Metal Warrior: Steel Trap (Mech Fighter Book 3)

by James David Victor

  The craft returned again, their five-craft wave breaking, widening, and firing.

  Flash! Dane saw the first of the walkways between the domes explode into glittering shapes of burnt and twisted metal. Horrifyingly, he was sure that he also saw tiny, struggling figures as scientific officers were dragged out, silent but screaming, into the night.

  Flash! There was a set of small explosions near one of the medium-sized domes, as some gas stores or fuel cells must have been hit. Then, in a chain reaction, the explosions rippled along some underground pipeline straight to the medium-sized dome. Dane swore he saw the entire thing glow from the inside before it broke apart. Octagonal panels the size of cars and buildings were thrown into space, turning and spiraling in oddly balletic movements . . .

  BWAAR! It was at that moment that the facility-wide alarm went off, and the lights started to flash a warning orange as the entire base went into high alert. The screen kept on rolling the footage, but the noise cut as the facility-wide speakers blared.

  “ALL COMBAT PERSONNEL TO IMMEDIATE DEPLOYMENT. REPEAT: ALL COMBAT PERSONNEL TO IMMEDIATE DEPLOYMENT . . .”

  Dane looked at Bruce and nodded. They had been trained to know what that meant. The suits. That was what they did, after all. They were Mechanized Infantry and were expected to suit up at the first sign of trouble. Dane knew that by the time he had done so, they would already have their more unit-specific objectives awaiting them.

  “Marines!” Dane jumped onto the table, bellowing to get their attention. “Form into fire teams. To the AMP Launch Hangar!”

  As there were now less than twenty active Orbital Marines (they had lost Harrison, and the training had winnowed their number down even more), they had naturally formed into four small fire teams. Each team had four or five marines each, with two teams forming a tactical squad. Dane had no idea what they were going to be called on to do in this calamity, since they were down here on Earth and all the action was happening up there on the Moon—but the orders had gone out, and they were being called to serve.

  Dane joined the others as he raced through the open door, already tightening his fatigues and ready for the AMP cradle.

  Their boots clattered down the corridors, following the blue flashing line, the whine of the facility alarm in their ears as the Orbital Marines mustered. They passed other soldiers and scientific staff running this way and that through the corridors under the Nevada desert, and Dane heard the snatches of orders as everyone scrambled.

  “Private! Bring up the extra battery cells!”

  “Signals! I want you ready by the time I get there!”

  The hangar bay doors were already open by the time Dane got there, and not for the first time he wished that he had Joey Corsoni nearby to be prepping his suit for him. But whatever had happened to their support engineers, they weren’t here, and Dane had to oversee the task himself.

  “By the numbers, people!” Dane shouted encouragingly as the lights flickered on over each Orbital AMP cradle. It looked like a row of statues or—the thought flashed uncomfortably through Dane’s head—the upright sarcophagi of some ancient race. Dane ran to his own suit, seeing the plates already petaled open to reveal the harness and straps inside as he climbed the short ladder, and swung himself in.

  “Williams!” A voice shouted from below, and Dane was surprised to see himself looking down at none other than Dr. Heathcote, wearing her white coat, hair disheveled, and waving something up at him. A black box, just like the one on his leg.

  “I grabbed it as soon as the deployment order came in. You haven’t got enough spares!” she was saying.

  Enough spares for what? Dane was thinking as he leaned out to catch the thrown box. He stowed it in one of the outer compartments on the belt section of the suit. He was still wearing his current Vito-neura injector under his fatigues on his thigh, and he had swapped out one of the ampules of the doctor’s antigens just last night. The medical scanner kept a constant watch on the chemicals secreted by his skin, and would inject him when the levels of antigen got too low and the effects of the nerve-killing Exinase compound started to attack. There was no way to say how long an entire ampule lasted, as it depended entirely on how much stress and physical exertion that Dane put himself through—but he guessed that he must have enough now for what, forty-eight hours?

  “I’ll try to send more to the base,” the doctor was saying, already backing away, checking her watch. “I have to go. Good luck!”

  “Which base!?” Dane called out, but Dr. Sylvia Heathcote was already gone, running back through the open doors, presumably to follow the green line to the medical sections of the facility.

  Dammit. The doctor already knew what his mission was going to be, Dane realized. Which perhaps wasn’t so much of a surprise. She was one of the leading military advisors in the whole defense of Earth, and presumably was prepped with all sorts of operational information that was denied to a lowly Lance Corporal like Dane.

  He thumped home into the webbing, secured the X-harness, and felt it auto-tighten around his body. The protective pads and cushions filled suddenly, securing him firmly inside his new skin.

  He slid his feet to lock home into the boots. At the same time, the half-circular greaves at legs and arms folded over his limbs, first magnetically locking and then whirring closed.

  Dane’s hands found the neoprene inner-glove mesh inside the giant gauntlets and twisted his hands a little, activating the metal gauntlets to secure shut. The connecting internal rods and locks slid home, whirred, and secured.

  The largest pieces of the Assisted Mechanized Plate—the sheaths of breastplates—folded over him and cut off the light as they did so. Dane had the sudden sensation of being buried in metal for the briefest of moments as everything locked into place and tightened so that he could almost no longer feel the difference where his body started and the suit began.

  Then came the mantle, lowering over his head to lock into place over his shoulder and collarbone, and finally, the helmet.

  >ORBITAL AMP 023 Activating . . .

  >Cycling accelerator unit . . .

  >Recognizing User . . . L. CPL WILLIAMS, D . . .

  >General Systems Check . . . GOOD . . .

  >Filtration, Biological, Chemical, and Radionic Protections . . . GOOD . . .

  >Connecting to Federal Network . . .

  The other marines were already activating and stepping out of their wall cradles by the time that Dane’s internal heads-up display flickered into green life. His suit still bore the scratches of the recent training encounter, but even without his engineer Joey Corsoni, it appeared that the spaceship builders of Nevada knew a thing or two about repairing Mech suits. The small vector icon of a green man on Dane’s right-hand view glowed a healthy, 100% prepared-and-shielded green.

  And then his orders came through.

  > M.I.D. 4-AMP Fire Teams: (Red, L. CPL WILLIAMS), (Blue, L. CPL CHENG), (Green, Act. CPL COPELLI), (Yellow, Act. CPL MUAI).

  > Mission: Retake Luna 1 . . .

  7

  The Gladius

  “Are you reading this, Dane?” Hopskirk’s voice broke over the suit communicator in Dane’s ear. Dane was collecting his own personal fire team, already waiting with the others at one end of the AMP deployment hangar. His team, thankfully, were all people that he had worked with before: Private First Class Hopskirk, Vindiar, Johnstone, and Okra. The other teams were already assembled around them under Cheng and the Acting Corporals.

  “They want us to retake the Moon. How on Earth are we going to do that?” Hopskirk was saying.

  “Well, for starters, we don’t do it on Earth, you idiot,” Johnston laughed, earning a playful clank as Hopskirk slapped his suit.

  “Watch the paint jobs, fellas,” Dane murmured. “You all know why we came here. To become Orbital Marines . . .”

  “. . . space marines . . .” Vindiar whispered excitedly under his breath.

  “And we’ve had the training . . .”

  “
Only twelve days of it!” Hopskirk murmured, but Dane continued to ignore him.

  “. . . so I reckon that they’ve already sorted out our travel plans for us,” Dane was saying. He didn’t say anything about the Gladius. They would all see it soon enough.

  >Teams 1-4 Ready . . .

  The status flashed up on all of their HUDs, and the metal hangar doors swept backward into the walls. There was the wide ramp that led down into the training space where he had been before, but all of the oil drums and concrete walls and metal room dividers were gone. Thoughts of the trick floor falling away from underneath him flashed through his mind, and of the secret chasm and chamber far below them where the rest of the Exin killbots slept. But Dane pushed it to one side as he followed the gleaming green arrow ahead, with his fire team following at his heels behind him.

  Instead of the obstacle course, a singular large object sat in the space. Dwarfed the space, really.

  “Holy mother of . . .” Dane heard Hopskirk breathe. Dane wondered at his own coolness at the sight of the Gladius up close, probably because he had been introduced to it before. He was suddenly struck by the notion that this was probably why senior officers appeared so in control and unfazed by events around them. They had already been briefed about any situation that they might encounter . . .

  “Is that what I think it is?” Vindiar said as their feet naturally slowed to take in the awe of it.

  The Gladius was even more impressive up close than it was through a view screen, Dane had to admit. It was the pinnacle of human space flight right now.

  “This looks like our ride, gentlemen!” Dane called out, marveling at how it was easily twice the height of him in his suit if not three times, gleaming all over with glossy, radiation-bouncing black.

  There were many compartments and bulbous sorts of nodes along its length, which Dane took to be sensors and scanners. The nacelles—the two long tubes that ran the length of its body—grew fat towards the end in what could have been rocket hubs, if Dane had not been told that the thing used pulse and gravitational energy.

  And then his eyes found the cannons mounted under the prow, looking like very large versions of the field rifles that every Orbital Marine carried. There were also smaller gun turrets on the shoulders and near the back of the craft, although Dane believed that these were much smaller smart laser setups.

  “About time!” a voice was calling. “We haven’t got all day, you know—we’ve got our Moon to save!” Dane looked at where a ramp extended from the chassis of the craft. There, standing on it, was none other than Joey Corsoni.

  “Get yourselves strapped in, and if anyone’s sick, I don’t want to hear about it!” Corsoni said cheerfully as he led Dane and the other tactical commanding officers through the narrow corridors of the Gladius to the cockpit. The rest of the Orbital Marines had to be content with using the webbing hooks in the hold.

  Dane found himself looking at a set of four wall-mounted chairs behind one pilot’s chair in front of a wide desk of buttons, levers, and dials.

  “They wanted to put holo-controls in, of course, but I told ’em naw . . .” Corsoni was saying as Dane settled into one of the seats.

  “You told them naw?” Dane asked. “Is that what you’ve been doing all this time?”

  “And the rest!” Corsoni laughed. “An engineer’s life isn’t just restricted to one project and one AMP suit, you know!” he said. He started flicking switches and turning dials before pulling down an old-style communicator on a wire from the ceiling.

  “Mission Control, this is Corsoni aboard the Gladius. Requesting checking. Repeat: requesting preflight checks.”

  Dane still couldn’t believe that his own personal engineer would have hidden the existence of this craft from him for so long. But then again, Dane wasn’t precisely sure how long the military had been working on it? A month? Two?

  “Ever since the Exin first attacked Earth, we’ve had to up our space game,” Corsoni explained when Dane marveled out loud at how much had been achieved. Humanity already had colonies up there on Mars and the Moon, of course, so they had a full range of space shuttles and space transports capable of ferrying goods and supplies back and forth. But the Gladius was going to be one of the first of a new generation of fighter craft, designed solely for combat operations, the engineer explained.

  “We’ve got a fleet of these babies already in production, and plans for supporting craft to form the basis of a pretty good space corps, I reckon . . .” Corsoni was saying. Then his eyes flickered and his tone went darker. “Because, after this . . . After the Exin . . .” he managed to say.

  Dane understood. Nothing was going to be the same now, was it? Nothing could be the same ever again. Earth now knew that they weren’t alone. That they had neighbors. And that not all of those neighbors were friendly.

  “But hopefully we only need this one,” Dane said, not explicitly saying anything about the Jupiter mission, but Joey looked briefly back and nodded. He knew of it, it seemed.

  “Gladius—this is Nevada Flight Control. Initiating checks. Prepare for launch sequence . . .”

  The radios blared, and the dashboard in front of Corsoni started to flicker with series and patterns of lights, analyzing internal pressures, battery capacity, and a hundred other things that Dane didn’t understand at all. Corsoni responded with a series of chantlike “check, check, check., all good . . .” until the last one was satisfied, and a new voice appeared over the radio.

  “Gladius, this is Otepi, operating command. You’re receiving mission data as we speak, and I want to remind you that this is an action that is currently developing, so expect to respond to mission updates on-the-ground, or on-the-Moon, as it happens . . .”

  Was that a joke? Dane wondered.

  “The Exin have taken out the Luna 1 battery stations as of 12:48 . . .”

  Dane checked his internal clock. It was now 13:06.

  “And they have made moon-fall.”

  “What!?” Cheng burst out. Dane shared his surprise. The Exin attacked and destroyed in lightning raids that rarely caused them to land. Their only purpose appeared to be the total destruction of humanity’s infrastructure, and their ability to respond. Not—whatever this was.

  “Repeat. The Exin have made moon-fall. We have lost contact with the Luna base and are trying to establish a connection through the spy satellites network. We believe they are moving to hold territory . . .”

  Dane felt his throat tighten. The Exin were going to try and take the Moon? That would give them a permanent staging post up there, if they could manage it—but it would be an audacious plan, even for such a technologically advanced race. They would be inside Earth territory—but Dane could see quickly how advantageous it would be for them. If the Exin could hold the Moon, then they would cut off Earth’s connection to Mars. They would be able to form a bridgehead directly into human space and would be able to bombard the planet to their heart’s (or whatever strange organ they had) content, until either Earth submitted, or until there was no intelligent life left to resist.

  But why?? What was it all for? The same old questions flashed through Dane’s mind, despite the fact that he wasn’t going to get any answers soon—or perhaps ever. And anyway, Dane knew well enough that for some people it was sufficient just to hate. Hadn’t various kingdoms and empires of humanity done the same to the other parts of their own globe in the past? Who was to say that the Exin weren’t operating under the same expansionist impulse?

  “You will be expected to deploy as the situation allows. Prepare for a hard landing,” Captain Otepi said. Dane fervently wished that she and her monolithic War Walker Mechs could be up there too.

  But right now, all they had was the Gladius and the Orbital AMP marines.

  “And gentlemen? Good luck.”

  The captain clicked off, and the message came through that they were cleared for launch. A set of external hangar doors rolled slowly down, revealing the brilliant gleam of a Nevada sky above.
<
br />   “I hope you’ve all completed your g-force training,” Dane heard Corsoni say as he flicked the last few switches and grabbed the flight sticks.

  Dane felt the Gladius shudder underneath and around him, like a beast that was rising to wakeful ire. He felt the slight tremor in his stomach, although he couldn’t tell if it was anxiety or excitement. Sometimes it was both.

  The lance corporal checked his harness, making sure it was tight, as Corsoni pulled the flight sticks back and up. Dane heard the clunk as the landing gear folded back into place.

  “What’s holding us up!?” It was Acting Corporal Copelli, sitting in his own seat beside Williams. The other Acting Corporal, Muai, appeared silent and stoic through all of this on one side of Bruce Cheng.

  “That, my about-to-be-amazed friend, would be the new generation of pulse thrusters!” Corsoni said. “Welcome to the future!”

  “If we manage to survive it,” Acting Corporal Muai broke his silence to say sardonically, as Corsoni pushed the flight sticks forward. The Gladius started to glide forward through the underground hangar, far more smoothly than any combustion could have performed.

  To the distant cameras of the Nevada Mission Control, they would have been able to see a dim orange glow coming from the nacelles of their flagship craft. It wavered and hazed the air around it and was able to push it forwards at a steady walking pace.

  Corsoni angled the nose cone, bringing them up the ramp for the sky ahead to glare a brilliant white and then diffuse to blue.

  “Take a look now or forever hold your peace!” the engineer shouted, clearly overjoyed. Dane took the opportunity to swivel in his large chair and look through the side windows of the cockpit. He saw the metal pipes and girders of the hangar bay door, and then the sweep of boulders and sand rolling away underneath them. This hangar apparently opened out of the base of a rocky outcrop, a cliff—and Dane realized that much of the Nevada Facility was probably burrowed inside that line of hard hills in the middle of the desert.