Metal Warrior: Steel Trap (Mech Fighter Book 3)

by James David Victor

  The plains before them were a mixture of ochre, brown, and gleaming white. Here and there, Dane could pick out the telltale posts of listening stations, antenna. The air was so clear here that Dane could see for miles. Flashing across their front window, high above, was the swirling curl of a condor.

  Corsoni was angling the Gladius upwards towards the blue, and, with a savage, victorious snarl, he threw the flight sticks forward, and suddenly the space fighter leapt towards it.

  8

  Hard Landing

  Dane felt the reverberation as his suit was punched backwards into the containing cockpit chair. The blue above them deepened—and darkened.

  He could feel the effects of the acceleration, but it was distant and removed, like being underwater or on a plane, where a sense of pressure in the ears and nose only heightened. The suit must be automatically taking a lot of the brunt of it, Dane realized, and so the actual experience of escape velocity was one that was ironically, much easier than it was in the centrifuge machine back at Nevada.

  Below at Nevada, Dane realized, as the blue started to become midnight, and then flares of white, orange, and red filled the cockpit window screens.

  “Whoa!” Copelli said, his voice pretty tight with pressure.

  “That’s normal!” Corsoni was shouting, as the Gladius started to shudder and shake. “It’s supposed to do that!”

  But is it supposed to shake like this!? Dane refrained from shouting back. It would do no good to spread the panic that he was starting to feel as his jaw ached. The deep vibrational thrum of the accelerating Gladius reminded Dane of the electric nerve twitch that accompanied the onset of another attack of the Exinase virus on his weakened system. It was impossible for the lance corporal to feel the same devil-may-care joy and exhilaration as Corsoni clearly did.

  The flames intensified and then flared a deep crimson. But inside the craft, apart from the judder, there was no accompanying roaring noise.

  This is the first of its kind, Dane was thinking. Doesn’t that make it a prototype!?

  The shuddering increased to a crescendo pitch, but then—suddenly—all shaking stopped as the flames disappeared, and the deep blue of a Nevada sky was replaced with black. A glittering black, as it was scattered with thousand, a hundred-thousand, a thousand-thousand pinpricks of stars.

  They had broken through the air of Earth, and they were now truly space marines.

  “Booyah! Marines!” Dane heard the shouts and whoops of the other marines of the Mechanized Infantry (the Orbital Mechanized Infantry now, he realized) over the open comms of his suit. He felt an agreeing echo of pride for them all. They had done it. They had made it into space, they had survived the horrors of a ravaged Earth, and now . . .

  “Take a hard look behind you, gentlemen.” The voice of Captain Otepi sounded in everyone’s ears. “Take a look at just what we are fighting for.”

  Dane didn’t have to swivel in his seat, however, as the captain of the War Walkers had sent a direct feed to each of their suits from what he guessed had to be the orbital satellites. A box popped up over his HUD, looking back the way that they had come.

  And there was the Earth.

  My home world, Dane thought instinctively and felt his heart lurch. That term “home world” had felt strange at first, a phrase from sci-fi shows and game consoles. Something that heroes used while fighting off impossible alien enemies.

  Dane was surprised at how accurate it felt as he looked at the brilliant blue-green orb that filled most of the screen. Earth. As he had never seen it before.

  She was bright, he thought compulsively. The dome of her horizon was brilliant with the light of the distant sun—or of the noble gases and magnetic radiations—he did not quite know which. But further into the globe’s surface, where the glare receded, he could make out the deep swathes of royal blue, flecked with silver and teal greens. The oceans of his home planet had never looked as appealing as they did now, even though Dane had never considered himself much of a water person.

  But then his heart saw more: the browns, greens, whites, and ochres of the landmasses.

  “Holy frack—that’s Florida!” he heard one of the acting lance corporals saying—in his daze of emotion, Dane didn’t remember which. All he knew was that the man spoke truth. He was looking at the outflung needle of land that looked little more than a spit of perilously thin green against the blue. All those swamps, he thought, imagining the gators that slunk in the flooded ditches beside sun-baked roads . . .

  And the thought of the reptilian life down there—most ancient of species still croaking around the planet, he remembered someone telling him once—instinctively made him think of everything else that lived down there that he was looking down upon, right now. The parakeets in the trees and the sharks in the Bay of Bermuda. The lizards sunning themselves on porches, the marlins and dolphins that he had once gone swimming with on one of those “adventure vacation” tours that his father had begrudgingly taken him on at twelve years old.

  It was too much to think about, and especially so when he saw the horrid, ugly mark of fractured gray and shadow that, by his reckoning, had once been the city of Columbus. They got it bad in the first wave of Exin attacks—that had been over a year ago, and the cityscape still looked like a burn on the surface of the world.

  Whatever satellite that Otepi had patched them into was traveling quickly (or maybe it was the Earth itself that was turning quick, from this perspective) but Dane swore he could see a handful of other such desecrations across the surface of his home world. The world had changed. It looked like a kid that had several shades of hell beaten out of it in various places—but it looked beautiful, nonetheless.

  But the sight of all those countless city graves made Dane angry. And the others apparently felt the same way . . .

  “I had a brother living in Sacramento . . .”

  “I spent the first eight years of my life in Portland . . .”

  “Washington sure looks different . . .”

  Dane swore that he could feel the mood of his men changing behind him—hadn’t Lashmeier said something about that happening? That after a while, the officer and their squad become something else? Whatever. Dane cleared his throat.

  “That’s right, marines. This is what we’re fighting for. Let’s do this one right,” he said, as the image suddenly clicked off with a snarl of static.

  >Gladius Threat System . . .

  The words scrolled across the top of his HUD. He hadn’t even realized that their suits were linked up to the Gladius’s servers.

  >Enemy Weapons Systems Detected . . . Enemy Locked On . . .

  “Incoming!” Corsoni shouted, as Dane’s attention snapped to the reinforced cockpit crystal glass ahead of them. The dream of the Earth was gone, and Dane saw the smaller, ghostly orb of the Moon ahead. It was dotted with pinpricks of flaring light, which were growing larger and larger and leaving the orb of Earth’s sister. Flaring purple stars, gleaming and crackling, were coming straight towards them.

  “Joey? What is it?” Dane said.

  The engineer-now-pilot’s face was a grimace behind his own shadowed face-plate suit. “They’re firing. I don’t know what it is, missiles or pulse blasts or . . . Frack!” He swore suddenly as the rising stars grew much larger and closer than Dane would have thought possible. He saw the glint of metal at their hearts. Suddenly, they were being thrown to one side as Corsoni dragged down one of the flight handles and threw them into a curve.

  The Moon and its deadly missives wheeled away across the cockpit, and they were charging at the speckled night of stars, but the tactical radar map activated on Dane’s HUD. He saw that there were three red vectors racing across the night, one of them apparently holding a straighter course and shooting out past them, the other two curving after their burn.

  “Missiles!” Dane hissed. He wished that he knew more—or anything—about flight tactics.

  “We got a mean turn—” Corsoni was saying. He was grunting
with the effort to drag the Gladius into a downward spin, once again bringing the orb of the Moon (much bigger in their windows now) dragging across the top of their view in a diagonal. One of the missiles was turning upwards, heading in a wild curve above them, while the other was attempting to curve downwards . . .

  “Problem is,” Corsoni spoke in a tight mutter as he quickly flicked a couple of the switches on the board, “no one’s ever written a manual on interstellar dogfighting.” He wrenched at both flight handles, and Dane and the others were suddenly pushed back into their seats with the punch of accelerating g-force as Corsoni attempted to swoop them out of their dive.

  “You’re gonna be the one to write it,” Dane said grimly, hanging onto the armrest and praying, fervently, that what he said was going to be true . . .

  The Moon ahead of them swung once again, quickly and crazily, straight into their view. She eclipsed their entire cockpit window until there was no space left to see, just white and gray, rock and dust and mountain, growing larger and larger with every heartbeat.

  >Evasion successful . . .

  The Gladius’s tactical servers bleeped, as the last of the purple-firing Exin missiles vanished with a blip on their tactical radar.

  “They lost their lock! I hoped if I could move fast enough, they might not be able to keep tracking . . .” Corsoni was saying as Bruce suddenly broke in.

  “Talk about moving fast enough!” the big man said urgently, and Dane could only agree as now they were looking at the rubble on the sides of mountains. Actual mountains on the Moon, picked up in perfect clarity. They were hammering straight for them!

  “Stabilizers,” Corsoni announced grimly, determined not to give way to the panic that he surely must be feeling as one hand shot to the flight desk to hit more switches. He calmly pulled back on the flight handles with a steady, powerful motion.

  We’re not going to make it . . . How can we make that turn!? The words of Dane’s anxiety, lodged somewhere in the back of his throat, spoke loud and clear. He saw the mountains grow larger and larger until he could make out boulders the size of cars, houses, the size of the Gladius itself.

  But Dane knew that the goal wasn’t to eradicate anxiety. It was to declaw it.

  “You can do this!” he growled at Corsoni—just as the stabilizers seemed to take action. The space fighter shuddered as it started to turn, the flat of the lunar surface now becoming an incline, a slope, a plain . . .

  And they were suddenly sweeping across the surface of the Moon, sending giant billows of white dust like the ash of demolished cities in their wake.

  “BOOYAH!” Dane heard himself yell. He was certain that they were only feet off the surface of the Moon, but already Corsoni was bringing them up, turning them, tweaking their devilish flight as they saw canyons rising before them.

  “That’s the entrance point. If I don’t splash us straight into one of the walls, you’ll be orbital evac’ing from Side Bay 2 on the other side. Go! Go! Go!” Corsoni was saying.

  “What?!” Dane was saying, but his mission parameters had already updated on his suit’s HUD.

  >M.I.D. 4-AMP Fire Teams: (Red, L. CPL WILLIAMS), (Blue, L. CPL CHENG), (Green, Act. CPL COPELLI), (Yellow, Act. CPL MUAI).

  >Mission: Retake Luna 1 . . .

  >Objective 1. Orbital Evac . . .

  >>>Situation Hot . . .

  >>>Overwhelm Enemy Defenses . . .

  “What the hell is an orbital evac!?” he heard Acting Corporal Copelli swear beside him. Dane had already hit the release on his suit and was springing from his chair, heading for the other marines.

  “Lock that down, Copelli!” Dane switched to private channel for a moment. He was running on guesswork and instinct now—just like in the ring—and it appeared to be working. “We’ve done evac procedures before. This’ll be no different . . .” (apart from the fact that they were being expected to make landfall from a moving starfighter to an orb with a fraction of the gravity of Earth’s and against enemy defenders, he presumed) “. . . and don’t let your men get a whiff of uncertainty!”

  Dane hit the door release as the Gladius was swaying and swinging through the turn of the lunar canyon. He clattered down the short but wide corridor to the hold where the rest of the marines were still seated, at the same time casting quick glances to the strategic diagram that Objective 1 showed to the superior officers. He saw an icon of the Gladius, and two arrows curving out at one point, and then the Gladius wheeled (presumably to the other side of the Luna Scientific Station) where another two fire teams were distributed.

  “Alright!” Dane shouted in what he hoped was his best voice of authority as he saw their hulking forms sitting along the walls. Each orb of a metal face-plated head turned to regard him at once.

  “You got your fire teams! Red and Blue by the side bay doors!” he said and was grateful as the suit’s internal display started to flash the green direct arrows as he spoke, updating itself to the mission parameters and showing the way to the doors.

  “We all know how this is done!” Dane found himself talking to everyone, for everyone. “Jump and roll. Remember the gravity differential. Let yourself glide where you can—but weapons are hot! Expect incoming. Keep to your teams. Work together!”

  “First in, last out!” He heard Bruce roar behind him as the big man was the second into the main bay behind him, already making his way to his own fire team of Blue. Dane reached his own four-man party, including Hopskirk and Johnston, who were already rising and running through their weapons check as they mustered at one edge of the double doors.

  “Marines,” Dane greeted them.

  “Nice bit of work,” he heard Hopskirk saying back to him, nodding to the marines who were rushing to accomplish what Dane had ordered. “Made it look like someone knew what the hell they were doing,” Dane heard the sarcastic shrug in Hopskirk’s voice. Despite the subtle insubordination, it made Dane smile all the same.

  “Lance Corporal Williams?” He looked up to see the great form of Bruce Cheng, his opposite number, on the opposite side of the doors from him. Red and Blue were going to be the leading point in this operation. The first ones deployed, which meant that they would probably be the ones to get the most flak too. Dane nodded grimly and saw the dome of Bruce’s face-plate do the same and then clutch his pulse rifle a little more readily to his chest.

  “Pilot to crew: chamber to 0.5 Earth pressures. Hang on to your hats and your balls!” they all heard Joey shout over their suit comms. The entire bay flushed a bluish light, and there was the sound of rushing air. Dane felt a rising sense of lightness from around his suit, but the suit itself insulated him from the sudden changes. He felt almost felt a chill, as the atmosphere of the chamber decreased to half of what he was used to on Earth. It seemed that the drive of the Gladius created a bit of a gravitational field as well, because he felt himself slowly becoming weightless as the ship gradually eased them into the environment that they were now entering.

  “We’ve been prepared for this,” Dane reminded the rest of his crew, and they answered him with nods. They had done a lot of training with different environments, after all, and Dane found that this experience felt close to swimming. There was still gravity here, just as there was still gravity on Earth, but it was a weak and ephemeral thing . . .

  “Approaching dropsite now,” Corsoni encouraged.

  “Get some,” he heard Johnston growl, almost to himself, as the Gladius swerved one more time and the light above Side Bay Door 2 went from a blinking red to a steady green.

  “Go! Go! Go!” Corsoni was shouting over the suit comms, as the door rolled open. Dane saw acres of gray-and-white rocks, and the glitter of purple light from somewhere nearby, as he and Bruce leapt from the lip of the open door.

  Whoa! Dane found himself spinning through the air. Despite what he had told everyone, he had pushed off with more force than he had intended, and he was busy spiraling through the near vacuum above the surface of the Moon like a thrown basketball.<
br />
  His head and body spun. He saw the surface of the Moon and the void of the sky flash black-and-white, black-and-white . . .

  But his exo-orientation training taught him to keep a central point in his sight, a middle point around which he could mentally pivot. His spinning was already slowing as he kicked out with his legs and dragged his rifle up in front of him.

  Flash! Flash! Flash!

  >Warning! Enemy Fire! . . .

  His suit was warning him a little late as he saw the broken, half-tooth domes of the habitats, blackened and jagged up ahead, with the flashes of purple pulse shots as the waiting Exin were already firing upon them. At least two fizzing, flaring balls of superheated plasma shot past him in near misses, and the Gladius was already swinging around the ruined lunar station to the far side.

  Wham! Despite the fact that weightlessness and light gravity looked very balletic, the actual effect of slamming into another planet—no matter how small in comparison to the Earth—was still one that sent judders and shock waves of pain through Dane’s back. Dust billowed up on either side of him as he skidded, bounced . . .

  “Ooof!” Before slamming back down into the ground once more and tumbling into a crouch.

  “Red Squad! On me!” Dane shouted as he bounded up, leveling his rifle to tap the trigger three times, releasing a thin volley of his own, answering with orange blasts back at the enemy positions. He had no intention of actually hitting anything or of overcoming the enemy from this range, but he hoped that the shots would force them back behind cover as he bounded—

  And rose high into the “air” above the Moon, a wide, huge, curving jump that pulled the broken Earth habitats a whole lot closer. He must have leapt, with the aid of less gravity here and the added hydraulic strengths of his suit, almost a hundred feet in one single bound!