One Good Soldier

The oaks splintered into millions of pieces as the forty-millimeter railgun rounds punched through them, leaving a splintered half-meter diameter trunk sticking up some three meters off the ground and another twenty meters of splintered tree raining down around him. Flames poured off both pieces of the tree, adding to the already hectic situation.

'Look out, Cross, that goddamned tree is gonna fall on top of your ass!' one of the AEMs shouted.

'Marines! Take cover and I'll see if I can draw some fire away from you,' Colonel Warboys said. His heavy armor plating and SIFs gave him a much better chance of survival in the hailstorm of armor-piercing death than the AEMs. Their suits were tough, but not designed to take on anti-mecha armor-piercing rounds like a hovertank was.

'Roger that, Warlord One! AEMs are digging in!' Colonel Roberts replied.

Warboys throttled his mecha up and moved the tank-mode metal through the trees as best he could, trying to perform some sort of evasive maneuvers. He took several low-caliber railgun rounds in the process. The rounds simply twanged against his tank, throwing sparks and ionized metal. The larger anti-mecha fire tracked onto him, which encouraged Mason to be more abrupt in his evasive maneuvers. The vegetation was so thick, however, that tank-mode wasn't very effective. He couldn't move around through the trees fast enough as a hovertank to avoid getting hammered by those large-caliber guns. His other choice while in tank mode would be to just ram the trees over, but that would seriously slow him down, cause unnecessary hazards to himself and the AEMs, and give him a serious headache after a couple trees. Warboys toggled his mode controls over to bot, and the tank flipped up and transfigured itself into a bipedal metal behemoth with a giant DEG barrel for a nose. The main railgun cannons of the mecha moved into position on the forearms of the standing armored bot.

Just off to the colonel's left and right two more tanks appeared out of QMT, each of them loaded with marines. A few seconds later, several more tanks popped in, loaded with either marines or Army infantry. The enemy line ahead of them was opening up with full force. There were almost enough U.S. troops teleported in to create an offensive line. Almost.

Cannon tracers and DEG blasts splashed all around them in a multicolored barrage of green directed-energy plasma burst and violet railgun ion trails. Another large thirty-meter-tall oak tree beside Warlord One suddenly burst in the middle from a cannon round, and wood chunks the size of a human leg were thrown asunder. Several of them ricocheted off his tank, making a loud kathunk sound against the armor plating. The large oak crashed down onto several of the marines just behind him. Flames engulfed the tree as the marines crawled out from underneath it. Their armored suits had protected them, but Warboys bet they had some serious headaches.

'Warlord One, this is Five!'

'Go, Five.'

'Where the fuck are we, sir?'

'We are ten klicks south of the governor's mansion and ten klicks north of the Capitol Pentagon. We have to push north.' Warboys panned the map in his head, looking at the terrain. It looked rough, and there were those damned rivers up ahead also. His lidar system took an extremely long integration time to find enemy targets through the foliage. His optical and IR sensors were marginal, but his QMs were working just fine. And what they showed was that there were more tanks and troops between him and the governor's mansion than there had been Seppy bastards that day of the Martian Exodus. It had been bad then, and he had had a squad of Marine FM-12s along for support, as well as air cover from the Navy. This scenario was probably really going to suck. It was probably going to suck big-time.

'Sir, if we were supposed to take that hill ten kilometers away, why the hell didn't we just teleport to there?' Warlord Three asked.

'According to my sensors, Three, it is way too goddamned thick with Seppies to drop in on them by ourselves. Plus, there so much goddamned EM noise around here that I'm not sure we could safely QMT any closer in. The Seppy bastards must have some kind of jamming fields around the Capitol. We draw them out, let fire and brimstone rain down from heaven, and then we punch a hole in the line and let the marines rush the end zone for a touchdown,' Warboys replied.

'I see, sir.'

'Besides that, it's our orders, Three.'

'Yes, Colonel. But just what happens if that fire and brimstone doesn't come in time, sir?' Warlord Three asked.

'Well, Three, then we'll just have to improvise.'

'Besides the fact that it is our goddamned orders, Corporal, my guess is