No, he would address it with them down in the bunker and in private to help them to improve.
She wasn't the first one at the elevator but far from the last as she circled inside and did her job to hold a position near the doors and stand ready with her grappler in case she needed to snag someone and drag them inside with her.
There was no such need, and the doors began to draw shut.
"Okay, good job, bulletfoots," Armstrong7 said to them over comms. "The pilots will continue to run drills here, but the rest of you head on down and get some grub. Once you're done, you'd better be working on the loot we picked up again or we'll be right back to drills. If one of you is missing, all of you drill since I figure you could all use extra incentive. Dismissed."
Incentive was generally code for hazing people until they got with the program, and while Jessica13 didn't approve of such measures, whatever the reason, she liked the idea of having to run drills all day even less. She wouldn't bully any of her fellow bulletfoots, but she would make sure that none of them stayed in the mess hall for longer than was necessary.
It wasn't like there was much to cause a delay in the mess anyway. The fare was the usual protein patty with green stew she was both curious to know the ingredients of and too afraid to actually ask. They had drilled for hours that morning, and none of them had any energy to talk or even do anything other than eat quickly and head to the hangar where they could get back to work on the pieces they were still sifting through.
It was comparatively relaxing. They could talk while they worked there, and most of them loved the main aspect of the job. Tinkering with new pieces and getting new devices to work was something they all lived for.
Well, Jessica13 could only speak for herself, but when the choice was between that and racing around in the sun all day… Granted, she liked being Topside too, but with her legs, stomach, and arms aching from doing more of the work than she was used to, being able to sit and tinker was a welcome relief.
Besides, tinkering wasn't the only thing she would do.
She was the first to reach the hangar and pulled Mini's headset out of the mech before she jogged to where she usually worked, where a tall pile of possibly ruined pieces waited for her. Quickly, she sat and placed a converter, a magazine autofeed, and a couple of wiring rerouters onto the table to make it look like she was working before she plugged the headset into the coding chip she still had in her pocket.
"Let's see if I can get you working this time," she whispered and almost hoped Mini could hear her.
Chapter Six
It very clearly would not be simple. Nothing Minato ever did was simple. They hadn’t designed something that could be easily copied or used by other companies and had wanted to come up with a product that was unique and beautiful. As odd as it might seem to someone who didn’t think the way she did, they tried to make a work of art.
Jessica13 could understand that. From what the pilots had to say about the other Minato designs they had tried, every one of them had been different from the other, even if they were supposed to be the same model and designer. She was used to that by now, having adapted to the kinks and idiosyncrasies in the mech.
With all that said, there was absolutely no way she could have been prepared for what she faced next. Integrating the AI code she had worked with off and on over the past few days was nothing short of crazy. Even the basic concept of plugging it into the mech made the software go haywire, both in the mech and in the chip she worked from.
The difficulty simply made her more determined not to give up. This was the last push into what she knew would change her life forever. It wasn't something she would back down from because it was a challenge. Nothing in Sanctuary came easy. If she wanted something done right, she had to be ready to work it until her fingers were numb.
People moved constantly around her. She could hear their muffled steps on the steel scaffolds suspended above the concrete floor to ensure that the heavy weight of the mechs didn’t cause damage on their way to and from the elevator.
The folks from Topside came down, their drills over, and Armstrong7 still yelled at them for mistakes he simply wouldn’t let go of until they got it right. That inevitably meant new drills for everyone the next morning, Jessica13 knew. It was his way to get everyone on the same page while he made sure those who weren't making mistakes helped those who were to not make them anymore.
All of that registered in the back of her mind like she knew what was happening around her but there was nothing that could intrude on her brain’s current focus. With single-minded determination, she wrote and rewrote the code she worked from as simulation after simulation failed to meet her expectations. Her fingers began to numb and her brain felt like it was on fire, but nothing could stop her now.
Suddenly, it all came together. She almost couldn't believe it when the first simulation concluded successfully and held her breath until the second did as well. A third was run that had a couple
