"Roger that, Goat. Offspring has sensors too!"
"Well, quit telling me about it, Marines, and shoot the fuckin' Gomers!" Bigguns ordered. Bigguns was running at a full trot turning left and right spraying at Seppy Stinger transfigurable mecha with her DEG and only occasionally going to missiles. At strafing range the guns worked better. Her FM-12 was now completely under her and her AIC's control and just became ten times more deadly.
"Shit!" she said, because the automatic avoidance surveillance system, which was more affectionately known as the auto-ASS, launched her into a forward flip over a communications dish mounted on the hull of the supercarrier.
The Seppy Stinger strafing her forced its way through the surface-to-air fire from the Madira and was hell-bent to go to surface and fight mecha-to-mecha. Bigguns tracked the incoming Stinger as it reconfigured itself to bot-mode and slammed into the deck of the supercarrier a few tens of meters port of her.
"We've got enemy mecha on the hull!" Bigguns warned over the net. "Guns, guns, guns!" She tracked across the horizon at the thing, missing it as it ducked for cover behind an exhaust vent that jutted out of the deck. She cut the DEG off just in time to keep from blasting a hole in the ship herself.
This is gonna take some finesse.
Yes, ma'am! Her AIC started plotting possible trajectories for the enemy mecha.
"Bigguns! On your six!" Goat warned her.
"I got it, Goat!" She leaped backward through a full backflip over a second enemy bot-mode mecha that had dropped through the lines on top of her and went to missiles for it and guns for his wingman. "Fox three! Guns, guns, guns. Take that, you Gomer motherfuckers!"
The first of the Stingers got off a round of mecha-to-mecha missiles that were tracking in on Bigguns' position fast at that short distance. The missiles arched upward from the mecha just as her guns took out the enemy fighter. As the missiles arched up and then back over they acquired a radar lock on Bigguns' FM-12.
"Fuck!" She rolled onto her back, firing at the incoming missiles with her DEG, and then up into a full run using ship structural features for cover. "Eagle-mode!" she cried as the missiles twisted and turned around the structural outcroppings of the Madira's hull. The fighter rolled over into eagle-mode with the forty-millimeter cannons above and below the fuselage of the fighter and the DEG in the left hand. The main drive of the fighter now was capable of flying the vehicle at top speeds and to outmaneuver the missiles.
"Fuck!" the Marine captain grunted and bit down on her TMJ bite block hard as the fighter was thrown back and forth from incoming cannon fire. The armor and the SIFs held. Bigguns pulled the HOTAS back and pushed full throttle forward, sending the FM-12 into a full-speed high g-load climb away from the supercarrier and up into the enemy swarm of Gnats and Stingers. She pushed down on the right foot pedal and pulled up on the left one, throwing a hard yaw into her flight path so she could target with her DEG as well as her cannons. Bigguns picked up several bogies along her flight path and started locking on targeting sensors.
I have a trajectory solution, Captain! her AIC alerted her, and uploaded the vector to her DTM.
Got it!
Steady . . . steady . . . now!
"Fox three! Fox three!" Bigguns followed the trajectory and fired missiles at two different Gnats. As the Seppy Gnats exploded, the fireballs confused the missiles that were tracking her and detonated into the shrapnel fields left from the exploding enemy ships.
We're clear, Captain. Great flying!
Let's get back on the deck, shall we. Bigguns turned the FM-12 back into an extreme dive toward the Sienna Madira, and rolled it up hard as the deck approached.
Bot-mode! she thought, causing the fighter transfiguration software to cycle the linkage mechanisms in a whirling rolling and snapping action, leaving her FM-12 standing upright on the deck of the Sienna Madira as a ten-meter-tall armored mechanical warrior.
Jack! I'm cutting the wireless radio off and going hardwire UDP.
What?
Hold . . . there!
The DTM virtual threat system lit up like a Christmas tree with Seppy Gomers painted all over the sky and ground. Lock-on warnings started blaring and the AIC-fighter connection began targeting multiple bogies.
"Holy shit, DeathRay! I've got sensors and targeting!" Fish announced over the net. Similar calls began coming in across the planet and the sky. "I've got multiple targeting solutions."
"Well, quit telling me about it and fucking fire, mister!" DeathRay replied while following his own advice. "Fox three, fox three, guns, guns, guns!"
"All right, Killers, let's show these Seppy motherfuckers what real mecha is!" Burner ordered the Marine squadron of FM-12 strike mecha into the fray. The FM-12 strike mecha was considered the most efficient high-technology piece of armed lethal force in the known universe and the Marine pilots knew that it was even more lethal in the hands of a full blooded heartbreaking and life-taking United States Marine! Burner never even backed off the throttle or the guns as he rolled from fighter-mode into bot-mode at a full-velocity run. "Full velocity with maximum ferocity" was the motto of the Marine FM-12 strike mecha drivers. Lieutenant Colonel John "Burner" Masterson dove headlong over the top of Lieutenant Colonel Warboys—an Army puke who had gotten himself into a goddamned pickle—tackling a Seppy drop tank that was in bot-mode and chasing Warboys' ass.
"Guns, guns, guns!" Burner judo-twirled and tossed the enemy mecha over a tank-mode mecha thirty meters to his right and fired the jumper jets on the mecha's feet. As Burner rolled in the air over two oncoming enemy bot-mode tanks he was forced to twist and maneuver the body of his FM-12 in order to get through the onslaught of their missiles and cannon fire—a feat that couldn't have been accomplished without his AIC-to-fighter combination working properly. The missiles spiraled around trying to gain purchase on the Marine's mecha but Burner was too good for them.
"Guns, guns, guns!" He set the twin shoulder-mounted forty-millimeter cannons loose in full anti-missile tracking mode. The purple and blue ion trail from the cannon rounds tracked across the path of the first, missile detonating it into a nearly perfect round orange fireball. The shrapnel from the lead missile performed acts of fratricide by detonating the other missiles in turn.
"Fox three!" A missile flew off, taking out a Stinger on approach to strafe him just as Burner righted his mecha standing behind the two enemy bot-mode tanks. He reached out with the butt end of his DEG and slammed it through the cockpit of the mecha on his left while stomping through the back of the mecha on his right, all the while his AIC firing continuously at multiple targets, and hitting them.
"Sweet goddamn, it smells like victory!" Boulder screamed out triumphantly over the net. "Guns, guns, guns."
"Scratch three!" One Night replied.
"BullNutz! BullNutz, you got a Stinger dropping in on your six at cherubs two!" Ace in the Hole said.
"I got 'em!" Epoxy replied as his DEG targeting system locked on and burned the Seppy fighter plane with a blue-green energy bolt that nearly ripped the Stinger in two. The enemy mecha fell with a hard thud to the Martian ground with the enemy pilot inside lifeless.
"Oorah, Epoxy!" BullNutz thanked his wingman.
"Oorah!"
Chapter 18
1:54 PM Mars Tharsis Standard Time
"CDC. CO." Captain Jefferson was having trouble understanding the warnings going off in his head. They were launch warnings of undesignated vehicles but there were so many that it made no sense. The virtual sphere in his head changed scale to encompass Mars out past the Belt and all the way to Luna City. There were trajectories scattering the sphere that, at that scale, were merely blinking red dots. But there were so many red dots that the CO was having trouble comprehending what it was he saw.