Metal Warrior: Precious Metal (Mech Fighter Book 5) Read online

  Metal Warrior: Precious Metal

  Mech Fighter, Book 5

  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. Sergeant

  2. Lost Contact

  3. This Is What Dying Must Feel Like

  4. Half a Galaxy Away, And We’re Still Screwed

  5. The Camp

  6. The Bunker

  7. The Forest

  8. Trust in the Dark

  9. The Nursery

  10. The Device

  11. The Message

  12. Make It Count

  13. The Beacon

  14. Incursion

  15. Beacon

  16. Outnumbered

  17. War Mech

  18. Final Countdown

  19. Cornered

  20. The Contest

  Epilogue

  Thank You

  1

  Sergeant

  Red light flared in Dane’s eyes, reminding him of fire and ruin, of death and destruction.

  Dane Williams, sergeant of the Mechanized Infantry, the Orbital Marines, woke up from a dream of thunder and confusion, of darkness mingled with fire, and of buildings falling down. He gasped for air. Gotta breathe, gotta breathe! Before he knew it, his feet had hit the cool metal floor, and he was lurching forward, escaping some nightmare of crushing weight and fiery inferno—and then the first spasm of pain ran up through his legs.

  “Ach!” His knees locked and he spun, going down and almost hitting his head on the metal desk, had he not caught it at the last moment.

  “Dammit!” He breathed, feeling the inside marrow of his calves and thighs burning as if someone had poured molten lead straight into them. Or maybe like someone had rerouted the entire station’s electricity supply right through Dane’s body. Or had perhaps done both at once, just out of spite.

  Everything around him in the little cubicle room that he called his quarters was cast in that baleful red light, probably precisely what had infiltrated his memories and made him think of crashing buildings and burning fires. The red light waxed and waned, coming from the tiny porthole window above him.

  Again.

  Out there, in the darks of space, Deployment Gate One—the captured jump station of their enemy—was being activated again for the Marine Corps’s latest rounds of tests and probes. The probes were fired through to the habitable Earthlike “Planet 892” on the other side. Every time the gate activated, it cast a red light that streamed in through Dane’s porthole and brought with it a rising sense of panic in the young man—which, right now, wasn’t quite as bad as the rising agony that raced through his legs.

  The sergeant scrabbled at the drawers underneath his bunk, pulling out the metal container to quickly rifle through what meagre belongings the Federal Marine Corps allowed him. Dane had never been much of a man to want things, even before he had joined the Marines, or before the Exin had come and burned half of the human cities off of the face of the Earth. Right now, however, he would have traded everything on this entire station for the pain-injector he was hunting.

  His fingers closed on the bulky object of black plastic, with metal tines at one end like a taser. It was a spare, and one that Doctor Sylvia Heathcote said that he should only use in emergencies. Except, well, everything was an emergency for him right now.

  His regular medical unit, the one that strapped to his thigh and injected the Vito-neura compound that Doctor Heathcote had designed herself, had been defunct for the last week. Dane was still eagerly waiting for the supplies to reach the Near Gate Platform where he was currently stationed, and now, in the words of Heathcote, he was “living on fumes.”

  So he had these, a crap-ass mixture of painkillers and tranquilizers and stimulants that was supposed to replace the Vito-neura, for those patients such as he who had lived beyond all hope of treatment.

  Dane gritted his teeth, refused to think about his prognosis as the red light of the station outside washed over him once more.

  He jammed the injector into each thigh and immediately felt the cooling rush of chemicals spread through his system like a good dose of heaven itself. He heaved a great sigh and wiped the sweat from his brow. As if reacting to this blessing, the red light started to lift and lighten, gently fading away and leaving him in the regular darkness once again. The last round of tests had been completed, and humanity’s personal wormhole had once again quieted.

  The thing was that his condition—the after-effects of being infected by the alien Exinase compound—shouldn’t be affecting him like this, not this badly up here on the edge of Jupiter.

  “There’s something happening to you that we don’t understand,” Heathcote had said over their last glitchy, out-of-synch holo conference last week. “The virus slows down when you’re in space. It races through your body if you’re on an Earthlike planet, but off-planet, it seems to go almost dormant . . .”

  “Not dormant enough, clearly,” Dane growled. He knew that he shouldn’t be grumbling, as he was probably one of the oldest still-living cases of the first wave of Exin contact. The doctor had made sure that, by putting in recommendations with Master Sergeant Lashmeier as well as First Admiral Yankis, Dane was kept on permanent rotation. He moved between the Near Gate Platform where he was now, the Marine Training Platform, and the International Solaris Station—so he never had to set a painful foot on Earth again.

  Which sucked.

  Dane got woozily to his feet and awkwardly stumbled the few steps to the porthole, where he could look out on his current, and perhaps final, home. It was still one hell of a sight, he had to admit.

  In front of him was the curve of the gas giant Jupiter that shepherded their system. He could see the Great Storm, or the Red Spot, constantly boiling away in the lower corner. The rivers of ochre and red and brown and white burned and churned constantly, a never-ceasing storm—which was pretty much like how he thought of his life, right now.

  And there, hanging next to the orb of Jupiter was Deployment Gate One, or the jump-gate—the left-behind wheel station of the alien invaders, which they had used to gain entry to their system not once but twice. Dane had helped lead the efforts to retake it, and then to recapture it from the Martian mercenaries too. They were a cult who called themselves New Earthers because they believed that on the other end of the black hole that station produced was another Earth—another perfect and pristine Eden.

  Dane sighed.

  And they had been right, hadn’t they? he thought. There was another Earth on the other side of that wormhole. There was another planet waiting for them . . .

  And now Earth was colonizing it.

  The Deployment Gate One had been rebuilt by the humans. Right now, the sky was alive with the shuttles and transport ships ferrying cargo and equipment, with squadrons of the twin-nacelle starfighters in constant guarding loop. It was getting busier out there, busier by every shift that Dane looked out.

  They were starting up the Deployment Gate every few shifts now, and each time they did, it created an awful crimson-purple glow that reminded Dane of the battles and the blood that he had to go through to close the damn thing in the first place. Satellites and drones were fired int
o that crimson warp-glow, as well as rockets and now even entire transporter ships.

  Dane glanced back at the slowly spinning wheel of Deployment Gate One. He told himself not to think about all of the good Marines that he had lost on or near that thing. That was their job, after all—to do the hard work that kept Earth safe.

  But still, Dane’s eyes flickered from the gas giant and the station to the star-flecked darkness further out. He was no good at astronomy. He had no idea which one was which, from this alien angle to Earth.

  He wondered if one of those bright stars was Earth somehow, a home that he was forbidden to return to.

  BWARP! A light flashed over his door, disturbing Dane’s rather morose thoughts.

  “Sergeant Williams, reporting,” he said instinctively, for a robotic voice to reply over his room’s speaker system.

  “Sergeant Williams of the Mechanized Infantry to report to Command Deck immediately.”

  No rest for the wicked. Dane sighed and made himself ready.

  2

  Lost Contact

  “Sergeants Williams, Cheng, Hopskirk. Prepare for mission brief!” blared the voice of the holo Lashmeier that stood, fading in and out of view, in front of them on the control deck of the Near Gate Platform.

  The Near Gate Platform—or NGE—was one of the larger Marine platforms that had been constructed since the last Exin invasion. Or almost invasion. The Exin had been about to move their entire fleet into Sol space, but Dane had managed to close the wormhole at the Deployment Gate, and the fraction of the Exin fleet that had arrived had been overwhelmed by the Marine Fleet and the flotilla of corporate vessels.

  That had been almost ten grueling months ago. The large Marine platforms that looked like children’s spinning toys, but with jetties and hangars pointing outwards, had been constructed at top speed by the fabricators at the Forge Asteroid Mining Operation. Humanity had accomplished a lot already, but today, Dane knew that it was going to try and achieve a whole lot more.

  The control deck was a large, semi-circular room that was alive with both holo and physical control desks, with gray-blue suited staffers and Marine specialists running through constant checks and procedures to make sure that everything went exactly according to plan. Beside Dane stood the large form of Sergeant Bruce Cheng, as well as the rangier form of Sergeant Hopskirk—the only ones left of the original Mechanized Infantry, first trained after the Exin invasion of nearly five years ago.

  “This is a recorded message,” said the only other person there to address them, red-haired Captain Otepi of the War Walkers Brigade in her black fatigues. She wasn’t a holographic projection (thankfully, Dane thought as he looked at the stalled image of Master Sergeant Lashmeier, stocky and see-through but still with the suggestion of his very square features).

  “Given the time difference between Solaris and Jupiter, we’re switching to a range of recorded messages for mission procedures that our best strategists can predict,” Otepi said with a slight curl of annoyance.

  I guess you don’t like taking orders from holograms either, Dane thought. The point was, as far as he knew from his almost four years of Marine experience—no strategist could predict all the outcomes of an engagement. Not one. Combat just didn’t work like that, did it?

  “Sergeants of the Mechanized Infantry, Deployment Gate One will next be activated at twenty-one hundred hours Earth-local time, and we will have a full standby of the Marine Fleet ready for any possible engagement.”

  “Ready for an Exin fleet to roll over us?” Dane muttered, earning a sharp look from Otepi. Even if she did share the same views as Dane, there was still hierarchy. There was still respect.

  How could everyone be so stupid? Dane continued to think to himself. Every time that they opened the gate, wasn’t there a chance that it would allow an Exin war fleet through again!? Dane could have shouted, had he not had this conversation a thousand times over the last year. At the end of the day, the results were always the same: the top brass of Earth had decided now that they had a personal wormhole generator, by god, they were going to use it!

  “As you know, we have had our best engineers and theoretical physicists working on it, and over the last few months, they have managed to successfully open—and re-open—what they call ‘microwindows.’ Miniature wormholes, if you will, which have sent out probes to the Earthlike Planet 892 on the other side.”

  Another holo appeared, glittering in front of them, and for a moment Dane thought that the screen wasn’t working, because all he saw was black. But then, a sudden sparkle in the top revealed that they were actually looking at the darkened night side of a giant orb. A planet, and above was the theater of its strange, alien stars . . .

  He heard Bruce’s intake of breath.

  The footage continued, the shadowed night side of the New Earth growing closer, until lighter areas could be picked out—seas? Mountain ranges?

  Before it suddenly cut off.

  “What’s that? What happened?” Dane asked.

  “Easy, Sergeant Williams,” Otepi broke in. “Each microwindow can only last for so long. After that, the transmission to Earth is cut.” She gestured and another footage showed, this time of the planet in much closer detail, as the probe must have raced over it like a satellite or a rocket. Dane saw blue and a suggestion of green—green! Actual trees and forests!—as well as craggy peaks reaching up to the lower haze of clouds . . .

  “It’s real,” he heard Hopskirk say, and, even though everyone in this room had known it was real for a very long time, of course, Dane still understood the sentiment. Until they had seen it, an actual living planet, then they didn’t realize how rare and precious such a thing as life really was.

  “Those robotic probes allowed us to conduct our first planned descent for a drone, which was ejected at near orbit over the northwestern hemisphere,” Lashmeier was saying. “It was to sound a constant beacon, powered by hydrogen cell reactors able to last a couple hundred years.”

  The holo screen showed a vector image of how the probe shot across the atmosphere of the planet, as a smaller piece—the Beacon—made a spiraling motion to the surface, releasing parachutes to slow it.

  “That Beacon sends a subspace frequency which our largest satellite array can just about detect. It’s not perfect. We can’t encode any information and even at that subatomic frequency there is a drag on the signal. But it’s something. We have a way to monitor whether that Beacon, and the new colony out there, is operational,” Lashmeier said, which was an incredible achievement in itself, Dane knew. They had a way of keeping in contact with Earth’s first extra-system colony. Sort of. Like looking at the blink of a distant lighthouse and knowing that somewhere out there, was a friendly face. It was the first step to what humanity wanted to do next . . . To reach upwards into the stars.

  “That mission was a success. Now that we have a reliable beacon and radar network set up on one quadrant of the planet, we can begin with the expeditionary team to construct a small habitat.”

  Poor sods, Dane thought of the menagerie of scientists and Marines like himself who had gone through just a month ago. He didn’t know any of them, but he believed that it must take a particular breed of insanity to willingly volunteer to visit an alien world.

  The holos flickered once more. This time, they showed aerial photos of what looked like silver, domed buildings, which had been dropped from orbit or constructed on sight by larger automated Mechs.

  “However . . .” Lashmeier said.

  “Here we go again,” Hopskirk beside him muttered, earning this time a sharp cough from the War Walker Captain.

  “A little over a week ago, the Beacon stopped sounding, and all contact with the expeditionary force was lost. We do not know what caused the malfunction, but we must assume the worst.”

  “That maybe it was a terrible idea to open the gate in the first place?” Dane muttered angrily.

  “Williams!” Otepi snapped at him. “Don’t make me demote you. I have f
ull authority to take you off this mission, you know!”

  “Gentlemen, you have been given a grave task. Perhaps the most monumental mission that our species has ever undertaken since the 1969 Moon Landing.” Even recorded, and even transmitted from a distance, there was a sobering effect in the master sergeant’s words. “You will form a rapid-response scouting team to investigate why we lost contact with the expeditionary force. You will be our emissaries to a new world. Perhaps even a new chance for all of us.”

  Something in Dane reacted at that. He didn’t want a new world. He wanted the old one back.

  3

  This Is What Dying Must Feel Like

  “Hope you’re buckled up, strapped down, and holding on to your particulars!” called the voice of their rangy, small, and utterly irreverent pilot, Joey Corsoni.

  “Preparing launch protocols,” Dane was halfway in the process of saying as he settled into his seat behind the pilot, when Corsoni gave them no time at all and hit the booster rockets that separated the twin-nacelle starfighter, the Gladius, from the NGE. Dane was slammed back into his seat (luckily, he had his X-harness already on) as they shot forward.

  “Sheesh, Corsoni!” Dane heard Cheng grumble, while Hopskirk in the seat behind only whooped in joy.

  “If you’re not used to it by now, champ,” Corsoni said, looking back over his chair to grin at his passengers, “then there’s just no hope for you at all!”