Shaking his head, Gabe said, “You know as much as I do, sir.”
“I see. Well, either way, in my view, the only thing strange about the mercenaries’ behavior is that it no longer serves Darkstream interests.”
Black’s eyes tracked Gabe’s carefully as he answered. “How do you mean?”
“Do you really not know, or are you just playing dumb, son?” Shaking his head, Black said, “Doubt you’d tell me either way. Back when the raiders were roaming the countryside, it served to drive Darkstream contracts, not to mention increasing the money they made from those contracts. Considering that reports say the mercenaries wield mostly Darkstream weaponry, it all kind of fits, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know about that,” Gabe said with a shrug. “Where else does anyone get guns? The system’s flooded with Darkstream-issue weaponry, sir. We have to make money, meaning we can’t discriminate too much between buyers, though we do run background checks, as you know. But it’s easy enough to fudge a background check. Other than firearms brought to the system from the Milky Way, Darkstream’ s the only game in town when it comes to guns.”
Black nodded. “The company line just rolls off your tongue, doesn’t it? I suppose it would. You have a reputation.”
“For being the first one to step foot on a planet that isn’t located in the Milky Way?”
“For being a brutal dog controlled by Darkstream, who does anything the company demands of him. Absolutely anything, the rumors say.”
Gabe stiffened. “I have a code.”
“Yes, and a pretty easy one to recite, I’d wager. If it makes money, you’ll do it. That about right?”
This time, Gabe answered with only silence. He found himself wishing for his mech.
“Has all that started to catch up with you, yet, son? Everything you’ve done? Because it usually does, for all but the most soulless men. Which are you? Soulless, or do you have a scrap of one left?”
Continued quiet, on Gabe’s part, though he clenched his fists. Usually, others found even his silence intimidating, but not Black. He just stared and stared.
With a glance down at Gabe’s clenched fists, Black nodded, as though having confirmed something. “Yes, I think you probably have a scrap of a soul left. Which means you’re headed for a crash. Try not to bring the rest of your team down when it happens, all right? And if you can muster up the strength of spirit, try not to order them to do something that will damn them forever.”
Without another word, Black exited the tiny chamber, leaving Gabe alone with his scarlet-tinged thoughts. If he’d been inside the dream, everything would have been flashing the color of blood, just as it had at the peak of his bloodlust during the Battle of Ingress.
Gingerly, he dredged up a memory from that same battle, of the flashbacks he’d experienced. Tattered Quatro corpses, strewn across a cave floor. Quatro families. The smell of burnt fur and flesh.
Then he thought of Jess—not of finding her dead, but of the way her hair flicked when she whipped her head around to smile coyly. The faint whiff of perfume whenever he’d passed her on the village green.
He realized, then, exactly why he missed her so much, when no other woman had made him feel that way:
After two long, dark decades of committing atrocity after atrocity for Darkstream—acts that were apparently starting to catch up with him at last—Jess had been the first person to ever make him experience something pure and uncomplicated and good.
He hadn’t deserved to experience that, not since he’d been a child. But Jess had made him feel it all the same. And now the Quatro had taken it from him.
Gabe knew the Quatro had at least some justification for attacking the human settlements on Eresos. Hell, he’d personally provided a fair amount of that justification.
But he didn’t care. The Quatro had also taken Jess from him, and for that reason, he would carry out at least one more horrible act.
He would slaughter every last one of them.
Chapter 44
Shut up and Shoot
While startling, the satellite images did no justice to seeing the Quatro horde with his own eyes.
Persistent neutralization fire from the city defenders kept the Quatro away from the walls, forcing them to linger near the edge of the area Plenitos’ council kept cleared of trees.
But now, they had begun to mill about, the mass of them writhing like one gigantic, purple beast.
“They’re about to strike,” Gabe remarked. The surface of the wall’s parapet was barely large enough to accommodate his mech.
Jake Price stood nearby, and now he turned to face Gabe. “There’s no way they can breach the wall…is there?”
“They’re here, aren’t they? And I just told you they’re preparing to strike. So they must think they can, at the very least. That should trouble us.”
The idea was worrying to everyone, which Gabe could see in the way the soldiers of the garrison shifted their weight from foot to foot, occasionally exchanging nervous glances.
The occasional Quatro attack was the reason Eresos’ two cities had built walls in the first place, and until now, they’d proven fully effective.
Quatro weren’t supposed to be smart enough to try tunneling under them, as they had at Ingress. But they had, and they also made full use of human firearms.
Now, Gabe wondered whether they might have acquired the artillery necessary to bring down Plenitos’ walls.
“We need to be out there,” Price said.
“You’re right,” Gabe said. “Round up the others and meet me outside the walls, now.”
“You’re serious?”
Gabe could only see the outside of Price’s mech, but his very posture conveyed his surprise. “Maintaining total authority doesn’t mean I’m closed off to good suggestions, Price. You should try making them more often.”
“Yes, sir,” Price said, turning. He didn’t bother to make for the long set of stairs they’d used to get up here. Instead, he simply leapt from the wall, crashing to the earth below with a thump that was audible even from sixty-five meters up.
Gabe hailed Arkady Black using his com, who accepted the call. He hadn’t quite forgiven Black for the uncalled-for verbal assault, but the man remained his superior officer, and they still needed to work together as well as they could.
Inside the dream, the man appeared alongside Gabe, atop the parapet.
“Sir, I’m taking my team out onto the field.”
“You’ll be crushed. Incredible,” Black said, shaking his head. “I knew those tin cans had filled you with hubris, but I had no idea how much.”
“I haven’t finished speaking. The Quatro will charge soon, and I want to do everything we can to try to break that charge—or at the very least, take down as many of them as we can. I’m contacting you to request that your men stand by to open the gates at my signal, in time to admit us before the Quatro reach the walls.”
“Ah,” Black said, expression unchanged. “That makes more sense.”
“I imagine it does. But sir, I promise you that you are grossly underestimating the capabilities of the MIMAS mechs. You haven’t seen them in action.”
“I don’t need to,” Black said, raising both hands. “They’re nothing but a gimmick—a marketing gimmick. There’s a reason no one developed them until now.”
“You’re right, there is. But it’s not the reason you think. Unfortunately, the true reason is classified, and unlike me, you’re not authorized to know it.”
“There’s that hubris again. Let’s you and I limit our communication to only what’s needed, shall we, son? I doubt either of us need our blood pressure raised any more than necessary.”
“Works for me,” Gabe said—growled, in truth.
“While we’re at it, why don’t you try acting your age? Black out.” The officer vanished from the parapet.
The sky over Plenitos darkened, and it took Gabe a moment to realize that it was merely a reflection of his mood, and not the w
eather.
Without further ceremony, he stepped onto the wall’s crenellations and then let himself drop.
Sixty-five meters’ worth of air whistled around his mech’s sensor-covered frame, and his HUD registered the otherwise unnoticeable increase in speed caused by acceleration due to gravity.
He absorbed the force of the fall by instinctively bending his legs, but it was hardly necessary. The mech’s complex system of shocks would have kept him perfectly safe without the maneuver.
The Quatro apparently hadn’t yet noticed his departure from Plenitos.
They will in a second.
Though he knew he should wait, the conversation with Black had once again dredged up unwanted thoughts and memories. The man got to him far more than he should, far more than made sense. But the fact of Gabe’s rage remained, and across the grassy expanse waited the perfect object for it.
Striding forward, he loosed a pair of rockets, then pivoted slightly to loose two more.
They struck seconds later, explosions blossoming from the ground, tossing burnt and mangled Quatro through the air as though they were toys.
That done, he fired six grenades in quick succession. By now, the Quatro were surging across the field toward him, meaning it was virtually impossible for his grenades to have anything but a devastating effect.
And indeed they did. More freshly-made Quatro corpses. Gabe laughed, and in the dream, his laughter shook the world.
All around him, his team began to crash to the ground, one-by-one.
Price shot him a look. “Trying to hog all the fun to yourself, sir?” The comment was delivered as a jest, but Gabe heard the note of concern it contained.
“Shut up and shoot,” Gabe said, running ahead, autocannons spinning faster to send hot lead screaming across the battlefield.
Explosions tore up the ground all along the loose formation of rushing Quatro, tearing the aliens apart, sowing chaos and confusion.
But still they came.
“Sir,” Price shouted a short while later, loud enough for all of them to hear over the explosions and the yipping of the oncoming aliens. “We have to go back!”
Gabe didn’t answer. He continued to visit death upon the enemy. Nothing would stop him from avenging Jess.
Suddenly, Price was at his side, placing a metal hand on Gabe’s bicep. “If we wait any longer, our window will vanish, sir. The guards won’t open the gates.”
Shaking off the seaman apprentice’s hand, Gabe turned back toward the Quatro to continue firing. “Go back, if you want. I’m staying.”
“They’ll overwhelm you, sir. Besides, none of us are going back if you don’t, so they’ll overwhelm all of us. We’ll do a lot more damage in the long run by surviving this opening scuffle, right?”
Mentally shaking himself, Gabe inclined his head. “Yeah. You’re right. Let’s go.”
Together, Oneiri Team ran back toward the gleaming steel walls, where the gates were already open and waiting. But as they neared, those gates started to close, and as the last one through, Beth Arkanian almost got trapped outside.
The gates clanged shut. Overhead, the garrison fired nonstop into the Quatro force.
But down here, just inside the city, his team just stood around and stared at Gabe.
They’re wondering about my ability to command. And they can cut that out right now.
“Remember who maintains total authority over your asses,” he bellowed. “Get back on that wall and rain down hell!”
“Yes, sir!” they said in unison, turning to speed toward the nearest stairwell.
Chapter 45
Act Fast
After the Quatro drove Oneiri Team inside the walls of Plenitos, Gabe had expected the aliens to have a swift followup.
“What is this?” Ash Sweeney said over the team-wide channel as she reined havoc on the Quatro below with her grenade launcher. She’d turned out to have a keen sense of where the enemy would be once each grenade exploded, not where they were when she launched it.
Probably from her lucid gaming, Gabe reflected reluctantly. As much as he and other old-school Darkstream operatives liked to look down their noses at it, lucid did teach an undeniable level of situational awareness and ability to prioritize targets.
“What is what?” Tommy Tomlinson asked, and Gabe decided not to interject with his view.
He was still in observation-mode when it came to the dynamics and abilities of his team, and he expected to remain in it for some time. Possibly forever. A good leader only stepped in when absolutely necessary. Constantly micromanaging only taught soldiers to rely on that micromanagement.
“I get that Chief Roach was trying to bait the Quatro by firing on them, but can that really be the only reason they charged? Surely they had a followup plan?”
Inside the mech—inside the dream—Gabe winced. They really needed to come up with some nicknames for everyone on the team, including himself. Having his team refer to him by his rank in battle created too much distance. Nicknames were more valuable for team cohesion than most people assumed.
But I have to let them emerge naturally, too. His old unit had called him Pioneer, but it didn’t feel right to simply order his team to call him that.
“Maybe the Quatro really are as dumb as we thought,” Tommy said.
Maybe. But Gabe doubted it. Still, the Quatro’s behavior made no sense. He’d expected them to have enough knowledge of the terrain to not try digging into the city, so the fact that they hadn’t done that didn’t surprise him, but they didn’t seem to have anything else, other than milling about in front of the city walls and trading shots with the defenders.
Either way, the Quatro offered no shortage of targets, and as he swept their ranks with his autocannons, he watched them bend and fall and break. Part of him rejoiced at the injury and death he dealt, and part of him recoiled in horror.
God, I’m a mess.
Through it all, he could see Jess’s face, and he couldn’t tell whether the expression she wore was approving or disappointed.
Either way, her memory enraged him, driving him to continue exacting his vengeance, no matter how she would have felt about it, no matter whether it was right or not. The madness of battle was upon him, and reason had no part of it.
As he stowed the autocannons by instructing the mech’s hands to reform in front of them, he used those hands to rip his rocket launcher from his back, just in time to loose a rocket at a particularly dense cluster of Quatro.
As he did, the Quatro revealed to him their plan.
The charge did have a purpose, after all. The sea of Quatro that had crashed against Plenitos’ walls was meant to conceal the heavy artillery-bearing individuals among them.
Individual Quatro wearing multiple rocket launchers of their own strapped to their backs leapt over the heads of their fellows with powerful limbs, loosing multi-rocket barrages straight at Plenitos’ walls before landing among their brethren and getting lost in the seething throng.
“Watch where they fall,” Gabe barked at his team. “Anticipate their trajectories. Take them out!”
But try as they might, the Quatro’s tactic was too effective. They were fast, and their fellows maneuvered to give them leeway to quickly change their position once they landed to continue running up and down the battlefield, firing barrage after barrage from random positions.
In the dream, Arkady Black appeared beside Gabe, hands clasped behind his back, looking strangely calm as he peered down at the battlefield, in full view of the enemy.
Or at least, it looked to Gabe like the enemy could easily sight and snipe him.
But he isn’t truly there.
“We seem to have a problem,” Black remarked.
“You don’t say,” Gabe said, following another rocket-launching Quatro’s path and loosing a rocket at where he expected it would be. It didn’t come back up again, and he felt fairly sure he’d finally taken one down.
Of course, another could easily take up its launc
hers.
Without the benefit of opposable thumbs, Gabe didn’t know how a Quatro could manage to strap the launchers onto its back, but then, they’d clearly managed to get them there in the first place. And the firing mechanism continued to remain a mystery.
“How much punishment like that are these walls built to take?” Gabe asked.
“Not very much at all,” Black said. “The builders never expected the Quatro to have access to rocket launchers, or to have the ability to use them if they did. You need to act fast, Roach.”
With that, Black vanished.
Thanks for the insight, Gabe said, racking his brain for how in hell they were going to prevent this city from falling.
Chapter 46
How Many Teeth
The journey back to Habitat 2 hadn’t been as eventful as the journey away from it. They weren’t returning with the reinforcements Lisa had hoped to secure, but…
At least we aren’t coming back alone.
Still, she wondered about just how effective the Quatro would prove against the drug lords’ fighters. They seemed to consider Lisa, Tessa, and Andy as part of their drift, now. And although the Quatro had avoided contact with humans for almost two decades, fearing they were agents of the Meddlers, the quadrupeds’ gentleness and geniality made it hard for Lisa to imagine them waging fierce combat against a determined foe.
If they proved just as friendly and accommodating toward Daybreak, then regaining Habitat 2 simply wouldn’t happen. Daybreak’s leader, Quentin Cooper, would crush them.
No matter how big the Quatro are…or how many teeth they have…
The Quatro did have incredibly bulky guns that they mostly carried using their Dome. The aliens were fairly closed-mouthed about the nature of their weaponry.
As for the Quatro themselves, they never seemed to tire—either of loping across the landscape of Alex alongside the beetle, or of engaging in long discussions about their culture.
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