Monroe had foreseen the need that they might need to replace some cabling in the semi. Therefore, he was able to dig out roughly thirty feet of the stuff from among their supplies. It didn’t have a connector on it, but really those were more for convenience. If you knew what you were doing, then you could wire one directly to the outlets without an issue.

  However, thirty feet wasn’t going to be nearly enough length. That said, if nothing else, there was a third option they hadn’t mentioned before. They could use the van to charge the semi, then move it back to the building, and use the power to charge the battery. It still wasn’t a perfect plan, but was better than nothing.

  With no options presenting themselves, Trace moved the van down the nearby slope and into the gulley.

  While he was doing that, Monroe was stripping the ends of the thick cabling, preparing them for use. As soon as he was finished with that, he pulled the rubber protection back from the rear of the charge port on the semi. It would be better and easier to do all of this from the rear than the front. They wanted the port to still be usable once they were done.

  Carefully, he wrapped the wires around the newly exposed rear sections of the port and covered them with tape. As soon as Black Betty pulled up beside him, he set about repeating the process. When the last wire touched the charge port connector, they heard something click in the semi as it began to charge.

  It would take a few minutes for enough power to be transferred over for them to turn it on. Even then, it would be a while longer before there would be enough juice to run diagnostics.

  Trace moved the screen, showing the current battery level in Black Betty so they could better keep an eye on it.

  With that task out of the way, the two began taking tools out of the back of the van and placing them in front of the semi. One of the largest items they had needed to bring was a jack capable of lifting the semi. There were also the jack stands, and thick planks for each to sit on as a steady surface. Monroe had been lucky enough to know someone who would let him borrow their equipment. Normal jacks and jack stands didn’t have the capacity to work with something on the level of a semi.

  Clamps, a secondary battery supply, lights, an air compressor, and, of course, the welding unit, were also brought out.

  They would be using heavy blankets to create a sort of tent wherever Monroe needed to work. From there, they would use the air compressor to blow out any sand that had gathered in the work area. The clamps would hold whatever he needed to work on together. Then he would do his best to weld whatever it was together well enough that it would at least make it back to New Denver.

  That was the basic plan, at least. They had other tools prepared and would tackle other problems as they came.

  Trace would do what he could with the electronic issues, while Monroe handled the more mechanical and structural issues.

  After placing the blankets, jacking up the front of the semi, and settling it down on the two heavy-duty jack stands, it had enough of a charge for Trace to begin working. He climbed inside and was immediately glad that he was wearing the rebreather unit.

  The cab was directly connected to the extra-extended RV sleeper portion. The dried-out dead body of the last owner was lying on the floor as though he had been crawling towards the door. Judging by the nasty, dried-out brown crust around the man’s mouth, Trace thought he had discovered why those bolts in the fourth room had been loosened in the building above. The poor bastard must have truly been desperate to survive to go to such lengths, and in the end, it still hadn’t done him any good.

  Trace swiped the crystal key from the man’s NetConnect, checked his pockets for anything useful, and took any credits in his crypto-vault. Then gingerly pushed him out the door. He had no respect for the dead, no matter how hard they had clung to life.

  He found a disinfectant wipe in the glove-box and wiped down the key several times before placing it on the dashboard. The rest of the wipes he dumped on the floor and gave the place a quick wipe down.

  Taking a deep breath, he removed his hood, snatched up the key, and slipped it into place. Once the hood was back in place, he took a tentative breath and wrinkled his nose. It was… unpleasant, but he had smelled far worse in the past. The mix of cleaning solution from the wipes, and him opening the door twice, had undoubtedly helped some.

  With the key slotted in his NetConnect, the semi now recognized him as the driver and gave him access to everything. Some vehicles, like Black Betty, used the older, really ancient style of physical-crypto-encrypted key. Others, such as this one, and his own vehicles, used the newer crystal keys. They were still cryptographically encrypted, but the handshake was done wirelessly instead of through a physical medium that could be stolen.

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  Some people preferred one over the other, and both could be used for houses and really anything that used a key to access.

  Trace slid to the edge of the driver's seat to better access the large screen in the middle of the dashboard. Going to the settings, it took him a moment to remember the process of putting it into diagnostic and maintenance mode.

  He had to go to the about screen, and then begin to tap in a specific way. He put his finger on the page scroll icon and began to tap. Up twice, down twice, left once, right once, left again, then right. Now he had to tap the first ‘B’ followed by the first ‘A’. Once he had done all of that, the word ‘Start’ in the middle of the document began to glow. He tapped it.

  The screen went blank for a second as the system rebooted into diagnostic and maintenance mode.

  Trace began the diagnostic and set about reading through the logs while he waited. The semi had been sitting here for about a year and a half. The original reason the driver had pulled over, if he was understanding the errors correctly, was likely related to problems with the trailer. It was only after he had pulled into the gulley to hide the trailer that the linkage under the semi itself had broken, stranding him.

  Or at least, that is what he thought was the likely course of events.

  Backing out of the event log, he waited for the diagnostic to finish running and began looking through everything it had found. Unsurprisingly, all the filters were clogged, and the batteries had suffered some degradation. Sand had found its way into places that would have normally been protected during its long sojourn there. It would need a good, thorough cleaning once they made it back to a proper town or city.

  He didn’t see anything that would keep it from driving away, once the batteries were closer to full, of course. The only real issues were the broken linkage, which Monroe was already working on, and the issue with the trailer. That particular problem was one he couldn’t inspect from inside the vehicle.

  Turning everything off, he hopped out and walked over to Black Betty. The battery was now reading a little above ten percent. Deciding that was enough for the moment, he unplugged everything and moved the van back up to the building. He would let Monroe worry about plugging it.

  In the time the van had been plugged into the semi, the larger vehicle’s battery had only charged to three percent. Meanwhile, Black Betty had started out above eighty percent. The sheer difference between the size of their battery capacities was staggering.

  He was busy inspecting the connectors on the trailer, using his flashlight in the failing light, when Monroe slid out from beneath the truck. He motioned to the building and grabbed a few pieces of equipment to haul back up with him. Trace managed to snag the battery pack and light and followed along behind.

  The big man grabbed the wire Trace had left dangling from the charge port and found a suitable outlet. He tore it from the wall and quickly wired it together. Once that was done, Trace pushed the final wire back into place on the charge port and followed him into the pyramid-shaped building.

  “Were you able to get it welded?” He asked as they both began stripping out of their suits. Despite the rebreather’s best efforts to keep him cool, his clothes were still all sweaty and sticky.

  Monroe carefully banged the filter of his rebreather on the floor before answering with a nod. “It is the absolute ugliest job I have ever done, but I layered it on nice and thick. Because of how big the linkage is, I couldn’t get a good penetrating weld on it. Hopefully, the layering will hold for the time being. It will still be weaker than the original by a fair margin, but as long as I don’t do anything crazy…” He threw his hands up in a helpless shrug. “What did you find out?”

  It took Trace a couple of minutes for him to lay out the complete story.

  Monroe eyed the fourth door in disgust and shook his head. “That’s just some bad luck there, although I think the linkage might have broken a few miles down the road. I have no idea if he went off the road for a bit or what, but it definitely had some signs of wear. Not a lot, but there were some. The main issue is the trailer, and getting the battery on that thing charged. We also need to figure out what he was even hauling.”

  “Tomorrow,” Trace muttered with a yawn. It had been a long day, and the need to continually maintain focus had worn at him. He was going to try and run through an enhanced teaching course or two, and then he would go to sleep. He had prepared some new ones recently and was somewhat looking forward to going through them.

  He had put ‘Enhanced Intermediate Programming’ back on his NetConnect after seeing how useful the skill was for Deckard. He was under no illusion that he would ever be as good as him. However, there was something to be said about hard work.

  He had also installed a module called ‘Enhanced Basic Vehicle Maintenance’, though he wasn’t sure what to expect of it yet. Considering what they had been coming to do, it had seemed like a good one to add. The last two had little in common with each other, despite their names, ‘Enhanced Basic Module Design’ and ‘Enhanced Basic Weapon Mod Design’.

  The module design had been a last-minute add that he had done after remembering the odd modules they had recovered from the Vinna-Kwoi agents. He wasn’t even sure why Pushman had something like that in the first place. The man seemed fairly intelligent, but his collection of modules had been rather eclectic, to say the least.

  Trace booted up the vehicle maintenance teaching program and settled back to learn. It started off by asking him about the specific model of the vehicle he would like to learn to maintain, although there was a generic option available as well. Doing his best to remember everything he could about the semi, he entered in the information. The make was ‘InterBilt’, while the model was the boringly named ‘I900’. He wasn’t sure of the year it had been made and took a random guess on that one.

  It ended up being the wrong year, but still close enough that he let the course continue. There were small differences in how things were arranged on the instrument cluster that clued him on. He was there to learn, not nitpick, and for the next few hours, that is exactly what he did. Until he felt as though his mind was too tired to continue and he had to shut everything down for the night.

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