Despite those long, informative talks, Lisa could never quite get an answer out of them about why they’d ended up in the Steele System in the first place. Or about what the home was like that they’d left behind.
Lisa soon tired of trying to sate her curiosity. Despite their politeness, the Quatro could be incredibly evasive when they wanted to, and she knew they used the language barrier to their advantage, even though that was dwindling as the translator got better and better.
Either way, as they drew closer to Habitat 2, she switched to talking about tactics. They would need a plan to retake her home from Daybreak, after all. She hadn’t realized that she actually thought of Habitat 2 as home until someone had taken it from her.
Funny how that works.
“We don’t have the sort of artillery that’ll let us blow open the side of the city,” Lisa said to Rug as she reclined inside their inflatable habitat one morning, following a strenuous PT session under Tessa’s ever-appraising eye. Strenuous, but they didn’t exhaust her like they’d once done. Lisa had gained a new layer of lean mass during her months of training. She hadn’t “bulked up” too much, but she liked how much more toned her body looked in the mirror now, and when she moved she could feel her increased strength in the way her muscles shifted, and the way everything had become much easier.
Rug wasn’t inside the habitat with her—the Quatro were much too large to fit through the airlock. They’d spent the entire journey in their self-sustaining pressure suits, supplemented by their dome-shaped supply vehicle. Lisa communicated with her via radio.
“Even if we did have that sort of firepower, I wouldn’t want to use it,” Lisa went on. “The idea is to retake the city, not kill its inhabitants by blowing open its side in a way that can’t be fixed quickly.”
“The city subsists on the yield of the Gatherers. Does it not?”
“Well, that’s the whole reason for its existence. To intercept the Gatherers and harvest their contents. As far as basic survival…what Habitat 2 can’t grow hydroponically, it gets from the constant supply runs to and from the space elevator.”
“Suffice it to say, then, that if the Gatherers ceased to come with their bounty, those who control Habitat 2 would become upset.”
“I’d say that’s an understatement,” Lisa said. “Cooper would have a fit, according to what Tessa says about him. He’d be ready to kill something. Do you have a way to disrupt the Gatherers, somehow?”
“We do. Before your arrival, we learned to reprogram them. In fact, our doing so is why your Habitat 2 has proven so lucrative. Have you not noticed that the site receives a disproportionate number of Gatherers?”
“We have,” Lisa said, shifting her position on the air-filled couch, which she could never quite get comfortable on. “It’s the entire reason we built the city there.”
“Yes. We also constructed a settlement there, once. And we reprogrammed the Gatherers to come to it in great numbers.”
“Wait a second,” Lisa said, sitting up, the overinflated couch as hard as a rock beneath her. “The Quatro used to have a base where Habitat 2 is now? Why was there no trace of it?”
Rug paused briefly, and then said, “I would posit two theories. One, the constructors of your city concealed from you the remnants of our settlement, which was destroyed by the Meddlers. Two, the Meddlers themselves cleared away all evidence of it ever existing.”
“Why would they do that?”
“I’m not aware of why the Meddlers meddle. But it is how they came to receive the name we gave them.”
“If we reprogram the Gatherers to deliver their payloads to somewhere else, we could starve out Habitat 2 permanently,” Lisa said. “It would become useless to my employer. I can’t do that to the people who live there. A lot of them are my friends, and most of the rest are good people.”
“Worry not. This can be a temporary measure, to remain in effect only until we have forced this Cooper to emerge from your city to confront us. Once we have retaken it, we will help you to increase Gatherer traffic to Habitat 2 even further, and you’ll become wealthy beyond your wildest imaginings.”
“Oh. That sounds pretty good, then.” She also liked the increasingly aggressive language Rug had begun to use.
When they finally reached Habitat 2, they approached it at the time of night when Alex was darkest—a time that changed throughout the year, and one which the Quatro kept careful track of. At this hour, the habitat was just a sprawling, dark silhouette against Alex’s sapphire terrain, devoid of detail.
Under that blanket of darkness, Lisa and her two human companions joined the Quatro in surrounding Habitat 2, to intercept every Gatherer that approached it.
In the frigid air, the Quatro’s powers were at their height. They seized the Gatherers with their superconducting brains, stopping them and forcing them open.
That done, they deposited a very specific amount of Terbium inside each Gatherer.
“This will cause every Gatherer to begin mining from a Terbium deposit fewer than ten kilometers from here,” Rug said. “We have measured these amounts carefully—a single milligram more or less, and the Gatherer would not heed our command.”
“Why will they go to that deposit in particular?” Lisa asked. “Is that the only one on the planet?”
“No. The amount required to indicate a particular deposit is always relative to that deposit’s size. The Gatherers appear to have perfect knowledge of the planet’s composition, but we do not, and determining the correct amounts took tremendous trial and error. Mostly error. But if we knew the correct amount, we could instruct the Gatherer to travel to a deposit on the other side of the planet. And it would.”
“Incredible,” Lisa said. She could appreciate the simplicity—the elegance, even—of the Gatherers’ functionality.
Hopefully retaking Habitat 2 will be that straightforward.
Somehow, she doubted that. Over a week ago, her stomach had begun churning at the thought of the coming battle; her first one, outside of lucid sims. She didn’t count fighting the thugs who’d stolen their beetle as a battle.
That said, she had killed that day, and now, she broke into a cold sweat at the thought that she would soon be called on to do so again, many times over.
Am I ready for this?
She didn’t know. But tomorrow would bring the answer.
Chapter 47
Parabola
“I don’t get it,” Tommy Tomlinson said as another rocket hit Plenitos’ walls, shaking it worryingly. He shifted his position on the parapet, gleaming legs flashing in the sun, and answered with rockets of his own. “The MIMAS mechs were supposed to help us win against the Quatro.” Tension and exertion made his voice waver as he continued to pepper the alien horde with explosives. “So why are they about to break through?”
“Doesn’t exactly work like that, Tommy,” Ash said, grunting a little as she ran along the wall to get a better vantage point before spraying a line of Quatro with bullets. “In these mechs, we can take on twenty Quatro each, probably more. But we can’t defeat an army like this by ourselves. Not in enough time to stop them from breaching the walls. The walls were supposed to hold.”
“Shut up,” Gabe barked, annoyance at his pilots’ chatter amplifying his stress. “We don’t have time to stand up here and philosophize about it. We have to do something, now.”
“What would that be, Chief?” Jake Price asked.
“We need to stop defending and start attacking.”
“But Ash just pointed out—”
“I don’t care what she pointed out. I don’t submit my orders to a committee—I give them, and you follow them. Everyone off the walls and follow me into the city.”
“But I thought—”
“Off the walls and into the city!” Gabe yelled, turning to leap from the parapet. The asphalt rushed up to meet him, yet he barely felt a thing upon impact, and he hit the ground running.
Behind him, the team charged after him, finally hav
ing ceased their babble.
Within a few minutes, they reached Plenitos’ only launch site, which was intended for situations where someone needed to reach Valhalla fast—like in the event the city was overrun, for instance, and the council felt moved to evacuate without delay.
“We left the battle,” Tommy said, in the tone of someone who’d just spilled his soft drink and had to buy another.
“We’ll be back there very soon,” Gabe said. “Each one of our mechs has the launch capacity to escape a planet’s gravity well and achieve orbit.”
“What does that have to do with the siege?” Henrietta Jin asked.
“Well, if we can attain orbit, then we can definitely launch ourselves over the city walls and come down directly behind the Quatro. From there, we’ll be much closer to the ones with rocket launchers. We can fight our way to them, put them down, then launch ourselves back to safety.”
“Probably singe some Quatro in the process,” Ash said. “I like it. But can you modify the function in time, sir?”
Gabe nodded. “Just need to tweak a few parameters. Give me a second.”
It took more like a minute, which was a minute they couldn’t afford to lose. But given the circumstances, it was pretty quick, and he was proud of how fast he arrived at calculations describing a shallow parabola that would take them over Plenitos’ walls.
“Sending it to your implants now,” he said. “Everyone spread out around the site. That’s against regular procedure, but we need to go together to cut down the Quatro’s reaction time, and our mechs’ armor is strong enough to handle a little rocket exhaust.”
Oneiri Team spread themselves across the launch site in a roughly even distribution. Good enough.
“All right,” he said. “Engage rockets on my mark. One…two…mark!”
The thrusters in his mech’s legs flared to life, and Gabe left the ground with startling speed. He barely cleared the roof of a warehouse, and then the city hurtled past below him.
Within seconds, his flight crested, directly over the wall.
Then, he passed the teeming mass of Quatro.
Then…
Then, he descended into the woods, having overshot his target.
Damn it, he thought as he crashed through the foliage, hitting the ground and rolling several meters before coming to a rest against one of Eresos’ countless leafless trees.
He’d sorely miscalculated. All around him, the other mechs collided with the ground, making it rumble.
“Back!” Gabe ordered. “We have to go back!”
But the Quatro had seen them land—and heard them, probably. Dozens of them charged into the woods in chase, and soon Oneiri was fighting them among the trees, desperately trying to push back toward Plenitos.
Chapter 48
Makeshift Tank
As shadows lengthened rapidly all across Alex’s landscape, Andy drove the beetle toward Habitat 2 at a stately pace.
Lisa sat beside him, the intercom raised to her lips, ready to broadcast over shortwave.
Finally, a form of communication that doesn’t rely on satellite.
Although she’d accepted that Darkstream maybe didn’t have the situation in Habitat 2 completely under control, she was still an employee of the company, and she intended to invoke that authority now.
They crested a rise that brought Habitat 2 into sight, and Lisa could make out more of it in the twilight. She hadn’t seen it from outside very often. Few did, other than the beetle drivers. It wasn’t built with aesthetics in mind, not the outside view anyway, but even so, Lisa thought it was beautiful.
The way its gunmetal gray flowed into Alex’s blue in the waning light. The way it sprawled across the terrain, with antennae, satellite dishes, and observation towers distributed across it at random intervals—the spires mostly offered a view of the planet itself, not of the habitat, though you could catch glimpses of it from them.
You couldn’t see it like this. Not like she was seeing it. And in that moment, Lisa came to love and miss her home even more.
I’m so close, yet regaining Habitat 2 will not be easy.
The beetle rolled to a halt, and Lisa depressed the slim red button that would broadcast her voice to Daybreak—and to any Habitat 2 inhabitants listening over the wide channel.
“This is Seaman Lisa Sato. I have M-level Clearance and I operate with the full authority of Darkstream Security to dispense and execute justice as I deem necessary. You have unlawfully captured Habitat 2, a settlement in which Darkstream Security possesses a controlling interest. I hereby order you to surrender and turn Habitat 2 back over to company constables and also to the council. You have five minutes to reply.”
Replacing the intercom, she glanced at Andy, who offered a small grin that didn’t hold much heart. “Think they’ll listen?”
Lisa paused. “No. But I have to give them a chance.”
“Do you? I don’t recall anything in the employee handbook about showing mercy to gangsters who mess with company property.”
“You’re right…but I have to anyway. For me.”
“I see.”
Five minutes passed, during which Daybreak failed to contact them. She raised the intercom once again, and was about to speak when the dashboard speaker crackled to life.
“How did you survive?” a gruff voice said.
“Who am I speaking to?”
“Quentin Cooper. Answer my question.”
She pressed the red button. “I’m not inclined to give you any information, Cooper. Submit to my requirements, or face the consequences.”
“What consequences? You’re out there. We’re in here. You can suffocate, for all we care.”
But Lisa heard the note of uncertainty in his voice. She drew a deep breath. “No doubt, by now, you’ve noticed the total shutdown of Gatherer traffic to Habitat 2. We did that. If you won’t surrender, if you want the flow of resources to resume, then you’ll at least have to come out here and face us. Without the Gatherers, you’ll have no leverage with Darkstream at all. They’ll devote considerable resources to exterminating you.”
Another silence—and this one lasted almost twenty minutes. Andy kept the beetle at the top of the rise.
From where they sat, they could see two vehicle bay doors, and at last, one of them opened to admit a beetle that had been outfitted with heavier armor than was usual for the transport vehicles, along with plenty of artillery.
Alongside that makeshift tank marched an entire platoon of pressure suit-clad figures, who also carried their share of guns.
“All right,” she said, her voice a little breathless. Her skin had begun to crawl with the prospect of imminent battle, and she felt like she couldn’t inhale enough oxygen, no matter how deeply she breathed. “We need to move.”
Chapter 49
Steam
A Quatro charged at Jake, leaving a faint trail behind it inside the dream—an effect he hadn’t noticed before, which he attributed to the alien’s speed.
He pivoted behind an unusually large tree, with a quickness that still surprised him, given the mech’s bulk. The maneuver forced the Quatro to veer to the right, leaving its muscular haunches exposed to Jake’s heavy machine gun.
It made short work of the beast.
He heard the next attackers before he saw them. They hit him from two new angles, outside his field of vision, and for a moment, he couldn’t move enough to bring one of his weapons to bear.
Screaming with the effort, he shoved his weight to the right, knocking one weighty alien aside and extending his right bayonet to drive it into its flank. As fast as he could, he stabbed it twice more before pushing it away.
The other Quatro pounced on him from behind, pinning him to the ground while it raked knife-like claws across Jake’s back, sending spasms of pain through his body.
Nothing seemed effortless, inside the mech—the dream saw to that. Yes, his strength was increased a hundredfold at least, but he still experienced every exertion as though
it was his own.
Because it was his own.
He pushed against the ground, flashing back to the intense PT Roach had subjected them to, trying his best to make them wash out.
The strain made him grunt. You’re going to wash out if you can’t do this, he told himself, and it occurred to him then that making Oneiri Team had been just as important as his own survival. More important, maybe. Because being an ongoing part of Oneiri ensured his sister would get the medical attention she so sorely needed.
He heaved upward, shifting the Quatro enough that Jake got his left leg underneath him.
That did it. Surging upward, he turned to aim a flamethrower at the beast—better suited to close-range than the autocannon, which would require time to engage and spin to life.
A gout of fire took the Quatro in the side and belly, causing it to recoil, screeching as its flesh sloughed off. Jake finished it with his heavy machine gun.
Scanning the trees for his next opponent, Jake noticed that the patches of sky between the forest canopy were flashing red.
That’s me, he realized. I’m doing that. The sky is reflecting my anger.
Most of his anger wasn’t for the Quatro, either—it was for Gabriel Roach. Twice now, the chief had miscalculated, landing the team in a position that detracted from the battle effort rather than enhanced it.
He didn’t care whether that was due to the newness of the mechs. If that was the case, Darkstream should never have deployed them this early, and Gabe should never have supported them in doing so.
To Jake, Gabe represented Darkstream. As far as he was concerned, they were one and the same in their eagerness to push new technologies before they’d been properly tested.
As a result, here they were, too far from Plenitos’ walls, which were about to fall.
Almost on cue, the sound of a rocket hitting the walls reached him, followed by a prolonged screeching sound. Another rocket exploded. Then another.
“What was that?” Tommy screamed over the team-wide as he grappled with a Quatro nearby, finally managing to throw the thing into a tree before turning to confront the next. The first Quatro snapped the tree clean in half.
Mech Wars: The Complete Series Page 19
