"The Warlords need immediate assistance on the ground. The Dawgs are gonna go pukin' deathblossom. That should give you enough air cover to hit the surface and give them some relief." Poser had been contemplating ordering the Navy pilots into the maneuver for which their fighters were specifically designed. It was a deadly maneuver for the enemy, but it also rendered the Ares-T pilots spent for several seconds afterward, leaving them vulnerable.
"Shit! Fox three!" Poser cut the power to the engines on the HOTAS and then yanked the stick hard left to give her some space between herself and the Gnats on her tail.
"I got you, boss!" Her wingman, Skater, rolled in an energy- usurping maneuver to draw the fire, giving Wendy time to go to guns.
"Guns, guns, guns."
"Roger that, Poser. The Saviors will hit the deck in bot as soon as you start puking."
Wendy's fighter spun over from her maneuver, forcing blood to her extremities and out of her brain. The g-suit squeezed her, and she grunted and flexed against the crushing weight. It subsided as her trajectory leveled off.
"Whoah, shit!" She shook her head to clear her mind. "That was nothing compared to this," she said to no one in particular. "All Demon Dawgs, listen up. Give yourself space and go to pukin' deathblossom as soon as you can on my mark! Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, go!"
Lieutenant Commander Wendy "Poser" Hill stomped on her left pedal and yanked the stick, rolling her Ares-T fighter over nose-first toward the surrounded Warlords below. Slamming the HOTAS throttle forward, she initiated a vector correction that pushed her at max velocity and minimum transit time to give them cover. At the same time that her acceleration line pushed her toward the Warlords, she pivoted the little snub-nosed mecha about its center point, scanning and firing on targets to give the Saviors cover.
The maneuver had been referred to as a "pukin' deathblossom" from some ancient pop-culture reference and because the wild spin put constantly changing g-loading on the pilot. The mad, three- dimensional spin would cause the pilot's inner ear to go apeshit crazy, and at the same time, the ship would spin like a whirling dervish, spewing death and hellfire from cannons and DEGs in all directions. The AICs and the direct-mind linkages were required for such a maneuver to prevent blue-on-blue casualties, but it was effective.
The spinning was usually more than the pilots could take and would force them to vomit violently from the inner-ear confusion. But most good Navy pilots could take a little vomit in their e-suit helmet, and the inner recycle layer of the suits usually absorbed the vomit in seconds. It was the retching being followed by the pressure suit squeezes and the high g-loading that took real presence of mind, fresh air, and vapor stims to overcome. It would take them a few seconds on the other side of the maneuver to be worth a damn. But there was usually very little in the way of targets left following the eighteen- second maneuver.
"I'm with you, Poser!" Skater replied, following suit and throwing his mecha at max acceleration past the cover of Wendy's pukin' deathblossom, and then initiated his own spherical cyclone of mad destruction.
"Roger that," came the reply from the six surviving Demon Dawgs, all rolling into the wild, deadly spin maneuver.
The stars spun wildly around Poser as she tried to stay focused on the targets and threats, but at the moment, vomiting was about all she could manage. "Ugh." She licked at her lips and accepted her bite block back in her mouth. She toggled the water icon, and a small cool squirt filled her mouth. She sloshed it for a second and swallowed it down. Her scratched throat burned from it.
"Hope that helped, Warlords."
The eight deathblossoms from the Dawgs spun out, leaving exploding and scattering enemy formations everywhere. The maneuver spread the bowl out and gave the Utopian Saviors time to focus on ground work. But the sky was filled with Seppy Gomers. Even though more than ten enemy planes had just been destroyed and another twenty were hit or at least scared, another forty dropped in from the outer edges of the bowl to support them. The Gods of War were up above and mixed in with the Dawgs, but there were too many holes in the dike and not enough fingers to plug them.
"Warning, radar lock. Warning, enemy targeting engaged." Wendy's Bitchin' Betty startled her, bringing some coherence back into her mind.
"Fuck!" She shook her head while throwing the HOTAS full-throttle and yanking the stick to her stomach. The fighter slammed her into her seat as it climbed at maximum acceleration. Orange tracer fire swarmed past her left wing but missed by mere centimeters.
"Poser! Bank hard right!" a voice warned her over the tac-net. Wendy didn't care who it was. It was a friendly who was covering her ass. She banked hard right.
Her fighter cut into the steepest turn she could manage and she was thrown into near blackout conditions. The suit and the stims were doing all they could do to keep her conscious. But the deathblossom had taken a serious physical toll on her body that she had yet to recover from.
Stay alert, Poser! Wendy! Wen . . . her AIC screamed in her mind, but it didn't help.
The stars stopped spinning, and they tunneled in around her into a distant, single point of light way out in front of her. Wendy's mind felt peaceful for a split second, and the distant point of light started to fade out.
A severe pain in her side burned through the blackness like a torch. Stimulants and a short defibrillator shock from her suit restarted her heartbeat. Wendy's mind was sluggish at first, but soon the tunnel opened back up, and the world around came back into view. Her DTM kicked in, spinning madly around her head. Then the spin dampeners in her ejection seat kicked in too, steadying her and leaving her floating freely, facing the planetoid below. The fireball several hundred meters below her quickly dissapaited to nothing, and a few seconds later she realized that that fireball must have been her fighter.
Antonio?
I've notified SARs. They will get to us when they can.
Be positive. They should get to the wounded first.
Yes, ma'am. You should rest and remain calm.
"Oh my God," Wendy cried. The painkillers were working enough now that she finally had the presence of mind to look herself over. There was a large portion of her left side, the size of an e-suit helmet, that was missing, along with her left arm from the shoulder. Her right leg was gone from the knee down. Her suit had sealed off around the wounds and had stopped the massive hemorrhaging that was taking place there. Immunoboost coursed through her, but so much damage had been done to her body that the wonder drug might not be enough. Immunoboost only stopped the bleading and allowed damaged tissue to heal. It hadn't been designed to regrow missing organs—in fact, it couldn't. She needed serious medical attention soon, very soon. As she looked across the battlescape, the Madira and the Blair were both venting and rupturing all across their hulls. That was where her medical attention would come from, if it ever did. Tears formed into balls on Wendy's cheeks and floated around her face in the microgravity. As the balls of salty tears drifted around inside her helmet they were trapped and absorbed by the organogel. Wendy stared aimlessly off into space, praying that she would survive long enough for help to arrive. Another one of the Dawgs' blue dots blinked out of her DTM. The link said that it was Lieutenant Junior Grade Barbara "Farmer" Jordan, BreakNeck's wingman.
"Hang in there, Dawgs. . ."
"On the deck, Saviors!" Major Caroline "Deuce" Leeland grunted over the tac-net. "The Dawgs are making an umbrella for us, so let's take advantage of it!"
Deuce had been evading three Separatist Gnats that had formed up on her and her wingman, Second Lieutenant Nathan "Hawk" Ford. The two marines had maneuvered their mecha over and around each other, cutting into extremely hard corkscrewing turns toward the deck. The two FM-12s in fighter mode corkscrewed around each other, trying to confuse the enemy planes' targeting solutions. Deuce would have instinctively jerked her head from the orange tracers the size of baseballs screaming past her, but the g-load was so heavy that she could barely move her head at all, much less flinch.