Metal Warrior: Steel Curtain (Mech Fighter Book 8) Read online

  WHAM!

  >Impact, all areas!

  His holofield was blurting out the warning, but all that Dane was aware of was the world catapulting over and over, spraying dust and sand as he grappled with the Exin Beetle across the alien plains. He saw the flash of pulse fire, but he was unsure if it was his own or the Exin Beetle’s weapons. Either way, the alarms blared and mingled as he fought, and there was a scrape of sparks as one of the Exin’s legs tore across his chassis.

  Dane’s thoughts were filled with fury. This thing had hurt one of his team. Dane had personally trained each of them from the very beginning. He remembered the fresh-faced Isaias appearing at the Jupiter Marine Training Platform, all awkwardness and eagerness in equal measures. He had never been off-world before. He had signed up to try and make a difference.

  Dane struggled, grabbing one of the legs and bending it back with the full stretch of his own metal arms. There was pressure, and then a spray of sparks and the squeal of metal picked up on his Mech’s microphones. He could feel the pistons and servo mechanisms of his suit locking in and exerting enough strength to tear apart buildings.

  Isaias had been there when they captured the Exin queen, Dane remembered. He had been there when they went to the Traveler’s world too.

  Suddenly, the tension released, and Dane was holding the forelegs up, lifting the Exin Mech back off of its haunches to struggle, kicking at his chassis with its legs. Dane didn’t even consciously recognize it, but a thousand hours of training as a Mech-Brawler were kicking in, amplified through his suit.

  “Main laser!” Dane snarled when he had the opposing Mech exposed. Three glittering green targeting arrows converged on the center of his screen. Any possible onlookers on the outside would have seen a bright circle of light appear on the nose cone of his chassis . . .

  The three vectors merged to flash red.

  “Fire!” Dane snarled and felt the shunt as the powerful main laser burst into being to slam into the body of the Exin Beetle. The pulse laser was a column of pure white lightning, leaving after-images in Dane’s eyes. It tore into the Exin blue-steel shell, slagging and melting the substance before a plume of fire exploded out of the Beetle’s back, and all strength vanished from the mechanical limbs.

  Dane threw the dead thing uselessly away, still spitting and roaring as he turned for the next.

  >Sergeant, I have to remind you of your current injury levels . . .

  The suit A.I. was trying to get through to him, and Dane had a vague, distant recollection of a lot of amber and crimson alerts on his suits, thanks to first smaller Exin spiders, and then several direct hits by the Exin Beetles.

  Frack that, Dane thought, firing one forearm laser at the next Beetle engaging with one of his automated Traveler units as he started to charge forward.

  “Sarge! Landing two hundred yards away on your three o’clock!” he heard Corsoni aboard the Gladius inform him, but Dane was incensed with fury as he put his shoulder down and hit the Beetle with a football-type block.

  WHAM!

  More crimson alerts flashed in his eyes as both he and the Exin Mech were thrown into the air, Dane hitting the dirt and skidding, while the Beetle flipped, legs overhead, and rolled across the alien plains, sending dirt spraying everywhere.

  >Sir, really, I have to insist . . .

  The A.I. was saying this as Dane pushed himself up—to realize that he was lopsided.

  “What!?”

  Several of the servos in his lower right calf had gone, popped out of their housing, which itself had been crumpled in his recent brawling skirmishes. He could still move, run, walk, and all that was regular and expected of him—but his leg was behaving strangely, and he wouldn’t be able to perform another shoulder barge like that one again.

  >Sergeant, proximity!

  The A.I. warned him, just before the lasers on the Exin Beetle he had just sent flying found him. As he had been looking at his leg, the creature had flipped itself over, gotten back onto its feet, and fired.

  WHAM!

  >Warning, sir! Red Alert for left side carapace, left leg, right arm! Amber alert all front areas . . .

  Dane was slammed backwards into the dirt by the blast. He saw stars as his head bounced so hard that not even the rubber foam padding of his harness could stop the metal behind it from hurting him. He tasted blood in his mouth, realized that he must have bitten his tongue, and was pushing himself over . . .

  WHAM! WHAM!

  There was a trio of pulse blasts singeing the alien air overhead, and Dane realized that two of the Traveler units had converged on this Beetle and were engaged in a shoot-out with the thing. Dane saw one of the Travelers stagger backwards as it was hit—and then, a flash of brilliant white light eclipsed its chassis. It had been the already critically injured Mech unit, Dane realized. A final strike from one of the Exin had destroyed it.

  But not before the final Exin Beetle itself was taken out by the rest of the Traveler Mech units, and the battle was over.

  “Williams? Williams—I’m on your location . . . man down?” It was Cheng on the comms as the Ares swooped overhead. The Gladius had already landed, and Hendrix and the others were carrying Isaias’ into its open launch bay doors.

  “Yeah, man down.” Dane sighed, picking himself awkwardly up from the sand and loping, as fast as possible, back to the Gladius.

  “I’m sorry.” There was a pause on the other end of the line before Cheng’s voice returned. “It’s going to be a fight to get out of here,” he said, and the meaning was obvious. There would be a time for grief, but it would not be now.

  “I know,” Dane breathed, as the welcoming shadows of the launch bay surrounded him. Dane turned as the launch bay doors started to close behind him. He could see the Exin power station in the distance, with its small pillars of smoke rising.

  “Activate detonation sequence,” Dane muttered, for the counter on his holo to start to count down.

  7

  Giant Slayers and Dragon Hunters

  >Impact! Right Outer hull plate! . . .

  Captain Otepi snarled as her Marine Corps fighter shuddered, and a whole new set of brilliant red alarms flared into life across her cockpit screen. The starscape outside spun and swirled (which is to say—she spun and swirled) as she tried to avoid the multiple bolts of meson fire that the Exin mother ship had launched after her.

  There. A sudden glimpse of the operation swinging past her cockpit—the two Marine Corps fighters darting back and forth between the giant spiderlike Exin ansible transmitters as another one erupted into a giant flare of brilliant white light.

  They’re almost done, Otepi was thinking, just as another wave of meson blasts ripped through space toward her.

  There are too many of them.

  It was a truth that she had been, vainly, trying not to let herself realize—but the realization was unavoidable. Only one of the Exin mother ships had come here to defend their ansible transmitter, but no sooner had it arrived than it started disgorging flights of Exin seed craft from both sides of its belly.

  “Computer—how many targets!?” Otepi barely had enough time to lift her eyes to check the navigation and targeting screens. She was too busy avoiding the oncoming attack vectors, meson blasts, pulse lasers, and enemy torpedoes.

  >Targeting Computer / Scanning . . .

  >>14 vessels TOTAL, 13 Exin seed craft, 1 Exin mother ship . . .

  “Only fourteen?” she managed to groan to herself as she threw her ship into another tight barrel roll across the burning vacuum. She had already taken out a handful of the smaller Exin seed craft, as had her lieutenant in Fighter Two, currently on the far side of the Exin mother ship . . .

  What!? Otepi saw her lieutenant’s position once again. “Fighter Two—pick up, stars damn it! You’re too far!” she shouted through the comms. Her job was to distract and to occupy the enemy—not assault!

  But the lieutenant in the identical Marine Corps fighter craft had suddenly swerved toward the mot
her ship, underneath an oncoming flight of three seed craft, and strafed the side of one of the giant ship’s nacelles with a line of pulse lasers.

  It was an entirely reckless move, but Otepi had to admit that she felt her heart leap as she saw the burst-flashes of explosions. The Marine Fighter’s blasts must have found power lines or vents.

  Unfortunately, it was still a stupid decision.

  “Captain, I’m keeping them busy!” Otepi heard her lieutenant say in a jubilant and yet savage voice—moments before one of the large, solid-white beams of light burst out from the craft and slammed into the side of the fighter ship, making the Marine Corps fighter look like a ridiculously small delicacy skewered on the end of a cocktail stick.

  For an impossible second, time appeared to freeze as Otepi looked on in horror at the struck ship. She thought that somehow her eyes could make out every last detail of the craft in the distance, the way that the brilliant light caught at its panels, the glint of its distant cockpit . . .

  And then there was a flash and a rapidly expanding and evaporating circle of burning gasses as the Marine Corps fighter, in its entirety, was destroyed.

  “No!” Otepi was already turning her ship toward the mother ship out of outrage and angered instinct, but no—she had to force her hands to keep turning the flight controls as she came into the firing arc of another three of the seed craft.

  Revenge was impossible. It was unthinkable.

  Wham! Wham! Wham!

  Another blister of shots struck the Exin mother ship, impossibly, from the rear of the craft. Captain Otepi had a moment of confusion as she struggled to see who or what could have been attacking it from that vector.

  >Squadron Ships Identified! Ares and Gladius . . .

  The two fighter crafts of Cheng and Williams surged through the atmosphere of the planet below, at the tips of their own clouds of vapor and burnt atmosphere.

  >Incoming Message!

  “Captain! This is Sergeant Cheng of the Ares. Mission accomplished. Reactors are going to blow any minute.” The implacable Bruce Cheng’s voice sounded cold and practical, and it was something that Otepi could rest her willpower against as she rallied herself. A moment later, the report came back from the other two fighters in her squadron too.

  “Captain, ansible satellites destroyed. Operation is a success—we’re coming to your location!”

  “No!” Otepi said immediately. They might have completed the mission—but she knew that they were still a long way from being able to call it a success.

  Because, well, if we all die out here, I’m not sure that would be a resounding victory . . . a smaller, more cynical part of her thought.

  But still. They had destroyed the ansible transmitter. Phase Two of Hammer Blow was clear. Her hands moved to the holo control on her flight deck, punching the authorization controls for the prerecorded snippet of code to be fired from her ship’s much smaller ansible back toward human space. She turned back to the tactical computer as meson blasts exploded all around her.

  “Get yourselves out of there, Ares and Gladius!” Otepi cried out. “Pull back! We’re done!”

  Otepi dragged the flight controls to one side and then another to avoid the shots and blasts of those thirteen-or-so seed craft coming their way. They had done a good job at disrupting their surging attack, but now they were everywhere, and there was no way to keep them all occupied at the same time . . .

  Otepi saw first one, and then another of the energy readings spike on the other Marine Fighters as they started to cycle their miniature jump engines.

  “Come on, come on—come on!” she hissed, firing her trigger to hit another of the seed craft and send it winging to one side.

  WHAM!

  Before Fighter Three went down.

  “No!” Otepi murmured in distress. The Marine Corps fighter had just started to create its own small corona of burning plasma. Its jump engine had activated when the Exin seed-craft shot had found it, hitting its rear carriage and bursting it apart in a brilliant explosion of blinding white.

  Fighter Four was luckier, sparkling with white light as it was flung forward, leaving behind the expanding halo of burning plasma as it jumped.

  That left the Ares and the Gladius. Otepi was turning in her flight in a wide, crazed arc to see where they were. Her gloved hands hesitated over her own jump engine protocols. Something inside of her wouldn’t let her leave the last two marine craft here, to whatever fate had in store for them.

  “Otepi—jump, damn you!” The message came back from Sergeant Dane Williams, and she ignored him as she swerved and flipped her fighter once more, meson blasts rippling atop her hull.

  >Impact Warning! Upper hull plate!

  The digital damage display was reading an almost-critical red on one nacelle, and a whole lot of alarming orange everywhere else. She had taken a lot of flak from the enemy, but as she turned back toward the large mother ship, she could see that the Ares and the Gladius were still trying their best to rise out of the pack of seed craft that pursued them.

  “You can still get clear, Otepi—do it!” Cheng was in apparent agreement with the other ship’s sergeant.

  “Like hell I will,” Otepi snapped. She knew that neither the Ares nor the Gladius could fire up their jump engines yet. One lucky shot from an enemy craft would result in another ball of burning plasma and shrapnel pieces joining at least two others of her squadron.

  But the Marine Corps fighters were larger and faster than their seed craft opponents, Otepi knew. Get them on a straight, and they could outpace them. Maybe fly far enough to hit the jump engine and be out of there . . .

  The only problem being that flying on a straight also made you a pretty perfect target to get shot at, Otepi knew.

  Without thinking, she flung her own Marine Fighter straight toward the Ares and the Gladius and the seed craft that rose around them.

  “Captain—what are you doing!?” She heard Dane William’s angered shout, just before the Gladius peeled away to one side to avoid the collision.

  >Alert! Proximity Warning! Multiple Alerts!

  Right behind the Gladius and the Ares, the crowd of seed craft had a moment to react, whirling out of the way just as Otepi opened fire with everything she had. Meson blasts and pulse lasers slammed into the phalanx of pursuing Exin fighters . . .

  >Target Hit! Target immobilized . . .

  >Target Hit! Target compromised . . .

  It was almost too easy not to miss as such a close range, but after a furious moment of fast-moving craft rushing around her in a storm, Otepi was suddenly free from the pack, and was curving her Marine Fighter craft around in a wide arc.

  >Warning!

  A giant beam of brilliant white light shot under her nose cone, searing across space. It was from the Exin mother ship. There were now no more seed craft between her and it. Behind her, the Exin seed craft hunting packs had been scattered by her kamikaze flight, and there was the mother ship sitting great and dark, straight ahead of her.

  Should I?

  The thought flashed through her mind. Was it what an officer of the Marine Corps should do? For a moment, she understood perfectly the motivations of her lieutenant who had sought to fling herself and her ship uselessly against the Exin behemoth. It was the same human impulse that led to stories of giant slayers and dragon hunters.

  Otepi had bought the Ares and the Gladius a brief window of time. Enough, perhaps, for them to activate their jump engines and start the leapfrogging process that would shuttle them across half the galaxy and back home to Earth space.

  >Warning! Tracking computers detected!

  Multiple flaring orange vectors, each one describing a warning, were flashing across her ship’s control field. The mother ship was trying to lock more targeting lasers on her, which would mean that it could shoot her out of space with ease. Added to this, the seed craft that were quick enough to turn around were also trying to lock their targeting computers on her as well.

  “Frack it!�
�� Otepi snarled in rage, her gloved hands tightening on the flight control sticks.

  As much as she wanted to throw herself forward against the mother ship—the chances of her doing anything but turning into neon confetti right now were slim. She might be courageous, but the captain wasn’t foolish.

  Survive now to defeat more later, she promised herself, hurling her ship hard into a roll as she spun and activated the jump engine. She felt the tremor run through the entire ship, through the walls, through the metal floor of her cockpit, and through the flight chair as her computer warnings just kept on coming. Would her engines have the chance to fire before the enemy’s guns finally found her?

  Otepi didn’t know. She just flew.

  8

  Phase Two

  Tens of thousands of light years away from the events at the Exin ansible transmitter, a dance of coded electrons was detected by the hypersensitive Marine Corps sensors at the training platform outside Jupiter.

  The signal was received late, a span of seven minutes and twenty-three seconds after it was sent from across the galaxy—but it was received. Automatic alerts were triggered and launch processes were started. Thousands of algorithms started, and outside the Jupiter Marine Training Platform, the giant wheel of Deployment Gate One started to turn, flickering with red lightning while squadrons of waiting attack vessels powered up their engines.

  Finally, just a few heartbeats after zillabytes of information were processed, it all awaited the input of one human.