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We stopped at the base of the mountain and I checked my read-outs. Stuck into the cockpit with a wooden frame and held together with duct tape, the communications equipment that normally sat in its own tent next to the commander’s was blocking me from maneuvering my mech’s left arm. Luckily we’d stuck it in the correct position, holding the antenna ready to extend when I reached the summit. Twelve hours left until the elliptical satellite came into wide scanner range. I’d have twenty four seconds to transmit the data.

Cracking open the hatch, I swung the thick glass plates out. While I wriggled out of the cramped seat, my onboard radio squealed to life.

“Cap, everything good in there?” The Minutehand had stopped a dozen yards behind me. Jingo’s boxy stock unit had turned its head up towards me, facial sensors shielded from the harsh midday sun by its free hand. She’d spent so long fine tuning the thing that it ran almost silent, even next to a stealth model like mine.

The Minutehand models were entirely humanoid, matching the look and style of our spaceflight uniforms, with a bit of extra armor. The standard green and white color scheme that most of the Minutehands adhered to had been worn down on this unit, and the remaining white was yellowed. The cockpit glass was freshly replaced, standing out against the well traveled plating. Despite the paint, the mechanics were well maintained, joints freshly scrubbed and all the sealant was fresh.

“It’s a nine hour hike to the peak. Just taking a moment to double check the external equipment.” I ducked back inside the cockpit, out of Jingo’s sight-line.

“Okay, but are you alright, captain?” Oh god, she wanted to talk about this. I slammed the glass shut and started my mech walking. “Look, I’m real grateful for you stepping in back there, but it’s totally alright if you’re pissed at me.” I buzzed back the code for radio silence.

Forty minutes later, we were picking our way through the ruins of a village. The main road twisted up the mountain and was relatively clear of debris. Luckily, the cars were already moved off to the side, so Jingo just had to walk ahead and cut the power lines for me to pass through. My Lachrymal Actuator Stealth and Recon unit was technically capable of reducing its height, but it did so while raising the active camo, which was a drain on my power cells that we’d need to broadcast.

Getting the lines down was slow going. We had to cut each cable and make sure that it was moved clear before the LASR could pass through. With the heavy gear weighing down my left side, any slip would be catastrophic. I reopened the radio channel.

“This is real shit work, Jin,” I tried to come across as conversational, but probably couldn’t keep out the bitterness. Her Minutehand tossed the last cable onto a nearby roof and we moved up to the next pole.

“I’m not about to apologize for kicking his ass.” She cut the thinner three lines in one motion. The last line flashed with residual power that made her radio fizz with static. Sparks shot everywhere and she stumbled back, arms wheeling. I moved away, out of range of her flailing.

“Didja kill yourself, Jingo?”

“Who the FUCK is still routing power up here? This place is ancient.” I heard her coughing over the line. “And don’t give me that ‘you kill yourself?’ bull. I keep my shit properly sealed AND grounded, unlike a certain jackass we know.”

“He’s a jackass that got us stuck up here all day. Also, I distinctly remember that a lack of ass kicking was your entire problem in that exchange. If anything, you were the ass kickee,” I said as we resumed our slow march. At the next pole, the Minutehand smashed the power converter box on the side of the pole first. She didn’t respond again.

Later, deep in the tall forest that ringed the middle of the mountain, Jingo re-opened the line. We’d picked up the pace, as the higher we got the less ground level vegetation there was to worry about. I was busy monitoring my in-built visualizer, which was throwing spectrographs over the glass. We were a lot closer to the enemy lines, and they'd been known to push their patrols out this far in the past.

She opened the line, but didn't say anything for a moment. By the time she'd worked it out, however, there were three repeated spikes on the visualizer, so I buzzed for silence and brought us to a stop.

I transferred the spectrograph down to the sub-screen array that was set past my knees. It kept up the pulsing irregularity. Working fast, I added a local radio scan and a low pass decibel display next to the spectrograph. The radio scan moved steadily through bands, emitting a rhythmic static pulse through the cockpit. On the main display, I added a seismic readout. While I reached into the net pouch above my head and pulled a map, Jingo had her Minutehand crouch and ready its primary gun. That thing really was quiet, if she'd been much farther away I might have not picked up the movement.

Two, then three minutes passed while I did nothing but listen to the radio search through fuzz. The spectrograph kept picking up the same random spike, but nothing else happened. Slowly, I dialed my local radio's broadcast power supply down to essentially nothing. The signal would be too weak to pick up after more than twenty feet at most, just close enough for Jingo. I made sure our band had already been searched by the scanner and opened the channel.

“Getting an anomalous reading on the spectro, just waiting it out.” Standard Operating Procedure for this class of reading was a fifteen minute wait. I'd give it that long, but we had to keep moving.

“That's the real finicky one, right? It'll freak out if a big enough bird flies overhead,” said Jingo. That was true, but only because a big bird took up the same space on camera as an air carrier. When I'd first gotten to Earth, I had been stationed up north where geese migrate overhead in the fall. The enemy had taken to flying in a similar V shaped pattern, which meant that twice an hour we had to stop and scout for approaching mechs that weren’t coming.

I kept the line between Jingo and me open while we waited. “It really should be McArthur up here. That bitch,” I said into the air. It was stupid of her to try and attack him, but McArthur had seriously fucked up the operation with his shitty mistake.

“How do you even miscalculate seventeen hundred miles?” Jingo opened her cockpit, which was significantly smaller than mine, and was perched on the edge, stretching her arms and back. I could hear the wind coming through the radio. “It’s literally his only job. Doesn’t have to fight, doesn’t have to scout, doesn’t have to take a fucking cleaning duty. All the man has to do is math. No, but he fucks it up and we’re all out in the cold on the wrong side of the continent.” She’d swung her legs out to dangle and was chugging a canteen.

“Instead, we have to climb this mountain to get the briefest upload. If it was going to be cloudy tonight, they would have canceled it entirely. The only reason that the antenna can reach the satellite from this far off is because of some quirk in the magnetic field.”

“Did they give you the full lecture on it?”

“Naturally. Three hours with the commander and then a field test in broadcast calculations.”

“At least it was the commander and not McArthur.”

“The commander doesn’t like everyone the way she likes you, Jin.” She looked up at me. There were new lines on her face and her skin was still darker after spending the summer on the high desert campaign. I still wasn’t used to it.

“I’m simply without fault.” She grinned at me, toothy and the exact same as I remembered it.

“Then this must be a high honor, and not a tedious punishment that's making us miss the good soup day,” I said as the timer started to ring. Fifteen minutes were up. I shut down the extra sensors, Jingo closed herself back inside the chest of her Minutehand and we started again.

We chased the sunset up the peak, cresting with just enough time to see it fall below under the earth. For a second, the world was painted in a deep, full red. When it changed again to an ever cooling purple, I held the LASR’s free hand out in front of me, spreading the four fingers as wide as they’d go. Under the first finger was the woody valley where our forces were camped. Between the second and third fingers, I saw the brown speck that was the town we’d passed through. Above the third, was the last battlefield where I’d fought, when we claimed this territory. There was still a scar in the earth from the fires that had started that night. I held up my smaller hand, where the wounds I’d gotten then were fresh pink scars.

The LASR had been stabbed through, an errant lance deflected by one of our massive Hourhand units. It had swept it’s shield wide and the lance was redirected into the copse where I’d been stationed in secret to assist with coordination efforts. The lance slammed into the cockpit, stabbing metal through the flesh of my arm and pinning me to the chair. My outer casing had been shorn into three pieces, which had become tangled in a pine tree. Unable to move my hand, I couldn’t untangle the mech from where it was stuck.

When an enemy mech found me, The Lachrymal system was attempting to increase the maneuverability, but it wasn’t working fast enough. The enemy unit, what we called a Trident, raised its sidearm to me. Weeping and unable to find traction, the LASR slipped and scrabbled trying to flee. The trident’s white metal shoulders tensed as it readied to fire— when it was slammed into by a silent Minutehand. The second convoy, returning from a long campaign in the south. The paint had been sandblasted off along the edges, and its cockpit glass was cracked in a long line.

Under my last finger was Jingo, picking her way carefully up the rocky slope. With her shorter legs, the rocks took longer to navigate, and I had to stop every few dozen meters to wait for her. Lowering the LASR’s hand, I took out the map and compass. It wobbled and twisted before pointing north, just like the Commander had shown me. We were there. I marked the spot on the map with a marker for later reference. The sun finished setting and it was suddenly dark. I switched the radio on.

“We’re here.” I stabilized the legs and set the map back in its pouch, removing a bundle of papers. The instructions for running the comms equipment was long, but we had very carefully labeled everything at the camp.

“Finally. Good if I climb out, stretch the legs a bit, captain?” I assented and Jingo lowered herself the twenty feet from the cockpit to the ground with a field winch. “My fucking legs… how do they expect me to sit in that thing all day if there’s not even leg room?” She bounced on the balls of her feet, talking into the handheld. “Hey, I could send in a complaint to central command, get the design division on it— oh wait, no we have to wait months before the next upload. Damn McArthur.”

“It wouldn’t be months between uploads if the enemy wasn't so fond of blowing our satellites out of the sky.” I hit the green series of switches to extend the antenna mast. The grounding spike inserted itself a foot into the dirt. “We have to use the elliptical satellites because of them, since they aren’t around long enough to get a stable target-lock on.” One more green switch locked it in place.

“I know that. Fuck those guys too,” said Jingo, laying back on a rock with her arms behind her head. I flipped the page to the yellow label checks. Main power, auxiliary power, and distributor came online. Gauges swung into position and the backlights turned on.

“You plan on fighting the whole world?”

“Just anyone who keeps me from talking to my kid.” Shit. It was so easy to forget that Jingo had a daughter back on her home station. Even after the summer campaign she was so lively that she seemed younger than most of the people they fought with. Now, I remembered that her entire family lived aboard the distant Lagrange-4 Helen Station.

“If they hadn’t encrypted the file already,” I said, pausing at the last yellow label toggle. The Commander had given me the file, compressed and encrypted enough that we could get the whole report broadcast in the short window.

“It’s locked in. I get it.”

Next page, red labels. Prep the scanner and fine tune the range. Start a ping-broadcast to confirm connection. I looked down at the paper. Next on the list was to set the connector to the temp-server that housed the file.

“I doubt they even got many images in there, let alone video.”

“Whatever it is, they sure needed every last byte.” Jingo sighed. I pulled up the file on one of my auxiliary screens. Ten Megabytes reporting on half a year's military action. Usually, they all got to record video to send home, alongside any personal letters. I hovered the cursor over the file, staring at the file size. Huh.

“Hey, Jin… Hey, I have a bad idea.”

After the broadcast, we ate dinner. The Minutehand dug out a pit for us to light a fire and we roasted our meal over the coals. I poured a little boiling water over my dehydrated meat and added an excessive amount of salt in a sad imitation of the stew we were missing back at base camp. Jingo let hers soak cold and then fried it on a hot rock using the fish oil supplements no one ever took.

Far, far above us, a tiny little metal can was busy processing the file it had received from the terrestrial complement. In another twenty hours it would leave the earth and again sail back out into space. Returning to its apogee, the satellite would transmit the data on to the waiting battleship. Whereupon, the ship would carry the file to the closest station, L-2 Webb. The decryption tech would have it ready for them at their desk when their shift began. Someone along the way would have to care, beyond just to punish us, and take the time to remember the name. Maybe while the high councils were reviewing the decrypted information the tech would be making a directory search, curious.

I swung the keyboard out to face the open hatch of the LASR, where Jingo had climbed up to meet me. Her face was lit by the screens that surrounded us. She was slow on the keyboard, and wasn't using all of her fingers. When she was done she handed the keyboard back to me and I hit enter. Red label, connect the wire to the server. The Ping came back and started the upload. The lights dimmed as the antenna surged with electricity.

“It’s a long shot that anyone will actually find her.”

“Worth trying for?”

“Yeah. Thanks, Captain.”

Happy_Birthday_Lauralie_Jino.ENC finished its upload to the stars.