Jack, I've got Gnats! Candis warned him. The DTM blinked full of red dots.
Roger that, time to go to work! He could tell by the blue dots that the Gods of War had made it out of the ship and through the first barrage of AA fire. Now it was time to face the Seppy fighters.
"Fish, we've got Gomers incoming off our three-nine at angels three." Jack tilted the stick left, diving and spiraling through the anti- aircraft fire into a head-to-head sprint toward the first Separatist Gnat. The two fighters closed on each other with a relative velocity of more than a thousand kilometers per hour. Jack toggled the DEG targeting X in his DTM view and set the missile lock sensors on search. A missile solution dinged in his mindview, and he let a mecha-to- mecha missile loose. "Fox three!" he shouted.
"Roger that, DeathRay! Gomers off our three-nine at angels three. I've got firing solutions. Guns, guns, guns!" Fish reported over the net. Jack only vaguely caught the motion of her fighter yawing and pitching madly into a sideways spin to target an enemy fighter passing beneath them.
Jack's missile twisted and countermaneuvered through DEG fire and hit home on the Seppy Gnat, immediately blasting the left wing from the incoming plane and spinning it catastrophically to pieces. Several of the larger pieces twanged against the hull of the VTF-32 as he passed through the spot where the two fighters would have collided. The SIFs and microfiber composite layered armor plating held. Jack tossed the fighter over, giving him a view of the planetoid facility beneath him as well as an eyeball's view of the approaching enemy fighters.
"DeathRay, this is some thick shit! I think we should double back and try to hold closer to the Madira," his second-in-command
Lieutenant Commander Damien "Demonchild" Harris said over the tac-net through grunts and bleats of breath.
"Roger that, Demonchild. Gods of War double back in the mix toward the Madira. If we can bring these in closer to the ship, it will clear out some of the path for the marines and tankheads. It might spread out the AA some as well." Jack doubled his fighter over one hundred and eighty degrees but left his vector in the same direction. The g-forces pulled roughly at his stomach. He grunted and reversed the propulsion system vector, pushing the left hand component of the HOTAS.
"DeathRay, you got a Gomer on your six firing! Get away, or he's gonna lock you up!" Fish warned him. "Fox three!" The Gnat dodged, while flooding the area in front of the missile with cannon fire, destroying it, and then rolling out of the way, still on Jack's tail.
"Shit! You missed him, Fish." DeathRay spun his head around, trying to get an eyeball on the Gomer that was barreling down on him. He could see it in the DTM but not with visual. "Where the fuck are you?" The range was too close to go to missiles.
"Watch out, DeathRay! Guns, guns, guns." Lieutenant Denise "Crash" Fourier streaked past him, only meters away, firing the cannons as she passed by DeathRay's tail. "Goddamn it, that one is quick."
"Crash missed him, DeathRay. I'm coming."
"I see him, Fish! Just keep your shirt on." The enemy Gnat had slipped in under him and then behind him somehow and had evaded both Fish and Crash so far. For the longest time, he could only find it in his DTM. But he finally managed to yaw his fighter and spin it wildly in order to find the damned thing visually. If he didn't act fast, his situation would deteriorate to shit in a hurry. And Jack didn't like the ramifications of that.
Jack toggled the mode control of his fighter, flipping him upside down and making him gasp and grunt for air; all the while, the g-suit continued to squeeze the devil out his lower extremities. Jack's fighter converted from a fighter plane into an upside-down, armored bipedal robot, wielding a DEG for a head with two forty-millimeter cannons mounted on each forearm. The DEG could swivel more freely in bot mode, and Jack immediately set it to auto-fire mode controlled by his AIC. Candis went about finding targets and blasting the hell out of them. Jack used the cannons on his forearms for spread effect and cover.
His AIC swiveled the DEG around, tracking the Seppy Gnat with green beams dancing all around the enemy fighter. The energy bolts tracked across the plane's trajectory, but it was moving in too close and too fast for the DEGs. Jack rammed the throttle against the stop, accelerating the bot mode Ares-T downward at over a thousand meters per second, nearly causing him to lose his breakfast again. Were it not for the advanced dampeners of the new fighters, that type of maneuver would have killed him, but Jack gave that no thought at the moment.
He choked the bile down and grunted against the nearly overwhelming g-forces and aimed both arm cannons through the DTM virtual sphere. The two yellow targeting Xs in his mind danced around the sphere, trying to lock onto targets as he fired. The railgun rounds hammered out of the guns at the Gnat as it darted in and out of his line of fire. The Gnat loosed two missiles, both of which were radar- and QM-locked on to Jack's plane. It had been on his tail far too long. Far. Too. Long.
Shit, DeathRay, he's locked on! Candis shouted into his mind.
Goddamn, Seppy motherfucker, he thought, stomping the left pedal and throwing a hard spiral into the mecha. Then he slammed the stick backward against the rear joystick stop. He held the HOTAS with a deathgrip that turned his knuckles almost white enough to see through his e-suit gloves.
"Uuuggghh! Fuck you! Fox three!" he screamed against the wild spin. His missile launched from the back of the bot, not locked on to any particular target but flying in the general direction of the incoming missiles. Jack tracked both cannons on the tail of his own mecha- to-mecha missile and fired. The forty-millimeter railgun rounds filled the space, tracking and bouncing around the purple glow from the tail of the missile until several of the rounds hit home. The missile exploded into a flaming debris field just as the two locked-on missiles passed through it, ripping them to shreds from fratricide. The additive effect of the other two missiles exploding slammed Jack's mecha with shrapnel and superheated plasma. The SIFs and armor of his fighter were stressed to the maximum, but they held.
Almost instantaneously, the Seppy Gnat passed through a firing solution of the DEG, and Candis burned him down. Jack followed up on him with a couple rounds from the cannons for good measure, and the enemy fighter burst apart. Jack's mecha still spun wildly with extreme angular acceleration. So, he spread the mecha's arms and legs like a figure skater to reduce the rotation, and then the retro fields kicked in, dampening out the rest. He heaved twice, losing some bile into his helmet, but he managed to keep most of his stomach; then he toggled the fighter-mode control. The bot pulled its arms and legs in and pitched over into a fighter plane again. His suit quickly absorbed the bile on his viewplate.
"Goddamn! What a maneuver, DeathRay!" Fish shouted. "Great fuckin' flying, sir!"
"Right," DeathRay said sluggishly, and swallowed hard at the lump in his throat. He chewed down lightly on the bite block and felt a fresh blast of oxygen and vapor stimulants rush over him. "Stay frosty, Gods of War. What we did three seconds ago won't keep us alive the next ten."
Chapter 9
October 31, 2388 AD
Sol System
Oort Cloud
Saturday, 6:05 AM, Earth Eastern Standard Time
"You frosty up there, gyrene?"