Metal Warrior: Ring of Steel (Mech Fighter Book 7) Read online

  Metal Warrior: Ring of Steel

  Mech Fighter, Book 7

  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. Fighter Squadron

  2. Fire over Pluto

  3. Mother Ship

  4. Knock, Knock

  5. Open Sesame

  6. Hive

  7. Tol’rumaa

  8. Loyalties

  9. The Sacrifice

  10. The Passed On

  11. Cargo

  12. An Unlikely Crew

  13. The Cavalry

  14. Negotiations

  15. My Purpose Undaunted

  16. Travelers

  17. Pressure

  18. Induction

  19. Epilogue: Gifts from Distant Stars

  Thank You

  1

  Fighter Squadron

  “Gold Squadron Scramble!”

  The words of Staff Sergeant Lashmeier, local-group commander of the Orbital Marines, rang through the comms systems. They spread like wildfire through the deep space human military base, spurring action, determination, and no small amount of anxiety.

  An electric pulse of adrenaline jolted up through Sergeant Dane Williams’ spine, leaping him from the metal bench he had been sharing alongside several other marines and scattering the metal trays across the table.

  “Boss!? What is it?” That came from Isaias, one of the youngest of the newly minted Orbital Marines that were being shipped to the Jupiter Marine Training Platform every week now. Dane saw the youth’s shocked, dark eyes seek out his own for a moment.

  It’s probably his first time, the older marine thought. First time fighting the Exin.

  “Don’t know yet, Marine.” Dane’s tone was quick and decisive. Don’t let them think for a moment that their superior can’t handle whatever is being thrown at them, Dane recalled his training.

  “On me, Isaias,” Dane said quickly as he started to half march, half jog to the bulkhead door that led out of Canteen 1 and into the main access corridor beyond. Several other marines had also jumped up at the same time, as soon as Lashmeier’s words sounded over the station speakers.

  All of them Gold Squadron. All of them my men and women, Dane thought as he gave a quick nod to the handful assembling with him. “Get to your equipment lockers, full-suit operations. Everyone meet at the hangar deck for further orders,” Dane barked as he broke into a run.

  The main access corridor was busy with staffers and rest-cycle marines, but they scattered for Dane and Gold Squadron as they ran. The neon strip lights in the vaulted ceilings flashed overhead, and their feet made a clattering noise on the metal of the grates as they ran past.

  They reached the first set of stairs, where Dane used the chrome work railings to half leap to the next flight and the next until they dropped several levels in the platform.

  The bulkhead door was sliding open at the fourth such landing. Dane and the others were running into a wide but gloomily lit launch bay where rows upon rows of the mech suit cradles were starting to activate, giant frames sliding out from the walls holding eight-foot-tall humanoid forms.

  The Assisted Mechanized Plate, the hallmarks of what had been designated as the Mechanized Infantry Division—were now under the umbrella of the Federal Orbital Marine Corps of Earth. These were once the experimental auto-assist suits of Dane Williams, Bruce Cheng, and twoscore others at the start of the human counterattack against the Exin. Now, they had become the premier fighting form of humanity.

  And perhaps the only tactical advantage they had against the galactic empire of the strange, insectlike Exin.

  “There you are,” It was hard for Dane not to feel something like relief as his feet ran him to suit 23, his own personal AMP.

  She was underlit and looming, but the automated process was lifting the helmet and causing the breastplate and cuirass to petal outwards, revealing the secure compression pads and X-harnesses inside that would hold her driver securely. As Dane climbed the outer rig to swing himself inside, his eyes found the telltale dents and scrapes that still decorated her dark blue-black outer hull, despite the countless hours she had spent in the repair shops.

  You and me, we’ve been through a lot, he thought as he settled himself into the metal cocoon, slotting his arms and legs into their holds to feel the suit tighten into place around him and the breastplate to smoothly hiss closed.

  The suit was like a second skin. One that fit him perfectly, and one that would hurl him against the terrors of the universe.

  The faceplate and helmet swung down, and Dane heard the magnet locks click, one after another, as the mantle collar rose. Inside, the holographic controls of his HUD, or heads-up display, flickered into gleaming digital orange-and-green life.

  >ORBITAL AMP 023 Activating . . .

  >Cycling accelerator unit . . .

  >Recognizing User . . . SGT WILLIAMS, D . . .

  >General Systems Check . . . GOOD . . .

  >Filtration, Biological, Chemical, and Radionic Protections . . . GOOD . . .

  >Connecting to Federal Network . . .

  “Lashmeier, sir!” Dane was saying as soon as the AMP suit’s microservers were online. He stepped down, out of the cradle, and turned to briefly check that the rest of Gold Squad were behind him. There was Hendrix and Farouk, and Private Isaias just stepping out of his cradle too. The youngest marine in Dane’s Gold Squadron had an AMP suit that was clean and unmarked. Its matte blue-black paintwork (designed to help reflect radionic waves) wasn’t buffed and scratched up like Dane’s was.

  “Williams,” Lashmeier’s bulldog voice croaked over the comms, just as threatening in audio as it was in person. “I said scramble! Get to the hangar deck, pronto!”

  “Gold Squadron assembled and ready for deployment, sir. On our way,” Dane said quickly, checking that it was the case.

  He led the way to the rear of the dimly lit hallway and to the large bulkhead doors at the far end, already hissing open to reveal the largest single space in the entire Marine Training Platform: the hangar.

  The hangar deck was vast and stretched over several floors with plain, functional metal gantries running along the walls. Each of these gantries ran to the large marine fighter ships that hung from the ceiling, held in their own cradles like monstrous versions of the AMP suits, their noses pointing towards their individual launch tubes.

  >Gold Squadron Access Permitted for Fighters 1 - 4 . . .

  The digital commands flared and scrolled across the inside of Dane’s HUD as a faded green vector glowed into life on his faceplate, describing the paths to the four ships already selected for their operation.

  Dane’s own personal line glowed the strongest for him, as he knew the others would have their own routes to follow. He was pleased to see that it led down the gantry and securely to the access port of the Gladius.

  “Sir?” Dane dared as he ran towards the twin-nacelle, marine starfighter. The Gladius was, if anything, like Dane’s suit. She had once been a prototype of the new space-based Orbital Marine fighting unit. Now, over the last handful of years, she had been re-equipped, repurposed, and even rebuilt to become one of the mainstays of their forward strike fl
eet. She looked like an elongated wedge of dark metal, with an old-style cockpit near the front of lengthy diamond-shaped windows.

  “Full mission details already downloading to your fighter,” Lashmeier responded. “But I can tell you that our deep space radar out near Pluto has detected something. We believe it to be another Exin attack.”

  “Dammit!” Dane gritted his teeth as he hit the door release for it to hiss open and for the lights of Inner Hold 2 to illuminate. He sprinted towards the short central corridor that ran up the spine of the Gladius. Around him, the rest of Gold Squadron was doing the same.

  Each of these marine fighters could have a complement of up to a dozen marines, Dane knew from past experience, but they could also be piloted by one marine alone, as would be the case now.

  Still, Dane felt a jitter of apprehension as he slid into the piloting chair and saw the command-and-control board light up in front of him. I’m not the best pilot on the wing, Dane knew, but he was trained—and trained well—by Captain Otepi and Engineer Corsoni, just as each and every one of the marines had been over the past eight months since the new Orbital Marine Flight Program had been approved.

  And Lashmeier was expecting a mere four-fighter squadron to face off against a potential Exin attack group!?

  “Master Sergeant, sir,” Dane said as he started flicking the controls, cycling the microreactors, the engines, the fuel injectors . . . “If I may ask . . .” he started to say.

  “I know what you are going to say already, and no, you may not question my orders!” Lashmeier snapped at him grumpily.

  Ouch. Dane winced, knowing that this was over the public channel of his Gold Squad too. It probably wouldn’t do his respect any favors if he got shouted at by a senior officer.

  There was a moment’s uncomfortable silence over the comms, during which Dane saw the Gladius’s reactors reach their peak performance, and the fuel injectors went active.

  >Gladius 023, you have clearance to launch . . .

  The message flared over Dane’s own suit faceplate, as his suit was linked directly to the ship’s servers. Dane stretched his fingers and grabbed the flight control handles.

  “Sergeant?” It was Lashmeier’s voice, sounding again from some distant command room far above them in the Marine Training Platform. “I’m sending you the deep-scan reports. Something appears . . . wrong with these signals we’re getting. As if the Exin craft is damaged, or better yet, crippled. But the Exin have never jumped so far away from central Sol space before. Maybe it was a navigation error. Maybe it’s some sort of ploy.”

  A trap, you mean? Dane clenched his jaw. He didn’t like the idea that he and his squad were being dangled before the Exin, but he also felt no rancor about it. He was a marine, and warfare relied on intelligence, after all.

  “But whatever it is, it is out of the ordinary, and they are so far out that we have plenty of time to react to them if they represent the outliers of a larger attack effort,” Lashmeier said.

  “And I guess that you don’t want to commit a sizeable force in case it is a decoy?” Dane inferred.

  “Exactly.” Their senior officer didn’t sound in the least bit remorseful, and Dane surprised himself in not feeling resentful in turn.

  “Don’t worry, sir,” Dane promised. “You can rely on Gold Squadron to get the job done.”

  “I knew I could, Sergeant,” Lashmeier sounded.

  And at that, the automated launch procedures were okayed at the command end, and Dane felt a lurch as the Gladius, along with all of the other marine fighters, was lowered into its prospective launch tubes as Dane started the pulse engines.

  The rear thrusters of his craft started to glow an eerie blue as they emitted particle-disturbing waves—a technology that humanity had learned from the Exin (along with a whole lot of other things, Dane thought briefly). But Dane felt the thrum of energy spread through the ship, and, when the holding shackles released, found that the ship was floating forwards slightly as the doors to the launch tubes secured shut behind them.

  “Gladius, you are clear in three . . . two . . . one . . . !”

  The words of some marine navigator sounded over the suit comms, and Dane hit the thrusters as the distant chute doors burst open.

  The Gladius and the sergeant inside were thrown forwards into the night of the mid-twenty first century.

  The four marine starfighters burst from the belly of the giant, cylindrical Marine Training Platform, leaving a trail of evaporating plasma behind them.

  They were briefly brilliant and bright—spears flung by some ancient godhead—before they were immediately painted small and dark against the backdrop of the nearest planet, the orange gas giant that was Jupiter.

  The four craft burned away from their military cradle, away from the kingly planet, and away from the small, flashing beacons that indicated flight lanes. There were many other craft in far orbit around Jupiter these days: huge container ships, as well as smaller team shuttles moving stock back and forth from Jupiter’s largest icy moon Europa and the giant spider wheel that was the Near-Earth Deployment Gate.

  The NEDG was stilled as Dane led his Gold Squadron away from humanity’s greatest achievement. In previous times, Dane had seen its spoked wheel spin, faster and faster, before it started to glow with a malefic crimson light as it tore apart the structure of the cosmos, creating a wormhole to the rest of the universe.

  But the four marine starfighters were not, thankfully, traveling by wormhole this time. Dane, in particular, thought that he’d had enough of such mind-bending travel for one lifetime, stuck as he had been on the far side of it, on humanity’s first colony world, Planet 892.

  “Ready your FTL drives!” Dane called, pulling the release which would start his ship’s small particle accelerator unit firing, faster and faster . . .

  “Ready, sir!”

  “Sir, yes, sir!”

  “Ready!”

  His marines came back at him immediately, and Dane watched the small green circle in his suit-to-ship controls, seeing it fill up.

  “On me! Gold Squad, go! Go! Go!” Dane hit the accelerator, for his ship’s twin thrusters to crackle with lightning and blaze with an unholy glow as the Gladius was flung forward, towards what looked at first like a fairly blank patch of regular space.

  Towards distant Pluto and the mysterious Exin signal.

  2

  Fire over Pluto

  >Approaching target . . .

  Streamers of burning white plasma cascaded over the Gladius’s forward cockpit windows as the marine fighter tore through the void at the speed of light. On Dane’s HUD was the small, icy planetoid of Pluto, growing larger and larger by the moment with a green vector zeroing in the planet’s marker.

  “Ready for deceleration,” Dane announced over the ship-to-ship channels. “Remember, we don’t know what’s going to be there to meet us when we—”

  The burning plasma of tortured particles gave one last valiant flare as it evaporated. Suddenly the Gladius, along with the three other marine fighters, were swooping on their glowing pulse engine thrusters towards the icy-white world of Pluto, home of the Deep Space Array.

  And, it seemed, home to a trio of Exin seed craft.

  >Warning! Enemy targeting system detected! . . .

  “Frack!” Dane twisted the flight handles of the Gladius violently, flinging the craft to one side as one of the teardrop-shaped, mottled brown-and-green seed craft turned expertly towards him.

  The enemies of humanity known as the Exin had a number of different types of craft, each of them (like all of their technology) appearing organic in structure, as if their metals were grown rather than forged. What humanity called the seed craft was by far the most dangerous and omnipresent threat.

  Each one was pointed at its prow with an eruption of metal-like spikes that Dane guessed were a mixture of sensing and weapons modules. It was from this jagged clump that a sudden bolt of purple plasma shot out towards Dane’s craft.

  >
Warning! . . .

  “Agh!” Dane snarled in frustration as he wrestled with his craft, hitting the floor pedal on his right to ignite the right-hand thrusters. In response, the Gladius started to spin even faster as it dove in a curving arc, and the bolt of searing, burning energy flew over his left-hand thruster.

  Dane released the right-side thruster, but the Gladius kept on spinning.

  “Come on, come on . . .” He saw the Exin seed craft sweep in an arc after him.

  Good.

  Dane kicked the thruster pedals forward in his seat as he snatched at the flight handles, causing the forward thrusters of the Gladius to suddenly fire and bringing the craft’s nose about and slowing its momentum, before it flipped, rear over nose . . .

  For the seed craft to suddenly be in front of Dane and his twin meson canons.

  >Target lock! . . .

  Dane squeezed the firing triggers and felt a jolt run through the craft as burning orange lasers slammed forward, crossing the small distance between him and the approaching enemy just as the enemy ship’s nose cone started to flare with murderous fire.

  And then, with a flash of blinding light, the Exin seed craft was struck by Dane’s attack. It broke apart, pieces pinwheeling away and over each other as the explosion died.

  “Sarge!” The panicked voice of Private First Class Farouk sounded in Dane’s ear. Dane had a heartbeat to see the next Exin seed craft bearing down on the Gladius, already firing . . .