Ramy Roberts's Robots, also known as the 3rd Armored E-suit Marines Forward Recon Unit, had made it a policy, strategy, crazy-a.s.sed tactic, or whatever you'd like to call it, of riding down the drop tubes with the Army tank mecha. They had first done it at the Battle of the Oort with great success, and it had been adopted as standard operating procedure. Most of the other AEM squads thought it was a great idea. Most of the Army armored infantry squads thought that the marines were bat-f.u.c.king crazy.

"Warlord Five in the tube and ready for drop!" Army Captain Sam Cortez announced as he brought the tank to a stop inside the tube and locked it down. "Hang on out there, Jarhead, we go in five, four, three, two, one..."

"Shiiiitttt!" Tommy growled as the tube was launched. His suit was magnetically locked down to the tank so he wasn't going to fly off. But it was still one h.e.l.l of a ride.

Nearly three dozen drop tubes were launched toward the QMT facility by the Sienna Madira Sienna Madira's underbelly catapults. Traveling at over four thousand kilometers per hour, only ten of them actually held the tanks and their unusual attachments. The rest were decoys in case the fancy electronic and quantum membrane countermeasures failed to confuse all of the enemy fire.

As AA rounds peppered against the exterior armored hull of the drop tube, Suez thought it sounded a lot like the ringing of the bells of Notre Dame. He hoped like h.e.l.l the tube's SIFs held up. They only needed to last for thirty seconds or so, since the flight of the drop tubes cut an unusually short ballistic trajectory. Tommy had been through this before, but it was still the most unsettling half-a-minute of any fight.

Since there was nothing he could do about it while magnetically locked to a tank inside the tube, he did his best not to think about the harrowing drop through flying shards of hot burning incendiary armor-piercing rounds outside. One way or another, it would be over soon enough. He went over in his mind exactly what he planned to do when he hit the surface. He was going to take cover and shoot any f.u.c.king thing in front of him without a blue force tracker beacon on it.

It was a good plan.

A few more seconds pa.s.sed, and Suez had to grit his teeth against the jar of the tube retrofields firing and the demo blowing apart the tube, leaving him riding atop the tank-mode mecha in open s.p.a.ce with the ground rushing up at them extremely fast and enemy AA rounds flashing about. The orange tracers from the enemy cannons seem to fill every part of the sky as far as he could see in front of him. So, like a good marine, he was headed toward where the s.h.i.t was thickest.

"Thanks for the lift, Warlord Five!" Tommy gave the command to pop the superconductor magnet free, and he pounded his jumpboots against the hull of the tank, launching him wide and clear of the mecha. He rolled in a forward flip, and then he slammed into the ground with his left knee creating a crater and slinging up dust. He pulled his HVAR at ready and scanned it around, looking for targets of opportunity. There were no enemy soldiers, but there were automated ant hills with antipersonnel defenses splattering out railgun rounds as fast as they could. The fifty-millimeter railgun rounds tore through chunks of rock and dirt all around the LZ and all around him. He recalled the taking-cover part of his plan.

The Robots spread out to cover the landing zone for the tankheads, and then, to confuse the ant hills, they spread across the ridgeline a couple of klicks up in front of Army mecha. PFC Roger Willingham and PFC Hicks pounded down not far on either side of him, and Tommy could call them up in his DTM blue-force tracker if he needed to. The rest of the Robots were on the move as well, and it was clear that they had to move forward fast and randomly or those d.a.m.ned automated snipers were going to tear them apart.

"Kent, keep your f.u.c.king head down!" Tommy heard Top shouting at the female lance corporal. McCandless's voice sounded as if she could chew the lance corporal's head off.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n, I'm hit!" Kent shouted over the Marine unit's tac-net. Tommy couldn't tell by the sound of her voice how bad it was.

"Top, Kent is down," he communicated.

"Got her, Gunny. She'll survive, but out of play. Keep moving," Tamara replied over the net.

"Roger that, Top. This f.u.c.king ground fire is thick as s.h.i.t! I'm open for ideas." Tommy ducked behind an outcropping of rocks.

"How about we get the f.u.c.k out of it?" Corporal Sandy Cross said. "I mean, I could think of more fun places to be."

"You kidding-ain't this right where all the action is? You gotta love it, Sandy," Corporal Bates threw in his two cents' worth.

"Knock that s.h.i.t off, Danny," Tommy ordered. He kept his position behind the rock pile for the moment. He couldn't tell if they were a man-made refuse pile of boulders or if they were part of the asteroid that had been dug out to make the QMT pad or if they were a natural phenomenon. He didn't really give a s.h.i.t, either. They offered cover from those G.o.dd.a.m.ned fifty-millimeter railguns, and that was all he was looking for at the moment.

The automated snipers were not very accurate, but they put down a s.h.i.tload of antipersonnel rounds in a G.o.dd.a.m.ned hurry. The Robots were gathering around the valley at the bottom of the ridgeline as best they could, and they could see the tankheads back behind them setting up a line. Several of them fired volleys into the ant hills atop the ridge and managed to take out a couple of the automated snipers, but there were hundreds of them per linear kilometer, which was way too many for ten tanks to take on.

Tommy, PFC Willingham, PFC Howser, and Sergeant Dallon Hubbard had bounced point to the rock pile he had found. There were more of the piles farther up the ridge that would make good cover and get them almost in range where their grenade launchers would be effective against some of the closer ant hills. He motioned to the two marines on him.

"Come on, we're moving up to that next pile. It's bigger and will give us a better vantage point," he told them. "On me in leapfrogs. And remember to adjust for the lower gravity. Go!" Tommy bounced first as far as his jumpboots would bounce him. He hit the ground on his belly, sliding uphill in p.r.o.ne position like a baseball player sliding into second base headfirst. He held still with his weapon pointed in the general direction of the ant hills. Several rounds from the automated railguns threw dust up around him, but he held still and the automated systems of the snipers didn't lock on him.

PFC Howser bounced twice. Her first jump was shorter than Tommy's, putting her about fifty meters behind him. Then she bounced as far as she could up the hill. She was still not even a third of the way to the next cover point. PFC Willingham followed the procedure, putting him somewhere near halfway to the rock pile. Then Sergeant Hubbard made it almost to the two-thirds distance before he slid to a stop and covered himself. Tommy crawled to his hands and feet and then bounced all the way up to the sergeant before he stopped. The two of them held still, planning to make it to cover last.

"Okay, Howser and Willingham, this time go and don't stop until you get there," he ordered them.

"Got it, Gunny."

As they bounced up the hill and over the two sergeants, Tommy noted that PFC Howser wasted no time on the bounce as she hit the ground. She bounced flawlessly. Willingham, on the other hand, seemed to be having trouble with his footing on one of the landings, forcing him to hesitate a second too long. His hesitation cost him. It cost him his right leg from the knee down.

One of the automated rifle rounds. .h.i.t home, punching through his armor just below his right knee. The round trajectory tore upward through the knee joint, blowing out the back and scattering red blood on the asteroid regolith. The red was less p.r.o.nounced in the red light of the red dwarf star.

"Oww f.u.c.king G.o.dd.a.m.n h.e.l.l!" he screamed over the net. "s.h.i.t, s.h.i.t, s.h.i.t!"

"Gunny! Willingham is. .h.i.t!" Howser shouted.

"Keep bouncing to that cover, Howser. I've got him on my bounce!" Suez ordered her.

"Need help, Tommy?" Sergeant Hubbard asked him.

"No. You get up there and make sure Howser doesn't do anything stupid."

"Got it, Gunny." The marine bear-crawled his armored suit up the hill a few meters to get up speed. Then he kicked off, looking like a four-legged armored menace leaping into the air. He rolled forward into a front roll and put his jumpboots down just in time to maximize his bounce went he hit. Two more bounces and he was behind the rock pile with Howser.

Before Tommy could decide exactly how he wanted to handle Willingham, out of the periphery of his vision to his right he caught a glimpse of two other AEMs bouncing in from somewhere farther down the valley behind him. His blue-force tracker showed the blue dots in his DTM mindview to be the second lieutenant and Corporal Bates. Tommy didn't like the angle they were bouncing at, but they had made it that far without taking a hit. s.h.i.t, you couldn't tell Bates anything anyway, but the SOB was lucky. Tommy had to give him that, because just as the two AEMs reached a point that should have been in a firing solution for the ant hills, four FM-12s streaked across the hill, plowing the ridgeline to nothing but dust and smoke. The autosnipers were blown to vapor and dust that scintillated and sparkled quite beautifully in the red sunlight. Tommy stood and bounced fast, coming down beside the second lieutenant and Corporal Bates.

"How is he, Danny?" the lieutenant asked the corporal. Bates had taken on the role of squad medic since the Battle of the Oort. Tommy figured it was because of all the wounded they helped load and unload onto troop shuttles in the aftermath of the battle. It had driven Bates to want to help more than just load and unload screaming and battered soldiers. So he had trained on being a medic in his spare time. The colonel had encouraged it, and it was part of what got Danny promoted to corporal.

"His knee is gone. The suit sealed off the wound. He can still bounce in it, but he won't be winning the AEM Olympics, I bet." Danny looked him over and had his AIC talk with the wounded marine's suit. The wireless health-monitoring system indicated that Roger was not in any near-term danger from his wound and in fact could function with somewhat diminished capacity.

"Roger, how you doing?" Tommy leaned in to the PFC and took a closer look at the suit. He would be fine. h.e.l.l, the adrenaline and the immun.o.boost were probably already healing the wound, but he didn't have a knee in there. He was going to have to have a replacement knee printed up for him back at sickbay. Until then, the knee-joint mechanism of the suit would move for him. He wouldn't really notice a big difference until he tried to take the suit off.

"I'm good, Gunny. It hurt like G.o.dd.a.m.ned h.e.l.l at first," Willingham said.

"Do you wanna evac out or can you keep going, Marine?" Tommy asked.

"I'm good, Gunny. I'm stayin'."

"If you start dragging on me, we're getting you out of here, got it?"

Tie into his health-monitoring system and keep me updated, Tommy thought to his AIC. Tommy thought to his AIC.

Affirmative.

"I'm good, Gunny."

"Gunny, I think we should get to cover," the second lieutenant ordered.

"Good call, sir." Tommy and Second Lieutenant Nelms helped the private up and then bounced twice up the hill to the rock pile.

"You know," Danny Bates started, "these d.a.m.ned rock piles are all over this valley and up this ridge. What the f.u.c.k are they?'

"I don't know, Danny," Tommy replied. "But right now they sure are handy as h.e.l.l to have around."

"Spoil piles," Second Lieutenant Nelms said. The tone of his voice couldn't have been more indifferent if he'd tried.

"Sir?" Tommy asked.

"These piles are the rocks they dug out to make those ant hills, Gunny. They're called spoil piles."

"Of course, sir. I didn't see that." Tommy looked left and right and could see the piles as far as his sensors could see, which was to the horizon of the facility. The facility was built on an asteroid that had been blown in half, so it was basically flat on the QMT side and round on the other. That meant that the suit sensors could see many kilometers in either direction, barring hills and ridgelines and spoil piles and artificial structures, which there were plenty of.

"Woah," Bates moaned. "If that means there's an ant hill for each one of these things, then we are in some thick-a.s.s s.h.i.t!"

"I'm afraid you're right, Corporal," Nelms replied. "Way thicker than we can manage with the firepower we have with us."

"So, do we dig in or keep moving, sir?" Tommy asked the lieutenant.

"For now, that is above my pay grade, Gunny. Hold on and I'll check in with the colonel."

"Yes, sir." Tommy liked the fact that the new lieutenant wasn't trying to figure out everything himself, but he also hoped he didn't think he'd have to ask the colonel about everything. Giving the new guy the benefit of the doubt, Tommy thought the second lieutenant did okay going after Willingham the way he had. He must've either realized the air support was coming or was lucky as h.e.l.l. It worked out all right for him in the end. If you thought that being on an excavated enemy teleport facility in s.p.a.ce under heavy fire was lucky. Tommy wasn't sure his perspective was in the right place. After all, they had all volunteered to be there.

The Robots were hunkered down not too far from where the drop tubes had spat them and the Army tankheads. The tankheads had set up a reverse perimeter while the Robots pressed forward. At first it was just a jog in the park, but as soon as they crested the first hill in view of the outermost structures of the QMT pad, they were picked up by QM sensors and the automated ground-defense systems started plinking away at them. The automated snipers along the ridgeline had them pinned down. The mecha jocks kept making run after run on them, which was creating gaps in the autosniper's coverage, but they were having their troubles, too. They were under heavy AA fire while trying to take out the ant hills. Apparently the FM-12 squad trying to take out the AA couldn't because of some type of electronic warfare. The only way to knock out the AA cannons would be with laser guiding the missiles to them. And that meant that somebody on the ground had to get close enough to the d.a.m.ned things to light them up with a laser designator. A shame they couldn't just raze the rock from s.p.a.ce....

"All right, Zack, the mecha jocks and the tankheads are gonna focus on this section of the ridgeline here." Colonel Roberts highlighted a piece of the ridge on a three-dimensional map projected into all their heads DTM. Though they were spread out behind the spoil piles across the valley and up the ridge, they could still have a fully interactive conference with visual aids via their AICs and DTM connections. "That ought to knock out the autosnipers long enough to create a pa.s.s through this line. Take Gunny Suez and PFC Howser and bounce like h.e.l.l across this AO to that ridgeline."

"Yes, sir."

"Zack, don't worry about shooting anything unless it gets in your way. Find a covered vantage point and start burning those AA cannons with the designator, got it?" Colonel Roberts ordered his new b.u.t.ter bar. Tommy hoped like h.e.l.l that the new second lieutenant got it. got it.

"Yes, Colonel. Got it. But from that angle I don't think we could get good line of sight with more than five or six of the tower batteries and a few of them on the ground, here, here, and here." He highlighted potential threats.

"Top and I will take the rest of the squad up the ridge farther around to our left and burn the boxes you can't get to."

"I see, sir."

"Good. Robots, let's get ready to move out."

Jawbone looked over her left wing at her wingman, First Lieutenant Dana "Popstar" Miller, then around the battlescape. There were no enemy fighters as far as her eyeb.a.l.l.s or her sensors could see across the long, gray, flat surface of the QMT-facility asteroid. They had made several runs across the ridgeline where the groundpounders were pinned down, but they still hadn't done enough damage, and the AEMs weren't moving very rapidly. Those d.a.m.ned autosniper ant hills were every-f.u.c.king-where.

"Major Strong, you understand the plan?"

"Yes, sir, Colonel. We're gonna focus our attack and punch two holes in the line at your designated coordinates. We're ready when you are, sir," Jawbone replied.

"Well, don't wait on us. Roberts, out."

"Roger that, Robots." Jawbone turned her mecha back around for another strafing run while trying to stay as far out of the view of those AA cannons as she could. Since the d.a.m.ned surface of the facility planetoid, or asteroid, or whatever the h.e.l.l you'd call it, was so f.u.c.king flat, well, that made it difficult to duck the AA.

As easy as shooting flying elephants at Disney World, hey, James? she thought to her AIC. she thought to her AIC.

Maybe. At least the ant hills aren't flying.

"All right, marines, on my wing, and let's. .h.i.t the deck. We need to clear the way for the groundpounders." Jawbone's mecha skimmed dangerously close to the surface, and she had to keep a close eye on the topography ahead just so a hill or a structure wouldn't manage to take her by surprise. "Deuce, you be ready to hit those AA cannons as soon as we get those AEMs in place, because this s.h.i.t is thick!"

"Roger that, Jaw. Been there, done that," Deuce replied.

The plan seemed to work just fine. The Marine FM-12s. .h.i.t the ant hills no-holds-barred. Then Tommy and company bounced up the hill quickly and professionally. One sniper system managed to survive the strafing run, but a few well-placed grenades from Bates's left forearm grenade launcher took care of it nicely. Tommy and the platoon leader crested the hill, giving them perfect line of sight of five of the eight towers. Both of them lay p.r.o.ne and started lighting up targets with the designators built into their HVAR sighting systems.

Once the AEMs tagged the AA cannons with laser markers, the second wave of FM-12s swooped in, going to missiles. Two of the mecha fighters screamed overhead, bobbing and weaving through the hailstorm of orange tracers out of the automated AA systems. A missile fired from underneath the wing of each of the fighters and corkscrewed through the cannon rounds right onto the laser spots designating them.

"Hot d.a.m.n! That's two of those mothers." Tommy cheered and then slid his elbow a few centimeters to his right to find another target to designate. Then several missiles were fired on the other side of the ridgeline, where Top and the colonel had gone. Those missiles. .h.i.t home as well. Things were looking up.

Chapter 17.

July 1, 2394 AD Tau Ceti Planet Four, Moon Alpha, a.k.a. Ares Separatist QMT Facility Friday, 2:53 PM, Earth Eastern Standard Time Friday, 7:53 PM Madira Valley Standard Time "Owww, G.o.dd.a.m.n that hurt!" Jack came to screaming in pain as he tried to shake himself back to consciousness. There was severe pain everywhere in his body. He could still wiggle his toes and fingers, but his neck and back and a.s.s hurt so bad there was no way he was going anywhere for a while. He carefully, very carefully, brought his right hand up to a breast pocket and pulled out a medipen. He slid the armored access panel up on his neck and then activated the pen. The needle slid out, arming itself, and then he jammed the thing through the seal layer of his armored flight suit into his neck. That hurt, too.

Candis, how long was I out?

Three minutes and fifty-one seconds.

Oh, well, not as bad as I thought. How am I? He could feel the adrenaline, pain meds, and immun.o.boost rushing over him. The pain had almost completely vanished. He could feel the adrenaline, pain meds, and immun.o.boost rushing over him. The pain had almost completely vanished.

I wouldn't try to move for about five more minutes. The immun.o.boost should be getting you back on your feet safely by then.

Roger that. What about Dee?

I'm not sure how she is, but I can still detect her AIC's emergency signal. You should try contacting Penzington, perhaps.

Good idea.

Jack was afraid to move his neck yet, but he could survey his predicament fairly well with his peripheral vision and by having his DTM mindview rotate about the axis of his head. His suit and helmet had limited sensors without his fighter, but he could still get simple optical and IR imagery.

He had come down about ten meters from where his mecha had hit and exploded. The gravity on the hull of the Seppy supercarrier must have been along similar protocols as that of the U.S. fleet ships. He felt like he was sitting on about one half of an Earth gravity. That's why his ejection couch hadn't simply bounced off and floated away. He could tell that he had bounced several times until his couch finally lodged itself into a niche in the hull plating. He had barely made it through the QMT gate in time, had barely managed to slow down enough, and had barely managed to eject at just the right time to not get himself killed. He'd have been of no use to the president's daughter dead.

As it was, he needed to let the immun.o.boost do its job for a few more minutes, figure out where Dee was, and then figure out how to get inside the ship. He was hoping that his CIA buddy on the inside could help him out with that one.

Candis, connect me to Penzington.

Hold on, Jack, she said into his mind. she said into his mind. Okay. Got her. Okay. Got her.

Penzington?

Boland, you made it! Where the h.e.l.l are you?