ATLAS 2 (ATLAS Series Book 2) (30 page)

“Chief,” I transmitted. “We’ve hit a bit of snag. Could use some help here.”

“I’m sending Bender and Hijak to get you,” the Chief returned.

Tahoe and I started taking incoming fire from the fourth or fifth floor of the adjacent building. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly where—my aReal didn’t have enough data to trace the route back to potential sources, which would’ve helped the rest of the platoon snipe them.

“Chief, taking fire!” I sent.

“Doing what we can,” the Chief answered.

Below me, Tahoe had finally managed to stabilize himself against the glass, despite the buffeting winds.

But Tahoe’s next words hit me like a gunshot.

“I’m going to cut away,” Tahoe announced, reaching for the knife in his utility belt. “There’s no time for anything else. It’s the only way to save you and the package.”

If he did that, he’d never survive. A fall from this height without a working jetpack? The exoskeleton wouldn’t save him. He’d break every bone and pulp every organ in his body.

“Tahoe, hold!”

But he didn’t listen to me.

The fingers of his good hand wrapped around the knife hilt.

I’d already watched one friend die saving me.

And now I was about to watch another.

CHAPTER TEN

Shaw

A
fter several more spectacular falls I finally got to the point where I could sprint relatively smoothly in the ATLAS 5. I ran in a practice circle, and when I hadn’t stumbled for a whole twenty minutes, Fan allowed me to carry him via the designated seat again. Maybe it wasn’t entirely trust that compelled him to sit there, because I also told him if he didn’t ride with me, I’d leave him behind. He’d already sent the location of his oxygen extractor to my aReal, so in theory I could run ahead and take it for myself, using the strength of my mech to haul it away. He’d have to trek to the next Forma pipe on his own and build himself another. Assuming his oxygen didn’t run out before then.

Of course, I wouldn’t have
really
ditched him like that. Just wasn’t my nature. Besides, I didn’t know if the extractor coordinates he’d given me were real or fake, so I couldn’t abandon him even if I wanted to.

Queequeg shadowed Battlehawk ten meters to my left, clipping along beside me. He loved it when I let him run like that. I didn’t blame him. There was something special about propelling yourself forward under the power of your own muscles, feeling the air burning in your lungs and the wind running through your hair. Okay, I supposed I myself wasn’t
really
operating under the power of my own muscles, not completely, and I didn’t
actually
feel the wind in my hair, but I certainly felt the burning in my lungs. I was working hard inside the inner cocoon of the mech, sprinting in place, suspended in the cockpit. The ATLAS 5 probably had an auto-run capability, but I preferred being in control.

Now that I had a mech, some new options for leaving the planet had opened up. The first involved tracking down the booster-rocket payloads that would have come down with the mechs. The payloads would be near the original landing site far to the north, and might take a week to reach at this speed. Since I had enough O
₂
now, instead of making my way toward Fan’s oxygen extractor, I could go north, retrieve the boosters, and launch myself into space.

Though there wasn’t much point in doing that, as Battlehawk didn’t have enough jumpjet fuel to actually go anywhere once I attained orbit. And where would I go anyway? There was no Gate, not anymore.

Unless . . . what if I waited until the Skull Ship made a reappearance? It had returned once before, since I’d crash-landed. The sky had filled with clouds that towered all the way to the heavens. A terrible storm had ensued and since I had been caught away from the shuttle, which still had power at the time, I was forced to take shelter in a sinkhole. An unpleasant encounter with the beasts had followed.

In any case, I had a theory that a Skull Ship appeared every four Stanmonths or so to refuel.

And it had been about four months since the last appearance.

But how would I get on board without being blasted from the sky?

That was a problem for another day.

But right now, there was something I needed to check. Something only Battlehawk could reveal to me.

“Voice projection off.” I didn’t want Fan to hear my next commands.

Battlehawk’s AI answered from somewhere deep within the cockpit. “Voice projection disabled.”

“Battlehawk, replay your archived audio and vid feeds for me, starting from the moment you landed on this planet.”

“Initiating video replay.”

The playback speed was 4x. I shrunk the video to one-fifth its original size, and moved it to the upper right of my Heads-Up Display as I ran.

On the video, I saw the members of Bravo platoon enter the excavation site and approach an ominous-looking shaft drilled into the darkness. The ATLAS 5s were too big for the shaft, so the pilots ejected and deployed the four mechs in a guard capacity.

The sixteen members of the platoon rappelled down the shaft.

Battlehawk scanned the now-empty excavation site. I saw giant dump trucks, monster mining shovels on treads, and the ever-present walls of Geronium, enclosing everything like a prison. The view kept returning to the shaft. Everything seemed calm. Lifeless.

Sometime later, two MOTHs emerged from the shaft—only
two
, out of the original sixteen. Kasper and Pyro. The spec-ops men hurried into the other mechs, and ordered Battlehawk and the remaining ATLAS to follow tight.

Crabs flowed out of the shaft as if from a disturbed hornet’s nest. The survivors fought them for a few minutes, but when it became clear the odds were overwhelming, the MOTHs fled toward the MDV.

A sinkhole opened up behind one of the dump trucks, and a white-hot slug barreled out, launching fresh crabs. More and more slugs emerged, carrying with them two hundred crabs each.

Man and machine fought side by side, MOTH and ATLAS versus crab and slug. But the enemy proved inexorable. For every two crabs that fell, five more appeared. Worse, blue Phants drifted en masse from the sinkhole, forming a deadly, impassable wall of vapor. While the crabs and slugs slowly closed on both flanks like a noose, the Phants approached head-on, immune to all the weaponry the ATLAS 5s threw at them.

Seeing them made me wonder why the Phants didn’t fight entirely on their own. They couldn’t be hurt, they killed all life and controlled all robots . . . maybe there weren’t enough of them. Or maybe the appearance of the slugs and crabs was some kind of swarm response built into the biological aliens.

Whatever the case, the way to the MDV was blocked.

The MOTHs fled.

The beasts harried and pursued them for the next few hours. At some point, a wave of dormant Phants arose in ambush from the landscape ahead, directly in front of the group. The two leading mechs made it through, but Battlehawk and the other ATLAS 5 became possessed.

The video feed became tinted blue. I paused the playback, and rewound, because I thought I noticed something odd about the possession incident. I resumed playback at normal speed.

What I saw was decidedly odd, but maybe not entirely unexpected. Shortly after possession, the two mechs looked down at their hands and body, as if they were experiencing what it was like to have arms and legs for the first time. Battlehawk took a tentative step, and nearly fell, just as I had foundered my first time. The mech took another wobbly step, and another. The possessed ATLAS 5 seemed like a baby struggling to walk for the first time.

Crabs and slugs tore past Battlehawk and the other mech, giving the pair a wide berth, apparently sensing the Phants within. When the alien horde was gone, Battlehawk and the other mech resumed exploring their new bodies.

I set the playback speed to 4x once again, and watched as the mechs advanced from wobbly steps all the way up to full-blown sprints. Battlehawk’s owner soon became proficient in using its jumpjets and full complement of weapons. The Phant nearly blew its own mech up when it stupidly pointed a rocket launcher at its vision sensors—I was reminded of a child who had discovered a pistol in his father’s dresser. Peering down the gun barrel was always the best thing for the child to do, right? Luckily, the Phant steered the weapon aside right before pulling the trigger, and the rocket streaked harmlessly past. However, the discharge obviously frightened the possessing Phant, because it threw the mech’s arm outward as if trying to rid itself of serpent launcher and arm alike.

Eventually, Battlehawk returned to the excavation site with the other mech. Crouching near the rim, the two mechs secretly observed a new party of men loitering within the site.

It was the MOTHs of Alfa platoon, returned from their failed mission to find Bravo.

Near them, where the shaft used to be, remained only a collapsed crater. All the MOTH weaponry was pointed at that crater, waiting for something to emerge. Expecting something to.

The video feed began to wobble slightly, and I thought the ground was shaking.

The platoon ran toward the opposite rim of the excavation site, weaving between the giant trucks.

The sole mech with Alfa platoon remained behind, buying the others time.

It was Hornet.

Rade’s ATLAS 5.

I stumbled and fell.

“
Chòu sān bā
!” Fan said. The crash hurled him some meters ahead of me. He hadn’t buckled up again, despite my insistence. “Again you fall!”

I ignored him. My attention was focused entirely on the vid. I enlarged it to take up the full screen, and slowed the playback to 1x.

Battlehawk and the other possessed mech assumed a position behind one of the dump trucks, and eventually engaged Hornet. I cheered for Rade the whole time, entranced. I was cheering against myself, because I felt like I was actually there, fighting him. It wasn’t a good feeling.

Go, Rade!

I knew he would win in the end, but still, not knowing
how
he would win, and watching how close to demise he came each time, was extremely nerve-wracking.

When a dump truck backed over Battlehawk, I exhaled in relief.

I never thought I’d feel so glad to be run over in my life.

The vision feed blinked out, and when it cut in again, Battlehawk was no longer at the excavation site. The mech had been dragged inside a hangar bay of some kind. I could see the dome-shaped buildings of an SK outpost beyond the bay doors.

Battlehawk’s vision was no longer blue-tinged and had returned to normal.

Rade’s mech was gone. Well, I already knew what happened next. Alejandro would be dead by now. And with him, a part of Rade.

I closed my eyes, remembering the shared grief, and the days spent comforting Rade when he returned. Well, those days were long gone now. I had to focus on the here and now, on outcomes I could affect, rather than those I could not.

I concentrated on the vid feed. Around Battlehawk, Weaver-like robots worked, fixing the damaged mech. The robots weren’t possessed as far as I could tell. I didn’t see any of the characteristic vapors that would’ve betrayed the presence of Phants in the smaller robots.

I increased the playback speed to 8x. The repair robots eventually moved away, clearing the way for the approach of a Phant. Battlehawk’s self-defense algorithms activated. It loaded its Gatling guns and attempted to fire at the glowing blue mist, to no avail.

The ATLAS 5 became possessed once again.

The mech moved south along the rocky plains, sprinting at near its maximum speed. I switched the playback to 32x, and watched the time indicator scroll past. A few days of constant running later, Battlehawk reached the Main Rift. At least I thought it was the Rift, given the sprawling canyons and towering rock formations.

I slowed the playback speed to 8x as Battlehawk approached a very large sinkhole, the largest I’d ever seen, about as wide and long as a football stadium. Despite the vast size of the hole, none of the alien beasts were present.

The possessed mech went inside, lighting the way with its headlamps.

Navigating the circular tunnels and jagged caves, the mech reached a small natural cavern of sorts. An odd-looking metallic disc was embedded in the cave floor. Fibonacci spirals etched the surface.

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.