Simeon groaned. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
The ceiling was continuing to fall, the whole structure rumbling. It felt like the entire complex was beginning to collapse.
The decking began falling away out in front of us, into a bottomless hole in the ground. Realizing we only had one chance, I dropped the Spence mech down and then activated the jump-jets under our metallic feet.
WHOOSH!
The compressed gas launched us up into the air just as the flooring disappeared under us. We were able to latch a metal hand around a metal beam that had partially fallen from the ceiling.
We swung from beam to beam and eventually pulled ourselves up onto the upper floor of the outpost, which was still in one piece.
Mindful that the complex was collapsing, we danced back in the direction we’d originally come from, silhouetted by the white light that was continuing to build.
I kept my eyes focused on the path ahead, trying to block out the shockwaves that gripped the structure.
A sound built behind us.
I couldn’t see anything, but I reckoned from the sound that the upper floor was now also falling away behind us.
The hole that the other operators had blown through the outpost’s outer wall was visible up ahead.
“PUNCH IT, DANNY!” Jezzy screamed.
Our engine redlined as we crashed forward, the hole in the wall coming up fast when—
The ground fell away beneath us.
I cried out and slotted the controls.
Our metal arms ratcheted out and the right one snagged the edge of the outpost wall, a section of metal directly beneath the hole in the floor.
We dangled there by our metal fingers, spinning so that we could see that the entire outpost was indeed crumbling away, falling down into a black pit that had been carved into the ground that lay between the lake and the rocky outcropping.
The pillar of white light was melting the outpost’s super-structure along with the surrounding ice and soil.
In seconds, the entire thing would vanish down into the massive hole in the ground.
I turned back and caught sight of the other mech operators. Billy and Dru reached out and grabbed us and Ren and Sato and Baila grabbed them. Everyone pulled at once, wrenching us free from the outpost.
We fell forward against Billy’s and Dru’s mech.
“Where the hell were you?” Billy asked.
“Long story,” I said.
“Where’s Sim?” Dru asked.
“He’s in here with us,” Jezzy answered.
A groaning sound filled the air and the lake began quaking as we pushed out onto the ice where the other operators, the ones from the other countries were standing in a circle. All around them were the bodies of dead alien soldiers and the still-smoking wreckage of the remaining Ocho mechs.
“GET BACK!” I shouted. “THE BOMB’S GOING TO BLOW!”
“There is no bomb,” the female operator with the British accent said.
“There never was,” said the operator with the Chinese accent.
It was at that moment that I felt it.
A powerful pulse of energy shooting up from the lake, radiating throughout the Spence mech.
“Get back,” I whispered to myself. Then louder: “GET BACK! TAKE COVER! THE OUTPOST IS SINKING!”
I looked up as what was left of the outpost shook violently and then disappeared down into the pit in the ground that lay at the edge of the lake. This was followed by a low thunder that rumbled down from the somewhere beyond the wreckage of the outpost. It was coming from the top of the rocky outcropping.
Powering up my viewfinder I could see movement.
The ice and snow at the top of the rocky outcropping had been jarred loose by the destruction of the alien outpost. I could see that the immense sheets of ice had shattered apart like glass and were sweeping down the hillside.
“What the hell is going on?” Jezzy asked.
“Ever seen an avalanche before?”
“No,” she answered.
“Well, you’re about to.”
“RUN!” Simeon screamed.
The Spence mech pivoted and we followed the other operators on a dead run across the ice.
It wasn’t an easy path forward.
We jumped over holes in the lake and weaved around the wreckage of the battle, dodging the smoking remains of the Ocho mechs and hurtling the still-steaming bodies of the fallen alien soldiers.
“IT’S CLOSING ON US!” Jezzy screamed.
You might be wondering what kind of sound an approaching avalanche makes.
Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s one of the most terrifying noises you’ll ever hear.
I’d experienced dozens of structure fires during my years on the run after the aliens came, and I can tell you a big fire is a vengeful thing. It eats and breathes, and makes this eerie mewling note when it’s shooting through the tight quarters of a building, hunting for its next oxygen fix.
An avalanche is a lot like that.
It goes wherever the hell it wants to, howling like the damned, destroying everything in its path and it makes the same horrible sound a fire does … times a thousand.
I scanned the viewscreen and saw the tsunami of icy debris nipping at our heels.
We were almost on the other side of the lake when we were buffeted by a dizzying energy wave from the edge of the avalanche.
The kinetic energy from the snowslide mercifully propelled us forward until we’d been tossed clear of the slide.
We skidded forward across the ice and came to a stop next to the other operators, looking back at the debris left by the avalanche and the pillar of light from what was once the alien outpost. The light continued to spiral up into the sky.
I could hear the others breathing over the commlink, but nobody said anything for several moments. “If that wasn’t a bomb,” I finally whispered, “then what was it?”
More silence, and then the operator with the Russian accent said, “That was a distress signal. That is why we were sent here. To make sure that it was not activated.”
Shit.
If that was the plan, then we’d screwed the pooch.
More troubling was the question of if that was indeed a distress signal, then who the hell was Alpha Timbo trying to contact?
I looked back at Jezzy and I could read her mind.
“I know what you’re going to say, Jezz, and I don’t know. I don’t know what the hell is going on.”
That was completely true of course.
I didn’t have the faintest clue what was happening.
But whatever it was, my gut told me it wasn’t good.
* * *
The End Of Book Two
Thanks for picking up a copy of the second book in the series. If you liked what you read, please leave a review on Amazon and check out book 3 “THE WORLD OVER,” which will be available in March, 2018.
* * *
**THERE’S A SAMPLE CHAPTER FROM BOOK 3 AT THE END OF THIS BOOK**
Author Notes
Just like in the movies, the only way to keep a series going is usually to find a way to ramp up the action and conflict. If Book 1 represented the (relative) calm before the storm, then Book 2 finds Danny tossed out of the frying pan and into the fire. Not only is he forced to fight the rogue aliens and their mechs in the desert and out on the ice, but he also begins to uncover (with Dexter’s help) some mysterious facts that might alter his perception of Vidmark and the Icarus Project. If that wasn’t enough, Danny also finds himself in a bit of a love triangle between Baila and Jezzy, and discovers that the aliens, at the end of Book 2, have sent out a distress signal … requesting backup from some unknown extraterrestrial force. All of the conflict is building to a resolution in Book 3 that will find Danny struggling to survive against a number of enemies, both human and alien (old and new), including some that he previously considered friends. Thanks in advance for reading Book1 and sticking around for Book 1 – I’m
working hard to make sure that all of the conflict and action pays off in a big way in Book 3!
Chapter One (Book 3 – “The World Over”)
You don’t send angels to do the devil’s work.
That’s the first thing I thought as I looked out at the mech operators from the other countries. We’d just managed to evade an avalanche and were lying scattered across the frozen lake, exterior lights on, facing each other.
The foreign mechs were different than ours. For starters, they were bigger and badder and somehow … more intimidating. Where our turrets were mostly rounded, theirs had an unusual octagon-like shape. Our machines were quilted with armor, but theirs were slabbed with thick ballistic plates, and studded with all manner of cannons and tubes that likely housed a wide variety of rockets and missiles. The legs on their mechs differed as well, shaped more like giant turnips, wide at the top, narrow at the bottom. I assumed this was to carry the weight of the armor and weapons systems, but it made me think that if our machines were like marathon runners, mostly long and lean, then theirs, especially when it came to the mechanical legs, more closely resembled sprinters.
Even in the semi-darkness I could see that the exteriors of their turrets were dented and fire-blackened, decorated with writing in foreign languages, and painted red slash marks (which I imagined represented enemy “kills”), along with what looked like bleached alien bodyparts that dangled from wires below the cannons and rocket launchers like wind chimes. I’d seen a documentary on a band of Southwestern scalp hunters back in the 1800s who used to ride their horses with bridles woven from human hair, the saddles decorated with bones and teeth. They were led by two men, one named Glanton and the other Holden, and were called a “Legion of Horribles,” and the “Scourge of God,” by those unlucky enough to come into contact with them. Sitting there, staring at them, I thought the foreign mechs looked an awful lot like those scalp hunters, a twenty-first century raiding party.
All of the mechs slowly rose to their feet and we stood in a circle in silence for several seconds, steam rising up from our fighting machines, the air still heavy with the snow and ice from the avalanche.
I was on edge because the scene resembled one of those Mexican standoffs from an old-time movie, the ones where somebody accidentally fires their gun and everyone winds up dead.
“That was one helluva ride,” Billy said, breaking the silence. “Who wants to go again?”
Silence greeted him.
The largest of the foreign mechs, the black one with a death’s head skull
painted on the side of the turret, stepped to us. A bulky white guy sat behind the controls. He rotated his turret from left to right, as if struggling to size each of us up.
“That was one fucked-up fire mission,” the white guy in the black mech said. His heavy Russian accent immediately let us know that was the foreign operator named Vadim.
“The job was accomplished,” Ren said.
“The hell it was,” replied Charlene, the foreign operator with the English accent. She was seated inside a silver mech with a large peace symbol painted on the turret in yellow. “This was a snatch and grab operation, not a barn burner. You blew up the target and brought a goddamn mountain down on us.”
“Look, baby girl,” Billy replied, “I love snatch just as much as the next guy, but we had orders to dust that outpost and prevent the scuds from escaping.”
“Your orders were in error then,” said Wang Wei, the foreign operator with the Chinese accent. He was behind the controls of a mech that had an enormous metal sickle pinned to the side by magnets. “The aliens were never trying to escape.”
“They came here for a very specific purpose,” said Amir, the last foreign operator who was snugged inside a mech with an unusually small cockpit that was surrounded by twice as many cannons as we had on the Spence mech.
“How the hell do you know that?” Billy asked.
“Because we are professionals,” Amir replied in heavily-accented English.
“That’s what you say,” Billy shot back.
“We are the ones talking so of course it is what we say,” Vadim offered.
“Enough of the bullshit,” Simeon snapped. “Sound off.”
“Vadim Kadyrov, Captain in the Strategic Mechanized Forces of the Special Operations Forces Command, operator in the Third Great Patriotic War.”
“Are you the one that shot that glider down?” I asked.
“Da, yes,” Vadim said in his thick accent.
“Well, hot damn and alright,” Dru said. “Turns out the Russians are good for something besides interfering in elections.”
Vadim muttered something that I assumed to be a Russian expletive as Simeon leaned into the commlink and tried to ease the tension. I was surprised to see him morph into the peace maker, but that’s what he did. He thanked Vadim for taking down the glider, then sounded off. The rest of us followed, introducing ourselves as the other foreign operators, Wang Wei, Charlene Strummer, and Amir Hosseini, did the same.
“We tried raising you before,” Baila said. “But nobody responded.”
“Who in their right mind would try to hail somebody on the surface of a glacier, sweetheart?” Charlene replied. “The bugs were listening the entire time.”
“They are still out there,” Wang Wei said.
“Bullshit,” Billy said. “You saw what we did back there. We huffed and we puffed and we blew the scuds’ house down.”
“ALL LIGHTS OFF! NOW!” Vadim shouted.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because … they are watching.”
“Who the hell is watching—”
“EMCON!” Wang Wei said, which I knew was resistance slang for radio silence.
I powered off the Spence mech’s exterior light and flipped off the commlink. Seated in silence with Simeon and Jezzy, I peered out through the cockpit glass. The wind had picked up and the way the blizzard’s heavy snow was falling at an angle made it seem as if we were trapped inside a snow globe. I checked the viewscreen, but I didn’t see any movement and so I worked to hail Richter, but still couldn’t raise him.
“You see anything?” I asked Simeon.
“Nada,” Simeon said.
“Maybe it’s a game they’re playing,” I replied.
“Then what do you call that?” said Jezzy, thrusting up a hand, pointing. I followed her line of sight outside where something was visible in the distance.
Some … things.
Shadowy forms that were pulling themselves out of the avalanche debris.
I looked back to the viewscreen, but whatever was out there wasn’t showing up on it.
“Whatever that is, it’s either got adaptive camouflage or it’s covered in deflecting paint and it’s coming this way,” Simeon said. “More scud leave-behinds probably.”
“Those things just don’t got no quit in ‘em,” Dru said.
Jezzy sighed. “Why can’t they just give up?”
“Because they still consider this their planet,” I replied.
“Which makes us what? Their galactic bitches?” she asked.
I nodded and Simeon reached over and flipped the commlink back on as we listened to the sound of the others breathing. Then somebody tapped twice on their commlink which was a signal that we could converse again.
“What are they?” I whispered.
“The things that come in the snow,” Vadim answered. “‘Ghost Dancers.’”
Simeon leaned into the commlink. “‘Ghost Dancers?’ That’s the best you can come up with?”
“Names are govno,” Vadim said. “Bullshit. The only thing that matters is what they can do.”
“You have seen them before?” Sato asked.
“Da. Twice. In Chiri Yurt in Chechnya—”
“And Gorgan in Golestan Province,” Amir added. “Both of those places were resistance outposts … until they came.”
“And then?” Dru asked.
“They ceased to be,” Vadim said.
�
��Then we need to beat our feet,” Billy said.
“We cannot outrun them,” Vadim said. “The only hope is to lure them into a trap.”
“One problem, ace,” Dru said. “We don’t got any bait.”
The foreign operators chuckled. “No, you do not understand,” Vadim said. “We are the bait.”
I watched Vadim’s turret rotate to face a section of icy hillocks in the distance. Scanning the viewscreen, I could from the red coloring on the map that the area under the hillocks appeared unstable, likely cored by glacial streams. Vadim muttered a series of coordinates which matched the land in and around the hillocks.
“We go there,” the Russian said.
“That ice can’t hold us,” Billy said. “Any fool can see it’s shot through by the meltwater.”
“You are missing the point,” Vadim said.
“Help me with your point,” Billy replied.
“The most dangerous place on the glacier is also the safest place,” Vadim said.
“That’s some bullshit,” Billy answered. “And I ain’t going.”
“That choice is yours to make. You can either stay here and die like a bitch, or follow me and fight like a hero,” Vadim said.
And with that, Vadim’s powerful mech bolted forward followed by the other foreign operators, their mechs combat-running across the ice, lasering over the lake toward the hillocks.
My gaze ratcheted over to Simeon and then back to Jezzy.
“I guess … last one’s a rotten egg,” she said.
I grabbed the controls and throttled the Spence mech’s engine.
We jolted off across the ice followed by the other operators, running away from whatever alien creatures were emerging from the avalanche detritus.
We still couldn’t use any exterior lights, however, so we navigated by the mech’s night-vision, Simeon and Jezzy calling out obstacles and weak spots in the ice that I maneuvered around or jumped over. The other mechs continued their torrid pace, running out well ahead of us. I juiced our engines and the Spence mech slingshot forward, falling behind everyone else, the path forward partially obscured by the falling snow.
World of Hurt Page 22
