One Good Soldier

now, while the ship flew in the complete opposite direction. She was flying backward with respect to her trajectory. 'Guns, guns, guns!'

'Watch the guns, Marine2. We're too tight to each other!' Deuce shouted at Dee.

'Shit, Deuce, get out of the way—I've got a shot!'

'Dee, I suggest you get some separation with the Navy and let's regroup,' Jawbone chimed in from the backseat. 'And don't forget who the squad commander is.'

'Got it. Deuce is the lead. Not used to that.' Dee jinked and juked but couldn't get anything clear on DeathRay, so she flipped her plane back around in normal flight vector. 'Deuce, I can't get a shot, and he's coming hot! Any suggestions?'

'Thought you'd never ask.' Deuce would have laughed had DeathRay not been keeping them both grunting and squeezing every muscle in their bodies. 'We have to stay together, Dee. We've lost Skinny, so that leaves us outnumbered. Just stay on my wing and take shots if you can get them.'

'Roger that.' Dee barrel-rolled over to Deuce's wing. She decided to trust the Marine lieutenant colonel ace for now.

Bree, give me some ideas, Dee asked her AIC.

Got it. A second later, several trajectory solutions popped in her mindview. Dee, Navy3 has broken from the pack again.

Shit. Colonel Fink is gunning for us.

'Deuce, Deuce, Navy3 has broken from the pack! I've got him projected as trying to loop around on us!'

'Roger that, Marine2. Stay on my wing!' Deuce replied. 'Stay on my wing.'

Dee held tight to the squad leader's wing, but she didn't get her tactic at all. She stayed on Stavros's tail, trying to get a shot while he and DeathRay rolled and bounced around each other, trying to shake them. The effect of the Navy planes' dangerous ballet left the targeting computer confused, and neither Dee nor Deuce was going to get a shot anytime soon. But Fink was coming in off their four o'clock very quickly. They had to make a choice soon or he was going to pick one of them off.

'Navy Gomer just behind our three-nine line, Deuce, closing fast!' Dee didn't like waiting on a shot at a plane in front of them that they were never going to get while an enemy mecha was closing in on them from the side. Then tracer simulators zipped across the canopy and into the front of her fighter. 'Shit, Deuce! I'm taking fire.'

'Stay on me, Marine2!' Deuce ordered.

'What!' Dee didn't like that order.

'Dee, stay with your wingman!' Jawbone warned her as she grunted through the maneuvers from the backseat. 'She knows what she's doing.'

'Fox three!' Deuce shouted. 'Bank up, Dee! Bank up!'

The mecha-to-mecha missile simulator twisted out in front of them and into Navy2 with a confirmed kill. There were fireworks simulating a fireball, and the computer animations didn't show an ejection of the pilot. That meant there would have been no time for Jay to eject.

'Shit!' Dee banked up, pulling the HOTAS back with her right hand and full forward with her left. Her stomach stayed somewhere about two hundred meters behind her when she did. Tracer simulators rocked her hull, but the computer scored it as minimal damage to the aft armor plating. Her SIFs were holding.

Pulling up the way the two FM-12s did put them above Navy3, who was now undershooting them rapidly and would have to burn off speed to loop back to them. This left the two remaining Navy planes separated from each other by a good distance and in a situation where they would be vulnerable in a two-on-one attack for a few seconds. Fink was closest. Dee liked that.

'Pitch reverse and guns, Dee!' Deuce shouted at her, meaning for her to flip over, pointing her nose in the opposite direction as that she was traveling, and go to guns while flying backward and upside down. Of course, she was in space, so upside down was really meaningless and only relative to the pitch angle she had been oriented in.

It took Dee only a microsecond to understand what she was supposed to do. Years in the simulator had honed her senses for just this sort of maneuver. But Dee had to admit that the simulator, even with gravity compensators and full mindview simulation, was nothing like the real thing. She pulled the stick all the way back and kicked both lower foot pedals. The ship flipped over. Dee could see through her canopy that Deuce was doing the same. Stars spun around her head, bringing the Madira and Mars behind her back into view. Now both of the Marine mecha were flying upside down and backward and were pointed at Fink's