Mech Wars: The Complete Series Page 4

  Now that he knew there was no apparent danger, Jake stood outside with him, both of them in pressure suits, all but gaping at what they’d uncovered.

  The question of where the mech came from ate at him, too. Everyone knew the surrounding stars showed signs of harboring life, though no one spoke of it. Life could easily mean intelligent, hostile life. Had another species been the ones to plant the mech here, and if so, why? Peter didn’t trust anything about this situation.

  When he’d contacted a Darkstream executive about the mech, she’d ordered him to immediately cease using company equipment to develop the comet until employees arrived to inspect the strange discovery for themselves. But Peter and Jake had kept plenty busy unearthing the thing—or un-icing it, more accurately.

  Now that they were finished, they kept themselves occupied by brushing away the remaining flecks of ice, and studying the mech. A process that mostly amounted to staring.

  The soft beep of an alert made Peter glance at his HUD’s information window, and he saw that the Javelin, Bob Bronson’s destroyer, had arrived at last.

  “They’re here,” Jake said over a two-way.

  Bronson’s voice broke into Peter’s helmet a second later. “Hi, Peter, Jake. I see you there, next to the mech. I’ve ordered my Nav officer to trail your comet in heliocentric orbit, and I’m coming over there via shuttle. Peter, I’d ask you to join me aboard the Javelin to discuss how we’ll proceed.”

  “What about me?” Jake’s voice cut in.

  “This is a conversation for your father and I to have, son. I’d ask you to remain inside your comet hopper, well away from the mech, if you please. That’ll be enough poking and prodding it.”

  “It’s our mech,” Jake said. “We found it. I don’t want to wait inside the Whale, and I don’t have to.”

  “Jake,” Peter rebuked his son harshly over the wide channel.

  That was enough. Gloved hands balled, Jake stomped across the comet’s surface toward their ship’s airlock.

  Peter waited out on the ice. It took fewer than twenty minutes for Bronson to arrive in what was once a UHF combat shuttle. Now, it belonged to Darkstream. They’d stolen it, essentially.

  “Why can’t we have our discussion right here?” Peter said once he was aboard, dispensing with formalities. He settled into a crash seat across from Bronson’s and looked the man in the eye.

  Bronson shrugged, the interior lighting playing across his shiny bald head. “We can, if you want. I thought you might prefer the comfort of the Javelin’s lounge.”

  “This is fine. Right here.”

  “All right, then.” Bronson cleared his throat. “Darkstream intends to take the mech, Peter.”

  “Is that right? What if I won’t allow it? The company’s entitled to sixty percent of whatever I find. That was the deal when they leased me the equipment. The rest is ours to keep.”

  “Well, we can hardly take sixty percent of a mech, can we? Not without rendering it useless to either of us. Besides, what use will you have for what is clearly a war machine, Peter? Do you plan to wage a war against someone? You and your son?” Bronson laughed. “Darkstream, though…we can use this. If we can learn its secrets, it could help us protect people from the Quatro. It could save lives, Peter.”

  Now, it was Peter’s turn to laugh—much more bitterly than Bronson. “Darkstream’s suddenly become so noble. Fine. You can have the mech. But I expect to be reimbursed for my forty percent.”

  It’s hard enough to make a profit, with the insane portion they take. Both Ingress and Plenitos, Eresos’ major cities, had plenty of homeless and starving people as a testament to that fact. Unless you were well-off enough to operate on a medium-to-large scale, it was difficult to prosper when you could only benefit from forty percent of what you produced.

  Raising a hand to his stubbled chin, Bronson scratched. “Reimbursing you could prove difficult. When you think about it, the mech is priceless. Considering it has value for system security, it’s impossible for anyone to calculate its true value. Tell me, are you always this hard-nosed when lives hang in the balance?”

  “Cut the crap, Bronson. Hearing a Darkstream executive trying to tell a sob story is like watching a mortician attempt vaudeville. “

  “All right, all right. You can’t blame me for giving it a shot. Tell you what. I’ve been authorized to offer you up to two billion credits, and I’m putting the entire amount on the table right now. You can use it to grow your comet development business exponentially, maybe someday buy the equipment you need outright. Then you wouldn’t have to give Darkstream their cut. The board has just one condition, though—you have to let me talk to Jake. One-on-one.”

  “Out of the question.” Peter stood from the crash seat, glaring down at Bronson. He was about to leave.

  “Now, hear me out, Peter. We know you’ve been filtering out the recruitment material from Jake’s feed. And we’ve never said anything about that, because it’s your prerogative. But I know what this is really about. We consider it unfortunate, what happened to you on Eresos. What you went through. But just because you went through a thing like that doesn’t mean Jake will. I only want the opportunity to offer him the opportunity of a lifetime. Your son tops the system leaderboards in three different divisions of lucid wargaming. Darkstream has had its eye on him for a long time. I only want the chance to talk with him.”

  “He’s too young, Bronson, not to mention too headstrong to follow orders. And he has too much life to live. He’s not ready to have his innocence stripped away by the likes of you.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic, Peter.” Bronson sighed, and he actually looked regretful—as though every emotion he’d ever displayed hadn’t been an act. Then, he sighed. “All right. If that’s the way it’s going to be, then we take the mech. No reimbursement. There are clauses in our contract that could easily be interpreted to entitle us to it, anyway. We don’t have to interpret them that way, but if you won’t play ball, the mech’s too important to system security to just leave it languishing on this ice ball.”

  Peter’s fists tightened. He continued to glare at Bronson, saying nothing, because he knew more would be coming. Darkstream always had another play. Always.

  “It’s too bad, really,” Bronson went on. “I understand your daughter is very, very sick. Sue Anne, isn’t it? I know she’s the reason you do what you do out here, alone in the cold. Two billion could have made sure she got the treatment she needs.”

  At last, Peter’s shoulders slumped. He hadn’t meant for them to, but his energy had suddenly bottomed out; his resolve vanished. “I haven’t been alone, out here,” he muttered, staring at the shuttle’s deck. “I’ve had Jake.”

  “And you won’t be alone going forward. You’ll be able to hire a proper crew.” Bronson smiled, and when he looked up, Peter saw a glint of victory amidst all the feigned sympathy. “I only want one chance. No one will be forced to do anything. If he doesn’t want to join, he doesn’t want to join, and you’ll still get your money. Even if he says no.”

  But Peter knew there was zero chance of Jake saying no. He was effectively signing over his son to save his daughter. But maybe, just maybe, Jake would be okay in the Darkstream military.

  He didn’t really believe that. But perhaps telling himself it would help him sleep at night.

  “All right,” he said.

  Chapter 6

  Mind on the Mission

  Chief Banks gave Gabe command of most of Allendale’s garrison, as well as full access to her arsenal. Plus an old tank, which would likely prove next to useless in the forest terrain.

  Banks clearly didn’t like giving him all that, but she didn’t have much choice. Darkstream wanted that Ambler put down.

  The giant machine wasn’t hard to track. Their usual routes were well-known. They followed Gatherer paths, and Gabe could call those up on his HUD at will.

  Of course, that wouldn’t do him much good today, because the Ambler had clearly deviated from its
programming. Much better to simply use the eyes God had given him, to look at the swath of felled trees that stretched into the distance. They followed that.

  Amblers were still as much a mystery to Darkstream as the Gatherers were, along with whoever had made them. When the company’s nerds had heard about Gabe and his unit felling one, so many years ago, they’d gotten pretty excited—until they’d learned that Gabe hadn’t left much of the thing to study.

  What bits of intact circuitry they’d been able to extract had remained inscrutable to them, as far as he knew. Of course, Darkstream wasn’t in the business of trumpeting its discoveries. Knowledge was power, and by sharing knowledge, you gave up some power. The company had known that for a long time, and they’d gotten an especially harsh lesson in the truism right before coming to this galaxy.

  Either way, Gabe felt fairly confident that Darkstream hadn’t figured out how to reproduce the Amblers’ lasers. Humanity had been using lasers in space for years to great effect, but hadn’t quite figured out how to make them work inside a planet’s atmosphere, where a phenomenon called thermal blooming heated the air and caused the laser beam to spread out, neutering its destructive potential.

  When it reached the woods, the tank was able to progress a few meters into the trees, but no farther. That didn’t come as a surprise.

  The trees knocked down by the Ambler had likely posed little problem to it—the metal colossus could simply step right over the fallen trunks. Not so, the tank.

  Gabe ordered the vehicle back to Allendale while he and his team clambered under and over the weird trees, heads and guns swinging to and fro, HUDs on full-alert.

  The trees still seemed weird to him. Their cascading waves of bare branches like gnarly fingers, all pointing down at the ground. At the Quatro dens far below, maybe.

  And that mildew smell. You couldn’t get away from it, not even when you cut the trees back a mile—which every village did, as part of basic defense—not even when you went indoors.

  I guess it’s better than living on Alex. Small consolation, but it was something.

  Sometimes, he missed the Milky Way, though he’d never admit it to anyone. That was not a thing you advertised in the Steele System. Not if you didn’t want to become a total pariah.

  That said, on occasion, becoming a pariah seemed like kind of an attractive idea.

  “Hey,” a young seaman apprentice said as he emerged from underneath a canopy of branches nearby. “Do you ever think about the day you set foot on Eresos? Kind of crazy, isn’t it, to think you were the first one to—”

  Gabe shoved the kid, sending him reeling back a step and nearly causing him to tip backward into the foliage.

  “Keep your mind on the mission,” Gabe barked. “Chief Banks didn’t mention she was sending any morons along with me. If any of the rest of you happen to be morons, I recommend you conceal that fact by keeping your stupid mouths shut.”

  “S-sorry, sir,” the seaman apprentice said, gripping his SL-17 tighter and keeping his eyes locked on the path ahead.

  After that, Gabe didn’t have to put up with any more of that fanboy crap. Thank God.

  From the Allendale arsenal, Gabe had distributed among his team three rocket launchers, two SAWs, two sniper rifles, a plethora of grenades, thirteen assault rifles, and one heavy machine gun complete with tripod. It turned out they didn’t need any of it.

  Five miles from the village the Ambler had attacked, they found it sprawled on the ground, surrounded by nearly three dozen Quatro.

  Larger than draft horses from Old Earth, most Quatro had royal purple coats, with long, powerful tails and eyes with colors never seen in humans—orange, purple, pink, black. Their bodies had the rough shape of bears, though with longer legs, and their heads resembled panthers.

  The autonomous mech had certainly taken out a lot of the aliens, but the fact that the Quatro had won at all spoke to their size, ferocity, and strength. It likely would have taken hundreds of humans to accomplish the same feat without any weapons—if they could have accomplished it at all.

  The Quatro’s tenacity and power went a long way toward explaining why they were so feared. But it didn’t fully explain it. Folks also found their primal nature disturbing. Most people assumed the aliens to be of much lower intelligence than humans, though not without a low cunning.

  “That’s weird,” said the seaman apprentice from before, apparently having found the courage to use his stupid mouth again. Somehow, idiots always did. “Why would the Quatro bother taking on an Ambler? It’s not like the machines are going to attack them in their dens. Wouldn’t fit through the tunnels.”

  “Maybe the Ambler attacked them,” said another Darkstream soldier.

  “Yeah, but what were they doing aboveground in such numbers in the first place ?”

  “Planning an assault, possibly,” Gabe said, and heads swiveled toward him. His words ended the chatter.

  “We need to secure the perimeter,” he continued. “This is only the second Ambler that’s ever been taken down, that I know of, and it’s in much better shape than the first. Darkstream will want it for study. Move, people.”

  Chapter 7

  Trying Not to Kill

  If Chief Lannon had been corrupted somehow, then Lisa wasn’t likely to get any help in investigating Jensen’s death. Not unless she contacted someone higher-up in Darkstream, and if she did that, her boss would learn about it.

  No, the company was now depending on her to find out exactly what was going on in Habitat 2, whether it knew it or not.

  Time to go undercover.

  She never wore caps, so the baseball hat she put on in front of a mirror in her tiny dwelling worked wonders, in her eyes.

  This makes it much less likely I’ll get recognized. I’m definitely not a hat person, so…

  To make the disguise even better, she let her midnight hair loose, which she never did in public anymore—she always kept it pinned up. Now, it spilled down to brush her shoulders. She’d always liked the way it looked like this, but Darkstream required that long hair be cut or pinned, and she believed in following the rules. She took her job seriously.

  Finally, she donned plainclothes instead of her usual Darkstream uniform. Wearing overalls and a plain white tee, she expected to blend right in.

  Her investigation would begin in the Swinging Eel. Of Habitat 2’s two bars, the Eel was by far the more disreputable. It was also where anyone involved in the drug trade was likely to drink.

  The moment she entered and the door swung shut behind her, returning the front room to its former dimness, silence began to wash over the bar, until no one was talking or drinking and everyone was looking at her.

  She cleared her throat, offering a grin. Not so wide, she told herself, and shrunk the smile a little. Drug smugglers would not smile so big.

  Crossing the room to the bar, behind which a woman seemed to be trying to peer into Lisa’s soul, she said, “Can I have, um, a whiskey…on the rocks?” She’d been about to order her usual whiskey sour, but had caught herself at the last minute. The drink didn’t seem to suit the atmosphere.

  “If you have the credits, I have the whiskey,” the wiry bartender said, her eyebrows raised.

  Drink in hand, Lisa decided to stick to her original plan. She crossed the still-quiet room to a table in the back corner, feeling immensely awkward. It felt like every eye in the bar was following her, and she was pretty sure that feeling wasn’t far from the truth.

  Sitting with her back to the wall, she studiously avoided eye contact with everyone. Gradually, conversation resumed, though it didn’t come anywhere near the dull roar that had preceded the sudden silence.

  Someone approached her table, hands on hips. Lisa followed those hips to a stomach, then to a chest, and then to a face.

  It was Tessa Notaras.

  “Tessa?” she whispered. “You drink here?” Lisa felt betrayed, somehow, mostly on Phineas Gage’s behalf. How could Tessa give any business to the Swi
nging Eel when the Dusty Bucket had always treated her so well?

  Tessa took a seat right next to her, brushing her swinging white hair out of her face. She’d brought no drink with her. “Did you really consider that an adequate disguise?”

  Even at three times Lisa’s age at least, Tessa still had plenty of fire in her. Her eyes shone with anger and disbelief as they studied Lisa, who tried not to cower into her seat.

  “Tessa…why are you here? Do you drink here a lot?”

  “Forget about that. You need to leave, Lisa.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re making a lot of people very nervous. You need to get out of here and find somewhere safe to hide. Don’t come out until it’s all over.”

  Squinting, Lisa said, “Until what’s all over?”

  Several sharp reports sounded outside, in quick succession. Gunfire.

  Lisa’s hand fled to her pistol, fumbling at it, though she didn’t draw. “What was that?” she asked, her voice low and shaky.

  Tessa cursed, leaping to her feet. “The answer to your question.” She made to run toward the door, but hesitated, glancing back. “Listen, Lisa. Stay here, and stay down. If you’re lucky, the fighting won’t reach you in here, but you need to stay low and hidden. You’re in greater danger than anyone in Habitat 2 right now, okay?”

  “Tessa, wait! I’ll come with you!”

  “Stay here,” Tessa hissed, dashing across the room and drawing the twin pistols she kept slung low around her hips.

  Lisa’s hands trembled around her whiskey. She took a sip, but her mouth twisted, and she placed the drink back on the table, glass knocking against the wood with her shaking.

  Less than a minute after Tessa’s departure, two groups of people stood up and faced each other across the bar. For the first time, Lisa noticed that there was a distinct divide among the Swinging Eel’s clientele. Most of the members of one group wore black armbands and bandannas, and most of the other had their heads shaved, each with a small tattoo somewhere near their right ear.