by C H Gideon
“Agreed.” Xi nodded, gesturing to the stack of slates. “But I’m going to need Podsy’s help with at least the material requisitions and inventories.”
“He’s the right man for the job,” Styles agreed before snapping a salute. “Captain.”
“Chief.” She returned the salute before making her way to the drop-deck, where Podsy and the rest of the battalion were working on a seemingly endless list of work orders.
“Captain Xi,” Podsy greeted, walking over on his shiny new pair of prosthetic legs. The proportions were picture-perfect for his physique, and beneath his jumpsuit, it was almost impossible to recognize they weren’t his original legs. His gait was still jerky and slow, but he was well ahead of the standard rehab schedule, which filled Xi with pride at her former Wrench working to overcome his physical trials.
“Lieutenant Podsednik,” Xi acknowledged, causing him to cock his head in surprise.
“Awfully formal, Captain,” he chided.
She gave a wan smile by way of apology before proffering a pair of data slates. “Which means you know that a total bone job is coming. Here’s the deal. I’ve been placed in temporary command of the battalion, and I need a dedicated quartermaster. Do you want the job?”
Heads turned in alarm at hearing Xi was now in command, and she felt extraordinarily self-conscious at that moment as all eyes quickly fixed on her.
“I heard the word ‘deal,’ but there was a distinct lack of anything deal-like.” He shook his head at her smirk. “Of course, Captain.” Podsy nodded, accepting the data slates and scanning their contents. He was doing the best of anyone present at hiding his surprise at her revealing the temporary change in command structure, but even he was unable to keep it entirely from his voice and visage as he asked, “When are we shipping back out?”
“Twenty-four hours and change,” she replied, turning to the nearby teams working at the deck’s various machining stations and workbenches. “Which means we need to re-prioritize this repair schedule to get as many vehicles back in the green as quickly as possible.”
“Understood, Captain.” Podsy nodded with professional conviction, and for some reason, Xi felt as though a wall had just sprung up between herself and the man she considered her closest friend in the entire Legion…and probably the entire universe. “We’ll shuffle the board and get mechs back in their cans ASAP.”
Chief Rimmer came over from one of the benches, wiping grease from his hands and nodding in agreement. “We’ll get the deck stowed and ready for departure on schedule, Captain.”
“Good.” Xi nodded. “Chief—” She caught herself too late before setting her jaw and starting over. “Lieutenant Podsednik, I’ll need a full report on those requisitions and inventories in three hours. Chief Rimmer.” She turned to the Bonhoeffer’s deck chief. “How close is the other drop-deck to getting back in rotation?”
Rimmer cocked his head dubiously. “If I pulled everyone currently off-shift, along with a few of the mech crews, and worked round-the-clock…we can get the hull patched up and the deck re-pressurized in time for departure. But I can’t do anything about the armor damage without a week in a proper shipyard,” he added with finality.
“Understood. Forget the armor and make your top priority getting both decks functional,” Xi commanded. “We can catch up on lost sleep after we break orbit.”
“Yes, Captain,” Rimmer said, displeased but equal to the task.
“Good. As you were,” she said with a nod, causing both men to spring into action and begin barking orders.
She allowed herself a moment to linger, savoring the energy of the deck as nearly two hundred men and women went about the task of preparing for battle. Colonel Jenkins had done an outstanding job assembling this team of passionate, dedicated warriors. Some of them fought as Xi did, aiming ordnance and holding positions inside the most fearsome armored vehicles humanity had ever developed. Others fought with rifles, grenades, unbreakable spirit, and unshakable ferocity like the Trappers and their infantry. Still others fought like Podsy and Rimmer, with wrenches and welders to keep the war machine relentless pressing into the heart of the enemy.
Only a fool could look at the lot of them and see anything but a united band of hard-edged fighters. And as Xi basked in their unity of purpose and intensity of spirit, she knew then more than ever that it was her duty—no, her honor—to lead them into battle. They would follow her orders, and those orders would lead some of them to victory and others to their deaths. It was a sobering thought, and one which made her doubt her worthiness to lead.
Podsy turned, catching her eye as he gave her an approving nod. And at that moment, her doubt melted away and two words crystallized in the fore of her mind. She pointed to him and nodded back.
“We’re ready,” she said with satisfaction, turning and leaving the men and women of Dragon Brigade to prepare for their next battle. Their enemies were numerous and would stop at nothing once they learned of the Legion’s latest mission. Speed and surprise were of the essence, and Xi knew she would need to maximize both if she hoped to achieve victory in Colonel Jenkins’ absence.
“Ready or not…” She allowed herself to smile as she entered the lift and punched in the bridge code, where she and the ship’s CO would prepare for the most important game in the Metal Legion’s history. “Here we come.”
The End
Author Notes - Craig Martelle
Written November 20, 2018
You are still reading! Thank you so much. It doesn’t get much better than that.
I love this series! I can’t thank Caleb Wachter enough for doing the heavy lifting. I met him through Matthew Thrush and ours was a writing match made in heaven! Caleb brings the characters and the flow, an innate understanding of the characters, and how to keep the reader riveted. I bring the military experience and lingo to punch up the realism. I am blessed to have found someone with Caleb’s talent to bring these stories to life.
I just returned from Las Vegas, where I ran the 20Books Vegas 2018 convention with my good friend, Michael Anderle. He came up with the 20Booksto50k® premise and it is this.
“I've talked in the past about how I wanted to create an income of $50k a year by having a backlist of 20 books. I came up with this number because I noticed after the first few days of selling my first book, I was averaging about $7.50 a day in income. At that number ($7.50 a day for each of the 20 books) I'd make $54k. You only need $36k to enjoy a very nice retirement in Cabo San Lucas. That was my goal.” Michael Anderle
A little group called 20Booksto50k® was born on Facebook and it now boasts over 26,000 members. We decided that it would be great for the authors to meet face to face, so we took the show to Vegas, where they are professionals at running conferences. I planned for 150 for the first show in 2017. We had 420 sign up. In 2018, we had 720 sign up. Because of space, we have to limit 2019 to 850. It is the single largest gathering of self-published authors in the world. It takes a bit of my time over the course of the year, especially since I also have self-published author conferences in London, Edinburgh, and Bali, too. We travel a fair bit, but the stories still get written.
And Michael Anderle is a total party. He doesn’t eat vegetables, which is okay and if you order family style, then be prepared to eat the entirety of the green bean casserole yourself. We went to what is touted as the best Chinese restaurant in Vegas. Hidden in Gold Coast is Ping, Pang, Pong. Don’t judge it by that. It was incredible. I had no heartburn from the orange chicken which had the lightest breading and sauce that wasn’t overly sweet. The chicken was tender inside. I wish I had a monster order of it sitting in front of me right now, but alas, I’m back in Fairbanks and Winter has arrived. Only five months left until Spring!
It’s dark eighteen hours out of the day, soon to be twenty. That means more writing time.
Because first and foremost, I write science fiction. I’m branching out into cozy mysteries and some fantasy, but that keeps the science fiction juices flowing.
I hope it does anyway. Maybe it’s that I love telling stories, regardless of the genre.
I hope everyone enjoyed Metal Legion. It was fun to write in a way that I found most relaxing. James Caplan, Micky Cocker, and Kelly O’Donnell keep me on the straight and narrow with in-process reads and ideas, language smoothing, continuity, and overall readability. They are an amazing bunch who help make me and my stories better.
No one goes on this journey alone. If it weren’t for being surrounded by great people and the incredible readers who keep picking up my books, none of these stories would be possible.
Peace, fellow humans.
Hellfire
Metal Legion Book One
1
Operation Brick Top
With the opening riff of Judas Priest’s Painkiller filling Elvira’s cabin, Xi keyed up the battalion-wide channel.
It was time.
“Dragon Brigade, this is Captain Xi,” she announced. “Engage target.”
Operation Red Rock, her subconscious replayed the mission briefing. The Vorr had disclosed there was material evidence of the Jemmin conspiracy buried more than thirty kilometers below the surface of a planet affectionately known as “the Brick.” Even with its dry, lifeless surface, there was a thriving human colony who were expected to fight the so-called invaders. The rebels, the enemy, the locals…whatever they were called, they were lightly armed and would present little resistance while the battalion supported a TBM, a tunnel boring machine, to access the deep underground. Easy mission.
Captain Xi Bao had never believed the resistance would be light or the mission would be easy. They’d heard the same thing before landing on Durgan’s Folly. Her experience led her to believe the opposite.
Elvira’s SRM tubes cleared, sending a flight of armor-piercing ordnance soaring toward the target facility. Built into a half-kilometer-tall plateau, the rebel fortress had walls of natural stone estimated to be seven meters thick. Given its dozens of heavy weapon fixtures and scores of automated defensive drones, the installation would be hard to bring down.
But certainly not impossible, as Xi and her people aimed to prove.
A dozen other mechs cleared their launch tubes, sending nearly two hundred bunker-busting projectiles tearing away from the semicircular formation of Xi’s mechs.
The first of the missiles stabbed into the rocky plateau, ripping multi-ton boulders from the red-brown rock that covered nearly every surface of the dead, blasted planet. Most of the penetrative ordnance slammed into the plateau with simple kinetic force, while some of the higher-end platforms delivered secondary and tertiary payloads which detonated dozens of meters behind the plateau’s rocky exterior.
Counter-missiles flew out from the enemy fortress as soon as the first of Xi’s warheads hit their targets. Hidden behind cleverly-concealed panels of rock and metal, the launch platforms were only exposed for an average of two seconds each before their protective doors slammed shut. But in that brief interval, during which the embedded launchers spewed eighty-six missiles in a coordinated wave of counter-fire, Xi’s people scrubbed three of the placements with expertly-placed strikes that snuck in before the doors could close.
Her people had trained for this assault for weeks, and she watched with satisfaction as the Legion loosed its intercepting counter-rockets against the enemy salvo. The first flight lost sixty-three of eighty-six missiles to the wave of counter-rockets, and the remaining twenty-three missiles were shorn from the planet’s exceptionally thin air by Dragon Brigade’s railguns. Not a single enemy missile broke the shield, filling Xi with pride at her comrades’ collective display of skill and focus.
The accuracy of the Metal Legion’s arsenal was once again put on display when every artillery cannon in the battalion thundered in near-perfect unison. Elvira’s dual fifteen-kilo guns roared, sending high-explosive shells downrange at a particularly exposed patch of the fortress’ superstructure. Twenty-two other cannons, most of them fifteens like Elvira’s, added their voices to the second barrage.
The fortress’ walls erupted in a satisfying shower of debris and shrapnel as the Legion’s rounds dug deep into the exposed frame. Xi felt a surge of endorphins flood her nerves as the neural linkage connecting her body and Elvira gave the distinctly pleasant feedback she had come to expect when they successfully delivered weapons on-target.
Even before the cloud of red dust settled, a dozen enemy vehicles scurried from the plateau and sent micro-rockets slicing toward her battalion’s mechs. The micro-ordnance was too small to be intercepted by counter-rockets, which left Xi’s people with computer-slaved anti-personnel chain guns and coil guns to address the incoming barrage.
Pivoting Elvira slightly to the left, Xi put her chain guns on-target and spat depleted uranium slugs into the sky. She sniped a pair of micro-rockets from the air and her fellow mechs had similar success, so together they scrubbed half the inbound fire before the enemy got their first hits.
A trio of rockets slammed into Elvira’s forward hull, one even striking her cockpit’s transparent alloy viewing windows. The micro-rockets were designed to take down small unarmored vehicles and did little more than dig fist-sized gouges in Elvira’s armor. The rest of the battalion suffered similarly inconsequential impacts until a pair of mechs’ missile launchers were taken off-line.
With the latest counter-wave spent, it was time for the battalion to get serious. The combined missile and artillery strikes against the plateau had been primarily designed to expose the structure to the biggest guns in the Metal Legion’s arsenal.
The Sam Kolt, with its roughly humanoid frame supporting a comically large cannon capable of engaging warships in low orbit, lowered down to all fours and engaged its charge cycle. Its massive capital-grade railgun’s capacitors thrummed to life.
Meanwhile, Cave Troll’s dual plasma cannons charged up on the opposite side of the plateau from the Sam Kolt. In a surprisingly poetic display of asymmetry, Cave Troll’s capacitors began charging after Sam Kolt’s, but Cave Troll’s guns managed to clear first by a half-second.
In spite of firing later, the Sam Kolt put a bolt of hyper-velocity tungsten on target before Cave Troll’s slower blue-white infernos poured into a gap in the fortress’ defenses.
The conflagration that ensued was every bit as glorious as Xi had hoped it would be.
The Sam Kolt’s capital-grade railgun tore a ten-meter-wide gash in the plateau’s southeastern face, sending a geyser of rocky debris skyward. The weapon’s tremendously destructive tungsten bolt carved a miniature canyon more than halfway across the two-hundred-meter-diameter chunk of rock, exposing a dozen tunnels and conduits that had formerly connected the fortress’ disparate nests.
On the other side of the rockface, Cave Troll’s sluggish bolts of plasma surged inside the structure. Five distinct eruptions rippled along the rockface as munitions cooked off within, destroying launch tubes, gun nests, and gutting the fortress’ interior.
Elvira’s SRMs had reloaded with explosive warheads several seconds earlier, and Xi sent those warheads into a pair of exposed missile boxes just as they fired in defiance of the Legion’s devastating assault.
But this second wave of fire had less than half the potency of its predecessor, and Xi’s people easily sniped the inbound missiles with nothing but railgun fire. Demonstrating their tactical superiority, the Legion’s second missile wave utterly devastated what remained of the fortress’ exposed nests.
Rubble was thrown in vast arcs as explosions rippled across the rockface. Amid the facility’s death throes, the fortress’ fusion plants lost containment, as demonstrated by a pair of thoroughly satisfying earthshaking tremors deep within the plateau. The entire plateau erupted, a million tons of rock flung skyward like water from a geyser.
“Recover,” Xi ordered, intently watching the blips of the mechs that had been closest to the fortress, Cave Troll and Sam Kolt. The two mechs moved slowly away from the rocky conflagration. Bao let out a breath and conducted a quic
k tally.
Nothing could have survived the fortress’ violent destruction, but Xi had no reason to believe that a single human life had been lost during the assault.
Even with the facility itself neutralized, there were still over a dozen agile, fast-moving drones zigzagging across the rust-red ground surrounding the former plateau. Ducking into and out of shallow artificial gullies, the drones would be nearly impossible to target with artillery and were too quick to hit with missiles reliably. They needed to be hunted down and engaged at close range.
This was where her newest recruits would show their mettle.
“Starfox and Grasshopper,” Xi called over the battalion-wide while simultaneously issuing virtual order packets via the command link, “move to engage target package Bravo. Gecko and Cleaver, you take package Charlie. Forktail and Blackbeard, you’re on Delta. Blink Dog, you’re on Alpha with me. Everyone else, maintain a defensive posture in place until we’ve taken out the trash.”
The mech teams acknowledged their orders as Xi maneuvered Elvira toward the nearest trio of enemy land-drones. Xi’s drone hunters were comprised exclusively of walker-type mechs since the ground surrounding the plateau was dotted with landmines. Walkers not only limited the potential exposure to the explosives, but they also kept their crews safer due to the elevated cockpits.
“Blink Dog,” Xi called over First Squad’s channel, “flush ‘em out.”
“Copy that, Elvira,” Corporal Miles “Blinky” Staubach acknowledged with his usual enthusiasm as his four-legged mech loped off toward the group of drones designated as “Alpha package.” Blinky had been Xi’s Monkey and her Wrench prior to being assigned to the newly-deployed Blink Dog, and this was his chance to prove the merit of one of Xi’s first roster decisions after receiving command of the brigade-slash-battalion.