"That's encouraging," Brian said. He went around behind Matt and kneeled down on the ground, craning his head down to look at the back of the seat. "Jesus," he said.
"What?"
"A bunch of shrapnel went right through the bottom of your seat. It punched through the steel plate. If it would've hit just five centimeters to the right and a little further up it would've got the oxygen supply line for your rocket."
Matt felt a shudder go through him at this news. He tried to shake it off. "Well, I would've got down a lot sooner if that would've happened, wouldn't I?"
"Yeah," Brian said. "Let me see what we got here." He ran the scanner over Matt's lower back and then looked at the reading. "Your spine is intact at least down to the curve of the seat. No kidney damage, no internal bleeding."
"So far so good," Matt said. "Can I get off of this thing now?"
"Yeah, let's give it a try. Release the harness and then move forward, onto your stomach. I'll be able to scan your backside that way."
Matt chuckled despite the pain and the knowledge that he'd almost died. "You always did wanna scan my ass, didn't you?" he asked.
Brian chuckled back. "You're funny. Now get the damn harness off and lay down. I know there's no enemy reported in the area but we really need to get under some cover."
Matt did as he was told, blowing the harness release button and stepping carefully forward. He immediately found that his balance was off. He was used to being in reduced gravity but that was only while strapped into an aircraft. He had never had to walk or move around in it in his life. He pushed himself forward too hard and found himself falling forward, but at a very slow speed. He hit the ground and bounced upward, sending a little puff of Martian dust into the air. He bounced one more time and then settled.
"That was graceful," Brian remarked, turning on the scanner and aiming it at its target. The scan took only a few seconds and the results were quite favorable. "You're a lucky motherfucker."
"Yeah?" Matt said.
"Something ripped through your suit, took a big chunk out of your left ass cheek and then exited out the other side. Nothing vital hit. No penetration past the bottom layer of flesh, no vessels hit, both holes sealed up normally, and you're no longer actively bleeding because of the pressure from the suit."
"No shit?" Matt asked. "I'm gonna be okay?"
"You're already okay," Brian said. "I'm sure it hurts like hell but you should be able to walk normally."
"Static," Matt said. He tried to get to his feet. It wasn't an easy task to accomplish. Twice he stumbled and fell, the second time right onto his injured ass cheek, sending a bright flash of pain up and down his body.
"Not all that easy, is it?" Brian said, extending a hand to help him.
"No, I guess it ain't," he agreed, taking the hand.
When they were both standing Matt walked to his ejection seat and removed his own survival pack. They each dug in their own and removed cases which contained broken down M-24 rifles and three magazines of ammunition. They quickly assembled them, loaded them, and mated them to their combat goggles.
"Let's head for that rise over there," Brian said, pointing to a shallow hill two hundred meters to their east.
"Sounds good," Matt agreed.
They headed off, both stumbling and falling again before they learned to walk very slowly.
"I'm sorry about all this," Brian said. "I know it was against orders but I thought that spotting those hovers was more important than orders. I got us shot down and got you injured. I'll take full responsibility when we get back to the base."
Matt simply shrugged. "I agreed to go up with you, remember?" he said. "I'm just as much responsible as you are."
"I feel bad that you got injured," Brian said. "I feel horrible about that."
"Hey," Matt told him. "It ain't no thing. It's just a little skin off my ass, that's all."
And while Matt was getting some skin taken off his ass, the hovers continued on their course, their pilots and gunners elated that they had actually shot down a Martian aircraft — the first such accomplishment of the conflict by a hover. They had borrowed the Martian tactic of hiding in the hills and staying low, hoping to keep concealed until they made their final target run. Their primary targets were — as speculated by Lon and his team and by Brian and Matt — the Martian heavy guns. There were twenty emplacements to be struck, the weapon of choice the high-intensity laser mounted at the front of each hover. In order to conserve fuel none of the eighty-millimeter shells for their main cannons had been loaded.
Collins and Taylor, armed with the position report sent by Brian and Matt, were the first to make contact with the force. They came in from behind them, screaming low and at full throttle, moving so fast they damn near collided with the rearmost hover when they finally rounded a hill and overtook them. Taylor dropped two of them in less than four seconds, sending them spinning into the gully below, only one of the crews safely ejecting. By the time his cannons recharged they were over the front of the formation. He dropped two more and then Collins spun them off into the side hills, getting them out of range. They circled around one more time and shot out perpendicular to the hover formation, cutting it in two and dropping one more hover to the ground. They then egressed back out over the valley right over the Jutfield Gap positions and headed for base, their fuel warning light flashing steadily. Their engine flamed out when they were still ten kilometers from the base. Collins brought them to a bumpy, grinding, crash landing on the surface with only minimal damage to the aircraft.
By this time, two other flights of Mosquitoes had located the hover formation. They swarmed in, lasers flashing, engines screaming. Ten more hovers fell on the first pass and then another six on the second although one of the Mosquitoes was also felled by a lucky shot from a hover gunner. The crew safely ejected but had to scramble to get away from the vengeful hover crews who had also ejected in the area.
By this point the MPG base, alerted to the incoming air strike, had managed to launch six more Mosquitoes into the air and had six more waiting to cycle through the airlocks and get airborne. These six were combined into one large flight and they found the formation twenty-one kilometers from their targets. They ripped into them without regard for their own safety, dropping another twenty-two to the ground but losing two of their own number.
This left twenty-nine intact hovers when they reached their initial point. Their lasers were charged and they rose into the air, seeking their targets. The attack plan of a hover strike at such a target is to rise up, quickly acquire and hit the target, and then drop immediately back down and egress. Unfortunately for the hover crews, the MPG air defense forces had already been alerted to their impending arrival and the fixed surface-to-air laser sites that protected the heavy guns were charged and ready. They locked on to the bright heat sources with pinpoint accuracy and fired. These lasers were fed directly from the Eden power grid and were much more powerful than those mounted on the Mosquitoes. It was, in fact, one of these lasers that had taken down the marine reinforcements back in the beginning. When they opened up, ten of the hovers exploded into oblivion in an instant, scattering debris over half a kilometer and vaporizing their crews. But before these lasers could recharge, the remaining nineteen hovers had reached their firing points. Confusion and fear was rampant among their crews at this point and several of them aimed at the same emplacement and one crew missed its target entirely. But when their lasers were done flashing fifteen of the heavy guns had been hit, the laser energy burning through their concrete housings and searing into the delicate gun mechanisms, fusing them, twisting them, rendering them completely inoperable.