One of the Quatro went flying, leaving a patch of red-flashing sky in its place, and Jake sunk his blade into another.
Then, an idea struck him. He knew Darkstream had designed the mechs to withstand a grenade blast.
Time to test that.
Pointing his grenade launcher directly at the ground, he fired.
He didn’t have to wait long for the explosion.
Searing heat washed over his body, making him cry out in the dream, and sound replaced fear as the universe’s main ingredient.
The Quatro smothering him were blown apart into several pieces. Time seemed to slow as alien limbs and torsos and heads went soaring away in all directions, streaming blood and sinew.
Jake watched in awe at the utter carnage he had wrought.
Then, he looked around for his comrades.
He felt confident one of them was very nearby. Not taking the time to consult his HUD to figure out who it was, he instead charged at the dogpile of Quatro covering his teammate.
Grabbing one of the beasts with enormous metal hands, he flung the creature away, sending it several meters into the air, yelping, before it landed with a sickening crunch.
The thing started spasming, but Jake didn’t take the time to watch. Instead, he plunged his blade into the next Quatro, ripping it open all down its body, and then he stabbed the next, over and over.
The Quatro turned to face him, lessening their pressure on the downed mech, and Jake retracted his segmented hands to let loose with his autocannons once more, backing up as he did. This gave him enough room to mow down the aliens as they came at him, and the mech they’d been holding down rose up, joining Jake in the slaughter.
It was Ash.
“Thanks for the assist,” she said, her voice echoing a little in the dream.
“Assist?” he said, chuckling, though his laughter sounded somewhat manic in his ears. “I saved your ass.”
“Oh, God. It’s going to be like that, is it?” Ash leveled her heavy machine gun at Jake and fired.
His stomach dropped, but then he realized what had happened—she’d downed a Quatro that had been charging at him from behind.
“Are we even now?” Ash said.
“Hardly. I could have taken that one.”
“Right.” Ash turned, striding toward Roach, who was just gaining his feet himself, and starting to visit havoc on the Quatro surrounding him.
Jake joined her, and together they waded into the war for Eresos.
Chapter 37
Crumbling
Gabe loosed a rocket, picking off a group of three Quatro charging toward him.
We’re turning the tide. We’re going to win this thing.
His HUD alerted him of another enemy coming at him from his seven o’clock, barreling across the little minimap. Alongside that, the HUD also gave him a readout that listed the Quatro’s velocity and estimated mass, but Gabe didn’t have time to read.
Instead, he turned in time to roast the thing with twin gouts of flame to the face.
The Quatro yelped, and the smell of charred fur and flesh reached Gabe’s nose.
Whoa. I didn’t know this thing had olfactory sensors.
Darkstream R&D truly had thought of everything.
Turning just in time to impale another Quatro on the point of his right-hand bayonet, Gabe stumbled as a vivid flashback hit him, of walking through a blackened cave.
The Quatro slid off his blade and onto the ground as he lost himself in memory, the images just as sharp as they’d always been.
A charred Quatro corpse lay prostrate near the bottom of a cave wall, the wall itself smeared with blood where it had cracked off its claws in its futile struggle to escape.
Snap out of it, Gabe.
He turned to confront another group of three Quatro that had almost reached him, firing his autocannons at full bore, his shooting sloppy, this time. Two of the Quatro did go down—but the third crashed into Gabe, knocking him backward.
Another flashback. A mother curled protectively around her pups, all of them charred black as coal.
Another: two Quatro that had died locked in combat, driven mad by the fuel air explosive, which had turned their oxygen to fire.
Why? Why now? Is the dream amplifying it somehow?
Struggling to keep it together, Gabe kicked up with his legs, sending the Quatro pinning him flying over his head. Turning as he rose, he picked off the alien before it hit the ground. It didn’t move again.
Another memory took over his vision: a white shape, a summer dress, stained with the scarlet smear of blood.
Jess.
A gunshot. Jess’s father, Mayor Sweeney, driven to take his own life by the horror of it all.
Your fault. It’s your fault, Gabe. Admit it.
The sound of cheering reached his ears, jerking him from his dark reverie. It was his team, Oneiri Team, celebrating.
Why? We’re still surrounded by Quatro.
Then he saw: the rest of the reserve battalion had arrived. It felt like the mechs had hit the ground less than an hour ago, but now that he thought about it, he realized he’d killed a lot of Quatro.
Armored personnel carriers, tanks, infantry—they all poured out of the city’s open gates, giving it to the enemy, hard. Darkstream snipers fired on the aliens, from positions all along Ingress’ walls.
“We’re doing it, sir,” Jake said. “We’re beating them!”
Glancing to the right, Gabe saw Jake’s mech, its fist raised in victory. Blood smeared its twin blades, and fragments of viscera covered its metal skin.
“Get back to work,” Gabe rasped. Turning, he fired up his autocannons, barrels rotating as they sent round after round of hot lead into the enemy, who were swiftly crumbling.
Chapter 38
First Words
Given that the only macroscale organisms Lisa knew to exist on Alex were humans, and now Quatro, she worried about the source of the meat the aliens had left for them. Eventually, her hunger overcame her worry, and she ate it, as did Tessa and Andy.
“The Quatro haven’t actually done anything to hurt us,” she reasoned out loud. “Screwed with us, maybe, but not hurt us.”
“That’s probably coming,” Andy said, ever the optimist.
“I’m just saying,” Lisa said as she chewed, holding the remainder of her haunch of succulent…whatever it was. “I’m sure this food is fine.”
“Huh?” Andy said. “What do you mean, fine? It tastes good. What are you worried about? You think they might have poisoned it or something?”
“Uh…never mind.” She’d assumed they were all thinking the same thing, but apparently not. Lisa exchanged glances with Tessa, and they all returned to dining in silence.
Two days after their ordeal in the puzzle room, the hatch flew open to reveal a Quatro in the enormous corridor, staring at them with bright orange eyes.
For the first time since they’d been transported from the strange, puzzle-filled room, the invisible force seized them, dragging them into the corridor, where four more Quatro waited.
This time, the force did allow Lisa to walk on her own—but only in the direction the aliens seemed to want her to move in. If she attempted to head another way, it was as though a brick wall was stopping her.
They entered a part of the ship she hadn’t seen yet, and Lisa’s internal compass told her they were heading deeper into the subterranean vessel, though she had no idea of its actual size.
The corridor gradually opened up, until it became a cavern of a chamber, terminating in a multi-level dais covered in furniture similar in shape to the pieces the humans had been sleeping on, though these were much more sumptuous.
Twenty more Quatro studied them from atop that furniture, enormous paws drooping from lush upholstery, forty pairs of eyes studying them—ranging from orange, to pink, to green, to one Quatro with midnight eyes the likes of which Lisa had never encountered.
Without warning, the Quatro rose as one, and the dark-eyed bea
st pounced, crashing to the deck right in front of Lisa.
The beast loomed over her, body bunched, its feline face terrifying in its fierceness.
Am I about to die?
It seemed likely. Tortured, at least.
Something’s about to happen. And I doubt it will be pleasant.
Something did happen, but it turned out to be nothing like her fears.
It was no less shocking, however.
The Quatro spoke.
“Hello. Human.”
That done, it continued to peer down at Lisa, and she realized that what she’d mistaken for ferocity was actually curiosity. It was waiting for her to speak as well.
“Um…hi,” she said.
Chapter 39
Our Planet Now
Gabe walked the fields outside Ingress in his MIMAS, helping to clear away Quatro corpses, as well as a few that belonged to human beings.
The latter would receive proper funeral ceremonies and burials. The former would be piled in a heap and burned.
Perhaps one of the mechs would be the one to light the pyre.
Once his team had regained their footing and started fighting the Quatro in earnest, the battle had shifted quickly, with the aliens falling in droves. When the rest of the Darkstream battalion arrived, it had quickly become a slaughter.
The Quatro ranks, such as they were, had broken, and the enormous quadrupeds had begun to flee into the hills surrounding Ingress.
Oneiri Team hadn’t taken that as a cue to relent. Instead, they’d run the beasts down, metal feet pounding across the hard-packed dirt surrounding Ingress, guns blazing. They hadn’t wasted any more rockets on the fleeing Quatro, but they hadn’t been shy about pouring hot lead into their retreating backsides.
And so the hills, too, were littered with Quatro corpses.
The battle had been a rout, in short, and the MIMAS mechs’ first outing had confirmed Gabe’s high estimation of his team’s skill, as well as the power of the mechs themselves.
Still, the Quatro had shown up in numbers they were not known to have, with a level of cohesion that also had never been seen before.
Sure, the aliens’ behavior had always suggested Quatro packs were tight-knit, but an attack of this scale required a level of social intelligence that surprised every analyst Gabe had heard from so far.
It was worrying. From a number of perspectives.
Something else worried him—a thought he kept wanting to suppress. Mostly because it made a little too much sense, based on what he knew about the company he worked for.
From a distance, he spotted Jake Price loping across the killing field toward him. He could see Price’s mech in as much detail as he would have close-up, thanks to his own mech’s enhanced visual sensors. As with everything else, while in lucid, his mech’s sight was his sight.
He hadn’t gotten out of his mech since they’d jumped from the space elevator, and what was more, he had no desire to. In fact, the idea of returning to his lesser, human form filled him with reluctance; even a low-level dread.
His mech periodically injected him with a REM sleep-inducing sedative. Just enough to keep him in the dream.
A dream from which he had no desire to wake.
It would take Jake fewer than ten seconds to cross the intervening space, though he’d been quite some distance away when Gabe had first spied him. At a jog, the mechs ran faster than a horse at full gallop.
A soldier helping with the cleanup was outside her speeder momentarily, and directly in Jake’s path. She noticed that fact too late to jump out of the way, and her body language suggested extreme terror, but Gabe knew she wasn’t in any danger.
He watched as Jake leapt several meters into the air, crashing to the ground on the other side of the soldier without breaking his stride.
Just like that, he was at Gabe’s side, saluting. Gabe saluted back.
“Sir, have you had a chance to inspect the weaponry the Quatro were using against us?”
Sniffing, Gabe felt a flash of annoyance at the question. Annoyance, because it drilled straight to the heart of his paranoia about what Darkstream might be up to.
“What are you here to report, Seaman?” Gabe asked.
“The guns, sir…I’ve found countless SL-17s on this field, as well as a bunch of others I recognize. This is all Darkstream-issue weaponry, sir.”
“So is every gun in this system. Did you think the Quatro manufactured the guns themselves?”
“No, sir. But it does raise the question of where they got the guns.”
“By invading villages, probably. By overwhelming their garrisons and raiding their arsenals.”
Jake shook his head—or rather, his mech did, and the motion looked surprisingly natural. “Village arsenals tend to be small, and we know they haven’t invaded that many villages anyway. Not enough to allow them to conduct a battle on this scale.”
Gabe sighed, taking care to prevent his implant from transmitting it. “You’re right, Price. It’s unusual. I’ll talk to Bronson about it.” The captain had been put in charge of overseeing and directing Team Oneiri.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Get back to work.”
Jake did, sprinting away to help a nearby group of soldiers struggling to hoist a Quatro corpse onto a trailer.
Bronson soon answered the call. Inside the dream, instead of just the captain’s grizzled face, the man actually appeared alongside Gabe on the battlefield. His hands were folded behind his back, and his mouth twisted slightly, as though he’d eaten something that hadn’t agreed with him. It often did that when Gabe contacted him.
“Roach. What can I do for you?”
“Sir, one of my pilots has noticed something odd. The Quatro used Darkstream guns to fight this battle.”
“So? Those could have come from anywhere. Raiding villages, probably. What are you suggesting, Roach?”
“Nothing, sir. I’m seeking your perspective on the matter. That’s all. I speculated about the Quatro obtaining arms from the villages they hit, but the combined arsenals of the ones we know they’ve invaded…it doesn’t seem like that would amount to as many guns as we saw here today.”
“Well, what about the bands of marauders? We have no records of how many times they’ve fought the Quatro. They don’t tend to share data with us, and it’s been a while since I’ve sat down with a marauder for afternoon tea. You?”
“Same, sir,” Gabe said, indulging Bronson’s need for a certain level of absurdity in any given conversation.
“That’s our answer, I suspect. The Quatro probably attacked some marauder camps before moving on to bigger prizes.”
“What do you think is the Quatro’s aim in all this?”
“It seems pretty straightforward to me. The Quatro want their planet back. But unfortunately for them, it’s our planet now.”
Chapter 40
Fullerenes
“I apologize for the lacking communication,” the Quatro said, its lips pulling back from its teeth as it spoke.
But after a second, Lisa realized the alien wasn’t actually speaking the words. Probably it lacked vocal cords suited to human language. Instead, a device hanging from its neck like a collar emitted the sound. Even so, the timbre of the device’s tones were deep and rich. It reminded Lisa of the way her family’s fat tabby cat back in Hub would purr—except, you’d have to turn up that purr several octaves to achieve a sound nearly as resonant as the Quatro’s.
“That’s…fine,” Lisa answered, reluctant to get too pushy with a couple dozen giant aliens. She wasn’t sure why the Quatro had chosen to address her in particular. Just go with it. “Is that a universal translator?”
“With sufficient time, yes. But the device is also needing of enough data to translate with big enough utility. Probably you find the structure of sentence and word choices clumsy, even so.”
“A little bit,” Lisa admitted. “But I can understand you.”
The Quatro paused, probably waiting for the
device to parse her words. In the meantime, now that they were getting friendly, Lisa tested to see whether the invisible force still prevented her from moving backward.
Shifting her elbow to nudge the air behind her, she found that indeed it did. The Quatro were clearly interested in communicating with them, but just as clearly, the idea of restoring their freedom did not yet appeal.
“The device will improve over time,” the Quatro said, and nothing else. It continued to stare at her.
Maybe it’s as nervous as I am. Somehow she doubted that, but things were getting a bit awkward, so she ventured another question.
“So…how did you collect this data on our language? Have you been spying on the Habitats?”
“We have monitored your talking,” the Quatro replied.
“Ah.” That made more sense. “Is that what that room with all the puzzles was about?” she asked, reasoning things out as she spoke.
“Indeed. It was the purpose of stimulating you to speak. We generated a series of unique situations, so that you would use words particular only to them, and all the while our program interpreted the meaning and assembled. Before, progress was compromised because of the rate you spoke—we needed you to speak more, faster.”
“Why’d you bring us here?” Andy said, less amiably than Lisa. “Why treat us like this?”
The Quatro swung its massive head to peer at Andy. Its expression looking menacing, but Lisa doubted any expression would exactly look comforting on that large, panther-like face. “We have treated you with hospitality, have we not? No harm was brought to you.”
“You’ve dragged us all around this station using some sort of magic trick, is what you did. How’d you do that?”
“Easy, boy,” Tessa said. “We’re not in the best negotiating position, right now.”
Even a glance from the Quatro seemed a momentous gesture, and Lisa thought she saw Tessa flinch a millimeter away when the beast looked at her. “There is not a need for negotiating. We hope to request your help.”
“Request away,” Tessa said. “What is it you think you need?”
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