Final Fantasy VII: Lifestream - Book 3: Pursuit

SIX

As we drove further south, the trees and grasslands eventually gave way to more dry badlands like what we'd seen around Midgar. We also saw more Shinra traffic, so we got off the road as soon as we could and continued driving south through the barren ridges and ravines toward Fort Condor. Behind me on the Hardy, Yuffie was quiet, but from how tightly she held onto me, I figured her motion sickness had been acting up again. Although I did what I could to smooth out the ride for her, it wasn't easy in the dusty and bumpy terrain.

As I'd thought, it was early afternoon by the time we finally saw the fort ahead of us. It sat at the base of a low, rocky hillside at the end of a winding ravine, and just a short distance above it was the mako reactor it had been built to guard. And we saw right away where the place had gotten its name. Right on top of the reactor's main tower was a condor, a huge bird bigger than any we'd ever seen before. Its feathers were rich and brown as it sat quietly on its nest, and I figured it had to be at least thirty feet tall with a wingspan twice that size.

"Whoa..." Wedge breathed.

Lena let out a low whistle as she gazed up at it from her seat in the Gust's sidecar. "Would you look at that..."

Biggs blinked. "Damn..."

"Wow, that's huge!" Yuffie gaped from behind me.

"Definitely impressive," I agreed.

We slowed down and drove carefully through the ravine as we got closer to the fort. There were a few boulders and clumps of rock laying here and there in the ravine, some with thick pipes in them that curved into the ground while more of them ran along the jagged, sloping walls on either side of us. Mako pipes. And I knew they must've stretched all the way past the fortress to the reactor.

Biggs was already looking around intently at the ravine, getting an idea of what the battlefield would be like as we drove on up to the fort. I knew we had to have been spotted by the lookouts by now, and I was right. As we pulled up in front of the main gate, we heard some shouts from the top of the wall, and when I looked up, I saw several men with rifles gazing warily at us. I nodded to the others, and we all relaxed and kept our hands away from our weapons.

One of the men called down to us. "Who goes there?"

"Friends," I answered. "We're here to help."

He thought for a moment, then said something we couldn't hear to one of the other soldiers. Just a few seconds later, the thick, heavy iron gate slowly slid open. It was a lot like the one at the 7-6 Annex back in Midgar. Then we drove on inside, and the gate closed again behind us. We rode slowly into a large courtyard full of small buildings and a few dirt lanes along with a collection of generators, pipes, crates, and other machinery and materials. The fortress itself stood ahead of us at the far end, and further up the hill was the reactor.

The front wall we'd just come through was several feet thick, made of metal like the gate, and spanned the entire width of the ravine. Stairs ran up to a pair of long ledges on either side of a small enclosed area in the middle right above the gate. The ledges were set four feet below the top of the wall so the lookouts could see above it out into the ravine as they paced back and forth, rifles in hand.

A dozen large turrets had also been set up along the wall at regular intervals, but they were old and bulky. I could see people working on a few of them, and I made a mental note to inspect them all myself later. They'd definitely be useful if I could get them running and tweak them a bit, and I decided to check out the weapons the men here had and see what I could do to improve them. From what I could see, though, I was definitely gonna have my work cut out for me.

There were a bunch of people moving about the area as we parked the bikes near the outer wall, but it was mostly men. And they looked a lot more like workers, engineers, and maintenance techs than soldiers. A lot of them wore gray coveralls spattered with black streaks of grease from working on machinery, and too many carried their weapons as if they didn't have much experience using them.