“I was hoping you’d say that,” Tag said, “although I could’ve done without the pretension.” He gave Coren a slightly playful smirk to let him know he was joking. Kind of.
Coren’s skinny shoulders lifted in a slight shrug.
“Okay, Sofia, get us the hell out of here,” Tag said, facing out the front of the air car once more. “To the Argo.”
“Aye, aye, Skipper,” she replied. “Your wish is my command.”
“I believe that was not a wish, but a command,” Alpha said. “So his command is your command. That’s rather redundant.”
“Semantics,” Sofia muttered. “How about we worry about getting out of here before poring over my word choice?”
“Let’s go!” Tag said, settling into his seat. The air car took off, and the Mechanic convoy followed, winding through the Forest. The mourning songs of the Forinths echoed all around them, accompanied by the occasional scream of a Drone-Mech going down under a flurry of scything blades. Tag imagined the invisible creatures were following them like a ghostly wake escorting them to safety. He wanted to thank them for the kindness, for their mercy, but no words would be enough for these beings.
Something else began accompanying the Forinth’s calls. Tag strained to listen. There was a distinctly mechanical sound, a whining like servos and motors straining against immense forces.
“Exo-suits!” Coren jolted upright in his seat.
The first few exo-suits lumbered into a jog, narrowing the distance between themselves and the convoy. In their metallic claws, they carried huge cylindrical weapons. Tag knew what those things could do from his time aboard the Drone-Mech dreadnought, and in case he needed a reminder, the closest exo fired on the nearest personnel carrier. An intense green laser struck the side of the vehicle. Its touch melted alloy, and slag flew from where it hit as the beam cut a wide swathe through the personnel carrier, then pierced its fusion core.
A booming explosion sent pieces of the personnel carrier and the Mechanics inside scattering into the trees. Metal shards and charred remains of Mechanics showered the rest of the convoy. Forinths jumped atop the exos, scratching at the polyglass and alloy, but their blades couldn’t penetrate the gargantuan defenses of the Mechs. The Mechs simply ignored them, or, when the Forinths shimmered particularly brightly and could be spotted, swatted at them like insects. Mechanics and marines fired back at the armored juggernauts. They took down one, then two, but a renewed assault on the convoy left another personnel carrier in flames that rivaled the bioluminescence of the Forest.
Tag felt his stomach drop at the sight. He didn’t think it could, but it plummeted lower when a swatch of trees cracked and fell, crashing through the forest.
“No,” Coren said, his voice tinged with horror. “No.”
“What?” Tag asked. “What is it?”
“In your language, a Death Walker,” Coren said.
A behemoth of black metal and orange polyglass galloped toward them. Its long legs stretched over the exos, making the intimidating armored suits look puny in comparison, and weapons bristled off of it everywhere. The eight-legged walking tank fired pulsefire cannons, kinetic slugs, and explosives, raining hell around the convoy. The Mechanic vehicles and Tag’s air car were shielded only by the dense foliage. That soon wouldn’t be a problem when the mechanical spider caught up to them.
Sofia pushed the throttle forward, carrying it to its limits while she wove dangerously between the trees. “Well, Skipper, it was nice while it lasted.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Death Walker closed in on them. Tag felt like a helpless fly caught in the web of this giant arachnid. The marines continued their assault on the exos and managed to bring down a few more, but the Walker relentlessly repelled their fire as if the rounds pinging against its armor were nothing more than pebbles slung by the Forinths.
“What do we do now?” G said, his voice shaking.
“Fire, goddammit, fire!” Bull roared.
But Tag knew it wouldn’t be enough. Nothing they could throw at this contraption would be enough. At least, not until they reached the Argo, and the gods only knew how many Drone-Mechs would be swarming around the ship. Tag’s only hope was that the camouflaging algorithm Coren had developed last time they were on Eta-Five was still working. They had enabled the antilidar and -radar tech before they left for the Forest of Light, and if all was well, maybe, just maybe, the Drone-Mechs hadn’t found the Argo. Still, none of that would matter if the Walker got them first.
“Where’s that damn exit?” Lonestar yelled as she joined the fusillade against another gaining exo.
“I’m working on it!” Sofia said. “Unless you want to pilot this tin can!”
Tag tried to ignore the anxiety-ridden banter between the crew. There had to be something they could do, something even the Forinths could do to stop the Drone-Mechs.
Then it hit him.
“Sofia, engage the external speakers on the air car,” Tag said.
“Why me?” she asked. “How about someone less busy?”
“Because I need you to do this.” He explained his plan to her. It wasn’t much, and it relied mostly on powers outside his control. But it was all he had.
Sofia began singing through the speakers. Her voice carried loud and booming over the sounds of exos and the Walker trampling through plants and trees. The slight shimmering of the color-changing Forinths disappeared from the mechanical monsters, and Tag saw them fade into the forest as they abandoned their attack.
“Captain?” Bull asked.
“Stay the course!” Tag said. “Keep firing! I need their attention on us.”
“On us?” G asked, gulping.
The ground continued to tremble as they raced toward an opening in the stone wall of the gigantic cavern where blue light filtered in. Sofia aimed straight at it. The tunnel looked as if it would easily fit the whole convoy just as Sofia had promised, but it would also be no problem for the Death Walker and its minions to follow as well. Soon the tunnel swallowed them, and they traced its rocky path while glowing, moss-covered walls sped by in a colorful blur.
“Bracken, when your last vehicle gets in the tunnel, throw everything you’ve got at it,” Tag said. “I want it collapsed.”
“That was already the plan,” Bracken replied coolly.
Tag couldn’t see when the last of the Mechanic convoy reached the relative safety of the tunnel, but eventually he heard them unleash a salvo of explosives and pulsefire into the stone walls. Planet-shaking rumbles chased them onward, along with the sound of rocks crashing against each other.
“It’s done,” Bracken said.
On and on they shot toward the surface. A faint glow caught Tag’s eye from the end of the tunnel, where sheets of white blew into it. Snow and ice, a frigid welcome back to the reality of Eta-Five’s surface.
“You think the Forinths did it?” Tag said to Sofia.
“I have no doubt they did,” she replied.
Bull looked like he wanted in on their conversation, but there was no time for Tag to explain. An explosion erupted from behind them as if the planet itself were releasing its pent-up energy in a fiery bellow. Stone and rocks pinged against the convoy and the air car. One chunk of earth collided with a hoverbike, taking the vehicle and rider out, while smoke, fire, and debris swallowed another lagging vehicle.
Tag watched for the vehicle to escape from the cloud of black and orange. It never did. Instead, in its place marched the Death Walker, cannons firing rapidly, blasting and shredding another member of the Mechanic convoy. Coren punched the dash of the air car, cursing under his breath.
“Damn!” Bull said. “They’re relentless!”
But Tag thought they might still make it. They could escape the tunnel, race across the landscape, and return to the Argo. Just a little farther. Soon they burst from the underground passage and sliced through the landscape, accelerating over the frigid desert of snow and ice, where a blizzard swirled in full force. Grainy white
and gray flecks peppered the windshield, making it look to Tag like he was viewing the world in some antique 2-D black-and-white film.
The rest of the convoy had made it out of the tunnel with the Walker trailing them and exos teeming at its feet. Pulsefire cut through the air, melting through snow and ice, and green beams lanced around them. Another Mechanic vehicle vanished in a mist of billowing flames. Then one of the exos turned its sights on the little car leading the convoy. Tag’s car. A tightening sensation gripped Tag’s chest, and he braced himself for the incoming fire.
“Evasive action!” he yelled.
Sofia swerved hard to the right.
It wasn’t enough. The blinding emerald beam caught the back of the air car. G disappeared in the laser, his body turned to ash before he could so much as scream. Every one of Tag’s nerves lit up at the sight, his eyes going wide, his mouth opening to yell, to cry out for G as, in an instant, memories of Kaufman and the others slaughtered aboard the Argo overwhelmed his senses. The other, more fortunate, marines tumbled against each other, their power armor rattling, as the car flipped end over end. Tag’s restraints pressed on his EVA suit, forcing him back into a reality as harsh as the nightmares haunting him, and he struggled to retain some semblance of orientation. The snow flurries and dancing ice clouds obscured which way was up until the remains of the air car finally settled, with warning lights and bleak alarms blaring, muddling the world around him.
“Critical failure,” a robotic voice said. “Fusion core overload reported.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Tag undid his harness, his heart hammering against his rib cage. “Everybody, move!”
He scrambled from his seat, ushering Coren, Sofia, and Alpha out before him and directing them toward the Argo’s location. Gorenado helped Lonestar out from beneath the wreckage of the air car, and Sumo climbed over a broken seat. She fired at the oncoming horde of Drone-Mech armored troops.
“G,” Gorenado said glumly as he searched for a body Tag knew wasn’t there. The young marine was gone, erased by that goddamned monster of a laser beam as if he had never existed.
“You got to go,” Tag said. “G’s gone.”
“Sarge,” Lonestar said, “we moving?”
But Bull stood in place, his eyes wide behind his visor.
“Bull, you good?” Gorenado said. “We got to move.”
“You all go!” Tag yelled as the alarms blared from what was left of the air car. When they hesitated, he raised his voice. “Go! That’s an order!” He clambered over a piece of broken bulkhead and grabbed Bull’s shoulder. “Come on, Sergeant!”
A look of abject terror was painted across Bull’s face. Tag was reeling from G’s sudden death, but he didn’t expect the trained marine to react like this.
“Bull!” Tag shouted.
The marine looked at him as if his spirit had left and all that remained was his shell of a body. His limbs shook as Tag tried to drag Bull from the car, but the armor was too heavy, too bulky to move all by himself. Alarms continued to wail, bolstering the surging panic flooding through Tag.
“Get yourself together!” Tag yelled. “We need to move!”
Then he understood.
Bull wasn’t frozen in terror from watching G die. No, not at all. He’d seen the deaths of his comrades aboard the Montenegro and likely plenty of other ships and space stations. But that was just it. He’d only ever been on a spaceship or station. His entire life, he had been surrounded by four solid walls, a roof, and a ceiling. Enclosed spaces. Tag had heard about it before: the fear of open spaces. Of suddenly being unprotected. The duration of Bull’s time spent on Eta-Five had either been spent inside an air car going to and from the Argo or under the looming embrace of the cavernous ceiling of the Forest. The concept of being exposed to an open sky was foreign to people who hadn’t lived or traveled to planets where the only thing preventing you from becoming one with the universe and floating away forever was a little invisible thing called gravity.
“Bull!” Tag yelled. “You need to move! If you don’t, you’re dead!”
He punched Bull’s armor. The blow would barely be felt through the alloy, and the armor’s automatic stabilizers hardly allowed the motion to move Bull. But it was enough. Bull’s eyes lost their glaze, and his wide-eyed expression filled with shame before the visor went dark. No doubt Bull was hiding his embarrassment with the color-changing polyglass.
“Apologies, Captain,” Bull said, taking off in a run beside Tag. “I was—”
“I get it,” Tag said as they loped off after the others.
The air car exploded behind them, tossing shrapnel and forcing them to duck into the snow. A concussive force rolled over Tag and Bull. Hot, slagged metal melted into the ice and snow around them as the rest of the air car burned, tongues of plasma jutting up through the wreckage.
“Do you need a pickup?” Bracken asked.
“Yes!” Tag said, still running toward the Argo.
Her convoy barreled their direction with the exos and Walker not far behind. One air car veered off from the pack. Two of the exos gave chase as the Death Walker targeted the brunt of Bracken’s force. Tag’s lungs were on fire by the time the air car reached him. A door slid open, and three Mechanics pulled him and Bull inside. They sped away, catching up to the others, and soon all of the Argo’s crew was within the Mechanic air car. All except for G.
“Can’t believe they got him,” Sumo said. “Can’t believe he’s gone.”
Gorenado shook his head. “Like he wasn’t even here...”
The shaking ground behind them calmed as the Walker doggedly pursued the main thrust of the fleeing convoy. Tag felt certain they were actually going to make it to the Argo. And once they did, he was already prioritizing what they needed to do to bring all the systems, engines, and weapons online as fast as possible. If they were quick enough, they could provide air support to Bracken’s crew. Luckily, whatever ships had dumped the Drone-Mech ground forces hadn’t descended on them yet. They might have a few minutes’ advantage to pull this all off.
“Bracken, we’ll power up the Argo and cover you when you get to the Stalwart,” Tag said. “Anything else we can do now?”
“Not unless you can get the Death Walker off our tail, Captain Brewer,” she said in a far calmer voice than he had expected.
As if on cue, the Walker changed course. Its thumping footsteps took it away from the convoy, and it careened toward the air car.
“That was not what I had planned,” Bracken said.
“Neither did I,” Tag said. “They’re listening in. They’re tapping into our comms and just pinpointed us!”
“We had comms encrypted!” Coren said.
“Guess your tech isn’t that much better than ours after all, huh?” Lonestar said.
“Now’s not the time, guys.” Tag turned to the Mechanic crew on the car. “Can you go any faster in this thing?”
“We are already at our limits,” the Mechanic driving the vehicle said.
“Bull, can you guys throw some firepower at it?” Tag asked. “Maybe blind it or something?”
Bull seemed to sense a hidden implication of inferiority in the question, though Tag didn’t intend there to be any. “Sure as shit we can.”
The marines joined the Mechanic fire teams at the portholes and mounted weapons stations within the vehicle. Pulsefire and slugs flew from the vehicle at the Death Walker. The wall of rounds would be enough to take down an exo, but it hardly scratched at the Death Walker’s armor.
“When you guys made these things, did you think about making something to destroy them?” Sofia asked Coren.
“The whole intent behind their design was such that they couldn’t be destroyed easily,” Coren said.
“Well, you all aced that one.”
The air car flew over a sheet of ice, and the ground began to quake with renewed vigor. At first it seemed like the trembling earth was from the Death Walker, but Tag would never mistake the characteristic gr
oan and buckling of the ice and ground for anything other than what it actually was. He’d had his own close encounter with the entity responsible for such tearing of the earth and resounding roars.
“What in the three hells is that?” Sumo asked.
Tag grinned back at her when he replied. “An ice god.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
An ice god burst from the ground with its jaw spread wide, revealing a mouthful of jagged fangs, each capable of crushing the meager vehicle Tag and his crew were in. Hundreds of beady black eyes traced the monster’s face, and its tongue whipped, throwing spittle that froze almost immediately in Eta-Five’s atmosphere. The monster dragged itself from beneath the ice and earth, carrying its serpentine body in a rushed charge on dozens of insectile legs, its tail thrashing behind it.
“It’s here,” Tag said.
“But the Forinth drums were supposed to keep these creatures away, were they not?” Alpha said. “I thought the radius of effect was larger than this.”
“It is,” Tag said.
“Which is why he asked me to tell the Forinths to stop the drums,” Sofia said.
“So those ice gods are on our side?” Gorenado asked.
“Uh, no...no, they aren’t,” Tag said. “But as far as we can tell, they’re attracted to sound and vibration. The Death Walker and those exos are a bit louder than us.”
“You’re just hoping that’s the case then,” Bull said.
“More or less,” Tag said evasively. “The ice gods are about the best reinforcements we have right now.”
“Or the best way to die,” Lonestar said glumly.
“Focus on going forward,” Tag said. “Let that thing do our dirty work.”
The ice god barreled over a Mech. Tag expected a small explosion, maybe limbs and chunks of broken metal thrown into the blustering wind. Instead the exo simply disappeared, swallowed whole. The ice god didn’t so much as gulp.
Edge of War (The Eternal Frontier Book 2) Page 8
