Metal Legion Boxed Set 1

by C H Gideon

  “Picks out, Metalheads,” Jenkins declared as Roy’s sensors showed the inbound Solar Marines would reach optimal firing range in twelve minutes. “It’s time to shred.”

  “Roger, Roy,” Xi acknowledged as the latest engagement clock spun up to eleven minutes and fifty seconds. “Cave Troll and Eclipse: hold position until it’s goose eggs on the clock. These fuckers think they’re in for a good old time at our expense, so let’s show them our ass until we’re ready to work.”

  “Copy that, Elvira,” both Jocks acknowledged.

  “How much ass are we showing, Captain?” her Wrench, Gordon, asked in mock confusion.

  Xi smirked. “Just enough to get them nice and hard, Chief.”

  “Oh. Wonderful,” Gordon deadpanned. “That may sound like fun to you, but I transferred out of Fleet to get away from institutionalized buggery.”

  “Look on the bright side.” Xi shrugged. “However this goes, I’m sure it will have a dramatic impact on Terran-Solar relations for decades to come. You get to be at the heart of what might be the most important diplomatic exchange in human history.”

  “Diplomatic exchange?” he repeated incredulously. “That’s one way to describe facing eight quads of Marines whose ship we just shot down. Low as their brows might be, Marines tend to hold grudges. Remember the American song? They were talking about the shores of Tripoli for over two hundred years.”

  “It’s thirty-one Marines, Chief, not thirty-two,” she chided, her spirits buoyed by Gordon’s pre-fight banter. “Besides, I’d consider it a badge of honor if they were singing about trying to frag my ass two centuries from now.”

  “I can’t tell if it’s the heavy metal, painkillers, or estrogen in your veins,” Gordon quipped, “but I’m sorry to report that you’re fucking insane, Captain.”

  She threw her head back and cackled gleefully. It was hard going into battle against her fellow humans, however great the differences between Solarians and Terrans had grown over time. Hearing her Wrench make light of the situation instilled in her a much-needed dose of confidence in what they were about to do.

  She wiped tears of laughter from her eyes. “On a serious note, those crayon-eaters are looking to send sniper-precise kill-shots at us in the opening seconds of the first exchange. Literally showing our asses is the only way to neutralize those fuckers’ annoyingly precise aim. Four holes in my window are four more than I wanted.”

  “Crayon-eaters?” Gordon repeated with patently false incredulity. “I don’t think they appreciate it when you talk about them like that.”

  “Good.” Xi grunted. “A cold blade holds its edge better than a hot one. At this point, I’ll take every edge I can get, even if it means pissing off power-armored Marines.”

  “That’d be why you’re in command.” Gordon laughed as the clock wound down to eight minutes remaining. “You’ve got bollocks the size of an elephant’s.”

  The inbound Marines had spread out to minimize the potential impact of long-range splash-capable weapons like Cave Troll’s plasma cannons or high-yield missiles from Preacher’s launchers. In the absence of an atmosphere to propagate explosive shockwaves, even tactical nukes had relatively limited effective ranges. Plasma cannons were marginally more effective in engaging large areas than concussive weapons like nukes or high-explosives. By comparison, artillery shells lost significantly less of their area effect capability due to the shrapnel they threw out.

  That was one of many reasons why artillery, like metal, had never died in the Terran Armed Forces panoply.

  Xi felt for her Wrench as he kept popping out to replace the plastic garbage bags to protect the equipment, but he did it because he had to. The mech had to keep firing.

  Xi had loaded Elvira’s fifteens with high-explosive shells, and the rest of the battalion’s artillery-equipped mechs had done likewise. But Marines were too quick and evasive, making long-range fire against them with anything slower than a railgun a fruitless exercise.

  Fortunately, the Metal Legion had such a railgun in the form of Sam Kolt, and Gunslinger’s mech had surprisingly avoided annihilation when the Solar dropship had been destroyed. It stood ready to engage the enemy the very second they crossed the engagement threshold.

  Minutes ticked by as the crescent-shaped line of Solarians moved forward with mechanical precision. The geometry of their formation was impeccable, and they spread farther and farther apart as they converged on the remaining Metal Legion forces.

  Colonel Jenkins had ordered all mechs except Preacher to an interdictory position between the Marines and the array. From here, they could engage the Marines before the Solarians gained clear shots on the two remaining transceivers.

  Finally, with just twenty seconds remaining until the Marines would be in range to leap up and fire their railguns, the order came from Roy.

  “One more into the breach, Gunslinger,” Jenkins said over the channel, drawing a lopsided grin from Xi as her CO put his own spin on one of the Bard’s most famous lines.

  “Copy that, Colonel. Speedy delivery on the way,” Sam Kolt’s Jock acknowledged as his mech resumed an all-fours posture. The capital-grade railgun built into its back lowered parallel to the ground and, with a brilliant flash, the mech unleashed fire into the line of enemy Marines.

  The nearby Marines immediately leapt aside, using their rocket-packs to clear the strike zone as the railgun bolt slammed into the ground along their left flank. Despite their quick movements, two Marines were taken down by the Sam Kolt’s strike.

  Their comrades returned fire with predictably devastating effect.

  Leaping high into the void, six of the Solar Marines gained firing arcs and sent tungsten slivers into the Sam Kolt’s cockpit. The robust armor protecting Gunslinger was skewered by four direct railgun hits, clustered into a grouping just twenty centimeters across. It should have been a killshot, and indeed the mech’s neural linkage system was rendered inoperable when three of the bolts struck the pilot’s chair.

  Fortunately for the Metalheads, Sam Kolt was uniquely equipped with a second pilot’s chair. Not equipped with a neural link, this second chair was designed as a manual-only backup in the event the mech’s pilot was killed in action. Gunslinger had wisely moved to the backup chair prior to the engagement, and as a result was able to keep his mech in the fight for at least a little longer, and far longer than the Solarians would have liked.

  As those six Marines, who were scattered across the Solar formation, vaulted from cover to take their shots, they exposed themselves to counterfire.

  Which the Metal Legion delivered with fierce zeal.

  HE shells soared through the void, gently arcing downward as Luna’s gravity drew them to her silvery bosom. The Legion’s SRM launchers unleashed a storm of twenty-two missiles, causing the Marines to scatter even farther from one another as the wave of Terran ordnance flew out to meet them.

  Artillery shells and missiles struck the ground in perfect unison, annihilating anything within the blast zone of their strike points. Of the six Marines who had leapt up to kill the Sam Kolt, three fell victim to the Terran barrage.

  But that was the extent of the damage wrought by the Terran guns, and like water sliding down a hill, the formation of Marines resumed their inexorable march toward the transceiver.

  Snarling in frustration, Xi reloaded her fifteens and awaited the next moment to strike. The Solarians discarded the leap-and-fire tactic, instead bounding across the pockmarked Lunar surface at breakneck speeds en route to the inevitable clash with their Terran counterparts.

  The Marines continued to fan out, prompting Sam Kolt to fire on their left flank a second time. Again the Marines scattered, and this time only a single target was scrubbed by Gunslinger’s fire. Every second that passed saw the Solarian crescent elongate, marking their intention to surround the Terran position.

  “Come on, Podsy,” Xi muttered, knowing their remaining control over the transceiver had shrunk to just a handful of minutes.

 
Suddenly the Marines leapt from concealment, stabbing railgun slivers into her mech’s stern. Before those slivers struck, Xi sent her last six missiles out in reply. The Solar railguns scrapped her missile launchers even before their projectiles’ rocket-tails had cleared the launchers, and Elvira’s last missile swarm of the engagement sped off to meet the authors of her fresh wounds.

  The Marines fired precise chem-driven anti-material rounds at the inbound missiles in the hope of intercepting them mid-flight. Such precision would have been impossible with unmodified human reflexes, but Marines (Solar or Terran) were the pinnacle of the human warrior tradition. Their bodies had been painstakingly selected, modified, and sculpted to produce the most potent fighters the human species had ever fielded. As a result, even efforts normally considered superhuman were commonplace for Marines, who transformed into angels of death after donning their power-armored battle-suits.

  So it came as no real surprise that four of Xi’s six missiles were sniped by this last-ditch defensive effort. The other two fragged their targets, scattering their power-armored remains across the gray dust just beyond the abandoned colony’s perimeter.

  “This is Colonel Jenkins authorizing all artillery weapons-free,” her CO declared. “Fire for effect and slow those bastards down while dancing like your lives depend on it. Fire! Fire! Fire!”

  Elvira deftly spun, putting her artillery on target with the approaching Marines. Her fifteen-kilo guns thundered along with Roy’s and Generally’s, splashing shells down-range, sending plumes of dust and debris flying before the line of charging Marines. The Metal Legion’s guns roared as fast as their feeders could load them, while Cave Troll prepared to unleash its special brand of pent-up fury upon the approaching Marines. As each mech fired, it scrambled left or right or forward or back in random evasive patterns in an attempt to buy time and live just a few seconds longer.

  After what seemed like an eternity of charging, the dual plasma cannon arms of the squat, broad-bodied Cave Troll glowed bright-blue as their capacitors prepared to convert a mixture of gas and metal into a devastating plasma bolt. The cannons finally flared to life and sent a pair of blue-white infernos at the encroaching Solarians. The recoil of the plasma cannons drove Cave Troll’s feet a full half-meter into the soft Lunar surface, and Xi watched with eager anticipation to see how effective the mighty mech’s ultra-heavy weapons would be.

  Predictably, the Marines scattered as the raging infernos fell upon their line. But even their quick movements could not save all of them, and three more Marines were killed.

  As they leapt free of the multi-kiloton plasma strikes, the Marines bracketed Cave Troll and delivered a swarm of micromissiles and railgun slivers into the mech’s weaponized arms and head.

  Cave Troll shuddered as explosions tore its left arm completely off its chassis. Its right side fared only marginally better. The mech’s starboard plasma-conversion chamber was ruptured by railgun fire, and a spray of gas escaped from the loading mechanism.

  The mech improbably remained standing, but after a few seconds, it was clear that its pilot had been knocked out of the fight. With its plasma cannons destroyed and its missile magazine empty, Cave Troll was little more than an armless statue (that Xi thought should be named “Luna de Cave Troll” in honor of the famous Venus de Milo). The Solarians wisely ignored the dead mech as they once again ducked down to the surface and resumed their enveloping approach.

  Without the myriad buildings surrounding the transceiver array, the Solar Marines would have already destroyed it ten times over. Terran artillery continued to rain down, halting the Marine advance at the Solar formation’s center but doing little to slow the enemy at the crescent’s edges.

  “Come on, Podsy,” Xi repeated as Elvira sent another pair of HE shells down-range in what felt like an increasingly desperate attempt to keep their Solar adversaries at bay. “It’s now or never.”

  16

  Commitment

  Ordnance blew on the far side of both Alpha and Bravo Tunnels, signaling the latest attempt by the Solarians to breach the uplink hub. Podsy breathed a sigh of relief when that effort failed to clear a path through the collapsed rubble for the power-armored Marines, but he doubted their luck would hold for even one more set of charges.

  “Come on, Styles!” Podsy snapped. “We’re already T-plus-six-minutes, and the Solarians are ready to kick down the door!”

  “We can’t hurry this,” Styles retorted, never taking his eyes off the screen as his fingers flew. “Jem ran into an authentication problem I’m trying to work around. I think I know how to deal with it, but we need more time.”

  “Alert,” Jem intoned, drawing Podsy’s attention from the intransigent Styles. “The Solar Marines are withdrawing.”

  “Dammit,” Trapper growled, pushing past Podsy to get a clear look at the tactical map represented on one of the hub’s central workstations. “They’re onto us. They’re pulling back to cut the data trunk and isolate this hub.”

  “Without those lines intact at the moment we overtake the system, none of this works,” Styles said grimly. “We only get one chance.”

  “Podsednik.” Trapper tossed a satchel containing four RPGs into Podsy’s hands before gesturing for the nine remaining, mobile members of his ground force to open the maintenance tunnel. “You’re with me. That maintenance tunnel takes a direct route to the closest junction those Marines can access. If we sprint, we can make it there before they do.”

  “What about Bravo Tunnel, Sergeant Major?” one of Trapper’s people asked.

  “Forget it.” Trapper shook his head, dropping his rifle and hefting one of the four remaining RPG launchers as his people finished opening the maintenance hatch. “Bravo’s a dead end. Let them waste time cutting it off. Repelling those two Marines in Alpha is our only objective. Move out!”

  The eleven-man team moved down the narrow maintenance tunnel, which was barely wide enough for them to move side by side in pairs without clipping their elbows. Podsy gave a final look over his shoulder and met Styles’ determined gaze. Each of them understood what they needed to do, and Styles understood the gravity of the situation every bit as well as the lieutenant.

  With a silent nod, Podsy turned and following the others down the tunnel. The RPG satchel was unwieldy, forcing him to clutch it to his chest to avoid a potentially disastrous collision with the tunnel’s many vertical struts, which seemed purpose-built to create precisely such an explosive outcome.

  The team ran full-out for three minutes, and despite the light gravity, the exertion was agonizing. Each step Podsy took fanned the flames raging in his lungs, and soon it was all he could do to keep his body from colliding with both walls with each step.

  But the team never faltered, and words of encouragement echoed up and down the line. Podsy didn’t really hear any of them, although he was dimly aware of their intent. Adrenaline pumped into his veins like never before. In fact, his focus was so tight on the simple task of not running into anything with the bag of grenades that he nearly slammed headlong into the wall ahead as the passage forked into a Y-shaped intersection.

  Apparently, Sergeant Major Trapper had already ordered half of his people down the left tunnel while leading the others down the right. Podsy recalled the order to accompany Trapper, so he turned right and continued to run for another minute before the trek came to a merciful end.

  The Metalheads’ helmets featured headlamps that filled the dark passage with soft yellow light. Sergeant Major Trapper, using nothing but hand signals, directed his people into three groups of two, one of which consisted of Trapper and Podsednik.

  The veteran soldier then outlined three separate hatches his people would use to enter the passage on the other side of the thick steel-and-concrete walls of the maintenance tunnel. It was only at that moment when Podsy realized the Solarian Marines were likely already on the other side of this wall.

  And they were probably placing demo charges that would pulverize anyone inside the tun
nel, where at Podsy’s back the all-important data lines were encased behind nearly a meter of steel and concrete.

  The other two teams moved out, one of which was equipped with an RPG tube while the other had a satchel full of frag grenades. For one of the first times in Podsy’s life, he felt genuine fear at what they were about to go up against.

  A single Marine in power-armor was, under certain conditions, a match for even a heavy mech, and in other conditions, it was vastly superior to such a large, unwieldy vehicle. Relying on speed and accuracy, lone human Marines had pacified entire rebel fortresses and fought off dozens of Arh’Kel without fire support. Their prowess, especially against “soft” targets like unarmored infantry, was legendary.

  And he was about to face two of them at knife-range without the benefit of a mech’s armored hull between him and the epitome of a killing machine.

  As Trapper’s people moved into positions on both sides of the main tunnel where the Marines would arrive (if they had not already done so), Podsednik produced a cylindrical grenade and drew an approving nod from Trapper. The sergeant major knelt in the traditional fire posture just inside the narrow hatch that led out to the tunnel containing their adversaries.

  During the pre-op preparations, Podsy had refreshed on loading the RPGs and was satisfied when he completed the procedure without bobbling the potent weapon. With the grenade locked in place, Podsy moved to the hatch’s locked handle where he awaited Trapper’s order to open it. He waited, his hands gripping the levered locking bolt tightly, but Trapper remained in a kneeling posture with his entire focus on the sight reticle fixed to the RPG tube’s side. Seconds ticked by as Podsy waited…and waited…and waited.

  Finally, after at least a full minute of inaction, a faint tremor shook the floor beneath them. Trapper gave a curt, barely-perceptible nod, and Podsy threw the door open as hard and fast as he could while staying clear of the launcher’s path.