“Doesn’t exactly work like that, Tommy,” Ash said, grunting a little as she ran along the wall to get a better vantage point before spraying a line of Quatro with bullets. “In these mechs, we can take on twenty Quatro each, probably more. But we can’t defeat an army like this by ourselves. Not in enough time to stop them from breaching the walls. The walls were supposed to hold.”
“Shut up,” Gabe barked, annoyance at his pilots’ chatter amplifying his stress. “We don’t have time to stand up here and philosophize about it. We have to do something, now.”
“What would that be, Chief?” Jake Price asked.
“We need to stop defending and start attacking.”
“But Ash just pointed out—”
“I don’t care what she pointed out. I don’t submit my orders to a committee—I give them, and you follow them. Everyone off the walls and follow me into the city.”
“But I thought—”
“Off the walls and into the city!” Gabe yelled, turning to leap from the parapet. The asphalt rushed up to meet him, yet he barely felt a thing upon impact, and he hit the ground running.
Behind him, the team charged after him, finally having ceased their babble.
Within a few minutes, they reached Plenitos’ only launch site, which was intended for situations where someone needed to reach Valhalla fast—like in the event the city was overrun, for instance, and the council felt moved to evacuate without delay.
“We left the battle,” Tommy said, in the tone of someone who’d just spilled his soft drink and had to buy another.
“We’ll be back there very soon,” Gabe said. “Each one of our mechs has the launch capacity to escape a planet’s gravity well and achieve orbit.”
“What does that have to do with the siege?” Henrietta Jin asked.
“Well, if we can attain orbit, then we can definitely launch ourselves over the city walls and come down directly behind the Quatro. From there, we’ll be much closer to the ones with rocket launchers. We can fight our way to them, put them down, then launch ourselves back to safety.”
“Probably singe some Quatro in the process,” Ash said. “I like it. But can you modify the function in time, sir?”
Gabe nodded. “Just need to tweak a few parameters. Give me a second.”
It took more like a minute, which was a minute they couldn’t afford to lose. But given the circumstances, it was pretty quick, and he was proud of how fast he arrived at calculations describing a shallow parabola that would take them over Plenitos’ walls.
“Sending it to your implants now,” he said. “Everyone spread out around the site. That’s against regular procedure, but we need to go together to cut down the Quatro’s reaction time, and our mechs’ armor is strong enough to handle a little rocket exhaust.”
Oneiri Team spread themselves across the launch site in a roughly even distribution. Good enough.
“All right,” he said. “Engage rockets on my mark. One…two…mark!”
The thrusters in his mech’s legs flared to life, and Gabe left the ground with startling speed. He barely cleared the roof of a warehouse, and then the city hurtled past below him.
Within seconds, his flight crested, directly over the wall.
Then, he passed the teeming mass of Quatro.
Then…
Then, he descended into the woods, having overshot his target.
Damn it, he thought as he crashed through the foliage, hitting the ground and rolling several meters before coming to a rest against one of Eresos’ countless leafless trees.
He’d sorely miscalculated. All around him, the other mechs collided with the ground, making it rumble.
“Back!” Gabe ordered. “We have to go back!”
But the Quatro had seen them land—and heard them, probably. Dozens of them charged into the woods in chase, and soon Oneiri was fighting them among the trees, desperately trying to push back toward Plenitos.
Chapter 48
Makeshift Tank
As shadows lengthened rapidly all across Alex’s landscape, Andy drove the beetle toward Habitat 2 at a stately pace.
Lisa sat beside him, the intercom raised to her lips, ready to broadcast over shortwave.
Finally, a form of communication that doesn’t rely on satellite.
Although she’d accepted that Darkstream maybe didn’t have the situation in Habitat 2 completely under control, she was still an employee of the company, and she intended to invoke that authority now.
They crested a rise that brought Habitat 2 into sight, and Lisa could make out more of it in the twilight. She hadn’t seen it from outside very often. Few did, other than the beetle drivers. It wasn’t built with aesthetics in mind, not the outside view anyway, but even so, Lisa thought it was beautiful.
The way its gunmetal gray flowed into Alex’s blue in the waning light. The way it sprawled across the terrain, with antennae, satellite dishes, and observation towers distributed across it at random intervals—the spires mostly offered a view of the planet itself, not of the habitat, though you could catch glimpses of it from them.
You couldn’t see it like this. Not like she was seeing it. And in that moment, Lisa came to love and miss her home even more.
I’m so close, yet regaining Habitat 2 will not be easy.
The beetle rolled to a halt, and Lisa depressed the slim red button that would broadcast her voice to Daybreak—and to any Habitat 2 inhabitants listening over the wide channel.
“This is Seaman Lisa Sato. I have M-level Clearance and I operate with the full authority of Darkstream Security to dispense and execute justice as I deem necessary. You have unlawfully captured Habitat 2, a settlement in which Darkstream Security possesses a controlling interest. I hereby order you to surrender and turn Habitat 2 back over to company constables and also to the council. You have five minutes to reply.”
Replacing the intercom, she glanced at Andy, who offered a small grin that didn’t hold much heart. “Think they’ll listen?”
Lisa paused. “No. But I have to give them a chance.”
“Do you? I don’t recall anything in the employee handbook about showing mercy to gangsters who mess with company property.”
“You’re right…but I have to anyway. For me.”
“I see.”
Five minutes passed, during which Daybreak failed to contact them. She raised the intercom once again, and was about to speak when the dashboard speaker crackled to life.
“How did you survive?” a gruff voice said.
“Who am I speaking to?”
“Quentin Cooper. Answer my question.”
She pressed the red button. “I’m not inclined to give you any information, Cooper. Submit to my requirements, or face the consequences.”
“What consequences? You’re out there. We’re in here. You can suffocate, for all we care.”
But Lisa heard the note of uncertainty in his voice. She drew a deep breath. “No doubt, by now, you’ve noticed the total shutdown of Gatherer traffic to Habitat 2. We did that. If you won’t surrender, if you want the flow of resources to resume, then you’ll at least have to come out here and face us. Without the Gatherers, you’ll have no leverage with Darkstream at all. They’ll devote considerable resources to exterminating you.”
Another silence—and this one lasted almost twenty minutes. Andy kept the beetle at the top of the rise.
From where they sat, they could see two vehicle bay doors, and at last, one of them opened to admit a beetle that had been outfitted with heavier armor than was usual for the transport vehicles, along with plenty of artillery.
Alongside that makeshift tank marched an entire platoon of pressure suit-clad figures, who also carried their share of guns.
“All right,” she said, her voice a little breathless. Her skin had begun to crawl with the prospect of imminent battle, and she felt like she couldn’t inhale enough oxygen, no matter how deeply she breathed. “We need to move.”
Chapter 49
/> Steam
A Quatro charged at Jake, leaving a faint trail behind it inside the dream—an effect he hadn’t noticed before, which he attributed to the alien’s speed.
He pivoted behind an unusually large tree, with a quickness that still surprised him, given the mech’s bulk. The maneuver forced the Quatro to veer to the right, leaving its muscular haunches exposed to Jake’s heavy machine gun.
It made short work of the beast.
He heard the next attackers before he saw them. They hit him from two new angles, outside his field of vision, and for a moment, he couldn’t move enough to bring one of his weapons to bear.
Screaming with the effort, he shoved his weight to the right, knocking one weighty alien aside and extending his right bayonet to drive it into its flank. As fast as he could, he stabbed it twice more before pushing it away.
The other Quatro pounced on him from behind, pinning him to the ground while it raked knife-like claws across Jake’s back, sending spasms of pain through his body.
Nothing seemed effortless, inside the mech—the dream saw to that. Yes, his strength was increased a hundredfold at least, but he still experienced every exertion as though it was his own.
Because it was his own.
He pushed against the ground, flashing back to the intense PT Roach had subjected them to, trying his best to make them wash out.
The strain made him grunt. You’re going to wash out if you can’t do this, he told himself, and it occurred to him then that making Oneiri Team had been just as important as his own survival. More important, maybe. Because being an ongoing part of Oneiri ensured his sister would get the medical attention she so sorely needed.
He heaved upward, shifting the Quatro enough that Jake got his left leg underneath him.
That did it. Surging upward, he turned to aim a flamethrower at the beast—better suited to close-range than the autocannon, which would require time to engage and spin to life.
A gout of fire took the Quatro in the side and belly, causing it to recoil, screeching as its flesh sloughed off. Jake finished it with his heavy machine gun.
Scanning the trees for his next opponent, Jake noticed that the patches of sky between the forest canopy were flashing red.
That’s me, he realized. I’m doing that. The sky is reflecting my anger.
Most of his anger wasn’t for the Quatro, either—it was for Gabriel Roach. Twice now, the chief had miscalculated, landing the team in a position that detracted from the battle effort rather than enhanced it.
He didn’t care whether that was due to the newness of the mechs. If that was the case, Darkstream should never have deployed them this early, and Gabe should never have supported them in doing so.
To Jake, Gabe represented Darkstream. As far as he was concerned, they were one and the same in their eagerness to push new technologies before they’d been properly tested.
As a result, here they were, too far from Plenitos’ walls, which were about to fall.
Almost on cue, the sound of a rocket hitting the walls reached him, followed by a prolonged screeching sound. Another rocket exploded. Then another.
“What was that?” Tommy screamed over the team-wide as he grappled with a Quatro nearby, finally managing to throw the thing into a tree before turning to confront the next. The first Quatro snapped the tree clean in half.
Before answering, Ash drove her bayonet deep into an alien that had reared up before her on its hind legs. She eviscerated it.
“Pretty sure that was Plenitos’ walls,” she said.
Ash was between Jake and Tommy. Three more Quatro emerged from the trees, then, all converging on her.
Jake ran as fast as he could toward her, but as he approached, she fended off one with a savage swipe of her bayonet while peppering the next with her heavy machine gun.
The first Quatro balked, giving Ash a window to turn her gun on it, planting her next round into its skull. When the third Quatro charged, she ducked low, and the alien soon found itself flipping through the air.
By the time it hit the ground, Ash was already opening fire with both autocannons.
“Damn,” Jake said as he reached her. “Nice going.”
“Oh, that? I was just blowing off some steam.”
“Hey,” Tommy said. “Maybe that can be your nickname, Ash. Steam. You sure moved through those Quatro like you were steam, or smoke or something.”
“Steam.” Ash’s mech cocked its head to its side. “Could be worse.”
“Uh huh,” Jake said. “We need to get to the walls, you two. Pronto.”
The trio dashed through the trees, and when they emerged from the tree line, they found Gabriel Roach standing just outside it, massive hands at his sides, staring at a quickly emptying field.
A wicked rent had opened in the city walls, splitting it almost in two, with only the topmost portion still joined.
The gap was wide enough for three Quatro to charge through abreast, and the massive horde was bunched at the walls, waiting their turn to enter, ignoring the smattering of gunfire from those defenders that had managed to retain their posts.
But that wasn’t what caused Jake’s ears to start ringing with rage. It was the fact that Roach just stood there, staring, not even bothering to fire on the bunched-up Quatro.
“Come on!” Jake growled, barreling toward the gap, both autocannons spinning up to send twin streams of hot lead across the field.
Chapter 50
A Losing Engagement
Commander Benjamin Clifford fought to regain his battle calm as Quatro after Quatro poured through the opening they’d made with their endless rocket barrage.
The original plan had been for Clifford’s battalion to push out of the city gates once Roach and his team had managed to neutralize the Quatro rocket launchers. They’d expected that effort’s success to enrage the Quatro, turning their focus on the mechs.
But when they’d overshot their mark, Clifford had known immediately that the walls would be breached. With that in mind, he made the snap decision to keep his battalion inside Plenitos, ready to deploy to wherever the Quatro managed to break through.
And so here they were—a significant portion of Darkstream’s reserve forces, known through the company as the Force Multipliers, all arrayed in a wide arc to gun down the Quatro as quickly as they came through.
Or at least, to attempt that. The aliens were proving just as resilient as always. At first, the combined fire of five mortars, ten heavy assault weapons, two tanks, and three platoons’ worth of soldiers with fully replenished kits had managed to keep the Quatro at bay.
Soon, though, the aliens began to use their dead fellows as cover, crouching behind them to fire on the defenders.
One of the tanks tried switching from kinetic penetrators to explosive anti-tank rounds. Clifford thought that seemed like a good idea, on the surface at least. The Quatro certainly had tank-like qualities.
And the first round did significant damage to the massive Quatro, obliterating one of them in a spray of viscera while debilitating two more.
The second shot missed its target, however, hitting the city wall instead and widening the gap even further. That made Clifford curse under his breath.
Just what we needed.
It was especially vexing, since Darkstream’s tanks were known for their pinpoint accuracy, especially at relatively close range like this.
That means the gunner screwed up.
A Quatro with a rocket launcher made it through, then, getting off two shots before Clifford’s people put the thing down.
The first shot went high, crashing into the upper floor of a supply depot, but the second took out a squad’s worth of tightly bunched soldiers.
That seemed to do it. The Force Multipliers were highly trained, and they’d seen plenty of fighting during the initial colonization of Eresos. Hell, a lot of them had once been UHF soldiers, with long histories of fighting insurgents in the Milky Way’s Bastion Sector.
S
till, they knew a losing engagement as well as anyone, and as more and more Quatro made it into Plenitos, the line started to buckle, and the Force Multipliers began to lose their superior firing arc.
If I don’t do something right now, this is going to turn into a rout, and I’ll be commander of nothing but a corpse pile.
“Fall back!” he screamed over the battalion-wide channel.
The reserve forces did not need to be told twice. They began retreating to the protection of the buildings behind them, the tanks rolling backward while firing off round after round, and the soldiers inching backward, doing their best to keep the Quatro at bay all the while.
Chapter 51
Attack Angle
They’d chosen the angle of their approach to Habitat 2 carefully, and as the Daybreak force neared, Andy inched the beetle backward through a shallow valley, gradually picking up speed.
The valley was already completely dark, and within minutes, so would be the rest of Alex. Parallel rows of hills comprised the valley, one side higher on average than the other, which formed a corridor between them. It was through that corridor that Andy now accelerated backward.
The drug lord’s cronies obliged them by following.
“You’d better get going,” Andy said. “If you wait any longer, they’ll have a firing solution on you. Plus, the beetle’s only picking up speed.”
“Where’d you learn the term ‘firing solution?’” Lisa said, grinning at him.
He smiled back, and this time it wasn’t as half-hearted as before. “Maybe I’ve been listening in on your sessions with Tessa.”
She laughed, surprised to find herself enjoying a conversation with Andy. “I imagine that was tiring all by itself. All right. Crack open the hatch.”
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