"Well, I'm not sure we'll get a heroes' welcome," Jessica13 said as they moved across the rough landscape. "If they are anything like Sanctuary, the chances are they heard the stories of how sometimes, bunkers would send raiding parties to neighboring bunkers for supplies. Breaching the sealed environment supposedly led to mass deaths from poison and radiation, so visitors are rarely—if ever—allowed anywhere near the doors."
"How did you conduct trades if that's the case?" the AI asked.
"There are a handful of caravans that travel between the bunkers,” she explained. “Some originate from the bunkers themselves and are sent out when they need some kind of resource and have another to trade for it. Others are peddlers who scavenge whatever they can find in the Cities-that-Were and come to trade. Either way, there’s not too much trust so when they arrive, they’re still kept under the watchful eye of the Guardian mechs and are never allowed inside. I guess that’s led to the bunkers being robbed too many times before. We were allowed Topside sometimes to see what they had to offer."
"I see. How do they transport the goods?"
“Most carry what they can on the backs of their mechs—they fit them with mag clamps like the one the Minato has—but I have seen a few who use pack animals. They are big, four-legged beasts with hooves and sometimes horns that carry almost as much as a mech could,” Jessica13 said. As she said that, the penny dropped. How had she missed the fact that these animals were impervious to the so-called poison in the air? The thought had never occurred to her before and seemed like another measure of her foolishness.
“What do they take for trade?”
She paused to consider this. “They’re mostly in it for the resources that can be traded like copper, food, and water, but they took the canteen I offered them too.”
“That is unlikely,” Mini pointed out. “There appears to be no centralized currency between the bunkers and so unless they made an agreement to exchange the canteen with the bunker for resources, they would not agree to it.”
She shrugged. "Whatever you say. All I know is that he didn't mind me exchanging my canteen for a couple of manus on how to fix…well, you."
"And I appreciate the effort. What are you doing down there?"
Jessica13 paused in her fiddling and watched the HUD closely. "I'm trying to see how you activated the Bulletfoot mode. It would help us get to the place faster."
"Well, the way to activate it is by giving me the controls," Mini pointed out. "Humans are not the best at running on four legs. It goes against your core programming and hardware, which makes it difficult for the human body to move the mech's controls… Well, there you go."
It was impossible not to smirk when she found the control that activated the all-terrain mode, lowered the mech onto all fours, and settled in. "No power on Earth or in the Cities-that-Were can stop me from finding out how to make a machine work. You should know that better than most, Mini. But, in the interest of helping people who might be in trouble, I'll elect not to spend the day tinkering with the mech to learn how it works. Would you mind picking up from here?"
He didn't speak for a moment but after three or four seconds, an approval message displayed on the HUD.
"Are you sulking in there?" Jessica13 asked.
"Negative. AIs are incapable of sulking."
"Well, that's good because you are the only person I can talk to out here and I would hate to lose that." She patted the inside of the mech.
"My human interaction software tells me that you are attempting what humans call emotional manipulation," Mini pointed out. "You should be aware that AIs are not susceptible to this but, as remaining where we are would put us in danger of being overtaken by possible predators, I say we should continue to move."
The approval message vanished and Mini took control of the mech to guide it between the trees and plants at an ever-increasing speed. Jessica13 wondered how long it could keep going without needing repairs and made a mental note of it by calling up the hardware diagnostics and pinning it to a corner of the screen.
They moved quickly through the forest until she could see an opening in the distance where it had been cleared. If it really was another bunker, it looked like they had a similar thought process as Sanctuary did in wanting to keep as much of the area around them as open as possible. The logic was that it would help them to see any threats that might approach in enough time to prepare for them.
Mini brought the mech to a halt at the edge of the tree line and looked out onto the clearing.
"Well, you were right," she said, softly and leaned forward until her nose pressed against the helmet. "There is a bunker here."
"The correct terminology might be 'there was a bunker here,’" the AI stated.
It was, unfortunately, true. The location looked like the scene of a battle straight out of one of the instruction programs. The minefield around the bunker appeared to have been detonated and bodies were strewn everywhere. Mechs had been damaged and left for dead—dozens of them lay in various states of disrepair and some of them still burned.
They weren't the source of the column of smoke that continued to rise into the sky, however. That issued from a heavy concrete structure which she could see was only the tip of what was likely an extensive complex that extended for kilometers underground.
"My electromagnetic sensors detect that we are about to enter a minefield," Mini warned.
"Most of the mines were detonated already," Jessica13 said. "Then again, one can never be too careful. Can your sensors give us an idea of where they are?"
"I am plotting a course now," he said after a second's pause.
The plotting took less than a minute
