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

by James David Victor

  What would happen if we hit one of them? Dane thought as he always did—before hastily realizing that he really didn’t want to find out. Ever.

  It was also supposed to be an impossibility, he remembered Corsoni once telling him—not that he wasn’t any less worried about hurtling through a tear between dimensions . . .

  Suddenly, the Gladius shifted as they followed the strange and incomprehensible routes of paired electrons. Another shift, and then another.

  “Corsoni!?” Bruce muttered in a voice of rising alarm between them.

  “It has never done that before. I don’t know why it is . . .” Joey was saying as they lurched once again and were apparently picking up speed.

  “We’re going further than we ever have before in jump travel. We’re as close to the Galactic Hub as any human has ever gone!” the pilot-engineer said in a not-very-enlightening explanation. “Maybe this is what happens? Like there are super nodes in the subspace?”

  Or we’re asking too much of our ship! Dane kept the dark thought to himself, closed his eyes, and breathed out once, in a low, steady breath.

  “My Skin will be as metal . . .” Dane muttered the beginning words of the Assisted Mechanized Marine Oath.

  “My Breath will be fire . . .” his words were immediately picked up by Bruce Cheng beside him, who nodded as his large gauntlets grasped the seat rests a little tighter. Then after him came the voices of everyone else in the Gladius: Captain Otepi intoning the oath in her high voice as sharp as cut glass, Joey’s voice like scraping granite, and the voices of the fresher marines, Isaias, Farouk, and Hendrix as they all spoke the words that described their mission and their purpose. The words that tied them together into one dangerous and undaunted whole.

  A family.

  “My Will is iron . . .”

  “My Purpose undaunted . . .”

  “First In and Last Out!” They all followed the traditional oath with the expected rejoinder, and finally:

  “BOO-yah! Marines!”

  And, at their shout, as if the universe had listened to their courage and found it pleasing, they were released from their strange journey, and the white light flared in a final wave around their ship and in front of their viewing windows. When it faded, it revealed regular space once more.

  They had arrived.

  16

  Travelers

  The skies are brighter here, was Dane’s first thought. He had grown used to seeing the brilliance of space from a Sol perspective (and only recently, from an Exin perspective when he had been captured and held hostage by them) Both of these visions had given him a sense of the vast, cosmic darks of space, scattered with the brilliant stars. Like a disparate, fragmented web. Like a net.

  Here, however, he was looking at a void that was filled with a solid hazed glow—a band of dull, faintly yellowish white like squinting at a distant sea fog.

  It’s the Galactic Hub, Dane suddenly realized.

  They were so close to the center of the Milky Way galaxy that they could literally see with their own eyes the brilliance of the stellar clouds and the dense “packedness” of the stars that congregated there, forever churning and being born and being pushed out and sucked in, in equal measure. Dane was momentarily aware of just how small they were in their tiny tin-can ship.

  “Guys . . .” He heard Bruce mutter in a tone that could have been awe or horror—or both.

  There was something else that was calling their attention and demanded their respect.

  A planet. One that was mostly a muddy ochre-red (like Mars. Rocky. Uninhabitable, Dane’s mind was already assessing) but it was speckled with occasional blue (seas!) and crisscrossed with brilliant, shining white fractal shapes.

  “What the stars am I looking at . . . ?” He heard Joey murmur in front of them where he sat in the cockpit of the Gladius.

  It was like a family of crazed, titanic spiders that spun crystal and sunlight instead of webs had taken up residence on the planet—or else, it bore a slight resemblance to the digital pictures of cities at night, lit only by the gridwork of street lights.

  But the scale of this radiance was vast. Too big, ever, to be the work of a normal mortal civilization.

  “Scans?” Dane asked, and Joey’s hands moved across the control board quickly.

  “Crystalline structure. Low frequency emissions, but . . .” Joey was saying and then gasped.

  “What is it, Corsoni?” Dane asked quickly.

  “Take a look at this. I’m picking up subsurface energetics. Massive energetics,” the engineer displayed a holo image of the planet, momentarily brilliant on the surface of the orb with the massive, continent-spanning crystal structures. But he cancelled the surface image to reveal deeper glowing shapes under the exterior of the planet—at least several miles down. There were dozens of these shapes that looked like long, glowing tapers of light which were also connected to each other by a tracery of shining white threads.

  “I think that it has to be some kind of immense, enormous geo-interlinked engineering project,” Corsoni, ever enthusiastic about science, informed them. “These Travelers must have tapped into the raw energies of the entire planet, using it to power their civilization. Perhaps they could even use that to alter the planet’s orbit, magnetism, climate . . . And that’s not all!”

  Corsoni pointed to a far portion of the stellar map and pulled it larger.

  It was an image of this system’s star, currently hidden behind the planet. (Dane realized that it should be nighttime on this side, but the brilliant lights of the crystal latticework were bright enough to illuminate the dark side of the planet).

  “Look, she’s a binary. Kind of,” Corsoni was saying, pointing to the projected scan images that reconstructed the distant star. It was indeed the shape of two objects, but one was bigger and blazingly large, while the other was tiny and small. There was a long helix corona of plasma moving like a constant shredding river between the two objects as they danced around each other.

  No one inside the Gladius—not Dane, no human, even—had ever seen anything like it.

  “It’s one central star, but it’s being held in an elliptical wobble by the much smaller dwarf object,” Corsoni explained. “I guess that could have happened naturally—but the magnetism and gravity well of that tiny white or blue dwarf would be so vast that, astrophysically-speaking, they should have morphed into one stellar object by now or else pulled each other apart in a supernova.”

  “Are you saying that the star itself is a construct? Artificial?” Dane heard Bruce say in awe.

  “Someone hacked that star’s nature. That is what I’m suggesting,” Corsoni said.

  “So, I take it that we’re in the right place,” growled the much-less-impressed voice of Captain Otepi over the ship communicator. She was currently waiting in the hold with Farouk, Hendrix, and Isaias—waiting for her deployment, Dane knew.

  “I don’t need to remind anyone that if we can trust anything that the Exin queen has told us, then we have to assume that the Exin keep tabs on this place, and that even now, they might be aware of our arrival,” she said tersely.

  “We get it, Captain,” Dane replied, just as determined. “We can’t waste any time. Corsoni—do you want to open a hailing frequency?”

  “Sergeant!” Otepi suddenly countermanded him. “That is not what my mission parameters state!”

  Dane opened and closed his mouth in frustration as he fought for the words. “But Captain—this is a contact event with an alien civilization! It’s only good manners to say hi . . .”

  “Irrelevant,” Otepi snapped back. “Anything we might say could be taken as an insult by an alien species. You were there at the science briefing.”

  Dane had been present at the mostly technical briefing, and he wished that he hadn’t, as Otepi summarized.

  “We are under orders to scout first, and, if our intelligence is proven correct—which it has—to make direct landfall.” Otepi said. “Any civilization this advanced
probably already knows we’re here, probably has already scanned us, knows everything about our capabilities, and read our mission logs. Heck—they probably already know who we are, what solar system we’re from, and what your mother did for a living already!”

  “We can’t know any of that,” Dane started to growl.

  “It’s the damn Kardashev Scale, Sergeant!” Otepi spat back at him, quoting a foundational principle of xeno-biology and extra-solar research: that an alien civilization that has managed to become space-borne rather than planetary must have reached certain levels of capability. Some sort of unity of purpose or society, for one (as sects, politics, and division would never allow the sort of species-wide effort it took to become truly exosolar). Even the Exin had, up until recently, been a unitary society—albeit a fascistic one, united under their queen.

  Another more important principle was that when a civilization moved truly beyond the planetary, and eventually became able to harness the energy directly from stars or the galactic subatomic structure itself, then that gave them ability to do magical, incredible things.

  They could create entire virtual construct worlds that were so completely indistinguishable from reality that it was supposed to be more likely that Dane was living inside one of their fantasies than that he was inside the Gladius, parked in the middle of space.

  Or that they would be beyond any human niceties or politics or diplomacy. That a hail from the mammalian humans might be seen as an insult to them, if they registered it at all.

  And that they would already have detected humanity and Earth and know about us before we even got here . . . Dane’s mind tried to catch up.

  “Our mission parameters have updated to: yes, they exist, and now, we make direct planetfall,” Otepi insisted. “They’re advanced enough to call the shots. We have no idea what their protocols are or any hopes of guessing what they are. We have to act to take control of the Traveler’s weapons directly, come what may.”

  “This is madness,” Bruce Cheng murmured.

  “Are you disobeying a superior officer, Cheng?” Otepi returned just as quickly. “You know that would be a court-martial offense in marine court alone, and then there’s mutiny on board a Marine Corps vessel, dereliction of duty, sabotage of mission . . .”

  “We get it, Captain,” Dane said with a snarl, before nodding at Corsoni. “Make the descent.”

  The only other direct intelligence they had about these people was that they were entirely eager to shoot down the Exin mother ship at first sight, and so far—they hadn’t done the same to them.

  If their guns were trained on them (and he was sure that they were) then there was absolutely nothing that anyone could do about it.

  Approximately ten minutes later, and the world of the Travelers nearly filled their cockpit screens, and they still had not been shot out of orbit.

  Yet.

  “Engaging stabilizers. Any particular place you want us to land, Captain?” Corsoni asked, shooting a sideways look at Dane as he said so, for Dane to roll his eyes.

  “The nearest of the subsurface engine constructs will do, pilot,” Otepi said and over her suit microphone, Dane could hear the clank and rasp of her metal as she must be preparing and limbering up.

  For what? Dane was at a loss to understand the woman or Marine Corps' top brass, either. Maybe they thought they could sneak in and steal the high-tech weapons, or maybe they believed that they had to make a show of courage to these new aliens—or maybe the top brass just believed that every alien would mean bad news for humanity.

  “Sarge—Captain, I mean!” Corsoni suddenly said, quickly throwing another apologetic wince in Dane’s direction. “We got contact! Directly ahead of us!”

  Corsoni called up the holo scans to see that there were ripples of jump light occurring above the horizon of the Traveler’s world. There were multiple ships flickering into existence. At least three.

  And each one was the large, three-nacelle “super mothers” of the War Master Okruk, and they skimmed across the dome of low orbit, using the planet to slingshot towards them and cut off the Gladius’s descent to the planet below.

  “They must have scan-drones in this system! They know we’re here!” Corsoni was shouting, as the three mother ships wasted no time in starting to spin and release a barrage of shots.

  “Get us to the surface, Corsoni!” Otepi commanded.

  “Evasive procedures!” Dane said at the same time, as the three mother ships shot towards them—and brilliant orbs of light exploded out from the Exin weapons modules . . .

  There was no time to fire back, just to avoid being turned into slagged metal.

  “Frack!” Corsoni pulled the Gladius in a tight barrel spin, kicking out at the positional thrusters and guidance rockets so that they were pointing almost directly down at the planet.

  Instantly, the Gladius started to shake and quake as they hit the gravity well and far magnetosphere of the alien planet head-on. Never a good move. Dane knew that it would be like throwing a rock directly at a wall—a hard object versus an incomparably harder one.

  “WARNING! Stabilizer overload!” The Gladius’s computers suddenly screamed, as the multiple pressures asked of the ship were obviously too much.

  “Where are they!?” Bruce Cheng was shouting, his gauntleted hands already on the firing guns of his copilot chair, turning to try and see where Okruk’s deadly emissaries were—but it was no good—the ships were moving too fast . . .

  “WARNING! Imminent—”

  The ship’s computer never had a chance to finish that sentence, as a terrible jolt reverberated through the entire craft, and suddenly they were spinning.

  “We’ve been hit!” Dane could hear Corsoni shouting as the room spun. The viewing windows ahead blurred with the brilliant glare of the planet, the flashing darkness of space, and everything edged with plasma fire as they tore through the thin atmosphere.

  “Hold on!” their pilot shouted.

  “I wasn’t planning on not holding on!” Dane managed to gasp, as Captain Otepi was already shouting.

  “Damage report!”

  But Corsoni was too busy trying to control their free-fall tumble, and there were too many warnings and alerts for him to make sense of. Stabilizers gone. Aerofoils inoperative. Outer hull plates weakening.

  “Aim for the water!” Dane managed to shout as their forward screens entirely hazed over with the burn of entry. Even a planet with a seemingly thin atmosphere like this one had enough collected gasses for them to turn into a manmade comet.

  “What water!?” Corsoni shouted back, as the scans in the holoscreen jagged and skewed crazily from one side to another.

  And then they hit something, and it felt like an enormous, implacable hand.

  17

  Pressure

  “Dane, wake up! Wake up!” Dane could hear someone shouting. When he finally opened his eyes, he saw the faceplate of Captain Otepi, with her shadowed face inside the visor itself, one good eye glaring at him and her other, robotic module beside it glowing with a dim red light.

  “Hgnh?” Dane, for a brief moment, thought that this might be a very cruel introduction to heaven—if he and everyone else had died on board the Gladius, then it was most unfair that he would have to spend eternity with the rather prissy and very grumpy Captain Otepi reminding him how he had failed.

  “Get your act together, Sergeant! Your marines need you!” she said, cuffing him heavily across the side of his own helmet with enough force to make his head rebound and for him to taste blood in his mouth.

  Urk, he thought. He wasn’t dead. Either that or heaven was a whole lot more painful than he had thought it would be.

  With the pain came the crash of consciousness—and noise. There was a cacophony of alarms once again sounding, and none of them seemed to make sense.

  “Bruce? Joey?” Dane said as Otepi pulled him to his feet.

  “Operational,” Otepi said in a rather functional, Marine Corps kind of way. “They�
��re at the launch hold, trying to figure out how to hold back a few gigatons of water.”

  “What!?” Dane said, but his eyes were drawn to the cockpit’s screen plate, and outside—

  Blue.

  The cerulean blue of water, growing darker and darker the further out he looked. Streams of bubbles broke free from their outer hull and headed up.

  “Corsoni found the water!” Dane congratulated. No wonder we’re not dead!

  “Corsoni found a stars-be-damned sea!” Otepi was saying as she strode at a fast jog out of the cockpit and down the central avenue to the launch bay, with Dane close behind.

  “Our suit seals will be good for the water and pressure, and the AMPs have enough stored oxygen,” she was saying as they arrived at the main launch hold, where Hendrix, Farouk, Isaias, and the others were already wading in a couple feet of alien ocean. The Gladius clearly had sprung leaks from somewhere—and although the other doors were sealed, it was only a matter of time before the immense weight and pressure of the ocean outside tore them open.

  “If we open the doors, then the influx will likely crush us,” Corsoni was saying beside the launch bay doors. They were designed for the cold and dry of planetary atmospheres or space-walks, not with an ocean lying against them.

  “We’ve got our AMP suits,” Bruce, on the other side of him, was saying.

  “Not versus an ocean, guy,” Corsoni said darkly. “We could well survive, but we can’t control it. Who knows who will get a broken limb or neck in the tidal wave?”

  “But . . . it’s like space, right?” Dane’s mind suddenly clicked.

  “What, large and uncaring?” Farouk, standing at the back of the canted cargo hall, said suspiciously.

  “No, differential pressures,” Dane pointed out. “Can we repressurize this hold? Fill it with a couple atmospheres maybe, then . . .”

  “Then we blow the doors!” Corsoni finished for him with a savage grin behind his own faceplate. “You’re a genius, Williams. A loss to engineering school.” He got to work, explaining how the explosion would force the doors outwards, and the bubble of pressurized oxygen inside the hold would be forced out . . .