The Gladius rocketed out from the platform, ignoring the warning signs that blipped at them from the stationary space beacons. Corsoni cut in front of a slow-moving Marine transporter, before swerving down into the right lane.
“Corsoni! I warned you if you did that again, I’d shoot you!” came the angered cry of the other pilot over the ship comms, but Corsoni just laughed.
“Hey, Drake—I’m taking my boys through the gate, or hadn’t you heard? Thought we’d better enjoy the ride while we can!” he shot back. They heard a grunt from the other side of the comms.
“Fair enough. Good luck, I suppose,” the other pilot said, in a tone that Williams thought translated “good luck” into “nice knowing you.” It seemed that Williams’s own suspicion about using the jump-gate was widespread.
“Yeah, well, I’m tired of this solar system anyway.” Corsoni settled in his seat, grasping the flight control sticks with one hand as he flicked the toggles and buttons on the control boards around him. Ahead in the cockpit, Deployment Gate One grew larger, and bright green vectors glowed directly in front of them, leading straight into it. Dane and the others were all strapped into their own flight chairs behind the pilot, wearing their regular fatigues. Their full Mech-Suits—the Assisted Mechanized Plates or orbital AMPs—were stowed in the hold behind.
Dane’s eyes were fixed on the giant alien wheel over Jupiter, swimming closer, as it started to turn.
“Deployment Gate One initiating activation!” came the notice from the Marine central servers, as a list of readouts streamed down one side of the cockpit window in glowing neon.
Everyone in the Gladius tightened their grips a little as a slight, dusky reddish glow started to emanate from the station as it moved, growing deeper by the second.
“Marine Squadrons One through Three, move into position.”
The Gladius slowed, and Dane saw three flights of four similar starfighters pull to the right, left, and below them. Ready to fire if the worst happened—if any of the Exin seed crafts suddenly appeared.
“They’ve done this a hundred times already, and no sign of the crawdads!” Corsoni seemed to be doing his best to cheer his passengers up, but Dane still detected the tension in his voice.
It’s like rolling the dice every time, Dane thought to himself, wishing that he was in his AMP suit. Even though he was surrounded by some of the densest hull-plating that the Marine Corps could provide in the form of the Gladius.
“Activation cycle reaching zenith in T-minus five . . . four . . .”
Ahead of them, the spoked wheel of the jump station was starting to turn faster and faster with every heartbeat, and the red light was only growing worse, until the spokes of the station itself started to blur and fade.
“Three . . . two . . .
The cockpit of their vessel was filled with the same hard glare, and Dane had the sudden notion that this is probably what living in hell was like. The controls and the walls around him—even his fellow sergeants—appeared unreal. The gate was spinning fast now, and the red light was so deep that it looked like a slow-motion inferno that they were moving towards.
“One and . . . launch!” the Marine servers called, and there was a deep pulse of light, a ripple of white spreading out from the center of the red light to its outer edges. Behind it, there broke into existence a tunnel made out of white light.
Corsoni kicked down on the pedals that controlled thrust and boosters, switching to the purple pulse-emitters instead of the rockets that threw them forward into the light.
Dane wondered if this was what dying felt like, as everything flared to a brilliant white light.
“We have stable energy conditions!” Corsoni was saying when Dane blinked. He wondered if he had been unconscious, as it felt as though time had passed. His body ached as if from a massive and sudden acceleration, and when he looked out of the cockpit windows, he saw streaming rivers of white threads racing around them, turning and moving and flowing around their nose cone.
“Boo-YAH!” Hopskirk shouted beside Dane, and when Dane turned his head, he thought he saw Hopskirk still stuck in the position of shouting, as if Dane was able to look two seconds into the past.
What the . . . Dane Williams had never had the pleasure of traveling via wormhole before. He didn’t realize that yes, time was behaving strangely, or rather, his heavy-material mammalian brain, designed for a very particular gravity well of a very particular planet, just didn’t have senses acute enough to catch up with what was going on. He felt pulls and pressures against his body as if they were banking and turning in combat flight, but it didn’t look as though they had moved, either . . .
“Is this normal!?” Dane opened his mouth to ask, but he didn’t hear the words. Or rather, he heard the words as if someone else had spoken them—another Dane, a few seconds in the past of this one—
Wham! Another flash of brilliant white light, and they were suddenly shooting forward into a starry expanse. The arrival into another part of the galaxy was so swift and sudden that Dane gasped for air, and saw Cheng leaning forward to shake his head groggily.
“Don’t ever let me do that again,” Bruce Cheng said miserably, although Hopskirk was laughing uproariously.
“Holy space crap! Did you guys see that!? How fast do you think we were going? How far do you think we went?” Hopskirk was saying with all the enthusiasm of a teenager at a fair.
“Check for yourself,” Corsoni said with the same brand of glee, nodding to the overhead holo controls as they started to determine where in the universe they were.
“Calculating fixed stars . . .”
“Isolating galactic center, analyzing spatial co-ordinates from plane and elliptic . . .”
That section of the cockpit filled with geometric designs, lines and curves, as the Gladius’s computers struggled to assess where the hell they were for a moment. With a bing, the screen changed to show a flattened picture of the Milky Way Galaxy with its spiral arms, with an almost hilarious tiny vector saying You Are Here halfway along one of the arms towards the middle.
“And where’s Earth?” Dane breathed, for another small, green, flashing triangle to appear, about a quarter of a turn of the galaxy away, and much nearer the edge than they were.
Oh. Dane thought. That looked quite a long way away. So far that, at a guess, entire species could evolve in the time it would take them to fly back in the Gladius at Faster Than Light.
“Target acquired!” the Gladius blipped at them, and suddenly Corsoni was swinging them around to see a dark shadow rise in their forward view.
An orb.
A planet.
Planet 892.
4
Half a Galaxy Away, And We’re Still Screwed
“Readying for descent,” Corsoni said as he brought the Gladius lower and lower towards Planet 892. Dane strained in his chair to look out of the portholes to see below them that the surface of the world was dark. They were going to land on the night side, with a projected arrival as approximately thirty minutes before the alien sun broke into dawn.
It was dark, but he could see the distant glitter of silver rivers and inland lakes, as well as shadowed masses that could have been green if he squinted right.
“I’m running ship scanners, and I’m not picking up any signs of power from the surface,” Corsoni was saying.
Just wonderful, Dane thought. If the expedition camp had been up and running and had living, breathing humans in it—then the Gladius should be able to pick up electro-magnetic and radio-frequency signals, shouldn’t it?
“The Beacon?” Dane asked.
“Nothing there either,” Corsoni said with a tight voice. “The scans are completely dead. As if no one had ever been there at all . . .” All four Marines went silent for a moment as they considered that, before Corsoni spoke once again. “I’m going to initiate the exo-planet report, so at least you freeloaders have got something to listen to while I try to stop us from breaking apart in re-entry.”
/> “Wow, fill us with confidence, huh?” Dane grumbled, but was still glad for the distraction as the computer voice started to speak.
“Planet 892. Earthlike. Gravity class: Human-standard (2.1% lighter). Surface atmosphere: breathable . . .”
The Gladius started to shake as they swept lower and lower, and the windows started to blaze with the flare of burning plasma as they cut through the upper atmosphere. Small bleeping alarms sounded, but Dane noticed that Corsoni didn’t appear to be overly worried about them.
“Twenty-six-hour day, night at current rotation twelve hours long. Planet 892 is noticeable for having a stable rotation around its sun compared to Earth/Sol, resulting in fewer marked seasons . . .”
Dane felt his own body start to shake as the cockpit around them rattled and bounced. Corsoni was gritting his teeth. His shoulders and hands seemed to be wrestling with the flight sticks as he hit the release for first one air brake, and then another and another.
“Known toxins present: None (Unknown). Caution advised (Full Environmental Suit) . . . Known lifeforms: Multiple readings and signs of heat and movement. Unknown genetic analysis . . .”
“Unknown genetic analysis? What the merry hell does that mean!” Hopskirk, despite his earlier enthusiasm, was just as worried about what might walk out of the jungle down there as the rest of them were.
“They only just started the mapping! That damn expedition was supposed to find out whether the natives were friendly or not!” Corsoni said through a hiss as he wrestled with the flight controls. The Gladius was shaking so badly that Dane could feel his jaw ache inside his flesh. Surely, they couldn’t withstand much more of this!
Then, all at once, they were free from the clutch of atmosphere, and they were swooping over a dark landscape. Dane looked to see deep forest underneath them, punctuated by much taller trees that were thin and straggly. They looked impossibly tall, maybe as much as two or three-hundred feet high.
The land was rutted by valleys and gorges, and the Gladius was screaming through these with a deep roar as Corsoni switched to rocketry instead of pulse. Dane saw startled creatures rising from the canopy below, things with two wings and four, and some that looked like bats or flying lizards.
“Approaching expedition site,” Corsoni called. One of the gorges rose into cliffs on one side, and a few miles out, a patch of bare land appeared, nestled by forest. Dane strained his eyes to see, but it was still nighttime and the dark humps and shapes of half-built buildings were indistinct. The Gladius slowed even more, turning in a high and wide circle above the expedition camp.
“Still not reading any energy signatures,” Corsoni called out.
“And there ain’t any lights on either,” Hopskirk said grimly, leaning as far as he could to look down out of the porthole window. Dane did the same on his side, seeing the Gladius’s floodlights pick out the half-built shell of a steel dome habitat, unfinished, alongside an oblong container-block building. There were also some of the gigantic loaders and Mechs—tracked vehicles with large pincered hands sitting stationary here and there around the camp as if they had just been left. Beside them were long piles of downed logs from the forest they had torn down to build the camp, as well as banks of earth forming a container embankment that the Mechs must have scooped out.
The brilliant lights of the Gladius swept back and forth over the camp, but no one came running out. There was no movement at all. Dane felt a sick feeling in his stomach.
“There’s only one reason why no one would be here, isn’t there?” he said in a solemn whisper to the others around him. “They’re all . . .”
“Don’t say it.” Bruce Cheng hissed suddenly at his side, surprising Dane with how fervent his voice was. “We don’t know that yet. Anything could have happened, and we cannot jump to conclusions.” He shook his head. “Not yet.”
“Okay, you’re right, but . . .” Hopskirk started to say, before Bruce cut him off.
“Don’t.” He turned to glare at Hopskirk beside him before releasing the catch on his seat webbing. “I’m going to suit up,” the big man said in a heavy voice, turning in the swivel chair to disappear through the door to the main holds behind them.
“Oh, sure. Go ahead. You’re supposed to wait for me to do landing procedures, but okay, whatever . . .” Corsoni mumbled. Dane could tell that he wasn’t really angry as he veered the Gladius to the large, opened-out area of the camp that the expedition must have been preparing as a landing pad.
“What was that all about?” Hopskirk muttered to Dane, nodding the way that Bruce had gone, for Dane to shrug.
“Who knows. Maybe Bruce just doesn’t like traveling half the galaxy to find out that we’re still screwed,” Dane said, releasing his own harness to make his way to the hold.
Dane grabbed a hold of the handlebars and pulled himself into the AMP suit in the hold of the Gladius. Each eight-foot-tall orbital AMP had its own built-in cradle that extended from the walls of the craft’s hold. As soon as Dane had settled himself in and secured the harness straps at his waist, thighs, and across his chest, the suit woke up and started closing around him, the multi-layered plates of armor folding over and locking closed with a series of clicks and hisses.
It felt good to be back here again. Back in what Dane knew. This metal suit, with the traceries of scratch marks and dents that could no longer be panel-beaten out of it, was like a second skin to Dane now. It was better than his own virus-infected body, he had to admit.
The legs closed and the arms locked as his hands moved into the heavy auto-assisted gauntlets, capable of bending and breaking sheet metal. The interlocking sections of breastplate settled and secured him, and Dane felt the foam pads fill and the straps tighten as the mantle collar rose to meet the interlocking faceplate that contained his HUD. Green holographic code and command lines flickered into life across the inside of his visor, along with the blips of team identifiers that read SGT CHENG, B, and SGT HOPSKIRK, F . . .
>Orbital AMP 023 Activating . . .
>Cycling accelerator unit . . .
>Recognizing user . . . SGT WILLIAMS, D . . .
Dane at last breathed a little easier. He could see the hold around them picked out with dim lights, each flaring and leading to the door. The cradle and the suit and the man inside it shook as the Gladius settled on alien soils.
>General Systems Check . . . GOOD . . .
>Filtration, Biological, Chemical, and Radionic Protections . . . GOOD . . .
>Connecting to Federal Network . . . ERROR!
Well, Dane thought—he shouldn’t be surprised at that, as the Federal Network was currently about two spiral arms away.
>>>Federal Network unreachable. Diverting to local area network (GLADIUS) . . . GOOD . . .
>Mission Parameters: Search and Rescue
>Objective 1: Deploy to 892 Expedition Base . . .
>Objective 2: Locate Professor Honshou and secure expedition research . . .
>Objective 3: Locate expedition staff . . .
“I’ve got the expedition report here loaded into the servers,” the pilot read as the cradle locks released Dane, Bruce, and Hopskirk from their holding arms to clank towards the doors. “Says here that Honshou is the head honcho of the expedition, some off-the-chart physicist and biologist and heaven knows what else who was tasked with leading the group. Says here that the expedition was mapping the planet as well as studying its flora and fauna, all for possible human colonization.”
Dane mumbled the affirmative and detached his heavy pulse rifle from his hip to check the charge. Good. Along with their rifles, it was clear that no expense had been spared for this mission, as each orbital AMP had on its hip a foot of hardened steel Field Blade, along with a smaller pulse pistol on its other hip, a set of flash-bang grenades across its ribs, and the smaller smart laser installation on its forearms.
“Lock and load!” Hopskirk said. He took the side of the hangar door, readying his rifle as Dane took the other, with Bruce in the middle,
already pointing his rifle straight at the center of the hangar door.
“Fire and fury,” Dane returned and palmed the release button for the door to sweep backwards, revealing the already-extending ramp to the dirt floor.
“Go, go, go!” Bruce called out, bounding through the hangar door to the dirt below, rolling with a spray of dirt and soil. Hopskirk was next, swinging around his side of the door with his rifle up and leaping as he did so, hitting the dirt to the right of Bruce. He took position as Dane did the same on his side, jumping through the air over the ramp to land with a roll on the left of Bruce. Dane ended in a crouch with his rifle up and sweeping across the darkened camp. He saw the empty space between them and the nearest of the buildings. Beyond that was the earth embankment and the solid darkness of the trees, moving slightly in the breeze.
“Clear right!” Hopskirk called.
“Clear ahead,” Bruce called.
But something made Dane hesitate. If anything, it was too quiet.
“Williams?” Bruce urged him, as Dane opened his mouth to affirm—
Wait. My suit isn’t picking up any breeze. He looked quickly at the small environmental indicators running down the side of his faceplate. Nope. So what was causing the movement in the trees back there . . . ?
Dane half rose from his crouch, as the first of the alien things flew over the embankment, straight towards them.
“Cover!” Bruce yelled as the black torrent of flying things swept low over the embankment, swooping between the buildings and smashing into the orbital AMP suits.
They were small compared to the suits, barely as big as a man’s forearm, and with four jet-black leathery wings, a pair of taloned legs, and small heads that appeared to be made entirely of biting teeth—
>Suit impact! Backplate 95% . . .
Metal Warrior: Precious Metal (Mech Fighter Book 5) Page 2