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Bonus Chapter
(Bonus chapter)
Ryan didn't share his team's doubts. He looked past the crates to the five technicians standing by the wall.
Two months of daily work on Scrapper had turned them into something resembling actual mech engineers. They knew every bolt spec, every cable gauge, every joint tolerance on the machine. They'd disassembled and reassembled it so many times they could do most of it blindfolded.
The lead technician caught his look and nodded. "We've reviewed the upgrade plan. It's straightforward. We're ready."
"Then let's go."
Armor off first. By now this was routine. Scrapper's black plating came away panel by panel, revealing the familiar skeleton underneath.
Phase one: cockpit overhaul.
The old driver support system was basic. Foot pedals on rails. A support arm behind the sensor vest. It kept the pilot in place during normal operation, but anything aggressive, a sharp turn, an emergency stop, a fall, and the pilot was at the mercy of physics. Inertial forces went straight through the cockpit frame and into the pilot's body. At combat speeds, the shock could break bones.
The new gyroscopic mount changed everything.
The circular ring went in first, bolted to the cockpit's structural hardpoints. The half-sphere backing followed, creating a cradle that could rotate freely on three axes. Once locked in, the pilot hung inside the ring like a compass needle, always vertical, always stable. If Scrapper fell forward, the mount rotated to keep the pilot upright. If Scrapper rolled into its spherical mode, the pilot stayed level while the mech tumbled around them.
Built-in shock dampening absorbed the kinetic feedback from footsteps, impacts, and sudden stops. No more feeling every stride in your teeth.
Phase two: energy system.
This was the big one. Two days of work. The most significant modification Ryan had ever made to Scrapper, and the first time he'd actually improved on the system's original design rather than downgrading it.
The movie version of Scrapper ran on one plasma reactor and two ion batteries. Based on the film's evidence, that configuration could sustain roughly thirty minutes of operation at full power. Good enough for a junkyard mech built from scavenged parts. Not good enough for Ryan.
He'd ordered double the reactors and quadruple the batteries. Two reactors. Eight batteries. By his calculations, this configuration would sustain Scrapper at full operational capacity for two continuous hours.
The problem was that the system's original blueprints only accommodated one reactor and two batteries. Ryan had to redesign the entire energy distribution architecture to handle the expanded loadout. New power buses, new routing, new load-balancing protocols. It was the first time his own engineering work and the system's technology had truly merged, and the process was neither simple nor fast.
Two days. The entire team working in shifts. Cable by cable, connection by connection.
When it was done, two reactors sat in the reinforced compartments Ryan had built into Scrapper's ankles years ago in Crestfield. He'd always planned for this moment. The empty bays in the ankle housings hadn't been accidental. They'd been waiting.
The eight ion batteries locked into custom mounts behind the gyroscopic cockpit frame, secured with vibration-dampened brackets that would hold them steady through any maneuver.
Phase three: sensors and display.
The radar installation was handled by Aegis's specialists. Compact, powerful, mounted in the empty cavity at the top of Scrapper's head. Effective range: roughly a thousand feet in every direction. More than enough for a mech that needed ten seconds to cover that distance at full speed.
Ryan handled the holographic system personally.
Four projectors, each the size of a human palm. Transparent on all four sides, with the projection elements visible inside like a glowing crystal. They mounted on the gyroscopic ring, two at waist height (one per side) and two at shoulder height.
Once installed, Ryan climbed into the cockpit for calibration.
He powered on the operating system, navigated to the new display subsystem, and activated it.
The radar hummed to life overhead.
The four projectors lit up simultaneously, casting overlapping fields of light that merged into a continuous holographic band encircling the pilot position.
The display showed three color channels. Green: Scrapper's internal status, a simplified schematic of the mech with real-time health data on every major system. Red: warning indicators, currently blank. Yellow: the external environment, rendered from the radar's returns.
Ryan could see the workshop around him mapped in yellow holographic wireframe. The walls. The equipment hidden behind the banners. The people standing below. Each human figure was a rough approximation at default zoom, but when Ryan pinched and expanded the display with a hand gesture, the resolution sharpened. Body shapes became recognizable. Individual people, standing in clusters, looking up at him.
Below, the team erupted in applause and cheering.
Kyle stood frozen in place. "He already had the gesture controls written into the operating system," he said to the person beside him. "The holographic system was installed ten minutes ago, and the hand-gesture commands work perfectly. That means he wrote the code for this months ago, before the hardware even existed."
The software team finally understood. All those mysterious, seemingly orphaned code blocks they'd been puzzling over for weeks, the routines that didn't connect to any existing system, the functions that seemed to output data for devices that didn't exist on the mech. They were pre-written drivers. Interface protocols for hardware that hadn't been installed yet. Ryan had written the software first and built the hardware to match.