Metal Warrior: Precious Metal (Mech Fighter Book 5)

by James David Victor

  “Sckrargh!” The creature landed on Hopskirk, throwing him to the floor and tumbling into a roll of lizard or insect-like limbs . . .

  “Contact!” Dane roared, turning his pulse rifle at the creature—

  But it was too fast. It had already sprung at Dane. Suddenly, his visor was filled with the gruesome sight of the thing’s three-part mandible jaw and the midnight, glooming blue and green of the thing’s scales as two clawed hands clutched at his shoulders—and then another two—stabbing into the chest of his suit as he was bowled over.

  >Suit impact! Breastplate 65% . . .

  “Ugh!” Dane pulled the trigger of his pulse rifle, but the shot went wild as he hit the floor, the creature springing off him in one eel-quick movement. Since when do they have four arms!? The thought flashed through Dane’s mind, but he was already turning himself and pushing himself up—to see that the creature had leapt past Bruce Cheng easily on its backwards-jointed legs to spring at the glowing pyramid, slapping one four-taloned claw on its surface . . .

  For the pyramid to suddenly flash with a bright, incandescent light.

  Dane had no idea what the thing was doing, but he was sure that it was bad. “Stop it!” he yelled, just as Bruce let off a burst of purple pulse bolts that slammed into the back of the creature, throwing it from the side of the pyramid . . .

  Tsss! For another hiss of steam, and then another to sound from the other two largest “tubes” of the structure.

  It’s a three-sided pyramid, Dane realized. And there were two more Exin emerging to add to the one that had already emerged . . .

  “We have to stop them!” Dane threw himself around to the nearest opening sarcophagi, just as the four-armed, super-large Exin jumped through it . . .

  “Ack!” Dane caught it in midair with a sweep of his rifle. It was too close and moving too fast to fire at . . . He swept the thing’s main, larger arms out the way as the smaller ones closed in on him. A flash of sparks as they raked the already buckled and scratched surface of his orbital AMP suit.

  >Suit impact! Breastplate 45% . . .

  But Dane had reversed the grip on the pulse rifle and slammed at the thing’s head. There was a crunch as the metal stock hit scale, sending it staggering backwards—

  “Bruce! Hopskirk!?” Dane called out, hearing pulse shots firing behind him.

  Dane leveled his pulse rifle as the Exin in front of him jumped to one side . . .

  Just as the first Exin to leave Hopskirk’s stasis tube blind-sided him, sweeping his claws against the man’s faceplate and dashing him to the ground.

  “Argh!”

  >Suit impact! Faceplate 70% . . .

  Dane rolled, but it was already too late—the second Exin that he had been attempting to stop had reached the pyramid and had slapped one clawed hand to the surface. The cavern flared with another incandescent flash of light.

  “Frackit!” Dane barely had the time to lift his pulse rifle before the first Exin was pouncing on him. He fired a shot straight at the creature’s chest for it to make a screeching squeal of a noise before slamming into him.

  “Get off!” Dane yelled, shoving and kicking at the thing—but it was already dead. His shot had been a lucky one and had found the only vulnerable spot that these creatures appeared to have—just above where their collarbones should be and under the hardened, chitinous plating that seemed to form their neck.

  But just as Dane heaved the heavy thing off him, there was another flash from the pyramid. All three Exin had managed to get to it—and do what!? Dane had no time to consider as he saw that Bruce was already engaged in a tackling brawl with one of them. Hopskirk crashed to the floor once more as the Exin that had attacked him turned and bounded towards the only other exiting corridor.

  “Hopskirk—speak to me!” Dane said, checking the Marine’s vital signs on his sensor’s readouts.

  >SGT HOPSKIRK, J . . . COMPROMISED . . .

  He was down, but the readings underneath it told Dane that the Marine’s heart rate was fast.

  “Go! Get after it!” Hopskirk called out in an anguished yell all the same. Dane took off.

  He had to duck slightly to fit into this smaller tunnel, but he wasn’t far behind the skittering shape that was even now surging ahead of him. There was a much brighter light at the further end, which Dane believed had to be a way out. This Exin had done what it was released to do, and now it was running. It was hunched like he was, holding its smaller arms close to its body as it scrabbled and made a terrible chittering noise at the same time.

  However, the Exin did not have the advantage of coming equipped with super-heated plasma firearms, did it? Dane thought as he started firing the yellow-white bolts of light from his pulse rifle at the creature. The first missed and hit the wall of the tunnel. The second hit it on the leg, flinging it to one side as it shrieked.

  “I got you!” Dane snarled at it, firing again and again. The creature was hit multiple times, but it still managed to launch itself into the light and disappear.

  “Frack!” Dane started to run, and it was only a few minutes before his eyes were blinded by the light of the outside jungle for a moment as he hit the forest floor and rolled . . .

  To find himself under an outcrop of black rock—a cliff, really—with the tunnel at its base. In front of him was a wide hollow in the jungle, with the many trunks and stems of the breathing trees rising up to form a natural hollow at the base of the cliff.

  And there was also the struggling body of the last Exin, rattling in its last death cry as the thing collapsed and was stilled, still reaching out towards the prey that it had been chasing when it was so rudely interrupted by Dane’s super-heated plasma.

  It was Professor Honshou.

  11

  The Message

  “No!” Dane hurried towards the professor, keeping his rifle trained on the stilled alien, to crouch at Honshou’s side. He saw that there was still a flicker of life from the once-human man.

  “Williams!?” It was Bruce over the suit-to-suit communicator. “We’re good,” Dane heard, before there was a glitch of static to cut the man off for a moment. Then the sound blared back to life again.

  “Enemies neutralized—but something weird is happening with this pyramid. It seems to be flashing faster now, like it’s cycling up for something . . .”

  “And the professor ran away in the firefight!” Hopskirk butted in over the group channel.

  “I’m on it,” Dane said tersely, opening the small medical unit on the AMP suit’s utility belt to snatch up adrenaline and stimulants. He might not be able to do much else for the professor, but there was a chance that these would keep him alive. A very small chance.

  “The professor is out here with me. He’s injured . . .” Dane searched the man’s suit for any piece of exposed flesh, and in the end, had to settle for the tears in the encounter suit that the claws of the Exin had sliced in the attack.

  “I don’t like that pyramid thing—can you stop it!? Turn it off!?” Dane jabbed the auto-injector down, but nothing happened.

  “Oh frack, oh frack. We need him alive!” Dane growled, instead switching to the wound spray to try and seal the terrible gash on the man’s back. Dane worked quickly, knowing that every second counted, and that they needed to know just what had happened to the expedition here on Planet 892.

  Suddenly, the dying man made a wheezing noise and spluttered, but it was very weak. When Dane looked at him, he could see that his strangely yellow eyes were going in and out of focus all the time.

  “Professor? Professor—hang in there. We’re going to help you . . .” Dane whispered, then remembered the man’s serum, still clutched in his hand. “Will this work? It might help you for just a bit . . .” he whispered hopefully, placing a large gauntlet on the man’s outstretched, quivering hand.

  “Too late . . . too late now . . .” the professor was saying.

  “No, of course it isn’t, Professor Honshou!” Dane tried to sound optimistic, despite
all the odds. “We’ll get you patched up in no time . . .”

  “Private Tychus found this place . . .” The professor raised a hand to point, tremulously, back towards the tunnel where they had come from. “I didn’t realize that he’d been inside, until . . .” his speech was suddenly cut off by loud, hacking coughs, and Dane saw that the inside of his old-fashioned bubble helmet was now speckled with blood.

  Until Private Tychus started breaking out in an alien infection? Dane considered.

  “When the infection became bad at the camp—I knew that I had to go to the source to find original samples. It was from here . . .” (cough, hack, splutter) “. . . Tychus was attacked by something. A trap, in that room . . .”

  Oh no. Dane felt his jaw clamp even tighter. Didn’t that mean that even if Hopskirk wasn’t infected before, then he would be now? Hopskirk’s faceplate was open to the elements of the alien world. Was the infection airborne?

  “It spread so fast . . .” The professor’s voice was getting weaker and weaker, and Dane had to lean closer.

  “But why destroy the expedition server records?” Dane breathed, not even really expecting an answer. “Why not wait, hold up for the gate to open again?”

  “You . . . you don’t understand . . .” Professor Honshou was wheezing now. “That room. That pyramid. It’s the Beacon. Their Beacon . . .”

  What? Dane didn’t understand. Bruce suddenly broke in over the suit-to-suit shared channel.

  “Uh, Williams? I’m not liking the look of this . . .”

  Back inside the Exin cave complex, under the acres of the black rock, Sergeant Bruce Cheng’s face lit up once again with a flash of brilliant light from the alien pyramid.

  Another one, and this time it was brighter—and happening faster than the others.

  “Williams . . .” Bruce repeated, moving his eyes from the pyramid to where Hopskirk stood off to one side, wavering slightly on his feet. The outer metal plates of his fellow Marine’s orbital AMP suit were battered and rucked where the super-strong claws of their dead foe had met it. Hopskirk did not look well, although Bruce could see no blood coming from his suit. The Marine was standing facing the pyramid, and even though he was swaying on his feet, he was facing the glowing pyramid as if he were entranced by it.

  “Bruce! . . .” crackle! The connection between them broke into static. It came back in waves, sometimes faster, sometimes quiet. “. . . is it? I got Honshou . . . Beacon . . .”

  “It’s the pyramid,” Bruce said, as another flash blinded his eyes for a moment. Then his faceplate did that auto-diffusion thing, darkening momentarily to reveal the alien structure, and the room, and the seemingly hypnotized Marine beside it.

  The Exin pyramid was pulsing with power, and it was happening faster and faster, like it was building up to something. Every time that it did so, Bruce’s internal scanners went off the chart with recording energies. The big guy was aware that he could even feel the thrumming energy under his feet. When he looked down, he saw that he was standing on one of the conduits of stonelike metal that went from the wall buttresses to the pyramid itself.

  What did the Exin do to it? Bruce was thinking. As soon as this chamber had been disturbed, they had awoken from whatever ancient sleep that they were constrained by, in order to race forward and touch the surface of the pyramid.

  Like an ID print . . . Bruce agreed with himself. Just like the many fingerprint and eye scanners and even DNA scanners that the Federal Marines used to authorize top secret access.

  So . . . what had they unlocked?

  “This is some kind of nursery facility,” Bruce was thinking as he stepped away from the rapidly cycling pyramid. It was flashing like a strobe light now and getting faster. The deep rhythm underfoot was repeating at ever-faster rates too.

  “But all the Exin had hatched . . .” Bruce thought back to that one table where the largest of the Exin eggs would have sat. The pictograms had seemed to declare that this was a place where birth was a reward, and that the ones born here were destined for great things. Was this how the Exin propagated themselves? Did they set up these hatching sites all across the universe?

  Their empire . . . ?

  Flash. Flash flash. The light was almost a constant lightning bolt of glare right now, and Bruce got the distinct impression that he did not want to hang around for when it had reached its zenith.

  “Hopskirk? Come on—we’re moving out!” Bruce snapped, reaching for their fellow Marine.

  “Sckrargh!” A sudden snarl of fury as Hopskirk turned, dropping his pulse rifle. His hands twitched, and he glared at Bruce through the broken-open viewing lens of his faceplate.

  And he had yellowed eyes.

  “Bruce!? Bruce, can you read me!?” Dane repeated. He crouched next to Professor Honshou as the line suddenly ended in a glitchy squeal of static. Whatever energies were being produced down there by the alien device were screwing with their suit channels.

  No wonder our Federal Beacon wasn’t working! Dane thought to himself. This thing was almost acting like a jammer.

  Beacon. An Exin Beacon, the professor had said.

  And then Dane suddenly saw it. Private Tychus must have disturbed this facility and accidentally woken up this ancient alien machine, effectively killing the human-dropped Beacon by jamming its signal. That was what had caused the supposed malfunction and cut off the humans from the Deployment Gate One deep radar network.

  And when Private Tychus accidentally activated the alien device, it had released a biological agent to make sure that no one could turn it off. And the Exin seemed to be masters of biological weaponry, didn’t they? Dane couldn’t help but consider the spore-creatures that the Exin had released on Earth, spreading the Exinase virus, or the Exin version of wolverines, or the living hand grenades that they used . . . This viral agent had to be one of theirs, and one that changed the infected person’s DNA, keeping them busy until . . . Dane’s mind leapt from conclusion to conclusion.

  “Honshou? What do you mean that it was an Exin Beacon? You mean that it sends a signal?” Dane turned back to the professor, but the man was beyond answering him now. He was in fact beyond answering anyone any more. Professor Honshou was dead.

  “Bruce!? Hopskirk? Can you read me—over!” Dane jumped to his feet.

  “Hopskirk! What are you doing!?” Bruce was shouting, as Hopskirk snatched out to grapple with his pulse rifle. Or not. In fact, it had seemed as though Hopskirk had thrown his arms out in order to snatch at Bruce himself—just like an Exin . . .

  But Bruce had managed to get his rifle up in between them just in time, and now the two men were wrestling in the cavern under the earth.

  “Sssss!” Hopskirk was hissing, and Bruce could see him snarling and gnashing his teeth, just as if he were no longer Hopskirk at all.

  “Hopskirk—get off me!” Bruce roared and shoved the smaller man with all of his considerable strength, sending him flying backwards to slam against the pyramid and slide down.

  “Bruce!? Hopskirk—what’s going on!?” Dane appeared in the mouth of the tunnel, his suit alternately looking brilliant silver or shadowed black with the repeated pulse of the pyramid.

  “Sss . . . !” Hopskirk hissed weakly. “You’re out to kill me! You’re trying to kill me!” he managed to utter in human speech, stumbling to his feet and lurching towards Bruce once more.

  The big man leveled his pulse rifle. “Hopskirk, don’t! I don’t want to . . .”

  There was a momentary pause in the eyes of the younger Marine, and Bruce saw the sudden outrage of having a gun pointed at him by his fellow Marine.

  “NO!” Dane and Hopskirk moved in the same breath. Hopskirk launched himself forward, unable to contain his insensate rage, and Williams threw himself forward to seize the smaller Marine around the waist and bring him down with a heavy thump against the floor.

  “Get off! Let go of me! Get off!” Hopskirk was screeching, hammering at Dane with his fists and boots. Bruce saw some of the outer def
ensive plate of his friend Dane buckle and crumple under the assault, as Hopskirk’s own already-augmented strength (empowered by the Assisted Mechanized Plate) was seemingly enhanced by the alien virus too . . .

  Flash. Flash. Flash. It was almost impossible to discern the pulsing between flashes now, as Bruce hurried to help Dane.

  “Hopskirk! Listen to me! You have to fight this! You can fight this!” Bruce heard Dane saying, but it seemed as though their comrade and brother in arms was beyond sense. Bruce was certain that there was a change around the man’s face, too, like his brow was becoming more pronounced. His temples looked as though something—horns?—were about to protrude from the surface.

  “Got him!” Bruce grabbed onto the man’s legs and squeezed, as Dane did the same on his upper chest and arms.

  “Get off! I’ll kill you first! I’ll kill all of you!” Hopskirk was shouting.

  “We’re not going to kill you. We’re not, I promise, Hopskirk!” Dane was trying to get through to him, but even Bruce was having a hard time hearing him over the rising thunder of the machine. Hopskirk was still shouting as Dane snarled.

  “I’ve got an antidote. From Honshou!”

  Bruce’s eyes were filled with the constant jag of light from the alien pyramid. “No time,” he said, just as the thud and thunder seemed to reach its pitch, and the pyramid burst.

  The top apex of the pyramid erupted into a bolt of pure, burning light that shot upwards into the roof of the cavern, vaporizing a hole straight through the black bedrock. Solid matter turned into gobbets of liquid magma or hissed into toxic gasses that obscured vision and made the three Marines lying on the floor choke and cough.