Mech Wars: The Complete Series

by Scott Bartlett

  “Get them up to speed as fast as you can and deploy them wherever you think they’re needed most,” Lisa said.

  “Will do. Notaras out.”

  That taken care of, Lisa opened up another encrypted channel. “Jake. It’s time.”

  “I’m on it,” Jake said.

  With that, three mechs—one MIMAS, one quad, and one bipedal monstrosity—charged from their various hiding spots, their suit lights dimmed so they didn’t stand out too much in the night. The majority of Lisa’s heavy-artillery-bearing Quatro were at their backs.

  Chapter 15

  Textbook

  Jake charged forward, his forearms taking the shape of giant energy cannons, which he fired at the spot on the city walls that his HUD had painted in bright red. Those among the legion of Quatro with heavy artillery strapped to their backs fired on that spot too, and before long, the walls began to buckle and warp, though almost imperceptibly. If it hadn’t been for his advanced night vision, Jake wasn’t sure he would have been able to detect the effect they were having, especially in the darkness.

  Fire from atop the city walls intensified, and the alien mech dream manifested a piercing violin note to notify him of two new arrivals to the battle: a pair of MIMAS mechs hurtling over the parapets to land with a ground-shaking thud.

  Paste and Razor.

  Jake ignored them, for now. They ran to engage the nearest mech—the quad piloted by Rug. As much as Jake wanted to assist, he knew breaching the walls had to be his top priority, and anyway, the Quatro could handle herself.

  Twin rocket launchers took form from Jake’s shoulders, loading and firing ordnance that he’d ordered the mech to fabricate in preparation for this battle. The effect of the resistance army’s concentrated fire on the walls was palpable, now, and definitely visible to the naked eye. Even fortified steel wouldn’t be able to take that kind of stress for much longer.

  The enemy was focusing its fire principally on the mechs, which the dream translated as thousands of venomous hornet stings all across his torso and limbs.

  Jake leapt forward several meters, barely dodging mortar fire. The explosion ruptured the ground behind him, along with the pair of unlucky Quatro that had been standing on it.

  His rage made the sky flash scarlet, and the cursed whispers rose up in discordant harmony. He dashed toward Ingress, sprouting high, thin blades that glowed with intense heat. Plunging them both into the city walls, he strained to draw them apart.

  Jake’s anger crescendoed, and the bayonets disintegrated in a violent explosion of light and heat. Flames bathed Jake, but as the smoke cleared and his vision was restored, he saw that the walls had been breached, with a jagged gap large enough to admit three Quatro at a time.

  He glanced behind him and saw several Quatro staggering across the battlefield, dazed, a couple of them injured.

  I did that. He hadn’t been aware the alien mech was capable of such a move, but he’d let himself be guided by his emotions, which was never a good idea when piloting the deadly machine. Now, some of his allies had paid the price. He just hoped he hadn’t done any permanent damage to them.

  “Get back,” he shouted at the injured Quatro, waving with enormous metal hands that had reformed in an instant. “You’re in no condition to be at the front.” Beyond those he addressed, the invading army was rushing forward to take the form of a wedge, which would funnel into Ingress as rapidly as possible.

  A deafening boom sounded directly behind Jake, the shockwave making him stagger forward several feet. He turned just in time to see another explosion, which was followed rapidly by dozens more, for hundreds of meters in opposite directions.

  White-hot metal shrapnel screamed through the night, killing the Quatro he’d been concerned about, along with dozens more. Several pieces hit Jake, almost as painfully as the bullets had, and their size and force made him stumble backward.

  An enormous stretch of wall was being blown outward onto the besieging army, visiting havoc upon their ranks. In several places, entire sections of the wall were blown free, crushing any who were unlucky enough to be nearby.

  Jake shook his head, dazed. All across the battlefield, tiny fires blazed from the flaming shrapnel that had covered everything, and Quatro lay groaning and dying in every direction. Jake heard some human cries mixed in, too.

  As his shock began to subside, he realized what Arkady Black had done. It wasn’t hard to piece together, since it was unfolding before his very eyes.

  Black had clearly known the city walls would be breached, and he’d accepted that—incorporated it into his tactics. So he’d blown it out himself, for nearly a kilometer, allowing his army to deploy onto the battlefield with lightning quickness. They were doing so now, and Jake soon saw the superior positioning Black’s move had given them.

  The defenders of Ingress were rushing forward to execute a flanking maneuver more perfect than any Jake remembered from the military history texts he’d devoured while on Valhalla. Tanks were concentrated at the edges of Black’s force, and they began to hammer the Quatro with explosive anti-tank rounds.

  Chapter 16

  This Is Awkward

  For Jake, the only response that made sense to such an unexpected move was a decisive counterattack.

  “To me!” he boomed, using the mech to amplify his voice a hundredfold. “Everyone, to me!” With that, Jake barreled toward the rightmost pincer of Black’s flank, his arms morphing into heavy machine guns he planned to use to rip up the human ranks.

  To their credit, the Quatro rallied quickly, forming themselves into a great, purple javelin to strike at the heart of what amounted to half of the enemy forces.

  With any luck, they’d rapidly disable that formation, and the enemy flanking maneuver would fall apart. Jake began directing his remaining rockets at the tanks, though it took five just to neutralize one of them.

  Black was smart, and he’d spread his tanks out, meaning the resistance mechs couldn’t deal with them easily.

  Worse, Black had also dispersed his mortar teams directly behind his forces, and they rained holy hell onto the Quatro army, landing mortar bombs in random locations and taking out multiple targets more often than not.

  Most devastating was the fact that the leftmost pincer was recovering quickly from Jake’s swift reaction, spreading out behind his and Lisa’s forces to envelop them.

  That’s not good. If the Ingress defenders maintained a superior firing arc for too long, Jake knew the day would be lost, and the resistance would end in fire and death. He doubted Darkstream intended to take many prisoners from among the alien army.

  The state of play on the battlefield shifted rapidly, and without warning, Jake came face to face with the MIMAS mechs piloted by Beth and Henrietta. They both gripped their heavy machine guns, and the moment they saw him they whipped the muzzles toward his head, though they didn’t fire. Not yet.

  Jake did not raise his weapons in kind. “Razor. Paste. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “It’s sort of part of the job at this point, Jake,” Henrietta said, and inside his mech, he winced at her failure to use his Oneiri nickname.

  “Seems a bit senseless, after having each other’s backs for so long,” he answered, trying to decide whether he sounded like he was begging or not. “I don’t want to fight you,” he said, and he heard his own voice hitch. “I’ve already watched the people I love suffer way too much. I really don’t want to become just another source of that suffering.”

  The head of Henrietta’s mech twitched toward Beth’s. “Maybe he’s right.”

  Beth replaced her heavy machine gun on her back. Then, with a strangled yell, she extended both her bayonets and charged straight at him.

  Lightning-quick, his machine gun forearms became rounded shields instead. He raised his right shield to parry Beth’s first blow, but her second carried such force that it punctured his left shield, the blade’s point coming to within centimeters of his face. Even inside the mech dream, Jake felt
his eyes go cross-eyed for the fraction of a second that he stared at it.

  He wrenched the skewered shield to the left, jerking Beth’s arm along with it. The blade slid out, bending slightly but not snapping, and Beth staggered.

  An anti-tank round connected squarely with Jake’s right side, throwing him backward against a Quatro who was firing on a squad of soldiers clustered near the city walls. The great alien shrieked in pain as the larger alien mech slammed it to the ground, and Jake felt something inside the Quatro’s body give way with a crunch.

  “Sorry!” he yelled, cringing at the damage he’d done, but even if he’d known how, there wasn’t time to minister to the Quatro, or even to make sure it was okay. The side of his mech yawned open from the anti-tank round, and though it was in the process of quickly knitting itself back together, Beth had renewed her vicious assault.

  For her part, Henrietta was circling around, her heavy machine gun still raised and pointing at him. “Sorry, Jake,” she said, squeezing the trigger. His head jerked back with the impact of her burst, and the mech dream represented it as an instant headache, worse than any migraine he’d ever experienced.

  But he couldn’t let it slow him down. Beth was bringing both bayonets to bear once again, forcing Jake back on his heels as he swayed left and right to dodge her thrusts, like a champion boxer about to lose his title.

  Henrietta continued to send heavy ordnance into his right side, and now she started focusing on the spot where the tank round had hit him, her bullets drilling closer and closer to where Jake’s body rested inside the alien mech.

  His vision blurred, and the dream simulated his own heartbeat pounding in his ears. Bringing his arms apart in a sweeping gesture, Jake knocked both of Beth’s bayonets aside. He shoved her, sending her reeling backward. “How could you?” he screamed. “We’re teammates, damn you both! Are Darkstream’s profits more important to you?”

  “That thing you pilot will drive you insane, Jake,” Beth yelled back. “Roach’s mech turned him into a mad dog, and he ran Ash through. He nearly killed her. You were lost to us the moment you climbed inside that mech.”

  Beth charged forward once again, her left blade aimed at Jake’s head. He barely knocked it aside, dancing backward to avoid a slice from the other bayonet.

  But he still couldn’t bring himself to fight. He kept thinking of Sue Anne’s face, racked with pain from her illness. He thought of his mother, and his father, and everything his neighbors back in Hub had gone through.

  I can’t be the cause of more pain for the people I love. He couldn’t, though he cursed himself for a fool that he continued to love the people trying to kill him.

  The battle raged around them, and Black’s forces enveloped Lisa’s. Henrietta sidestepped smoothly to get a better angle around Beth. She opened up on Jake, sending round after round into his wounded side, preventing it from repairing properly. Her bullets tunneled closer and closer to him.

  They’re going to kill me. Black ordered them to, and they’re really going to do it.

  Rug drew into view behind Henrietta, and for Jake, everything seemed to slow, as though encased in thick gel. An energy cannon sprouted from Rug’s chest, aimed at Henrietta. The Quatro seemed to share none of Jake’s hangups when it came to returning the MIMAS pilots’ hostility.

  “Rug, no!” Jake shouted.

  Too late. A massive blast of energy sprouted from her gun, taking Henrietta’s left arm clean off, and causing her heavy gun to tumble to the ground.

  Despite the pain Jake knew the mech dream must have been communicating after losing the MIMAS’ arm, Henrietta wasted no time in reacting. She swung her right arm around, its fingers retracting against her wrist to expose the rotary autocannon beneath, and she pelted Rug with it, causing the alien to flinch backward.

  Something was changing on the battlefield. The volume behind Jake had dropped, and the amount of ordnance coming from that direction had lessened, too.

  He turned to take in the reason why. Lisa’s efforts to recruit more Quatro drifts to their cause had paid off in dividends, and just in time, it seemed.

  A second force had arrived—just under half of the existing Quatro force, by Jake’s estimation—and they were pounding Black’s left pincer, eviscerating what had been a devastating flanking maneuver mere moments ago.

  Jake’s rear sensors alerted him to a renewed assault from Beth, and he turned to answer it, but then she suddenly dropped both arms.

  He kept his arms up, wary that this was a ploy of some kind. Except, he noticed more Darkstream soldiers beyond Beth dropping their weapons as well, and raising their hands toward the sky.

  “Black just ordered the surrender,” she said, her tone flat. “He can recognize a rout when he sees one.”

  “I see,” Jake said, finally lowering his arms too. He glanced from Beth to Henrietta, and then back at Beth again. “Well, this is awkward.”

  Chapter 17

  Repelling the Actual Attack

  Their training clearly wasn’t like what Roach put us through, Ash reflected as she watched the MIMAS trainees coordinate a mock assault against a simulated enemy’s position on Valhalla’s Endless Beach.

  The new MIMAS team had chosen the name Phantom, which Ash didn’t think fit very well. Either way, their coordination was lackluster, coming nowhere close to the hairpin tactical pivots Oneiri Team had executed on a regular basis. It was Ash’s job to teach them to emulate that level of responsiveness, she supposed, but the material she had to work with was a far cry from the hardened weapons that Roach’s training had made of Ash and the others.

  Of course, she still wasn’t prepared to think of what Roach had done to them as humane, but maybe it had come close to being justified. She wouldn’t have said that at the time, but now she felt grateful that she’d become tough enough to endure the horrors that Eresos had subjected Oneiri to.

  Few of her memories involving Roach were fond ones. But for this, she did offer him quiet thanks.

  “Tighten up that formation,” she barked into the coms of the five mechs making up the sneak attack’s main thrust.

  “Sneak attack” had been their term, not hers, and it wasn’t exactly what she would have called it. Any enemy commander worth his or her salt would have handily anticipated an attack from the trajectory they’d chosen, which made it wholly unsurprising when the simulated enemy succeeded in surrounding the MIMAS pilots. That done, they began tearing them apart.

  Ash fought her mounting agitation, which urged her to chew them out for the eighth time this week. Instead, she started pacing her own mech up and down the sand.

  Maybe it’s a good thing their training wasn’t as rigorous as ours. She remembered rumors that the Darkstream brass hadn’t liked how rough Roach had been on them, and they’d likely scrapped his program for one of their own design.

  Did she actually want to try to fix the bad habits the new pilots had been left with? Do I really want to improve the soldiers who’ll be ordered to kill my friends?

  A few of the new pilots were capable soldiers, despite Darkstream’s bungling. Ash had seen early on how well-rounded Seaman Apprentice Maura Odell was. Her only real shortcoming was being lumped in with a team that lacked cohesion. Orson Cole had a keen tactical mind, but he wasn’t persuasive enough to sell his ideas to his teammates, who couldn’t appreciate their value. And Benny Cho was a dead shot who really should have been providing fire support in the current exercise, rather than leading the frontal assault.

  The simulated enemy routed Phantom Team, and Ash suppressed a sigh as they approached her slowly, no doubt reluctant to hear her views about what had just gone on.

  The weaker they are, the less of a danger they’ll be to Jake and Marco, Ash reminded herself. Still, it was hard to watch soldiers falling apart when she was responsible for forging them into an effective weapon.

  “I know I don’t need to break down the mess you just made of that,” she said when the eight mechs were assembled before h
er. “You repeated every mistake I’ve pointed out to you from previous exercises. It’s like you went out of your way not to miss a single mistake.” She shook her head. “Everyone to your bunks. We’re going lucid. Your situational awareness needs a lot of work.” Lucid was ideally suited to that, since it lent authenticity to the emotional component of simulations.

  But that wasn’t her only reason for choosing to conduct this exercise using lucid—nor was it her main reason. Though Darkstream logged everything that happened in lucid, Ash knew they were much laxer when it came to reviewing it than they were with actual events recorded by soldiers’ implants. That made it even less likely that they’d catch on to what she was really trying to accomplish.

  “Officially, I’m not supposed to discuss this with you,” Ash said once the team was once again assembled before her, this time inside the dream. “But it’s no real secret that a resistance force is attacking Ingress, led by MIMAS pilots who have gone rogue. So I might as well use it to guide your training. There’s a chance that the traitors will secure the elevator and use it to attack Valhalla. What I want you to do is design the type of defense that you’d recommend for the station’s garrison to use, and then implement it against a simulated attack. There are no wrong answers, here. If you consider surrender or retreat to be the most viable route, then say so, but justify your response. And know that you’re going to look pretty stupid if you advocate retreat while your teammate organizes a defense that holds out against my simulated attack.” Ash smiled. “Now get to work.”

  She’d intentionally phrased the exercise in a way that sounded like she was discouraging retreat, and it was possible none of them would choose that route. Even so, judging by how conservative each pilot’s defense turned out to be, she’d be able to gauge just how optimistic they were about Valhalla’s chances of repelling the actual attack.