Powered (Mech Wars Book 1)

by Scott Bartlett

  “We don’t know for sure that those systems are occupied by anyone.”

  “Okay, but it seems pretty—”

  “Sir!” It was Ash, apparently forgetting to subvocalize. She sounded panicked.

  “Report!” Gabe barked.

  Exertion strained her voice as she continued. “We’re engaging the Quatro. There are fifty of them up here already, and they’re showing no sign of stopping!”

  Gabe turned to Price to find the boy looking back at him.

  “If we let those creatures get to these things, we’re done. Humanity is done—on Eresos, at the very least. You ready, boy?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m ready.”

  “Then let’s head back to that cave. See if we can contain them there. If not, we’ll fall back to here, and do what we have to in order to keep the Quatro from accessing these things. Let’s go.”

  Gabe sprinted back toward the tunnel mouth, and behind him, he heard Price pounding across the earth.

  Thank you for reading!

  Sign up for the mailing list and read Onslaught for free, the prequel to Powered.

  Onslaught is exclusive to mailing list subscribers - only you get to read it. It reveals a shocking secret from Chief Roach’s past, when Darkstream first conquered Eresos.

  You’ll also be the first to know when Meltdown comes out - that’s book 3 in the Mech Wars series!

  Dedication

  To Cecily, my heart.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to Jeff Rudolph for offering insightful editorial input and helping to make this book as strong as it could be.

  Thank you to Tom Edwards for creating such stunning cover art.

  Thank you to my family - your support means everything.

  Thank you to Cecily, my heart.

  Thank you to the people who read my stories, write reviews, and help spread the word. I couldn’t do this without you.

  Two sample chapters from Dynamo (Mech Wars Book 2) follow.

  If you’d prefer to just get Dynamo now, click here.

  Chapter 1

  Into the Shadows

  As Gabe and Jake Price sprinted toward the tunnel mouth, the earth was still vomiting up Quatro by the dozens.

  Oneiri Team was fighting hard, but it wasn’t enough. The aliens were still managing to get between them to attack what remained of Darkstream’s reserve battalion, the Force Multipliers, along with the soldiers from Plenitos’ garrison.

  Bayonets extended from several of the Quatro’s backs, and they gouged at the humans viciously while the other aliens mostly hung back to pelt the soldiers with artillery, which was also strapped to their backs.

  How the aliens managed to operate the firearms remained a mystery—but it wasn’t the most mysterious thing about them.

  “Hit them with everything we have,” Gabe growled over the team-wide. “Do not let them reach the hills. If that happens, this is all over.”

  And so the MIMAS mech pilots stepped up their game. For his part, Gabe extended both bayonets as he slammed into the first wave of Quatro, skewering two of them at once, and withdrawing the blades to plunge them into alien flesh again.

  His targets down, Gabe engaged both flamethrowers, crisscrossing the long streams of flame as he took one hard-fought step after another.

  The fire flickered over the shapes of allies and enemies alike, casting them in sharp relief. It wasn’t just that: everything had a hyper-realness to it, which Gabe took as the dream rendering the urgency of keeping the Quatro away from what he and Price had discovered in the hills behind them.

  It was hard to fathom the timing. Just as they’d emerged from the tunnel, after being pursued by a pair of Quatro with the unexpected power to stop bullets in midair, Price had spotted unusually colored meteorites streaking toward the planet.

  He and Gabe had investigated, and what they’d found troubled Gabe as much as it confused him: mechs, clearly of alien make, and just as clearly built for Quatro to use.

  Having cleared the area in front of him, Gabe instructed his mech’s hands to retract, splitting to settle back against his wrists as he spun up the rotary autocannons they revealed.

  Armor-piercing shells sped through the air—more than enough to part Quatro flesh and rupture their innards. Providing they didn’t stop the rounds before they struck their target, using the same magic trick they’d used underground.

  They didn’t. The Quatro no longer seemed to have the ability to halt bullets in midair, for reasons just as inscrutable as the power’s existence before.

  Was I hallucinating?

  No. His mental state had been iffy, lately—even he could see that—but the others had also seen what the Quatro had done.

  Besides, if he’d hallucinated that, then he’d also hallucinated Tommy’s death.

  I know when I’ve lost a soldier. I wouldn’t just dream up something like that.

  Gabe added Tommy’s death to the long list of things for which he intended to repay the Quatro. Never mind that it had happened while the Darkstream soldiers were invading the aliens’ home. They’d deserved that, too. They deserved everything that had happened to them, as well as everything Gabe intended to do to them.

  Having driven the Quatro front back, Gabe reformed his hands in front of the autocannons, switching to rockets. The other members of Oneiri had followed a progression of weapons similar to Gabe’s, and together they’d had the desired effect, of pushing the Quatro farther and farther back toward the tunnel mouth.

  At last, the aliens began to slip into the shadows, disappearing from the surface of Eresos.

  Slithering back into their dank holes. Where they belong.

  Gabe switched to a battalion-wide channel, so that everyone could hear his orders. Bronson had given him the command, which was lucky. He doubted any of Arkady Black’s people would appreciate the gravity of the situation they faced, and the same went for the remnants of the late Benjamin Clifford’s Force Multipliers.

  To prevent humanity from getting wiped from the face of Eresos—maybe even the whole system—he was glad to have the command.

  “I want both the soldiers of Plenitos’ garrison and the Force Multipliers to continue guarding the tunnel mouth. Oneiri Team, to me.”

  As he spoke the last words, Gabe jogged to the edge of his forces, allowing enough space for the giant MIMAS mechs to gather around him.

  They did, many of them stowing artillery as they ran, metal parts clicking together with a pleasing cleanness.

  All of Oneiri’s mechs appeared to have retained one hundred percent functionality, even after several battles, which spoke highly of Darkstream’s engineering. That said, they’d suffered a fair amount of superficial damage. Price’s MIMAS looked singed from the bottom-up, with his feet almost totally black while above his elbows was barely touched. Ash Sweeney’s torso was crumpled slightly near the center, though the damage wasn’t serious.

  Almost all of the mechs were scored in several places, whether by the Quatro’s bayonets, their claws, or their knife-like fangs.

  “I’ll keep this short, since I don’t know how much time we have,” Gabe said over the team-wide. “When Price and I went into the hills to investigate the meteorites, we found mechs that appear to have been designed for Quatro use. Someone’s screwing with humanity, and judging by these quadruped mechs’ similarity to the Gatherers and Amblers, the culprit seems likely to be whoever made those.”

  He let that sink in. Other than a couple of glances exchanged between some of the team members, everyone remained silent. Gabe had told them of the need for haste, and he was glad to see they didn’t impede that with any stupid questions.

  “Our task right now is to locate as many of these Quatro mechs as we can find. If we miss even one, it could mean disaster for every human settlement on Eresos. I hope I don’t need to explain why.”

  He looked around expectantly at his team. No one seemed to require an explanation.

  If Tommy was still alive, he’d probab
ly need one.

  The thought was callous, but he was prone to those, especially lately.

  “Good,” he said. “Move out.”

  The MIMAS mechs spread through the hills.

  Chapter 2

  Quads

  “Found another quad, sir,” Beth Arkanian said. “You wanna check this one out, too?” They’d settled on the name “quads” for the quadruped mechs naturally enough.

  It fits well enough, I suppose.

  Gabe considered Beth’s question. This was the eighth quad they’d found. “Does it look similar to the others?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then I’m good. Send the Force Multipliers its coordinates, and tell them I said to back up a personnel carrier next to it. Gonzalez, Sweeney, and Price, help Arkanian to load the quad aboard.”

  They’d discovered that if they stripped out one of the Force Multipliers’ armored personnel carriers, they could just fit two of the quads inside.

  “Why don’t we just destroy them, sir?” Price had asked when Gabe first gave the order to load the quads onto the personnel carriers.

  Gabe had turned toward him. “Remember when I said, back on Plenitos’ walls, that I welcome decent suggestions from my subordinates?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This isn’t one of them. If the quads are anything like the alien mech your father found out in the Belt, their armor’s as strong as hell. I’m not sure we even have enough ammunition to destroy them, and if we ran out before we finished the job, the quads would become easy pickings for the Quatro. Better to save our ammo for the aliens themselves.”

  “Makes sense. Thanks for breaking that down for me, sir.”

  Gabe couldn’t hear any sarcasm in Price’s voice, but the boy had given him attitude before, and he was always on the lookout for it. Even if he hadn’t been at his wits’ end, he wouldn’t have wanted to continue putting up with it, and he certainly didn’t plan to while he was this on edge.

  “What about Tommy’s mech, sir?” Marco Gonzalez asked after they’d finished loading the latest quad.

  Glancing toward the tunnel mouth, Gabe grimaced, which manifested inside the dream as the sky flashing emerald three times in rapid succession.

  Tommy’s abandoned mech stood alone, arms extended forward slightly, looking as though it was ready to do battle.

  But it won’t. At least, it wouldn’t until Oneiri Team gained another qualified mech pilot. Backup pilots had been trained, but they were still up on Valhalla Station as far as he knew, and Tommy’s mech was all the way out here.

  “We’re going to have to secure it to one of the tanks. It’ll impair the tank’s functionality, but it’s all we can do. We can’t leave a MIMAS out here for a mercenary to stumble across.”

  For two more hours, they combed the hills near the entrance to the Quatro tunnels. But after the eighth quad that Beth had found, no more turned up.

  Which was lucky, considering they’d run out of personnel carriers to transport them in. Gabe didn’t want to impair another tank if he could avoid it.

  “All right, then,” he said over the battalion-wide. “We have a journey ahead of us. I want these quads off this planet, as fast as we can make that happen. Which means we’re headed back to Ingress. We don’t have shuttles big enough to ferry them up to Valhalla, and I’m sure as hell not crawling inside one of those things to check whether they have launch capability. So the space elevator’s our only option. Let’s roll out.”

  Without further ceremony, they started down the same Gatherer path they’d taken to get here.

  Gabe had wanted Oneiri Team to take a long break in Plenitos—to rest, but also to spend time out of their mechs.

  Inside the MIMAS mechs, each member of Oneiri Team felt powerful, nigh-indestructible. Outside of them, they felt small, vulnerable…weak.

  They were becoming increasingly dependent on the machines, not only physically, but psychologically. Gabe had already noticed a few of his Oneiri soldiers walking with slumped shoulders outside their mechs, and he’d snapped at them to straighten up. They no longed walked with confidence, with heads high. No, they reserved that for their mechs, now.

  None of them brought up any of that, of course. But Gabe could see it in them. And he recognized it in himself.

  That wasn’t all. Gabe had also come to find that piloting the mechs had a disquieting distancing effect. The dream, which had been meant to increase immersion in battle, was instead causing him to feel detached from its effects, its consequences.

  The dream made him feel justified in everything he did, by default. That was more or less how he’d always felt anyway, but now he didn’t even bother to examine his own actions, and that was starting to get to him. Especially during the fleeting moments he spent outside of the mech, which seemed to be characterized by a lot more self-reflection than when he was inside the thing.

  And so, he’d wanted his team to take time in their own bodies, to reconnect with their humanity.

  But the quads’ arrival had dashed that hope. Now, they’d have to spend weeks more in the mechs, weeks full of long days of journeying. No one else could pilot the mechs for them—no one else was authorized to, for good reason.

  Until the quads were safely aboard the space elevator and on their way to Valhalla, Oneiri Team would live inside their mechs.

  I hope you enjoyed this free sample. To read the rest of Dynamo, click here to download it.