Mech Wars: The Complete Series

by Scott Bartlett

  The Quatro had almost reached the personnel carriers, where they clearly planned to enter quads of their own. If that happened, Jake was certain the night would be lost altogether.

  “Jake.” It was Chief Roach’s voice, coming over what Jake’s HUD told him was a two-way channel.

  Hearing his first name in Roach’s voice gave him a momentary sense of surreality as he continued to unload with his autocannons. “Uh…sir?”

  “Turn around.”

  Jake did, stopping the stream of bullets and stowing the autocannons by reforming his mech’s hands in front of them.

  He saw Gabe’s mech walking out of the woods toward him, but it was moving oddly—stumbling, limbs moving in a fashion that was awkward and cumbersome. Certainly not how they’d been designed to move.

  The mech itself had a crumpled look, with dents and deep furrows all over it, as well as a massive scorch mark all down its right side.

  “I see you did a fine job with taking command,” Roach said, his voice acidic. With that, the chief switched to a team-wide channel. “Oneiri Team, this is Chief Roach. You are to abandon this camp and rendezvous at a location I will send your implants. Now.”

  “But, sir…” Ash said. “The quads! And Tommy’s mech!”

  “Listen to me, Sweeney. If we stay, we will be defeated by the Quatro, who will soon access those quads. There’s no preventing that. The camp is lost, and if we remain, the mercenaries will kill us and get our mechs, too.”

  “What about the Force Multipliers?” Jake said. “And the soldiers from Plenitos?”

  “They’re lost,” Roach barked. “And so will all of Eresos be if you don’t do your job and follow my order, right now.”

  Chapter 24

  On Patrol

  Lisa missed having Rug and Tessa with her during patrols of the city streets. Returning to her old duties was a change in more ways than one, and few of them were exactly pleasant.

  Other than the lack of companionship, and her diminished role and authority, she also felt fairly tired most of the time.

  She attributed that to the training she conducted every night with her militia. Even though they did it while sleeping, there was no question that lucid affected quality of sleep.

  She refused to take stims except during battle, and even then only when she truly needed them. Coffee, on the other hand, she drank by the gallon.

  It’s worth it. To hold on to Habitat 2, it’s all worth it.

  Today, her patrolling mattered more than it normally did. The entire Darkstream battalion had donned pressure suits and headed outside Habitat 2, to scout the surrounding terrain at the request of the council, so that they could prepare for the coming battle with Daybreak.

  The idea was to consider each possible attack angle, and also what the defensive strategy would be for each one.

  Lisa would not be part of those discussions. Even though she’d played a major role in retaking Habitat 2 from Daybreak, she was still just a lowly seaman as far as Darkstream was concerned.

  Before the Darkstream soldiers fanned out of Habitat 2 to scout the neighborhood, Lisa had covertly contacted Rug over an encrypted channel, warning her and the other Quatro not to remain near the city for the time being. A chance encounter between Darkstream and Rug’s drift was the last thing they needed. Not to mention the last thing Lisa needed.

  A man farther down the street caught her eye, and she started walking briskly toward him. He seemed to notice her approach, slipping into an alley as though to hide from her.

  I’m sure that was Samuel Dalton. He was the Daybreak member who she’d offered leniency to, in exchange for information on Quentin Cooper.

  Except, he was supposed to be in a jail cell.

  She quickly checked her SL-17’s action and broke into a run. Her first impulse was to barrel around the corner and into the alley, but remembering her training from Tessa, she checked that impulse.

  Her restraint saved her life. Two more soldiers waited with Dalton in the alley, and all of them were armed.

  As soon as her head appeared around the corner, all three of them pointed their guns at her. She pulled back just as they began to fire.

  Lisa wasn’t authorized to carry actual grenades while on patrol, because of the risk of structural damage to Habitat 2.

  Luckily, she was authorized to carry flashbangs, and she had one on her today. She ripped it from her belt, activated it, cooked it for a second, and tossed it into the alleyway.

  It worked exactly as advertised, disorienting the trio of escaped prisoners with a deafening bang and a flash of bright light.

  Lisa huddled against the structure she was using for cover as it went off, plugging her ears, and then she walked backward into the street until her first target came into view.

  It was Dalton, and he had his hands clamped to his ears. She shot him in the chest, and he dropped.

  That’s one of the major disadvantages of being an escaped prisoner. No body armor.

  Moving to the left, she got the next Daybreak operative, a woman, in the throat.

  The third fired wildly out of the alley, but none of her shots hit, and Lisa put her down as well.

  That done, she switched on a channel she’d set up weeks ago but had yet to use—one that gave her direct access to every member of her militia.

  “The Daybreak prisoners have escaped,” she subvocalized. “I just took down three of them, but if they released their friends as well, and I don’t know why they wouldn’t have, then we have dozens more to contend with. I’m transmitting my location to your implants. Make your way toward me, but proceed with extreme caution, and unite with each other along the way whenever you can. Sato out.”

  I wonder where the prisoners got their guns. Not that firearms were hard to acquire inside Habitat 2.

  She began running along the street she’d been patrolling, toward the jail where the prisoners had been kept. It was fairly close to here, meaning the other Daybreak operatives were likely to be near.

  The thought that Daybreak might retake Habitat 2 while most of her Darkstream colleagues were out on Alex, without Quentin Cooper even needing to show up—well, she just couldn’t let that happen.

  Chapter 25

  Constable Station

  Out of necessity, every structure in Habitat 2 was the same height: two stories. The ceiling—comprised of parallelogram lights designed to simulate skylight with the sun beaming through—capped buildings at that level, and if you reached up with a broom from a second-floor balcony, you’d hit it with the bristles.

  It was the balconies that now gave Lisa the most trouble: few buildings had them, but there were enough to make defending against three dimensions a real thing.

  A prisoner popped above one now, firing down on her with a shotgun.

  Lisa reacted instantly, diving behind a hoverbike nearby and making sure to position herself behind the engine block, which was the only part of hoverbikes that offered real protection from gunfire.

  When the shooting stopped, she popped up immediately, hitting the balcony with suppressive fire while walking backward toward a nearby alley.

  She stopped shooting, as though she needed to reload, at which time she would have typically taken cover.

  But she didn’t actually need to reload, and when the Daybreak fighter appeared above the balcony again, she put the two rounds left in her magazine right in his face.

  I’m getting tired of this.

  A soft, high-pitched whine came from behind her, which she recognized as the sound of an approaching hoverbike. She swung around while slamming another magazine into place at the same time.

  It was Andy, applying steady power to his forward propulsor so that he came to a stop directly beside her.

  “Need a lift?” he said.

  “Thought you’d never ask.” She climbed onto the bike behind Andy and wrapped her left arm around him while letting her right dangle, assault rifle nestled against the hoverbike’s side.

  Andy
gunned the motor, and they continued in the direction Lisa had been headed.

  “Seems they’re headed toward the Darkstream Constable Station,” he subvocalized.

  “Yeah. Not really surprising. That’s where they’ll have access to the airlock overrides. Where they can prevent the Darkstream soldiers from getting back into Habitat 2.”

  Andy chuckled, which sounded flat, subvocalized as it was. “I have to wonder how they knew to time this so well.”

  “I have to wonder how they escaped in the first place.”

  “Let’s wonder later. Looks like we have company.”

  Andy patched his view of the street ahead through to Lisa’s implant. It showed three Daybreak goons running to take cover from them.

  “Ready?” Andy subvocalized.

  “Ready,” Lisa answered, not exactly sure what he was planning, though she had an idea.

  He engaged the forward propulsor while easing up on the back one, causing them to swing around until they were coming at the Daybreak goons sideways.

  Lisa raised her gun, catching one of them out in the open, dropping her, and clipping another one in the arm before he managed to conceal himself.

  Then, Andy was accelerating into a side alley.

  “I wonder if they know Habitat 2 as well as I do,” Andy subvocalized. “Doubt it. No one’s cruised these streets more than me.”

  “What’s the upshot, Andy?” Lisa said, not quite in the mood for his boasting at the moment.

  “This alley connects with the one they’re taking cover next to. Ready to get high?”

  “Punch it.”

  Andy cut through the network of alleyways, handling each corner like a champ. Soon, they were headed in the opposite direction—straight at the pair of remaining Daybreak fighters.

  As Andy sped up, Lisa remembered him saying that he’d modified his hoverbike so that it was capable of exceeding the speed cap Darkstream installed to prevent accidents within the confines of Habitat 2.

  As he accelerated, the hoverbike went higher, until Lisa worried they would collide with the artificial ceiling.

  They sailed over the heads of their foes, who were gaping upward, slowly raising their guns to track them.

  Too late.

  Lisa fired off one round, two. Both escaped convicts hit the ground.

  “That was fun,” she subvocalized. “Let’s do it again.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Bob O’Toole’s voice came over the militia-wide channel. “Lisa, I mean ma’am, me and Rodney Vickers and a few others are holding out against more than two dozen Daybreak asshats, here in front of the Constable Station. We’re giving them everything we got, but there’s a lot of them, and I’m scared they’re gonna break through our defense soon.”

  “Acknowledged, O’Toole,” Lisa said. “Tessa, you hearing this?”

  “Sure am. Meet you there?”

  “You got it. Just tell me when you’re in position.”

  When Lisa and Andy arrived, thirty Daybreak fighters had O’Toole and the others pinned inside the Darkstream Constable Station. The enemy fighters were crouched behind hoverbikes of their own, which they must have stolen along the way.

  “Tessa? How are you looking?”

  “Peachy. You?”

  “We’re here. Hit them now.”

  Andy veered into the square in front of the Constable Station, executing a controlled fishtail so that Lisa could hit the enemy formation from behind.

  Several of them turned to fire back, and Andy came to a stop.

  “Take cover behind the engine block, Andy,” Lisa shouted. “The engine block. And cover me!”

  For her part, Lisa leapt off the hoverbike, running across the square while firing at the nearest enemy fighters, who shot back at her.

  Andy’s covering fire kept some of the pressure off of Lisa. Then, directly above the Daybreak fighters, the ceiling broke apart as four parallelogram lights shifted aside.

  Tessa and the four-person team she’d led across Habitat 2’s roof rappelled down, still wearing pressure suits. They came to a halt in midair and fired on Daybreak from above.

  Lisa reached the alley she’d been making for, using the combination of adequate cover and the enemy’s disorientation to open fire.

  The soldiers suspended in the air rained bullets onto the enemy’s head, and emboldened, O’Toole and those with him emerged from the Darkstream Constable Station, guns blazing.

  The escaped prisoners threw down their guns and put their hands in the air.

  “We surrender. We surrender, you bastards!”

  Of the original thirty soldiers, there were eleven left.

  “We accept,” Lisa said. “I just hope you’ve learned your lesson. Now get back in your cells.”

  Chapter 26

  If I Bleed, I Bleed

  I’m slowing them down.

  On his way back to Oneiri Team, Gabe had been sure the mercenaries and the quad were about to catch and kill him at any minute.

  His mech was badly damaged, the servomotors failing and the actuators misaligned.

  To return, he’d essentially needed to learn to walk again, on the fly. He’d quickly figured out that when he tried to walk forward, he listed dramatically to the left, but the stutter in his right leg was random, impossible to predict, and he tripped several times. His left arm was almost totally useless, but the right still mostly worked.

  “I’m slowing you down,” he said to the rest of Oneiri Team. Did I say that already? “You need to go on. Save your mechs. Mine will probably be useless to the enemy, anyway. I doubt they’ll be able to repair it.”

  “No, sir,” Jake Price said.

  “Excuse me, Seaman Apprentice?” Gabe stopped walking to glare at Price.

  “I said no. I refuse to follow that order. We aren’t abandoning you to the enemy. I’m prepared to declare you unfit for command, if that’s what it takes to disobey that command and get you to safety. Failing that, I’m ready to be straight-up insubordinate. But we’re all getting out of this alive. All of us. We’re not leaving anybody behind.”

  Gabe stared at Price, feeling wretched, his mech curled in on itself even as he stood still. “Fine,” he spat.

  Price only nodded, and they continued on, the others marching and Gabe limping, his feet dragging across the ground.

  He forced the mech to increase its pace, in an awkward, stumbling run that he felt sure was difficult to behold. But they needed to speed up. Otherwise, they were all done.

  There’ll be harsh discipline for Price if we get out of this. He’s endangering all of Eresos by risking the MIMAS mechs.

  But Gabe doubted he would survive long enough to administer that discipline.

  “Sir…” Ash Sweeney said.

  “What, Steam?”

  “Your vitals, sir. I just had a look at them. You’re bleeding out.”

  “It’s irrelevant,” he said.

  “You have several broken bones. Your suit has detected internal bleeding. I have to insist that we stop now so we can give you first aid.”

  “No way are we stopping,” Gabe said, his voice strained. “If we stop long enough for me to fall out of my mech, so you can take turns playing nurse with me, then we’ll all need medical attention. The Quatro are close behind us, I can guarantee you that.”

  Price stepped forward. “Sir,” he said, clearly trying to sound authoritative.

  Gabe raised his one functioning arm, his hand splitting apart to expose the rotary autocannon waiting behind it. “Yes, Price? What is it you need me to do in order for you to get it through your air-filled head how serious I am?” The autocannon began to spin.

  “All right, sir,” Price said quietly. “All right.”

  They pressed on.

  As they did, Gabe said, “The mercenaries already have Tommy’s mech, and I expect they’ll figure out how to override the biometric lock in short order. If they left those tanks intact, then they have those, too. If I bleed out, I bleed out, and
if that happens, you are to destroy my mech beyond all use or recognition. I will not empower our enemies just because you’re all acting like a bunch of bleeding hearts.”

  Chapter 27

  A Lot to Answer For

  After they finished re-incarcerating the Daybreak prisoners, Lisa and Tessa went back on patrol, just like old times, as they waited for the Darkstream soldiers to return.

  Other than Daybreak members and soldiers of Lisa’s militia, there were only two casualties among the habitat’s civilian population, both injuries from which the victims were expected to make full recoveries.

  One of Lisa’s soldiers had died, and two more had suffered fairly serious injuries. Those incidents were tragic, but Lisa considered the civilian casualties totally unacceptable.

  She knew it could have been a lot worse. Still, the prisoners should never have gotten free in the first place.

  “We need to find out how they escaped,” Lisa muttered.

  Tessa turned to her as they walked, her expression grim. “Yes. We do. But I don’t think you’re going to like the answer, once we find it.”

  To that, Lisa had nothing to say. She kept her eyes on the surrounding buildings. Very little structural damage had been done during the attack, so they’d been fairly lucky, there.

  “I didn’t see the Darkstream operatives surveying anything while my team and I were getting into position on the roof,” Tessa said. “I didn’t see them at all, as a matter of fact. It was almost as if they cleared out intentionally, so that they couldn’t possibly come to our aid when the Daybreak prisoners broke out.”

  Once, Lisa would have immediately condemned Tessa’s comments as needless conspiracy theorizing. Now, she found herself without any words for them.

  Then, unexpectedly, she found some: “Habitat 2 is big,” she said. “The Darkstream soldiers might have been out of your line of sight.” But even she could hear how halfhearted that sounded.