Infliction (Mech Wars Book 4)

by Scott Bartlett

  “Thank you.” Lisa stepped forward, and Jake automatically swept her into an embrace, holding her tightly against him. Her face turned up toward his, and then her lips were pressing against his cheek. “Thank you,” she repeated, in a whisper that made Jake’s heart beat so hard that he wondered whether Lisa could feel its pulse.

  “Price.”

  The single syllable, spoken in that world-worn voice, turned Jake’s stomach to ice. He released Lisa, and he turned to behold his worst fear.

  It was Gabriel Roach. Both arms had taken the form of long-barreled cannons already crackling with energy.

  Jake was too far from his mech to react in time. If Roach wanted to kill him, his opportunity to do so had come.

  Chapter 36

  Deficient

  “Roach,” Jake said, refusing to let his fear show in his voice or on his face. “Do your worst to me. Just leave Lisa out of this.”

  “No,” Roach said, raising his weapons, and Jake’s throat clenched, as though squeezed by an invisible fist.

  “No, you don’t understand,” Roach went on, and gradually it dawned on Jake: Roach had raised his arms in a gesture meant to be placating. It just so happened that those arms had already taken the form of energy weapons primed to fire, which made the move a lot less comforting.

  “Why are you here, Roach?” Jake said.

  “I want to help you fight the enemy. The real enemy.”

  “Out of the question.”

  “Please,” Roach said, and the word sounded odd coming from him. Jake had never known his old commander to use many manners. “Let me finish. I’ve realized how misguided I’ve been. I fought the Quatro to get revenge for Jess, but the Quatro were never the real enemy. These shadows, who’ve sent their metal killers against us—that’s who we need to defeat.”

  “You almost killed Ash,” Jake said. “You ran her through, and it’s basically a miracle she survived. You did kill Richaud. There’s no way we can trust you, Roach. You spent that coin a long time ago.”

  Roach was becoming visibly more agitated, and his gun-arms twitched upward once more. Jake had to suppress a wince. “This thing made me do that,” Roach said. “Except, I’ve finally learned to control it. Didn’t Sweeney tell you? She set me free from Darkstream’s containment cell, and I was able to stop myself from killing her or her allies. I targeted Darkstream instead. Give me another chance, Price. I deserve it. I can be valuable to you.”

  Lie, Jake urged himself. You need to lie.

  He needed to tell Roach that they would welcome him back. He needed to maintain that fiction until he was back inside his own mech, and he could finish Roach off.

  But Jake had never had it in him to deal in falsehoods. Even if he could bring himself to try, he doubted the attempt would be very convincing.

  Out of nowhere, he remembered an ancient vid he’d come across once while skimming the system net, of a zoologist from Old Earth, studying silverback gorillas in the wild. One of the gorillas had charged at him unexpectedly, but the zoologist hadn’t flinched, and his total lack of fear had repelled the animal. Sheer instinct had gripped the gorilla, causing it to turn and scurry away. Because, to it, if the zoologist lacked fear there had to be a reason.

  Is Roach so unlike that gorilla? Jake had a good idea of how fragmented the man’s mind must be—if it was even correct to call him a man, anymore. The alien mech had the power to dismantle the user’s psyche, turning a rational human into something that closely resembled a wild animal, full of primal strength and rage.

  “The answer is no,” Jake said, his voice steady, commanding. His eyes were riveted to Roach’s face, or at least the closest thing he had to a face anymore.

  For a long time, Roach returned his gaze, perfectly still—other than his energy-cannon arms, which wavered up and down.

  “What about you?” Roach hissed at last. “What will become of you once your mech succeeds in taking apart your mind, and you start attacking your allies like I did?”

  “That won’t happen,” Jake said, his eyes riveted to Roach’s face.

  “Why wouldn’t it?”

  “Because I still have my humanity. You lost yours long before you ever stepped inside that mech.”

  The alien mech’s head jerked. “You…you’re saying I’m…deficient?”

  “You made yourself deficient. Now, go. Go and accept the fate you know that you deserve.”

  Roach raised his energy weapons till they were leveled at Jake, and for a long time they stood there, all three of them in fraught tableau.

  At last, Roach spun on his heels and charged back down the corridor, away from the landing bay and toward the Core.

  Chapter 37

  State of Play

  Commander Stephanie Yates, who was now captain of the McDougal, did not seem thrilled by Lisa’s and Rug’s presence inside the destroyer’s CIC.

  During the first seven hours of the journey, Lisa had done her best to remain unobtrusive, and to interfere with the ship’s operations as little as possible. Her companion did likewise, though of course that was Rug’s nature.

  As they neared the section of the Outer Ring where Rug said the Quatro ship was hidden, Lisa’s silence became less and less viable.

  “Captain, if you could have your sensor operator scan nearby planetesimals one more—”

  “I’ve had Jacobs tracking the trajectory of every comet in sight,” Yates snapped, “which is taking up significant computer resources, by the way. I’ve certainly had him continuously scanning for ships. There’s nothing here, Seaman Sato.”

  Lisa didn’t like Yates’s insistence on making frequent use of her rank, and she liked the woman’s tone less. But rebuking her would have signaled insecurity to the CIC crew, and ultimately she and Rug were at their mercy. Lisa needed to project strength and certainty.

  They’re at our mercy, too, she reminded herself. Neither Rug nor Lisa had left their mechs, and Rug alone wielded sufficient strength to render the destroyer inoperable—a fact of which Yates seemed bitterly aware. Every other UHF ship was in the same situation: each had over a hundred Quatro aboard, more than enough to keep the humans working for Darkstream in line.

  “It is almost as though the Meddlers are aware of my hidden ship’s existence,” Rug subvocalized over an encrypted two-way channel.

  “That’s not what I would have said their absence indicates,” Lisa said.

  “Consider that their numbers are sufficient to cover most of the Outer Ring. Why this gap in their containment? I sense a trap, with my ship used as bait.”

  “Are you suggesting we abandon the mission?” Lisa was pretty sure she knew the answer to that, but she had to ask.

  “No. I am sorry, Lisa Sato, but though our friendship grants me great trust for you, I cannot say the same for the rest of your species. It is important that the surviving Quatro in this system gain a ship that we control. It is much less than we arrived with, but we deserve at least this, especially considering our contributions so far.”

  Lisa nodded, drawing glances from the captain and her officers, who weren’t privy to their conversation. “I’m not disagreeing with that, Rug. I was only asking.” She cleared her throat. “What do you know about the capabilities of the ships Marco spotted out here?” Lisa took the opportunity to tell her implant to call up images of the Meddler ships, which Marco had sent to the resistance leaders, as well as to everyone in Oneiri. The ships were gray, oblong spheroids, unremarkable in almost every way other than their size—twice that of the Providence, which was one of the largest ships the UHF ever built.

  The quad’s eyes glowed brighter as Rug answered. “When they decimated the fleet we brought to this system, they used a mix of conventional weaponry and weapons well beyond my species’ capability to produce.”

  “What do the Quatro consider conventional weaponry?”

  “Kinetic weapons. Lasers. Guided missiles.”

  Lisa nodded, then gestured for Rug to continue, drawing more glan
ces from the CIC crew, whose eyes tracked the movements of the MIMAS’ fingers. “All right. What was new to you?”

  “The Ravagers themselves serve as the ammunition for one weapon we hadn’t encountered before. We believe that is part of why the Meddler vessels are so large—they must have immense manufactories aboard, where they mass produce the Ravagers from raw materials.”

  “So they…launch Ravagers at other ships?”

  “Yes. In extremely high numbers, and at extremely high velocities.”

  “Hmm.” She could see how that could be effective. “It only takes a few to get past point defense systems, I guess.”

  “Yes. Once Ravagers have breached a ship, panic spreads quickly among her crew. Battling them in the corridors is one thing. If the Ravagers breach the hull near critical systems…”

  “Right. What else do they have?”

  “Particle weapons.”

  That made Lisa swallow. Humanity’s own experiments with particle beams had ended in mostly disappointment, and some tragedy, too. Human engineers had never been able to prevent particle beams from becoming de-focused by ambient electric or magnetic fields—at least, they’d been able to do it over short distances, but not distances meaningful for space combat. They’d also had a lot of trouble making the weapons efficient enough, and the biggest prototype had exploded, destroying the ship it was on, after unexpectedly dumping all its waste heat into it .

  But if the Meddlers had made particle beams work, they would have a huge advantage. Particle weapons would be many times more devastating than the lasers wielded by Darkstream’s aged warships.

  Lisa had fallen silent for a while, and Rug said, “You are concerned by what I’ve told you.”

  “Yes.”

  “You should be.”

  “Well, we can’t let it intimidate us, can we? This is just the state of play, and we can only work with it.”

  “As you say, Lisa Sato.”

  Chapter 38

  Return to Habitat 2

  Habitat 2 had no automated defenses, though it did have a lot of heavily armed drug smugglers on its roof, and they all seemed to have itchy trigger fingers.

  One of them fired a rocket at Ash as she descended toward Alex. Screw this. She ordered her parachute to detach, relying on aerospike thrusters alone to carry her the rest of the way. She handily evaded the next rocket that came at her, and then she returned the love by retracting her mech’s fingers against its wrists and opening fire with both rotary autocannons.

  The rocket man went down, his pressure suit perforated in dozens of places, while Ash’s sky flashed a pleasurable rosy shade.

  Her first instinct had been to go for the heavy machine gun on her back, but Jake had ordered them to refrain from firing anything that might compromise the integrity of Habitat 2 and let all the atmosphere out.

  Ash felt up to that challenge. If she got the opportunity to bake some coked-out slaver with her flamethrower today, she’d be a pretty happy MIMAS pilot.

  She landed on Habitat 2’s roof, the metal creaking beneath her, but she hadn’t hit hard enough to break anything. A nearby Daybreak slaver had been firing on one of the other descending mechs, but now he turned to confront her.

  A bayonet found the throat of his suit, and the reinforced fabric didn’t do very much to arrest the force Ash put behind the blade. A red, crystallized mist sprayed from the wound.

  Andy Miller landed his MIMAS nearby, and he threw himself at the nearest Daybreak soldier, his rancor partially making up for his lack of skill. Both MIMAS and gunman went down in a heap, and Ash chuckled to herself as she bathed them both in flame.

  “Hey!” Andy said, pushing himself to his feet over the blackened form of the dead man. “That hurts!”

  “It’s just the mech dream simulating pain. You’re not actually hurt.” Pansy.

  Jake slammed into Habitat 2’s roof a dozen meters away, and Ash felt it tremor from the weight of the alien mech. He pounded away across the rooftop, toward where a handful of defenders were taking cover. Then Maura Odell landed, and she leapt into action immediately, whipping her heavy machine gun from her back to pick off Daybreak fighters.

  In less than a minute, they’d cleared the area, just in time for the shuttles full of Quatro to start swooping in and depositing their troops at ground-level.

  “The freight elevator can only accommodate one mech at a time,” Jake said over the team-wide. “And our Quatro friends aren’t getting in through the ground-level airlocks unless we let them in. That means a single mech is going to have to hold the base of that elevator until another can join him.”

  “Him?” Ash said. “Why are we assuming it’s going to be a him?”

  “Because I’m going down there. The alien mech is the only one I trust to withstand the sort of firepower I expect them to launch at us.”

  “Typical,” Ash said, but she injected enough mirth into her tone to let Jake know she was joking.

  He entered the elevator, patching his visual feed through to their HUDs so they could watch what was going on.

  The doors opened onto Habitat 2’s sterile interior, with its ground-to-roof structures, all lit up by parallelogram lights designed to simulate sunlight.

  Looks like he was right about the amount of resistance. Armor-piercing rounds from heavy guns set on tripods, a steady stream of rockets—Quentin Cooper’s fighters clearly didn’t share Oneiri’s concern about breaching the walls of Habitat 2 and letting the oxygen out.

  Unsurprisingly, Jake held his own, giving as good as he got and killing half a dozen operatives before the freight elevator returned to the roof again.

  Andy stepped toward it, but Ash intercepted, putting a hand against his MIMAS’ chest. “I’m next.”

  “Seriously?”

  “You better believe it.” She walked inside and maintained eye contact with Miller until the doors blocked him from view.

  As the elevator descended, bringing her closer and closer to joining up with Jake, Ash thought about Jess, as she often did whenever she got a rare moment of quiet.

  She mostly avoided quiet, and Jess was a major reason why. Ash had never wanted to fully acknowledge the role her sister’s memory had played in driving her to become a MIMAS pilot, and then in her mission to kill as many Quatro as possible.

  But she’d finally realized what Gabriel Roach could never manage to: honoring Jess’s death wasn’t about causing even more death. Seeking vengeance only disgraced her memory.

  The right way to honor her was to fight as hard as she could to get to a place of peace and stability—for her, for her friends, and for all humans.

  Here, today, in the Steele System, that seemed like an impossible dream. But even if she died fighting for it, then she knew Jess would be proud.

  Sometimes, she wondered if Jess was watching somewhere, and if she did, how she felt about Ash’s actions.

  If you’re out there, you can stop feeling ashamed of me, sister. You can start feeling proud of me. Because I’m going to make you proud.

  The elevator doors opened to Jake’s back, which was immediately thrown into sharp relief by a rocket exploding mere meters away from him, detonated by one of his energy blasts.

  The bright threads of heavy machine gun fire bracketed him as Ash moved up to join him, scanning for the weapons operators as she raised her rotary autocannons.

  There. Instead of high-velocity rounds, she directed lasers at the target, which went up in flames seconds later.

  Marco joined them next, and together, they pushed to the nearest vehicle bay, where they let in Quatro by the dozens.

  After that, the battle only lasted another forty minutes longer. Habitat 2 was theirs.

  “No sign of Quentin Cooper anywhere,” Tessa Notaras said in front of the Constable Station, where Jake had called a hasty meeting. “Looks like he’s moved on since taking over this place.”

  Jake nodded. “I’m putting Councilman Pichenko on coordinating the evac from this habitat. He�
��s good with that sort of thing. The rest of us are hitting Habitat 1.”

  Chapter 39

  Many

  Rug guided the McDougal’s Nav officer toward a slightly misshapen, oblong comet, then she asked her to expand the view until the icy mass filled the entire viewscreen.

  “The comet’s appearance has changed in the twenty years since I last laid eyes on it,” Rug said. “But I’m confident this is it.”

  “That’s your ship?” Lisa said, using her MIMAS’ amplifiers for the benefit of the CIC crew. “How are we supposed to access it?”

  “My quad should get us inside fairly quickly. Originally, we planned to drill through the ice to reach the ship, but that would take time we don’t have.”

  Nodding, Lisa faced Captain Yates. “Captain, we’re going to need every combat shuttle from every ship on standby, ready to start transporting Quatro to their ship the moment I say so.”

  “Understood,” Yates ground out.

  Lisa and Rug made their way to the destroyer’s shuttle bay in silence. They found Beth Arkanian waiting for them near the airlock, and when she saw them approach, she gave the signal for the doors to be opened without bothering to greet them.

  A couple minutes later, they were outside: two MIMAS mechs and one quad rocketing toward the great mass of ice.

  “There is still no sign of the Meddlers,” Rug said in her usual calm bass.

  “They’re pretty much everywhere in the Outer Ring but here,” Arkanian said. “Do they really think we’re buying that we got this lucky?”

  “I think we’re probably acting exactly as they want us to act,” Lisa said.

  “What else can we do?”

  “Exactly.”

  As they neared, Rug began hitting the ice with measured blasts of energy. Within seconds, a hole opened, and less than a minute later she’d widened it enough to fly a shuttle through with room to spare; even the old, clunky UHF combat shuttles would fit.

  Beyond, Lisa could see only blackness—until they passed through. Then the lights from their suits played across the ship’s hull, and she saw that it was a glimmering purple, like a Quatro who’d just pulled itself onto a river’s bank.