With a surge of rage, he heaved at the metal to feel it hold firm and then start to give . . .
“Rargh!” Dane roared in his pain and desperation, as the metal suddenly ripped backwards, discharging yet another lightning spark that held him in place for a moment before throwing him back against the wall.
Dane saw stars.
And then Dane saw the monster.
At the center of the jump ship was a monster.
But it wasn’t even an Exin, Dane realized.
The silver-coil panels were ripped apart, and Dane could see clearly into the large central hub, whose walls appeared to be made out of more of these silver rods and columns.
And there, in the center of the room, was another of the metal spiders, but this one was even larger than Dane was, and it had many more legs than the ones that had tried to clean their station of him. Its body appeared to be made of giant diodes and connectors, glowing and sparking with energy, and it was using its legs to make connections to various of the silvered panels.
She’s a living conductor! Dane thought, just as the thing started to react to Dane’s invasion, shuffling towards him and extending long steel legs.
With no gravity, Dane was falling into the hub room as he struggled for the explosives at his waist. He wished his limbs didn’t feel alive with agony, just as—
>Suit Impact! Lower right leg -40% . . .
One of the giant robot’s legs lanced down at him, catching him against the wall and pinning him there. Dane screamed in pain as the sharpened steel crumpled through the outer plate and started to grind its way through the inner plate too. Dane could feel the metals on the inside of his suit breaking into the flesh of his legs.
“Frack!” Dane had dropped the explosives module. It had floated free along the spider-thing’s back, rolling slowly over and over itself. Dane swung with the Field Halligan, smashing at one of the many knee joints of the leg that held him as the giant thing started to glow and flare with energy.
The leg buckled, and Dane rolled through the air, seizing onto the next of the thing’s many legs in the weightless vacuum to haul himself towards the explosives.
Flash! But the diodes that made the robot’s body pulsed, and the spider-thing became alive with electricity that sparked along its form, down its legs, and through Dane’s suit.
“Ach!” He was flung back against the walls, once again feeling like his body had been momentarily in the middle of a furnace. He swore that he could smell burning.
>Warning! Suit capacitors nearing critical . . .
No-no-no . . . Dane shook his head for his suit to respond slowly. Every movement felt like he was lifting some of the heavy metal Mech. The spider was shuffling in its confined space, attempting to turn around, while at the same time hurriedly touching first one silver coil and then another, making connections. Dane was certain that it was overseeing the power generation necessary to do . . . what?
There. There were the explosives, slowly tumbling to the floor underneath the thing’s belly, and Dane was between the stamp and rise of the thing’s legs as it sought to do its job and to kill him at the same time.
I can reach it. I can almost reach it . . . He grabbed two of the legs again and pulled himself forward under the weight of the thing. He reached out towards the explosives.
And there, underneath the spider, he had a clear view of the other side of the room, where a viewing window looked out into space. There was a flash across the window, and Dane realized that it was one of the spokes turning, revolving around the hub, and the vacuum between the spokes was brilliant with purple light. With every sweep of the spoked towers, the brilliant light grew stronger and stronger between them.
The entire ship was an accelerator, and this spider was its living machine heart.
And there, in the flashes of purple light, Dane could see something else. Shadows and suggestions of other shapes, moving forward.
Slam!
>Suit Impact! Left foot -25% . . .
Dane suddenly snarled as another of the spider’s legs had managed to crunch into his leg. He kicked back, dislodging it, and seized the floor plates, dragging himself forward under the creature.
Flash. It was hard for Dane to take his eyes from the viewing window outside, where the spokes flashed past faster and faster, and the purple light grew deeper and richer, revealing in its clouds the ghostly shapes of objects. Crafts.
Seed crafts.
Dane realized that he was looking into the wormhole that this jump ship was creating. He was seeing the other side, and the massed Exin fleet that awaited humanity’s destruction. There were hundreds of ships. Thousands.
No. Dane stretched himself out so that his fingers barely caressed the edge of the explosives.
“Come on, come on!” He grabbed a hold of the poly unit, drawing it towards him.
“Williams!” There was a voice over his suit communicator. Dane turned around to see that it was none other than Bruce, right there, looking into the gap that he had torn in the wall.
“Get out of here!” Dane cried, just as there was a flash of static from the Exin spider—one of its defensive mechanisms, apparently. Bruce was flung backwards, disappearing from view back into the chute.
No. Not Bruce. Dane felt a sick horror. If he detonated the explosives now, he would kill not only himself and this creature, but Bruce too. And the big guy wouldn’t even have the chance to try and escape.
“Dammit!” Lodged underneath the spider’s bulk, it could no longer reach him with its legs as it worked (although it was trying to). Dane flipped open the makeshift control panel on the explosive device and quickly set the timer. Five minutes. That was all he could afford to give—before he activated the magnet lock to stick it to the floor, and turned to fire straight into the gut of the spider thing.
Sparks flew and metal ruptured. The spider itself started to shake, and its legs wobbled and shook erratically, punching forward to miss the cylinder coils it was aiming for, causing more erratic sparks between it and the walls.
It would have to do. It would have to be enough. Dane grabbed the thing’s legs and, even as he felt the jolts of electricity threatening to set his heart into overdrive, he dragged himself back, back towards the rip in the walls. And to Bruce, whose body floated on the far side.
“Wha . . . ? Williams?” Bruce was muttering as Dane grabbed his shoulders and set his thrusters to whatever maximum burn they had left. It was uneven flight, and they were bouncing off of the walls and crashing into each other as they rocketed up like pinballs.
“Dane. What—what are you doing?” Bruce was attempting to say over the glitching communicator. His suit appeared riddled with many cracks and hairline fractures from the battle he’d had with the spider drones above.
“Don’t you dare tell me about throwing my life away now, Cheng!” Dane growled, sticking one hand out to catch the torn-open exit leading back to the embattled marines.
“Williams!”
“Lance Corporal!” It was Hopskirk and Rogers. They were still alive, along with just a handful of the Orbital Marines, and they were only saved by the fact that the bodies of the drones had formed a wall of twisted and slagged metals, effectively halting the attack against them.
“Where are the others!?” Dane called out, checking his suit timer.
>Three minutes twenty-two . . .
“Out. Out or dead,” Bruce managed to grumble. “I came looking for you, seeing if you had died yourself!”
“Bad luck,” Dane said, before instantly finding it ridiculously funny.
“What are you laughing at?” Bruce asked.
“Badluck. Badluck Williams. It used to be my Mech wrestling name,” he explained.
“Dear god. Don’t prove it right,” Hopskirk was saying, grabbing Bruce and hauling him up towards the open vent in the roof. “Come on. We have to get out. We haven’t got the firepower to do this ourselves . . .”
“Actually, we do,” Dane was saying . . .
>Two minutes forty . . .
“I set the explosives, but we’re out of time. Two minutes to get beyond whatever supernova this thing will generate when she goes critical.”
“Frack,” Hopskirk didn’t waste any time with pushing Bruce through the vent, and then rolling himself through, then Rogers, then Williams himself.
They skittered across the surface of the metal and jumped upwards, firing their thruster rockets as each did so. The foursome burned upwards into the night, heading for the small array of bright burning stars—the thruster burns of the remaining, surviving Orbital Marines. Against the backdrop of the station and the giant Jupiter behind even that, they looked too small and too tiny to have done anything.
Flash! Dane couldn’t help but look back and see how the entire wheel of the vessel was churning fast, but it was throwing aside lightning-bolt sparks everywhere, and the crimson-purple light appeared to be erratic. Sometimes stronger, sometimes lighter. Dane could see the legions upon legions of the Exin seed craft caught in the light too. He wondered if he was looking through a window to a distant galaxy or another dimension—
And then it happened.
It started as a series of white lines fracturing over the hub of the wheel, which quickly turned into plumes of racing explosions up one spoke, then another, and another. Two of the spokes affected crumpled inwards instantly as the explosion of Dane’s making overcame sensitive internal materials. Another spoke sheared completely from the hub and started to swing outwards, disgorging gleaming metal components and organs.
And the purple light seemed to waiver and then diffuse. The wheel of the machine turned slower, and slower, and eventually halted altogether.
“What the . . .” Rogers whispered in awe as he turned around to see the sight behind.
“Booyah! MARINES!” Hopskirk shouted, and Dane felt the savage swell of pride in his chest at the same time. They had done it. They had stopped the invasion of Earth.
Epilogue
The shuttles and transporters arrived near Jupiter’s orbit some twenty minutes later: a whole stellar array of ships of all shapes and sizes from cones to tubes to bulky boxes. None of them were equipped for battle, and Dane wondered what good they would have done had the jump ship managed to maintain the wormhole to the Exin fleet.
Lance Corporal Williams and Cheng, along with the handful of other Orbital Marines that had survived the assault, had made it into the limping Gladius, battered and barely operational from its own battles—but victorious, at least against the two seed crafts that had been defending the station.
“Good job, marines.” It was Captain Otepi, beamed over the suit communicators in a time-delay message that took almost twenty minutes for each response.
“You did very good today. A day to be proud of in the history of Earth.”
But as Dane looked around at the eight faces that had remained alive of the nearly two dozen that had left Earth, he wondered if such a thing counted as a victory. The Orbital Marines and the Mechanized Infantry were destroyed as a military force. It would take months to retrain another group like theirs.
“But months might be precisely what you have bought us,” Otepi said, a half-hour time delay after Dane had expressed his concern. Dane realized that she did not doubt that the Exin would be back.
“They know where we are now,” Otepi explained in her staggered, delayed transmission. “We don’t know how long it will take for them to build another jump ship like this last one, or what means they have to get here, but we know that we are not alone—and that our neighbors are out to steal our planet.”
Dane glanced towards the stilled alien form of the jump station, now dark and hanging in the space over Jupiter like an obscene warning.
And he knew that he wasn’t going to let anyone steal his planet. Anyone or anything.
“Whenever they come back,” he said quietly, more to the remaining Orbital Marines that huddled around him in the bay of the Gladius than to the distant Captain Otepi, “whenever Earth is threatened again—we’re going to be ready.”
Find out what happens next in Hard as Steel.
amazon.com/dp/B08Q3M6GK4
Thank You For Reading
Thanks for reading Steel Trap, the third book in the epic Mech Fighter series. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I really have a lot of fun writing about the amazing technology the future holds for us, and all the possible chaos :)
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Metal Warrior: Steel Trap (Mech Fighter Book 3) Page 13
