ATLAS 2 (ATLAS Series Book 2)

by Isaac Hooke

  Battlehawk stepped over the disc.

  Suddenly the mech was no longer in the cavern, but in a corridor, standing over a similar disc. The bulkheads, deck, and overhead of a ship surrounded Battlehawk now. The surfaces were made of lattices of closely set pipes and rods positioned at different angles at various planar depths. The different planes overlapped so many times that they created the illusion of a solid surface.

  The mech walked along a dense gangway formed from the confluence of those lattices. A large robot stepped aside to let Battlehawk pass. No, it wasn’t a robot, but an alien wearing a jumpsuit of some kind, a translucent glass dome sitting atop the suit. Inside, a dark head regarded the mech with two lizard-like eyes.

  I switched the playback speed to 1x.

  Battlehawk entered a passageway. There was a broad window on one side, revealing stars and a planet. Not Geronimo, but a gas giant of some kind.

  Where the heck was Battlehawk?

  The mech entered an expansive room. Various glass holding tanks lined the bulkheads. Inside each tank, robotic, spiderish arms—I’ll call them Alien Weavers—hung from the ceiling. Some of the tanks were filled with liquid, others air. I realized I was looking at a multitude of different life-supporting environments, because within those tanks I saw beings like nothing I had ever seen before.

  There were creatures from fairy tales and creatures from nightmares. In one tank, a jellyfish-like entity replete with a circle of razor-sharp teeth floated in a vaporous environment. In another resided some kind of plant being, resembling a giant lizard with pine needles bristling from the bark of its body. In a third tank a tentacled, squid-like creature with two heads drifted to and fro.

  This was, for all intents and purposes, an alien menagerie.

  The Alien Weavers operated on roughly half those creatures. Metal parts were drilled and grafted into restrained bodies. Tiny microchips were jabbed into unconscious brains.

  The Alien Weavers were making cyborgs of some sort.

  Battlehawk walked into one of the empty tanks, and the entrance sealed shut behind it.

  The mech’s vision returned to a normal hue as the possessing Phant vacated its brain case.

  Another Phant vented into the tank, moving very fast. A purple one.

  I had the impression the blue entity was leaving so that the purple Phant could take over.

  But Battlehawk was the quicker. Now that the internal AI was back in control, the mech activated its defensive subroutines.

  It turned toward the nearest glass wall, firing its twin Gatlings while initiating a horizontal burst from its jetpack.

  The ATLAS 5 collided with the weakened glass and burst right through.

  Battlehawk retreated at full sprint the way it had come, evading gaseous Phants and shooting down two humanoid aliens in jumpsuits along the way.

  It arrived at the chamber with the metallic disc on the floor. Stepping over the disc, the mech instantly appeared in the cavern on Geronimo once more. I had a feeling the disc could be tuned to different destinations, and that it was sheer luck the destination still pointed to Geronimo. But this was alien technology, and whatever human intuition I might have was likely to be way off the mark.

  Battlehawk sprinted through the underground tunnel system, emerging from the sinkhole with its jetpacks firing at full burn. When it landed, the mech kept on running, and proceeded down the middle of the Main Rift.

  The ATLAS 5 constantly swiveled its head around to scan its six, but there were no pursuers.

  I increased the playback speed and watched the time indicator count off the hours as the mech continued to flee.

  Finally Battlehawk swerved into a defile cut into the Main Rift, and squeezed past a tight bend. Then it turned around, aimed its guns down the path, and waited.

  Time elapsed.

  Nothing appeared.

  Battlehawk had escaped.

  The mech initiated its “call home” beacon, as per standard recall protocol, and entered hibernation mode.

  The vision feed jumped.

  A figure in a black jumpsuit peered past the defile’s bend.

  A human. Text overlaid the identity scan: Embedded ID profile inconclusive.

  A square appeared around the helmet, with the words: Facial recognition in progress. Sino-Korean feature match.

  Target.

  The latter word appeared in big, flashing red.

  Battlehawk opened fire.

  The SK vanished, and Battlehawk entered hibernation mode once more.

  The vision feed jumped.

  I watched myself approach in my hybear-fur jumpsuit.

  I shut the video down, and my view of the outside world returned.

  “Shaw Chopra, are you all right?” Fan was saying. “Shaw Chopra?”

  Queequeg was jumping around and howling in concern beside me.

  “I’m fine, Queequeg,” I said, ignoring Fan. “Queequeg, I’m okay.”

  I stood up, and the mech hummed to life, rising with me.

  Queequeg hastily put some distance between us.

  “What happened to you?” Fan said.

  I glanced down at him. I couldn’t get over how small human beings appeared when viewed from the heights of an ATLAS mech.

  “We have to make a slight detour,” I told him, resisting the urge to call him “little man.”

  “That is a terrible plan,” Fan said.

  “I think it’s a very good plan,” I countered.

  “The Mara will kill you before you cause any damage.”

  “They won’t,” I told him.

  “What do you have against them, anyway?” Fan said. “They have not invaded human space. Why the grudge? We are the ones who invaded their space.”

  “They’ve killed some good people. That’s a good enough reason for me to stage an attack. They’re not friendly.”

  Fan studied me beneath the endless daylight. “You know nothing about their intentions! They are an alien race, with an alien consciousness! If you found yourself in a beehive, surrounded by worker bees, would you think they were unfriendly simply because they followed their biological imperative and attacked you for invading their hive?”

  “What are you trying to say, that these aliens are big, lovable honeybees protecting their hive?”

  “That is exactly what I am trying to say. Except they are more than simple bees. You risk your life to stage an attack against a superior alien race, who—”

  “They’re not superior,” I said.

  “Let me correct myself: a technologically superior alien race,” Fan said. “Whose only crime was the defense of their colony.”

  “We have to do this. I have to do this.” For Alejandro, Big Dog, and all the dead of Alfa platoon. “If you don’t want to join me, then don’t. I’ve already set a waypoint to that oxygen extractor of yours. I’ll meet you there in a few days. If I don’t return, things will go right back to the way they were before. For you at least.”

  “No,” Fan said, quietly. “I will come. I cannot allow you to go alone. Still, that does not mean I approve.”

  “Well, I was actually going to insist that you stay behind,” I said. He started to protest but I cut him off. “Look, I don’t really need you. You’ll probably just get in the way. You’re in a jumpsuit. I’m in an ATLAS 5. Slight mismatch there in terms of armor and firepower.”

  “I am coming, Shaw Chopra of the UC Navy. I cannot go back to the way things were before, as you say. To being eternally alone. But you must promise me, at the first sign of trouble, we leave. If we arrive and the sinkhole is surrounded by Mara, we go.”

  I nodded. “If there are beasts patrolling the whole area, obviously we’re not going in.”

  Fan nodded. “Then let us go and get this done with.”

  I had the ATLAS set the necessary waypoi
nt, and I followed the contours of the wide valley at a run. Fan sat in his usual position on my back, while Queequeg loped along to my right.

  Time passed very slowly for me. It felt like I was running toward my doom. I kept telling myself I didn’t have to do this. That Fan was right. We were the invaders. We were in the wrong.

  Yet all I had to do was remember the agony on Rade’s face after Alejandro’s funeral. Or my own pain upon hearing the news of Alejandro’s death. Pain commingled with guilt: I’d lost a good friend, and yet I was relieved Rade had been one of those who’d lived.

  I hoped that by doing this, I’d rid myself of that pain and guilt once and for all.

  It took about four hours to reach the sinkhole I’d seen in Battlehawk’s vid archives. The size of the hole was indeed immense. The vast entrance sloped down into the darkness at a gradual angle of around thirty degrees, almost like the outgoing ramp of a drop ship. Because of that angle, the sunlight only traveled a few meters inside, and darkness quickly shrouded the view. It looked evil somehow.

  I wanted to turn back. But I couldn’t. Not now.

  “To quote a UC expression,” Fan said from behind me. “I will be damned if I am going in there.”

  I actually laughed. It was a bitter, forced laugh. “Bit late for second thoughts now, isn’t it? Because I’m certainly not taking you back. You better start walking.”

  “Let me down,” Fan said.

  I did.

  Fan walked to the edge of the sinkhole. “Give me my rifle.”

  “No.”

  He glanced over his shoulder at me in exaggerated disgust. “You are up there in an ATLAS 5 with Gatlings and jumpjets and rockets. What do I have? A jumpsuit superglued with pieces of rock. Shaw Chopra, you must give me my rifle.”

  “Not yet. Besides, all the firepower in the world won’t do a thing against the alien mists, if we encounter them.”

  Fan grimaced. “Very true. Yet another reason for us to avoid this place. The Yaoguai will have our souls.”

  “All right. Stay here then. What about you, Queequeg? Are you coming?”

  The animal halted a firm distance away from the sinkhole, and refused to advance any farther.

  “I guess I’m doing this alone, then.” I switched on Battlehawk’s headlamps and started down into the darkness.

  A few paces in I heard muted howling behind me. I glanced back.

  Queequeg leaped to and fro near the entrance, like he wanted to advance but some invisible barrier kept him from doing so.

  Fear. It was a powerful obstacle.

  “You don’t have to come, Queequeg,” I said. “You’re free now. I release you. I don’t . . . I don’t know when I’m coming out again.” Maybe I’d never see the light of day again.

  I wanted to linger, but I knew if I did that I might very well change my mind.

  If I was doing this, I had to do it now.

  I turned around and plunged into the darkness.

  I didn’t look back.

  I never imagined the farewell between Queequeg and I would be so abrupt, but it was what it was. Let’s just say I wasn’t a big fan of good-byes. The hardest good-bye of my life had been when I’d abandoned Rade. I hoped he found it in his heart to forgive me for what I did. I knew he would have come with me. But I couldn’t allow it. One of us had to make it back. One of us had to return to Earth. To humanity.

  At this very moment Rade was probably doing PT on a white sandy beach somewhere, or hitting the pubs in New Coronado with Tahoe and the rest of his platoon. Training and living his life under the open air, without the constant threat of death hanging over his head.

  I’d join him, someday. I’d reach Earth. I had to. I had made a promise to myself. It’s what kept me going each day.

  I wasn’t a quitter.

  The Navy had taught me that.

  My training had repeatedly drilled the core values of honor, courage, and commitment into my head. That, and the fact you never gave up. Not ever.

  What was the quote Rade had told me once? The one by Winston Churchill? Yes:

  Never give in—never, never, never, never. If you’re going through hell, keep going.

  I wasn’t going to die down here. I wouldn’t allow myself. I would see the sky once again.

  I would.

  And one day I would even make it back to Earth.

  Just not today.

  I had toyed with the possibility of using the disc device to teleport my mech to the alien ship. But that would be like transferring from house arrest to a maximum-security prison. I’d be on a vessel run entirely by aliens, with no idea how their systems worked. Even if I somehow managed to capture a key individual, assuming there was such a concept in the alien race, I wouldn’t be able to communicate with them to negotiate any terms for my hostage. Plus, I’d stand out like a sore thumb the moment I arrived.

  Unless I could disguise myself somehow . . .

  “Battlehawk,” I said, hit by a sudden inspiration. “Are you equipped with any electromagnetic pulse weapons?”

  “I am equipped with limited EM capabilities. No actual weapons-grade emitters are installed by default.”

  “So there’s no way you could mimic the EM signature of a Phant?” I said. “Make the beasts think you’re possessed? You have the alien EM signature on file, right?”

  “I have stored the alien EM signature, but I cannot mimic it,” Battlehawk said. “I am equipped with limited EM capabilities.”

  Well, it was a nice thought.

  I marched resignedly into the darkness. Around me, the walls, floor, and ceiling formed a perfectly continuous circle.

  Battlehawk had already mapped out the cave system for me, all the way to the transportation device. Unexplored side passageways and tunnels appeared as black sections on the HUD map, in what was commonly referred to as the “Fog of War.”

  I had no intention of exploring those side passageways. I would head for my objective and nothing else. Get in, do what I came to do, get out. I wanted to be alive when this day was done, after all.

  There was no sign of beast activity. It seemed almost a little too quiet.

  And then I heard a scuffing behind me.

  I turned around to illuminate the area with my headlamp.

  Queequeg lowed softly. He’d joined me once more, loyal to the end. Still, his body language was all fear: mane flattened, ears folded back, tail curled below the belly. It took a great deal of courage for him to be here.

  “I won’t forget this, Queequeg.”

  I spotted a light coming from the tunnel behind him.

  “And then there were three,” Fan said, his silhouette emerging from the darkness. He beckoned into the depths. “Should we . . . roll, as they say in the UC?”

  The three of us proceeded into the dark.

  Battlehawk’s footfalls sounded disturbingly loud to my ears as they echoed down the tunnel. I tried to tread as gently as possible, but it didn’t really help. The thud of a three-tonne weight repeatedly striking solid rock wasn’t going to come across as soft.

  I turned into a side tunnel, as indicated by my HUD map. Like the main tunnel, it was perfectly circular, but only four meters in diameter. That still gave me a meter to spare on all sides, though the concave floor forced my ankles inward slightly, requiring some extra balance on my part.

  “Battlehawk,” I said. “Isn’t there some kind of support probe you can launch? An HS3 or something? It would be good to have an early warning on any hostiles.”

  “Affirmative,” the mech’s AI answered. “There is the ASS.”

  “The ASS?”

  “The ATLAS Support System.”

  I rolled my eyes at the acronym. Leave it up to the military to come up with something so crude and smart-alecky. “I see. Launch it. Destination: Waypoint Alpha.”

 
A compartment opened on Battlehawk’s shoulder and the ATLAS Support System drone floated down the tunnel. A revolving cone of light illuminated the rock around it in a corkscrew fashion.

  On my HUD, I viewed the vid feed from the ASS in the upper right. The signal pixelated and froze every few seconds, but otherwise the tunnel ahead looked exactly the same as where I currently walked.

  The vid feed progressively worsened the deeper the probe traveled, until the pixelization became so bad I couldn’t discern a thing. I had Battlehawk recall the probe before I lost contact entirely, then I instructed the ASS to maintain a scouting position a steady twenty meters ahead.

  We proceeded forward, and the tunnel opened into a vast cavern. The black walls yielded to crystal structures that could best be described as yellow quartz. The crystals were beautiful I supposed, but I had trouble appreciating them. Firstly, there was the sense of impending doom I always felt when entering a sinkhole, the feeling that a horde of beasts could come piling out at me any moment, which wasn’t entirely unfounded. Secondly, I’d made the mistake of glancing at the telemetry report on my HUD. We were about fifty meters underground. Fifty meters. The knowledge triggered my claustrophobia. In space I usually dealt with any claustrophobia by spending long hours looking through the portal at the vastness outside.

  But I had no portal here. Just thousands of tonnes of rock over my head, fifty meters thick. Not to mention the three tonnes of metal encasing me.

  It’s not far now, Shaw. Soon enough you’ll be done. Then you can go back, take a nice warm bath and soak for a while.

  None of it was true, of course. But it helped take my mind off the claustrophobia. I had to remain strong now, if not for myself, then for Queequeg and Fan, who were relying on me to get them through this. They were here because of me, and I wasn’t about to let them down.

  I took a deep breath, and proceeded.

  The probe led the way to the next four-meter diameter tunnel. I dreaded leaving the cavern behind for the smaller tunnel, but I pretended I was entering the sinkhole for the first time again, and that there was hardly any rock above me.

  Somehow it worked.

  Finally, two more caverns and one fork later, I reached a natural cavern, the smallest yet. A metallic disc was set into the rock in the middle of the floor. I recognized the disc from Battlehawk’s vid archives—Fibonacci swirls engraved the surface, those “golden” spirals that occurred everywhere in nature, from the shells of snails to the spiral arms of galaxies.