It was a good plan.
A few more seconds passed, and Suez had to grit his teeth against the jar of the tube retrofields firing and the demo blowing apart the tube, leaving him riding atop the tank-mode mecha in open space with the ground rushing up at them extremely fast and enemy AA rounds flashing about. The orange tracers from the enemy cannons seem to fill every part of the sky as far as he could see in front of him. So, like a good marine, he was headed toward where the shit was thickest.
"Thanks for the lift, Warlord Five!" Tommy gave the command to pop the superconductor magnet free, and he pounded his jumpboots against the hull of the tank, launching him wide and clear of the mecha. He rolled in a forward flip, and then he slammed into the ground with his left knee creating a crater and slinging up dust. He pulled his HVAR at ready and scanned it around, looking for targets of opportunity. There were no enemy soldiers, but there were automated ant hills with antipersonnel defenses splattering out railgun rounds as fast as they could. The fifty-millimeter railgun rounds tore through chunks of rock and dirt all around the LZ and all around him. He recalled the taking-cover part of his plan.
The Robots spread out to cover the landing zone for the tankheads, and then, to confuse the ant hills, they spread across the ridgeline a couple of klicks up in front of Army mecha. PFC Roger Willingham and PFC Hicks pounded down not far on either side of him, and Tommy could call them up in his DTM blue-force tracker if he needed to. The rest of the Robots were on the move as well, and it was clear that they had to move forward fast and randomly or those damned automated snipers were going to tear them apart.
"Kent, keep your fucking head down!" Tommy heard Top shouting at the female lance corporal. McCandless's voice sounded as if she could chew the lance corporal's head off.
"Goddamn, I'm hit!" Kent shouted over the Marine unit's tac-net. Tommy couldn't tell by the sound of her voice how bad it was.
"Top, Kent is down," he communicated.
"Got her, Gunny. She'll survive, but out of play. Keep moving," Tamara replied over the net.
"Roger that, Top. This fucking ground fire is thick as shit! I'm open for ideas." Tommy ducked behind an outcropping of rocks.
"How about we get the fuck out of it?" Corporal Sandy Cross said. "I mean, I could think of more fun places to be."
"You kidding—ain't this right where all the action is? You gotta love it, Sandy," Corporal Bates threw in his two cents' worth.
"Knock that shit off, Danny," Tommy ordered. He kept his position behind the rock pile for the moment. He couldn't tell if they were a man-made refuse pile of boulders or if they were part of the asteroid that had been dug out to make the QMT pad or if they were a natural phenomenon. He didn't really give a shit, either. They offered cover from those goddamned fifty-millimeter railguns, and that was all he was looking for at the moment.
The automated snipers were not very accurate, but they put down a shitload of antipersonnel rounds in a goddamned hurry. The Robots were gathering around the valley at the bottom of the ridgeline as best they could, and they could see the tankheads back behind them setting up a line. Several of them fired volleys into the ant hills atop the ridge and managed to take out a couple of the automated snipers, but there were hundreds of them per linear kilometer, which was way too many for ten tanks to take on.
Tommy, PFC Willingham, PFC Howser, and Sergeant Dallon Hubbard had bounced point to the rock pile he had found. There were more of the piles farther up the ridge that would make good cover and get them almost in range where their grenade launchers would be effective against some of the closer ant hills. He motioned to the two marines on him.
"Come on, we're moving up to that next pile. It's bigger and will give us a better vantage point," he told them. "On me in leapfrogs. And remember to adjust for the lower gravity. Go!" Tommy bounced first as far as his jumpboots would bounce him. He hit the ground on his belly, sliding uphill in prone position like a baseball player sliding into second base headfirst. He held still with his weapon pointed in the general direction of the ant hills. Several rounds from the automated railguns threw dust up around him, but he held still and the automated systems of the snipers didn't lock on him.
PFC Howser bounced twice. Her first jump was shorter than Tommy's, putting her about fifty meters behind him. Then she bounced as far as she could up the hill. She was still not even a third of the way to the next cover point. PFC Willingham followed the procedure, putting him somewhere near halfway to the rock pile. Then Sergeant Hubbard made it almost to the two-thirds distance before he slid to a stop and covered himself. Tommy crawled to his hands and feet and then bounced all the way up to the sergeant before he stopped. The two of them held still, planning to make it to cover last.
"Okay, Howser and Willingham, this time go and don't stop until you get there," he ordered them.
"Got it, Gunny."
As they bounced up the hill and over the two sergeants, Tommy noted that PFC Howser wasted no time on the bounce as she hit the ground. She bounced flawlessly. Willingham, on the other hand, seemed to be having trouble with his footing on one of the landings, forcing him to hesitate a second too long. His hesitation cost him. It cost him his right leg from the knee down.
One of the automated rifle rounds hit home, punching through his armor just below his right knee. The round trajectory tore upward through the knee joint, blowing out the back and scattering red blood on the asteroid regolith. The red was less pronounced in the red light of the red dwarf star.
"Oww fucking goddamn hell!" he screamed over the net. "Shit, shit, shit!"
"Gunny! Willingham is hit!" Howser shouted.
"Keep bouncing to that cover, Howser. I've got him on my bounce!" Suez ordered her.
"Need help, Tommy?" Sergeant Hubbard asked him.
"No. You get up there and make sure Howser doesn't do anything stupid."
"Got it, Gunny." The marine bear-crawled his armored suit up the hill a few meters to get up speed. Then he kicked off, looking like a four-legged armored menace leaping into the air. He rolled forward into a front roll and put his jumpboots down just in time to maximize his bounce went he hit. Two more bounces and he was behind the rock pile with Howser.
Before Tommy could decide exactly how he wanted to handle Willingham, out of the periphery of his vision to his right he caught a glimpse of two other AEMs bouncing in from somewhere farther down the valley behind him. His blue-force tracker showed the blue dots in his DTM mindview to be the second lieutenant and Corporal Bates. Tommy didn't like the angle they were bouncing at, but they had made it that far without taking a hit. Shit, you couldn't tell Bates anything anyway, but the SOB was lucky. Tommy had to give him that, because just as the two AEMs reached a point that should have been in a firing solution for the ant hills, four FM-12s streaked across the hill, plowing the ridgeline to nothing but dust and smoke. The autosnipers were blown to vapor and dust that scintillated and sparkled quite beautifully in the red sunlight. Tommy stood and bounced fast, coming down beside the second lieutenant and Corporal Bates.
"How is he, Danny?" the lieutenant asked the corporal. Bates had taken on the role of squad medic since the Battle of the Oort. Tommy figured it was because of all the wounded they helped load and unload onto troop shuttles in the aftermath of the battle. It had driven Bates to want to help more than just load and unload screaming and battered soldiers. So he had trained on being a medic in his spare time. The colonel had encouraged it, and it was part of what got Danny promoted to corporal.