But traveling back to it is another matter altogether.
It had taken them ten minutes to cross the open region, while taking their time, and it would take at least five to do so again at a run—providing no one suffered any injuries.
“We have other problems,” Tessa said, pointing.
Lisa followed the gesture to a cliff face on her left—which their shuttle pilot was in the process of scaling.
“Incredible,” she muttered, then turned back to Tessa, eyebrows raised. “You got that?”
“I can shoot him down.” Tessa hefted her assault rifle. “Making the shot from here will be easy.”
“Tessa, will you cut it out?” Ever since Rug had learned about her past, Tessa’s unflinching bravery had turned into a recklessness that had Lisa constantly on edge. “There’s no way we’d get him across that terrain with a bullet wound. We sort of need him.”
The white-haired woman scowled, lowering her SL-17. Then she raised it again and shot the cliff just above the pilot, raining dirt and rock fragments down on his head. “Any higher and I’ll shoot you off that rock!” she yelled.
“You’ll never do it!” the Darkstream pilot shouted back. “You need me!” He kept climbing.
“Damn it,” Tessa spat, tossing her gun onto the ground.
“You need to climb up after him,” Lisa said, her words clipped.
For several long seconds, the older woman held her gaze, her face hard. Finally, she muttered, “Yes, ma’am,” and jogged stiffly toward the cliff.
Most of the militia had followed Lisa’s order to fall back across the open terrain, but Rug remained, as well as Rodney Vickers.
The Quatro stepped forward. “I will help you protect the others, Lisa Sato.”
Nodding, Lisa said, “Thank you, Rug.” Her gaze drifted up to the alien’s shoulders, where her energy weapons were still mounted.
“Can you use those things in this heat?” she asked. The Quatro lacked hands, but their brains were laced with superconducting fullerenes, allowing them to manipulate metals. Their power weakened dramatically as the temperature rose, however.
“I have turned down the pressure required to depress the trigger to the minimum setting possible,” Rug said. “I do not know for certain, as I’ve never attempted to operate them in this level of heat. But I will try.”
“Okay.” If Rug could make the weapon work, it could actually make a difference in holding off the Ambler. It would be the first time she knew of that energy guns had ever been used on one.
“It’s coming!” Vickers said.
Lisa looked. The Ambler was indeed stalking into view, swiveling, no doubt seeking its prey.
“Get back down to the lower level!” she yelled, scrambling back over the rise she’d recently climbed. The others followed. Rug had to crouch quite low to the ground to avoid exposing any part of her to the Ambler’s weapons.
Lisa could hear it as the giant mech strode toward them, sending a tremor through the ground with every step.
“Give me that,” Lisa said, nodding at the militia’s only rocket launcher, which Vickers had insisted on carrying from the shuttles.
The man frowned. “But…”
“Give it to me, Vickers. Now!”
Reluctantly, he handed it over, and Lisa gave him her SL-17. That done, she inspected the rocket launcher and saw that it seemed intact, even after Vickers had dropped it in his panic to escape the Ambler.
“Okay,” she said. “Here’s the plan. Rug, you pop up and distract the Ambler with your energy gun. Fire, duck, change your location, and repeat. Vickers, you fire on it if Rug is taking too much heat, and switch up your location, too.”
“What will you do?” Vickers said.
“The Ambler’s sticking close to the cliff on our left, and the way that cliff tapers outward at the top looks pretty unstable. I’m going to see if I can dislodge anything with a rocket, send it down on the Ambler’s head. Got it?”
“Got it!” Vickers said.
“I understand,” Rug said.
“Then go. Both of you!”
They spread out, firing on the Ambler from spots far enough away that Lisa wouldn’t get hit by errant shots from the mech.
Looks like Rug’s gun is working after all. Thank God.
But she couldn’t execute her part of the plan just yet.
She opened a two-way channel between her and Tessa. “Tessa, report!”
“He made it up the cliff, but I caught up to him. It’s pretty flat up here, so if you can make it back to the shuttles, you should be able to land one here to pick us up.”
A wave of relief washed over Lisa. “Excellent. How far away from the cliff are you?”
“He made it twenty meters before I caught up to him.”
“Drag him farther away from it, if you can. Sato out.”
She waited for Rug to unleash her next energy barrage, and when she did, Lisa popped up over the rise and scanned the cliff above the Ambler.
As she’d hoped, the energy weapon was doing some damage to the great war machine. It recoiled a little with each shot, and much of its front was singed from the hits it had already taken.
It staggered backward as Rug hit it again—right underneath a boulder that loomed overhead.
Lisa lined up the launcher and took her shot, aiming for the cliff just under the boulder and praying for it to collapse.
It did. The large rock tumbled down, connecting with the Ambler’s giant dome of a head and sending it stumbling into the open.
That was good, but the Ambler was far from finished, and now it had moved away from the cliff. As promising as Rug’s success with the energy weapon was, Lisa knew it couldn’t neutralize the enemy robot by itself.
“Rug, we need to drive it back to the cliff!”
“I am trying,” the Quatro shouted. “However, whenever I fire on it, the return fire forces me to stop. I need a bigger window.”
Racking her brain for a solution, Lisa glanced at Vickers. Then she shoved the launcher at him.
He accepted it, eyes gleaming. The assault rifle clattered to the hard ground, and Lisa picked it up.
“I’m going out there,” she said. “To distract it, and to take some pressure off Rug. She’ll use the opening to force the Ambler back against the cliff, and when she does, I need you to make it collapse on top of it. Think you can do that?”
“I was born to do that,” Vickers said, sounding breathless.
“Good.” She raised her voice. “Rug, you’re about to get your window!”
Lisa moved.
The Ambler seemed to notice her the moment she appeared above the rise, and it swiveled to turn autocannons on her.
Sprinting as hard as she could, Lisa felt shrapnel biting into her ankles as the enemy tore up the ground directly behind her.
I need to keep moving. If she didn’t, the Ambler would have the opportunity to cook her with its lasers. If it doesn’t decide to simply rip me apart with its autocannons.
“Rug!” she yelled, and it was all she had the breath for.
At last, the energy weapon started firing, and the Ambler was not in position to return fire. Instead, it sent random shots zipping through the air over Lisa’s head, and she fell into a prone position, scrambling to turn herself around and fire on the mech.
Her SL-17 probably didn’t contribute much, but the energy weapon was doing enough work for the both of them. The Ambler fell back, still trying to reorient itself to fire back at its tormentors.
Then, Vickers’ rocket hit, and it did exactly what Lisa had hoped. The top of the cliff gave way, sending a cascade of dirt and boulders crashing down onto the Ambler.
A particularly large boulder connected with its head, denting it and causing the massive machine to collapse. The avalanche soon blocked it from view.
“This is the best chance we’ll get!” Lisa screamed over the tumult. “Move, you two. Move!”
They turned to flee over the uneven terrain as fast as t
hey could. Behind them, Lisa was sure she heard the pile of rocks shifting as the Ambler struggled to regain its feet.
Chapter 18
The Glades
He really needs to slow down. This is getting ridiculous.
In the thirty minutes Roach had given her to gather Oneiri Team, Ash had tried to get some additional Darkstream forces together for the mission to the Glades.
She’d failed, though, and it wouldn’t have mattered either way. The moment the five remaining MIMAS mechs of Oneiri Team gathered together outside the city gates, Chief Roach took off without another word, pounding across the grassy plains—far too fast for any ground unit that wasn’t a mech to keep up.
He’d barely altered his pace at all since then, and at some point Ash realized that he meant to reach the Glades today, and probably to engage the Quatro if he could find them before nightfall.
It took everything Ash had to keep up with Roach as they pounded through dense woods, dodging around massive trees, leaping over jagged stumps.
Even though it was the MIMAS that actually endured the strain of running this fast for this long, the mech dream translated the exertion into a visceral experience, so that it felt like she was the one whose endurance was being taxed.
It amounted to the same thing. With every mile, it became harder and harder to continue the breakneck pace, and it took just as much will for her to continue running as it would have if she’d been running in her own body.
In the meantime, her implant helpfully informed her that she hadn’t eaten since the modest breakfast she’d had early that morning.
Now, dusk lengthened shadows across Eresos’ surface, and her body needed nourishment. She’d be fine without it, but if Roach had been looking out for the wellbeing of his team he would have ordered a stop.
“What’s wrong with him?” Beth subvocalized over a two-way with Ash, and she could hear the tension in Paste’s voice—from the simulated exertion, no doubt, but probably also from the anxiety that stemmed from not knowing what Roach was planning. Ash certainly felt that, herself.
“I don’t know,” she rasped back. “He’s not the same as he was.”
“Think it’s something to do with that thing he lives inside, now?”
Ash considered that for a moment. “Not sure. He seemed to change even before that. When he came back half-dead from chasing that quad…his behavior worried me back then. Now, though…I don’t know. He’s different, for sure, no matter what’s causing it.”
“He needs to get his shit together. We’re counting on him. Everyone is.”
“I’m not sure he cares. About anything, other than killing Quatro.”
“Well, we have that in common.”
Ahead, the woods began to thin—a telltale sign of an upcoming glade, for which this region had taken its name. Not all the glades had villages, but this one did, according to Ash’s HUD.
Indeed, she soon spotted the first structure. And then the next.
Something struck her as odd, and at first, she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Then, she had it:
There aren’t any lights on. It’s getting too late to get around unassisted. And not everyone would be inside. Not on a night like this.
Of course, a bulletin about Quatro in the area would have gone out to every village, and maybe this one had blacked out intentionally, to avoid attracting attention.
That makes sense. Still, an eerie feeling dogged her as they began to pass the first houses.
She used her S-level security clearance to access Darkstream’s database of implants and v-lenses. The company made and sold the devices everyone used to access the system net, and they took the liberty of tracking each one’s location, which was a fact known only to certain operatives.
If you had the knowhow, you could disable that ‘feature,’ but most people didn’t even know it existed in the first place, even though the fact of it was buried somewhere inside the End User License Agreement. The clause had even been published on the system net, but not many people spent their time on the system net reading articles about privacy and security issues.
When Ash consulted the database, she could find no indication that any v-lens or implant was active inside the entire village.
“It’s deserted,” Ash said.
Marco nodded in confirmation. Knowing him, he’d probably done the same thing she had.
Roach had stopped in the center of the village green, and now he revolved slowly, taking in the structures surrounding them.
From the way the other MIMAS mechs twitched, Ash could tell that they found Roach’s behavior just as creepy as she did.
A cracking came from Ash’s right, and she whirled just in time to see the quad that was crashing out of the building two meters away from her, eyes glowing bright red in the dark.
It charged, knocking her backward onto the ground while it sank lengthening claws into her mech’s shoulder.
The night sky flashed scarlet.
Chapter 19
Comet Four
Using the alien mech’s thrusters, Jake was capable of rapid acceleration—much faster than the comet hoppers—and in the void of space, there was nothing to impede that acceleration, other than the comets of the Belt. As long as he succeeded in avoiding those, he could pile speed on top of incredible speed.
Jake might have accelerated indefinitely, reaching Hub in astonishing time—if he’d had unlimited fuel. The alien mech was a technological wonder, and the dream had already highlighted comets as an excellent source of hydrogen fuel.
He availed of that, of course, but it did entail stopping, and after each refueling he needed to begin his acceleration all over again.
The Ravager attacks did not help matters, though they grew less frequent as he neared Hub.
That worried him, since it probably meant that any Ravagers in the neighborhood had been diverted to the effort to take out the only major settlement the Belt had.
Someone’s intent on scrubbing humanity from this system quickly.
But who? And why wasn’t Bronson more concerned? If he’d been Bronson, he would have prioritized the defense of Hub.
Losing it would represent a huge blow, strategically, since this was the system’s only presence out here. On the other hand, repelling the attackers would send a message that humanity was not to be trifled with.
Bronson has to listen to the board, I guess. But that didn’t mean Jake forgave the man for abandoning the people of Hub, and for ordering Jake to do the same.
At last, Hub came into view: seven large comets, all roughly the same size, and all connected to a central control center using super-strong nanotethers that were tens of thousands of kilometers long.
Hub’s design allowed for the addition of more comets without upsetting the structure’s rotation, and it allowed for their subtraction as well. In the event that something went catastrophically wrong with one comet, the other six would continue to spin, unaffected.
The comets averaged around a mile and a half in diameter. Residents used small craft to visit their neighbor comets, whether for business or pleasure. Each comet had a single landing bay, all of which faced inward—a testament to the fact that the inhabitants considered theirs to be a community cloistered from the rest of the universe.
And it pretty much is.
Except, now it was overrun by Ravagers—the peaceful paradise compromised, possibly ruined forever. Hub’s inhabitants had stopped posting updates of their plight shortly after the post Jake had read. He’d tried sending several messages, to his family, to old neighbors, to members of the Council, and to everyone else he could think of.
No one had responded.
Maybe I’m too late. Maybe everyone was already dead.
But he wasn’t prepared to entertain that thought. Not yet. Jake had designed his entire life around keeping his sister alive, and the idea that she might have been murdered by an alien robot instead of the carcinoma that they’d all been battling together for years�
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He tried contacting his mother once again, and even though he was within real-time communications range now, Brianne Price still didn’t answer.
So he headed for the second-largest of the seven comets that formed Hub. It was called Comet Four, and it was also where he’d grown up.
When he jetted to the outer airlock, which was big enough to admit the old combat shuttles Bronson and the other rogue UHF captains had brought with them when they first fled to the Steele System, he found the hatch smashed open.
The minor violin note returned, from when he’d fought the Ravagers en route to here. This time, that was the only way the mech dream chose to represent his distress.
As though he needed an external indicator of the potent mix of shock and fear that raged within him.
The emergency backup hatch failed to engage.
In the event of a breach, the landing bay was supposed to enter Lockdown Mode, to prevent the comet’s atmosphere from escaping into space.
But it hadn’t. Instead, it had been expelled from the comet where Jake’s family lived in a great rush.
No one could have survived that.
Not unless they’d had advance warning of the attack, of course. There were emergency shelters, installed for exactly such an eventuality, and if you made it to them in time, you could make it. They were kept oxygenated, pressurized, and well-stocked with food and supplies.
At least, they’re supposed to be.
If his home comet had not been the first one attacked, it was possible his family had had enough advance notice to make it to a shelter. Doing that with all of the equipment and medicine necessary to keep Sue Anne alive would have made that tedious, but it was possible.
A slim hope. But a hope nonetheless.
Jake jetted past the airlock and through the shuttle bay. The inner airlock was clogged up with everything from the comet that hadn’t been secured—a miscellany consisting of wooden boards, tools, speeders, and even the mangled corpses of livestock. The buildup didn’t create a perfect seal, though. Jake could see light shining through the barrier, meaning it wouldn’t have acted to preserve any of the comet’s oxygen.
Meltdown (Mech Wars Book 3) Page 7