Then the Quatro took a step forward in tandem. Another.
“Fire!” Gabe yelled, and they did again, all three of them sending a volley of lead directly at the aliens.
Again, nothing. Again, the bullets hit the ground with dozens of clinking noises.
The Quatro stepped forward.
Suddenly, Gabe’s gun was wrenched from his grasp, and so were Ash’s and Jake’s. The weapons flew through the air toward the Quatro, disappearing into the dark behind them.
Then the aliens charged.
“Back!” Gabe barked. “Fall back behind the tripod! Tomlinson and Jin, prepare to fire!”
They retreated behind the heavy machine gun, which commenced its staccato roar, a blinding starburst spouting from its muzzle.
The effect was exactly the same, with the Quatro continuing their charge. One of the aliens pulled ahead of the other, reaching Tommy to swat his face with a paw larger than the boy’s head.
Tommy flew into the tunnel wall, neck twisted at an unnatural angle, staring back at the rest of his team, rivulets of blood dividing his face into vertical segments.
“Retreat!” Gabe screamed over the battalion-wide channel, running from the Quatro as fast as his stiff body permitted. “Everyone out of the tunnel, now! Get out! Get out!”
Chapter 59
Quadruped
Gabe was one of the last to rush out of the tunnel mouth—not due to some valiant instinct, but only to his position in line.
His breathing came out hot and ragged, and his innards felt like they were vibrating. Without the mech dream separating him from the world, he’d been completely certain he was going to die down there.
If I’m being honest, I have no idea why I didn’t.
“Get into some kind of formation,” he ordered over the wide channel. “Prepare to send everything we have against those Quatro.”
For his part, he made a beeline for his mech, using his implant to send it his unique signature. It detached its back, lowering it to form a ramp for him to climb.
He reached into the mech, groped the pocket just inside and to the right, and sighed with relief when he found the sedative he used to enter the dream and control his machine.
Popping it, he climbed into the claustrophobic confines of the mech, trying not to let the closeness increase his sense of panic.
At last, he slipped into lucid, and a dream-replica of the world replaced reality.
In that dream-replica, Gabe became his mech once more. Its limbs were his limbs, and so was its bristling artillery.
But the tunnel mouth remained empty. The Quatro did not pursue them onto Eresos’ surface.
Why didn’t our bullets affect them? The Quatro are invincible!
But invincible or not, the aliens did not emerge.
All of Oneiri were inside their mechs now, pacing back and forth in front of the tunnel mouth, but always facing it.
Their confidence had returned, now that they had resumed control of their mechanized colossi, and they positioned themselves between the tunnel and the rest of the battalion, ready to protect their fellow soldiers from whatever the Quatro had become.
Still nothing. Why don’t they come?
“What happened to Tommy?” Richaud asked.
“The Quatro got him,” Henrietta said, her voice quavering slightly. “One swipe was all it took.”
Richaud shook his head, silent.
“Sir?” Jake said.
Gabe turned to look at him, and when he did, he found Price facing away from the tunnel. Following the seaman apprentice’s gaze to the horizon, he saw…
Nothing.
“What is it, Price?”
“I—maybe it’s nothing. I thought—”
Something streaked across the sky, toward the surface of the planet, and when it met the horizon there was a brief, faint glow before darkness returned.
“There!” Price said. “That was it.”
Another meteorite fell as he said it, and then another. Except, these did not behave like regular meteorites. A fourth fell, much closer, and this time it was followed by a rumble that Gabe felt from inside his mech, from within the dream.
“They look like they’re coming down pretty close. Think we should check it out, sir?”
“Yeah,” Gabe said. “Just you and me. You others, stay here and guard the tunnel mouth. Notify me immediately if you detect any movement at all.”
“Yes, sir,” his team responded in rough unison.
Gabe and Price loped toward the low hill where the meteorites had seemed to fall, not saying anything else, both presumably lost in their thoughts.
Eresos’ landscape sped by, and it occurred to Gabe that he was finally starting to take it for granted—even the weird, leafless trees, and maybe even that constant mildew smell.
Maybe this was home.
Or maybe it’s just a suitable place to fight the Quatro till I find an early grave.
At the top of the grassy hill, they found a wide area that had been flattened, and at its center was a perfectly circular crater, no doubt caused by one of the things that had fallen.
Adjusting his night vision and using his implant to magnify his sight, Gabe studied the spherical object lying in the exact middle of the fresh crater.
He approached it.
“Sir, do you really think…?”
Price trailed off, probably after realizing Gabe intended to continue ignoring him. When he reached the sphere, which was easily five meters across, he noticed several crescent-shaped crevices. He stuck his hand into one, tugging at it, but not expecting it to do anything.
So it surprised him a fair bit when something did happen.
“Sir, get back! It’s opening up!”
Gabe didn’t need to be told twice. He danced back, then leapt backward into the air, coming to land on the rim of the crater beside Price.
“Is that…?” Price trailed off again, apparently hesitant to classify the object that the sphere had opened to reveal.
The surface of that object was very similar to that of the Gatherers, of the Amblers…
And of the mech Price and his father had found on that comet.
In fact, it clearly was a mech. But just as clearly, it was not one that had been designed for human use.
“Quadruped,” Gabe muttered, his voice hoarse. “Someone built this for the Quatro to use.”
“Who’s sending these here?” Jake wondered aloud. He clearly didn’t expect an answer.
Which was good, because Gabe didn’t have one for him.
“Could it be a species that lives in one of the nearby star systems?” Jake went on.
“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.
DYNAMO
Mech Wars: Book 2
© Scott Bartlett 2017
Cover art by Tom Edwards (tomedwardsdesign.com)
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This novel is a work of fiction. All of the charact
ers, places, and events are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, locales, businesses, or events is entirely coincidental.
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 probably 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, an
d 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 longer walked with confidence, with heads high. No, they reserved that for their mechs, now.
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