Three Gnats were in the middle of a straffing run over the Warlords' position. From the blue dots in the bowl, Burner could tell that the ten remaining fighters were all engaged or being engaged at the moment, and the tankheads were just having to hunker down and take it. Burner pulled completely out of his dive while his mecha-to- mecha missile exploded into the wing of an unsuspecting Gnat. The poor Gomer never knew what hit him.
"Splash one." He looked in his rearview and made certain that Boulder was on his wing. The two Marine mecha screamed in behind the three-Gnat formation going for QM lock. The firing solution algorithms tracked vectors in each of their DTMs for them to follow for best possible chance of a kill.
The enemy planes pulled into a tight bank to the right and upward. Burner barrel-rolled to the right, pulling him over Boulder and meeting the lead Gnat as it pulled through its hard bank. Burner climbed toward it, only meters from the enemy plane, and had to back off on the throttle or he would have overshot it. The enemy pilot was skilled, and he backed off on his power at the same time. The two planes were canopy-to-canopy only a few meters apart, barrel-rolling over each other in hopes that one would gain an energy advantage over the other.
The aerial ballet was a mix of throttle and stick with roll and pedal in a continuous fight not to overtake the other plane. The pilot that made the mistake of overshooting the other would be the one that flew through a targeting solution and would be dead. Burner grunted and squinted his eyes against the g-load.
"Burner! The other two are on us pretty hot!" Boulder shouted.
"Bot mode, Boulder! Kill your throttle and cover my ass! Don't let 'em take your six!" Burner replied, still grunting from his constricting g-suit. "Gigi! You and Dundee get down here and watch Boulder's six!"
"Roger that, Boulder, but we're sort of tied up right now!"
"Goddamnit!" he grunted, and ground his molars against the bite block and took fast breaths from the fresh shots of cool air in his face. The vapor stims gave him just the edge he needed to accept even more g-load and widen his roll, giving him room to go to eagle mode. Burner grunted through the maneuver while the arms and feet of the bird of prey spread underneath the vehicle. Burner reached out and punched the cockpit of the Gnat with his right mecha hand. His mechanized armature cracked against the bubble of the enemy plane, startling the pilot for a fraction of a second. That would be the Gomer's last mistake. Burner dropped his throttle, kicked his pedal, slipped in behind the enemy fighter, and went to guns. The tracers tore through the empanage and across the canopy of the plane, shattering pieces of the fighter along its trajectory. Several of the rounds hit home on the pilot, killing him quickly.
"Scratch two. Hold on, Boulder, I'm coming!"
Boulder toggled to bot mode, spinning left then right to avoid the cannon fire from behind him. Burner had pushed on ahead after the lead Gnat, leaving him for the two on their six. Going to bot and then kicking the HOTAS in reverse was enough of a wild negative g-load that Jason regurgitated bile into his helmet. The organogel quickly started absorbing it, and the suit started pumping adrenaline and other stims into his system to compensate.
One of the Gnats passed by his mecha and clipped Boulder's arm with its tail fin. The impact sent the bot-mode mecha spinning even wilder. His already-spinning head and churning stomach were aggravated by the blow. Jason stomped hard on his left upper pedal to slow the spin, and then he jammed the HOTAS against the forward stop, thrusting the mecha in a vector along an axis from toe to head, which happened to be horizontal with the planetoid's surface. He pulled the DEG sights into his mindview and shot from the hip at the two Gnats as they took positions on Burner's tail. The QMs locked on to the fighter that had clipped him, and Boulder squeezed the trigger.
"Guns, guns, guns," he said. The sensors pinged a missile lock on the other, and Boulder was preparing to fire fox three when his Bitchin' Betty started bitching.
"Warning, weapons lock. Warning, radar lock from enemy targeting system."
"Fox three!" He fired only milliseconds before tracer rounds from a formation of Stingers that had been stalking him ripped through the torso of his mecha. "Oh, fuck!"
The rounds continued to cut into his mecha, sending a leg of the bot exploding off into space. Then secondaries exploded from power systems being ruptured. Boulder quickly assessed his plane's health and realized it was a goner.
Eject, eject, Jason! his AIC warned him.
"Eject, eject, eject!" he shouted while pulling the handle. The mecha twisted against the exploding components, giving it a roll. The cockpit shot free from the upper torso of the mecha, and his couch was launched into space, groundward. Boulder grunted against the g- load of the ejection seat and tried to catch his breath. He managed to force his eyes to focus just in time to see the ground rush up at him at over a hundred meters per minute. He hit head first, snapping his spine and crushing his head almost instantly. The numbers game had beaten him. He had beaten the two Gnats that were on his tail, but three Stingers from out of the blue got to him before Burner could get back to help.
HoundDog, prepare for impact in five, four, three, two, one.
"Fuck!" HoundDog tensed his body as the ejection chair slammed across the ice-hard surface of the planetoid. He could feel the chair creaking as it rolled and tumbled to a stop, throwing up dust and ice particles behind him and leaving a wake floating gently in the light gravity, casting odd rainbows with each flash of light coming from the myriad violent blasts all around him.
He quickly began unstrapping himself from his seat and pulling himself out of the multimillion-dollar g-seat. Several rounds of enemy fire stirred up dust and flung showers of splintered rock and metal around him. The splintered debris zinged against his armored g-suit. The g-suits were nowhere near as bulky and protective as an AEM's suit, but they did offer a downed marine some protection from the environment and minimal protection against shrapnel.
"You'd better move your ass, marine!" a voice buzzed in his helmet as his AIC tuned him to the AEM tac-net. The blue dot that was associated with the voice popped in place about ten meters behind him, near a pile of girders and other metallic refuse from the facility's construction. The name with the blue dot said Second Lieutenant Paul James.
HoundDog crawled behind his chair, keeping his body as low to the ground as he could, and then started digging out the HVAR and survival gear. There was an extra ammo case in the kit as well, and he snapped it to his waist harness and turned toward the blue dots nearest him. Out of the corner of his right eye, he caught a glimpse rushing toward him, and his mindview painted several red dots basically on top of him.
Four enemy infantrymen pounced all around him, firing at the AEMs on the other side of the rubble pile. Only one of them was paying him any attention, and the type of attention he was paying, HoundDog didn't really enjoy. Railgun rounds splashed all around him and were tracking right for him. HoundDog rolled to his left over onto his back and then kicked his heels against the surface, tossing him upward into a backward handspring. As he rolled through the handspring, he gripped the HVAR in his left hand, firing freestyle into the enemy soldier. The low-gravity acrobatics had imparted a considerable amount of angular momentum to HoundDog, but he was a mecha pilot and understood the physics of his situation quite easily.
HoundDog rolled himself into a tight ball to increase his spin rate which enabled him to hit the ground on the other side of his handspring, rolling like a ball. He tumbled through a couple of front rolls until he managed to turn upright and spring forward, using his momentum to slam into the back of one of the enemy troops charging the other marines. HoundDog was first to his feet, firing his rifle full- auto into the back of the soldier's head, and then he bounced with all his strength for the cover of the rubble pile.