Metal Warrior: Steel Trap (Mech Fighter Book 3)

by James David Victor

  FZZT! Lines of fire were searing across the space from either the hand-mounted weapons that the Exin killbots wore or from the Orbital Marines.

  “Concentrate fire! We’ve got them!” Dane heard Bruce Cheng roaring. He saw the bulk of the lance corporal’s suit (they had to make a larger suit especially for him) leading the charge as they pushed through the last of the Exin drones that faced them.

  The bots had fallen from the ceiling all over their position, Dane saw quickly. Both his own eight-man squad and Bruce’s were spread out and separated in the dark space.

  “First team! Form up on my signal—keep tight!” Dean shouted. He raised one gauntlet to Bruce’s answering nod and started moving through the obstacle course, following the bright green arrow that flared in front of him.

  “Lance Corporal!”

  “Sir!”

  Other Orbital Marine shapes appeared out of various annexes, alcoves, and vaulting barriers as they met William’s command. He was glad to see that Hopskirk and Harrison and the others were not majorly injured—although the icons of some of their suits did flash disparate colors of warning orange from the damage that they had already sustained.

  “We’ll take point,” Dane said, nodding ahead as he broke into a run down the main avenue of the darkened space, his metal boots ringing on the floor . . .

  Which suddenly started to fall away underneath him.

  What!?

  The metal panels of flooring were angling downwards, and fast, and at their end was a widening abyss of pure night. Dane slammed into the floor and started sliding downwards towards the widening chasm. His suit lights picked up the distant ruddy-cream rock of the cavern wall. There looked to be a sheer drop underneath this section of the cavern, and his suit lights could not illuminate its bottom . . .

  “Argh!” Harrison tumbled and spun past him. He hadn’t dropped to the floor as Dane had, and his jogging run had only propelled him faster towards the ledge . . .

  “Marine!” Dane shouted, reaching out—but there was nothing he could do. He had no grappling hook. No line to throw . . .

  Harrison vanished over the edge with a startled yell and disappeared in a moment. Dane was the next to come sliding and scrabbling towards it . . .

  “Dane! The boosters!” He heard Bruce’s voice shout behind him, and suddenly Dane remembered the new equipment attached to his back. He even had a corresponding glyph on his HUD, a tiny, stylized rocket shape.

  “Personal thruster system!” Dane yelled, hoping that the voice recognition software on the Orbital AMP suit would be able to recognize related words. In response, he felt the plates on his back open, kick outwards as the twin cylinders were deployed . . .

  Just as Dane fell over the edge.

  4

  Secrets

  Frackit!

  Dane tumbled and turned over as he fell. He saw walls and the gleam of the metal shelf above, but no floor. He could feel the spinning dizziness in his ears, disorienting him. He might have a heartbeat until he smacked into the floor. He might have minutes.

  But the insignia for the boosters was flashing an encouraging green, and, as Dane tumbled to see the distant metal shelf once more, he realized that he didn’t know the activation commands.

  “Ignite!” he yelled desperately.

  And was lucky. He felt a kick to his back as the twin propulsion cylinders hummed and purple-blue, almost-translucent flames exploded outwards from his back. He was thrown upwards.

  But the rockets weren’t enough for flight behavior, were they? The walls flashed into a blur around him, and Dane almost got back to the lip of metal that was the edge of the flooring he and the others had been running across—only for the acceleration to decrease. He was starting to fall back once more . . .

  Desperately, Dane swung the Field Halligan at the rock wall. It bit and gouts of rock dust and chips of stone exploded out around him as he scrambled and fell.

  “More power! Extra thrust!” Dane snarled. His suit’s intelligence circuits recognized something of what he was saying (maybe it was the way that he was screaming it with full force) as he felt the cylinders on his back kick once again. His drop slowed, and the point of the Halligan caught in a crack between the rocks. He was suddenly slamming into the wall and hanging on the end of the metal tool.

  But he hadn’t smashed into wherever the chasm floor was, Dane thought gratefully.

  “Lance Corporal? You good?” It was the voice of Cheng over the suit-to-suit communicators.

  “I am currently hanging over an unknown drop at the end of a thin bit of metal!” Dane hissed in annoyance. The only saving grace to his predicament was the fact that the larger, more robust Orbital AMP suits were strong enough to hold and haul their bodyweight with ease. He felt the servo-assists along his back and shoulders lock and move into place, and then he was pulling himself up, his feet digging at the rocky walls and finding ledges and cracks for support.

  “You got this, Williams?” Bruce was asking. “I’m tracking you on the suit scanners. You’ve got about sixty feet until you can access the ledge. From here, it looks to be a thruster-assisted jump to get to the opposite side . . .”

  “You lead both teams across, Bruce. I’m not coming . . .” Dane was hissing in determination. “I’m climbing down, not up. I’m going to get Harrison.”

  Dane had known what he had to do as soon as he had stopped himself from being smeared across the chasm floor. First ones in, last ones out, he recalled the unofficial marine motto. And No marine left behind.

  Dane couldn’t fail anyone else under his command the way he had with Private Mahir, he was thinking.

  “Harrison? Marine!” Dane was saying into the dark as he dropped the last couple of feet onto the sanded floor of the chasm under the Nevada Facility. He started sweeping the area for his marine.

  Or for a body. Dane tried not to think about that. He cast a glance back up to where the distant flaring jumps of the rest of the Orbital Marines were but small comets moving in a dark sky. He couldn’t even guess how deep he had come to get to the bottom. Sixty feet?

  Either way, it was a big fall for anyone and would have killed a human not in a suit. Dane’s hope was that Captain Otepi had been right. That these suits really were much beefier than the general AMPs were, and that Harrison was just knocked out down here, and that explained why he wasn’t responding . . .

  “Scanners. Full sweep,” Dane whispered, turning in a slow circle to reveal that the chasm was really a wide, conelike gulf in the rock of the desert, narrower at its top and wider here at the base. The floor looked to be a compacted collection of boulders and gravel, like it had been half filled in. Dane guessed that these underground rivers or sinkholes or whatever they were had made the Nevada desert the perfect place for a secret military facility.

  The lance corporal’s screens flashed a friendly green to reveal nothing. No call sign or suit identifier, and the entire expanse of the chasm floor was devoid of smashed metal body.

  Huh?

  On the thermal sweep however, Dane saw the residual light hues coming from one direction—the residual heat of where Harrison had hit the floor? Or from the marine’s movements as he sought to find a way out?

  Sweep.

  And then came the radionic blue-purple scan, and one side of the chasm—the same one which had the faintest of heat signals in it, lit up.

  “Okay . . .” Dane frowned. There was an awful lot of circuitry over there, but not in the form of an Orbital AMP. He trudged towards it, the lights on his suit picking out the stone walls, the gravel floors, and then . . .

  A metal door. Which had been rent and forced open.

  Ah, Dane thought as he saw the gouges and scrapes at the hinge points riveted to the frame, and something made him look at the Field Halligan that he now held onto. Just like the very one that Private First Class Harrison would have attached to his suit—which was perfectly capable of busting through metal doors like that one.

  Behind it was a
darkened corridor, paneled in concrete and metal, and the electrical signals were flowing thick from it. It had to be some other part of the Nevada Facility that led into here, and Harrison had wandered in, busting the door in his desire to get out of here and have this nightmare training scenario over with already.

  Better go get my man. Dane heaved a sigh, holstered his weapons, and stepped into the dark.

  The tunnel was long and sloped gently downwards. After the first sixty feet, it was lit by dull blue lights set high in the wall. Dane could hear the echoing tramp of his boots as they went further and further below ground.

  >Error! Service unavailable . . .

  With a blink of red, Dane’s suit telemetries snapped off. He still had his individual scanners available, of course, but he had lost his connection to the rest of the Mechanized Infantry squads. Even his connection to the mainframe servers—the Federal Marine-wide communications network and the more service-specific command servers for the Mechanized Infantry Division and Nevada Facility—were offline.

  Too much rock. Dane grumbled to himself as he crunched forward. The sheer volume of dirt between him and the nearest transmitter must be getting in the way. The lance corporal let out a sigh, figuring that he would probably be in for an earful of reprimand from Staff Sergeant Lashmeier or Captain Otepi when he got back out with Harrison, for going offline.

  “Don’t!”

  The sensitive microphones in his suit picked up a small sound from further ahead, coming out of the brighter haze of electric glow that signaled the service tunnel’s termination.

  Oh no. It sounded an awful lot like Harrison from the snippet that he had heard—and it sounded like the Private First Class was pretty uptight about something.

  “Harrison!” Dane called out, breaking into a fast run into the glare of light—the glare suddenly reducing as his face-plate’s automatic optics took over . . .

  To find himself at the end of the service tunnel, on the downward entrance to a room, which was bright and light and filled with chrome and glass and long, medical beds. In the middle stood Private First Class Harrison, his Field Halligan hanging loose in one hand and the heavy pistol in the other. He was pointing it straight at the much smaller form of a human in a white coat.

  And there, standing on the other side of them both, was an Exin.

  “Crawdad!” Dane shouted, quickly snatching the rifle from where it was mounted along his suit’s thigh and raising it—

  “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” The human white coat, some kind of scientist clearly, held up his hands and stepped in front of the alien, which stood in its hulking, hunched-over way, as tall as Harrison and Williams, its skin gleaming with the gray-green glitter of scales. The Exin made no movement with its taloned hands or its strange, two-jointed legs, but its small three-part mandible jaw twitched slightly.

  “Step aside!” Harrison was shouting, his field pistol wavering in his hands slightly as he said so. Dane could see clearly from where he stood behind the private first class how seriously beaten up his suit was. He must have fallen all of the sixty or so feet straight down and hadn’t figured out how to activate the Orbital AMP’s thrusters before impact. The defensive plates there were crumpled and smashed, and he had completely discarded his face-plate helmet, leaving jagged cracks in the high mantle and blood running freely from the side of Harrison’s forehead.

  “Don’t shoot! It’s not what you think!” The scientist appeared puny compared to the three giant forms around him. He had a crewcut of autumn brown hair and glasses, and he waved his hands enthusiastically in front of Harrison, as if to break the man out of his murderous intent.

  “Not what I think? I see right here one of the things that killed thousands!” Harrison spat, taking a step forward. “And if you don’t move right now, I’ll be shooting right through you and your crawdad lover behind!”

  At this final insult, the alien seemed to raise its head in a curiously human gesture, as if daring the human to get it over and done with.

  Dane could see how incensed the private was and how close to losing it he was. Harrison wasn’t in control. And no matter what the immediate danger was to them all from the Exin (who knew if it carried the Exin virus?) Dane also knew that an unhinged marine was a bad thing for any situation.

  “Stand down, Harrison. I’ve got this. That’s an order,” Dane growled, but kept his own rifle up and pointed straight at the Exin’s head. It was then that he realized that the alien in front of him wasn’t in the regular exo-armor that they seemed to wear: the form-fitting plates and scales that looked oddly organic and were covered with bony protrusions like nodules. In fact, the creature looked much thinner and, well, creepier to Dane’s eyes.

  The alien invader had some form of close-fitted clothing, a mesh of glittering silver-gray cotton fabric like a body suit, but the lance corporal could clearly see the alien’s muscles at leg, neck, and arm. They were strange to his human eyes. Not in the right place, and they moved and pulled oddly in a way that the native Earth organism inside of him found deeply disturbing.

  But it wasn’t armed or armored. Dane’s memory flung back up at him a fragment of conversation that Captain Otepi had given him. This Exin in front of them was not dressed as one of their warrior caste.

  Did the alien threat even have civilians? Workers? Staff?

  “But look, Williams—look!” Harrison had turned his attention to the rest of the room around them. There were what looked like many medical beds, each one encased in plastic and metal, and each one sized much larger than for the average human form.

  And inside, there appeared to be more Exin.

  No, not Exin. Dane’s eyes banished the image. It was the drones. The murdering killbots modeled on the aliens just like this one. They were in various stages of completion under their glass domes, Dane could see, and it was faintly grotesque to see their innards of cogs and servos and even stranger apparatus that Dane had no name for.

  The Exin murderbots occupied one side of the unit. (It was from here that they were deployed, Dane rationalized. They were built here and released out into the chasm and the training hangar above . . .) But on the other side of the room were more of the glass-domed medical beds, and inside of those were human forms.

  “What the . . . ?” Dane saw what appeared to be sleeping humans, a variety of men and women dressed only in their underwear with a multitude of sensors and wires attached to their bodies. As Dane’s eyes narrowed, he saw the chest of the nearest one rise and fall softly. They were still alive in there. His eyes moved to one of the last of the human-occupied medical beds, and he gasped when he saw a familiar, meaty, bald frown of a face.

  Osgud? Dane gasped under his breath. It was true. It was the M.I.D. marine who had hounded and tormented Dane all through basic training for being “weak” and “crippled” (as it was common knowledge that Dane was carrying the Exin virus, and Osgud had believed that he was just a liability to the rest of them).

  Which, perhaps, was true . . . Dane thought about what had happened to the unconscious man. They had been on their first active deployment when Osgud had come to grudgingly respect Dane’s experience in a Mech suit. But Osgud in turn had been exposed to the Exin virus and had been put on Dr. Heathcote’s Vito-neura treatment just as he was. Or so Dane had presumed. The last time that Dane had seen him, he had been ensconced in a similar-looking medical bed but in Fort Mayweather, the Mechanized Infantry Base Camp, and had blamed Dane for his infection.

  And the death sentence that it entailed, Dane knew only too well.

  “That’s Osgud! That’s Osgud!” Harrison was saying, his tone somewhere between fury and panic. Dane didn’t know that the two men had been buddies back at camp. But the lance corporal knew that there was a very real way in which everyone who had been through the rigors of basic training and deployment and first combat were now brothers. Dane felt a shiver of anger at seeing one of his own lying here, apparently at the mercy of whatever arcane experiments this sci
entist was running.

  “Someone had better start explaining fast,” Dane growled, his attention snapping back to the scientist as he settled his aim on the Exin “civilian.” “And that someone had better be you, Doc . . .”

  “It’s a part of Phase 2! It has been authorized by the first admiral himself!” the scientist was saying, just as there was a glitch in the lights overhead. Dane saw a momentary burst of static flare in his HUD.

  “What!?” Dane snarled, as alarms sounded, and the lights started to flash across the room. The inner doors opened, pouring black-garbed security personnel brandishing guns and batons into the room—

  Dane tried to move, but found that he couldn’t. At all.

  “Lance Corporal!” He could hear Harrison’s worried shout and didn’t have to turn his immobile head to see straight out of his eye how the man’s suit had frozen into a half turn. “I can’t move! I can’t move!” Harrison was saying in panic as the security guards of the Nevada Personnel arrived at his side and soundly whacked his exposed head with a stun baton.

  “HEY!” Dane shouted but was completely helpless to do anything. They’d done something to his suit, locked all of its motors and plates somehow, remotely. Something that meant that he couldn’t move a muscle.

  “Lance Corporal Dane!” It was the voice of Captain Otepi, scattering the security personnel around her like gadflies as she strode into the room. And although she wore the same black fatigues that they all did, with no hint of armor or mechanized plate, somehow she managed to stand just as tall as Dane did. And she completely ignored the Exin in the room as she made a beeline for Williams.

  “You’re under arrest for broach of military secrets!” she snapped.

  And behind them all, the Exin invader continued to stand, making a slight hissing sort of noise, as if it chittered in victory.