fleas on a dog. These fleas were packing armor-piercing railgun cannons, DEGs, and a shitload of missiles, not to mention the hands and feet of their mecha. As they ran across the hull, they dropped HE grenades into any devices, protuberances, antennas, or any other parts of the spaceship that jutted beyond the structural integrity field that protected the hull. The strategy behind the battle plan was that the ship might be forced to die the death of a thousand cuts. The mecha attack on the one enemy supercarrier freed up the already overwhelmed fleet ships to focus their attack elsewhere. The problem was that the AA of the supercarrier was focused on the mecha, but the DEGs kept blasting toward the
Deuce clanked at over seventy kilometers per hour across the hull and flipped her mecha behind an AA box that was pumping out green tracer rounds into the fray around them. There was clearly some U.S. pilot in the targeting solution of the box. One of her buddies, most likely. She rose to her feet, bringing her DEG to bear on a Seppy Gnat that had been trying to lock her and Goat up. Goat flipped his mecha over her sideways and atop the AA box. Then he bounced to cover somewhere out of her visual several tens of meters behind her.
'Guns, guns, guns!' Deuce tracked across the horizon at the enemy fighter as it flew over the horizon of the ship's hull. 'Shit, I missed!'
'Don't worry, Deuce,' Goat said. 'There's plenty more where that one came from! Fox three!' He let go a mecha-to-mecha missile that careened around a radome in front of him and twisted upward into the tail section of a Seppy Stinger that was pulling away from him. 'Shit!' he shouted as the Stinger burst into a fireball.
'Goddamn, Goat, quit complaining. You got the Seppy bastard!' Popstar noted.
'I was aiming for the fucking radome! The goddamn sensor pulled off and locked up the fighter!' Goat replied.
'Don't worry, Goat,' Deuce grunted. 'There is plenty of shit to shoot at!' She ducked for cover behind an exhaust vent that jutted out of the deck behind the AA box as the Gnat that had vanished over the horizon of the ship screamed back up, going to bot mode. The Gnat hit the hull running at top speed and serpentined across the hull of the enemy ship toward her. The Seppy splashed her with DEGs but missed. The directed energy beam cut through empty space and kept on going and continued to track onto Deuce right up until she took cover. Then the Seppy Gomer cut the DEG off just in time to keep from blasting a hole in his own ship.
'Deuce! On your six!' her wingman warned her. Another enemy Gnat was starting to get a drop on her.
'I got it, Goat! Guns, guns, guns!' She leaped backward, firing both shoulder cannons and the giant DEG gun she held in her left armored mechanical hand into the AA box. She held the trigger in place until she saw the AA barrels stop firing, and then she carried her motion through a backflip with her feet thrusters at full throttle over the second enemy bot-mode mecha that had snuck up on her. Deuce went to missiles for it, and guns for his wingman that had been putting the pressure on her. 'Fox three! Guns, guns, guns! Take that, you Gomer motherfuckers!'
She hit them both, but only took out the one in front of her. The Gnat that had been behind her managed to break out of her firing solution, and it got off a round of mecha-to-mecha missiles that were tracking in on Deuce's position way too fast at that short distance. The missiles arched upward from the mecha just as her guns had taken out the enemy fighter in front of her. As the missiles arched up and then back over, they acquired a radar lock on Deuce's FM-12, and the enemy fighter that had been behind her gave her the slip.
'Fuck! Goddamnit to fucking hell!' She rolled onto her back, firing at the
