Powered (Mech Wars Book 1)

by Scott Bartlett

  Residents were still getting dragged violently from their homes. Sometimes, that was the source of the gunfire.

  Lisa clamped a hand to her mouth as she watched a bandanna-clad Daybreak goon forcing a man to his knees in front of his home. Casually, the thug drew his pistol and put a bullet in the back of his victim’s head. He walked away, leaving the body to cool in the street.

  As Lisa and Tessa passed the dead man, Lisa glanced down and recognized him. He was Jordan Lee, a councilman. It seemed the gangsters were executing anyone important to Habitat 2’s civil power structure.

  “They’ll face big consequences for this,” she subvocalized to Tessa.

  “Maybe. Cooper’s the kind of man who’ll call any bluff, whether it’s actually a bluff or not. He’s willing to reach for anything he wants, and he leaves it to his adversaries to try and stop him. Normally, they don’t dare.”

  Lisa sent Andy an IM ahead of time, and when they reached him he was ready, opening his door to admit them and closing it just as quickly once they were inside.

  He wore a grim expression as he eyed their weapons briefly, then turned back to the bags he was in the process of stuffing full of clothes and other personal effects.

  “I see you have the same idea we do,” Tessa said, watching the vid feed that showed the street in front of the residence.

  “You got that right,” he said. “Somehow, I doubt I’d keep my position in the new order. I don’t think the gangsters will trust me to do supply runs for them.”

  Lisa scrutinized his expression. “Would you work for them even if they did trust you?”

  Andy paused his packing to meet her gaze, frowning slightly. “Of course not, Lisa.” He continued packing.

  “It’s still possible Darkstream will negotiate with Daybreak for their employees back,” Tessa said, never taking her eyes off the street outside.

  “I’d say it’s likely,” Andy said.

  “Exactly,” Lisa put in. “Because it’s the right thing to do.”

  “No,” he said with a chuckle. “Because if it gets out that they abandoned their employees to live as slaves, they’ll suddenly find the labor market much less accommodating to their needs. Even so, I’m not willing to take any chances. I’m leaving within the hour.”

  “Darkstream will come for their employees, Andy. They will. They’ll do right by us.”

  “Don’t be naive, Lisa.”

  “Screw you.”

  That brought another chuckle. “Spitey as always.”

  “Cut the squabbling, children,” Tessa said, her tone flat. “Andy, how likely are we to secure a beetle?”

  “How good are you with those pistols?”

  “Good enough.”

  “I hope so. Because I’m sure the beetle bays were the first thing Daybreak locked down.”

  Andy finished packing, then slung the enormous, overstuffed duffel bag over his shoulder.

  “The definition of stealth,” Lisa said, quirking an eyebrow at him.

  “Oh, I’m sure you’ll keep me safe,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

  Somehow, they managed to make it to the western beetle bay without drawing unwanted attention. Maybe the gangsters figured no one would be brazen enough to attempt stealing a beetle.

  Tessa drew up beside Lisa. “Can you patch the bay’s vid feed through to my implant?”

  “Uh…yeah. Sure.” The idea of using her Darkstream security clearance to help a confessed criminal didn’t appeal to her very much, but Lisa couldn’t see an alternative.

  After a few seconds of studying the feed, Tessa nodded. “Okay. Open it up, Lisa, and stay out here with Andy.”

  “Are you serious? I can help!” She hefted the SL-17 she’d taken from the basement where Tessa had found her, to help make her point.

  Tessa locked eyes with her. “Stay here with Andy.”

  “Fine,” she said, her voice coming out more sullen than she’d wanted. But she wasn’t about to oppose Tessa when she gave her that look. In fact, she didn’t know of anyone who ever did. Not anyone who’d made it through the experience unharmed, anyway.

  Lisa opened the entrance to the beetle bay, which disappeared upward into its casing. Producing a flashbang, Tessa tossed it inside, then pressed her back to the wall near the entrance.

  Lisa took cover herself, looking away, but she still saw the bright flash of light, and the loud crack reached her ears, amplified by the hollow of the bay. When she looked again, Tessa was already inside, her pistols firing in tandem.

  Five gunshots later, the white-haired former Darkstream soldier emerged, nodding at Lisa and Andy. “Clear.”

  They both followed Tessa into the beetle bay, where four of the awkward-looking vehicles awaited them in a neat grid. There were also five bandanna-wearing thugs sprawled on the ground, each sporting a bullet hole in their skulls.

  “Wow,” Andy said. “Good work.”

  “Just do your job, beetle jockey. Take your pick of these wrecks.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I pick the wreck closest to the exit.”

  “Good choice.”

  Andy had sufficiently high security clearance to open the beetle’s rear hatch, which lowered to become an entrance ramp.

  They strode up it, and Lisa used her clearance to open the wide portal into the airlock.

  Chapter 12

  Accelerate Vengeance

  Gabe hoisted the thermobaric grenade launcher onto his shoulder and dropped to one knee, lining up the arc of his shot with care. He really didn’t want to mess this up. Not with Darkstream troops milling all around the area, making sure no Quatro escaped.

  “Careful, son,” Commander Bob Bronson said, behind him and somewhere to the left. “That’s a fuel-air explosive you’re about to deploy.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve fired them many times before, back in the Bastion Sector. I know the risks.”

  “Good. We want to set the air they’re breathing on fire, not ours,” Bronson said with a chuckle. “Are you ready?”

  I think so. “Yes, sir.”

  “Then fire.”

  Gabe did, angling the launcher upward, bracing for the kickback, and pulling the trigger. The grenade left the launcher’s tube with a whoosh. He watched it arc toward the mouth of the cave system where this group of Quatro had made their home.

  “Right on the money,” Bronson said. “Hit them again.”

  Without warning, everything shifted, and Gabe was inside the caves themselves, among the Quatro.

  He heard the first grenade quietly skitter across the rocks near the cave mouth. Several giant Quatro heads swung toward the sound, gazing warily into the darkness.

  Then came the explosion, rapidly converting the world into flame and death.

  A fiery shockwave tore through cave after cave. Those Quatro closest to the bomb were simply incinerated, while those farther in caught fire, their burning fur reeking.

  The bomb consumed the air for its fuel, in an explosion that never seemed to end.

  Even those farthest from the explosion would suffer countless internal injuries—concussions, burst ear drums, ruptured lungs. Blindness. If any of the Quatro or their pups managed to escape the endless barrage, they would limp away with maladies they’d likely carry for the rest of their lives.

  Gabe bolted upright amidst sweaty, tangled blankets.

  Another nightmare. As it receded, he recalled that his life had also become a nightmare, of sorts.

  Jess. The thought of her made him want to stay inside and weep. But there was work to do.

  The smell of perfume still clung to the sheets he’d shared with her just two nights before. Trying his best to ignore it, he pulled himself out of bed and started getting dressed.

  Yesterday had been a day of searching for survivors and burying the dead. Today would be one for figuring out exactly what had happened during the Quatro attack on Northshire.

  And why.

  To that end, Darkstream was sending a team of analysts down from
Valhalla. If Gabe were to guess, he’d say the team would likely focus on the fact that the Quatro had shown up with guns, when it had always seemed like a given that the aliens couldn't possibly operate technology of any kind, due to the simple facts of their anatomy. Their paws weren’t evolved to grasp anything—case closed. At least, it should have been closed.

  Gabe felt like his skin concealed a vast well of emptiness inside him. Only bitterness could fill that void, if he let it. But he couldn’t. Not yet.

  However they did it, the Quatro have shown their true nature. We haven’t touched them for years, and then they did this to us. Slaughtered the people of Northshire. Took Jess from me forever.

  He’d gotten one night with her. Just one. After months of glances stolen across the oaken dining table, at meals with the mayor and his family. Months of chance meetings on the village green, paired with sly winks and wry remarks from Jess, which had always left him blinking, baffled.

  More importantly, it had left him feeling something. That had always been a rarity, for Gabe. But Jess had managed it.

  No more.

  He’d been such a coward. Their difference in age should have meant nothing to him. He should have cast aside his career the moment they’d met, spirited her away to…somewhere. Anywhere. It shouldn’t have mattered. But it had. And now she was gone.

  Cursing quietly, he left his private quarters and headed down the path into the village, the one he’d walked every day during happier times. Hopefully, he wouldn’t have to walk it for much longer. He wanted to leave Northshire behind and never return.

  At the village green, he found the team of company analysts had already arrived and were inspecting everything there was to inspect.

  “Anything I can do to help?” he asked after walking up to one of them.

  “Secure the perimeter. And try to do a better job of it, this time.”

  It took everything Gabe had not to knock the little weasel to the ground. “I was ordered away,” he growled. “Darkstream ordered me away.”

  “Whatever.”

  Gabe stalked off, his chest rising and falling rapidly with rage. Almost, he turned around to attack the cretin who’d tried to lay Jess’s death at his feet.

  This wasn’t Gabe’s fault. It was the Quatro. It was the Ambler’s who’d attacked Allendale. But it wasn’t his.

  Or is it? a tiny voice asked.

  He decided to check on Seaman Sawyer, who had managed to survive his injuries and was recovering in the infirmary. Doctor Poe even said he might be battleworthy again, after a few months.

  But before Gabe reached the infirmary, a message came in over the system-net, glowing yellow in the upper-right corner of his HUD. He willed it to open, and it did.

  Captain Bob Bronson’s face appeared, hovering over reality. That gave Gabe a start, given how recently he’d seen that face, in his nightmare. And how long it had been since he’d seen it in real life.

  “Roach,” Bronson said. “I have a proposition for you. The company made a strange discovery, out in Kuiper Belt 2. We found a mech, and it’s pretty clear that whoever built the Gatherers also built this thing. It means a huge leap forward in Darkstream’s own attempts to build one, and we expect to have a working model soon. A unit’s worth of them, shortly after that.”

  Bronson grinned. “We have a lot of viable candidates to pilot them, but they’re mostly untrained scrubs who score highly on the relevant lucid leaderboards. We need somebody who can whip them into shape, fast. That somebody’s you, Roach. We know you have the chops for it, and we also know you like being the first to do things. At least, if you’re the same man I remember, you do. This is classified for now, but the public will learn about it soon enough, and we expect having your name attached to the project will make for decent PR.

  “This goes without saying, but the mechs should give us a huge advantage against the Quatro. And it seems like we’ll need that, given how feisty they’ve become. Take a day to think about it, if necessary, but no longer than that. I need to know your answer soon. Bronson out.”

  “Feisty,” Gabe muttered. That was one word for what the Quatro had done.

  He already knew his answer to Bronson’s proposal. He would take the job.

  Vengeance was all he had left, now, and it seemed likely this opportunity would accelerate that cause nicely.

  That was all he needed.

  Chapter 13

  Beetle

  Andy tried to radio Habitat 1 for what seemed to Lisa like the twentieth time. Still no luck.

  He sighed. “Either we’re specifically being locked out of the com satellites, or the entire system-net is down.”

  That brought a grunt from Tessa, who sat in the seat opposite Lisa’s. “I’m not sure which possibility is more alarming right now.”

  “Indeed.”

  Tessa returned to whatever she’d been doing on her implant—reading a book, probably. They’d been fleeing Habitat 2 for two days, but for Lisa, those days had felt like weeks.

  It didn’t help that it also felt like the beetle was crawling. Andy assured her that any pursuers would be traveling just as slowly. If they knew what they were doing, anyway.

  The terrain of Alex would punish the unwary, Andy said, opening a ravine beneath their wheels when they least expected it, or upending them with rocks that looked as though they should have posed no problem.

  Darkstream had plans to eventually terraform the planet, but currently they didn’t have the extra resources to devote to the effort. So for now, Alex would remain as she was. Beautiful but forbidding. Harsh. Blue.

  Everything natural on Alex was mostly the same sapphire hue, and so was the dust that kicked up and clogged suit valves and engines. Even travelers following the strictest protocols would eventually find everything they owned coated in a growing layer of blue dust.

  The beetle boasted a number of tricks for navigating the treacherous landscape. Perhaps the most important feature was its individually articulated wheels, which allowed it to “walk” over rocks that would otherwise impede it. Almost as crucial was the jointed arm mounted in front of the crew cabin, for rolling rocks out of the way.

  They were headed for Habitat 1, which was one of only four permanent habitats Darkstream had established on Alex. It had taxed the system’s economy and industrial base to get just those four up and running, but they more than paid for themselves, now. They had the endlessly toiling Gatherers to thank for that.

  Lisa felt embarrassed at the realization that she’d never taken enough of an interest in the geography of Alex to figure out how far away Habitat 1 was. She vaguely knew that 3 and 4 were well out of reach, and separated from the first two by a gargantuan canyon that stretched across half the planet and was basically impassable.

  But she didn’t have a good idea of how far 1 was from 2. Ever since she’d been assigned to provide security for the businesses and inhabitants of Habitat 2, she’d focused on the particulars of the job, not on the planet that existed outside it.

  Eventually, as much as she hated to admit her ignorance to Andy, she decided to just ask. “How long will it take for us to reach Habitat 1?”

  Andy seemed too focused on navigation to bring his usual snark to bear, thankfully. “I’ve never made the trip. I’ve only gone to the space elevator and back, and that’s roughly equidistant between the two Habitats.”

  “How long does that trip take, then?”

  “Three months, if you’re going at a sane speed. Which we will be.”

  “I’m guessing by ‘sane’ you mean slow as hell.”

  “If you consider our current speed to be slow as hell, then yes. And we can assume the rest of the trip to Habitat 1 will take about as long again.”

  Shaking her head, Lisa said, “Why did they put the elevator so far away?”

  Tessa snorted. “Well, the official explanation for that is the company could only afford to build two of them on Alex, so they put them equidistant between each pair of habitats. But t
hat’s bull. The real reason is so the habitat residents can’t easily mount an offensive on the elevator, should they ever become disgruntled enough with their lot.”

  That brought a short, awkward silence, and Lisa wondered whether Andy found Tessa’s conspiracy theories as off-putting as she did.

  She decided not to engage with Tessa’s paranoia. “Why don’t we just go as far as the elevator?” she asked instead. “We can take that up to orbit and ask Darkstream for help.”

  That made Andy glance back at her. “You seriously don’t know?”

  Lisa suppressed the urge to frown. It wasn’t hard to see that she was about to feel stupid again.

  “What?” she said, her voice small.

  “Darkstream maintains a minimal security presence on the orbital station at the top of the elevator. Definitely not enough to retake Habitat 2, if that’s what you’re hoping. The company only uses it as a pickup point for the resources we produce and a drop-off point for supplies. Us beetle drivers do the dirty work of hauling both back and forth.”

  “So…”

  “So, if we’re going anywhere, it’s all the way to Habitat 1, across the most treacherous terrain humanity has ever willingly subjected itself to. Buckle up.”

  Chapter 14

  Your Favorite Video Game Character

  Captain Bronson invited Jake to the CIC to watch their approach to Valhalla Station. He even let Jake sit in the Captain’s Chair, while Bronson stood off to one side of the main viewscreen, hands curled at his sides.

  Jake accepted both offers, though he kind of felt like he was being treated like a giddy little kid.

  It surprised him that Bronson would let him inside the CIC at all. Overall, protocol seemed fairly lax aboard the Javelin.

  I guess that’s what comes of not having any enemy ships to fight for almost twenty years.

  Those thoughts fled Jake’s mind the moment Bronson ordered his sensors operator to magnify their view of Valhalla Station. His breath caught in his throat, then.