A wild shot from one of the Demon Dawgs VFT-32 Ares-T's pukin' deathblossoms cut through the wing of the lead Gnat. The Seppy Gomer reacted abruptly, slinging his fighter into a deadly spin colliding with his right wingman. The impact ripped his wing the rest of the way clean and sent his wingman reeling. The third enemy fighter banked left to avoid getting caught up in the deadly mélange of entangled fighter plane components. Deuce took that gift from above as the opportune moment she needed.
"Break left, Hawk! Dive, dive, dive!" She yanked the HOTAS left and forward and clamped her teeth down on her mouthpiece. The compression layer of her suit crushed against her as her body weight increased by a factor of nine. She spun her mech around with a one- hundred-and-sixty-degree yaw that let her track across the sky at the remaining Gnat. She toggled to her DEGs and shouted, "Guns, guns, guns!"
Her DEGs locked on, and a wash of blue-green directed energy engulfed the tail section of the enemy fighter, ablating away its hull armor until it burned through to the power system. The enemy plane burst open like piñata scattering in pieces along its trajectory. The pilot never had a chance to eject.
"Warning, collision approaching. Warning, collision approaching," her Bitchin' Betty rang through the cockpit.
"Deuce, your dive's getting too hot! Bleed off and pull out!" Hawk warned her.
Deuce's vision spun as she yawed back around into her dive, and then she killed the throttle and yanked the HOTAS to her stomach. That wasn't going to be enough to keep her completely off the deck. She toggled the mecha over to bot mode with her right pinky and gritted her teeth against the mouthpiece, hoping that the stims and fresh oxygen would be enough to keep her from passing out.
"Uh! God-fuckin'-damnit!" she grunted rapidly as her mecha spun upside down into an armored bot. Bile rushed up her esophagus, and she choked at it, trying to force it down. With right pedal and manipulation of the armature controls, she rolled the bot through a handspring against the planetoid and then absorbed more of the shock with her feet as she rolled over. Then she tucked into a judo roll, putting the elbow of the forearm of the mecha down first and then the back, buttocks, legs, forearm, back, buttocks, legs until she had rolled four times, trading most of the fall's energy with the ground. The jerk—standard rate of change of acceleration as a function of change in time—from the rolling impact was so large that the inside of the mecha rumbled like a thunderstorm on Earth and flung dirt up along with it. Deuce held tight on the HOTAS and then kicked the throttle forward with the last roll as her feet hit, springing her upward.
"Warning, enemy targeting system is acquiring lock. Warning . . ."
Still dizzy from her rolls, Deuce inhaled sharply and closed her eyes. Using just the DTM targeting system, she focused on the vehicle that was targeting her. It was an Orcus drop tank on the surface of the planetoid. She kicked at two of the pedals on her left side and yanked the stick, sending the bot spinning like a figure skater doing a triple axel with the axis of it precessing in a full circle along the axis of travel.
"Come on!" The yellow targeting X of her cannons or her DEGs in her mindview wouldn't lock, and she was way too close for missiles. The cannons might not hit the enemy mecha, but it was close. "Guns, guns, guns!"
Cannon tracers tracked across her empennage just as her tracers threw dust up around the enemy drop tank. The scattered dust and explosions from the high-explosive armor-piercing railgun rounds created enough of a distraction that the tank driver flinched. The enemy targeting system lost lock, and Deuce killed her throttle, bouncing to the surface and running and twisting like a mad ballerina.
"Hold on, Deuce, I'm with you," Hawk shouted over the net, and Deuce caught a faint glimpse of him to her left as she opened her eyes. The world spun around her, but she kept her mind on that damned tank. She slammed forward, holding her left arm out and hooking it around the upper torso of the bot-mode tank like a professional wrestler performing a crooked arm lariat or a clothesline. The two mecha clanged together briefly, but Deuce's forward momentum sent the enemy tank flailing over backward against the surface. In a wall of flying dust, Deuce continued forward and out of the way as Hawk pounced in behind her, tag-teaming on the downed tank.
Hawk's bot-mode feet tore through the torso of the tank as he stomped down on it with full throttle, and then he flipped forward over Deuce's head, firing his cannons into the tank's wingman before it even realized what had happened.
"Now that's how we do it off the top ropes!" he said through the grunts and growls that the g-load had forced him into.
"Great work, Hawk. Now stay frosty!" Deuce shook her head to clear the spins. More radar warnings pinged at her, and she dove for cover behind the edge of a crater rim. She slid facedown as cannon tracers passed over head. She started to rise up, but something held her in place.
"Don't move, marine! I've got your back." Warlord Three knelt beside her mecha, firing its main gun over the ridgeback at the tank line and giving Deuce her much-needed cover and a few seconds' break.
"Thanks, tankhead." Deuce rolled over when the pressure backed off her mecha from the big M3A17-T's hold and searched for her wingman in her DTM. Then she settled down and located the rest of the Saviors as they scattered around the Warlords.
"Anytime, jarhead."
"Saviors, fan out and let's take it to the tanks. Warlords, give us what cover you can!"
"Roger that, Saviors," Warlord One responded over the net. "Get down! Guns, guns, guns."
Three enemy Stingers transfigured from fighter mode to bot mode and came careening over the edge of the crater on the west side. Deuce hit her thrusters, launching upward and into a backflip. As her bot twisted over the other three enemy bots and over the scrambling Warlords, she pointed her DEG from the hip in the general direction of the Stingers. She fired like a trick-shooting cowboy and scorched across the rear torso of one of the enemy mecha but didn't do enough damage to stop it. Hawk streaked in from the east, tackling one of the bots just as Deuce came down behind them.
The third enemy mecha grabbed one of the Warlords and suplexed it backward into the ground, finishing it off by ramming its armored elbow through the cockpit and crushing the Army tankhead.
Autocannons, Bobby! she orderd her AIC.
Got it! The AIC tracked across the enemy bot with the QM sensors and fired two fraction-of-a-second bursts through the leg of the vehicle before it maneuvered away, wounded.
The bot, with which she had managed a strafe with the DEGs, had turned on her and one of the Warlords. The two bounced and juked and leaped over one another in a flurry of mechanized acrobatics, trying to gain the upper hand on the other. The Stinger tried to go to its DEG and shoot from the hip, but the tankhead kicked it away, only to take a knee to the back inturn. The enemy-targeting system pinged onto Deuce, but she moved in too close for it to fire.
I've got a QM lock on a Gnat straffing from above! Bobby alerted her.
Great. Fox three!
"Watch your backside, Deuce," Skinny's voice buzzed.
"Hawk, where in the hell are you!" Deuce spun and ducked and punched and kicked at the enemy Stinger. The Gomer was good and kept her completely occupied. He'd already stomped through the Warlord that had been helping her.