Metal Warrior: Steel Trap (Mech Fighter Book 3)

by James David Victor

  Flash! Flash!

  The walls of the nearest habitat were close—and so were the enemy too. Dane saw another blister of purple flashes and their Exin operators clearly now. Five members of the Exin warrior caste were arrayed in a loose defensive line in front of the nearest habitat and were taking pot-shots at the bouncing and bounding, jumping Orbital Marines coming for them.

  “Argh!” Dane heard a scream, abruptly cut off by a snarl of static as one of his Red Fire Team—a marine named Hernandez—was hit by two bolts of purple laser fire. He spun in smoke as he tumbled to the ground.

  “Hernandez!” he shouted, but Dane was already too far away, scissor-kicking through the air as he had thrown himself into another titanic leap—

  He was firing in a wide arc around him, heading straight for the middle of the Exin positions. One of his blasts hit one on his right, and the other hit one on his left (who flew backwards as a bit of the scale suit appeared to burst with smoke and ruptured metals). But now Dane was landing, reversing his grip on the rifle to bring it down in an overhead strike straight against the rising arms and shell blaster of the nearest Exin warrior.

  Crack! The action happened in almost total silence, but Dane felt the crack running along his arms and into his shoulders as his attack hit home, forcing the Exin’s arms away with all the momentum of his leap.

  Dane flipped the rifle once again as his boots hit the dust and dirt of the lunar surface, and he was holding down the trigger and firing point-blank into the chest of the Exin before him. Dane remembered to keep the trigger down as the Exin was blown backwards. He even lunged forward so that he could keep the burning orange beam of light on the center of the alien’s chest as he saw sparks fly.

  And then there were brilliant white flashes up and down the alien’s suit as Dane’s pulse weapon must have torn apart some vital pressure or wire or reactor. The alien was flung against the wall of the habitat, spilling bits of shell and ichor as it floated to the floor in a thump of limbs and death.

  Yes! Dane was chorusing, mostly to himself, as he swung around to deal with the next Exin, the one he had knocked to the ground with one of his incoming blasts.

  WHAM!

  For a bolt of burning particles to slam into his chest and fling him to one side.

  9

  Hard Choices

  >Suit Impact. Breastplate -35% . . .

  Dane groaned as he opened his eyes to see stars very, very literally indeed.

  He was lying on his back on the lunar surface, and even though it felt like a lifetime ago, time and space snapped back into unceasing action as if he had only just blinked.

  “Williams!” He heard a roar and saw the glossy reflection off the dark suit of Bruce Cheng (easily recognizable because of the gold stripe on the shoulder and because it was built bigger than the other Orbital AMPs suits) slam into the nearest Exin. He sent it tumbling through the air like Cheng was playing a tackle in some pro-ball game.

  Unlike any sports game back on Earth, however, Cheng finished up his tackle with a concentrated beam from his pulse rifle, neatly severing one of the limbs from the alien in mid-flight before he even turned around.

  “Holy frack, Cheng . . .” Dane murmured, pushing himself up—and then seeing the giant circle of slagged and burnt metal in the center of his chest, just above his utility belt. He had been hit almost point-blank by one of those blasters. He was lucky it didn’t break a hole in his suit for the vacuum to spool out his innards in an instant . . .

  “I never knew you were such a good shot,” Dane managed as he swung about—to see that the Red and the Blue Teams had overcome the initial alien defenders, but that they had also lost numbers.

  “Hernandez!?” he called out, but heard nothing back on the comms from the Private First Class.

  Instead, it was Private First Class Johnston who answered. “I’ve got him, sir. He and Ullanov from Blue are with me. Life signs bad, but they can survive with the right treatment. I’m requesting medical evacuation from the Gladius . . .”

  “Which is under heavy fire—” Bruce chimed in, turning to point between the domes of Lunar 1 to where the Gladius flashed past, followed by the batteries of gigantic purple meson bolts, spearing up into the night after it.

  “Dammit!” Dane growled. Both Red and Blue had two good men down, and there was no word how Yellow and Green had done. He cast a quick look at the lightning bolt that was the Gladius, then came to a knife-turn of a decision. “Lance Corporal Williams rescinding that request for medical,” he called out on open comms, knowing that Corsoni would pick it up if he had a chance to even look at his screen updates.

  “What!?” Johnston started to protest.

  “They can’t come down and get our wounded or they will be shot down. It’ll be better to get to Lunar 1 medical for now. We can take care of them there,” Dane explained, nodding. He activated the tactical map that the mission parameters contained within and sent it to Johnston and Cheng’s Orbital AMP suits. There blossomed in their sights the original map of the lunar station with its seven different-sized domes, and a small glowing green vector indicating their current position.

  “Every lunar dome has its own medical, right?” Dane was saying, zooming in on the tactical map of the one that sat right in front of them. “Every one of these domes has to be self-sufficient in case there’s any danger.”

  “Like an alien invasion, you mean?” Hopskirk appeared, bounding out of the sky and proceeding to kneel a few yards ahead of them, taking up point. “My scanners are picking up movement. We knocked, they’re about to answer,” he said in a more serious tone.

  “Okay, smart-ass,” Dane sighed. “Here and here.” He used the sensors in his gloves to drop pins on the map on their screens. “Fully equipped medical bays. We’ll get the wounded there. We need the Gladius’s firepower, and we need the Exin concentrating their big guns on her not on us.”

  And, Dane tried not to add, we just have to hope that the Gladius continues to outrun the Exin’s missiles too—because if she goes down, we’ll be stranded here until they manage to build another Gladius.

  The lance corporal didn’t mention any of this to them. He figured that much was pretty obvious, but hoped that no one else had figured it out yet . . .

  “Lance Corporal, if I may object?” Cheng was saying.

  Oh great, Dane thought, wondering what an argument between the two leading officers would look like to the rest of Red and Blue Teams, who had already lost a man each.

  “The Exin batteries. We need to take them out. That way we relieve pressure off the Gladius,” Cheng said, which was a damn good point, Dane conceded. Without the missile batteries, any help that Earth and First Admiral Yankis could send would get here a whole lot easier . . .

  But what help? Dane was forced to ask.

  “Gentlemen? They’re closing fast on our nine o’clock,” Hopskirk was saying, swinging around to point across the gray dirt to the next nearest dome, still with its broken-open walkway facing towards them. Dane guessed the Exin warriors were either inside of it or on the other side of that walkway and coming straight at them. “Whatever we’re doing, we need to move now.”

  Dammit! Dane could have sworn with frustration. If he knew that the Gladius was coming back, he would dig his heels in here, defend the wounded men until they could get out. But that wasn’t an option, not with the Exin batteries still firing. So, they should set the auto-medical functions on Hernandez and Ullanov’s suits and leave them in a suspended coma until they could come back . . .

  No. Dane couldn’t do that. What if the oncoming Exin find them? They’d be sentencing them to execution.

  But should they all get killed and the entire mission—the entire safety of their beautiful orb of Earth—be jeopardized for two injured men?

  “Okay.” Dane nodded with Cheng. “We split. You take Blue to the nearest Exin battery, and I take Red and the wounded in here for the nearest medical,” he offered. He could tell from the way that Bruce�
�s suit hunched that the big man didn’t like the idea of their two teams splitting up—three able-bodied men apiece and Dane taking the two wounded with him—but Cheng also knew that he had no right to overrule how Dane used his own fire team.

  “Dane . . .” Cheng still murmured however, and Dane already knew what the big guy was going to say. That their mission objective was to retake the Moon, and that they had to respond with overwhelming force. That they had to act decisively and quickly, and sometimes in war hard choices had to be made, and casualties were unavoidable . . .

  “No marine left behind, Lance Corporal,” Dane said and was already signaling for Johnston to move with Hernandez and Ullanov to the broken-open walkway that led into the dome in front of them. (Thankfully, it was easy work to shift the semi-conscious bodies in near-zero gravity).

  “On me, Hopskirk!” Dane said, as he and Hopskirk covered Johnston’s approach. Bruce Cheng’s suit regarded him for a moment, and then turned, leading his two other remaining Blue Team members around the curve of the dome, heading for the nearest Exin battery. Dane wondered if he had just done something incredibly stupid. He wondered if he should have agreed to leave Johnston and the wounded there, to be overrun by the oncoming Exin . . .

  But . . . No.

  There was absolutely no way that he was going to let any other marine fall like Mahir did, right before his eyes, because of his inaction, Dane promised himself.

  10

  Habitat 4, Luna Station

  “Who’s got the damn access codes!?” It was Johnston, swearing as he made it to the airlock door and hitting the door release button.

  The door to Habitat 4 remained stubbornly closed.

  Dane, Hopskirk, Johnston, and the two semi-conscious bodies of Ullanov and Hernandez were cramped inside the broken-open walkway that led to the door—a short corridor of white metal ending in double doors of gray steel. Behind them, the walkway was torn and slagged open to reveal the gray-and-stone ash of the Moon and the next rising dome of the larger Habitat 3.

  Have I made a mistake? Dane was thinking as he pushed past Private Johnston, stopping him just before he was about to blow the door with a point-blank blast of his pulse rifle.

  “That’ll only make our job harder—you need to override the security algorithms with your suit’s code cracker . . .” Dane said, reaching the door and scanning it. There. Below was the access control panel, which he quickly crumpled with one sure punch of his Mech gauntlet, ripping off the casing to reveal the smaller switches and ports inside. “This whole place must be on emergency lockdown. If we blow our way in, there’ll be no way of closing the door behind us!”

  “Oh yeah . . .” Johnston muttered, already getting to work on the access panel, drawing out a cable from his belt and plugging it into one of the access ports. Every AMP suit was supposed to be able to be dropped into any situation, from a battlefield to a stealth operation. Therefore, even the generalized ones had their own security servers and telemetry systems which governed the suit’s performance, but also did a hundred other functions like run scans, stay in contact with central marine servers—as well as a whole range of security protocols.

  In effect, Dane knew that each AMP suit was a walking computer—no, a walking battleship. Of the security procedures that they could initiate, each AMP suit could encrypt and decrypt communications to and from their suit, as well as run static interference in a personal “cloud”—and of course, run code-cracking software (albeit, nowhere near as advanced as what a dedicated military intelligence unit could perform).

  “They’re coming!” Hopskirk said. Dane swung around to race back to the end of the broken walkway just as the first bolts of Exin purple lasers leapt towards them.

  “Frack!” Dane heard Hopskirk snarl as he ducked back behind the edge of the torn metal. The moon rocks in front of them exploded. Dust obscured their vision entirely, but Dane could now hear the wham against the metal of the walls, picked up by his suit microphones. And even more worryingly, he could see the sudden impacts and bulging craters punching inwards as the blasts hit home on the walkway walls.

  “Johnston!?” Dane called.

  “Almost there!” The man sounded stressed over the suit communicator.

  And no wonder, Dane thought. He’s trying to keep two people alive as well as break into a habitat.

  Johnston grunted while he worked. Dane leaned a little out and fired as best he could at where he thought the enemy had to be. He was firing through drifts of lunar ash and dust, so it was impossible to track where they were with his eyes. But there were angry red blips of danger on his HUD scanner. He fired at them and was rewarded by at least one of them being thrown back . . .

  Before the answering volley hammered their position.

  “Williams!” Dane heard Hopskirk cry out. Then he was being hauled backwards as the marine dragged him away from the edge of the broken walkway, almost flinging him in the light gravity. The entire front of the walkway cracked and sheared inwards with the tumult.

  “Urgh . . .” Dane groaned from where he crouched against the wall, a few feet away from where Ullanov was similarly crumpled. Dane could see the pale image of his face behind his face-plate. It looked ghostly white.

  “Thanks,” Dane said to Hopskirk, who shook his head.

  “Of course, now the crawdads have just made it harder to get at us,” he was saying, nodding to where the front of the walkway appeared half-collapsed. “Stupid fools . . .” He was about to laugh at them, when the wall beside him suddenly ripped open with a glowing orange line.

  “Holy crap!” Hopskirk dodged as they saw three glowing-orange metal claws punch through the tear and slowly bend the metal backwards in on itself.

  “Johnston!” Hopskirk called in panic, leveling his rifle straight at the tear in the wall and through it, to where there stood an Exin wearing some sort of clawed gauntlet on one hand, clearly designed for just such a purpose.

  “I got it!” Johnston cried out, and there was a hiss of pressurized pistons as the door slid open, and Johnston hauled the bodies of Hernandez and Ullanov ahead of him into the airlock . . .

  “Get some!” Hopskirk was shouting as he pummeled the gap in the wall with laser blasts. He feathered the trigger to produce a salvo of bolts—half of which merely pounded into the wall on their side, further slagging the metal into a burning crimson-red melt.

  “Hopskirk—get back!” Dane snarled, lowering his own rifle to fire a singular beam straight through, and he was rewarded with a flash of something.

  Private First Class Hopskirk dove for the airlock. Dane kept the beam running as he backed to the door frame.

  “Come on, we’re closing!” Johnston shouted, hauling on the wheel on the inside that brought the airlock door down manually.

  Scrape! Another triple line of glowing orange cut through the metal on the other side of the corridor. Whatever that tool was that the Exin were using, it was powerful, and they had more of them equipped with it.

  No wonder they broke into the habitats so quickly, Dane thought as he fired another shot at the other side. As it widened, he saw the glimmer of a steel-and-green armored shell, and then he was ducking under the door as it slammed home and locked.

  “Dear holy suffering mothers of . . .” Hopskirk was snarling. Behind them was another airlock door which supposedly led into the body of Habitat 4. There were already hisses of steam filling up into this room as their suits felt suddenly heavier than they had before. The gravity was still a light, but the barometric pressures went a long way toward making the internal environment normal for humans.

  “Okay, we’re good to go,” Johnston said, hitting the door release for the internal room, but of course, they already had a problem.

  “If the Exin want to, they’ll just blow through these doors, which will depressurize the habitats, creating a whirlwind inside . . .” Dane was saying, looking from the sealed external door to the opening internal.

  “If we close this door,” Johnston
said as he picked up Hernandez bodily, and Hopskirk picked up Ullanov, “then we at least create a buffer. They’ll blow that outer door, which will create a blast of atmosphere that will hopefully send them flying for about two hundred feet . . .”

  “But they must know that, right?” Hopskirk said as he paused at the entrance to the wide, white corridor inside.

  “No time,” Dane shook his head, feeling pressured and as if he were missing a part of the puzzle that he couldn’t see just yet. “We’ll just have to hope the Exin are either stupid enough to blow the doors anyway or just give up,” he said, nodding for them to continue.

  “There’s a medical bay on Level 2, one floor up from us, near the center. Third right.” He checked his suit’s strategic scan maps, and they started toward the medical bay.

  But as they clattered through the habitat, Dane knew that there was something that he didn’t like about this. They were now trapped in here.

  “I’ve got movement up ahead!” Johnston called out. He awkwardly manhandled Hernandez to one side as he slapped his pulse rifle to his back and exchanged it for his heavy pistol. The corridors of Habitat 4 were arched with gray steels every ten feet or so, but between that were the smooth whites of regular metal panels. They had passed a few bulkhead doors leading to their right and left, with numbers stenciled onto their fronts alongside designations like Botany Labs 1-4, Chemistry Operations 17. The lunar colony was a scientific research station, Dane knew, which was mostly used for the production of telecommunications as well as research into growing, health, and living on exo-planets.

  If we lose what we’ve gained in Luna 1, it’ll probably set back our colony efforts by twenty-odd years, Dane guessed.