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

  “Rargh!” Even with all of his augmented strength, the metal block was hard to move. Dane started to feel the give and cost on his own meat-body inside the suit. It seemed like forever to get to the edge of the ditch, and then to heave the final load over the end and collapse himself after it into the wide, sandy bottom, panting.

  With accompanying grunts and shouts of pain or agitation, other Mechs were doing the same. Private Marks had actually completed the job ahead of him and was crouching in the trench, looking over the far side.

  We’re done. What now? Dane was thinking, a moment before his suit’s parameters updated.

  >Success!

  >OBJECTIVE 3: Advance on Enemy Position…

  The green-vector arrow pointed straight over the patch of flat land toward a much higher embankment at the end of the practice field.

  Almost a hundred feet. Dane hazarded a look over the top of the ditch to see bursts and flares of light where others—full Marines or drones or automated units—were busy firing at their positions.

  “Advance? Are they crazy!?” Dane heard some of the radio chatter over his suit. It was Private Redguard, normally a slim guy in his meat-life.

  PHA-BOOM! There were more explosions and flares of dirt across the patch of simulated battlefield, and the lines of fire seemed to be walking toward them in waves, before concentrating wherever one of the Mechanized Infantry dared to raise a head.

  “We’ll get blown to bits!” Redguard was shouting, and Dane saw Marks turn his Mech’s head warily, as if waiting for someone else to go first.

  In fact, everyone is waiting for someone else to go first, Dane thought.

  “Together! We go together!” That was Bruce, shouting from his own hidden crouch in the ditch, beside his metal block.

  “We use the blocks!” Marks offered instead, already moving to start to lift the corner of one… His suit was still slightly blackened on one side from the explosion where he had taken a near-direct hit.

  But it was only soot, Dane realized. What had Corsoni said? That these suits could take the punishment of most firearms, even up to general purpose machine guns!?

  Poor body-mind, he remembered. He had been caught thinking in terms of meat-flesh. Of weakened biology that would be ripped apart by bullets.

  Whereas, right now he was inside a walking tank.

  “No need!” he called to Marks, feeling that tremor of glee at the thought. Like he was indestructible.

  “What!?” Marks stopped hauling.

  “Look—they’re not going to kill us!” Dane said. Are they?

  “These suits are designed for punishment. We’re the freaking Mechanized Infantry Division!” he shouted.

  “You’re crazy,” Osgud offered over the suit-to-suit communicator system. “You wanna be cannon fodder, be my guest!”

  Idiot, Dane thought. Maybe it was the exhilaration of being in a Mech suit once again, or maybe it was the fact that his legs didn’t hurt, but Dane remembered his earlier promise. He was going to show them all that he deserved to be here. That he was brave enough and capable enough to be here.

  “Watch me,” he snarled, seizing the reinforced blocks that made up one edge of the ditch and hauling himself up and over it…

  And into a world of light and noise.

  >Auto-Glare. Sound Dampeners. Activating Suit Auto-Defense…

  Dane rolled forward, feeling his suit cinch a little tighter, at the same time as the outermost plates seemed to lift.

  Making a crumple plate? Dane was thinking as he bounced to his feet, legs extending into a run. He started to zigzag across the field, just as they had taught him to do in basic training.

  PHA-BOOOM! More dirt exploded at his side and behind him, but none of the shooters appeared to be as quick in their reactions as he was at running. Dane varied the time between each lurch to one side and then another, so that the shooters couldn’t predict where he would be.

  “Follow him!” he heard Bruce shouting, and more calls of “Boo-yah!” “Marines!” from behind as they followed his lead (let him become the target for the flak, he was thinking). Something hit him directly on the hip, like a cannonball.

  “Arg!” Dane didn’t know it, of course, he was busy seeing white glare and gray. But he was somersaulted over and had been sent spinning into the dirt.

  My legs. My legs! He panicked. He was lying on his back, just as he had been back then—when the dome of New Sanctuary landed on him.

  >AMP Suit Impact! Right Hip-plate -10%…

  Dane was too busy hyperventilating and feeling the pain radiate over his hip and thigh to see the message the first time that it flashed up.

  “Move on! Move on!” he heard Bruce shouting from somewhere, and then the suit’s damage message repeated itself.

  Only ten percent! That direct hit had only caused ten percent damage to his suit! When he looked down, he saw that the plate over his hip and thigh appeared crumpled and crushed as if under a heavy weight and was surrounded by blackened scorch marks.

  “But I’m okay. It was only a little bit of damage,” he said with amazement, suddenly feeling vindicated as he pushed himself up. He started to run forward again.

  He had been right. The suit he was inside was a walking man-tank, and it could take the punishment—if he could.

  Dane was a little behind the front runner, Bruce, but he was among the first of the pack to scramble up to the embankment to find a line of auto-gun drones there. As soon as the Mechs had reached the embankment, the drones seemed to deactivate, but Dane purposely rolled himself to the far side just the same, skidding down the side of the embankment with a grateful sigh beside the others.

  The rest of the squad came in, panicked and panicking, in dribs and drabs, skidding, tumbling, and rolling to the floor.

  All save one. Redguard.

  >Success!

  >OBJECTIVE ACHIEVED…

  His suit appeared happy with the outcome, but for the sergeant, the result was mixed, to say the least.

  “Congratulations, privates. You have performed your first fully-suited operation. A few of you are clearly M.I.D. material.” Lashmeier flickered a look at Dane, “Private Williams,” as well as the first to make the far side of the embankment, “Private Cheng,” but then the sergeant’s tone shifted.

  “But the excellence of a few is outweighed by the truly abominable stupidity OF ALL OF YOU PUT TOGETHER!” the sergeant bawled at them. Lashmeier looked very small in his fatigues next to them, but his comparative size did nothing to reduce his anger.

  “Private Redguard broke an ankle coming out of the ditch to the battle zone, and how many of you stopped to help him!?” Lashmeier was shouting.

  “Sir—I didn’t realize this was a collaborative mission, sir…” Hopskirk had the audacity to answer.

  “I beg your pardon, Marine!?” Lashmeier turned his ire at him. “Did you not hear the Marine Code? No one left behind, no one! Or are you attempting to say that I did not explain the code to you well enough? That I did not do my job—is that what you are trying to tell me!?”

  Even inside his suit, Dane could hear the private’s gulp of anxiousness.

  “Sir no sir—of course I would never…” he tried to say.

  “Hopskirk, because it seems that you like excuses not to help your brother Marines, you clearly need to learn that we are a team! We NEVER leave one of our own behind, you hear me!?” Lashmeier was shouting. He promptly gave poor Hopskirk a lesson by ordering him to pack away the gymnasium equipment, thus helping the Marine Corps out in some way.

  “And as for the rest of you, get up—three laps around base,” Lashmeier shouted.

  “In the suits, sir?” Marks asked.

  “Four laps around the base and another if anyone else questions my orders!” Lashmeier shouted. Everyone struggled to their feet, feeling exhausted and tired, but setting off in a ragged double line.

  And, as Dane naturally fell into place beside Bruce, he was aware of the almost murderous looks of jealo
usy that Private Osgud and Marks shot their way.

  Wonderful.

  7

  What a Marine Is Capable of…

  The sergeant was pushing them hard. If Dane had thought that his days were busy before, then he clearly wasn’t prepared for what was coming over the next two weeks. Their active day was extended by two hours, and extra training sessions were added.

  Dane and the other Private-nothings of the M.I.D. not only had rotating sessions in battlefield operations, firearms, and engineering, but also two rounds of daily PT—running marathons and climbing frames, swimming and scrambling over assault courses. They also had what was starting to be called the “metal mayhem,” when they would have to do all of the same activities, plus several object-movement ones, inside their AMP suits.

  The metal mayhem sessions, thankfully, were what Dane excelled at. It was only everything else that he felt like he was lagging behind in. Like now, when he was struggling to take notes and not hiss in pain during the daily briefing, as his legs were seizing up.

  “…best guess is some sort of organic-metal composite…” Dr. Heathcote was saying, pointing to the board where a fuzzy picture of a pointy-looking seed pod was magnified too large.

  Why is she telling us about plants? Dane tried to concentrate. NOT plants. Exin. He tried to focus, but another electric glimmer spread up through his legs to his hips, making them judder under the desk.

  Ack! The problem wasn’t just overworking his legs—but also when he stopped, they would start to cramp and seize up. He held in his pain, reaching down to his thigh to find the medical unit still securely attached. He depressed the emergency release button.

  And nothing happened.

  What?

  He pressed the button again, but again nothing happened. The pain was only getting worse, not better…

  And meanwhile, the picture on the screen was of one of the Exin craft, and it was a part of a whole slide show of image stills and film clips showing these small, malevolent ovals falling into Earth’s atmosphere. Then, they scudded across the sky, emitting a blue glow from their backsides. They looked vaguely biological, with strange whorls and ripples on their surfaces.

  “Propulsion system believed to be gravity manipulation, meaning that they can travel at tremendous speeds…” Heathcote was saying about the glowing aspect of the Exin’s crafts.

  “They’ve got fracking gravity control, and we’re still on rockets and boosters?” Dane heard Bruce mumble at his side. If Dane had been concentrating on anything other than his malfunctioning injector unit, then he would have agreed that this hardly seemed fair.

  “They haven’t even come back,” Dane heard Private Marks whispering to Osgud a row behind him, where they sat in the auditorium. “Maybe those crawdads had one taste of human missiles and realized they were out of their depth!”

  Idiot, Dane thought, leaning against his hand on the small desk and trying to breathe through his rising pain. Marks and Osgud, as well as many others here, hadn’t been directly affected by the Exin attack. They hadn’t had their homes bombarded. Or their hopes crushed. Anyone with half a brain could turn on a news channel and see just how badly Earth had been beaten, Dane thought miserably.

  “We believe that they have both an internal and an external skeletal structure,” Heathcote instructed, moving to the images of the various bits of body parts left behind by the Exin when the few ships were blown out of Earth skies. “Either that, or the external plate is cybernetically attached to the inner creature.” The parts of gray-green and blue shell looked segmented and chitinous, like some deep-sea creature or a close-up of a spider, but with lots of small, gleaming nodules brushed with metal.

  Like an AMP suit, Dane was thinking. Suddenly, his leg spasmed, smacking his knee against the underside of his desk and half-forcing him out of his chair.

  Ow! He shot back up, hearing the snigger of Osgud and Marks behind him.

  “Oops! There he goes again!” Osgud was enjoying the show, clearly.

  Dane spun around in his seat to glare at Osgud.

  Just as a shadow eclipsed them all.

  “Is there a problem here, privates?”

  Oh crap.

  It was Sergeant Lashmeier, looming over them with his face as stern as a broken brick. “Are you not finding the good doctor’s words interesting enough for you, Private Williams?” Lashmeier glowered.

  “Sir no sir!” Dane did his best to stand up and salute, but one of his legs buckled as soon as he moved. He ended up on his face, staring at the booted foot of the sergeant.

  Argh! Dane felt a wave of humiliation engulf him as first Osgud and Marks, and then at least half of the rest of the platoon started to hiss and snigger with laughter.

  Lashmeier stood above him, impassive, and made no effort to stop their laughter.

  “Get up, Marine,” he said in a low voice, and Dane growled as he turned himself over, his hands pushing himself up to his knees—

  “Ack!” Another wave of pain shot from heel to head, and he crumpled to the floor once again. The sniggering had another wave, but Dane was only concentrating on the small sigh of despair from the sergeant above him.

  “I said get up, Private Williams,” Lashmeier said in a low voice. “Or do you want them to continue laughing at you?”

  No one is going to treat me special or cry over my disability here. Williams thought about the words that the sergeant had offered him when he had signed up. He took a deep breath and hissed it out through his teeth as he forced his arms to press himself up into a crouch…

  “Sergeant! This is entirely unnecessary. This man needs medical treatment!” The accusative tones of Dr. Heathcote broke through the auditorium.

  Oh no, no-no-no!

  “It’s fine. I got this!” Dane hissed at Heathcote. The last thing I want is to be viewed as a helpless case in front of Lashmeier and the others!

  “You clearly don’t, Marine,” Heathcote returned.

  “He has to try on his own,” the sergeant said in a harsh voice, rebuking the doctor as the rest of the room fell silent, watching this conflict. “If he can’t stand like a man, then what am I doing with him in my platoon?”

  Gee, thanks. Dane was breathing hard. Knowing that he had to do it, for the sake of his own pride. And his career.

  “You go, Williams,” he heard Bruce murmur encouragingly.

  I can do this. Focus on my goals, Dane thought, pushing once again with his arms.

  Somehow the pain seemed to have radiated all the way up his legs and hips to his spine and then across his shoulders to his arms, too. His arms started to shake with the effort as he pushed himself from his crouch, feeling his legs wobble and shake underneath him.

  “Sergeant, really—this can do more damage than his body can take!” Heathcote was saying.

  You’re not helping, Doctor! Dane gritted his teeth and clenched his eyes against the pain, before hissing out and starting to rise on his legs. He got from a crouch to a bent-kneed hover as another wave of pain shook his body.

  “Rargh!” With a grunt, he forced himself to stand straight. Then, with tears of effort in his eyes, he performed a shaking hand salute straight at the sergeant.

  “There you go, Williams.” Lashmeier stepped forward to say quietly, barely over a whisper to Dane, “Don’t you dare think for a moment that a Marine cannot conquer any pain, because you clearly can.” The sergeant turned to go. “CLASS DISMISSED!” he called out, and with that, the spell was broken, and Dane crumpled back to his knees in a panting tremble.

  “Sacred heavens!” Heathcote was at his side, already fiddling with his thigh harness. “You’ve run out of antigen, that’s why.” Heathcote threw a muttered insult at the disappearing back of Lashmeier. “That man will kill you if he keeps punishing your body like this!” She hissed, disappearing to grab her briefcase, before returning. She had another set of ampules to load into Dane’s medical unit and small medical scanner.

  Punishment? Dane was thinking. It�
�s not punishment. It’s training.

  “I said I got this, Doctor!” Dane hissed, feeling compromised and weak. He had to rely on her and her drugs, but if he did so, then the chances of gaining any sort of respect in Lashmeier’s eyes would grow smaller and smaller.

  “Do you?” Heathcote said angrily, glaring at Dane. “Because right now, you don’t look like a man who has got this.” She jammed the new ampules of the antigen into the medical unit and then smacked the scanner against his thigh.

  “Ack!” Dane felt the pinch of needles as the scanner whirred and withdrew some of his blood.

  “What are you doing now?” Dane said resentfully, feeling the newly-loaded compounds sink into his leg and start to filter through his system. The relief they brought was almost blissful, but he didn’t want to admit that to Heathcote or to himself.

  “I’m checking the levels of Exinase in your blood, you ungrateful idiot!” Heathcote said in tight-lipped anger, looking at the readouts. She suddenly pursed her lips. “What?” she muttered.

  “What is it?” Dane felt a moment of panic. “Have they gotten worse? What’s wrong?”

  “When were you infected, Private Williams?” Heathcote was saying.

  As if she didn’t know already, Dane thought. “When New Sanctuary was attacked,” he said in a grumble. “I thought you, of all people, would remember that.”

  But Heathcote had already pulled back, tapping on the scanner for several long moments, and was ignoring him.

  “Doc—what’s going on? Are you done poking and prodding me? Can I get back to training now!?” he asked.

  Heathcote pulled back and looked at Dane with shadowed eyes. “There’s something wrong here, Private. There is no way that you can have this high a concentration of Exinase in your system if you were infected six weeks ago. My antigen should have bonded to eighty percent of the available virus by now,” she was saying.