One Good Soldier

July 1, 2394 ADRoss 128, Arcadia, 10 kilometers south of the capital city of MegalopolisFriday, 3:26 PM, Earth Eastern Standard Time

The capital city of Arcadia was known as Megalopolis, with all the ancient Earth historical references intended. The governor's mansion sat on a hill in the middle of Capitol Park. The park was actually a forest reserve. The mansion was the only building in any direction for twenty kilometers, and surrounding it was a dense hardwood forest reminiscent of the oak trees that grow in the Appalachian Mountains of North America. There were three small rivers that met just south of the mansion, and there was ample Arcadian, as well as imported, wildlife living in the park.

Capitol Park was surrounded by four districts known only as Capitol North, Capitol South, Capitol East, and Capitol West. Capitol North was mainly a business and political district. Capitols East and West were manufacturing districts. Capitol South was the analog of the defense industrial complex district. A government building designed in honor of the Pentagon housed the leaders of the planet's Armored E-suit National Guard. Just to the west of the Capitol Pentagon was the armory for the National Guard as well as several airstrips and hangars. The planet had a small air force, but the ground forces were quite impressive.

Smaller city suburbs tied the four main cities together in a giant ring of humanity, pavement, steel, and streetlamps over forty kilometers in diameter. The local natural vegetation still covered the region where there were no obvious signs of civilization. In essence, Megalopolis was a giant ringed city about ten kilometers in width surrounded both within and without by wild natural forest land. There were roads that led into the governor's mansion from each of the four main extensions, making the city look like a giant wheel with four spokes when viewed from space. The three rivers running through the forest were mostly straight and formed a Y shape with the intersection on the south-sided lawn of the mansion. The legs of the Y met the outer ring at the five, one, and nine o'clock positions. The rivers added three offset spokes to the wheel of Capitol Park and the Capitol Districts.

Colonel Mason "Warlord One" Warboys had been, just seconds before, on the QMT asteroid forty thousand kilometers straight up, looking up at four supercarriers of the U.S. Navy fleet being pounded on by several enemy battleships. The U.S. fleet ships were heavily outnumbered, and things didn't look too good for them at the time. He was ordered to prepare for immediate teleport. Rather than tac-nuking the capital city and risking large numbers of casualties, the plan was to drop ground and air forces to take back Arcadia. After all, President Moore had promised to minimize civilian casualties.

So Warboys prepared himself as best he could. He loaded as many of Colonel Ramy Roberts's Robots AEMs onto the surface of his tank as would fit and then told them to hold the fuck on. For a brief instant he thought he saw a flash of the inside of a supercarrier tank bay. Then the next thing he knew he was in the middle of a forest staring at about fifty enemy tanks and a line of Arcadian armored ground forces only two kilometers away. The enemy troops detected his presence almost instantly and started firing on his position. Small caliber railgun rounds and larger caliber armor-piercing rounds with tracers filled the air all around him.

"Holy shit! Roberts, get off my mecha!" Warlord One shouted over the open tac-net to the AEMs. The armored e-suit marines dove for cover almost as soon as they materialized from the QMT teleport.

"Move it, Marines!" Warboys recognized First Sergeant Tamara McCandless's voice. His DTM view showed the blue dots scrambling for cover behind trees and rocks. The trees didn't seem to be helping the AEMs that much, as the larger rounds passed through them like a knife through hot butter. The anti-mecha rounds from the enemy guns plowed through a ninety-year-old oak tree just to Warlord One's right like it was nothing more than balsa wood. The oaks splintered into millions of pieces as the forty-millimeter railgun rounds punched through them, leaving a splintered half-meter diameter trunk sticking up some three meters off the ground and another twenty meters of splintered tree raining down around him. Flames poured off both pieces of the tree, adding to the already hectic situation.

"Look out, Cross, that goddamned tree is gonna fall on top of your ass!" one of the AEMs shouted.

"Marines! Take cover and I'll see if I can draw some fire away from you," Colonel Warboys said. His heavy armor plating and SIFs gave him a much better chance of survival in the hailstorm of armor-piercing death than the AEMs. Their suits were tough, but not designed to take on anti-mecha armor-piercing rounds like a hovertank was.

"Roger that, Warlord One! AEMs are digging in!" Colonel Roberts replied.

Warboys throttled his mecha up and moved the tank-mode metal through the trees as best he could, trying to perform some sort of evasive maneuvers. He took several low-caliber railgun rounds in the process. The rounds simply twanged against his tank, throwing sparks and ionized metal. The larger anti-mecha fire tracked onto him, which encouraged Mason to be more abrupt in his evasive maneuvers. The vegetation was so thick, however, that tank-mode wasn't very effective. He couldn't move around through the trees fast enough as a hovertank to avoid getting hammered by those large-caliber guns. His other choice while in tank mode would be to just ram the trees over, but that would seriously slow him down, cause unnecessary hazards to himself and the AEMs, and give him a serious headache after a couple trees. Warboys toggled his mode controls over to bot, and the tank flipped up and transfigured itself into a bipedal metal behemoth with a giant DEG barrel for a nose. The main railgun cannons of the mecha moved into position on the forearms of the standing armored bot.

Just off to the colonel's left and right two more tanks appeared out of QMT, each of them loaded with marines. A few seconds later, several more tanks popped in, loaded with either marines or Army infantry. The enemy line ahead of them was opening up with full force. There were almost enough U.S. troops teleported in to create an offensive line. Almost.

Cannon tracers and DEG blasts splashed all around them in a multicolored barrage of green directed-energy plasma burst and violet railgun ion trails. Another large thirty-meter-tall oak tree beside Warlord One suddenly burst in the middle from a cannon round, and wood chunks the size of a human leg were thrown asunder. Several of them ricocheted off his tank, making a loud kathunk sound against the armor plating. The large oak crashed down onto several of the marines just behind him. Flames engulfed the tree as the marines crawled out from underneath it. Their armored suits had protected them, but Warboys bet they had some serious headaches.

"Warlord One, this is Five!"

"Go, Five."

"Where the fuck are we, sir?"

"We are ten klicks south of the governor's mansion and ten klicks north of the Capitol Pentagon. We have to push north." Warboys panned the map in his head, looking at the terrain. It looked rough, and there were those damned rivers up ahead also. His lidar system took an extremely long integration time to find enemy targets through the foliage. His optical and IR sensors were marginal, but his QMs were working just fine. And what they showed was that there were more tanks and troops between him and the governor's mansion than there had been Seppy bastards that day of the Martian Exodus. It had been bad then, and he had had a squad of Marine FM-12s along for support, as well as air cover from the Navy. This scenario was probably really going to suck. It was probably going to suck big-time.

"Sir, if we were supposed to take that hill ten kilometers away, why the hell didn't we just teleport to there?" Warlord Three asked.

"According to my sensors, Three, it is way too goddamned thick with Seppies to drop in on them by ourselves. Plus, there so much goddamned EM noise around here that I'm not sure we could safely QMT any closer in. The Seppy bastards must have some kind of jamming fields around the Capitol. We draw them out, let fire and brimstone rain down from heaven, and then we punch a hole in the line and let the marines rush the end zone for a touchdown," Warboys replied.

"I see, sir."

"Besides that, it's our orders, Three."

"Yes, Colonel. But just what happens if that fire and brimstone doesn't come in time, sir?" Warlord Three asked.

"Well, Three, then we'll just have to improvise."

"Besides the fact that it is our goddamned orders, Corporal, my guess is that it is too fucking thick with Seppies up there for us to just drop in on them unannounced with no backup," Gunnery Sergeant Suez told Corporal Bates as the two of them dug in behind several large rocks. The landscape reminded Tommy of Tennessee more than any place he'd ever seen. Had he not known he was fifteen, or sixteen, or whatever number of light-years away from Earth, he'd have sworn he was somewhere just south of Knoxville. The steep hills covered with large oaks and white limestone rocks reminded him of that one time he had been to the Smoky Mountains when he had been a kid. He remembered being bored to tears as his parents drove around gawking at trees and waterfalls and bears and shit. This forest had enough going on in it, like enemy soldiers and tanks firing at them, that he didn't expect boredom to be a problem.

"Well, I was thinking that the governor might invite us in for tea," Bates replied.

"Gunny?" Colonel Roberts's voice came in through the net.

"Yes, sir, Colonel?"

"We need to dig in here for now and hold this spot. As soon as we see hell coming down from above, we'll make our push. Get your squad covered and do not let the Seppies advance on us. Watch out for those M3A16s. Those tanks are older than ours, but they're still tanks nonetheless."

"Yes, sir." Tommy checked his DTM mindview. Bates was right beside him. Howser, Willingham, and Sergeant Hubbard were dug in about fifty meters to his east, near the bank of the river.

Hey, where does this river go? he thought to his AIC.

Here is a map, Tommy. It goes right to the front lawn of the governor's mansion, where it Ys and strings outward to the nine and one o'clock positions of the Megalopolis beltway. In the other direction, the river crosses the beltway around five o'clock.

How deep is it?

The only records I have are from the local Internet connections. It looks like it has a barge channel in it, so it must be at least ten meters deep.

That would be deep enough.

Deep enough for what?

"Top, got a second?" Tommy called to Tamara.

"Well, Gunny, other than ducking all this goddamned Seppy cannon fire and DEG plasma and watching out for these exploding fucking trees around me, I'm not that busy. I was considering taking a nap." It was the typical AEM joke. Tommy ignored it. Well, first he chuckled to himself, then he ducked and prayed as a tree just behind him crashed after it exploded about five meters up the trunk, then he ignored it.

"Well, Top, I'd hate to bother you while you're napping, but did you notice this river about a hundred meters to your east?"

"Uh, yeah, Tommy, what about it?"

"Well, Top, it has a barge channel in it, and it goes all the way to the front lawn of the governor's mansion." Tommy thought for a second, then added, "You think a tank can walk underwater?"

"Son of a bitch. Hold on, Gunny. I need to talk to the two colonels," Top said.

"What's up, Tommy?" Bates asked him.

"Danny, are you up for a swim?"

"I don't know, Mason, it might work. We might be able to go really quiet, as quiet as we fucking can, and slip right past them. Especially if there were enough resistance from the line here, it might just work. The Army armored infantry and some more tankheads could do that." Colonel Warboys listened to Colonel Roberts's wild-assed, harebrained, bat-crazy U.S. Marine scheme over the command net.

"Well, if we timed it with some help from above, I believe that might do. What do we do when we get there?" Warboys thought about it briefly as he ran his bot-mode tank through the forest, dodging trees and anti-mecha fire. He pulled up maps of the park and details of the rivers and was beginning to see a plan. "We'd be behind the lines, and they wouldn't be looking for us. A few tanks could cover you AEMs long enough to get inside and take the QMT controls. I dunno, Ramy. It's risky. But it might just work. It's a long shot your AEMs would survive."

"Hell, Mason, sitting around here like fish in a barrel ain't?"

"Good point. Shit! Guns, guns, guns!" He turned over backward to avoid incoming while returning fire in the general direction. He probably didn't hit anything but a fucking tree, but it might have at least made some Seppy bastard duck. "All right, Ramy. I'm getting tired of this shit. Our diversion strategy should still be our original strategy. The tanks and grunts on the line hold it until we get support from above. Then they try to poke a hole in the line and rush through to the mansion. By then we might be there, and we'd probably need somebody to cover our asses." Mason liked the plan. Well, it wasn't so much that he liked it as he liked it better than sitting around dodging cannon fire and exploding trees. The marine's plan was bold, daring, sneaky, and only a little bat-shit crazy. Only a little.

"I agree with that plan. We should shoot it up to the ground boss," Roberts said to the senior colonel.

"Yep. I'm a little busy over here. You want to take care of that?" Warboys dove his tank over a downed tree, taking cover from an incoming rain of anti-mecha fire. One of the tracer rounds passed just below his canopy and between the arm and torso of his mecha.

Shit that was close, he thought.

Too close, sir, his AIC agreed.

Warlord One's targeting system tracked the trajectory of the railgun rounds back to the generation-old tank that had nearly got him and then locked on with the DEG.

"Guns, guns, guns!" he shouted. The directed energy burst from the barrel atop his bot-mode tank and traced across the hillside, cutting through several oaks as it did. The DEG blast followed the enemy tank as it bounced through the woods up and down the slope until it finally hit its mark. The energy burst tore into the cockpit of the Arcadian M3A16 hovertank. The bot-mode tank exploded at the seams in an orange flash and then fell forward, sliding to a halt into an oak tree farther down the slope. Black smoke poured from the dead tank's joints and seals.

"Ground boss likes the plan, but can't be certain when we'll get top cover. Apparently, things are tough all over up there," Roberts communicated back to him. "I tried to convince them that things were tough all over down here, too. They said they would try to get us some FM-12s for backup."

"Air cover would be nice," Warboys replied.

"How long will it take you tankheads to walk ten kilometers underwater and against a current?"

"Uh, my AIC says eighteen point six minutes. Let's shoot for twenty-five," Warboys answered the Marine colonel.

"Got it. I'll work the plan. Assuming we get approval, let's be ready to move in five minutes. Pick your team and start moving them to the river without looking like you're moving them to the river."

"Roger that, Ramy. Let's do it."

"All right, folks, listen up!" Warlord One broadcast to all the tanks, AAIs, and AEMs. "Our mission is to take the governor's mansion. That is where the controls for that QMT facility are supposed to be, so we can't just blow it up from space. We have to march in there and take it away from the bastards standing there. Let's go show them how the United States of America plays king of the hill."

"Hoowah!"

"Oorah!"

The Warlords totaled twelve state-of-the-art M3A17 transfigurable tank mecha. There were two squads of AEMs and three squads of AAIs. Warboys's DTM view of the battlescape showed him at least fifty enemy tank mecha and more than a thousand ground troops, and that was just in the near vicinity. His long-range sensors showed a much larger mass of troops just beyond the main line between them and where the control center for the orbiting QMT facility was.

"Warlord Two, you and the rest of the even numbers will stay here and lead this attack. I'll take the odd-numbered Warlords and a few AEMs for a swim," Warboys ordered his second-in-command.