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Kelly threw Black Knight's considerable strength into the effort, hardened alloy claws squealing and grating as they tore into the rocks under his feet, servomotors whining in protest at the forces involved. With slow, ponderous grace, the huge rock tilted off it's axis, beginning a slow roll toward the chasm. "That's it, fire in the hole!" He spun and ran away from the edge, sprinting a few hundred meters, then turning to watch as the boulder slowly ground its way over the side of the cliff. It seemed to almost hover for a moment, then vanished over the edge with a grating rumble. A few seconds later there was a mighty crash, then another, and another as the boulder bounced back and forth between the canyon walls like a giant wrecking ball in its plunge to the bottom. Dust and dirt rattled from the far wall on the first blow, the second bringing some loose rocks and larger chunks peeling away from the plateau.

"Come on, come on, you can't be THAT sturdy..." There was a third, grating crash as the boulder hit bottom, and the canyon seemed to shimmer with vibration from the impact against the base of the far wall. There was a moment of silence, then a vast, booming roar as chunk of the far wall the size of a good-sized house broke loose, tumbling downward into the canyon. It plowed into the near wall, causing a sympathetic collapse, and in an instant, fully a hundred meters of the plateau vanished, riding the avalanchevator into the canyon below. A great cloud of dust billowed into the air as rubble spilled out in a great vee below, blanketing the floor of the canyon in broken rock for hundreds of meters in both directions.

"Woohoo! Now THAT is what I call making a big entrance right there!"

"Well, if I thought there was anything down there to witness it aside from scorpions and assorted reptiles, I might have put a bit more work into the dramatic nature, I suppose." Kelly walked over to the side, looking down. "Hmm, that should do it, looks like only about a thirty foot drop to the top of the rubble, that's well within specs, shouldn't be a problem at all."

"Now that's the mercenary spirit right there, Talon. Keep that outlook, and you might end up doing quite well. Remember, there's a couple of really basic rules to merc-work. First rule is to get paid. That means you do your job, and don't hose up. Second rule is to live to SPEND that pay. That also means not to hose up. It can also mean letting the other guy go first." He laughed and jumped over the side, landing with a clattering crash on the still-loose pile of rubble below, using Black Knight's claws to dig into the shifting pile and maintain his balance. "Careful, it's a bit loose, but seems stable enough. Just make sure you walk down the side in a different spot from me, it's impolite to kick debris on your buddy's nice, shiny Zoid."

"Well, if there were any down there, they don't any more." Kelly chuckled, for some reason that tweaked his odd sense of humor. He crouched and leaped again, landing with a grinding crash of debries and rubble fifty or sixty feet down the slope. Before his weight could dislodge the loose rocks under him, he leaped again, barely staying in front of a the garbage that crashed down the hill from his first landing.

Riding a small collapse of scree and small boulders, he bounded down from the base of the collapsed slide and jogged a ways out onto the canyon floor to avoid any disturbed rocks from either of their descents, turning to look back and make sure Talon made it down ok.

"Well, and common sense doesn't get paid nearly as well as taking a few risks on occasion. This was a fairly calculated risk, we're still close enough to the base that they could send us some help if we really needed it, although the chances of getting into something that we can't dig out ourselves isn't ALL that great." He kept his head up and scanning as he spoke, the republic had practically littered the entire desert with their sleeper traps, and it was entirely possible that there was at least a small detachment in the area. He wasn't terribly worried, old sleeper units were no match for even their lightly-armed Raptors, but if they were caught by surprise, it could turn into a sticky situation.

"Hey Talon, keep a sharp eye out, who knows what's down here."

"Don't worry, if they charge you can drive them back with blasts of sarcasm. that seems to work well on irritated spirits." He grinned behind Knight's canopy, and toggled up the MAD display to his forward HUD overlay, walking down the canyon a little slower now. For getting back up, I was planning to stroll along the bottom of this lovely little gully until I found a slope shallow enough to climb, or walls close enough together to chimney. With as irregular as these canyons are, that shouldn't be too hard to find, I think.

"Hey, I have some smaller signatures buried in the sand on the canyon-facing side of the wall anomoly. Rubble, perhaps, but keep sharp, we don't want to be caught by surprise." He reached down and toggled the combat system online, watching the status indicators pop up on the HUD too, although the board was depressingly short. "We've really got to get some guns to take onto these things, this is almost sad."

"Well, a bit of danger is part of life, the trick is in picking where and how much danger you get into. Being prepared is a must as well, and in this case, knowing where your opposition could be. By closing the field, we really only have two possible routes of attack, discounting air units. One of those two routes is currently blocked by a handy little landslide." He gestured forward, a motion mirrored by one of Knight's forelimbs. "Back me up, I'm going to go ahead and see what we've turned up here."

He slowly advanced down the canyon, pausing about every three steps to make another MAD sweep, slowly building a very precise composite map of the close area. "I think we've found a sleeper trap here, they either haven't detected us yet, or they're offline, I'm showing no motion yet. Closest target looks to be about three hundred meters, buried by about three. Guysaks, probably. No real threat, but let's try to be covert if we can. There's almost certainly something here if there's a sleeper trap around to protect it. Or it could just be a random ambush, of course." He shrugged. "No real way to find out without poking at it, though. What do you think? Press on and see what happens, or go over the rubble the other way and bail out?"

"Well then, let's see what we can stir up." Kelly looked cautiously at the area ahead, deciding exactly how he wanted to go about it, then crouched and sprinted forward, zigzagging wildly down the canyon. He ran right over the area with the possible contacts and continued down the bottom of the canyon for several hundred yards before slowing to a stop and turning around, seeing no sign of pursuit at all.

"... Well that was anticlimactic." He walked back along his claws-deep sprinting tracks, watching the MAD display to position himself right over one of the suspected sleepers, and used one foot to scrape the overburden sand away. After some minor excavation (and some profanity as the loose sand kept wanting to slide right back into the hole) he uncovered the dull brown skin of a Republic Sleeper Guysac, as expected. What he didn't expect were the heavy wrinkles in its tough alloy skin, with the glass broken completely out of the cockpit. "Well, this one looks kind of... mushed. From the amount of rocks and debris here, I wonder if they weren't fast enough to get away when one of the walls came down, that would explain how nobody had noticed this anomaly before." He gestured to the canyon wall, where a few twisted beams of definitely structural nature protruded. "Looks like we at least found something worth our time to come down here... Wonder if there's any way in?"

"Could be, it's mangled enough." He crouched and popped the canopy of the Black Knight, standing on the cockpit rail to inspect the pile of rocks and rubble. "Well, at least it doesn't look too heavy to get through. I'm fairly sure we can clear those if we can't find a way in without it, nothing there looks to out-mass the lifting capacity of our front grippers. I'd rather not shift anything we don't have to."

He dropped back into the cockpit and closed the canopy, standing up again and walking back away from the wall, inspecting the slope above the ruins. "We're going to want to be careful, though. Something's already come down off that slope once. It looks stable enough, but you never really know. I'm setting a locator beacon on Black Knight to give our position and a distress call if we don't come out in a couple of hours."