The quad simply trampled him, heavy paws knocking him down and pummeling him into the earth.
He cried out in agony as the dream tried to convince him that his body was shattered beyond repair, bones ground to dust, organs ruptured like overfilled balloons.
Maybe that feedback mechanism is a little too intense. Or maybe his body really was destroyed.
Deciding to do what he could to test the hypothesis, he pushed himself to his feet, forcing himself to run at his foe, who was coming about to charge again.
This time, Gabe was ready. With a mighty leap, he sailed over the quad, pelting it with his autocannons all the while.
A weapon that closely resembled a rocket launcher took shape from the metal on the quad’s back, and indeed a rocket emerged from it, timed to catch Gabe at the peak of his jump. The missile scored a direct hit with his right side, and the explosion threw him farther into the air, limbs flailing uncontrollably.
As Gabe descended, the quad’s tail took the shape of a great blade poised to skewer him on the way down.
It was possible that the MIMAS mech’s armor was strong enough to withstand being run through, even with its full weight coming down on a single wicked-looking point.
But Gabe wasn’t eager to test that. Instead, he fired every rocket he had in his arsenal in the quad’s direction. The effort served to stabilize his descent somewhat, and he turned his autocannons on the alien once more as he finished falling.
The kickback from his firing served to push him backward slightly, and he missed the blade by a matter of centimeters.
Extending his own blades, Gabe drove them forward into the quad’s armor, producing a piercing shriek of metal against metal. His effort produced only thin, white lines, like those made by a butter knife across a wooden table top.
The Quatro spun, swinging a massive paw at Gabe’s head in a gesture reminiscent of the one that had killed Tommy deep underground. Gabe felt sure he had time to dodge, but he was wrong. The blow knocked him to the ground, where he rolled sideways to avoid whatever the Quatro was planning next.
Gabe regained his feet, but immediately a blast of energy threw him straight through another structure. He landed inside, his entire body on fire.
The quad came in after him, landing on top of him, raking him with razor claws that had formed the moment the Quatro had need of them. Furrows of pain sprang up all down Gabe’s body.
He let two grenades tumble out of his grenade launchers, without actually launching them. Both exploded, causing Gabe’s anguish to spike brutally but forcing the Quatro to ease up enough for him to scramble out from underneath it.
Charging at one of the unbroken walls, he succeeded in breaking through to the outside.
There, he came face to face with a group of two dozen mercenaries, bearing all manner of artillery. They stood approximately thirty meters away.
Two of them directed rocket launchers at Gabe and fired.
Chapter 18
Creative Karma
Another energy blast followed him between the trees as he attempted to flee into the rapidly darkening woods.
The dry, leafless trees all around him exploded into flame, and Gabe pitched forward, face-first into the forest floor.
He staggered once more to his feet, a rocket sailing past him to hit an unusually large tree, which the explosion enveloped. Gabe stumbled around it, though the heat found him, spurring him to run as quickly as he could.
His mech was behaving erratically. He suspected the fight had done serious damage to the actuators and servomotors in several of his joints, as he was having great difficulty in making the MIMAS go where he wanted it to.
An attempt to sprint between two trees resulted in colliding with the leftmost one, causing him to spin and almost lose his balance again. He found his feet, somehow, and staggered on, the shouts of the mercenaries close behind him, their bullets ripping up the ground all around him.
Make for the densest cluster of trees. That’s your only hope.
Gabe did. It was almost night, and he prayed his pursuers would lose track of him…if he could just keep moving.
His HUD had been nagging him to review his vitals, but he hadn’t found the time for it in between running for his life. While the dream interface granted him an incredibly close connection with his mech, it distanced himself from his own body.
He reached a part of the woods where the trees grew close together, and he weaved through them as best he could, hoping they would slow the quad some. Only then did he glance at what his implant was trying to tell him about his body’s health.
The prognosis wasn’t good. He was slowly bleeding out, just like the boy back on Thessaly had been, and if he didn’t get medical attention soon, he would die, just as the boy had.
That wasn’t an acceptable outcome, he decided. The other members of Oneiri team had to be warned of the devastating power wielded by the quad, as well as the fact he’d found it in a mercenary outpost.
Were those Red Company fighters?
He had no way of knowing, other than a massive hunch. Another hunch told him there was a reason the Quatro who’d stolen the quad had gone to the mercenaries. It had headed straight for their settlement, and Gabe seriously doubted that was by chance.
It thought it had something to gain there.
That meant the Quatro almost certainly had an alliance with the mercenaries, or some sort of arrangement, at least. If Darkstream’s enemies were uniting against the company, then that was a piece of information that gravely needed to be passed on as well.
If only he believed that he actually had a chance of making it back to his team.
As he ran, he briefly considered allowing his transponder to broadcast his location to Price and the others, so that they could come to his aid. But he quickly scrapped it as a horrible idea.
The fact that he hadn’t encountered any Quatro other than the one piloting the quad told him the other aliens had likely continued to trail the Darkstream battalion, looking for a chance to strike and liberate more of the quads. Even if that wasn’t the case, the quad had made short work of him, and he wasn’t totally confident that even the combined might of Oneiri team could take it down. True, it had taken the arrival of the mercenaries to finish Gabe off, but he didn’t know how long he would’ve lasted against the quad even in their absence.
It would’ve taken dying in a one-on-one duel with the quad to get a more accurate impression of its prowess, but that would not have served anyone.
He passed Jess as he barreled through the dense wood. She was standing between two trees that left a gap much too narrow for his mech to fit between.
“Do you believe in karma?” she asked, but by the time his overtaxed brain registered the question, he was already too far to answer her.
Then he saw her again, standing at the bottom of a natural bowl in a small clearing dead ahead.
“If karma does exist, I wonder what its limits might be?”
Again, Gabe rushed past too quickly to engage in any conversation, let alone one about complex philosophical issues.
But then, Jess reappeared just ahead. “If someone’s committed an excessive number of horrible acts,” she said, “how can karma possibly compensate for that?”
Gabe stumbled on, but this time Jess shrieked loud enough for him to hear: “How creative is karma willing to get?”
As Gabe continued on through the woods, the gunfire and explosions grew dimmer behind him. He wasn’t sure whether that was because he was succeeding in putting distance between him and his pursuers, or because he was losing consciousness.
He gradually became obsessed with the concept of blood loss, and the dream facilitated that obsession. Droplets of blood started to ooze from every tree, and pools of it welled up from the ground.
The sky itself began to bleed.
Chapter 19
Sucker for Punishment
“See you tomorrow night,” Bob O’Toole said, peering at Lisa.
&
nbsp; Lisa grunted, and he vanished.
Tessa grinned. “That’s the one circumstance where he’ll ever get to say that and it’ll be true.” Then she disappeared too, leaving just Lisa and Andy in the lucid lobby.
Since Laudano had disbanded it, Lisa’s militia had almost doubled in size. Nothing quite got the word out like having a secret group that no one else was meant to know about, she supposed.
She turned most of their lucid simulations down to minimum lucidity, so that her trainees forgot entirely that they were dreaming for the duration of the dream, convinced the sims were real life and that they truly were in danger.
At the end of each sim, however, they were all sent to a lobby with the lucidity turned up to max so that they could review whatever scenario they’d just run—what had worked, who had died, and what might have gone better.
They’d just conducted tonight’s final scenario, though she wished there were more. She found it incredibly rewarding to watch her charges improve.
They’d been doing that a lot, lately. Improving. Especially since they’d begun training entirely in lucid. Dream-time was incredibly condensed. One minute of real-time could equal fifteen minutes of dream-time, often more. That meant they were able to get at least fifteen times the amount of training in.
Daybreak won’t stand a chance.
“I feel like tonight went great,” Andy said.
Lisa nodded. “They’ve all been going great. Everyone has their basics down pat, so now we can finally begin to innovate.”
“Yeah.” Andy rubbed the back of his neck, which must’ve been a gesture of discomfort, considering it was unlikely he would dream he had an itch in full lucidity. He met her eyes. “Listen, do you feel like getting a drink together soon? Tomorrow, maybe?”
That took her aback. “Um, yeah! Sure. I get off at eight in the evening. So, maybe nine? Dusty Bucket?”
“Sounds good! See you then.” With that, Andy winked out of existence.
Before returning to her regular sleep, Lisa took a moment to process that. If she was being honest with herself, and she saw no reason not to be, she was excited by the attention from Andy. But it also made her wonder—why the sudden interest now?
Nevertheless, when her shift ended the next day, she headed to her compact, two-room home, got into a black dress that was a little more flattering than her uniform, and headed for the Bucket, half expecting to be stood up.
But when she arrived, there he was, waving at her from a table in the corner. She stopped by the bar for her usual whiskey sour from Phineas Gage, which he gave to her on the house, and then she went to join Andy.
“I’m a little surprised you agreed to this, to be honest,” Andy said as she took a seat across from him. “I would’ve thought that, after months of being stuck with me inside a beetle out on Alex, you would’ve had enough of my company to last a lifetime.”
“I must be a sucker for punishment.” She offered a grin, to soften the snarkiness.
“Do you ever think about those times?”
Do you? For the first several weeks after returning from their journey, Andy had barely spoken to her. “Sometimes,” she said.
“I have to admit, I’m impressed by what you’ve been able to accomplish since you’ve gotten back.”
Even though Tessa had already told her he’d said that, Lisa was still surprised when she heard it from him. Since returning to Habitat 2, she felt like she’d been grasping for the right choices the entire way, groping in the dark, and only chancing to make anything work. Maybe she was being hard on herself, but that was how it felt, from retaking Habitat 2 to starting her citizen militia. “Well, thanks, Andy. It means a lot, really. Stuff like this, trying to make a difference—it’s the reason I came to the inner system from the Belt in the first place.”
“Do you miss it? The Belt?”
“I miss my father. My mother died when I was young. Father had to play the role of both parents, and I have to say, he did it well.”
“What’s he like?”
Lisa paused as she searched for the right words to describe her father, which was something she hadn’t had occasion to do very much. People normally didn’t ask about her family, or about anything else, really. Why would they? She was just a lowly seaman, on the bottom rung of the Darkstream corporate ladder.
“He’s kind,” she said. “Wise. Deeply distrustful of governments, too, which is the reason he gives for being happier here in the Steele System than he ever was back in the Milky Way. He was always super suspicious of Darkstream, though, too, which got on my nerves sometimes. It was always my dream to work for this company. Not everyone gets to do that, anymore. It’s not like it was before.”
Andy watched her as she spoke, not attempting to interject with his own opinions, which was good, because they would be irrelevant. He’d never met her father, and likely never would, so what did it matter what he thought about him?
“I say I came out here to make a difference,” Lisa went on, “and I did – at least, that’s what I tell myself. But others would probably just call it plain old ambition. My father would’ve said that that’s not such a bad thing. He would’ve called it a good thing, actually. He always said that if I can get to the point where what’s best for the world is also best for me, then I’ll know I’m on the right path.”
“I like that.”
“Yeah. Me too. What about you? You’re from Eresos, right? Do you miss it there?”
Andy shook his head. “I had two parents there—have, I guess—but they amounted to less than one, between them. They took no interest in my life. Had no time for me. I was always convinced I was an accident, and one night, when he was drunk, my father admitted it’s true: that I was an accident.”
“Wow,” Lisa said. “I’m sorry, Andy. Though it sort of explains why you have such commitment issues. You’re too afraid of getting hurt to let anyone get close.”
That brought an extended silence from Andy, and he ran a hand over his freckled chin. She knew she shouldn’t have said it, but he had hurt her, both after returning from their journey and well before they’d ever left. She wanted him to know that. To acknowledge it, in some way.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess it kind of does.” He took a long pull from his beer, which looked to be a stout of some kind. “I don’t mean to change the subject, but did you hear that Darkstream released David Lannon and sent him in a shuttle to Valhalla?”
David Lannon was the former head of security for Habitat 2. The one who’d been caught helping Daybreak to enslave the people Lannon had been in charge of protecting.
“To stand trial?”
“No. To evade consequences altogether, it would seem. They’re finding him another posting.”
“Are you kidding me? That’s ridiculous.”
Andy shrugged, his shaggy brown hair bouncing a little. “Laudano assured me the move is strictly business. According to him, if Darkstream started prosecuting their employees all over the place—his words, not mine—then they’d receive fewer applications from qualified candidates.”
“So they’re just sending him elsewhere. To empower criminals to abuse some other innocent people, maybe.”
“Maybe.”
Lisa shook her head. I really don’t want to have to admit to Tessa that she’s right.
Chapter 20
Alliance
The Quatro—he now knew that was what he was, or at least what the humans called his species—soon tired of the chase.
If they’d been able to finish off the human mech, that would’ve been good, but it wasn’t his priority. They had limited time.
He halted, the powerful suit he wore immediately arresting his momentum, and he shouted, “Stop!” The suit’s voice boomed through the forest, and the mercenaries that Wound could see came to a halt, turning to study him wearing expressions ranging from wonder to shock.
“Let us return,” Wound bellowed, and he began to lope back toward the settlement that he and the human h
ad mostly destroyed with their combat.
Wound was the name he had chosen for himself, after learning from the suit’s translation function about the importance of having a name when communicating with humans. The name referenced his blown-off ear, but it also represented something much deeper.
The suit’s translator is one of its most powerful weapons. Possibly, it was the most powerful. At least, that was what Wound hoped.
Even so, the suit was a technological and military marvel by any measure. Its versatility seemed almost unlimited, and one of the main limits that did exist was Wound’s own imagination.
The suit was capable of morphing to form nearly any weapon he cared to wield, and given enough time, it could manufacture ordnance within itself in preparation for a coming engagement, using materials harvested from Gatherers. It could blast enemies with energy, too, the capacity for which also took some time to recharge.
Most importantly, whoever had built the suit had designed it to detect and amplify the Quatro superconducting ability. It responded to his magnetic nudges by translating them into powerful movements, completely negating the disadvantage Quatro normally experienced aboveground, and instead turning it into an incredible advantage.
The only thing that worried him were the whispers that he’d begun to hear during the quiet moments.
“You are not the humans who attempted to eradicate us from this planet,” Wound said to the mercenaries once they were gathered before him inside the circle of wrecked structures. “You are not the ones who filled our tunnels with fire so that our young could not breathe. Instead, you gave us the weapons we needed to oppose the ones who did that. And you just now aided me in battle against one of the indiscriminate killers of your species.” Wound swung his head so that he took in all the bipeds standing before him. “Why?”
A man who was large for a human stepped forward. His face was broad and red, as though it endured prolonged exposure to the sun on a regular basis. He spread his hands. “We figured, if we could make friends with great big fellas like you, together we could do a lot more damage to Darkstream than we could’ve otherwise. I’m Saul, by the way.”
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