Metal Warrior: Steel Curtain (Mech Fighter Book 8) Read online

  Metal Warrior: Steel Curtain

  Mech Fighter, Book 8

  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

  Prologue: Distant Discoveries

  1. Operation Hammer Blow

  2. Target Acquired

  3. Alien Metal

  4. Evasive Tactics

  5. Blast Radius

  6. Critical Threat

  7. Giant Slayers and Dragon Hunters

  8. Phase Two

  9. Cat and Mouse

  10. Perfect Landing

  11. General Systems Alert

  12. Surrounded, Outnumbered, and Annoyed

  13. Still Surrounded

  14. The Orbital Defense

  15. The Dreadnought Lincoln

  16. Last Stand on Moon 32b

  17. The Recall

  18. The Intercept

  Thank You

  Prologue: Distant Discoveries

  The canopy of stars stretched across, well, everything. From the point of view of the vacuum, the void, this oceanus aeternus—there was no up or down, left or right. There was just this distant brilliance, a hazy glow with subtly darker areas where the gaps between galactic arms could be spotted or brighter regions where the nearest nebulas slowly got on with their work of birthing yet more stars.

  It was a complete misnomer that space was dark, thought the very small human in the very small spacecraft that cut across this blackness like a thorn.

  Sure, there are areas that are dark, the woman thought. Lieutenant Carey Tetlov of the Special Forward Task Force of the Orbital Marines had listened (a little) in the mandatory astrophysics lectures to know that much. Darker areas where black holes were predicted to exist. Avoid those bits.

  And, sure, it wasn’t as if space was anything like downtown Manhattan at New Year’s—lit up and as bright as a city in peak jubilation. It was more a soft brightness, like looking into a room lit with candles.

  But it wasn’t dark.

  Downtown Manhattan is dark these days. The errant thought flashed through Lieutenant Carey Tetlov’s mind, unwelcome as the hardy thirty-something-year-old woman scrunched her forehead and made a face inside her AMP suit—or Assisted Mechanized Plate. She hated this thing. It was too bulky for the sort of work that the Special Forward Task Force was designed to do. But the AMPs, of their various sorts and sizes, were mandatory operational wear for every Orbital Marine at this stage in the Human-Exin war.

  She was trying not to think about Manhattan, Tetlov had enough self-knowledge to realize. Or the darkness of Manhattan in particular. Her home district had been hit hard in the First and Second Exin Incursions that sparked the war. The entirety of downtown had been reduced to a darkened rubble wasteland—and they were still quarantining that place because of the vestigial traces of the Exinase virus, the bioweapon that the Exin had released . . .

  So, yeah—space wasn’t bright. But then again, neither was her home district. Which Carey knew was all a very roundabout way of distracting herself from not thinking about the fact that she was currently hanging in the middle of this eternal ocean in basically a prototype ship for a prototype mission and probably about to be blown out of the sky, or stars, or sea, or whatever term you were supposed to use for space.

  Lieutenant Carey Tetlov was indeed the best candidate for this special mission. She had been retrained from the Special Navy SEALs unit that she had been a part of (pre-Exin) to the new Special Forward Task Force Orbital Marine—but that didn’t really mean that she liked space or anything.

  Still, if there was a chance that what she was doing would help win the war—or would help her not to see the images of destroyed, smoking Manhattan every night—then Carey would do it gladly and eagerly.

  Right now, of course, that meant that she had to drift closer to the only other set of objects that shared this little ripple of space-time with her. They were still a fair number of miles away—over twenty, to be exact—but her spacecraft, the reconnaissance-scout Kestrel, was packed with the most cutting-edge sensing and imaging technology, enough to bring the strange array of objects into sharp, crystal clear focus.

  They look like spiders, Carey thought a little grimly. They were large with columnar abdomens made of the same blue-black metals that the Exin culture favored. They had five, not eight, legs—which Tetlov supposed made them closer to beetles than arachnids, but whatever. As she watched, she saw that they still flexed their long, mechanical legs as they hung against the glitter and gleam of space as if they truly were alive.

  “Radionic scans.” Tetlov frowned as she looked at the strangely flexing Exin drone satellites. Each one was probably larger than her craft by more than half. They were truly monstrous if they did what the much smaller Exin spider drones did—suddenly spiraling toward any invaders and trespassers to crush and puncture them with metal claws and spinning blades.

  “They’re moving in unison . . .” Tetlov murmured for the benefit of the black box recorder that monitored everything that happened inside and outside the Kestrel, Tetlov’s suit readings included.

  The specialist had a hunch. She saw one of the thing’s legs move slightly, recoiling and twitching. Then the next closest Exin satellite of the configuration (the whole array comprised at least seven satellite drones in a large web) also flexed the leg closest to its moving neighbor.

  The scans, when they came back, confirmed it. Tetlov’s holoscreens were washed with purples, blues, greens, and blacks of the different electromagnetic, meson, ion, and many other sub-frequencies to show that each moving limb had an incredibly narrow focus but incredibly concentrated beam of energy between them. The beam reduced in strength exponentially as soon as each limb stopped. Carey got the sense that each of the spider satellites were somehow tugging or messaging at each other.

  And there, beyond the Exin satellites and still just a bright orb in the distance, was an Exin world. Mostly ochre-red and dark colors in her enhanced scans. A world which their Deep Space Array had picked up , confirming the data given by the captive Exin queen.

  As if we can trust her! Carey thought about the strange nine-or-ten-foot-tall alien monarch that Sergeant Williams had brought back with him on one of his ridiculous away missions. Carey had only seen the Exin queen once from afar as she was escorted to senior brass meetings by an entire squadron of Orbital Marines. Her vaguely insectile legs had stalked, not walked. Everything in Carey’s gut had shouted at her that this was a bad idea, having her right there on the Marine Training Platform, right next to Jupiter.

  She had not met Sergeant Dane Williams, either—but she’d heard all about him. Some lowly grunt who had signed up at the start of the war and had been at the front of every hair-brained scheme that Marine Central could come up with. Carey didn’t like the messiness of that—but that was war for you, wasn’t it?

  Anyway. Carey regarded the distant Exin planet and had another hunch.

  “Widen field,” she breathed into the Kestrel’s controls, and the surrounding space was washed with the sweep of the same scanners that the lieutenant had been using to examine the Exin spider satellites.

  Aha! There it was. A flickering array of pulse beams emitted fr
om the surface of the planet to these satellites here, barely registering on her sensors because it was such a tight, narrow beam . . .

  But as Carey kept watching, she saw that there seemed to be some kind of pattern. The tiny beams from the planet flickered on and off almost all the time, and in response, the legs of the spider satellites flexed and moved.

  “Pulling threads,” Carey muttered and then, “directing, managing, relaying the energy collected . . .”

  There was a moment of utter silence inside the cockpit of the Kestrel when Tetlov realized that she had it. She had found it.

  “Mission log,” she cleared her throat and said unsteadily into her suit’s recorders, “by Specialist Lieutenant Carey Tetlov of the Special Forward Task Group. I can confirm that we’ve got it. I have a positive identification on the site of the Exin Master Ansible.”

  A tremor ran through the woman’s body when the realization hit her of what this discovery might actually mean.

  It could be the first strike that undid the Exin.

  Her hands were still shaking as they steered her away from the Exin drones, using every bit of stealth and jamming technology that the Kestrel had to mask her trail. When she was deemed far enough away by her mission protocols, the option to start up the MJU—the Mobile Jump Unit—lit up on her cockpit’s holographic controls.

  This, too—like the rest of the ship itself—was all experimental technology. The ship had been built hastily and around the clock, with technology copied from the captured Exin mother ship (or the relics thereof). Along with the scanners and the weapons and the stealth technology, it had one thing that made Carey very nervous indeed: the same ship-mounted subspace particle-wave emitter that allowed a small ripple to be created in local space-time. A ripple that connected, through the quantum entangling of electrons, back to predefined coordinates.

  In short, an MJU, or Mobile Jump Unit. The Exin had recently given up the need for the giant circular jump-gates to create wormholes. Now they had ship-based jump engines—and the human Marines had copied the technology.

  “Marine Corps Kestrel cycling MJU,” Carey said, keeping an eye on the energy readouts as a huge cylinder somewhere deep in the heart of the vessel started to spin at ever-increasing speeds.

  Flickers of static lightning blinked into existence on the surface of the Kestrel, along with a hazy radiance, just like the distant canopy of stars all around. Specialist Lieutenant Tetlov was about to return home, to take her discovery with her to Marine Corps Command. This might change the whole course of the Human-Exin war. Tetlov cast a final look back at the enhanced image of the Exin spider satellites.

  Had they spotted her?

  Would they detect the use of the MJU?

  For a moment, Tetlov was sure that the nearest spider satellite flickered its legs. Flickered three legs nearest to her. At her. Had it picked up her signal? Did it think that the Kestrel was another vast power emitter trying to send it food?

  Or had the alarm just been raised?

  The reading cycled to full green, and Tetlov spat the word which made the Kestrel suddenly glare with a brief flash of white light.

  “Jump!”

  And the Kestrel was gone, leaving the flickering legs of the alien satellite flaring and reaching toward where it had been in vain.

  1

  Operation Hammer Blow

  We got it.

  The words passed down the chain of command in thrilled whispers and urgent, encrypted messages to triple-secure servers. They pinged back and forth from the offices of the first admiral or space to senior generals and flight commanders before eventually finding their way to Sergeant Dane Williams, in the form of his much larger friend, Sergeant Bruce Cheng.

  “We’re go?” Dane muttered back at the dark, steady eyes of the larger marine opposite him. Cheng had found him by viewing window 27 of the Marine Training Platform. This was one of the few that did not look out toward the titanic wheel of Deployment Gate One, but instead at the new H-orbital platform that was being built to house all of the new traffic (and recruits) to the Marine Corps effort.

  Fight for Earth! On the opposite wall, one of the motivational holos that had been replicated all across the Sol system was playing itself out. It featured pictures of the Marine Corps starfighters swooping over the cerulean skies and deep jungles of their new colony world, Planet 892, or New Eden. This video was replaced by depictions of the Forge asteroid mining installation, the Martian Habitats, the Lunar science colony—and lastly, a selection of the waterfalls, forests, lakes, and plains of Mother Earth herself.

  They’re really pushing the recruitment, Dane reflected as he struggled to process what Bruce had just told him. Was it because they now knew that the new Exin leader—War Master Okruk—had at his disposal a guided asteroid? A weapon called the Tol’rumaa—something that could destroy continents and colonies at will?

  Outside, the H-platform was still only partially built. It was a giant football-post structure with modular units—each as large as a house—being inserted onto its crossbeams to turn into the new habitats, dormitories, laboratories, and vehicle launch bays. A shoal of smaller shuttles and drone robots moved this way and that over its surface, arc-welding connections or fitting cables. It was getting busy up here, Dane thought—and not a damn bit of it would make any difference—not the new platform, not the new technology, and not the damn recruitment posters—if War Master Okruk threw the Tol’rumaa at them.

  Nothing would make a difference—but perhaps this?

  “The Exin . . . queen . . .” Bruce Cheng’s face clouded with anger as he struggled to even voice the name of the captive they had in this very building, “. . . was right. She gave us the coordinates for their large ansible transmitter, and the recent recon mission confirms it. If we take that out, then the entire Exin front line goes dark . . .”

  Dane couldn’t help the wolfish smile that started to tease at the corner of his mouth. It was the breakthrough that they had been waiting for. Both the Exin and humanity now had ansible technology—ways of sending encoded data through quantum entanglement itself, meaning that they could communicate nominally with anywhere in the galaxy.

  But even ansible technology had its limitations, the sergeant had been informed. It still required a monstrous amount of energy. The field ansibles that they had installed on the latest generations of the Marine starship fighters had a range that could keep them in contact over several thousand light years, but no more.

  And we now have the MJUs to jump with, Dane considered—but it still meant that they would be leapfrogging deeper and deeper into enemy territory, always staying near each other, never able to coordinate an attack across all of Exin galactic territory.

  Their answer had been this: take out the nearest of the Exin ansible transmitters. By all accounts, it was a space-based system that was given energy by the nearest Exin planet. That would put the Exin in the same position that they were in and allow the Marines time to begin their strikes.

  It would be the biggest mobilization that humanity had performed so far.

  Dane felt excited. He also felt a flutter of fear somewhere deep in his gut. Are we ready for this? Can we pull it off?

  “My skin will be as metal.” His eyes flickered up upon hearing Bruce Cheng’s murmured words. It was the oath of the Assisted Mechanized Division of the Orbital Marines, those who had first been put into the humanoid walking Mech suits. It was a statement; it was a promise.

  “My breath will be as fire.” Dane nodded seriously. “Let’s do this.”

  “Alert! All Systems Check . . .”

  The automated words of the Marine Corps central servers rang through the voluminous and vaulted hall of launch bay three, bringing with it the flush of amber light and the hissing of steam as hydraulic pistons started to lift the ships—and the suits—out of their harnesses.

  “Gold Squad! Get yourselves ready!” Dane called as he marched, seeing Private First Class Hendrix, Farouk, and Isaias hurriedl
y rushing to their AMP cradles. Each one stood almost seven feet tall: a golem of metal and special synthetic compound alloys. They were painted a dark, almost black, matte gray with splashes of brown and green camouflage.

  Not that we have any idea what sort of terrain that Exin world is going to have, Dane admitted to himself. What if the vegetation down there was all bright neon yellow and pink—meaning that their suits would stick out like a sore thumb?

  Whatever. Sometimes you can’t game the scenario, he reminded himself. Sometimes you just had to trust that your instincts and skills would be enough . . .

  Each AMP suit swung out from its cradle before his three-man team, the tubings of their metal limbs and chests open like the dissected remains of some vast alien insect. Dane watched as Hendrix, Isaias, and Farouk climbed the small cradle ladders to swing themselves in. He saw that they reinforced the webbing correctly and secured the X-harness straps before the auto-bracing pads swelled around their bodies.

  One after another, the suits hissed closed in tandem, first the limbs closing to magnet lock and pressure seal with audible whirring clicks, before the large breastplates, carapaces, and outer defense plates snugged closed around all of it. The final addition was each faceplate, helmet, and collar mantle that swung down from above, locking into place and lit from below with the suit’s LEDs.

  Dane knew that each one of his Gold Squad would be looking at the start up commands of their inside HUD, or heads-up display, that threw holographic information and scans onto the interior of each AMP’s faceplate. They would be reading him as a biological form. They would be reading the energy outputs of the entire launch bay around them—and their final Marine Server connections would send up identifiers with his name and rank and health status.