ATLAS 2 (ATLAS Series Book 2)

by Isaac Hooke

  I stared at her, stunned. “Who taught you those words?”

  She smiled sadly. “You did.” Her gloved fingers tightened around my own. “Forgive me. For all I have done to you.”

  My eyes were stinging. “You haven’t done a thing to me.”

  “I have. And I’m forever sorry for it. I deserve this, for what I’ve done. I should’ve resisted my possessor, somehow. I should’ve been stronger. I’m sorry, Rade Galaal.”

  I squeezed her hand back. “You couldn’t have resisted an enemy like that, Lana. None of us could.”

  “I was wrong, you know. About the UC. I thought you were all bigots. I—”

  And then she was gone. Her eyes just stared straight ahead. Her mouth remained open.

  If I’d approached her first instead of Hijak, maybe she might’ve stood a chance. If I’d—

  No. I wasn’t going to second-guess myself. Not in this.

  Still, I wished . . . I really wished . . .

  I closed my eyes.

  I always lost everyone I ever cared about.

  I heard the comm activate, and I waited for Hijak to say something. Instead, all I heard was violent coughing.

  Feeling a sudden rising panic, I turned toward him. “Hijak, what’s wrong?”

  More coughing.

  That’s when I noticed the thin, dark gash in the cockpit of his mech, just beneath the arm. The mark of an energy ax impact.

  “Nothing’s wrong, bro,” Hijak said. “Well, unless you count the small fact that I’m dying.”

  “No. Not you too.” I ordered Hopper to guard Lana’s body, then I jetted over to Hijak’s mech. “Open her up.”

  “No point,” he answered.

  “Open it! Now!”

  He popped his cockpit hatch.

  I opened the hatch just as his inner cocoon released him.

  Hijak looked up, and forced a smile. The entire lower half of his face mask was covered in blood. He coughed again, sending fresh crimson splatters onto the lens.

  I saw the jumpsuit patch he’d applied under his armpit. “What happened?”

  “Damn thing plunged its energy ax into my ATLAS,” he said, between coughs. “Went right through the cockpit. I jetted away, but not before the tip got me. Good thing my arm was raised high up, or I would’ve lost the limb. Still, the ax pierced my right lung pretty bad. Seems I have a knack for attracting mortal wounds. I’m getting good at it. I’ll make the doc proud.”

  “I’m going to apply a bandage.”

  “Bad idea,” Hijak managed. “It’s a chest-sucking wound. Lung . . . filled with blood.”

  Damn it.

  I didn’t have my medbag, which contained a special type of occlusive seal with a one-way flutter valve specifically designed to let the air and blood escape. The suitrep kit contained jumpsuit patches, a few bandages, one IV, a SealWrap, some clotting agents, all-purpose tape, a bag of plasma volume expander . . . nothing I could really use to create a chest seal.

  I saw his vitals darken on my aReal, and I had a sickly feeling in my stomach, the kind I got when one of my platoon mates died.

  A feeling I’d just experienced with Lana.

  I was going to lose Hijak and there was nothing I could do about it. Not while I was out here, alone, billions of klicks from civilization.

  Like I said, I always lost everyone who got close to me.

  It seemed to be some universal rule.

  Why did the universe hate me so?

  “Rage.” Hijak pawed at my face mask, like he was suddenly desperate to tell me something. “Rage.”

  “Save your breath, Hijak.” Was he going to die now? At this very moment?

  “Have to . . . say this.” Hijak coughed more blood into his face mask. “You want to leave the Navy? Because you don’t have heart anymore? You’re wrong. You have heart. More than anyone I’ve ever known. I’ve seen you fight, Rage. You have this uncanny ability to read and anticipate the flow of battle. Like you were born to fight. And you never give up. No matter how badly the odds are stacked against you. That’s heart, brother. That’s true courage. It’s why you can’t leave the Navy. The MOTHs need people like you. Humanity needs people like you. Promise me you’ll stay.” He gripped my gloved hand, and squeezed hard. “Promise.”

  I stared into his eyes. “I . . . I’ll stay, Hijak. I swear I will.”

  And so I floated there in the void of space, holding Hijak’s hand as he slowly choked to death on his own blood.

  I’d gone back for him, on the enemy ship. I’d refused to leave him behind.

  But it was all for nothing.

  All of it.

  I couldn’t save him.

  I was done.

  Hijak said I never gave up? He was wrong.

  Because I put my head down and gave up right then.

  No one was coming for us.

  I knew that in my heart.

  No one except the enemy.

  And Hijak was going to die.

  For some reason, as the two of us lay drifting in the ring belt, my mind kept returning to the contents of the suitrep kit. You missed something, a distant part of my mind told me.

  I dismissed that voice in scorn.

  You didn’t miss anything. You’ve failed Lana. And you’ve failed your brother, Hijak.

  But that distant voice kept coming back, stronger and stronger, no matter how many times I told it to go away. It read out the contents of the kit in my head:

  Jumpsuit patches, bandages, an IV, a SealWrap, clotting agents, all-purpose tape, a bag of plasma volume expander . . .

  Wait a second.

  A bag of plasma volume expander.

  I hurriedly fetched the kit from Hijak’s cargo pocket.

  “What are you doing?” Hijak said weakly.

  “Quiet.”

  I secured a SealWrap to my wrist, choosing the glove with the working laser. Then I grabbed a bag of plasma volume expander and cut it open with Hijak’s utility knife. The contents vaporized and desublimated, forming a cloud of very fine crystals. The discharge was beautiful, but I didn’t have time to admire it.

  The deflated plastic bag formed a square in my hands. I applied tape to three sides, parallel to the borders, so that half the adhesive protruded over the edges. I folded the bag in two, keeping the sticky portions of the tape facing outward, and I wedged it between the ring finger and pinkie of my glove, within the SealWrap.

  I lifted Hijak’s arm assembly.

  Incredibly, he shoved it right back down again.

  “Raise your arm,” I told him sternly.

  “No.”

  “Goddammit, Hijak. Stop behaving like a caterpillar. You have to let me try.”

  “No I don’t. Maybe I want this. Maybe I deserve it for what I’ve done. Betraying my team. Betraying my country.”

  “You betrayed no one, Hijak. Now lift your arm before I kick your ass. You’re a MOTH. You never give up. Or is your weak Chinese half finally asserting itself?” Ordinarily I’d never say something like that, but I wanted to get a rise out of him. I wanted him to fight.

  It worked, because he lifted his arm, glaring at me the whole time from beneath his helmet.

  I secured the SealWrap to his suit, atop the patch he’d applied beneath his armpit. Then I cut through the fabric of both the patch and the jumpsuit, using the surgical laser in the index finger of my glove. The SealWrap puffed out as the inner atmosphere of the suit expanded to fill it.

  I slid aside the circular fabric I’d cut away. The blood from the chest wound trickled outward because of the lack of gravity. I had to work quickly before that blood hampered my efforts.

  I placed the empty plastic bag directly over his injury and applied pressure, securing the three taped sides to his bare flesh. Because the blood had been floating directly
outward, there wasn’t too much plasmatic fluid around the edges of the wound, so the tape held.

  I watched as the bag sucked inward with each inhale, sealing the chest wound; when he exhaled, the excess air and blood spurted out the untaped section.

  Job complete. One makeshift flutter valve applied.

  Meatball surgery at its finest.

  Hijak’s vitals stabilized. For now. It was only a temporary solution, I knew. Hijak needed to see a surgeon as soon as possible. But I had bought him some time, at least.

  I wrapped the fingers of my other hand around the neck of the SealWrap, crimping it just below my fingers, and then I carefully extracted my wrist. I turned the adhesive dial, converting the SealWrap into a stand-alone jumpsuit patch.

  “Thanks, Rage.” Hijak sounded much better. “I got something I want to say.” He gripped me by the arm.

  “Say it.”

  He swallowed visibly. “I’m going to make it. I’m not going to die out here. I refuse. Not after all you’ve done for me.”

  “That’s the brother I know.”

  Hijak grinned for the first time all day, though it looked macabre with all that blood splattering his face mask. “When we get back, I owe you a beer.”

  “I get told that a lot.”

  I hoped he got the chance to buy me that beer. I really did.

  “There’s one thing I still don’t get,” he said, releasing me. “Back on the ship. Why did you come back for me?”

  “Because you’re my brother.”

  “I thought you hated me.”

  It was my turn to clasp his arm. “Actions speak louder than words, bro.”

  With difficulty, I began repairing the rear-shoulder puncture in my jumpsuit, because although the swelling skin and coagulated blood of the wound formed a temporary seal, if I didn’t patch the suit I risked the whole area necrotizing.

  When I finished, my shoulder wound temporarily reopened as the swelling subsided. It would clot again on its own. I just hoped I wouldn’t lose too much blood in the process.

  I secured Lana’s body to the passenger seat above Hopper’s jetpack, then Hijak and I went inside our respective ATLAS 6s and continued onward.

  We aimed to put as much distance between ourselves and the frigate as possible. We didn’t know if the Guide was planning another attack of some sort, and we certainly didn’t want to hang around to find out.

  An hour passed. We let the mechs proceed on autopilot through the ring system. The only sounds I heard were my own breathing and the occasional thud of small rocks against Hopper’s hull. I fell in and out of sleep.

  Silent sparks continued to erupt from the stump of Hopper’s right arm. I thought of another time I’d lost the arm of an ATLAS mech. Bender had really loved it. In fact, he would probably mock me for months when he found out I’d lost another arm, this time in an ATLAS 6.

  Bender. Would I see him, and the rest of the platoon, ever again?

  Hijak called a stop shortly into the second hour.

  “What’s wrong, bro?” I transmitted.

  “Nothing. Just . . . I want to see the stars one last time.”

  He pivoted his mech, swinging away from the gas giant that consumed most of our vision.

  I glanced at his vitals on my HUD. They were darkening again, and a hint of red was showing through. The tape must have come loose.

  Well, there was nothing for it. Though I was weary to the bone, I’d just have to make him another flutter valve.

  I opened up my cockpit, and the inner cocoon released me. I reached for my suitrep kit.

  It was gone.

  I’d lost it somewhere along the way. I remembered taking it out in Lana’s cockpit. I must have forgotten it there . . .

  Maybe I could just re-tape the existing flutter valve. Except the SK suitrep kit in Hijak’s jumpsuit only had one SealWrap, and I’d used it already. Without the SealWrap, there was no way I could get access to his wound without permanently depressurizing his entire suit.

  He was going to die for real this time.

  Then I remembered Lana. She would have a suitrep kit as part of her jumpsuit.

  I exhaled in relief.

  I jetted to the passenger seat that held her body.

  Incredibly, her left cargo pocket was empty. I checked the right pocket.

  Empty as well.

  So that was it, then. I’d lost.

  It was all for nothing.

  I jetted to his side and wrapped my glove around his. I watched the stars with him, waiting for him to die.

  I thought I was hallucinating when I heard the incoming communication.

  The words were in Italian, so I didn’t understand them at first. I was too far gone to even accept the translation proffered by my helmet aReal.

  Then the words came again, in English.

  “This is the Furlana, H-class shuttle of the Franco-Italian battle cruiser Tarantella. Do you copy, over?”

  Stunned, I didn’t answer.

  Then I saw the soft angles of the Franco-Italian shuttle as it crested the fringe of the ring belt. The distant Tau Ceti sun shone from precisely the right location behind the shuttle, giving the craft a beautiful yellow halo.

  I cried tears of joy.

  That the Franco-Italian warship was nearby to pick us up was a stroke of luck, because any longer and Hijak would have died. The FIs had detected the PASS device, along with the thermal signatures of our mechs. It helped that the explosions from our little space battle had lit up sensors halfway across the system—well, those sensors not occluded by the gas giant anyway.

  I told them about the SK frigate, but when the Captain of the Tarantella sent probes to investigate, the enemy vessel was long gone. A rad trail led toward the opposite side of the planet, but Captain Andino elected not to pursue. He explained that he was under direct orders to proceed to the other gas giant in the system, Tau Ceti II, where the Tarantella would provide much-needed reinforcements for the fleet. He didn’t really understand when I tried to convince him of the Guide’s importance—he probably thought I was suffering from a touch of space insanity.

  Lana’s body was packed in cold storage, while Hijak and I were summarily dispatched to the Convalescence Ward.

  The Weavers patched the wound in my rear deltoid, removing the bullet and replacing unsalvageable tissue with bio-printed variants. I only spent half a day in the ward, with most of that time in detox, where I was repeatedly scanned for the presence of alien germs. Hijak was still recovering, so that night I was debriefed alone over a secure vid node with Lieutenant Commander Braggs and two unidentified fleet officers.

  The Tarantella was still quite far from the Gerald R. Ford and the rest of the fleet, so the communications lag was about four minutes between each question and answer. The Lieutenant Commander had me spawn a background process to upload the most recent audio and video archives from my embedded ID since my capture, and that only further degraded the connection. That said, the IntraPlaNet node on the Tarantella was working surprisingly well, given the system-wide EM interference from the Skull Ship. It helped that the Gerald R. Ford was on the opposite side of the gas giant from the Skull Ship, as was the Tarantella.

  When the debriefing began, the very first thing I admitted was that I’d been broken. I’d given up the password to my embedded ID and the enemy had downloaded everything.

  I told them of the torture sessions with Keeper Jiāndāo, and how she had turned out to be a pilot named Lana. I told them what Lana had revealed about the enemy: how the Phants communicated telepathically, and obeyed some “Observer Mind.” I also shared the full details of my conversation with the possessed Artificial, including how the Guide promised to “spare” twenty percent of humanity in exchange for our surrender.

  When I was finally done, I gazed at the blank screen, waiting for the next
transmission from the Lieutenant Commander to appear.

  The four-minute latency mark came and went.

  Six minutes passed.

  Ten.

  The blank signal that stared back at me told me everything I needed to know. I’d messed up. Big-time. I’d revealed all our secrets to the enemy, and sabotaged our chances of winning this war.

  When the vid feed finally kicked in fifteen minutes later, the faces of the Lieutenant Commander and the fleet officers were grave.

  “Thank you, Mr. Galaal,” the Lieutenant Commander said, rather stiltedly. “We have everything we need for now. Good to have you back. Rest up. Oh, and please leave the secure connection active overnight, so we can finish downloading your embedded ID recordings.”

  The vid feed cut out.

  Mr. Galaal.

  Not Rage.

  Yes. I’d betrayed them all right.

  The next day I underwent additional surgery to remove the metallic knob grafted into the back of my head. It was an SK technology familiar to the Franco-Italian doctors and was supposed to be easy enough to remove. But apparently I’d suffered complications, because I ended up waking an entire week later.

  After that I was sent to PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) therapy.

  The military psychologist assigned by the Franco-Italians assured me I had done the right thing. The best of us would have broken under the same situation, he said.

  I wasn’t so sure. But I nodded my head and pretended I was fine, though inside I was falling apart.

  Hijak and I berthed alone in the guest quarters, which was good, because I wasn’t in the mood to fake camaraderie with the rest of the FI crew. When the two of us visited the mess hall to eat, we always took a table apart from everyone else. When we went to the gym, we worked out together in our own little world, again ignoring everyone else.

  It was funny, because although Hijak and I hung out all day, the two of us hardly exchanged more than a few words.