"Oh…fuck, I'm sorry," Jack5 said and backed away slowly. "I'm…uh, going over there to…look at something. See you later."
She turned to watch him walk away as Mini emitted a series of beeps and trills in her headset.
"I know," she replied and once again imagined she understood what the malfunctioning AI had said. "He's worse at small talk than I am."
Another trill with a downward tone indicated disappointment and the flower on her HUD began to spin again. She resisted the urge to shrug and returned to her work. There were a large number of mechs that needed to be taken apart and sent to the manufacturing and recycling levels and little time to do it in. They didn't want to be caught out there after dark.
The tools in the Mini worked quickly to smoothly disassemble the pieces and lay them in piles. One would be sent to recyc and the other comprised those that would be plugged into other mechs. The beginning was always the easiest part. Most of the armor would be sent to the lower levels. It was when she got deeper inside that it was interesting.
And depressing, she acknowledged with a grimace. One of the pilots was still inside and his blood had soaked into the inner layers of the pilot compartment. He was someone's child. They would need to go through the whole progenation process to replace him, but that was not really her department. She didn't know how many resources it took to bring a human being into the world, but it had to be more expensive in terms of resources than having the already adult human there to contribute to the bunker themselves.
"Sorry," Jessica13 said softly and tried to work around the body inside the mech. She removed the pieces and placed them in their respective piles while a couple of other bulletfoots collected them and dragged them to the elevator to be processed.
Another of the Guardian pilots marched over to her. She could almost tell the size of the damn thing merely from the way it made the ground shudder with every step as the pilot hailed her through the comms.
"I noticed you saw some action during the fighting," Lance7 said when she accepted the hail on her HUD.
"There’s not much a Minato can do against mechs like that," she said and gestured with her head toward the fallen pirate mechs. "Still, I managed to dance around one until one of ours came in and took him down."
"It wasn’t a bad first taste of action," he said and tilted his head inside the Guardian helmet. "Not many folks in a support mech would have gotten away alive, nor with their mech intact."
"I have some damage to my chest here," she pointed out and tapped the place where the Lancer’s foot had stamped on her. "Not a pleasant experience and I know I'll have to fix it in my spare time."
"It’s relatively intact, anyway," Lance7 said. "Still, it’s the first time I've ever seen these bastards get this close. It’s not like them to be so brazen in their attacks. They tend to remember their place in the food chain, as it were."
"They were better armed than attackers in the past," she said as she worked to finish with the friendly Guardian that had gone down and placed the last of the pieces on their respective piles. "A couple of them had the kinds of explosives and mechs you don't see in most of the other pirate gangs—at least the few I’ve seen."
"What makes you say that?" he asked.
Jessica13 continued her work as she spoke. "These had the numbers and the equipment to deal Sanctuary some real damage if they managed to get past the Guardian line. Sure, they're missing all kinds of bits and pieces here and there. You can see that one didn't have any core containment and it's running light on armor.” She gestured to an enemy mech sprawled alongside. “That's how the shotgun blew the head clean off. I guess they might have done that to make it run lighter and faster. My thinking, though, is they didn't have the parts and put these bastards together from scrap, elsewise they would have given us far more trouble."
"Thank the Seven they didn't," Lance7 said.
"Where do you think they came from?" she asked and moved to the downed pirate mechs she’d indicated. She doubted she would feel any pity over taking that one apart, all things considered. Jack5 had done a number on it. The shotgun had blown the head off completely and the flame thrower turned most of the outer armor to slag to make sure. Most of it would go into the recyc pile.
"Somewhere out there," Lance said, raised his arm, and aimed his assault rifle out at the world below.
Jessica13 turned from her work to see where he was pointing. Now that the dust from the battle had settled, there was a clear view out into the world below the mountain Sanctuary had been built into. The sun descended into the west as it set and covered the sky and the land below with a gorgeous orange and gold glow.
People talked about the dangers of the Outside a great deal and she hadn't really had any cause to disbelieve them, even with her time spent above ground. The world was full of all kinds of dangers that would kill her faster than it would take to arm the grappler in her Minato.
With all that said, though, it sure was gorgeous up there. She could see for miles and they looked down on one of the Cities-That-Were. It was one of her favorite things to look at, second only to when there was some Skyfall to watch. The gold was painted over the ruined buildings, some of which soared hundreds of meters into the air—higher, almost, than Sanctuary's mountain. Even hundreds of miles away, silhouetted by the sun on the horizon, she could make them out.
She liked to
