"Roger that, boss," Lieutenant Delilah "Jawbone" Strong responded. The rumor was that Delilah had gotten her callsign as a cadet when she promised a larger male cadet named Sampson—last name—that if he didn't get off her back, she was going to beat him to death. She likely would have, had several others not stepped in and pulled her off of the young and stupid, bleeding cadet. The story had spread later that she had taken Sampson's jawbone of an ass and pummeled the living shit out of him with it. "Jawbone of an ass" was a bit too long, but "Jawbone" had stuck to her like Acme coyote glue, forever.
"Oorah, Heehaw!" the rest of the squad replied over the tac-net.
"We'll have this thing cleared out before the Army pukes drop in. Approaching attack zone. Commence, commence, commence!" Heehaw ordered. He toggled the Transfigure button on the HOTAS and stomped the right, lower foot pedal to give him more slip as the Marine FM-12 strike mecha transformed from a fighter plane into a giant armed and armored robot. He gripped the throttle and pushed it full-force forward with his left hand, while controlling the flight path with the stick in his right. The standard HOTAS controls mimicked most fighter control systems that had been developed for centuries. The exception, of course, was the direct-to-mind control links between the plane and the pilot and the AIC. The DTM connections enabled modern fighter mecha to do things that no others in history could have done, even if that did happen to include attacking the Magic Kingdom and an army of flying elephants, magic carpets, and pixies. The rest of second group followed. Nearly a dozen mecha slowed and transfigured to bot mode while another dozen screamed past in fighter mode, yanking and banking into randomized approach patterns.
"Holy shit, Heehaw! We've got incoming. There is a literal fucking no-fly zone of red paint on the lidar." Jawbone accelerated ahead and split her group off the main squad and started flying interference patterns against several flying elephants, hoping to create enough of a distraction that Heehaw's group could get down and cover the extraction without drawing much unfriendly attention on the way. The virtual sphere around her head was filled with vectors and red blips. She looked through the sphere with her eyes, lidar, and QMs for real-scale views. Almost immediately she caught a reflection from the moonlight off of an inbound vehicle. Make that several inbound vehicles, at once. Her biggest concern was trying to decide which target to shoot at first. She manipulated the FM-12 through a nose-over and then yawed and barrel-rolled around an inbound hovercoaster car. The car screamed by underneath her plane and just missed her wingman. The fighters were jostled harshly by the atmospheric disturbances left in the wake of the rapidly passing enemy vehicle.
"Fox three!" she grunted and squeezed her legs and abdominal muscles against the excessive g-forces of her turn. The mecha-to- mecha missile locked its quantum membrane sensors on the power plant of the hovercoaster and tracked through until it exploded in a white flash, composite parts scattering in all directions. A large chunk of elephant trunk smashed into the cockpit and then bounced harmlessly off the transparent armor. "Shit, there is no telling what the damned techs are gonna paint on my plane after that."
"Jawbone, Jawbone, you got inbound on your three-nine line left," her wingman Lieutenant Junior Grade Carl "Saw" Wilson warned her. "And right, fuck me, and on our seven o'clock!"
"Take it easy, Saw. Just stay frosty now." Jawbone increased the contrast of her QM display so that in any direction she looked, it was as if she were floating in space and looking in full daylight. The computer removed the plane from her field of view, so she had a completely unobstructed viewpoint of the battlespace. Full QMs often were the make-or-break training flight for modern fighter pilots. Anyone suffering from agoraphobia had extreme problems with the full-sphere QM display, especially when they were in midair. Fighting in space was even worse.
There had to be hundreds of hovercoaster cars screaming through the night sky at the marines. Jawbone realized very quickly that they were outnumbered by at least three to one. The armor and weaponry of the mecha and the BY GOD U.S. Marines inside said mecha would just have to make up for the deficit.
"All right, listen up! We are overwhelmed with the numbers game here, marines. We need to go to full scatter. Wingman groups only, no more than twos. Spread out! If you need to mix mecha modes, do it as you see fit," Jawbone ordered the forward group, and then banked just in time to miss incoming. "Guns, guns, guns! What the fuck was that?"
"I think it was a goddamned flying monkey," Saw answered. "Fox three!"
"Affirmative on the flying monkeys. We got an entire squadron of them up here," another voice commented over the tac.
"Fuck, are there falling houses too?" another voice asked over the net.
"Okay, listen up!" Jawbone ordered. "I want all railgun cannons to go to full auto anti-aircraft algorithms. There are enough targets here that the AICs should have a field day, same as us. I want AICs on cannons and marines on DEGs and missiles."
You got that? she thought to her AIC.
Roger that, ma'am, James One Nine One Nine Tango Seven replied. The fighter mode FM-12 housed two forty-millimeter cannons. One sat atop the bird just aft of the cockpit and was best suited for targets behind, beside, and above the fighter in most of the upper-rearward hemisphere. The other sat on the belly of the plane and covered the lower and forward sphere. Almost instantly, James locked multiple red-force tracking algorithms against several blue-force, identify- friend-or-foe codes and started firing away. The sky around the FM- 12 filled with forty-millimeter rounds, moving with relativistic energies into enemy targets. The codes were designed to disable the cannons when any civilian casualties or property damage might occur. The AICs had to modify the codes on the fly to enable them to shoot at roller-coaster rides. Spontaneity and improvisation were the two largest arguments for both marines and AICs.
The heavy railgun rounds fired from the mecha of the entire first group ripped through the morning air, leaving behind violet and blue fluorescing trails. Some rounds tracked out of site while others tracked into explosions where the rounds met their target's vital components. Power modules of the hovercars made a beautiful array of reds and oranges when an armored slug of nylon passed through them at two hundred million meters per second.
Whatever AI was controlling the overall attack for the amusement park rides was quick. It learned almost immediately new flight patterns to maximize the potential for collateral damage and adjusted the hovercoaster cars' flight paths accordingly. That mostly consisted of bringing them in lower and closer to the buildings of the amusement park.
The FM-12 pilots responded by flipping through mecha modes and dropping to ground, then shifting modes again and going back to air, and vice versa. Mixing up the modes helped add a confusing mix of convoluted multidimensional combat tactics, which was one of the original reasons for developing mecha in the beginning.
"Ungh! Watch out now!" Jawbone screamed, flexing her thighs and abdominals to their straining point. "Guns, guns, guns." She toggled the mode switch on the HOTAS, flipping the fighter plane upside down as it converted to bot mode. In midair and upside down, she fired the DEG from the hip and swiveled a full circle, like a break dancer spinning on her head.
"I got you covered, Jaw." Saw followed suit going to eagle mode, and then he flew just ahead of her headspin, drawing fire and giving his wing leader the edge of being able to focus on offense for a brief moment. "Fox three!" he cried.