Mech Wars: The Complete Series

by Scott Bartlett

  Before turning the next corner, she checked around it, as she had with every turn so far. At last, she beheld the cliff.

  Only one machine was there, but it was also one of the most fearsome machines Rug had ever encountered.

  It was an Ambler.

  Other than the fifty unarmed Quatro, she also had sixteen with energy weapons and fifteen with human guns. Rug felt reasonably confident she could take the cliff from the colossus. It would entail significant loss of life—possibly half her force or more.

  But there was no other choice.

  She sent the message of what she had seen back to the Alex Quatro, who were evenly dispersed throughout the force behind her, so that they could quickly disseminate to the others whatever news she gave them over their communicators.

  Once her companions had been given time to steel themselves, there was nothing for it but to emerge.

  Beyond the path she now exited, there was an expanse of perhaps one hundred and fifty meters until the plateau terminated at the cliff. That would afford their force space to arrange itself into some sort of attack formation, but Rug doubted they would have much time to do so. The Ambler would likely notice them forming up in short order.

  Nevertheless, she crept from the path as quietly as she could, taking care to disturb no loose rocks as she padded across the ground, keeping as far from the Ambler as possible while giving those behind her room to emerge and begin arranging themselves.

  Twenty Quatro—only three of them bearing energy weapons—had emerged when the Ambler finally turned, instantly opening fire with the heavy guns mounted on both its sides.

  Though Amblers possessed the same ability to morph that the Gatherers did, they used it less, and certain components seemed essentially permanent, such as the long, heavy guns it now used to send streams of lead into Quatro flesh.

  The seventeen unarmed Quatro who’d made it onto the plateau charged, with the four in front quickly falling to the Ambler’s fire.

  The felled Quatro crashed to their bellies, and Rug saw one Quatro’s head glance off a sharp-looking rock. It pained her to see a mighty warrior lose his dignity in this way.

  Rug opened fire herself, sending bolts of white light toward the Ambler’s dome, where she assumed its “mind” resided—if indeed it had one. Either way, the dome offered the biggest target, and her efforts didn’t take long to earn her the attention of the machine.

  The Ambler turned lasers on her, and Rug immediately fled the spot she’d been standing, though heat had already begun to build up on top of her head, imparting an instant headache. A moment longer, and the temperature would have likely caused her skull to rupture.

  The other two Alex Quatro opened fire on the enemy, granting Rug covering fire, and more armed Quatro now emerged onto the plateau to join in.

  Perhaps this will go better than I’d assumed.

  The mech seemed unable to focus on any one target long enough to neutralize it—the Quatro were succeeding in fragmenting its attention and preventing it from doing significant damage.

  Then, one of her companions called out, and Rug recognized his voice as the one who’d imprisoned Lisa Sato and Tessa Notaras: “Look beyond, at the opposite cliff!”

  Rug looked from Salve—which was the name the drift leader had chosen for himself—to the far cliff.

  On it, two more Amblers pounded toward the edge.

  Then, incredibly, they leapt into empty air.

  Rug thought they must surely plummet to their doom—until rockets sprouted from their undersides, carrying them to the cliff where the Quatro fought. Both mechs crashed to their feet, flanking the Ambler already there and causing the ground to tremble.

  Rug had never before heard of Amblers having that capability.

  “Rug?” Lisa Sato’s voice said, sounding alarmed. “Did I just see what I thought I saw?”

  But there was no time for a response. A promising engagement had just become a losing one.

  Rug surged forward to do what she could to help her fellow Quatro.

  Chapter 50

  Locked in Combat

  Marco had seen Roach impale Ash, and he’d caught glimpses of Beth’s attempts to protect her from the swarming robots.

  But there’d been nothing he could do to help. He and Henrietta had been working together to engage one of the quads, to prevent it from killing more Darkstream soldiers.

  Even that was getting a lot less of his attention than it deserved, since it took almost everything he had to keep the smaller robots from shredding his mech.

  But when Marco saw Roach advancing on the hill where Beth carried on her desperate struggle to keep the robots from ravaging Ash’s mech, he knew he had to do something.

  So he charged, through the battling soldiers and robots, battering aside any enemy that got in his way while weaving around or leaping over friendlies.

  “Spirit, where are you going?” Henrietta said, frustration giving her voice an edge. “We’re making progress against this thing!”

  They hadn’t been, but Marco wasn’t about to contradict her right now. “If Roach reaches that hill, both Steam and Paste are done. Paste already has her hands full with the robots.”

  When he saw that Roach was going to reach his target no matter how fast Marco ran, he sent two rockets streaming across the battlefield at the alien mech.

  One missed, though it chanced to take out one of the smaller robots—and the other hit. It caused Roach to stagger a step, and then he whipped around to see who’d attacked him.

  It worked…I got his attention!

  But soon, Marco began to feel his gambit had worked a little too well. Roach dashed toward him, arms taking the form of broadswords, just as they had at the beginning of the battle.

  Aware that if he hesitated at all, he was lost, Marco extended both his bayonets and charged as well.

  As they neared each other, Roach positioned himself for an obvious thrust. So obvious, in fact, that Marco expected a feint, but he readied himself to parry it just in case Roach followed through.

  Roach did follow through, and Marco raised his blade to intercept. It didn’t go as planned. At the last second, Roach’s broadsword had become a massive, metal fist, which shattered Marco’s bayonet and connected with his chest, knocking him to the ground with shocking force.

  Staring up at the sky, mentally shaking himself, he tried to get up.

  That didn’t work, either. Roach stepped forward, planting a heavy foot on Marco’s chest while bringing his arms together. Those arms melded, sending tendrils into each other to intertwine and twist around to become a single, gigantic energy cannon angled at Marco’s head.

  Lightning crackled inside that cannon.

  “Say goodnight, Gonzalez,” Roach said, and his voice sounded like that of the damned.

  Something streaked out of the sky, the angle of its approach vector changing rapidly until it was almost parallel with the ground.

  Just before it would have collided with the ground, it collided with Roach instead, knocking the alien mech off of Marco and sending it skidding, leaving deep furrows in the hard-packed earth to mark its passage.

  Marco managed to regain his feet, and when he looked in the direction Roach had been carried, he saw that Roach’s mech was locked in combat with its identical twin.

  Chapter 51

  Balance of Power

  Jake slammed into Roach, driving him off of Marco—just in the nick of time, from the looks of it.

  To avoid killing everyone on the battlefield, with the possible exception of the mechs, he’d devoted some effort to arresting the momentum he’d gathered from his atmospheric reentry.

  Even so, he’d hit Roach with a lot of force, which carried them both several dozen meters across the ground.

  Roach was beneath him, luckily, and it was his mech that took the brunt of the damage.

  Part of Roach’s mech slapped the ground, presumably in an attempt to slow their momentum, though the effect was that Jak
e tumbled forward instead, with Roach flipping around behind him and both of them rolling end over end, still locked together.

  Finally, Roach managed to regain his feet, separating himself from Jake, though their forward motion caused them to skid several more meters. For a few seconds, they “surfed” over the hard-packed dirt.

  As they slowed, Jake stepped forward and delivered a haymaker to the base of Roach’s throat, causing him to stagger backward, clutching at it with his right hand.

  He seemed surprised by the force Jake was capable of bringing to bear—equivalent to the power Roach himself wielded.

  “Not used to that, are you?” Jake asked.

  “Who…who are you?”

  “I’m the one who gave you that mech, you asshole.”

  Jake strode forward, converting his left hand into a heavy machine gun and firing at Roach’s head over and over at point-blank range.

  His former chief’s response was to sidestep rapidly, clearly angling himself to strike Jake’s back.

  Jake let him complete the maneuver—and the moment Roach was in position, he repeated the trick he’d discovered in the Belt, inverting so that he faced backward without having to turn around.

  The maneuver appeared to shock Roach, and the instant of hesitation made the hook Jake landed on his jaw all the more effective.

  Roach stumbled backward once again. “Price,” he spat, as though the name was a flea that had flown into his mouth.

  “Good guess. You know, when I picked you up from your sickbed and carried you across Valhalla like a baby, to be born again inside that mech, I didn’t expect this.”

  The other mech shook its head slowly. “You…” Roach said, trailing off for a moment. “You truly don’t understand what’s happening here?”

  Ignoring the question, Jake took the fact that they’d stopped to chat as an opportunity to turn his left arm into an energy cannon and blast Roach’s head off.

  At least, he tried. Roach sidestepped once again, and the energy glanced off his head, causing it to jerk violently but doing no significant damage.

  Either way, it seemed to piss him off, since next, Roach tried to tackle him. Jake met the charge head-on, and they grappled for several moments without either one of them making any headway. They were virtually matched in strength.

  But perhaps not in skill.

  “The whispers…don’t they call to you?” Roach asked.

  That took Jake aback, and his shock was the window Roach needed to alter their engagement. He twisted forward, breaking Jake’s grasp in order to deliver a savage headbutt.

  This time, it was Jake’s turn to stagger backward as he struggled to keep his feet under him. Roach ran forward to try to capitalize on the loss of balance, but Jake’s arms became twin autocannons to send fragments of himself screaming toward Roach.

  That, it seemed, was a mistake, as Roach merely absorbed the fragments, adding their mass to his own. Jake quickly stopped firing.

  “The whispers should have explained to you the truth,” Roach said as he took one inexorable step after another, his fists clenched, fingers writhing against each other. “They must call to you. The suit must whisper to you.”

  “It does,” Jake said. “I’m just not stupid enough to actually listen.”

  It wasn’t nearly that simple, of course, but the taunt had the desired effect of enraging Roach further, causing him to lose all restraint and charge at Jake with abandon.

  Jake ran to meet him, but he dropped to the ground at the last second, sliding feet-first in an attempt to trip his enemy. To supplement the effort, he shifted his mass to make the alien mech more wedge-shaped, hoping to send Roach flying through the air so he could shoot him on the way down.

  But Roach was transforming too—into a wheel with serrated edges, which ran over Jake, severing his right arm from his torso.

  Flipping onto his stomach, Jake scrambled toward the limb, desperate to rejoin it with the rest of his body.

  But Roach had assumed a humanoid form once more, and his foot connected with Jake’s chin, sending him flipping backward, recoiling in pain.

  He recovered just in time to watch Roach pick up the arm and hold it against his chest, where tendrils snaked out to embrace it. Within seconds, it had been absorbed into the alien mech.

  Chapter 52

  Full Potential

  After Roach absorbed Jake’s right arm into his chest, the battle became more challenging for him.

  His actual arm was fine, of course—it was still attached to his body, anyway, inside the torso of his massive mech. But that wouldn’t mean much if Roach killed him.

  I don’t see why I can’t simply regrow the arm.

  Indeed, as he focused on the jagged stump where his mech’s arm had been, he felt an itching sensation within the mech dream.

  But Roach wasn’t about to wait around while Jake regenerated a limb. He was that much larger, now, and he swung a fist at Jake that was shaped like a hammer.

  Dancing backward neutered the attack somewhat, but Roach still struck a glancing blow on Jake’s chest.

  His arm continued to sprout from his shoulder, though it was a thin, weak-looking thing, and it seemed it would take forever for it to regain its musculature.

  How was Roach able to incorporate my arm so quickly? Jake commanded his left arm to become an autocannon, afraid that an energy gun would detract too much from the regeneration process. The autocannon should hold him off for a bit…

  The dream flashed scarlet—just before one of the quads tackled him from behind, knocking him onto the ground and pinning him there.

  The insects that had haunted Jake back in Hub returned, then, digging into his flesh with more vigor than ever before. The single, grating violin note returned as well.

  Let us join as one, the alien mech whispered to him. Only then will you be granted full command of your abilities.

  “No,” Jake grunted, and four pillars shot out of his body and into the ground, jostling the Quatro mech enough to allow him to roll onto his back and place his autocannon against its underside.

  He fired, and the rounds sank into the quad’s belly.

  The Quatro spun away, emitting a strangled roar. It seemed Jake might have actually gotten a shot through to the beast inside. He didn’t know how he’d managed it, but the thing certainly seemed rattled.

  His arm had continued to grow, and now he told his other arm to become a long, thin blade, with which he was determined to lay open the quad who’d attacked him.

  The other quad charged, then—but this time, Jake was ready. He sidestepped the alien, jamming his left arm backward as he went so that it tore through the thing’s armor.

  Rapidly, he reformed the autocannon, intent on sending high-velocity rounds into the rift he’d made—

  Roach tackled him, then, and they flew through the air to land on the ground. Straddling Jake, Roach gripped him by the neck, pulled him upward, then punched him so that his head slammed back into the hard-packed dirt. Roach repeated the act once. Twice.

  I can’t take on all three of them at once.

  The whispers answered immediately, this time: You can. You are better than them, and once you are on equal footing, you will tear them apart. Let us join as one.

  This time, Roach’s fist sprouted spikes before crashing into Jake’s face. Metal fragments flew, reminding him of the Ravagers who’d torn apart his face back in the Belt.

  He couldn’t find the purchase to throw Roach off, or to wriggle out from under him. His adversary was larger than him, now, and it seemed absorbing the arm had lent him more power, too.

  Let us join as one, the alien mech whispered.

  Almost, Jake did it. The only alternative seemed to be death, for him and his friends.

  Okay. I’ll…

  The dream seemed to sing in anticipation, and a second note joined the lone violin note, to create a hauntingly beautiful harmony. Roach’s fist slammed into Jake’s head again.

  But then
he remembered Sue Anne’s gaunt face, staring up at him from her deathbed, holding his gaze riveted.

  Remember me, Jake. Remember me, fighting to live despite how badly I wanted to die. I want you to remember how much you owe me. How deeply in debt you are to me—a debt you can never, ever repay, except by continuing to resist that voice, forever.

  “I deny you!” Jake yelled, and his voice boomed over the battlefield. “I deny you!”

  With that, his right arm surged from his shoulder, metal sinews and tendons wrapping around it to lend it the mass it once had.

  Jake used the regrown arm to grip Roach by the neck, and with a titanic effort, he slammed his adversary to the ground beside him, flipping over to become the one straddling Roach.

  His left hand morphed, becoming an energy cannon, and he allowed the energy to build up for several seconds while Roach attempted to buck him off. Almost, the former chief succeeded.

  Too late.

  The cannon unleashed a broad, white-hot bar at point-blank range, taking Roach’s head clean off. Where it had been remained only a melted stump.

  One of the Quatro charged Jake, then, trying to take advantage of his diverted attention, but his newly formed right arm became a lance, which flickered like lightning toward the quad’s chest, biting through the metal.

  Judging from the way the enemy mech slumped to the ground, the lance had found the Quatro inside. Jake rose to his full height to face the remaining quad, but it turned to sprint toward the horizon as fast as it could.

  A ragged cheer rose up from what beleaguered Darkstream soldiers were left over from the battle.

  The cheer abruptly fell off into shocked silence, and Jake turned to find Roach’s headless mech rising to its feet, both arms rapidly becoming energy cannons.

  Incredible.

  Jake turned his own energy gun into an autocannon, which took less time than forming weapons from scratch, as Roach was doing.