looked like a jagged half sphere with craters all over. The moon was standing on edge with respect to Arcadia. On the flat surface there were many concentric octagonal rings. At each point of the outer octagon were towers reaching several hundred meters up into space. The largest such tower was right in the middle of the thing. The facility looked pretty much like the one at the Oort Cloud in the Sol System, without the extra moons and scrapped ships moored to it for structural integrity. This system looked newer and better thought out. It had been built by the U.S. military, not the Seppies on a shoestring budget.
He scanned as best he could for any other surprises. The Seppies were known for using clever guerrilla tactics, booby traps, and kamikaze ships loaded with gluonium bombs, and they had used mass-driver guns at the Battle of the Oort very successfully. He hoped they didn't have any of those here. The problem with mass drivers, though, was that the damned things were usually kept underground and were hard as hell to find until after they had been fired. With all the American traffic in and out of the Ross 128 system, it would have been difficult for the Arcadians and/or the Separatists to build mass drivers in the system without anybody spotting them. Wallace doubted they had them here, but he wasn't taking anything for granted or making any undue assumptions. When in doubt, check it out.
'CO!' The air boss, Captain Michelle Wiggington, turned from her console. 'Gods of War are out, sir! The Demon Dawgs and the Utopian Saviors are deploying.'
'Good, Michelle.'
'Drop tubes away, CO,' the ground boss, Brigadier General James Brantley, added. 'The Warlords and the Robots are out. The AAIs are right behind them.'
'Good. We are stuck here without that facility.' RADM Jefferson could do little more than wait at this point. The battle plan had been put into action. There was no gauge of the enemy's real strength until they started using it. Were there mass drivers? Did they have any ships? How many troops were on the QMT pad? 'And I don't want to spend the next eighteen months in hyperspace.'
'Sir! We're taking in some serious AA fire from the QMT facility,' the XO said.
'I've got it, XO,' the air boss replied. 'I'm putting the Utopian Saviors on it.'
'Ground Boss, any sign of enemy troops on the facility?' Jefferson asked.
'No, Admiral. Only automated defenses,' Brantley replied. 'But, sir, there are apparently a hell of a lot of the automated defenses. A lot more than were originally installed on that thing, according to our records.'
'That's not what I expected to hear. They have been planning this for some time, it would appear. Who knows what modifications the damned Seppies have made to this facility? There could be traps, ambushes, and minefields. Better tell the ground forces to dig in and cover until we take out the automated systems from the air.' The admiral was happy to see there were no defenses to speak of at the facility moon, but that also gave him a queasy feeling in his gut. The Arcadian ambassador had claimed to have a million man–strong Armored National Guard. Where were they?
'All right Saviors, listen up.' Lieutenant Colonel Caroline 'Deuce' Leeland bounced her USMC FM-12 strike mecha around to avoid the QMT facility AA fire. Her mecha in fighter mode screamed across the surface at just over fifty meters high. Her wingman, Captain Timothy 'Goat' Crow, was off her right wing at five o'clock, and the rest of the Utopian Saviors were in pairs spread out behind her. 'We've been given new orders from on high, and those are to take out the surface defenses and that AA fire. Skinny and HoundDog, Golfbag and Volleyball are on me. Jawbone, you and Popstar split off with Beanhead, PayDirt, Romeo, and Freak. My team will hit the AA and, Jaw, your team takes the ground defenses.'
'Roger that, Deuce,' Jawbone replied.
Deuce pushed her throttle forward a bit, tapped her right top pedal slightly, and crabbed her fighter to her right a few degrees to line up on the enemy AA cannons. From what she could tell, the cannons were dispersed on the towers of the facility at each of the points. There were eight points across each of the octagonal concentric rings. The outermost ring had half-kilometer–tall towers on each, and there was an even taller one dead center. The three-dimensional image in her mindview was fused together by QM, IR, lidar, radar, and optical sensors into an extremely detailed view of the targets. The cannons looked like large gray metal
