'Watch out, DeathRay! Guns, guns, guns.' Lieutenant Denise 'Crash' Fourier streaked past him, only meters away, firing the cannons as she passed by DeathRay's tail. 'Goddamn it, that one is quick.'
'Crash missed him, DeathRay. I'm coming.'
'I see him, Fish! Just keep your shirt on.' The enemy Gnat had slipped in under him and then behind him somehow and had evaded both Fish and Crash so far. For the longest time, he could only find it in his DTM. But he finally managed to yaw his fighter and spin it wildly in order to find the damned thing visually. If he didn't act fast, his situation would deteriorate to shit in a hurry. And Jack didn't like the ramifications of that.
Jack toggled the mode control of his fighter, flipping him upside down and making him gasp and grunt for air; all the while, the g-suit continued to squeeze the devil out his lower extremities. Jack's fighter converted from a fighter plane into an upside-down, armored bipedal robot, wielding a DEG for a head with two forty-millimeter cannons mounted on each forearm. The DEG could swivel more freely in bot mode, and Jack immediately set it to auto-fire mode controlled by his AIC. Candis went about finding targets and blasting the hell out of them. Jack used the cannons on his forearms for spread effect and cover.
His AIC swiveled the DEG around, tracking the Seppy Gnat with green beams dancing all around the enemy fighter. The energy bolts tracked across the plane's trajectory, but it was moving in too close and too fast for the DEGs. Jack rammed the throttle against the stop, accelerating the bot mode Ares-T downward at over a thousand meters per second, nearly causing him to lose his breakfast again. Were it not for the advanced dampeners of the new fighters, that type of maneuver would have killed him, but Jack gave that no thought at the moment.
He choked the bile down and grunted against the nearly overwhelming g-forces and aimed both arm cannons through the DTM virtual sphere. The two yellow targeting Xs in his mind danced around the sphere, trying to lock onto targets as he fired. The railgun rounds hammered out of the guns at the Gnat as it darted in and out of his line of fire. The Gnat loosed two missiles, both of which were radar- and QM-locked on to Jack's plane. It had been on his tail far too long. Far. Too. Long.
'Uuuggghh! Fuck you! Fox three!' he screamed against the wild spin. His missile launched from the back of the bot, not locked on to any particular target but flying in the general direction of the incoming missiles. Jack tracked both cannons on the tail of his own mecha- to-mecha missile and fired. The forty-millimeter railgun rounds filled the space, tracking and bouncing around the purple glow from the tail of the missile until several of the rounds hit home. The missile exploded into a flaming debris field just as the two locked-on missiles passed through it, ripping them to shreds from fratricide. The additive effect of the other two missiles exploding slammed Jack's mecha with shrapnel and superheated plasma. The SIFs and armor of his fighter were stressed to the maximum, but they held.
Almost instantaneously, the Seppy Gnat passed through a firing solution of the DEG, and Candis burned him down. Jack followed up on him with a couple rounds from the cannons for good measure, and the enemy fighter burst apart. Jack's mecha still spun wildly with extreme angular acceleration. So, he spread the mecha's arms and legs like a figure skater to reduce the rotation, and then the retro fields kicked in, dampening out the rest. He heaved twice, losing some bile into his helmet, but he managed to keep most of his stomach; then he toggled the fighter-mode control. The bot pulled its arms and legs in and pitched over into a fighter plane again. His suit quickly absorbed the bile on his viewplate.
'Goddamn! What a maneuver, DeathRay!' Fish shouted. 'Great fuckin' flying, sir!'
'Right,' DeathRay said sluggishly, and swallowed hard at the lump in his throat. He chewed down lightly on the bite block and felt a fresh blast of oxygen and vapor stimulants rush over him. 'Stay frosty, Gods of War. What we did three seconds ago won't keep us alive the next ten.'
Chapter 9
October 31, 2388 AD
Sol System
Oort Cloud
Saturday, 6:05 AM, Earth Eastern Standard Time
'You frosty up there, gyrene?'
'Roger that, Warlord One.' Major Roberts dug his jumpboots into the harness and rolled his armored hands around the saddle handles for a tighter grip. The M3A17-Ts were designed with several ports for armored infantry to attach to during drop or maneuvers. Each hovertank could carry at least four AEMs if needed. But that would be risky. If a tank bought it on the way down, there went four groundpounders with it. If the numbers were sufficient, it was always better to risk the minimum number of lives with each drop.
Since there would be ten Warlords deploying in their mecha, Roberts and Gunnery Sergeant McCandless had decided that they should use a ten AEM recon group—one AEM per dropped tank. Roberts and McCandless had checked on all the marines to make certain that they were saddled in and locked on to the mecha, and then the major had insisted that the gunnery sergeant get locked on. A short discussion followed about how Gunny saw it as her job to make certain that her CO was taken care of. Then Roberts countered with a statement about being the superior officer and that he reserved the right to . . . and so on. The discussion ended with a quick round of Rock, Paper, Scissors, where Major Roberts picked scissors. Gunnery Sergeant Tamara held her tongue, mostly, as she folded her paper and stomped away to her tank.
Roberts had then clanked his jumpboots against the deck and landed straddle just behind the tank's main turret cockpit. The oversized armored suit atop the mechanized hovertank looked like a maniacally twisted combination of knight in shining—camouflage— armor upon his trusty, oversized noble steed. Roberts squirmed his way into the drop position on the tank. The hardpoint connectors of the tank met the suit with superconductor magnetic field coils pulling them into place. The only way the suit would let go of that tank would be to give the software command to shut the coils off or to vaporize either the tank or the suit. After a few systems checks and DTM conversations with his AIC, the launch authority announced that the Gods of War were away and heavily engaged with the enemy. From the pounding the
'Hold on, marine, here we go,' Warboys warned him as the tank hovered off the deck and approached the drop-tube shroud. The mecha moved almost silently as the quantum vacuum fluctuation power supply fed the repulsor motivator's thirst for power without batting a capacitor.
