But I have emphasized the importance of duty and honor. And most of them didn’t need to be told in the first place.
It was an argument that Lisa could hold only in her head, however. She was already in deep enough trouble without contradicting Laudano more than she already had.
“I’m prepared to accept whatever consequences you deem fit, sir,” she said. Though if Laudano actually intended to dishonorably discharge her, she expected he would have done it without all the fanfare.
Laudano wants something else from me.
“Yes, I expect you are prepared. But perhaps we can arrive at a situation where there is no need for me to administer any consequences.”
Here we go.
“The resource collection from the Gatherers,” Laudano went on, “though it took a sharp dip before and during the battle you fought to retake Habitat 2, has gone way up since then. I’ve been monitoring the reports closely, and it wasn’t a momentary spike caused by a glitch in the machines. No, this is sustained. Do you know why that might be, Seaman?”
Lisa did know why, and her lip trembled as she struggled with the question of whether she should volunteer the information. No doubt Laudano would extract it anyway, but she didn’t want to betray the Quatro by passing on their secret. That said, Rug had never asked her to conceal it from anyone.
“You really need to start being more forthcoming with me, Sato,” Laudano said, with a sigh. “Very well. We will walk through it, shall we? To have increased resource collection, you must have increased Gatherer traffic to Habitat 2, meaning you have discovered how to influence the machines somehow. I can only assume your Quatro friends helped you to do so. If you want to escape your dishonorable discharge, you will tell me how this was done. Immediately.”
Now, it was Lisa’s turn to sigh, much more tremulously than Laudano had. “You have to feed them a very particular amount of a resource they aren’t currently collecting. I don’t know the amounts, but I do know they correspond to deposits scattered throughout the planet. If you feed one just the right amount of terbium, for example, it’ll start harvesting from the corresponding terbium deposit.”
A smile grew like a cancer across Laudano’s face. “Congratulations, Sato. You have escaped discharge this day. You may return to your duties of patrolling the streets of Habitat 2 and never sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, ever again. Further, if you are caught training civilians anymore, you will find yourself not just discharged, but also incarcerated. Do I make myself clear, Sato?”
“Clear, sir.”
“Dismissed, then.”
Chapter 29
Significant Deviations
Since Roach was unable to concentrate on anything other than staggering forward in his battered mech, Jake retained the command, if only in function and not in name.
He ordered Oneiri Team to stick as close behind him as he could, though he regularly glanced back, to make sure Chief Roach was keeping up.
In the meantime, he randomized their path as much as he could, in an attempt to throw off pursuers. That said, it was difficult to conceal the passage of seven MIMAS mechs.
Then they hit the Barrens, and the terrain changed so radically it was as though they’d teleported to another planet.
During their first trip through this region, on their way to help break the Siege of Plenitos, Jake remembered thinking that if he had to come up with a single word to describe the Barrens, it would have been “vertical.”
Sheer, craggy cliffs seemed to be their chief characteristic, and his implant had helpfully volunteered the information that the Barrens were known for their frequent volcanic activity; one of the main reasons very few humans lived here.
The Gatherers traversed the Barrens just fine, of course. Nothing seemed to ever impede their progress.
Jake’s mind kept flashing back to the memory of his fellow Darkstream soldiers back in the camp, fighting for their lives, and falling by the dozen.
We left them. Abandoned them.
They’d been following orders when they’d done it, but that didn’t change things. Yes, they’d left to keep the MIMAS mechs out of enemy hands. And that was a positive thing, from a strategic perspective.
It still doesn’t change the fact that we spent the lives of good men and women to accomplish it.
“Clutch.” It was Ash, subvocalizing over a two-way channel.
“Yeah, Steam?” he said, too focused on keeping his footing on the uneven landscape to look back at her.
“The quads…”
That made him look. Far behind them, appearing as tiny specks on the sere landscape, were the Quatro in the mechs they’d stolen.
They were gaining ground rapidly. Even as he watched, the tiny specks grew in size.
“We need to move faster.” Jake looked at Roach. “Sir, we have to speed up.”
“Easy for you to say,” Roach growled. “I told you to leave me behind.”
“Sir, we’re operating under the same principle we did outside the walls of Plenitos. If you stay behind, we all stay behind, and then we fight the quads together, probably losing in the process. So if you consider it important strategically to keep the MIMAS mechs from the enemy, I suggest you find a way to speed up.”
Roach didn’t answer. Instead, his mech did speed up, and because he’d left his transponder on, they all could hear the agonized screaming that accompanied the effort.
Jake turned back and continued leading Oneiri Team across the Barrens of Eresos. They bounded across ravines, leapt from hilltop to hilltop, and sprinted across brief stretches of flat terrain as fast as they could.
It didn’t seem to make a difference. The quads still gained steadily, and in the meantime, a sheer cliff rose up in front of Oneiri Team.
That thing must be two-hundred feet high.
“You all see that cliff? When we reach it, I want you to jump as high as you can—find a handhold somehow. Use your launch thrusters, if you need to. I can guarantee you that those quads can’t climb as well as we can. It’s the same principle as hiding from a bear in a tree.”
He’d tried to sound confident, but the fact was that they were still in uncharted territory when it came to exploring the MIMAS mechs’ capabilities. Yes, they knew what the designers claimed they could do, but there’d already been significant deviations between those claims and reality.
Jake had sent an evac request to Bronson well before they’d entered the Barrens. No shuttles had yet been built large enough to accommodate the mechs, and so escaping a planet quickly involved using the mechs’ rockets to achieve low orbit, to land on a waiting warship.
Unfortunately, the maneuver required considerable precision, and Bronson wasn’t even in position yet. Once he arrived, Oneiri Team would have to execute the launch on the run from the quads.
Speaking of the Quatro…
When he glanced back, he saw that they were hot on Oneiri Team’s heels, a mere fifty meters away.
Good God. Their speed was unbelievable. Jake turned to run backwards for a while, risking losing his footing on the treacherous terrain. He flashed back to training on Valhalla, when Roach had frequently demanded they run backwards
Now I know why.
Jake loosed rockets at the quads in front. Great explosions blossomed on the dry terrain, and the quads did make the effort to evade them, which bought Oneiri a few seconds. But no more than that.
He continued to fire rockets at whichever Quatro was in the lead. Once his payload was spent, he said, “Steam, use your remaining rockets to do what I just did, and Arkanian, you do the same after Steam is finished. We need more time.”
One by one, Oneiri Team turned to run backward while firing on the chasing quads, allowing the MIMAS mechs to inch closer to the cliff that was their goal.
But their rockets ran out with the cliff still a considerable distance away. And the front quad had almost reached the rear MIMAS.
Jake stopped running. “Keep going!” he barked at the othe
rs.
That was all he had time to say. The quad was upon him, and Jake charged straight into it, both bayonets extended.
The alien knocked him backward with a shocking abruptness. One instant he was grappling with the quad; the next he lay flat on his back, pinned by the thing, who looked like it was about to savage him.
A blur of dark-gray and orange streaked toward the alien. It was Ash, using her launch thrusters to tackle the Quatro.
It worked. The quad rolled sideways, scrabbling for purchase on the sunbaked clay. Ash found her footing faster then the alien, arresting her momentum and dashing back toward Jake, extending her hand toward him.
He took it, and she flipped him to his feet. Together, they chased after the rest of Oneiri Team.
“Surely now we’re even,” Ash said.
“Not quite,” Jake said.
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. I owe you, now.”
Chapter 30
Jump
The cliff loomed before them, with the Quatro practically nipping at their heels.
Within the dream, the sky yawned open, revealing a widening scarlet chasm. The ground appeared to steam, and periodically the world flashed blood-red.
The mech dream was doing everything it could to make sure Jake knew exactly how much danger he was in.
He didn’t really need the reminder. The power of the quad he’d taken on had astounded him, and he was still reeling from getting slammed into the ground. Med-diagnostics flashed in the upper left of his HUD, informing him that he needed the attention of iatric nanobots as soon as possible, to repair some internal bleeding. It was odd to have to be told by the interface that he was hurt, while he felt every injury to the mech itself as though it were his own.
I wonder if iatric nanobots will be enough to return Chief Roach to health.
He’d snuck a glance at Roach’s vitals, just as he was sure the rest of Oneiri had. If he was being honest, it seemed amazing that Roach still lived to operate the mech, let alone remain conscious. The chief wouldn’t have been able to move at all if it wasn’t for the MIMAS carrying him, even if it did run in a bizarre, stuttering fashion.
At last, they drew close enough to the cliff.
“Jump!” Jake yelled, and the others needed no further prompting.
As one, Oneiri Team leapt, their powerful legs carrying them dozens of meters into the air.
Jake slammed into the cliff face, and his implant simulated the air getting knocked out of his lungs, while he viewed the rock in front of him through a haze of maroon.
He scrabbled against the cliff side for a handhold, and when he couldn’t find one, he drove his metal fingers into the rock, creating one.
Meanwhile, a piercing keen cut through the pain, and he realized this was an additional effort by the dream to convey the danger, as well as the damage that had already been done to his machine.
Well, that’s new. At least the implant was coordinating with his subconscious to keep things fresh inside the dream.
He took a moment to glance around at his team, making sure everyone had managed to latch onto the cliff.
Ash had landed just above him, and now she dangled from one hand while scrabbling against the rock to find lodging for the other. Sure hope she doesn’t fall. If she did, she’d come down right on top of him.
Marco was below him and to his left, and just beyond Marco, Beth clung to the rock.
Jake looked to his right. There’s Richaud. And Henrietta. For an instant, he wondered where Tommy was, then he remembered with a pang that he was dead.
Where’s Chief Roach?
He looked down. Roach had managed to make the jump, and he’d found purchase on the cliff face, too. But he’d landed far below the rest of Oneiri Team—only around half as high.
The Quatro had also leapt, and while most of them had failed to cling to the rock, two of them remained on it—both of them on narrow ledges not far below Roach.
One of them was attempting to claw its way up the rock, long, wicked claws taking shape as they were needed. The quad drove those newly formed claws into the cliff, pulled itself up, then did the same with its other front paw, using its back paws to stabilize itself.
It would soon reach Roach.
Captain Bob Bronson appeared beside Jake on the cliff, seeming to stand on nothing.
“Price. Thought I’d drop by to let you know my destroyer’s in position. Feel free to launch whenever you, uh…whenever you find a good surface to launch from.”
“Thanks, Captain,” Jake said.
The quad reached Roach, then, surging upward to swipe at him with a giant paw. It succeeded in knocking Roach’s mech from the cliff, and the chief tumbled toward the ground below.
Jake released his grip on the rock, pushing himself off slightly to the left as he plummeted.
A counter appeared along the top-center of his vision, calculating his acceleration due to Eresos’ gravity.
He ignored it, focusing instead on Roach’s MIMAS. The mech quickly grew larger in the visual feed from Jake’s left foot, which he was patching through to his HUD.
Jake reached Gabe just before the quads on the ground did. He seized the commander of Oneiri Team, wrapping both arms tightly around Roach’s mech, and he engaged his rockets.
The two of them launched toward the sky together, while below, the quads came together where Roach had lain.
Chapter 31
This Thing Is Moving
Despite Ellis’s continued jokes, Peter could tell that both he and Noah were on edge since their strange discovery on the last comet they’d worked on.
Even the jokes themselves were getting more strident and less funny. They were just Ellis’s way of coping, Peter had come to realize, and so he tried to tolerate them as best he could, despite how annoying he found them.
But neither the fresh memory of the robot that had crawled from the ice nor Ellis’s jokes could account for a fraction of the stress Peter experienced every second of every day.
Even when he managed to sleep, his dreams were dark, fevered things. The reason was that adenosarcoma had finally begun to win the fight it had waged with his daughter for years.
Peter’s business was booming. With the war on Eresos, and the trouble on Alex, there was a backlog of people who suddenly wanted nothing more than to live on a comet, millions of miles away from the inner system. Peter had recently leased a fourth comet hopper, and all four were fully operational, meaning he developed four comets at a time, with all of the materials he needed to do so—another luxury he’d rarely enjoyed before the boon brought by the discovery of the mech he’d sold to Darkstream.
A booming business meant having enough to cover the exorbitant costs involved with getting Sue Anne the advanced medical procedures she needed, this far out in the Belt. He’d even sprung for an experimental treatment, fresh from the cutting edge of medical science. Sue Anne hadn’t been a good candidate for the treatment, given her deteriorated health, and to convince the researchers to accept her into their program, Peter had had to grease their palms considerably—to the tune of quadruple the cost of what more traditional treatments cost him.
Despite everything he’d done, the specialists he’d paid to come out to the Belt to personally oversee Sue Anne’s care now told him she had mere weeks to live, if that.
Upon learning the news, his wife had begged Peter to come home. “You have to be at your daughter’s side…” Brianne hadn’t quite been able to bring herself to say the words “when she dies.”
“Sue Anne needs you,” she said instead.
But Peter had refused. There was no chance he was coming back. Not yet, at any rate. If Sue Anne died, she would die with him in the harness, working as hard as he could to save her.
That way, his conscience would never be able to tell him that he hadn’t done absolutely everything he could to save his daughter’s life.
Something will change. The doctors will come up with something. They have to.<
br />
He didn’t truly believe that, but it was what he told himself at night, to snatch what little sleep he was able to.
Now, he stood in the Whale’s bridge, watching on the small viewscreen as they approached the next comet slated for development.
Ellis joined him, and they both watched as the comet grew larger on the screen.
“What do you reckon they’ll end up building here, boss?” Ellis asked. “Maybe a shopping mall, this time? A theme park, perhaps?”
That did make Peter smile. It would be a long time before the Steele System’s economy was developed enough to support a shopping mall anywhere, let alone in the Belt.
“If you don’t get suited up soon, you’d better hope they build an unemployment line there, Ellis.”
Ellis stared at him, blinking. “Was that…was that a joke, boss?”
“Yes, Ellis. It was a joke.”
“Ah. It was funny! Sorry. Not used to hearing those from you.”
Peter felt his smile tighten up, and he said nothing else.
They donned their pressure suits, and this time, Peter did ask Ellis to triple-check his, while he performed the same service for his employee.
“Safety first, eh, boss?”
“That’s right.”
By now, he and his two employees had figured out their routine, as well as their division of labor. Without having to say anything, Peter and Ellis scouted a suitable spot to start drilling, deployed the hose, and extended the radar from the side of the Whale.
As for Noah, he remained inside and forgot to turn on the water harvester until Peter reminded him, which reliably delayed everything, every single time.
Peter really should have terminated Noah a while ago, but he didn’t have the heart. The man had children of his own, back on Eresos, and Peter knew he sent most of his paychecks back to their village’s council, so that they could bolster security.
Personally, if Peter had been in Noah’s situation, he would have been working like a dog. Hell, he basically was in Noah’s situation, and that was exactly what he was doing. But he supposed not everyone had the get-up-and-go that others did.
Dynamo (Mech Wars Book 2) Page 9