Metal Warrior: Precious Metal (Mech Fighter Book 5)

by James David Victor

  The pyramid pulsed with light one last time. The ground and walls quivered as it poured the pent-up energy into one bolt that drove upwards through the earth of the alien jungle, exploding tree roots as well as entire trees when it burst from the surface with all the grace of a miniature mushroom cloud.

  And the energy beam did not stop there, but continued burning upwards in a dazzling flash, straight up into the skies, and into the atmosphere, and into the near planet orbit, and out into the depths of the starry void.

  The beam held itself—shining, brilliant, and terrifying for a long pause—a living thread that burnt between the surface of the planet and the depths of the void before it was spent. It winked out of existence just as suddenly as it had arrived. However, the event left its traces behind in the form of a blackened and smoking detonation zone atop the cliff that sat over the cavern and the charred remains of the giant trees and unlucky vegetation that had lived there for a millennium. The sky, too, was disturbed and lowering with graying, ashen clouds as the atmosphere reacted to the sudden intrusion.

  And further out still, beyond the orbit of Planet 892 and beyond the reach of any eye to see, something else in the universe reacted too. Something else saw the sudden burst of stored energy around a distant star.

  Something else noticed and started to move.

  12

  Make It Count

  “Ugh . . . Dear fracking hell . . .” Dane coughed inside his suit. Even though his Assisted Mechanized Plate operated the best air filtration and toxin reduction systems around, there was still a strange, burnt-iron smell cycling through his suit’s air supply, and the explosion alone had thrown him clear of Hopskirk.

  Hopskirk! Dane suddenly scrabbled to one side, reaching for the man . . .

  Who was stilled.

  “No. Dammit. No!” Dane pulled himself up to Hopskirk’s face. He saw that the man was listed to one side with his eyes closed.

  >ERROR! Biology unknown! . . .

  Instead of the usual health reports and scans that Dane could call up on his faceplate’s HUD when he looked at any Marine, instead of Hopskirk’s Marine ID, there was just a scan error, notifying Dane that his friend’s DNA had already changed so much that the suit could not even recognize him.

  No . . . But Dane saw movement, and his suit’s biological scanners picked up life, at least. Hopskirk was alive, but the explosion appeared to have sent him into shock, and he was now in a feverish sort of unconsciousness.

  “Just like what the video said happened to Private Tychus, before he went full Hulk . . .” Bruce muttered angrily beside Dane.

  “Yeah,” Dane nodded, feeling his heart plummet. “I know.”

  But a tremor shook itself through the chamber that they were in, and a few more bits of rock dislodged from the ceiling to thump into the alien floor. The pyramid beside them was apparently dead, now a dull and lifeless gray-silver, with no sign of activity at all.

  “I think we should get out of here,” Bruce grunted. “There is nothing about this that is giving me any sense of confidence.”

  Dane could only agree as he grabbed Hopskirk under the arms and started to haul him at a quick shuffle through the tunnel to the outside.

  The Marines managed to make it to the clearing just a few minutes before some deep weakness in the bones of the alien earth gave in. There was a rumbling noise as the ground shook underfoot. A billow of white cloud erupted from the tunnel behind them, and they heard the sound of crashing rock.

  “That’s a one-time deal, huh?” Bruce said in a stern tone.

  “I guess.” Dane set Hopskirk down on the other side of the clearing from the other two resident dead bodies and quickly searched his utility belt. He was relieved to see that he did still have the small phial that Professor Honshou had been clutching when he had passed.

  “The antidote,” Dane explained, holding the small thing up. “The professor must have led the last of the expedition here and synthesized it himself, just as . . .”

  “Just as the rest of his team turned into monsters around him?” Bruce grumbled, and Dane thought about the dead body of the expedition Marine that they had found outside. “We don’t even know if that is going to work!” Bruce pointed out.

  “No, but the professor was down there for days. We don’t know when he got infected, but I think that this was stopping it from taking over . . .” Dane said, shaking the phial for a moment in the light. It sparkled briefly, and Dane lowered it to where Hopskirk’s AMP suit had the auto-injector module—a small hatch that was flipped open on the inside of the forearm, revealing slot-in tubes for the various cures, anaesthetics, or remedies that a Marine-on-the-go might need, delivered straight by the suit through the pin-prick injectors beneath . . .

  “Wait.” Bruce’s metal hand suddenly caught Dane’s wrist.

  Dane looked up at his fellow sergeant in surprise. “What is it, Bruce? We have to stop this process before it goes too far!”

  “We might need that serum. For the Marine Corps. We might need to replicate it.” Bruce said gruffly.

  What!? Dane couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Then they can spend a billion credits on scientists to make it again! Hopskirk needs this now!” Dane pointed out.

  “Kayla,” Bruce said softly, getting to the real point of his objection.

  Ah, Dane thought. “Bruce . . .” he said a little softer, while in front of him, Hopskirk’s breathing hitched a little bit in his tortured sleep. Dane didn’t know what he was about to say until he said it.

  “We might be able to save Hopskirk right here, now,” Dane said, holding the big man’s gaze through the dimmed windows of their faceplates.

  Bruce stared hard at him, and then, after a pause, he released Dane’s wrist. Williams felt terrible as he moved the phial to Hopskirk’s suit injector, but he also knew that he was doing the right thing.

  “Sometimes, we’ve only got our skills and the tools we carry right now.” He remembered an old piece of advice from his father—one of the few times that his father had helped him in his pre-Exin career. “We don’t know if it’s going to be enough, but it’s what we’ve got. We can make it count.”

  Bruce nodded once and silently, and Dane slid the phial in and closed the hatch.

  At first, nothing happened. Then there was a slight noise from the infected Hopskirk, as his breathing hitched a little deeper, and he seemed to be a little more restful. On Dane’s suit scanners, it still read:

  >ERROR! Biology unknown . . . restarting scan.

  At least the scanner trying again also seemed to suggest that Hopskirk was edging a little closer to human norms, Dane thought hopefully. His heart rate was lowering from the jackhammer parade that it had been a moment ago, and his temperature wasn’t in the boiling-egg zone.

  I just have to hope that it’s enough . . . Dane sighed, easing back on his haunches. He didn’t know how much the professor had used to keep his own infection under control. Or even if he had used too much . . .

  Bruce radioed into the Gladius, now that they were out of the earth and their suit channels were working again. Corsoni was only too happy to lift off from the expedition camp to come and get them, and he managed to set down on the top of the ridge of black rock from which the Exin Beacon had spewed its brilliant light. It would have been a struggle to carry the semi-conscious Hopskirk, still in his orbital AMP suit, up the rocky incline to the Gladius, but luckily, Corsoni dispatched one of the floating Federal Marine transport drones, which looked like a large insect on its own miniature pulse engines, although its body looked like a medical stretcher.

  Bruce and Dane loaded Hopskirk onto the drone’s bed and climbed the outcrop themselves. In no time at all, they were strapping into the cockpit behind Joey Corsoni and rising off to head to the final part of their mission: the Federal Beacon.

  “We’ll be there in under twenty,” Corsoni advised them. His usually reckless and optimistic demeanor seemed cowed.

  “I’m guessing that you fou
nd what happened to the Expedition, then?” their pilot and engineer said after a moment. It was, after all, the only reason why the Marine team hadn’t flown to where the defective Federal Beacon was situated—Dane had insisted that they follow the route that the expedition had traveled in order to find them.

  “Yeah, I guess.” Dane sighed. He couldn’t find the strength to go into how each of them had seemingly turned on one another, one by one, as they succumbed to the Exin biological weapon.

  “Almost,” Bruce grunted. “Almost all of them.” His tone was dark and serious, and Dane was suddenly aware of the fact that they already had Hopskirk under sedation a few rooms behind them in one of the Gladius’s small emergency medical beds. They had agreed for the Marine to remain like that until the Deployment Gate next opened, and they could get him some proper medical attention. Maybe even synthesize some kind of cure for the mutagen that was trying to turn him into something not-Hopskirk. Dane wondered if they would have two such people on two such medical beds before this mission was over.

  But as Dane looked out through one of the cockpit windows to see the vast expanse of green down there, unmapped and unknowable, that seemed to stretch all the way to the distant horizon—he thought that the chances of finding Bruce’s missing Kayla were slim, if anything.

  “We’re almost there.” Corsoni broke Dane’s chain of thought, as the Gladius started to round another higher outcrop of the black-and-brown rock, its sides festooned with long rivers of green vines. The top, however, was mostly barren save for a few sprigs of strange, straggling bush-type plants.

  And, as they neared, Dane’s internal suit mission array started bleeping.

  >Mission Parameters: Search and Rescue . . .

  >Objective 1: Deploy to 892 Expedition Base . . . COMPLETED

  >Objective 2: Locate Professor Honshou and secure Expedition research . . . COMPLETED

  >Objective 3: Locate Expedition staff . . . INCOMPLETE

  >Objective 4: Locate Federal Beacon and repair . . . BEACON FOUND!

  13

  The Beacon

  “It’s been trashed,” Bruce said in a low snarl of anger as soon as they set down and bounded out of the Gladius. It was windy up here on the five-story-high plateau, and past the Gladius, past Bruce, Dane could see a whole lot of undulating green forest spiked with those super-huge trees like skinny mountains.

  The Federal Beacon sat just a few hundred yards away, but even before they got much closer, Dane’s foot almost tripped on a piece of metal, buckled and ripped from wherever it had come from, with the Federal Marine logo stamped in one corner.

  “Exin?” Dane asked, raising his pulse rifle in one smooth movement as it whined up to full charge. “Or any one of the other critters that live out here?”

  “I don’t know . . .” Bruce slowly shook his head as he took point between the weathered boulders and fingers of rock towards the center of the vandalism. “Apart from what we released—and killed—back there in that Exin Nursery, we haven’t seen any other sign of the Exin out here.”

  “You mean those three four-armed, fanged, and clawed things aren’t enough?” Dane tried to make light of their predicament, but Bruce always had a knack of being totally immune to humor when he wanted to be.

  “The Exin were in some form of stasis, Williams,” Cheng pointed out. “This happened before they were released, didn’t it?”

  “I guess so . . .” Dane considered, stepping forward into the hollow between the rocks where the Federal Beacon was supposed to rest.

  Well, its base did still rest here, it had to be said. Dane could see the square of thick metal footing attached to the metal platform, driven into the rock and plugged with quick-set concrete. The base itself still contained a mess of instrumentation from cracked glass and ceramic tubes to frayed gold-and-copper wires spraying out of strange and fractured circuit boards. Half of the metal walls, double plated just like Dane’s Assisted Mechanized Plate—were intact—but their tops and one whole panel of the box had been ripped apart.

  “Corsoni? Are you reading this?” Dane asked, knowing that the pilot engineer could patch into Dane’s suit cam whenever he wanted.

  “I got it. Sheesh! That sure looks messed up!” his voice came back.

  “Can you do anything about it? Get it working again?” Dane frowned at the broken-open shell before him. He couldn’t imagine it becoming anything more than scrap at this point.

  He heard a whistle on the other end of the suit comms, which was Joey Corsoni’s way of saying, “Yeah, but this is going to be a whole lot tougher than any of you think . . .

  “I can still see the microreactor there. That’s the little silver unit that looks like a set of tubes?” Joey said. Dane’s eyes found it and he nodded. It looked untouched. He didn’t know if that was because of negligence on the part of the saboteur, or whether it was especially designed to be impervious to anything thrown at it. (Dane also felt, it had to be said, a moment of nervousness at the fact that he had been standing so close to something that was clearly so dangerous as a reactor).

  “If that’s still working, then I can do something with it. Maybe rig up a makeshift accelerator from the Gladius’s inverters . . .” Corsoni mused.

  “I have no idea what you just said,” Dane confessed. “You’re doing that thing you do. Science speak.”

  “Ha, right—sorry. The answer is a resounding ‘it’d be a miracle if I get it to do anything other than make toast, but I’ll give it a try,’” Corsoni said.

  Dane groaned. He’d thought as much. “All right, Corsoni. Keep an eye on the radar until our search is done, and then get on it.”

  “Already designing the fix, champ.” Corsoni laughed.

  At least Joey is a fount of optimism, Dane thought as he clicked off the channel and took in the devastation in front of him. Only large, rending claws could have done this. The sort that the Exin had, Dane thought.

  Or . . . Dane blinked at the suggestion, his eyes moving to Bruce. There was, after all, another very strong type of creature on this planet that they knew of, which had claws that could dent and rupture orbital AMP defensive plate, and which might even have reason to destroy their own Beacon, so as to stop any one else coming here . . . ?

  “No. Don’t say it,” Bruce said suddenly, catching Dane’s meaning without the man even saying it out loud. “Kayla wouldn’t do this. Not even if she had turned into . . .” his voice quavered for a moment, “one of them.”

  “Not even if she thought, in her last human moments, that she was going to prevent future harm?” Dane asked softly. “Just like the expedition Marine back in the bunker, who released a virus inside their own servers to keep anyone else from replicating their journey to the Exin Nursery?”

  “No!” Bruce said suddenly, fiercely, turning to kick one of the metal plates to send it skidding across the plateau top. “I said that Kayla wouldn’t have done this. She wouldn’t! She would want to come back home! To me!” The big man ended on a strangled, almost desperate plea—only Dane did not think that plea was directed at him at all.

  Dane didn’t push his hypothesis. In his heart, he had already come to a conclusion about what had really happened here.

  Private Tychus accidentally activated the Exin Beacon, which made their own—this one—jam, Dane thought. The expedition had proceeded to fall to the Exin bio-weapon, and Honshou decided to lead the last of the team out to what he called the device in the Exin Nursery, to find a cure. He failed. The Marines left back at base camp, knowing that the infection was only going to claim the lives of the next expedition to come here, had decided to try and destroy all records of the Exin Nursery or device to stop the spread.

  And Kayla, Dane thought, looking at the rent and crumpled mess, possibly in her last human acts, had hiked all the way up here to destroy their means of communicating home too.

  Dane thought that it was an incredible act of bravery, really. One that meant that she had wanted to sacrifice her life for the good of a
ny future humans who would later come here.

  “Corsoni? What sort of hardware do you have in there?” Dane asked over the suit channels. “If anyone can get this Beacon working, then it has to be you . . .”

  “Ugh, I’m not sure that we’ve got time for that right now, Sergeant,” Corsoni’s voice came back thick and worried.

  “Huh?” Dane turned back to the Gladius, already starting to hurry towards it. “What is it Corsoni? Is it Hopskirk? Is he okay? Waking up?”

  “Sergeant Hopskirk is sleeping like a baby, Williams,” Corsoni said. “It’s not him that I’m worried about at all.”

  “Then what is it!?” Dane had already covered half the distance back to the Gladius by the time that the shapes broke the envelope of the sky.

  “It’s the incoming signatures I have from near orbit, boss.” Corsoni said. “That’s what’s giving me grief.”

  And Dane raised his head to see that there, breaking into flashes of fire and long-tailed plumes of white smoke, screamed three incoming vessels.

  14

  Incursion

  “Report!” Dane was saying as he thumped down into one of the copiloting seats behind Joey, with Bruce still on his way back to the ship.

  “Champ, the situation is pretty darn messed up, and my recommended report would be that any other team of Marines would be screwed,” Corsoni said, casting aside with a sweep of his hands the makeshift schematics he had been working on for the new and improved Federal Beacon. He brought up the satellite imagery that the Federal Marine Planet 892 network had captured just a few minutes before.

  “Ah,” Dane said awkwardly when Corsoni replayed the material.

  The satellite network for Planet 892 was still patchy, and the Marine Corps had yet to establish deep space radar stations as yet out here, on humanity’s furthest colonial expedition. Mostly, the angled camera images were pointing down towards Planet 892’s surface (in order to complete the planetary mapping effort) not up and out, back towards the apparently hostile environs of the void.