Metal Legion Boxed Set 1 Read online

  Metal Legion Boxed Set 1

  Scorpion's Fury, Frozen Fire, Hellfire, Lunar Assault

  C. H. Gideon

  Caleb Wachter

  Craig Martelle

  This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  CH Gideon is Craig Martelle’s military science fiction pen name and the complete book is Copyright ©2019 by Craig Martelle

  LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  LMBPN Publishing

  PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy

  Las Vegas, NV 89109

  First US edition, October 2019

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-64202-499-9

  Contents

  Scorpion’s Fury

  Frozen Fire

  Hellfire

  Lunar Assault

  Scorpion’s Fury

  Metal Legion Book One

  Elvira

  Humanity reached for the stars, but then did what humans do best. They disagreed and went their separate ways. The Terran Federation and the Solarians. The Solarians did their thing. Terra did another. The Terran Federation negotiated with the aliens and signed treaties so they could use the wormholes. Then the aliens reneged and showed up in warships filled with soldiers...

  The deck bucked beneath Xi Bao’s pilot chair violently enough to jostle her neural link, temporarily interrupting Elvira’s data streams and giving Bao a wave of intense vertigo before the links were restored.

  “Kill that fucking nest, Podsy!” Bao snarled as she struggled to keep Elvira stable. The fifteen-meter-long mech’s six spider-like legs scrambled to stay upright amid the hail of ordnance coming from the enemy position, a bunker Elvira had stumbled upon seconds earlier.

  “Give me a quarter-second firing window,” Podsednik snapped back, his voice transmitted via the mech’s hard-lines.

  In spite of the rounds hitting the armor, and the impacts disrupting the ground beneath its legs, she managed to steady the ungainly mech. Just as Xi opened her mouth to rebuke her engineer-turned-gunner’s tardiness, he sent an archaic fifteen-kilo slug, Elvira’s second-most-potent weapon, into the enemy’s nest.

  Even with the short-range ‘soft-loaded’ ammunition, the sound was terrifying, and the recoil doubly so. Elvira’s front legs lifted a full two meters off the rocky ground as every kinetic compensation system kicked in to counteract the force of the blast. Where the enemy-filled nest had been, nestled beneath the surface of the volcanic rock-field, now a smoking crater lined with shrapnel and charred lumps of flesh remained. Nothing, not even a Marine in state-of-the-art armor or a mech like Elvira, could survive a point-blank hit like that.

  After the mouth of the subterranean ‘nest’ was silent for a few seconds, Xi Bao breathed a sigh of relief. “Lucky shot,” she snorted as she processed a stream of damage reports from Elvira’s active compensation systems.

  “You’re a real bitch, you know that?” Podsy retorted.

  “Takes one to know one.”

  “Oh, fuck off,” he snorted. “And don’t do it up there, that’s not why they call the manual controls ‘joysticks.’”

  “One for you, Podsy,” she laughed before an alarm went off on her HUD—her heads-up display. “We’ve got a blown stabilizer on five,” she said, transmitting the relevant information to Podsy’s console.

  “Probably just the hydraulic safety tripping again,” he said confidently after a rapid perusal of the data. “I’ll reset it.”

  “Copy that,” she acknowledged as she swept the nearby area for more contacts and found none, not even the humans which should have been in range of Elvira’s thermal imagers. “Where the hell is our infantry, anyway?”

  Podsy used the crawlspace between Elvira’s segments to get to the panel where he could manually reset five’s safety circuit.

  “Captain Murdoch said the force was exposed, so he pulled them back to the center. He must have been confident that we’d have things covered over here,” Podsy drawled. “Frankly, with your winning personality, I’m amazed they didn’t go AWOL and plaster themselves as meat shields on Elvira’s armor to defend your virtue.”

  “Captain Murdoch. Like we needed a ground pounder rank between Lieutenant and Lieutenant Commander, but there it is.”

  She snorted with derision before addressing Podsy. “If the rock-biters counterattack during this push—” Bao grimaced, ignoring his dig at her notorious prickliness. “—we’re going to be stuck out here on the flank with no support. I haven’t registered a drone sweep through our quadrant in the last forty minutes. Mechs aren’t designed to operate solo, especially not mechs with systems that are as old as our great-great-grandparents!”

  “I think you underestimate our girl,” he replied and drifted off as a new stream of data came pouring in through his helmet’s HUD. “Is five showing online?”

  Bao checked the stream and nodded in relief. “It is. Good work. Now get us off the skyline.”

  Podsy scampered back to his position.

  “What,” he quipped, “I’m not lucky this time?” Elvira started flexing her legs, preparing to navigate the rubble of her last engagement.

  “It’s better to be lucky than good,” Bao riposted.

  “Maybe, but it’s best to be both.”

  She had no comeback for that. After testing the five legs’ systems, she resumed her trek across the blasted wasteland of the volcanic planet, which for the last three weeks they had called home.

  “Get back on the fifteen,” she urged, referring to the cannon Podsy had cleared the enemy nest with. “This whole area’s riddled with caves and shit. There could be a zillion more bunkers out there.”

  “On it,” he replied, moving to his second position and quickly strapping himself into the gun’s control pod.

  Normally the mech’s pilot, Bao, would directly control the weapons and wouldn’t need a gunner. But half of Elvira’s control systems had failed shortly after arriving in the combat zone. That meant while she controlled Elvira’s movement and anti-personnel systems, she was forced to rely on Podsy, her engineer, to man the heavier weapons until they received replacement components.

  Like that was going to happen any time soon.

  Elvira was a two-hundred-year-old relic, pulled out of some godforsaken scrapyard, or, more likely, a collector’s showroom, and approved by a panel of boneheads back at Fleet Command for active duty, despite missing a quarter of her onboard systems. With less than a weeks’ training with the rusty bug, Bao and Podsy had been dropped behind enemy lines as part of the aptly-named Operation Spider-Hole.

  Just two months earlier, Bao had been training at HQ with an eye toward an official posting later in the year. A mech Jock by training, her unorthodox career had nearly been derailed by run-ins with superiors at nearly every stage of that training. She had resigned herself to serving as some other Jock’s Monkey, the backup to every other job, and generally considered the most expendable member of a mech’s standard three-person team. But when Commander Jenkins’ new unit presented the opportunity for her own rig, she had leapt at the chance.

  In hindsight, she wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to wait, cooling her heels as some other Jock’s Monkey rather than taking a museu
m piece into combat.

  The Terran Republic had declared Durgan’s Folly a potential host planet and that meant it had to be cleared the old-fashioned way. No nukes from orbit. No high-intensity, high-damage weapons. Only a quick clearing operation of the estimated small number of Arh’kel. But Xi knew better. The op had gotten her out of jail first and foremost even though she already knew that nothing was quick or easy so expected the battle to go sideways. They always did.

  “You know,” Podsy observed, seemingly reading her mind, “this would be a lot safer with a dedicated Monkey aboard.”

  “I thought you Wrenches all started off as Monkeys,” she retorted while guiding Elvira across a particularly deep, narrow chasm, stretching the mech’s legs to their maximum in order to cross the deadly crack in the blasted surface of this hellish world. “You should be right at home hotfooting it from one job to another.”

  “Nice. Thanks for not dropping us into the pit of doom,” Podsy noted, eyes locked on the screen showing the mech’s external view. Elvira’s twin fifteens swerved back and forth to reduce reaction time in case of an ambush. His goal was to shoot more while getting hit less. He and Bao had the same goal: survive. He also refused to take anything too seriously. “I thought you Jocks all had decent interpersonal skills since they’re kind of helpful in command positions,” he fired back. “So much for thinkin’.”

  Bao deepened her voice in blatant mockery of their division commander, Commander Jenkins. “Fleet Command needs to field the maximum number of platforms with the minimum number of crew. This is a fast-track opportunity for anyone bold enough to seize it. We achieve our objective in three months or less and every Jock, Wrench or Monkey in the division earns a ticket to promotion or back to whatever shit-stain of a world was misfortunate enough to have birthed you. Your choice.”

  “Which will it be for you?” Podsy asked as Bao finally guided Elvira away from the deadly chasm.

  “What’s that?”

  “You going for the promotion or kicking out of the service after we turn these boulders into gravel?” Podsy clarified.

  In truth, Bao hadn’t given it much thought, at least not since arriving on rock-biter central. She’d been too focused on staying alive, which she suspected would be all the reward she could reasonably hope for as an unfortunate participant in Operation Spider-Hole.

  “I doubt we’ll live long enough for my preference to matter,” she said dismissively.

  “Maybe,” he allowed, “but me? I’m calling it quits after this. Getting that ‘time served’ stamp on my jacket three years into a fifteen-year sentence is looking pretty good. I might even be able to get my old job at the plant back and have something approaching a normal life.”

  “Remind me again what you got clinked for, Podsy?” she drawled. She could almost hear him wince and snarl.

  “Stuff it up your...” he began, only to be cut off when the ground beneath Elvira gave way and the mech tilted dangerously.

  “Shit.” Bao gritted her teeth, struggling with both the neural and manual controls as the ground before them gave way.

  Fanning out in front of Elvira, the formerly-solid ground of the flat plains fell away in a spectacular cascade of brittle volcanic rock—spreading out in a crescent before the mech and exposing a massive cavern with the floor many times Elvira’s height. The roof of the cavern crashed into the floor, the mech’s six legs lost traction, and she started to slip down into the now-bowl-shaped depression like a bug caught in an antlion’s pit-trap.

  “Shiiiiiiiiiiiit!” Bao called out, fighting desperately to keep the mech upright while they slid toward the depression’s center.

  “Commander, I’m picking something up in Grid Three Two,” reported Styles, a battalion high-altitude drone operator.

  Commander Jenkins turned, his stomach clenched in a sudden knot. “Aren’t we a little thin there?” he asked, moving toward Styles’ workstation.

  “Yessir, just one Scorpion-class in a two-click radius of the event,” Styles reported as he maneuvered his drone to get a better look.

  “One Scorpion with attached infantry…it’s light, but it might be enough to secure an access junction,” Jenkins’ brow lowered darkly as he recalled his numerous rejected requests for reinforcement. Fleet Command had pled poverty, as usual, leaving him and his battalion of forty-four mechs, manned by mostly criminals and reprobates, the unenviable task of soaking up however much of the enemy’s vigor as possible before the real soldiers moved in to execute the main phase of Operation Spider-Hole. “Get the Monsoon and Babycake on the line; they need to be ready to move to support our Scorpion in Grid Three Two if I give the word.”

  Jenkins had been painstakingly surveying areas like Grid Three Two for days in an attempt to find a mainline passage into the enemy’s underground facilities, but had met no real success. Every time they got close to a tunnel large enough to move armor down, the enemy would collapse it, willing to blow the passage up rather than see it fall into human hands.

  When the commander moved diggers in to clear the rubble, the enemy’s efforts were at least a step ahead of their excavation efforts. Division HQ had made clear they could not afford to fight a war of attrition down there: they needed to strike at the enemy’s bases of operation quickly or they risked losing what little support they had thus far received.

  “No infantry showing in the area, sir. The mech is out there solo,” Styles said grimly.

  Jenkins’ eyes narrowed, “Who the hell authorized a Scorpion to hold down the right flank of this advance without infantry support?”

  A pause. “It looks like Captain Murdoch gave the order twenty-eight minutes ago to re-deploy that mech’s infantry complement to reinforce his company’s Mobile Command Platform.”

  “Make a note of that,” Jenkins said grimly as the first mid-resolution images of the event came across the viewer, images which made his narrowed eyes widen in a mix of surprise and horror. Without delay, he snapped off orders, “Orbital, I need every piece of hardware in the area to re-orient onto that location. Comm, get everything that rolls, marches, slithers or crawls diverted into those tunnels ASAP. Styles, establish contact with that Scorpion,” he said, watching as the giant mech somehow, against all odds, managed to keep its feet as it skittered to a halt at the center of the largest subterranean transport nexus yet unearthed on this hellhole of a planet. “Tell them reinforcements are inbound, and they are to hold that position and prevent a coordinated cave-in of the main arteries leading out of there,” he ordered, watching with a thrill of satisfaction as the Scorpion’s fifteen-kilo slug thrower annihilated an enemy vehicle before it could flee down one of the fifty tunnels leading away from the nexus.

  Acknowledgments streamed in from the various recipients of his orders, and he watched as the Scorpion’s flank-mounted anti-personnel arsenal unleashed a storm of fire on the enemy stirring from beneath the collapsed roof.

  It soon became clear from the thermal feeds that there were thousands of the damned things climbing up through the rubble.

  At its current rate of fire, Elvira’s pilot would exhaust her Scorpion’s maximum ammo supply in less than three minutes.

  Reinforcements wouldn’t arrive for another six minutes.

  “I can’t establish contact with Elvira, Commander,” Styles reported, the tension in the command center thickening with each passing second. “I’ve got a pair of air units inbound, ETA five minutes.”

  “A surrounded Scorpion can’t hold that long…” he muttered under his breath, recalling a similar situation he had once narrowly survived during his third tour as a mech pilot. He gripped the rail as he leaned intently toward the nearest video feed display, which showed the aged Scorpion pivoting in preparation to fire one of its chem-driven fifteen-kilo cannons. “Make each round count, rookie…”

  Elvira’s fifteen belched righteous fury, thundering into the far side of the now-open-air cavern and destroying two more of the fleeing enemy tanks, or whatever these rock-biters
called the large, lumbering hunks of mostly iron that served as their heavy unit transports.

  “Good shot, Podsy!” Bao cheered as she pivoted Elvira on her two remaining left legs.

  The front-left leg had been snapped off at the nearest joint, leaving the mech badly-crippled but still able to fire her main guns, for now. Thankfully, the rest of the mech’s limbs were functional; she could still maneuver her big guns into firing arcs that would keep the worst of the enemy off them as long as their supply of close-range rounds held.

  “Side-up against the wall,” Podsy suggested just as she had the inkling to do precisely that. “We can cut our fire to just one flank’s machine guns and maybe stretch the ammo out for another minute, minute and a half.”

  The downside to his suggestion, of course, was that they would be conceding the possibility of escape. Using the wall for cover would make certain this would be a fight to the death, since the enemy would cut them off from the rubble-strewn slope down which they had arrived. But it was an easy call to make. Bao had no illusions about the fact that they weren’t already in a fight to the death, and clearly Podsy felt the same.

  “Good call,” she agreed as she walked Elvira toward the nearest cavern wall while pouring hot rounds point-blank at an enemy that seemed to ooze out of the rubble.

  They were made of the same stuff as the stone that had temporarily buried them.

  Rock-biters. The Arh’Kel.

  Silica-based life forms were nothing new to veterans of the Fleet, but this was Bao’s first combat deployment and her up-close-and-personal look at non-humans. These ones were short, squat, three-legged things with a trio of ‘arms’ that were apparently identical to their ‘legs’ because, in actuality, they were. Without any recognizable head, the creatures’ locomotion consisted of them ‘rolling’ along like a cross between a slinky and a caltrop, with each limb taking a turn as a leg before rotating upright once again and becoming an arm.