“Are we going to have a problem, here, Sweeney?” Bronson said, the mirth draining from his voice.
She returned his gaze, her mind racing. Bronson was hailed as a hero throughout the Steele System. He was the man who’d bested the authoritarian Captain Keyes; the man who’d led a battle group of rogue UHF warships away from the Milky Way’s tyrannical Commonwealth; and also the one who’d secured Darkstream’s transition into this galaxy.
Bronson was also the man who’d conquered Eresos for use by Darkstream colonists.
But maybe the popular portrayal had Bronson exactly backward. Maybe he’d accomplished everything through manipulation instead of the bravery and sacrifice everyone attributed to him. The idea seemed as unlikely a proposition as DuGalle’s entire data dump being faked, but maybe that was only because Bronson commanded such respect.
In one sense, the idea he’s a snake is much, much simpler.
“Sweeney?”
“We don’t have a problem, Captain. I’ll lead Oneiri on to River Rock. But we’d better get going.” She gestured with a giant metal hand at the path ahead, where the rest of Oneiri had stopped to peer back at her. “Otherwise, we’ll risk losing Roach’s trail.”
“You do that,” Bronson said, and his eyes were narrowed as he flickered out of existence.
Chapter 38
The Debt
Jake knew the physics checked out: with the distances involved, blowing up Comet Three’s artificial sun should not have negatively affected the environments inside the surrounding comets. Even if the radiation had reached them, the thirty meters of soil would have been more than enough to soak it up.
Even so, he still insisted that Pichenko check the comet’s radiation levels. The last thing his conscience needed was the slimmest chance he’d exposed his sister to even more radiation, let alone his mother and the rest of Comet Four’s inhabitants.
When the tests came back normal, he breathed a small sigh of relief.
But that was hardly the only thing bothering him.
The fight with the alien mechs played over and over again in his mind, both while sleeping and awake.
It wasn’t the combat itself that got to him most, though that had come pretty close to ending him.
No, the most disturbing thing was the part he still had to contend with, on an ongoing basis: the dark whispers the mech continued to feed his mind whenever he was inside it.
He had no one he could talk to about it; no one who would understand the torment, the constant darkness involved with being inside the mech.
The knowledge that if he was going to protect his family and his friends through whatever was happening to the Steele System, he would need the mech…
It made his throat clench whenever he thought about it.
He couldn’t talk to his mother about it. She would tell him to stop using it, end-of-conversation. Jake knew that wasn’t an option, but for Brianne Price, even that wouldn’t matter. The safety of her children was paramount, and every other consideration was subordinate to it.
Neither could he talk about it to his father. Aside from the ten-minute delay their conversation would suffer from, telling Peter would only cause him to worry more than he already did, and he worried a lot.
Who could understand the unending torment Jake endured? Who could relate to the awareness that the torment might never end—that moving forward meant contending with it, day after day, possibly for the rest of his life?
Then, as he walked alone through the fields of Comet Four, which were greening once again, the answer came to him:
Sue Anne. Sue Anne would understand.
But no. He couldn’t possibly discuss this with his sister. She had enough darkness in her life to grapple with.
And yet…he’d had nothing to talk to her about before. Nothing had seemed real enough.
This was certainly real.
And if he wanted to feel comfortable talking to his sister…wanted to show that, on some abstract level, he could relate to her situation…
He knew it was awful. But he went to her all the same.
His mother and his sister were still at Pichenko’s house, even though they’d discovered that many other Comet Four homes were vacant as well.
Pichenko had grimaced when Jake had raised the specter of his family moving into one of them. “Pardon me if this is callous, Jake, but the last thing your family needs is to stay in a home belonging to the recently deceased. It’s the last thing I need, for that matter. No. They must remain in mine. I am more than comfortable in the Council Chambers.”
Jake nodded at his mother when he entered the house, and she glanced up from some reading, smiling halfheartedly before returning to it.
He smiled back, hoping his expression looked more genuine than hers, and he continued through the house…to the sick room.
When he opened the door, he found his sister asleep, and he settled into the rocking chair beside her bed as silently as he could.
Even so, the chair creaked, and Sue Anne’s eyes fluttered open. They found him.
“Jake?” she rasped.
There was a note of surprise in her voice, and that killed him. He knew it belonged there, though. He’d been avoiding this room, spending much longer periods out searching the other comets for survivors than he should reasonably have expected of himself, of which his mother continually reminded him.
“Hi, Sue Anne,” he said.
“Something’s bothering you. Isn’t it? Something big.”
He raised his eyebrows. “How can you tell?”
“When you spend months at a time in bed, you get really good at reading the people who visit you.”
“That makes sense,” he said, and then he sighed. “I…I haven’t visited you. Not nearly enough. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I understand.”
Jake returned her gaze, and he could see that she did understand—fully. That made it even worse.
“Tell me what’s bothering you,” she said.
“It’s that, uh, that thing I pilot.” For some reason, saying the words ‘alien mech’ out loud felt a little ridiculous. “It’s getting to me. To be honest, it scares me.”
Sue Anne shook her head a little against the pillow, and even that seemed to require a tremendous effort. “Why?”
“It keeps trying to…to tempt me.”
“It’s sentient?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. It’s something. Possessed, maybe.” He laughed, though he wasn’t sure he was joking. “It whispers to me. Keeps asking me to join with it. I don’t know what it means by that, exactly, but it seems like a bad idea. On the other hand, I keep getting this idea that if I give in, I’ll become even better equipped to fight the things that attacked Hub. And maybe, if I’m quick enough, I can help save Eresos from them, too.”
“You must not give in, Jake.”
Studying her gaunt face, he said, “Why do you say that? What could you possibly know about it?”
“I know that you just said it’s a bad idea. You’ve spent a long time inside it, by now. You have a lot of experience with that thing, and you’re my brother, and I trust your judgment.”
He nodded. “Thanks. But, Sue Anne…I’m not sure how much longer I can hold out against it.”
“Listen to me,” Sue Anne hissed, and genuine anger filled her voice. “Are you listening, Jake?”
“Yes…yes. I’m listening.”
“Good. Because what I’m about to say is very important. For most of my life, I’ve dealt with more pain than you can imagine. I don’t care what Darkstream did to you in training. I don’t care what you’ve encountered in battle. All I have to do is take one look at you to tell that you haven’t encountered a fraction of the pain that I have, on a daily basis, for years and years and years. Are you following me?”
“Yes,” he whispered, and his voice was barely audible, even to him.
“Good. Then I hope you’ll believe me when I tell you that the pain I’ve experienced
makes life not worth living.”
“Sue Anne—”
“Shut up. I’m not kidding. It’s not worth it, to live like this. I would honestly rather be dead. So, why do I cling to life, when I could have stopped fighting at any second? When I could have let my sickness take me and it all would have ended?”
Sue Anne’s eyes held his gaze as they burned with more energy than he would have thought possible. He didn’t dare speak.
“Jake, I clung to life because I could see how important it was to mom, to dad, and to you that I go on living. I saw how hard you all worked on the fantasy that you could somehow save me from this dragon that has been ravaging my body since I was five. I did it for you, Jake. For you.” If Sue Anne’s illness hadn’t dramatically diminished her voice, she would have been shouting, now.
“So when you hear that thing’s voice calling to you, beckoning to you to give in, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to remember me, fighting to live, despite how badly I wanted to die. I want you to remember how much you owe me. How deeply in debt you are to me—a debt you can never, ever repay, except by continuing to resist that voice, forever.”
Jake couldn’t answer, because he was weeping, now, and the tears showed no sign of stopping. He sobbed so hard that speech wasn’t an option.
At last, after a long, long time, he did manage to utter two syllables.
“Thank you.”
Chapter 39
Silence
The next day, Jake called his father, despite how difficult the communications delay rendered conversation.
That didn’t matter, not really. Because Jake only had one thing to say of any importance:
“Come home, Dad. It’s time for you to come home.”
And he did. A day later, Peter stepped out of the airlock, and Jake and his mother were there to greet him.
His parents exchanged thin, tight smiles, and together the three of them walked to Councilman Pichenko’s house.
“Did you call your comet hoppers to come?” Jake asked.
His father nodded. “And I put out the call to other development outfits. A few of them resisted, but after I showed them the footage, most agreed.”
“Good.”
In addition to the ships used to develop comets, the residents of Hub would also employ every shuttle in the city-settlement that still functioned, and a request had been put out to the entire Steele System: anyone with a spacecraft at their disposal was asked to come to Hub and help with the evacuation.
It was doubtful any of the eleven warships that had accompanied Darkstream to the Steele System would come to Hub’s rescue. A scant handful of those were devoted to patrolling the space between the Belt and the inner system, but Darkstream used most of them as passenger and cargo ships, and they rarely stayed in one place for long. Jake doubted they’d divert from their courses—not even to help the thousands of refugees from Hub.
Across all seven comets, Jake had found nine thousand survivors, mostly located in Comet Two. Though the population of Hub had varied somewhat, it had once averaged around a hundred thousand—over ten times the number of people who were left.
They arrived at Pichenko’s house, and Brianne paused briefly before opening the front door, offering Peter a smile that was a little warmer than earlier.
Then they all entered, making their way to the sick room, where Peter Price reunited with his daughter at long last.
She wasn’t able to lift herself from the bed even an inch, and Peter had to gently slide his arms underneath her so they could embrace.
After that, the conversation was sparse, but it didn’t seem to matter. Sue Anne looked truly happy, and that did matter.
After less than an hour, they left Sue Anne’s room, unwilling to deprive her of the rest she so badly needed. She would need as much energy as she could muster for the journey into the inner system.
But as it happened, she would never make that journey.
Before bed, Jake slipped inside Sue Anne’s room to kiss her goodnight. He tiptoed across the room, not wanting to wake her.
The military had taught him to interpret sense-data quickly, and he instantly noted the silence, where once there had been the steady beep-beep-beep of the heart monitor.
He traced the cord and found that Sue Anne had disconnected it from herself—she must not have wanted to disturb them with its shrill and steady keening.
When Jake touched her forehead, there was still some warmth there.
He sat on the edge of the rocking chair, holding Sue Anne’s limp, cooling hand. And for the second time in as many days, he cried.
Chapter 40
River Rock Redux
After receiving Bronson’s orders, Oneiri slowed their pace toward River Rock. They were meant to reunite with the two reserve battalions, after all, and although both were in the area, they moved much slower than the MIMAS mechs.
As she picked her way through the woods, Ash struggled with the implications of the data dump DuGalle had given her.
If it truly held water—and a big part of her screamed that it must—then Darkstream had orchestrated the war with the Quatro from the outset. They’d launched an unprovoked attack against the aliens, with the sole intention of drawing them into a prolonged conflict and increasing company profits.
But a Quatro killed Jess.
How could she reconcile her sister’s death with the possibility that the Quatro had never wanted this war in the first place? That their attack on Ash’s home had been in response to repeated attacks on their own?
At last, she couldn’t take it anymore, and she forwarded the data dump to the other members of Oneiri Team.
“Fake,” Henrietta said after a cursory glance.
“Are you kidding me?” Ash said. “You can’t have looked at more than one or two of the documents.”
“The tech for doctoring basically anything has been around for ages. Right, Spirit?”
Haltingly, Marco nodded as he dodged around a particularly large tree. “Well, yes…”
“See? Case closed. Who are you going to trust, Steam? Red Company, or the company that made us mech pilots?”
Ash paused for several seconds, collecting her thoughts. She’d been reasoning this out for hours, but now that Henrietta was actually confronting her about it, her arguments had promptly fled.
“I don’t know, Razor,” she finally said. “It seems like it would have taken a hell of a lot of effort for Red Company to forge all these documents. Did they even have the resources to do it? I mean, they disbanded because they lack resources, didn’t they?”
“They’re conniving bastards,” Henrietta said. “They would have found a way. And as for them ‘disbanding,’ I don’t trust that for a second. Sure, they said they’re disbanding. But what better way would there be for them to catch us off-guard?”
Realizing she needed more time to puzzle over it, Ash fell back into her own thoughts. Henrietta spoke so plainly, with such conviction, that it was difficult to argue with her. The confident way she talked made Ash feel like everything Henrietta said should have been self-evident, and like everything Ash thought was silly.
At last, they joined with the Venomous Vipers and the Pied Pipers. This time, Ash barely batted an eyelash at the moronic names Darkstream’s reserve battalions inevitably took for themselves.
The force they brought to bear was no joke, however: eight tanks, five mortar teams, forty snipers, and ten platoons’ worth of infantry would give Roach a hard time no matter how powerful he was now.
Darkstream was clearly intent on putting Gabriel Roach down like the rabid dog he’d become.
But when they rolled into River Rock, Roach was nowhere to be seen.
In his place, hundreds of corpses littered the village, so thickly that patches of visible ground were rare. The bodies had already begun to attract insects, which briefly vacated their meals as the Darkstream soldiers passed before lighting upon them once more.
There weren’t only h
uman bodies—there were Quatro bodies among the dead as well, dwarfing their human counterparts. And though Ash wasn’t certain, she would have bet that the dead Quatro were the same ones Oneiri had fought in both Cordage and Peppertree.
Most of the structures were also obliterated, though Ash got the impression that not all of the damage had been done recently. Some of it looked like it had been in the middle of getting repaired when it had been ripped apart once more.
Sure enough, when she consulted the system net it told her that River Rock had already suffered from one attack, consisting of six Quatro led by a quad.
Something moved amidst the corpses, and in an instant dozens of guns were trained on it.
It was a human corpse, bouncing up and down—once, twice, three times.
At last, it fell out of the way, and a hatch opened beneath it, which must have led directly into the ground.
An elderly man emerged out of the hatch, both wavering hands held high in the air.
“Who are you?” Ash demanded.
“Billy Overton.” He nodded, ever so slightly, at the hatch he’d just vacated. “This here’s my shelter. Paid tens of thousands of credits for it, and let me tell you, it was worth every penny.”
Ash exchanged looks with Beth. Then she turned back to the old man. “What happened here?”
“Bunch of Quatro showed up, led by two in those four-legged mechs. Then, a two-legged mech showed up—alien-looking one, very same one as saved this village a couple weeks ago, far as I can tell. Except, this time he joined the Quatro in their killing. They didn’t just kill humans, neither. The Quatro mechs turned on their own kind. I saw it. I watched it all from down there.” He nodded again toward the hatch he’d emerged from.
Meltdown (Mech Wars Book 3) Page 14
