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

  As Dane stood up, the other marine fighters fired their own magnet locks, anchoring themselves in stasis as each of the Orbital Marines made their way to their hangars.

  The expedition bundle was just one of many such bundles that could be attached and magnet locked to a suit of Assisted Mechanized Plate. Dane hit the release on the appropriate overhead locker in the large hold and pulled out the auto-coil of metal rope, the reserve medical kits and small engineering kits, as well as the large Field Halligan—a steel rod with a giant spike at one end, and a double-headed crowbar and axe at the other. Dane moved to the weapons locker next, where he removed the large, general purpose pulse rifle, as well as the Field Blade. It would be a sword in any normal human’s hands but looked more like a knife in the metal gauntleted hands of an AMP.

  There, he was ready—but his mind was still worrying at the mystery ahead of him.

  There was tension inside Exin society. Dane had experienced it firsthand when he had been forced into “The Challenge”—some kind of trial of combat, endurance, and wits for the right to survive.

  But the war master’s problem with the queen seemed to be that, if anything, she was too slow in wiping out humanity. That she was using human intelligence and human collaborators as she made her move against their solar system.

  Ugh, Dane shook his head as he closed the outer hangar doors. Maybe I’ll never figure out how the Exin think.

  “Magnetize boots thirty percent,” Dane said and felt his suit settle a little more solidly to the floor. He would need this when he opened the outer airlock doors. Even though the air was pretty thin inside the Gladius, it was enough atmosphere to send him flying as soon as he opened the door.

  The outer doors slid open. Dane heard the hiss of escaping atmosphere over his suit’s pickups. About a hundred and fifty feet in front of him was the smooth surface of the Exin hull, and Dane realized that he had never seen it this close before.

  Well, not without a firing trigger in my hand, he thought as he used small hand gestures coupled with vocal commands to activate the twin thrusters on his back. He felt the chug of his backplates moving and locking into position as twin cylinders lifted from either side of his spine, and Dane leapt.

  “Fire!”

  The burst of orange light urged him forward towards the alien hull, where he brought up his knees and hands to thump into the side of the hull, bouncing off it slightly before he managed to get his magnetized boots on the metal.

  There. He was secure, crouched with the giant Exin outer pod as his floor, and looking up as first Hendrix, then Farouk, then Isaias performed their own space leaps behind him.

  “Good,” Dane grunted at their near-perfect execution, knowing that they had practiced space grapples and landings many times around the Marine Training Platform. The Orbital Marines were getting good at being marines in space, he thought. He turned towards the broken-open metal at the end of the pod and started to clank forwards.

  “Line formation. Eyes peeled,” Dane said as he detached his rifle from where it was locked at his hip to hold it in one hand as he space-walked. “There may not be any life signs, but that doesn’t mean . . .”

  >Warning! Proximity Alert! . . .

  Dane barely even had the time to warn them of some of the Exin dangers he had encountered before—murderous drones, organic bombs—when there were little puffs of escaping gasses further around the curve of the pod, as small objects were released . . .

  “Exin spiders!” Dane snapped, turning and half crouching as he brought up his rifle against the small shapes that were flung into the night. He turned abruptly with bright flashes of purple pulse light to angle dramatically towards the bots.

  Dane had fought these things before when the marines had taken the wheeled jump station from the Exin. He remembered how the four-legged, metal robot things had flung themselves at his fellow marines, catching them bodily and not slowing as they were dragged from the surface of the station to their fiery deaths by re-entry into Jupiter’s atmosphere.

  The Exin spiders were some kind of robotic, automatic defense, Dane had guessed. Perhaps a way to clear the outer shell of the Exin crafts of debris and damage.

  And each was almost as large as an AMP suit itself, with whirling metal blades for a mouth and sharpened carbon pincers at the ends of their insectlike legs.

  >Target lock! . . .

  The targeting triangle on Dane’s HUD, linked to the smart rifle in his hands, flashed green as he pulled the trigger. A salvo of burning orange meson plasma shot out towards their attackers.

  Flash! One of the spider bots was blown apart before it could even get near them, and another lost a leg to send it cartwheeling erratically across the surface of the Exin hull.

  “Holy crap!”

  “Get some!”

  The rest of his squad reacted slower than Dane did, but they were firing at the fast-moving spiders as they descended on them in a small cloud. The spiders didn’t appear to have any sensors save those that told them where to attack. Either that or they weren’t programmed to care when they were shot at, as they didn’t evade or dodge or spin out of the way of the volley of marine fire.

  Maybe the spiders knew that there were already far more of them than the humans they faced, Dane thought grimly as he fired another volley before dropping his rifle for it to magnetize with a clank to the hull. He drew his Field Halligan with one smooth gesture as the nearest spider flared its legs to surround him.

  Smash! With a swing that any professional baseball slugger would have been proud of, Dane sent the Exin spider spiraling backwards with a flash of sparks and readied himself to bat at the next. You couldn’t pinpoint fire with these things. You had to flail and scythe . . .

  Dammit! Dane realized that he hadn’t told that to the others. A gap in the darting and racing spiders around him allowed him a chance to look out at his fellow Gold Squad.

  Hendrix and Isaias were holding their ground. They had closed formation, Hendrix crouching and firing scatter shots all around them. Isaias had done what Dane had and was using his Field Halligan as a club to clear any away that had managed to get through the deadly rain of meson fire.

  “Farouk!” Where was Private Farouk!? Dane thought in shock before he saw the green code identifier to the extreme right of his faceplate HUD. The marine had already been swept off his feet and off the hull entirely.

  Without thinking, Dane jumped forward, one heavy boot slamming onto the hull and then another as he hopped, skipped, and . . .

  “Fire!” He activated his back thrusters as he leapt from the mother ship and was zooming out into space, away from the others and the anchored marine starfighters, after Farouk.

  Farouk, ahead of him, was fighting and struggling with the Exin spider as they tangled and flew into the depths of space. There was no Jupiter here for the spider to kamikaze itself and its victim into, but Dane knew that it wouldn’t need a planet’s gravity well. Just so long as it flew long and far enough and kept on puncturing Farouk’s outer plates with its blades and pincers, then that would be enough for the marine either to lose oxygen or for his suit to break a seal.

  “Hang on, Marine!” Dane was shouting over the comms as he kept the pulse thrusters burning, using up lots of valuable fuel. But the sergeant was gaining on the fighting pair, and he could see that Farouk was still struggling, holding the creature’s spinning-blade head back by the nearest shoulder joints, as the remaining two legs repeatedly slammed into his back.

  “Sarge!” He heard the panic in Farouk’s voice as he closed in on them. Dane was coming in fast—too fast to do much more than to raise his Field Halligan before him like a spear.

  Smash! Dane hit the back of the Exin spider like a meteorite, instantly clicking off his pulse thrusters, but still the trio were sent spiraling away from each other.

  Dane’s body strike had dislodged the spider and Farouk from each other, and all three spun and twisted free for a desperate moment in the void.

 
“Here!” Dane reached out towards his tumbling marine as Farouk’s gauntlet caught his. Dane pulled—just as the spider flared its legs and managed to hook one around Farouk’s ankle.

  “Argh!” the marine howled in pain, and Dane saw the crunch of metal plates where the robot spider exerted an implacable, machine force.

  Jackknifing suddenly, Dane rolled himself forward.

  “Get off my marine!” he yelled as he brought the Halligan down against the back of the machine’s head. There was a flash of burning light amidst a crunch of metal as the creature shook and started to spasm. Farouk kicked it clear with his other boot, and the two marines were spinning free in space.

  “Sheesh. Frack. Damn,” Farouk was panting as Dane grabbed him and turned around to the hull to fire his back thrusters again.

  “You okay? Can you fight?” Dane was asking, sparing a look at the large metal boot on Farouk’s AMP suit. It was badly dented on two sides, but he couldn’t see any oil or escaping gasses. The Exin spider had failed to break the suit’s inner atmospheric seals, at least.

  “I can fight, sir,” Farouk said. “My suit’s meds are kicking in,” he said in a slightly tight voice. Dane knew that was probably the effect of the painkillers and stimulant that every AMP suit was loaded with, auto-injecting when their human occupant needed it.

  “Besides—looks like we can’t spare anyone,” he said with a slightly cheery, rictus sort of voice. He directed Dane’s attention to the surface of the outer pod of the Exin mother ship, where Hendrix and Isaias were retreating to the edge of the exploded material, both firing back at their pursuers.

  “Hell,” Dane breathed. The two marines had managed to clear the first wave of the Exin defense spiders, but another cloud of them was being released from the other side of the hull, perhaps another ten, another twenty . . .

  “I don’t have my rifle,” Dane cursed as they angled towards their fellow marines.

  “I’m on it, sir,” Farouk, despite his pain, had already brought his own rifle up.

  “Take as many as you can before they reach the others,” Dane said, and Farouk grunted an agreement as he slammed home the chamber on his rifle and started firing.

  Flowers of brief-lived light and plasma rained down on the Exin hull and the swarm of launching spiders. Dane saw several small flashes of purple-and-orange sparks as many of them were hit and broke apart—but Farouk’s strike was never going to be enough. It was a diversion and cover for the retreating marines as Dane and Farouk neared them.

  “Inside!” Dane shouted as he separated from Farouk, and the pair were suddenly rocketing between giant strips of slagged and broken metal. Isaias and Hendrix fired their own back thrusters and took to the vacuum themselves, and now all four marines were flying through the confusion of metal and pipes and smashed hull frameworks, into the craft itself.

  “We need an entry point! Bulkhead, door lock, waste chute, anything!” Dane’s eyes were scanning the destruction, the bright LED lights of his suit revealing twisted and broken shards of metal everywhere, like a forest. Small elements he could vaguely recognize as functional in some way, the slats and frame that could have been an access ladder or the remains of a stairwell, perhaps.

  But amongst this chaos, there was also the baffling and bizarre—giant cylinders that appeared made out of multiple bronze plates, each almost as large as the Gladius was wide, suddenly opening underneath them. Dane cast a nervous eye to his suit sensors, but no dangerous toxicity or radiation could be detected.

  Other glances revealed strings of crystal-like bulbs hanging from where their housing had ruptured, or strands of wire that was as fine as human hair, and yet seemed to catch their suit lights with a phosphorescent glow.

  “Sarge!” It was Hendrix, clanking to a halt as he landed on a bit of gantry that was still in existence, next to something that Dane did recognize. An almost octagonal shell in the blue-black metal wall. A door.

  “But how do we open it!?” Isaias was there next, moving at once to the smooth and glossy patch that Dane knew would light up with arcane glyphs of commands when operational.

  “Anyone know the Exin for open sesame?” He heard Isaias sound confused. They probably only had moments before the spider drones rounded the debris and fell onto them . . .

  “I do,” Farouk said as he landed with a grunt of pain on one foot, lifted his rifle, and started to fire at the control panel.

  “Whoa!” Hendrix jumped back as sparks erupted from the door and fizzing metal started to melt and run. Sudden small explosions came from whatever electronic systems the aliens used as they were exposed inside.

  “Here they come!” Isaias was calling as Dane landed, spinning on his heel to see the light glint off dozens of metal bodies, spinning, bladed teeth, and sharp talons. The spider drones rounded the edge of the broken-open pod and surged forward.

  “Here!” It was Hendrix, throwing Dane his recovered rifle. “I picked it up. They’re here!” the marine was saying.

  “Covering fire!” Dane shouted, catching his rifle and firing salvo after salvo of burning plasma into the chaotic ruins. There were flares and explosions of sparks, sudden bursts of metal supports, and the movement of hull plates as the delicate balance holding the structure up was disturbed.

  But still, despite being slowed down by the collapsing body of their own mother ship, additional Exin spiders kept appearing just as soon as one knot was blown apart. More must have woken up to attack them, Dane thought.

  “Farouk! The door?” Dane shouted as he fired, almost keeping a constant pressure on the trigger now. They couldn’t stem the tide, and now they were backed against a wall.

  “Working on it!” Farouk was shouting, just before there was a brighter flash, and Dane felt a sudden wave of something—atmospheric gases—surge over him.

  “We’re in!” Hendrix shouted.

  Dane kept on firing as the marines piled behind him into the popped-open door, before gauntleted hands grabbed him, too, and dragged him into the dark.

  5

  Open Sesame

  Clang! Hendrix slammed the airlock door home and held it while Isaias used the laser-cutter tool to heat the edges, forming a temporary sort of slagged seal as the marines floated inside.

  No sooner had Isaias got most of the way around than the outer door started to reverberate with the thumps of many smaller metal bodies, as the spider drones outside doubtless tried to find their way in.

  Dane looked around, checking his sensors to see that there was no movement, but he was registering sudden increases in atmospheric pressure.

  The Exin breathe like we do, he remembered from past (bitter) experience aboard the other mother ship. As soon as the seal was made, some automatic system started to work inside the ship, and the large octagonal room filled with hisses of white steam.

  Wham! Dane and the others landed on the floor as the pressure and some hidden gravitational device was initiated . . . and still the door kept on shuddering with the assault from outside.

  “Guess they don’t give up easily,” Farouk said.

  There was a blink of green light from the opposite side of the room. An alien glyph was blinking on the wall beside the open door. It flashed once, twice . . .

  And then the inner door swung open and in rushed a snarling Exin . . .

  “Frack!”

  Dane had shot the Exin before he realized that the alien warrior was already dead and had merely been falling through the airlock, not leaping in to attack them.

  “Way to go, Sarge,” Hendrix muttered. “You killed a dead one.”

  Dane pulled a face at his fellow marine before inspecting the Exin body. He knew that they didn’t have a lot of time, as his suit microphones were already picking up the hammering noise of the spiders on the outer airlock door.

  The Exin was one of the four-limbed warrior caste, and had apparently been well armed and armored before something—or someone—had shot it in the back.

  The Exin came in at least tw
o different castes that Dane knew about, with the overlarge queen being an additional, extra type of Exin similar to a queen ant. The smaller worker Exin had only two arms, backward-jointed knees, and the same gray-blue skin of pebbled plates as the warriors. The fighting class types were much bulkier, larger, and even had an extra set of arms.

  Their entire culture was alien to Dane. He remembered how they had seemed intent on conflict and combat to prove their worth for anything, coupled with some sort of fanatical obsession—even reverence—when in the presence of the queen.

  They bred these larger warriors in tanks and set them in suspended animation until required, Dane remembered. They seemed able to grow their metals just as they did their people.

  And not once during his time as a prisoner on the other mother ship had he seen a scrap of decency, kindness, or generosity. Even the workers appeared to snap and growl at each other as they rushed about their tasks. Was their entire society based on might makes right!?

  Whatever. Dane found what he had been looking for, however, as he slid open one of the modules at the dead Exin’s belt. He drew forth a small, vaguely teardrop-shaped piece of metal.

  “What’s that, boss?” It was Isaias, casting a wary eye behind them at the outer door before nodding to the device that Dane had found.

  “A key. I used one when, uh . . .” Dane’s thoughts flittered back to the Challenge Planet for an instant, before he shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Just put it down to experience. They seem to use these to unlock doors.”

  “Let’s just hope this one wasn’t the janitor then, and all it unlocks is the broom closet,” Hendrix muttered as he was the first to step into the main corridor beyond, sweeping with his rifle as he did so.