'Oh Jesus!'
'Warlord Four bought the farm! Shit! Guns, guns, guns! Lay some cover back here!' Warlord Two shouted as an exploding missile tossed him forward, nearly throwing him off balance. Warlord Two spun his mecha around just in time to go face-to-face with a botmode drop tank. He instinctively head-butted the mecha and pushed it backward with his right hand while at the same time sweeping its large mechanical legs with mechanized martial artistic brilliance. Warlord Two stomped through the Seppy drop tank's cockpit with a half ton mechanical foot before the poor enemy bastard had time to respond to being thrown.
'Retreat, Warlords! Retreat to the escarpment and scatter. Lay rearward cannon fire as fast as you can.' Warboys did a backwards flip just escaping the grasp of an enemy mecha. He rotated his cannon rearward and blasted it as he ran away. His DEG at the hip cleared a path for his squad. Warboys ran serpentine through the enemy mecha firing his cannon and his DEG and when that wasn't enough, going hand-to-hand with the enemy mecha, ripping at them with the giant mechanized hands and feet of his vehicle.
'Fish, give those tankheads some cover on the north side! Demonchild, see if you and Hula and Stinky can't cover those Angels!' DeathRay dropped almost below ten meters from the deck to strafe the enemy drop tank lines, trying to draw some of the fire from the Warlords and to distract them from the evac ships. 'Fox three!'
' . . . guns! Scratch four!' Fish exclaimed.
The problem with drawing fire was always that it meant you were trying to get more people to shoot at you. And at the moment there were plenty of Seppy Stingers and Gnats swarming and buzzing the sky trying to kill the Gods of War so that they didn't also need a bunch of surface dwellers pounding away at them too. But Warboys was in a fix! One of the downed M3A17s had just self-detonated, taking out several of the surrounding Seppies with suicidal efficiency, but that was just a sign that things were going to shit fast for the tankheads.
'Guns, guns, guns.' Jack sprayed the DEG, again disrupting the tanks that were about to engulf Warboys. But the Warlords weren't giving up without some serious fighting. And the Gods of War were going to help out as best as they damned well could.
'Warlords, move!' Warboys fought like a madman to keep the tide of Seppy tanks off his Warlords but he couldn't retreat and fight efficiently without his sensors.
'Sir, on your left!'
'Look out, Warlord Two!'
'Fuckin' Seppy motherfuckers!' Warlord Two screamed. 'Fuck you! Fox three! Goddamnit all to hell. Guns, guns, guns!'
'There's just too goddamned many of them, One!'
'Well, Burner I guess now's a good a time as any!' Warboys finally called his pal for help and the trap was sprung. Warboys just hoped that the surprise and the superior fire power of the Marine FM-12s would be enough to overcome the extreme numbers of the enemy.
'Now Reyez! Sehera! Go now! Go! Go! Go!' Major Moore stood up, firing the Seppy HVAR full auto to lay down cover at any enemy motherfucker that looked crossways at his little girl. He bounced and zigged and zagged across the lava stones, actually charging the oncoming rush of Separatist mecha. One unarmored retired Marine in a civilian e-suit with a commandeered Seppy HVAR that was running low on ammo charged an oncoming wall of enemy armored mecha. And for the moment he was a force to be reckoned with.
'Kootie, on your right!' Washington yelled over the QM. 'Sergeant, give those civilians cover as hot as you can! Kootie, grenades!'
'Hold on, Dee! We're going for a ride!' Reyez Jones hugged the little girl to him and bounced out of the foxhole toward the edge of the cliff, never looking back. Sehera bounced in right behind him.
'Go go!' Sehera screamed.
'Keep the video going!' Gail Fehrer yelled over the sounds of the battle at her cameraman. 'This is incredible!'
'Yeah, if it don't get us fuckin' killed!' Calvin replied from behind the AEMs in the foxhole.
'Roger that, Lieutenant!' Clay stood firing his railgun full auto and popping out the grenades from the underbarrel launcher as fast as he could action the slide. 'You heard the lieutenant, Shelly!'
'Oorah, motherfuckers!' Shelly bounced up out from the foxhole over the ancient lava rock outcropping and rushed in to meet the senator. She was better armored and armed and could lay down more serious damage. The sergeant fell in behind them, pouring out grenade after grenade into the oncoming barrage of enemy tank mecha. The Warlords crested the ridgeline battered and bloodied and fighting hard as hell!
Reyez bounced one bounce away from the edge of the escarpment and tapped the ready switch on the gliderchute that he'd been packing since morning. He hoped that the little girl's mother remembered how to operate the chute system. With that thought he took a millisecond to look over his shoulder to check on Sehera. She bounced down beside him almost at the same instant, running as hard as she could. Reyez might have been startled if he hadn't already been scared out of his mind.
'Come on!' she screamed at the man carrying her daughter and activated her gliderchute pack like a pro. Just as they crested the edge of the escarpment they bounced their jumpboots as hard as they could and the ground disappeared beneath them for at least a half a kilometer or more as they began to fall out of sight over the edge. Then a swarm of FM-12 strike mecha rose up around them.
'Shit!' Reyez had to roll his body sideways to avoid hitting the wing of one of the fighter planes. Anybody other than a base-jumping expert like Reyez would have probably hit the wing of the plane and been dead. As he rolled his body and arched his back he stared eye-to-eye with the mecha's pilot, who seemed just as surprised as he was. Reyez was so close he could read Lieutenant Jason 'Boulder' Cordova underneath the fighter's cockpit. He pulled Deanna closer to him and it took him a second or two to stabilize his fall, but he wasn't concerned at all, for this
'Wait on the chute, Sehera!' Reyez was now in his element. 'Wait!' He held on to the little girl with both hands as hard as he could, squeezing her to him. He reached down and grabbed his belt carabiner and snapped it onto the little girl's e-suit harness.
The floor of the cliff began to loom upward at them. They had fallen well below the edge of the escarpment by hundreds of meters and were picking up speed. Even though the Martian gravity was only thirty-eight percent of that on Earth, just under four meters per second per second of acceleration was pretty appreciable and there was much less air friction to slow down their descent.
'Now!' Reyez shouted. He waited for Sehera's chute to open so that she would be a second or two above them and then he pulled his cord. The chute opened and jerked them to a slow drifting fall. Deanna squeezed the adrenaline junky hard to her.
