“They’re almost here!” Johnston called again. Both he and Hopskirk were trying to keep their wounded brothers in arms safe as well, so it was Dane who took point with the rifle. Up ahead of them was a T-junction, and on Dane’s scanners, he could see the converging blips of orange unknowns coming from both sides.
“They could be Exin infiltrators,” Johnston was saying. “They might already have taken the habitat.”
“Or they could be civilians!” Dane said quickly, stepping forward once again and setting his suit speaker to full. “Orbital Marines! Federal Marine Corps!” he bellowed and was rewarded with a cheer just before the first of the signals turned the corner towards them.
They were humans. Scientists, to be exact, wearing a variety of white-and-cream jumpsuits and bearing a motley of small pistols and crowbars. The first of them, a woman not wearing any atmospheric gear so Dane could clearly see her dark skin and shaved head, lowered her small pulse pistol and laughed.
“Thank the lord we didn’t have to use any of this.” She gestured at their array of weapons. “But it’s all we had. We thought they’d come for us at last.”
“Not if we can help it, ma’am,” Dane said. They looked pitifully under-tooled for the task of facing an alien invasion. He wondered at the wisdom of not having a permanent military presence on the Moon, Earth’s closest sister . . .
“Wait—are you all there is?” She blinked, seeing Dane and the two others (and the two wounded as well). “Oh crap . . .”
“Not all, but we’re the ones who are here,” Dane said quickly. “We’ve got three other teams out there trying to clear the Exin. But my men . . .” He half turned, and the woman nodded.
“Medical. Follow me.” She turned and led them and her gang back the way they had come, up a set of wide clattering stairs to another secure door. “My name is Dr. Powers, Associated Space Science Institute—the Exin attacked about two hours ago,” she was saying, filling him in as she swiped her card over the door. It lifted smoothly and revealed a wide, octagonal room with multiple medical beds and instruments against the walls. Dane liked the way that she didn’t panic and kept to the information required.
“They destroyed Main Dome 1 and Habitat 2 entirely, but mostly they seemed concerned with the gun emplacements and the walkways.” She crossed to the nearest beds, her hands running over the controls on their sides for their plastic shells to open. She pointed at the beds. “You’re going to have to get those men out of those—whatever they’re wearing—suits?”
“Mechanized Infantry Division, ma’am. Mech suits.” Dane nodded, helping Hopskirk and Johnston to work on the release catches that popped open the plates to reveal the wounded Hernandez and Ullanov inside.
The pair looked even worse up close, Dane had to admit. Hernandez had a terrific wound on his forehead, with still-weeping blood having formed a sheet down his face so that it looked that it was painted a deep crimson brown. Ullanov was little better. He had a deep burn on his chest just over his ribs from one of the Exin blasts.
“The suit must have auto-sealed after it,” Johnston muttered. “If it hadn’t . . .” Dane was glad that the man didn’t explain. He didn’t need to think about how the vacuum of space would find any hole in the man’s suit and do terrible things to what was inside and what was outside of a fleshy body.
“We can do this. We’re down to reserve power, but medical gets emergency priority on power usage after life support,” Dr. Powers was saying, as she carefully saw to the two men, cutting away their fatigues where she needed to and cleaning the wounds.
“We’ve got laser and cellular therapies as well as all the usual—but these men won’t be going anywhere fast,” she explained, administering two shots from an auto-injector to each.
“What is that?” Johnston hissed, a little protectively.
“Painkillers. A touch of sedatives. There’s no way they can heal without rest,” Powers said, casting a sharp eye at the large hulking form of the Mech beside her.
Suddenly, the ground shook underneath them. The other assembled scientists started to gasp and shout.
“What was that!?” they were shouting just as all the lights went out for an instant. They returned in a dim flicker, and the lights on the medical beds turned up first.
WHAM! This time, the walls shook with the force of whatever hit it. Several of the lighting panels in the ceiling crashed to the floor. The scientists screamed once again.
“Are they inside!?” Dane heard one of the lunar staff scream. He switched to the secure command channel.
“Bruce? Bruce! You okay—you got eyes on what’s happening out there!?” Dane had turned away, quickly asking. There was a moment’s silence and then a blip as Bruce’s voice came over his suit communicator.
“Williams. We’ve got trouble. The Exin have turned their gun batteries against the habitats. They mean to destroy them utterly . . .” His voice sounded taut and tense, and behind it, Dane could hear the bangs and clashes of battle. “My team and the others are pinned down across Habitat 2 and 6. I can’t get to them.”
Oh no. Dane clenched his teeth. Something inside of him had feared that they would be sitting ducks inside the habitats. But what choice did he have—he couldn’t let two fellow marines fall, could he? Dammit. Just. Dammit!
“The Gladius?” Dane asked.
Another glitch of static before Joey’s voice appeared. “Doing my best, but I got two of the seed crafts to slap around now!” he said, and he sounded almost jubilant. Crazy pilot, crazy engineers, Dane growled internally. He had never met any mechanic or engineer who wasn’t absolutely manic.
“Okay. Are any of the human gun batteries still operational?” Dane asked quickly.
“None. The Exin totaled them.” Bruce said, as there was another wham against the side of the habitat, making the floor shake. They intend to kill us all. Dane gritted his teeth. To break apart the habitat domes like eggs and kill us all . . .
Dane checked the strategic map as the habitat around them shook. The nearest of the Exin batteries had been set up at the same compound as one of the human batteries. Maybe the Exin had plugged them into the same power grid or just taken advantage of the defensive concrete walls that the human gun emplacements had.
WHAM! Suddenly, a muted alarm started up throughout the base.
“Something’s breached the outer wall shell!” Dr. Powers snapped, without ever looking up from the two marines that she was tending.
“Doctor—have you got an underground level to Habitat 4? A bunker?” Dane asked.
The doctor nodded. “Emergency life raft bunker. Good for forty-eight hours,” she said as the habitat shook.
“Good. I need you to get your people and my wounded down there as quickly as possible,” Dane was saying, already clicking through the lunar colony maps. There had to be a way to take out those Exin guns somehow, before they were all blown to pieces!
“Marine—what about you and your men?” Powers hesitated, looking between Dane to Johnston and Hopskirk.
“We need to get to the gun emplacements,” Dane was saying, swiping through schematic image after image to try and find what he was looking for. But it was no good. All he had were masses and masses of layouts for the internals of the habitat domes.
“We put in a service chute last year,” Powers said. “It’ll lead straight to Gun 2, and there’s another from Main Dome 1 to Guns 1 and 3. We got sick and tired of requesting approval from Earth, and we knew we needed to provide a pressurized, secure way for staffers to get out of there if . . .” her words faltered, and Dane could tell what she was going to say. If something like this were to happen.
The only problem was that something like this did happen, and they still weren’t ready. But a secret way in and out of the guns? Dane would take that. “Where is it?”
“North Corridor 207. Third-floor hatch,” Powers said quickly, already releasing the wheel locks from the medical beds so that she could move it to the bunker raft below. “B
ut marine—there’s no guarantee that the chute is accessible. The Exin pounded the colony with meson blasts . . .”
“Or that the Exin haven’t found it themselves,” Johnston grumbled.
“We’ll have to take that chance, ma’am,” Dane said. If we want to live, he thought but didn’t say aloud, before nodding to Johnston and Hopskirk. “Come on.”
11
Magnetized
“Got it!” Hopskirk said, lifting the metal access panel to reveal an even darker space below their feet. The whole of Habitat 4 was dark as the bombardment must have hit some vital piece of infrastructure. The only light came from their suits as they gazed down into darkness: a metal ladder and a concrete floor below, with what looked like barely enough room for the suits.
“I’m on point,” Dane said. If they were going to walk into a firing line of Exin warrior caste, then he wanted to be the first one to face it, not his men—
WHAM!
Another blast against the habitat, throwing them all to one side like bowling pins, and then came a rising roar of noise.
“What the . . . ?” Hopskirk said, as Dane saw the outside suit pressures suddenly start to drop dramatically.
“They’ve punctured the dome!” he cried out. Suddenly a whirlwind met them as air was dragged out of every open space not guarded by a bulkhead and sucked into the void.
And it brought with it everything that wasn’t nailed down.
“Brace!” Dane shouted, as his suit was hit by a metal table. A chair. A whole scattershot of silver steel utensils from any number of the labs.
>Suit Impact! . . .
>Suit Impact! . . .
Multiple alarms pinged from Dane’s HUD as he hit the deck and started rolling in the storm. It was impossible to keep track of all of them as his suit rattled, but he saw his back-plate and shoulder-plate efficiency numbers start to decline at a steady rate: 90%, 85%, 75% . . .
“Get inside!” Dane called, slamming his gauntlets against the floor and walls to stop being sucked along with everything else out into the night. Suit magnets! He remembered what Otepi had told them during training just a handful of days before. These Orbital AMPS were fitted with mechanisms that would keep their suit on the ground in times where gravity was untrustworthy.
>Suit Environmental Controls and Magnetic Controls . . .
>>>Magnetic charge 30% . . .
Dane set the controls as quickly as he could with hand gestures while also trying to stop himself from being pulled down the corridor. With an electric twitch that felt like pressure in his jaw, he suddenly held closer to the floor, and slid backwards only by inches, not feet. He knew that he could have upped the charge to stick him to the floor like, well, a magnet, but instead he gave himself just a light enough charge so that he could still move.
He raised his head—
Just in time to see an entire steel catering cabinet slam and bounce down the hall and hit Johnston in the face, spinning him into the air.
“Johnston!” Dane raised a hand upwards, grabbing at the marine’s arm as he tumbled overhead.
Ach! A wrench as, even inside the mechanized suit, he could feel the pull as he swung Johnston to the floor with a clang that shook the corridor.
“You okay? You copy?” Dane asked, to hear a groan and an affirmative at his side. “Let’s not hang around,” he said, hauling both himself and Johnston towards the access hatch and falling inside as Hopskirk struggled to flip the internal plate of metal. The roaring sound abruptly stopped, but Dane knew that there wouldn’t be any atmosphere in this chute now. Oxygen moved pretty fast into a void.
“We got all our limbs, gentlemen?” Hopskirk asked, his voice a little frayed, and it was clear that he was trying to sustain some false cheer.
“I think so,” Johnston groaned, as Dane stood up, shook himself, and raised his rifle towards the dark. They didn’t have any time. If the habitat’s atmosphere had been breached, he could only hope that Dr. Powers got her staff and his marines to the bunker in time. Otherwise, they would be holed up in that medical suite with ever-diminishing oxygen until that ran out—or until the next Exin blast tore into the heart of the dome, as well . . .
Dane suppressed a growl as he started to jog forward into the dark.
The service chute was clearly rough-made, reminding Dane of the old, ancient style of war shelters that people back on Earth used to make during the time it looked like one half of the globe was going to nuke the other half. The floor and walls were concrete, poorly applied, with metal girders every thirty feet or so, and metal paneling on the roof. Something about the construction and the lunar rock overhead had made a seal, but that was it as far as safety procedures.
Dane’s light illuminated the long corridor—and something shining at the far end of it.
A steel ladder.
They had crossed what Dane thought must be six hundred feet. Still, every now and again, he could feel more than hear the dull whumpf as one habitat or another was met by the pounding of the vindictive Exin.
It doesn’t make sense, Dane thought as he closed in on the ladder. The Exin could be trying to call in for reinforcements, to form a real bridgehead against their enemy—Earth. Instead they appeared to be reserving their bile and attention for the humans who worked and lived here, which arguably posed no significant military threat.
And they have the Gladius to think about too, Dane thought. If the Exin guns and the seed craft above concentrated their attacks, then they might even be able to catch the Gladius in mid-flight—it was fast, but it was only one ship against multiple armaments . . .
But instead, the Exin appeared to be determined to destroy as much of the infrastructure as possible. Not even setting up defensible positions for themselves, if Dane could read between the lines on the tactical threat map. Almost like children knocking over each other’s sandcastles.
Salt the Earth . . . The words floated up from the depths of Dane’s memory. Some 101 military strategy class that he had been forced to take back at Fort Mayweather, back on Earth.
“It was what the Romans used to do to make sure that their enemy couldn’t even grow food after they had left . . .” Dane half murmured to himself.
“What was that, boss?” Hopskirk had taken up side position, pointing the rifle straight up at the latch. “How about I blow the hinges—but I still don’t think that we’ll find any Romans up there . . .” he was saying.
“Yes. I mean no—no Romans,” Dane shook his head and started to climb the ladder. His head was still thinking about that cruel practice of the ancient generals. Making sure that, even when the army had rolled past, their foes had a worse life even if they survived.
They did it when they wanted to demoralize and take over a culture, Dane realized. This attack on Luna 1 had never been about taking territory. It had been a show of force on the part of the Exin. But why?
The Exin were using up an awful lot of effort and warriors, probably knowing that they were going to be surrounded, to destroy this colony . . . The thoughts cycled as he lifted his rifle and then paused. No. His suit was stocked with grenades, wasn’t it?
>Suit Armaments/Grenades . . .
>>>Compression X3
>>>Flash X2
>>>Disruptor X1
Dane hesitated for a moment, then slapped his rifle to his side and grabbed the two flash grenades instead. That would cause one hell of a commotion as soon as they got the lid open.
“Keep magnetized,” he muttered to Hopskirk and Johnston, knowing that as soon as that hatch above was blown, then he would shoot out the top like a cork with the last of any escaping atmosphere left down here. He set his own suit magnetizer up to fifty percent.
Why would the Exin throw away warriors in a crusade against buildings?
“Ready in three . . .” Hopskirk said intently, increasing the output force on his pulse rifle and aiming carefully.
A big, showy act of destruction, the thought flashed through Dane’s mind.
&nbs
p; “Two . . .”
Not just destruction, he realized. A distraction.
“One . . .”
“Someone warn Otepi!” Dane gasped, just as Hopskirk shot a concentrated beam of purple fire above him, past his shoulder to sink into the metal hatch way above. It burned a brilliant white and gobbets of molten metal fell past his shoulder to spatter on the floor.
WHOOM!
And then the plate burst inwards, and Dane felt the pull of the void. He let it take him upwards.
12
Distraction
Most of the air had already been sucked out of the service chute, and so there was really very little difference in pressure between the chute and whatever was above them. Added to that, the Orbital AMP suits were heavy, and so Dane was only thrown upwards a few yards—enough to pop into a wide room with a domed roof, with what looked like a great cannon and firing seat occupying half of it.
And three Exin, one of them sitting in the seat (awkwardly, as the seat was built for a far smaller human being) and apparently taking pot shots at the nearest habitat.
He saw them turn the instant the hatch burst.
“Surprise!” Dane threw flash grenades at them, then half fell, half tumbled to the floor in the low gravity as all hell broke loose.
The two flash-bang grenades went off, glitching Dane’s screen a pure static white and filling his suit’s microphones with a high-pitched whine before the dampeners cut in.
Wham! Dane slammed into the floor, getting a suit warning for it, but ignoring it as he rolled, reached for his—
Oh crap! His rifle had been knocked free when he hit the floor. He still had his pistol . . .
He heard a snippet of noise through his suit speakers, and then a metal-articulated boot ending in three metal claws hit him hard under the chin and kicked him backwards. Apparently, the Exin themselves or the suits that they wore were also pretty resilient to flash-bang grenades, just as the Orbital AMPs were.
Metal Warrior: Steel Trap (Mech Fighter Book 3) Page 9
