Hellfire: Mechanized Warfare on a Galactic Scale (Metal Legion Book 3) Read online

  Hellfire

  Metal Legion™ Book Three

  CH Gideon

  Caleb Wachter

  Craig Martelle

  Hellfire (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.

  Copyright © 2019 by Caleb Wachter & Craig Martelle writing as CH Gideon

  Cover artwork by Luca Oleastri, Typography & Logo by Jeff Brown

  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, January 2019

  Dedication

  We can’t write without those who support us

  On the home front, we thank you for being there for us

  We wouldn’t be able to do this for a living if it weren’t for our readers

  We thank you for reading our books

  Hellfire Team

  Thanks to our Beta Readers

  Micky Cocker, James Caplan, Kelly O’Donnell, and John Ashmore

  Thanks to the JIT Readers

  John Ashmore

  Crystal Wren

  James Caplan

  Misty Roa

  Kelly O’Donnell

  Peter Manis

  Micky Cocker

  Jeff Eaton

  Paul Westman

  If I’ve missed anyone, please let me know!

  Editing services provided by LKJ Bookmakers www.lkjbooks.com

  Contents

  1. Operation Brick Top

  2. Hat in Hand

  3. Drill, Baby, Drill

  4. Counterattack

  5. Tempting Bait or Unique Opportunity?

  6. Into the Depths

  7. Walking Away

  8. Negotiations

  9. Eviction Notice

  10. The Power of Principle

  11. Surrounded and Outnumbered

  12. Bad News & Tries Against Our Interests

  13. Reunions

  14. The Big Dance

  15. Shots Fired

  16. Xi Bao, Goddess of War

  17. Cry Havoc

  18. The Prize

  19. A Continuum of Martial Morality

  20. Armistice

  21. The Poisoned Carrot

  22. Solidarity

  23. Virtuous Leadership

  Epilogue: Fly Me to the Moon

  Author Notes - Craig Martelle

  Books by Craig Martelle

  Other books from LMBPN Publishing

  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 quick 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.

  Blink Dog was exceptionally fast, capable of reaching speeds in excess of a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour on flat ground. Proving his gift for the pilot’s seat, Blinky was pushing the recon mech to its limits.

  As Blinky’s mech approached the trio of drones, they scattered and opened fire on the relatively lightly-armored Blink Dog. Micro-rockets zipped through the nearly-nonexistent atmosphere, nine of them targeting the fast-approaching mech.

  Xi loaded a pair of air-burst shells into Elvira’s fifteen-kilo guns, calibrated them to explode on the micro-rockets’ plane, and fired in hopes of intercepting at least a couple of the rockets.

  One of the air-burst shells took two micro-rockets down, but the other shell failed to explode before striking the ground.

  Seven inbound rockets streaked toward Blink Dog, aiming to end the vehicle. Just before they impacted against the canine mech’s hull, Blinky fired a chaff cloud while pivoting hard left and dropping to the deck. Two of the micro-rockets exploded in the diversion, another two whistled past Blink Dog’s previous position, and the other three struck the right flank of the juking mech.

  Even the lightly-armored Blink Dog was able to shrug off the micro-rocket impacts, but Blinky’s mech was delicate in comparison to Elvira. A lucky hit against Blink Dog might cripple it, whereas the worst Elvira would suffer was a weapons system failure or damage to a leg mechanism.

  Blinky deftly resumed his nimble mech’s charge, bearing steadily closer to the zigzagging drones and looking every bit the hungry dog chasing down a fresh meal. He sent a hail of chain gun fire at the nearest target and managed a trio of impacts before the drone ducked back into the cover provided by the trenches.

  Digging out surface vehicles would normally be simple, the standard procedure being to use aerial drones, but the atmosphere was so thin on this blasted rock that the only way to get airborne and stay there was via rocketry, making standard aerial support unavailable during this deployment. That didn’t mean Xi and her people were completely without eyes in the sky, though.

  The Dietrich Bonhoeffer had assumed geostationary overwatch of their position after deploying Dragon Brigade to the world’s surface. Live sensor feeds streamed from the Bonhoeffer to Xi’s people, showing them precisely where the enemy units were at all times with less than a tenth of a light-second delay.

  “Come on,” Xi muttered irritably, “show yourselves…”

  Eight seconds later, she got her wish.

  Her sensor board lit up, Christmas-treed with indicators of artillery fired from seemingly random points on the ground.

  The enemy had buried dozens of weapon platforms, turning an otherwise empty field into a potential death trap. The pop-up mortars and eight-kilo artillery embankments sent a cloud of fire at Xi’s unit, with the majority concentrated on the lighter mechs actively engaged in flushing out the drones.

  The enemy weapons’ reports were immediately answered by the Legion’s railguns and artillery.

  Xi bracketed a trio of mortar banks with SRMs and fired just as Blink Dog took two indirect hits from high explosive shells. The loping canine mech’s stride nearly faltered, but Blinky proved his chops by keeping it upright and continuing to pursue the fleeing drones.

  An eight-kilo shell struck Elvira’s topside, causing a subdued warning klaxon to sound in the rear of t
he compartment.

  “I need that hydraulic leak plugged, Gordon,” Xi snapped, deactivating the alarm and focusing on the shower of artillery that pulverized the enemy’s scattered emplacements.

  “On it, Captain,” acknowledged her new Wrench, Chief Warrant Officer 4th Class Gordon, who served as Elvira’s current mechanic and troubleshooter. As on Durgan’s Folly, personnel were stretched thin across the battalion, so Xi had opted to take one of the more experienced recruits as her Wrench while foregoing the addition of a Monkey, the third crewman normally assigned to a mech team.

  While Elvira’s Wrench did his work, Blinky managed to pour twenty consecutive chain gun rounds into a fleeing drone, blowing its capacitor and cratering the nimble vehicle.

  “Good shooting, Blinky,” Xi muttered, uncertain if she could have done any better given the myriad variables the younger Jock was contending with. A quick check of the tactical overlay showed that the other hunt teams had already scrubbed five more of the surface drones. Six down, six to go, she thought.

  “New contact, Captain,” came Styles’ voice over the command channel.

  “What have you got?” she asked.