The Arcwater Ribbon announced itself long before it came into view.
A distant, ceaseless churn. Water dragging metal along with it. The rhythm hadn't changed since the last time she'd been here.
Then, she had come looking for a way forward. A passerby.
Now, she came looking for something to carry her.
The Fox slowed as the Ribbon opened before her, that vast engineered scar cutting through the world. She didn't linger on the view. She didn't need to. She already knew how the water glowed faintly with chemical runoff, how the remains of buildings scraped the sky. She had bled here once. Memory filled in what her eyes didn't bother to.
This time, her purpose was different.
She adjusted the weight of her pack and scanned the banks.
The Tidebreaker units were hard to miss once you knew what you were looking for. The massive crabs with hulls of overlapping plates, angled to deflect impact and corrosion alike.
Before the age of war, they had been something almost mundane.
Cargo carriers. Walking freighters. The answer to a world that had decided the sky was no longer safe for machines to inhabit. When aircraft were banned, first for civilians, then for freight, the Tidebreakers had risen to fill the gap. They carried food across flooded plains, machinery across broken cities, medicine through zones too unstable for roads.
Then the war affected even these majestic beasts. They were armored. Armed. Turned inward, turned hostile. Ammunition replaced grain. Bastions replaced carriers. They marched through battlefields like mobile fortresses, shrugging off gunfire.
And when the war ended, it if could be called an ending, they were abandoned where they stood.
The Fox exhaled slowly.
She needed one.
She moved along the Ribbon's edge, boots crunching softly against sediment-caked metal and old concrete. Her eyes stayed sharp, her movements measured. The Arcwater was not a place that tolerated carelessness. Even now, even after everything, she felt the faint echo of unease crawling up her spine.
She remembered the wasp drone.
The way it had taken down a Tidebreaker crab and fed on its power.
That memory mattered now.
If she wanted to keep one of these machines, she would need to solve the problem of energy first.
Her charging deck wouldn't cut it. She knew that immediately. The deck had been deigned to sustain her equipment, her limbs, her terminal, things on a human scale. A Tidebreaker ws something else entirely. Five times her mass, at least, and built to run for days without stopping.
She'd need to get creative.
But first, she needed access.
She spotted one crouched near a bend in the Ribbon, its legs half-submerged, motionless. Its bulk casted a long shadow over water. The hull was intact, no visible breaches. Whatever damage it had sustained over the years had been internal.
Perfect.
She circled slowly, keeping her distance at first. She watched for any sign of awareness. Targeting sensors. Blinking eyes. Any twitch of movement that suggesting it was still functional.
Nothing.
The Tidebreaker remained still, its system idling so low they barely registered. If it had once been a fortress, it was now a mausoleum.
She approached.
Each step was deliberate. Her rifle stayed slung across her body, her hand close but not gripping.
When she reached the base of the hull, she paused and tilted her head, listening.
A faint vibration hummed through the metal. The heart was still beating. Weak. But alive nonetheless.
She shrugged off her backpack and set it carefully on the ground, unbuckling the turret arms and laying them beside it. She rolled her shoulders once, feeling the strain ease, then bent her knees and jumped.
Her hands caught on a recessed seam. She hauled herself up with practiced ease, boots finding purchase along the armored plates. The metal was cold, slick with condensation. She climbed quickly, until she reached the upper hull.
Still nothing.
No alarms. No response. The Tidebreaker didn't even acknowledge her presence. That worried her more than if it had.
She moved toward the maintenance hatch, a small, almost apologetically sized opening set into the hull's dorsal ridge. It had been designed for human technicians back when humans were still expected to walk alongside these machines. The panel slid aside with a grunt of effort.
Inside was darkness.
She ducked and slipped into the compartment, pulling the hatch shut behind her. The space was barely enough for her to crouch in, knees pressed tight to her chest, shoulders brushing cold metal on either side. The air smelled of stale coolant.
She pulled out her terminal and connected it to the port embedded in the wall.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then, the screen flickered to life.
Lines of code cascaded down the display, systems booting to register the intrusion. Diagnostic routines stuttered into motion throwing errors faster than they could log them. Errors overlooked by the creators had piled up, slowing down the crab's processing.
The Fox's lips curled beneath the mask.
[Fox] "Bingo."
This was worse that what she had anticipated.
And that made it better.
She scrolled quickly, fingers dancing across the terminal screen. The architecture was beautifully old. Modular. Written by engineers who believed their creations would be maintained, not abandoned. Error accumulation slowed the Tidebreaker programs to a crawl and left entire subsystems waiting on responses that never came.
Its sense of self-defence hadn't been removed.
It had been drowned in noise.
She didn't need to rewrite it completely. She just had to reroute authority and control the crab manually.
She injected her pre-written code into the command layer, watching as it slipped between fractured protocols and settled into place. A soft vibration rippled through the hull.
The Tidebreaker shifted. Just slightly.
The movement reverberated through the compartment, metal groaning as ancient joints flexed. The Fox braced herself instinctively, heart pounding, but the motion stopped as quickly as it began.
She checked the terminal.
Control handshake established.
Limited access, but real.
She exhaled a breath she hadn't realized she was holding.
This was more than just a machine. It was an asset.
A moving base, a shelter that could walk away from danger instead of hide from it. A way to carry more that she ever could alone. Tools, supplies.
She reached up and tapped the hull lightly, a quiet, almost affectionate gesture.
[Fox] "Guess it's just us now."
The Tidebreaker didn't respond.
But deep within its layered geometry, something shifted its weight, ready, at last, to move again.