“Sir, do you really think you need to deny us knowledge of your location? I mean, we won’t follow you, but if you run into trouble—”
“Damn it, Price, this is exactly why I need to block my transponder. You were about to say that if something happens to me, you’d come try to pull me out of it, and that’s what I just ordered you not to do.” Roach’s mech was shaking its head. “Typical.”
“Sir…why choose me to command Oneiri? I failed. I let the Quatro steal the quad.”
Roach surged to his feet, crossing the distance between him and Jake in an instant, so that their faces were inches away. Even though Jake was also inside a giant robot, Roach still managed to be intimidating.
“Is this the result of your training, Seaman Apprentice? Did I teach you to mope around when the going gets tough, or did I teach you to act like a soldier?”
“The latter, sir.”
“Then act like one! That’s an order, too.”
“Sir…why do you think the Quatro retreated? Why not press the advantage, once they had the quad?”
“They were taking heavy losses. If the battle had gone on much longer, most of them would probably be dead. But they have the quad, now, and they’ll learn the thing’s power, the extent of which we’re not even sure about. They could do a lot of damage with it.”
Jake nodded. Ever since the Siege of Plenitos had begun, the chief had been exhibiting signs of exhaustion and mental instability. He’d screwed up the launch that had brought them wide of the Quatro force besieging Plenitos, which had resulted in the enemy breaching the walls. Shortly after that, Jake had found him standing on the edge of the woods, motionless, staring at the fractured city.
And now, he was heading alone into the wilderness, to chase a weapon whose capabilities he knew nothing about.
But Jake had resolved not to question the chief.
“It’s possible I’ll find the Quatro dead inside the quad it took,” Roach said. “The mech your father found in that comet killed Zimmerman when he couldn’t control it. But I have to make sure. Do you understand that, Price?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Now, get those quads to Ingress. Don’t let me down.”
With that, Roach turned and walked into the woods. Jake watched him until the trees blocked him out, and then he listened until the sound of Roach’s mech crashing through the undergrowth faded away.
Chapter 10
Played
“Don’t tell me,” Former Habitat 2 councilman Leonardo Fiore said as he sneered at Lisa through the bars of his cell. “Are you going to offer me leniency in exchange for information? We all know how that turned out.”
The former councilman was tall, lithe, and tanned. The kind of tan that was difficult to attain inside a sealed habitat, without spending ample time lying in a tanning bed.
“Actually, I haven’t decided what I should offer you,” Lisa said, returning Fiore’s gaze without breaking eye contact. “What did Quentin Cooper offer you, that made you spill your guts so liberally?”
“Oh, I’m confident he will find a way to reward me. I’m a man with…broad tastes.” Fiore’s eyes slithered up and down Lisa’s body, which made her feel like vomiting.
Refusing to let her nausea show, Lisa continued to study the man’s lean face.
She knew what her father would say about a man like Fiore: his overconfidence blinded him to his own shortcomings. It was easy to find that sort of man’s buttons, and once you found them, it was even easier to jam your thumb down on them till he behaved exactly as you wanted.
“I’m afraid he won’t get the chance to reward you,” Lisa said. “Darkstream is deploying an entire battalion of trained soldiers to Habitat 2. Cooper doesn’t have a prayer of victory. He’s already enjoyed all the success he’s going to.”
“You’re a fool, girl,” Fiore spat, and Lisa didn’t react to that either, despite how much she hated being called “girl” after months trapped inside a beetle with Tessa Notaras. “Cooper’s spent years preparing for this. You’ve done nothing but set him back a little. He has sprawling facilities that he built years ago, inside hills well outside the beetle routes. I helped him do that. I used my position on the council to redirect what resources I could to him, and I was repaid in kind. Plus, Cooper has soldiers of his own, armed with weaponry I helped him to secure, and beetles built with parts that I procured for him. How else do you explain the sheer volume of drugs that flooded not just this habitat, but all of the habitats? Cooper’s operation is not some two-bit racket. It spans the planet, with operatives in every habitat, as well as inside Darkstream’s own power structure. Those operatives will be on their way, soon. You’re done, girl. Done.”
Lisa nodded, saying nothing. By bruising Fiore’s pride, she’d prompted him to give her exactly what she wanted, and it had been almost as easy as pushing “play” on a vid using her implant.
Of course, to tell Fiore he’d been played would put him on guard against the tactic in the future, and she wanted to preserve it, in case she ever needed it again.
So she maintained her silence as she exited the cell block, which she knew would likely make him think his words had had the impact he’d wanted.
“Do visit again,” Fiore shouted after her. “It would be my pleasure to educate you as much as is needed.”
As Lisa returned to her office, she received a message from the council of Habitat 1, notifying her that their entire fleet of beetles had been stolen.
That was as good as confirmation of Fiore’s boasting.
So he was telling the truth. Cooper really is coming.
“Let him come,” she muttered to the empty room. “We’ll be ready and waiting.”
Chapter 11
Vaguely Humanoid
“Another day, another comet, eh boss?” Ellis Green said with his easy grin. “You want me to double check your pressure suit?”
“The computer should have it covered.” Peter Price had once been a lot more diligent about manually checking over the suit’s seals. That had been when his son had worked with him, and he’d wanted to instill good habits.
I should still be that diligent.
Jake might not be here, but Sue Anne was still counting on him, and it wouldn’t help her if he died because he’d been negligent about his pressure suit.
All the same, he didn’t ask Ellis to check it. Instead, he stepped inside the airlock and waited for the man to join him.
“Where’s Noah?” Peter asked as the inner door sealed.
Ellis’s eyes flitted away before returning to meet Peter’s once more. “He said he’d be right out.”
“Uh huh.” Slept in again.
“What do you think we’ll find inside this ice ball, boss?”
It was a joke. Peter hadn’t found anything unusual since he’d uncovered the mech with his son, which had turned out to be a tremendous windfall. Darkstream had paid him two billion credits for his share of the find, and he’d used the money to lease another comet hopper from Darkstream, and to hire two men and three women to help him increase the number of comets he could turn into homes each year. After a few months, he’d made enough credits to lease a third.
In exchange for all that, he’d allowed Darkstream to take his son away from him. To go kill Quatro on the surface of Eresos, millions of miles away.
To lose his soul.
He tried to return Ellis’s grin, with one of his own. It felt halfhearted on his lips. “There’s only one way to know what we’ll find,” he said as the outer hatch opened to let them out onto the ice. “We just have to find it.”
He knew Ellis was only trying to build up a rapport with him. The three of them had to live together, after all, in fairly close quarters. It got lonely out here in the Belt, far away from the inner system, and far away from Hub, the Belt’s only real city.
But part of Peter still didn’t want to accept that he’d lost the dynamic he’d had out here with his son, and that he’d never get it back.
There’d been something special about there just being the two of them, going it alone against space and ice, carving out a living, as well as enough money to pay for Sue Anne’s medical treatment.
He was sure Jake had never enjoyed the experience as much as he had. Most likely, Peter was just as foolish as any father who tried overzealously to share his passion with his son.
That didn’t change the fact he missed Jake dearly.
He walked around the comet hopper, which Jake had always called the Whale, and now Peter did, too. He reached the compartment that housed the half-kilometer coiled drilling hose.
By now, Ellis didn’t need to be told what to do. He approached a panel near the bow of the ship, which extended outward to reveal the antenna array. That done, Ellis would instruct the array to use step-frequency radar to scan the comet, so they’d know what they were in for in terms of the ice’s density.
“Noah,” Peter said, using his radio to broadcast his voice throughout the Whale. “Have you activated the water harvester?”
“I will now,” came the reply, and Peter rolled his eyes before returning to the task of preparing the hose to blast the comet with boiling water.
At least, I’ll blast it with boiling water eventually.
Because Noah was so late in getting started on his part of the job, it would be some time before the water harvester collected and heated enough liquid to begin drilling.
“Boss,” Ellis said. From his gestures, Peter could tell he’d been reviewing the radar scan’s findings, but his hand had paused in midair. “The scan found something.”
“Is that another joke?”
“No. Seriously. Just a few meters below the surface. Take a look at this.”
Ellis made the flicking gesture that would transmit an image to Peter’s HUD, but before it rendered, something emerged from the comet, breaking through the ice and crawling out onto the surface.
As it got to its feet, it was vaguely humanoid, though it wasn’t much higher than Peter’s belly button. That said, it seemed to hunch slightly, gleaming dully in the dim light.
The thing had dark gray, metallic arms like elongated shields, and its thighs and shins had the same shape, only shorter. Peter couldn’t discern a face anywhere on its elongated head, which extended forward as well as backward. The thing didn’t even seem to have any eyes, or sensors of any kind. None that were evident, anyway.
Without warning, the machine’s arms snapped downward against the ice, sending it sailing off into space with startling speed—deeper into the Belt.
“What was that thing?” Ellis asked, his voice filled with awe.
“I have no idea,” Peter said. “But I’d better go back inside. Darkstream will want to know about this right away.”
“You really think you’ll be able to sell this one too, boss?” Ellis asked, jocularity already creeping back into his voice. “I mean, it got away, didn’t it?”
But Peter didn’t answer. Suddenly, he felt even less receptive toward Ellis’s jokes than he’d been before.
Chapter 12
Militia
“It’s interesting that Daybreak didn’t position any snipers up here,” Lisa said, her pressure suit’s audio picking up her own footfalls across Habitat 2’s gunmetal gray roof.
Ahead of her, Tessa shrugged her slim shoulders. “Doesn’t surprise me, honestly. I doubt Daybreak expected to be attacked. They were negotiating with Darkstream, and other than the company, who would have the resources to oppose them?”
“Us.”
“Us and the Quatro. Who no one knew were even on Alex. Besides, we lured them into the valley, which a rooftop sniper wouldn’t have been able to hit anyway.”
Lisa didn’t answer. As always, Tessa’s tactical analysis was dead-on, but that didn’t mean she needed to be praised endlessly for it.
She’s confident enough as it is.
If only Tessa had been able to appraise Darkstream just as accurately. Lisa had a lot of affection for Tessa, but the woman’s hatred for Darkstream made their friendship a little strained at times.
“Andy’s been talking you up, lately,” the former soldier said, turning so Lisa could glimpse her amused expression through her faceplate. “Says he’s impressed with everything you’ve accomplished, this last little while. I do believe the boy is growing smitten with you.”
Lisa offered a terse chuckle. “If he is, it won’t be for long. Andy’s as fickle as a pickle.”
“How fickle is a pickle, exactly?”
Shaking her head, Lisa grinned to herself as they reached the edge of the roof and she gazed out over Alex’s blue expanse. “Just a cheesy saying my dad used to trot out way too much.”
Dust devils chased each other across the terrain, putting on a little performance for the two friends. After long months cooped up in a beetle, with nothing to look at but this, Lisa would have thought she’d have tired of the planet’s beauty.
Not so. And, watching more loose shapes of dust form and dissipate, over and over, she doubted she ever would.
Tessa turned to her. “Unlike Cooper, we have the advantage of having advance notice of the coming attack. We can put snipers up here.”
“Yeah. Although, they’ll be most effective if we can anticipate what direction they’ll hit us from. Otherwise, we’ll have to allow time for our snipers to move across the roof. Which might take too long for them to have any effect at all.”
Tessa sniffed. “Shouldn’t be hard to anticipate where Cooper will hit. We can just keep an eye on the satellite images—providing Darkstream allows us continued access to them.”
For the second time today, Lisa responded to her friend with only silence.
The older woman sighed. “I know how fond you are of your employer, Lisa. But whether I’m right about them or not, I hope you realize that we can’t leave the safety of Habitat 2 up to the timing of their arrival. If they take their sweet time to get here…well, I don’t need to spell it out, do I?”
“I’ve already thought about that, Tessa. And I agree.” Her friend did have a point. The charge that Darkstream’s bureaucracy could be slow and cumbersome held a lot of water. “I’m going to start training a citizen militia. Providing the council approves, obviously.” A new city council had just been elected by the habitat’s residents, and Lisa had no intention of subverting them. “I think they’ll approve it. Darkstream won’t like it, but Habitat 2 is too important to leave its fate to chance.”
Through Tessa’s faceplate, Lisa could see that her eyebrows were hiked up as far as they would go. “You surprise me more every day, Lisa. I honestly didn’t expect to hear you say that. Not without a lot of convincing.”
“Well, don’t expect me to start endorsing your crazy theories just yet. This is strictly about pragmatism.”
Tessa smiled. “I’m choosing to see it as a sign there’s some hope for you.”
“Yeah, yeah. Think we’ll get Andy firing a gun and shooting straight?”
“He won’t be thinking straight enough to shoot straight. Not with you around.” Then, Tessa’s smile turned down a couple notches. “You know, Daybreak did leave a few Three Points members alive.”
Lisa tilted her head to the side. “Wow, Tessa. Really? Are you really about to say what I think you are?”
“There’s no one who hates Daybreak more than them.”
“Out of the question. They’re staying in their cells, and they’re certainly not joining any militia. The council would never sign off on it, for one.”
Tessa turned from the edge of the roof and started back toward the nearest airlock leading down into Habitat 2. “Well, here’s hoping recruitment goes well for you. If it doesn’t, and Daybreak shows up with Darkstream still nowhere in sight, you may find yourself singing a different tune.”
Chapter 13
Not Just a War of Expansion
Whatever else was true about the quad the Quatro had stolen, tracking it did not offer much of a challenge.
That w
as because it apparently had the power to obliterate trees, leaving only splintered stumps and a shower of bark. The MIMAS mechs could do that to smaller trees, at a full run. Gabe had no idea how fast the quad was moving, but the wreckage it left in its path…
Suffice it to say I’d rather it didn’t do that to my mech.
Despite his growing trepidation, it brought him a measure of relief to do something other than fight in a battle.
Killing had never been a problem for him before, but since the start of this war, it tended to cause him paralyzing, guilt-ridden flashbacks of the first missions on Eresos, to subdue the Quatro population.
He didn’t know why it was flashbacks of killing aliens and not fellow humans that haunted him, but he didn’t pretend to know how the human brain worked.
The one thing he was certain of was that chasing the quad did not seem to trigger any flashbacks. He welcomed the reprieve.
Then, he started seeing Jess.
He was loping along the swath of destruction the quad had left in its wake when she appeared right in the middle of it. Her arms were folded across her stomach, and her auburn hair shifted in the breeze.
Gabe twisted to the right, trying to change his course, but he only succeeded in losing his balance, crashing forward. If Jess had been real, he would have crushed her.
But the MIMAS passed through nothing, and he hit the ground hard, the dream translating the mech’s impact as a wave of pain that spread through Gabe’s body.
He pulled himself to his feet and checked all around him, but there was no sign of Jess, other than his racing heartbeat, which manifested inside the dream as a shimmer over everything in his sight.
The dream.
It was only supposed to make people appear like that when Gabe was communicating with them, to provide the illusion of an in-person conversation, which was supposed to improve the quality of long-distance meetings.
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