Her attacker slapped a new mag into its rifle but jolted suddenly and jerked to the right and then to the left.
"Did he…go crazy?" Jessica13 wondered aloud and Mini voiced a questioning series of beeps as well.
The Lancer burst into flames and moved in lurching, panicked motions as if the pilot forgot he was riding a mech. To be fair, you forgot all kinds of things when you were being cooked alive.
Jack5's Cinder fired the finishing round from his shotgun and blasted the head off before he turned and offered her a hand, which she took gratefully.
"That Minato's a piece of shit but it sure can move fast," he admitted with a chuckle. "I didn't expect these guys to have Lancers, though. Tough fuckers."
The sounds of the battle began to die down. It appeared the last push had managed to get the pirates this close to the entrance but wasn't enough to get them through.
"Thanks for the assist," Jessica13 replied, and when he tapped his chest in response, she didn't wait for him to say anything. She still had orders to carry out, even if the fighting was winding down, and she pushed into a sprint to the elevator doors.
Something was wrong, she realized immediately—a little damage to the pressure in the hydraulic system, but nothing terminal. It could wait for repairs until after the fighting was concluded and they were done scrapping the mechs for parts.
Some would be their own, of course.
Chapter Three
There was no waste in Sanctuary. Everything was recycled, reused, and repaired so there would be no need in the future. The folks running the bunker in the lower levels had everything meticulously controlled and it mostly went according to plan, thanks to the Seven.
Of course, there were small problems here or there that arose—like a group of pirates attacking Topside and trying to get in—but they were mostly glitches on the radar and were generally fixed with a little attention and a quick hand.
In this case, of course, the hand in question was the Guardian mechs who made sure everyone in the levels below were safe from the Outside again. The pirates were defeated, and everything could go back to normal again.
But there would still not be any waste. The mechs that had been destroyed would need to be replaced, and there was no better place to start than the mechs themselves, including those that had destroyed them in the first place. Jessica13 had read in one of the manus that had been on sale about how people in the past respected the dead, put them in the ground, and left them to rot.
There were others who burned their dead but didn't contain the energy emissions, which meant they too went to waste. It seemed dead people were respected by letting everything they'd left behind be wasted.
It was ludicrous to her, but they didn't need to worry about wasting resources very much back then. It was difficult to fully come to terms with that in her head but she liked to pretend she was in a world where she didn't need to count virtually everything she used so she could report it and have it replaced with recycled materials.
This was, of course, mostly a daydream, something to take her mind off the fact that she now peeled pieces of mech away from one of her dead comrades.
Jack5 moved to where she worked and toyed with the regulators on his suit. It needed to be done almost constantly since the Cinder 300's flame throwers tended to warp after every use. She wasn't sure why someone would even use that fire trap, but those who did had to know what they were doing.
And needed to have something of a death wish. Wisely, she kept that opinion to herself.
"Hey," he said and contacted her through a private comm line. "How…how are you doing?"
Jessica13 looked up from her work. Jack5 didn't seem the type to simply come over and check on how she was doing, although it did seem like he was genuinely concerned for her. It presented an odd change over how he had always treated her in the bunker.
"I'm okay," she replied. "How are you doing?"
"Not too bad. I…well, you did good out here today. I may have said some things that weren't true and maybe even a little hurtful."
"Are you apologizing?" she asked and narrowed her eyes.
"Are you accepting my apology?" he countered.
"There's no need for an apology, but…yes, sure." She shrugged casually and Mini exaggerated her movements. "We all give each other a hard time out here. That's how it works. What matters is how we handle it when it comes to protecting Sanctuary."
"I appreciate that and you are right, of course," he agreed.
"Can I ask you something, Jack5?" she asked in an effort to make conversation when the silence between them threatened to continue.
"Of course."
"Why did you get named Jack5?" She kept her focus on pulling pieces off the ruined Guardian in front of her. "I mean…Jack is a nickname for someone named John, so why didn't your mother call you John?"
"Oh, yeah, my mother wanted to name me John, but there were already twenty-four others in Sanctuary using that name," the man explained. "It's a popular name, so the people in charge of the progenation process said that was too many sharing the same name, so she chose Jack. She might have thought it was clever, but four people had come up with the same idea before her. Mothers, right?"
"I never met mine," Jessica13 said softly. "As it turned out, my father wasn't much better and went and got himself shredded in a pirate attack while piloting an Argonaut. He loved coming up here, did my dad. Too much Topsider in him, the other pilots
