Powered (Mech Wars Book 1)

by Scott Bartlett

“Check out that fountain,” Andy said, pointing. “That Quatro looks ready to tear someone’s head off.”

  Lisa followed his finger to the sound of burbling water. A metal sculpture of a Quatro spewed the liquid from its mouth, into a tiny hole, where it presumably got recycled.

  “I guess they don’t want us dying of thirst,” Tessa said. “Although, what I really want is a slice of cheesecake.”

  “Cheesecake?” Andy said, looking at her strangely.

  “What? It’s just what I’m craving.”

  “Fair enough. I guess.”

  A strange basin projected from the bulkhead across the chamber, directly opposite the Quatro-head fountain. Drawing nearer, Lisa discovered that the bottom was uneven, with a convoluted pattern of dips and swirls. It wasn’t attractive by any measure, and she was sure it had a purpose of some kind, though she couldn’t sort it out.

  Not far from the basin, what was unmistakably a computer console rested inside a hollow.

  As with the rest of the ship, beautiful artwork covered every bulkhead of the room.

  But what seemed most important, for some reason, was the fact that this room reminded her of going lucid.

  She approached a panel in the bulkhead that appeared to depict an alien landscape. It had rolling hills that exhibited a strange symmetry, foreign to nature. Above, twin moons hung in place. The whole scene had a dreamlike, watery aesthetic.

  Lisa knelt in front of the panel, pushing against it.

  Nothing happened.

  “Lisa?” Andy said. He’d ceased chattering with Tessa, and now they both studied her, wearing twin expressions of mild concern. “What are you doing?”

  Lisa tried to slide the panel left, then right. Still nothing.

  Then, she tried to slide it up. As she pressed upward against it with her palms, the panel rose an inch, but fell again when she lost her grip on the smooth surface.

  “Help me lift this.”

  Tessa stepped forward, kneeling beside Lisa, and joining her in attempting to push it up. This time, the panel rose several inches before hitting a barrier inside the bulkhead with a thunk.

  “Come and search underneath it, Andy,” Lisa said, her voice a little strained with the effort of keeping the panel raised.

  “What in Sol for?” Andy said.

  “Get over here, boy,” Tessa barked. It was the first time she’d called him that, though she’d called Lisa “girl” plenty.

  When Tessa spoke like that, people moved, and Andy was no exception. He knelt between them.

  “Don’t drop that thing,” he muttered as he ran his hand over the ledge they’d revealed, as well as over the bulkhead behind the panel. “There’s nothing here.”

  “Try gripping the bottom of the panel and pulling it out,” Lisa said.

  With a sigh, Andy positioned his fingers on the bottom of the panel. “I can’t—” he said, but then he found enough purchase, and the panel lifted away from the wall by barely an inch.

  It was enough. When Lisa and Tessa lowered it, the panel slid from its casing, till Andy dropped it. It came to rest on the deck, still partially locked in the twin runners that held it in place.

  Above, in the space that had been revealed, was a grid with symbols along the left and bottom sides, which corresponded with the various rows and columns. Lisa picked at the edge of the grid with her finger, and it peeled away from the wall with ease.

  When it did, she saw that the grid’s squares were transparent, and so were the symbols themselves. The horizontal and vertical lines, as well as the edges, were opaque and purple—the same shade as the Quatro.

  “Congratulations,” Andy said. “You found a stencil.”

  “It’s not,” Lisa said, her tone level. She poked her finger at one of the squares, and it encountered a barrier. “There’s something there; it’s just see-through.”

  Lisa walked around the room with her discovery, peering through it and ignoring Andy’s ongoing commentary.

  She stopped in front of a mural depicting a starry sky. It had the same dreamlike quality as the panel. “I think it goes with this.”

  Suddenly, five of the stars twinkled, which only strengthened her convictions. When she looked at them with her naked eye, they did nothing, but they twinkled when viewed through the grid.

  “It’s not a painting,” she went on. “It’s a mostly static display, but some of the stars twinkle when you use this.”

  A quick study of the floor revealed a faint black line, and she held the grid directly above it, squinting through it at the stars.

  “Check that console across the room,” she said over her shoulder. “See if the symbols are the same as the ones along this grid.”

  “Do it, boy,” Tessa said, and Andy did. Then he returned to study the grid, recrossing the room once more to stare at the console.

  “They’re the same,” he said at last. “I’m sure of it.”

  “All right. I figured out something, too. I’m pretty sure these symbols are supposed to be numbers. The same ones are in the same order going up as well as across.” After another moment’s study, she said, “There are five rows and five stars. I bet if I go up row by row, describing the symbol of the column each star falls, and you punch them into that console…”

  “What?” Andy said. “We’ll win a prize?”

  “Something will happen. I’m sure of it.”

  Looking back, Lisa saw that Tessa was frowning. “As strange as Quatro on Alex is, this feels even stranger,” the former Darkstream soldier said. “It’s like they’re making us play some weird game.”

  “They’re not making us do anything,” Andy said. “Lisa is. And you’re making me follow her orders.”

  “I rank higher than you, anyway, Andy,” Lisa said.

  “What does that matter, anymore? We’re prisoners.”

  “That’s when it matters most. Now, are you ready to punch in these symbols? The first star falls in a column marked with a sort of crescent moon with a line through it.”

  Andy sighed. “All right. I see it. There.” He punched a button. “What’s next?”

  Lisa continued to describe the symbols, one after another. Andy entered the fifth, and after a few suspenseful seconds, something happened: two slim metal drawers sprang open from the bulkhead next to the panel they’d moved. Both drawers were empty, but before long, Lisa discovered that the bottom one came all the way out.

  She set it on the floor, and was able to reach her arm through the hollow the drawer had left behind, at the back of which she found a metal receptacle, like an extremely narrow drinking cup with a rim that was ridged unevenly along its circumference. Near the bottom, it was circled by a rubber-like black band covered in evenly spaced dots.

  Together, they worked through puzzle after puzzle, almost all of which required plenty of cooperation and communication. The cup allowed them to transport water across the room to the strange basin, and when they filled it up, the water took the shape of three more symbols.

  After several minutes of wondering over that, Andy discovered another panel that could be pulled away from the wall to reveal three concentric wheels covered in symbols. When they lined up the three symbols from the basin, another drawer sprang open nearby.

  Twenty minutes later, after assembling an image from six pieces collected from various hidden compartments around the room, accessed by solving yet more puzzles, an entire wall lifted upward—the one that bore the stars from one of the first puzzles—revealing a long, dark tunnel.

  Lisa looked at Andy, who looked at Tessa.

  “We’re not actually going down there, are we?” Andy said.

  “What else can we do?” Lisa asked, shrugging. Then she took the first step into the tunnel.

  The others followed. Her heart beating a tattoo in her chest, Lisa tried to focus on her exhilaration over her fear. What might their reward be for their work on the puzzles? Assuming there would be a reward, and not a punishment. Every lucid sim she’d ever played h
ad trained her to expect the former, but this wasn’t lucid, was it?

  It would make a lot more sense if it was.

  Without warning, the invisible force seized her once more, followed by three Quatro stepping out of the shadows, piercing lights clicking on behind them to blind her.

  The Quatro dragged the three humans the rest of the way down the tunnel and into the brightness of the rest of the ship.

  After whisking them through a series of corridors, the Quatro deposited them in the first room they’d stayed in—the one with the strange furniture.

  The hatch screeched shut once more, closing with a clang.

  Andy was shaking his head. “What just happened, exactly?”

  “We were played for fools,” Tessa said with a drawn-out sigh. “We just don’t know what kind of fools yet.”

  Chapter 35

  Miscalculation

  Though he’d put on a brave face for his young team—or, possibly, an indifferent face—Gabe wasn’t thrilled about dropping through a wide section of Eresos’ atmosphere using untested technology.

  Well, the tech itself is pretty old. It was using it to send mechs hundreds of kilometers to the ground without killing their occupants that was new.

  The fact that, in order to interface with the mech, he would also technically be asleep…that didn’t help his composure very much.

  He felt a bead of sweat creeping down his forehead, but he refused to wipe it away. It wouldn’t be good to let the team see that.

  Before his stress could show through in other ways, he popped a sedative and placed his hand over the sensor pad on the mech’s calf, long enough for it to read his biometrics. A section of the mech’s backside folded down, becoming a ridged ramp for him to climb.

  The designers had seen an opportunity in the fact that each pilot would go lucid for the entire time they spent inside their mech. In other vehicles meant for battle, it was necessary to allow for some room in the cockpit, to give occupants space to stretch their limbs, shift their weight, and so on. Otherwise, panic-inducing claustrophobia could easily set in.

  Not so with lucid-controlled mechs. The space could be devoted instead to more artillery and more fuel.

  Slipping into lucid, Gabe didn’t just interface with the mech—he became the mech, standing just as tall as it did, and feeling just as powerful.

  He would also feel what it felt. The designers had decided to render damage to the mech as physical pain to the occupant, which was easily accomplished using lucid.

  That had been a controversial decision, and it almost hadn’t happened, except for Gabe’s ardent support for the idea.

  A good soldier knew how to use pain to stay aware—of their situation, and also of their limitations. Plus, the knowledge that actual pain would accompany damage to the mechs would also force the pilots to use them as judiciously as they used their own bodies.

  Which was good, because right now, the mech was Gabe’s body. Its wicked artillery protruded from his metal flesh. And when he stepped toward the space elevator’s opening aperture, toward the widening slice of star-speckled space, it was Gabe’s heavy metal foot that moved.

  Standing on the edge of the platform, looking down on the world, he felt like a god. All-powerful. Invincible.

  He leapt. Which quickly reminded him of his humanity, and the accompanying mortality.

  At first, there was barely any sensation, as he hadn’t entered the atmosphere yet and so there was no air resistance. The planet also didn’t seem to get any closer. He was so high up, it didn’t feel like he was falling at all.

  Then, his ablative heat shield deployed automatically, just before he hit the atmosphere. The shield lowered the temperature to a survivable level by carrying the heat away using convection, but Gabe could see the flames that licked at it, and he felt their heat, too. He was really sweating, now.

  It occurred to him how insane jumping from the elevator had been, without having tested the process first. Darkstream considered it worth it to gamble with their soldiers’ lives in this particular situation, and Gabe hadn’t said a thing about it.

  He’d become just as reckless as the corporation he worked for, apparently. This type of thing never would have gone ahead, back in the UHF.

  Of course, if he’d been in the UHF all this time, he would have been court-martialed several times over for the things he’d done.

  At last, the fires receded, and now wind whipped past his metal frame, threatening to freeze his—well, technically he didn’t have those right now, did he?

  In an attempt to distract himself from Eresos’ surface, which now grew gradually larger, he thought of an old story he’d heard just before leaving the Milky Way, about that pansy Vin Husher, taking a leap down to the surface of the Winger homeworld in nothing but a Darkstream reentry suit.

  Ten credits says he wet himself on the way down. He accepted his own bet, though he wasn’t sure how the logistics of that would work.

  To be fair, in just a suit, Husher would have had a much worse time than Gabe was having now. The drop weight was much lower in a reentry suit, meaning the number of Gs your body was subjected to ratcheted way up.

  Either way, Husher wouldn’t have been able to handle this much machine. Of that, Gabe felt confident.

  “How’s everyone doing?” he subvocalized to his team. “Check in.”

  “Doing fine, sir,” Jake said.

  “As good as can be expected,” said Henrietta.

  One after another, his entire team sounded off. Which only served to distract him for around thirty seconds.

  He thought of Jess, but quickly stopped himself. No need to show up for battle a sobbing wreck.

  Come on, Gabe. This isn’t a big deal. You’ve entrusted yourself to the laws of physics, that’s all. And to Darkstream engineering.

  Which, admittedly, wasn’t always the most dependable.

  There was nothing to get overly excited about. This was only the first mech space jump performed in history.

  Probably this was a very, very stupid idea.

  His mech’s heat shield had dissolved, and now Eresos’ landscape expanded below him, its details growing sharper and sharper. Before long, a parachute would deploy, designed to disengage well before landing. After that, aerospike thrusters would take him the rest of the way.

  He spotted Ingress below, surrounded on all sides by teeming masses of indistinct purple dots. As those dots grew larger, they became vaguely recognizable as Quatro.

  “Sir?” It was Ash.

  “Yeah?” he croaked, his voice coming out mangled. He cleared his throat. “Yeah?” he repeated, more confidently.

  “Are you sure we calculated our entry angle correctly?”

  Gabe blinked, trying to clear his head. He studied the ground. To do this, he didn’t need to tilt the mech’s head down—the machine had sensors all over, and it fed their data to his implant, which relayed it to him in lucid.

  As he considered Ash’s question, his parachute deployed.

  He cleared his throat again. “Uh—it seems we’re going to come down directly in the middle of the Quatro, everyone. Stay frosty and remember your training.”

  In the meantime, Gabe’s chest tightened with panic, and he struggled to calm himself down.

  Breathe. Just breathe.

  Chapter 36

  Heavy Ordnance

  Jake’s mech crashed to the ground.

  More accurately: Jake crashed to the ground, his metal legs buckling to absorb the shock.

  Rearing to his full height of two and a half meters, he retracted the mech’s hands to reveal twin rotary autocannons, which he leveled at the Quatro who charged at him from all sides.

  Inside the mech’s forearms, the guns began to rotate, sending heavy ordnance tearing into the beasts’ flesh, flinging them back as they yelped or barked throatily.

  As he’d fallen toward the planet, his anxiety over the coming battle had quickly mounted, but that hadn’t prepared him for the leve
l of sheer terror he experienced now. Even within the dream, he could feel his nostrils flare widely as he sucked in each ragged breath, and he became intensely aware of everything around him, wary of potential threats.

  The autocannons weren’t enough to keep the enemy at bay. A Quatro pounced on him from behind, knocking him forward, making him stagger a couple of steps.

  This can’t happen. I won’t let it.

  As his hands reassembled themselves in front of the autocannons, blades sprung from his wrists, and he spun around, slashing wildly at his assailant.

  Steel found alien flesh, and scarlet droplets flew through the air, but another Quatro crashed into him from the side, sending him stumbling again, and then another tackled him head-on.

  Jake was sent sprawling onto his back. The Quatro piled onto him, tearing at his skin, racking his entire body with waves of pain.

  This was nothing like training—even lucid hadn’t prepared him for this. Lucid, where even though his brain accepted the simulated reality, on some level he’d still known it to be a simulation.

  This…this was real. Each claw mark left searing lines along his body. The aliens weren’t bothering to use their guns; they seemed content to tear apart his mech and rip Jake from it bodily.

  Even before applying to become a mech pilot, Jake had considered himself among the best—the quickest kid in the Belt; one of the best lucid gamers in the system. Wasn’t that supposed to count for something? Can this really be it?

  Some of the Quatro had long bayonets with wicked blades, and they gouged Jake with them, working at his joints, scoring his casing.

  When Jake glimpsed the sky between the giant aliens covering him, it flashed blood-red—the dream’s way of reflecting the danger he was in.

  His fear did a good job of that, too. He was consumed with fear. The world seemed made of it.

  But then and there, he decided he would refuse to let it paralyze him. Motivated more by terror than determination, he managed to roll onto his stomach and bring one of his knees between his chest and the ground.

  Then, he shoved the ground, surging up through the hulking aliens that pinned him.