Flitting her eyes across the screen, Jackson notes the data readouts on her tablet and impatiently waits for the data to finish loading through the solar-powered wi-fi router she surreptitiously installed in the hangar awnings to the hub at her base.  Janis Jopin's voice is singing softer as the song fades out, but she's already burned another firing test, well along her way to the perfect smiley-face she's planning for the cinderblock.  The wailers start a slow swing rhythm, and before Bob Marley's (https://youtu.be/pHlSE9j5FGY) voice kicks in, she's recording the third firing test.  Not that she's particularly worried about the results, for she's measured the specs and calculated them in her head-- or, at least, her nanites have-- and so far, they've followed the specs exactly, and the material components have held up precisely as they should.  She's relieved... the last design she'd submitted was for a magnetic, pre-shaped, grenade-launchable breaching-charge.  It went to Raytheon, and clearly some rising-star engineer had tried to "improve" the design by altering the refraction using some elementary calculus.  The result had been disastrous.<br/><br/>Waiting for the next data load, she checks the capacitor of the energy weapon, and was glad to see it still at 90%.  If the readout is to be believed, it won't need another fusion charge until after tomorrow's checks, but she will still keep it in cold storage... just in case.  The temperature is already beginning to climb, even in the shade, and she pauses long enough to take another drink of water from the plain steel bottle.  The ice keeps it cold to the touch, though the silver surface is scarcely wet with condensation in the desert air.  She takes a moment's pause to rest it against her forehead, then the nape of her neck, disengaging from the calculations to focus entirely upon the sensation of the cold steel against her skin.  It's not so hot, just yet, that she can quite stifle the shiver of the sudden heat transference, and the nanites in her neural system seem to take a specific interest in this tactile experience.  Alien as their intelligence is, any such response from her neural system elicits a strange curiosity from them.  She doesn't exactly<i>deprive</i>them of stimulation, but clearly they crave more than she provides.  Better that than they burn out on stimuli.<br/><br/>Tilting her blue eyes skyward for a moment, Jackson appreciates the sheer breadth of the sky-- the enormity of open space that seems here so wide and free beyond all that mankind can touch.  She hears the subtle electronic click from the tablet as the data finishes loading, and without looking, she types the next sequence's code and disconnects the interface and cables. Setting her canteen aside, she looks down at herself-- her dusty boots, baggy khakis, and wrinkled shirt, her slim body completely hidden beneath the sags and folds of concealing cloth-- and she feels utterly apart from it all.  She doesn't seem to fit here.  Her pale skin, so susceptible to burns she's had to coat it in countless layers of SPF90 each morning.  The baggy linens and cottons, supposed to breathe well in the heat but, invariably, irritating her with their weight beyond belief.  Catching another glance of the small reptile on its basking rock, she sighs enviously.  Never a stitch, always at home.  The warmer, the better.  Bob Marley croons on, '<em>No woman, no cry...</em>'<br/><br/>And a boom echoes through the sky, drawing her immediate attention and-- by sheer reflex-- causing her to level the blaster in a defensive posture.  Not surprisingly, her non-armored hand has a hard time finding the forend grip... a momentary fault of the muscle memory.  But it takes her longer to recognize that this is not a gunshot, a boom echoing from the sky.  Freezing for a moment, Jackson barely has time to scan the sky-- her human eyes barely having the time to take in sufficient data for her augmented brain to process enough data for her piqued mind to manufacture an assessment.  Not a bomb, not a gunshot-- she's processed the details and determined that, with 70% certainty, what she heard was a breach of the sound barrier from an object some 1,000 to 3,000 feet above the ground.  From the distance between soundwaves, she could estimate it to be 2 to 4 miles away, but such factors are unreliable.<br/><br/>Unreliable... but not unreliable enough for her not to set the energy weapon down on the tabletop with a clunk and rummage through her rucksack, finding a hard steel case labeled "CONSUL-OCTRFS-2.3X-2018.2.15" and crack open the flip-switches with anxious fingers, lifting a five-pound device from its sculpted-foam resting-place and, with successive flicks of her fingertips, removing the rubber lens covers and toggling to 'on' a targeting computer for a sophisticated optical device produced last year by a gray-market company, Consulate, who seamlessly mixed Japanese and Californian electronics with Swiss optics to produce the most sophisticated scopes and range-finders that she's ever found on the market.<br/><br/>Hurriedly, she whipped a long cylinder of aluminum from the pack and flung it to the ground on the tarmac, where it sprung to life with the relief of a couple of clasps and deployed spring-loaded shafts, rattling its fully-shaped form to life-- a full tripod and stand, and with only a moment's fidgeting she affixed the optical scope to the base and touched a series of buttons as she watched the LED-lit screen with her eye pressed eagerly to the rubber baffling.  She swiveled it.  Ghost images from heat-waves, speckles of clouds, and motion interference flickered to life, then died out, on the screen.  She searched, and she waited.  She kept searching.  Whatever had buzzed by the old, abandoned base was no jet-- she has to know what it was... and nothing changes.  She breathes rapidly, her drumming in her chest, swivels fifteen more degrees south.<i>I don't think it could have cut back that sharp, but... maybe...</i>and her breath catches, because something shows.<br/><br/>It's an anomaly.  Too small.  Just a blip, and it's off the optics-- but then it's back on.  It's moving too fast to track.  If she was trying to hit it with this scope, she'd never have a chance-- maybe with a guided missile, but more likely with a Phalanx if it were heading her way.<br/><br/><i>Wait,</i>she thinks, suddenly feeling a twinge of sinking realization.<i>It</i><strong>is</strong>heading my way.<br/><br/>She watches through the scope, absently reaching with one hand back for the energy rifle with her armored hand, finding the grip, and bringing it to rest at her shoulder for assurance.  Wishing for a moment she could feel its weight, for assurance, she assesses the options.<i>It must be a missile.  The mass is too small for anything else.  But the maneuverability doesn't match up... it's like a small Mig, too maneuverable to be anything that... that...</i>and, as she looks up, she can see that in a few moments she'll be in visual range.<br/><br/>For the briefest of moments, her human brain interfaces with the nanites and does what those alien entities rarely do-- it thinks creatively, optimistically.<i>Maybe it's a Super.</i><br/><br/>And on that hope alone, she lifts her pistol to the exposed side of a half-degraded hangar-- one she's opted to scrap-- and clicks the radial button selector to dial down the power on the newly-designed energy weapon, setting it to act like a long-range, wide-beamed arc-welder.<br/><br/>She turns her face to aim this, because the angle will make it tricky, and she pivots her armor-guided arm and wrist to guide the wide-angle focused beam up and through the rafters of the dilapidated shed.  She scorches up through the roof in a wide arc, then two small circles.<br/><br/>Thus, as Hope passes, she may notice the still-glowing smiley-face burned into the roof of a hangar on the abandoned military complex, staring up at her from the otherwise barren complex of sand and sagebrush like awkward graffiti.  And if she looks hard enough, she'll see a woman with a black and silver arm, drawing back her tan, broad-brimmed had from her red hair, staring up at the sky with a curious, sly smile that is at once bold and inviting, challenging and curious.