Metal Warrior: Precious Metal (Mech Fighter Book 5)

by James David Victor

  ERROR! Unknown genome . . .

  “No way,” Dane whispered, stepping up rapidly from the body, even though he knew that he was perfectly protected inside the suit from all forms of environmental contagion and infection.

  “What is it, Williams?” Cheng asked.

  “I don’t know quite yet.” Dane was frowning deeply at the body below. “But is it possible that this contagion could, I don’t know, turn a human into something else entirely? Another species?”

  “What!?” Hopskirk coughed inside his suit. “That’s . . . that’s really messed up. I’m not sure I like the sound of that at all.”

  “You and me both,” Dane said sombrely. “Come on, let’s see what’s waiting for us.” He stepped towards the airlock door, for a single green light to flicker into life above it and code to scrawl across his HUD.

  >MARINE ID ACCEPTED. Activating controls . . .

  The double-steel doors opened with a hiss and a scream.

  6

  The Bunker

  “Aiiii!” The voice that howled at them wasn’t human. Or not quite, anyway. And the figure that rushed towards them was no hologram, as it swept its long arms and dashed Dane to the side of the wall.

  >Suit impact! Breastplate 65% . . .

  It was one of the troll creatures, rushing out of the room and past Dane as he slid to the floor, shaking his head.

  “Contact!” Cheng was yelling, managing to raise his rifle. Before he could even fire it, the creature had grabbed the barrel and shoved it out of the way, ripping the rifle out of the sergeant’s hands and slamming its other claw across Cheng’s faceplate. With a grunt, the big man went down, with deep scores scratching the surface of his crystal glass.

  Hopskirk, who had been at the back of their little group, had more time. He fired off a beam of orange laser fire into the chest of the creature. It crashed into him, swinging both the stolen pulse rifle and its claws in a wild arc straight at Hopskirk’s head.

  “No!” Dane had dropped his rifle when he hit the wall, but he still had his pistol. He snatched it from the magnet lock at his waist and fired it at the green-and-olive back of the creature. It was a large enough target, anyway . . .

  Olive? Dane realized that the creature was half wearing the tattered fragments of an expedition fatigue suit, just like the dead soldiers all around here. And the thing’s horns weren’t as large as the dead troll-creature upstairs, but were much smaller, as if only newly formed.

  “Rargh!” And now the creature had turned as Hopskirk hit the stairs behind it, and the troll-thing was turning on the one causing it pain. Dane.

  Both Dane and the creature froze for the slightest moment. Dane could see the smoking holes in the thing’s chest and across its side where it had already been shot many times, and it was still going.

  Oh frack, Dane thought.

  The creature lunged towards him, and Dane fired. He had to hope that the thing still had a brain that worked even a little like a human’s and a skull that wasn’t made out of titanium or something.

  “Urk!” His shot hit, searing straight between the creature’s eyes as it fell onto Dane, dead but very, very heavy indeed.

  “I’m telling you, this monster didn’t start off a monster. It started off a man . . .” Dane groaned as he heaved the body of the troll-like alien from him. “Bruce? Hopskirk?” Dane coughed.

  “I’m good. Head ringing like a bell, but good.” Bruce Cheng was groaning from one side of the lobby as he struggled to his knees first and then accepted Dane’s hand in pulling him up.

  “Uh . . .” Hopskirk made a distressed sound that was definitely not all right, however. Dane and Bruce rushed to where their friend was kneeling, back towards them.

  “Stay back!” he said in a tone that Dane had never heard the usually irreverent Marine use before.

  “What!?”

  Hopskirk turned to face them, and Bruce hissed in shock. The Marine’s faceplate had been smashed by the creature’s claws, and an ugly red cut was oozing blood across the bridge of his nose. It wasn’t a bad wound at all, but everyone knew what the cause for alarm was.

  Something had infected these Marines and turned them into the thing that lay on the floor behind them. Dane saw the awareness and fear stark in Hopskirk’s eyes as they flittered to the lichen-covered creature that was still bursting out of the ragged olive fatigues.

  “Wait, Hopskirk,” Dane said hurriedly, kneeling down beside the Marine. “We don’t know anything yet. We don’t know how or why this happened. Or what happened, even.”

  “You should stay back. Get away from me!” Hopskirk said, his voice becoming a babble as Dane could hear the hysteria rising in him. “What if I’ve got it? What if I turn into one of those!?” Hopskirk backed himself against the stairs, closing his metal gauntlets over his shattered faceplate.

  “No.” Dane crouched and clapped a reassuring hand on Hopskirk’s shoulder. “You’re freaked. You’re scared. None of us understand this thing—but there’s no way that we are going to leave you,” Dane said steadily. “Take a breath, Marine. You know the code, right?”

  “No one left behind,” Bruce, above them, said the words steadily.

  “No one left behind,” Dane repeated the words with conviction. Very, very slowly, Hopskirk peeled his hands from his face and took a long, shuddering sigh.

  “But . . . But what if . . . ?” he started to whisper.

  “Stop it. You were trained the same as I was, Hopskirk,” Dane said a little more forcefully. “You remember our time back at Fort Mayweather? What that old goat Lashmeier told us? ‘Your expectations create your reality.’ Every time.”

  “So, you telling me that all I gotta do is believe that I’m going to be okay, and I’ll stop whatever virus is probably running through my system right now!?” Hopskirk spat the words. “Reality really doesn’t work like that, Williams.”

  “No, dammit, Hopskirk!” Dane said, his frustration and temper flaring. He guessed that he was as upset as Hopskirk was himself. “What I’m saying is that we simply have no clue what caused these men to turn into those things. For all we know, they might have done it to themselves! And what I’m saying is that if you’re just going to sit here and invite trouble, then you’re not doing yourself any favors. Or your team, Marine!”

  Dane saw Hopskirk’s eyes flare with a sudden wounded pride. Good, Dane thought. Stop being scared. Get angry instead.

  But then Hopskirk was hissing his breath out past his teeth in one long, frustrated whistle. “Gee, Williams, you can be a real turdburger sometimes,” the Marine said with a grunt before seizing his rifle and pushing himself off the floor. “Fine. Let’s get on with this,” the wounded Marine with the broken faceplate said. “Just, y’know . . . If I go and Hulk out on you halfway through the mission, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Hey, maybe we’re going to need a Hulk.” Dane stepped over the body of the troll-like thing and raised his rifle towards the gloom of the open bunker door.

  “Not helping, Williams, not helping,” Hopskirk groaned.

  As soon as Dane stepped over the threshold, the dim blue lights of the bunker control room started to light up, flickered and dimmed, and then lit up once more. It revealed a low-ceilinged room that was deep but not very wide, half-filled with the generators and microreactors that powered the expedition camp—as well as control decks and boards.

  “Hopskirk, you’re up. The holo data chip . . .” Dane said as he swept his rifle over the room. There was an incident table in the center surrounded by chairs, the sort where maps could be projected and projects planned. Most of the chairs had been dashed to the side, and at least one entire control panel looked like it had been smashed to smithereens.

  “I guess we know that kept . . .” (Him? It?) “. . . them busy,” Dane muttered, with a sick feeling when he considered that the man-creature had been stuck in here for however long, slowly changing . . . Dane wondered if the process hurt? Or did the human Marines just fall a
sleep, and then when they woke up, they were . . . changed?

  “I’ll see if I can get into the base servers,” Bruce said, moving to one of the undamaged control boards. He tugged a small socket from his orbital AMP’s belt, pulling out a connection wire to plug his suit straight into the mainframe. Hopskirk, on the other hand, still appearing disgruntled and ashamed of his broken-open faceplate, ducked as he moved to the incident table to find a port for the holo data set . . .

  >Holo Recorder EXP1a / Honshou / Personal Records . . .

  The lines of code sprang into the air above the incident table as the rectangle lit up. Smaller holo display windows popped into existence and started to play reruns of the ghostly blue man running towards the door.

  “Okay,” Hopskirk said, his voice steadying as he focused on the work. He was good at computers, Dane knew. That was one of the reasons why he had asked him to do this. Focus on what he was good at. Y’know, instead of turning into some slavering, walking man-mold . . .

  “Seems to be some kind of virtual log.” Hopskirk scrolled through the snapshots of footage. “Here . . .” He tapped on one of the holo boxes, for it to enlarge and show—not an image of a running, freaking-out Marine—but instead of a small man with silvered hair scraped back from his head into a very short bob.

  Civilian. Dane immediately spotted the non-regulation haircut.

  The man looked old, but there was a life and energy to his eyes and features that belied the deep wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. He sat at a desk in front of the camera and wore one of the regular expedition suits, only his was banded with white for medical.

  I guess this is Professor Honshou, Dane thought.

  “Record Log, day six.” The man spoke in clipped, exact tones. His eyes were unwavering and slightly unsettling as they stared straight into the camera and did not waver an inch.

  “We have had to abandon our plans. We’re leaving today, as soon as I finish this, but I intend to leave this recording running, as a warning to any that come after . . .” Honshou said, before his steady expression broke into a sudden frown of anguish. “If only there was a way of direct contact! If we manage to recover the device, and my suspicions prove correct, then perhaps—just maybe there might be a chance that we can contact home . . .” A moment of clear-eyed hope spread across his features, before it quickly died.

  The device? Dane’s ears pricked up. What device? Did he mean the Beacon?

  “But we cannot bet on things that have not happened yet. So, we will be abandoning the camp and striking out for the device. If another team arrives before we are back, then perhaps, heavens willing, they will be forewarned before any more harm is done.”

  The image suddenly dissolved into static.

  “Wait? What happened?” Dane stood up a little straighter.

  “The files have been corrupted somehow,” Hopskirk frowned, “but there’s this fragment of files attached.”

  The screen ahead filled with a very blank-looking vector graphic map of the surrounding area, on which Dane could see a small grayed-out almost-circle with EXPEDITION BASE written across it. There were some very hazy contour lines between that and a marker in the upper corner which Dane took to be the malfunctioning Beacon. And there, worming across it in fractured blue blips, was the route that Professor Honshou had plotted to take. It seemed to take a very indirect route, and one that diverted out of its direction for almost a day’s march.

  Why did they plan to do that? Dane thought. Was it this device they were talking about?

  “It would be quicker to take the Gladius.” He tried to measure the distance in his mind. Less than an hour, maybe two by flight.

  “Yes, it would,” Bruce muttered from where he worked at the rest of the facility’s mainframe servers. He sounded annoyed, either with what he was doing, or with the mission in general. “But the Beacon is still not working,” he pointed out heavily. “The expedition might have run into trouble along the way.”

  Dane thought for a moment, then nodded. “Okay. We know the route they took,” he said. “We try to track them.”

  “Whatever you guys say. I’m easy.” Hopskirk was scrolling back through the small holo projections to see that screen after screen was fuzzed and full of white-noise static. “Here . . .” He found another one that appeared to be halfway through to the bottom.

  Once again, the professor appeared on the screen, but he was instead standing over a medical unit where the body of a Marine lay. Dane immediately thought that the man was dead. Then he suddenly groaned and tried to move, but his limbs were slack and loose.

  “Easy there, Tychus, easy . . .” The professor leaned over the man, pressing an injector pretty similar to Dane’s own medical injector against the side of the man’s neck. The man’s movements slowed, and his breathing deepened. Honshou waited, taking the man’s pulse at his wrist for a long moment before he started murmuring.

  “Record Log, day three of the Planet 892 Expedition, Marine Corps . . .” Honshou’s voice sounded tight.

  “I have here Private First Class Tychus, one of our Comms Specialists despatched with our expedition. I’ll attach his general health records pre-expedition for later comparison.” Honshou gently set the man’s hand back down, sighing heavily.

  “Private First Class Tychus contracted a fever on the way back from his mapping mission. His medical sensors showed his temperature and heart rate spiking, and his white blood cell count started to react approximately three point five hours ago. By the time that he got back into camp, the man was delirious, and I can only assume that he must have contacted some viral or toxic agent on his mission. There are no clear signs of wounds or puncture marks visible, but I have yet to conduct a full medical examination.” Honshou stepped back from the bed to consider the man. The professor looked tired already.

  “His symptoms concur with infection: fever, headaches, disorientation, and delirium,” the Professor said, picking up a medical scanner from a nearby steel table before setting it back down to pick up a different one instead.

  “The one noticeable and unique symptom appears to be large, floret-like ring marks on his skin, which reminds me of a parasitic infection. They discolor the outer surface of the skin and appear to be forming nodules under the epidermis. I am placing the entire camp under a High Biological Alert. Although I have every confidence that we will be able to isolate the case, I have nonetheless ordered the expedition to scale back on mapping activities at the moment.”

  There followed a boring-to-Dane discussion on the various symptoms that Private First Class Tychus exhibited, mostly because Dane didn’t understand the technical jargon.

  “I knew it,” Hopskirk hissed in anger. “That poor schmuck went out, and something happened to him, and looks like they couldn’t contain it at all! I’m canned, Dane. You know it already.” The Marine stepped back with a heavy sigh.

  “It happened out there, Hopskirk,” Dane pointed out. “Not in here. That Marine wasn’t attacked, and he wasn’t wounded, all right?” Dane said in exasperation, hoping that what he was suggesting was true. “But we do know that the answers might lie in those holo recordings right there. Any way you can recover them?”

  Hopskirk muttered that he couldn’t promise anything, but that he would keep working on the corrupted files. “There’s usually a backup in the working temp or administrator code. If you give me some time, I might be able to recover the original file backups and help piece together the video logs again.”

  “Good idea,” Dane said, turning to Bruce. “So, what do you think? How’s the mainframe?”

  “Minimal,” Cheng grumbled from where he was plugged into one of the control decks. “There’s more than enough juice in the reactors to fire this whole place up, but all that’s running is the basic security and life support and absolutely nothing else.” Cheng shook his head. “If you ask me, this was done purposefully.”

  “What? The expedition willingly shut down their own camp?” Dane shook his head.

>   “Yeah. I’m seeing huge amounts of corrupted data—which might explain what happened to your holo file too. Mission and mapping and survey and architectural data all corrupted in the mainframe. If you ask me, someone released some kind of computer code into the mainframe.”

  “A virus? They hacked it?” Dane frowned. Looks like there’s two viruses going around, one in the computers and one in the bodies of the dead Marines . . .

  “Can’t say for sure,” Cheng sighed. “But whoever did it, they tried to fence off the parts of the mainframe responsible for basic life support and security—that’s why our Marine IDs were recognized, and the doors opened, and perhaps that’s why some of the professor’s holo recording survived . . .”

  “They wanted to keep the warning going,” Hopskirk muttered dolefully behind them. “They left only the basic services going that would keep that warning holo replaying, over and over, in the medical rooms . . .”

  Dane winced. Why would they corrupt their own mission data? Honshou did say in the latest clip that they were going to abandon the camp and strike out for the device, Dane thought. Whatever this device was . . . The professor had also seemed pretty adamant about leaving a warning behind for any who came after. Us, Dane mused.

  And then his eyes fell on the smashed control board and the open door, and the two bodies out there—one monster, one man—as well as another body on the ground floor above them. All three had been infected by whatever that thing was, and one had been trapped inside here long enough to turn into the monster.

  Did that mutated Marine do this? Dane thought. “What if . . .” Dane said out loud, pointing at the troll-man. “Our friend here was stuck inside, slowly turning into . . .” Dane threw a look at Hopskirk, who was studiously ignoring the conversation as he worked on lines of code.