One Good Soldier

pull out of this climb or we're sitting ducks!' Goat warned her over the pilot's tac-net channel.

Deuce's vision spun as she yawed back around into a dive, and then she killed the throttle briefly and stepped on the left upper pedal to yaw her around not so abruptly. Once her fighter was facing downward, looking at the enemy supercarrier, she pushed the throttle all the way down. She held her line toward the ship as both AA fire and tracers from a bot-mode mecha on the hull of the ship continued to try and lock her and Goat up.

'Shit! Watch the AA, Goat!' she grunted and tossed her mecha into a barrel roll over Goat's line. Bile rushed up her esophagus, and her stomach retched a bit, but she managed to force it down.

'Warning, enemy targeting lock imminent. Warning, enemy targeting lock imminent!'

'Look out, Deuce!' Popstar shouted as she and Jawbone strafed through the line of fire, but both of them missed the enemy bot. It did confuse the thing's radar briefly.

'Fox three!' Goat shouted. His missile went wide of the bot but hit the AA box, knocking it out.

'Shit! I'm locked up!' Deuce jinked and juked and did everything she could as she saw a missile fire out of the bot's torso missile tubes. 'Fox three! Fox three!' she shouted as the unlocked missiles jumped out in front of her. She tracked the tailpipe of her own missiles with the upper and under forty-millimeter cannons. 'Guns, guns, guns!'

Her tracers tore through the ass-end of her mecha-to-mecha missiles just as the enemy's missile began spiraling up at her. Her two missiles exploded into a fireball, confusing the enemy missile, which lost lock and spun out of control through the plasma in front of her. Deuce rolled her fighter, and the enemy missile tumbled centimeters past her. She yawed herself one hundred and eighty degrees and tracked the tumbling missile with her cannons, blasting it out of the sky. She pitched back over to orient her nose back into the line of travel and was now cockpit-to-cockpit with Goat as they barrel-rolled around and around each other.

'Guns, guns, guns!' Goat shouted. 'Shit, Deuce, we're coming in too fast!'

'Prepare for QMT in five, four, three, two, one,' the air boss's AIC voice chimed in Deuce's mindvoice.

'About fucking time!' Deuce killed her throttle and banked left and suddenly had a brief view of the inside of a ship and then was in very thin atmosphere about twenty kilometers directly above the Arcadian governor's mansion. Her blue-force tracker showed several other mecha all around her at safe distances, popping into space. Several were already at full throttle toward the engagement zone below. Then Goat spun into existence beside her with sparks flying from his mecha. From the looks of it, he had tried to go to bot mode and something had taken the left arm of his mecha off. His DEG gun was nowhere to be seen.

'Shit! Look out, Deuce!' he shouted, but the air boss AIC had put him in at a safe distance. Unfortunately, it hadn't brought him in fast enough to prevent that Seppy fighter from getting him. His plane was out of commission.

'Toggle to fighter, Goat!' she shouted at him. The bot rolled over and tucked its legs in and expanded its wings, spinning into a fighter-mode mecha. The thin atmosphere was enough for the control surfaces to kick in and dampen out his spin.

'Shit! I've lost my DEG, and I've got systems going out everywhere!'

Jawbone popped into space nearby, and then Popstar. Deuce started counting up the Utopian Saviors and sending them a signal to form up on her through DTM.

Bobby, get the message to all the Saviors as they QMT in.

Aye, ma'am.

'Do you still have SIFs and propulsion?'

'No SIFs, but I have propulsion.'

'Shit, you're out of the game, Goat. They should've teleported you out first!' Deuce said it before she could stop herself. Hell, she knew that 'should'ves' never do anybody a damned bit of good. 'All right, Goat, you can't go back to the Madira from here. So you need to find a safe place on the ground to hang out and see if you can stay out of trouble.'

'Damnit. Sorry, Deuce.'

About that time another FM-12 spun in out of control. It was Skinny's wingman, Captain Michael 'HoundDog' Samuels. The FM-12 was in eagle mode in a three-dimensional spin, and his tail section was spewing plasma and his cockpit venting air and smoke.

'I'm hit, I'm hit!' HoundDog screamed with real pain and fear in his voice. The right tailfin of his plane blew off and a fireball started to form. 'Eject, eject,