It was going to do to Hendrix precisely what it had done to Farouk, Dane could see. Overwhelm the marine’s defenses with its own speed and ferocity, before putting all of its weight and strength into one killing blow.
Dane wasn’t about to let that happen, and he threw himself forward.
“Back thrusters!” the sergeant called, and he was flung forward across the corridor and the space that separated them in less time than it took for a heart to beat.
Wham!
>Suit Impact! Breastplate 35% . . . Right shoulder-plate 75% . . .
Dane struck the Exin and Hendrix like a thunderbolt, remembering just in time to throw one folded arm to come between the Exin and his own marine. The result was that Dane performed a perfect flying clothesline—a move from his old Mech Brawler days. One that smashed the Exin warrior against the wall with the full weight of an AMP suit against it, before Dane heard a disgusting crack and pop of bones. He slid to the floor with the Exin warrior dead before him.
“Holy stars. Holy. Holy. Holy . . . frack!” Dane heard Hendrix whispering (as much to himself as to anyone else) when they were done, and they realized that they hadn’t, in fact, died.
Farouk had, though.
“Clear!” Dane heard Cheng’s voice shouting. He turned to look through the wrecked, booby-trapped corridor to see Cheng’s Silver Squad light up the last Exin that had attacked them too.
“Bruce?” Dane asked. “One man down, and one Exin taken out too. These ones . . .”
“Yeah. They’re something else.” He saw the glimmer of Bruce’s suit lights ahead as the sergeant beckoned him forward. “The other three made it into the service ducts of the Ares itself. They could be anywhere.”
“Dammit!” Dane swore, hurrying to step into the room where Bruce already had two of his Silver Squad attempting to peer through the hole that the Exin had cut into the walls. It was too tight for them to fit, especially in their burdensome AMP suits.
“There’s a main service tube out there.” One of the marines was peering into the dark. “I think it says ‘A1 Acc’ on it.”
“Oh, crap,” Bruce, rather uncharacteristically, swore.
“What is it?” Dane asked.
“A1 Acc is the shorthand for the primary service tube to the accelerator. The small mechanism that runs the whole Ares. If the Exin are heading for that—then they could cut the power to the whole damn boat. Or just to life support. Or just the door mechanisms . . .”
“And flush us out into the wormhole . . .” Dane whispered, before a pulse of electricity galvanized him into action. “What’s the fastest way to get to the accelerator?”
“This way,” Cheng had already set off at a run, and Sergeant Dane Williams was only a moment behind him.
“But what are they doing here!?” Dane asked out loud as they clattered along the Ares’s corridors once again.
“Trying to kill us, don’t you think?” Bruce managed to grumble.
TZZT! There was a sudden flash from the ship lighting. Suddenly, the lights clicked off in sequence. This would have plunged them into darkness had not their AMP suit lights automatically lit brighter.
“Oh. They must have found the accelerator controls! Come on!” Bruce said breathlessly as they sped up. “The accelerator as a whole is segmented into multiple command modules. The Exin can’t know which one controls which—and are just messing with whatever they can find.”
“Fills me with confidence,” Dane growled, but he couldn’t shake his thoughts from his earlier question.
What were the Exin doing here, of all places? Was this revenge for what he and they had done to Planet 32 and 32b? These were clearly the most elite band of Exin interceptors—capable of apparently breaking the laws of interwarp physics, breaking into a quantum wormhole, and then attacking the ship inside—why they were here?
It didn’t appear to make any kind of sense to Dane. Yes, he had known of soldiers and marines that pursued their own personal vendettas across the battlefield. That was something that was technically outside of the rules of war—but it undoubtedly happened. Was he seeing an alien version of this?
No, Dane thought. That Exin assassin that had attacked them downstairs—the one that had killed Farouk—had done so with complete and utter professionalism and skill. It had also attacked three armored marines in their Assisted Mechanized Plate suits, presumably knowing that it was going to die.
It wasn’t acting from blind revenge, Dane thought. If anything, it was acting from some kind of fanatical cause.
Which meant that it had been chosen for a very specific task, and it was the type of soldier—a type of team of soldiers—that no general, admiral, or war master would easily throw away.
Now Dane thought he grasped a corner of it. Two separate facts cohered together in his mind: they had been attacked almost as soon as they had arrived at the Exin ansible station, and there had been an Exin mother ship already on the way during their attack. That meant that their attack had been almost forewarned to the Exin . . .
Maybe they have a way of breaking into our Marine Servers? Dane thought. Or maybe the Exin’s deep scanners are more advanced than we suspected . . .
Either way, such an advanced and skilled attack that they were experiencing now—the use of a technology that the Exin had been keeping secret—had to be reserved for a mission that was important.
Why use it against us, and not a Marine Dreadnought?
Because—the pieces started to fit together in Dane’s mind—because they were the ones heading back to human space, weren’t they? It looked as though the Exin were trying to stop any word from getting back to Marine Corps Central about what was happening out on the front line.
“Or cutting each group, Jupiter and the front line, from each other!?” Dane whispered.
“What are you muttering about, Williams?” Cheng half turned to glare at him as they reached the bulkhead door that led to the main accelerator room. “Anyway. No time now. And one more thing: no guns!”
“What!?” Hendrix said in alarm behind them “Have you seen those things?”
“No guns, Marine!” Cheng repeated even more firmly than before. “I don’t want to take the chance that a stray pulse bolt lodges in our quantum reactor or our particle accelerator or our power differential sequencers!”
Dane had no idea what sort of calamity a differential sequencer could produce, but whatever it was, Bruce thought that it was serious enough to warrant mentioning.
“Fine,” Dane growled and slid his Field Blade from its sheath. “We don’t need them anyway . . .”
“If you say so, Sarge,” Dane heard Hendrix mutter. Then Bruce gave the order to open the doors, and the Orbital Marines sprang inside . . .
“Skrargh!” The first Exin was almost directly in front of them. It turned around in a snarl of frustration from where it was busy removing a control panel from what looked like a room filled with fish tanks.
Not fish tanks, Dane suddenly saw. They were actually different modules whose innards were made up of beds of strings and strands of glowing filaments and balls, interspersed with smaller control units and relay boxes. These larger units were joined into vast ceramic or metal cabling that snaked across the floor to the next such glowing unit, and the next, and the next, and the next.
Each one, Dane was sure, controlled a particular vital service on board the Ares, and there were already more of these Exin elite assassins bent over four such control units. Their work, clearly, was attempting to sabotage the human marines’ journey home.
But Dane had caught the first by surprise, and his Field Blade snatched it under the mandibles to fling its head cleanly into the room. The body was still reaching for him by the time that the head hit the floor, unaware that the Exin it belonged to had already died.
“Tssk!” The next Exin was to the right of Dane, but Bruce and Hendrix had already converged on it. So Dane leapt the cabling to the center of the room, and went at the next two who were working on one
unit together . . .
“Hah!” Dane lunged, but the first of the Exin had already had time to prepare for his approach. It smoothly slid out of the way, spun, and backhanded Dane across the side of the faceplate, making him rock slightly in place . . .
But Dane ignored it. He reached for the remaining Exin in front of him with both hands and seized the thing’s two outer, larger arms and pulled upwards.
The Exin screeched, struggling as it was dragged into the air, and the Exin thrust out with the tools it held in its two smaller, forward arms—
FZZT!
>Suit Impact! Breastplate 35% . . . 25% . . .
The Exin had been holding laser cutters, and their bright molten arcs surged as they cut into Dane’s chest and bubbled through the top outer plate of his suit . . . Dane could feel the heat of them against the restraints and insulation that held his body tight. Any moment, and the laser would burn through the softer, flexible inner plate—and his AMP suit had taken a battering already.
But Dane finally let himself be filled with the rage that he felt.
This was for Isaias.
This was for Farouk.
“Rargh!” With a roar, Dane twisted on his hips, flinging the Exin clear across the accelerator control panel, where, with a sickening crunch, it broke against the wall. Then Dane turned back with a snarl to the remaining Exin, which had already drawn and raised one of its blades to use against him.
Dane confronted the alien and saw the Exin hesitate. It was scared! Dane was so consumed by fury and so without any thought for his own safety that the elite Exin assassin actually took a step backwards.
Dane threw his weight forward into one solid punch, straight through the Exin’s ribcage.
“Dear stars, Williams! You some kind of machine or something?”
When the rage cleared, Dane could hear the shocked exclamations of Private First Class Hendrix and Sergeant Bruce Cheng at how he had performed, killing three elite assassin Exin in almost as many minutes.
The battle was over, and Dane had been shepherded out of the way as Joey got to work repairing the damage that the Exin had done.
“It looks like they were primarily interested in sabotaging our jump drive and our communications,” Corsoni said, pointing to the strange, egglike shape that was made up of multiple smaller silver balls.
“That’s our field ansible. The much, much smaller version of the satellite-based ones. Without it, we can’t get in touch with the front line or Jupiter.”
“Why would they want us not talking to each other?” Dane heard Hendrix say, as all of Dane’s fears came together.
“They don’t want any warning getting out,” Dane heard himself say.
“Any warning? What warning?” Cheng was saying.
“Think about it,” Dane explained. “There’s no other reason why they would attempt to sabotage our ability to talk to each other and our ability to jump. Only if they didn’t want us to warn each other about something . . .”
“About what?” Bruce repeated once again, when the alert came through that they had arrived and that they were just about to fall out of jump.
>ALL CREW PREPARE FOR JUMP PROTOCOLS! PREPARE FOR ARRIVAL! . . .
The sirens rang, and by now, after everything that they had been through, Dane and Bruce and Hendrix mostly ignored the warning. So, as it was, when their bubble of quantum energy broke through the thin fabric of space-time and back into human space, they were jostled and rocked by the vibrations of transdimensional travel.
When they had finished sliding and shuffling to one place or another, the alarms and scanners inside their suits continued to ring.
“What is that?” Bruce muttered.
>Marine Corps Server / RED ALPHA ALERT!—Network Wide Message—RED-ALPHA ALERT! . . .
The Ares had jumped not all the way to Deployment Gate One at Jupiter space, but instead between the outer planets of the human Sol system and the inner. This was the designated safe area for such returning jumps, rather than arriving in the already crowded militarized zones around Jupiter.
Which was just as well, because right now their crowded militarized zones around Jupiter were crowded for an altogether different reason:
>Marine Corps Server / Network Wide Message Begins:
>>All vessels! Deployment Gate One and the Jupiter Marine Training Platform has been attacked by Exin raids at precisely 23:09:00 last night. Explosive drones were jumped into our location to cause the COMPLETE destruction of the Marine Corps bases and strongholds.
>>Warning all vessels! Return to defend Earth IMMEDIATELY. And, if you are hearing this message, may God protect your souls . . .
>>MESSAGE ENDS . . .
Dane blinked, looking at Bruce and then at Hendrix and then at Corsoni. Disbelief and dull shock raged through them all.
The Exin had apparently done it. They had used the human Operation Hammer Blow as a cover for their own destruction of the main Marine Corps stronghold.
How was humanity ever going to survive now?
See how this epic adventure ends in Fist of Steel.
amazon.com/dp/B098TWY13Y
Thank You For Reading
Thanks for reading Steel Curtain, the eighth 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 :)
The last story in the series is called Fist of Steel and you can order it now on Amazon.
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Metal Warrior: Steel Curtain (Mech Fighter Book 8) Page 13
