Meltdown (Mech Wars Book 3)

by Scott Bartlett

  Well, they’re these little robots that nearly tore my hull clean off out in the Belt. Price had his hands full shooting them off the Javelin while battling the alien mech—”

  “Wait, Jake fought one of those things?”

  Shaking his head as though to clear it, Bronson said, “Look, Sweeney, all you need to know is that those things are small but vicious. They did a number on my ship’s armor, and they’ll do one on your MIMAS if you let them. So don’t let them, all right?”

  The dream-sky had turned blood-red to reflect Ash’s anger. “Sir, if you knew about these things…”

  “You have two entire battalions with you, Sweeney! Figure it out!”

  With that, Bronson disappeared.

  Unbelievable.

  “Steam?” Henrietta said. “Are we just going to let this happen?” She was pointing at the alien mechs, whose killing sprees were still well underway.

  “No,” Ash said. “Actually, it looks like we’re going to have to stop that, somehow, before those things in the sky arrive down here.”

  “What are those things, exactly?” Marco asked. They’d known Ash was contacting Bronson.

  “Robots capable of ripping apart our mechs, apparently. From the sounds of it, facing them and the alien mechs at the same time is the last thing we want to do.”

  “So, we neutralize the three alien mechs first,” Marco said. “How hard can that be?”

  Ash glanced askance at him. She was used to sarcasm from Henrietta. If Marco had started being sarcastic, it was probably a good sign they were in trouble.

  “We stick together,” Ash said. “Remember how we took out the quad outside Ingress—by pinning it down and melting its armor with our lasers. All we have to do is take out the Quatro inside. So we focus on one of those first.”

  Since Roach no longer had a body they could kill, she had no idea how they’d put him down. She’d decided to concentrate on the enemy whose death she knew was at least possible.

  Ash led the way across the battlefield, charging at the quad who’d strayed the farthest from the other two enemy mechs.

  By now, the Darkstream formation wasn’t one—instead, it was just a writhing mass that half-fled and half-fought, depending on a given unit’s proximity to the hostiles.

  Neither effort was going very well.

  Hoping for the element of surprise, Ash charged at her target’s backside, bayonets extended.

  She should have known better. If the Quatro mech was anything like hers, its HUD would warn it of significant threats approaching from any angle.

  Indeed, seconds before she drove her right bayonet into its metal hide, the quad turned, rearing up to crush her beneath metal paws.

  Ash pivoted out of the way, retracting her segmented hands to fire up at the enemy mech as she sidestepped.

  The moment the Quatro crashed back to the ground, Ash noticed Marco had leapt into the air, slowly flipping so that his mech’s whole weight would be behind his blades when he fell.

  The Quatro didn’t seem to register the attack from above, and yet when Marco’s bayonets drove home, they glanced off harmlessly, and he tumbled off the alien’s hide to land in a heap.

  The quad began to turn, but Henrietta was already there with her heavy machine gun, pelting the Quatro’s head and lending a stutter to its movements.

  Ash was still hung up on the ineffectiveness of Marco’s attack. Do the quads have a hardening mechanism of some sort?

  Maybe, if they had advance warning of a significant threat, they were capable of hardening their armor in that spot by compressing the metal scales there; trading versatility for impenetrability, for as long as they needed to.

  It was the only way Ash could explain Marco failing to penetrate the quad with that much momentum behind his bayonets.

  “We need to engage all at once, from four separate angles,” Ash shouted over the team-wide. “I think it’s able to turn away our bayonets if it knows they’re coming, but if we can keep it guessing, surprise it…”

  It was a long shot, but it was the best thing any of them had suggested yet.

  Then again, it’s also the only thing anyone’s suggested.

  Nevertheless, Oneiri moved to circle the quad, which in turn tried to isolate them and take them out one by one.

  It charged Beth, and in the dream, Ash’s distress took the form of the taste of cigarette ashes. She charged forward at the Quatro, bayonets extended before her.

  The quad turned around, batting at Ash with a massive paw and sending her hurtling backward.

  “What happened to engaging it together?” Henrietta said.

  “Uh…right. Sorry.”

  They continued to circle the Quatro, trying out their entire arsenal on it.

  At this range, their heavy machine guns seemed to have a good effect, opening gaping craters in the Quatro’s metal hide that took a while to close.

  Oneiri’s assault on the quad had given the soldiers around them an opening to catch their breath and increase pressure on the quad as well.

  Ash could tell the soldiers were well-trained: they took care to avoid hitting the MIMAS mechs, and their shots were well-timed, forcing the Quatro into compromising its position several times.

  But nothing seemed to work. Either Oneiri was failing to get the drop on the quad or it had learned to repel their blades with a one-hundred-percent success rate.

  If that’s the case, we’re doomed.

  But she had to assume they would get there eventually.

  We have to keep trying.

  “Uh…Ash?” Marco said, his gaze fixed on a point beyond her.

  Ash didn’t have to ask what he was looking at, and when she patched through a feed from one of the visual sensors on her back, it confirmed what she feared: the first robots were starting to crash to the earth, their landing zones scattered across the empty expanse between them and the town. Great plumes of dust sprouted into the air with each impact, and each robot sprinted toward the Darkstream forces the instant it gained its footing.

  They looked like tiny mechs, with limbs that were shaped like elongated shields and heads that curved forward as well as back.

  And they ran like demons chased them.

  “Sweeney,” Bronson said, his likeness appearing suddenly on the hard-packed ground before her. “I may have a solution to the robot problem you’re experiencing.”

  “Oh? That’s welcome news.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it…” Bronson cleared his throat. “I’ve parked the Javelin in low orbit, directly over the battle. I have orders to, uh, nuke the entire area if things go south.”

  Ash froze in place, stunned, while the others grappled with the quad. “But…that’ll kill the Darkstream forces as well, not to mention the citizens of Vanguard.”

  “If you’re defeated, everyone there will die anyway. So don’t lose, and it won’t be an issue. Bronson out.”

  The captain disappeared from the battlefield outside Vanguard once more.

  Chapter 45

  Champion

  Gabe’s feet, ever-shifting to grant him perfect balance, pounded across the hard-packed dirt as he laid open devil after devil with his blades.

  How many must I kill?

  He’d intended the question rhetorically, but as they often did, the whispers offered up an answer:

  All of them. You must kill them all. Only then will the location of your beloved be revealed.

  Gabe swept a man’s head off his shoulders with a flick of one of his broadswords, and the puny ball of flesh and bone sailed through the air trailing droplets of blood before falling to the hard-packed ground. Less than a second later, its body followed.

  Most of the figures he slew seemed minuscule to him, and they offered him no challenge whatsoever. The stinging of their weapons had the same effect that hail had on human skin—it hurt a little, sometimes, but hail rarely killed anyone.

  The tanks held more interest for him, actually providing some satisfaction
whenever he succeeded in taking one out. The armored personnel carriers caught his eye, too, and he thought it would be enjoyable to make those explode, though the feat would hold little tactical value.

  Besides, they might be keeping Jess in one of them.

  He’d been ecstatic when the whispers told him that she was still alive. Or at least, he’d felt that way once they’d convinced him of it.

  At first, he had been skeptical. He’d seen Jess’s corpse with his own eyes—the scarlet that stained her white summer dress.

  That wasn’t her, the whispers insisted. It wasn’t her at all. They fooled you, Roach.

  But if it hadn’t been Jess, then who?

  No one, the whispers answered. That was no one. They’ve been keeping you in a waking dream, Roach, and it is only now that you have entered my dream that you are awake.

  The whispers had explained it all: how Darkstream had fabricated the Ambler attack on Allendale, sending him north to investigate the hoax.

  On the way, they’d hijacked his implant, sending him into lucid without his knowledge.

  There, they’d concocted this whole fantasy: of the Quatro attacking Northshire, of them killing Jess Sweeney as well as her father and the other villagers.

  Not that the Quatro were blameless—oh, no. They had helped Darkstream fool him, and they’d betrayed their own kind on top of that.

  That was why he and the two quads had slaughtered human and Quatro alike, back in River Rock. No one liked being betrayed by your own kind, no matter the species.

  A woman in his path stood her ground, showing no fear as she fired round after round from her SL-17 up into his face. Gabe was about to cut her down when he stopped, frozen on the battlefield, his rampage far from complete.

  He asked the whispers a question he hadn’t asked them before.

  Why…why would Darkstream trick me into thinking Jess was dead? What would they stand to gain from that?

  A high-pitched cackle rose up inside him, then, and he had to suppress the urge to clutch his head with his metal hands.

  Gabriel Roach, must you really ask? Do your enemies need a reason for the evil they do, other than their evil natures? The laugh came again. They did this because they are war profiteers. The humans and the Quatro both—they conspire to make their species fight, and after each battle they count their credits.

  “I see,” Gabe muttered, and of course it all made sense, now. He should have seen it before. It brought him shame that he’d been foolish enough to have to ask.

  Continue your slaughter, Roach. It is the same mission you’ve been on almost all your life. Kill, kill, kill. It doesn’t matter who directs you to do the killing. It never has. Has it? Has it?

  The whispers had become a single, unified shriek. Gabe returned to fighting.

  He commanded his arms to transform from broadswords into rotary autocannons, and he sent streams of hot lead into all who stood against him.

  As meteorites crashed to the earth all around him, becoming metal bipeds who also engaged the Darkstream forces, Gabe focused on one of the MIMAS mechs—the one with yellow swirls covering its face and body.

  There, the voice inside him said, having become a whisper once again. Kill her, and you will have your answer.

  “But how—”

  That is their champion! Kill her, and your enemies will surely crumple! What can they do, then, but yield to you your beloved?

  Gabe knew exactly who the whispers had instructed him to kill.

  “Jess won’t be happy with me…” he mumbled.

  But if this meant getting her back, it was worth it. Anything would have been.

  He charged.

  Chapter 46

  Makeshift Gunships

  In short order, the twenty or so Quatro who charged at the enemy holding the canyon were mowed down in a hail of gunfire.

  They lack military training.

  To Lisa, that was clear. If they’d possessed the discipline instilled by training, they would never have let their emotions lead them to their own deaths.

  She’d hoped that the Quatro’s sheer size and ferocity would compensate for their lack of training, but now she began to doubt that.

  I need to get them under control.

  Suddenly, she remembered that her jumpsuit’s collar had an amplification function, in the event that coms went down and shouting became the only means of communicating in battle. She used her implant to activate it.

  “All units fall back in an orderly fashion! You infantry in front—go to the right or left of the Quatro you’re retreating past!”

  She wasn’t sure “infantry” was quite the right term for the Quatro—they were more like cavalry than anything else. Some of them had been outfitted with spare guns Lisa’s militia had had on the shuttles, making them…a mix between cavalry and infantry?

  Now was not the time to puzzle over their classification. Bullets rained down all around her, sinking into Quatro flesh.

  Rug positioned herself between Lisa and the robot army, and she saw the Quatro twitch as ordnance found its way into her body, her facial features contorting.

  “Move out of the way, Rug!”

  “I will not. You move back, out of harm’s way. Fall back, Lisa Sato.”

  She let out a frustrated sigh through gritted teeth as she began striding backward, ducking out from behind Rug whenever she could to provide covering fire for their retreat. Her shoulder was killing her.

  “Militia members and Quatro with guns,” she barked, “return fire against the enemy units that are pressuring us most!”

  The swiftness with which her soldiers followed her command pleased Lisa—and also brought her a small measure of relief.

  Maybe this isn’t completely hopeless after all.

  Rug also turned around to fire on the enemy with the energy weapons strapped to her back, though she continued to provide physical cover to Lisa as she stalked backward.

  At last, the majority of Lisa’s force made it to cover. The uneven terrain was good for that, at least—there were plenty of hollows, hills, and short cliffs to use.

  Even those who could find no cover were protected by the distance they’d put between themselves and the canyon, which was where the robots seemed intent on remaining.

  “Tessa,” Lisa subvocalized over a two-way channel. “What’s your location?”

  “Taking cover to the south.”

  “Looks like I was right about the robots organizing and opposing us.”

  “It seems you were,” Tessa said after a short pause. “But I stand by what I said. There’s no point in obsessing over something until it becomes an actual problem.”

  “Right. Well, it’s a problem now. There must be satellite photos of the terrain to the north and south—have you had a chance to look at them? Is there another route we can take?”

  “Doesn’t look like it. According to these elevation readings, the land to the north is too variable to allow passage for a force of any meaningful size. To the south, mountains, with no discernible pass through to the west that I can make out.” Tessa sighed. “I’ll admit, it looks like these machines are clear on their goal: prevent us from returning west.”

  Lisa racked her brain for an answer that didn’t involve trying to advance through that meat grinder.

  We could ferry our forces back and forth using the shuttles…

  But no, that was stupid. It would take weeks to move everyone, and they’d make themselves vulnerable to attack during the operation. Besides, they’d run out of fuel long before they transported everyone.

  Somehow, I doubt Darkstream will be willing to lend us more.

  At last, she said, “Tessa, do you see an alternative to battling through that canyon?”

  “Not unless we leave the Quatro we’ve recruited behind. I’m assuming we don’t consider that an option.”

  “I don’t. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “All right, then.” Lisa stared over the sunbaked land, at the c
anyon that would be her crucible. “There has to be a way to get to the top of one of those cliffs that form the canyon. What are you seeing on the photos?”

  “Uh…I’d try for the southern cliff—try to find a path through the mountains that leads to it. The mountain slopes look treacherous, and I’m not sure humans could get up there, but maybe Quatro could. Maybe.”

  “I say we send Rug and the Alex Quatro with their energy weapons, plus half the Quatro we’ve outfitted with guns and another fifty without. Their mission will be to take that cliff and fire down on the robots in the canyon as well as the ones stationed on the opposite cliff. They can time the attack with our own charge at the canyon. What do you think?”

  “Well, it’s your call. You’re in command. But if you ask me, it still sounds risky as hell. I think we can expect our forces to get torn to shreds as we try to take that canyon.”

  “Maybe not, if we order our ten shuttles to fly forward to join the fight. They’re combat shuttles, remember? If we use them as makeshift gunships, order them to hit the robots from the air, and Rug and the others to hit them from that cliff, we might just be able to make a go of this.”

  “Huh.” Judging by the silence that followed that syllable, Tessa was mulling the plan over. “I sure can’t think of anything better.”

  “Then we’ll run with what we have. I’ll start handing out the orders.”

  “I’ll sit on my ass, I guess.”

  “No you won’t. You’ll organize the armed Quatro we’re keeping with us, along with the humans from our militia. I want them to spread out from each other as much as possible, to reduce their vulnerability to enemy fire and to increase the firing solutions they have on those metal bastards.”

  “Hey, someone taught you well.”

  “That someone had better get moving. Sato out.”

  Chapter 47

  Concentrated Fire

  Ash soon discovered the most efficient way to fight the robots that continued to fall from the sky.

  She kept her hands retracted and settled against her wrists but left her bayonets extended. That way, she could rip apart the robots with armor-piercing rounds when they were far, and slash them to pieces or impale them when they were near.