"All right, folks," he said. "We've paid our respects to the fallen and in a little while, they'll bring in some people to apply for their positions. Until then, the rest of the staff will need to carry their work detail. It means a little more work and a little more canteen until we're at full capacity. You'll see the updated schedules on your pads. For the moment, though, we already have folks upstairs working through what's left of the mechs we tore apart, and some of the pilots will have to pull extra duty to find the parts we'll keep."
There was a collective groan from the pilots in question, and Jessica13 couldn't help but roll her eyes. It wasn't like they worked to protect the bunker on their own, but simply because they were the ones who did all the shooting, they thought they didn't need to help with the clean-up.
"Go back up, read your assignments, and get to work," the CO said. "I don't have the time to constantly track you down whenever you need a hand to hold. Get to work, and I'm sure we'll find our way out of this."
There was a collective response of “yes, sir” from the crowd.
"Peachy," he said. "A7 out. Dismissed."
She would never call him that, but it was entirely irrelevant. They would all head up to finish the work they had started the day before.
As it turned out, however, she was not included in that particular duty. Jessica13 would not go Topside to work on the mechs, after all. Her pad told her she was confined to the lower level to work on separating the bits and pieces that had been collected from the damaged mechs and identified as useful without the necessity to go through the recyc process.
As much as she wanted to go Topside, it was good to work with her hands again. She liked being able to take the various pieces apart, study them, and put them back together in a way that made them work correctly. Maybe it was the Athena genes that made her tick, but it was something she genuinely enjoyed.
Or would have at any other time but today, she felt a little twitchy and impatient for some reason. Either it was the ceremony in the recyc level or maybe it was all the talk about something somewhere waiting to be discovered. She had heard those words hundreds of times before and not only when someone got themselves killed.
People often spoke the words of The Great Prophet Sagan, and they usually said them like they knew what they meant, but it had never made much sense to her. It seemed like they simply took his words and twisted them to make sense and fit their way of thinking and never really considered what the man himself had intended for them.
Then again, she had no idea what the great prophet had actually said, so she had no idea if people merely adjusted the words to fit their worldviews or if their worldviews were altered by the words. Still, talking about how the discoveries were waiting for them and how all they had to do was go and find them had touched her this time.
Perhaps the prophet's words were supposed to be open to interpretation. Maybe, in her case, she was meant to go and find something out—to make a discovery and help Sanctuary. Or maybe, just maybe, a discovery that was supposed to help her rather than everyone else. It was like the words had tugged at a thread and the entire tapestry that was her life had begun to unravel.
"What did they do to you?" Jessica13 wondered aloud as she fiddled with one of the pieces from her selection.
"What are you looking at there, Jessie?" Armstrong7 asked as he strode to where she sat and worked. "Something useful or something interesting?"
"A little of both," she replied. "Look at what they did to this core catalyzer."
The man leaned in and narrowed his eyes at the piece she held aloft. "Aside from a couple of crude drawings of the various uses of a phallic shape, I don’t really see what they were doing here."
"Oh, is that what they are?" She looked at the drawings more closely. They were small and appeared to have been cut by a laser cleaner over the rust that had collected on the outer steel coating. Now that he had pointed them out, it was obvious that they had drawn crude phallus shapes going into what looked like equally crude depictions of female genitalia.
"Focus, Jessie," Armstrong growled. "You can stare at dicks on your own time. What are you talking about? What…what is this?"
"It's a core catalyzer," she explained. "It works like kind of a temporary battery and collects the power from the nuclear cores before it disperses it either into actual batteries or wherever else it needs to be. Guns, HUD, et cetera."
"Right…a core catalyzer." Armstrong7 nodded.
"Anyway, it looks like they peeled the containment off and plugged these wires into the holes. I'd say the idea they had was to make the conversion from the core to the rest of the suit more efficient, but like this, you'll burn the catalyzer out in…three weeks of use tops."
"How long did they use it for?"
"It’s hard to say for sure, but this blackening around the edges… You can see how it's already started overloading along the polarity," she pointed out. "It'll be simple enough to fix, but I need more ceramic to restructure the containment. Otherwise, it'll blow up any suit we put it in."
"Well, put it in the maybe pile," the CO said and glanced around. "The chances are any ceramic we get our hands on will be put to use elsewhere. Now, what about that one over there?"
Jessica13 looked at the piece he indicated and tilted her head as she gave it a quick scrutiny.
"That looks like one of the older cannons RIOT used to make." She picked it up for a closer look. "Depleted uranium slugs is what they're usually good for—the armor-piercing ones. It has one of the first autofeed magazines in mass production for guns that size. I think the Argonauts used to use them until they were upgraded to the Hellfire models. There’s less of a kick in the slider and less tendency to jam too."
"I thought it looked familiar," Armstrong7 said. "Any chance we can put it to good use? We could use a couple more Argonauts in the rounds."
"I know you like the Argonauts, so I'll put this as delicately as I can," she said. "Without the Hellfire model cannons, it's almost impossible to hit anything. Maybe if you ramp an S2 chamber to shoulder the recoil, but then we'd have to take this…circular saw off. Even then, if you channel the S2 over about thirteen volts, you'd still have to ground it with copper filament into the catalyzer and you risk shorting the whole firing mechanism. You basically end up with a heavy club you can use to maybe…uh, knock people around with, if you want. The chances are you'll either spray and pray or you'll have a very fancy deadweight on your arm. Even fancier if you keep the saw."
Armstrong7 narrowed his eyes and inclined his head a little disapprovingly as he studied the canon closely before he spoke. "You're not half wrong in that regard, but it's always a good thing to have cannons in reserve. Maybe we can plug them into those turrets we've tried to get operational again."
It had been a while since the turrets that used to protect Sanctuary had gone offline after a group of pirates riding a Sherlock had attacked with a long-range rifle that took the guns out. For at least a year, all they had been good for was an early warning system that required them to head up with Guardians and Argonauts every time an alarm was triggered.
Finding replacements was always a pain, but they had tried.
"Maybe," Jessica13 said. "So, maybe pile?"
"Sure," he said. "What do you make of the weapons they used?"
"Mostly basic assault rifles, grapplers, and a couple had some rocket launchers too," she said. "Not the autoloader ones. You know, only the ones with four tubes they had to reload manually. They were creative, and I’d say they had fun trying to work out how to get as much use out of as little materials as possible. They set up chest plates with aluminum sheets, and all the mechs I saw had ways to get through harder armor—the kind you see on our Guardians. You wouldn't need all this to handle your average pirate gang or to attack one peddler or another. They were readying to get through us, and… Well, they didn't get through, but they got much closer than the other attacks."
"True," he agreed, his expression unreadable. "Kee
p up the good work. Let me know if you find anything interesting. We need to go through all these piles quickly, though, so if in doubt, put it in the maybe pile and we'll get to it later."
She nodded and turned back to her work. It was relaxing to pull the bits and pieces out and work with them and she didn't feel a need to rush the work either. Sometimes, you simply needed to pry the benefits out of the devices they were working on. Besides, she reasoned, if she could focus on what she loved most, the other uncomfortable speculations that had begun to haunt her would subside.
The most interesting parts were always those most pilots would overlook. Their interest, like Armstrong7's, lay in the guns and weapons the pirates had carried, whereas hers lay mostly in the software included in the mechs they had used. The kinds she had worked with her entire life had been coded and written up to be unhackable, which didn’t allow anyone else to step in and use them aside from the pilots themselves.
Many of the newer AIs did that too and ran software defense.
But those that were designed to run on the simpler software weren't protected. Not many people would even bother to hack into it since most of the functions inside the suit were run on manual anyway, but that didn't mean they were useless.
The tracking software showed where they had come from and other software revealed what they'd been shooting at as well as a whole horde of other small details that would allow them to work out how to use the rest of the parts.
"Oh… Well, aren't you interesting?" Jessica13 mumbled under her breath as she connected the SSD to an HUD simulator and powered it up.
When it activated, it gave her exactly what she had expected it to. They hadn't upgraded the software, which meant it still ran on factory settings and displayed the Minato logo before it opened the rest of the programming.
Very few people liked using Minato software these days—or even back in their heyday, apparently. They had always been the cheaper option for the less discerning or those who cared less for the lives of the people who piloted them.
Opening one of the command prompts was the most interesting, however, as it brought up the code they used. It was, of course, from the same factory Mini had come out of and it was far better than the corrupted, gutted version she'd had to work with.
Her heart immediately began to race with the possibilities. It wasn't much, but it was something to start with and more than she'd ever had. She would be able to get Mini up again. Having a real AI would make the mech work the way it was supposed to.
And hey, having someone to talk to who had more than chirps and whistles in reply was always a plus too.
Jessica13 unplugged the chip from the simulator and looked around at the other the bulletfoots and pilots who currently worked around her. All were engaged in their tasks and paid not the slightest attention to what she was doing or even realized that she was looking at them.
One chip that wouldn't be useful to anyone but her wouldn’t be missed, she assured herself. Maybe this was her very own something incredible waiting to be known. But like Armstrong7 had said, on her own time. The thought brought a tantalizing surge of excitement like this small rebellion—her first ever against the system—was the beginning of something way bigger.
Part of her recoiled at the thought and tried to fall back on her life-long litany of safety and sacrifice. The other part reveled in the daring step that promised untold advantages. After all, fixing Mini was to Sanctuary’s benefit too.
She slipped the chip into her pocket and continued to work.
Chapter Five
Armstrong7 had begun to get on her nerves. This was the third fucking drill he'd run in the past two days, and the man had done all but sound the alarms. He couldn't sound them, of course, since that would send the word to all the other people in Sanctuary, but other than that, he went all out.
The attack had clearly rattled him more than he let on. He hadn't lost very many people under his command before the attack. Most of those who had passed before had been as a result of self-injury. Those had pissed him off too and made him yell at the folks under his authority until they got it right.
But this attack had scared him. Jessica13 hadn't been around as long as the other pilots—or even most of the bulletfoots—but she knew what made her CO tick. And without doubt, something was ticking him now.
While she could understand his grief and not wanting anyone else to die on his watch, she was still pissed off by how far he was taking it. The situation, in general, was bad enough but what was worse was the fact that he seemed to time all his drills when she was supposed to have downtime.
Of course, simply because she wasn't working didn't mean she wasn't busy with something important. Most of her waking time that wasn't spent working was used to retrieve the coding from the chip she'd borrowed from the maybe pile. Of course, even with the complete and uncorrupted code, it was still difficult to apply it to the Mini. They were essentially different models, and while they worked from the same base code, that was where the similarities ended.
Despite the challenges, she wasn't about to be dissuaded from her work. This was as close as she'd ever come to discovering why Mini didn’t access the “brain” function of her software where the AI was really supposed to originate from. Without it, there was no thinking and no higher functions, merely data processing and maybe a hint of electrical current through random areas that made her think the AI was trying to repair itself.
But Mini’s code was corrupted beyond repair and without anything from the original, she would not be able to adjust it fully or correctly. Sure, she could copy from one of the other AI cores, but then it wouldn't be Mini. It would merely be a copy from an AIs—the judgmental kind no one liked working with.
Admittedly, it had proven to be a considerable challenge even to get the new code to work and to move it beyond running simple operations and easy calculations so it would actually function through the brain of an AI. It wasn't simple and it was far from easy, but she was determined to do it. She still had the manus, which gave her a running translation of the binary flex and explained what each line of code was supposed to do, at least under the more basic functions, but it was slow work.
She was startled out of her reverie when someone pounded demandingly on the metal door to her little room. It made her jump slightly on her cot and she removed the Mini headset from her ears.
"It's unlocked!" Jessica13 shouted. She'd learned that she needed to be loud to be heard through a door that thick.
The handle twisted and Armstrong7’s powerful, lean frame blocked the neon light from the hallway outside. "What are you doing in here?"
For a moment, she simply stared at him like she hadn't heard the commlinks all but blow up with him calling all hands on deck for another drill.
"I’m performing updates on my mech," she replied. "Did you need me for something?"
"Don't play stupid with me, Jessie," the man snapped. "I know your commlink is live and activated so I know you've been listening. That tells me you know we're running drills right now and that it's all hands on deck."
Jessica13 could have pointed out that this was the third such drill in the past two days. She could have told him he might be overreacting to all this. They lived in a dangerous world, after all, and while they were safer than the average peddler out there, they would still lose people.
But none of that was something to be said to your commanding officer. Armstrong7 had given her an order and she had no desire to be the kind of person who would be insubordinate merely because she thought she was right. The possibility of being wrong was there too and in the end, his efforts came from a desire to not lose any more of his people.
And that was something she could get behind.
"Coming right out, sir." She scrambled off her bed but kept the headset connected to the chip.
The CO grunted something unintelligible, nodded, and headed farther down the hall where he began to hammer on more doors and yell at the occupants. It seemed
like she wasn't the only one who had the idea of hiding out in their bunk in the hope that their presence wouldn’t be missed.
"It doesn't work when everyone's doing it," she grumbled under her breath as she pulled her piloting suit on again, zipped it hastily, and jogged out into the hallway where the others began to join her. The group hurried toward the hangar where their mechs were waiting.
There was the spirit of practiced precision in these drills again. The memory of the attack hadn't faded, of course, but every member of the team gathered their confidence once more and went through the motions they had practiced dozens of times before. The pilots all hurried to their combat mechs and mounted up as the bulletfoots helped them to get started before they moved to their support mechs.
The first time they'd run the drill, Jessica13 had needed to clench her hands to keep them from shaking, the memories of the attack still too fresh in her mind. Two drills later, though, she felt considerably better, a little calmer, and more relaxed in her work. By now, she could have done it in her sleep.
Maybe that was why Armstrong7 chose to run so many of these in such quick succession. People would think a little too much about what happened to their comrades the last time they were involved in real action, and he wanted to make sure they got the nerves clear before they were called into a real combat situation once more.
Maybe she didn’t give the man enough credit.
Jessica13 turned toward her Minato and played with the coding chip she had connected to her headset as she jogged to where her mech was still coupled.
She could bring it up now. Not only that, she had made significant progress in integrating the code between the chip and her device. The chances were that she would need a couple of field tests before she got everything right.
Still thinking it over, she climbed into the chest of the Minato while the second wave of pilots began to follow their usual routine and head toward their guardians. She almost missed Jack5 with the group until he paused and looked at her where she prepared to head to the elevator herself.
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