One Good Soldier

cubes with a gun turret sticking out of each of the five faces that were not attached to the ground or tower or other structure the thing rested on. Deuce picked the first one in her general flight direction and locked it up with a QM guided missile.

'Fox three!' she shouted. The missile twisted out across the surface of the Arcadian QMT toward the AA box on the tower nearest her. She guided her mecha low to stay out of the AA firing solutions so she could watch the impact of her missile. The missile never got close to the target before it turned upward and tumbled wildly out of control, landing somewhere beyond the engagement zone and never exploding. 'What the hell!'

'Fox three!' Goat shouted. Her wingman followed up her attack the same way. The second QM guided missile spiraled out of control and went dead as well. 'Shit, we're being countermeasured.'

'Roger that, Goat. Shit.' Deuce pulled away from her current run and out of the AA as best she could. 'Saviors! Abandon present mission approach and pull back to angels ten. The facility is Gridiron. I repeat, the facility is Gridiron and fox three is ineffective.'

'So why don't we just go to guns, Deuce?' Skinny called back over the net. Just because they were Gridiron—meaning electromagnetic countermeasures were taking out the missiles—didn't mean that guns would stop the AA boxes.

'Negative, negative, Skinny. We can't take the chance of damaging any part of the tower. If we can't hit the boxes, we don't hit them at all.' Deuce thought about the problem for an instant and then had an idea and switched channels to the AEM command-net frequency. 'Colonel Roberts, this is Lieutenant Colonel Leeland.'

'Go ahead, Deuce.'

'Colonel, the locals have us Gridiron and zapped, making our missiles useless against the AA boxes mounted on the towers. I'm DTMing you my sensor data of their locations now.' Deuce thought to her AIC to link up with the AEM commander's AIC. 'We need someone to burn them for us so we can go to laser-guided seekers.'

'Hell, Deuce, we were getting bored down here anyway. I think my senior NCO is taking a nap. I'll see if I can wake her up and get it done for you.'

'Roger that, Colonel. We'll see if we can't help keep the ground defenses preoccupied while you do it. Keep us posted on the status of the burn.'

'Roger that. Robots are on the move, Deuce.'

'All right, Saviors, watch for the AEMs making a move for the towers and let's see if we can't give them some cover,' Deuce ordered her flight squad.

Ramy Roberts's Robots, also known as the 3rd Armored E-suit Marines Forward Recon Unit, had made it a policy, strategy, crazy-assed tactic, or whatever you'd like to call it, of riding down the drop tubes with the Army tank mecha. They had first done it at the Battle of the Oort with great success, and it had been adopted as standard operating procedure. Most of the other AEM squads thought it was a great idea. Most of the Army armored infantry squads thought that the marines were bat-fucking crazy.

'Warlord Five in the tube and ready for drop!' Army Captain Sam Cortez announced as he brought the tank to a stop inside the tube and locked it down. 'Hang on out there, Jarhead, we go in five, four, three, two, one . . .'

'Shiiiitttt!' Tommy growled as the tube was launched. His suit was magnetically locked down to the tank so he wasn't going to fly off. But it was still one hell of a ride.

Nearly three dozen drop tubes were launched toward the QMT facility by the Sienna Madira's underbelly catapults. Traveling at over four thousand kilometers per hour, only ten of them actually held the tanks and their unusual attachments. The rest were decoys in case the fancy electronic and quantum membrane countermeasures failed to confuse all of the enemy fire.

As AA rounds peppered against the exterior armored hull of the drop tube, Suez thought it sounded a lot like the ringing of the bells of Notre Dame. He hoped like hell the tube's SIFs held up. They only needed to last for thirty seconds or so, since the flight of the drop tubes cut an unusually short ballistic trajectory. Tommy had been through this before, but it was still the most unsettling half-a-minute of any fight.

Since there was nothing he could do about it while magnetically locked to a tank inside the tube, he did his best not to think about the harrowing drop through flying shards of hot burning incendiary armor-piercing rounds outside. One way or another, it would be over soon enough. He went over in his mind exactly what he planned to do when he hit the surface. He