The twin-engined ship lifted off from the surface of Earth’s sister with a flare of orange fire. She cast plumes of dust behind her as she jumped forward, flinging herself over the rocky surface before rising steadily, higher and higher into the void. On his suit’s screens, Corsoni had patched the M.I.D. channel into the rear cameras of the Gladius, and so there was a meditative mood as they all watched the Moon slowly getting smaller and smaller behind them, with the distant blue-green gem of the Earth behind that too.
Joey swung around the Moon in an all too close arc. “Slingshots are always fun!” he said by way of explanation, gaining greater and greater speed until he started the business of what he called real acceleration.
“Initiating main reactors one and two,” Joey called out, flipping switches on the control board beside him. Dane watched as the displays showed twin red circles slowly filling with green. Dane could swear that he even felt a thrum run through the ship as the massive coils started to spin and fling particles towards impact . . .
“Three, two, and . . .”
The twin circles turned a solid green. Suddenly Dane, Bruce, and the others were pushed forcefully against the backs of their seats as the Gladius leapt towards its full potential. Dane felt the g-force push at his skin and organs, even behind the great Orbital AMP suit with all of its absorbers that he wore.
The brightest stars in front of them suddenly blurred and glared into long, trailing comet’s tails, streaming towards them. The backdrop of glittering space became a surreal dream haze of silvers, grays, and blacks as they approached half the speed of light, and then two-thirds, three-quarters. . .
“Forward particle shield stable.” Corsoni called out arcane and, to Dane at least, unknowable adjustments and reports.
“Negative mesons good . . .”
“Gravitational flux holding . . .”
Before, when the Gladius had broken through the thick envelope of sky and atmosphere that enfolded the Earth, their prototype ship had shaken and trembled with the effort, as gravity and resistance clutched and tore at them. But now it was different. There was no shaking, no tremors, and the Gladius was smoothly accelerating better than any craft or vehicle that Dane had been in before. Even the feeling of the g-force started to die down, as did the nausea and pressure behind Dane’s eyes and in his ears.
“We’re in a stable field!” Corsoni said with apparent relief. “She’ll mostly fly herself now, as there’s no resistance or objects between us and Jupiter on this course.”
“What happens when we aren’t in a stable field?” Dane couldn’t help but ask.
“Well,” Corsoni turned to shoot Dane a macabre grin, “we wouldn’t be talking to each other, that’s for sure. We’d probably be spread from here to Mars.”
“Wonderful,” Dane swallowed. It was Bruce’s turn to ask a question.
“What about the Red Planet? Venus? Can we see them?”
“Not going close enough,” Corsoni said. “And if we were, it would just be another radiant blur like all the others. We’re traveling at the speed of light! Just think: this is what the universe looks like, or almost what the universe looks like, to a neutrino!”
It was beautiful out there, Dane had to concede. Like being caught in shifting prisms of light reflected from some celestial window. Not everyone shared his opinion, however.
“I’m quite happy being a man,” Bruce said somberly, before asking, “How long until we get there?”
“Are we nearly there yet?” Corsoni cackled back. “No. Another half hour. Thirty-three minutes, to be precise. Enough time to prep.”
“Enough time for this,” Bruce turned to look at Dane, and the lance corporal knew that whatever burden or enmity had been on the big guy’s mind, he meant to settle it now, before they might all be shot to hell.
“You came through back there, Williams,” Cheng surprised him by saying. “You really did. We would have been toast if you hadn’t taken the guns from the Exin.”
“Oh, thanks.” Dane blinked. He had been expecting a lecture on battle tactics. Instead, he got something similar, but not that.
“Don’t get me wrong—I think you did the right thing, looking after your men and taking them into the dome first . . .” Bruce said steadily, lowering his words to a murmur, and Dane realized that they were on a private suit-to-suit channel. “I overreacted. I’m sorry.”
“Please, don’t mention it.” Dane shrugged it off. It made him feel uncomfortable to dissect the decisions of battle, decisions that had been made in the crucible of the moment.
“I’m worried, Dane,” Bruce said after a moment, “about your need to keep your men safe.”
What!? Dane blinked. “That, well, that is hardly what any of us are doing right now, is it?” he attempted. Did Bruce still have a problem with his decisions to protect his men?
“I know, I know, Dane—that’s not what I meant.” Bruce’s voice was urgent and low. “What I mean is . . . you seem to be developing a wish to keep your men alive no matter what,” Bruce said, his eyes dark behind the shadow of his face-plate. “You know what I’m talking about. Private Mahir . . .”
“Don’t.” Dane felt a kick to his stomach. Just what was Bruce suggesting? That he throw the lives of good men away for nothing? “I am committed to keeping the men in my charge alive, Lance Corporal, and I will do my best at it.”
“And in so doing, you ignore the sacrifice that they make,” Bruce said solemnly. “I am not suggesting we should be careless with the lives of those under our command. But I am suggesting that we work out what will override our mission.”
“What do you mean—override our mission!?” Dane was starting to lose his temper.
“You cannot save everyone, Dane Williams. And you will not be able to keep everyone safe. You should realize that now,” Bruce said with a sudden sigh, the tension easing out of the big man. Dane could see that Bruce was not angry. He appeared, if anything, upset.
“You could have stayed in a battle formation with my team and alongside Yellow and Green. You instead split our forces up, and you were the only fully independent man on your team when you went into Dome 4. And then it was you who led the charge against the gun.”
“It had to be done!” Dane said hotly. Bruce hadn’t been there. How could he make these judgments?
“Yes. It did. But if you are not careful, this will turn into a pattern, Lance Corporal,” the big man said heavily, before he turned back. “Think about that. Think about what danger you will put yourself in, in order to keep everyone else safe.” Lance Corporal Bruce Cheng turned to release the webbing on his chair and got to his feet. “Now, I need to go prep for the operation. I hope that I haven’t offended you, Dane.”
You have. Dane held his tongue, but inside his anger seethed.
“Approaching Jupiter,” Corsoni’s voice called out, and Bruce was gone.
Oh great, Dane thought irritably. Now I have to go into battle in a bad mood!
14
The Station
“Slowing, slowing—halt!” Corsoni called over their suit channels, and Dane could see the external image of Jupiter springing into view, with the distant dots of its moons hanging against the night.
No wonder they call her a giant, Dane thought, as his mind tried to fathom just what he was seeing. The gas giant was indeed vast, but she was also beautiful. Rivers of gold, cream, orange, and brown ran across her surface like inks in water, somehow resiliently not merging, despite their fury. Dane’s eyes quickly found the large, angry bruise at her lower left corner, and then, the glint of light from something far, far above it. If he squinted, he was sure that he could see an object there too.
The plan was, more or less, a simple one—if an outrageous one too.
“Full interference running,” Corsoni whispered, and in tandem, Dane’s view of the planet glitched and disappeared, returning him to where he stood in Side Bay 2, with his two-man fire team behind him. Bruce was similarly positioned with the same number
s, on the other side of the door. It felt, curiously, like Dane was about to replay what had happened at the Moon. He immediately wondered if he would tell his men to stay back, so as not to get hurt.
“I have no idea if this will work,” Corsoni said, “but wish me luck!” For the first time since he had known him, Dane heard a note of worry in the engineer-pilot’s voice.
“You never needed any luck,” Dane quipped back, just as fast. “You’re the best starfighter we have.”
“Ha! I’m the only starfighter, you mean!” Corsoni cackled, but his tension appeared to have eased. “Whatever. I’m kicking you all out. Don’t get killed.”
“You too,” Dane had a chance to say as the red light above the bay door started to flash slowly at first, and then faster and faster, until it achieved a steady glow . . .
“Go! Go! Go!” Dane yelled as the door opened, and the marines of the Mechanized Infantry Division jumped out, somersaulting as they did so into the stellar dark.
Dane saw stars beneath his feet. Jupiter swung around, above, and below him—and for a dizzying moment he entirely forgot how to think in a vacuum. What was up and what was down? It didn’t even make sense to talk of up and down any more.
He saw the Gladius through his face-plate, as well as on the internal tactical map, sweep past them, speeding up as it did so, leaving the string of men tumbling and turning in the night. “Be prepared for unconventional operations.” Some of the words that Captain Otepi had told him floated up into his mind.
Yeah. He was pretty sure that if anything counted as unconventional, then this had to be it.
“Wait for the signal!” Dane urged his fire team, seeing them steady their movement by raising their arms and lifting legs, until they hung in an irregular line like tiny metal stars.
“What signal?” Hopskirk said, moments before there was a flash as the Gladius released a flare of rockets against the Exin jump ship.
“That signal,” Dane said. “Rockets!”
The marines had been dropped close enough to see the ship before them, but far enough away that the idea was that they shouldn’t be detected on radar. If their Exin collaborator was right, of course. Otepi had hazarded that the signals of the men would be too small to be noticed. Or so they had to presume, anyway.
Without any resistance to their flight, suddenly the Orbital AMPs were powering ahead on the orange glow of their pulse thrusters attached to the backs of their suits. It was hard to feel the acceleration in these conditions, but Dane could see the alien jump ship growing larger and larger by the heartbeat . . . Already, it was the size of a dinner plate, a wheel, a chair, a car . . .
“We’re coming in fast!” He heard Bruce’s voice nearby, as his fellow lance corporal’s suit also rocketed towards the alien vessel.
Dane could see the surface of the strange alien craft: four cylindrical spokes, turning like prayer wheels, catching and glinting with the flashes of static electricity. And these spokes were attached to the wheel hub of the craft, itself spinning slowly and dotted with odd encrustations. What Dane would have called portholes, windows, or modules on any other vessel, but on the Exin craft they looked more like barnacles or odd coral growths of some fantastic deep-sea life. The entire thing, Dane thought, had to easily be the size of the whole lunar colony—perhaps just a little smaller than the International Solaris Station.
An entire Exin station, here in our system! Dane’s stomach lurched with sick dread. He felt shock and, what was worse, a dull anger at his own people’s apparent ignorance of it. How could they have been so negligent, so unprepared, that an entire alien station appeared in their backyard, just an hour away from Earth!?
The Gladius that was right now banking hard and pulling back from its attack swoop against the Exin craft, releasing a glittering silver cloud like star dust behind it.
The fired rockets it had unloaded hit the outer rim of the Exin station, and the void-flying marines saw the dim flashes of orange-and-white light and the shudder through the vessel.
“Yes! Direct hit!” Dane heard Corsoni say over the suit communicator. For a wild moment, he wondered if they even needed the Orbital Marines. Maybe the Gladius would be enough alone to take out the Exin craft . . .
But no, such hopeful things could not happen in the universe that they lived in.
There was a sudden flash as a bolt of purple light speared out of the night towards the Gladius. It missed, but it revealed the dark shape of one of the Exin seed crafts as it rose from where it had apparently been dormant and started chasing the Gladius.
“On your six o’clock . . .” Dane said, more out of habit than what he thought Corsoni needed to hear—as the pilot and engineer was bound to have a tactical scanner many times sharper than Dane’s eyes.
“Yeah—and right up front too!” the pilot said, as suddenly the Gladius was spinning to avoid another purple pulse blast from ahead of it as the other seed craft made itself known. The shot skipped over the Gladius’s prow, but it was close. Very close.
“This is it. Over to you!” Corsoni said in a tense gasp as Dane imagined him wrestling with the controls. His part of stage one of the operation was done. He had poked the Exin and released the interference foil that was supposed to scramble near-frequency scanners. The idea was that the Exin would concentrate their efforts on the Gladius now, and their scanners wouldn’t even be able to detect the deadly antlike forms of the Orbital Marines.
That was the plan, anyway. Now, Dane knew, it was very much up to them.
The Exin station filled the view ahead of them, and it looked like some kind of dark god. Its spokes and rim had been cast in deep ironlike black by the brighter light of the gas giant behind it. And behind that, all that they could see was the boiling, crimson red of the eternal storm. Through its turning spokes, Dane could see the storms and churn of clouds so big that they could engulf entire human cities. Static lightning played itself out across the surface of the Exin craft, making it look like an underworld, hellish sort of god. A being of vengeance and malevolence.
On Dane’s heads-up display, a glowing green vector of lines appeared, flashing towards the point where his current trajectory would take him on the craft. The outer rim, near the joint of one of the spokes.
I wish I knew where the thing’s power source was, he was thinking, as there was another sudden, giant flash of static electricity that seemed to crackle over the entire station. The station appeared to hold a shimmer of heat or radiation or something for a few long breaths afterwards, before it faded out.
I have no idea how long it will be before it is ready to make the jump . . .” Dane was thinking. Although he could see an indicator on the inside of his suit: the readouts of energy waves being transmitted by the thing. When he looked at the scan images, he could see each rising curve and fall—tracking the bursts of energy flashes just like this one—getting bigger and more pronounced as the time between the flashes lessened. It was only getting more and more powerful.
It was building up to something.
“Red Team, prepare for contact . . .” Dane whispered, his hands sliding to the large modules he had attached to his utility belt. They would be unbearably large for any human to carry, as each one contained two hastily taped-together cells from the Exin warheads. With just a small bit of engineering trickery from Corsoni, and a few chemical supplies from the lunar scientists, they had made for themselves a whole batch of some very powerful explosives.
Dane prayed that it would be enough.
“There, Williams, look!” It was the words of Bruce Cheng. The station rim filled their view as they were thrown towards it. Dane could make out the finer details of the craft’s hull itself: lots and lots of overlapping and interconnecting plates, just like the almost-organic scale armor that the Exin wore themselves, as if the ship had been grown, not manufactured.
Cheng was pointing towards the hub of the craft. “Check your energy read outs!” the big man called. Dane flicked on his radiological, biologi
cal, and thermal scanners to see that the hub appeared to be glowing much brighter than everywhere else.
Dane knew immediately what he was saying. That anything that had that much power inside of it must also be pretty vital to the functioning of the craft in general . . .
“Red Team, changing course,” Dane said, spreading one of his arms out to one side and turning his hip to change the angle of his flight. The hub ahead looked like a much larger version of one of the seed crafts: a large oval shape, like a dark egg.
They were close, and Dane and the others were flying down one of the slow-turning spoke towers when it happened. Dane didn’t know if their interference had finally run out, or maybe their luck had, or both, but Dane saw movement along the body of the spoke. The larger encrustation modules that dotted the spokes here and there suddenly moved. Little puffs of releasing gases burst from their tops.
“Eyes up!” Dane managed to shout, just as things emerged from the modules. Things made of black, glistening metal and with altogether far too many legs. And they were launching themselves at the Orbital Marines.
15
Defense Mechanism
“Frack!” Dane tried to spin as one of the things flew straight for him. It was some kind of drone, with its central body little more than a pulse engine ending in something with lots of sharpened pincers.
Smack! His arm hit the wall of the spoke with a scatter of sparks as he careened across it. Down it. No—it felt like he was somehow, insanely, falling upwards.
>Suit Impact! Right arm -10% . . .
And then the thing was upon him, flaring out its legs so that the sharpened pincers at the end caught at him. It snatched onto the plates of his shoulders and swung itself around to bring its pincered “mouth” straight for his back!
Metal Warrior: Steel Trap (Mech Fighter Book 3) Page 11