A few years ago, in some sort of misguided effort to promote “squad cohesion”, the higher-ups announced that we’d all be given the same timeslot of maintenance bay access to fix up our mechs after missions. Working side by side as a team, sharing technical know-how, finishing up and hitting the showers together to wash off the sweat and grease - sounds great in theory, I guess.
In reality, before we even made it through the maintenance bay door, squad cohesion was plummeting faster than a Schiaparelli Peregrin with misaligned antigravs. Everyone looked at me funny when I started handing out the radiation dosimeter badges, so I explained the process of disconnecting and inverting an overcharged N2 core, and how the standard 30-minute safety window is drastically reduced once the operating lifetime passes 10000 hours. N2 cores are technically illegal for sale or purchase in the Earth Sphere, so I had to “salvage” mine off a 0063 Morningstar destroyed in a joint operation with a Venusian squad, and I don’t know how many hours it had on it when I got it.
I wouldn’t have minded everyone moving their mechs to the far end of the maintenance bay, except that they insisted on keeping the tools cart all the way over on their side. The credit-pinchers up top had repeatedly rejected my budget requests for a personal plasma cutter, and having to walk all the way across the bay and back for tools was going to make that safety window a lot more dicey. In a stroke of genius, I activated the BINA-26 drone installed in my shitbox Volantis, and instructed it to fly back and forth fetching tools while I focused on carefully adjusting the core’s Minovsky flux rate. It worked like a charm, right up until Lefton and the BINA both reached for the spline-welder at the same time.
Now, normally, there are strict interlocks and confirmation codes that prevent BINA-26 units from transitioning between Utility mode and Combat mode unexpectedly. Unfortunately, it turned out that the salvaged components I’d used to assemble this BINA were actually from two different BINAs with different major firmware versions. This meant that when Lefton hit the power button on the spline-welder while trying to wrestle it away, my BINA registered it as an energy weapon, and bypassed the interlocks.
The court-martial proceedings went surprisingly well. I successfully argued that Lefton’s injuries were due to a targeting error by an AI drone, which under Earth Sphere military law, I was specifically not responsible for. The BINA did get impounded, and it took forever to scrap together a new unit that would link into my Volantis’ drone mount. However, I did get the maintenance bay all to myself once again. If anything, I feel like the warning sign they required me to put on the bay doors while I worked was a bit alarmist.