This was a huge step in the right direction. Manipulating the game into pushing them ahead had been too easy for Alexis. He was certain it was the right choice, however. The longer they were in here, the closer everyone in the real world got to that confrontation. He for one didn’t want to miss his chance to pay the Seven back for the destruction of Qu’Baka.
There was enough to feed a whole battalion by the time he’d finished cooking the chili and baked a batch of bread from pre-made dough.
K’aia appeared at the galley door, drawn by the aroma. “The passengers are all good. I gave them an extra dose of the gas to make sure they don’t wake up before SI Torrence gets them to the transfer, however they’re doing it from here. You about done with dinner?”
Trey nodded. “Yeah. Grab that for me,” he requested, indicating the box he’d loaded up with their mess tins, spoons, ten bottles of rehydrated milk, and the bread.
“Gotcha.” K’aia picked up the box and followed Trey as he carried the pot outside and set it down on the center of the flat rock the others had appropriated as a makeshift table.
“Grub’s up,” Trey called. “Get it while it’s both kinds of hot.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sibil asked. “How can it be more than one kind of hot?”
“You haven’t had chili before? There’s heat-hot and spicy-hot.” Alexis chuckled as she plucked a tin and a spoon from the box and headed over to sniff the contents of the pot. “It’s pretty mild right now, but trust me, this stuff gets spicier the longer you leave it.”
There was a scramble for the food, then a few minutes of silence while they filled their stomachs.
“’S good,” Sibil mumbled through her first mouthful.
“It’s one of my favorites from human cuisine,” Trey told her. He passed out the bread and took a seat on the mossy ground to eat his dinner. “So, we persuaded the big man to let us fight. What next?”
Gabriel swallowed and took a sip of the questionable-tasting milk. Still, it calmed the capsaicin party happening in his mouth, so he sucked it up and sipped again. “My thinking is that we track down that ship we saw and take it over.”
Alexis tilted her head, a wicked gleam appearing in her eyes. “I have another idea. How about we call Gemini?”
The rest of the unit looked at her blankly, while Gabriel, K’aia, and Trey broke into similar grins.
“That’s if she can get here in time,” Gabriel hedged. “Do we know how many Gates we are from Devon?”
Alexis shrugged. “I already called her, so…”
“She’ll get here, or she won’t,” Gabriel finished for her.
“You’ve got it,” she answered, refocusing her attention on her food. “Hey, Trey, this is pretty good.”
“You say that like you were expecting it to be bad,” Trey told her with narrowed eyes.
Alexis picked up her milk and shook the bottle vigorously. “I tasted my milk first. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t expecting much from the chili.”
“Enough about the food,” Pootie cut in. “Who is Gemini?”
“Our battleship,” the twins answered in unison.
“You have a what, now?” Sibil asked. “Why are we only just hearing about this?”
“Yeah,” Gorrak added. “What I want to know is why you didn’t call it sooner.”
Gabriel lifted a shoulder as he stirred his chili. “We didn’t need her while we were on Zenith.”
“But at the Corral?” Gorrak pressed. “We could have escaped at any time if we’d had a freaking battleship to swoop in and pick us up.”
“Didn’t want to escape,” Gabriel reminded him. “We chose this path.”
A movement overhead caused them to all look up. They spotted a Zenith ship and went back to eating, secure in the knowledge that it was only SI Torrence coming in to land.
The ship landed a little way from theirs, and SI Torrence came down the ramp with four antigrav carts trundling behind him like a high-tech version of baby ducks following their mama.
He glanced at their makeshift camp with approval. “Glad to see you thought to refuel before you go in,” he praised.
Alexis snorted. “I was just thinking of taking a nap when you arrived, Staff.”
The joke brought chuckles from the others. Alexis craned to see what was in the carts without getting up. “It looks like you brought us some goodies.”
“Goodies, indeed,” SI Torrence agreed. “Those of you with mech certification will find what you need in the cargo bay of my ship. The rest of you, I brought battle armor.”
K’aia, Trey, Sibil, Gorrak, Pootie, Jentek, Boden, and Slash dashed to the Zenith ship.
“I’m good,” Alexis decided. “I don’t need to be confined to a cabin. It doesn’t suit my fighting style.”
Gabriel paused in his tracks and stepped off the ramp, sighing at the missed opportunity. “I stay with Alexis,” he told the staff instructor. “She’s right. We’ll fight better without the mechs. We’ll take point on the unit.”
“I thought you’d say that,” Torrence told them with a smile. “I brought a set of armor for each of you, plus weapons.”
Alexis stood and stretched before walking over to get a good look at the contents of the cart Torrence indicated for her. Her eyes widened. “What kind of armor is this?” she asked in amazement, touching the bright blue metal to see if it felt as warm as it looked.
“Experimental,” Torrence told her. “It’s up to you whether you take it or go with the standard issue you’re wearing now.”
“What are the drawbacks?” Alexis asked.
Torrence shrugged. “We don’t know yet. You two are the only ones with the ability to use this armor to its full capability. The idea is that you can move freely between here and the Etheric while wearing it.”
Alexis met Gabriel’s gaze with identical wide eyes. You think this is Jean’s prototype for the Bl’kheth armor? she asked him.
Gabriel couldn’t see that it was anything else. It would make sense to have us test it in a simulation before putting it out there for real, he replied. The question is, will it work?
Alexis grinned. “Only one way to find out,” she told him aloud, drawing a confused look from SI Torrence. “Let’s get it on and find out.”
Chapter Ten
The twins emerged from their ground ships wearing the new armor.
Alexis flexed her armor, unused to the way the suit worked with every movement of her body.
“It’s amazing, right?” Gabriel remarked, performing a similar set of stretches to test his armor’s capabilities.
“I don’t know yet,” Alexis told him. “Let’s see how bad the drag is in the Etheric before we start singing its praises.”
She slipped into the Etheric, bracing herself for the usual increased draw on her energy.
Gabriel joined her a fraction of a second later.
They looked at each other and grinned.
Alexis called out. “Eve, can we get a minute?”
There was a swirl in the mists ahead of them, and Eve walked out. “What can I help you with?” she asked.
Alexis extended a hand and manifested an energy ball to see how it felt to draw through the armor instead of her own body. “Are we right about this being the first build with the Bl’kheth armor?”
Eve smiled beatifically. “The sixth, actually. Jean isn’t going to waste resources on building the real armor until it’s been thoroughly tested in simulation, meaning, she wants you to push it to its limits.”
Gabriel chuckled. “I can’t see that will be an issue. Do you have any hints as to what’s ahead in the game? It would be better not to die of surprise.” He grinned. “For the test, of course.”
Eve fixed him with a stern look. “You might be able to wrap Izanami around your little finger with that smile, but you’re getting nothing out of me, Gabriel John Nacht.”
“Ooh, she used your Sunday name!” Alexis teased. “Thank you, Eve. We’ll manage from here. Just
one thing. How are you getting Ookens if there’s no Gödel in this timeline to create them?”
“Evolution works in the funniest ways,” Eve told her with a mysterious smile. She dropped her hands to her hips. “Go on now, or the battle will start without you.”
SI Torrence breathed a sigh of relief when the twins reappeared in the clearing. “I thought… Never mind what I thought.” He waved the unit in, no easy feat when eight of them wore the fifteen-foot tall mech suits. “This is the latest data on the invaders. They’ve sent two ships. Both have landed in the city I had you avoid earlier. It’s looking like they’ve sent in their shock troops, mindless killing machines with only one goal—to consume any organic material they come across.”
“Doesn’t that include the plants and animals?” Trey asked, picturing an Ooken chewing up a tree trunk while the people around ran to safety.
SI Torrence shook his head. “If that were the case, they’d be easily distracted. They go for movement, which is just about perfect since the first thing any sensible person would do on seeing one of these monsters is run for their lives.”
“Then I guess we’re a bunch of dumbasses,” K’aia called with a laugh. “Because we’re going to make mush out of them.” She had her mech stamp the ground and grind its heel afterward. “All that’s going to be left is paste.”
That raised a cheer from the others, who had their mechs copy her movements.
Alexis raised an eyebrow. “If you’re all done with the dance audition, we should get started before the city is lost.” She grabbed a utility belt loaded with grenades from the antigrav cart holding the weapons and attached it around her waist before selecting a pair of short-barrel rifles to accompany them. “You ready?”
Gabriel completed his own rifling of the weapons stash and came up with a compound bow and a full quiver. He slung the quiver over his back, being careful not to dislodge any of his knives. “G-2-G, sis.” He hopped onto Trey’s mech and climbed up to its left shoulder. “But I’m not wasting my energy walking.”
Trey lifted the enormous sword in his mech’s right hand and roared his readiness. “Let’s go!”
Alexis hopped onto the hand K’aia lowered and took her position on the mech’s shoulder. “Move out.”
The mechs ate up the miles without difficulty, bringing them in range of the city limits in just over an hour.
The city was already in flames, telling them that the Ookens had been wreaking havoc there for some time.
Alexis was disheartened that they hadn’t gotten there in time to prevent the destruction that had already occurred, but she was also aware that they had plenty of time to save the majority of the population.
She stood up and accessed the Etheric, using the energy to make herself rise until she had a three-sixty view of the city streets. She opened her mind to locate the hive mind of the Ookens and was surprised to find no trace of it in the mindspace. “Of course,” she muttered. “Why make it easy on us?”
“Where are we headed?” Gabriel called over the comm, interrupting her private bitching session.
Alexis shaded her eyes against the setting sun and scanned for sound. She located the most recent outbreak of violence by the sounds of despair coming from the people. “That way,” she directed, pointing to the east side of the grid. “I can hear people screaming.”
The mechs crashed through fallen buildings and rubble-choked streets to the source of the screams Alexis had pinpointed. The unit had trained for this moment.
They stomped the Ookens guarding the gates of the park where the people had gathered in the mistaken belief they’d be safe, then fanned out, laying down bursts of suppressive fire on the roving bands of enemies to help the people escape.
The people cried out in relief when they saw the giant mechanical monsters were there to help. It took them less than a moment to start running for the streets now that their way wasn’t being blocked by murderous, tentacled soldiers.
“Keep the civilians covered,” Alexis ordered as she began blasting the weird-looking Ookens with thick gouts of flames.
The unit kept their mechs moving, splattering Ookens under their heavy clawed feet as they followed Alexis’ direction.
Alexis was glad her team had the protection of the mech suits. These Ookens seemed to have more intelligence than the kind they’d learned about in the real world. They also used weapons, each having a laser rifle in addition to the ever-biting teeth in their tentacles. She noted the soldiers recognized that the unit was a danger by the way they moved, darting in to mob the mechs, then firing wildly on them as they dashed back. “We need to get some strategy going on here,” she told Gabriel.
“Agreed. We can herd them.” Gabriel braced his feet and fired the explosive arrows in his quiver to blast a ditch into the ground around them.
Trey helped as best he could, although his efforts produced gaping holes in the landscape rather than the line Gabriel was drawing to keep their enemy contained. He shrugged, almost dislodging Gabriel as his mech mimicked the action. “Sorry!” he called. “How many do you think there are?”
“Too many for my liking,” Gabriel replied. “I’m going down there.”
Trey wasn’t too sure that was a good idea until he saw that Gabriel was doing something with the Etheric to make his body incorporeal.
Gabriel phased in and out of sight, and Ookens dropped wherever he appeared.
Alexis lowered herself to the ground and joined Gabriel in his decimation of the enemy troops. She barely felt the impact of their tentacles on her armor, registering that the inertia blocking she had become used to in earlier models had been improved.
Gabriel grinned as she reached his position. “This is the life, right?” he enthused as he tore two tentacles off an Ooken and used them to beat back the others surrounding them. “You feel like getting fancy?”
“Always,” Alexis replied with a giggle at the Ookens being knocked back by his efforts. She loosed a concussive wave that tore into the Ookens and gave them space to maneuver. “What do you have in mind?”
Gabriel furrowed his brow, considering their options. “Link to me. I have an idea.”
Alexis harnessed her power to Gabriel’s, seeing the seed of a daring plan bloom in the recesses of his mind. “Just don’t blow us up, okay?”
Gabriel grunted as he took control of the energy Alexis handed him. “You might wanna put a shield around us because this is going to get messy.”
Alexis siphoned a small amount of energy from the river she was pulling from the Etheric for Gabriel and cocooned them within it. “Done.”
Gabriel continued to spool out the energy until he felt like his skin would split from the pressure, then released it in a burning wave that turned the Ookens for thirty feet in all directions to ashes.
“Nice!” came the cheer from K’aia.
Pootie, meanwhile, was tearing her own strip from the enemy’s hides. She and Trey worked to stay together, with Trey keeping her mech protected while she fed explosive after explosive from her stash into the tubes meant for kinetics.
The ground shook with the impacts, knocking the Ookens off their feet. Trey mopped up around her with wide sweeps of his sword.
Over at the west gate, K’aia had plucked a tall tree and was using it as a staff. Her mech danced a deadly ballet, with Boden and Slash in the roles of backup dancers.
Boden’s mech jumped to clear K’aia’s staff. “Careful!” he cried.
“Oops!” K’aia called. “Didn’t see you there.”
“How could you miss me?” Boden groused. “I’m as large as you!”
“Kinda concentrating on the fight,” K’aia replied distractedly. “See if you can help Sibil and Gorrak.”
She pointed with the tree trunk at the southeast side of the park, where their teammates had gotten themselves into something of a jam.
Their mechs were pinned against a building, which Jentek had climbed. They were prevented from moving by their need to protect the g
roup of civilians who had run into the building, thinking to find safety there.
The Leath reached the roof and began firing on the crowd of Ookens trapping Sibil and Gorrak. “Damn civilians,” he cursed. “Why they couldn’t run in a direction that didn’t trap them, I don’t know!”
“Never mind that!” Sibil exclaimed. “Just keep firing!”
Pootie and Boden arrived to back them up, and the Ooken group was quickly picked off.
“Whose idea was it to stay and fight?” Pootie bitched. “Because I’m going to save one of my charges to stick up their—”
She was cut off by an explosion nearby.
Everyone in the park looked up as a dark ship blocked the remaining light.
“Great!” Pootie yelled. “More of them!”
The ship slowed overhead and opened its drop doors to disgorge yet more troops.
“More Ookens?” Alexis asked.
“No!” Pootie exclaimed. “They don’t have the tentacles.”
Alexis let off a stream of curses more suited to her mother when she realized what they faced next. “Mechs!”
“Could be worse,” Gabriel told her. “At least it’s not zombies.”
Alexis growled. “Do not give Eve ideas!”
She whirled around and released a barrage of hardened energy charges. “We need backup. Call SI Torrence.”
No need, a soft female voice cut in. I am here.
“Gemini!” the twins cried in unison.
Are we glad to hear from you, Alexis told the AI. Can you do something about that ship before we’re overrun?
Already on it, Gemini replied. I tried a warning shot, but they obviously didn’t take me seriously.
Gemini dropped her ship’s cloaking as she swooped in over the park. Her words were accompanied by another explosion, this one much larger than the first.
If All Else Fails Page 8
