The Quatro he’d trained his autocannons on became Ash Sweeney—but only briefly.
Northshire replaced the scene once more, and Sweeney became the Quatro that was advancing on Jess.
Do I fire?
The world flashed again, becoming Peppertree. Then it reverted to Northshire, and the process repeated several times more.
For a period of several long seconds, Peppertree reappeared, and Gabe saw Lafontaine’s mech lying on the ground, blackened and smoking.
The mech dream pulsed with Gabe’s horror as he checked Lafontaine’s vitals.
He was dead.
With that, Gabe turned away from Peppertree and fled into the woods.
Chapter 27
Lockdown Mode
After they got the typical mother-seeing-her-son-for-the-first-time-in-years stuff out of the way—complete with comments on how much he’d changed, and facial expressions that mixed wonderment and anxiety in equal measure—Jake wanted to see his sister. Before he saw to anything else, he wanted that.
“Of course,” his mother said, tears still clinging to her eyes. “Come with me.”
He followed her through a sterile, metal corridor, from which you could access everything inside the emergency shelter. At least, if his memories of the frequent drills of his youth were any indication.
Along the way, he received greetings from neighbors he barely remembered, as well as from a man and a woman he recognized as Council members. They’d barely spared a moment’s thought for him, back when he’d been growing up here, but now their breathless words were delivered in tones of reverence.
Jake didn’t care. He only wanted to see Sue Anne.
Space inside the emergency shelter was fairly limited, but because of her condition, Sue Anne had gotten her own room.
Brianne entered first, leaving the door slightly ajar while Jake waited in the hallway.
“Sue…you have a visitor. Sue?”
Muffled whispering from the sickroom, accompanied by the soft beeping of a heart monitor.
Footsteps recrossed the room, nearing the door, and Brianne appeared once more, wearing a smile that looked in danger of getting blown away by the slightest breeze.
“Okay. I’ll leave you two to catch up.”
“Thanks, Mom.” He hugged her again, for the eleventh time since he’d arrived, and then he went in to see his sister.
He stopped just two feet into the room.
It had been months since Sue Anne had been well enough to record video messages to accompany the ones his mother frequently sent him. During that time, she’d ceased to be his sister and had become a pasty, thin creature without any hair.
The creature’s mouth broadened in a smile that looked truly pleased, but the eyes…the eyes were so, so tired.
“S-Sue Anne?” he croaked, and knew right away that the uncertainty in his voice was exactly the wrong reaction.
“Yes,” she said, her voice a barely audible rasp. “Of course it’s me. Come closer.”
He did, and each step felt heavy, as though he were marching toward his own funeral.
“How…?” Jake cleared his throat. “How do you feel?”
It was perhaps the dumbest question he could have asked. Possibly, it was the dumbest question anyone had ever asked.
Obviously she feels awful.
“Today isn’t the worst day,” she said, maintaining her smile.
“That’s good,” he said, trying for a natural-looking smile himself, but he knew he was failing miserably. It felt like a pasted-on grin.
Worse, he couldn’t think of a single thing to talk about. What could he possibly ask his sister that would be relevant, or even kind?
Every question that popped into his head struck him as callous, frivolous.
What have you been up to?
What do you do for kicks?
See any good movies lately?
Have you been following the war on Eresos? A lot of people are dying, hey?
“It’s okay, Jake,” she said, and her smile had taken on a note of true sympathy—as if he were the one deserving of pity in this situation.
Incredible!
“You don’t have to say anything. Just sit, why don’t you? It’s good to see you.”
But instead, he took a step backward, toward the door. He cleared his throat again.
“I should really—um, the Council will want to see me. They’ll need the airlock fixed, so that it goes into Lockdown Mode, and they can start reclaiming the surface…”
“Of course,” Sue Anne said, nodding. “Go do that. That needs to take priority—people getting back to normal life. We’ll talk when you’ve taken care of it. Love you, Jake.”
“Love you, Sue Anne.” And with that, he fled the sickroom.
His stomach roiled, and heat prickled all along his spine. The back of his throat burned, too.
What was that?
His mother was waiting with Councilman Ryan Pichenko.
“Jake!” Pichenko said, extending his hand. “What’s it like to be home?”
He stared at the hand for a moment, then shook it.
“Are you all right, Jake?” his mother asked.
“Yes,” he said, trying to force his mind back to normal functioning, recoiling from his own guilt over the way he’d behaved toward his sister. “I’m fine. How…how did you survive the attack?”
Pichenko answered. “Comet Seven was attacked first, on the opposite side of Hub. Ours was hit not long after, but we got lucky—at least, luckier than some of the other comets. We had just enough warning to get almost half of the residents inside the shelter.”
“Only half?” Jake asked in disbelief.
Pichenko lowered his head, with what appeared to be authentic sadness tugging at the corners of his mouth. After working for Darkstream for so long, Jake found it odd to see actual emotion on the face of someone in a position of power.
“I’m afraid so, Jake. The other council members and I, we tried our best given the warning we had, but…it wasn’t good enough.”
Jake laid a hand on his shoulder. “You did what you could, Councilman. You’re to be commended.”
Pichenko met his eyes, and he actually seemed to appreciate the comment. “Thank you.”
Why was that so easy, when talking to Sue Anne was so hard?
“It’s possible other residents still survive, inside personal shelters,” Jake said. “A few people had those, if I remember correctly, and they may have invited in neighbors.”
Nodding, Pichenko said, “That’s a good point. We should look into that immediately.”
“First things first, though—I’ll need to see what’s gone wrong with the airlock’s Lockdown Mode.”
“Does that mean you’ll have to get back inside that thing?” his mother asked, and when Jake looked at her, he got the sense that she’d blurted it out without thinking.
“Yes, Mom. I’m afraid it does.”
Chapter 28
Defeatist
Lisa had taken the lead through the dark tunnels as a show of strength, but she didn’t have the courage to back it up.
“You need to move faster,” Tessa told her, thankfully subvocalizing so the others couldn’t hear. “You’re walking through these caves like you’re blind. If we don’t speed up, another group of Gatherers will catch up to us.”
It was certainly dark enough that Lisa would have been blind, had it not been for her implant’s night vision capabilities. “Tessa,” she subvocalized back, “I—I think I’ve lost my nerve.” It was hard to confess that, and she wouldn’t—couldn’t—say it to the rest of the militia, for fear it would obliterate morale. “The Gatherers behaving so violently…it’s totally unprecedented. Do you think we should start preparing for the possibility that we won’t even make it back to oppose Darkstream?”
That brought a sharp look from the white-haired woman. “How in Sol do we prepare for that? Are you suggesting we prepare for our own deaths? That’s defeatist, Lis
a, and it’s not how I trained you to behave. I trained you to act like a soldier.”
Lisa glared back at the white-haired woman. “If the Gatherers are attacking us now, I don’t see what hope there is for anyone on Eresos. And if the Amblers mount an organized assault—”
“You’re letting your imagination run wild.”
“Are you saying it’s not possible?”
“Of course it’s possible. But if you spend your energy on obsessing over a scenario that has shown no sign of actually coming true, then you’ll have none left over to deal with the scenario actually facing us.”
Lips tightening, Lisa tried to ignore Tessa and refocus on the mission. Though the woman was grating on her, their conversation had had the benefit of making Lisa feel more angry than scared. She studied the route her implant had traced through the tunnels, so that they could find their way back.
The implant had also noted plenty of branching tunnels, but Lisa had continued to follow the Gatherers—or at least, the signs that they were still on a Gatherer path.
They didn’t actually see any more Gatherers, which had been her intention. Catching up to the robots ahead would be just as bad as letting the ones behind catch up to them.
But the Gatherers always left little signs of their passage behind—mineral fragments they’d dropped along the way, scrapes along the rock that marked their paths, and so on.
We’re on the right track. We have to be.
They were passing another branching tunnel when Tessa suddenly disappeared inside it, as though jerked sideways by some invisible force.
“Tessa?” Lisa yelled, panic filling her voice. She pointed her assault rifle into the side tunnel, which also angled the flashlight she’d mounted on her SL-17 in that direction.
The beam found Tessa suspended in the air before the dark silhouette of a four-legged beast.
A profound sense of déjà vu struck Lisa, then, from a time back on Alex, when they’d been manipulated by a similarly invisible force, using the metals in their pressure suits.
Quatro.
Something yanked her assault rifle out of her grasp, and the beam of light it projected rotated wildly, illuminating parts of the cave at random.
Lisa lost sight of Tessa.
Then, something slammed her against the rock from behind, and everything went black—even blacker than it had already been.
Chapter 29
Cascade Error
To investigate what had gone wrong with Comet Four’s airlocks, Jake needed to travel to Hub’s control center—the “hub” for which the city-settlement was named. It was made from a comet much smaller than the others.
After hours of trial and error, he was finally able to engage the Lockdown Mode for Comet Four’s landing bay. He wasn’t sure why the emergency safeguard hadn’t kicked in, except that something had caused a cascade error in the system.
Luckily, the comet’s computer systems were all isolated from each other, and so the error hadn’t spread to other systems, such as Life Support, which kicked in with massive zirconia electrolyzers as soon as it detected that comet integrity had been achieved.
His job done, he departed Hub’s control center, which thankfully had not been attacked. Its airlock functioned flawlessly, and so Jake had been able to access the computers while outside of his alien mech. Doing so with the giant mech’s appendages would have proved tedious.
It would take the better part of a week for the electrolyzers to fill the entire comet with oxygen, but a lot of the residences had much smaller electrolyzers of their own, and by late afternoon on the day Jake engaged Lockdown Mode, a lot of residents were able to don pressure suits and leave the emergency shelter for their homes.
As thanks to Jake, Councilman Ryan Pichenko had lent his house to Brianne and Sue Anne Price indefinitely.
“I’ll sleep in the Council Chambers,” Pichenko said. “There are plenty of synthleather couches there that are more than comfortable enough for me to catch some shuteye.”
“Thank you, Councilman,” Jake said, giving Pichenko’s hand a squeeze as they shook. “It means more than I can say.”
“So does making the comet livable again. That means a lot to all of us. I’m far from repaying the debt we all owe you, Jake.”
“No debt needs to be paid,” Jake said. “This is my home, too.” At least, it was. “I plan to check the other comets for survivors next.”
Now, he sat with his mother in Pichenko’s kitchen, with bowls of canned tomato soup sitting on the table in front of them. Outside the kitchen window, Jake’s mech sat, inert, waiting for him to come and take command of it.
He didn’t trust the thing. Not so long ago, he’d been locked in desperate combat with it, while it did its best to end his life. Now, it sat there like an obedient dog, waiting for its master to come and give it its next command.
Who would build a thing like that? And what’s its purpose?
Did humanity have a guardian angel somewhere in the cosmos, designing unrivaled weapons for human use against their enemies?
Or did the alien mechs have another purpose?
“Where did you get that thing?” Brianne asked, following his gaze outside to the alien mech, a spoonful of soup halfway to her lips.
“It’s an experimental Darkstream design,” Jake lied.
It felt awful to deceive his mother, but Brianne had enough problems without worrying about alien invaders, or about the worrying effect Jake knew the alien mech was having on his psyche.
Unfortunately, Brianne wasn’t buying it.
“There’s no way humanity has technology that begins to approach that thing,” she said. “Not even Darkstream. Besides, it looks exactly like photos of the one you and your father found on that comet. Don’t lie to me, Jake. Is this mech the one you found?”
Jake shook his head slowly. “No,” he said. “Someone else has that one.”
“Where did you find this one, then?”
Jake hesitated, unsure whether he was supposed to divulge that information. At last, he said, “Dad didn’t tell you he found a second mech?”
Instead of eating the soup in her spoon, Brianne lowered it back to the bowl, and her eyes found the tabletop. “Your father and I don’t talk much, anymore, I’m afraid.”
“Seriously?” This was news to Jake. “Why not?”
“I want him to come home, to be with Sue Anne, during her…” Brianne swallowed. “Peter thinks it’s his duty to continue working, no matter what happens, to give Sue Anne the best possible chance, but it’s…” Again, his mother couldn’t finish.
It’s only a matter of time, Jake finished for her, though he wouldn’t dare to do so out loud.
Chapter 30
DuGalle
Before Roach turned on them, Oneiri had been wreaking havoc on the Quatro attacking Peppertree. Of the original fifty-six—a count that included the quads—a mere nineteen remained, by Ash’s estimation, which she confirmed by instructing an AI to review the battle recordings from each MIMAS’ point of view.
We were winning. And now this.
They buried Richaud Lafontaine at the edge of the glade that contained the village, beneath one of the taller trees, whose cascading branches formed a protective canopy over the grave.
Most of the villagers turned out for the funeral, probably out of gratitude for Oneiri saving their hides.
It really is the least they could do.
Ash was still too shell-shocked from Roach’s bizarre betrayal and the loss of Richaud to say anything at the service they held.
Beth rose to the occasion once more, though, and the eulogy she gave ended up reminding Ash of the one at Tommy’s funeral.
Mostly because we neglected to give Richaud a nickname before he died, too.
He’d been the last one not to receive one, and Ash had even been working some over in her mind, trying to decide between them.
At Tommy’s funeral, they’d granted him a nickname posthumously, but they didn’t do
that at Richaud’s. Ash suspected that Beth felt too ashamed on all of Oneiri’s behalf, and Ash shared that sentiment.
It’s too late. We lost him, and we clearly didn’t appreciate him while he was here.
Marco and Henrietta had remained inside their mechs for the service, and Beth’s and Ash’s hadn’t been far. Once Beth finished speaking, Henrietta stepped forward to plant the cross Beth had fashioned, driving it firmly into the ground with large, metal fists.
With that done, Ash and Beth got back inside their mechs, and Oneiri trudged back to the village.
“I’m going to kill Roach,” Henrietta said as they passed the outer buildings. “If we see him, stay away from him. He’s mine.”
“The kill belongs to whoever manages to take him down, Razor,” Ash said. The others already seemed to look at her as their leader, and she was doing her best to rise to the task, though her self-doubt ran deep. “We’ll be lucky if we can manage it at all.”
“Why did he do it?” Beth said. “How could he?” Her voice hitched as she asked the question none of them could answer. “Has he been with the enemy from the start?”
Marco shook his MIMAS’ head. “We can’t understand Roach’s thinking any longer. He’s more machine than man, now—much more. Maybe some hidden subroutine told him that killing Richaud was a logical step.”
“A step toward what?” Henrietta said.
No one answered.
Darkstream had classified every Red Company fighter as enemy combatants, but in the confusion and distress following the engagement, no one from Oneiri had thought to make prisoners of the mercenaries that survived.
Doesn’t seem like it’s necessary, anyway.
The Red Company fighters appeared totally dejected, avoiding eye contact with everyone as they wandered aimlessly—especially with the villagers, who they’d convinced to let Red Company protect them, and who they’d utterly failed.
Now, Ash began to question the members of Red Company, to see who they had here, and also what they knew.
“You’ll want to talk to DuGalle,” said the bedraggled woman Ash asked first, who sat in the middle of what looked like someone’s flower garden.
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