Lisa pressed her lips together. “You’re right,” she said at last. “I apologize.”
“It’s…fine,” Tessa said slowly, with a small shake of her head. “You haven’t seen what I’ve witnessed Darkstream do. You don’t know the extent of what they’re capable of.”
“What did you see, Tessa? What did you witness them do?”
“Hopefully I can tell you, one day. But that day is not yet here.”
Lisa studied the older woman’s face—the deep lines that crisscrossed it. Worry lines, stress lines. “You’re afraid of Darkstream, aren’t you, Tessa?”
“Yes,” Tessa said, without hesitation. “You should be, too.”
Lisa nodded, and then she sighed. “Unfortunately, I don’t think Habitat 2 can be saved.”
That seemed to give Tessa pause, and the white-haired woman blinked. “We have to try.”
“I agree…that we should try. But I’ve been giving this a lot of thought, and as much as it kills me to say it…I think we should try something else.”
Chapter 35
All the Cards
Everyone in Landing Bay Alpha had overheard Jake’s conversation with Chief Roach before the man had jumped to the planet below.
It would have been impossible not to. Jake had been shouting, and Roach…well, Roach’s voice had seemed to shake the entire station.
It was also incredibly easy to piece together that Jake was responsible for transporting Chief Roach to the alien mech and placing him inside it. The security footage was all there, in addition to the conversation overheard by the flight deck crew. Commander Stevens had seen him wheeling Roach through Alpha Quadrant.
His insubordinate act could be pinned to him in at least three different ways. He supposed he’d hoped that this would end up being one of those insubordinate acts that turned out for the best, and for which everyone praised him.
I didn’t expect Roach to behave like he did.
So it didn’t surprise him when Captain Bronson summoned him to his office.
“Seaman Price,” the captain said from behind an enormous mahogany desk. “Take a seat.”
That did surprise him, a little. Jake hadn’t expected to be permitted to sit.
“How are you, son?” Bronson asked. “A bit shaken up, I expect?”
“A bit, sir.”
“Completely understandable. But you’ll be back to normal soon. I need you to be, anyway.”
“Uh…yes, sir,” Jake said cautiously, unsure about when Bronson would begin outlining all of the consequences he’d face.
Bronson sighed, lacing his fingers behind his head and leaning back in his reclining chair. “You know, son, until very recently, Eresos was a tremendous growth market for Darkstream. The renewed Quatro threat were driving contracts like crazy, making them multiply magically. They doubled over an extremely short time—tripled, even! Not only that, the rates we were able to negotiate went way up. It was a bonanza, Price. And now, with these quads, as you call them, and Red Company allying with the Quatro…” Bronson shook his head. “Can you see the problem, son?”
“Uh, yes, sir. The people of Eresos are starting to see us as weak. We can’t hide how we were forced by the quads to abandon the surface. And with the quads as their allies, Red Company can start extorting massive fees, for protection.”
“That’s very perceptive, son. Very perceptive.”
“Well…Marco broke it down for me, mostly, sir.”
“Ah. Then I must say, it takes character to give credit where it’s due, especially when you don’t have to. You pilot your mech like a pro, Price. That’s all Darkstream has ever needed from you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Anyway. What I’m getting at is that Darkstream is very keen to stabilize the situation on Eresos, to decisively neuter this new threat posed by the quads, and to get back to a place of growth. We’re hoping Chief Roach will help with that effort, and not hinder it, inside that new alien monstrosity of his. Hopefully he won’t end up getting himself killed, like Zimmerman did. But he’s a wild card, now, and we can’t factor him into our plans, so we’ll put him out of mind for now.”
Jake coughed into his curled fist. “Um, sir…you do know that I’m the one who carried Chief Roach to R&D, right?”
“Yes, yes. But I’d assumed he ordered you to do it. Did he not?”
“Well, yes, sir.”
“Then you were only following orders. If anyone did something wrong, it was Roach, not you. True, he deprived us of the ability to continue studying the thing—we’d only just begun to learn its secrets—but that’s not your fault.”
Jake nodded slowly. The fact that Bronson was taking it so easy on him made him suspect the man needed him for something, and so it was simpler not to discipline him.
I wonder if Bronson knows how transparent he is. Probably, it didn’t matter either way. Bronson held all the authority, all the cards. Any maneuvering from him now was likely meant to ensure Jake followed orders as enthusiastically as possible.
Bronson was smiling at him, in a way Jake assumed the man thought was comforting, but the silence was getting a bit awkward in its length.
“I’ll do what I can to resolve the situation on Eresos, sir,” Jake said at last.
“Eresos? Oh, you’re not going back down to Eresos, son.”
“I-I’m not?”
“No, no. You’re going back to the Belt.”
Another silence ensued, but Jake broke this one a lot sooner than the first: “The Belt, sir?” He cleared his throat. So, he was being disciplined for taking the chief to the alien mech after all. A jolt of fear ran through his body at the thought that he was about to lose his place on Oneiri Team.
Nodding, Bronson said, “Your father just found another mech encased in a comet. Only difference is that this one has activated, and it’s currently attempting to escape. Who knows what it’ll do once it succeeds. Your father has backed away from it, but we still don’t know what these things are truly capable of, and so we aren’t going to take any chances. You’re coming with me, in the Javelin, and together we’ll either take it in or neutralize it if we can’t.”
This time, Jake’s fear manifested as a ball of ice in the pit of his stomach rather than a jolt through his body.
Dad.
Peter Price was in danger—possibly, everyone living in the Belt was in danger.
“I’m in, sir. When do we leave?”
“Right now.” Bronson stood up, his grin widening, which Jake found fairly off-putting. “Follow me.”
Chapter 36
Oxygen
Lisa stood with her fellow Darkstream operatives on the roof of Habitat 2 when the Daybreak force rolled up.
Before the battle, Quentin Cooper had requested parlay with Laudano, who stood near the edge of Habitat 2’s roof, in plain sight. As agreed beforehand, Cooper also stood in full view, so that both commanders were taking on equal risk.
Upon Cooper’s first appearance, Lisa had instructed her implant to zoom in to confirm his identity through his faceplate, just as she was sure her colleagues had as well.
At least, I hope they did.
Cooper’s force had approached from the west—the same direction Lisa, Andy, Tessa, and the Quatro had approached during their attack, months ago.
As for the composition of Cooper’s force, it seemed Leonardo Fiore had been telling the truth. Between the reinforcements he’d gained from his contacts in Habitat 1, along with the forces he must have had hidden in Alex’s wilderness, away from the major supply routes, Cooper had two hundred soldiers under his command, as well as eight beetles, all of which had been modified for war.
As far as the weaponry wielded by Cooper’s people went, Lisa spotted at least four rocket launchers, plus a smattering of sniper rifles, shotguns, and plenty of assault rifles, though those wouldn’t prove very useful unless Daybreak managed to penetrate Habitat 2.
Which Lisa fully expected they would.
An intelligent
defense would have rooftop snipers picking off Cooper’s rocket launcher-bearing soldiers first, followed by as many snipers as Laudano could manage to neutralize. Meanwhile, Lisa would have had Darkstream’s own rocket launchers targeting the beetles, before they did too much damage to the structure of Habitat 2.
But Lisa wasn’t confident Laudano intended to conduct an intelligent defense.
Cooper spoke first, over the wide channel they’d decided on for their parlay: “You can’t win, Commander.” Lisa was reminded of a play put on by school children, which she’d seen back in the Belt, right before she’d left to work for Darkstream. They’d been reenacting a battle from the Milky Way’s First Galactic War, if she recalled correctly. “My forces are too great,” Cooper went on. “We intend to blow open Habitat 2 and retake it for our own.”
“Just try it,” Laudano said, and his acting came across as a little more natural.
Even so, Lisa could see it for what it was, now: acting, and bad acting at that. Now that she’d come around to Tessa’s way of thinking, the truth seemed glaringly obvious to her, shining brightly from behind everything Laudano said or did.
“I’ll give you one chance to leave Habitat 2 without losing any of your people,” Cooper said. “Take it, or die.”
“We’ll never let you oppress the people of this city again,” Laudano said. “Get ready for war, Cooper.”
“Very well,” Cooper said, turning to walk toward the valley, to where it had been agreed all of the Daybreak forces would return before the battle began.
Then, predictably, Cooper broke his word. He leapt behind one of the beetles and gave the order to start firing.
His soldiers moved behind the vehicles, too, also taking cover there, while Cooper’s snipers fired on the Darkstream soldiers on Habitat 2’s roof.
For their part, the Darkstream combat operatives scrambled for cover of their own, Commander Laudano included.
Laudano let this happen. It’s all so transparent.
Indeed, the battle was unfolding exactly as Tessa had predicted.
Keeping an eye on the Darkstream soldiers nearest her, Lisa crept quietly backward, toward the nearest rooftop airlock, where she intended to take a freight elevator back down into the city.
The beetles started firing, then, and before Lisa managed to reach the freight elevator, she heard over a wide channel: “They’ve blown a hole in the side of the habitat!”
The panic Lisa heard in the soldier’s voice sounded genuine.
Maybe the lower-ranking soldiers aren’t in on it.
That seemed likely, now that she thought about it. If it had been otherwise, the chances would have been much greater of Laudano’s plan leaking.
It also meant that innocent men and women would die today. But that had been inevitable no matter what happened.
Lisa reached the airlock, palming the controls, her stomach tense as she waited for the outer doors to open. When they did, she crept inside, slapping the biometric scanner once again to close the outer doors and then to open the inner ones.
At last, she was alone inside the elevator. As it descended, another message came—this time, from the elevator’s overhead speaker. That meant it was being broadcast throughout all of Habitat 2.
It was Laudano: “The habitat has been breached. All residents, go directly to your homes, seal the entrance, and activate emergency life support until the situation is resolved. I repeat, all residents, go directly to your homes.”
The elevator doors opened onto the streets of Habitat 2, which had already descended into chaos, with residents scrambling through the streets as the oxygen they breathed was sucked out of the city by the breach.
Lisa kept her pressure suit on. She headed for the Dusty Bucket.
Chapter 37
Billy’s Bunker
When the other inhabitants of River Rock saw the cloud rising up over the Barrens, they called it just another dust storm—a fixture of life on the border between Eresos’ wetlands and the Barrens, where one became the other with an abruptness you rarely would have seen back on Old Earth.
“Nope,” Billy Overton said, his thumbs tucked behind his belt. “That’s no dust storm.” He’d seen plenty of those during his sixty-five years, and this wasn’t one.
Dust storms came in like giant, puffy clouds rising up from the ground. This dust-up was narrower, high, and sharp.
“Those are machines coming,” Billy said out loud, though no one had stuck around to hear him say it. As usual. “Big ones. And fast.” The others had already decided that the oncoming formation was a dust storm, though, and so now they were in dust-storm mode. “Sure hope they’re friendly, those machines. Else the rest of you’s in for a mighty surprise. Ah, yes.”
Billy didn’t plan on sticking around to gauge the friendliness of the machines for himself. Instead, he meant to head for the bunker he’d paid Darkstream to install for him, right underneath his front yard.
You never knew when you might need a bug-out shelter in your front yard when you lived on a planet populated by giant aliens who could snap your shins clean in two with a single munch. Especially when your town council was too cheap to sign a security contract, not even with those ragtag mercenaries that had set up shop recently.
Billy Overton never needed much of an excuse to hunker down in his shelter. Sometimes, he even went down there if he wanted to pretend he wasn’t home, like when that insufferable Sable Hawthorne came calling. The others were used to him heading for it, so even if they noticed he was doing so now, that wouldn’t serve them as a tip-off of approaching danger, either.
“Tried to warn you,” Billy said to himself as he ambled toward his property, which he was already only a stone’s throw away from. He knew they thought of him as the old man who cried wolf, and they considered his version of crying wolf to be hunkering down in that shelter of his.
Well, someday calamity really will come. Then I’ll get my money’s worth, damn it. And you lot will be sorry.
He fumbled his keycard out of his pocket, hands trembling slightly—as they always did, ever since the accident with the farm robot a half-dozen years ago—and he made his way around the side of the house to caress the scanner with the card.
It didn’t open. Grumbling, he cursed under his breath about what a cheap product it was as he wiped it off on his shirt and tried again.
This time, it worked, the tiny hatch sliding open and a cheery voice greeting him with a “Hello, Billy,” its voice sounding a little tinny by now, after such repeated use.
“Hello yourself,” Billy said as he lowered himself carefully down the ladder and closed the hatch behind him.
Ah, yes. Security. Solitude. He put on a cup of joe and booted up the vid stream from the street in front of his house.
Quiet, so far. Probably nothing again. It was always nothing. Sometimes, he cursed himself for buying this fool shelter from Darkstream. He never would have admitted that to anyone, but down here in its confines, he did permit himself such thoughts.
Here came Sable Hawthorne, hobbling down the dusty lane, beating at patches of grass with her cane.
Tens of thousands of credits gone, all for the privilege of watching crusty old Sable Hawthorne hobble down the road at two inches an hour.
Billy knew the Amblers malfunctioned sometimes, deviating from their preprogrammed routes, but none had ever come rampaging through here, of course. No, that would have justified Billy’s purchase. Can’t have that.
He sighed, long and ragged, the kind of exhalation that he’d never permit himself around the other inhabitants of River Rock. He settled into the shelter’s single seat with the fresh coffee.
At least I have this, he said, raising the mug to his lips.
Without warning, a great metal monstrosity came out of nowhere, knocking Sable Hawthorne clean off the screen.
Billy leapt to his feet, coffee spilling all over him, and he danced around the shelter, shouting and waving his arms. “Ah! Ah! Ah!”
&
nbsp; At last, he regained the presence of mind to strip off his shirt, though he expected he hadn’t succeeded in sparing himself a bad burn. It had already begun to sting across his stomach and chest.
He returned his attention to the screen, and he grasped the joystick that manipulated the camera affixed to the roof of his house, jerking it to the left. His smarting gut hung out over his belt, and as the camera slowly shifted, he patted the forming welt gingerly.
There. There she was. Sable lay on the ground, her cane nowhere in sight, her face a ruined, bloody mess.
Billy’s eyes went so wide they ached. “Oh my God,” he muttered, his voice getting real high-pitched on the last word.
Somehow, he felt none of the satisfaction he’d always expected to feel in the event of a calamitous event striking River Rock. Not only that, he experienced a sharp pang of guilt over all the nasty things he’d thought about Sable Hawthorne over the years.
Poor old woman. She’s dead.
He took hold of the joystick once again, directing the camera toward the village green. “Come on,” he muttered as the view shifted at a glacial pace. “Come on…”
There.
“Wow,” he whispered.
There the monster was that had taken down Sable, shooting great blasts of energy all over the place, at every building in sight. All around it were armed men and women, gunning down the residents of River Rock like they were cutting the grass, and to top it all off, a troop of six Quatro were rampaging around town, too.
This wasn’t just calamity. This was the apocalypse, as far as Billy was concerned. And even if he made it through—even if his shelter really could withstand those balls of energy, which obliterated entire walls and set structures instantly ablaze—Billy realized he wouldn’t have a soul left to talk to. He’d never much been interested in chitchat, before, but the realization that he might lose the opportunity altogether made him feel sad.
Another metal monstrosity strode onto the village green, then, appearing around a building that the first monster had turned into an inferno. This one had two legs, instead of the four that the first one had.
Dynamo (Mech Wars Book 2) Page 11
