like it's coming just north of the line near the tankheads.'
'Roger that, Hula,' Fish replied.
'Okay, Fish, get ready to start bleeding off speed!'
The plunge to the deck had accelerated their fighters to nearly twenty-seven-hundred kilometers per hour. There was no way that they could pull out of the dive at that velocity. Jack pulled the throttle all the way back and kicked in reverse thrust. He tracked the Stingers, formed in a V-shaped formation low on the deck, and gently added right slip and stick to veer his trajectory across the Gomer's flight path.
'All right, Fish, let's pull in behind them and start picking them off.'
'Roger that, DeathRay.'
'Pull out of the dive in four, three, two, one, now!' Jack pulled out of the dive, slamming his body into the couch at over ten and a half gravities. The force load on his body grew from the standard eight hundred and eighty-two newtons to well over nine thousand. In old body weight standards, he would have grown from a hundred and ninety pounds to over nineteen hundred pounds. The plane was actually pulling much heavier g-loading, but the structural integrity and inertial dampening fields protected it and the pilot from them. But maneuvers like this one taxed the living hell out of those systems.
'Uh, uh, whoo,' Jack grunted and squeezed his abdomen and leg muscles to fight the gravity and keep the blood in his head. The g-suit constricted on him like a giant anaconda crushing its prey and forcing blood back into his brain. Jack bit down on the bite block, holding on to the edge of consciousness and struggling to breathe as he pulled through the dive. The engines of the little snub-nosed mecha screamed against the turn and then settled back down as it leveled off at over eight hundred kilometers per hour, just two hundred meters off the deck. He looked over his right shoulder, and Fish was right on his wing.
'Whooo! That was a fuckin' thrill a minute,' she said.
'Uh huh.' Jack was still swallowing his stomach and barely managed the response. Stars raced across his vision as the blackness that was threatening to engulf him faded out of view.
'Gomers in sight just below us, cherubs one.'
'Got them on eyeball. Going to missiles. Fox three!' Jack fired. A missile leaped from underneath the fighter and silently zipped across the sky, locking QM sensors onto the tail of the Stinger. The Seppy Gomer would never know what hit him. Jack and Fish had dropped in on them so fast that there was no way they would have time to react.
'Fox three!' Fish shouted. Her missile twisted in only milliseconds behind Jack's at the next-to-last enemy fighter in the formation.
Jack's missile hit home, totally destroying the Stinger. The plane tumbled and spread out, leaving a field of debris along its trajectory that finally crashed into the surface several kilometers away. The fighter's wingman burst into a fireball almost as quickly as Karen's missile tore through it.
'Splash six! Ace plus one for the day,' Fish said.
'It could still be a long day, Fish,' Jack replied.
'It's already been pretty goddamned long,' she added.
The lead two Stingers pulled up from the deck and to the left. Jack and Fish quickly overtook them since they were still flying at a much faster relative speed. The enemy fighter's bank slowed them enough that the two Gods of War flew right by them—almost an amateur mistake. Almost.
The two enemy planes barrel-rolled over each other and banked behind them, accelerating and going to guns. Jack toggled his mecha into bot mode, and the snub-nosed Ares-T fighter pitched over and transfigured quickly. The mechanized bot stood upside down on its head and spun around, facing the enemy Stingers on his tail. With no atmosphere, his bot continued along the same vector at eight hundred kilometers per hour.
Two yellow Xs appeared in DeathRay's mindview, tracking the paths of the Seppy fighters that were bouncing and bobbing in and out of his line of sight. The yellow X on his left attacker blinked red, then back to yellow, then back to red, and finally locked on red.
'Guns, guns, guns,' Jack said, firing the forty-millimeter railgun cannon now on his right arm. The tracers tracked into the incoming enemy mecha, blasting it to bits. The second yellow X blinked red and locked on, and he fired the cannon on his left arm. The cannonfire ripped through the Stingers right tail but didn't do enough damage. It kept coming and firing at him.
'Shit,' Jack muttered as he kept aiming with the cannons trying to close a firing solution on the enemy plane. It fired at him again, and the tracer rounds zipped past his cockpit. Jack kicked the HOTAS and spun clockwise and head-over-feet into a full flip, trying to evade the enemy.
'Warning. Enemy targeting system has lock. Warning. Enemy targeting system has lock,' Jack's Bitchin' Betty repeated.
'Fox three!' Fish said, loosing a missile that blasted out in front of the enemy fighter and exploded just as it was starting to go to guns again. The fighter flew into millions of pieces with a bright orange fireball.
Jack looked over his right shoulder to see Fish's mecha in fighter mode, flying backwards and upside down. Her fighter yawed back and forth as if she were looking for something else behind them, and then it pitched back over to normal flight. He heard her groan and curse from the g-loading.
'Good shot, Fish.' Jack toggled back to fighter mode and fell back into lockstep formation with her.
'You owe me one, partner!'
'DeathRay, this is Poser. Glad y'all decided to come down from on high and join the party.'
'Roger that, Poser. Looked like there was more action going on down here.'
'You got that . . . shit . . . fox three!'
Chapter 15
