Dynamo (Mech Wars Book 2) Read online

  Contents

  Copyright

  Onslaught

  Chapter 1: Into the Shadows

  Chapter 2: Quads

  Chapter 3: Classic Conspiracy Theorist

  Chapter 4: Valiant

  Chapter 5: Two-Legged Murderers

  Chapter 6: Mating Ritual Initiated

  Chapter 7: Fury and Justice

  Chapter 8: Adventurous Benders

  Chapter 9: Act like a Soldier

  Chapter 10: Played

  Chapter 11: Vaguely Humanoid

  Chapter 12: Militia

  Chapter 13: Not Just a War of Expansion

  Chapter 14: Extermination Is Also Acceptable

  Chapter 15: Operational Details

  Chapter 16: Eyes Aglow

  Chapter 17: Feedback Mechanism

  Chapter 18: Creative Karma

  Chapter 19: Sucker for Punishment

  Chapter 20: Alliance

  Chapter 21: Infiltration

  Chapter 22: Imminent Danger

  Chapter 23: Back in Business

  Chapter 24: On Patrol

  Chapter 25: Security Station

  Chapter 26: If I Bleed, I Bleed

  Chapter 27: A Lot to Answer For

  Chapter 28: Contract Violation

  Chapter 29: Significant Deviations

  Chapter 30: Jump

  Chapter 31: This Thing Is Moving

  Chapter 32: Coma

  Chapter 33: That Which Nullifies

  Chapter 34: Try Something Else

  Chapter 35: All the Cards

  Chapter 36: Oxygen

  Chapter 37: Billy's Bunker

  Chapter 38: Slave State

  Chapter 39: Play with Explosives

  Chapter 40: More Hectic than Expected

  Chapter 41: Paste

  Chapter 42: Nature's Original Shape

  Chapter 43: Our Best Idea

  Chapter 44: Training

  Chapter 45: A Monster or a Coward

  Chapter 46: Supposed to Be the Best

  Chapter 47: Defensive Formation

  Chapter 48: The Long-Term Doesn't Matter

  Chapter 49: Lay Down Your Guns

  Chapter 50: Payload

  Chapter 51: Dynamo

  Chapter 52: No Choice

  Chapter 53: Subsumed

  Epilogue: Progenitor

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Thank You!

  DYNAMO

  © Scott Bartlett 2017

  Cover art by Tom Edwards (tomedwardsdesign.com)

  This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0

  This novel is a work of fiction. All of the characters, places, and events are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, locales, businesses, or events is entirely coincidental.

  Onslaught

  Sign up for the mailing list and read Onslaught for free, the prequel to Powered.

  Only mailing list subscribers get to read Onslaught. It reveals a shocking secret from Chief Roach’s past, when Darkstream first conquered Eresos.

  You’ll also be the first to know when Meltdown comes out - that’s book 3 in the Mech Wars series!

  Chapter 1

  Into the Shadows

  As Gabe and Jake Price sprinted toward the tunnel mouth, the earth was still vomiting up Quatro by the dozens.

  Oneiri Team was fighting hard, but it wasn’t enough. The aliens were still managing to get between them to attack what remained of Darkstream’s reserve battalion, the Force Multipliers, along with the soldiers from Plenitos’ garrison.

  Bayonets extended from several of the Quatro’s backs, and they gouged at the humans viciously while the other aliens mostly hung back to pelt the soldiers with artillery, which was also strapped to their backs.

  How the aliens managed to operate the firearms remained a mystery—but it wasn’t the most mysterious thing about them.

  “Hit them with everything we have,” Gabe growled over the team-wide. “Do not let them reach the hills. If that happens, this is all over.”

  And so the MIMAS mech pilots stepped up their game. For his part, Gabe extended both bayonets as he slammed into the first wave of Quatro, skewering two of them at once, and withdrawing the blades to plunge them into alien flesh again.

  His targets down, Gabe engaged both flamethrowers, crisscrossing the long streams of flame as he took one hard-fought step after another.

  The fire flickered over the shapes of allies and enemies alike, casting them in sharp relief. It wasn’t just that: everything had a hyper-realness to it, which Gabe took as the dream rendering the urgency of keeping the Quatro away from what he and Price had discovered in the hills behind them.

  It was hard to fathom the timing. Just as they’d emerged from the tunnel, after being pursued by a pair of Quatro with the unexpected power to stop bullets in midair, Price had spotted unusually colored meteorites streaking toward the planet.

  He and Gabe had investigated, and what they’d found troubled Gabe as much as it confused him: mechs, clearly of alien make, and just as clearly built for Quatro to use.

  Having cleared the area in front of him, Gabe instructed his mech’s hands to retract, splitting to settle back against his wrists as he spun up the rotary autocannons they revealed.

  Armor-piercing shells sped through the air—more than enough to part Quatro flesh and rupture their innards. Providing they didn’t stop the rounds before they struck their target, using the same magic trick they’d used underground.

  They didn’t. The Quatro no longer seemed to have the ability to halt bullets in midair, for reasons just as inscrutable as the power’s existence before.

  Was I hallucinating?

  No. His mental state had been iffy, lately—even he could see that—but the others had also seen what the Quatro had done.

  Besides, if he’d hallucinated that, then he’d also hallucinated Tommy’s death.

  I know when I’ve lost a soldier. I wouldn’t just dream up something like that.

  Gabe added Tommy’s death to the long list of things for which he intended to repay the Quatro. Never mind that it had happened while the Darkstream soldiers were invading the aliens’ home. They’d deserved that, too. They deserved everything that had happened to them, as well as everything Gabe intended to do to them.

  Having driven the Quatro front back, Gabe reformed his hands in front of the autocannons, switching to rockets. The other members of Oneiri had followed a progression of weapons similar to Gabe’s, and together they’d had the desired effect, of pushing the Quatro farther and farther back toward the tunnel mouth.

  At last, the aliens began to slip into the shadows, disappearing from the surface of Eresos.

  Slithering back into their dank holes. Where they belong.

  Gabe switched to a battalion-wide channel, so that everyone could hear his orders. Bronson had given him the command, which was lucky. He doubted any of Arkady Black’s people would appreciate the gravity of the situation they faced, and the same went for the remnants of the late Benjamin Clifford’s Force Multipliers.

  To prevent humanity from getting wiped from the face of Eresos—maybe even the whole system—he was glad to have the command.

  “I want both the soldiers of Plenitos’ garrison and the Force Multipliers to continue guarding the tunnel mouth. Oneiri Team, to me.”

  As he spoke the last words, Gabe jogged to the edge of his forces, allowing enough space for the giant MIMAS mechs to gather around him.

  They did, many of them stowing artillery as they ran, metal parts clicking together with a pleasing
cleanness.

  All of Oneiri’s mechs appeared to have retained one hundred percent functionality, even after several battles, which spoke highly of Darkstream’s engineering. That said, they’d suffered a fair amount of superficial damage. Price’s MIMAS looked singed from the bottom-up, with his feet almost totally black while above his elbows was barely touched. Ash Sweeney’s torso was crumpled slightly near the center, though the damage wasn’t serious.

  Almost all of the mechs were scored in several places, whether by the Quatro’s bayonets, their claws, or their knife-like fangs.

  “I’ll keep this short, since I don’t know how much time we have,” Gabe said over the team-wide. “When Price and I went into the hills to investigate the meteorites, we found mechs that appear to have been designed for Quatro use. Someone’s screwing with humanity, and judging by these quadruped mechs’ similarity to the Gatherers and Amblers, the culprit seems likely to be whoever made those.”

  He let that sink in. Other than a couple of glances exchanged between some of the team members, everyone remained silent. Gabe had told them of the need for haste, and he was glad to see they didn’t impede that with any stupid questions.

  “Our task right now is to locate as many of these Quatro mechs as we can find. If we miss even one, it could mean disaster for every human settlement on Eresos. I hope I don’t need to explain why.”

  He looked around expectantly at his team. No one seemed to require an explanation.

  If Tommy was still alive, he’d probably need one.

  The thought was callous, but he was prone to those, especially lately.

  “Good,” he said. “Move out.”

  The MIMAS mechs spread through the hills.

  Chapter 2

  Quads

  “Found another quad, sir,” Beth Arkanian said. “You wanna check this one out, too?” They’d settled on the name “quads” for the quadruped mechs naturally enough.

  It fits well enough, I suppose.

  Gabe considered Beth’s question. This was the eighth quad they’d found. “Does it look similar to the others?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then I’m good. Send the Force Multipliers its coordinates, and tell them I said to back up a personnel carrier next to it. Gonzalez, Sweeney, and Price, help Arkanian to load the quad aboard.”

  They’d discovered that if they stripped out one of the Force Multipliers’ armored personnel carriers, they could just fit two of the quads inside.

  “Why don’t we just destroy them, sir?” Price had asked when Gabe first gave the order to load the quads onto the personnel carriers.

  Gabe had turned toward him. “Remember when I said, back on Plenitos’ walls, that I welcome decent suggestions from my subordinates?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This isn’t one of them. If the quads are anything like the alien mech your father found out in the Belt, their armor’s as strong as hell. I’m not sure we even have enough ammunition to destroy them, and if we ran out before we finished the job, the quads would become easy pickings for the Quatro. Better to save our ammo for the aliens themselves.”

  “Makes sense. Thanks for breaking that down for me, sir.”

  Gabe couldn’t hear any sarcasm in Price’s voice, but the boy had given him attitude before, and he was always on the lookout for it. Even if he hadn’t been at his wits’ end, he wouldn’t have wanted to continue putting up with it, and he certainly didn’t plan to while he was this on edge.

  “What about Tommy’s mech, sir?” Marco Gonzalez asked after they’d finished loading the latest quad.

  Glancing toward the tunnel mouth, Gabe grimaced, which manifested inside the dream as the sky flashing emerald three times in rapid succession.

  Tommy’s abandoned mech stood alone, arms extended forward slightly, looking as though it was ready to do battle.

  But it won’t. At least, it wouldn’t until Oneiri Team gained another qualified mech pilot. Backup pilots had been trained, but they were still up on Valhalla Station as far as he knew, and Tommy’s mech was all the way out here.

  “We’re going to have to secure it to one of the tanks. It’ll impair the tank’s functionality, but it’s all we can do. We can’t leave a MIMAS out here for a mercenary to stumble across.”

  For two more hours, they combed the hills near the entrance to the Quatro tunnels. But after the eighth quad that Beth had found, no more turned up.

  Which was lucky, considering they’d run out of personnel carriers to transport them in. Gabe didn’t want to impair another tank if he could avoid it.

  “All right, then,” he said over the battalion-wide. “We have a journey ahead of us. I want these quads off this planet, as fast as we can make that happen. Which means we’re headed back to Ingress. We don’t have shuttles big enough to ferry them up to Valhalla, and I’m sure as hell not crawling inside one of those things to check whether they have launch capability. So the space elevator’s our only option. Let’s roll out.”

  Without further ceremony, they started down the same Gatherer path they’d taken to get here.

  Gabe had wanted Oneiri Team to take a long break in Plenitos—to rest, but also to spend time out of their mechs.

  Inside the MIMAS mechs, each member of Oneiri Team felt powerful, nigh-indestructible. Outside of them, they felt small, vulnerable…weak.

  They were becoming increasingly dependent on the machines, not only physically, but psychologically. Gabe had already noticed a few of his Oneiri soldiers walking with slumped shoulders outside their mechs, and he’d snapped at them to straighten up. They no longed walked with confidence, with heads high. No, they reserved that for their mechs, now.

  None of them brought up any of that, of course. But Gabe could see it in them. And he recognized it in himself.

  That wasn’t all. Gabe had also come to find that piloting the mechs had a disquieting distancing effect. The dream, which had been meant to increase immersion in battle, was instead causing him to feel detached from its effects, its consequences.

  The dream made him feel justified in everything he did, by default. That was more or less how he’d always felt anyway, but now he didn’t even bother to examine his own actions, and that was starting to get to him. Especially during the fleeting moments he spent outside of the mech, which seemed to be characterized by a lot more self-reflection than when he was inside the thing.

  And so, he’d wanted his team to take time in their own bodies, to reconnect with their humanity.

  But the quads’ arrival had dashed that hope. Now, they’d have to spend weeks more in the mechs, weeks full of long days of journeying. No one else could pilot the mechs for them—no one else was authorized to, for good reason.

  Until the quads were safely aboard the space elevator and on their way to Valhalla, Oneiri Team would live inside their mechs.

  Chapter 3

  Classic Conspiracy Theorist

  As she walked, Lisa sighted down the barrel of her assault rifle at the ground.

  I need to calibrate the sight again.

  She’d had to do that several times since leaving Alex’s wilderness for the confines of Habitat 2. The planet had given her a souvenir in the form of its blue dust, which had filled every crevice of her body, clothes, and weaponry. She’d dealt with the first two with multiple washings, but her guns were posing a stiffer challenge. She’d probably have to dismantle and clean them yet again.

  Tessa had joined Lisa on her rounds, patrolling the streets of Habitat 2. With drug crime either eliminated or driven deep underground in the wake of Daybreak’s defeat, she didn’t expect to encounter much that needed her attention, but that wasn’t really what this was about.

  After what they’d been subjected to, living under the thumb of Quentin Cooper and his goons for two months, the people of Habitat 2 needed to see that Darkstream military personnel were patrolling the city keeping them safe.

  Unfortunately, right now, all they had in the way of Darkstream milit
ary personnel were Lisa and Tessa, and Tessa didn’t even work for the company anymore. In fact, she loathed it.

  “Have you given any more thought to what Samuel Dalton said?” Tessa said. “About Darkstream allowing Daybreak to take over Habitat 2?”

  Lisa frowned. She hadn’t meant for Tessa to find out about that. The guards that had brought Dalton before her had been sworn to secrecy, but they’d blabbed about the interview to Andy Miller anyway, because they knew Andy was a friend of hers and they figured it wouldn’t matter.

  Andy, God love him, had told Tessa.

  “I’m afraid I don’t consider the words of a criminal enough to indict my employer, Tessa.” Lisa checked down an alley as she spoke. Nothing. As usual. “I’m going to need more than that to go against the organization that everyone’s lives are built on, in the Steele System.”

  “Oh, that’s classic,” Tessa said. “Blind yourself to immense danger, because seeing the truth would be too inconvenient. Yes. I do love it when history repeats itself.”

  Lisa decided to change the subject. “Have you been talking to any of the Quatro lately?”

  “A little. They’re not much for chitchat. That said, they seem to like us a lot more than they like the rest of humanity.”

  Lisa nodded. “That’s for sure.” She sniffed, double-taking at a darkened window, which she felt pretty sure was the one she’d peered out from during her temporary imprisonment in a basement, the day Daybreak had taken over. “Rug keeps pushing to go to Eresos. She thinks they can convince their fellow Quatro to stop attacking settlements.”

  Tessa barked laughter, at that. “Rug doesn’t even know why they’re fighting. Besides, the way Rug treats most everyone in Habitat 2, I would have thought she’d want the Eresos Quatro to kill as many humans as possible.”

  Lisa turned from her study of a shadowy doorway to look at Tessa. “That isn’t fair.”

  “I know. It was a joke. A poor one.”

  “All right.”

  “Bottom line about going to Eresos is, we have no way of doing it. I mean, we could head out toward the space elevator, I guess, but I’m not keen to get blue dust in every orifice again.”