that point, we’d better either have found a mite fountain, or some local machine donors.”
The airspeeder didn't just have full cells, it also had the husks of spent ones too, but there were too many of them to fit in my small bag. I'd taken what I could and if we found the means to refill cells, we could come back here later and grab the rest.
“Can you fight without armor?” He asked.
“Eh.” I said with a shrug, getting up and walking over to the sealed doorway. “I’m still dangerous without armor, but Journey’s spoiled me and I rather like being nice and toasty inside here. Plus it smells like beetle and weasel out there right now.”
He nodded. “The bit that got in earlier reeks like rotting crab and fish fucking together. We agree on that at least. We need weapons now.” He stood back up, headlights on his helmet lighting brightly and adding onto Journey’s own illumination.