Force One sitting on a runway.
'Ah, Air Force One is what we are looking at, I assume.'
'Yes, Gail. That is Air Force One sitting on the runway at Orlando. President Moore is here, somewhere. Now, if he is actually at the Magic Kingdom, we can't say for sure.'
'I see. What else can you tell us, Calvin?'
'Well, we got this video seconds ago. Twenty or thirty U.S. Marine strike mecha zoomed over us at high speed toward the park.' The screen again switched, showing a group of fighters passing into the night sky. The image zoomed in as several of the planes converted to bot mode and dropped near the place where the explosion had occurred previously. There were multiple missiles fired and what appeared to be a serious dogfight taking place above the park.
'That is incredible, Calvin. Thank you, and keep us posted.'
'We're gonna try to get closer.'
'Good luck and stay safe. Wow, we can only hope that the president and his family are okay. Could this be a new terrorist attack? And what does it mean with the looming election in a couple of days? We have with us Colonel Timothy Vann, U.S. Army Intelligence, retired. Colonel . . .'
'All right, we've got multiple targets and some of them are armed with railguns. The extraction includes all of the First Family and its bodyguard contingent,' Captain Adam 'Heehaw' Elliot briefed the rest of his marines on the secure tac-net. The FM-12s approached the centuries-old theme park at full velocity and had tied in to the data passed along to them from the president's AIC. 'The second group is on me. We will go maximum velocity with maximum ferocity straight to the VIP. There we go to bot mode and drop in to surround and protect the extraction. Just before that, Jawbone, you and first group take out anything flying that ain't one of us. Got it?'
'Roger that, boss,' Lieutenant Delilah 'Jawbone' Strong responded. The rumor was that Delilah had gotten her callsign as a cadet when she promised a larger male cadet named Sampson—last name—that if he didn't get off her back, she was going to beat him to death. She likely would have, had several others not stepped in and pulled her off of the young and stupid, bleeding cadet. The story had spread later that she had taken Sampson's jawbone of an ass and pummeled the living shit out of him with it. 'Jawbone of an ass' was a bit too long, but 'Jawbone' had stuck to her like Acme coyote glue, forever.
'Oorah, Heehaw!' the rest of the squad replied over the tac-net.
'We'll have this thing cleared out before the Army pukes drop in. Approaching attack zone. Commence, commence, commence!' Heehaw ordered. He toggled the Transfigure button on the HOTAS and stomped the right, lower foot pedal to give him more slip as the Marine FM-12 strike mecha transformed from a fighter plane into a giant armed and armored robot. He gripped the throttle and pushed it full-force forward with his left hand, while controlling the flight path with the stick in his right. The standard HOTAS controls mimicked most fighter control systems that had been developed for centuries. The exception, of course, was the direct-to-mind control links between the plane and the pilot and the AIC. The DTM connections enabled modern fighter mecha to do things that no others in history could have done, even if that did happen to include attacking the Magic Kingdom and an army of flying elephants, magic carpets, and pixies. The rest of second group followed. Nearly a dozen mecha slowed and transfigured to bot mode while another dozen screamed past in fighter mode, yanking and banking into randomized approach patterns.
'Holy shit, Heehaw! We've got incoming. There is a literal fucking no-fly zone of red paint on the lidar.' Jawbone accelerated ahead and split her group off the main squad and started flying interference patterns against several flying elephants, hoping to create enough of a distraction that Heehaw's group could get down and cover the extraction without drawing much unfriendly attention on the way. The virtual sphere around her head was filled with vectors and red blips. She looked through the sphere with her eyes, lidar, and QMs for real-scale views. Almost immediately she caught a reflection from the moonlight off of an inbound vehicle. Make that several inbound vehicles, at once. Her biggest concern was trying to decide which target to shoot at first. She manipulated the FM-12 through a nose-over and then yawed and barrel-rolled around an inbound hovercoaster car. The car screamed by underneath her plane and just missed her wingman. The fighters were jostled harshly by the atmospheric disturbances left in the wake of the rapidly passing enemy vehicle.
'Fox three!' she grunted and squeezed her legs and abdominal muscles against the excessive g-forces of her turn. The mecha-to- mecha missile locked its quantum membrane sensors on the power plant of the hovercoaster and tracked through until it exploded in a white flash, composite parts scattering in all directions. A large chunk of elephant trunk smashed into the cockpit and then bounced harmlessly off the transparent armor. 'Shit, there is no telling what the damned techs are gonna paint on my plane after that.'
'Jawbone, Jawbone, you got inbound on your three-nine line left,' her wingman Lieutenant Junior Grade Carl 'Saw' Wilson warned her. 'And right, fuck me, and on our seven o'clock!'
'Take it easy, Saw. Just stay frosty now.' Jawbone increased the contrast of her QM display so that in any direction she looked, it was as if she were floating in space and looking in full daylight. The computer removed the plane from her field of view, so she had a completely unobstructed viewpoint of the battlespace. Full QMs often were the make-or-break training flight for modern fighter pilots. Anyone suffering from agoraphobia had extreme problems with the full-sphere QM display, especially when they were in midair. Fighting in space was even worse.
There had to be hundreds of hovercoaster cars screaming through the night sky at the marines. Jawbone realized very quickly that they were outnumbered by at least three to one. The armor and weaponry of the mecha and the BY GOD U.S. Marines inside said mecha would just have to make up for the deficit.
'All right, listen up! We are overwhelmed with the numbers game here, marines. We need to go to full scatter. Wingman groups only, no more than twos. Spread out! If you need to mix mecha modes, do it as you see fit,' Jawbone ordered the forward group, and then banked just in time to miss incoming. 'Guns, guns, guns! What the fuck was that?'
'I think it was a goddamned flying monkey,' Saw answered. 'Fox three!'
'Affirmative on the flying monkeys. We got an entire squadron of them up here,' another voice commented over the tac.
'Fuck, are there falling houses too?' another voice asked over the net.
'Okay, listen up!' Jawbone ordered. 'I want all railgun cannons to go to full auto anti-aircraft algorithms. There are enough targets here that the AICs should have a field day, same as us. I want AICs on cannons and marines on DEGs and missiles.'
