Mech Wars: The Complete Series

by Scott Bartlett

Tessa shook her head. “You need to start putting together the pieces, g…”

  Glancing at her sharply, Lisa said, “You almost called me girl again.”

  Tessa’s mouth formed a thin line. “Look at what’s happened to us, since Daybreak took over the first time. Darkstream’s attempts to reclaim Habitat 2 were basically nonexistent. Out on Alex, we had our system net access blocked, in a way that could only happen if someone powerful was directly targeting us. And now this. I appreciate how loyal you are. I think it’s one of your best traits—I really do. But it’s begun to verge on insanity. You need to wake up.”

  Lisa shook her head. Everything she’d dreamed of, everything she’d worked toward… everything she’d always believed Darkstream stood for.

  Profits, yes, of course—but also security. Everyone in the Steele System benefited from the stable environment the company created. And those that worked hard, who were smart, who acquired enough money because of the genuine contributions to society that they’d made…well, they could afford even more security. They could afford to hire Darkstream military operatives, to protect them from the danger that lurked everywhere.

  Everywhere in the universe, it seems.

  Tessa was calling all of that into question. She was attacking the idea that Darkstream was the force keeping a lid on evil—indeed, she was arguing that Darkstream itself was a source of evil.

  It had Lisa’s stomach in knots as she tried to contend with the idea. Bile crept up her throat, and she forced it down, only for it to surge back up again.

  “Lisa?” Tessa said. “Are you okay?”

  What would my father say? She took a moment to cast her fevered mind back to the Belt, where her father toiled. Part of her believed that he would always be there, toiling eternally, and that she’d be able to visit him any time.

  He would have agreed with Tessa. Without a doubt. Her father had never trusted Darkstream.

  “Seaman Sato,” a voice said, coming through her implant. It was Commander Laudano.

  “Yes, sir?” she said. “Have you and the others returned? I have a lot to report.”

  “I’d say you do. A lot to answer for, too. Get to my office in the Darkstream Constable Station, right now.”

  Chapter 28

  Contract Violation

  “Close the door,” Laudano said once she entered his office, his voice steel.

  She complied, turning to come to attention and salute.

  He took a seat behind his desk, but did not offer for her to sit in one of the three chairs reserved for visitors.

  “Would you like to tell me what happened while I was away?”

  “Certainly, sir. The Daybreak prisoners escaped from their cells. We haven’t been able to ascertain how, yet—as far as we can tell, they somehow accessed the keycards to open them. We managed to stop their incursion. That required killing most of them, but the remaining prisoners are back in jail.”

  “You keep saying we,” Laudano said, his eyes never leaving hers. “What do you mean by we?”

  Lisa cleared her throat. “Uh, I had the help of some of the other residents of Habitat 2.”

  “Yes, clearly, but there was something different about these residents, was there not? They seemed to have a reasonably high level of training in firearms, as well as unit tactics in an urban environment. The sort of training that only a member of a professional military body could have imparted. Do you have any idea how these residents came to benefit from such training, seaman?”

  Lisa’s eyes found the floor. “I trained them, sir.”

  “Of course you did. I knew that already; I just needed to get your confession on record. Are you aware of the consequences of insubordination, Seaman Sato?”

  Whatever you want them to be? “Yes, sir,” she said.

  “I am well within my rights to discharge you dishonorably—and that’s just for insubordination. For violating your contract with Darkstream, which also forbids passing on the training we have given you to others, the company can sue you into oblivion. Either way, your name would be disgraced throughout the Steele System, and your aged father would hang his head in shame, I am sure of that. I told you not to give these residents the gift of military training. By doing so, you have granted them a dangerous weapon, without the sense of duty and honor that is meant to accompany it.”

  But I have emphasized the importance of duty and honor. And most of them didn’t need to be told in the first place.

  It was an argument that Lisa could hold only in her head, however. She was already in deep enough trouble without contradicting Laudano more than she already had.

  “I’m prepared to accept whatever consequences you deem fit, sir,” she said. Though if Laudano actually intended to dishonorably discharge her, she expected he would have done it without all the fanfare.

  Laudano wants something else from me.

  “Yes, I expect you are prepared. But perhaps we can arrive at a situation where there is no need for me to administer any consequences.”

  Here we go.

  “The resource collection from the Gatherers,” Laudano went on, “though it took a sharp dip before and during the battle you fought to retake Habitat 2, has gone way up since then. I’ve been monitoring the reports closely, and it wasn’t a momentary spike caused by a glitch in the machines. No, this is sustained. Do you know why that might be, Seaman?”

  Lisa did know why, and her lip trembled as she struggled with the question of whether she should volunteer the information. No doubt Laudano would extract it anyway, but she didn’t want to betray the Quatro by passing on their secret. That said, Rug had never asked her to conceal it from anyone.

  “You really need to start being more forthcoming with me, Sato,” Laudano said, with a sigh. “Very well. We will walk through it, shall we? To have increased resource collection, you must have increased Gatherer traffic to Habitat 2, meaning you have discovered how to influence the machines somehow. I can only assume your Quatro friends helped you to do so. If you want to escape your dishonorable discharge, you will tell me how this was done. Immediately.”

  Now, it was Lisa’s turn to sigh, much more tremulously than Laudano had. “You have to feed them a very particular amount of a resource they aren’t currently collecting. I don’t know the amounts, but I do know they correspond to deposits scattered throughout the planet. If you feed one just the right amount of terbium, for example, it’ll start harvesting from the corresponding terbium deposit.”

  A smile grew like a cancer across Laudano’s face. “Congratulations, Sato. You have escaped discharge this day. You may return to your duties of patrolling the streets of Habitat 2 and never sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, ever again. Further, if you are caught training civilians anymore, you will find yourself not just discharged, but also incarcerated. Do I make myself clear, Sato?”

  “Clear, sir.”

  “Dismissed, then.”

  Chapter 29

  Significant Deviations

  Since Roach was unable to concentrate on anything other than staggering forward in his battered mech, Jake retained the command, if only in function and not in name.

  He ordered Oneiri Team to stick as close behind him as they could, though he regularly glanced back, to make sure Chief Roach was keeping up.

  In the meantime, he randomized their path as much as he could, in an attempt to throw off pursuers. That said, it was difficult to conceal the passage of seven MIMAS mechs.

  Then they hit the Barrens, and the terrain changed so radically it was as though they’d teleported to another planet.

  During their first trip through this region, on their way to help break the Siege of Plenitos, Jake remembered thinking that if he had to come up with a single word to describe the Barrens, it would have been “vertical.”

  Sheer, craggy cliffs seemed to be their chief characteristic, and his implant had helpfully volunteered the information that the Barrens were known for their frequent volcanic activity; one of the
main reasons very few humans lived here.

  The Gatherers traversed the Barrens just fine, of course. Nothing seemed to ever impede their progress.

  Jake’s mind kept flashing back to the memory of his fellow Darkstream soldiers back in the camp, fighting for their lives, and falling by the dozen.

  We left them. Abandoned them.

  They’d been following orders when they’d done it, but that didn’t change things. Yes, they’d left to keep the MIMAS mechs out of enemy hands. And that was a positive thing, from a strategic perspective.

  It still doesn’t change the fact that we spent the lives of good men and women to accomplish it.

  “Clutch.” It was Ash, subvocalizing over a two-way channel.

  “Yeah, Steam?” he said, too focused on keeping his footing on the uneven landscape to look back at her.

  “The quads…”

  That made him look. Far behind them, appearing as tiny specks on the sere landscape, were the Quatro in the mechs they’d stolen.

  They were gaining ground rapidly. Even as he watched, the tiny specks grew in size.

  “We need to move faster.” Jake looked at Roach. “Sir, we have to speed up.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Roach growled. “I told you to leave me behind.”

  “Sir, we’re operating under the same principle we did outside the walls of Plenitos. If you stay behind, we all stay behind, and then we fight the quads together, probably losing in the process. So if you consider it important strategically to keep the MIMAS mechs from the enemy, I suggest you find a way to speed up.”

  Roach didn’t answer. Instead, his mech did speed up, and because he’d left his transponder on, they all could hear the agonized screaming that accompanied the effort.

  Jake turned back and continued leading Oneiri Team across the Barrens of Eresos. They bounded across ravines, leapt from hilltop to hilltop, and sprinted across brief stretches of flat terrain as fast as they could.

  It didn’t seem to make a difference. The quads still gained steadily, and in the meantime, a sheer cliff rose up in front of Oneiri Team.

  That thing must be two-hundred feet high.

  “You all see that cliff? When we reach it, I want you to jump as high as you can—find a handhold somehow. Use your launch thrusters, if you need to. I can guarantee you that those quads can’t climb as well as we can. It’s the same principle as hiding from a bear in a tree.”

  He’d tried to sound confident, but the fact was that they were still in uncharted territory when it came to exploring the MIMAS mechs’ capabilities. Yes, they knew what the designers claimed they could do, but there’d already been significant deviations between those claims and reality.

  Jake had sent an evac request to Bronson well before they’d entered the Barrens. No shuttles had yet been built large enough to accommodate the mechs, and so escaping a planet quickly involved using the mechs’ rockets to achieve low orbit, to land on a waiting warship.

  Unfortunately, the maneuver required considerable precision, and Bronson wasn’t even in position yet. Once he arrived, Oneiri Team would have to execute the launch on the run from the quads.

  Speaking of the Quatro…

  When he glanced back, he saw that they were hot on Oneiri Team’s heels, a mere fifty meters away.

  Good God. Their speed was unbelievable. Jake turned to run backwards for a while, risking losing his footing on the treacherous terrain. He flashed back to training on Valhalla, when Roach had frequently demanded they run backwards

  Now I know why.

  Jake loosed rockets at the quads in front. Great explosions blossomed on the dry terrain, and the quads did make the effort to evade them, which bought Oneiri a few seconds. But no more than that.

  He continued to fire rockets at whichever Quatro was in the lead. Once his payload was spent, he said, “Steam, use your remaining rockets to do what I just did, and Arkanian, you do the same after Steam is finished. We need more time.”

  One by one, Oneiri Team turned to run backward while firing on the chasing quads, allowing the MIMAS mechs to inch closer to the cliff that was their goal.

  But their rockets ran out with the cliff still a considerable distance away. And the front quad had almost reached the rear MIMAS.

  Jake stopped running. “Keep going!” he barked at the others.

  That was all he had time to say. The quad was upon him, and Jake charged straight into it, both bayonets extended.

  The alien knocked him backward with a shocking abruptness. One instant he was grappling with the quad; the next he lay flat on his back, pinned by the thing, who looked like it was about to savage him.

  A blur of dark-gray and orange streaked toward the alien. It was Ash, using her launch thrusters to tackle the Quatro.

  It worked. The quad rolled sideways, scrabbling for purchase on the sunbaked clay. Ash found her footing faster than the alien did, arresting her momentum and dashing back toward Jake, extending her hand toward him.

  He took it, and she flipped him to his feet. Together, they chased after the rest of Oneiri Team.

  “Surely now we’re even,” Ash said.

  “Not quite,” Jake said.

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. I owe you, now.”

  Chapter 30

  Jump

  The cliff loomed before them, with the Quatro practically nipping at their heels.

  Within the dream, the sky yawned open, revealing a widening scarlet chasm. The ground appeared to steam, and periodically the world flashed blood-red.

  The mech dream was doing everything it could to make sure Jake knew exactly how much danger he was in.

  He didn’t really need the reminder. The power of the quad he’d taken on had astounded him, and he was still reeling from getting slammed into the ground. Med-diagnostics flashed in the upper left of his HUD, informing him that he needed the attention of iatric nanobots as soon as possible, to repair some internal bleeding. It was odd to have to be told by the interface that he was hurt, while he felt every injury to the mech itself as though it were his own.

  I wonder if iatric nanobots will be enough to return Chief Roach to health.

  He’d snuck a glance at Roach’s vitals, just as he was sure the rest of Oneiri had. If he was being honest, it seemed amazing that Roach still lived to operate the mech, let alone remain conscious. The chief wouldn’t have been able to move at all if it wasn’t for the MIMAS carrying him, even if it did run in a bizarre, stuttering fashion.

  At last, they drew close enough to the cliff.

  “Jump!” Jake yelled, and the others needed no further prompting.

  As one, Oneiri Team leapt, their powerful legs carrying them dozens of meters into the air.

  Jake slammed into the cliff face, and his implant simulated the air getting knocked out of his lungs, while he viewed the rock in front of him through a haze of maroon.

  He scrabbled against the cliff side for a handhold, and when he couldn’t find one, he drove his metal fingers into the rock, creating one.

  Meanwhile, a piercing keen cut through the pain, and he realized this was an additional effort by the dream to convey the danger, as well as the damage that had already been done to his machine.

  Well, that’s new. At least the implant was coordinating with his subconscious to keep things fresh inside the dream.

  He took a moment to glance around at his team, making sure everyone had managed to latch onto the cliff.

  Ash had landed just above him, and now she dangled from one hand while scrabbling against the rock to find lodging with the other. Sure hope she doesn’t fall. If she did, she’d come down right on top of him.

  Marco was below him and to his left, and just beyond Marco, Beth clung to the rock.

  Jake looked to his right. There’s Richaud. And Henrietta. For an instant, he wondered where Tommy was, then he remembered with a pang that he was dead.

  Where’s Chief Roach?

  He looked down. Roach had managed
to make the jump, and he’d found purchase on the cliff face, too. But he’d landed far below the rest of Oneiri Team—only around half as high.

  The Quatro had also leapt, and while most of them had failed to cling to the rock, two of them remained on it—both of them on narrow ledges not far below Roach.

  One of them was attempting to claw its way up the rock, long, wicked claws taking shape as they were needed. The quad drove those newly formed claws into the cliff, pulled itself up, then did the same with its other front paw, using its back paws to stabilize itself.

  It would soon reach Roach.

  Captain Bob Bronson appeared beside Jake on the cliff, seeming to stand on nothing.

  “Price. Thought I’d drop by to let you know my destroyer’s in position. Feel free to launch whenever you, uh…whenever you find a good surface to launch from.”

  “Thanks, Captain,” Jake said.

  The quad reached Roach, then, surging upward to swipe at him with a giant paw. It succeeded in knocking Roach’s mech from the cliff, and the chief tumbled toward the ground below.

  Jake released his grip on the rock, pushing himself off slightly to the left as he plummeted.

  A counter appeared along the top-center of his vision, calculating his acceleration due to Eresos’ gravity.

  He ignored it, focusing instead on Roach’s MIMAS. The mech quickly grew larger in the visual feed from Jake’s left foot, which he was patching through to his HUD.

  Jake reached Gabe just before the quads on the ground did. He seized the commander of Oneiri Team, wrapping both arms tightly around Roach’s mech, and he engaged his rockets.

  The two of them launched toward the sky together, while below, the quads came together where Roach had lain.

  Chapter 31

  This Thing Is Moving

  Despite Ellis’s continued jokes, Peter could tell that both he and Noah were on edge since their strange discovery on the last comet they’d worked on.

  Even the jokes themselves were getting more strident and less funny. They were just Ellis’s way of coping, Peter had come to realize, and so he tried to tolerate them as best he could, despite how annoying he found them.