Mech Wars: The Complete Series

by Scott Bartlett

  Suppressing a grimace, Lisa decided she wanted to steer the conversation away from Tessa as much as she could. “A lot of the Quatro seem to be moving away from that sort of thinking,” Lisa said. “Take the ones who stayed behind with family, even though their militia—their drift—needed them. Not saying I begrudge them that. I would have done the same, actually. But I am saying that a lot of your people appear to be stepping away from the drift-first mentality. They’re finally putting themselves first.”

  Rug lay on the deck of the shuttle, though her head still rose just over Lisa’s. Before, she’d looked fairly relaxed, but now she stiffened. “Your words contain a measure of truth. On Alex, my drift ceased reproduction due to the scarcity there, but with the resources the Eresos Quatro have, their population has likely multiplied by a factor of fifteen since their arrival.”

  “Whoa—Quatro reproduce that quickly?”

  “Yes. Meaning the Quatro here are raising entire generations outside the Quatro way. But just because they are abandoning the ways of our people does not mean that I should.”

  Nodding, Lisa said, “Fair enough, I guess.” A smile crept over her face. “Though I think you’re going to change, too, Rug. Stick around Steele System humans long enough, and we’ll rub off on you.”

  The Quatro made a protracted snorting sound, similar to that which a horse might make. “I do not think it’s wise to remain in the Steele System, for humans or for Quatro. You promised me you would bring us to our hidden ship in the Outer Ring. It is more than large enough to accommodate our militia. We must go there, Lisa Sato. You must keep your promise to us.”

  Lisa shifted in her crash seat, readjusting the straps. “I will,” she muttered, then cleared her throat. “I will, Rug,” she said, with more conviction. “It just can’t be our main priority, right now. You understand that, don’t you? Both our peoples are in terrible danger, here on Eresos. We have to stop Darkstream, and we have to figure out where all these strange mechs are coming from. From what I can tell, someone is trying to play both sides of this war. I just can’t figure out why.”

  “I have figured it out already, Lisa, and I am happy to explain it to you. It is the Meddlers, doing what they have done before: meddle. They will return once the Gatherers fill their reservoirs with resources from the mines of Alex and Eresos—or rather, they’ll come at the time they expect them the reservoirs to be filled. That is little more than a single year away, and when the Meddlers do come, there will be survival for few. Those that are left will be reduced to what my drift became, back on Alex: few in number, struggling to eke out a desperate existence.”

  Lisa sighed. “We’ll get you to your ship, Rug.”

  “But will you get us to it in time? A year may not be enough for you to stop a war and initiate a mass exodus from this system.”

  “I haven’t decided to leave this system, and neither have any other humans. We consider this our home, and we intend to stay here. We’re prepared to defend it if we have to.”

  For a long time, Rug met her gaze while saying nothing.

  Then, at last: “You do not grasp the incredible danger of the situation at hand, Lisa Sato. For that reason, I fear for us all.”

  Chapter 14

  Without a Spacefaring Enemy

  Jake found it almost depressing, how lax security was aboard the Javelin. As a boy, his dreams of joining the military had been filled with soldiers who believed in self-discipline, strict protocol, and vigilance.

  But without a spacefaring enemy to fight, the destroyer had turned into something that more closely resembled a floating resort for Bronson and his crew than it did a warship.

  Sure, it still technically had military personnel, and despite the general sense of panic, they’d held their own in the battle against the alien machines.

  Still.

  The out-of-shape crewmembers. The Starlight Lounge. And now this…

  The destroyer’s main weapons locker, completely unguarded. Jake sighed as he strolled inside and began combing the racks for what he needed.

  Tear gas…check. Flashbang grenades…check.

  Fully loaded, fully automatic SL-17 assault rifle…check.

  Though if this went well, he wouldn’t have cause to use that. What he was planning already amounted to full-blown insubordination, of the sort that resulted in no mere slap on the wrist. Jake’s punishment for what he was about to do would go well beyond demerits. It would mean a dishonorable discharge followed by a hefty fine and a lengthy jail sentence.

  That was if they managed to apprehend him before he achieved his objective.

  Before leaving, he loaded a pistol with a magazine full of electric bullets, and he stowed a few more magazines around his jumpsuit. He didn’t want to hurt anyone—he just needed to make sure they couldn’t stop him.

  God help them if they try.

  He opened the weapons locker hatch a crack, checking down the corridor before stepping into it and scanning the opposite direction. Nothing.

  He progressed through several corridors that way, clutching his pistol with both hands, low but at the ready.

  This is truly depressing. Even after the recent attack, the Javelin’s marines still weren’t as on-alert as they should have been. The fact that there wasn’t a single soldier within several corridors of the warship’s primary weapons locker…

  He repressed the urge to sigh again.

  Checking around the next corner, he finally spotted some marines—a pair of them, ribbing each other about something, one of them holding a coffee in hand. They were both laughing loudly about whatever the subject of their fun was, so they didn’t hear Jake’s slow approach up the corridor.

  They’re about to feel real stupid.

  He shot the one without a coffee in the neck, dropping him to the deck, a shuddering, jerking mess.

  The other marine’s mouth formed a comical “O” as she turned to register Jake’s presence, her mug turning sideways to spill coffee onto the deck.

  She, too, got an electric bullet in the neck.

  The bullets were designed to continue delivering an electric shock over a prolonged period of time—enough to keep the target incapacitated but not enough to seriously injure them. The bullets were also meant to stop shocking the target well before permanent nerve damage was done.

  Of course, no nonlethal weapon was perfect, and there were plenty of cases where things had gone wrong with the use of electric bullets.

  Plenty of lawsuits against cops, back in the Milky Way.

  That wouldn’t be the consequence Jake faced if Darkstream apprehended him, however. He’d just be jailed and sucked dry of his personal finances.

  But that would be far from the worst consequence of getting captured.

  Far worse is the fact that my family would surely die.

  He hated having to risk injuring his fellow soldiers, but this was what Bronson had driven him to. Maybe the Darkstream board of directors would have signed off on abandoning the innocent people of Hub to their fate—if that was the case, then they’d driven Jake to this, too.

  Thinking you could stop me from protecting my family was your first mistake.

  Jake cleared corridor after corridor. He’d planned all this out shortly after his conversation with Bronson. Briefly, he’d considered tying up his targets after stunning them with the electric bullets. Then, he’d realized that they would have sent out an alert using their implants the moment the shocks subsided. Until it did, they likely wouldn’t have the concentration necessary to operate the implants, but that was all the time Jake had, unless he wanted to cut the damn implants out of the marines’ heads.

  So he moved swiftly, drawing closer and closer to the shuttle bay, taking as much care as he could afford to. Checking around each corner, moving from cover to cover. Neutralizing everyone he encountered.

  Without warning, Captain Bronson himself emerged into an intersection of corridors ahead, turning the corner so that his back was to Jake. He held a coff
ee mug of his own.

  “Captain,” Jake barked.

  Bronson turned around, and an expression of surprise had begun to blossom on his face when Jake shot him in the neck.

  Pausing next to the captain’s jerking form, Jake peered down at him, keeping his expression neutral. “I didn’t want to shoot you while you weren’t looking at me.”

  Within five minutes, he reached the shuttle bay. Lowering his faceplate, he turned on his jumpsuit’s life support before using his S-level security clearance to open the hatch.

  Good thing I still have that clearance. It served as further evidence that he’d caught the crew of the Javelin with their pants down.

  Across the shuttle bay, four marines surrounded the alien mech, which wasn’t unusual—Bronson had ordered a rotating guard of four soldiers shortly after the mech had been brought aboard, though Jake wasn’t sure what good they would do if the thing activated and started to attack.

  That posed the biggest danger in all of this: whether the alien mech would accept him inside it, or whether it would kill him. It was a risk he had to take, however. The thing clearly had the ability to operate in space, and if it was anything like the smaller robots that had almost succeeded in dismantling the destroyer, it could do so for long periods. If those robots hadn’t had that ability, they would never have attempted to make the journey to the inner system, to Eresos, which Bronson had told him they had.

  Unclipping a flashbang from his belt, Jake hurled it across the shuttle bay in a broad arc.

  His aim was good. The flashbang landed between the two marines closest to him, who seemed roughly as oblivious as those he’d encountered in the corridors.

  One of them glanced down at it—just before it went off, sending both marines reeling, hands clamped to their ears, eyes squeezed shut.

  The pair of marines on the far side of the alien mech rushed around it, but Jake was already sprinting across the shuttle bay for a better shot. He dispatched one of them with an electric bullet to the neck, and the next with one to the cheek.

  Whoops. He hadn’t meant to hit anyone in the face, and he hoped it wouldn’t result in too much scarring.

  “Thank Bronson for that one, not me,” Jake said as he stepped over the marine’s writhing body in order to get to the alien mech. He said it more for himself than for the marine, he knew. He was still trying to convince himself that he was doing the right thing.

  After the flurry of action his rush from the weapons locker to the shuttle bay had required, it felt odd to stand there and stare up at the mech’s alien face. The thing would still be disabled from the EMP he’d hit it with outside the destroyer, and this part of Jake’s plan involved effecting some hasty repairs. He’d been taught to perform mech repairs during training on Valhalla, before ever deploying to Eresos, but he hadn’t been trained to do them under the time constraints he now faced.

  Plus, I learned to repair a MIMAS mech, not an alien one.

  “Stop right there!” a stern voice barked.

  Jake whirled around, raising his pistol to point toward the hatch. There, he saw the woman who’d yelled at him. She stood at the head of a squad of marines, all with guns trained on Jake.

  He cursed under his breath. So I get no time to do repairs, then.

  To confront so many soldiers at this range, his pistol was useless. He dropped it to the deck, grasping his SL-17 where it was slung by his right side.

  With his left hand, he grabbed one of the jerking marines by the back of his jumpsuit, taking care not to come in contact with the man’s skin to avoid getting shocked. Jake pulled the solider up until the assault rifle’s muzzle met the back of his head.

  “Shoot and you end this man’s life,” Jake yelled, his voice wavering a little. He hadn’t expected it to come to this—he didn’t see himself as the sort of person who did this. “All I’m trying to do is leave without hurting anyone. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Hub is under attack. That’s where my family lives. Bronson’s already informed me he has no intention of going there to help, so I’m taking matters into my own hands. I hope any of you would do the same.”

  The woman opened her mouth as if to answer, but no words came out.

  Jake glanced at the alien construct. “Are you going to let me inside, mech?” It felt completely absurd to address the thing, especially since he knew it was still disabled, but what else was there? Attempting to repair the mech would be impossible while clutching his hostage, with ten marines pointing weapons at him.

  Incredibly, the mech opened—from the front, which Jake hadn’t seen before. A hatch fell forward to clang to the floor, forming a convenient ramp for Jake to ascend.

  Clearly, the mech had taken it upon itself to repair the damage from the EMP, which should not have been possible.

  Obviously it is possible, though. So…it’s just been sitting here all this time, fully functional? Waiting for…what? Me?

  That sent shivers up Jake’s spine, but he had no choice except to take advantage of the mech’s unexpected functionality. He ascended the ramp backward, dragging the marine up with him. Jake’s eyes never left the marines near the shuttle bay’s hatch.

  Once he was seated inside the alien mech, he jettisoned the marine, and the man crashed to the floor, still shaking from the electric bullet lodged in his neck. Jake immediately popped a fast-acting, REM sleep-inducing sedative into his mouth.

  The mech sealed up instantly, the ramp snapping up to become one with the rest.

  Jake entered the mech dream, and as he looked out on the shuttle bay with the mech’s eyes, a terrible anxiety took root deep inside him.

  Doing his best to ignore it, he strode toward the airlock, willing his hands to become ultra-thin wedges. He drove those into the crack between the doors and wrenched them open enough to grip them with fingers that reformed in an instant.

  He closed the inner door behind him and then pulled open the outer one. That done, he blasted out of the airlock and into the void.

  Chapter 15

  Sabotage

  It was Lisa’s shift to monitor the pilot and make sure he wasn’t doing anything to sabotage their mission.

  They no longer kept a weapon trained directly at his head—that seemed like overdoing it, at this point. The man seemed compliant enough.

  That said, he remained a Darkstream employee, and Lisa still wondered how much of a loyalist he was. Would his affection for his employer lead him to put himself in danger for the company? Or was that above his pay grade?

  Best not to take any chances.

  Lisa’s hand did not stray very far from the pistol holstered near her hip. She’d adjusted it for easy access, even as she reclined in the copilot’s seat, which rarely got used outside of training. The shuttle’s AI was typically copilot enough.

  The pilot had devoted most of the cockpit’s screens to views of the terrain below, and Lisa found it hard not to get distracted by the landscape as it gradually transformed, from rolling forests filled with leafless trees to a craggy, uneven desert region.

  Recently, she’d read on the system net that Darkstream was planning to start switching all their vehicles to an interface similar to the one Oneiri Team used to control their mechs. All new vehicles would be built with it from the get-go, and existing ones would be retrofitted.

  According to the post she’d read, the company seemed pretty adamant that within two years, every employee that drove or piloted a Darkstream vehicle would feel like they were that vehicle, be it a beetle, speeder, shuttle, warship, or mech. As with the mechs, they felt it would increase immersion while granting pilots a proper respect for their mechanical charges.

  Lisa wasn’t sure how she felt about it. Her training with Tessa had left her with serious misgivings about the actual utility of lucid, and the idea of turning warfare into one big dream didn’t sit all that well with her.

  Real people died in war, and real lives were ruined. That cost was steep enough, but to inflict it while you were actually
asleep…

  Doesn’t seem great.

  Andy, on the other hand, would probably love it. Anything that gave him greater control of his beetle, or whatever else he ended up driving—Lisa felt sure that would be all fine by him.

  Something on one of the viewscreens caught her eye. “Hold up,” she barked, and the pilot stiffened. “What is that? Zoom in on that region, there.” Lisa pointed at one of the screens, and the pilot winced when her finger touched the display.

  “If you could refrain from actually touching the monitors—”

  “Shut up and zoom in!”

  This time, he listened. And when the view magnified, Lisa beheld what appeared to be a parade of Gatherers. There were more than she’d ever seen in one place.

  “That has to be a sign of someone living nearby,” she muttered. Hopefully, it’s the new Quatro friends we hope to make. “Take us down. But before you do,” Lisa said, raising her voice, and holding her index finger an inch from the pilot’s face, “check the region thoroughly for Amblers. You’ll be coming with us as we search this area, so if you try to send us into danger, you’ll be there too, to endure it with us.”

  “I understand,” the pilot said, his voice flat.

  “Good.”

  Chapter 16

  Blaring Prophecy

  The alien mech dream was not like the one he’d used to interface with his MIMAS.

  Inside this one, everything had a stark, dire quality to it. Sounds were crisper—or at least, they’d been back in the shuttle bay, before he’d entered the soundless void of space—and sights were more vivid, but not in a way that was beautiful or calming. Instead, it was as though he viewed the universe through a filter that accentuated the essential tension that underlaid everything. Wasn’t every last particle just a blaring prophecy of the death that awaited every living thing? Someday, everyone he’d ever known or loved would cease to be, their carbon dispersing into the void, conserved in a sense but not in a sense that meant anything.