an encrypted message to flight command letting them know they would need to head in for refuel in the next ten minutes. They had been awaiting their reply when the emergency action message came over the radio frequency.
'Fuck me,' Matt said as he listened to the message. 'Boss, did you hear that shit?'
'I caught some of it,' Brian said. 'Repeat it.'
'Six-three attack hovers have just launched from the Eden LZ. They're heading east at one-zero-zero meters AGL, moving maximum speed. All units move to intercept if possible.'
'Sixty-three of them?' Brian said. 'Shit. I was hoping I'd heard wrong.' He looked down at his fuel gauge and clicked his lips a few times.
'They gotta be going after the 250s,' Matt said. 'If they get through they'll kill them!'
'Get us an intercept course right now!' Brian told him. 'We need to drop as many as we can!'
'Boss, we got the fuel to do that? If we go turnin' and burnin' while we're on low we might not make it back to the base.'
'We need to try,' Brian said. 'If we have to ditch before we get back then we have to ditch. Now get me that fucking course and then open up a channel to our wing.'
Matt didn't hesitate for an instant. 'Right, boss,' he said, flipping over to the navigation screen. 'Plotting it now.'
'If we find them fast, hit hard, and identify their path for the rest of the Mosquitoes we should be able to pull back and make it to base.' He shook his head a little. 'Should be.'
'Right,' Matt said, his fingers flying over his screen, trying to intersect their current position with an imaginary line where sixty-three hovers moving one hundred and seventy klicks an hour would be at the time they got in the vicinity. 'Broad fuckin' daylight,' he said. 'It'll be harder to pin them down from a distance. And if we get too high they'll be able to engage us.'
'We need to find them,' Brian said. 'That's the most important thing. Get me some kind of a course so I can get moving!'
Matt's course plotting was far from complete but he knew at least the basics. 'Turn to one-seven-two. Prelim look has an intersection of them and us in about six minutes.'
'Doing it,' Brian said. 'And get the wing on the line. Fuck radio silence. This is an emergency.'
That was a simple flip of a switch. 'You're hot,' Matt told him and then bent over his plot again, barely noticing the sharp turn of the aircraft to the right.
Their wing had already followed them through the turn and accelerated to maximum right alongside them. Brian keyed his mic and told them what they were doing.
'Brian, the fuel's gonna be awfully fuckin' tight here,' said Collins, one of the recently trained pilots.
'No shit,' Brian told him. 'You head back to base if you don't wanna risk it. You're well within doctrine and I won't think any less of you. But I'm going after those fuckers and if we have to ditch on the way back that's the breaks.'
There was a slight hesitation and then Collins said, 'I'm with you. Lead the way.'
'My sis is working on it now,' Brian told him.
They flew on in silence for another fifty-two seconds. Finally Matt came up with an official estimated plot. He found it wasn't all that different than his instinctive guess. 'Turn left to one-seven-four,' he said. 'If they follow their course and speed from the LZ as reported and if the time is right that will put us out over the valley right in front of them.'
'Got it,' Brian said, making the adjustment. 'And ship it to the wing and to air command.'
'Already done, boss,' Matt said. 'They're reporting all of the other flights are moving in as well. Their positions and courses are coming up on our screen now.'
'Fuckin' aye,' Brian said. 'Get those cannons charged up. I want us to hit fast when we find them. Hit any of them you can.'
'Right,' Matt said.
They reached the intercept point exactly on time. The two aircraft shot out over the valley and then turned sharply to the west. They saw nothing but emptiness below them.
'Where the fuck are they?' Brian asked, his enhanced eyes looking for something, anything that resembled heat in the infrared spectrum.
'They're not exactly here,' Matt said. 'They're either in front of us or behind us. So they're either going faster or slower than we thought.'
'Which is it though?' Brian asked. 'Are they in front of us or behind?'
'How about we split up?' Matt suggested. 'We go east and Collins goes west? That way one of us should come up on them.'
'With only half the firepower,' Brian said. 'And they might be winding their way through the mountains instead of following the valley. If they're doing that neither one of us will find them.'
'So what do we do?' Matt asked.
'We don't have much time. We need to climb and look down from above.'
'Climb? Are you crazy, boss? If we go up high and they spot us they'll pot us out of the sky!'
'I want to do it,' Brian said. 'I think it's important enough to risk our asses for. If you object, tell me now and we'll keep searching low.'
'Fuck,' Matt muttered. 'You're determined to kill my ass, ain't you?'
Brian grinned. 'You want to live forever or something?'
'Naw,' Matt said. 'It would be boring. Let's do it.'
'I knew I liked you for a reason,' Brian said. He flipped over to the wing channel again. 'Collins,' he said. 'We're going high and we're gonna find these fuckers. Circle right here and we'll vector you in.'
'Brian, you can't do that!' Collins shot back. 'They'll shoot you down if you're caught up high!'
'We'll spot and drop,' Brian said. 'We made our decision in here. You just do what you're told.'
'Brian, this is against standing orders!' Collins said. 'You know that!'
'I must've been absent the day they told us that order,' Brian said. 'Start circling and get ready to move in.'
'Brian...' Collins started.
'Do it!' Brian said. 'We're going up.' He pushed forward on his throttle and pulled back on the stick. The aircraft began to climb, streaking into the pink Martian sky, the hillsides and the valleys dwindling quickly below them, the altimeter blurring with altitude it rarely showed.
'Nothing yet,' Matt said, terrified as he watched them pass through a thousand meters and continue upward. Even if they did manage to not get shot down they had just burned up a good portion of their precious fuel climbing up here. The chances of making it back to the base were looking slimmer and slimmer.
'They're out there somewhere,' Brian said. 'The instant you see them, get a position and we're diving back down.'
'Right, boss,' Matt said, looking out in all directions, his head swiveling like a radar dish.
It was when they got to thirty-two hundred meters above the ground that he spotted something. 'I got a heat blur!' he said. 'Moving fast. Now two, now three! It's them! The rear elements of the strike. They're in the mountains north of the valley. Locking position now.'
'Hurry it up!' Brian said, leveling off and preparing to dive. 'If we can see them they can see us. Out of sixty-three of them one of them must be looking!'
Matt quickly marked the position on the map, got their speed and course, and then told the computer to coordinate it and give him a longitude and latitude. This only took three seconds to accomplish. It took another two for him to broadcast the position of the hovers to command so it could be forwarded to every other unit in the field. It was only five seconds but it was too much.
They never saw it coming. Eight of the hover gunners below had spotted their heat signature and six of them locked on and fired their anti-aircraft lasers. Five of them hit right on the hottest spot — just forward of the rocket outlets. The laser energy burned into their engine, searing through the hydrogen and oxygen delivery system and the main combustion chamber. A tremendous explosion resulted, blowing the aircraft into pieces. The computer controlled ejection system sensed the fatal injury to the aircraft the instant the first laser hit and automatically ejected the two crew members in less than a tenth of a second but even this was not quite fast enough. The
