But Dane was already flinging himself forward once again as the Traveler Mech recalibrated, and he was turning, zigzagging deeper into the crystal city.
I need a particular place. There’s got to be one of these buildings that match it! he thought—just as there was the smash and tinkle of crystal shattering behind him.
“What the . . . ?” The sergeant threw a brief look over his shoulder to see that the Traveler Mech had leapt, springing like a kangaroo or some strange insect, to crash straight through the crystal archways and send them shattering.
Oh frack. If the Mech was that strong, either from its mass or from its servo-strength, that it could smash through apparently solid rock crystal, then it could probably easily smash its way through the outer hulls of spaceships!
Dane took a turn down one of the “streets” as another beam tore up the dirt behind him. But in his mind, he kept the picture of one clue: the Traveler Mech’s landing had broken open one of the walls of the crystal buildings, revealing a smooth hallway beyond, whose ceiling, floors, and walls were made of the same stuff. Smooth. Shiny. Reflective.
Where? Where? He tried to double back, to find another way to that perfect mirror room, when the ground shook, and there was an explosion of crystal fragments from nearby . . .
With a sudden explosion of scintillating rock crystals, the Traveler Mech burst out of one of the buildings ahead of Dane. The marine was already running at full tilt as it turned to sweep one three-jointed metal arm straight for him.
“Thrusters!” Dane hissed in alarm as he leapt, before feeling the kick of the pulse thrusters on his back (apparently undamaged by his time submerged in the alien sea). He was thrown forwards and upwards in the air, rolling as he flew—
He almost made it.
But the Traveler Mech was fast. Very fast. Its arm lashed out as Dane flew upwards, hoping to leapfrog over the enemy. But with a metal crash which felt like being hit by an earthquake, the top galvanized talons of the creature struck Dane’s leg.
“Argh!”
>Suit Impact! Left Leg-plate 10% . . . Plate compromised!
Pain surged through Dane’s leg. The marine snarled in agony as he felt the infrastructure of his suit collapsing around the foam pads of his leg and the meat of his calf as well.
Thump! And then he was hitting the roof of one of the crystal buildings and was skidding across its opaque, glittering surface.
“Urgh . . .” Dane had no time to assess whether his leg was broken as he pushed himself to his feet, felt the jolt of agony race up his hip. He could still bend his knee. He could sort of put weight on it too.
And he would have to. The ceiling-floor of whatever Traveler building he was currently on top of burst upwards as the Traveler Mech smashed one of its fists straight through it behind him.
Dane felt the roof underneath him heave as cracks shot through the crystal structure, and the plate he was on started to tilt back towards his enemy.
He ran as fast as he could towards the end of the building.
“Move it, move it!” He demanded of himself as the floor continued to tilt, now at fifteen degrees, now at thirty. He was charging uphill, every step sending daggers of pain into his hips—and a small part of him recalled a previous time before, when the Exinase virus would do the same thing. It would flare up as it attacked his nervous system. It would seek to cripple him, render him useless.
No.
But this marine had learned a few ways to deal with pain. He had spent the last four or five years living with it daily, until he had been unwittingly healed by the Exin, that is. Dane’s animal instincts recalled what he had to do in order to navigate this extra punishment. He was, perhaps, one of the few people alive who had been asked to suffer and develop those skills, alongside his marine training.
“Get up.” He remembered the words of Staff Sergeant Lashmeier during one such exercise, when he was sure that the Exinase would kill him, and he had felt as weak as a baby.
“Are you going to be a marine? Are you going to let that thing beat you!?” He recalled again as his heart fought against the hard wall of hurt. Lashmeier hadn’t spared Dane anything during boot camp training, and then the subsequent Orbital Marine training, either. Dane recalled hating him then, but now, he knew what the old man had been attempting to prove to him.
That expectations create reality. Dane saw his target: a perfectly octagonal hatchway in the roof, still thirty feet away.
CRASH! Behind him, the next part of the roof shattered upwards as another of the Traveler Mech’s fists burst through it. The ceiling was now tilting almost at a fifty-degree angle, and it felt as though Dane was only moving ahead on momentum and determination alone.
It wasn’t that Lashmeier had wanted Dane to ignore the Exinase virus that had been chewing him up from the inside, the sergeant now understood. It was instead this simple formula: that if Dane could somehow learn to master it, then he would be able to perform at marine standards despite his pain—and therein lay the secret.
If Dane could out-perform his own bodily hurt, then what he could achieve was only limited to will and determination alone.
And Dane had seen the footage of the Tol’rumaa. He had seen the ruins of Washington, of Detroit, New Sanctuary, and Columbus. He had seen his fellow marines shot out of orbit or flung into burning, fiery deaths over Jupiter. He had held the body of dying brothers when Exin pulse weapons and flying blades had taken them. He knew what the Exin were capable of, and he wasn’t about to let that happen again. Not on his watch.
I’ve come too far, Dane knew, felt, and jumped . . .
He skidded across the roof, his body finding the hatchway to the inside of the alien structure as the roof at the back of his feet exploded upwards with one sweep of another fist.
Thump! He hit the floor from fifteen feet up, and his leg erupted with pain. He felt something crack, a sound like a snapping twig, and his eyes instantly watered as he rolled . . .
. . . straight to the feet of the Traveler Mech, now walking through the crystal building itself.
But, despite his pain, this was precisely what Dane had wanted. The creature was standing barely under the ceiling, mostly filling the crystal hall with its bulk as Dane snarled up at it. “Come and get me!”
He saw the forward, predatory nose of the thing flare a brilliant white circle as it turned its arrowlike carriage to look straight at him.
“Thrusters!” Dane called, praying that at least they still worked, as there was a glare of solid-beam blue-white light from straight above him.
He felt the kick to his back as he was thrown to one side, his back pulse thrusters burning at maximum to slam him into one of the walls. There was an almighty flash of concentrated light . . .
“Ach!” Even the visual filters on Dane’s faceplate weren’t enough to stop the burning afterimages searing into his eyes as other warning alarms went off inside his suit. He had crashed into the far wall. It had done damage to his outer plate. A medical scan of his leg was bad. It suggested aborting his current mission and radioing for immediate extraction.
But Dane had no time for anything but his enemy as he turned to see—
That his strategy had paid off. The Traveler Mech was taking one stumbling half step backwards, its chassis starting to raise as if it was looking upwards in surprise or shock.
And there was a great big smoking hole just to the left of its body and under its carriage. The Traveler Mech had fired its pure-white pulse beam at its dedicated target, as Dane had been too close for the arms or legs to reach without backing up, and Dane had guessed that if the Traveler Mech was a robot, then it would be programmed to use the easiest and quickest weapon first.
It had, clearly.
The outside of these alien buildings were fractal crystal shapes, a thousand shining surfaces for the pulse beam to refract and break apart on—but the insides of the buildings were somehow smoothed and polished, forming constant mirror surfaces.
And the pulse
beam had shot through the place where Dane had crouched, hit the wall behind, and then bounced with the same strength of the mirror wall to the mirror floor, perfectly striking its firer in the face.
With a sudden series of sparks from its giant, fist-sized hole in its body, the Traveler Mech suddenly leaned back and crashed to the floor, stilled and silent.
Sergeant Dane Williams had won. He had defeated the challenge set to him by the Passed On.
19
Epilogue: Gifts from Distant Stars
“And you’re sure they won’t give us those ones instead?” Bruce Cheng grumbled as he sat up, rubbing his head, and regarded the new and rebuilt view screen of the Gladius.
They were watching the distant scan images of brilliant pillars of white light lancing up through the alien skies, perfectly hitting the three Exin mother ships that had been patrolling the Exin planet.
“Might be a bit big for the Gladius,” Joey was saying, pointing at another of their ship’s scans, which showed that these giant planetary defense beams came from the subsurface engines themselves—each unit could easily be half a mile long.
“And they gave us the schematics for their pulse stabilization technology,” Captain Otepi said, pointing to the strange crystal octagon data chip that blinked with light every time that it neared the ship’s computer. It didn’t even need a physical state interface, apparently, as it would remotely “open” and allow access through human server configurations thanks to some strange biological DNA stamp reader (or so Dane remembered the Traveler inside Otepi saying).
Now though, Captain Otepi was back to normal. Which meant that she was glaring at everyone in the cockpit, automatically assuming them to be either idiots or mutineers. She claimed to have no recollection of having her body taken over by the ancient aliens, just as Bruce, Joey, and the others did not remember a thing since they entered the water.
It had been up to Dane to tell them what had happened, how he had been tested for his need to survive against one of the Traveler Mechs: one of the very same contingent that were even now walking into a perfect white metal crates on the surface of the Traveler world. Dane counted at least twenty, if not more.
“They can have human drivers,” Joey crowed with delight as he pinged the Traveler data crystal and scanned through the technical drawings for each of their new weaponry. “They can function on autopilot or be auto-linked to a human ‘captain’ who drives one or each can have a human pilot,” he said in admiration. “And they certainly look pretty tough, if you ask me—those metals are unlike anything that I have ever seen before.”
“There will have to be rigorous Marine Control testing before we deploy them!” Otepi said sharply, which Dane had, of course, been expecting. But he also had a secret belief that they would see battlefield operation much sooner than Otepi guessed, as the Marine Command would know that War Master Okruk presented a far greater threat than the Exin queen ever did.
As well as the Traveler Mech, the Passed On aliens had apparently given them the designs for a more efficient and more powerful pulse-beam technology (“And it looks like the same principles could conceivably lead to force fields—imagine that!” Joey had thrown his scientific eye over the numbers and calculations and been very pleased indeed).
Not only that, but when Dane had defeated the Traveler Mech, he had been led back to the others by a glowing series of octagons on the floor to find them waking up, and that the Gladius was standing on dry land, apparently rebuilt from its crash and without any sign of watery invasion. It had taken Joey no time at all to inspect her and declare her fit for duty, and now they were sitting in the cockpit, awaiting takeoff, and for the time window for their own Deployment Gate jump portal to open.
“Ready to launch when you are, boss.” Joey nodded to Sergeant Williams, and then suddenly realized that Captain Otepi was still there and technically the superior officer. She scowled briefly, but then nodded for Dane to continue.
“Begin launch sequence,” Dane said, leaning back in his copilot chair. His suit was still pretty smashed up, and he had been pumped full of enough auto-medicines so that his leg didn’t quite feel as though it was going to fall off at any minute (he had a fracture, apparently. Not a full break. Nothing that the marine medical suites couldn’t deal with).
They would have to build their own mega-lasers powerful enough to shoot out the Tol’rumaa when it came, and they would also have to rapidly develop their deep space array scanners to detect the continent-killing comet from far enough away to give them time to point and shoot.
But Dane felt good. He felt like they had a chance now, at least.
A chance to beat the Exin for good. A chance to win.
See what happens next in Steel Curtain.
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Thank You For Reading
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Metal Warrior: Ring of Steel (Mech Fighter Book 7) Page 13
