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

  First Admiral Yankis stood at the ready in the Marine Corps High Command as the multiple holofields kept him and his elite staff updated with the latest strategies, predictions, and updates.

  >Authorization required . . .

  A single line of code bleeped in front of him.

  First Admiral Yankis, a small man with a crew cut of silver hair and a perpetual frown, remained motionless for one moment.

  >Authorization required . . .

  The command code before him started to bleep, and the second stretched a little too long, as the senior aides, the generals, and the flight commanders dared a scattering of looks at the taut and constrained little man, always seeming to contain far more energy, waiting to be born . . .

  “Sir . . . ?” One of his senior aides breathed, and the first admiral’s eyes finally broke from their glower to take in the room. This was, after all, the moment that humanity had been waiting for. The giant ansible arrays had been destroyed, as had the power station reactors that kept them operational.

  The entire Exin frontier would now have gone dark. They still had their ship-borne ansibles, just as the human marines did—but now, neither side had the advantage in forward sensing.

  The Exin wouldn’t be able to see the human squadrons coming— or at least that was the predicted outcome.

  “Sir?” said the senior aide once again, as the moment stretched just a little bit longer. Unknown to them, it was at this point that Captain Otepi was fighting for her life and wondering whether or not to charge the attacking Exin mother ship head-on.

  First Admiral Yankis made a small noise and moved forward, extending one gloved hand before the holofield.

  Did he hesitate for a moment at this—the most important decision of his life?

  The admiral stabbed his finger forward into the holofield.

  >Authorization Accepted. ID Verified: Commander First Admiral Yankis, Marine Corps . . .

  The attack started.

  The squadrons of the human Marine Corps threw themselves into the crimson tunnel of burnt and tearing atoms. They were followed by the heavier, business-built, tanklike Marine Corps Dreadnoughts—each one almost the size of an Exin mother ship.

  The flights of ships were sucked through the tens of thousands of light years to their first attack site, appearing in a dizzying ripple of white-and-red plasma over alien worlds.

  Without stopping, the first squadron flight and one of the dreadnoughts kept on going toward the deep gray-and-slate-blue world whose surface sported blankets of distant stars: Exin forward settlements, military musters, and factory cities.

  These ships of humanity started to fire their meson blasts long before they hit atmosphere, and the weapons ports on the dreadnought hissed open for the giant, single-beam stabilized pulse beams to fire also. Launch bays opened with the fires of escaping gasses as entire clouds of drone missiles were set in motion on the unsuspecting frontier world below—that world starting to erupt in brilliant flashes of fire and maelstrom, even visible from space.

  Behind this first attack, the secondary and tertiary squadrons were already flashing with the light of their jump drives. They did not wait for signs of battle or response, but wasted no time in cycling up their jump engines to start their attack run on the next frontier world—and the next.

  Soon, the space above and behind the world was filled with the flashes of Marine Corps ships punching holes through the fabric of space-time as they were about to race along the edge of the Exin territories in jumps and deadly raids. If there were any Exin looking up at the night sky (and there were many thousands on this first world), then it must have appeared to be the glitter of a thousand new stars being born above their own satellites and drones . . .

  But here, at this first struck planet, the battle was joined quickly—first by those very same satellites and upper atmosphere drones. They quickly wheeled and turned to fly, suicidal and brash, straight into the oncoming Marine Corps fighters.

  Elsewhere, the flicker of the Exin orbital lasers began, for answering pillars of light to shoot upwards from the outskirts of the factory cities and strike the Marine Corps Dreadnought. There were explosions, and inside its metal halls were the screams of human marines, soldiers, and staffers alike.

  This might be a lightning raid, but it was not one that would be easy—or without casualties.

  9

  Cat and Mouse

  >Jump completed!

  Dane’s forward holofield showed the results of the Gladius flight computers, even before he felt the last tremor of the ship (and his suit) around him die down.

  “External ship cameras?” Dane breathed, to see a small square image of the space outside the Gladius be transferred to his suit’s holo.

  There was a hell of a lot of dark out there. For some reason, Dane was almost expecting to see other ships here already—but of course, the other fighters in the squadron, and the Ares too—had already made their jump and were probably another full jump ahead of them on the leapfrog home. The others of Gold Squad were moving Isaias to a medical unit to put him in stasis and try to keep him alive. If he did survive, it would be by the skin of his teeth. The blast had hit him full in the front, the most armored part of the suit, so there was a chance that he would survive. But not a very good chance.

  Dane couldn’t bear to see his man in that state right now, especially knowing that Isaias had been trying to help him when he was hit. He shook that thought from his head. There were other things to think about first, and Isaias was not dead yet.

  “Did the other ships make it!?” Dane suddenly asked, remembering the desperate flight of the last few fighters. He wasn’t sure who he was asking. Anyone who might answer, perhaps. “Bruce. Otepi?” he clarified suddenly.

  “Sarge.” It was Corsoni, on one end of a speaker. “Scans showed that the Ares jumped before we did, so I guess that Bruce’s men must have.”

  “And Captain Otepi?” Dane hissed. Last time that he had seen her, she had been hightailing it toward the mother ship behind them. Should they go back for her?

  “Last reading has her jump drive activating,” Engineer Corsoni said. “We have to assume that she made it.” Dane let out a snarl of frustration. Most of him wanted to go back to see for himself the fate of the woman who had saved his life—perhaps even to do the same for her if he could—but he knew that would be suicide. That planet was probably going to be swarming with mother ships as they jumped to the first sign of trouble, unaware that their entire front line was about to erupt with that very same trouble.

  “Preparing jump engine for second transit, Sarge,” Corsoni went on. “Next jump should take us halfway to Jupiter, and then another—”

  The engineer didn’t get the chance to finish that statement. There was a sudden flare of alarms across the flight computers, and another ship broke through into their space.

  “Ah,” Dane heard Corsoni say in a completely surprised voice.

  What? “On screen!” Dane said.

  And the holofield interlinked with the Gladius’s sensors to reveal the giant shape of the Exin mother ship that they had just been fleeing from, bearing down on them.

  “What!? Who said they could do that!?” Dane was shouting as Corsoni swept them into a long curve away from the Exin ship.

  “They must have a way of tracking our jump coordinates, Sarge!” the pilot said.

  “But I thought that was impossible!?” Dane belligerently argued.

  “So did I!” Corsoni said, throwing another curve as a giant pillar of burning white plasma shot across their nacelles.

  “Get us out of here, Corsoni!” Dane was saying, before he suddenly realized the error. If this mother ship had some way of tracking what their jump coordinates were, then Dane would just lead them straight back to Deployment Gate One and Jupiter and the Marine Training Center, wouldn’t he?

  Which might have lost most of its navies now that Phase Two is operational!

  “Dammit—cancel that order!�
�� Dane shouted at once. “Jump us to the front line!”

  “What!?” Corsoni’s face appeared, worried, in the upper left of Dane’s screen. Rather disconcertingly, Dane could see the smaller image of the Exin mother ship in the back of the image, silhouetted against the stars of the Gladius’ cockpit, and bearing down on them.

  Just our luck it would go after us, Dane thought grimly.

  “Nearest front-line attack. I want to bring her straight to where there’s a whole lot of meson canons heading her way!” Dane said tersely, as Corsoni rolled his eyes and nodded.

  “Your wish is my . . .” he heard his pilot mutter before the man threw them into yet another gut-wrenching turn. Dane, inside his Traveler Mech, felt the giant suit start to shift in place.

  Removed as he was, Dane couldn’t read the impact warnings and targeting alarms that erupted across the flight control deck of the Marine Fighter—but he didn’t have to, either. The shudders and shakes that ran through their vessel were enough to make Dane’s teeth crawl. He wished that he was up there, in the cockpit—able to do something, anything—rather than being down here in the hold. For the first time in his career as an Orbital Marine, Dane Williams felt the fragility of the metal shell that was enclosed all around him, and his complete inability to do anything other than wait it out.

  “Cycling jump engines . . .” he was relieved to hear Corsoni hiss, as an almost imperceptible hum rippled through the entire Gladius . . .

  From the outside, it looked like a game of cat and mouse—if the proverbial cat was ten times bigger than its prey.

  The chasing Exin mother ship was vast. An elongated triangle shape in midnight blues and metallic greens, reminiscent of a fang or a claw reaching through space. It had three of the long, tubular nacelles running along its body—but one of them was clearly damaged, whether from the attacks of the Ares and the Gladius, or from the other Marine Fighters of Captain Otepi’s Task Force. Drifts of brilliant green-and-purple plasma spurted and gushed from one side in drifts, and there were clearly ruined and rent metals peeling back from the outer carapace.

  The Exin mother ship flew awkwardly, rolling slightly as it swept forward after the much faster and quicker Gladius—but she was still a threat.

  Weapon ports flared open along the front of her nose cone, and bright lights flared—shooting pin-prick pulse lasers out at the tiny Marine Fighter.

  The Gladius swerved and rolled, its own twin engines glowing a fierce, brilliant blue-white as every bit of available power was asked of it—but still the scatterings of needle-shot found it, impacting with explosions of sparks along its hull.

  The Gladius suddenly rocked to one side—something was clearly wrong (more wrong than being chased by a full Exin war ship) as a cloud of gasses vented from one side of the ship.

  The small marine craft appeared to slow, to tumble almost end over end, and the Exin mother ship was rising over it. The giant weapons pod over its front prow started to glow as it powered up its orbital meson laser . . .

  But the Gladius, too, was emitting a glow as its jump engines started to ripple and shed the light around the craft.

  The mother ship fired. A single column of brilliant white light that shot forward . . .

  To burn through nothing but empty vacuum. The Gladius had jumped.

  10

  Perfect Landing

  “Hold on!” Corsoni was shouting—which he really didn’t need to say, as Dane and the rest of his Gold Squad had clearly gotten the message from the way that the hold was tilting at an alarming rate . . .

  “Magnet locks!” Dane called out to his own Traveler Mech and to the human marines inside their smaller Assisted Mechanized Plate suits. In each of them, as they flipped the controls, their suits secured themselves to the metals of the Gladius’s floor, affording them momentary stability.

  Which was more, clearly, than the ship itself had going for it.

  “Corsoni—report!?” Dane called out, and there was a muttered affirmative as the navigational computers booted back up after the jump and were beamed to Dane’s field.

  Oh, frack . . . was about the best that Dane could say about what he saw.

  They were flying straight into a pitch battle between the Exin forces and the Orbital Marines. Before them was a greenish world with a large moon that was only marginally smaller than its stellar brother and predominantly made up of a bluish-gray color. Lights burned and sparkled over the surface of the planet as the Exin defenders shot upwards at the swooping and soaring Orbital Marines . . .

  . . . who were apparently bogged down in both dogfights and orbital barrages, Dane took in quickly. Larger, orbital beams shot upwards from the green planet and also the smaller blue moon toward the flights of Marine Fighters, and the space between the two celestial bodies was filled with the sudden, zipping movements of Exin seed craft. Dane saw explosions and strafing barrages of meson and pulse fire, and the brilliant flashes as spaceships exploded in the void.

  Dane realized two things in that moment, as the Gladius rolled and shook and flew headlong into the midst of this tumult.

  One, that this was no lightning-fast strike, disable, and go raid. Whatever had happened here, the forces of the Orbital Marines had clearly become bogged down in this raid. Maybe it was the fact that there was such a well-developed, occupied, and clearly defensible moon right next to the Exin planet. Or maybe it was because the transmitter strike that Dane, Bruce, and Otepi had been a part of had been disrupted.

  Did we take too long? The Orbital Marine Sergeant had a moment of deep guilt. Had his actions inadvertently plunged hundreds and thousands of fellow marine lives in the most terrible danger?

  But then, as the Gladius shook and screamed through space, there was the other realization that Dane couldn’t shake.

  And that was that they were out of control, and that they were going to crash.

  “Can we make it to the dreadnought?” Dane called out, meaning the large, segmented, three-moduled body of the marine ship that was of the largest class that the humans had produced. There was only a handful of the trainlike ships, but each one was designed to be a mobile Marine Platform, capable of fielding dozens of the smaller fighter craft like the Gladius and the Ares.

  They were the Marine Corps answer to the Exin mother ship, Dane knew—and perhaps they were marginally bigger.

  And if we can get to it, we might be able to fly right into one of its holds . . . Dane was thinking, looking at his holofield. The dreadnought was slightly turning toward the Exin green planet and releasing payload after payload of meson canon blasts down to the installations it sensed there.

  Which unfortunately meant that its far side was open to the attacks of the Exin super moon, and one of the modules in particular was getting fairly well hammered by pulse light.

  “Signaling,” Corsoni said, as he sent the urgent distress call to the dreadnought.

  WHAM!

  As an Exin seed craft, clearly not quick enough to register the Gladius’ sudden materialization, winged across the prow, turning its curved shell just in time to avoid a direct collision—but not fast enough so that it didn’t scrape along the side of its hull.

  There was a sound like the world ripping in two, and suddenly the inner holofield of Dane’s suit was filled with alarms. Nothing related to his own suit, thankfully—but definitely related to the fact that there was now a heck of a lot less pressure outside the suit, and that it was vanishing rapidly.

  “Sarge!” Dane heard the terrified, sudden scream of one of his Gold Squad marines—Farouk!? He turned to see that the collision had caused one of the bulkheads beside the door to ripple and almost collapse—the launch bay doors were crumpling and there were warning amber lights flickering on and off all over them.

  And there was Farouk, despite the magnet clamps of his boots, starting to slide toward the crumpling door. The vacuum seal that separated the precious atmosphere inside the Gladius and the sucking void outside must have broken.

 
Dane moved at once, breaking his own magnet lock connection and throwing himself forward toward the rent and ruined launch doors.

  Private First Class Farouk got there first, slamming into the doors as the entire thing buckled outwards by several more feet. As tough as the Gladius was built to be, it could not fight against the entire force of the universe . . .

  The ship was spinning, and Dane barely had any sense of up or down as he seized onto the bulkheads to prevent his giant Traveler Mech suit from smashing into the smaller, doll-like body of Farouk.

  “Argh!” He grabbed onto the struts and the supports at the last moment, bracing his legs against the door frame and using one giant metal claw to snatch at Farouk and haul him backwards

  “I got you! I got you!” he was calling, right about at the same time that the Gladius bowled into the upper atmosphere of the Exin moon.

  >Sir, maximum safety measures are called for . . .

  Dane could clearly hear the rather nonplussed voice of his suit’s soft A.I. over the alarms. It was curiously calming, despite the sounds of grinding and screeching metals all around. They were being jolted and shaken, and Dane saw his outer screen eclipse with the wash of flame.

  Flame!? Flame!

  >Sir, I am forced to remind you that your Traveler Mech suit was already in a compromised state . . .

  His A.I. appeared to be annoyed at the fact that Dane could let this amazing piece of alien-human technology get so battered. In his defense, Dane quickly explained, with no small use of expletives, what he thought of the A.I.

  >External seals to your craft have been breached. I am initiating maximum security procedures.