Metal Warrior: Ring of Steel (Mech Fighter Book 7) Read online

  No!

  Dane wrenched at the flight handles to angle the Gladius away—but he wasn’t fast enough. One of the alien’s purple shots hit the upper hull of the marine fighter’s short back, exploding as it scattered fire across it.

  >Warning! Top hull plate at 70% . . .

  >>Damage to filtration systems! . . .

  Alerts and warning suddenly peeled into life in front of Dane. He could see the digital vector image of his craft, turning slowly in three dimensions. Most of it was picked out in a healthy green, save for a glowing red section at its top.

  Filtration, Dane thought as he hit the thrusters to give him more power. But was that water, air, or fuel filtration? Any one of them could kill him, but only a problem with the way the super-hot plasma was extracted could cause the Gladius to break apart like a small supernova.

  >Warning! Enemy targeting system . . .

  Not that Dane had any time to wonder about that right now, with the seed craft bearing down on him. He twisted the flight handles to one side and then back as he swerved first one way and then another . . .

  And the gray-white dome of Pluto was rising ahead of him.

  “Got it!” Dane had an idea, punching every bit of power he had into his rear thrusters to fling his marine fighter straight towards the surface of the icy world.

  In seconds, he would be broken into smithereens across its surface, as the ice mountains and craters of plates of hardened rock ice rose before him.

  “Williams!? Sir?” He heard Farouk’s worried call. But Dane was already pulling up on the fight handles, forcing the Gladius to start to lift her nose, her body—and then she was racing over the frozen surface, his Exin tormentor following close behind.

  Pluto had little gravity, but there was a bit, Dane knew. And a bit was all that he would need as he watched the vectors of ice cliffs and frozen spumes of liquid gasses rushing towards him. He dodged them with a flick of movement on the handles, just as one giant, frozen fountain beside the Gladius exploded as the seed craft started to open fire.

  Dane’s ship burst through a glittering haze of silvered frost. The missed shot by the Exin provided Dane with the perfect cover to pull his craft into a rise between two giant ice plateaus.

  Williams could see the small patch of space high above as he angled the Gladius straight towards it. He slid the floating targeting window of his meson canons to one side and fired.

  As the Exin seed craft burst through the glittering haze of ice behind him, Dane’s own fire struck the ice cliffs and sent shivers and shock waves through their crystalline bulk. The Gladius was rising and flying hard as great shards of frozen gasses, some of them hundreds of feet thick, started to crack and fall inwards.

  >Proximity Warning! . . .

  More alarms, this time flashing from his left-hand side as one ice plate fell in front of him and the other behind.

  Dane twisted the flight handles, shooting through the crack between falling debris and back into Pluto’s near orbit as geographies fell and crashed behind him.

  There was a muffled flash of light as the gigantic ice cliffs fell on the chasing Exin seed craft, and Dane was free.

  “Booyah!” he shouted, suddenly filled with fire and exultation as he checked his navigation.

  “Hendrix! Farouk, Isaias?” He called and was relieved to see that all three of his wings were indeed still flying. Hendrix and Farouk were flying in near formation in the outer orbit of Pluto. A shimmering disk of debris and burning gasses slowly evaporated behind them, which must have been the last Exin seed craft to attack.

  “We’re good, sir,” Hendrix called out. “We got them with a three-man wing, straight out of the textbook.”

  “And Isaias?” Dane frowned, noting that the third of their smaller attack group was a few miles in front.

  “Sarge—I’ve got eyes on it,” Isaias sounded back a moment later, and his comms were accompanied by a transmitted image from his own marine fighter’s cameras. Dane blinked as he tried to make out what it was he was looking at. A dark shape that blocked out the stars. A shadow that slid across the distant stars beyond.

  “It’s the Exin mother ship, sir,” Isaias said in a voice that was heavy with trepidation. “It’s what the Deep Space Array picked up.”

  3

  Mother Ship

  “It’s . . . big!” Dane heard Private First Class Isaias say as the sergeant pulled the Gladius alongside him.

  He’s never seen the Exin mother ships before, has he? Dane realized as he tried to keep one eye on the alien menace ahead of him, and another on the warning signals that were even now erupting across the Gladius’ holoscreens.

  >Losing Fuel 200cv parts/mg . . .

  >Pulse Engine Efficiency at 30% . . .

  “Damn, damn, frack and damn!” Dane didn’t quite know what the “two hundred cv” thing meant, but he could already bet that it wasn’t good.

  “Marine Server diagnostic,” he muttered, calling up the small, machine A.I. auto-prompt that every marine starfighter was fitted with. “Just how much crap am I going to be in if I don’t get to a repair shop!?” he asked it.

  >Error! User Term Unidentified . . .

  Dane sighed. “Please diagnose current operational state,” he said with exasperation. He turned his attention back towards the image on the screen ahead as the Gladius’s servers got to work.

  The mother ship was large. Three elongated pods were attached to the main, major bulk of the craft with thick trunks of the same organic scale metal that the Exin seemed to grow.

  Thankfully, she was still a good few miles away. Dane, Isaias, and the others were currently looking at it through the most extreme magnification that they could perform.

  But even at this distance from her, Dane could tell immediately that something was wrong with her.

  “She’s not firing on us,” Dane said worriedly.

  “You make it sound like that is a bad thing.” Hendrix’s voice sounded, dry and ironic, over the comms.

  “She’s huge compared to us and to her own seed craft,” Dane pointed out. He knew. He had even spent time inside one of them as a prisoner of war.

  It was where their queen resided. Dane remembered the gigantic, four-armed, praying mantis-like alien with the swept back, fused horns, many feet taller than he was—even inside his AMP suit. He shuddered at the thought and quickly turned instead to concentrate on the task at hand.

  “The mother ship has far wider and deeper capabilities and sensors than our smaller ships can hold,” Dane said. “If she was fully operational, then she would have detected us already and would be firing.”

  But strangely, she wasn’t. Dane watched as the Exin mother ship hung there in deep space at the furthest limits of the human solar system and appeared to slowly list and roll.

  “She’s damaged,” Isaias pointed out. “Just as Lashmeier said.”

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions, now,” Dane growled quickly as he activated his deep field sensors. He was still picking up radiation and electromagnetic signals from her, that was for sure. But he had nothing to compare it to. The signals weren’t strong, certainly not in the same ballpark that their Marine Training Platform would give off—but what if that was just a feature of every Exin mother ship?

  “We don’t know enough about her,” Dane murmured, knowing that, all the while, he was technically the only person in all of humanity who did know the most about this type of ship. He knew that these mother ships could create their own warp tunnels and didn’t need the giant jump stations that the Exin had first erected.

  Williams also knew that these mother ships were usually the home of dozens and dozens of Exin seed-craft fighters—not just three!

  “Is it a trap?” Farouk’s voice sounded spooked.

  Dane was thinking just the same thing as the auto-scan on his ship suddenly pinged.

  >Repair Diagnosis complete! . . .

  >>>Severe damage to fuel filtration and injection system, resulting in loss of a
vailable fuel . . .

  >>>Approximately 3 hours thruster burn left . . .

  >>>Insufficient charge to initiate FTL drive . . .

  >>>Approximately 6 hours of life support left at current usage level . . .

  “Oh, dear crap . . .” Dane breathed. He was in it far worse than he had thought, all things considered.

  “Sarge?” Farouk was the first to ask.

  “That lucky shot from the first Exin got my fuel lines. I’m unable to FTL out of here,” Dane said.

  “No worries, Sarge, we’re close enough to the Deep Space Array on Pluto,” Hendrix, as ever, seemed to be the man who could have a plan at a moment’s notice. “We ping the Training Platform, they send out support . . .”

  “Er, guys . . . You mean that Deep Space Array?” Isaias, apparently, was even quicker witted than Hendrix was, as the image of the mother ship was replaced with an image still of the Plutonian surface, where the gleams of silver and white were marred with a black and ruined mass.

  “Oh, holy fracking bat balls,” Dane heard himself swear. The seed craft that had been chasing him must have taken the opportunity to fire on Pluto’s Deep Space Array as they had flown over the surface of Earth’s most distant cousin. Perhaps, he thought rather guiltily, he had led the enemy right to it.

  “Well, we can perform a space dock,” Hendrix cut in. “We get you on board one of our fighters, and just leave your ship. No problemo!”

  Abandon the Gladius? As much as Dane knew that he would do what it took to survive, he also knew that he would never hear the end of it from Corsoni when he got back.

  “Okay, sure.” Dane winced, just before another idea struck him.

  Unless . . .

  Unless they could find enough available fuel right there on the mother ship, right? Maybe it was a crazy idea, but Dane had so far never managed to stay alive and beat the enemy by playing it safe. They were here to do a job, to investigate what was happening with that apparently stilled Exin warcraft sitting right ahead of them. A mother ship that, if fully operational, would pose a significant threat to Earth if it was allowed to roam free.

  Besides which . . . Dane couldn’t stop remembering the fact that the Exin queen resided on these mother ships alone. The cruel, terribly majestic Exin queen—the ruler of the entire empire of aliens, who appeared to control and decree who in her society could give birth to their eggs or not—the queen who had declared a holy crusade against the “soft” and “weak” homo sapiens . . .

  If she is on board this ship, then we have a chance to capture her, Dane was thinking.

  “We’ll complete the mission. We scout the mother ship, and I’ll worry about the Gladius or my ride home afterwards, okay?” Dane said. From the silence on the other end of the comms, he could tell that the other three marines must be thinking that he was nuts.

  Maybe they were too young and inexperienced to see that with this enemy, they had to be aggressive. They had to use every opportunity to oppose the Exin that they had.

  A memory flashed across Dane’s mind—an image of a seemingly endless sea of orange, with pinpricks of light dotted across it, surrounding a few very small puddles of green dotted here and there. It was a piece of strategic data from the Exin military servers that he had helped steal nearly a year ago now.

  The orange was the expanse of the Exin empire, and the green were all the territories that the Exin had yet to take over. They were tiny in comparison to the Exin’s reach and looked ridiculously weak against such a tide of alien malevolence.

  And one of those small and fragile green areas had been Earth . . .

  Or maybe his fellow marines were right, Dane thought with a reckless laugh, and he really was nuts.

  “Drones,” he said. “Send in the surveillance drones. And then we’ll make our contact.”

  A scatter of small, hard lights was flung into the void as ports opened along the noses of the Gladius and the other ships. Small drones, barely bigger than a person’s head, burst forward on flares of micropulse engines.

  The marine fighters waited, silent and stilled and deadly, as the tiny robotic craft shot through the night towards their target. At about halfway, their dim neon lights suddenly clicked off, and the micropulse engines took on a deeper, fainter glow as they activated their own stealth measures.

  These represented some of the most advanced surveillance drone technology known to humanity, so small in size and with such a tiny radionic imprint that they could completely bypass even the most sensitive of surveillance systems.

  Human surveillance systems, that is, the human marines inside their respective crafts were thinking and worrying.

  But no warning lights flared as the drones drew closer to the much larger ship, and no weapons ports suddenly burst open to fire upon them. The three tiny craft swept on different axis towards their target like eels through an inky-black sea, and they transmitted what they saw the closer that they got.

  The mother ship was similar to every other that humanity had so far encountered. She was almost as large as the Marine Training Platform, and she was made of close-fitting metal plates, each of a unique, erratic shape—so close were they, in fact, that it would seem difficult to press a bolt or a rivet between them.

  Streams of scan data started to download in the waiting craft behind them, along with different thermal and energetic imaging shots of the craft.

  There was undoubtedly power still in the engines. One scan image showed it glaring a burning, brilliant white, with threads of that power rushing through the craft like the hidden root systems of invisible plants.

  There were undoubtedly chemicals and radiation. Each scan revealed different concentrations of green or purple or orange or blue in small, exact pockets throughout the craft. Precisely what one would expect for a craft of its size, which presumably had to store as well as process and refine its own materials on its endless route of conquest between the stars.

  But then the biological scan came back.

  Nothing.

  No sign or twinge of life anywhere at all.

  4

  Knock, Knock

  “Well, that’ll do it . . .” Dane heard Hendrix whisper as their ships slid past the bulk of the giant alien craft to reveal that one of the three outer pods of the Exin craft was torn open at its end.

  “Dear gods!” Dane breathed as he saw the devastation. The entire final quarter of one of the giant pods was now a frozen image of an explosion. Long fingers of metal were flung outwards around craters bent inwards, with veins of what had to be slagged and molten metal stilled in their moment of spillage. The gray-greens of the hull were deeply blackened and bubbled, as if from a great heat.

  “What could do that!?” Dane heard Isaias breathe, and again, he cursed the fact that he didn’t have Corsoni here. The young engineer was brilliant, and would have had an answer, he was sure.

  “Malfunction?” Dane hazarded. If these pods acted in the same way as the thrusters that the humans used, then that would mean that they were also the housings for whatever vast stellar engines powered them. Had some critical error happened here? Was that why the mother ship was listless? Why there was seemingly no life signs on board?

  “I don’t know about that, Sarge.” Isaias was the first one to spot it. “Look at that over there, upper two o’clock.”

  The younger marine was pointing out to a piece at the edge of the destruction, where a myriad of smaller holes (each one still larger than Dane was tall, he reckoned) punctured the pod. It was clear from this angle that the metal was slagged and broken inwards, not outwards.

  “Something struck it,” Isaias said confidently. “And maybe that something hit a reactor or a fuel line.”

  “Gee, don’t remind me,” Dane’s eyes swam to the small part of the Gladius’s display panel where it clearly stated that he had even less oxygen and life support left. “But what do you think could do that? Meteorites?” Dane frowned.

  He heard the vocal equivalent of a shrug on the ot
her end of the ship comm.

  “Hell if I know. The crawdads might even have done it themselves for some god’s unknown reason. But whatever happened, it was pretty dramatic, right?”

  “Yeah,” Dane muttered as he frowned. He knew that there was certainly no end to the tensions inside the martial Exin society that he had seen (as far as he could make out). Dane had met some kind of war chief called Okruk who appeared tantalizingly close to disobeying the queen.

  “But only by wanting to wipe out humanity all the quicker,” Dane muttered.

  “Sarge?” Isaias asked. “Was that an order, sir?”

  “No. Yes. Find us a way to dock,” Dane said, as he tried to organize his thoughts.

  The Exin might have done this to each other, but why fire on their own mother ship that was already heading towards Earth, presumably on an attack run? That was the part that didn’t make sense to Dane’s mind.

  “Sir! I think there’s space enough for direct entry,” Hendrix said, and a green vector showed a curved line leading into the pulled-apart explosion and into the pod itself.

  “Radiation levels? Toxic environments?” Dane asked. He didn’t want to go walking into the slagged ruins of some Exin nuclear reactor just for kicks.

  “Already checked, sir, and it has come back clear. Background radiation is nothing that our AMP suits aren’t designed to handle,” Hendrix drawled confidently.

  Dane hesitated, but seeing that the only other option was to blast a way in themselves, he figured that they might as well use the part of the ship that was already blasted open.

  “Fine. I’ll go first, and the rest of you follow. I want everyone careful on their perimeters, and you’re going to need the expedition equipment bundles,” Dane ordered. He was already setting off the magnet clamps that fired on long spools of chain from the sides of the Gladius. They slapped onto the side of the pod, holding the Gladius in place.