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

  >Warning! Oxygen levels running low . . .

  Dane could see sparks in his vision as he stumbled forward, grabbing the nearest firing chair for support as he tried to turn around to help his fellow marines.

  To see the smoke of the broken doors clearing, and that the three marines had managed to deal with the two Exin warrior caste and were even now rising from their fight.

  Alive. Good. Dane collapsed against the chair, as black stars filled his vision briefly. When he opened his eyes once again, he saw that Hendrix was in front of him.

  “Steady, Sarge. We need to relieve the pressure off your lungs!” he was saying, grabbing the buckled and twisted plates of Dane’s armor and pulling.

  “Secure the area!” Dane hissed, before screaming as Hendrix pulled the outer layers of plate backwards. It felt like his own marine was attempting to force his fingers through his chest—but an instant later the pain stopped, and he realized that he was breathing.

  “Urk!” Dane leaned over to cough and hack. Corsoni was already at the control units by the doors.

  “There’s no hope for the doors, clearly,” the pilot was saying about the busted-open entrance. “But I think I can get all the other doors in this facility to lock down, and, given the attention that we’re getting . . .” Corsoni pressed a button and nodded up to the overhead screens, which suddenly showed camera footage of the area outside the ziggurat-style building.

  A swarm of Exin drones were flinging themselves toward the building, followed by more of the Exin Beetle Mechs, and long lines of Exin warrior caste.

  “I guess that they know that we’re here, right?” Dane winced, before checking on Farouk. “You two good?”

  “Oh yeah, new and shiny,” Farouk managed to cough from where he was crouched. From where Dane was standing, he was sure that he could see blood through the man’s visor.

  But he and Hendrix still had their rifles, and they were pointing them back up the corridor.

  Suddenly, Dane realized what he was asking them to do—and what they were prepared to do for him. For the Marine Corps and for Earth.

  There’s no way off this planet, is there? he suddenly thought, as that old argument that he’d had with Bruce swelled up in him. This was just what Bruce Cheng had warned him about, all those months ago. Bruce had said that Dane was too willing to throw his own life away for a cause, and sooner or later, he was going to take others down with him.

  Dane felt the kick of shame to his heart, as tight and as taut as when he couldn’t breathe.

  “Don’t,” he heard Hendrix saying in a low murmur at his side.

  “Huh?” When Dane turned around, he saw that Hendrix had read him as easily as if Dane had been speaking his thoughts out loud.

  “I saw that. Don’t insult us by saying we had no choice. We always have a choice,” Hendrix whispered under his breath.

  “Not if you were crash-landed on an alien planet,” Dane pointed out.

  Behind his faceplate, Hendrix pulled a face. “Admittedly, our choices were pretty limited. But we could have stayed with the ship. We could have tried to steal an Exin ship. But we didn’t. We decided to follow you—and to get this done!” Hendrix had already turned to take one of the firing chairs of the Exin, leaving Dane with the other one.

  “Fine.” Dane settled into the strange alien firing chair, to see that its apparatus was not so very different from that of a Marine Fighter. There were two firing arms that rose on either side, with what he could see had to be triggers. As soon as he gripped them, two flashing orange triangles appeared on the screens showing the distant battle above and moved in keeping with his hands.

  The Dreadnought Lincoln was still in a bad way, listing to one side and taking all manner of fire from every Exin ship that moved.

  Dane brought his firing handles up in front of him.

  “Let’s see if we can help them out, shall we?”

  15

  The Dreadnought Lincoln

  On board the Lincoln, alarms rang through the narrow halls and warning lights flashed at a constant tempo. The Lincoln was just one of the new dreadnought-class ships that had been built to counter—and dominate—even the gigantic mother ships of the Exin Fleet.

  Each dreadnought was three blocky cars long. Each of these vaguely blocky cars bristled with weapons ports, hubs, launch doors, and windows, connected at their segments with masses of massive mechanical bolts, servo systems, and titanic engineering.

  The dreadnoughts were not meant to be fast. They were not meant to chase down the enemy fleet. They were meant to form an instant barricade of metal, a living front line that could rain fire down at the enemy.

  That was the plan, anyway—but it wasn’t what Admiral Haskel was currently seeing as he looked at his battle screens in his control deck.

  “Critical Alert! Decks three through five, B car!” one of his flight lieutenants said in the tightly controlled tone of a man who had been taught how to handle himself under fire. The whole command room was like that—the best-trained marines who had been put through advanced battle simulations to get to this point. Admiral Haskel was proud of their achievements so far, even if there were more red alarms on his screens than there were green notifications.

  B car was the middle compartment of the three-part dreadnought, and it was the one most exposed to both the red-gray Exin planet 32 below them and its moon 32b behind it. The Lincoln was between the two worlds, supposedly forming a bridgehead for the attacking Marine Fighters.

  “Show me,” Admiral Haskel said in a growl. In one corner of the vast overhead screens—lit up with the attack vectors of the fast-disintegrating battle line before them as the Marine Fighters sought the industrial and military defenses of the planet—the screen glitched and displayed the live feeds from the critical decks.

  An inferno raged, flames filling corridors and mess halls, before intense explosions continued to burst from wall units.

  Fire, Admiral Haskel thought with a shiver of trepidation. Fire was a terror on board any type of ship, whether it sailed on water or on the seas of stars.

  “Life signs?” Haskel asked, as more bolts of fire strafed their far sides. There were phalanxes of the Exin seed craft running havoc along both sides. The barrages of the Lincoln’s own gun ports were hunting them, blowing them apart when their volleys of white meson bolts found them—but the Exin seed craft were quick. Very quick. More alarms rang, this time from car A, their own forward car.

  “I can’t read any, sir . . .” the flight lieutenant said, and Haskel was already opening his mouth to give the order to seal the decks, ready to blow the port holes to suck out the fire, when . . .

  “Wait! Fire Team Seven is still in there!” The flight lieutenant threw onto the overhead another screen, this time showing a group of three marines in the bulky, oversized encounter suits using their waist-mounted extinguishers on everything around them as they tried to stop the uncontrollable blaze.

  “Dammit!” Haskel hissed angrily to himself. “Order them to the nearest safe bulkhead—get them out!”

  “Sir . . . ?” It was the thin marine strategist, a man who had been appointed to the Lincoln on the orders of Marine Corps High Command. Admiral Haskel wasn’t particularly pleased about this, but the strategist had apparently spent the last five years in deep intelligence research, and was thus supposedly an expert in combat strategy against the Exin.

  “If you don’t seal those decks now, sir, you risk the fire spreading to the lift shafts. You could lose car B entirely!” the man said sharply. He apparently thought that because the fleet admiral himself had appointed him, it meant that he had a right to overrule the admiral.

  “I will not doom men to die on my own boat!” Haskel snapped at him, and a number of his lead flight lieutenants twitched at the sudden angry tone. It was not a good idea to get on the admiral’s bad side.

  >Weapons port four compromised!

  There was a sudden squeal of alarm. The outside Exin fighters had just bl
own away from the nose of the Lincoln one of the domed forward weapons ports—and with them, two marines in control of the forward heavy lasers.

  “Admiral, sir . . . !” the strategist started to warn.

  “Those are my orders! Get that fire team out!” Haskel this time roared, his eyes focused on the now-running forms of the three Marine Firefighters as they desperately tried to get back down the corridor to the nearest lift. There were more sparks that blew from the walls, and a sudden gale of flame licked at their backs as they slammed into the door.

  “Come on . . .” Haskel muttered, wishing them speed as the critical alerts grew all around. There was a bright flicker of light from the surface of Exin Planet 32, and a spear of brilliant light lanced up to strike the Lincoln’s lead car.

  Pha-BOOOM!

  It was one of the defense lasers, the primary weapon of planetary defense of the Exin planets, looking like a pillar of light.

  “Steady!” Haskel shouted as the last car in line started to rock, slowly turning on its axis as the mighty meson laser bolt began to crumple and burn the outer plates of metal. The ripple of movement shook itself through each car as they started to twist and turn. On the screen ahead, the three firefighters were suddenly thrown to one side as their corridor rocked.

  “Outer plate damaged but holding,” Haskel heard one of his team shout, just before the orbital laser clicked off.

  Why haven’t the Marine Fighters taken that laser out yet!? Haskel managed to snarl silently. He waited to see the three firefighters finally manage to open the door and fall into the lift on the far side, the door closing behind them on the conflagration.

  “Seal decks three through five,” Haskel said immediately. “Blow outer ports as soon as you’re able.”

  “Sir, aye, sir!” the flight lieutenant said, and in the vector diagram of the three-module Lincoln, a wide section of the middle car filled with restricted red.

  On the outside of the impressive dreadnought, a series of ports suddenly blew outwards in gusts of steam and smoke, as the auto-explosives were triggered. In an instant, their ports were filled with the fires being sucked out into the vacuum, along with the myriad of chairs, tables, units, weapons—and bodies—and everything else that had been in those three decks. The alarms rang for a long second, before finally the fire was out, and decks three to five were cleared. The Lincoln had been saved.

  Saved from being destroyed by internal combustion, anyway. Now they had another deadly threat to contend with.

  The dreadnought was slowly rolling on its side as teams of seed craft swept up and down its length, pursued by the attendant defensive Marine Fighters. The worst affected was car C, the final one in tow—which had twisted almost at a forty-five-degree angle from its neighbor, car B.

  Below them, the Exin world of Planet 32 glittered with lasers and explosions while the main body of the Marine Corps fighters swept through the upper atmosphere to attack infrastructure. Operation Hammer Blow had been designed as a lightning offensive—unexpected and unpredicted after the Forward Attack Squadrons had taken out the Exin satellite ansible. Up and down the frontier line of Exin worlds, the same thing was happening as the Marine Corps conducted bombardments against the surfaces of the worlds.

  How long before the rest of the Exin fleet of mother ships got there?

  “We’ve lost stabilizers on car C!” the marine strategist said. Everyone could feel the tremors shaking even through the command deck as the third car of their train started to sway and shift, turning toward Planet 32 . . .

  Wham!

  Another bolt of pure white light shot up from the alien world to strike the car—and this time, with eerie, deadly precision. The pillar of burning light struck car C near its giant joint with car B. Now it was starting to tear loose . . .

  “We’re losing her!” Haskel heard someone shout.

  “Dispatch auto-stabilization protocols!” he shouted. At the end of car B, twenty ports burst, flinging three-foot-long electromagnets of giant industrial chains from their internal chassis across the gulf between cars. They slammed against the edges of car C, forming a new emergency web of metal threads holding it in place.

  “Another strike from the planet like that last one will still destroy her,” the strategist rather unhelpfully pointed out.

  “I know. Now, unless you have some good ideas, shut the hell up!” Haskel rounded on the man, earning a shocked glance of horror from the specialist.

  What was worse was that the man was right, Admiral Haskel knew. Another strike and they would lose that last car and the hundred Marine Corps souls that were crewing it.

  “Begin evacuation, sir?” his flight lieutenant asked—just as there was a new flicker of orbital lasers, this time coming from behind them, on the Exin moon.

  They did not reach across to strike the Lincoln, however. They darted past it to strike at its sister planet instead.

  In the midst of the terror and the confusion, Haskel watched as it appeared that the Exin moon was firing on its own mother planet. It fired once, twice—and then there was a spectacular detonation of expanding white as one of Planet 32’s defense facilities was blown.

  “What the—?” The command team looked in surprise and astonishment at the battle screens.

  “Why are they helping us!?” his flight lieutenant was saying.

  “Don’t question it!” Haskel demanded. “How many Marine Fighters do we still have operational?”

  “Eighteen, sir!”

  “How many enemy?” Haskel checked the battle screens.

  “Thirty-two seed craft, sir,” the strategist contritely said.

  There was another flash from the Exin moon behind them, striking its sister planet and causing another detonation of white.

  It was incredible what was happening—and if it continued, then they might even be able to succeed with the main mission objective: to disable the Exin frontier.

  “Divert all Lincoln weapons to seed craft,” Haskel demanded, taking advantage of their new, mysterious ally. In response, instead of firing down at the planet, the many weapons batteries and modules up and down the three buckled and cratered cars swiveled to begin concentrating their barrage of fire against the swooping phalanxes of Exin fighters. This was how the battle was supposed to have gone all along. Haskel thought that they might even be able to make it out of this battle alive.

  16

  Last Stand on Moon 32b

  “Two orbital installations down!” Private First Class Hendrix shouted. Dane swept his gaze across the screens to look at another of the target sites up ahead. Already they had laid waste to small pockets of the alien planet opposite them, and, although his screen did not have telescopes capable of focusing on the distant surface of the world, Dane could make out the expanding halos of dark smoke from the places where their orbital beams had struck.

  How long before they decide to strike us in return? Dane thought. Surely that was what he would do if he was some Exin artillery alien in some distant installation, and he had just seen two of his fellow comrades blown off the surface of the planet.

  “Got it!” Corsoni was shouting, as he had managed to get the Exin computers to scan the surface of the opposing world for any and all possible targets. The screen was washed with multiple converging lines of orange, to finally settle around four remaining targets.

  “The smaller two appear to be more planetary laser batteries,” Corsoni said, “and, from their energy signatures, I think that the larger two might be some sort of regional power stations.”

  “Factories? Like the ones that powered the Exin ansible satellites?” Dane asked.

  “Yep, I think so,” Corsoni said. “Taking those out—and this is all hypothetical— might take out a large part of the Exin’s defenses, including the lasers, shipyards, you name it.”

  “Tz’ark!” There was a sudden glitch of alien noise from the screens, and a small window started to flash and flare, filled with alien script.

  “Oh, frack
—what’s that!?” Hendrix hissed.

  It appeared to be a hailing frequency, a message sent to them from the Exin mother planet as they tried to figure out just what the hell was going wrong.

  “As soon as they see us, they’ll target their lasers on this facility,” Dane said, and the implication was obvious. That once they had the coordinates, the mother planet would presumably incinerate them in seconds.

  “Well, that might be for the best, Sarge!” He heard a sarcastic laugh from Farouk behind and swiveled in his chair as the Exin alien continued trying to berate them into answering.

  Farouk was propped up beside the open door of the firing chamber, and was gesturing up to a small screen, apparently displaying the outside of this very facility, where a line of Exin Beetles was arrayed against them. There had to be at least five of the super-large Exin Mechs out there, and Dane was suddenly, intensely sorry about the fact that he’d had to abandon his old Traveler Mech.

  Beside the Exin War Beetles were hordes of the four-armed Exin warrior caste, too, apparently being marshalled into silent lines. They were clearly ready to come streaming into the facility and finish them off as soon as the Beetles had done what they were called for.

  Wham! A shudder ran through the floors and walls of the facility. The Exin Beetles had opened fire. Their laser bolts struck the doors and hissed as metal shook and bubbled and melted.

  “How long before they break through?” Dane shouted.

  “Minutes!?” Corsoni guessed. “But there are a handful of sealed bulkhead doors between that and here. They’ll have to blow each one!”

  Dane swiveled back to face the battle screens above.

  “Target the power factories!” he cried out. “Do it now!”

  They were going to get the job done. No matter what.

  Far above the heads of the marines in their stolen seats, the metal walls of the Exin defense battery convulsed and whirled, as plates of metal swung around and locked into place, and crystal chambers glowed with the sudden release of spectral gasses.