One Good Soldier (3 page)

The yellow targeting X blinked and jumped around in Deanna's mindview but couldn't quite lock on to the Stinger. The X blinked red then yellow and then hopped off the enemy fighter again. No matter what type of juke or jink she tried, the damned enemy mecha managed to squirm, bob, or roll its way out of her targeting solution.

"Shit! Come on you bastard. Hold . . . fucking . . . still." She grunted against the overwhelming and crushing load on her chest. The g-suit squished her breasts flat as pancakes and her abdominal muscles were squeezed so tight that she wasn't sure she'd ever be able to unsqueeze them.

Then the enemy mecha did something. Dee wasn't sure if it was brilliant or stupid. The mecha, in fighter mode, flipped over forward and began to transfigure to bot mode. The transfiguration took only a fraction of a second and left the mecha standing upside down on its head and facing Dee and her wingman with both arms pointing forty-millimeter cannons in their general direction.

"Warning—enemy targeting lock established. Warning—enemy targeting lock established," the Bitchin' Betty of Dee's mecha chimed. Times like this the mecha's automatic warning system was more distracting than helpful.

Tracers tracked out of the right-arm cannon of the enemy fighter across her nose and into the empennage of her wingman's plane. Dee could see Jay jinking and juking his fighter around inside the firing solution of the enemy weapons, but there was little he could do at the time. The rounds continued to rip through his mecha, throwing bits of armor plating off into space with an orange and white spray of plasma.

"Pull out, Jay! Pull out!" Deanna, with her hands-on-throttle-and-stick (HOTAS), slammed the throttle full forward and the stick all the way forward against the stop, rocketing her fighter-mode mecha into a horrendous dive toward the deck.

"Shit, Dee, I'm hit! Eject, eject, eject!" Jay shouted.

Just as her mecha nosed down, her wingman's mecha exploded behind and to the right of her, and brilliant orange tracer rounds zipped by her canopy, only centimeters away. She didn't have time to see if an ejection couch cleared the fireball or not. The Gomer off her three-nine line to the right was closing in and firing. Then several rounds from the bot-mode mecha that she had been tailing zipped through her tail section but only caused minor damage. While Jay had been with her it was two against two and she had an enemy in her sights. Things had been looking up. Suddenly, in less time than it takes to blink an eye, the situation had switched in favor of the enemy. It was now two against one, and both of them were targeting her. Dee continued down at alarmingly increasing acceleration until it was clear that the mecha behind her and to her right were going to follow.

They're on you now, Dee!
Bree warned her.

Roger that!

Dee toggled the transfigure button on the HOTAS and stomped the right, lower foot pedal all the way down to give her more slip as the Marine FM-12 transfigurable strike mecha rolled and flipped over and then transformed from a fighter plane into a giant armed and armored robot.

Let's see if what is good for the goose is good for the gander!
she thought.

Dee, watch your altitude!
Bree warned her. The landscape of the small moon they were fighting over filled her entire field of view and was rapidly approaching. It looked a lot like Pluto's moon, Charon.

She gripped the throttle and pulled it full-force backward with her left hand while controlling the flight path with the stick in her right. The standard HOTAS controls mimicked most fighter-control systems that had been developed for centuries with the innovation, of course, of the DTM-control links between the plane and the pilot and the AIC. There had been experiments where mecha had been piloted by AICs alone, and those mecha could make maneuvers that human bodies couldn't withstand. But there was a certain art to combat flying that only humans in the cockpit could bring. The experiments always showed the same results. Human and AICs together in the cockpit always came out on top when flying against a plane with just one or the other in it. The DTM connections between pilot, AIC, and mecha enabled modern fighter mecha to do things that no others in history could have done, and Dee was pushing the combination to the limit.

The bot-mode mecha now stood on its head, which was upside down in relation to the other fighters, and backward, facing the pursuing mecha. The g-loading of the full-force reversal caused Dee to vomit dryly into her helmet, and her vision began to tunnel in around her. But she fought through it and held on to the HOTAS.

"Aaarrhhggg, woo!" She grunted and flexed her abdominal muscles again, trying to hold off blacking out long enough to lock up her pursuers. Two yellow Xs filled her mind, bouncing around the fighter-mode Stinger to her right and the bot-mode mecha on her tail. The quantum-membrane sensors locked up on the fighter-mode plane, and a lock tone sounded in her mind. "Fox three!" she shouted as she loosed a mecha-to-mecha missile. The missile spiraled out toward the enemy fighter, leaving a very faint blue ion trail through the almost nonexistent atmosphere of the small moon.

"Warning, surface collision imminent. Warning, surface collision imminent," her mecha's Bitchin' Betty announced.

"One more . . . second . . ." Dee grunted as the yellow targeting X turned red. "Guns, guns, guns!" she shouted as she triggered the cannons on both arms. Tracers tracked out and blew the enemy mecha into a fireball of orange and white debris.

Pull out, Dee! Pull out!

"Warning, surface collision imminent. Warning—"

Dee tried to pull the mecha over into a horizontal run with the ground but didn't make it. Her mecha slammed into the surface just as she began to black out.

"Apple didn't fall far from the tree, if you don't mind my saying so, sir," Thomas Washington commented to President Moore as they watched the president's eighteen-year-old daughter, Deanna, on the large viewscreen at the Mecha Combat Training Simulations Center located at the south end of the Sea of Waves near the limb of the Moon.

"I was never a mecha jock, Thomas." Moore smiled back at his bodyguard, only briefly taking his eyes off the simulation displays. Three other Secret Service agents stood behind them and didn't flinch or make a sound. The president's daughter was in a large metal box suspended on repulsor fields. The box whirled and bounced and twisted madly in place, simulating a combat scenario. Inside the box was a replica of a U.S. Marine FM-12 transfigurable strike mecha fighter cockpit.

Deanna had logged thousands of hours in the sim over the last five years and had reached a point where her proficiency was approaching that of a seasoned Marine mecha pilot. Of course she hadn't gone through all of the basic Marine training, as it was against the law to enlist before the age of twenty-one. Deanna was only eighteen, and for more than a century, as life expectancies had increased, the age to enter active duty as soldiers, firemen, policemen, and a few other dangerous professions had been set to the legal adult age. So Dee would just have to wait a few years, but Moore could tell by watching how she handled the simulations that she had the skills to be a good mecha pilot. She just needed the benefit of age and training. And train she had. Since she had been thirteen, Dee had studied and trained and competed in any and all mecha jock activities she could. She had been accepted into the most prestigious military academy in the Sol System. And while there were plenty of skeptics out there, Alexander had never once needed to use their family's political pull to help her. Moore hated that Dee had been living in a dorm at the Sea of Waves Powered Armor and Mecha Academy for the past four years instead of at the White House with him and Sehera.

But Dee had put in the work and Alexander was proud of her. Fortunately, Air Force One often made trips to the Moon. He wished that Dee would have taken up lion wrestling, or football, or shark baiting, or chainsaw juggling, or anything less dangerous instead. But she hadn't. For the past six years, since that incident in Orlando, she had thought of nothing but being a goddamned U.S. Marine mecha pilot. When she saw those marines tromping around Disney World in bot-mode mecha, bringing all kinds of hell to the robot AIs that were trying to capture the First Family, her life changed. U.S. Marine Major Alexander Moore wanted to say "Oorah!" President of the United States of America Alexander Moore wanted to say, "Good work, and your country would be proud to have you serve!" But for just plain old Alexander Moore, hick from Mississippi, daddy to a little girl, it was
his
little girl, his princess. He didn't ever want to see her in harm's way.

But Alexander knew that Dee was gonna be Dee, and the best he could do was support her and try to make her as damned good a marine as he could manage. That might just keep her alive in the future. He still had three years to talk her out of it. He wasn't giving that much of a chance—snowballs and Hell came to mind.

"Goddamned gutsy, if stupid," USMC retired Colonel Walter "Rat Bastard" Fink III stood at ease behind the president, with his hands behind his back.

"I agree." Moore turned to the mecha pilot instructor and frowned at the former marine. Of course, Moore knew well and good himself that there was no such thing as a former marine. "She is no good to anybody dead. And she can't move on to the final rounds of the competition, either."

"Permission to speak freely, Mr. President?" Colonel Fink asked.

"Go ahead, Rat."

"She isn't thinking of life and death at all, only about killing her opponent to win a competition. She still thinks of this as a game, sir. A game with a reset button. Oh, she is damned good at it, and with her and her wingman there we'll probably snag the trophy at Ross 128 next week. But I'm here to train marines, sir, not just simulation-competition winners. And like you said, she's no good to anybody dead, sir," Fink said without moving a muscle or changing the expression on his face.

"I think somebody should make her . . . aware . . . of her problem, Colonel Fink. Don't you?" Moore smiled at the instructor.

"Yes, sir," Fink replied as a large toothy grin covered his face. "And I think I know just the person, sir."

The "box," as it was affectionately referred to by mecha trainees, or "nuggets," drifted to a resting spot on the floor of the sim center, and the side opened up by folding over into steps. Two instructor techs rushed into the box to help Dee out of the pilot's couch. The box for her wingman a few meters to the left of hers had already been opened. Moore could see the young man's face was pale, and when he stood his legs were shaky.

Deanna managed to walk upright down the ramp but only with the support of the instructor techs under each arm. Once she made it to the bottom of the ramp she motioned that she could support herself and then twisted off her helmet. Alexander could tell by the look on her face that she was physically exhausted but proud of herself for having killed her pursuers. Fink was right. She still didn't understand the life and death of the predicament that she was considering getting herself into—the predicament of being a United States Marine.

"Cadet Moore!" Rat shouted with a rough, gravelly tone at the "First Nugget," as Dee was known.

"Sir!" Dee snapped-to tightly, her exhaustion showing through her expressionless face. She and her flight gear were soaked in sweat from her shortly cropped Martian-dark hair to her toes, which were a long, athletic, and curvy one hundred seventy-six centimeters down.

"How do you think you performed on that mission, Nugget?"

"I killed the enemy, sir." Dee didn't move or flinch or even blink.

"Your wingman is dead!"

"Yes, sir."

"You are dead!"

"Yes, sir."

"The entire nation is going on a week of mourning because the First Nugget has died uselessly, if heroically, in combat! Sorry, Cadet Stavros, but only your family will be mourning for you, as you are dead as hell as well!"

"Yes, sir," Dee and Jay answered simultaneously.

"You think this is a goddamned game, nuggets?" Fink stood looming over Dee, his nose only inches from her face. Then he glanced and glared at her wingman.

Again, simultaneously, Dee and Jay responded. "No, sir."

"Then what the hell was that! Your mission was to go in and support the recon unit infiltrating that facility, and you ended up getting yourself and your wingman killed. Now, what if those heart-breaking, goddamned life-taking, and God-fearing AEMs down there needed some more air support? Huh? Just what in the flying fuck were you thinking? Those marines had a mission, and now, because you were too busy up there goddamned hotdogging it out like some goddamned virtual world goddamned gamer, this mission has a larger probability of failure. That is failure with a capital fuckin' F! Do you understand me, Nugget? Failure!"

"Sir!"

"And fucking failure, with a capital fuckin' F, is one thing that I WILL NOT accept from my nuggets! Do you two hotshots under-fucking-stand me?"

"Yes, sir!" Dee made the mistake of letting her eyes glance at her father standing in the background, but only for a fraction of a second. But that was a fraction of a second too long.