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

  “Get off me!” Dane yelled.

  >Incoming Private Channel: CHENG…

  >Dane, Dane! Pull yourself together!

  The other suit was Bruce, and he bear-hugged Dane to his chest as Dane at first struggled. He felt angry and frustrated, as if his body was electric with despair about how he was treated, about the jokes, about his legs…

  >>Breathe, goddammit, Dane, breathe!

  Bruce was saying as the small challenge ring was filled with support staff rushing to Osgud’s suit to extricate him from it.

  “What the hell was that!?” Lashmeier had followed the staff in. Even though he wore no suit and was easily two-and-a-half feet smaller than the Mechs here, he did not appear fazed by the relative differences in size at all. He glowered up at Dane.

  “You were supposed to hold for a count of five to win, Williams!” Lashmeier shouted. “This isn’t one of your brawling championships. This is the Marines!”

  “Sir yes sir!” Dane took breathe after deep breathe, drawing himself back under control. He watched as Osgud’s AMP was opened up behind the sergeant for the support staff to check the recruit.

  Osgud was still alive, and he even pulled himself out blearily. But his face was blotched with swelling, and he had a nasty cut at his hair line where he must have been rebounding inside his suit like a bean in a can.

  And then Dane saw the faceplate of Osgud’s Mech behind. It was crumpled and twisted by his powerful blows.

  “Not only did you endanger the life of a brother Marine—but you also damaged a very expensive piece of Marine property! You’re on your first warning, Williams!” Lashmeier shouted.

  Oh frack. Dane’s anger vanished as it transformed into a sick feeling of panic. You only got two warnings, he knew. All of this had been explained to them in their first few days. You got two warnings, followed by punishments—and on your third, you were booted out of the Marines.

  Back to Sacramento Teaching Hospital. Back to my life in a bed, Dane thought.

  “Ugh!” Lashmeier gave a grunt of disgust. “Get yourself back to Launch Hangar and get your suit cleaned up, Williams. Then I want you putting all these walls back in place and cleaning the gymnasium until my dear old grandmother would eat off it—you hear me, Private!?”

  “Sir yes sir!” Williams said. Bruce released him, and Dane stumbled and lurched out of the arena.

  “Dane! Dane!” It was Corsoni, arriving at the AMP Launch Hangar a full hour after every other private had completed their tat-down and gone off to the showers and their first rec session. Osgud had insisted that he was alright, but he was still walked off by the Fort Mayweather medics to the nearest medical bay to be checked for a possible concussion.

  And now Dane was exhausted. Even though the metal walls could be unbolted from the floors and the wheels locked into place to make them easier to move, they were still almost impossible. It was backbreaking work.

  “Here, here,” Corsoni was saying as he ran over. He took the other end of the last wall that Dane was wheeling back to shove into the space where they were kept.

  It was then that Dane saw the large bruise on Corsoni’s head, near his eye.

  “What happened?” Dane asked. “I was wondering why you weren’t here.”

  Corsoni winced. “Well, I was working in the machine sheds before the AMP session, as I usually am,” he said in a low, wary mutter. “And the next thing I know, I woke up in medical.”

  “What?”

  “There was a leak in the air filters, apparently, and the medics think I must have stumbled and fallen over, hitting my head.” He shrugged.

  “But the thing is, I was sure that the air filters on the various gas storage units we have down there were all secured and safe. They get inspected every month, and any faulty or worn-out parts get replaced,” he was growling. “I’m lucky that it was only enough to make me fall asleep, not kill me!”

  Hmm. Dane frowned. “Well, I’m glad you’re not dead. While you were away, I got a warning,” Dane said dourly.

  “Ha! I heard,” Joey laughed. “Word is all over the base that Bad Luck Williams is back, a wild man with a temper.”

  Dane smiled a little crookedly, but the shame he felt at losing control overrode any misplaced pride.

  “Still, I should have kept it together,” he sighed as they slid the wall into place and turned back to the suits.

  “Yeah, you should have—but there’s all sorts of things that we outta do, right?” Joey was saying. “Maybe it was my recent brush with death, but I’m thinking we need to not beat ourselves up too much with what we can’t fix and focus on what we can.”

  Joey had a point, and it was at least a little reassuring to hear someone not be disappointed or angry with him for a change. But talk of fixing reminded Dane of something.

  “Like my suit,” Dane said.

  “Got a battering, did it?” Joey said.

  “Not as much as the other guy’s did,” Dane couldn’t help but say, and the pair shared a grin before walking back to Dane’s AMP.

  It took Joey a fraction of the time it would have taken Dane to strip the AMP’s outer plates to get to the inner working of the seized-up knee joint.

  “I think I must have ripped a cable when I sweep-kicked Marks,” Dane said a little ashamedly.

  “Unlikely,” Joey was saying as he leaned over the mechanism with a tiny LED penlight. “Those wires are thick rubber with double metal-wire meshes as well. You’d have to have articulated metal jaws to tear them apart,” he was saying before suddenly freezing.

  “What the frack!?” he burst out.

  “What is it?” Dane said urgently, hovering over his shoulder.

  Joey was working hurriedly, reaching further up and down the Mech leg, unclipping and pulling at the lubricant wire to draw it out of the AMP leg and into the light.

  “Here.” He spooled out the wire and lifted it up to show Dane. “It’s been cut,” he said, holding the end.

  “But… What?” Dane shook his head.

  “You can’t tear it, but you can cut it with a tool. It could have happened in manufacturing, but I doubt it,” Joey was saying grimly.

  And that was when Dane remembered Osgud’s gesture toward his leg at the start of the fight. And what he said to him.

  “How are those legs, Williams?” Dane muttered under his breath.

  “What did you say, Williams?” Joey was looking up at him.

  “It was Osgud,” Dane hissed in anger. “I know that it was Osgud who did this. Maybe he even arranged for the gas leak in your machine shed somehow, too—knowing that you would find the cut cable when you checked out the suit,” Dane said.

  I should have kept on hitting him.

  “Whoa there, champion!” But Corsoni, it appeared, was far more circumspect than that. “You can’t just go around accusing people of stuff. A direct act of sabotage of not only Marine equipment, but a Marine AMP suit as well?” Joey shook his head slowly.

  “And we’re talking conspiracy to cause injury, even death,” Joey pointed out. “You really think that this Private Osgud of yours is capable of that?”

  Dane shrugged off the speculation. “He’s the sort of guy who doesn’t care. Maybe he didn’t think how far it could go or care if anyone died or not. But I’m telling you that he’s behind this somehow.”

  Joey Corsoni breathed through his nose and leaned back against the AMP suit in its cradle with a heavy sigh. “Just hold your horses, Williams. We need to be sure about this before we take it to the sergeant.”

  Who said anything about taking it to the sergeant? Dane thought a little vindictively, but immediately knew that Corsoni was right. They would have to take this to Lashmeier if they could prove it.

  “Because anyone who messes with an AMP suit isn’t just breaking regulations or committing conspiracy. That also counts as treason, Williams, in a time of war,” the engineer said very seriously. “Private Osgud will be lucky if he spends the rest of his life in a maximum securit
y prison. He’d probably get shipped off to Mars.”

  “There’s always a silver lining,” Dane muttered under his breath.

  “I’m going to see if I can get access to the security footage of the Launch Hangar,” Joey said, “but I’ll have to do it quietly. And you have to watch your back from now on, Dane. If Osgud can gas me and tamper with an AMP suit, what else is he willing to do to get you kicked off the training program?”

  Pretty much anything, Dane was thinking.

  10

  New Sanctuary

  Sylvia’s jeep cruised down the empty highway, roaring at speeds that would have been considered reckless at any other normal time.

  But these weren’t normal times, and, for the moment, the interstates and the streets were mostly empty, save for the occasional covered farm vehicle and the army tankers looking like covered metal boxes, sprouting defensive plates and gun turrets.

  The world has changed, the doctor was thinking as she looked out on the wide fields around her, mostly deserted save for drone vehicles. Off to her left in the far distance gleamed rising steel and concrete walls as defenses were being placed around another American city.

  Everyone is scared of the virus storms, Sylvia thought. There were domes going up. Habitats. Reinforced, air-conditioned housing units. The very jeep that she herself was driving had a plate-armor shell encasing it, making it look bug-like—but giving it a hell of a lot of forward momentum when she maxed out at ninety-five miles per hour.

  Everyone is scared of the skies, she considered. On the horizon on the other side of her, she saw the three, fast-moving shapes of rocket-propelled jets as the Federalized Air Force made their constant sweeps toward the coast.

  I wonder if we’ll ever trust the skies again, Sylvia thought dismally as she started to see the horizon mist and pall ahead of her.

  She had reached her destination and could see that some of New Sanctuary—the first place attacked by the Exin—still burned two months after the attack.

  “Welcome to hell on Earth, Doctor,” said the Federal Marine at the final checkpoint, a full mile out of the city, as he holstered the ID scanner after taking a retina scan of Doctor Heathcote. The man wore fatigues of tan and off-gray, as well as an armored encounter suit, complete with neck collar and full-face visor. Behind him stood the armored hut and the pull-away steel barricades that were the third such checkpoint that Sylvia had crossed just to get this far.

  “You, uh, you going in alone? No backup?” The Marine cast a look inside Sylvia’s otherwise empty jeep.

  “Just me, sir. What can I say—we all have our jobs to do.” Sylvia shrugged. The woman still felt slightly nervous about the fact that she had left the base. Not that it was illegal or that she wasn’t allowed—but the decision from higher-up to not allow her an away-squad would probably have been interpreted by anyone else as strong guidance not to leave the base.

  But I didn’t get to be Head Xeno-Epidemiologist by never bending the rules! Sylvia thought as she grinned professionally up at the Marine.

  “Am I good to go?” she asked sweetly. “Just a routine sample-capture. I’ll be in and out in a couple of hours.”

  “Hmm, I should warn you that there is still a lot of unstable infrastructure down there.” The Marine frowned. “We’ve got salvage teams working day and night, but it’s a damned city,” he said with a shrug. “And there’s still looters going in. You armed?”

  Sylvia nodded to the passenger seat, where an AR-15 was stowed along the inside door. “Sure am, soldier.”

  “I should really get a second opinion on this,” the man muttered, looking skeptically down the road at the ruined, still-smoking buildings of New Sanctuary.

  Sylvia coughed.

  “May I remind you that my work is of the utmost importance to the effort, soldier?” Sylvia said. Perhaps there were some perks to leading teams of video briefings to almost every force group in America and several international liaison meetings with their allies over the pond as well. Dr. Heathcote was fast becoming known throughout the military world as the lead scientist on the virus, and her face was becoming recognizable—even if it was behind the plastic visor of her encounter suit.

  “Every minute we delay is a minute I don’t have in the lab, soldier.” Sylvia added a little steely authority to her voice, imitating Sergeant Lashmeier’s calm acceptance of his absolute right to do pretty much anything.

  “Uhr…” The soldier coughed, looked confused, then nodded. “Keep your phone on you at all times. Your base HQ will want to have tags on you at all times,” he muttered gruffly, indicating the personnel tracking app that every base comms unit had installed for their staff.

  “Always running, sir. Now, can I get on with saving lives?” she asked with a sigh, and the man waved her on. The steel blockade was removed. Sylvia drove forward past the first precinct of mostly-undamaged warehouses and industrial parks on the outer edge of New Sanctuary.

  “Meredith?” Sylvia said aloud to herself in the quiet hum of her vehicle.

  “Dr. Heathcote, how might I be of assistance?” said her phone’s Simulated Helper, a digital assistant program that Sylvia had been using for several years now.

  “Run New Sanctuary infection cases,” Sylvia said as she drove. The jeep bounced a little as she crunched over bits of gravel and concrete chips and got nearer to the Exin strike zones.

  In front of her were the two reaching arms of an overpass, completely broken in the middle and still hanging in their air, the iron and steel wires poking from their broken ends like arteries and veins. The salvage teams had cleared the road underneath, but the ground was still pocked with impact holes and littered with pulverized buildings.

  Yeah, the Exin sure did a number on this place. Sylvia narrowed her eyes at the demolished cityscape around the road. It was almost like looking at a natural vista, with hills and distant peaks, and low-lying mists clinging to the gorges between them. But the hills and peaks were all made of the same ruined white-and-gray blocks of buildings, and the mists were heavy stone dust and still-smoldering buildings.

  “Dr. Heathcote, survey completed. How would you like the results?”

  “Name top three infection sites and correlate with New Sanctuary city districts,” Heathcote said.

  “Immediately, doctor. That would be Sanctuary Falls, followed by Jefferson Place, and downtown Appleby,” the assistant said in her expressionless voice.

  “Sanctuary Falls it is,” she said, reaching the crossroads and not waiting for any lights as she wheeled right and gunned down the city arterial road for the district. Within another ten minutes, the digital assistant pinged that she was here, and Sylvia found herself surrounded by half-standing residential blocks, their windows all blown out and gaping.

  “Creepy as hell,” Sylvia murmured as she made sure that her suit seals were on and got out of the vehicle. Her reinforced boots crunched when they hit asphalt.

  I need a place for the collector station. She looked around, holding in her hand the bulky duffel bag and the mobile sampling unit that would start to breath in virus compounds as soon as she set it up.

  In between the buildings was the remains of what might have been a nice park. Trees still stood at one end, with drifts of rubble coming in on three sides like snow drifts. She had already crossed to the park and was looking at the small patch of remaining green that would make a great set-up site, when she realized she had forgotten something.

  The gun!

  The doctor looked back the fifty yards or so to the parked jeep, then at the welcoming patch of grass just a little way ahead of her.

  There didn’t seem to be anyone else around her. No sounds or sight of looters. It was kind of peaceful even, she thought.

  “It won’t take ten minutes,” she muttered to herself, knowing that she had to get to the other sites and back before Fort Mayweather starting shouting at her over the phone.

  Sylvia was right. The setup of the mobile sensor unit did not even take ten min
utes. She pulled out the long rod of its head and its tripod legs, jamming them into the soft earth and pulling the body down to touch the grass.

  Grass that could be infected by Exinase. Does the virus bond stronger to organic surfaces? she was thinking as she turned the unit on. Small rotors started to spin near the top of the pyramid structure, driving air particles to the three funnels below. The ground-touching sensors started sucking in air particles from vents.

  It also didn’t take ten minutes for the person who had been following the doctor to ghost around the rubble pile while Sylvia’s back was turned, and for the next to cross on the other side…

  “Calibrate for wind speed, temperature,” Sylvia was making the final adjustments before leaning back from the scanner…

  This will pick up what virus is still floating around out here, she was thinking. And from there, I can trace the iterations of viral reproduction, work out if my theory is right. That the virus indeed started before the Exin attacked New Sanctuary.

  There was a crunch of something from behind her, and some animal part of the doctor knew that it didn’t sound right.

  “Don’t move!” shouted a voice, as the first figure jumped up, leveling a rifle.

  Oh crap! Sylvia threw herself into a roll, and there was a grunt as the man fired.

  CRACK!

  The doctor really wished that she had her gun about now as she skidded behind one side of the nearest tree and heard the sound of running feet heading across the park, toward her—

  Move it! The tree at her back blocked their line of fire on her (she hoped) and it was only a little way to the rubble building behind…

  “Get her!” one of her attackers was shouting. Doctor Sylvia Heathcote launched herself into a run, her feet kicking up dirt as the bullets smacked into the ground at her feet.