Lisa had ordered the shuttles they’d stolen from Darkstream to remain where they were until they received further instructions. It wouldn’t do to have them fly into a warzone exposed, and it didn’t serve much to have them leapfrog along with their force, either.
She might have waited behind with them and hitched a ride once her force drew close enough to the warzone, where the battle between Darkstream and Quatro still raged, at least according to the system net.
But abandoning her new army immediately after rallying it didn’t feel right. A good leader walked alongside her soldiers and shared in their hardship.
Tessa had taught her that.
By the time she reached Rug, the front of the group was just nearing a canyon bracketed by towering cliffs. Lisa thought she remembered seeing it from the shuttle’s cockpit as they flew overhead, during the trip to locate the eastern Quatro drifts. If she was right, the canyon continued for almost two kilometers before the cliffs leveled out into more open terrain—or at least, as open as the Barrens ever got.
“How is Andy Miller?” the Quatro asked once Lisa arrived.
“On the mend, from what I hear. He’s up and on his feet—well, foot. Apparently the Quatro we left him and Bob with are looking after him. One of them fashioned him a set of crutches using materials from a Gatherer.” Lisa had gotten in touch to check on Andy the moment she’d returned to the planet’s surface and her implant signal had been restored.
“These are good tidings,” Rug said.
As they reached the mouth of the canyon, a rocket left the cliff on their right, sailing through the air to connect with the front ranks of the Quatro army.
Flame licked the dry air, and an explosion rocked the ground while Lisa’s heart leapt toward her throat. When the smoke and dust cleared, she saw that three Quatro were down, not moving.
A second rocket came, connecting with another Quatro, this one closer to Lisa and Rug. The missile had been loosed from a hidden cleft somewhere partway up the cliff to the left.
Squinting through the chaos and into the canyon, Lisa saw a battalion of robots who were just now turning a corner and emerging from the cliffs’ shadows, the sun glinting off their metal surfaces.
“Fall back!” Lisa screamed, and then she repeated the message over a wide channel.
But most of her force did not have the means to listen over the wide channel, and as disorder took hold over their ranks, with some Quatro surging forward to meet the attackers while others turned to try to flee through the thick alien horde, Lisa began to panic herself.
Chapter 43
Vanguard
Roach and his new quad friends dodged around the rockets Oneiri fired at them with ease, changing trajectory and speeding up as needed.
“We need to coordinate,” Ash barked over a team-wide channel, though the urgency in her voice wouldn’t come through over the subvocalization. “Let’s focus on the rightmost Quatro. Spirit, Paste—help me corral it while Razor tries to land a hit.”
“I told you,” Henrietta shot back. “I’m aiming for Roach.”
“Damn it, Razor!” Ash yelled, and she didn’t subvocalize this time. “Are you abandoning the entire concept of a military unit operating efficiently together? Have you decided the chain of command doesn’t suit you today? Or are you going to actually act like a soldier?”
Henrietta glanced sideways at her, and Ash was sure if she could have seen her face, it would have been glaring.
But when Henrietta turned back toward the enemy, she gave a sullen shrug and ground out, “Fine.”
Beth landed a rocket to the Quatro mech’s left, forcing it to veer right, and then Marco put one between it and Roach.
That gave it no path but forward, and Ash decided to take the shot. When the quad sped up again, angling slightly left, Henrietta loosed a missile that scored a direct hit.
Beth whooped, but stopped when none of the others joined her.
Any cause for feeling triumphant was short-lived: the explosion dispersed, and the quad emerged from the smoke, virtually unscathed.
“They’re getting too close for rockets. Engage rotary autocannons and sweep them,” Ash ordered.
The others complied, peppering the trio of mechs with armor-piercing rounds.
Even though the high-velocity rounds lent a stutter to the enemy mechs’ step, it did not slow them by much. They barreled closer and closer.
“All right,” Ash said, her voice tight. “Prepare to extend bayonets.”
But when Roach and the two quads were about to close with Oneiri, they split apart—Roach and one quad sprinting past to Oneiri’s right while the other quad passed on their left.
“What the hell?” Henrietta growled.
Ash saw instantly what the enemy was doing: by charging straight at the Darkstream reserve battalions, they’d made it hazardous for the MIMAS mechs to continue firing at them, for fear of hitting friendlies.
That meant they only had to contend with the weaker artillery wielded by the soldiers under Janessa Okar’s command.
Still, there was a lot of that artillery. A tank scored a direct hit on one of the quads, ripping its shoulder half-off. The metal instantly began to knit itself back together, though, and within seconds it had reformed.
Still, Okar knew what she was doing, and threads of deadly light came from all over the wide arc she’d established—straight at the enemy mechs, whose progress was significantly impeded, now.
There was no avoiding that massive barrage of ordnance, and the trio of mechs could only continue their forward surge.
For a moment—as hundreds of metal fragments were shot off the alien mechs’ sides and heavy ordnance continued to hammer their fronts, which had to be doing major damage—Ash dared to hope.
Were the mechs about to go down without inflicting any casualties on Darkstream’s forces?
But then Roach and the quads reached the Darkstream ranks.
Immediately, most of the shooting dropped off, to avoid friendly fire. The soldiers around the mechs tried to pull away from them to continue shooting, but clearly Roach and the Quatro now considered it their turn.
They wouldn’t let the Darkstream soldiers get away, keeping close to them instead.
The Quatro mechs charged through the ranks, impaling infantry on twin lances that sprouted downward from their shoulders while firing from batteries of guns that projected from their flanks.
A broadside barrage from a ground unit. Ash shook her head in wonderment.
For his part, Gabe elected to simply lay about the enemy troops with arms that had become massive broadswords. Then, without warning, he charged straight at a tank, and the soldiers in his path scurried to get out of his way.
Leaping high into the air—Ash took the opportunity to pelt Roach with her autocannons, but to little effect—Roach descended to pierce the tank with both blades.
He must have done something else to the tank, then, because it exploded beneath him. Moments later, Roach emerged from the conflagration to continue his rampage.
“What do we do now?” Beth said, her voice small.
“I don’t know,” Marco answered. “But I suspect it’ll probably have something to do with dealing with that.”
Ash glanced toward Marco to see him pointing at the sky. She followed the gesture with her eyes.
Far above Eresos, hundreds of streaks of fire were hurtling toward the planet’s surface. They were visible even in broad daylight.
“What is that?” Henrietta said.
“It’s something entering the atmosphere,” Ash said, remembering the way the Quatro mechs had first arrived on Eresos. “Many somethings, from the looks of it. And I doubt we’re going to welcome our new visitors.”
Chapter 44
Engage Together
“Captain,” Ash said as Bronson answered her call, appearing on the ground before him. “Do you know anything about those meteorites that look like they’re hurtling straight for us?”
Bronson rubbed his palms against both stubbled cheeks. “Ah. They showed up, then, did they?”
“Huh? What do you mean, ‘they?’ What are they?”
The captain sniffed. “I’ve been keeping the Javelin near the space elevator, hoping to intercept them there. I figured the elevator would be their first target…I knew they couldn’t possibly move fast enough to race a destroyer accelerating at full power, but I never expected them to strike Vanguard…” The man cleared his throat.
“Would you mind telling me what the hell you’re talking about, sir?”
Well, they’re these little robots that nearly tore my hull clean off out in the Belt. Price had his hands full shooting them off the Javelin while battling the alien mech—”
“Wait, Jake fought one of those things?”
Shaking his head as though to clear it, Bronson said, “Look, Sweeney, all you need to know is that those things are small but vicious. They did a number on my ship’s armor, and they’ll do one on your MIMAS if you let them. So don’t let them, all right?”
The dream-sky had turned blood-red to reflect Ash’s anger. “Sir, if you knew about these things…”
“You have two entire battalions with you, Sweeney! Figure it out!”
With that, Bronson disappeared.
Unbelievable.
“Steam?” Henrietta said. “Are we just going to let this happen?” She was pointing at the alien mechs, whose killing sprees were still well underway.
“No,” Ash said. “Actually, it looks like we’re going to have to stop that, somehow, before those things in the sky arrive down here.”
“What are those things, exactly?” Marco asked. They’d known Ash was contacting Bronson.
“Robots capable of ripping apart our mechs, apparently. From the sounds of it, facing them and the alien mechs at the same time is the last thing we want to do.”
“So, we neutralize the three alien mechs first,” Marco said. “How hard can that be?”
Ash glanced askance at him. She was used to sarcasm from Henrietta. If Marco had started being sarcastic, it was probably a good sign they were in trouble.
“We stick together,” Ash said. “Remember how we took out the quad outside Ingress—by pinning it down and melting its armor with our lasers. All we have to do is take out the Quatro inside. So we focus on one of those first.”
Since Roach no longer had a body they could kill, she had no idea how they’d put him down. She’d decided to concentrate on the enemy whose death she knew was at least possible.
Ash led the way across the battlefield, charging at the quad who’d strayed the farthest from the other two enemy mechs.
By now, the Darkstream formation wasn’t one—instead, it was just a writhing mass that half-fled and half-fought, depending on a given unit’s proximity to the hostiles.
Neither effort was going very well.
Hoping for the element of surprise, Ash charged at her target’s backside, bayonets extended.
She should have known better. If the Quatro mech was anything like hers, its HUD would warn it of significant threats approaching from any angle.
Indeed, seconds before she drove her right bayonet into its metal hide, the quad turned, rearing up to crush her beneath metal paws.
Ash pivoted out of the way, retracting her segmented hands to fire up at the enemy mech as she sidestepped.
The moment the Quatro crashed back to the ground, Ash noticed Marco had leapt into the air, slowly flipping so that his mech’s whole weight would be behind his blades when he fell.
The Quatro didn’t seem to register the attack from above, and yet when Marco’s bayonets drove home, they glanced off harmlessly, and he tumbled off the alien’s hide to land in a heap.
The quad began to turn, but Henrietta was already there with her heavy machine gun, pelting the Quatro’s head and lending a stutter to its movements.
Ash was still hung up on the ineffectiveness of Marco’s attack. Do the quads have a hardening mechanism of some sort?
Maybe, if they had advance warning of a significant threat, they were capable of hardening their armor in that spot by compressing the metal scales there; trading versatility for impenetrability, for as long as they needed to.
It was the only way Ash could explain Marco failing to penetrate the quad with that much momentum behind his bayonets.
“We need to engage all at once, from four separate angles,” Ash shouted over the team-wide. “I think it’s able to turn away our bayonets if it knows they’re coming, but if we can keep it guessing, surprise it…”
It was a long shot, but it was the best thing any of them had suggested yet.
Then again, it’s also the only thing anyone’s suggested.
Nevertheless, Oneiri moved to circle the quad, which in turn tried to isolate them and take them out one by one.
It charged Beth, and in the dream, Ash’s distress took the form of the taste of cigarette ashes. She charged forward at the Quatro, bayonets extended before her.
The quad turned around, batting at Ash with a massive paw and sending her hurtling backward.
“What happened to engaging it together?” Henrietta said.
“Uh…right. Sorry.”
They continued to circle the Quatro, trying out their entire arsenal on it.
At this range, their heavy machine guns seemed to have a good effect, opening gaping craters in the Quatro’s metal hide that took a while to close.
Oneiri’s assault on the quad had given the soldiers around them an opening to catch their breath and increase pressure on the quad as well.
Ash could tell the soldiers were well-trained: they took care to avoid hitting the MIMAS mechs, and their shots were well-timed, forcing the Quatro into compromising its position several times.
But nothing seemed to work. Either Oneiri was failing to get the drop on the quad or it had learned to repel their blades with a one-hundred-percent success rate.
If that’s the case, we’re doomed.
But she had to assume they would get there eventually.
We have to keep trying.
“Uh…Ash?” Marco said, his gaze fixed on a point beyond her.
Ash didn’t have to ask what he was looking at, and when she patched through a feed from one of the visual sensors on her back, it confirmed what she feared: the first robots were starting to crash to the earth, their landing zones scattered across the empty expanse between them and the town. Great plumes of dust sprouted into the air with each impact, and each robot sprinted toward the Darkstream forces the instant it gained its footing.
They looked like tiny mechs, with limbs that were shaped like elongated shields and heads that curved forward as well as back.
And they ran like demons chased them.
“Sweeney,” Bronson said, his likeness appearing suddenly on the hard-packed ground before her. “I may have a solution to the robot problem you’re experiencing.”
“Oh? That’s welcome news.”
“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it…” Bronson cleared his throat. “I’ve parked the Javelin in low orbit, directly over the battle. I have orders to, uh, nuke the entire area if things go south.”
Ash froze in place, stunned, while the others grappled with the quad. “But…that’ll kill the Darkstream forces as well, not to mention the citizens of Vanguard.”
“If you’re defeated, everyone there will die anyway. So don’t lose, and it won’t be an issue. Bronson out.”
The captain disappeared from the battlefield outside Vanguard once more.
Chapter 45
Champion
Gabe’s feet, ever-shifting to grant him perfect balance, pounded across the hard-packed dirt as he laid open devil after devil with his blades.
How many must I kill?
He’d intended the question rhetorically, but as they often did, the whispers offered up an answer:
All of them. You must kill them all. Only then will the location of your beloved be revealed.<
br />
Gabe swept a man’s head off his shoulders with a flick of one of his broadswords, and the puny ball of flesh and bone sailed through the air trailing droplets of blood before falling to the hard-packed ground. Less than a second later, its body followed.
Most of the figures he slew seemed minuscule to him, and they offered him no challenge whatsoever. The stinging of their weapons had the same effect that hail had on human skin—it hurt a little, sometimes, but hail rarely killed anyone.
The tanks held more interest for him, actually providing some satisfaction whenever he succeeded in taking one out. The armored personnel carriers caught his eye, too, and he thought it would be enjoyable to make those explode, though the feat would hold little tactical value.
Besides, they might be keeping Jess in one of them.
He’d been ecstatic when the whispers told him that she was still alive. Or at least, he’d felt that way once they’d convinced him of it.
At first, he had been skeptical. He’d seen Jess’s corpse with his own eyes—the scarlet that stained her white summer dress.
That wasn’t her, the whispers insisted. It wasn’t her at all. They fooled you, Roach.
But if it hadn’t been Jess, then who?
No one, the whispers answered. That was no one. They’ve been keeping you in a waking dream, Roach, and it is only now that you have entered my dream that you are awake.
The whispers had explained it all: how Darkstream had fabricated the Ambler attack on Allendale, sending him north to investigate the hoax.
On the way, they’d hijacked his implant, sending him into lucid without his knowledge.
There, they’d concocted this whole fantasy: of the Quatro attacking Northshire, of them killing Jess Sweeney as well as her father and the other villagers.
Not that the Quatro were blameless—oh, no. They had helped Darkstream fool him, and they’d betrayed their own kind on top of that.
That was why he and the two quads had slaughtered human and Quatro alike, back in River Rock. No one liked being betrayed by your own kind, no matter the species.
A woman in his path stood her ground, showing no fear as she fired round after round from her SL-17 up into his face. Gabe was about to cut her down when he stopped, frozen on the battlefield, his rampage far from complete.
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