warned his flight commander.
'Roger that, Boulder. I see 'em. Let's make it too fast for them to keep up. We need to land on the deck and help out those tankheads.'
Burner held the HOTAS full-forward, ramming blatantly through AA fire and the continuos hell of the dogfight that was all around them. By maximizing their speed, the Marine mecha squadron plowed away from any of the other fighters trying to engage them. That didn't mean that they were immune to lucky shots, AA from the ground, SAMs, or just the random chance of colliding with a passing fighter.
The deck approached rapidly, and Burner was beginning to get a visual on what had happened there. The tankheads were surrounded in a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree attack. The only thing saving them was that they had managed to take refuge in a man-made crater about fifty meters in diameter and maybe five meters deep at the center. The M3A17-Ts were spread out around the rim of the crater, holding off any ground advances while several Ares-Ts of the Demon Dawgs and FM-12s from the Utopian Saviors were trying to cover their airspace. Several of the FM-12s were bouncing around the enemy Orcus drop tanks in bot mode and were doing what they could to push the flood back to give the Warlords some breathing room.
The problem with the scenario was that the enemy had deployed over a hundred fighters into the airspace, and the Dawgs and Saviors had started out with less than ten each. The Dawgs had been attritted to only four planes, and the Saviors had fared a bit better, with six remaining. The Gods of War had entered the mix and were fighting fiercely, but the numbers game still weighed extremely in the favor of the Seppies. And to top that off, there was an ocean of enemy tanks on either side of the crater, rushing the Warlords at an almost continuous pace. Burner hoped to change that with the Killers. Another twelve FM-12s in the fight would go a long way. Another dozen FM-12s in the hands of marines went further.
'Burner, I've got a lidar glint off several Gnats straight down,' Boulder called him.
'Roger, I see them. Let's lock on their six and start attritting them.'
'Oorah.'
'Okay, better bleed off the energy.' Burner pulled full back on the HOTAS with his left hand and toggled his targeting system. Yellow Xs popped up all over the place. His compression layer squeezed in on his body as he started a tight pull up from the dive, and then one of the yellow targets turned red and dinged. 'Fox three!'
Three Gnats were in the middle of a straffing run over the Warlords' position. From the blue dots in the bowl, Burner could tell that the ten remaining fighters were all engaged or being engaged at the moment, and the tankheads were just having to hunker down and take it. Burner pulled completely out of his dive while his mecha-to- mecha missile exploded into the wing of an unsuspecting Gnat. The poor Gomer never knew what hit him.
'Splash one.' He looked in his rearview and made certain that Boulder was on his wing. The two Marine mecha screamed in behind the three-Gnat formation going for QM lock. The firing solution algorithms tracked vectors in each of their DTMs for them to follow for best possible chance of a kill.
The enemy planes pulled into a tight bank to the right and upward. Burner barrel-rolled to the right, pulling him over Boulder and meeting the lead Gnat as it pulled through its hard bank. Burner climbed toward it, only meters from the enemy plane, and had to back off on the throttle or he would have overshot it. The enemy pilot was skilled, and he backed off on his power at the same time. The two planes were canopy-to-canopy only a few meters apart, barrel-rolling over each other in hopes that one would gain an energy advantage over the other.
The aerial ballet was a mix of throttle and stick with roll and pedal in a continuous fight not to overtake the other plane. The pilot that made the mistake of overshooting the other would be the one that flew through a targeting solution and would be dead. Burner grunted and squinted his eyes against the g-load.
'Burner! The other two are on us pretty hot!' Boulder shouted.
'Bot mode, Boulder! Kill your throttle and cover my ass! Don't let 'em take your six!' Burner replied, still grunting from his constricting g-suit. 'Gigi! You and Dundee get down here and watch Boulder's six!'
'Roger that, Boulder, but we're sort of tied up right now!'
'Goddamnit!' he grunted, and ground his molars against the bite block and took fast breaths from the fresh shots of cool air in his face. The vapor stims gave him just the edge he needed to accept even more g-load and widen his roll, giving him room to go to eagle mode. Burner grunted through the maneuver while the arms and feet of the bird of prey spread underneath the vehicle. Burner reached out and punched the cockpit of the Gnat with his right mecha hand. His mechanized armature cracked against the bubble of the enemy plane, startling the pilot for a fraction of a second. That would be the Gomer's last mistake. Burner dropped his throttle, kicked his pedal, slipped in behind the enemy fighter, and went to guns. The tracers tore through the empanage and across the canopy of the plane, shattering pieces of the fighter along its trajectory. Several of the rounds hit home on the pilot, killing him quickly.
'Scratch two. Hold on, Boulder, I'm coming!'
Boulder toggled to bot mode, spinning left then right to avoid the cannon fire from behind him. Burner had pushed on ahead after the lead Gnat, leaving him for the two on their six. Going to bot and then kicking the HOTAS in reverse was enough of a wild negative g-load that Jason regurgitated bile into his helmet. The organogel quickly started absorbing it, and the suit started pumping adrenaline and other stims into his system to compensate.
One of the Gnats passed by his mecha and clipped Boulder's arm with its tail fin. The impact sent the bot-mode mecha spinning even wilder. His already-spinning head and churning stomach were aggravated by the blow. Jason stomped hard on his left upper pedal to slow the spin, and then he jammed the HOTAS against the forward stop, thrusting the mecha in a vector along an axis from toe to head, which happened to be horizontal with the planetoid's surface. He pulled the DEG sights into his mindview and shot from the hip at the two Gnats as they took positions on Burner's tail. The QMs locked on to the fighter that had clipped him, and Boulder squeezed the trigger.
'Guns, guns, guns,' he said. The sensors pinged a missile lock on the other, and Boulder was preparing to fire fox three when his Bitchin' Betty started bitching.
'Warning, weapons lock. Warning, radar lock from enemy targeting system.'
'Fox three!' He fired only milliseconds before tracer rounds from a formation of Stingers that had been stalking him ripped through the torso of his mecha. 'Oh, fuck!'
The rounds continued to cut into his mecha, sending a leg of the bot exploding off into space. Then secondaries exploded from power systems being ruptured. Boulder quickly assessed his plane's health and realized it was a goner.
