Metal Warrior: Steel Trap (Mech Fighter Book 3) Read online

  The marines were unsure how to respond to a non-uniformed officer. It was Bruce who let out a “SIR, YES SIR!” to be echoed by everyone else in the hangar. Perhaps it was Dane’s imagination, but the space around them had appeared to fall into quiet, and he couldn’t see any movement or action from anyone around them.

  “From the moment you enter the Nevada Facility, all external communications are forbidden,” Jessica stated. “That means no cell phones, no public broadcast Wi-Fi, nothing whatsoever. Any broach of these rules will be considered treason of the highest order.” She didn’t ask for their agreement. Dane felt a shiver of unease ripple through his men. They were used to military oversight, of course, but the occasional phone call home to those who still had family on the outside was a lifeline, he knew.

  Not that I have anyone out there. Dane’s thoughts flickered to his father, “Hurricane” Williams, a no-nonsense amateur boxer. He was many years dead now, but still Dane felt the wince of constriction as the external world disappeared for them all.

  “First Admiral Yankis has been installed at the International Solaris Station,” Jessica informed them through a tight jaw, as if sharing information was painful for her. “He has personally asked for the M.I.D. training to be accelerated to the next level, which is why you are here . . .” Dane saw her take a breath.

  “As you all know, a little over a month ago the original appointee to the First Admiralty, General Keel, was killed by insurgents in Washington. They also seriously damaged the Jefferson Space Port. We can only surmise that this was an attempt to cripple our planetary defense,” she said heavily and accusingly—as if any of them here might also be responsible for the attacks.

  “What we have learned since then is that there is an . . . object,” her lips curled in disgust, “inside our own solar system.”

  What!? An Exin mothership? Dane thought. The aliens had to be coming from somewhere, after all. And so far, they had managed to appear and attack Earth as well as the proto-mining colony on Mars and the scientific colony on the Moon. But we don’t even know how they got here . . .

  They watched as Jessica nodded at the captain, who drew from one of her pockets a small black data pad. After a scurry of fingers, there bloomed between them a floating hologram. The Nevada hangar was dark enough that Dane and the rest could see clearly the curves of colored lines and shapes: The curve of a large ball.

  A planet.

  And there, floating in front of it was a tiny speck.

  “Here, let me magnify,” Otepi said. Another flurry of fingers sent up a static image this time of what looked like a giant, ruddy bruise. Hanging over it was a very small thing. A wheel.

  “That is quite enough, Captain,” Jessica said, for Otepi to snap off the shape, but it burned in Dane’s memory still. It looked like a cartwheel slowly spinning across something . . .

  “The Great Storm of Jupiter. Otherwise known as the Great Red Spot,” Jessica said with apparent and obvious distaste. “And that object was—is—a foreign body.” She said the last words with great difficulty, Dane saw, and had reserved all of her scorn for it. He knew what she meant.

  That it was not something borne of this solar system or of human hands.

  It was Exin.

  “Do we know what it is?” Dane burst out. “What it does? What its capabilities are?”

  “Lance Corporal!” Lashmeier reprimanded him immediately, although Dane didn’t feel any particular compulsion to show due respect to someone who didn’t even declare their rank to those they expected to serve them.

  “Staff Sergeant, those are good questions.” Captain Otepi intervened however, before turning to address Dane directly. “In short, no. We know nothing about it. But it doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together: A new, clearly advanced object in our solar system, and now humanity has been attacked by an aggressive alien race . . .” Dane saw that Jessica was watching the exchange like a hawk, probably searching for a reason to charge any of them with treason.

  The captain continued. “First Admiral Yankis wants you all naturalized to an ex-planetary position immediately, so that you will be able to answer these questions for us,” she said.

  Which, in military speech, as far as Dane knew, meant that the first admiral wanted them to check things out and shoot anything that didn’t look human, right?

  I can do that, Dane thought. We can do that.

  “AARGH!”

  I can’t do this! Dane was thinking as he was being propelled, close to the speed of a jet fighter’s maximum thrust, in a small metal box around a giant centrifuge. For once in his military life, Dane was eminently happy not to have eaten recently. He retched and heaved as his senses spun. The lights on the external walls were just a blurring, constant line of fire, and Dane was sure that every internal organ that he contained was trying to force its way out of his nose.

  “Okay! Time’s up!” He heard the cheery voice of his engineer, the “sapper” Joey Corsoni, over the headphones as his spinning started to slow, then slow some more. This was almost worse than the high-vibration thrum of the maximum acceleration, he thought. His body once again knew that he was no longer going to die by being shaken to pieces, but was instead just going to feel like crap for a while.

  The white blur turned into the strobe of light, and Dane’s ears popped themselves back to normal human pressures. Dane was strapped into a flight chair with full ear protectors and pressure-filled pockets that were slowly deflating from around his chest and thighs.

  “That’s so all your blood doesn’t pool in one place and your brain starves to death,” Joey Corsoni, the man responsible for keeping his AMP suit functional, had said cheerfully before the ordeal. Dane hadn’t been impressed.

  How did I do? he wanted to say when the small module he was in had finally wound its way to a standstill. The hatch above opened and Joey appeared, grinning as usual. Corsoni was the kind of guy who could grin at an oncoming hurricane. Dane didn’t know if it was recklessness or bravery or both. Right now, he hated the engineer for it.

  What came out of Dane’s mouth instead of his question was a “Hgnrr-urgh?” As the straps loosened, the side door opened, and he fell out of it onto the metal ramp as if every bone in his body had been turned to Jell-O.

  “Here you go, champ.” Joey was there, scrabbling down the side of the centrifuge chamber to sling one arm underneath Dane’s own and get him to his feet. “Don’t worry about it. Everyone crumples or pukes on their first time around.”

  “Put that man down!” someone was shouting. Dane blearily lifted his head to see that there, beyond the ramp to the centrifuge chamber, was the rest of the prep room. A line of pale-faced and worried-looking Mechanized Infantry Marines were aghast at the state that their Lance Corporal was in.

  And Captain Otepi, striding free from the group and pointing at Corsoni. “You think that your engineer’s going to be with you to wipe your ass whenever you need it, Lance Corporal!?”

  Dane didn’t think that Otepi particularly wanted an answer to this, so when Joey let go of him and stepped back, he allowed himself to crumple back into a crouch on the cold metal floor.

  “Now get up, marine!” Otepi yelled in a tone that was almost as forceful as Staff Sergeant Lashmeier’s, Dane was thinking.

  Focus on your goals. This is only sensation. He reached down to drag at the maxims that had got him through Marine Basic Training. It was true, of course. His limbs like jelly and his rolling stomach and ringing ears were only bodily sensations—but they were pretty powerful ones, he had to admit . . .

  But I have to do this, Dane gritted his teeth and forced himself to stand taller. Higher. He pushed himself up and felt the entire room spin around him. He was sure that he was going to faint. Or be sick. Or both.

  “That’s it, marine. Now get to the equipment bay and disassemble me a rifle!” Otepi said in a stern, but quieter voice. Dane stumbled forward—even the steps he was taking seemed to be all out of proportion with each other. He
had to take exaggerated steps. Bigger steps than normal—which elicited murmurs of humor from the watching marines—but Dane forced himself onwards.

  “I don’t know what you’re chuckling about, marine—you’re next! In!” Otepi ordered the mocking Abrams into the centrifuge, and Dane felt a tiny spike of vengeful glee. He got to the equipment table, where a general purpose rifle sat on a bed. He raised wavering hands to try and grab it, but it was out of focus and shifted from being too near or too far.

  “Ugh . . .” Dane forced his hands to slap down onto the table, finding the weapon mostly by touch alone.

  “When you’re up there, you have no idea what environment you will be facing.” Otepi was lecturing the marines as they alternatively waited, or were spun, or fainted. “I do not know what environment you will be facing. No one does! Maybe these Exin have high-gravity ships. Maybe you will have to engage in combat while your ship is moving near light speed! Maybe some of you will just go bullcrap-crazy when you realize there is nothing above, below, or around you but void!”

  It didn’t sound to Dane much like an encouraging pep talk, but he persevered. His fumbling fingers had found the secure catches at least. Even though his ears roared with nausea and vertigo, he closed his eyes and forced his hands to work by instinct. He managed to take the stock and the barrel apart and was working on the finer mechanisms.

  “It is my job to get you to a point where you can still act in all of these crazy conditions. Where you can still, at least, pick up a gun and shoot it at the enemy!” Otepi turned to Dane.

  “Reassemble that weapon, Lance Corporal! Bring it to Firing Room 3 to collect your ammunition and begin firing practice!” Otepi shouted.

  What? Dane groaned, swayed on his feet, and hastily started jamming the rifle back together again. Abrams was released from the centrifuge, to promptly fall out, throwing up as he did so.

  “Hopskirk! Clean that up!” Otepi was shouting. “Clear that man to the benches, Cheng—you’re up next!” She was relentless, and Dane was already slamming the final pieces home to stagger around the equipment table to the corridor that led to Firing Room 3. When he eventually got there (he had to use his eyes, finally) he used a full magazine. He managed to hit the distant paper target only ten out of twenty times, thanks to the way his vision blurred, and he constantly felt like the world was spinning around him at faster and faster speeds.

  That sensation of everything spiraling out of control would follow Dane through much of what happened at the Nevada Facility.

  3

  Orbital AMPs

  “And these, gentlemen, are what you’re going to have to get used to wearing. Quickly,” Captain Otepi said, just as sternly as she said anything. But there was a smidgen of something else to her voice as well. Pride. Accomplishment.

  It was day nine at the Nevada Facility when Lance Corporal Williams and the others of the Mechanized Infantry Division were shown their new AMP suits. The days so far had become a blur of grueling training and generalized exhaustion for Dane, as his body was being asked to specialize and exceed in ways that were entirely unnatural for the human animal. Dane had thought he was fairly fit before (well, apart from the Exin virus running through his system) but somehow, the strange PT—or physical training—they did here at Nevada seemed to use an entirely new set of muscles.

  “Physically, it’s about blood pressure and internal organ regulation,” Dr. Heathcote had told him during one of their regular health checks that they appeared to be having every couple of days. “You may be externally fit, but we need to find ways to tone the inside of your body as well, because . . .”

  Because of decompression and recompression, Dane now knew. Because of velocity and acceleration and weightlessness. Because he was about to be surrounded by the void of space, which would kill him in exactly 12.8 seconds flat if he was unprotected.

  Already, some of the guys from the M.I.D. had flunked out. Small ailments and conditions had been discovered which never would have interfered with their ability to fight a ground offensive. Private Martinson had a predilection for high blood pressure which would have increased his chances of developing brain aneurysm and blood clots in space by forty-five percent. Private Fadja, it turned out, had the slightest defect in the growth of his inner ear, meaning that he would be sick and faint if the barometric pressure raised or dipped beyond a certain point. Both Fadja and Martinson were congratulated by Captain Otepi herself, but then escorted off-site. Dane didn’t know if he would ever see either of them again.

  But the increased daily PT sessions where they were shaken, vibrated, where they ran endlessly on machines or climbed obstacle walls or swam in the sunken pools a lot—they weren’t even the worst of the training exercises . . .

  That horror, for Dane at least, was reserved for what was called “exo-orientation.” In these exercises, the new Orbital Marines were put through a variety of observation and perception-changing practices aimed to change their sense of up and down, left and right, near and far. It could be an hour spent in cubicles looking at the movement of strobe lights playing complicated patterns, starting at the periphery of his vision and then shooting forwards, or upwards, or around. At other times, it was being strapped to a chair while an array of film clips played, always of movement—the camera following a dirt road, to suddenly cut to swooping between mountains, or hurtling straight towards earth, or moving backwards down a road once more.

  The very strangest of these orientation exercises were, however, the isolation tanks that they spent time in every day. Dane and the others scheduled in that work group would each clamber into a sealed metal-and-plastic tub taller than he was standing, where they would allow themselves to float as the lid was sealed and all lights were turned off.

  And there, surrounded in total darkness, they would just—float.

  What sounded like a chance to relax for once and to ease aching muscles turned out, for any who tried it, to be a deeply unsettling and then strange experience. Dane would swear that he had dreamed, although he had been wide awake. He would swear that he talked to his dead father once again, and that he saw Private Mahir—the marine that he had let die—again and again, and each time, Mahir would still have the Exin blade lodged in his chest, and each time Dane wouldn’t be able to save him.

  So, when Captain Otepi announced on day nine that today was the day that they were finally going to get back into their AMP suits once again, Dane, like all of the others, was overjoyed at the opportunity.

  “This is the deployment hangar, reserved for use of the M.I.D: Orbital,” Otepi explained, pointing to the band of blue strip light that lit the subterranean corridors that they were all used to now, all the way to the hangar. There were a number of these glowing lines that followed the walls through the underground complex, each color associated with something different. Over the last few days Dane had come to understand what some of them referred to—even if he had only heard of them in passing. Green was for Health and Medical, white was for Logistics, Command, and Operations, while blue seemed to be for Technical and Engineering, and there were still orange and purple color bars that Dane knew nothing about at all.

  “These suits are still prototypes, but we hope to get the working product up and running in a matter of days.” Otepi said as she held up a hand to the steel bulkhead doors.

  “ID AUTHORIZED. CAPTAIN OTEPI . . .” an automated voice called out, and the doors slid open to reveal an AMP hangar.

  It was long and narrow, with the crane and webbing like cradles for each suit extending down each side of the room to the right and left. Eight-foot-tall metal golem figures stood inside each cradle, and there was enough room in the middle for one to be standing proud of the others, underlit by dimmed floor lights.

  “Rockin’ . . .” Dane heard the whispered words of Hopskirk behind him. They looked at what appeared to be an almost-regular AMP suit—with some notable differences.

  First of all, the eight-foot-tall human shell was fitted with a
glossy black armor plating, interspersed with the more regular concrete-gray matte of the interstitial plates. Dane knew that the larger protective plates—at the shoulders, chest, thighs, arms, and legs, were made of layers of composite metals, foams, and graphene shock absorbers, but these also had a highly reflective sheen, like a brand-new sports car.

  “Obviously, space is pretty dark,” Otepi said, (Was she speaking from personal experience? Dane wondered) “and you might have to perform space-walk or vacuum operations where stealth is desirable . . .”

  Stealth is desirable!? Dane blinked, imagining himself inside one of these suits, snaking across the starfields to some distant, alien artifact.

  “To that end, these suits have a variety of sensor-evading and frequency-scattering measures,” Otepi said, carefully walking around the show suit.

  What was also subtly different from the previous AMP suits he had worn, Dane saw, were the face-plates. These were not the regular, humanoid “heads” of the previous AMP suits. Instead, each suit had a sunken dome with a far larger collar that extended almost from where the breastbone would be, all the way to the height of the ears. It curved to give a full range of visibility from the black dome of the helmet inside. In general, the mechanical metal humanoid was thicker and broader than its predecessors, like a pro-weightlifter version of the previous AMPs. Dane thought that they looked guarded and thuglike.

  “Obviously, special attention has been paid to their ability to supply oxygen to the helmet,” Otepi noted. “Added layers of atmospheric protections make their larger construction necessary.” She stopped to bang on the sleek black metal arm, which rang with a solid noise. “Because of their bigger size, they have extra servo-assists on all limbs and joints and are approximately fifty percent stronger than the previous suits you were wearing.”