“Frack off!” Dane flung a fist at the thing’s body, hitting one of the thinner legs and causing it to suddenly crack and bend backwards. If the thing squealed or made any noise, then he couldn’t hear it. It had attached itself to his back, and he felt the jolt and scrape of the thing’s jaws against his back—
>Suit Impact! Back-plate -15% . . .
“Dammit!” Dane bucked, but it was impossible to dislodge the thing as he tumbled and rolled—but then the thing didn’t bite again. Instead, it did some twist with its body. Dane felt the kick of the creature’s pulse engine as he was now leaving the spoke, being driven away from the Exin drone’s home, through the gap between the spinning spokes and out the other side.
Towards the Great Storm of Jupiter.
Crap. In a heartbeat, Dane saw the real danger of these things. They didn’t even have to injure or overcome the Orbital AMP suits directly with their claws and pincers. All they had to do was to tackle the invaders and fling themselves towards the planet below, where the gravity well and the burnup of entry would get rid of the problem.
No way. No way am I going to die out here like this . . . Dane reached for the pistol attached to his hip, snatched it up, and swung it over his shoulder, firing a prolonged beam as close as he dared to his own suit.
With a sudden flare of light, Dane felt the pressure on his back lessen, and he was flying free. A twist of his body, and he was turned back around, still falling towards the planet, and now with the Exin jump ship station above him. The spider-drone thing was still twitching its legs, but was clearly badly damaged as it spewed sparks from its main body before finally curling in on itself and apparently dying.
But there, falling like angels, Dane saw that there were others of his Orbital Marines that were not so lucky. Goodman, Liu, Terence—they were all falling towards the planet, with one or two or even three of the spiders clutching at their bodies.
“No!”
And Bruce.
Cheng was struggling as three of the Exin spider drones held onto his body, clearing him from the spokes and coordinating their pulse engines to send him rocketing towards the great storm.
No-no-no-no! Dane fired his back thrusters and snapped his arms together, turning himself into a human torpedo that shot towards his fellow lance corporal. Reaching the man in an instant, he grappled the first spider and tore it from one of Bruce’s legs. Holding onto his friend’s AMP, he fired another beam straight into the thing’s “mouth.” With a sudden flare of sparks, it spiraled backwards into the night, leaving just the last.
“Frackers!” Bruce dragged the thing from his own shoulder-plate, using his suit-aided prodigious strength to literally tear metal from metal.
“You idiot!” Bruce turned his ire towards Dane as the two grappled onto each other and spun.
“What!?” Dane was trying to angle his body, straighten himself out so that he could point them back towards the Exin station.
“I told you not to throw your life away! You’re endangering the mission!” Bruce was shouting.
“Shut. The. Hell. Up.” Dane grunted. His suit’s internal readings were now racing upwards as Dane’s scanners were registering heat and the pull of gravity. “We can still make this.” He commanded more power to his suit’s thrusters, but their vicious spin was making it too chaotic. Too hard to use effectively . . .
“We’re both going to go down!” Bruce was shouting over the comms.
No. Dane refused to believe it, despite the rising blur of burning electrons and gasses around them forming a hazy blur of a corona. The Exin jump station was now the size of a wagon wheel in front of them.
“Take my hand!” Dane grabbed onto Bruce’s gauntlet and let himself tumble free from the big man, until they were holding onto each other just by their hands alone. “Now fire your thruster! Full burn!” he shouted and felt the kickback from his suit as he did so, and Bruce’s suit did the same just a fraction of a second later.
Dane could feel the acceleration and the drag pulling at him. The Exin jump station didn’t appear to be getting any larger before them, and he was sure that they were still falling towards Jupiter.
“Divert all power to pulse thrusters!” Dane demanded, and there was a warning blip on his suit.
>Power Warning!
>>>Available suit oxygen 15 minutes . . .
>>>Available residual suit heat 35 seconds . . .
The lance corporal felt the cold like a clamp that settled over his body as the internal heating elements shut down, and he felt the slight dizziness as his suit stopped recycling the oxygen through his suit’s filters. A host of smaller processes run by the life support server stopped: his health monitor, the pressure dampeners. All and any available power was put into the rockets on his back.
“Dane! Don’t be a fool!” Bruce was roaring, but Dane could feel the drag starting to lessen behind him. The Exin jump station was actually getting bigger. He was doing it. They were doing it. They weren’t completely inside the gravity well of the gas giant yet. Instead, they were skimming the surface of its outer magnetic fields.
And then, with a sudden jolt, they were free even of that and rocketing fast towards the Exin jump ship. Faster than they had traveled before.
>>>Available residual suit heat 25 seconds . . .
Dane’s teeth were starting to chatter, and by now he could see that Goodman, Liu, and Terence had turned into burning stars behind them as they were eaten by the giant planet. And there were still others of his division falling and tumbling with the Exin spider drones, still struggling.
How many was that—Six? Seven?
“I can get them!” Dane promised.
“No. Dane. Dane. DANE!” Bruce hauled the man towards him and cuffed him roughly around the face-plate.
>Suit Impact!
“But Bruce, our men!” Dane gasped, as he saw another Orbital Marine suddenly start to glow and flare as he became a star in the atmosphere of Jupiter.
“Those men are gone! Think of Earth!” Bruce was shouting. “Think of what good you can do right now!” And Bruce abruptly turned Dane around to see that they were nearly at the Exin spoke, and that there were men here and now fighting for their lives.
With the danger right there in front of him, Dane reacted, snapping his pistol up and shooting the first of the Exin spider drones and then another from where they were threatening the last of the Orbital Marines.
They had managed to make a break into the spoke, Dane saw. Hopskirk and Tove were clutching onto the wall of the spoke, defending a jagged square of metal that they must have used the lasers on their pistols to create. In a flash, Dane saw how Hopskirk and Tove were also calling and dragging the last of the Orbital Marines towards their entrance, holding their position against a tide of the Exin defense mechanisms.
“Oof!” Dane landed on the spoke next to Bruce, sliding at first, and then remembering to magnetize his boots as he restarted his life support. His body was freezing, and his breath misted inside the helmet as his suit started to cycle its way back up to fully operational.
Not that Dane had any time for that. He fired into the broiling mass with the pistol, drawing the Field Halligan with his free hand and wading in.
“Williams!” Dane heard Bruce shout. But Dane was now too busy swinging the weapon back and forth, hitting the spider drones from the surface of the spoke like gold balls with the metal bar as he continued to shoot down at them as well.
The pair of lance corporals had landed on the other side of the attacking drones and the entrance point made by Hopskirk and Tove. Dane had almost cleared a path through when he felt something crash into his leg.
>Suit Impact! Left leg -10% . . .
Two of the spiders had managed to scuttle under his guard and had attached themselves to his leg. They fired their pulse engines, and Dane flipped, spinning through the space above the spoke—
“No you don’t!” Just as Bruce snatched him from the vacuum and slammed him back down to the alien
hull.
>Suit Impact! Back-plate -10% . . .
“Wow, cheers . . .” Dane groaned, but Bruce was already clearing the last of the spider drones with his Field Blade, scattering metal body parts and wires this way and that as he got to Hopskirk, Tove, and the others.
“Sheesh, thanks!” Dane heard Hopskirk say as he scrambled back to his feet. “I didn’t think we could hold them off . . .”
“Inside!” Bruce growled, not at the two first class privates, but at Dane. It seemed as though there was very little that Dane could do to ameliorate the big man’s view of him.
But Dane didn’t have time to think about it, because as soon as he pulled himself inside the alien craft, he was met with a wall of metal bodies and pulse fire.
“Watch out!”
“Engage! Engage! Engage!”
They had dropped into a pitch battle against more of the Exin spider drones. A corridor full of them, forming a living, biting, murderous wall that was seeking to force the Orbital Marines back out from either side.
“Constant fire!” Dane heard himself shout, firing his pistol over the head of one marine on his right, and then turning to shoot down another of the spider drones that was creeping over their heads. There was no gravity in this place, and it made the fighting difficult. The remaining Orbital Marines—no more than twelve, Dane guessed—had to clutch onto each other and the walls while they laid down a consistent barrage of suppressing fire up and down the tunnel.
No warrior caste. The thought appeared in Dane’s mind. Why were they fighting drones and not the living, breathing Exin warriors?
“Reload!” One of the marines, Johnston, had to push himself flat for Dane to step forward and fire three quick salvos into the surging metal horde coming straight for them. The marine of Dane’s own fire team quickly slammed new fuel cells into his rifle before turning around, rising into the air in the vacuum, and firing a steady beam of laser fire into the drones, then raking it across their number.
The entire tunnel was becoming filled with their slagged parts and broken limbs, but still the spider drones kept coming. Dane growled as one of them on his other side managed to get enough space to fire its pulse engine, turning it into a living missile. It went straight for one of the Orbital Marines, who went down with a shout.
“Hold still!” Dane shouted, jamming his Field Halligan between the spider drone and the marine and wrenching it off. He shot it point-blank, then fired again at the tide that was threatening to sweep them all back out into space . . .
“Dane! The explosives!” It was Bruce beside him, sharp-shooting steady and fast. “We have to set them off. We can’t hold this for much longer!”
“Set them off here!?” Dane shouted. That was insane. That was ridiculous. They would all die. Each and every last one of them.
“We have to! The mission!” Bruce growled, and Dane felt a moment of shame. Was he really going to jeopardize Earth with his willfulness?
But no, no . . . Dane couldn’t believe that he would have to kill all of his men—all of his friends—for that. There had to be another way. A smarter way.
“There’s no promise—” Dane shot two more of the spider drones, turning to his other side once again, “that blowing one of these spokes from the wheel will stop the machine!” he argued. “You said yourself—the energy signals are coming from the hub!” He spun, shot, floated, spun, and fired again.
“How are we going to get there! We have to take the chance it might work!” Bruce was demanding.
But that’s only a chance! Dane suddenly realized. He wasn’t prepared to throw anyone’s life away on a chance that it might work. He needed to be certain. He needed to know that what he did meant something.
“Scanners,” Dane called up, and his face-plate was swept with the sudden circles of green, blue, and orange light.
Got it. Dane knew that there had to be something behind these walls. The internals of the corridor itself looked just as strange and alien as the outside, lit up by their suit lights, and with the walls seemingly sheathed and segmented together.
But his scanners showed that there were temperature and pressure differentials on the other side of the walls, along with long lines of faint radionic power. In short, it didn’t matter how strange and alien a ship was, or whether it was grown or created. Every last one of them had to have places which stored these spider drones. Places where the essential pipes and wires and technical equipment ran.
It had to have service chutes.
“This way!” Dane pointed his laser at the nearest patch of different colors and started to fire his pistol in a sustained, long blast.
“Williams—what are you doing?” Bruce demanded.
The metal started to fizz and turn a molten orange, revealing a dark space behind it.
“Finding us a way to the hub,” Dane growled, completing the burn and pulling the rest free with his halligan. For a moment, he half expected more of the station’s defenses—more of the spider drones—to boil out of it, but no. Instead, all Dane saw inside was a space just big enough for his suit, and walls like the organic sheen of white bone.
“Go!” Hopskirk was saying, firing as he did so. “We’ll hold them back . . .”
Follow me in, Dane almost said, but then stopped himself. No. That would only be leading them all towards the explosion that he was about to create, wouldn’t it?
“A pleasure serving with you all,” Dane whispered, before hauling himself into the weightless chute and firing his back thrusters to scream down (up) the chute towards the hub . . .
16
Through the Wormhole
Frack! Dane had to turn off the scanners because the glow was just getting too strong for him to make any sense out of what he was seeing. The output ahead of him was phenomenal: a mess of purple and sparkling white that completely overtook his HUD.
And, as soon as he turned off his sensors, he saw what they had been concealing: The end of the service chute, appearing as multiple silvered coils of some strange metal.
>Environmental Warning! External radiation alarm . . .
Dane cut his thrusters and floated towards the wall in a decelerating fall. Even without his active scanners running, his suit’s sensors were still picking up enough radiation to cook an unprotected human in minutes.
“Let’s do this quick,” he whispered, reaching for his Field Halligan and jamming it between one of the coils.
>Suit Impact! . . .
The static charge that swam up through the metal and into his suit was strong enough that Dane saw nothing but blackness for a moment. When he blinked and opened his eyes again, his entire body felt like it had been kicked by a War Walker.
But he still held onto the end of the halligan, and now there was an electric thrum of unease running through his body. A sensation like prickled heat and nausea rising in his jaw as his suit became a part of the circuit of whatever alien machinery this was.
The explosives . . . he thought, one heavy gauntleted hand cramping as he reached for the module at the side of his belt where the selection of fuel cells and grenades were strapped together. Maybe this was it. The machine itself . . .
But Dane’s hand wavered as it closed on the polycarbon unit. What if I am wrong? The thought swam through his head, along with the words of Bruce. Wasn’t he about to throw his life away by detonating the explosives in the same way that Bruce had accused him of?
What makes me so eager to do that? The lance corporal blinked and realized, although he didn’t have to search far for the answer. His body was riddled with the Exinase virus, wasn’t it? He knew that he had only several months left to live, and so he was trying to do what he could now—and not take everyone else with him . . .
Which is exactly what might happen if I blow these here, he considered, turning on the scanners briefly to almost be blinded by the static across his HUD. An explosion that set off that much contained energy would probably race up the service chute he had just come down and take ou
t every last Orbital Marine behind him. His men.
“I have to do this right . . .” Dane turned off the scanners and turned back to the Field Halligan instead. Was there a way that he could set off the explosives so that they crippled the jump-ship and didn’t kill everyone else? If he failed, and the Orbital Marines died, then there was nobody standing in the way between the Exin and Earth.
With a snarl of determination, Dane seized the tool and started to wrench apart the silver coils. At the same time, a low, electric burn started to spread through his hands. Even with the multiple layers of insulation between him and the world, the charge in the coils and the growing radiation still managed to seep through.
He heaved, and there was a cracking sound as sudden bolts of lightning zapped from the torn metal, spilling what looked like wires, but made of some crystalline substance.
“Argh!” This time, the shocks that came ran through Dane’s body like knives, and he felt them dig into his bones, reaching all of the places where the Exin virus hid.
Dane pulled at the crystal-silver wall again, and, as the coils moved, he saw a space inside. A round chamber at the heart of the hub . . .
“ACH!” His jaw suddenly locked as another burst of power scattered over and around him, driving him to his knees as his legs gave in to spasms. His nervous system was already screwed. Dane knew that much for sure. And these charges were only making what was already a trashed body worse.
For Earth, Dane thought. Just as Dr. Powers had said. That they were doing this for that jewel of Earth that he had left behind. That they were the last defense. Dane thought of all of the things of Earth that he had taken for granted before the invasion. Eating ice cream and hot dogs while walking through the park. Even the terrible hiking trips he had as a kid, and the training and rings he fought in as a Mech-Brawler. All of it was gone now. That world was dead forever, and he could never go back to it.
Metal Warrior: Steel Trap (Mech Fighter Book 3) Page 12
