Across the shuttle bay, four marines surrounded the alien mech, which wasn’t unusual—Bronson had ordered a rotating guard of four soldiers shortly after the mech had been brought aboard, though Jake wasn’t sure what good they would do if the thing activated and started to attack.
That posed the biggest danger in all of this: whether the alien mech would accept him inside it, or whether it would kill him. It was a risk he had to take, however. The thing clearly had the ability to operate in space, and if it was anything like the smaller robots that had almost succeeded in dismantling the destroyer, it could do so for long periods. If those robots hadn’t had that ability, they would never have attempted to make the journey to the inner system, to Eresos, which Bronson had told him they had.
Unclipping a flashbang from his belt, Jake hurled it across the shuttle bay in a broad arc.
His aim was good. The flashbang landed between the two marines closest to him, who seemed roughly as oblivious as those he’d encountered in the corridors.
One of them glanced down at it—just before it went off, sending both marines reeling, hands clamped to their ears, eyes squeezed shut.
The pair of marines on the far side of the alien mech rushed around it, but Jake was already sprinting across the shuttle bay for a better shot. He dispatched one of them with an electric bullet to the neck, and the next with one to the cheek.
Whoops. He hadn’t meant to hit anyone in the face, and he hoped it wouldn’t result in too much scarring.
“Thank Bronson for that one, not me,” Jake said as he stepped over the marine’s writhing body in order to get to the alien mech. He said it more for himself than for the marine, he knew. He was still trying to convince himself that he was doing the right thing.
After the flurry of action his rush from the weapons locker to the shuttle bay had required, it felt odd to stand there and stare up at the mech’s alien face. The thing would still be disabled from the EMP he’d hit it with outside the destroyer, and this part of Jake’s plan involved effecting some hasty repairs. He’d been taught to perform mech repairs during training on Valhalla, before ever deploying to Eresos, but he hadn’t been trained to do them under the time constraints he now faced.
Plus, I learned to repair a MIMAS mech, not an alien one.
“Stop right there!” a stern voice barked.
Jake whirled around, raising his pistol to point toward the hatch. There, he saw the woman who’d yelled at him. She stood at the head of a squad of marines, all with guns trained on Jake.
He cursed under his breath. So I get no time to do repairs, then.
To confront so many soldiers at this range, his pistol was useless. He dropped it to the deck, grasping his SL-17 where it was slung by his right side.
With his left hand, he grabbed one of the jerking marines by the back of his jumpsuit, taking care not to come in contact with the man’s skin to avoid getting shocked. Jake pulled the solider up until the assault rifle’s muzzle met the back of his head.
“Shoot and you end this man’s life,” Jake yelled, his voice wavering a little. He hadn’t expected it to come to this—he didn’t see himself as the sort of person who did this. “All I’m trying to do is leave without hurting anyone. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Hub is under attack. That’s where my family lives. Bronson’s already informed me he has no intention of going there to help, so I’m taking matters into my own hands. I hope any of you would do the same.”
The woman opened her mouth as if to answer, but no words came out.
Jake glanced at the alien construct. “Are you going to let me inside, mech?” It felt completely absurd to address the thing, especially since he knew it was still disabled, but what else was there? Attempting to repair the mech would be impossible while clutching his hostage, with ten marines pointing weapons at him.
Incredibly, the mech opened—from the front, which Jake hadn’t seen before. A hatch fell forward to clang to the floor, forming a convenient ramp for Jake to ascend.
Clearly, the mech had taken it upon itself to repair the damage from the EMP, which should not have been possible.
Obviously it is possible, though. So…it’s just been sitting here all this time, fully functional? Waiting for…what? Me?
That sent shivers up Jake’s spine, but he had no choice except to take advantage of the mech’s unexpected functionality. He ascended the ramp backward, dragging the marine up with him. Jake’s eyes never left the marines near the shuttle bay’s hatch.
Once he was seated inside the alien mech, he jettisoned the marine, and the man crashed to the floor, still shaking from the electric bullet lodged in his neck. Jake immediately popped a fast-acting, REM sleep-inducing sedative into his mouth.
The mech sealed up instantly, the ramp snapping up to become one with the rest.
Jake entered the mech dream, and as he looked out on the shuttle bay with the mech’s eyes, a terrible anxiety took root deep inside him.
Doing his best to ignore it, he strode toward the airlock, willing his hands to become ultra-thin wedges. He drove those into the crack between the doors and wrenched them open enough to grip them with fingers that reformed in an instant.
He closed the inner door behind him and then pulled open the outer one. That done, he blasted out of the airlock and into the void.
Chapter 15
Sabotage
It was Lisa’s shift to monitor the pilot and make sure he wasn’t doing anything to sabotage their mission.
They no longer kept a weapon trained directly at his head—that seemed like overdoing it, at this point. The man seemed compliant enough.
That said, he remained a Darkstream employee, and Lisa still wondered how much of a loyalist he was. Would his affection for his employer lead him to put himself in danger for the company? Or was that above his pay grade?
Best not to take any chances.
Lisa’s hand did not stray very far from the pistol holstered near her hip. She’d adjusted it for easy access, even as she reclined in the copilot’s seat, which rarely got used outside of training. The shuttle’s AI was typically copilot enough.
The pilot had devoted most of the cockpit’s screens to views of the terrain below, and Lisa found it hard not to get distracted by the landscape as it gradually transformed, from rolling forests filled with leafless trees to a craggy, uneven desert region.
Recently, she’d read on the system net that Darkstream was planning to start switching all their vehicles to an interface similar to the one Oneiri Team used to control their mechs. All new vehicles would be built with it from the get-go, and existing ones would be retrofitted.
According to the post she’d read, the company seemed pretty adamant that within two years, every employee that drove or piloted a Darkstream vehicle would feel like they were that vehicle, be it a beetle, speeder, shuttle, warship, or mech. As with the mechs, they felt it would increase immersion while granting pilots a proper respect for their mechanical charges.
Lisa wasn’t sure how she felt about it. Her training with Tessa had left her with serious misgivings about the actual utility of lucid, and the idea of turning warfare into one big dream didn’t sit all that well with her.
Real people died in war, and real lives were ruined. That cost was steep enough, but to inflict it while you were actually asleep…
Doesn’t seem great.
Andy, on the other hand, would probably love it. Anything that gave him greater control of his beetle, or whatever else he ended up driving—Lisa felt sure that would be all fine by him.
Something on one of the viewscreens caught her eye. “Hold up,” she barked, and the pilot stiffened. “What is that? Zoom in on that region, there.” Lisa pointed at one of the screens, and the pilot winced when her finger touched the display.
“If you could refrain from actually touching the monitors—”
“Shut up and zoom in!”
This time, he listened. And when the view magnified, Lisa beheld what a
ppeared to be a parade of Gatherers. There were more than she’d ever seen in one place.
“That has to be a sign of someone living nearby,” she muttered. Hopefully, it’s the new Quatro friends we hope to make. “Take us down. But before you do,” Lisa said, raising her voice, and holding her index finger an inch from the pilot’s face, “check the region thoroughly for Amblers. You’ll be coming with us as we search this area, so if you try to send us into danger, you’ll be there too, to endure it with us.”
“I understand,” the pilot said, his voice flat.
“Good.”
Chapter 16
Blaring Prophecy
The alien mech dream was not like the one he’d used to interface with his MIMAS.
Inside this one, everything had a stark, dire quality to it. Sounds were crisper—or at least, they’d been back in the shuttle bay, before he’d entered the soundless void of space—and sights were more vivid, but not in a way that was beautiful or calming. Instead, it was as though he viewed the universe through a filter that accentuated the essential tension that underlaid everything. Wasn’t every last particle just a blaring prophecy of the death that awaited every living thing? Someday, everyone he’d ever known or loved would cease to be, their carbon dispersing into the void, conserved in a sense but not in a sense that meant anything.
Why didn’t I ever think about that, before? Why wasn’t it foremost in my mind, every second of every single day?
It felt incredibly irresponsible that he hadn’t constantly dwelled on it, now. Maybe, if he had, his family wouldn’t be in the danger they were currently in.
It’s possible they’re already dead. Have you considered that?
Of course he’d considered it. But he didn’t dare think about it.
Other than the fact that it was all he could think about.
Something collided with his face—the mech’s face—clinging to the metal skin, rending it with tiny claws. Within seconds, scraps of Jake’s face floated through the void, streaming behind him, and that caused him alarm. He aimed his jets forward, to arrest his momentum, to try and reclaim the pieces of his face.
Oh. Probably he should deal with the little creature trying to penetrate the mech and access his flesh-and-blood body, as well.
He reached up and plucked it off, which cleared his vision sensors. The moment he did, he recalled that he could probably patch through the feed from anywhere in his body, just as he had in his MIMAS.
He held his attacker in front of his face, studying it. It was a robot identical to those that had attacked the Javelin and then headed for Eresos, and it writhed in his grasp, trying to free itself.
It wouldn’t have stood much chance of doing that even if Jake had still been piloting his MIMAS, but in the alien mech’s grip, its probability of escape was exactly zero.
He’d used his MIMAS to tear one of the robots in two, but now he simply clenched his fist, and the robot fragmented.
We should call them Ravagers. It suits their behavioral patterns.
“Wait,” Jake muttered. “We?”
His thoughts had already seemed detached, from both reality and from himself, but he’d chalked that up to the fundamental strangeness of this new mech dream.
Now, he began to wonder whether those thoughts had a source outside himself. Either that, or I’m going crazy.
That thought had been his. He felt pretty sure of it.
Pretty sure.
“Ravager is a good name, though.” He thrust backward gently, and as he did, the shreds of his face reunited with his body, to become part of his shoulders and neck.
Another Ravager crashed into Jake’s back, sending him forward.
Acting solely on instinct, Jake inverted, so that his feet pointed in the opposite direction, along with his face. His arms and legs and torso all switched around so that he about-faced without actually turning.
That done, he plucked the Ravager from his new chest and crushed it.
That’s two, now.
Far behind him—ahead of him, now, rather—something gleamed dully in the dim sunlight that reached this far into the outer system.
Is that another—?
A third Ravager charged into him from his right, making him jolt to the left, and a fourth and fifth collided with his lower back, while a sixth landed on his head.
His four new visitors started to tear at the surface of his mech right away. Three more impacts followed, jerking the alien mech this way and that in the inertia-less void. Then five more impacts, all in quick succession.
I need to act.
And he did act, tearing the Ravagers from his body as fast he could manage it, all while the remaining creatures burrowed deeper, inching closer to the cocoon where Jake’s unconscious form was nestled.
More of them arrived, hitting him with various degrees of force. One connected with such speed that it sent Jake hurtling backward, end over end, and though there was no gravity the sight of the system’s ecliptic plane spinning so frenetically made him feel nauseated, even inside the dream.
This mech dream had new ways of communicating negative emotions—of maintaining his immersion in the battle and of communicating the danger he was in. The temperature seemed to skyrocket, and he felt like he was cooking. A minor note began to play: an eerie, one-note ballad performed by a violin in need of tuning. The volume ratcheted up quickly.
His fear and rage reached a crescendo, and his fight-or-flight instinct took over.
Until he did it, he hadn’t known what he was about to do:
Jake exploded.
Jagged spires erupted all over his metal skin; one for each Ravager.
Most of the smaller robots ruptured, sending dozens of fragments sailing through the void in dozens of directions, but a few of them stayed intact enough to remain impaled on the tips of the spires.
The spires slowly retracted into him, although Jake wasn’t sure he’d willed them to. He wasn’t sure he’d willed them to emerge in the first place.
Could it have been my subconscious?
He didn’t know. At any rate, no more Ravagers attacked. Either that had been the last of them, or the feat he’d just performed had convinced them to retreat.
Trying to still his racing heart, and to lower the furnace the dream had continued to simulate, Jake continued his voyage through the Belt, toward Hub.
He was attacked again by Ravagers less than ten minutes later. They quickly covered him, making alarming progress in their efforts to infiltrate the mech and rip Jake from it bodily.
At first, he couldn’t replicate the trick with the spires. But when his aggravation peaked, it happened once more, destroying his enemies in one fell swoop.
Ten minutes later, they attacked again.
Bronson had said that clouds of the robots had set a course for Eresos, but here more were, out in the Belt. With that in mind, as well as the attack on Hub, Jake realized that something fundamental had changed. Not just for the Belt, but for the entire Steele System.
It wasn’t safe here, anymore. And based on Bronson’s actions, the only military in the system was no longer devoted to the safety of the population.
If it had ever been.
Chapter 17
Avalanche
Lisa wiped a bead of sweat from her brow as she pulled herself up yet another sharp rise.
Navigating is brutal, here.
A few meters to her left, Rug easily stepped onto the rise, pulling herself up with her front paws. The rise was even steeper where she climbed it.
Helps to be a giant alien, I guess.
Fan, the Quatro acting as their guide on the journey to find the distant drifts, had said those drifts were “across the Barrens.” That had made Lisa expect a dramatic change in scenery—from desert to jungle, maybe, or lush wetlands.
But they’d flown a long way in the shuttles, and so far the terrain seemed basically indistinguishable from the Barrens. It was just as dry, just as uneven, and just as treacherous.
Andy probably would have made fun of her for not knowing much about Eresos’ geography and what to expect from it. But these lands reminded her of Alex’s landscape, and as they followed the Gatherers through them, she wished for a beetle.
The only reason she didn’t order a return to the shuttles was the fact that the Gatherers were clearly heading somewhere with purpose. And if they could make it wherever they were going, then so could whoever lived there, and so could the soldiers of Lisa’s militia.
“Careful, Vickers,” she called ahead. “Take that corner carefully.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Rodney Vickers was on point, and currently he was about to enter a ravine with steep, dusty-brown walls.
He crept forward, rocket launcher at the ready, and quickly scrambled back, falling on his backside as heavy machine gun fire tore up the ground where he’d been standing. The shoulder-fired rocket launcher fell to the ground with a wince-inducing crack.
“It’s an Ambler, ma’am, headed toward us!”
Lisa cursed. “Everyone, full retreat, now! Double-time!”
Exchanging glances with Tessa, she could tell the other woman grasped the situation just as well as she did, which wasn’t a surprise.
They’d just finished crossing a craggy, open expanse, which had been treacherous to traverse but which offered inconsistent cover.
There was no way they could take out the Ambler, not without losing most of the militia. She’d only heard reports of two ever being taken down in the history of Eresos—one by three full platoons of Darkstream soldiers, and another by Quatro, which had resulted in dozens of them dead.
There was a good chance that, if they tried to take one on here, they could all die.
That meant…
“We need to stay and hold it off if we can,” Lisa said. “Try to give the others time to cross that open terrain.” Just before the expanse, there’d been another ravine, narrower than the one ahead, which the Ambler would not be able to chase them through.
Meltdown (Mech Wars Book 3) Page 6