Dane looked down at the unconscious mercenary for a moment. “No. Leave him. He’s one man,” he said, as he turned back to the screens. He has done everything that he could, Dane thought. He had turned off the defense lasers, hopefully saving fellow marine lives, and he had sent the contents of the Exin military computers to the Marine Corps attackers above. Perhaps in those records would be defense positions of the Exin, or factories, or things that the Marine Corps could use.
Dane heaved a sigh. Maybe he was never truthfully going to get off this planet. But at least he had done something with his life.
“But—if you leave him, he will be a danger in the future!” the Chr-At leader nudged the unconscious body of the Hyena rather savagely with his foot.
“Let the Exin have him.” Dane shrugged when he thought of the Hyena. “He is only one man. And my people—like yours—work best when we work together.” Dane thought about his friends at the Marine Corps. “If we work together, then we can achieve anything.”
“Even stop the Scales?” the Chr-At said a little doubtfully.
“Especially stop the Scales.” Dane nodded as light flared into their room from something hanging in the air outside their tower.
It was a ship. A Marine Corps ship.
22
Creative Uses for a Neutrino
“You’re lucky we didn’t nuke you!” Captain Otepi snapped at Dane as she powered the Marine Corps fighter back through the atmosphere of the Challenge Planet and into the burning void beyond.
The Exin mother ship was decimating the Marine Corps squadron. She was firing broadsides of plasma fire against the three remaining ships that harried her. Otepi’s own forward squadron was running damage control in trying to counter the Exin seed craft.
“Well, I’m glad you didn’t . . . but aren’t we equally screwed now?” Dane was saying.
The captain had received Dane’s message and had quickly ascertained that they must have an ally on the surface. Using a simple biological scan, she had discovered the sergeant’s position in the city. Considering that he had turned off the city’s defense lasers, she had swept in to retrieve him.
“Screwed? Not today, at least.” She pointed up to a patch in space that was starting to ripple and blare with strange light. It was the Deployment Gate, and it was opening a warp tunnel to their location.
“But . . . The Exin . . .” Dane muttered, hurriedly strapping on his harness in the spare cockpit seat.
“Wait for it . . .” Otepi pointed at her screen, and Dane saw a glint out there in the stars. Something very small and very fast was flashing through the dark under the battle lines and heading straight for the mother ship.
“As soon as I realized I wasn’t going to blow up a city, I found a much better target,” Otepi had barely finished saying, when there was a sudden incandescence from the side of the mother ship. Dane had to shield his eyes as their ship shook, and the giant neutrino bomb, the Goliath, slammed into the hull of the mother ship with all the brilliance of an exploding star.
“Everyone! Fall back! Fall back!” Otepi was shouting at what Marine Corps fighters remained. Dane blinked away afterimages to see small, brilliant flashes of light that had to be the rocketry and plasma engines of the Marine Corps fighters as they withdrew themselves into the open wormhole.
Dane felt the familiar lurch in consciousness and stomach as Otepi took them through the wormhole too, leaving behind them the slowly turning and breaking-apart remains of the Exin mother ship and the Challenge Planet.
“She’s the only warp or jump-capable ship that we know of,” Otepi was saying with cool and savage glee. “With any luck, it’ll take the Exin a long time to rebuild her. Long enough for humanity to build our own!”
Dane slumped in his seat, thinking that at least the massive detonation might also have bought the Chr-At some time in their own struggles too. Perhaps enough time for the Chr-At to flee to their forests and jungles once again.
Even though Dane’s eyes were closed, he could still see the burning afterimages of the nuke and the flare of burning plasma as they sped through the wormhole. He was going home. At last, with the tattered remnants of Otepi’s first-strike marines around him.
But Dane’s mind kept on ghosting back to that image of the giant orange sea of the Exin galactic empire, and the tiny pebble that was Earth.
Could they do it, really? Could he?
This epic adventure continues in Ring of Steel and you can order it now on Amazon.
amazon.com/dp/B091XSYH4H
Thank You For Reading
Thanks for reading Steel Cage, the sixth book in the epic Mech Fighter series. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I really have a lot of fun writing about the amazing technology the future holds for us, and all the possible chaos :)
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Metal Warrior: Steel Cage (Mech Fighter Book 6) Page 13
