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The emergency lights painted the hangar red.
Forty people squinted against the strobing glare, looking like they were standing in front of a fire truck at point-blank range.
Marsh coughed. "Kill the lights. Third button on the left."
The pilot found the control and the strobing stopped. The hangar returned to normal lighting.
"The emergency lights are for location visibility in active fire zones," Marsh explained to the group. He turned back to the intercom. "Switch to bipedal mode."
The Peterson triplet acknowledged and worked through the transformation sequence.
The four legs folded inward in a coordinated motion. Joint assemblies rotated. The paired limbs interlocked at their connection points and merged into two consolidated legs. The feet re-formed as well, each one expanding into a petal-pattern splay of five broad digits that could flex individually to conform to uneven terrain.
Ryan watched the mech's neural link operate with professional interest. The system was a stripped-down version of Scrapper's full architecture. He could tell from the external indicators that it supported only a limited command set: basic locomotion, a handful of emergency reflexes, and a few hardcoded safety responses. Everything else required manual input through the cockpit's mechanical switches and touchscreens.
That was by design. Full neural control for every function would have driven costs through the roof and increased pilot training time significantly. The hybrid approach, neural for movement and manual for equipment operation, matched how actual firefighters already worked. A firefighter's muscle memory drove the body. Their hands operated the tools. The mech followed the same principle.
In bipedal configuration, the machine looked… almost normal. Not quite Scrapper's level of presence, but unmistakably a mech. The legs were bulkier than proportional, thickened by the interlocking joint system and the equipment mounts. When the water tanks were installed on the lower legs, the mass would only increase.
The scaffolding was rolled away.
"Take a step," Marsh said.
*THUD.*
The mech's first stride landed heavily. Slower than Scrapper, with a shorter gait, maybe ten feet per step. But it was standing. Moving. Following the pilot's input without collapsing, jerking, or losing balance.
The second step followed. The third. The mech walked across the hangar floor, each footfall rattling the tools on the workbenches, and reached the hangar door without incident.
Ryan clapped. So did everyone else. The professors were grinning. The research assistants looked like they might cry.
Kyle stood beside Ryan, hand pressed over his heart.
"I really thought it was going to fall over," he whispered.
"Me too," Ryan said, mostly lying.
"You think so?"
"The structural strength looked marginal in the design review. There was a real chance a joint would fail under dynamic load. You and your team are going to be the first professional mech designers in the country, by the way. At this rate, you'll be the people writing the safety standards for the whole industry."
Kyle's face lit up. "My parents are going to lose their minds."
Marsh continued through the test sequence.
"Exit the hangar. Run the mobility test on the external field."
The mech walked out through the doors. Outside, the training field was a packed-earth lot about the size of a high school athletic field, enclosed by a fifty-foot perimeter wall. Full darkness by now. The mech's head-mounted spotlight activated, casting a bright cone forward.
Then the Peterson triplet opened it up.
The engine spun to full power. The legs extended. The mech ran.
It wasn't Scrapper-fast. But it was fast. Two massive legs stretching across the field in long strides, each one covering twenty feet at a time, the ground shaking with every impact. In the dark, lit only by its own spotlight, the machine looked genuinely mythological.
Those were, by any reasonable metric, the longest legs currently on planet Earth. Only Scrapper could match them.
The sound reached the neural link research facility next door. The drift researchers didn't look up. A mech running around at night was no longer a novel occurrence. They had data to analyze.
Ryan pulled out his phone and took a photo.
The shot was almost entirely dark. The only illumination came from the mech's spotlight and the faint glow reflecting off the ground. The legs were clearly visible, bright against the surrounding blackness. The upper body was barely more than a silhouette.
Classified-grade image quality. Perfect.
A few minutes into the run, the pilot's voice cut through the intercom.
"Warning light. Something's deforming. System is flagging a structural issue."
The team went tense.
"Slow down. Slow down carefully," Marsh ordered, his voice unusually sharp.
The mech reduced speed, each stride shortening gradually until it transitioned from a sprint to a jog to a walk. It returned to the hangar without incident.
The warning turned out to be minor. A structural stress indicator had exceeded its threshold during the high-speed run, but no actual failure had occurred. A joint somewhere had flexed further than its design tolerance under dynamic load. The mech was safe to park and inspect.
Ryan wasn't surprised. Scrapper's first walking tests had produced similar warnings, and he'd been working from perfect blueprints. These professors and students had designed this machine from scratch, using first-generation principles on a second-generation mission profile. That they'd gotten it this close to working on the first full test was impressive.
"Structural team, you're up," Ryan told the group. "You're about to have a very busy week."
Kyle relaxed noticeably. Structural issues weren't his problem.
He did have a problem, though. He was the lead on the neural link team, and the moment the Peterson triplet climbed down from the cockpit, Kyle and the rest of the neural team descended on him to ask about the connection experience.
Meanwhile, Marsh and the other professors were already scaling the scaffolding with their diagnostic equipment, heading for the cockpit to pull logs and inspect the flagged joint.
Ryan looked around. Everyone had work to do. He did not, at least not right now.
He cleared his throat discreetly and left.
He was hungry. He'd been hungry since he woke up. Fourteen hours of sleep had taken his stomach to a desperate place.
The twenty-four-hour cafeteria was open. He ordered a light noodle soup, sat at a corner table, and pulled up the photo he'd taken.
Good shot. Mysterious. Atmospheric. The upper body of the mech was barely visible.
He added a little more digital obscurity to the upper half, just enough to make sure no one could reverse-engineer the design from the image. Then he opened Twitter.
*Saw this on the field tonight during my run. Is this what people mean by "long legs"? Pretty sure nothing else on Earth has legs this long.*
He attached the photo and hit post.
His soup arrived. He ate it slowly, watching the engagement numbers climb.
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