Powered (Mech Wars Book 1)

by Scott Bartlett

  “How about Oneiri?” she said. “Since we’re going with the whole Greek mythology thing, with MIMAS…the Oneiri were gods that ruled over dreams and nightmares. It’s especially fitting, considering the way we interface with—”

  “It does fit,” Gabe said. “And no one’s come up with anything better. I’m good with it. Any objections?”

  No one objected, so Oneiri Team it was.

  And the following day, Oneiri would find out what it was really made of.

  Chapter 31

  Taken

  With their limited oxygen, Andy only inflated the central area of their habitat, and all three of them spent the night in there, attempting to sleep on the cramped, air-filled seats.

  Before they’d entered, he’d sent one of their ten flares into the sky. They’d all watched as the red beacon rose up, sparkling beautifully against Alex’s darkening sky. Then it extinguished, and Lisa sighed.

  They got up before dawn the next day—they tried to spend as little time inside the habitat as possible, to maximize their walking time.

  It was laughable to think they could get anywhere near the space station. Laughable to think anyone would notice them, little specks that they were amidst the vast alien wilderness.

  Andy sent up another flare as they got underway, and this time, no one bothered to watch it.

  Eighteen years didn’t seem long enough to get to spend in the universe. Sure, she knew some babies died during birth—pretty rare, these days, but it did happen.

  Still, she felt like she’d gotten just a small taste of life, and now it was about to be snatched away, in what would probably be one of the most excruciating ways possible. Starvation or suffocation.

  Take your pick.

  The sun still hadn’t risen, and Alex was freezing. Her HUD told her the air around her was very, very cold: thirty degrees Celsius below zero. They’d set their suits to the minimum requirements for survival, and Lisa’s breath came out as fog.

  “See that?” Andy said.

  “What?”

  “Something moved, on that ridge over there, to our left.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Lisa saw Tessa unlimbering her pistols from their holsters. She followed the example, unslinging her assault rifle and holding it at the ready.

  “Look to our right,” the older woman said. “About two o’clock. Don’t be obvious about it.”

  Lisa did. A dark shape stood against the sky, atop a second ridge. At first, she’d assumed their assailants from Habitat 2 had returned to finish the job, but that thought evaporated as quickly as it had taken shape.

  This thing, it…it looked like a monster.

  A powerful force seized her from behind, separating her gun from her hands at the same time. Amazed, she watched the SL-17 hover in midair, attached to nothing.

  Then, whatever gripped her slowly turned her around, and she saw that nothing actually held her, either. An invisible force manipulated her, just as it did her rifle.

  There was something standing behind her, however, and it was very visible. It was a quadruped, and it wore a sleek, form-fitting blue pressure suit.

  Through its faceplate, its species was undeniable, though it made about as much sense as the force that held her.

  This was a Quatro.

  Quatro weren’t supposed to be on Alex.

  With that thought, everything went dark.

  Chapter 32

  Subterranean Ship

  When Lisa woke, she was still being transported by the bizarre, unseen force, the toes of her boots scraping along the rocky ground.

  Dim light came from a single incandescent strip that ran along the ceiling of what seemed to be a rocky underground tunnel.

  The bluish hue of the poorly illuminated tunnel walls told her she was still on Alex, which didn’t surprise her. Then again, after getting hoisted along by an unseen power, she wasn’t sure she’d have been surprised by discovering she’d left the planet, either.

  An oppressive sense of helplessness set in, and she began to breathe rapidly, black spots swimming in front of her eyes.

  You’re okay, she told herself. You’re not hurt. You’re okay. But she couldn’t unclench her jaw.

  Ahead, the backside of a pressure suit-clad Quatro filled most of her vision, but when the tunnel curved, Lisa glimpsed Tessa ahead of it, suspended in the air in a similar manner, her boots dragging on the tunnel floor.

  Those boots moved, attempting to scrabble for purchase, but with the futility of a titmouse attempting to defend itself against a lion.

  “Tessa,” Lisa subvocalized.

  “That’s ma’am, to you,” Tessa said.

  When an implant user subvocalized, his or her voice was rendered in a neutral tone, though it usually came pretty close to how the speaker actually sounded. Even despite the supposed neutrality, Lisa knew that Tessa had meant her words to come across as clipped.

  “Ma’am. Have they hurt you?”

  “No. You?”

  “I’m fine. Where’s Andy?”

  “He’s being carried by the beast ahead of me.”

  A sigh escaped Lisa’s lips, which she realized the subvocalization probably would have transmitted.

  “That’s good,” she said, glad her tone would come across as somewhat disinterested to Tessa. “Have you ever heard of Quatro being on Alex before?”

  “No. Never. It’s as bizarre to me as the way they’re managing to heave us along this tunnel like helpless babes. These aren’t just any Quatro, apparently. They’re mystical, magical Quatro.”

  “Somehow, I doubt that’s an improvement.”

  “Me too. Though, we’ll probably end up just as dead.”

  A comforting thought. “Did you pass out, too?”

  “No. I gather you did, since you weren’t answering me, earlier. Must have been from shock. If it was something they did to you, they’d have done it to me, too.”

  Their situation was doubly bizarre. As Lisa remembered an ancient author once writing, any sufficiently advanced technology was almost always indistinguishable from magic.

  Of course, that was providing this unseen force was due to a technological advancement the Quatro had made, and not…something else.

  What seemed even more mystical—and certainly not the exciting, fun ‘mystical’ of old fantasy novels—was how the hell the Quatro were here in the first place.

  “The Quatro are supposed to be primitive. Aren’t they?”

  “That’s what we’ve always assumed,” Tessa said. “The ones on Eresos have never shown any sign of using even basic technology. The first Darkstream combatants that encountered them classified them as just highly advanced predators, with cognition on the level of dolphins. And look how the dolphin ended up.”

  Lisa vaguely remembered that losing the dolphins had been looked on as a great tragedy, and that it had also heralded the ultimate destruction of Earth.

  Most people who’d come to Steele with Darkstream considered that sacrifice more or less worth it. Earth had been the price paid for humanity’s mighty corporations to expand into the stars.

  She took the fact that she was thinking about dolphins right now to mean she would do anything to distract herself from how terrifying it felt, to be this helpless.

  The tunnel ended in what turned out to be an airlock installed right into the rock. It opened, and the Quatro brought them inside. Once the airlock finished oxygenating, it admitted them into what looked a lot like the interior of a spaceship.

  Not any human spaceship, though. It was huge, for one—huge enough to accommodate the Quatro, who were larger than the largest horses of Old Earth. And whereas most ships built by the UHF and Darkstream had an austere, gunmetal aesthetic, vibrant colors filled this one. Yellow, red, green, blue, purple—the royal purple of Quatro—they all swirled together, or fit together in elaborate geometric patterns.

  Even the floor provided a canvas for the art, and Lisa was calmed slightly by the fact that these Quatro, whatever t
heir true nature, were capable of producing such beauty.

  She soon came to suspect, however, that the art was not meant to impress them, or indeed meant for them at all.

  The ship seemed fairly old, actually, and in a general state of disrepair, with intermittent flaky patches amidst the artwork, as well as worrying cracks in the bulkhead.

  A hatch slid open at the Quatro’s approach, squealing with age, and Lisa and her companions were deposited inside a chamber that was huge by human standards.

  The same invisible force held them in place until the Quatro withdrew and the hatch closed, leaving no discernible avenue of escape. Only then did the force release them.

  Their HUDs told them the air was breathable, and so the trio removed their helmets and took in their surroundings while they attempted to shake the blue dust of Alex out of every pocket, fold, and crevice of their pressure suits and persons.

  “The furniture looks like it would be comfortable, if we were Quatro,” Andy said.

  It was true. Couch-like pieces lined the wall, except they curved into peaks and troughs, like waves—but waves designed to accommodate a quadruped at rest.

  The trio performed a frenetic search of the room, but escape appeared totally out of the question. There was a grated vent near the ceiling, but Lisa had to get on Andy’s shoulders to reach it, and it was firmly sealed. The hatch remained as impenetrable as before, and an ear pressed to its cold surface yielded no sound.

  At the rear of the chamber, an enormous, hanging chair lined with a fine mesh turned out to be surprisingly accommodating, and Lisa climbed up into it, letting her back rest against the net of small, flexible wires.

  She glanced at Tessa, suddenly wary that the white-haired woman was about to make her get up again, to begin a prolonged round of strenuous PT.

  But even Tessa seemed dejected—too dejected to read, apparently, since she didn’t seem to be doing anything with her implant, even though she’d taken advantage of every other spare moment since leaving Habitat 2 to read one of the thousands of books she had loaded onto the device.

  Eventually, Lisa’s eyes drifted closed. She floated away from her bizarre circumstances for a time, and nightmares soon took their place.

  Chapter 33

  Drop

  The space elevator only made one run a day—down during the night, up during the day—and so it was built big; a wide, circular disk with dark-orange walls that bulged outward and a gunmetal ceiling that hung well over the mechs’ heads.

  The elevator climbed up a carbon nanotubes composite ribbon by way of a robotic lifter at its center. The ribbon looked way too thin to Jake, but nevertheless it had done the job of transporting the elevator up and down for the decade and a half since Darkstream had built it, along with the free-electron laser system located inside the depot at the elevator’s bottom.

  The ribbon was anchored by the depot in Ingress’ center, and Valhalla Station, in its geosynchronous orbit, provided the elevator’s counterweight.

  Normally, the elevator went both ways packed full of cargo, stopping for a set period on either end, which was based on Darkstream’s calculation of how long loading and offloading should take.

  Tonight, its only cargo was one of Darkstream’s reserve battalions. This one called itself the Force Multipliers, though Jake wasn’t sure who had come up with that somewhat hokey name. It fit, he supposed—despite being a reserve force, they did have access to some of Darkstream’s best training, hardware, and personnel. They were under the command of Commander Benjamin Clifford.

  I shouldn’t be too hard on them. They’ll play their part. Just so happens we’ll be ten times more effective, at least.

  He expected so, anyway. The fact that Darkstream was sending both Oneiri and the Force Multipliers meant the company considered Ingress very important. Which made sense: not only was it their main gateway to the planet, given the elevator terminated there, but it was one of Eresos’ two major human cities. Losing it would mean losing an essential foothold on the system’s only planet with a breathable atmosphere.

  Oneiri Team didn’t intend to let that happen. And neither did the five armored personnel carriers, three tanks, two mortar teams, fifteen snipers, and four platoons of battle-hardened infantry that comprised the Force Multipliers.

  None of the MIMAS pilots strayed far from their mechs to make small talk with the other soldiers. Probably because they coveted their new war machines, each feeling a certain sense of ownership over their respective mechs, which made sense, given how hard they’d worked to earn the right to pilot them.

  For Jake’s part, he just wanted some peace and quiet, to find focus before his first actual battle.

  His eyes met Gabriel Roach’s, who leaned against his mech’s legs, arms crossed. They exchanged nods.

  Jake had half-expected Roach to pilot the alien mech into battle, but it turned out Darkstream’s board considered that way too dangerous. He’d already taken a tremendous risk by climbing into it in the first place, which they’d forgiven him for since it had led to such a breakthrough in the company’s development of MIMAS mechs.

  But actually taking the thing into battle—they weren’t okay with that. They much preferred him to pilot their mech, whose designers had left out the feature where the mech folded inward to kill its occupant.

  “Ingress will end up much deeper in debt to Darkstream after this,” said Ash, stepping up beside Jake.

  “You figure? Their current contract doesn’t cover siege-busting?”

  “I highly doubt it. I mean, look at the scale of this operation. Also, word is the Quatro have figured out how to disrupt the flow of Gatherers to the city.”

  “Wow, really? We haven’t even been able to do that.”

  “I know. And if Darkstream can manage to fix the Gatherers after the battle…well, they’re going to want expanded resource rights in return, aren’t they? Hell, I’d say signing over those rights is the only way Ingress can afford to pay for all this. The city’s already stretched as thin as it can go.”

  “How do you know all that?”

  Ash met his eyes. “My father was mayor of Northshire. He had friends in almost all of Eresos’ sitting councils.”

  Roach appeared to be subvocalizing with someone over his implant. He held a hand to his ear as he spoke, which a lot of the old-timers did, even though it wasn’t necessary. When he was finished, he locked eyes with Jake.

  “Everyone meet next to Price’s mech,” Roach’s voice said into his ear. “There’s been an update. Double-time.”

  The rest of Oneiri jogged over. “What up?” Richaud said as he neared.

  “Wait till everyone’s here,” Roach said.

  Henrietta was last to arrive. “What’s the word?” she asked. “Let me guess—the other soldiers have started asking for mechs of their own?”

  Roach didn’t even crack a smile. “The Quatro have started to tunnel.”

  “But Ingress’ walls extend down almost two hundred meters, don’t they?” said Marco. “We’ll get down there in plenty of time to stop them.”

  “The Quatro are proficient diggers, and the tunnel entrance was only just spotted by satellite—we don’t know how long they’ve been working on it. They could emerge inside of Ingress any minute. The higher-ups are worried. They don’t think the elevator will make it in time.”

  “So…what’s the solution?” Ash asked.

  “We engage the elevator’s emergency stop. Then Oneiri Team jumps, landing in the hills directly behind the Quatro force. We’ll rain hell on them from the hilltops.”

  “That’s insane,” Jake said. “We haven’t even tested the reentry tech.”

  Roach shrugged. “The physics check out, and the engineers seem confident in their design. We have our orders, Price. I’ve already sent the elevator operator the command to stop.”

  “I told you, Jake,” Ash subvocalized over a two-way channel. “Ingress is too important to Darkstream. They probably see this as a calculated r
isk.”

  I wonder if the calculus would be different if it was their lives on the line.

  The nanoribbon emitted a deep groan, then, and the elevator slowed to a stop.

  “It’s time,” Roach said. “Everyone inside your MIMAS.”

  Chapter 34

  Stars

  The door sprang open without notice, slamming against what Lisa had come to think of as the bulkhead.

  Starting from her sleep, Lisa gasped as the invisible force seized her once more, yanking her from her giant hanging basket and into the corridor.

  As the Quatro spirited the trio through the underground vessel, she noticed something odd: none of the hatches they passed appeared to have opening mechanisms of any kind. That perplexed her for several seconds, distracting her momentarily from her panic, until the explanation dawned on her:

  The Quatro used whatever strange force they wielded to manipulate their ship as well.

  Something else about the ship had become quite apparent to all three of them as they attempted to rest: it was freezing. They were forced to keep their pressure suits on, for fear of hypothermia. It was even colder in here than it was on Alex’s surface at night. Whenever Lisa’s helmet was off, her breath fogged in front of her.

  How can they live in such frigid conditions?

  The Quatro did not seem interested in providing her with that information. Instead, they carried the mystified trio deeper into the ship, until they arrived at a chamber that was much less accommodating than the first one.

  Lisa, Tessa, and Andy were thrust inside, and the hatch squealed shut, as though on rusty hinges.

  “I guess they thought we were too comfortable,” Tessa said, glancing around at their new room.

  “You call that comfort?” Andy said with a terse laugh. “Maybe Lisa was comfortable, after claiming the only piece of furniture remotely hospitable to humans.”

  But Lisa barely registered the jab. Their new accommodations had her attention, and there was something even stranger about them than the rest of the ship.