Patting the side of the nearest shuttle, Zachary replied, "I've given them all a thorough going over. If they don't fly, well, I don't know how they [i]wouldn't[/i]."

As Hector moved on Zachary turned to Nal, rubbed his hands together and said, "Time to give them their final test run."

He entered the pilot's seat and went over the controls. The past twelve days had been spent repairing these three shuttles and, when the repairs were done, on optimising their performance. Obtaining parts had not been too difficult, for it was simple enough to send a patrol out on a scavenging mission and Sector Zero had its own stockpiles and machine shop. And the work itself passed with incredible efficiency, for Kaa'is abilities of machine reading and magnetokinesis allowed him to see exactly what he needed to do at a whim and then often do it without having to crawl into the shuttle's engine spaces. He could work so efficiently that he had even been able to help in the maintenance of the Mercenary's weapons, diagnosing problems such as jams and fixing them in seconds at times.

Even with all the engineering to distract him, as the days wore on the consequences of [i]that night[/i] were catching up with him. He was twitchy, fidgety and irritable. He would often work late into the night, and he would skip meals because he was feeling nauseous. He could rarely stop thinking about the upcoming battle, the fighting, and he was filled with excitement, desire, blood-lust. Sometimes he would just want to beat someone's skull in with a length of pipe and he would pull at his hair because there was no one whom he could do so to. He hated Kaa'is for turning him into this wreck. He hated being without any outlet. And even more frustrating was that Kaa'is was so quietly [i]smug[/i] about it. Kaa'is did not even have to speak for Zachary to know this every time his symptoms afflicted him.

Of course, Zachary kept this to himself and he tried not to show it. As he often worked alone on the shuttles, this was not exceedingly difficult. He had taken to handling a greasy rag to cover the fidgeting, because it could easily be mistaken as just an engineer's habit. How could he bear to let anyone know the truth?

But now respite was just over the horizon. He steadied his breathing and let his mind fill the shuttle. In his mind he did a full systems check. He reached out a flicked each switch one by one, watching as power entered each system and each system spring to life in their various ways. Then came the big one, the power to the propulsion. He had no qualification whatsoever for piloting a shuttle, but twelve days of becoming intimately familiar with every wire, every core, every switch, every computer, every patch of metal and every bolt meant he knew exactly how it worked and exactly how to fly it. Even if he wasn't at the controls he could probably still fly it by magic and feel. At the pull of a switch power was supplied to the main kinetic and gravitational cores and with a roar the shuttle rose from the ground. Gingerly yet precisely Zachary flew the shuttle in a tight circle inside the hangar and gently landed it where it was before.

He shut off the systems, opened the door, poked his head out and said to Nal with a grin on his face, "It works like a charm."

He walked to the second shuttle, and as he did so he was wringing the greasy rag in his hands. Without turning to face Nal, he said, "There's been something I've wanted to ask. I've seen the Wall up close, and looked at how it was made. The military really spared no expense on it. They must have been quite confident that this cataclysm would happen. The Warshiran steel you see is just the exterior. Most of it is constructed from kinetic cores the size of apartments, powering kinetic shields that could probably withstand enough force to level all of Sovereign. And along the foundations are steel fibre cores, enough to regenerate the entire coating of the Wall several times over even if you were somehow able to damage it through the shield. I haven't seen the aerial shield up close, but it is probably almost as strong as the one covering the Wall. With that in mind, how the hell are we going to crack through it?"