Metal Legion Boxed Set 1

by C H Gideon

  Fat chance of that. He smirked.

  “Okay, Podsy…” He exhaled steadily. “Time to earn your keep.”

  Striking the icon, he inserted the program into the Bonhoeffer’s computer core. At first, nothing seemed to happen, and he felt the pit of his stomach fall away in the ensuing ninety seconds.

  During which time, absolutely nothing happened.

  He laced his fingers behind his head and closed his eyes, wondering precisely how many days they’d keep him alive in the brig before they spaced him for mutiny and a dozen other charges.

  The bitch of it was, he’d do it all again given the chance.

  15

  The Duel

  Xi flattened Elvira to the ground just as the bug spat a bolt of blue plasma at her cockpit. The plasma struck her topside, gouging a red-hot, thirty-centimeter-deep groove that stretched a third of the mech’s length.

  “You want to dance?” Xi growled, crab-walking and raising her stern to train the fifteens on the bug-thing. AP shells loaded into the fifteens, with both guns going green on her HUD as she lined up a shot. “Let’s dance.”

  The shockwave of the deafening reports sent icy debris scattering in a rapidly-expanding disc. Both shells struck true, but neither pierced the thing’s robust hide.

  “Fine, you like it rough?” she quipped, loading HE shells as she continued crab-walking in a clockwise pattern. “I can do rough.”

  The bug spat another bolt of plasma that struck her front-left leg, slagging much of its armor but failing to damage the limb’s internal workings. Crab-cakes skittered out from beneath the thing’s bulbous form, and with single-minded purpose, the mobile grenades surged toward Elvira with chilling unity.

  “On the way!” she barked, authoring another pair of reports from her fifteens. The HE shells struck home, one head-on and the other a near-miss that blew a three-meter-long gash open on the very top of the thing’s “back.”

  Strangely, the head-on impact seemed not to have much effect. She loaded another pair of HE shells with the intention of putting the overgrown bug down. Hard.

  She presented her left flank to the line of crab-cakes, raking up and through the tide of explosive drones-slash-creatures and causing more than half of them to explode on impact. No matter how good she aimed, a few snuck through and began latching onto her limbs, where they exploded with such intensity that plumes of steam wafted up around her mech.

  Her board registered a pair of the bizarre, mortar-like projectiles, and she was unable to re-train her guns before they struck near her stern. Warning lights sprang to life, indicating her right fifteen had suffered severe damage to its aiming mechanism. Snarling in frustration, she removed that gun’s shell and quickly fired the left gun’s HE round, where it exploded with a violent crack against the bug-thing’s carapace.

  “Come on,” she muttered, “give it up. You’re tough, I’m tough, everybody’s tough. Let’s make nice and grab some tacos—”

  Another bolt of plasma fire struck her, this time hitting the left fifteen and causing similar warning alarms to sound.

  “Lu,” she snapped, “see if you can do something about Righty’s aiming mech.”

  “Yes, Captain,” he acknowledged.

  “Blinky,” she continued, increasing her lateral speed as her chain guns tore deep divots in the icy shell of Shiva’s Wrath while steadily picking off the crab-cakes, “I need you to remove the safety interlocks on the primary drive hydraulics.”

  That last order was one of the many reasons she had switched Lu and Blinky for this particular op. She expected Lu would argue, or at least delay carrying out such an order, but Staubach was ever-eager and would likely not hesitate to follow such a dangerous command.

  True to form, Blinky replied, “Safety interlocks disengaged. Increasing system pressure to one-hundred-twenty-percent of maximum.”

  “That’ll do,” she grunted, careful not to overdrive the suddenly super-powered ambulatory system. “All right…” she muttered as the tide of crab-cakes drew steadily nearer, during which time she waited for the opportune moment to mute her chain guns. “Hang on!” she yelled when that moment arrived.

  She cut her chain guns and, using Elvira’s briefly super-powered legs, jumped her mech a full two meters off the ground before bringing it back down with precisely the desired effect.

  Every crab-cake within thirty meters of her position exploded when a chain reaction took place as a few of the nearest crab-cakes were crushed by her mech’s legs. Their explosions rippled down the line of encroaching critters, killing at least three-quarters of them in the most satisfying version of the domino effect that Xi had ever instigated.

  She howled with delight, re-lighting her chain guns and tearing into the few remaining grenade bugs with surgical precision.

  It wasn’t until she had cleared the ground of the destructive little drones that she realized how bad the damage to her drive system was. Three of her legs were seriously damaged, with Leg Two knocked completely offline.

  Gritting her teeth in irritation, she called, “Blinky, I need you to get Two Leg back online.”

  “Working on it, Captain. Give me twenty seconds,” Staubach acknowledged, neither frantic nor muted in his tone. He was proving himself worthy of full-time assignment as a Wrench with his combination of a steady hand and eager demeanor.

  “How’s that gun coming, Lu?” Xi asked as she prepared to fire SRMs at the wounded bug-thing, which circled clockwise opposite her position on an invisible circle nearly a hundred meters across.

  “Right gun’s out, Captain,” Lu replied, his voice strained. “Left gun’s…questionable. Give me thirty seconds.”

  “We might not have it.” She grimaced, recoiling in sudden surprise when the bug-thing shuddered.

  She narrowed her eyes as its chitinous plates began to fall away one by one until something entirely different took shape beneath.

  “Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding…” she swore, firing all of her SRMs simultaneously as the bug-thing split in two smaller creatures. One of them slithered out like some kind of centipede, complete with a pair of horn-like apparatuses at its head and a long, articulated spike at its tail.

  The other unfurled yellow, wasp-like wings from a slender, teardrop-shaped body and took to the sky.

  The SRMs destroyed what was left of the original creature’s hide, and the shrapnel thrown off by the explosions struck both the crawler and flyer. Surprisingly, neither seemed deterred by the impacts even though each began dripping greenish-blue liquid onto the ice.

  The flyer shot forward as a rocket-like flame erupted from its rear, propelling it faster than any creature its size had a right to fly. She swept her chain guns up to intercept, but it simply moved too fast for her to be able to do more than rip a dozen holes in its wings before it cleared her firing arcs.

  Xi began loading anti-missile rockets into her launchers, but no sooner had she issued the command than both launcher mechanisms registered catastrophic warning alarms as the flying thing dropped some sort of incendiary devices onto Elvira’s stern.

  A bloodcurdling scream pierced her skull, and she immediately knew what had happened: caught in the tiny crawlspace beneath the left gun, Lu had just been burned by whatever the flyer had dropped on her.

  “Blinky,” she yelled, “get him out of there ASAP!”

  “Already on it,” Samuels unexpectedly replied. And if the reporter’s voice was filled with abject terror, Xi would die before confirming it. Not now. Not ever. For all her flaws, Samuels had answered the call without hesitation during this deployment. She had earned respect the hard way.

  “Good work, Samuels,” Xi acknowledged grimly, turning and raking the meter-tall, three-meter-wide, and ten-meter-long centipede-looking thing with her right flank chain guns.

  She struck true with over half of her rounds, but somehow none of her slugs pierced its skin. It would have taken a mech with fifteen centimeters of solid steel armor to shrug off such an atta
ck.

  Xi moved Elvira toward the centipede and was pleased to see Blinky bring Two Leg back online while somehow stemming the flow of hydraulic fluid from a dozen different leaks caused by her jump’s self-destructive back-pressure.

  The flyer swept along a ponderous arc as it lined up for another strafing run, but Xi suspected anything light enough to fly would be less durable than the armored centipede.

  With her right flank chain guns pouring fire on the fast-approaching centipede, Xi turned her left chain guns onto the flyer. Three hundred and fifty depleted uranium slugs flew from her rotary barrels each second, and it took her two full, agonizing seconds to sight in on the flyer.

  But when she did, it was all over for the would-be bomber.

  Gore flew in all directions as Elvira’s anti-personnel guns cut the five-meter-long flyer into ribbons. Somehow, it maintained its approach trajectory, even firing its bizarre thruster before finally succumbing to the savage ferocity of Xi’s chain guns.

  The flying thing’s devastated form hurtled mindlessly over Elvira, its rocket engine suddenly firing at maximum. The flyer tumbled end-over-end in mid-air again and again before its chaotic death throes finally ripped the thing completely apart in a shower of fiery gore that spread across the ice-field just under a hundred meters from Elvira.

  “One down.” She smirked. “One to go.”

  But without her artillery or missile launchers, Xi was seemingly unable to deter the oncoming creature. Its twin “horns” belched fire when it came within twenty meters, and those streams of liquid flame covered Elvira’s hull from stem to stern.

  Steam boiled up all around Elvira as the burning fuel dripped onto the ice, and for a brief moment, Xi imagined her mech, surrounded by both ice and fire, as a metaphor for the Terran contingent on this world. Surrounded by forces that wanted to destroy them, it seemed their only hope was to master one before the other could kill them.

  Then the centipede came within five meters, and Xi lowered her right legs at the last second, hoping to crush the thing before it reached the lightly-armored undercarriage of her mech.

  That undercarriage would almost certainly fail to protect Elvira’s crew from any anti-vehicle ordnance the centipede might be carrying.

  As her legs struck the ice, Xi experienced the phenomenon of her life flashing before her eyes.

  And she was proud of what she saw.

  “Colonel,” Styles called out in a raised voice as the Terran missile shield continued to scrape Jemmin missiles from the sky, “I’m receiving telemetry from the Bonhoeffer forwarding fresh target locks on nine Jemmin Specters…and one Jemmin Poltergeist.”

  “A Poltergeist?” Jenkins repeated in surprise as heads turned all around the compartment.

  Jemmin Poltergeists were the rarest of Jemmin vehicles, rumored to be the command vehicles for planetary-scale invasion forces and only cataloged once before in Terran history. Many Terran military theorists suggested that a Poltergeist was worth more than three of their standard Wraith-class warships, like the one the Bonhoeffer had destroyed. If a Poltergeist was here, then destroying it would certainly prove decisive in the outcome of this engagement.

  It might even end the conflict outright, depending on which theories of Jemmin society were correct. Jenkins and his people were about to put some of those theories to the test.

  “Chaps, engage those targets with priority on the Poltergeist,” Jenkins ordered. “Styles, forward all target locations to the battalion and put all of our Owls on that command vehicle. Request orbital strikes from the Bonhoeffer on all locations, with priority on that Poltergeist,” he finished eagerly.

  “Negative on orbital strikes, Colonel,” Styles said with disappointment as the battalion unleashed its fury on the enemy command platform. “Bonhoeffer’s weapon control systems are on temporary standby following some sort of core computer breach.”

  “Acknowledged.” Jenkins grimaced, hoping that he and his people could bracket and scrub those targets before they lost the Bonhoeffer’s target locks.

  Shockingly, the Poltergeist was just sixteen kilometers from Terran HQ. It seemed to be nestled beneath a two-meter-thick layer of ice lined with sensor-disrupting materials. How the Bonhoeffer suddenly located ten high-value targets was beyond Jenkins, but whoever was responsible would earn himself Jenkins’ undying gratitude.

  “Missiles away,” Chaps declared, sending missiles downrange while Preacher and several other mechs did likewise. Even the fortified Beta and Charlie Sites, over thirty kilometers from HQ, sent their limited supplies of mid-range missiles at the Poltergeist.

  The Poltergeist, apparently aware of its pending demise, broke cover and sped off at nearly three hundred KPH. MRMs and LRMs tore after it, while artillery mercilessly pummeled its recently-vacated foxhole. Some of the SRMs struck the foxhole as well, but others adjusted course and pursued the accelerating vehicle as it passed the six hundred KPH mark.

  Burning ordnance pursued the fast-fleeing Jemmin vehicle, and for several seconds, all eyes were on the tactical plotter as a dozen missiles slowly converged on the Poltergeist’s location.

  The first missile struck true, slowing the enemy platform to just under four hundred KPH before it resumed its breathtaking acceleration.

  Unfortunately for the Jemmin commander, that dip in velocity proved decisive.

  Three more SRMs slammed into its stern in rapid succession while five were torn from the sky by Jemmin countermeasures. An MRM impacted on the ground in front of the Jemmin vehicle, which passed through the flaming steam cloud and cut a stunning visual worthy of a top-shelf action holo-novel. An LRM was ripped from the sky by some sort of Jemmin drone, but a final SRM snuck underneath the briefly-tilted Poltergeist and exploded.

  The Poltergeist’s hover-drive system was destroyed, causing the roughly disc-shaped vehicle to careen into the ice and tumble like a rolling coin, going end-over-end and scattering hull debris as the vehicle started to come apart.

  Just before the Poltergeist came to a rolling stop, four MRMs sent by the Beta and Charlie Sites slammed into it. In a cataclysmic release of energy that equaled roughly two megatons, the Jemmin command vehicle ceased to exist. The steam cloud from the blast site tore skyward, preceded by the multi-layered mushroom cloud that seemed to clear a path for the boiling, seemingly volcanic jet of steam released from the immense explosion.

  Roy’s command center erupted in cheers, but Jenkins knew this fight was far from over.

  “There are still at least nine Specters out there,” Jenkins bellowed, quickly quieting the compartment. “Let’s deal with them before we break out the champagne.”

  But the truth was he felt every bit as exhilarated as they did. His people had just done the unthinkable: they had destroyed the most valuable and potent Jemmin ground platform known to humanity.

  Unfortunately, as with the Arh’Kel on Durgan’s Folly, he suspected no one would learn about their victory until everyone in the unit was well into their grey hairs.

  “Maintain focus, people.” He swept the room with a hard look. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”

  16

  Frigid Fury

  Xi shook her head in confusion. She remembered shooting down the flyer, and being unable to hurt that Goddamned centipede thing, but after that, nothing seemed to make sense.

  She looked down at her console, seeing that only a quarter of the indicators and interfaces were online. Her neural link was severed, and after looking down at her chest, she realized she had emptied the meager contents of her stomach at some point in the last minute or so.

  She tried to speak, but nothing came out. She worked her jaw up and down for several seconds, cleared her throat, and repeated the attempt.

  “Podsy?” she asked, belatedly realizing he was no longer part of her crew. She shook her head again, causing a wave of vertigo to wash over her that made her grip the arms of her pilot’s chair until it had passed. “Blinky?” she said, this time more loudly. “Lu?” s
he demanded, unstrapping her harness and falling out of the chair, only realizing after she hit the deck that Elvira was tilted twenty degrees starboard.

  She got to her hands and knees and reached for the door, relieved to find that it quickly opened at her command.

  The rear cabin was in shambles. Scorch marks covered the walls, and a fire had apparently broken out near the left power coupling. Sarah Samuels was normally strapped in near that coupling, but Xi saw no sign of the reporter.

  “Blinky?” she called, staggering to her feet and gripping the smartly-positioned rails along Elvira’s ceiling. The rails allowed her to balance, despite her vertigo, her progress slower than she would have liked as she made her way through the compartment. She only remembered the fire that had burned Lu after she had traversed half the cabin. “Samuels?” She raised her voice, wondering if she was the only survivor of the bizarre fight.

  “I’m here…” Samuels replied weakly. “But I…I hit my…ear.”

  “Stay down,” Xi commanded, her focus sharpening after hearing the woman’s voice. “I’m coming.”

  The rearmost section of the cabin was where the gun mechanisms were accessible. They were secured behind a thick bulkhead that featured a single, narrow hatch situated along the starboard side of the compartment. Xi moved through that hatch and was relieved to find all three of her fellows alive.

  Blinky was breathing but unconscious, lying across Sarah Samuels whose eyes rolled around aimlessly. Lu, on the other hand, looked even worse than Podsy had back on Durgan’s Folly. The back of his head was scorched, bloodied, and rough. The left side of his face was badly burned as well. His left arm dangled at an unnatural angle, but he too was breathing, and it appeared that Blinky had managed to put tourniquets on his arm to stop the bleeding.