The doors opened, parting slowly, majestically.
Gabe stepped forward into the opening. He considered warning them about what would happen to the outer doors if they refused to open them, but he decided it was probably already pretty obvious.
Inside the dream, the alien mech muttered again, and this time, Gabe could make out the words: Is our union that which nullifies?
“Yes,” he answered as the outer doors drew apart to reveal the inky blackness of space. “I believe it is.”
He jumped.
Chapter 34
Try Something Else
“They didn’t just know you were still training the militia because we successfully defeated the prisoner uprising,” Tessa said, glancing around the Dusty Bucket, where they were on their second drink. “They’ve been monitoring our lucid sessions—I’m sure of it.”
Lisa nodded, still unable to believe that she no longer viewed this sort of talk as borderline insane.
It’s all so crazy. Everything.
But she remembered the man she’d seen in one of their simulations. Plus, Laudano had seemed to wait for the perfect moment to spring on her the fact he knew she was still working with her militia.
What else is he keeping in his back pocket, to use against me when he has need of manipulating me again?
“What do you suggest?” she asked Tessa.
“Well, we need to talk, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the streets themselves are bugged. The alleyways, too.” Tessa nodded at the bar behind Lisa, her long white hair swaying forward. “Darkstream definitely has this place bugged. Imagine the intel they’d collect from listening in on conversations here.”
“So, what? Do we go outside Habitat 2?”
“No. Radio communications can easily be intercepted. We need to reenter lucid, just the two of us, and hash this thing out. We just need to put the proper security measures in place first.”
For that, they went to Bob O’Toole, who, conveniently, was sitting on his customary stool at the bar.
“You have need of me, m’ladies?” O’Toole asked, his words coming out slurred.
“Need of your friends, more like,” Lisa said, adopting the usual stern expression she used with O’Toole. The man had proved himself useful, but she still understood the need to keep him at arm’s length. “We need a way to disguise net traffic between mine and Tessa’s implant, maybe reroute it somehow.”
“I don’t know what most of that means, but I’ll put in a good word for you to one of my nerds. Should I have them meet you somewhere?”
“My place,” Tessa said. “And send a female, O’Toole.”
As they made their way to Tessa’s modest house, Lisa said, “If they’re monitoring our communications as closely as we think they are, isn’t it likely they just overheard that conversation?”
Tessa nodded. “Possible. But it’s a gamble we need to take. They can’t process all communications at all times. Probably they’ll get around to listening to it eventually, but by then we’ll have had our secret conversation, hopefully. And to prosecute us after the fact, they’d have to admit to spying.”
Soon, with the help of a woman named Stacey Quick, they were inside lucid, in a realm that Quick assured them was secure.
“Okay,” Lisa said, her hands folded on a table that Quick had graciously provided them with. “I assume you want to discuss preparations for dealing with Daybreak?”
“I do. And I can only assume that you’re ready to start developing a defense plan that doesn’t involve Darkstream. Because if you aren’t, you can expect to lose Habitat 2. It wasn’t a coincidence that the company operatives were all out ‘scouting the terrain’ while the prisoners got loose. I’d go as far to say that I bet Laudano furnished them with the keycard, or delegated someone else to do it, so he didn’t have to get his hands dirty.”
“What do you think they were really doing out on Alex, then?”
“If I were to bet? Looking for Rug and the others.”
That sent a shiver through Lisa. “Thank God they didn’t find them.”
“Indeed.”
“Well, I’ve seen enough to start thinking it’s far likelier that you’re right about Darkstream than wrong. I trust your judgment, Tessa.”
“You didn’t trust it enough. Not until now. If you had, we’d be better prepared for this.”
Lisa pressed her lips together. “You’re right,” she said at last. “I apologize.”
“It’s…fine,” Tessa said slowly, with a small shake of her head. “You haven’t seen what I’ve witnessed Darkstream do. You don’t know the extent of what they’re capable of.”
“What did you see, Tessa? What did you witness them do?”
“Hopefully I can tell you, one day. But that day is not yet here.”
Lisa studied the older woman’s face—the deep lines that crisscrossed it. Worry lines, stress lines. “You’re afraid of Darkstream, aren’t you, Tessa?”
“Yes,” Tessa said, without hesitation. “You should be, too.”
Lisa nodded, and then she sighed. “Unfortunately, I don’t think Habitat 2 can be saved.”
That seemed to give Tessa pause, and the white-haired woman blinked. “We have to try.”
“I agree…that we should try. But I’ve been giving this a lot of thought, and as much as it kills me to say it…I think we should try something else.”
Chapter 35
All the Cards
Everyone in Landing Bay Alpha had overheard Jake’s conversation with Chief Roach before the man had jumped to the planet below.
It would have been impossible not to. Jake had been shouting, and Roach…well, Roach’s voice had seemed to shake the entire station.
It was also incredibly easy to piece together that Jake was responsible for transporting Chief Roach to the alien mech and placing him inside it. The security footage was all there, in addition to the conversation overheard by the flight deck crew. Commander Stevens had seen him wheeling Roach through Alpha Quadrant.
His insubordinate act could be pinned to him in at least three different ways. He supposed he’d hoped that this would end up being one of those insubordinate acts that turned out for the best, and for which everyone praised him.
I didn’t expect Roach to behave like he did.
So it didn’t surprise him when Captain Bronson summoned him to his office.
“Seaman Price,” the captain said from behind an enormous mahogany desk. “Take a seat.”
That did surprise him, a little. Jake hadn’t expected to be permitted to sit.
“How are you, son?” Bronson asked. “A bit shaken up, I expect?”
“A bit, sir.”
“Completely understandable. But you’ll be back to normal soon. I need you to be, anyway.”
“Uh…yes, sir,” Jake said cautiously, unsure about when Bronson would begin outlining all of the consequences he’d face.
Bronson sighed, lacing his fingers behind his head and leaning back in his reclining chair. “You know, son, until very recently, Eresos was a tremendous growth market for Darkstream. The renewed Quatro threat were driving contracts like crazy, making them multiply magically. They doubled over an extremely short time—tripled, even! Not only that, the rates we were able to negotiate went way up. It was a bonanza, Price. And now, with these quads, as you call them, and Red Company allying with the Quatro…” Bronson shook his head. “Can you see the problem, son?”
“Uh, yes, sir. The people of Eresos are starting to see us as weak. We can’t hide how we were forced by the quads to abandon the surface. And with the quads as their allies, Red Company can start extorting massive fees, for protection.”
“That’s very perceptive, son. Very perceptive.”
“Well…Marco broke it down for me, mostly, sir.”
“Ah. Then I must say, it takes character to give credit where it’s due, especially when you don’t have to. You pilot your mech like a pro, Price. That’s all Darkstream has ever needed fro
m you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Anyway. What I’m getting at is that Darkstream is very keen to stabilize the situation on Eresos, to decisively neuter this new threat posed by the quads, and to get back to a place of growth. We’re hoping Chief Roach will help with that effort, and not hinder it, inside that new alien monstrosity of his. Hopefully he won’t end up getting himself killed, like Zimmerman did. But he’s a wild card, now, and we can’t factor him into our plans, so we’ll put him out of mind for now.”
Jake coughed into his curled fist. “Um, sir…you do know that I’m the one who carried Chief Roach to R&D, right?”
“Yes, yes. But I’d assumed he ordered you to do it. Did he not?”
“Well, yes, sir.”
“Then you were only following orders. If anyone did something wrong, it was Roach, not you. True, he deprived us of the ability to continue studying the thing—we’d only just begun to learn its secrets—but that’s not your fault.”
Jake nodded slowly. The fact that Bronson was taking it so easy on him made him suspect the man needed him for something, and so it was simpler not to discipline him.
I wonder if Bronson knows how transparent he is. Probably, it didn’t matter either way. Bronson held all the authority, all the cards. Any maneuvering from him now was likely meant to ensure Jake followed orders as enthusiastically as possible.
Bronson was smiling at him, in a way Jake assumed the man thought was comforting, but the silence was getting a bit awkward in its length.
“I’ll do what I can to resolve the situation on Eresos, sir,” Jake said at last.
“Eresos? Oh, you’re not going back down to Eresos, son.”
“I-I’m not?”
“No, no. You’re going back to the Belt.”
Another silence ensued, but Jake broke this one a lot sooner than the first: “The Belt, sir?” He cleared his throat. So, he was being disciplined for taking the chief to the alien mech after all. A jolt of fear ran through his body at the thought that he was about to lose his place on Oneiri Team.
Nodding, Bronson said, “Your father just found another mech encased in a comet. Only difference is that this one has activated, and it’s currently attempting to escape. Who knows what it’ll do once it succeeds. Your father has backed away from it, but we still don’t know what these things are truly capable of, and so we aren’t going to take any chances. You’re coming with me, in the Javelin, and together we’ll either take it in or neutralize it if we can’t.”
This time, Jake’s fear manifested as a ball of ice in the pit of his stomach rather than a jolt through his body.
Dad.
Peter Price was in danger—possibly, everyone living in the Belt was in danger.
“I’m in, sir. When do we leave?”
“Right now.” Bronson stood up, his grin widening, which Jake found fairly off-putting. “Follow me.”
Chapter 36
Oxygen
Lisa stood with her fellow Darkstream operatives on the roof of Habitat 2 when the Daybreak force rolled up.
Before the battle, Quentin Cooper had requested parlay with Laudano, who stood near the edge of Habitat 2’s roof, in plain sight. As agreed beforehand, Cooper also stood in full view, so that both commanders were taking on equal risk.
Upon Cooper’s first appearance, Lisa had instructed her implant to zoom in to confirm his identity through his faceplate, just as she was sure her colleagues had as well.
At least, I hope they did.
Cooper’s force had approached from the west—the same direction Lisa, Andy, Tessa, and the Quatro had approached during their attack, months ago.
As for the composition of Cooper’s force, it seemed Leonardo Fiore had been telling the truth. Between the reinforcements he’d gained from his contacts in Habitat 1, along with the forces he must have had hidden in Alex’s wilderness, away from the major supply routes, Cooper had two hundred soldiers under his command, as well as eight beetles, all of which had been modified for war.
As far as the weaponry wielded by Cooper’s people went, Lisa spotted at least four rocket launchers, plus a smattering of sniper rifles, shotguns, and plenty of assault rifles, though those wouldn’t prove very useful unless Daybreak managed to penetrate Habitat 2.
Which Lisa fully expected they would.
An intelligent defense would have rooftop snipers picking off Cooper’s rocket launcher-bearing soldiers first, followed by as many snipers as Laudano could manage to neutralize. Meanwhile, Lisa would have had Darkstream’s own rocket launchers targeting the beetles, before they did too much damage to the structure of Habitat 2.
But Lisa wasn’t confident Laudano intended to conduct an intelligent defense.
Cooper spoke first, over the wide channel they’d decided on for their parlay: “You can’t win, Commander.” Lisa was reminded of a play put on by school children, which she’d seen back in the Belt, right before she’d left to work for Darkstream. They’d been reenacting a battle from the Milky Way’s First Galactic War, if she recalled correctly. “My forces are too great,” Cooper went on. “We intend to blow open Habitat 2 and retake it for our own.”
“Just try it,” Laudano said, and his acting came across as a little more natural.
Even so, Lisa could see it for what it was, now: acting, and bad acting at that. Now that she’d come around to Tessa’s way of thinking, the truth seemed glaringly obvious to her, shining brightly from behind everything Laudano said or did.
“I’ll give you one chance to leave Habitat 2 without losing any of your people,” Cooper said. “Take it, or die.”
“We’ll never let you oppress the people of this city again,” Laudano said. “Get ready for war, Cooper.”
“Very well,” Cooper said, turning to walk toward the valley, to where it had been agreed all of the Daybreak forces would return before the battle began.
Then, predictably, Cooper broke his word. He leapt behind one of the beetles and gave the order to start firing.
His soldiers moved behind the vehicles, too, also taking cover there, while Cooper’s snipers fired on the Darkstream soldiers on Habitat 2’s roof.
For their part, the Darkstream combat operatives scrambled for cover of their own, Commander Laudano included.
Laudano let this happen. It’s all so transparent.
Indeed, the battle was unfolding exactly as Tessa had predicted.
Keeping an eye on the Darkstream soldiers nearest her, Lisa crept quietly backward, toward the nearest rooftop airlock, where she intended to take a freight elevator back down into the city.
The beetles started firing, then, and before Lisa managed to reach the freight elevator, she heard over a wide channel: “They’ve blown a hole in the side of the habitat!”
The panic Lisa heard in the soldier’s voice sounded genuine.
Maybe the lower-ranking soldiers aren’t in on it.
That seemed likely, now that she thought about it. If it had been otherwise, the chances would have been much greater of Laudano’s plan leaking.
It also meant that innocent men and women would die today. But that had been inevitable no matter what happened.
Lisa reached the airlock, palming the controls, her stomach tense as she waited for the outer doors to open. When they did, she crept inside, slapping the biometric scanner once again to close the outer doors and then to open the inner ones.
At last, she was alone inside the elevator. As it descended, another message came—this time, from the elevator’s overhead speaker. That meant it was being broadcast throughout all of Habitat 2.
It was Laudano: “The habitat has been breached. All residents, go directly to your homes, seal the entrance, and activate emergency life support until the situation is resolved. I repeat, all residents, go directly to your homes.”
The elevator doors opened onto the streets of Habitat 2, which had already descended into chaos, with residents scrambling through the streets as the oxygen they breathed was su
cked out of the city by the breach.
Lisa kept her pressure suit on. She headed for the Dusty Bucket.
Chapter 37
Billy’s Bunker
When the other inhabitants of River Rock saw the cloud rising up over the Barrens, they called it just another dust storm—a fixture of life on the border between Eresos’ wetlands and the Barrens, where one became the other with an abruptness you rarely would have seen back on Old Earth.
“Nope,” Billy Overton said, his thumbs tucked behind his belt. “That’s no dust storm.” He’d seen plenty of those during his sixty-five years, and this wasn’t one.
Dust storms came in like giant, puffy clouds rising up from the ground. This dust-up was narrower, high, and sharp.
“Those are machines coming,” Billy said out loud, though no one had stuck around to hear him say it. As usual. “Big ones. And fast.” The others had already decided that the oncoming formation was a dust storm, though, so now they were in dust-storm mode. “Sure hope they’re friendly, those machines. Else the rest of you’s in for a mighty surprise. Ah, yes.”
Billy didn’t plan on sticking around to gauge the friendliness of the machines for himself. Instead, he meant to head for the bunker he’d paid Darkstream to install for him, right underneath his front yard.
You never knew when you might need a bug-out shelter in your front yard when you lived on a planet populated by giant aliens who could snap your shins clean in two with a single munch. Especially when your town council was too cheap to sign a security contract, not even with those ragtag mercenaries that had set up shop recently.
Billy Overton never needed much of an excuse to hunker down in his shelter. Sometimes, he even went down there if he wanted to pretend he wasn’t home, like when that insufferable Sable Hawthorne came calling. The others were used to him heading for it, so even if they noticed he was doing so now, that wouldn’t serve them as a tip-off of approaching danger, either.
“Tried to warn you,” Billy said to himself as he ambled toward his property, which he was already only a stone’s throw away from. He knew they thought of him as the old man who cried wolf, and they considered his version of crying wolf to be hunkering down in that shelter of his.
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