One Day on Mars

Jack pulled back on the HOTAS and rolled the fighter upside down, screaming and grunting and chomping on his bite block the whole way. He pulled over fourteen gravities for a couple of seconds and Candis had to take over the controls for about four more.

Jack?!

'I've got it! Fox three, Fox three, guns guns guns!' he shouted, shook his head, blinked his eyes a few times, depressed the controls to fire the mecha-to-mecha homers, and then went full bore with the DEG blasting away at the drop tanks and missile launchers scattering across the Martian mountain only a few tens of meters beneath his fighter.

The mecha-to-mecha homing missiles used dumb sensors that were closed systems and not connected in any way to the fighters other than the launch trigger. There were no AICs on the missile systems and therefore the jamming wasn't affecting the missile's accuracy at all. The DEGs, on the other hand, were having to be fired from the hip as the pupillary targeting system was being spoofed. Shooting from the hip along the violent flight path wasn't easy or very accurate. The ground effect and the flying debris trail buffeted the fighter harshly or perhaps it was the AA fire and secondary explosions he was flying through. Hence, targeting the DEG wasn't easy.

'DeathRay! DeathRay, you got a Gomer Gnat trying to give you a rim job!' Fish grunted out, and she added, 'Guns guns guns!' The Separatist fighter plane flew into pieces as Fish pulled her fighter into the same death- defying roll that her wingman and squad leader had just done. 'Wooohooo goddamn!' she screamed over the tac. 'That's better than sex!'

'Then you're not doing it right!' came a response from an unnamed pilot over the net. 'Oh shit! Guns, guns, guns. Take that, you fuckin' Gomer!'

'Fish! Hit the front line to slow their advance some!' DeathRay rolled his fighter in a corkscrewing trajectory so that he was continuously seeing the ground then the sky, ground, sky, ground, sky. 'Goddamn, this is gonna make me dizzy! Guns guns guns!' he growled as the blue-green directed energy beam washed across the front of the Seppy convoy hitting home a couple of times, rewarding Jack with the red-orange fireball from a vehicle exploding.

'DeathRay! We're getting fucking hammered here,' Fish screamed.

'I agree with Fish sir!' Lieutenant Damien 'Demonchild' Harris corkscrewed orthogonally across the Seppy convoy line of travel, firing missiles. The fireball and dust plume thrown up created a wall of zero visibility. The battered Gods of War zipped through the cover in their mad twirling and sinewy trajectories, ignoring the danger of flying blind. At least in the dust cloud the Seppy vehicles would be blind too. They hoped. 'We could use a couple Hellstorms in here!' Demonchild wished for a couple nukes they didn't have.

'DeathRay, we got Stingers and Gnats out the ass over here!' came another one of the Gods of War over the net.

Jack had little time to go DTM and track his pilots to see how many were falling. It was all he could do to keep himself conscious and from being shot down and not necessarily in that order.

Jack, we need to keep them off the AEMs.

Maybe we can steer them away. Hold on.

'Guns guns guns! Fox three!' he shouted as another Seppy Stinger armored transfigurable fighter jumped from the deck in bot-mode unloading a salvo of mecha-to-mecha homers out of his torso batteries at him. Jack zigged left and then rolled over, winding in and out between the missile ion trails almost sending him into an uncontrollable all-axis spin. Fortunately, the maneuver was enough for him to avoid being blown to hell and gone. Going to DEG to burn the missiles swarming all around him, Jack grunted hard and rocked the HOTAS back and then sideways, and the tough little Ares fighter shook violently from the nearby exploding missiles.

'Fox three!' he cried, letting loose a mecha-to-mecha missile that twisted through the fiery debris trails, hitting the Stinger mecha dead center of the pilot cabin. The enemy mecha exploded into a spinning orange and white fireball. Jack had to just grit his teeth and fly through.

'Where do you think you're going! Fox three!' Fish said. 'That's another toasted Gomer.'

'Yeah well, don't get cocky, there're plenty more where that one came from! Shit!' Jack flipped his bird a complete one hundred and eighty degrees without changing his flight path direction and grimaced at the pain from the massive g-loading. 'Fox three!' He fired a missile, taking out the mecha that had taken position on Fish's six.

'Thanks, sir,' Fish said sheepishly.

'Warboys, Warboys! DeathRay! Copy?'

'Warboys, here! Go DeathRay.'

'We're gonna try to turn these bastards off of you if we can. But we're taking a pounding, so you might want to hunker down in case it doesn't work,' Jack told the Army tank driver.

'Negative, DeathRay, that is a negative. If you can do anything to steer them, bring 'em on to us!'

'They have you waaay outnumbered, Colonel!' Jack warned Warboys.

'You let us worry about that. Besides, I got me some friends.'

'Roger that.' Jack's sensors only showed the AEMs, but four AEMs against a bunch of mecha couldn't be much advantage. Warboys must be cooking up something and the Killers were nearby, somewhere.

'XO! We're rapidly losing pilots!' Captain Jefferson's DTM lists of his crew were blinking out fast. Since the invisible Seppy ships had entered the mix, the battle had turned in the wrong direction—seriously in the wrong direction.

'Aye sir! We need to pull the Ares fighters in, I think. They can't fight like this,' Colonel Checkov replied.

'Can't pull them in now! Tell them to get out of the engagement zone at max velocity on any safe vector! And get me every gun with eyeball tracking capability we've got on the exterior decks,' the CO ordered.

'Aye sir!'

Sir!