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 that it is too fucking thick with Seppies up there for us to just drop in on them unannounced with no backup," Gunnery Sergeant Suez told Corporal Bates as the two of them dug in behind several large rocks. The landscape reminded Tommy of Tennessee more than any place he'd ever seen. Had he not known he was fifteen, or sixteen, or whatever number of light-years away from Earth, he'd have sworn he was somewhere just south of Knoxville. The steep hills covered with large oaks and white limestone rocks reminded him of that one time he had been to the Smoky Mountains when he had been a kid. He remembered being bored to tears as his parents drove around gawking at trees and waterfalls and bears and shit. This forest had enough going on in it, like enemy soldiers and tanks firing at them, that he didn't expect boredom to be a problem.
"Well, I was thinking that the governor might invite us in for tea," Bates replied.
"Gunny?" Colonel Roberts's voice came in through the net.
"Yes, sir, Colonel?"
"We need to dig in here for now and hold this spot. As soon as we see hell coming down from above, we'll make our push. Get your squad covered and do not let the Seppies advance on us. Watch out for those M3A16s. Those tanks are older than ours, but they're still tanks nonetheless."
"Yes, sir." Tommy checked his DTM mindview. Bates was right beside him. Howser, Willingham, and Sergeant Hubbard were dug in about fifty meters to his east, near the bank of the river.
Hey, where does this river go? he thought to his AIC.
Here is a map, Tommy. It goes right to the front lawn of the governor's mansion, where it Ys and strings outward to the nine and one o'clock positions of the Megalopolis beltway. In the other direction, the river crosses the beltway around five o'clock.
How deep is it?
The only records I have are from the local Internet connections. It looks like it has a barge channel in it, so it must be at least ten meters deep.
That would be deep enough.
Deep enough for what?
"Top, got a second?" Tommy called to Tamara.
"Well, Gunny, other than ducking all this goddamned Seppy cannon fire and DEG plasma and watching out for these exploding fucking trees around me, I'm not that busy. I was considering taking a nap." It was the typical AEM joke. Tommy ignored it. Well, first he chuckled to himself, then he ducked and prayed as a tree just behind him crashed after it exploded about five meters up the trunk, then he ignored it.
"Well, Top, I'd hate to bother you while you're napping, but did you notice this river about a hundred meters to your east?"
"Uh, yeah, Tommy, what about it?"
"Well, Top, it has a barge channel in it, and it goes all the way to the front lawn of the governor's mansion." Tommy thought for a second, then added, "You think a tank can walk underwater?"
"Son of a bitch. Hold on, Gunny. I need to talk to the two colonels," Top said.
"What's up, Tommy?" Bates asked him.
"Danny, are you up for a swim?"
"I don't know, Mason, it might work. We might be able to go really quiet, as quiet as we fucking can, and slip right past them. Especially if there were enough resistance from the line here, it might just work. The Army armored infantry and some more tankheads could do that." Colonel Warboys listened to Colonel Roberts's wild-assed, harebrained, bat-crazy U.S. Marine scheme over the command net.
"Well, if we timed it with some help from above, I believe that might do. What do we do when we get there?" Warboys thought about it briefly as he ran his bot-mode tank through the forest, dodging trees and anti-mecha fire. He pulled up maps of the park and details of the rivers and was beginning to see a plan. "We'd be behind the lines, and they wouldn't be looking for us. A few tanks could cover you AEMs long enough to get inside and take the QMT controls. I dunno, Ramy. It's risky. But it might just work. It's a long shot your AEMs would survive."