Metal Warrior: Ring of Steel (Mech Fighter Book 7)

by James David Victor

  Fzzt!

  A blast of purple-and-crimson light burst against the side of the pillar that Dane was crouching beside. Private Isaias was a few yards away from him, and there were still more Exin coming down the corridor.

  Knowing he had very little time indeed, Dane called up the tactics program in his HUD and shot over the command to Private Isaias.

  >Command Interface / Williams, Dane (SGT) . . .

  >>Operations Choice: Pincer . . .

  “Got it!” He heard Isaias nod that he understood the classic attack move, as two green attack vectors materialized on their faceplate HUDs. Dane’s remained stationary while Isaias’ performed a curving arc towards the enemy.

  Dane waited for a break in the firing, then—

  “Go! Go! Go!” He popped out from his crouch and fired a volley in the Exin’s direction, before adjusting his aim to fire a few warning shots back towards the corridor—and the other converging Exin. Then he turned back again to keep the original target under fire.

  In the meantime, Isaias had jumped outwards into a roll across the floor to the next pillar, then sprang up to leap towards the next stack of crates.

  “Skreckh!” The Exin ahead had spotted the movement, but if it wanted to respond, it would have to turn its back to Dane, who fired another volley to keep it in place.

  “Home!” Isaias called as he slid into position, just as the other Exin arrived at the mouth of the cargo hold.

  Frack! Dane had a moment to skid to the other side of the pillar before a thunder of bolts slammed into it and the floors around him.

  “I got this!” Isaias called, firing on “his” Exin, as Dane realized that the ones attacking him hadn’t stopped. They weren’t marines, and they didn’t think like humans, who might have waited at the corner of the hold and used their cover to isolate him, their enemy.

  No, instead, the three Exin four-armed warriors, with flaring mandible parts and bone and metalized scales were already leaping forward across the space to rush him.

  Damn it!

  Dane heard the blister of shots from Isaias as he scrabbled to his feet, firing one blast from his pulse rifle at almost point-blank range at the first Exin (blowing it backwards). Then a black-taloned claw caught him on the side of the helmet, and he was suddenly flying to the floor.

  >Suit Impact! Faceplate 70% . . .

  “Argk . . .” Dane could hear the snarls and shouts of fighting from somewhere nearby—but right now he was shoving himself over—realizing that his hands were not holding his rifle . . .

  “SKRARGH!”

  >Suit Impact! Breastplate 80% . . .

  Dane caught a flicker of shadow as something very large landed on his chest. The something large was one of the Exin, who was even now raising its shell gun to hammer it down on Dane’s faceplate.

  No! The marine jerked to one side instinctively, but the resounding blow still sent shock waves through his neck and shoulders as he rebounded off the ground.

  >Suit Impact! Faceplate 50% . . .

  “Get off!” Dane jackknifed—or tried to, anyway—and the worst that he did was manage to dislodge the hold that the Exin had on him with two of its arms. It was enough for him to squirm and strike out to shove the Exin back just a little.

  “Sarge! Magnetize!” he heard Isaias shouting, but Dane had no time to do anything other than fight for his life. He snatched his Field Blade from his back and swept it in front of him as a terrible grinding sound filled the cargo room.

  Schtick! His blow connected with one of the Exin’s raised arms, spilling ichor and a savage, chittering scream as it did so—but the creature responded with a fierce blow inside of Dane’s backswing—

  >Suit Impact! Faceplate 30% . . .

  There was a sudden crack and a spiderweb of hairline fractures spread through one of the layers of his faceplate’s crystal glass. It still held, thankfully—but for how much longer?

  “Sarge!” Isaias was shouting in alarm, as Dane swiped out at his enemy again, and traded a blow with another of the Exin warriors on his right. There were too many of them. There had to be at least three surrounding him, there were—

  None.

  Huh?

  >Environmental Warning! Atmospheric pressure dropping rapidly! Warning! . . .

  Flaring orange lights flickered across Dane’s faceplate in the moments before he felt the suction pull at him. The three Exin warrior-caste that had been about to disembowel him were being dragged backwards to one end of the cargo hall . . . Towards the semi-circular doors, which were starting to rise open, revealing the stellar glint of the void.

  And Dane found that he was being dragged towards that fate too. The reason the Exin had been sucked into the increasing vacuum first was because they had been standing up—and Dane was heavier inside of his Assisted Mechanized Plate suit. But physics were unstoppable, and one set of pillars swept past him as his boots left the metal floor.

  “Magnetize boots! Maximum magnetize!” Dane yelled in alarm as the cargo doors swept towards him inexorably. Suddenly, he was slamming into the ground, the reverberations causing his knees and hips to scream in pain despite all of the padding and support bracing that he wore.

  “Sss—” The sound was thin and a fraction of what it should have been in a normal atmosphere, but the enraged shriek of one of his enemy reached his suit microphones a second before he felt the grab of hardened claws on his shoulders and arms.

  “Ooof!” Dane was dragged forwards a few feet, as one of the Exin held onto him, hanging and flailing vertically from his arm as it threatened to pull him, too, out into the void.

  Isaias found a way to open the cargo doors! A small, rather slow part of Dane’s mind caught up with him.

  >Suit Impact! Shoulder-plate 60% . . .

  Claws were crunching and piercing their way into his shoulder. Even through the AMP suit, he could feel the pressure and the grind of metal on his own flesh.

  “I told you—” Dane shouted, swinging his Field Blade, “to get off me!”

  “Skra—!”

  His blow cleaved the Exin’s arm at the elbow joint, and it was suddenly somersaulting backwards through the void, along with its fellows. Dane was rocking forward, grabbing onto anything to stop himself from losing his footing in the effort of his blow.

  “Gotcha!” It was Isaias’ hand, clamping onto his as the private was himself holding onto the last pillar before the cargo bay doors and dragging Dane backwards.

  Wham! Williams and Isaias hit the floor, and the younger Orbital Marine was hammering on the door controls he had found, for the green-black metal to start grinding downwards again.

  “Quick thinking, Private,” Dane congratulated him in between gasps. The nearness of space, even in all of its starry glory, was still an existentially sobering thought. Even inside his Assisted Mechanized Plate, a suit especially designed to withstand extreme environments, alien habitats, and zero-G, there was an intrinsic, animal part of Dane that realized that he was nothing but a small mammal inside a tin can, at the whim of cosmic forces.

  “Uh . . . Sarge?” he heard Isaias say worriedly, as Dane blinked himself out of his more morbid thoughts.

  “Yes? Are there more?” he said, making sure that his suit’s boots were set to their maximum magnetization as he cast a look back into the rest of the cargo hold and the corridor beyond it. The soldier in him fully expected to see more snarling, taloned, and scaled bodies arriving.

  But there were none, and that was not what Isaias had been trying to draw his attention to at all.

  “No, sir, well—not in here, if you get my drift,” Isaias was saying in a very worried tone, gesturing towards the gap between door and floor where it was finally meeting the floor.

  There was the inky dark of space, dusted with the hazy brilliance of distant stars. It was darker out here on the edge of the solar system than it was deeper inside, near the interior. Pluto was, after all, one of the last planetoids aside Eris and Ketu, and there were no super-bright
Jupiters or Venuses or Neptunes or even Sol itself to attract their vision.

  Then just what the doohickory frack is THAT!? Dane thought, as a very bright star started to move across the radically closing gap. He only saw it for a moment, but he was certain that it was getting bigger. If he absolutely had to call it, he would probably have insisted that it had a slight purplish hue to its corona.

  Just like the light of subspace atomics being torn apart whenever a ship uses a jump gate . . .

  “Only the Exin mother ships don’t use the stationary jump gates, do they?” Dane realized. No. They had their own jump engines, just like this very Exin mother ship that he was standing inside did. Or had, anyway, before the Travelers turned it into Swiss cheese.

  So outside, there was another ship with warp capabilities, just arriving out of its own wormhole.

  And it had to be an Exin mother ship, as that was the only type that Dane knew about which was even remotely capable of generating its own jump travel.

  “Well . . .” Dane murmured to himself or Isaias beside him, he wasn’t sure which, “It looks like the emergency message got through to War Master Okruk, doesn’t it?”

  12

  An Unlikely Crew

  “Farouk! What’s the sit-rep on the Marine Servers!?” Dane was shouting over the suit-to-suit comms even as he and Isaias ran back towards the command-and-control room.

  “Sir!? Sir—I think we’ve got a problem.” Farouk’s voice came back in a crackle of static, phasing in and out as whatever strange metal alloys and components used in this Exin craft disrupted their communications.

  “I know! A nice big Exin mother ship. Possibly an entire battle group, responding to the damn SOS sent just a moment ago!” Dane snarled. “I need you all out of there and moving, yesterday. We can make it to the marine starfighters.”

  “You humans have as much brains as a Ryleth’ian frole!” the Exin queen’s voice suddenly sounded over the entire ship’s external speaker system.

  “Who asked her?” Isaias growled, and for once, Dane was inclined to agree. He was fast getting tired of her unceasing insults to their ability and prowess—especially since they had so far managed to fight off at least two waves of Exin warrior caste, in far greater numbers, and were currently the Exin queen’s only chance at surviving the next hour! Dane was about to ask Farouk to remind their guest of this fact in any way that he saw fit, when the queen’s voice spoke once again over the mother ship’s speakers. Unfortunately, what she said next made quite a lot of sense.

  “That is the signal of a mother ship. A Surek-class mother ship, one of the modern varieties, but still not as advanced as this one, the Royal Mother Ship!” The queen chittered and shrieked, and Dane’s translation bug conveyed over the marine suit-to-suit channels.

  “Were my ship not damaged, we would have a good chance at defeating it!” she continued.

  “Does someone want to point out the obvious to Her Majesty?” Dane heard Hendrix growl from his end of the suit comms.

  “Your mere fighter craft are no match for it—not in terms of speed or firepower. Each Surek can be equipped with up to thirty Exin fighter craft of its own! Were you to flee, they would only hunt you down,” the queen stated.

  “And what would you have us do!?” Dane heard Farouk shout and imagined the tense scene playing out in the halls above them somewhere.

  “She wants us to fight,” Dane answered for her (a fact he hated, it had to be said). It was even worse that the queen was right.

  “She’s telling us that we have a better chance of fighting off this other mother ship from the controls of this one,” Dane interpreted. “But Her Majesty is forgetting that this thing is a ruin and a wreck! It hasn’t even got operational engines!”

  “Have any of you even attempted to look at them? To try?” The queen asked them all imperiously.

  “Sarge?” It was Farouk. “We haven’t got a lot of time. Scans show that the enemy vessel is making a beeline for us . . .”

  “The Travelers took out our main jump engine mainframe. We still have positional and auxiliary movement thrusters . . .” the queen was stating, as Dane swore.

  “Farouk, Marine Central?” he asked quickly.

  “Message sent using the mother ship’s transmitter array. Good and strong. They should already have received it. I used all the up-to-date security codes I know, but it’s still going to be laced with Exin code. The Marine Corps might think that this is a trap.”

  “It was a trap,” Dane muttered to himself, thinking of the warrior caste that had been waiting for them. “But Lashmeier signed off on this mission himself,” the sergeant pointed out. “He’ll have already registered the loss of the Pluto Deep Space Array and probably has drones of marine starfighters on their way as we speak. He’ll receive the message. He’ll figure out that it’s from us.” Dane hoped.

  “How long until they get here?” the sergeant called as his feet carried him on the final leg towards the command-and-control room. “And can you, Your Majesty, teach us how to fight in this thing before they use us as target practice?” he demanded of the queen.

  Her answer came back a fraction of a second later, as the doors to the control room swung open, and he saw the queen standing in front of her command chair throne. And, although her face was entirely alien to him, Dane was certain that the way that her mandibles twitched suggested that she was grinning.

  “This is my ship, Sergeant. And I can teach anything.”

  “Sweet stars! Which ones are the lower left quadrant thrusters again!?” Hendrix was shouting as he wrestled with the strange gears and roundel controls of the Exin mother ship.

  “Sek’yrajh!” the Exin queen snapped at him, which Dane’s bug translated as, “By your left foot, human! Must you have all the intelligence of an [ERROR: UNDEFINED] slub worm?!”

  Hendrix shot the queen a dark look, but there was no time to assess the man’s intelligence compared to whatever creature the queen knew so well, as the first lancing bolts of pulse fire struck their ship.

  “WARNING!” The control room speakers shouted in Exin tongue, but once again immediately translated. “Damage to Section 14 Hull! Dispatching Repair Drones.”

  “Sarge . . .” Farouk, at what they understood to be the comms board, said with urgency. It was clear to see just what Private Farouk was concerned about, as he flicked a hand to the holoscreens ahead, which showed the hardware coming for them.

  At first the lights were distant, but at Farouk’s arm gesture, they magnified in a heartbeat, revealing the shape of another three-part Exin mother ship screaming towards them, surrounded by the haze of brilliant, neon gasses.

  “Frack,” Dane muttered, mostly to himself, but everyone in the room shared his estimation (apart from perhaps the Exin queen, but no one could really tell for sure).

  The ship outside had the same three long, tubular external thruster drives connected to the main body of the pendulous Exin craft that theirs did. But that was where the comparison ended, because it was like comparing two wolfhounds—one which was old and hadn’t hunted anything in years—and the other which was at the fighting prime of its life.

  The opposing ship before them was sleeker and somehow meaner than their own, Dane saw immediately. Where the hull of their captured ship was riven with the burns and punctures of the Travelers’ attack, this one ahead was pristine and ready for violence. It also appeared to be made of a darker, closer-fitting skin of blue-black metal, which Dane at once imagined must be an upgraded version of whatever their own ship was hulled with.

  She spun as she swept forward, moving in a steady corkscrew motion that made Dane feel slightly sick even just gazing upon it. He could make out arrays of glittering points of the forward nubs of the thrusters, which he took to be scanners and weapons pods. Are there that many on this ship? he wondered distractedly, before calling.

  “Bring us around, Hendrix! Let’s not try to give them such a huge target!”

  “Easier said than done
, Sarge, when half of your boat has been shot to pieces,” Dane heard his marine mutter—which would have been cause for another citation, Dane had a heartbeat to think, if, you know—they might survive anything longer than the next ten minutes.

  As Dane watched, there were flares of lights along the enemy vessel’s spinning length. Spilling out from her body came a string of swirling lights.

  What is that? he thought—before the lights suddenly flared a little brighter and shot forwards.

  “We got corkscrews!” Dane shouted, referring to what in human hardware would be called corkscrew missiles—deployed spinning rockets flung out from the weapons ports of a vessel, before spinning forward on some kind of heat-seeking or preplanned trajectory . . .

  “Ten seconds until impact!” Farouk called. “What defenses!?”

  “Skragh!” the Exin queen snorted where she sat behind and above Dane and all the rest of them in the command throne. It appeared to be just a gesture of annoyance, as there was no accompanying beep of translation. The queen’s hands buzzed over her own armrest controls, however. A series of glowing Exin glyphs scrolled down the screen as their ship started to creakingly, achingly, turn.

  “There!” Isaias was saying from his own seat beside Dane, pointing at one of the smaller in-set holo screens of the Exin craft, which showed a variety of modules activating and opening at the Queen of the Exin’s apparent command, for flares of silvered streamers to hurl themselves into the void.

  “What is that!?” Dane frowned, and then the answer was obvious. “Chaff! We have chaff!” he said, referring to the mechanism that spread materials (which in human tech he knew to be aluminium foil or wire) which would confuse targeting scanners.

  But the Exin technology, a few hundred years more developed than even the cutting edge of human military intelligence, worked a little differently. Dane saw the glittering cloud of sparkling metal—stuff—flow around the slow-moving Exin mother ship. Then, at another single-word command of the queen, it suddenly crackled with the barest blue glow of electricity or magnetic ionization.