“Hold up. This is intel . . .” Dane said.
“Sss!” The queen reacted with another lurch towards the marine before slumping to the floor. Her head was bowed, but a slither of words hissed out of her, and the Exin translation bug on Dane’s collar flickered blue as it translated.
“You humans speak of intelligence?” Her words were transmitted through the air by the bug, but lost none of their croaking, predatory gleam.
“Who’s the one shackled and beaten to hell?!” Hendrix growled and took a step forward.
“Wait!” Dane urged again, keeping his pulse rifle aimed at the Exin queen. “What are you doing here? What happened to you?” he demanded.
The queen’s body was so still where it half crouched, half lay, that Dane’s warning alarm faded away to nothing. For a moment, he feared that those had been her last, caustic words, before both the alien and the sensor trembled into life as the queen took one long, shuddering breath. It was clear that their nemesis was near death, and only some hate-filled determination left in her kept her clinging to existence.
“As if . . .” the queen rasped and shook, “I owe you anything.”
“We could just as easily shoot you,” Hendrix muttered aggressively, earning a sharp look from Dane to shut the hell up.
Dane licked his lips inside his suit. He hadn’t prepared for anything like this. Even though he understood his marines’ desires to exact vengeance for the countless thousands of human lives that this being had sent to their deaths in wave after wave of Exin attacks on Earth—or the bioweapon that was the Exinase virus that they had given to their human collaborators to release on Terran soil. Even despite all of that, Dane knew that the queen could also be the prisoner of the century. Of the millennia. Of the history of human warfare.
The things that she knows could end the war for good, Dane told himself and forced down the memories of the good men and women of the original Assisted Mechanized Division, who he had lost along the way.
They would want this war done and over, the sergeant told himself. And keeping her alive might be the best way to do that.
Coming to an abrupt decision, he squared his shoulders a little sharper.
“Keep her covered,” he snapped, as he hit the release on one of his equipment modules on his suit’s utility belt and unspooled the metal wire that the expedition module kept for climbing and salvage purposes.
“Sarge? Williams!?” Dane heard both Hendrix and Farouk gasp. “What are you doing?”
But Dane had already batted away the queen’s weak attempts to claw at him as he hurriedly pulled both sets of arms together behind her back. He tied them off amidst the queen’s snarls and growls of outrage. Next, he beckoned for Isaias to come and cut her chain.
“She’s worth more to us alive than as a pile of scale and bones,” Dane said as Isaias cut the heavy, dark-blue chain that held her, and she slumped to one side. The final thing that Dane knew he had to do, absurdly, also felt like the worst.
He took out the medical injector from his suit’s built-in unit and selected the stimulant.
“I have no idea if this is going to work or not on you,” Dane said, twisting the dosage dial to its lowest possible setting. “And it is just as likely to kill you, but I need you alive, and this is the only way that I know how to do that.”
“Sarge, I’m not happy using marine medicals we should be keeping for ourselves on her!” Hendrix muttered irritably under his breath. “Especially when there could be a whole squad of angry Exin warriors coming to save her!”
“I’m not exactly happy about it either!” Dane growled back. “But these are my orders, and I’m still the superior officer in charge here, so . . .”
The ghostlike face of Hendrix held Dane’s glare for a long moment before he looked away in submission, and Dane jammed the injector in what he thought was the softer part of the alien’s neck.
“Ssss!” Almost immediately, the queen flinched, and her limbs took on a stronger tremor. Dane and Isaias jumped back quickly, with Dane holding the metal rope that held the queen in one hand and his rifle in the other.
“Don’t doubt for a moment, Your Highness,” he added the last words in a growl, “that I will not hesitate to shoot you if you come for me or any of my men—and my men might just shoot you anyway!”
The queen’s trembling slowed and then stopped completely, but a new wave of life seemed to flow through her body as Dane’s sensor flared brightly on his HUD. She stood up in an awkward, complicated movement.
The queen was still clearly in pain, Dane saw, but she was able to move.
“Take us to the control room of this ship,” Dane said in a level voice.
The queen, in turn, looked at Dane imperiously—or as imperiously as she dared, with ichor and injury rampaging over half of her body.
“Look, you can play hard ball,” Dane said, not knowing or caring if the Exin queen would understand his words, “but I’m guessing that they shackled you to that post and beat seven bales of hell out of you for a reason. I also think that we’re your last hope. So walk!”
The queen remained still, and Dane was certain that she was going to refuse him, until she lowered her head almost imperceptibly. Then she took a step forward, towards the rear of the room where another archway led outwards. She paused before reaching the end of her chain, however, and half turned to regard Dane with an expression that he thought was weary.
“You won’t win, you know. You can’t win. My capture means nothing.”
“We’ll see about that,” Dane growled and followed the Exin queen as she led them into the belly of her ship.
7
Tol’rumaa
“Any word on . . .” Dane muttered the words, but did not finish them in front of the queen. He did not want her to know that there were others of her kind still out there in the hulk somewhere and still alive.
Hendrix coughed and said nothing, and so it was Isaias who answered him.
“No sign on the sensors, Sarge,” the younger soldier said, as Dane groaned inwardly. He really didn’t want to have an insubordination issue right now, in the middle of enemy territory. He resolved that he would have to work this out with Hendrix later, but for now, he had to keep an eye on the queen.
Who was trailing a little to one side of the corridor that she had led them through, towards the blue-metal walls that were now veined with silver lines like threads.
Dane saw her start to raise a claw to gesture to the walls at the last moment, before he jumped forward.
“Hey!” He held the rifle close to her back.
“Don’t try it! I promise . . .”
“Promise?” The queen froze, but her translated voice seemed to convey mockery. “What good are promises, coming from the mouth parts of dead things?”
“I think we’re very much alive and kicking!” Farouk snapped in retaliation, just as something started to happen to the wall panels in front of them.
The silver threads started to intertwine and move, rolling and threading over each other, widening as if they flowed organically.
“Back!” Dane shouted, and then at the queen, “What did you do!?”
“Merely proving a point.” The queen made no movement at all, as the silver threads widened open and revealed something like blackened glass on the far side, which started to lighten in color immediately.
Dane and the other marines tensed.
For the blackened glass to animate like video screens. They replayed clips and images, and each one of them appeared more terrible than the last.
Dane saw a line of Exin warriors in their bulkier scale suits, marching and lurching over a broken and flaming landscape, their shell guns firing under a crimson sky.
“That was when we took Orabius Prime,” the queen said. “The people of that planet, too, were a little humanoid. They suffered from the same fallacy that they did not deserve their fate.”
The image changed once more, and this time it showed a deep ochre desert, dotted with round, wh
ite buildings. The shot must have been taken from above by some kind of drone or satellite, Dane thought. It magnified to show row upon row of small, shadowed creatures like hunched-over porcupines, all walking in line. Dane thought that there had to be processions of thousands of them in this scene alone.
“That was the pacification of Yth,” the queen ventured. “The Ythie were a wiser race. They surrendered as soon as our warships appeared in their skies.” The Exin queen turned to talk to Dane more fully, in a perversely conspiratorial, intimate gesture. “The Ythie were rewarded for their allegiance. We didn’t even have to kill many of them.”
Dane felt sick, and snorted in disgust. “Is this what you meant to show us? Some scare tactics coming from a queen in disgrace, beaten by her own people and left to die on a rusting hulk of a ship!?”
A snarl of outrage spread across the queen’s face, as the image in front of them changed. “No! Stupid human!”
The image now showed what Dane thought was a dark orb, hanging against the glitter of a starry sky. A planet. Lifeless and barren, Dane assumed—because he could see no glimmer of light across its surface.
There was a light nearing it, however. Dane saw something approaching from the far upper-right hand corner—something that was small at first but still burnt bright.
“This is what I meant to show you, stupid human. The Tol’rumaa,” the queen said.
The bright, glowing light grew larger and brighter, but it was still only a fraction of the size of the dark planetoid it was heading towards. Dane blinked as it crossed the distance in seconds, gathering a brilliant corona of burning plasma and dust and gasses around it as it flew.
It was a spear, of sorts. Dane thought he could make out a much smaller black lozenge in its heart.
“The Tol’rumaa is the ultimate weapon. A harnessed comet that we can direct at will,” the queen said.
As the burning comet slammed into the dark planetoid, there was a brilliant white flash that spread like a wave across the planet’s surface.
“Holy frack cakes . . .” Dane heard Farouk whisper. The white flash started to ebb, to be replaced by a racing wide circle of burning crimson as the detonation tore across the mantle of the planet. Dane saw sudden bursts of dark, heavy planetary rock and magma in its wake as its destruction must have crossed hundreds or thousands of miles—or maybe even more.
“The Tol’rumaa is the final weapon that we use against those civilizations that refuse to cooperate and who are too troublesome to take over,” the queen said with a satisfied rasp of breath.
“It is a civilization killer. A planet killer. A species killer.”
Dane opened and closed his mouth. She was threatening them, and the scale of what he had just witnessed, or what the Exin empire was capable of, was simply too much for anyone to dream of resisting.
But . . . A stubborn, defiant thought rose in the back of Dane’s mind.
“Then why haven’t you?” He pointed at the screen that was even now fading back to black, and whose silver threads were returning to their original positions. “If you have got this great apocalypse hanging over our heads, why haven’t you already used it against us?”
Dane asked this because he knew one thing for sure. That there were bullies and there were the people who got things done. Bullies liked to talk because they didn’t like to get things done.
“I didn’t think that your Earth warranted total destruction yet,” the queen said in what was almost an airy voice for the scaled alien. “Do you know how rare a breathable, carbon-rich planet is in the cosmos?”
“All the more reason why you won’t use that thing against us,” Dane pointed out.
The queen snarled at him once again. “Perhaps I wouldn’t have. But, as you now know, I am not in charge of my people anymore, am I? War Master Okruk—whom you met—is.” The queen’s tone of hiss fell sibilantly lower. “And War Master Okruk doesn’t have the patience that I have.”
“We’ll take our chances,” Dane growled before gesturing with his pulse rifle back to the corridor. “Get on with it. The comms room!”
“As you wish, human,” the queen hissed with laughter.
Just as Dane’s sensors started to blare across his faceplate HUD.
>Warning! Multiple Exin contacts! . . .
8
Loyalties
“They’re coming up fast!” Isaias’ voice called out over the suit-to-suit comms, and he sounded as nervous as Dane felt. The four marines were running down the central avenue where the queen had directed them, but the enemy blips on their scanners were approaching rapidly. Hendrix was in the front, his suit lights illuminating a set of two giant Exin statues made of the same blue-steel metals of the ship. They stood thirty feet in front of a massive set of doors, guarding them.
“Your Majesty,” Dane snarled at the alien figure ahead of him on the chain. “If you would be so good as to open those goddam doors, we’d much appreciate it.”
“Sss-eckeragh!” the queen snarled. Dane’s translation bug came back with a string of expletives that were neither physically or anatomically possible—but afterwards, ended with a simple translated, “understood.”
“I’m sure that you want to hang around here about as much as we do, with your old subjects that chained you to a post,” Dane muttered. He turned to see that Isaias was hanging back, covering the tunnel behind them.
“Stay close!” Dane growled at the younger marine, raising his pulse rifle and staring down the darkened corridor.
“Tss’ch’kol!” The queen was making hand gestures before the set of double doors, before placing her clawed talons on its dark surface and waiting, as if expecting something to happen.
Nothing did.
“They’ve changed the biocode,” the bug on the mantle of Dane’s suit translated.
Dammit! Dane felt his teeth clench in frustration.
“Huh, they really don’t like you, do they?” Hendrix muttered at the queen, before resorting to pointing his pulse rifle at the middle seam of the door and firing. With an enraged hiss, the Exin queen stumbled back as a flower of sparks exploded beside her. It was clear that Hendrix didn’t much care if he took out their hostage in the process, and Dane gave a warning grunt to his marine.
He has to obey orders, Dane thought to himself—but he had no time for a reprimand now, not if the warning scanners were anything to go by.
“Just get it open,” Dane muttered, turning back to take aim down the tunnel.
“Sarge.” It was Farouk, who was looking at the base of the statues. “If we can bring these down . . .” he started to say, and Dane saw immediately what he meant. The statues were almost the height of the corridor entirely, and if they fell, they would form a large barrier. Maybe buying them enough time to blast the doors.
But if we blast the doors, then we’ll be leaving them open behind us, no? Dane thought, and then, no time. It was better to be alive and have a defendable position than to be eviscerated.
“Good idea,” Dane said, checking his utility belt. He had a spare cartridge of the pressurized plasma containers that worked as reserve batteries for his pulse rifle.
“Here.” He moved swiftly to the base of one of the statues, placing the cartridge between the thing’s legs where he thought there was a joint seam.
“It’s the best we got,” he murmured, stepping back and calling, “Fire in the hole!” before shooting one sustained lance of burning particles at the cartridge. The hardware was sturdy and designed for the rigors of space-based laser combat—and for a moment, the thing glowed a deep cherry red before Dane’s strike overcame the reinforced metals. There was a boom of thunder and a flash of light that caused Dane’s faceplate to glitch.
Then a creak, and the first statue started to fall from where its feet had turned into piles of slagged metal. Dane and Farouk were moving out of the way as the statue crashed to the floor across the corridor, bouncing once and coming to rest almost at chest height.
“Sarge! Sarge!
” When Dane’s suit microphones returned to normal, they were immediately filled with the worried sound of Isaias on the other side of the fallen statue.
“They’re here!”
Frack. They didn’t have time to drop the second statue. Dane moved to the new barricade as Hendrix was firing at the doors behind them. Dane aimed his rifle at the glinting shapes that were racing up the corridor towards Isaias.
Sheee-ez! The awakened Exin warrior caste could move fast. Isaias was firing back down the corridor, but in a heartbeat, what had been glints of suit light on scale and claws a moment before were now the racing, loping bodies of alien warriors.
The Exin had backwards-jointed legs, meaning that they could run and leap like kangaroos. They kept their heads and torsos bent low, with the larger sets of their arms raised high to either side as they came. Dane saw the glint of predatory eyes.
The only blessing was that they weren’t carrying their shell guns with them, and neither did they wear their larger exosuits of the same blue-black scale metal. Not that they needed any of that to be truly terrifying, Dane thought, as he saw the light glint on hardened, blackened claws—
FZZT!
Isaias was firing, and one of the forward group was thrown backwards by the blast of orange-yellow pulse fire. Dane fired, and another was bowled over as his shot took out a leg . . .
But they were too fast. There was no way for Isaias to get back behind the barricades in time.
“SARGE!” Isaias shouted in horror as he, too, must have recognized the same error.
The leading Exin got to him, and Dane was helpless to do anything as he watched the outflung arm of the warrior alien swipe the marine’s legs from behind, tumbling him forward to slide to the base of the statue barricade.
“Cover me!” Dane shouted to Farouk beside him as he scrambled and reached, seizing the grab handles on Isaias’ suit and hauling backwards. Private First Class Farouk was firing bolt after bolt of fire past his shoulder. Dane heard shrieks and squeals of alien pain as he hauled the younger marine over to the not-much-safer side.
Metal Warrior: Ring of Steel (Mech Fighter Book 7) Page 5
