However, despite these limitations, one of the slowed-down cameras did indeed manage to capture the moment that the stars appeared to melt and shift like a heat mirage, and there was a scattering of flashing lights as a new type of Exin ship appeared. It was larger than any of the small, oval seed crafts, with a much fatter end, three radiating seed-like “pods” coming from its middle, and a pointed, extended prow.
“What in the name of all that is holy is that!?” Dane whispered.
The craft was big by Dane’s reckoning, probably at least three times the size of the Gladius—making it smaller than a Marine Training Platform, but definitely more than a match for a little mixed-class fighter like theirs. They watched the footage as it swam towards Planet 892, gaining a corona of burning gasses as it sought entry into the upper atmosphere.
“Did you see that!” Corsoni said. “It seemed . . . I mean . . . It didn’t look as though it came through the red-shift of a wormhole. It looked as though . . .”
“As though it generated the wormhole itself,” Dane completed. “Like the Exin have figured out how to space-jump without the need for their stationary jump stations?”
“Precisely!” Corsoni agreed. Although Dane knew that the engineer pilot’s enthusiasm was for the demonstration of new and novel technology, this idea only plummeted Dane’s heart further. If the Exin had ships that could do jump travel with stationary gates, then that meant that any Exin ship at any time could turn up anywhere (more or less) and attack . . .
And, as the ripple of stars started to fade in the wake of the new type of Exin ship, there appeared a wave of what they called the Exin seed crafts—large seed-shaped pods made of scaled metals, capable of outflying anything that the Marine Corps had right now. Dane tried to count them and thought that there had to be between seven and ten up there right now, slotting into a scattered diamond formation around the larger ship. Whatever new form of jump technology that Exin mother ship was using seemed to be able to bring with it other, smaller ships at the same time. But how many? How far could they jump?
Oh frack oh frack oh . . . “They’ve come back to retake the planet. When the New Deployment Gate opens again from our side, they’ll just storm through . . .” Dane’s mind was racing.
About ten Exin craft, versus the Marine enforcement on the Jupiter side of the Deployment Gate. It was nowhere near the size to attack Earth, but with their speed and firepower, they might just be able to retake the Deployment Gate station. Or at least hold it until their own reinforcements turned up.
Or they might just jump all the way to Earth, hang over our habitats, and bomb us before we can say boo . . .
“We have to tell command!” Bruce growled from beside them.
The sky through the Gladius’s windows—not the satellite imagery—reported what came next. The large Exin ship was making entry inside its own bubble of flame, slowing as it lowered itself towards the surface. The craft was about to make planetfall, and as it did so, it was firing at Planet 892.
No, not firing . . . Dane thought, as he looked out of the cockpit window. He saw the cometlike shapes appear to break apart in midair, losing smaller, tumbling pieces over the forest skies as their larger hearts spun and revolved and started to morph . . .
“Magnify,” Dane whispered to his suit, for his faceplate lens to react immediately—the targeting vector zeroing in on the three shapes and choosing the nearest to suddenly enlarge in Dane’s eyes.
“Oh crap,” Dane murmured when he saw what the things really were.
The shapes had morphed just before they crashed into the ground, throwing out blocky limbs attached on large, motored joints. They slammed into the ground with the distant sounds of explosions and the rise of dust and debris into the air.
They were Mechs. Giant, alien Mechs.
The three large, crablike shapes had been ejected around the mother craft’s drop site, in what the Marine in Dane could tell was a textbook landing procedure.
“It’s using those things to secure the perimeter, while the main ship lands . . .” he was saying. Dane’s eyes swam up to the Gladius’s radar, to see that the other phalanx of Exin seed crafts hadn’t followed the larger ship as it made its progress to Planet 892’s surface. Instead, they had started to zoom high across the envelope of atmosphere in near orbit, each criss-crossing the globe in different routes.
“They’re on defensive patrol,” Dane said hurriedly. “They’ll be the first response to any of our forces that come through our gate.” He realized what that must mean. That whatever the larger Exin craft was about to do, it was important enough to need a guard patrol and alien Mech-giants. That had to be the target.
“We have to stop them, somehow,” Dane said.
“Guys—the clock,” Bruce was saying. “We’ve got forty minutes until the Deployment Gate next opens. And they’re probably going to send another scouting ship. By the time that they arrive, the Exin will have formed a bridgehead.”
Their Beacon, Dane remembered the dying words of Professor Honshou. That was what this place was. Planet 892 was theirs, the Exin’s. And the expedition had alerted their enemy to the fact that the humans had come here.
“We can’t let the Exin take 892,” Dane was saying, looking at the other two men beside him.
Two. He only had two men, and one of them wasn’t even a ground fighter.
“Corsoni, get our Federal Beacon fixed yesterday!” Dane said.
“Got it,” Corsoni was saying.
“And as soon as you’ve done that, I need you to send an alert back to the Deployment Gate . . .”
“You can’t signal anything more detailed than lights off or on,” Corsoni was saying. Then his eyes lit up. “But that means that we can still go really old school. We’ll use Morse code. SOS. Dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot. . .”
“Whatever you think, engineer,” Dane was saying. “And then, when you’re done, bring the Gladius and find us. Because me and Bruce are going to go down there and stop an invasion, right?”
And without hesitation, both Bruce and Corsoni were nodding. There was no fear or anxiety in their faces. They knew just what had to be done.
They had to fight.
“Bruce, you ready?” Dane whispered through his suit comms. He had activated the triple-security measures for the communications, dampening their radio emissions to the tightest of narrowband frequencies possible, but there was still no way of knowing whether the Exin could pick them up or not.
“Ready and willing,” Bruce’s reply came back just as quickly. His voice was low and tight. “I’ll wait for your signal,” the unseen man said. He was currently almost half a mile away from where Dane stood, hidden under the eaves of the alien forest.
In front of Dane was the drop site of the Exin, which the two Marines had hiked back to through the jungle, leaving Corsoni prepping the Gladius for the fight of its life. Ahead of him, he could see the humped ground of the sparse forest that the Exin had picked. Stubby trees lay splintered or still burning from the alien landing, and, as the sun was drawing towards the horizon, the three squat shapes of the Exin War Mech looked more like boulders than they did creations.
They stood at what Dane guessed was fifteen or eighteen feet tall, and wider still than that. Four heavy, trunklike metal limbs were sunk into the same ground that they had landed in, with their back legs half-folded, making them look as though they were crouching. The alien Mechs were wide, with semi-cylindrical domed carapaces that gave them an oddly crablike shape. The “head” or cockpit of each Mech—if indeed that was how they worked—was nothing more than a strip of dull crimson lights along the forward edge of their dome body. They looked mean, and Dane could only guess that humped nodules on their backs and mounted over their arm joints would be weapons pods—although he had no idea what sort of weapons they would be using at all.
There is no way that just three guys, two orbital AMP suits, and one ship can take on that much hardware, a small part of Dane’s mind v
oiced the expected concerns. Dane did as he had been trained to do: he accepted it, he heard it, and then he reminded himself why he was here.
If we let the Exin establish a bridgehead here, then they’ll have another base to attack Earth from. His home world was on borrowed time, and humanity was only just stepping out to swing . . .
And Dane was going to be that punch.
“Going dark,” he whispered, and turned off all suit communications.
>Assisted Mechanized Plate 023 / SGT WILLIAMS, D . . . Stealth mode activated . . .
All his deep range scanners silenced, leaving him with only active frequencies in the nearby twenty feet or so. The suspension in his suit tightened and jostled just slightly, giving him finer motor controls over his actions. His suit had no lights on now at all, meaning he had to rely on natural eyesight alone in the evening. And the AMP suit started to emit an invisible, dull field of charged particles, hopefully running interference and obscuring him from the Exin’s active sensors.
Dane still had no idea whether these procedures would work.
“But I guess I’ll find out in a minute . . .” he breathed as he hunched over and stepped out into the sparse clearing, using one of the fallen trees for cover.
First step. The slight crunch of the strange, oval-shaped grasses under his boots. Dane kept his eyes on the nearest alien War Mech, which was turned slightly away from him, and he saw that it didn’t make a move. Only the dull crimson lights remained on its forward edge to show that it had any power in it at all.
Second step. Third, fourth . . .
Dane was following a slight hollow in the ground—the long dried-up ruins of an old creek bed, perhaps—with the trunk of one of the trees on its edge. He knew that he was almost completely obscured from view, and out of the corner of his eye, he could see the top of the War Mech’s head, still unmoving.
The old creek bed curved around to the left of the War Mech, close to one of its legs.
>Warning! Movement detected!
The HUD on the inside of Dane’s faceplate lit up, and he froze against the creek bed wall, crouching as a sudden light appeared on his right.
Frack!
Dane knew that his suit’s sensors were at their most minimal, meaning that they were only good for thirty feet, and whatever that light was, it had to be within that. If that is an Exin patrol . . . Dane felt his muscles tensing inside his suit, and he willed them to remain still. If it was ground troops of the enemy, then they would see him easily.
The light suddenly flared into brilliance about fifteen feet in front of him, and Dane saw a large floating object like a teardrop. It floated purposefully over the ground, over the creek-gulley, and not hesitating as it moved off towards the Exin War Mech.
Some kind of patrol drone? Dane thought, holding still as the vector on his navigation slipped out of near range, and the light started to fade. He waited for a full count of ten before starting his move again. He wondered if the Exin were expecting trouble or whether they slept.
As it turned out, in the next turn of the creek gully, bringing him almost level with the War Mech and just a hundred yards away from the main Exin mother ship itself, he found his answer.
There was more movement out there in the dark. The ship was a large, brooding shadow over the ground with a string of floating drone lights holding steady in the air around it. Dane could see the glimmer against the odd scale construction of the craft, its fat tripod legs that bit into the air like pylons, and the multiple ramps that met the floor.
Up and down which Exin were moving.
Dane felt his jaw tighten immediately, but he resisted the urge to scream and shout at them. Instead, he surveyed. The alien invaders of Earth moved with that odd, nonhuman grace as they hurried up and down the loading ramp of their mother ship, carrying crates and cylinders. Dane thought that they always reminded him of the movement of insects somehow, at once jerky and angular, but somehow quick and graceful in their coordination at the same time.
They did not appear as big as the warrior caste Exin that Dane had fought before. He had no idea if this was due to some species or gendered difference, or merely whether this was because these Exin did not have the extra layers of carapace armor that the taller, wider and more heavyset Exin warriors did.
They loped back and forth, occasionally making chittering noises to each other in their alien tongue.
We were right, Dane thought as he watched them stacking the crates and tubes in ever-larger piles beside the landing site, constantly hurrying back and forth, back and forth. The Exin were planning to establish a colony.
Re-establish a colony, he thought, as his hand moved ever so slowly to the weapons modules attached just over his belt. When he depressed the action key, they popped open to reveal the three svelte cannisters of grenades which he and Bruce had collected when they had returned to the Gladius. Dane had three on this side, and three on the other.
They looked ridiculously small compared to Exin War Mechs or their mother ship before him.
The plan was a staggeringly simple one: throw a punch. Make a distraction. Get the Exin really mad.
Dane judged the distance between where he stood and the nearby War Mech. He was within range. He could throw two at a time at it. That would sure get their attention, wouldn’t it?
Dane took two of the grenades into his hand and pulled back his arm . . .
Just as there was a bellowing, raucous sound from the mother ship at his side.
What? Dane’s arm froze. He threw a look back to his right. Had they spotted him? No. What he saw instead was that the Exin workers had stilled. They had congregated into two lines along the ramp and the clearing floor, as if awaiting something . . .
Scree-ARRR! The bellowing, almost metallic sound rang again, and this time, it was accompanied by a different sort of Exin emerging from the depths of the mother ship. This one was taller than the others and appeared to be dressed in robes of a deep, dark, midnight blue that set off the lighter shades of its head scale. At its sides, there emerged two lines of much squatter and heavier Exin—warrior caste? Dane immediately thought. They were the same type as the ones that they had fought in the Exin Nursery, with four sets of arms, and who looked much meaner than any that Dane had so far seen.
In the hands (talons) of the robed Exin was held a large, oval shape. An egg.
“Just like the giant egg that was on the pictograms back there.” Dane wondered for a second. Was this one of what Bruce had called their king eggs? Some kind of leader? A hero? A prophet to this warlike race?
The other, smaller Exin at the sides started to sway a little back and forth, making a slight rasping noise as they crooned at the egg or their robed leader.
The expedition activated the Nursery and the Exin Beacon. Dane’s mind was racing. Perhaps the Exin had responded to that. Perhaps they thought that their bio-weapons should have killed off any unwanted attention already, and they believed that they now had free reign to carry on with hatching the next murderers of humanity . . .
Dane didn’t even pause to think as he turned in one fluid movement and threw the two grenades straight at the robed Exin priest, and the monstrous egg that they carried.
15
Beacon
“Dang it. Dang it. Dang it!” Corsoni worked as fast as he could, breaking several Marine Corps-approved safety guidelines and probably many more layers of common sense, as he slotted the components home into the Federal Beacon.
It was cold up here, and it was already getting dark as evening drew in on this alien planet. Dane and Bruce had already left a while ago, using their rockets and the vines to propel themselves down the side of the caldera-like rocky outcrop to the jungle below and to the Exin landing site.
“Well, I haven’t heard any explosions yet . . .” Corsoni muttered to himself as he stepped back for a moment to reflect on his work. He did, indeed, have to hack several nonessential pieces out of the Gladius and drag them over here in order to get this
thing to anywhere near working.
“Why, oh, why don’t they ever load us up with service drones!?” Corsoni grumbled to himself, dreaming of the day that he could have Loader-Mechs and other automated assists. But the Gladius had been built as a fighter, and that meant that it had to travel light.
Ugh.
“But . . .” Corsoni leaned in to rivet the final panels into place before stepping back and admiring his handiwork. It certainly looked as though it was a working Beacon. Sort of. If that Beacon had been stuck together with old bits of store cupboards and still had bits of the silvered foil insulation poking out from under the panels.
“Only one way to find out . . .” He had in his hand the regular engineer’s controller that every Marine Corps engineer had—a heavy slab of metal with rubberized protectors and just about every bit of sensor stacked into it that could be. He waved it to switch it on and checked the residual energy readings coming out of the Beacon.
>Fluctuation levels: HIGH . . .
“Oh frack . . .” that didn’t look good. If the dial on the Gladius had spiked and jumped like that all the way into the red zone, then he would have demanded that they take it into maintenance until they found the problem, and he would have been certain that some vital transmitter or conduit would blow . . .
BOOM!
But then, suddenly, the distant rocky outcrop lightened a fraction with a yellowish light. Joey spun on the shale and rock gravel of the ground, turning to see a plume of fire rising from the jungle beyond. It was a small mushroom crown of flame and fury, and it was quickly followed by the distant purple flashes of Exin fire.
Metal Warrior: Precious Metal (Mech Fighter Book 5) Page 10
