ATLAS 2 (ATLAS Series Book 2) (50 page)

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.

We did have one real conversation, however.

About three days after we’d started PTSD therapy, shortly after lights out, I found myself staring at the ceiling. Unable to sleep.

Again.

“You awake, Rage?”

“Yeah, Hijak,” I said.

“You never told me. Did they break you?”

The Keeper had said she’d broken us, in front of me and Hijak both. But Hijak was apparently too out of himself at the time to remember.

I didn’t answer him for a long moment.

“Yes.” I closed my eyes, and a tear trickled down my cheek. I was glad for the darkness. I didn’t want Hijak to see me, not like this.

“I told you what she said, didn’t I?” Hijak sounded close to tears himself. “That she’d hang my parents up like pigs and skin them alive. That all their money wouldn’t save them.”

“You told me,” I agreed.

“It was bullshit, wasn’t it? There was no way she could’ve reached my parents, or anyone else on Earth. Not from here. Yet I believed her.”

“I don’t have an answer for you, Hijak,” I said.

“What kind of MOTH am I,” Hijak continued. “Betraying my platoon, my
nation
, like that? What kind of
man
?”

“A damn good one,” I said. “One of the best I know.”

“I feel like such a traitor. A failure. Like I’ve gone against all the tenets MOTHs hold true. We never give in, no matter the cost to ourselves. We go through hell, and we keep going, and we never back down.
We never back down
.”

“Hijak. We were tortured. They broke us. Probably had us doped up on truth serum or scopolamine and whatever the hell else. That’s something you can’t fight: someone messing with your brain chemistry.”

Lana, when she was Jiāndāo, had told me I was resistant to scopolamine. I didn’t want to believe her; it was far easier to pretend a chemical had broken me.

“That’s no excuse,” Hijak said, refusing to take the easy way out. “We should’ve been stronger.”

“Well we broke, and there’s nothing we can do about that now except bounce back,” I said. “We’re returning to the Teams. We have to fight on. Live by the tenets of the Navy, and the MOTHs. Honor, courage, commitment. Truth to ourselves, our country, and our brothers. We can’t give up. We can’t let what they’ve done destroy us. If we do that, we’ve let the enemy win. Two more MOTHs, killed in the line of duty, and the enemy didn’t even have to fire a single bullet. No, Hijak, we’re going to hit back. We’re going to have our vengeance for what the enemy did to us. Let their crimes stoke the fire of your spirit, and your rage, because we won’t let them go unpunished. We’ll show the enemy what it means to be more than men. We’ll show them what it means to be MOTHs.”

Hijak didn’t answer for so long that I thought he’d gone to sleep.

Just as I closed my eyes, he said, “Thank you, Rage.”

My speech may or may not have helped him, but to be honest, I was more the intended recipient of those words. And it worked, for that night anyway. But the next morning when I woke up I felt hollow inside all over again.

When I killed more of the enemy, I’d feel better I was sure. But until then . . .

The
Tarantella
finally rendezvoused with the
Gerald R. Ford
above Tau Ceti II, near orbital station
Lequ
, our forward operating base. Hijak and I took the first shuttle to the supercarrier, and once aboard I was forced to undergo yet another week of counseling. Other than Hijak, the therapist wouldn’t let me see anyone from the platoon. Not even Tahoe. On a ship as big as the
Gerald R. Ford
, that wasn’t hard to arrange.