“Go ahead,” Lisa said to Andy, her breath still ragged. “Say something snarky.”
“You look good.”
“What? Really?”
Andy nodded, saying nothing else. Gradually, Lisa’s breathing slowed, and she managed to heave herself onto one of the seats, where she sat with her elbows on her knees and her head hanging. Her raven hair had become loose, and now it spilled down toward the floor.
“Why’d you stop returning my calls, Andy?” Lisa asked. The words just came out, surprising even her. Maybe the intense PT had dislodged them.
“Oh. I…I just…I don’t think I could be happy with you. Sorry, Lisa. I should have said something, but…it was just easier to fall out of touch.”
And to act like a jerk whenever you ran into me at the Dusty Bucket, Lisa would have added. But she didn’t. “Why’d you think you wouldn’t be happy with me?”
He shrugged. “Too many options.”
“Huh? Options?”
“Yeah. You know. If I’d gone with you, there would have always been a prettier girl to distract me and cause trouble.”
“A prettier girl.”
“Yeah.”
“I see,” she said, and the words sounded icy even to her ears. She was glad. She dragged herself to her feet and trudged to the portal that led into her own bedroom. “Good night, Andy.”
“Good night,” he said, his expression unreadable.
What a jerk. Lisa vowed never to engage Andy again, on anything other than topics that pertained directly to their jobs.
Chapter 17
Living Hell
Darkstream had devoted an entire section of the Omega Quadrant to training and housing its security forces, with several floors filled with equipment, gyms, obstacle courses, Olympic-size swimming pools, barracks, a shooting range, an arsenal, an infirmary, a mess, and so on.
Jake filed into the largest gym Darkstream trainees and soldiers had exclusive access to, along with hundreds of other recruits. As they passed through the enormous double doors, they were told to gather in a central, circular expanse, which was the only one devoid of equipment.
Instructor Gabriel Roach awaited them there.
“I have limited time to get you battle-ready,” he told them the instant they’d all assembled, his low tone making them all shut up and lean forward so they didn’t miss anything.
“The Quatro aren’t waiting. Ever since they razed Northshire, they’ve been ramping up their aggression against human settlements all across Eresos. So far, they’ve mostly been focusing their attention on villages that can’t afford Darkstream protection, and they’ve been having a lot of success with that approach. But the board expects them to strike more vital targets soon.”
Roach paused to let that sink in, and as it did, the recruits around Jake shifted their weight, some of them murmuring to each other.
“Shut up,” Roach said, and without having to raise his voice, utter silence swept across the gathered trainees. “As I said, we don’t have much time. Darkstream needs a full mech team, staffed only by the best and meant for deployment wherever we’re needed most. And they need it now. Which means that those of you who aren’t already seventy percent of the way to where I need you are going to wash out.” He grinned. “Right now, each of you is telling yourself that it won’t be you. But it will be. I can almost guarantee that it will be you. I do invite you to prove me wrong.”
Jake felt the corners of his mouth curl back as his jaw set, teeth grinding together.
It won’t be me. But that was exactly what Roach had just predicted he’d be thinking. I don’t care. It’s not going to be me.
“There are hundreds of you standing in front of me, gaping like you just walked off a farm. In a sense, a lot of you did, though not in the way humanity’s traditionally conceived of farms.” Roach chuckled. “Sorry. I don’t mean to overtax your brains. Instantly forget any big words I happen to let slip, and remember that of the hundreds of you here today, most of you will wash out. Hell, it’s possible that every one of you will. Even if some of you don’t—even if some of you really are seventy percent to where I need you—the process of digging deep and finding that extra thirty percent is going to basically kill you. That’s a promise.
“The training will be grueling, children. Darkstream needs fresh recruits to pilot the mechs they’re developing, and they need them soon. Unfortunately, the only place to get individuals suited for the job is the system’s lucid leaderboards. To succeed there, you need to have the exquisite reflexes and situational awareness it takes to pilot mechs. Many of the games you played in lucid involved mechs. This is because Darkstream has been developing them for a while, and it anticipated the need for pilots a long time ago.”
Roach shook his head, smiling widely at them, his forehead bunching in ever-increasing amusement. “I’m sure what I just said went straight to your heads. Suddenly, you think you’re a bunch of hotshots, don’t you? I tore you down and then I built you back up, right?” Terse laughter. “Wrong. Just because you’re good at Darkstream’s video games does not mean you’re going to make it through what I’m planning to subject you to. It’s my job to find among you individuals who can be molded into soldiers who won’t choke at the first taste of battle. To do that, I intend to kick your asses around and around this station. I intend to make your lives a living hell. And that’s just to start.”
Chapter 18
We’re All Starting to Hate
Chief Gabriel Roach was a man of his word.
By the end of the first day, Jake felt like someone really had kicked his ass.
By the end of the first week, he felt like he was going to die.
He’d always considered himself fairly fit. Developing comets with his father, using just the equipment Darkstream leased to them—it involved a lot of physical labor.
Sometimes, during rare visits to Hub to see his mother and Sue-Anne, or more frequent supply stops at various outposts in the Belt, Jake would challenge other guys his age to arm wrestle, or just straight up wrestle. He’d rarely lost, though he’d always been a pretty good sport about winning, in his opinion.
Roach’s version of PT involved moving from exercise to strenuous exercise without stopping. At the beginning of each day, he laid out their training schedule, and it was always daunting, but Jake quickly learned that it never encompassed everything they would do that day.
For Roach, everything that happened was an excuse to pile on extra PT.
If someone faltered, he assigned the entire group more PT. If someone complained, that was at least sixty minutes of added PT. Once, Roach said that one of the recruits looked funny, and as a result, the entire group earned two hours of extra PT.
Jogging ten miles, jogging backwards ten miles, push-ups, burpees, pistol squats—Roach prided himself on constantly hitting them with new exercises that none of them had heard of before. He wasn’t happy until someone collapsed.
When someone did, that meant more PT.
In class, they were taught tactics and strategy, insertion and evacuation techniques, weapon use and maintenance, explosives, unit formation, Quatro anatomy and strategy—such as it was. They spent a fair bit of time on the shooting range, as well, with Roach ridiculing them whenever they missed.
They were also shown vids of every Quatro attack that had ever occurred.
When he was shown the first vid, of the recent attack on Northshire, Jake was struck by the savagery of the aliens, as well as their complete lack of mercy.
The aliens chased down men, women, children, the elderly, the infirm, the disabled. It didn’t seem to matter to the Quatro, who rent their victims with scythe-like claws and tore at them with teeth like knives, or simply tossed them into buildings using powerful jaws.
During that first vid, he happened to glance at Roach, standing on the side of the classroom.
Even with the lights dimmed, Jake could see how Roach’s eyes burned, and the way his jaw protruded with tension. Roac
h hated the Quatro; that much was clear.
Jake was coming to hate them, too. He’d never hated anything or anyone in his life—not really. Not true hatred. But after watching those vids, he hated the Quatro.
Then, suddenly, something began to bother him. Other than the Northshire attack, there really wasn’t very much footage of Quatro attacking human settlements. Roach just rotated the same four or five, showing them in different orders, cycling them again and again.
But what really stoked animosity toward the aliens were the lucid sims Roach had them run, where the Quatro were consistently the enemy.
Their mission was always to defend a helpless village from the Quatro, or to stop a Quatro attack already in progress, or to rescue a group of children the Quatro had captured, or to contend with some other atrocity the aliens had committed.
The sims had the greatest effect—even greater than the vids. While lucid, Jake had to watch the Quatro tear his fellow recruits apart again and again.
Several times, he experienced a Quatro savaging him, tearing at his guts, jaws coming away with glistening intestines dangling.
And because the human brain consistently mistook dreams for reality, the fear was always real. And the pain.
And the hatred.
During lunch, halfway through his third week of training, Jake commented on it to those sitting around him in the Recruits’ Mess.
“We’re all starting to hate the Quatro, but it’s mostly because of what they do to us in lucid, right? I hate them. I can’t help it, because of what they’ve done to me and what I’ve seen them do to my friends. But the hatred is coming from simulated events. They didn’t actually happen, not any of it. Doesn’t that bother anyone else?”
“There are vids, too,” said Ash, a trainee around his age. She had a thin nose, blue eyes, and short, wheat-colored hair. “The way they act in the sims is what they’re really like. We know that because of the vids.”
“But there are only five vids, tops,” Jake said. “How many times have humans attacked Quatro dens? We haven’t seen any vids of us attacking them. I mean, if they want me to fight an enemy, fine, but are these tricks really necessary?”
Ash shook her head, and started to speak, but she trailed off, her gaze fixed on a point over Jake’s head.
He turned to see Gabriel Roach standing behind him, arms crossed, eyes ablaze.
Jake felt certain he could actually feel the color draining from his face. But Roach didn’t say a thing. He just stood there, for at least a minute, until at last he walked away without a single word.
“I’d watch your back,” Ash told Jake, eyebrows hiked up her forehead. “That looked like a death glare to me.”
The first couple of weeks had seen only a trickle of wash-outs, but there was something about that third week. Seventy trainees quit that week, over twenty percent of the total.
On the evening of Jake’s conversation with Ash in the Recruits’ Mess, Roach suddenly announced that he wanted to test how far their conditioning had come. He brought them to the gym and told them to line up in ranks, fists locked at their sides.
“Tighten your abdominals,” Roach told the first recruit he came across, giving him only a second to do so before striking him in the gut.
The recruit grunted, falling back a step.
“Needs work,” Roach said. “A lot of work.” He moved to the next recruit. “Tighten your abdominals.” Then came the blow.
Roach worked his way down the first line, and then the next. Jake wasn’t totally clear on how this tested their conditioning. He supposed having a strong core was part of it, but the regular PT should have already given the chief a much better idea of their conditioning overall.
When Roach reached Jake, he saw the glint in the officer’s eye, and suddenly he knew what this was really about.
“Tighten your abdominals,” Roach said softly, and Jake did, praying silently.
Roach’s fist felt like a rocket launched straight into his guts. The chief put his full weight into it, sending Jake reeling back into the recruit behind him, who caught him by the arms.
“Let him fall,” Roach said, and Jake’s fellow recruit immediately let him drop to the floor.
The chief walked over, looming over Jake for several seconds, glaring down at him as he gasped for air. For a second, Jake expected Roach to drive his foot down onto his stomach.
But he didn’t. Instead, he shouted: “Training’s over for the day. Retire to your quarters and lick your wounds.” His lips curled into a tight smile, which he directed at Jake, and then he stalked out of the gym.
Most of the recruits left without ever having to tighten their abdominals.
Somehow, the fact that Roach hadn’t assigned more PT after Jake collapsed was even more humiliating than getting knocked to the floor.
Going down is supposed to mean more PT. But not this time.
The other recruits followed their chief as Jake lay on the floor, still gasping. All but one of them.
Ash Sweeney walked over and offered him her hand. He took it, wincing as she dragged him to his feet.
“Told you it was a death glare,” she said.
Jake nodded. “You had the right of it.”
“I heard a rumor that Roach lost someone to the Quatro. That’s why he hates them so much. Maybe that’s why he didn’t like you defending them.”
“I wasn’t defending them. I was just saying.”
“Yeah. Well, if the rumor’s true, then I know how Roach feels. I lost my sister in the attack on Northshire. My father, too.”
“God. I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. You wanna fight each other in lucid?”
“Yeah. Okay.”
They left the gym together.
Chapter 19
Plenty to Worry About
When Tessa wasn’t running Lisa into the ground, she exchanged increasingly lewd jokes with Andy, with whom she appeared to be holding a contest to see who could be the raunchiest.
That bothered Lisa, for some reason.
Maybe it was because, with Tessa as her mentor, and with Lisa’s vow to mostly ignore Andy, she had no one she could really talk to.
Either way, she’d never been a prude, but being forced to hear Andy and Tessa swapping off-color jokes all day got really old, really fast.
Even though there’s nothing else to do.
They still had access to satellite imagery, though they’d grown less concerned about checking it regularly. Before, they’d taken turns getting up throughout the night in order to search the latest photos for plumes of blue dust that might indicate pursuers.
They were two months out from Habitat 2, however, and Andy figured that anyone wondering about the missing beetle had probably given up looking for it by now.
On the second day of training, Tessa had calibrated Lisa’s implant to properly simulate her actual strength—physical, psychological, and emotional. And though she’d been skeptical, Lisa had to admit that the white-haired woman had been right. Now that she could no longer dream herself into a superwoman, lucid combat had become much harder.
During the times Tessa wasn’t putting her through another round of endless PT, or handing her her butt in lucid battles, Lisa stared out the crew cabin’s silicon nitride windows at the unchanging terrain.
When they’d first left Habitat 2, she’d cherished the planet’s sapphire color. It made her think she hadn’t spent nearly enough time out on the surface, before. But now, she wanted to retreat inside a habitat, any habitat, and never leave it again.
Constant defeat had stolen her joy for going lucid. Now, staring at the terrain was the only thing she had any interest in doing. Not that she had very much interest in that, either.
On the bright side, as the weeks crawled by, she could feel herself growing stronger, more proficient. Much more.
Tessa called those “beginner gains,” but whatever. It didn’t make them any less real. Lisa was making progress.
One morning, she
woke to getting shaken roughly. She opened her eyes to find Andy standing over her inflated bed.
“What are you doing in my room?” she asked, her voice dripping with venom.
“Lisa, you need to get up. I just had a glance at the latest satellite photos. I think there’s something coming. Three somethings.”
Leaping out of bed, trying not to think about the fact that she wore only a bra and underwear, Lisa pulled on her uniform and ran out into the habitat’s common area.
“Where’s Tessa?” She glanced back at Andy. “You woke me first?”
He shrugged. “You’re my colleague, not her.”
“Get her up.”
“Sure thing.” Andy went to the portal leading into Tessa’s bubble and opened it.
Soon, they were all standing around the common area, studying a pair of photos Andy had forwarded to their implants.
“These were taken an hour apart, and judging by the distance those dust plumes covered, our pursuers are traveling faster than it’s safe to. The beetles may have been named to encourage slowness, but they’re capable of pretty high speeds. Whoever’s driving those beetles, they’re obviously not afraid to take advantage of their full power.”
Although Lisa was the ranking Darkstream official, and the beetle was Darkstream property, Tessa had already taken command. “I’ll help Lisa deflate the habitat and stuff it into the beetle. Andy, you get the beetle’s systems up and running. Be ready to floor it as soon as we climb in.”
“Sure thing.”
“How much time do we have?”
“Enough, probably, if we stop wasting it this second and hustle.”
Tessa nodded. “Let’s get moving, then.”
They barely spoke as they rushed to put everything away, deflate the habitat, and collapse the airlock. Using the habitat’s venting system, they were able to deflate it and pack it into the beetle’s undercarriage compartment in under thirty minutes. Then they clambered aboard, and Andy gunned the engine.
Just in time. The rear viewscreen showed the pursuing beetles cresting the horizon and barreling toward them, rapidly closing the distance.
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