Metal Warrior: Hard as Steel by James David Victor

Author:James David Victor [Victor, James David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: N15
Publisher: Fairfield Publishing
Published: 2021-01-19T05:00:00+00:00

“They’ve been mustering here on Europa,” Dane said, his voice thick with the glower that was spread across his face.

“Makes sense. The reconstruction effort for the Deployment Gate has been going on for the best part of a year. Lots of material and men coming up this way. They must have found a way to establish a base here in the middle of all the coming and going...” Corsoni’s voice crackled over the suit comms before he swore loudly.

“Still no external comms?” Dane was asking. He checked his forward perimeter to see the green target vector of the base up ahead, still invisible to the eye but highlighted on his HUD. He was keeping a slow but steady pace on point, his rifle held in front of him with Muyanne twenty feet to his right, Ghoulani on his left, and Vasquez behind them in classic diamond formation. They had left the injured Jenkins back at the Gladius to guard Corsoni as he worked to restore the ship’s transmitter.

“Nothing external to Europa. Lucky we have our suit’s servers—but that won’t last for much longer...” Corsoni warned, and Dane grunted the affirmative. Their Orbital AMP suits had local receiver/transmitters that functioned to keep the fire teams in contact with each other, but without a larger transmitter/receiver or a dedicated backpack unit, they wouldn’t be able to get in touch with Central Marine Servers.

And besides, Dane sighed as he flipped open the public fire team-wide channel, they had to make sure that the mercs didn’t see them coming.

“Time to go dark, Reds,” Dane whispered. “Visual contact only.” He saw Muyanne raise a thumb in reply, and Dane activated the stealth protocols for the suit. All transmissions stopped immediately, and even the sensors shrank back to narrow band sweeps only, highlighting the upcoming mercenary staging post. And that was it. To any surveillance drones that might have been watching, it would have seemed as though the AMP suits had just disappeared.

They kept the ice ridge on their right as Dane moved forward, relying on leg power alone instead of his back thrusters. The mercenary station was bigger now, filling their vision—and Dane could see at least two half-submerged bunkers buried in the icy dunes.

Phwooosh! Dane felt a tremor through the ground. There was a sudden explosion of gasses and steam as one of the rockets started to lift from the scaffold-like launch tower, moving slowly at first until it cleared its parent structure before arcing eastwards.

Towards Jupiter, Dane was thinking. The mercenaries were using this base to hold their position. But had the Hyena already blown the jump-gate station? Were Cheng and Hopskirk and all the others fighting a pitched battle between the stars against an enemy position?

Dane couldn’t know the answer. But he knew that there were still another two of those rocket ships stationed there and, from the flashing red and amber lights up and down their towers, they were busying themselves for launch.

“We take out the towers first,” Dane mumbled to

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