Metal Warrior: Hard as Steel (Mech Fighter Book 4) Read online

  Metal Warrior: Hard as Steel

  Mech Fighter, Book 4

  James David Victor

  Copyright © 2021 James David Victor

  All Rights Reserved

  Except for review quotes, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the written consent of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. All people, places, names, and events are products of the author’s imagination and / or used fictitiously. Any similarities to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Cover Design by Christian Bentulan

  Contents

  1. I. Corporal

  2. II. The Forge

  3. III. Room 201

  4. IV. Karl Klausen

  5. V. Breach

  6. VI. Mega-Mechs

  7. VII. Briefing

  8. VIII. The Short Road to Jupiter

  9. IX. Europa

  10. X. Demands

  11. XI. You’re Damn Right

  12. XII. Emergency Procedures

  13. XIII. Final Strategy

  14. XIV. The Loaders

  15. XV. Old Earth for New

  Thank You

  1

  I. Corporal

  “Brace!” Dane yelled as he tucked his legs and held out his arms, ready for his impact with the very large, black piece of rock that looked ready to crush him like a bug.

  Even though he had performed this operation hundreds of times, it still made him glad that he was wearing the fully-automated, eight-foot-tall and three-foot-wide Orbital AMP suit, the space-ready version of the suit he used to wear back on Earth.

  Back on Earth. Gee, Dane really wished he was back there right now. The thought flashed through his mind as the slowly revolving piece of void-rock, with its glossy black-glass sides erupting with slagged bubbles of melted iron ore, filled his vision...

  Thwack! His suit hit the side of the asteroid, making a sound like a demented god beating the universe with a celestial hammer. Even with all the extra layers of plate, the shock-absorbing micro-compressors, and the insulating foam compresses between his frail human body and the gargantuan rock, Dane Williams of the Mechanized Infantry Division still felt the ripple of impact like a jackhammer run through his body.

  Ach! Which awakened the jangle of electric pain through his nerve endings, racing through his hips and flaring at his knees as the remnants of the alien virus—the Exinase—still tried to eat him alive from the inside.

  “Dammit!” Maybe he was running low on Doctor Heathcote’s antigen compound, her Vito-Neura, which was usually auto-injected into his thigh by the medical unit he strapped there every morning. How long had he been out here, hopping asteroids on maneuvers now—Five hours? Six? Eight?

  Dane’s piston-aided arms scrabbled, seizing the jagged edges of the rock that momentarily splintered off shards of the obsidian flakes that were baked through this particular asteroid, before finding purchase. The glistening black ores rotated and spun in the void around him, each one packed with rare earth minerals. Another reason why Earth wanted the asteroid belt farmed and another reason why Dane Williams, now Corporal Williams, was leading the training practice for the new brace of M.I.D. Marines across the Belt.

  The Belt had to be utilized. It had potential as a high-value resource for humanity, and to that end, there sat in the distance on Dane’s extreme left the edifice called the Forge: a vast frontier industrial factory that sat on top of three of the largest of the asteroids in the Sol system’s inner asteroid belt where Dane and the others trained. If any of the trainees took time to look, then they would have seen vast steel-gray domes rising, along with tubular concrete towers shot through with black-iron girders. Small walkways stretched from one prominence to another, and the whole place was littered with the movement of drones as ore was gathered and brought towards the processors, refined, and then taken to the transporters to be sent to Mars, the Moon, or the International Solaris Station that orbited Earth.

  It was humanity’s latest achievement in space engineering, and the Forge was a vital part of the space effort, especially since the humans now knew that they were not alone in the universe.

  The strange alien threat—the almost-reptilian, almost crab-like creatures they called the Exin, had come and gone. They had pulverized human cities and habitats for the best part of three years in short, lightning-fast raids before conducting a savage assault on the Lunar Scientific Colony. But Dane Williams, Bruce Cheng, and the newly-minted Mechanized Infantry had managed to disable their jump-ship orbiting Jupiter, and, for an almost blissful two years, the humans had known peace.

  Of a sort.

  The Exin and their human collaborators (traitors!) had left behind their bio-weapon, the Exinase virus that attacked the human’s nervous systems, trapping them in their crippling bodies in agonizing pain before eventually killing them. Doctor Sylvia Heathcote’s Vito-Neura had hit general production, with the big pharma companies rolling it out to mass production, but it still wasn’t enough to undo the damage that the alien virus had caused. Almost one twentieth of humanity had been infected, which Dane might not think sounded like such a large number—but when the population of the world was peaking at eight billion, the numbers indicated entire countries worth of people.

  Come on, come on! Dane reached and grabbed, finally seizing a blob of the iron ore that looked liquid, but was as solid as metal—and his grip held as he pulled himself up onto the face of the asteroid. He could feel the pistons and strength relays moving into place in his suit, enhancing his own physical strength by a factor of twenty or more, and he was suddenly crouching on the side of the slowly turning rock...

  “Magnetize twenty percent,” he breathed automatically, and his suit felt suddenly a fraction heavier and sturdier as his boots clung to the metals in the rock a little bit more.

  Now, time to see how the newbies had done... Dane checked the vector readouts on his suit, where the clusters of glittering green M.I.D. markers on his right were mostly attached to their respective asteroids. Mostly.

  “Vasquez! Magnetize!” Dane yelled over the suit comms to the very next marine down the line from himself. Vasquez was, like most of the marines out here today, a private first class of the Orbital Marines. That meant that he and the rest were barely out of basic training and were still filled with that irrepressible belief that they could do anything. That they were immortal and unstoppable in their godlike suits of mechanized plates.

  They hadn’t faced the Exin in direct battle, as Dane had. They hadn’t been surrounded or attacked by human terrorists working with the Exin (Why!? Why would any human do that!?) and they certainly hadn’t fought desperately against the Exin’s defense robots over the turbulent skies of Jupiter, watching as man after man of their brothers and comrades fell and burned up over the gas giant...

  In short, none of these privates had ever seen live-fire combat with the enemy. Any enemy, in fact. And right now, their inexperience showed. Private Vasquez was barely holding on with his one fingertip as the asteroid he was on started to spin faster and faster.

  He’d hit the asteroid high, Dane saw at once, knowing the newbie’s mistake well because he had done it many times himself when First Admiral Yankis had ordered the Mechanized Infantry to expand their operations and turn from a mostly Earth-based Mech force to a space-based defense force.

  Too high, and all you did was add to the asteroid’s rotation. That was why you had to time your jump and your arrival with pinpoint accuracy. It wasn’t just about having the chutzpah necessary to jump from the drone platform through the void with nothing above, below, or around you but t
he air-stealing vacuum... This maneuver was about having the smarts to pre-judge. To observe, analyze, and act as needed.

  Which was pretty much what being a marine was, the corporal thought. He growled to himself, pushing himself off his edge of the asteroid, one boot hitting the metal ore and the next kicking him off through the black towards Vasquez...

  “Ten percent thrusters!” Dane called, and the twin pulse-engines on his back flared with an orange kick of energy, propelling him across the distance just as the fast-moving asteroid shrugged Private Vasquez off.

  “Heeelp!” Vasquez wailed as Dane brought up his boots to meet the rock of his destination.

  “Sixty percent magnetize!” Dane yelled. His suit feet struck the obsidian and iron ore and held strong as he stretched up. One large metal gauntleted hand reached out with the three-foot metal spar of his Field Halligan—a solid steel bar with hooks and chisel and blade at its ends—to neatly catch the edge of Vasquez’s suit with the curved-down point of the bar and pull him with a thud back down to the asteroid.

  “Urgh...” Vasquez’s groan was pretty audible over the suit-to-suit’s group channel, but Dane could see from the readouts on his own suit that the little guy wasn’t hurt. His heart rate was up a bit maybe, but there was no damage to suit nor flesh.

  That was more than Dane could say of himself, as another electric twinge surged up through his legs, accompanied by a spasm of pain. He ignored it. The training mission was nearly over, anyway.

  “You’ll live, Private,” Dane growled, turning the young man over to clutch at the slowly spinning asteroid just as the others were doing on their own.

  “Such a hard-ass...”

  “What’s his problem?”

  He heard the mutter and whisper over the channels as various other privates had seen Dane’s action. They probably thought that they were on private channels to their next, selected suit members and didn’t realize that, as the NCO for their training group, Dane had the power to override any personal chat.

  “Stay tight!” Dane barked at all of them. “One by one, starting with Vasquez here, we’re heading back to the platform. No mistakes this time—and pay attention to your trajectory!” Dane still had one heavy gauntlet on Vasquez’s shoulder and half turned to point back towards where they had come from: the gleaming silver orb with its four, jutting-out metal platforms like piers. He waited for their fast-spinning asteroid to get to the perfect position, and then almost threw Vasquez back towards it with a shove.

  “Jump!” Dane demanded and watched as the private first class kicked and flailed in the void for a moment. Then the twin thrusters on his back pulsed with orange energy, and he was pushed towards the pier, landing on it with a skid that almost threw him against the double bulkhead door at the far end.

  “Shoddy, but survivable,” Dane grumbled his assessment, as then Gomer jumped from the next asteroid, followed by Hepburn, Horowitz, Felis, and all the others. As the training platform was stationary, and they were not, they had to change the burn rates and durations on their individual thruster packs. Most of them managed it with skill and perhaps even a degree of style, but a few burned too short and had to jerkily fire a few times to get back into position. Dane inwardly groaned and tried not to berate them. It was difficult. When each of the eight trainees he had brought out here were on the pier, he okayed the mission conclusion commands with a combination of hand gestures inside his gloves and voice commands.

  >Training Mission / Exo-Planetary Movement 047 / Complete...

  >>STATUS:...

  The green command lines swept down one side of the heads-up display that was holo-projected onto the inside of his faceplate helmet. Dane wondered just what level he could give them. It was a success, after all. No one had died, he supposed.

  “Satisfactory,” Dane growled. The mission status updated for all of the marines, eliciting a further round of gasps and half-covered swear words.

  “Anyone got a problem!?” Dane shouted, still crouched on his turning asteroid, looking back at them. “Take it up with the first admiral! I’m here to make sure that you don’t kill yourselves and more importantly—each other! Do I have to remind any of you again of the danger we face? Do I have to remind you of your oath to the Marine Corps? To Earth itself!?”

  There was a mumbled return of “sir, no sir” over the group channels, one that was not as spirited or as passionate as Dane would have liked, but he was too tired and in too much pain right now to haul them up for that too.

  Ugh. “Mission over. Get yourselves through decompression and cleaned up. Next session in,” Dane checked his suit’s timer. “T-minus two hours.”

  “What?”

  “When are we sleeping!?”

  Dane ignored the whispers on (what the marines thought) were their private channels. He knew that he might have felt the same at their stage of the training. But his post-bootcamp training had been on the battlefield, not in space. He’d had to learn how to go without sleep and to keep on working the hard way.

  Ow. Another spasm surged up through his leg, and Dane was pleased that his boots were so heavily magnetized to this rock. If they hadn’t been, he would have twitched and shaken his own way free of the asteroid just like Vasquez.

  >Incoming Transmission!

  >>Private Channel / CPL CHENG...

  Before Dane could concentrate on the pain, his suit communication hummed and was instead filled with the heavy voice of a heavy man, his fellow corporal, Bruce Cheng.

  “Williams, I’ve got a priority one at the Forge. It’s Lashmeier,” Cheng said. “He wants us to check something out.”

  “Dammit,” Dane groaned, really wishing that he had the chance to at least search his quarters on board the training platform for more Vito-Neura. “What is it?” But Master Sergeant Lashmeier, who was their direct superior, was not a man to understand excuses.

  “Didn’t say. All I got was that he wants corporals and NCO officers at the Forge right away,” Cheng muttered.

  “Message received. I’ll be there in ten,” Dane said. “Williams out.”

  He turned with pain racing up and down his legs towards the distant lights of the Forge, glowing weakly in the void. With a wearied groan, he jumped into the air to fire his rockets and power forward.

  2

  II. The Forge

  Dane was met by the security drone at the outlying perimeters of the Forge, where the line of metal pylons driven into this asteroid’s surface were topped with baleful crimson lights like miniature Eyes of Sauron.

  >Recognition: CPL WILLIAMS, M.I.D...

  >>Accepted...

  The jagged, rectangular matte-black drone acknowledged Dane’s suit signature with a gleam of green light. And then it was rising on its four-part thrusters, gliding towards the nearest entrance dock, leading the way for Dane to follow. The mass of buildings of the Forge rose around him as Dane slow-motion jumped and powered his way onwards. He was soon surrounded on all sides by the gridded world of bulky industrial architecture.

  The drone hovered by the smallest of a set of vast steel doors, waiting as one of the main doors rolled upwards with bursts of escaping gasses to release a much larger drone transport—easily the size of a haulage truck and just as rectangular. The transport made its way out of the hidden dock area and lifted up towards the stars. Dane watched it for a moment, seeing its three cars jostle slightly in the air as it turned and started its slow trajectory back to Solaris. Such transports were conducting a constant orbit now, and still Earth needed more—more!—for its new fleet of starfighters and its interstellar defense fleet.

  Blip! With a flash of green, the smallest of the airlock doors opened. Dane floated into the decompression chamber, a small octagonal room of cool steel colors, waiting for the outer door to close and for the room to re-compress, and then for the inner door light to go green. He felt the returning weight of the Orbital-AMP suit, which, despite all of its suspension and absorbers, still weighed a ton in comparison to zero-G work.
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  “Get that loading dock clear!”

  “Zinc and diamond to bay seventeen!”

  His suit microphones were assaulted by a sudden rush of noise as he stepped out onto a thin walkway that stretched along the top of one of the main processing docks here at the Forge. He made his way across, looking down at the vast warehouse-like space where a complicated set of bays and platforms with train-like rails led to and from the carts that loaded or emptied the constant supply of the precious minerals being harvested here. People in jump suits and protective visors moved between them—the engineers and oil-junkies of humanity, most of whom had jumped at the chance for selection from their previous Earth-based jobs. Small personal drones whizzed and blipped through the airs of the space, carrying urgent messages or commands from one department to another.

  “Securities lounge,” Dane told the lift at the other end of the walkway as soon as he was through. The stifling heat of this place forced him to detach his faceplate with a series of hisses and mechanical clicks. The lift shook and juddered, turning first one way and then another as he was directed deeper into the factory, and Dane once again felt the spasm of pain race through his hips and legs.

  “Damn frack and damn!” Dane hissed through gritted teeth. The latest batch of Vito-Neura was wearing out fast, only proving what Heathcote had told him before he was assigned up here.

  “It is, Dane, quite frankly impossible that you are still alive and that your body is continuing to function despite the levels of the Exinase in your system...” he remembered her sobering conclusion in the serene white halls of her medical lounge, back at the Nevada Facility on Earth, “I thought you had between three and six months before my antigen completely failed to work. It’s now been a year and a half, and somehow your body is continuing to fight the Exinase. It might be the advanced physical training you’re going through, or it might be the effect that zero-G is having on your system. Ever since you went up into space, the virus seems to have slowed its attacks...”