Cooper’s here, all right. And he knows we’re coming.
Jake’s mech didn’t need the ablative heat shield, parachute, and aerospike thrusters that the MIMAS mechs used for reentry. His biggest challenge involved slowing his descent enough for the others to keep pace.
“Tessa,” he subvocalized. “You keeping up?”
“You know I am, boy.”
“Stay ready to peel away if the heat’s too much. I mean it. If you’re in danger of losing shuttles, let us mop up some of the resistance and then come in after us.”
“All right. But I’m not letting you hog all the fun.”
The other mechs’ ablative heat shields had disintegrated several minutes ago, and as Habitat 1 resolved below, becoming a growing silver mass glinting amidst Alex’s sapphire landscape, their parachutes deployed.
“Be ready to cut your chutes loose and coast in on aerospike,” Jake ordered over the team-wide. “I expect this to get interesting fast.”
“You kidding?” Maura Odell said. “This’ll be just like Habitat 2. Might have a few more dents in my MIMAS to show for it, that’s all. If…”
Odell trailed off as something strange happened with one of the lower hills nearby. The blue surface seemed to peel back, exposing a flat plane underneath lined with white lights.
“What the hell?” Odell said.
“That’s a landing strip.” No sooner than Marco had spoken the words, a fighter jet burst from the opening in the hillside and flung itself into the air. A second one followed hot on its heels, then a third, and a fourth. Soon, a squadron of eight fighters were in the air, spreading out and heading straight for the five mechs.
“Detach your parachutes!” Jake yelled. “Detach your parachutes!”
Chapter 41
The Lie
Lisa charged through the Quatro ship in her MIMAS, following the solid bar of light that Rug had activated for her, which led her up and up along ramped, curving corridors.
She came to a dead end, where the glowing white bar terminated abruptly.
But only for a few seconds. The wall where the light ended rose into the ceiling, and the glowing bar extended for a few meters more.
Lisa dashed forward, and the wall where the dead end had been closed behind her. The one in front of her opened, then, revealing the inky black of space. Out here in the Outer Ring, the stars were the clearest she’d ever seen them. Clearer even than back at Hub.
She threw herself from the ship, twisting as her hands split apart and drew back to rest against her wrists.
There. She fired, picking off a Ravager before it could burrow through the Quatro ship’s hull, which Rug had said was called the Morning Light. Her HUD highlighted a second Ravager for her, making it glow red in her sights, and when she took that one out it showed her a third.
Using the thrusters built into her arms and calves, Lisa soared past the purple hull, fighting the vertigo that tried to twist her stomach into knots.
She encountered a patch of five Ravagers working together to tear a massive hole in the Morning Light.
Whipping the heavy machine gun from her back, Lisa lined up her shot. A short burst across the hull took out three of the Ravagers at once, and the fourth fell just as quickly, but the fifth robot scurried through the hole they’d created and disappeared.
Cursing, Lisa used her calf thrusters to propel her farther along the hull, to deal with the next group.
The heavy machine gun neutralized the Ravagers in less time than her autocannons, and she was able to take out a dozen more in the space of two minutes.
It wasn’t nearly enough. All over the hull, Ravagers were disappearing through the holes they’d made. It would be everything Rug and Arkanian could do to prevent them from tearing the vessel apart from the inside. Lisa knew the Ravagers would have the advantage—whereas her allies would have to obey the layout of the ship, the murderous robots could tear through bulkheads at will, making their way toward vital components in a more or less straight line.
She replaced the heavy gun on her back, deciding she could get more work done by targeting two Ravagers at a time with her autocannons.
The first two went down quickly, but as she lined up her next shots, her vision went snowy, and a frenetic hissing noise blocked out all other sound.
Is something wrong with my sensors? She tried firing her autocannons anyway, but she found that she had no control over them.
Gradually, the snow cleared. Instead of the battle outside the Quatro ship, green fields stretched before her, crisscrossed with roads and fences, and dotted with houses and trees and livestock.
As her eyes followed the terrain to the horizon, she blinked, shaking her head. There was no horizon. The land curved up and away, and…
…and circled back overhead. Up there, there were also houses and trees and cattle—hanging upside-down.
She was in Hub.
But Hub was exactly like she remembered it. Not overrun by Ravagers. Not overrun by anything.
“Lisa,” a warm voice called, and she turned to find Jake, ambling across a field toward her, hands stuck into the pockets of a pair of blue jeans.
“Jake?”
He drew near enough that he had to crane his neck to look at her mech’s face. “Hi.”
“This is Hub, isn’t it? And it’s…it’s okay. It’s just like I remember.”
Jake’s smile widened. “Oh, yeah. I lied to you about the attack. That never actually happened. Kind of ridiculous to think it would, when you think about it.”
“Why would you lie to me about something like that?”
Jake shrugged.
“I don’t love you anymore, Jake,” Lisa said.
He nodded. “Andy will be relieved to hear that.”
Chapter 42
Do Not Think
A Ravager tore into the corridor ahead of her, and Rug barreled toward it, up the gentle incline until she was upon the foe.
A swipe of her mechanized paw was all it took to send it flying into the bulkhead, where it shattered.
The ship sent the closest Ravagers’ locations to her HUD, which then painted a glowing strip over reality that would lead her along the quickest route to the robots.
Rug galloped along that strip for everything she was worth.
When she’d finally boarded her ship, which she and her people had so carefully hidden in the Outer Ring, it had filled her with blissful relief—only to be cut short by the arrival of the Meddlers.
Had the enemy inferred the ship’s existence from the fact that the UHF warships had headed toward it, or had they known about it all along? Neither possibility was comforting, but the latter implied disturbing things about the nature of the Meddlers’ interactions with humanity and the Quatro.
The Meddlers have already taken everything from my people once. I will not allow them to take my ship!
She reached the next group of Ravagers just as they were burrowing through an inner bulkhead. Two of them fell to energy blasts, but a third squeezed through the rent it had created before Rug could take care of it.
No!
Burrowing through that bulkhead would take it near one of her ship’s primary engines. That could not come to pass.
Rug turned and ran back the way she’d come, headed for a corridor closer to the engine, in the hopes of intercepting the metal beast. Her quad’s speed was such that her momentum nearly took her past the required turn, and her left side slammed into the bulkhead as she veered, leaving a shallow dent.
Nothing compared to what the Ravagers are doing to my vessel.
“Beth Arkanian,” Rug subvocalized as she ran. “How are you faring on the starboard side?”
“As well as can be expected,” Arkanian answered, her voice strained. “I think the rate of infiltrations has slowed—the ship’s arsenal must finally be having an effect, now that the ice isn’t blocking it. But, Rug…I think there are too many of them already inside.”
“Do not think,” Rug said as
she caught up with the Ravager who’d been headed toward the engine. She blasted it to bits. “Only help me save my ship.”
They both fell silent as they waged their separate battles against the endless metal marauders. The ship began directing Rug to the Ravagers who were closest to vital systems, and whose trajectories were likely to take them there. It seemed that each Ravager she destroyed had made it closer to a critical ship component than any before it.
Soon, they will dismantle her. And I doubt we’ll have time to effect the necessary repairs.
She rounded a corner to behold five Quatro battling with an equal group of Ravagers. One of the robots tore a wicked gash in the side of the Quatro closest to Rug, and Rug overcame her shock in order to take the bot apart with high-velocity rounds.
“Brothers and sisters!” she yelled. “I did not think the humans would manage to get a shuttle through the onslaught they’re suffering.”
“Three shuttles have made it through,” the wounded Quatro answered. “Two more have docked on the other side of the Morning Light.”
“Then perhaps there is hope for her.”
A transmission came through, then—from Stephanie Yates, captain of the McDougal. Her likeness appeared in the corridor beside Rug.
“I have some bad news for you, uh, Rug,” the captain said, seeming to stumble a little on the name Rug had chosen for herself in order to interact properly with humans.
Somehow, Rug knew what Yates was about to tell her, even thought she’d yet given no indication of it.
Even so, she asked: “What is it?”
“Your friend, Sato…her mech went strangely immobile, and we could do nothing to get in contact with her. A group of Ravagers descended on her.”
“Has Lisa Sato been killed, Stephanie Yates?”
“I don’t know. But she seemed alive when we saw her last. The Ravagers didn’t kill her—they engaged thrusters and took her inside one of the enemy ships.”
Chapter 43
High-Risk
The squadron of fighters sent kinetic impactors screaming into all five mechs, though the MIMAS didn’t weather the storm nearly as well as Jake’s alien mech did.
I need to do something. As he slowed his descent with streams of fire projecting from his calves, he turned his arms into energy cannons that he swept across the aircraft, fragmenting their formation and causing five of the eight jets to peel away.
Three continued on, though, and now Jake was their primary target. They each sent two missiles at him of unknown make, following up with guns.
The fighters started to launch another missile salvo, but Jake was ready for it, having ignored the initial one. He directed his steady stream of energy bolts along a downward diagonal, intersecting with the rightmost jet and exploding one of its missiles as it left the tube. The jet flew straight into the explosion, shearing off one of its wings.
Jake rocketed downward sharply, narrowly evading the first volley of missiles. The five jets that had peeled off were coming around for a pass at the MIMAS mechs, who they’d probably figured out were easier prey.
“They don’t look like any jets I’ve seen,” Marco said. “At least, not any meant for combat inside planetary atmospheres.”
But in this area, at least, Jake’s knowledge exceeded Marco’s. He’d always been fascinated by the history of jet and space fighters, and he knew almost every model that had ever been constructed, all the way back to the Me 262.
To Jake, these fighters looked like F-22 Raptors, but with longer wings and a much more spherical body.
“I think those wings retract,” he mumbled as the wind whipped past him on his way to Alex’s surface.
“Why would they be designed that way?” Marco asked, and Jake blinked. He hadn’t realized that he’d broadcasted his muttering.
Clearing his throat, he said, “To allow them to compete in space.” Clearly, Cooper wasn’t content with dominating only Alex. These space fighters meant he had designs on the entire system, and with Darkstream in decline, that made a lot of sense.
“Target those things with your rockets and be ready to use autocannons to take apart any missiles they send back at you,” Jake said.
They were closing with Habitat 1’s roof, but that brought its own host of challenges. Suddenly, they were within rocket range, and missiles started streaming up from below as well.
He shook his head to clear it, and then he started speaking rapidly, in order to deliver his next orders fast enough to allow time for their execution:
“Change of plans,” he spat. “I want the four of you to aim for spots on the hill where you’ll have plenty of cover. You’ll need to play a stealthy game in order to take out all those armored beetles without getting taken out yourselves.”
“What will you be doing?” Ash asked.
“Taking the roof.”
“All by yourself?”
He took a deep breath. “The alien mech is the only one versatile enough to have a chance. They’ll have twenty clear firing lanes at anything that lands there. I’m calling off the shuttles until we can deal with this mess—there’s no way anything’s getting through, as-is.”
“Okay. Good luck, Clutch.”
“Good luck, Steam. Spirit. Uh…we don’t have nicknames for Odell or Miller yet.”
“Moe for Odell and Hotshot for Miller,” Ash said hastily.
Jake hesitated. “Yeah? Just like that?”
“We tend to lose pilots who don’t have nicknames.”
With that, Jake landed on the roof. He was in the thick of things, and unable to concentrate on anything except survival.
Dozens of assault rifles came alive, peppering him with rounds, but that was the least of his worries. A rocket streamed at him from point-blank range, directly behind him, and then everything happened at once.
The mech dream saw to it that he reacted appropriately on an emotional level—with a stab of panic underscored by the familiar piercing violin note. A piece of him shot from his lower back, detonating the rocket before it traveled more than a few meters and killing the diminutive man who’d fired it.
After that, an area opened up around Jake with a rapidly widening radius, as his enemies quickly learned to give him his distance. Rockets began streaming toward him from every direction, and he had no time to incorporate conscious thought into his reaction.
The input from the visual sensors covering his body fused with the mech dream’s ability to induce instant emotional responses to physical phenomena.
Jake embraced his fear, which screamed at him to favor flight over fight. He twisted left and a rocket sailed underneath his left armpit, while another impacted his right—at least, it would have, if he hadn’t commanded the mech to be elsewhere, bunching into itself, compressing, curling around the rocket’s trajectory so that there was only empty space where it would otherwise have hit him.
Tiny energy rifles projected from various spots on his body, single-use in the sense that they formed solely to shoot down a rocket and then retract inside him once more.
A sniper rifle round connected with the back of his head, causing it to crack forward and inducing an immediate migraine.
He couldn’t afford to take notice of it. Instead, he kept evading missiles; kept ducking and dodging and returning fire at his aggressors whenever he found space to do so.
Five of the seven remaining fighter jets began to fly toward the roof of Habitat 1 for a strafing run, and something inside Jake snapped. He launched himself from the rooftop with a powerful leap, engaging his rockets while firing backward with energy cannons, using his rear sensors to pick off more rooftop targets.
The lead jet sped up, but it couldn’t escape him. Jake widened, long, sinewy arms lengthening to wrap around the jet in a powerful embrace. The frame buckled inward slightly, and Jake engaged his thrusters at full power, at an angle that forced the jet to flip around and spiral toward the ground.
Originally he’d intended to carry the jet back to the rooft
op, to use it as a sort of bomb against those who’d tormented him with their bullets and missiles. The whispers rose up in harmony to encourage the idea.
But doing so would almost certainly cause irreparable damage to Habitat 1, sending its atmosphere whooshing out.
Instead, Jake guided the jet toward the beetle that was farthest from the habitat. He flung the craft toward it, hard enough that there was little the pilot could do to correct its course.
Jet and beetle collided in a spectacular explosion, orange and yellow flames licking the air before Alex’s lack of atmosphere quenched them. Jake rocketed back toward the rooftop.
On his way, he took out a dozen or so soldiers wielding rocket launchers, and that was enough to break the spirit of Quentin Cooper’s criminals. Having seen what the alien mech was capable of, they fled—some of them toward one of the habitat’s two freight elevators, others toward the edge of the roof, where they leapt over the side, likely to suffer injuries and suit breaches when they landed.
“The roof’s clear,” Jake said over the team-wide, more to boost morale than anything else. He ran to the edge of the roof, directing bolts of crackling energy at beetle after beetle while sparing some for the jets overhead. The other Oneiri pilots had succeeded in taking out almost half of the beetles, and with Jake unleashing superior firepower from an elevated position, they made short work of the rest.
Only four jets remained, now—the MIMAS mechs had succeeded in taking out two more while Jake fought on the roof—and the jet pilots seemed to glean the likely outcome of this battle. They abruptly angled themselves upward and began the steady climb toward space, as they were designed to do.
“All right, then,” Jake said. “Good work, Oneiri.”
His implant pinged him with a transmission request, and when he approved it, a voice with a British accent came through. “Jake Price, isn’t it?”
For some reason, the mech dream didn’t simulate a likeness of Cooper—the transmission was audio only. Maybe the man had altered his implant to block the function, somehow. “It is. I assume this is Cooper?”
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