Metal Warrior: Steel Cage (Mech Fighter Book 6) Read online

  “Bruce said that the mutagenic infection came from there, didn’t he?” Sylvia finally turned around to give the captain her haughtiest of stares. “That it was some kind of bioweapon, one that infected the expedition and Hopskirk. I would say that counts as a health-related matter for sure.”

  “All of my marines will be wearing full Assisted Mechanized Plate. They won’t be in direct physical contact with anything but their suits,” Captain Otepi pointed out—although Sylvia noted that she still hadn’t turned off the screen yet.

  “Can you promise that? What if one of the suits malfunctions? Or god forbid, they get attacked by something?” Sylvia returned. “And besides which . . . I think that the Marine Corps needs to know all about that mutagenic bioweapon, don’t you? Which means that you will need a doctor on the mission to the site to collect samples and perform tests and what have you.”

  Captain Otepi was silent for a long moment, and Sylvia could tell that she was getting through to her.

  “I agree in theory,” Otepi started to say slowly.

  “Excellent! When is the departure time? Can I requisition a suit from stores?” Sylvia smiled briskly and turned to go.

  “However,” the captain said heavily. “I am not entirely sure that I want my lead medical officer—and dare I say, the lead investigator into the Exinase virus that Earth has—to be exposed to such dangers.”

  Give me strength! Sylvia almost screamed. Captain Otepi hadn’t been around or voicing such concern when Sylvia was kidnapped by smugglers and Exin collaborators, had she?

  “I’ve done basic field training, as I’m sure you know,” Sylvia returned in a brittle tone. “I can look after myself.”

  “Irrelevant,” Otepi stated. “I don’t care how good a shot you are. If you are on one of my missions, then you would be my responsibility . . .”

  She is going to play hard-ass, Sylvia thought. She wondered if Marianne Otepi was a spiteful woman or one who held a grudge. Maybe this was because Sylvia had refused Otepi’s command back in the medical lounge earlier.

  But whatever the friction was between them, Sylvia had more reasons than just the sensible ones why she wanted to go.

  “Sergeant Hopskirk,” the doctor announced seriously.

  “What is it? Is he awake?” Captain Otepi blinked, surprised by the sudden change in conversation.

  “No. I’m keeping him in a state of tranquilized sleep, due to his condition.” Due to the fact that he now has horns and claws and has put on fifteen pounds since his last marine medical exam, Sylvia could have added, but didn’t. “But the fact is that Sergeant J. D. Hopskirk, formerly of Minnesota, chose to become a serving member of the Federal Marines. He chose to endanger himself and put his life on the line for all the rest of us when he was selected to train as an Orbital Marine.” Sylvia said the words carefully.

  “Sergeant Hopskirk is also one of the few, the very few remaining members of the first wave of Mechanized Infantry Division. There are only a handful of graduates from that first class of Fort Mayweather, and he is one of them . . .” Sylvia continued. “Unfortunately, he has paid for that decision by being infected with an alien bioweapon, one that is robbing him of the very humanity that he is trying to protect.

  “Did you know that his DNA now confuses the bioscanners? That Sergeant J.D. Hopskirk of Minnesota will not even be recognized by the hometown he was born in?” Sylvia ended in a rush.

  “What are you trying to say here, Doctor?” the captain asked, her eyes steady and piercing. “You know that I cannot make military decisions based on pity.”

  “How about honor?” Sylvia returned quickly. “Hopskirk deserves a chance to be human again. And I think that the way to do that is through whatever samples I can get from the source of the bioweapon. I don’t have to remind you that the very fact that I am the leading expert on the Exinase virus, also an alien bioweapon, makes me the perfect person to find a cure for Sergeant Hopskirk’s condition.”

  Sylvia ended tartly, holding her chin up to defy the captain to refuse her what she wanted.

  Otepi was silent as she looked at the nursery site and then nodded once. “We leave in two hours. I have to remind you that this will not be first and foremost a medical operation. This will be a military intelligence mission to see if that Exin Beacon has the location of the Exin home world somehow encoded within it.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m very unobtrusive in my job,” Sylvia said with a nod. She waltzed out of Captain Otepi’s office to requisition her encounter suit and prepare for the field.

  Sylvia had been entirely truthful when she said that she wanted to go on the mission to seek a cure for Sergeant Hopskirk. But as the doctor was making her way through the busy corridors of the Hammerhead, she found her heart jumping at the thought that at the Exin Beacon was the answer to where Dane Williams had been taken.

  6

  By Fire and Dust

  “If you think you are going to shove me one more time, buddy, I promise you that I will . . .” Dane began his threat boldly, but it ended with him seized by the back of the neck and slammed on a cold slab of metal by his Exin guard.

  “Oh. Hello, you,” Dane managed to croak as his body pounded with pain. “I think you’re starting to like me.”

  The marine had been taken to some secretive place in the heart of the mother ship, dragged down and down through metal corridors that grew smaller, narrower, and quieter the further they traveled.

  Eventually, his guard had shoved him through an open hatch door and into this place, an oval room of dark-blue metal with one long slab in its center, clearly sculpted to an Exin’s form.

  “If this is your twisted, uncomfortable version of a massage parlor, I think I am starting to see why all of you crawdads are so uptight,” Dane managed to gasp. The guard slapped one heavy hand on his chest to hold him there, and the hatch door hissed open. Another, much smaller Exin with only two arms appeared.

  “Who’s he? What’s he doing!?” Dane said, watching as the smaller one scurried to one of the wall panels and made a few gestures for it to roll open to reveal rows and rows of gleaming silver instruments.

  “Hey, now . . . It was a joke. There’s no need for . . .” Dane started to say as the smaller Exin turned around. In his clawed hands was some kind of medical injector, which he jabbed into Dane’s neck without any hesitation.

  When Dane woke up, he realized two things. One, that he was still alive—and two, that he was no longer in pain.

  “What?” He blinked in confusion.

  He was still in the small medical room, staring up at the vaulted, almost organic ceiling. But he appeared to be entirely alone, from what he could see and hear.

  And his body felt curiously healthy.

  Dane pushed himself up on his elbows to look down at himself, seeing that he was dressed in the same dirty encounter suit that he had been wearing under his Assisted Mechanized Plate when he had been kidnapped. It was still torn and blood-stained in places, but when he raised his hands or opened the buttons to look at his chest, he could see no grazes, bruises, or bumps.

  “Huh?”

  And then Dane realized that he was not in any pain at all.

  The Exinase virus that he had been infected with—the infection that ate at his nerve endings and sent trembling, near-crippling daggers of pain up through his legs and his spine—wasn’t there. Somehow, he knew that he was cured of it in a total way that began as a body sense, one that was not based in his thoughts. Even after he had just taken Doctor Sylvia Heathcote’s Vito-neura antigen and experienced the wave of temporary relief, even after his pains subsided, he still felt the barest electric tingling at the edges of his consciousness.

  Dane realized that he had lived with that awareness of the virus—the tinnitus, the slight headache—for so long that he had learned to block it out when the more debilitating effects weren’t overtaking him.

  Now, however, Dane felt like he had been scrubbed raw by light and wore an entirely new body.
There was no stiffness, no aches, no sudden pangs of fire as his own central nervous system tried to kill him.

  Dane Williams realized that he was cured. That the Exin themselves, when they had injected him, must have cured him of their own virus.

  Weapons, was Dane’s next thought, as he slid off the cold metal slab and moved toward the panel in the wall where he had glimpsed the gleaming stainless steel instruments.

  “But how does the thing open?” He tapped at the panel in exasperation, and saw a dull line of scratches along one side. Hieroglyphs. Curling shapes cut through with jagged lines.

  “Aha!” Hesitantly, he pressed a finger to the top one . . .

  For it to flare a dull green and then shift tone darker and darker into a mauve bruise.

  That didn’t look good, Dane thought, pressing the one below it quickly.

  Just as the door to his room hissed open, and his friend the Exin guard marched in with an alien cough. The alien fixed Dane with a sharp stare and leveled the whorled shell of a pulse gun at him.

  “Would you believe me if I told you that I was looking for Tylenol?” Dane said.

  “Skrey!” The creature said, and a small green light flared from a crystal diode on a tiny unit mounted near its mandibles.

  “Get ready.” The guard, still holding the pulse gun, reached to one of the bulbous metal modules at his side, plucking it from his utility belt and holding it up for it to petal open like a metal flower. Out spilled a light, cream-colored cloth.

  “Excuse me?” Dane asked.

  The Exin stepped away from the piles of material on the ground, gesturing between it and Dane with its gun.

  I guess you want me to wear that!? Dane groaned, reaching cautiously down (half expecting to be batted or swiped or struck by his not-so-friendly guard) and pulled at it to discover that it was a light material. A jumpsuit.

  Dane considered sharing the finer points of human courtesy and decency with the Exin, but one look at the guard’s flaring mandibles made him realize that the conversation would be a waste of time. So instead, he stripped down to pull on the human-shaped jumpsuit. He found that it fitted near perfectly and even had pouches and pockets and belt hoops (although all entirely empty).

  “Great. A-plus for human tailoring. Now, why do I feel like I’m the proverbial turkey, and this is Christmas?” Dane asked.

  “Move.” The guard stepped back out of the room, gesturing for Dane to follow. Since all he had in this room was a cold metal slab and no way of opening the cabinet, he obliged.

  What did the queen say? That I have won the right to die? Dane thought grimly as he followed. He wasn’t sure that he liked that sort of logic.

  Dane was led through the warren of corridors in the mother ship and was once again surrounded by the alien drone workers as they moved back and forth through the ship.

  But this time, he was sure that it was different. They appeared to be avoiding him, or, when they looked up to croak, hiss, or chitter at him—they did so in a diminished way, quickly murmuring their cries and looking away as if the human were cursed.

  Dane was really starting to get a bad feeling about this, as his guard moved and cajoled him down the passageway. He and the guard hadn’t traveled very far when Dane felt a deep, vibrational shudder through the body of the mother ship, and then—stillness.

  He paused, looking back at the guard.

  “We’ve arrived, haven’t we?” he said.

  “Skrar!” (“Move it!”)

  The guard pushed and shoved him down a wide flight of stairs, Dane’s light shoes padding while the guard’s talons clicked on every one. The walls opened out on one side . . .

  Dane saw that these stairs switchbacked down the side of a large hangar, shaped like multiple archways that reminded Dane of very old style railway terminals he had seen in some textbook or another—only here, everything was made of metal.

  The marine saw the movement of bodies down there as Exin raced back and forth between one seed craft to another, each one hovering on its own dull blue glow of a force field. The pipes snaking up toward it seemed vaguely organic, like they were grubs that were being fed.

  “Ssss!” Dane was so busy trying to gain information on the military hardware of the Exin craft below that he completely failed to spot the large, hulking shape ascending the steps that he almost collided into before it was too late.

  Dane’s eyes shot up, registered the four arms (no wait, three . . .) of the Exin warrior in front of him. He saw the crushed old legacy of a fracture on one side of the Exin’s face scales . . .

  Oh no. It was War Master Okruk.

  “Sss-Tra’kh!” the war master spat, his two good forearms lashing out to almost shove at Dane. But they paused just as quickly, a few inches away from Dane’s shoulder.

  Are you trying to scare me? Dane glared back at the Exin general. Glared up at the Exin general.

  War Master Okruk was much larger than many other Exin that Dane had so far seen—even the personal warrior guard of the queen that Dane had faced on Planet 892. But he wasn’t just tall. He hulked, hunching over his own form. He also wore a type of battle plate—large metal scales that were shaped over his own, with small nodules and diode encrustations that Dane presumed were sensors or weapon ports of some kind.

  “Are we going to go for another round, War Master?” Dane said in a low, menacing hiss. He was aware that the guard behind him was saying nothing at all, as if unsure what to do in such a confrontation.

  “Sss . . .” Okruk started to growl, and one of the diodes nearest his scaled neck flashed green.

  “. . . if I must speak your foul and primitive tongue,” the translation caught on a second too late. Dane didn’t mind. He presumed the first part of that sentence was probably another insult.

  “You are not worthy of this, human—I should put you over the side right now and be done with you!” Dane saw the war master’s multiple shoulders flex as if he were about to do just that.

  “Dane,” he said. “Please address me by my name and rank. Sergeant Dane Williams of the Assisted Mechanized Infantry.”

  Okruk’s mouth parts quivered and trembled in rage, opening and closing as if anticipating the kill Okruk so badly wanted. In the end, the war master jerked back with a violent shake of his head.

  “Your name is unworthy of me!” the war master croaked. “You are unworthy!”

  Dane got the impression that there was some prohibition holding the war master back—just like the way that he had been stared at and side-eyed by the other drone Exin. The queen had decided his fate. Dane thought that meant that no other Exin would dare interfere with it.

  “Your queen thought I was worthy,” Dane said lightly, taking a half step forward.

  “Ssskrak!” his guard suddenly hissed. Some variation of telling him to shut up, Dane assumed.

  The war master hissed loud and low, a croon of violence. “You think that you are special, little human thing?” Okruk remained stock still. “You think that the queen’s wishes will protect you forever!?”

  Dane’s ears pricked up at that. Was this a sign that there was trouble in Exin politics? That the war master—or perhaps others—were prepared to defy their own leader?

  “This is irrelevant!” Okruk suddenly pulled himself up to his entire height and waved one languid claw at the guard, who hurriedly stepped out of the way.

  Dane, however, held his ground.

  “It is almost a shame that you will die so soon, little man thing,” War Master Okruk seemed to sneer at him. “It would almost have been amusing for you to see the fate of your people. Of your home world. Of everything that you thought you were!”

  The war master started to chitter as he stepped away and past Dane, striding up the stairs as if the encounter really had meant little more than an annoying fly in his path.

  “The universe will forget the humans ever existed, little man!” Okruk’s voice rose triumphantly. “In fact, they will never even know about your third-rate lit
tle civilization! You will be consumed by fire and dust like all the others we have crushed!”

  Dane was left on the turn of the stairs with a dull, hot anger in his chest as he looked up at the retreating back of the war master.

  It wasn’t true, he swore. Humanity would not disappear. They would not be forgotten.

  We will survive, he thought—as the guard jabbed him painfully in the back and forced him to continue on his path.

  7

  The Device

  “This is it,” Sylvia heard the captain’s breath come over the suit communicator, startling her slightly.

  Doctor Heathcote stood on the edge of the jungle, wearing a pared-down version of one of the Assisted Mechanized Plate suits—the Mark One suit, according to the marine engineer Joey Corsoni. It was hotter in here than she had expected, and a part of her was feeling guilty that she had spent her military career advising young men and women on how to survive in these things without ever having worn one before.

  Right now, however, she was standing looking at a large outcrop of dark rock that poked its head from the jungle of Planet 892.

  And the Exin that stood in an avenue leading toward it. They had certainly given her a shock for a moment, and she didn’t believe her new suit’s sensors when they told her that the stationary Exin were not alive, but were only carved rock.

  But this is the place where Dane and the others came, Sylvia thought as she saw Captain Otepi in her own (Mark Two!) Orbital Amp suit. Otepi stepped into the avenue between the statues, along with a team of other suited marines.

  “Eyes up. Full scanners,” she heard Otepi breathing over the open channel.

  “Remember your biological filters,” Sylvia murmured.

  “Doctor?” Otepi paused at the entrance to the cave.

  “If my studies are correct, that place in there is the epicenter of the mutagenic virus. Your marines need to take extra care that all filters are running at maximum and be aware not to break suit seals.”