Infliction (Mech Wars Book 4)

by Scott Bartlett

  Henrietta’s words brought a curt nod from the Darkstream captain. “That’s a fine answer. I’ll even log it as your explanation for failing to follow my order to come immediately to Valhalla after the Battle of Vanguard. But you still haven’t fooled me. I know you were entertaining the idea of turning against us. Consider yourselves both on notice. I’ll be keeping an eye on you.”

  Until now, Beth had been letting Henrietta do the talking, but she sensed that Bronson was about to cut the conversation short, and there was something important that the other MIMAS pilot had so far neglected to ask him.

  “Can we get an evac, sir?” Beth asked.

  “Negative,” Bronson said, and the widening of his grin told Beth he’d been anticipating the question with some eagerness.

  “Seriously?” Henrietta said. “Why the hell not?”

  “Easy, Jin,” Bronson said, his evident mirth intact. “You’ve just been given your jobs back. You should consider yourselves incredibly fortunate. As for an evac, there’s no ship available to park in orbit over your location and wait while you rocket up. Your chance to do that was back at Vanguard. Now you’ll have to travel to Ingress and take the space elevator.”

  “Sir…” Beth said, hesitating. She knew that there was no argument she could make to change his mind, and that she was already treading on thin ice. But she couldn’t help stating the obvious. “Eresos is in total chaos. It’s safe to assume we’re surrounded by hostiles right now, and not just the Quatro. There’s also the Gatherers to consider, and the Ravagers, plus we still don’t know how a MIMAS will fare against an Ambler—”

  “Ravagers?” Bronson said. “Where did you come by that term?”

  “P-Price, sir,” Beth stammered, and Henrietta’s mech whipped its head around to stare at her. She felt pretty sure the other pilot was glaring.

  “I see.” Bronson’s grin had melted into an expression that was all business. “Consider your trek back to Ingress a mission to settle down the countryside.”

  “How are we supposed to do that?” Henrietta asked.

  “By engaging every hostile you encounter. Bronson out.” With that, the captain disappeared.

  Henrietta was still staring at Beth, and now her mech’s hands lifted into the air in an exasperated gesture. “You just had to piss him off, didn’t you?”

  They continued on toward Ingress. It wasn’t long before their HUDs, linked into the system net and kept updated by satellite scans of the planet’s surface, alerted them to the presence of an Ambler roaming less than a kilometer to the north, on the other side of a tree-covered rise.

  Razor will probably want to interpret Bronson’s order as favorably as possible, Beth reflected. For that reason, she kept walking north-west, along a trajectory that wouldn’t intercept the Ambler’s.

  “Where are you going?” Henrietta said, extending the bayonets that had earned her the nickname Razor.

  “Bronson told us to take out any hostiles we encountered. I didn’t figure you’d consider being a kilometer away ‘encountering’ them.”

  “You kidding? I’m itching to see how our mechs stack up against Amblers. Besides, after talking to that dick, I need to blow off some steam.”

  Steam. Hearing Ash Sweeney’s nickname made Beth wince inside her mech, and inside the dream, it lent a red tinge to the sky. I bet Henrietta used that word to goad me. The other pilot grew testy when she was angry, and she wasn’t above taking it out on her teammates.

  Except, they weren’t teammates anymore, were they? Oneiri Team was shattered, and they were just individual mercenaries working for a company with questionable motives.

  She decided that rising to Henrietta’s bait wouldn’t serve anything. Instead, Beth extended her own bayonets, and the metallic rasp of the blades projecting from her wrists was as satisfying as always.

  “Fine. What’s the plan?”

  They crept over the hill, which was covered in Eresos’ unique species of leafless trees, whose branches cascaded downward in waves until they brushed the ground. As they crested the rise, a gap in those trees showed them the Ambler, surrounded by a group of Gatherers—twenty-one of them, according to Beth’s HUD.

  “You creep closer while I circle around,” Henrietta said. “When I give the signal, engage the Ambler, then melt back into the woods. If I’m right, it’ll break rank with the Gatherers to chase you. Once it’s far enough away, I’ll engage the smaller bots, tear them to shreds. Keep your distance from the Ambler till I can close with it from behind. We’ll take it out together.”

  Beth nodded. “I like it.” And she did. She was surprised that Henrietta was playing it so safe, actually—that wasn’t typically her MO when she was upset.

  Maybe Henrietta’s changing. She wouldn’t have considered it possible, back during MIMAS training on Valhalla. Then again, Eresos had changed all of them, hadn’t it?

  As Henrietta went back the way they’d come, to follow a wide route around the hill, Beth inched from tree to tree, taking great care not to offer anything for the Ambler’s sensors to detect.

  We’re lucky it didn’t pick us up through that gap in the trees. In truth, Beth had no idea how sophisticated the thing’s sensors were. No one did. But she suspected that the coming days would give her a stern lesson in the robots’ capabilities.

  Henrietta appeared beside her in the mech dream, unclad in her MIMAS. “Now, Paste!” she said, using Beth’s own nickname, which Ash had given her. Hearing it brought another pang to her heart.

  But she refused to let it get in the way of doing her job. Stepping out from behind a particularly large exemplar of Eresos’ native tree, she loosed two rockets at the Ambler.

  The towering mech turned toward her as the missiles hissed through the air. One went wide, but the other slammed into its hip, causing it to stagger backward briefly before it charged toward Beth with abandon.

  She sprinted forward several steps, her metal fingers retracting to rest against her wrists, revealing the twin rotary autocannons built into the MIMAS mech’s forearms. Both guns blazed, sending forty rounds per second screaming toward her foe.

  Abruptly, Beth about-turned and dashed back into the relative safety of the wood.

  Her MIMAS had sensors all over its body, however, and she was able to keep an eye on the Ambler as she fled. That came in handy when the enemy mech sent a pair of rockets at her, followed closely by two more.

  Given the way the missiles veered in response to Beth’s course adjustments, they clearly had onboard guidance systems.

  Not a problem. Their plan involved the woods for a reason, and this was far from the first time she’d ever had highly explosive ordnance sent at her.

  Weaving through the wood, she timed her turns so that each rocket found a tree as its target—instead of her backside. Within seconds, four trees blazed behind her, and she was far enough through the woods that the Ambler had lost its visual on her. At least, it stopped firing, anyway.

  When Beth reached the hilltop where she and Henrietta had scouted the enemy, she risked a glance back through the gap in the trees.

  Sure enough, Henrietta was out on the plain, wreaking havoc on the Gatherers flinging themselves at her with abandon.

  They were no match for the MIMAS. True to her handle, Henrietta whirled around and around, slicing through each robot before it could touch her.

  But the sound of the Ambler crashing through the trees reached Beth, far too close for comfort. She engaged her flamethrowers, igniting the flora between her and her adversary to buy some time. This close to the Barrens, the trees were all standing tinder, waiting to be set ablaze.

  Beth didn’t hang around to watch the dancing flames. She fled down the hill.

  It took more time than she’d anticipated for Henrietta to catch up, which meant more fleeing across Eresos’ uneven landscape for Beth. That made her worry about stumbling across even more enemies.

  In the end, her fears went unrealized. Beth watched through her rear sensors as
Henrietta overtook the Ambler with surprising stealth, given her speed. The MIMAS collided with the alien machine, driving both bayonets into its midsection.

  That didn’t stop the Ambler, and it turned to confront Henrietta. But Beth had already turned around and detached her heavy machine gun. She proceeded to pelt the Ambler’s back with armor-piercing rounds.

  That propelled the Ambler into Henrietta, who plunged her bayonets into the mech once more, pushing it off to fire her autocannons straight into its face, or at least what passed for its face.

  “Back up!” Beth shouted as she fired a stream of four rockets at the enemy mech.

  Henrietta leapt backward several meters, landing just as the missiles connected with the Ambler—all four of them.

  It went down, but Beth wasn’t about to assume the job was done. Instead, she trained her newest weapon on the mech; her lasers, which Darkstream had only recently discovered how to use inside planetary atmospheres.

  Short seconds later, the Ambler burst into flame, followed by an explosion that flung its parts in several directions for dozens of meters.

  Intelligently, Henrietta continued to back up. But as she did, her human likeness appeared before Beth.

  “Good work,” she said, staring up at Beth’s MIMAS.

  “You too. Do you have that worked out of your system, now, or are we going to have to engage every hostile the satellites notify us of?”

  Henrietta shrugged. “Let’s take it a little easier, from here on out. Taking down an Ambler makes for a pretty successful afternoon, in my books. Besides, I have a feeling we got lucky, with this one.”

  I’m just hoping we make it back to Ingress. But Beth decided not to share that sentiment out loud.

  Chapter 4

  Warzone

  Lisa had no mech, and except maybe in extreme circumstances, she wasn’t about to let one of them carry her.

  She knew her refusal to be carried was slowing down their progress, but she considered her dignity worth it.

  Besides, our mission isn’t terribly urgent.

  Lisa, Jake, and Marco were headed to join up with the Quatro drift who’d taken care of Andy while he recovered from the injuries he’d sustained escaping Alex. The idea was to recruit the Quatro caring for him to join the fight against Darkstream, but at the very least, Lisa would collect Andy and Bob O’Toole, so the effort shouldn’t be a total wash.

  It’ll be close to one, though, if the Quatro don’t join. She doubted Andy would be well enough to fight, and Bob O’Toole…she wasn’t totally sure regaining O’Toole would help or hinder the revolution she seemed to find herself leading.

  At least her army was out doing constructive things, under the guidance of Tessa Notaras and Rug. They were following up on rumors of nearby fighting between humans and Quatro, in the hopes of recruiting the aliens.

  Even though Lisa’s short, human legs were slowing down the mechs, Marco Gonzalez still managed to fall behind every now and then, lost in the task Jake had assigned him.

  “How’s your progress on breaking those access control locks, Spirit?” Jake asked after Marco started trailing behind for what felt like the hundredth time. The alien mech Jake piloted towered over Marco’s. As intimidating as Lisa found the MIMAS models, the shapeshifting mech was much moreso.

  Thank goodness there’s only one left, and it’s on our side. For now. But she didn’t like to think about the possibility of Jake turning against them like Gabriel Roach had.

  “Uh,” Marco said. “It’s coming. I should have access within a couple days.”

  Jake’s mech inclined its head without breaking its stride. “Make it one day.”

  A sigh projected from the amplifiers installed all over Marco’s mech. “I still don’t see why we can’t just leak the MIMAS training sims to the system net. They’d be hacked inside of an hour, then.”

  Jake grunted, and said, “You really think the public can break digital locks faster than you?”

  “Sure. Don’t underestimate the power of crowdsourcing. Anyway, hacking isn’t my specialty. Being smart doesn’t mean I’m an expert at everything.”

  “No one said you were smart,” Jake said with a chuckle. “Anyway, there’s no way we’re leaking these to the public. Just because we’ve turned against Darkstream doesn’t mean we’re going to start leaking military secrets all over the place. We’re only going to leak matters of extreme public interest—like the fact that the company was complicit in enslaving everyone on Alex.”

  Marco shook his mech’s head. “I still don’t see how it’s dangerous to leak the sims. People would still need to obtain actual MIMAS mechs to do any harm with those, and that’s incredibly unlikely.”

  “My decision’s final, Marco. We’re not leaking the sims.”

  When Lisa had first asked Jake for access to the training sims, he’d been reluctant. Although he seemed committed to fighting Darkstream in theory, he was still struggling with going through the actual motions. He hadn’t seen what she had.

  Although, Bronson did order him to abandon his family to die.

  Either way, he’d needed some convincing.

  “Do you really think we’re going to get our hands on more mechs?” he’d said.

  “I think we have to. The deck is stacked against us, Jake—so high that it’s hard to see the top. If we’re going to win this war, we need something to even things up. We need to obtain some more mechs.”

  He’d shrugged uncomfortably. “I just don’t think it’s very likely.”

  When she’d answered, her voice had been much softer than before. “Well, isn’t it a little more likely that something bad could happen to you or Marco while you’re outside your mechs? We’d need replacement pilots, if that happened.”

  After a pause, Jake had said, “You’re right. My mech is pretty different from a MIMAS, and I wouldn’t wish piloting it on you. But you’ve convinced me. We can’t transmit the sims to you without breaking the access controls protecting them—I’ll have Marco get started on that right away.”

  That comment, about how Jake wouldn’t wish piloting his mech on her, had robbed Lisa of sleep that night. But what could be done? They couldn’t afford for Jake to stop using the alien mech.

  Even if we could afford it, I’m not sure that he would stop.

  An alert from her implant interrupted her reverie, telling her that they were drawing near the location that Andy had transmitted to her.

  The Quatro had learned not to engage in any large troop displacements unless they had an underground tunnel or cave that they knew they could viably retreat too. Aboveground, their superconducting fullerene-laced brains only had enough power to pull the triggers on the artillery they’d acquired, but belowground was a different matter altogether. There, it was cold enough that their ability allowed them to halt bullets before they reached their targets.

  Luckily for the Quatro, the topology of Eresos was riddled with such underground hideaways.

  If Andy hadn’t told her how to find the entrance to this Quatro drift’s current lair, she doubted she would have found it on her own, even given the coordinates. Two trees twisted together to huddle up against a hillside, and the gap was such that the Quatro themselves likely had to squeeze through. Lisa had seen several Quatro big enough that she wasn’t sure they would have fit at all, though maybe the trees had more give than they appeared to.

  Or maybe Quatro are more flexible than I think.

  “How are we doing this?” Jake asked. “The mechs aren’t getting through there. Not unless we widen the hole, and I doubt your friends would appreciate that.”

  “It’s up to you,” Lisa answered. “But like you said, if you come, your mech stays out here.”

  Jake nodded. “Marco, you keep watch. Drop the hacking for now, okay? I don’t want you distracted enough that you let a Darkstream battalion drop on our heads without warning.”

  “I wasn’t that distracted!” Marco protested.

  “Trust me, Marco,” Jak
e said as the front of his mech opened up to let him leave. “Give the hacking a break.”

  The temperature dropped with surprising rapidity as Lisa and Jake progressed along the tunnel, and they hadn’t gone very far before their weapons were snatched out of their hands to fly into the darkness.

  They’d been expecting this, and they both raised their empty hands into the air.

  The invisible force gripped the metal in their jumpsuits and walked them gently but firmly deeper down the passage.

  Without Rug, they had no means of speaking to the Quatro escorting them, but luckily, Rug had persuaded a member of her drift to leave a translator behind, to facilitate communication between Andy, Bob O’Toole, and the Quatro.

  Within minutes, they entered a modest cavern lit by two campfires, filled with Quatro, who Lisa’s implant instantly tallied up: “SIXTEEN QUATRO PRESENT.”

  One of the aliens stepped forward, lowering its enormous head while bending its forelegs slightly, which Lisa knew was a gesture of respect. Metal glinted from around the quadruped’s neck—the translator.

  The Quatro escorting Lisa and Jake rumbled briefly in the aliens’ language, and then the one wearing the translator spoke.

  “Welcome, Lisa Sato,” the Quatro purred. “I apologize for the precautions, however I have trained my soldiers to treat all humans with wariness, especially humans who make their way into our base. This one is not known to us.” The Quatro indicated Jake with its gaze.

  “This is Jake Price,” Lisa said, “a former Darkstream mech pilot. That is, he still pilots a mech—just not for Darkstream. He’s on our side, now. He’s a friend.”

  The alien shifted its gaze to the Quatro holding them and spoke in their tongue. With that, their escort released them from its invisible grasp.

  “Thank you,” Lisa said.

  “You will no doubt wish to see your friends,” their host answered. “Follow.”

  The Quatro turned with more grace than should have been possible, given its size, though Lisa was accustomed to that by now. Even so, when its paws landed, it sent a slight tremor through the rock.