One Good Soldier

rolled and flipped over and then transformed from a fighter plane into a giant armed and armored robot.

Let's see if what is good for the goose is good for the gander! she thought.

Dee, watch your altitude! Bree warned her. The landscape of the small moon they were fighting over filled her entire field of view and was rapidly approaching. It looked a lot like Pluto's moon, Charon.

She gripped the throttle and pulled it full-force backward with her left hand while controlling the flight path with the stick in her right. The standard HOTAS controls mimicked most fighter-control systems that had been developed for centuries with the innovation, of course, of the DTM-control links between the plane and the pilot and the AIC. There had been experiments where mecha had been piloted by AICs alone, and those mecha could make maneuvers that human bodies couldn't withstand. But there was a certain art to combat flying that only humans in the cockpit could bring. The experiments always showed the same results. Human and AICs together in the cockpit always came out on top when flying against a plane with just one or the other in it. The DTM connections between pilot, AIC, and mecha enabled modern fighter mecha to do things that no others in history could have done, and Dee was pushing the combination to the limit.

The bot-mode mecha now stood on its head, which was upside down in relation to the other fighters, and backward, facing the pursuing mecha. The g-loading of the full-force reversal caused Dee to vomit dryly into her helmet, and her vision began to tunnel in around her. But she fought through it and held on to the HOTAS.

'Aaarrhhggg, woo!' She grunted and flexed her abdominal muscles again, trying to hold off blacking out long enough to lock up her pursuers. Two yellow Xs filled her mind, bouncing around the fighter-mode Stinger to her right and the bot-mode mecha on her tail. The quantum-membrane sensors locked up on the fighter-mode plane, and a lock tone sounded in her mind. 'Fox three!' she shouted as she loosed a mecha-to-mecha missile. The missile spiraled out toward the enemy fighter, leaving a very faint blue ion trail through the almost nonexistent atmosphere of the small moon.

'Warning, surface collision imminent. Warning, surface collision imminent,' her mecha's Bitchin' Betty announced.

'One more . . . second . . .' Dee grunted as the yellow targeting X turned red. 'Guns, guns, guns!' she shouted as she triggered the cannons on both arms. Tracers tracked out and blew the enemy mecha into a fireball of orange and white debris.

Pull out, Dee! Pull out!

'Warning, surface collision imminent. Warning—'

Dee tried to pull the mecha over into a horizontal run with the ground but didn't make it. Her mecha slammed into the surface just as she began to black out.

'Apple didn't fall far from the tree, if you don't mind my saying so, sir,' Thomas Washington commented to President Moore as they watched the president's eighteen-year-old daughter, Deanna, on the large viewscreen at the Mecha Combat Training Simulations Center located at the south end of the Sea of Waves near the limb of the Moon.

'I was never a mecha jock, Thomas.' Moore smiled back at his bodyguard, only briefly taking his eyes off the simulation displays. Three other Secret Service agents stood behind them and didn't flinch or make a sound. The president's daughter was in a large metal box suspended on repulsor fields. The box whirled and bounced and twisted madly in place, simulating a combat scenario. Inside the box was a replica of a U.S. Marine FM-12 transfigurable strike mecha fighter cockpit.

Deanna had logged thousands of hours in the sim over the last five years and had reached a point where her proficiency was approaching that of a seasoned Marine mecha pilot. Of course she hadn't gone through all of the basic Marine training, as it was against the law to enlist before the age of twenty-one. Deanna was only eighteen, and for more than a century, as life expectancies had increased, the age to enter active duty as soldiers, firemen, policemen, and a few other dangerous professions had been set to the legal adult age. So Dee would just have to wait a few years, but Moore could tell by watching how she handled the simulations that she had the skills to be a good mecha pilot. She just needed the benefit of age and training. And train she had. Since she had been thirteen, Dee had studied and trained and competed in any and all mecha jock activities she could. She had been accepted into the most prestigious military