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

  The twin guns on the roof of the low ziggurat building reacted, firing two bolts of brilliant white light that shot upwards into space and through the battle between the stars, between the Dreadnought Lincoln and the Exin seed craft.

  The twin beams of power shot past the bows of the Lincoln, searing through the thin atmosphere of the moon’s Exin sister planet with expanding circles of plasma, and down to their two respective sites.

  One: a giant facility like a stranded oil platform on the edge of a brackish, green sea, where the wide acres of beaches were made of a black, glittering sand.

  Two: another platform facility with giant domes and towers belching noxious gases into the world’s atmosphere, sitting in a barren patch of ochre-and-red rocks.

  Each of these two immense alien power stations were connected to their distant communes and cities by giant silver pipelines that snaked across their strange, morbid landscapes like threads left by some demented, monolithic arachnid. Each of these two platforms had injection wells that sunk deep into the mantle of their world, drawing up geothermal heat and precious fuels and minerals from the subterranean layers below.

  It was, after all, one of the reasons why this world was an Exin frontier planet at all—because its inner geological makeup was complex and powerful, and its recent volcanic ages had deposited great stores of useful minerals and ores, ready to be used in the Exin galactic war effort.

  Private First Class Hendrix’s laser hit the green-sea structure, and Sergeant Dane Williams struck the rock facility. The two beams of light tore through the sky like the sudden disapproval of a terrible and powerful god pointing its finger at those it was displeased with.

  And, when both were struck, for a moment, they stood starkly illuminated by that stellar judgement—before all hell broke loose.

  The largest explosions were from the heart of each facility. Enormous flashes of brilliance swept over their landscapes before sending up gigantic mushroom clouds to grace the lower atmosphere. But there were also smaller explosions, as the silver pipelines that transported the precious power, energy, gasses, liquids, and electricity burst along their seams, racing away to their distant Exin communities and outpost.

  As seen from space, the explosions were large—but on a planetary scale, they looked like mere bubbles of light. They were soon overtaken by sudden outages and darkness falling over municipalities and regions of the Exin colony. Entire landscapes were plunged into a technological night.

  They had done it. This Exin frontier planet was defenseless.

  “Boo-YAH!” Hendrix shouted as large swathes of the opposing planet went dark, and, obviously, the power to the planet’s defense lasers went out as the annoying alarm call of the Exin message clicked off too.

  Unfortunately, that still left them with the pressing problem of what to do about the army of Exin warrior caste at their door.

  Wham! There was a shudder that Dane felt even through his firing chair as the Exin War Beetles made their entrance.

  “Outer doors down! They’re coming!” Farouk called. Dane was already rising from his seat, grabbing his rifle to join his fellow marines at the open doorway. The screen overhead showed the streams of Exin warrior caste charging in through the slagged, melted doors and into the main entrance hall. They were already breaking off into battle squads as they reached the three exits.

  To find the doors sealed.

  “I’ve trashed the security mainframe. I don’t think they’ll get through it any time soon,” Corsoni was saying as the Exin warrior caste struck the wall units and instrumentation.

  There was an alien shout, however, and the fighting squads fell back. Beams of burning purple light flew through the air and struck the doors, blasting them inwards in an instant.

  “Oh,” Corsoni said, as the internal cameras switched to the different Exin fighting squads—perhaps numbering twenty or so each—charging into the two corridors. Up the stairs they went, which led to the next level up, and then the next, and then their very own level.

  “But they can’t get the Beetles inside,” Farouk grunted, still half in pain. As they watched, the four-armed alien warriors leapt up the stairs to the next set of bulkhead doors. This time, they didn’t even bother to use the door controls, and instead the front line slowed as they struck them, removing small units from their own suits to attach to the door servos.

  “They’re going to blow them,” Hendrix stated (rather obviously, Dane thought). A moment later, the hordes fell back down the stairs while flashes of explosions glared through the camera readouts, and the screens filled completely with smoke.

  “There! Level two!” Farouk said, pointing at the next camera readout, which showed the Exin once again crossing the nearest corridor to the next flight of stairs. They had already decided not to even bother with the lifts, it appeared. Instead, at the next floor, they would apparently try and repeat the whole process.

  “Is there anything we can do?” Dane said with a growl. He had three marines plus himself training rifles down the main corridor—but they would be against fifty. There was no way that they could hold out against that many.

  “How many can each corridor fit, do you think?” Dane hissed.

  “Seven? Eight?” Hendrix guessed.

  “Get ready,” Dane said, lowering himself into a crouch. They could probably take out the first two or three, and maybe even four waves of soldiers before their rifles started losing battery power.

  And then, of course, they would be down to hand weapons . . .

  >Incoming Transmission!

  There was an alert on Dane’s suit, and, even as he watched the Exin clear the next level and start to rush to the penultimate door, he saw, with wonder, that the transmission was coming from the Marine Fighter Ares.

  “What is he doing here!?” Dane hissed, accepting the incoming message. The Ares was under the command of his fellow officer and friend, Sergeant Bruce Cheng. And the last time that he had seen Cheng, it had been when he saved the Ares from the surprise Exin mother ship that had been waiting for them at the Exin ansible planet.

  “Cheng! You were supposed to fall back to Jupiter Deployment!” Dane snarled.

  “But I bet you’re glad I turned back around as soon as I heard you went back in!” Cheng responded, as his stoic and stony face appeared in the small window of Dane’s heads-up display.

  “Admiral Haskel tracked the last signal of the Gladius to that moon, and he reckoned that it had to be you down there on the big guns,” Cheng said.

  “Sarge!” This from Hendrix, as the Exin cleared the penultimate door to make it to the stairwell that led to the final door—and their own corridor in front.

  “Take aim!” Dane snapped, before turning to Cheng’s face. “Well, as great as it is to see you, it might be a farewell toast,” he said.

  “Look out your window. I’m coming in!” Cheng responded. Dane turned back to peer past the twin firing chairs to the blank screens beyond them. The screens would usually be alight with the targeting vectors of the guns themselves, but as soon as the firing chairs were empty, that left them blank and showing the Exin cityscape view outside—where a Marine Fighter was currently screaming down out of the starlit atmosphere, straight for them.

  “I got your scans. I can see you’re . . .” Cheng was saying.

  “Fire straight at us!” Dane called, before grabbing Corsoni standing beside him and flinging him to one side. “Everybody cover!” he shouted to his marines.

  “What!?” Cheng said.

  “No time. Fire straight at that stars-damned window!” Dane roared and—WHAM!—the final doors to their level were blown apart by the Exin soldiers.

  Smoke filled the corridor ahead. The Orbital Marines scrambled for the extreme corners of the room.

  Purple-and-green lasers started to spear toward them as the Exin warrior caste leapt out of the clouds . . .

  WHAM—WHAM—WHAM—WHAM! A sudden barrage of needle-thin lasers struck through the windows of the bui
lding, obliterating the two firing chairs in their center, then struck the doorway and the open corridor beyond.

  Dane ground his suit into the corner of the wall and floor, and still he thought that he could see the brilliance of laser flashes through his faceplate visor. The sound deafened and glitched his AMP suit’s sensors, as the area behind and above them was consumed in a wall of fury and burning plasma. Dane was sure that he heard a squeak or several of alien alarms amidst the thunder.

  “Williams! Williams! Get up!” Cheng was bawling into his ear, and when Dane rose, he felt groggy, like he had woken early from a heavy night of drinking. The assault on all of their senses had been intense—but when he viewed the devastation to the firing chamber, he realized that it was nothing compared to the assault that had hit the Exin forces.

  The chamber they were in was a smoking ruin. Any sign of the twin firing chairs was gone, replaced with broken holding bolts on the floor. The metal tiles of the floors and corridor walls were punctured and pocked with laser shot. The edges of the lasered holes were just finishing bubbling as they reset back into solid metal. And then there was the corridor.

  Thankfully, the corridor had collapsed halfway through, and the steam of burnt bodies and scalded metals still obscured much of the green-black body parts that had made up the murderous Exin. In fact, save for one vaguely scaled claw holding a double-bladed weapon, it was almost impossible for Dane to make out any individual Exin body at all from the gloop and mess of churned up destruction.

  FZT!

  “Sarge!” It was Farouk. Dane responded by turning around, and he saw that the blackened data-glass that had been the firing chamber’s window was now a gaping hole. And there, hanging outside in the dark alley, was the vast weight of the Marine Corps Ares, quickly turning to present one of the side launch bay doors, open to them.

  FZZZT!

  And then there came another blast of green light across the window. Some of the Exin or worse, the Beetle War Mechs, must have made their way around the side of the ziggurat firing station to fire up at the new invader.

  “You’ll have to jump!” Cheng shouted. Dane signaled for Hendrix—the most able-bodied of all of them—to go first. The sergeant himself crouched by the edge of the ruined window and started to return fire downwards.

  “Admiral Haskel is leaving. He says the mission is complete, and he’s moving to provide support to the Delta Attack Group at the next Exin world,” Cheng said in Dane’s ears while Dane fired another two potshots in the direction of the warriors attempting to take them out.

  “Hendrix—go!” Dane counted his men out. “Farouk—go!”

  The marines jumped the ten-foot space between ruined building and Ares, hitting the deck with a roll that brought Farouk to an angry snarl of reawakened pain.

  “Corsoni—go!” Dane said, firing a volley off below to cover the engineer’s reckless leap. There were more of the Exin congregating below by now, and more of them had discovered that the enemy was hovering right there.

  Any minute now and the Beetles will be here . . . Dane fired again, forcing the Exin warrior caste to take cover at the side of the building.

  There was just Dane left.

  Even as he was firing, another wave of Exin managed to get around the far side of the building and began to fire up at the ship. There was no way that they could be targeting the distant humans between window and launch bay.

  “Dane! Sarge!” It was Corsoni, already at the open launch door of the Ares and firing down at the massing Exin along with Hendrix and Farouk.

  “Damn it!” Dane snarled, as his heart hammered with hope of escape, and his vision threatened to cloud into a mist of adrenaline.

  But no. Dane had lived through more than this. He had lived through his marines dying, time and time again. In fact, it felt as though any life that he had once lived before his career as a marine no longer exist. All he knew was his training and his battles.

  He leapt the space between window and Ares as pulse laser bolts seared the air around him.

  “Evac, evac, evac!” he could hear Bruce calling. The Ares swung sharply to one side over the Exin buildings at the same time as the launch bay door was still closing and the ship starting to rise. The door hammered home and sealed with hisses of pressure just before the twin nacelles fired with a burst of purple, and then white plasma—and they were off, accelerating at incredible rates into the skies of the Exin moon.

  17

  The Recall

  Dane sunk to the cold metal floor. The Ares continued to accelerate into the skies and shuddered with the burn of exiting the moon’s thin atmosphere.

  “Great job Gold Squad, you saved this operation,” Cheng announced to all of them, to which Dane could merely grunt his agreement.

  “Get yourselves some rest after you use the ship’s medical services,” Dane called to his team. He pushed himself to his feet and moved off to the Ares’ cockpit.

  “Sergeant Williams, sir?” He was greeted by a marine that he didn’t know in the short corridor. The marine’s call sign read that his name was Private First Class Toshevski, one of Bruce Cheng’s Silver Squad.

  “Sergeant Cheng asked me to find you, sir. I’m sorry about . . .” the man started to say, but Dane just nodded, remembering the fallen Isaias, left buried in the rubble of the city.

  “Got it, Private. Let’s go.” Dane followed Toshevski up to the cockpit, where the doors opened to reveal Bruce Cheng handing over the controls to his own pilot, Thurston, and swiveling in his chair for Dane to sit down.

  “You did good, Sergeant,” Bruce congratulated formally, and even though he and Bruce were the exact same rank and had lived through the exact same battles, it felt strangely good to Dane’s ears to at least hear the support coming his way.

  But still . . .

  “I lost a man, Cheng,” Dane countered with.

  “You did,” Cheng nodded, and in that moment, Dane was relieved that Cheng did not offer any words of solace or wisdom or hindsight advice. When Dane looked up, Cheng was merely looking at him steadily, acknowledging the loss, with the backdrop of a battle behind him.

  The Dreadnought Lincoln was already rippling and flashing with wormhole plasma before winking out of existence. It was accompanied by the smaller flashes from the smaller mobile jump units that each ship now carried. They left behind a newly darkened world and the weakened scatterings of a handful of Exin seed fighters. It appeared that the alien stragglers left behind were not so bloodthirsty now as they had been when they had entire squadrons and phalanxes behind them. With their numbers vastly diminished, they appeared to be returning to their main world and their moon, probably to reassess their failure.

  Good! Dane frowned savagely at their fleeing tails. Let them see the destruction we left. Let them see the fruits of the seeds they sowed!!

  “Where next on the list?” Dane said, for Bruce to regard him with surprise.

  “What was that?” Cheng asked, as the Ares started to accelerate to build up the momentum it needed to activate its own mobile jump unit.

  “The next Exin planet on the line of the frontier,” Dane clarified. “We’re following the Lincoln, aren’t we?”

  “No way.” Cheng shook his head. “We’re done for round one. We’re jumping back to Jupiter. Your Gold Squad is compromised. We’ve lost a whole squad of Traveler Mechs and a Marine Fighter. If we continued the offensive now, we’d be as much a liability to our own forces as a help.”

  “Balls,” Dane said and held Cheng’s gaze. There was that same unspoken familiarity between them. They both knew what the stakes were, and that, with their available resources, humanity had to throw in all of their dice in one shot. They didn’t have a hope of holding back.

  Which means there’s another reason why we’re going back to Deployment Gate One, isn’t there? Dane said and nodded to Cheng once again. “Spill it, Bruce. What’s the real reason?”

  “Fleet Admiral Yankis,” Cheng sighed heavily as their pilot st
arted up the mobile jump unit, and the vibration began to thrum throughout the ship.

  “He wants you back. All of the Mechanized Infantry Division who were involved in the first assault. It sounds like he doesn’t want us biting off more than we can chew,” Cheng groaned.

  “Or maybe he doesn’t want any more heroes than he already has,” Dane muttered. It was a sore point that everyone was aware of—that Fleet Admiral Yankis had yet to fight in any frontline battle himself against the Exin. At all. And so far, Dane and Bruce and the others of the original Orbital Marines had been in every one of them.

  “Okay,” Dane groaned. Orders were orders, after all, he thought. Meanwhile, the Ares started to shift and glimmer and tear a hole through the fabric of space-time itself . . .

  The Ares had taken on the smooth hum of wormhole travel, a sensation that Dane had become familiar with. The journey in total would take three separate jumps or hops—due to the fact that their Marine Fighters were only capable of carrying the smaller mobile jump engines. Between each of the three hops, their craft would have to take time to once again cycle and spin the jump engine before they would finally complete the trip back to the human part of the galaxy—and to Deployment Gate One of Jupiter.

  Dane wandered the Ares fitfully, ostensibly seeing to the repairs of his suit and to the condition of his men, but really, his Gold Squad knew what they were doing and were more than catered to by the camaraderie of Bruce Cheng’s Silver Squad.

  “Grab a seat, Sarge?” Farouk looked up from the canteen table in the small mess lounge where he sat huddled with Hendrix and two other members of Cheng’s squad. They were making their way through the reconstituted gloop that the Marine Corps Health Board considered food, while Farouk was now nursing bandages over one side of his face and neck. Like the others, they were outside of their AMP suits now (not enough room here for that bulky armature) and there was a nervous tinge to the air.