Jake couldn’t answer, because he was weeping, now, and the tears showed no sign of stopping. He sobbed so hard that speech wasn’t an option.
At last, after a long, long time, he did manage to utter two syllables.
“Thank you.”
Chapter 39
Silence
The next day, Jake called his father, despite how difficult the communications delay rendered conversation.
That didn’t matter, not really. Because Jake only had one thing to say of any importance:
“Come home, Dad. It’s time for you to come home.”
And he did. A day later, Peter stepped out of the airlock, and Jake and his mother were there to greet him.
His parents exchanged thin, tight smiles, and together the three of them walked to Councilman Pichenko’s house.
“Did you call your comet hoppers to come?” Jake asked.
His father nodded. “And I put out the call to other development outfits. A few of them resisted, but after I showed them the footage, most agreed.”
“Good.”
In addition to the ships used to develop comets, the residents of Hub would also employ every shuttle in the city-settlement that still functioned, and a request had been put out to the entire Steele System: anyone with a spacecraft at their disposal was asked to come to Hub and help with the evacuation.
It was doubtful any of the eleven warships that had accompanied Darkstream to the Steele System would come to Hub’s rescue. A scant handful of those were devoted to patrolling the space between the Belt and the inner system, but Darkstream used most of them as passenger and cargo ships, and they rarely stayed in one place for long. Jake doubted they’d divert from their courses—not even to help the thousands of refugees from Hub.
Across all seven comets, Jake had found nine thousand survivors, mostly located in Comet Two. Though the population of Hub had varied somewhat, it had once averaged around a hundred thousand—over ten times the number of people who were left.
They arrived at Pichenko’s house, and Brianne paused briefly before opening the front door, offering Peter a smile that was a little warmer than earlier.
Then they all entered, making their way to the sick room, where Peter Price reunited with his daughter at long last.
She wasn’t able to lift herself from the bed even an inch, and Peter had to gently slide his arms underneath her so they could embrace.
After that, the conversation was sparse, but it didn’t seem to matter. Sue Anne looked truly happy, and that did matter.
After less than an hour, they left Sue Anne’s room, unwilling to deprive her of the rest she so badly needed. She would need as much energy as she could muster for the journey into the inner system.
But as it happened, she would never make that journey.
Before bed, Jake slipped inside Sue Anne’s room to kiss her goodnight. He tiptoed across the room, not wanting to wake her.
The military had taught him to interpret sense-data quickly, and he instantly noted the silence, where once there had been the steady beep-beep-beep of the heart monitor.
He traced the cord and found that Sue Anne had disconnected it from herself—she must not have wanted to disturb them with its shrill and steady keening.
When Jake touched her forehead, there was still some warmth there.
He sat on the edge of the rocking chair, holding Sue Anne’s limp, cooling hand. And for the second time in as many days, he cried.
Chapter 40
River Rock Redux
After receiving Bronson’s orders, Oneiri slowed their pace toward River Rock. They were meant to reunite with the two reserve battalions, after all, and although both were in the area, they moved much slower than the MIMAS mechs.
As she picked her way through the woods, Ash struggled with the implications of the data dump DuGalle had given her.
If it truly held water—and a big part of her screamed that it must—then Darkstream had orchestrated the war with the Quatro from the outset. They’d launched an unprovoked attack against the aliens, with the sole intention of drawing them into a prolonged conflict and increasing company profits.
But a Quatro killed Jess.
How could she reconcile her sister’s death with the possibility that the Quatro had never wanted this war in the first place? That their attack on Ash’s home had been in response to repeated attacks on their own?
At last, she couldn’t take it anymore, and she forwarded the data dump to the other members of Oneiri Team.
“Fake,” Henrietta said after a cursory glance.
“Are you kidding me?” Ash said. “You can’t have looked at more than one or two of the documents.”
“The tech for doctoring basically anything has been around for ages. Right, Spirit?”
Haltingly, Marco nodded as he dodged around a particularly large tree. “Well, yes…”
“See? Case closed. Who are you going to trust, Steam? Red Company, or the company that made us mech pilots?”
Ash paused for several seconds, collecting her thoughts. She’d been reasoning this out for hours, but now that Henrietta was actually confronting her about it, her arguments had promptly fled.
“I don’t know, Razor,” she finally said. “It seems like it would have taken a hell of a lot of effort for Red Company to forge all these documents. Did they even have the resources to do it? I mean, they disbanded because they lack resources, didn’t they?”
“They’re conniving bastards,” Henrietta said. “They would have found a way. And as for them ‘disbanding,’ I don’t trust that for a second. Sure, they said they’re disbanding. But what better way would there be for them to catch us off-guard?”
Realizing she needed more time to puzzle over it, Ash fell back into her own thoughts. Henrietta spoke so plainly, with such conviction, that it was difficult to argue with her. The confident way she talked made Ash feel like everything Henrietta said should have been self-evident, and like everything Ash thought was silly.
At last, they joined with the Venomous Vipers and the Pied Pipers. This time, Ash barely batted an eyelash at the moronic names Darkstream’s reserve battalions inevitably took for themselves.
The force they brought to bear was no joke, however: eight tanks, five mortar teams, forty snipers, and ten platoons’ worth of infantry would give Roach a hard time no matter how powerful he was now.
Darkstream was clearly intent on putting Gabriel Roach down like the rabid dog he’d become.
But when they rolled into River Rock, Roach was nowhere to be seen.
In his place, hundreds of corpses littered the village, so thickly that patches of visible ground were rare. The bodies had already begun to attract insects, which briefly vacated their meals as the Darkstream soldiers passed before lighting upon them once more.
There weren’t only human bodies—there were Quatro bodies among the dead as well, dwarfing their human counterparts. And though Ash wasn’t certain, she would have bet that the dead Quatro were the same ones Oneiri had fought in both Cordage and Peppertree.
Most of the structures were also obliterated, though Ash got the impression that not all of the damage had been done recently. Some of it looked like it had been in the middle of getting repaired when it had been ripped apart once more.
Sure enough, when she consulted the system net it told her that River Rock had already suffered from one attack, consisting of six Quatro led by a quad.
Something moved amidst the corpses, and in an instant dozens of guns were trained on it.
It was a human corpse, bouncing up and down—once, twice, three times.
At last, it fell out of the way, and a hatch opened beneath it, which must have led directly into the ground.
An elderly man emerged out of the hatch, both wavering hands held high in the air.
“Who are you?” Ash demanded.
“Billy Overton.” He nodded, ever so slightly, at the hatch he’d just vacated. “This here’s my shelter. Paid
tens of thousands of credits for it, and let me tell you, it was worth every penny.”
Ash exchanged looks with Beth. Then she turned back to the old man. “What happened here?”
“Bunch of Quatro showed up, led by two in those four-legged mechs. Then, a two-legged mech showed up—alien-looking one, very same one as saved this village a couple weeks ago, far as I can tell. Except, this time he joined the Quatro in their killing. They didn’t just kill humans, neither. The Quatro mechs turned on their own kind. I saw it. I watched it all from down there.” He nodded again toward the hatch he’d emerged from.
Turning to scan the soldiers that circled them, Ash spotted Commander Janessa Okar, who’d been placed in command of both battalions.
“Commander, would it be possible to arrange a shuttle to evacuate Mr. Overton?”
Okar nodded. “Of course.”
Turning to the three MIMAS pilots that remained under her command, Ash said, “We can cover ground the fastest. Spread out and look for signs of where Roach might be headed next.”
“What will you do?” Henrietta said, and Ash’s gaze snapped onto the face of Henrietta’s mech. The somewhat impertinent question reminded her of the one she’d asked Bronson just hours ago.
“I’m going to download satellite photos and study them.”
Henrietta made a sound that was difficult to decipher, and with that, the other three mechs entered the woods, in three separate directions.
Nearby, Overton was arguing vehemently with the soldier trying to escort him to the shuttle’s landing zone.
“I got my shelter,” Overton said, gnarled hands planted firmly on his hips. “It’s got me this far. Plenty of food, and plenty of security!”
“Sir, please—”
“I’m not going with you. And that’s that.”
Chapter 41
We Stick Together
An hour of searching by Henrietta, Marco, and Beth brought no results, and finally, Commander Okar ordered one of her battalions to join the search as well.
Ash hadn’t wanted to suggest that outright, since she still wasn’t sure how their delicate division of power was supposed to work. But she’d certainly hinted at it pretty overtly, and she was glad when Okar finally arrived at the decision.
Forty more minutes of searching yielded a trail, which Ash suspected had gone pretty cold by now.
Nevertheless, it was all they had, and they continued along it. It pointed directly at Vanguard, the largest settlement that bordered the Barrens. They’d begun building walls at Vanguard, though construction had halted once it had become known walls were now useless in defending against the Quatro. Either way, the town was well on its way to becoming Eresos’ third true city.
That was, if everything didn’t fall completely to pieces before then.
Fifteen minutes into following the trail they’d found, they received an emergency bulletin that Vanguard was indeed under attack by three alien mechs—one biped and two quadrupeds.
It seemed beyond likely that it was Roach, apparently aligned now with the Quatro mechs.
The Darkstream force doubled its speed, which came as a tremendous relief to Ash. Under the best of circumstances, the reserve battalions came nowhere near to matching the MIMAS mechs for speed, but at least, now that they’d quickened their pace, they might have beaten a glacier in a race.
Although, maybe they’d have to increase their speed just a little more to do that.
At last, they neared Vanguard, and Okar began handing down orders with a crispness and precision that Ash had to admire.
Partly for defensive reasons, and partly because of the direct access it granted the town to Gatherers laden with resources, Vanguard had been built in a cleft formed by two sheer, towering cliffs. Those cliffs embraced the town like a lover, exposing less than half of her to the cruel world.
Even the terrain that led to Vanguard was hilly; uneven. That made the town’s location enviable, from a defensive perspective. At least, it should have.
Despite that the alien mechs were already rampaging through the town’s streets, Okar showed restraint that was as admirable as much as it was likely difficult.
Before anything else, the commander spread the Darkstream reserve battalions out over the hills, in a wide arc that surrounded the part of the town not covered by the cliffs.
Only then did she send in Oneiri to draw the enemy out.
If she was being honest, Ash didn’t like her odds. The MIMAS mechs had already been proven inferior to those of alien make, even though they had succeeded in taking down one of the quads.
That had required intensive collaboration, and Oneiri’s numbers had been reduced even more since then.
This looks grim.
But her training hadn’t taught her to think like that. As a soldier, she was supposed to charge into battle, unhesitating, no matter how daunting the odds. She was supposed to follow orders, even if those orders asked her to face what seemed like near-certain death.
So that was what she did.
And it was also what Marco Gonzalez, Henrietta Jin, and Beth Arkanian did. If none of them made it through today, Ash hoped that they would at least be remembered for the way they unflinchingly followed the order that sent them to their deaths.
As it happened, they did not need to enter Vanguard. Just as they neared the outskirts, Roach emerged from behind one of the outer structures—a warehouse, from the looks of it.
Flanking him were the two Quatro mechs that Billy Overton had said accompanied him, which reports from Vanguard’s beleaguered garrison had confirmed.
The trio of alien mechs galloped across the dry terrain, a great cloud of dust rising behind them.
“Fall back,” Ash said. “Let the reserve battalions soften them up.”
“You go ahead,” Henrietta said. “I’m staying. I already told you—he’s mine.”
“Razor, no. You know they’ll run your MIMAS over. Our mechs are most effective when we’re backed up by a variety of units.”
“You’re right, Steam. That’s why you three should retreat. You can have whatever’s left of Roach when I’m done with him.”
“Roach is currently backed up by two quite powerful quadruped mechs,” Marco reminded Henrietta, but she didn’t respond.
“Razor,” Ash said sharply, and Henrietta glanced back at her. Beyond, Roach and his companions were closing the distance. “If you stay, we all stay. You know that. We’re Oneiri Team, and we stick together, damn it.”
Henrietta turned back to the oncoming enemies. “Tell that to Roach,” she said. “You can do what you want. I’m taking him on.”
Heaving a sigh, Ash turned to Marco and Beth. “All right, team. Rockets first. Then autocannons. After that, prepare to engage at close quarters.”
Marco tried one more time: “Henrietta…”
“Shut up, Marco.”
With that, Oneiri assumed a single rank and began sending missile after missile at the oncoming mechs, which were now shimmering in the heat.
Chapter 42
Her New Army
“Incredible,” Lisa whispered. “I’m like a general, now, or something.”
She stood atop a piece of land that swept up out of the Barrens, affording her a view of the tremendous host that passed before her, causing the earth to tremor.
Her tremendous host.
Either the other Quatro drifts scattered throughout this region held more closely to the “Quatro way” than did the drift that had captured Lisa and her soldiers, or her words really had been persuasive, even when translated into the Quatro language and repeated.
Either way, over a thousand of the aliens had responded to the call, pledging to fight Darkstream in order to liberate their brethren.
More Quatro messengers were remaining behind, to continue searching for and persuading other Quatro drifts. Any they succeeded in recruiting would follow behind the advance force.
Most of the Quatro had never been in their own species’ m
ilitary, and so they were content for Lisa to take the command, since she already led the militia from Alex and had racked up a decent amount of combat experience, at this point.
Not to mention the thorough training she’d received at the hands of the woman whose voice now spoke behind her:
“You did it,” Tessa said.
Lisa turned to find the white-haired woman marching up the incline to join her, showing none of her age.
“We did it,” Lisa said.
“Either way. We actually have a fighting chance against Darkstream, now, especially after we join with the Quatro near the space elevator. And we can finally leak the footage of Darkstream’s behavior on Alex. It won’t just sink into obscurity—we actually have the teeth to make them pay for their crimes.”
Sighing, Lisa nodded slightly. “Maybe. But if Eresos’ robots are turning on us…I don’t know. There are a lot of Amblers on this planet, Tessa, and a lot of Gatherers. If they all hit us together…”
“Then we’ll do something about it. What have I told you? There’s no use entertaining anxiety about something that hasn’t happened yet. And if it does happen, we’ll handle it.”
“I hope you’re right.” Lisa turned to leave the rise and rejoin her forces.
The Eresos Quatro had had their technology stripped away from them by the Meddlers before getting stranded here. But Rug and the others still had their devastating energy weapons, as well as their multipurpose jumpsuits.
Lisa knew from Alex that her implant interfaced well with the Quatro communicators, and now she used that connection to locate Rug in the vast alien throng.
“I’m near the front of the great drift, Lisa Sato. Join me and we shall talk.”
Lisa chuckled at the Quatro’s grandiose way of talking. “Will do, Rug. I’m coming now.”
Even though the Quatro were consciously checking their speed to make sure the humans could catch up, it still took a brisk jog to overtake them in order to catch up to Rug.
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