"Where's that fucking ammo, Armstrong7?" Jack5 shouted through the comms.
"En route!" the CO replied, turned quickly, and opened fire in the direction of the fighting. She could see a couple of targeting reticles, which revealed where the hostiles were and allowed her, in the support mech, to avoid them while the others continued to fight.
Jessica13 looked into the HUD, selected one of the nearest Guardians, and isolated him to tell the others who she would go to first and the other five did the same. She had enough ammo to restock two of the Guardian mechs before she could make a break back to the elevator.
A series of whistles and chirps sounded in her headset.
"No, we're not here to pick a fight, Mini," she said and kept herself moving as the stabilizers maintained her in an upright position. "We're only here to let the other guys load up and then head back. Nothing complicated—it’s like being a delivery girl but for keeps."
She ducked and a couple of stray rounds clipped the top of her helmet and ricocheted upwards.
"Fuck!" she shouted but kept on moving as Mini trilled at her once more. She had neither the time nor the inclination to pretend she knew what it was supposed to mean.
As she approached one of the Guardians, she sent an alert to notify him that she was close. A ping in response told her he was ready, and she sprinted as fast as the Minato could go until she was in front of him, dropped quickly, and skidded across the dust and dirt-covered surface while she disengaged the clamps for one of the crates.
The Guardian picked it up and relieved some of the weight, which forced Mini to adjust the hydraulics again. The combatants continued to fire around her as she worked but there was little that she could do other than hope and pray to the Seven that nothing struck her dead on. The Minato had been designed with the armor shaped into a number of angles, which raised the chances that any round would bounce away and leave only a dent. Unfortunately, it wasn't thick enough to take any rounds dead on.
And if a grenade hit her, they would wash her remains out the inside of the mech with a hose. Well, not really. No one would willfully waste that much water. The chances were the other bulletfoots would have to scrub her out.
"Clear!" the pilot behind her called, and she pushed herself up as one of the reticles came closer to her and the Guardian she had restocked. She could even see bits and pieces of it moving in the cloud of dust, a shadow more than anything else.
"Shit, shit, shit!" Jessica yelled frantically, ducked her head, and pushed into a sprint. The enemy engaged the Guardian and ignored the smaller mech that bolted away. Chirps matching her own intonations emitted in her helmet, which told her the AI was panicking too.
Not that AI's panicked in the same way humans did.
She still had a job to do. Her heart thumping like it would break through her rib cage wouldn’t change that. Jessica13 selected another of the Guardians in need of ammo and began to run toward it.
The explosions were felt almost before she saw them and she grimaced when they gouged chunks of concrete out of the bunker’s outer facade. The dust on the ground made it difficult to stop in time. The shocks from the explosions reverberated through the armor and thrust the breath out of her lungs as she skidded to a frantic halt.
The Guardian she had raced to assist was a flaming heap. No sound issued from the comms, which told her his death had been mercifully quick and he no longer needed the ammo. The target on her HUD disappeared quickly.
It was replaced by one of the reticles and displayed the shadow of the massive mech that had demolished the Guardian like it was nothing more than paper. It was smaller than the Guardian, of course, but it was still a good three feet taller than Mini. Numerous pieces protruded from it—a unique design and yet one she knew only too well. Many of the folks living near the Cities-That-Were tended to use the same Lancer Design, although it was probably not an original make. Not many were these days.
Hammercide Industries had designed a suit that was adaptable, easy to make and fix, and hard to bring down. This one looked like it had been fitted with a rocket-launcher on the shoulder, which was how it had annihilated the Guardian. While the tubes were empty—which indicated that it couldn't shoot them again—the assault rifle with an under-barrel grenade launcher would be more than capable of tearing through Mini.
The AI squealed in her ear.
"I know!" Jessica13 shouted as the rifle targeted her and she flung herself hastily to the left as the air around her was suddenly filled with lethal projectiles. A handful of the rounds bounced off her armor, although none penetrated, but that wouldn’t last long. The pirate hadn't expected her to be that fast and struggled to adjust to her movements. With no AI to help with the targeting, the pilot would have to do it manually and he sucked at it.
Still, it was only a matter of time until one of the bullets found her.
"Jessie, over here!" Jack5 called over the comms and she could see him waving the arms of his Cinder 300 from behind the Lancer. He was out too and wouldn’t want to engage the enemy until he had ammo.
There was no way for her to get around their adversary, though, not without stepping into a hail of bullets. She had no time to think, only do.
Jessica13 made a decision she knew would get her yelled at as she came to a sudden, skidding halt and ducked to avoid the bullets that streaked past her. A quarter of a second was all she would have for this, and it needed to work.
Her right hand reached up behind her back to yank the last crate off and as soon as it came free, she disengaged the clamps and tossed it up. It arced over the Lancer's head as it ducked instinctively. The pilot thought she had attacked it, apparently, and didn't want to be killed by a support mech.
Thinking she had missed, the Lancer advanced. It was also out of ammo, but once more, that didn't really matter. The left hand moved in a vicious swipe to end her quarter-second’s grace and she felt the impact all the way up her spine when she was swatted like a fly and landed heavily.
The pirate mech moved forward, pressed its foot on her chest, and reached back to find another magazine to reload before it executed her. She couldn't see through its visor, but the poor condition of the Lancer was clearly visible to her as it stood over.
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 gro
up 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 used to say."
"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, an
d 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 imagine what it was like to live in one of those cities. It was intriguing to think about how it would be to look out at the world from one of those buildings.
Of course, to hear the peddlers talk about it, those were a hazard now. No one dared live within the ruins anymore. Not only was there the danger of radiation or disease, but Skyfall in the area meant something of a domino effect that brought the buildings down on the heads of those stupid enough to scavenge around the Cities-That-Were.
Or desperate enough, she reminded herself. Not everyone was lucky enough to be born in one of the bunkers or had the safety the folks in Sanctuary enjoyed. Despite all the things she’d been told about Outside, though, a part of her hankered after the wide-open spaces that seemed to whisper of freedom and adventure. It wasn’t the first time odd thoughts like this had intruded and she pushed it away. Her life was here where it was safe and she could contribute to something that was much more important than her childish imaginings.
Bulletfoot One Page 3
