Metal Warrior: Steel Trap (Mech Fighter Book 3) Read online

  Metal Warrior: Steel Trap

  Mech Fighter, Book 3

  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. Up from the Wreckage

  2. Phase 2

  3. Orbital AMPs

  4. Secrets

  5. Tribunal

  6. Launch

  7. The Gladius

  8. Hard Landing

  9. Hard Choices

  10. Habitat 4, Luna Station

  11. Magnetized

  12. Distraction

  13. The Jupiter Run

  14. The Station

  15. Defense Mechanism

  16. Through the Wormhole

  Epilogue

  Thank You

  1

  Up from the Wreckage

  Lance Corporal Dane Williams watched the steady sweep of the green scanners across his suit’s HUD. He saw the sudden scatter of green friendlies and the occasional flare of red thermal signatures as his squad in their Assisted Mechanized Plate suits, or AMPs, worked to clear the wreckage of downtown Portland.

  “Steady there, Hopskirk—you’re coming up on an active site . . .” Dane growled through the intercom as he watched his crew. His team were spread out across a city block, and all around stretched the ruins of yet another human city that had never even got so far as to build a habitat dome. Portland had only been attacked by a handful of the Exin’s crafts, and yet each of the alien seed-shaped fighters had unerringly targeted power stations, relays, and depots in a clear effort to do the maximum damage possible in the shortest time.

  Crawdads, Dane breathed, as his mind flashed to the actual sight of them—the alien “warrior caste”—each one vaguely humanoid, but with scaled skin and hardened plate armor like sheaths of bone. Even though the Lance Corporal had spent months preparing at Fort Mayweather for that first encounter, studying images and footage of the alien threat, his stomach still turned over at the sight of them on Earth soil. Something so strange. Something that chittered and moved with a speed no human could match, and which appeared to be completely devoted to the obliteration of the human race . . .

  Watch out!

  For just a moment, Dane recalled the flaring glitter of an alien-thrown scale knife as it had flashed through the air. It flew inches from his visor to lodge into the breastplate and chest of the next Mechanized Infantry Marine at his side. Dane remembered the look in Private Mahir’s face as he had fallen: surprise, shock, and then a stubborn stoicism not to give in to the pain before he died.

  On my watch, Dane was thinking. He and Mahir and a handful of others had been ordered to escort the new first admiral to safety, and they had been ambushed by both alien sympathizers and aliens.

  But who would do that? What sort of human would side with the alien invaders over their own genus? Their own planet!?

  “Oh frack!” The sudden gasp over his suit-to-suit communicator snapped Dane back to reality in time to see the red signal on his sensor sweep. It suddenly expanded in a rippling wave, and he heard Hopskirk’s curse.

  “Marine! Crap!” Dane broke into a run across the rubble. He could see the shells of former Portland buildings around him, and the rising smoke expanding from where two buildings had spilled a frozen tide of brick and fractured concrete.

  But when Dane skidded down the final pile of bricks, he saw the blackened crater where Hopskirk had been working—as well as the steaming, charred AMP suit of First Class Marine Hopskirk himself. The marine pushed himself up painfully from where he had landed some several feet away.

  “Hopskirk, you okay?” Dane threw himself to the marine’s side. He kept one eye on the suit telemetry system that flashed on Hopskirk’s HUD.

  >Hopskirk, 1st Class . . .

  >Bio-signatures: NORMAL . . .

  Thank god, Dane thought as Hopskirk groaned and accepted the Lance Corporal’s hand.

  “Dammit, I’m sorry, Hops—I should have pulled you back . . .” Dane said. The man’s AMP suit had a dusting of black char all over the front and was still glowing a slight heat-signature orange to Dane’s thermal scanners.

  “You did warn me, Williams.” His fellow marine shook his head and laughed. “But I guess that I clipped a sunken gas line or something . . . The suit took most of it.” The man shrugged, flexing the large shoulder-plates so that they grated and sighed as the metal pieces flared over each other.

  Still, Dane’s thoughts were dark as he heaved a groan and looked through the middle distance at the smoke-strewn skies. It was my job to keep you safe. This is my job . . .

  >Incoming message!

  >Sender: RESTRICTED

  Dane’s HUD lit up as a close-band frequency message, clearly sent by someone with enough security clearance so that it didn’t even register on Dane’s security protocols, burst over his intercom.

  “Lance Corporal Williams? This is Captain Otepi. You and your squad are to cease operations immediately and come with me.”

  “Dane?” Hopskirk must have heard Dane’s irritated gasp. It was followed by a quick intake of breath from his fellow, somewhat-charred marine, as there was a large crunch of rubble and bricks from the way they had come. A series of three large metal shapes moved with mechanical grace out of the wreaths of smoke. Each one was almost twenty feet tall, two high, backward-jointed servo legs holding a conelike metal chassis between their “hips.” Jet-black, no markings, and with swivel-mounted cannons at their hips and underslung from their carriage nose cones.

  War Walkers. The elite Mechs of the Federal Marines, led by the fierce, red-headed woman, Captain Otepi. And they had come to escort Dane and his team back.

  “What’s the situation, Captain?” Dane asked as his squad of five Mechanized Infantry headed back to the muster point and drop zone. They had to jog in double-time to keep up with the long legs of the War Walkers. “Why the need for the heavy cavalry?” He attempted a bit of humor, not that he felt it. In fact, the sight of the giant Mech at his side did not fill him with a feeling of security, but rather a rising sense of dread.

  You didn’t call out the Joint Operations Intel and SEAL Unit that ran the War Walkers for nothing, did you?

  Was there another attack? Which city? The fact that it hadn’t even been a month since the last Exin attack didn’t register on Dane. Ever since the human saboteurs had killed the first first admiral to be nominated (First Admiral Keel), and then the humans and aliens had made an attempt on the second First Admiral Yankis, nothing would surprise Dane Williams any more. It felt as though the Exin could reach down to Earth any time they wanted, anywhere they wanted, like the pointed finger of some vengeful god.

  We’re playing catch-up, Dane knew. Even with all of their new Mechs, they were still light years behind what the aliens could do.

  “I don’t have the clearance to tell you, Lance Corporal,” Otepi said tartly over the suit-to-suit.

  Don’t I have a right to know if I am going to end up putting my men’s lives on the line? The angry thought flared through Dane’s mind, but he knew by now better than to ask direct questions like that. The military, for all of its apparent ignorance of the enemy, still held on rigorously to the chain of command and the importance of security c
learances.

  “But I can say this,” Otepi said. They rounded the avenue into Colombia Park where the hulking box-forms of marine transporters, and a multitude of camp tents were billed. Many of the trees at the south end had been cleared for this hasty militarized zone. Dane knew that were he to take off his face-plate, he would probably smell the jag of diesel and the smoke of the distant city in the air. Almost idly, the Lance Corporal wondered if all of America smelled like that these days.

  “The new First Admiral Yankis has bumped up the Mechanized Infantry to Tier 1 deployment. Congratulations, and welcome to the club.” There was a shade of sarcasm to her voice.

  “Tier 1?” Dane frowned as the party jogged into the park over the hastily laid avenues of hard-standing rubble and scree. Already, one of the blocky marine transporters with their four rotors was extending its hull doors to admit them. He tried to remember what Tier 1 had meant in the Strategy and Deployment 101 class he’d had at Fort Mayweather.

  “It means you’re first in, Lance Corporal,” Captain Otepi said. “The good first admiral has decided that the Mechanized Infantry Division are our first line of offense against the Crawdads.”

  Dane felt a shiver of something pass through his body, some savage animal feeling that was somewhere between fear and excitement. They had stopped just outside the gigantic transporter as Dane’s men jogged past, finding their webbing cradles and attaching their suits to the walls before releasing the locks on their face-plates. It was wise to get a bit of fresh air and water whenever you could, and Dane’s men were well-trained.

  Beside Dane, Otepi’s War Walker took a few steps away from the landing site and, along with the two others, settled into a defensive perimeter. This really is serious, Dane thought as he threw a salute at the giant Mechs and turned to join his men.

  “But now that you’re on your way,” Otepi’s voice suddenly erupted onto Dane’s suit comms, “I guess it doesn’t hurt to tell you this—you’re going to be rendezvousing with the rest of the Mechanized Infantry at the Nevada Facility. Good luck, Lance Corporal,” she said and clicked off.

  The Nevada Facility. Dane blinked as the marine transporter doors slid to a close in front of him, forcing him to hurry to the closest available cradle. He knew of it by reputation.

  That was the place where they built spaceships.

  2

  Phase 2

  “So, they’re redeploying us as . . . space marines?” Dane paraphrased the words that the shorter, stockier, and altogether angrier form of Staff Sergeant Lashmeier had just said.

  The pair stood in one of the large hangers of the Nevada Facility, waiting for the rest of the M.I.D. to assemble. Around them hummed large machinery and loaders, moving in the electric-lit corners. The front bay doors stood wide open onto the golden oranges and brilliant whites of the Nevada desert, as well as the low concrete domed hangars that were completely nondescript on the outside, but hid vast, cavernous spaces on the inside.

  The Nevada Facility was vast from what little that Dane could see—but it wasn’t recorded on any map and was automatically blacked out from all satellite images by top-level security programs. From the amount of activity and strange tracking equipment being off-loaded by unmarked army trucks every hour of the day and night, an awful lot of money was being poured into this place, and at very short notice too. The facility had the air of a military camp in the middle of, well, a war. Everyone was tense and running around on tight schedules, checking security notices and clearances at every doorway.

  “We prefer to use the term Orbital Marines. Do I detect a problem with that, Lance Corporal?” Lashmeier said in his deadpan voice that could have made mountain ranges think twice about standing too close to him. Beside Dane stood the only other senior marine wearing an AMP suit, Dane’s buddy and ex-sumo wrestler Bruce Cheng, also a Lance Corporal.

  “You mean like . . .” the larger man started to say.

  “No, I do NOT mean like we’re playing around with little models, making peww-peww noises at each other!” Lashmeier snapped, and any urge that Dane might have felt to snigger suddenly evaporated. “And no, you are not being called space marines, but a part of your role will be to conduct marine operations in space, understood!?”

  Like space marines, then . . . Dane could almost hear the cogs in Bruce’s head turning. Neither of them was suicidal enough to make the comment though.

  “Sergeant, SIR!” There was a shout as Johnston, Vindiar, and the other twenty or so Mechanized Infantry jogged out of one of the bulkhead doors to their muster point. The M.I.D. had been assembled from all over North America, wherever they had been using their suits to clear wreckage and go into the alien virus-swamped areas with their stronger protective gear. They had filtered in through the night, arriving in the bunk room in sets of fours and fives, each blearily wide-eyed at being called to the most secretive military facility in all of the United States.

  “Form up! ATTEYYN-HUT!” Dane barked out of habit. Somehow feeling that Lashmeier expected it of him. To his left, the twenty Mechanized Infantry smoothly stamped into a line and saluted the Staff Sergeant as one. They held the pose until Lashmeier nodded and lifted the cuff of his sleeve up to his mouth to speak into one of the small node communicators there.

  “We’re go,” Dane heard him say, as three people walked out of the darkness of the hangar to join them.

  All of them were women, but none of them could have been more different in Dane’s eyes. The first that he recognized was Dr. Sylvia Heathcote, frizzy blonde hair distractedly pulled back into an unkempt bun and wearing a white coat. Her eyes flickered with recognition when she saw Dane. He had, after all, saved her life in the Exin-overrun ruins of New Sanctuary.

  The next was Captain Otepi herself, a little taller than Sylvia with red hair and sharp features, wearing black combat fatigues and no insignia at all.

  Outside of her War Walker, Dane could see that the SEAL captain had a silvered scar running across her brow and cheek, and the eye that it intersected was a solid ball of metal. The Captain didn’t register Dane at all, but kept a fierce expression on the assembled M.I.D., as if examining each and every one for fault.

  The last woman was a civilian—or looked like one, anyway. She also had blonde hair, but it was scraped back into a severe bun that looked, Dane thought, positively painful. She wore an A-line pencil skirt (charcoal gray, of course) and a simple white blouse under a similarly gray sweater.

  Jessica, Dane tried to stop his brows furrowing. He had nothing against the woman at all really—only what she represented. She wore a lanyard about her neck with a digital photo and a string of letters and numbers. Dane knew that they would probably grant her access to anything, everything, and anyone. She was some kind of government special agent, with enough jurisdiction to make decisions about what First Admiral Yankis—the man responsible for coordinating the defense of Earth, presumably—could do.

  Of course, “Jessica” had no second name, rank, or title as far as Dane was aware.

  “Marines.” It was Otepi to speak first, addressing them casually, but the authority that she carried was clear. “Welcome to Nevada. I am Captain Otepi of the Joint Intelligence SEAL taskforce, and I have been tasked with Phase 2 of your training.”

  There’s a Phase 2? Dane thought.

  “You will be required to operate in and out of a new class of AMP suit in zero-G, low-G, and unpredictable environments.”

  Unpredictable environments. Dane’s eyes slid to Bruce, who shared with him a similarly wide-eyed look. That means exo-planets, right?

  “You will be required to master these operations, technically, yesterday,” Otepi said, permitting herself a small smile at the ripple of groans through the assembled M.I.D.

  At least she has a sense of humor, Dane thought.

  “Failing the training will not be an option,” she concluded direly.

  Why? Dane blinked. What did that mean—surely, they would just get kicked back into the planetary grou
nd-level forces if they couldn’t hack it?

  Ah, but then Dane’s eyes found that Sylvia was looking at him, and her face was full of concern. The Exin virus? he thought. He knew that his body was riddled with it, as was approximately one-fifteenth of the human population. For most of them, the Lance Corporal knew, there was no possible recovery. Their bodies would erupt in neuralgia and joint pain, leading to a slowly crippling and agonizing death only moderated by the use of painkillers and tranquilizers. Dane, however, was one of the lucky ones. He was getting daily doses of Dr. Heathcote’s antigen Vito-neura, injected direct into the meat of his thigh by the medical unit he wore always, all the time.

  And the virus is only kindling in my body. Dane remembered Sylvia’s words. He had at best six months to live unless a cure could be found.

  Sylvia’s dark look to Dane concluded what he had feared. While succeeding at the new training was probably rhetoric for Captain Otepi, for him, it meant medical treatment being withdrawn. He’d have to go back to Sacramento Teaching Hospital and probably to an even shorter life . . .

  “Your training begins today,” Captain Otepi informed them with a nod. She turned slightly to the only supposed civilian in the room.

  The woman only known as Jessica pursed her lips, clearly disappointed with something, before speaking. “Gentlemen, may I remind you that you all signed the Official Military Secrets Act upon signing up and that you are still bound by those protocols until anything that you see, hear, or do while performing as a member of the military services becomes declassified—which I highly doubt will happen in your lifetime. Is that understood?”