“Seems like they found us,” the older lady said. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, ma’am. You?”
“I’m fine. Judging by that sound, we’ve lost the habitat. If we hang out in here much longer, we’ll risk getting hit ourselves.”
Lisa pulled on the suit’s gloves and worked on joining them with the sleeves to create an airtight seal. “We can’t go out the airlock—that’s where they’ll expect us to come out. They’ll hit us for sure. Hold on, I’m switching to a wide channel.” She sent her implant the mental command to include Andy in the conversation. “Andy, is there any way to tell which part of the habitat those bullets hit?”
“Yeah, hold on. I can access its sensors via my implant.” A brief pause. “Looks like both tears are between my bubble and yours, Lisa.”
“Okay, so with the airlock between your bubble and Tessa’s, that means we should cut our way out between Tessa’s and mine. That way, we won’t be emerging into someone’s line of fire.” Hopefully.
“Right. I keep a diamond knife sharpened for that purpose—it’s the only thing that will cut through the nanofabric.”
Lisa grabbed her assault rifle from next to her bed, and after a cursory inspection, she joined Tessa and Andy in the habitat’s common area.
“I’m going to miss this place,” Andy said as he began cutting through the exterior with the knife he’d fetched from the central storage compartment.
“Me too,” Lisa said, “especially if it means I have to spend all my time stuffed inside that beetle.”
“I say we take their habitat,” Tessa said, her voice grim.
The opening Andy made let them out near a rock face that ended just above their heads.
“Here.” Tessa thrust one of her pistols into Andy’s hands. “Stay behind the habitat for as long as you can. If you can get a clear shot at one of them, take it. I’m going around the right, to make sure they’re not messing with our beetle. Lisa, can you climb onto this ledge?” She slapped the rock with a gloved hand.
Lisa nodded. “No problem.”
“Circle around, fast as you can, and flank them. Stick to cover as much as possible. Be careful.”
“You too. Let’s move.”
Behind his faceplate, Andy looked white, but he held the pistol steady, which was good.
Lisa clapped him on the shoulder before finding a foothold halfway up the short cliff and hoisting herself on top of it.
She saw the profile of one of their attackers right away, crouched behind a low rock outcropping. To take her shot now, out here in the open, would be suicide. Instead, she ran for a shallow in the ground to the northeast.
Her heart hammered in her chest as she went—she could feel each palpitation. Her eye twitched. This was her first real engagement. Unlike in lucid, if she was successful here, real people would die. And if she wasn’t, then she would.
She made it to the hollow, nestled her SL-17 on the rock, lined up her shot, and took a deep breath, letting it out in an even whoosh to steady her aim. Then she fired.
The burst took her target in his neck and the side of his faceplate, which cracked but didn’t shatter. Even so, the figure collapsed, clutching at his throat, and soon was still.
No one came for Lisa, so he must not have been able to speak to warn his fellows over the radio. Still, the realization that she’d just taken a human life—one that couldn’t be restored by waking up from lucid—it hit her like a bus.
Can’t think about that now.
She clambered out of the hollow, running to take up her target’s position. More gunfire sounded from below, near Tessa’s location, but she ignored it. Tessa had her job to do, and Lisa had hers.
Moving from cover to cover, keeping hidden, she took down two more enemies before coming up on what must have been their beetle, which seemed utterly abandoned.
That’s odd. She would have expected them to keep a close eye on that.
As soon as she thought it, she heard the sound of another beetle start up and then begin to move. It was coming from the shallow valley where she, Tessa, and Andy had set up camp.
“Tessa?” she subvocalized. “What was that?”
“That was our beetle driving away,” Tessa said, cursing. “I tried to stop them, but they had me pinned.”
“They left theirs,” Lisa said. “I’m looking right at it.”
“Ten credits says there’s something wrong with it,” Andy said.
They approached it warily, but soon discovered it truly was abandoned. Once inside, they found that Andy was right.
Ten minutes later, he had the result of a diagnostic scan. “It’s the front-left wheel as well as the front- and middle-right ones,” he said. “We might get a day or two out of them, if we’re lucky. But sooner than later, this beetle’s going to break down.”
“Can you fix it?” Tessa asked.
“I can switch the middle-right wheel with the front-left one. That’s what may give us the day or two, since the middle-right one is in a bit better condition. But there’s no fixing them. Grit got in through the seals, into the bearings, and then when they seized, the friction melted parts of them. After that, the whole mechanism started twisting into scrap, a process that will soon be complete.”
Lisa was still grappling with her emotions after the engagement with the Daybreak goons. She was feeling somewhat shell-shocked, but Tessa was as sharp as ever: “Seems like there would be a failsafe of some kind, Andy. To prevent this from happening.”
But Andy was vigorously shaking his head. “I told you, these beetles weren’t meant to go as fast as we’ve been driving them over Alex’s terrain. This is what happens. Yes, the feedback circuitry on the drive motor should have shut off the wheels when the current increased, but that’s not what happened. Instead, the motor burned out too.”
“That’s why they kept chasing us,” Tessa said. “They had no choice.”
Andy nodded, his hands dancing over the instrument panel, checking a series of readings that he must have been feeding straight to his implant. “The electrolyzer’s working fine, so we won’t run out of oxygen. We can sit in here and breathe the air for as long as we like. Food, however…that’s another issue. Either way, we’re not making it to Habitat 1. We’re not making it anywhere.”
“What about the space elevator?” Lisa managed, struggling to snap herself out of the mental aftermath of the battle. “We could head for that.”
“We passed it almost four weeks ago. This beetle’s good for two days, tops. We’re not going to make it there walking. We can’t carry this beetle’s habitat with us—it’s too heavy—and so even if we tried to walk, we wouldn’t be able to eat. Have to take off the pressure suits for that.”
“Then we have to chase the beetle they stole from us. Take it back.”
“They have no habitat,” Tessa said. “Meaning we won’t catch them outside of it, like they did to us. Getting it back will probably involve damaging it, maybe irreparably.”
“We have to try,” Lisa said. “They’ll be heading back to Habitat 2, right? We can drive after them in that direction. And if we fail, at least we’ll be closer to the elevator than we would have been, once this beetle breaks down. That’ll make it more likely we get spotted and rescued.”
Tessa nodded. “Lisa’s right. It’s our only shot. Get this thing moving, Andy.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Chapter 28
Claustrophobia
When Jorge Delgado saw Ingress’ gleaming metallic walls, he heaved a sigh of relief. Rumors had been flitting around the system net about Quatro sightings near the planet’s second-largest city, but that was also where the only space elevator was located, and he had to continue his supply runs for Darkstream.
Bertha was on his back enough without him skipping out on his job because of the irrational fear that always got play on the net. And Jorge knew she was right to be on his back.
They had three little mouths to feed, and it was bad enoug
h that he hadn’t taken that job on Alex. He got claustrophobic, was all, and he hated the idea of living in cramped spaces for months at a time, maybe years. If he took the Alex job, who knew how often he’d be able to fly across the system to visit his family on Eresos?
Bertha didn’t view the claustrophobia as a good excuse. That was why she kept on his back all the time.
And she’s right to be, darn it. I know she is.
But he hated the idea of those small spaces.
The speeder jerked to the side, suddenly, as though something large had collided with the hover-trailer he towed along behind him. Looking in the side-mirror, he saw that was exactly what had happened.
A Quatro had charged his trailer, and it now ran alongside it, as though angling to do it again.
Suddenly, he felt claustrophobic, even inside his speeder, which he never had before. He was having trouble breathing, but he managed to keep his foot on the accelerator.
Whack. Another Quatro came from the right, barreling right into Jorge’s speeder, which tipped sideways a little before leveling out.
“Oh, no,” he moaned, maxing out the vehicle’s speed, even though he knew the Quatro could keep up if they were motivated enough.
Turned out they were motivated. Not only that, a dozen more Quatro emerged from the trees and out into the Gatherer path ahead.
Looking in the mirror, he saw that maybe two dozen more were amassing in the path behind.
That was when he realized he wouldn’t make it to Ingress today.
The Quatro charged, tipping over his speeder so that it was belly-up. They clawed at the door, which made terrible screeching sounds, and Jorge knew that they were smart enough to get inside, eventually.
I should have taken that job on Alex after all.
Chapter 29
Stranded
“Okay, what are we going to do, Andy? Seriously.”
He glanced back at her from the beetle’s driver seat, brow furrowed, then returned to his study of Alex’s sapphire landscape. “What do you mean, seriously? Do you think I’m joking when I say we’re out of options?”
“No, but it all seems kind of ridiculous, doesn’t it? That there wouldn’t be more safety precautions than this put in place? I mean, this is your job!”
“It is my job, and it’s a dangerous one. I knew that going in. But we aren’t supposed to get attacked by a drug lord’s cronies, and the wheels aren’t supposed to seize up, and we’re supposed to be able to use the satellite link to call for help if we need it!”
“How can our specific signal still be blocked? Even after we switched beetles?”
Tessa chuckled. “I already told you that, girl. Who controls the satellites?”
“Darkstream would not intentionally strand us in the middle of nowhere. Uh, ma’am.”
“They’ve done worse.”
“Like what?”
But Tessa clammed up, like she always did whenever someone asked her that question.
“Is there anything we can do, Andy?” Lisa said. “Anything at all? To keep from dying out here?”
“There is, actually. We’re going to keep driving until the beetle stops.”
“I know that already. What do we do then?”
“We walk.”
“But we can’t carry nearly enough oxygen to get us to the space elevator.”
“Well, we’ll fill up what tanks we have from the electrolyzer, and then I’ll put them in the detachable trolley. I was thinking…we can use the trolley to carry the inflatable habitat, too, so we can at least eat. And we’ll see how far we get. See if someone picks us up.”
“What if no one does?”
Andy sighed. “If it makes you feel any better, Darkstream provides flares we can fire off. See if that helps.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah,” Tessa said. “We’re kind of screwed, girl.”
The training regimen had come to a halt after their beetle was stolen, since as Tessa had remarked, Lisa would need her energy for walking across Alex’s craggy surface.
Still, she could sense that she was nowhere near the level of military prowess that would satisfy Tessa.
And I probably never will be. She didn’t even know whether she was cut out to fight in another engagement. The first one had left her depressed and feeling hollow, in a way that their present misfortune didn’t totally account for.
A whining sound began, loudly at first, but steadily growing softer.
Two minutes later, the beetle rumbled to a halt.
The trio exchanged wordless glances, then they set about gathering together the consumables they’d need to survive in the Alexandrian wilderness for as long as possible.
They left the beetle sitting alone in the blue dust, to become a relic in the middle of Alex’s barren nowhere.
Chapter 30
Oneiri
Jake made the MIMAS pilots, and not only that, he would be among the first eight to ever pilot mechs in human history. Not counting Chief Zimmerman, that was, whose death had been declassified and painted as a tragic act of heroism in service to the advancement of humanity.
For their failure to back up Omega and Alpha squads when they needed them most, Kincaid and his entire squad washed out of the program.
In fact, they were unlikely to ever see combat, though they would have other jobs with the company if they wanted—such as maintenance and repair, supply runs, collecting payment from those Darkstream leased equipment to, or whatever.
Kincaid had complained, loudly, but Jake had no time for it, and neither did Roach or anyone else in Darkstream.
It’s more than fair. If Kincaid had done what Jake had told him to, Jake might not have had to sacrifice himself in order to save Marco. It wasn’t a big deal in the sim, but they’d thought it was real, meaning Kincaid would likely be just as unreliable in real life.
They couldn’t have that. The MIMAS pilots couldn’t have it. And the people of Eresos deserved better.
After graduation from Roach’s program came several weeks of nonstop test runs with the mechs, during which Jake and the others learned the ins and outs of the mechs’ controls along with exactly what they could do.
The extent of the MIMAS mechs’ capabilities astounded even Jake, who’d assumed he’d seen it all during his years of running mech sims in lucid, where features were limited only by the game designers’ imagination.
But he’d been wrong. From the impressive arsenal of the mechs—boasting twin rotary autocannons, a heavy machine gun, rocket launchers, twin flamethrowers with nozzles projecting from the wrists, grenade launchers, and thermal lances—to the ability to use its boosters to launch from a planet’s surface and straight into low orbit, Jake was blown away by everything the mechs could do. He’d expected early models to be sort of underwhelming, but the fact that Darkstream had been working on developing them pretty much since arriving in Steele really shone through.
Flamethrowers had reentered the company’s arsenal only recently. Back in the Milky Way, they had long been banned by widely agreed upon galactic conventions, but of course, Darkstream was no longer subject to those conventions, and the flamethrower was considered an effective tool against Quatro.
Part of Jake railed against the notion of using a weapon that most of his species considered inhumane. Somehow, however, that voice has been turned down to a soft murmur. He suspected that probably had something to do with the constant anti-Quatro messaging they’d been subjected to, and although he was aware of that, it rendered the messaging no less effective.
Ash Sweeney also made the first eight mech pilots, along with Marco Gonzalez, Beth Arkanian, Tommy Tomlinson, Henrietta Jin, Richaud Lafontaine, and Gabriel Roach himself.
“We need a team name,” Roach had said, the day after graduation. “I don’t have a creative bone in my body, but if you want to brainstorm it among yourselves and come up with a half-decent one, please do, before Darkstream labels us with something extra cheesy.”
He’d
stood up, then, and there’d been some more uncomfortable shifting and throat-clearing from the newly graduated mech pilots.
Looking around at them, Roach said, “You aren’t my trainees anymore. I know I put you through absolute hell these last few months, and there’s certain things you may never forgive me for. That’s fine. In fact, I think it’s as it should be. But you all met my standards. All seven of you. You all passed muster, in my eyes. I plan to maintain total authority, of course, but I never want you to forget that you belong on this team. Go into battle with pride, armed with that knowledge, and with everything you’ve learned. You earned this. You made it.”
Battle, it seemed, was coming to them. They learned about the Quatro besieging Ingress a week before they were finished getting trained in on the MIMAS mechs. The aliens were attacking any speeder that attempted to approach the city, and no speeder dared to leave. Since Ingress had Eresos’ only space elevator, and since the planet was the breadbasket of the Steele System, this was a big deal.
A week was also around how long it would take Darkstream to muster the force it deemed necessary to break the siege. So the mech pilots would finish with preparations just in time.
Jake was ready. While he remained skeptical about the way they’d been indoctrinated into hating the Quatro, the aliens were proving that indoctrination right more and more. They weren’t content to live peacefully among themselves, or to leave humanity at peace. Even though there were plenty of resources to go around, the Quatro apparently resented the humans’ presence too much. So they’d struck.
Another shock came when the mech team was shown classified footage of the Quatro using guns to fire on Ingress’ defenders, as well as on civilian speeders. Before, there’d only been jumbled rumors to that effect, but actually watching it happen, watching how the Quatro seemed to operate the guns without even touching them…it was unsettling, to say the least.
The day before they deployed, during one of a long string of tactical meetings, Ash suggested a team name.
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