It's July in the Sonoran Desert, and perhaps twelve miles down a dirt road from Tat Momoli-- like everywhere nearby-- the sage brush and creosote cast long shadows on the warming Arizona soil. The sun's broadening light is beginning to break the horizon, bringing with it the heat that scalds skin, sears metal, cracks leather... but these fibrous plants thrive, the dusty soil and blue-green sage--<br/><br/>--interrupting that thought, a bur sage leaves a prickly trail of nettles on Jackson's canvas pants, giving her a tiny scratching sensation as if to remind her of their determination.  She chuckles softly.  "Tougher than me," she says with a chuckle, and weaves her way around another of a hundred or so of the towering saguaro cacti.<br/><br/>She's climbing  a small ridge, leaving her workshops and bunker behind her in the growing heat of the morning, a canvas bag over her shoulder rattling against her hip with the weight of black ballistic cases, metal battery sleeves, polymer shells.  To an outsider, she'd look terribly out-of-place anyway-- a pale, willowy young woman, head-to-toe in khaki and light-gray cotton, wearing a broad-brimmed tan hat and touristy, black RayBan's-- but to be lugging a bag of gear that was more than equal her size, and sagged with the weight of, perhaps, a few hundred pounds?  The answer was her right arm and shoulder-- rather, what covered them, supporting the bag and hoisting it like a sack of oranges from the corner stand.  A glimmering carapace of black and gunmetal-blue, an inch thick or more, articulated and actuated over her joints like a fine set of custom-made armor.  It shimmered with grim purpose, easing the burden-- and it was as much a part of her mission today as the gear she was carrying.<br/><br/>Reaching the top of the ridge, she looked down-- the cacti had been cleared out here decades ago, and she was looking at a dilapidated runway and adjoining, empty hangars.  She had never try to land a plane here, of course... no one had maintained it since the Army shut down this base in the 1990s.  But it made for a good, clear range to test gear... and one of those hangars held her helicopter, out of the prying eye of passing satellites or public scrutiny.  Patches of the tarmac, and some of the hangar walls and roofs, were crumbling faster than others-- not from age, but from other forms of corrosion.  Scattered concrete debris, warped and melted metal, fragmentary shrapnel,  high-energy overflow, concentrated and burning accelerants-- all manner of destructive implements had been loosed upon this range, and her dwindling stack of cinderblocks and clay tiles was a testament to their effectiveness.<br/><br/>Setting up her usual workstation at a worn, sun-faded metal table in one of the intact shelters, she rested the bag with a rattling thunk and fetched out her first steel water-bottle from the top, taking a steady drink before carefully securing the cap and attending to her second-to-survival priority: music.  Fetching her phone from her pocket and thumbing the touchpad a couple times, a portable Bluetooth speaker chips to life in her bag and, a moment later, music begins to spill out into the hollow desert morning (https://youtu.be/j0f5ZG9LG6k).  She notices a collared lizard, barely visible, sunning itself on a flat piece of shattered slab toward the east side of the range.  She starts singing along softly with the song as if she's singing to the lizard-- "didn't I make you feee-eel, like you were my oooonely man?"   She lifts a black plastic case with her augmented armor and lays it upon the tabletop, smirking at her own silliness as she punches in a few numbers of code, then presses her fingertip to a touchpad.  It beeps, and locks release.  Lifting the lid, she reveals what looks like a space-age toy within-- a chrome-surfaced shaft about three feet long with a bulging chamber embedded between the foregrip and tactical grip of an assault rifle.  She could see the schematics in her head-- in fact, she'd helped design them, but lacked the facilities to produce this specific device.  The UK and US Governments had authorized Lockheed-Martin and Syntel to send her the prototype on a provisional basis for field testing in accordance with UNTIL's expectation that she was a reliable asset; practically human, even.  Simply a gadgeteer with a fascinating brain.  If only they knew.<br/><br/>With the touch of a button, she activated the capacitor coil array, and felt an immediate hum in her hands.  Part of her mind was questioning if they'd used adequate shielding in the chassis design and was calculating from the weight and volume that, indeed, they'd followed her specs.  Another part was gauging the distance downrange based on her initial projections of the beam focus through the lens and assuring that the effect would be as expected.  Another was singing with Janis Joplin, and her lips were moving-- enunciating with her British accent a slight lilt contrasting Janice's drawl.  "I'm gonna show you baby that a woman can be tough," she sang, then glanced up at her reptilian spectator.  Casting him a wink, she lifted the energy weapon in her armored arm, leveled its forty-pound weight at full extension from her body downrange.  Only thirteen percent of her brain was required to aim based on the occipital recollection of her cinderblock target fifty yards south.  She didn't have to look as she watched the lizard for his reaction.  "<i>Take another little piece of my heart now--</i>"There was a pop-- not some deafening boom, not a bolt of thunder-- just a pop like a balloon expelling air in a ruptured burst.  The lizard turned its head to look at her with one eye, quizzical and curious, but not even alarmed.  "<i>--baby.</i>"<br/><br/>She turned to study the damage-- a clean, quarter-sized hole, scorched straight through the cement-ash composite and into the ground beyond at a precise eight-degree entry angle.  The song continued, but she wasn't singing along just yet, and instead was checking the device, clipping it into the chipset reader of a tablet and looking for variations in the capacitor readings before she powered it down and started remeasuring the lens for any warping.  The first of a hundred measurements she would need to conduct today, the first of a dozen songs she'd hear in the desert heat before the temperature broke 110 degrees and she'd lug the gear back to her lab to load the data for analysis.<br/><br/>Glancing back over her shoulder at the lizard once more, she started to sing along again.  "<i>You know you got it,</i>" then trails off smirking a little.  It was a good day so far.