“Sir, I’m taking my team out onto the field.”
“You’ll be crushed. Incredible,” Black said, shaking his head. “I knew those tin cans had filled you with hubris, but I had no idea how much.”
“I haven’t finished speaking. The Quatro will charge soon, and I want to do everything we can to try to break that charge—or at the very least, take down as many of them as we can. I’m contacting you to request that your men stand by to open the gates at my signal, in time to admit us before the Quatro reach the walls.”
“Ah,” Black said, expression unchanged. “That makes more sense.”
“I imagine it does. But sir, I promise you that you are grossly underestimating the capabilities of the MIMAS mechs. You haven’t seen them in action.”
“I don’t need to,” Black said, raising both hands. “They’re nothing but a gimmick—a marketing gimmick. There’s a reason no one developed them until now.”
“You’re right, there is. But it’s not the reason you think. Unfortunately, the true reason is classified, and unlike me, you’re not authorized to know it.”
“There’s that hubris again. Let’s you and I limit our communication to only what’s needed, shall we, son? I doubt either of us need our blood pressure raised any more than necessary.”
“Works for me,” Gabe said—growled, in truth.
“While we’re at it, why don’t you try acting your age? Black out.” The officer vanished from the parapet.
The sky over Plenitos darkened, and it took Gabe a moment to realize that it was merely a reflection of his mood, and not the weather.
Without further ceremony, he stepped onto the wall’s crenellations and then let himself drop.
Sixty-five meters’ worth of air whistled around his mech’s sensor-covered frame, and his HUD registered the otherwise unnoticeable increase in speed caused by acceleration due to gravity.
He absorbed the force of the fall by instinctively bending his legs, but it was hardly necessary. The mech’s complex system of shocks would have kept him perfectly safe without the maneuver.
The Quatro apparently hadn’t yet noticed his departure from Plenitos.
They will in a second.
Though he knew he should wait, the conversation with Black had once again dredged up unwanted thoughts and memories. The man got to him far more than he should, far more than made sense. But the fact of Gabe’s rage remained, and across the grassy expanse waited the perfect object for it.
Striding forward, he loosed a pair of rockets, then pivoted slightly to loose two more.
They struck seconds later, explosions blossoming from the ground, tossing burnt and mangled Quatro through the air as though they were toys.
That done, he fired six grenades in quick succession. By now, the Quatro were surging across the field toward him, meaning it was virtually impossible for his grenades to have anything but a devastating effect.
And indeed they did. More freshly-made Quatro corpses. Gabe laughed, and in the dream, his laughter shook the world.
All around him, his team began to crash to the ground, one-by-one.
Price shot him a look. “Trying to hog all the fun to yourself, sir?” The comment was delivered as a jest, but Gabe heard the note of concern it contained.
“Shut up and shoot,” Gabe said, running ahead, autocannons spinning faster to send hot lead screaming across the battlefield.
Explosions tore up the ground all along the loose formation of rushing Quatro, tearing the aliens apart, sowing chaos and confusion.
But still they came.
“Sir,” Price shouted a short while later, loud enough for all of them to hear over the explosions and the yipping of the oncoming aliens. “We have to go back!”
Gabe didn’t answer. He continued to visit death upon the enemy. Nothing would stop him from avenging Jess.
Suddenly, Price was at his side, placing a metal hand on Gabe’s bicep. “If we wait any longer, our window will vanish, sir. The guards won’t open the gates.”
Shaking off the seaman apprentice’s hand, Gabe turned back toward the Quatro to continue firing. “Go back, if you want. I’m staying.”
“They’ll overwhelm you, sir. Besides, none of us are going back if you don’t, so they’ll overwhelm all of us. We’ll do a lot more damage in the long run by surviving this opening scuffle, right?”
Mentally shaking himself, Gabe inclined his head. “Yeah. You’re right. Let’s go.”
Together, Oneiri Team ran back toward the gleaming steel walls, where the gates were already open and waiting. But as they neared, those gates started to close, and as the last one through, Beth Arkanian almost got trapped outside.
The gates clanged shut. Overhead, the garrison fired nonstop into the Quatro force.
But down here, just inside the city, his team just stood around and stared at Gabe.
They’re wondering about my ability to command. And they can cut that out right now.
“Remember who maintains total authority over your asses,” he bellowed. “Get back on that wall and rain down hell!”
“Yes, sir!” they said in unison, turning to speed toward the nearest stairwell.
Chapter 45
Act Fast
After the Quatro drove Oneiri Team inside the walls of Plenitos, Gabe had expected the aliens to have a swift followup.
“What is this?” Ash Sweeney said over the team-wide channel as she reined havoc on the Quatro below with her grenade launcher. She’d turned out to have a keen sense of where the enemy would be once each grenade exploded, not where they were when she launched it.
Probably from her lucid gaming, Gabe reflected reluctantly. As much as he and other old-school Darkstream operatives liked to look down their noses at it, lucid did teach an undeniable level of situational awareness and ability to prioritize targets.
“What is what?” Tommy Tomlinson asked, and Gabe decided not to interject with his view.
He was still in observation-mode when it came to the dynamics and abilities of his team, and he expected to remain in it for some time. Possibly forever. A good leader only stepped in when absolutely necessary. Constantly micromanaging only taught soldiers to rely on that micromanagement.
“I get that Chief Roach was trying to bait the Quatro by firing on them, but can that really be the only reason they charged? Surely they had a followup plan?”
Inside the mech—inside the dream—Gabe winced. They really needed to come up with some nicknames for everyone on the team, including himself. Having his team refer to him by his rank in battle created too much distance. Nicknames were more valuable for team cohesion than most people assumed.
But I have to let them emerge naturally, too. His old unit had called him Pioneer, but it didn’t feel right to simply order his team to call him that.
“Maybe the Quatro really are as dumb as we thought,” Tommy said.
Maybe. But Gabe doubted it. Still, the Quatro’s behavior made no sense. He’d expected them to have enough knowledge of the terrain to not try digging into the city, so the fact that they hadn’t done that didn’t surprise him, but they didn’t seem to have anything else, other than milling about in front of the city walls and trading shots with the defenders.
Either way, the Quatro offered no shortage of targets, and as he swept their ranks with his autocannons, he watched them bend and fall and break. Part of him rejoiced at the injury and death he dealt, and part of him recoiled in horror.
God, I’m a mess.
Through it all, he could see Jess’s face, and he couldn’t tell whether the expression she wore was approving or disappointed.
Either way, her memory enraged him, driving him to continue exacting his vengeance, no matter how she would have felt about it, no matter whether it was right or not. The madness of battle was upon him, and reason had no part of it.
As he stowed the autocannons by instructing the mech’s hands to reform in front of them, he used those hands to rip his rocket launch
er from his back, just in time to loose a rocket at a particularly dense cluster of Quatro.
As he did, the Quatro revealed to him their plan.
The charge did have a purpose, after all. The sea of Quatro that had crashed against Plenitos’ walls was meant to conceal the heavy artillery-bearing individuals among them.
Individual Quatro wearing multiple rocket launchers of their own strapped to their backs leapt over the heads of their fellows with powerful limbs, loosing multi-rocket barrages straight at Plenitos’ walls before landing among their brethren and getting lost in the seething throng.
“Watch where they fall,” Gabe barked at his team. “Anticipate their trajectories. Take them out!”
But try as they might, the Quatro’s tactic was too effective. They were fast, and their fellows maneuvered to give them leeway to quickly change their position once they landed to continue running up and down the battlefield, firing barrage after barrage from random positions.
In the dream, Arkady Black appeared beside Gabe, hands clasped behind his back, looking strangely calm as he peered down at the battlefield, in full view of the enemy.
Or at least, it looked to Gabe like the enemy could easily sight and snipe him.
But he isn’t truly there.
“We seem to have a problem,” Black remarked.
“You don’t say,” Gabe said, following another rocket-launching Quatro’s path and loosing a rocket at where he expected it would be. It didn’t come back up again, and he felt fairly sure he’d finally taken one down.
Of course, another could easily take up its launchers.
Without the benefit of opposable thumbs, Gabe didn’t know how a Quatro could manage to strap the launchers onto its back, but then, they’d clearly managed to get them there in the first place. And the firing mechanism continued to remain a mystery.
“How much punishment like that are these walls built to take?” Gabe asked.
“Not very much at all,” Black said. “The builders never expected the Quatro to have access to rocket launchers, or to have the ability to use them if they did. You need to act fast, Roach.”
With that, Black vanished.
Thanks for the insight, Gabe said, racking his brain for how in hell they were going to prevent this city from falling.
Chapter 46
How Many Teeth
The journey back to Habitat 2 hadn’t been as eventful as the journey away from it. They weren’t returning with the reinforcements Lisa had hoped to secure, but…
At least we aren’t coming back alone.
Still, she wondered about just how effective the Quatro would prove against the drug lords’ fighters. They seemed to consider Lisa, Tessa, and Andy as part of their drift, now. And although the Quatro had avoided contact with humans for almost two decades, fearing they were agents of the Meddlers, the quadrupeds’ gentleness and geniality made it hard for Lisa to imagine them waging fierce combat against a determined foe.
If they proved just as friendly and accommodating toward Daybreak, then regaining Habitat 2 simply wouldn’t happen. Daybreak’s leader, Quentin Cooper, would crush them.
No matter how big the Quatro are…or how many teeth they have…
The Quatro did have incredibly bulky guns that they mostly carried using their Dome. The aliens were fairly closed-mouthed about the nature of their weaponry.
As for the Quatro themselves, they never seemed to tire—either of loping across the landscape of Alex alongside the beetle, or of engaging in long discussions about their culture.
Despite those long, informative talks, Lisa could never quite get an answer out of them about why they’d ended up in the Steele System in the first place. Or about what the home was like that they’d left behind.
Lisa soon tired of trying to sate her curiosity. Despite their politeness, the Quatro could be incredibly evasive when they wanted to, and she knew they used the language barrier to their advantage, even though that was dwindling as the translator got better and better.
Either way, as they drew closer to Habitat 2, she switched to talking about tactics. They would need a plan to retake her home from Daybreak, after all. She hadn’t realized that she actually thought of Habitat 2 as home until someone had taken it from her.
Funny how that works.
“We don’t have the sort of artillery that’ll let us blow open the side of the city,” Lisa said to Rug as she reclined inside their inflatable habitat one morning, following a strenuous PT session under Tessa’s ever-appraising eye. Strenuous, but they didn’t exhaust her like they’d once done. Lisa had gained a new layer of lean mass during her months of training. She hadn’t “bulked up” too much, but she liked how much more toned her body looked in the mirror now, and when she moved she could feel her increased strength in the way her muscles shifted, and the way everything had become much easier.
Rug wasn’t inside the habitat with her—the Quatro were much too large to fit through the airlock. They’d spent the entire journey in their self-sustaining pressure suits, supplemented by their dome-shaped supply vehicle. Lisa communicated with her via radio.
“Even if we did have that sort of firepower, I wouldn’t want to use it,” Lisa went on. “The idea is to retake the city, not kill its inhabitants by blowing open its side in a way that can’t be fixed quickly.”
“The city subsists on the yield of the Gatherers. Does it not?”
“Well, that’s the whole reason for its existence. To intercept the Gatherers and harvest their contents. As far as basic survival…what Habitat 2 can’t grow hydroponically, it gets from the constant supply runs to and from the space elevator.”
“Suffice it to say, then, that if the Gatherers ceased to come with their bounty, those who control Habitat 2 would become upset.”
“I’d say that’s an understatement,” Lisa said. “Cooper would have a fit, according to what Tessa says about him. He’d be ready to kill something. Do you have a way to disrupt the Gatherers, somehow?”
“We do. Before your arrival, we learned to reprogram them. In fact, our doing so is why your Habitat 2 has proven so lucrative. Have you not noticed that the site receives a disproportionate number of Gatherers?”
“We have,” Lisa said, shifting her position on the air-filled couch, which she could never quite get comfortable on. “It’s the entire reason we built the city there.”
“Yes. We also constructed a settlement there, once. And we reprogrammed the Gatherers to come to it in great numbers.”
“Wait a second,” Lisa said, sitting up, the overinflated couch as hard as a rock beneath her. “The Quatro used to have a base where Habitat 2 is now? Why was there no trace of it?”
Rug paused briefly, and then said, “I would posit two theories. One, the constructors of your city concealed from you the remnants of our settlement, which was destroyed by the Meddlers. Two, the Meddlers themselves cleared away all evidence of it ever existing.”
“Why would they do that?”
“I’m not aware of why the Meddlers meddle. But it is how they came to receive the name we gave them.”
“If we reprogram the Gatherers to deliver their payloads to somewhere else, we could starve out Habitat 2 permanently,” Lisa said. “It would become useless to my employer. I can’t do that to the people who live there. A lot of them are my friends, and most of the rest are good people.”
“Worry not. This can be a temporary measure, to remain in effect only until we have forced this Cooper to emerge from your city to confront us. Once we have retaken it, we will help you to increase Gatherer traffic to Habitat 2 even further, and you’ll become wealthy beyond your wildest imaginings.”
“Oh. That sounds pretty good, then.” She also liked the increasingly aggressive language Rug had begun to use.
When they finally reached Habitat 2, they approached it at the time of night when Alex was darkest—a time that changed throughout the year, and one which the Quatro kept careful track of. At this hour, the habita
t was just a sprawling, dark silhouette against Alex’s sapphire terrain, devoid of detail.
Under that blanket of darkness, Lisa and her two human companions joined the Quatro in surrounding Habitat 2, to intercept every Gatherer that approached it.
In the frigid air, the Quatro’s powers were at their height. They seized the Gatherers with their superconducting brains, stopping them and forcing them open.
That done, they deposited a very specific amount of Terbium inside each Gatherer.
“This will cause every Gatherer to begin mining from a Terbium deposit fewer than ten kilometers from here,” Rug said. “We have measured these amounts carefully—a single milligram more or less, and the Gatherer would not heed our command.”
“Why will they go to that deposit in particular?” Lisa asked. “Is that the only one on the planet?”
“No. The amount required to indicate a particular deposit is always relative to that deposit’s size. The Gatherers appear to have perfect knowledge of the planet’s composition, but we do not, and determining the correct amounts took tremendous trial and error. Mostly error. But if we knew the correct amount, we could instruct the Gatherer to travel to a deposit on the other side of the planet. And it would.”
“Incredible,” Lisa said. She could appreciate the simplicity—the elegance, even—of the Gatherers’ functionality.
Hopefully retaking Habitat 2 will be that straightforward.
Somehow, she doubted that. Over a week ago, her stomach had begun churning at the thought of the coming battle; her first one, outside of lucid sims. She didn’t count fighting the thugs who’d stolen their beetle as a battle.
That said, she had killed that day, and now, she broke into a cold sweat at the thought that she would soon be called on to do so again, many times over.
Am I ready for this?
She didn’t know. But tomorrow would bring the answer.
Chapter 47
Parabola
“I don’t get it,” Tommy Tomlinson said as another rocket hit Plenitos’ walls, shaking it worryingly. He shifted his position on the parapet, gleaming legs flashing in the sun, and answered with rockets of his own. “The MIMAS mechs were supposed to help us win against the Quatro.” Tension and exertion made his voice waver as he continued to pepper the alien horde with explosives. “So why are they about to break through?”
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