Metal Warrior: Nerves of Steel (Mech Fighter Book 2) Read online

  Metal Warrior: Nerves of Steel

  Mech Fighter, Book 2

  James David Victor

  Copyright © 2020 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. The Man on the Shore

  2. Healthy Competition

  3. Use Your Life Well

  4. The Ceremony

  5. Deployment

  6. Shadow Play

  7. The First Admiral of Earth

  8. Lance Corporal

  9. Replacement

  10. Special Ops

  11. Infiltration

  12. Surrounded

  13. Complications

  14. The New Front Line

  15. Direct Contact Event

  16. Rescue

  17. The Craft

  Thank You

  1

  The Man on the Shore

  Under the eaves of an old-growth forest, on a rocky hump of land that lowered itself to the dark sea, a man waited, looking eagerly out over the dark waters, and at the cold glitter and gleam of the stars.

  And one star in particular, one that was growing larger with each heartbeat.

  The star grew larger before its gleam started to diminish, resolving itself into a low-flying, oddly triangular hump of black metal. Each of its surfaces were fabricated so that sensor sweeps would be thrown around it, hiding it from military view. Inside the craft, the man knew, there were also a whole range of electronic transmitters that further aided its camouflage—making it virtually undetectable by anything other than the naked eye.

  It virtually piloted itself on the latest glow of propulsion systems and had cost a lot of money. An awful lot of money.

  But the man in the casual, but smart, attire—jacket and polo neck, thin chino trousers all in muted colors—had a lot of money to spare. Owning one of the Mega-Funds, a financial institute that traded exclusively in other companies like an apex predator, afforded him that luxury.

  The man himself was probably north of forty—although it was hard to tell given the utmost care and latest medical attention that he had received all of his life. He kept his short, oiled hair its natural salt-and-platinum gray and hadn’t bothered with the amino acid therapies that would restore its original blonde color.

  It adds a distinguished air, the man liked to think.

  By now, the craft ahead was large and squat over the waters, making just the barest of surface ripples as it approached the shore and started to lower itself onto black sands. Inside was the team that he had assembled from the world over—ex-military and ex-military intelligence, mostly, but with a scattering of rougher mercenaries and professional criminals who had risen to the top of their regional and national games of cruelty and thuggery.

  The people inside would follow his orders precisely and to the letter. They had done so before, and they had yet to fail.

  As the craft lowered, the man took out a sleek black phone and held his thumb over it to unlock its encryption. He tapped in the numbers that opened up the secondary ghost network of apps that it held.

  Is This the Face of the Man Who Will Save Humanity? He navigated to one particular news report, showing a square-jawed man in military uniform, his eyes hard and blue.

  In just two days’ time, General Keel of the Federal Marines will be inaugurated in a public ceremony in the new habitat dome in Washington City, voted by world member-states to be the First Admiral of Earth—a role that will see him catapulted into the limelight and tasked with marshalling united Earth forces against the possible return of the Exin threat. But what can we say about this man, who was previously only barely familiar with the Federal Marine Corps?

  “What can we say about General Keel?” the man said with a smile. “We can say that his tenure was very short-lived indeed…”

  The craft ahead of him crunched to a soft halt, and the man closed his apps.

  It was all about to begin.

  2

  Healthy Competition

  “Frack you!” Dane spat as his head rebounded off of the inside of his AMP suit, making him see stars and causing his ears to ring for a moment.

  WHAM! He had hit the floor, and the fact that he was outside and that it should be grass below him in no way made up for the fact that it was hard.

  “Get up, get up—get up!” He heard Joey Corsoni’s voice over his suit communicator in his ear. Joey was his personal engineer, ordered to try and keep his suit-walker alive by direct maintenance as well as in-field system tweaks from where he was sitting, safe and sound, back in the mobile unit on the edge of the training site.

  “I am!” Dane grunted, pushing himself off with his hands, each arm enclosed in a framework of metal plates with servo-mechanisms that could add many pounds of pressure to his normal physical strength.

  He flipped, one leg hitting the dirt as one metal gauntlet caught the dirt and was pushing him to a bouncing leap…

  But his attacker, Private Marks, was gone. Dane could see the back of him as he slapped one hand on the rusted hood of the derelict car and vaulted over it with ease, on towards the second objective of the training mission.

  >PVT. WILLIAMS. SQUAD: SOLO MISSION…

  >MISSION ID: Capture-the-Flag…

  >OBJECTIVE 2: Drop point…

  “Dammit!” Dane snarled, throwing himself forward after Private Marks, feeling a twinge of pain in his side near his hip.

  No!

  Was it his medical unit? It was supposed to pump into his body the Vito-neura compound created by Federal Marine Doctor Sylvia Heathcote. She had designed it to combat the Exin virus that still lived in his neurons.

  No, he thought as he lengthened his stride and felt the pain similarly stretch and pull. It was no such thing—only the normal protest of aching muscles trying to recover from his recent combat.

  He had been lucky out there in the ruined city of New Sanctuary—the place that he had once called home a lifetime ago. He had been lucky to have survived not only a bazooka blast but also two contacts with what the good doctor now referred to as Exin spore-creatures. These large, bullish things had scales and three-part jaws, and exuded the Exin virus into Earth’s skies.

  But his battles hadn’t come without a cost. No one had come up with any wonder drug yet to help his traumatized body heal from scrapes, knocks, and being pounded into the dirt by the alien things…

  Alien things that released by humans, the thought flashed through Dane’s mind.

  “Concentrate!” Joey was shouting. Dane suddenly realized he was a step too short. He threw himself into a roll instead, sliding over the top of the car’s screeching metal instead of vaulting it as Private Marks, a fellow training member of the Mechanical Infantry Division (or M.I.D. for short), had done.

  SCREEE!

  >Suit Warning! Back-plate -5%…

  Dane controlled his swearing once again as his feet hit the floor, and he sprang forward into the field of fire after his fellow. He hadn’t taken that obstacle well. There was no need for his suit to get injured, not unless—

  TZZRT! A line of lancing blue light shot past him, holding itself steady as it hit the car behind him. It fizzed with black smoke before the line winked out.

  It was one of the medium lase
rs that they were training against—well, that and each other. Dane leapt to one side, his heavy metal boot hitting the dirt and then kicking back in a zig-zag pattern, just like Sergeant Lashmeier had taught them.

  TZZRT! Another beam speared past his left hip to burn the grass right in front of him.

  “Keep it random, champ,” Joey was saying. “I’m reading a three-second delay and point nine-second recalibration…”

  “Point nine!?” Dane shouted. How the hell was he supposed to think faster than that?

  TZZRT! As if to prove his point, another line of burning blue light shot towards him to sear the spot just behind his heel.

  Four seconds. Almost.

  It was no good for Dane to count them. He had to rely on instinct alone to judge when the gun would move into position and spend the point nine of a second to try and track him again. He ended up in a hopscotch dance across the field, heading up the giant mound of earth which already had several burn holes from other AMP trainees who had attempted this mission.

  TZZRT! Another flare. Another.

  And then Dane was charging up the rise, reaching Objective 2 to see that it was a perfectly circular drop in the top, a concrete well big enough for him to jump straight into…

  And coming up on his left side was another trainee.

  >Suit Recognition! PVT. HOPSKIRK…

  Both he and Hopskirk couldn’t jump into the hole at the same time, Dane saw immediately. There was only room for one—

  TZZRT! A flash came from across the field somewhere as Dane threw himself into a skidding spray of dirt. He caught the lip of the concrete well and swung his leg out in a sweep that smacked Hopskirk just below the suit’s knee, toppling him onto his back in a thump and a muffled cry that sounded more surprised than painful. The blue lance of medium laser fire shot over both of them.

  Knee-Breaker, we call that, Dane was thinking as he pushed himself into a roll over the lip of the well and let himself drop. If he’d time to think, then he would have been pleased that his previous career as a Mech-Brawler in the far smaller and less-sophisticated Intrepid Mech-Suits still served him well. The Knee-Breaker wouldn’t actually break Hopskirk’s knee, of course—but it had always looked good on the cameras, and it got the job done.

  Wham!

  Dane landed in darkness, bracing his legs, his hands hitting the solid floor of the concrete bunker system below before pitching himself forward into a roll.

  >Suit Sensors: Low-light settings, Thermal radionic settings…

  Dane’s HUD, or heads-up display, updated, overlaying a field of digital green over the dark that he could see with his eyes, just in time for—

  “Williams!” There was a gleeful shout in his ear, as he rose from his roll to see the approaching knee of Private Marks in his own suit, who had apparently been waiting for him down here…

  >Suit Impact! Shoulder-plate -5%…

  “Five percent! That all you got?” Dane shouted inside his visor as he rolled from the impact of Marks’ knee, pushing himself up from the concrete floor.

  But Private Marks must have realized that his attack wouldn’t do any serious damage to him. In fact, he must have known right from the start—and had merely planned that attack to keep Dane temporarily occupied as he—

  Lifted one of the abandoned girders that littered the floor of this place and swung it like a club—straight towards the rising Dane.

  Fracker! Dane barely had time to jump backwards out of the way as the steel girder swept past his chest.

  >Objective 3: Last Man Standing at exit point…

  The green code updated along the top of Dane’s face-plate HUD. It told him that all he had to do was to follow the pulsing green arrow through the concrete warren to the exit point to complete the training mission. But the mission parameters had become a “last man standing” game—meaning that it was a no-holds-barred, winner-takes-all contest to cross the finish line.

  Obviously, neither Dane nor Marks nor anyone else was actually allowed to kill anyone down here in the dark—they were all marine brothers, after all. But they were certainly allowed to attack, disrupt, and immobilize their opponents along the way.

  “A spot of healthy competition never hurt anybody,” was what their immediate CO, Sergeant Lashmeier, would be saying, Dane imagined. The private sometimes thought that he was wrong. He had already seen other trainees break ankles, fracture cheek bones, and break arms in their bouts of “healthy competition”—something that was frowned on, but not deemed illegal…

  Now, however, as the AMP suit opposite him reversed its grip on the metal girder to use it as a lance instead, Dane wondered if this counted as “healthy competition.”

  “Fracker!” He heard Marks grunt with unsuppressed vitriol as he lunged forward.

  The attack was easy to dodge, as Marks had telegraphed his attack clearly…

  And the next will be a sweep—Dane was thinking as he jumped out of the way. Marks did just that, whirling the girder high around his head in a blow that would probably crush one of the external crumple plates on the outside of Dane’s suit.

  But Private Williams had seen the attack coming, and he waited the heartbeat it took for Marks to whirl the girder around his head…

  Before jumping forward and kicking at the man’s chest with one outstretched metal boot as he reached the apex of his swing—WHAM! With a muffled grunt, Marks fell backwards, the heavy alloys and metals of his suit rebounding off of the solid floor. Dane turned, following the green arrow—

  “Urk!”

  But Marks, apparently, was quick. He lashed out with a boot at Dane’s ankle as he sprung away, making Dane trip and then stumble—careening into the nearest wall.

  “Oh, come on!” Dane hissed in anger, pushing himself up from the wall, turning.

  For Marks to launch himself at his brother marine, their suits clanging together like a car crash. They tumbled to the floor in a squealing, metal-screeching, protesting scramble as Dane felt Marks attempt to pummel his chest with one metal gauntlet.

  >Suit Impact! Breast-plate -10%…

  Somehow, the other trainee had managed to land on top of him, one metal forearm pressed up under the chin of Dane’s face-plate as he attacked him with the other fist. Dane could feel the pressure of the blows and even feel a shadow of pain from them as the front of his suit vibrated.

  >Extending defensive measures…

  His suit flashed the message. He felt the mechanical whirr as the crumple plates—each one curved and shaped to follow the form of Dane’s body—rose over an inch from the surface on tiny, shock-absorbing supports. In better times, Dane might have thought that it gave each suit a vaguely porcupine-like appearance, with the highest crumple plates around his shoulders and the mantle around his neck, back, and chest.

  However, right now, they worked to reduce the force of Marks’s blows, giving Dane a little more breathing space.

  So he could curl his knees up and push them out at his opponent, forcing him back.

  You can’t beat a professional Mech-Brawler on the ground, kiddo, Dane thought, accepting the blows to his chest. He knew that their damage was minimal at best. He slapped a metal gauntlet against Dane’s side and started to lever him off.

  It was all about physics in a Mech-Suit, Dane knew. In his previous life, he had spent untold hours learning jujitsu, as the same principles applied. Physics and pressure applied, that’s all it was—

  TZRK! But suddenly, there was a flash of sparks across Dane’s vision. What!?

  >Warning! Suit Damage Mantle…

  Marks rolled backwards, spilling sparks from his fist as he did so, and Dane suddenly realized what the other private had been attempting to do. Those pounding fists had only been a way to keep Dane occupied as Marks had performed his real attack. He had pulled back at Dane’s mantle protecting his neck and the sensitive rubber seals and internal suit mechanics layered inside.

  “Hey!” Dane shouted in alarm. That was intentional and malicious dama
ge to his suit, wasn’t it? Was that covered by the “healthy competition!?”

  Marks had already rolled out of the way. Dane’s hand rushed to his throat, where the rubber seal was starting to feel very hot indeed…

  “You don’t deserve to be here, Williams—look at what you did to Osgud!” Marks snarled, springing from his steps and starting to run as Dane patted at his neck gingerly.

  “Suit auto-repair…” he said, just as Joey’s voice cut in.

  “What. An. Idiot. What the hell was he thinking?” the engineer said, sounding angered. “Does he realize the work that goes into maintaining these suits you boys get to run around in?”

  “I’m more worried about my head catching fire right now, Joey…” Dane said.

  “The AMPs are built better than that. I got you, Williams…” Joey said, just as lines of neon code started scrolling down one side of the face-plate.

  >Engineering Remote Access/…

  >>>Initiating Sealant Routine…

  >>>Isolating Circuits…

  There was a sudden hiss of steam from the neck of Dane’s suit and then a flash on his HUD as the heat on his neck was suddenly replaced with a cold and cooling feeling.

  “There are sealant valves all through the suit. It sprays a quick-drying epoxy to seal ruptured wires and cabling,” Joey explained. “It should also kill any potential sparks…”