As he lit up the more highly trained guards on the platform, Axton yelled his frustrations out over an open channel.

“How the god damn fuck can a single shaped charge warhead disable a mech’s arm?! What kind of cheats did that bastard give you people?!”

In a turn of events that surprised him, Axton received a reply from Daxter over the same open comms line.

“For a single shot from a man-portable rocket launcher to do that much damage, it must be using aerosolized incendiaries.”

“What, like magnesium or thermite?” Axton remarked while still quite perturbed.

“As if!” Daxter snapped back. “Those things wouldn’t do jack shit to a War Suit, even one that was made of spare parts like yours! Besides, Aerosolized Incendiaries are beyond illegal, even for actual national militaries! Pretty sure you can at the very least be put in the slammer for around a half-century for even trying to buy them, let alone owning them or using them. If those guys are packing that kind of shit, you need to dodge!”

“Don’t need to tell me twice!” Axton shouted back as another blaster bolt his Franken and carved out a piece of the armor. “Shit! Who knew blasters were this powerful!”

“Uhhh…” Daxter’s voice came on over comms again. “If a hand-held blaster rifle just managed to damage your armor then it isn’t a blaster, it’s a disintegrator. If Stebbs has people with those things on his side, plus the A-Inc RPGs, then the rumors of his trying to get in good with the Andromedan Empire are true. Only those bastards would willingly flaunt the rules of war and give that kind of hardware to some random nobody in a backwater shit of a colony like this one.”

“Less background, more solutions.” Axton replied as he mowed down another ten guards with a short burst from his twin heavy machine guns.

“What solutions are there aside from shooting down the shuttle? Not like we have anything among our little rebellion that even comes close to that stuff aside from your War Suit. Speaking of which, you need to take that thing down ASAP. If it runs away and comes back when you aren’t around, we’re toast.”

“I got it, I got it.” Axton said as Franken smashed a group of three thugs to paste by ramming them between a wall and its tower shield. Axton then had Franken turn about-face and began to train its sights on the shuttle, but by this time the inbred pilots had somehow managed to rewire the shuttle’s navigation systems and said shuttle was starting to turn tail.

The half-cylinders that formerly covered the two heavy machine guns on Franken’s chest slid down a tad bit more and revealed Axton’s last surprise to anyone who needed immediate removal. Beneath each of the heavy machine guns was a singe guided missile, and Axton fired both of them directly at the fleeing shuttle. Both missiles connected, but Axton and Daxter both screamed in anger as the missiles lodged themselves into the shuttle but failed to explode.

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The shuttle flew off towards the transport that had begun to descend into the atmosphere, and Axton was forced to flee as more goons arrived on the scene. He, Daxter, and the rest of the rebellion bid a hasty retreat from the now mostly destroyed colony, completely sure that they were fucked until the sound of a massive explosion ripped through the tense air like a nuke going off.

Everyone, rebel and loyalist alike, turned to watch as the transport erupted into a massive ball of fire and molten death before rapidly losing altitude and crash landing into the distance beyond the compound.

…

Time to rewind back to when the shuttle was fleeing with two missiles stuck in its hull.

The pilots pushed the shuttle’s puny engines to their limit and beyond, redlining the ship until it was ‘safely’ near the transport that carried their whole, massive, inbred family. With the shuttle having redlined itself for so long, plus it having had run nearly non-stop for over three days, the shuttle was just moments away from giving out entirely. Thankfully for the pilots and their passengers, the shuttle made it safely into the transport and parked itself in the usual spot nearby the ammo cache, fuel reserves, and powerplant.

It skidded to a halt and the maintenance crew was about to get to work until they saw the two missiles lodged in the craft’s side and underside. This started a chain of ‘not my problem, it is yours’ that kept going even as the shuttle’s engines kept running and its thrusters kept spitting fire. Nobody wanted to get close to the machine, which meant that nobody would relieve the pilots, which meant that the pilots were not allowed to turn the machine off or power down any components, which meant that… well, you get it.

And, as you might imagine, during all of this the shuttle was idling with two presumed dud missiles in its hull next to all the ammo and fuel the transport had in it, alongside the transport’s main power plant. And said power plant was, unfortunately, not shielded nor was it up to the Galaxy’s version of OSHA standards. This, combined with the fact that one of the missiles was lodged danger-close to a main thruster, led to what happened in the immediate future.

First, the missile lodged near the thruster exploded.

Second, the second missile exploded.

Then the shuttle exploded.

Then the fuel caught fire.

Then the ammo caught fire.

Then the ammo exploded.

Next, the exploding ammo ripped a massive hole in the main power plant, which caused a chain reaction that saw each secondary power plant severely overtaxed and then explode.

All of this, from the time the first missile blew up to the time the last secondary reactor detonated, happened within roughly fifteen seconds. But what really made for an awesome show of fireworks above and beyond the colony’s farthest outskirts was the fact that, by some odd miracle of engineering, the main shield generator held the ship and the rapidly expanding explosion inside just long enough for the whole thing to be that much more violent and beautiful when the shield generator was finally destroyed from within.

It took 15 seconds for a transport ship big enough to hold over fifteen thousand inbred security guards and their equally inbred families to be reduced to a flaming mass of molten scrap metal that could no longer hold its own against the force of gravity that was pulling it down. And all that from two failed missiles launched from the chest of a ten-ton mech.

And that, everyone, is why you don’t drive your vehicles back to base with unexploded enemy ordinance lodged inside it, and why you keep the ammo, fuel, powerplants, and maintenance bays as far away from each other as possible.