Mech Warrior: Born of Steel (Mechanized Infantry Division Book 1) Read online

  Doctor Heathcote.

  “Aii!” A short scream of alarm as Dane broke into a run after the thing. He lengthened his stride as more of Osgud’s laser shots flared past him to the copter behind.

  Heathcote was trying to squirm her way backward with what Dane saw were bound limbs…

  She had no chance against a thing that could crunch machine plate.

  No!

  Dane sprang, momentarily forgetting the pain racing up his spine as he threw himself through the air, reaching out toward the beast—

  Wham!

  His hands grabbed onto its back and they were both thrown into a jumble of claws, metal, and snapping teeth as they tumbled and rolled across the debris.

  “SCKRARGH!” The Exin creature tumbled onto its side, snarling and scratching at Dane as he tried to get his elbows up to his face, instinctively trying to protect himself from that snapping, lunging head.

  “Agh!” He had been rolled completely over, with the thing’s weight once more completely on top of him. A spike of pain flowed up through Dane’s legs and back, at the same time as the panic of being crushed threatened to unman him.

  Snap! The thing lunged toward his head, and he managed to turn aside at the last moment.

  Scratch! There was the grinding of sparks as the thing’s claws ran along his chest, scraping metal, and further crumpling the raised defensive plate deeper against his lungs.

  The thing was alien and monstrous. An animal, insensate thing that appeared to writhe and move with the purest malice for the human it ground down.

  Dane grabbed at the creature’s neck, attempting to push it from him.

  But his arms trembled. The creature was too strong. He was too weak. With a sudden flinch, the creature’s body dove toward him by a series of inches before he managed to regain control over his arms, locking them to force the thing as far from him as possible—

  But it was still only at arm’s-length, and Dane knew that he couldn’t hold it back for long. It would inevitably overpower him…

  I can’t do this. I’m too weak… The thoughts were rising fast and strong in Dane’s mind. Thoughts of failure, of feelings so uselessness. How could he, with his condition, ever dare to hope that he could win? That he could ever become a Marine?

  Dane could feel his legs starting to tremble, his hips ache and his spine start to twitch with electric spasms. His body was betraying him. Maybe he should just accept the fact that he wasn’t meant to be out here. He just had to let himself die.

  “Kill it, Williams!” He heard a shout, and, miraculously, he realized that it was coming from Osgud. His tormentor was encouraging him on, at the same time as the already battered and damaged Marine was running down the ruinous slope to keep up his covering fire at the looter’s copter above.

  “You got this! MARINES!” Osgud was shouting, bellowing, throwing every bit of certainty and authority into his voice as he ran.

  Don’t let it win, Dane thought, as a fire was kindled in his belly. He’d already lost everything in his life, hadn’t he? He’d already walked through hell—or been crushed underneath hell, anyway.

  And Williams’ DON’T give UP. He remembered the words of his own long-dead father. His father who only ever had nominal success in his life as a boxer, but had still believed in himself. He had still gotten up and put himself in training every day, because he had to put food on the table for his child

  And because it was what he believed in, Dane remembered.

  The Exin thing suddenly reared back, clearly intent on pounding Dane into the rubble once again, and this time to probably break his back with the sudden, thunderous crash.

  Agitation and fury boiled inside Dane’s heart. He wasn’t going to let this thing win. He wasn’t going to give up or give in.

  I’ve already been stuffed full of your virus, and I came back! he thought as he reached out to grab the thing’s neck with one metal hand. His other hand grabbed a piece of rubble… Anger and determination roared through him.

  I’ve already stood back up and been through hell to get here! The creature lunged forward, and this time Dane let it—but shoved the thing’s neck to one side as he turned his head, bringing up his other hand to force the rounded rock into the thing’s mouth at the last moment, as far into the thing’s gullet as he could manage…

  “Urk!” The thing clamped down on the boulder instinctively. For a brief second, Dane was sure that the piece of rubble was going to disintegrate and explode under the thing’s teeth…

  But then the creature was twisting its head back, making convulsing quivering motions as it sought to cough and force the piece of rubble from it’s throat…

  “Frack you,” Dane growled, closing his hand into a fist and turning to smack the thing in a haymaker punch against the side of its temple—

  FZZT! And at the same time to fire the light laser as it connected with the creature’s skull.

  He wasn’t even sure that the laser was powerful enough to kill the thing, but at that close range, he heard a coughing, muffled gargle from the alien thing as it fell backward under a plume of oily black smoke.

  With a final quiver, the thing died, and its body collapsed against the rubble.

  With a gasp, Dane was shoving his way out from under the thing and scrambling over the rocks to get to where Doctor Heathcote had been.

  “Heathcote? Sylvia?” he was calling.

  He heard a worried cry. The dust-coated head of her emergency visor appeared over the end of the drifts of detritus.

  “You’re alright. Thank heavens you’re alright,” Dane said as he reached down with one hand to help the doctor from the wreckage. His suit, although battered and broken, was still strong enough to easily lift the doctor out of the broken window.

  “Thank you,” he heard Sylvia mumble, her voice shaky with shock.

  “Sit,” he advised her. Dane might not have been in a battlefield before, but he had been in plenty of fights. Even tournament and challenge fights could flood your body with so much adrenaline that it left you feeling queasy and sick, dizzy-headed and having to sit down.

  Objective Accomplished. We did it.

  We. He suddenly remembered Osgud, turning to look for where the acting lieutenant was.

  Only to see Osgud lying on the floor, his suit smoking from one of the copter’s artillery shells.

  25

  Not Even My Worst Enemy

  “Is he going to be alright?” Dane asked nervously as he hovered over Osgud’s body.

  “Only if I can get to him fast.” Sylvia had slid to the ground beside the still-steaming body of the acting lieutenant, her hands moving over the crumpled and torn metals of the man’s suit.

  Which had blood seeping from one of the grooves between the man’s chest-plates.

  “I need to open him up. Now,” Sylvia was saying as Dane knelt down, his hands already moving to the auto-release clips secured by the hips.

  “That will open up the chest-plate, but…” Dane suddenly thought. “This virus! You’ll expose him to the virus…”

  Sylvia flickered a hand to where the bead of blood was oozing down the metal of Osgud’s outer suit. The acting lieutenant inside was silent and stilled, but Dane could still register life signs on his screen. He’s alive, but only barely.

  It looked as though Osgud had taken almost a direct hit from one of the copter forward artillery guns—and the thing that Dane found more amazing than anything was the fact that he was still alive at all.

  His suit protected him, Dane thought in wonder, and no little relief, at the clear strength of the Assisted Mechanized Plate.

  And then he came to a decision. “Here.” His hands moved to his own legs, unlocking the clips with a twist and allowing his right leg greave to hiss out with a gentle pop, revealing his smaller human leg within, held in its cradle of webbing and padding.

  Dane was already hunched over, pulling at the material to get to the sleek metal box on his leg. The Doctor’s very own medical uni
t that delivered the Vito-neura antigen that she had designed.

  “What are you doing? You’ll be doubly exposed, without protection!” Sylvia was looking at him in horror.

  But Dane had already unclipped the unit and tossed it to the Doctor, who caught it.

  “This still has your antigen in it, right? If we apply it now, as soon as Osgud is exposed—maybe there’s a chance it can hold off any infection…” Dane was saying, as he suddenly felt a tremor of pain rising up through his leg. It looked like it wouldn’t take long for the massive doses of the virus already in his system to make a resurgence, and now he had exposed his body to yet more of it, too.

  Sylvia blinked. “You’re sure?”

  Dane thought—for just a fraction of a second—of what the virus had already done to him. Had already stolen his life once and irrevocably changed it thereafter.

  And, as much as he had hated Osgud, his previous life of fighting had taught him one thing: that any fight should always end at the ringside edge. A good fighter didn’t carry it with him—or tried not to, anyway. “On that day, in that hour, I either won or lost,” his father used to tell him. “Whatever happens inside that ring was a lesson to learn from.”

  It’s not about vengeance. It’s not about grudges.

  And I would never wish that virus even on my worst enemy, Dane thought as he nodded.

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” he said, as Sylvia opened up the man’s suit to find that the shell hadn’t gone through.

  But it had crumpled Osgud’s suit that was already damaged from the bazooka explosion, and the internal support systems had been overcome, ramming bits of metal into the acting lieutenant’s body.

  Secure the area, Dane thought, already raising his fist and the smart laser mounted there and moving out with an obvious limp as his leg started to rattle with shivers of pain.

  The looter’s copter was gone, disappearing between the buildings and off into the distant smokes of New Sanctuary’s skies. Dane did not know who they had been, but he knew that they had dared to attack the Federal Marine Corps—which was worrying enough in itself.

  And then there was the Exin-thing, lying dead on the ground on the other side of the landing site. It was the second that he had faced, and the second that he had killed himself…

  But not without the help of my brothers and friends, he thought. And, as the crackle of his suit communicator started up, bearing the news of the approaching Green Squad of his fellow AMP trainees, Dane thought he caught a glimpse of what Sergeant Lashmeier had been talking about…

  Not so long after, and the sun was glinting off of the metals of his fellow trainees as they climbed the rubble wall to survey the devastation that Osgud, Sylvia, and Dane had been at the heart of.

  And Dane Williams had never been happier to see anyone in his life.

  My brothers, Dane thought.

  Epilogue: The Family

  “Private Williams, at ease!” roared the voice of Sergeant Lashmeier.

  The stocky growl of a man stormed into the recuperation room that Dane was in, standing by the vertical weight set.

  Dane only had a moderate series of injuries in the end, strains, bruises, and compression injuries mostly—but the doctor had insisted that he been given full medical isolation for three days following his willful re-exposure to the virus, just in case.

  Strangely, the Marine private had felt returned to his beginnings, before he had ever come to Fort Mayweather all of those months ago.

  “Sir!” Dane threw a salute. Apparently, this one was better than the first one he had ever tried in similar circumstance, as it elicited the briefest of nods from the Sergeant and no comment.

  Instead, Lashmeier walked boldly to stand in front of Dane and look the recruit in the eye for a long moment.

  “You did good out there, Private Williams,” he eventually said. “Took down two Exin spore-creatures alongside Osgud, rescued Doctor Heathcote, and disrupted the activity of the looters.”

  Dane felt a wave of pride wash up through him. Lashmeier was so fleeting with his praise that every nugget felt like it was worth its weight in platinum.

  “Permission to speak, sir?” Dane asked, earning a nod in response.

  “Those looters—Doctor Heathcote said that they were carrying the Exin spore-creatures. Transporting them…” He puzzled.

  The sergeant’s look instantly darkened. “Don’t beg for mysteries, Private,” the older man growled in warning. “But yes, that is our working hypothesis. That those looters—somehow connected with something called the Triton Corporation—accessed Exin biotechnology. Although we cannot be sure if this is collaboration with an enemy and treason on their part, or mere profiteering.”

  Dane felt an answering anger rise up inside of him. How could anyone do that? Betray their own species for what—profit? The opportunity to loot New Sanctuary—his home—undisturbed?

  “I see that you’re eager for more action, Williams,” Lashmeier growled. “Good. But keep that to yourself. I’m only telling you because I believe that every soldier and Marine has a right to know who they were fighting and why,” the man grunted. “Don’t worry. Military intelligence is looking into it as we speak, and I am sure that we will be making a move on Triton in the near future.”

  “Sir?” Dane asked, earning another nod. “What about Private Osgud? How is he, sir?”

  The sergeant gave a small tweak of his mouth. Not quite a smile—as the sergeant doesn’t really smile, Dane thought. “I am glad you asked about your brother Marine, Private Williams. Osgud is also on the mend—but I am afraid he was exposed to the Exinase compound by the treatment of Doctor Heathcote…”

  Dane nodded.

  “However, the good doctor assures me that Private Osgud only had a minimal dose—far less than you did, apparently—and that she expects Osgud to respond favorably to the same treatment that she gave you.” The sergeant nodded, his voice a little tight.

  And suddenly, Dane saw the conundrum that the man was in. With every successive deployment, he might well be exposing more and more of his troops to possible exposure.

  No wonder the sergeant was so brutal about not giving me any special treatment, Dane thought. Dane realized that he had been like the first role model for the rest of the unit. If the Sergeant had gone easier on him, then Lashmeier would have to go easier on every Marine who subsequently might become infected…

  Lashmeier looked around for a moment at Dane’s room, giving a nod at what he saw. “You’ve been keeping up your training. Good. Because the doctor is lifting the medical order on you, as she’s pleased with your recovery.”

  “Yes!” Dane burst out, before seeing the sharp scowl from the sergeant at interrupting the man. “I mean, thank you, sir.”

  “I’m here to tell you what I told all the others. That the first field test of the AMP suits and the Mechanized Infantry Division is considered a success by those higher up than us. You’ve all been in basic training for nine weeks now, over the requisite six, and so you will all be graduated to the next stage of the M.I.D. Are you ready for that, Private? Because it’s not going to get any easier, you know.”

  Dane didn’t even hesitate. “I am ready, sir. I am.”

  This time the sergeant did grin, wolfishly.

  “Then it is with great pride that I can welcome you to the ranks of the Marine Corps and the Mechanized Infantry Division, Williams. You made it.”

  Booyah! Dane thought.

  Find out what happens next in Nerves of Steel.

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  Thank You For Reading

  Thanks for reading Born of Steel, the first book in the epic Mechanized Infantry Division series. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I really have a lot of fun writing about the amazing technology the future holds for us, and all the possible chaos :)

  The next story in the series is called Nerves of Steel and you can order it now on Amazon.

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