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9.Trouble with Tigers

The cockpit smelled of hot, humid air, and while the helmet with its anti-fog coating didn't condense with droplets of water, a cockpit with the air conditioning system turned off in combat conditions was by no means a comfortable place to be.

"Look out, it's coming." The familiar command came over the headset. The forward screen was still only an indecipherable interweaving of blinking dots of light. Red jamming tags bounced off the radar showing nothing.

But just before the words fell, the blue light exploded in the darkness ahead.

A flare!

Before the naked eye or hand or foot could react to this, the keen computer had pointed the red cross representing a lock somewhere ahead, and brief beams of light and long, continuous lines of fire began to flicker around, but it was a bizarre mime with only light and shadow effects and no sound.

The organism maintained its aim under an erratic evasive procedure, and he knew that premature firing was lacking in meaning. The distance readout on one side of the screen was decreasing rapidly, and then the image of the enemy aircraft was sufficiently discernible from the screen.

A certain momentary heterogeneity came to mind, but it was followed by an almost uncontrollable pull of the trigger. One could almost slowly see the red-hot traces of the rushing particle beam burning through the opponent's side of the plane. The opponent didn't stop, but advanced like a suicide, he knew the battle was pretty much doomed, and the distant flashing fortress was already showing signs of collapse.

But his opponent clearly had no intention of going back alive, and he could see the jets of fuel spewing from his opponent's jets, then the loss of control, the familiar, unfamiliar, overlapping images of the machine crashing into his face. The blunt, heavy impact came from the front.

Couldn't hear the impact.

The seatbelt was tightened and the head seemed to have hit something. Some sort of blur obscured all vision.

........

When Carl opened his eyes again, he saw a human face leaning over him, while still maintaining that awful body feeling of dampness and stifling heat. He felt a little feverish in his brain, probably because of the shards of memory that had floated up from the depths from which he had flashed earlier.

"Hell, the Colonel's right, Captain, it's his orders, you need to go back to your cabin, shower, and get some sleep." The sergeant major of the formation looked at himself from the open MS cockpit hatch.

"Okay, thanks, I guess ...." Fragments from some unknown past or dream made him momentarily forget the name of the sergeant major, but at least when he stood up on somewhat shaky legs, his brain was enough to recognize the picture of the hangar presented to him.

"Yes, I'll follow orders, Sgt. Maddock, the airframe is yours."

He knew he did need to rest, the war was still on, and a guy with a brain in the condition he was in was hard to fight, he wasn't just a pilot who could deal with his own programming all night, but a guy who was responsible for the team under his command, and he should have known better.

As he walked slowly through the hangar with heavy steps, a lazy wave was given to him by the soldier lying in a fake sleep on a tank on the side of the Eurasian Union. Two Air Tyrants were warming up, and the pilot already on standby in the cabin was gesturing to the ground crew ahead of him, one of which appeared to be carrying ground-to-ground ammunition? Apparently, somewhere, some other people are still on the battlefield one step away from death.

That's none of your business for the moment, mate, what you need right now is a clear head and plenty of energy, Karl convinced himself with a silent nod of his head.

"The Major has rushed back to sleep, he even fell asleep in the cockpit just now while he was debugging the program," Maddox said into the face of the bridge officer on the terminal

"Fine, how's the Air Tyrant?"

"Ready for takeoff, pilot is on standby, mount check clear."

"Very well, permission to strike is granted, attention, commanded by Major Frada in the air upon arrival at the first navigational point,"

25km away, desert, Zaft commando unit

Antebellum .

Sitting steadily in his speeding jeep, Baltfielut watched the battle from the rear with a shallow smile. Just as he had planned, those brave guerrillas, relying only on their recoilless guns and shoulder-fired launchers, were fearlessly charging at the Baku under his command, "It's like, well, charging at the tanks with cavalry." He thought to himself in the back of his mind.

Initially, there was a shot of RPGs apparently fired in their direction by the smart guys in the opposing team, but then all the firepower was taken up by the Baku squads, and even though they had bottomed out on ammunition, they were enough to crush the squads of jeeps and half-tracks, thanks to their massive bodies - -literally crushing. With just one standard movement of jump-impact, even if those guerrilla vehicles scattered nimbly, Baku's reliance on the combined action of his foot joints and tracks was enough to crush the unarmored carts to pieces with a sharp turn.

"...Might as well be dead - I've often heard people say that, but is it really so?" Another small, flickering cloud of fire appeared under the Baku's tracks with a metallic, twisting screech. But then, as if on some kind of command, the guerrillas maintaining their sparse formation still struggled to move between the giant legs, but the lines of fire fired began to focus purposefully on the legs and joints of the MS.

"Carkwood, what's the status of the 3?" As the airframe tilted sideways like a misstep, Tiger grabbed the radio and asked.

"The joints are jammed, but the tracks can still go, no problem."

"Hurry up and take care of them, we're in trouble if we don't hurry." Tiger was already frowning as he turned around, he heard some sort of distant whirring from an engine, some sort of, sound that belonged to air power. He hadn't brought along the slower Desert Ginn and the short-legged Air Combat Dinn to ensure maneuverability and concealment, and now the squad of baku and jeeps he had on hand had nothing to defend against air power. And now he had to feel a little uneasy about that.

He knew that the Combined Forces squad that had parachuted in behind him had a small air force, and he wasn't familiar with the kind of airframe called the Air Overlord that had equipped the Combined Forces only after neutron jammers had been widely used and not very often. There was information that it had been developed as a support aircraft for the new Joint MS, but he hadn't seen the rumored new Joint MS in previous battles, and the only MS the airborne unit had was the cobbled-together Ginn, which had suffered considerable damage in the battle a few days ago. At the same time, the battle a few days ago had proven that such fighters did not lack the ability to fight independently, and even without dropping any bombs or missiles, they had managed to open up a series of not insignificant holes in his flagship with their beam cannons. He noted from the records left over from that battle that their beam cannon was mounted in a rotating turret on the back of the plane, a design apparently intended for use against air targets, and very unsuitable for use against ground targets, it would have to fly backwards, or dive at a tremendous angle for that beam cannon to get a shot on the ground.

Besides, the time was now in its favor, and the tiger looked at his watch to confirm that fact. The cold desert night was coming to an end, soon the temperature here would rise to an unbearable height for the human body, and during this brief period of rapid warming the beam weapon's rays would be disturbed by thermal convection and would be difficult to aim. If his own luck wasn't too bad, the rival Air Overlord would have to watch his squad enter the next town outside the base where Dinn's patrol circle was deployed, and then leave in a huff.

Just as he thought, as the whistling from the sky suddenly increased, several light green beams had cut through the air and burned into the empty sands. The particle beams, deflected by the desert's thermal convection, hit nothing, and seconds later the plane hiding in the clouds fired again, the same deflection meaning the other side didn't have a correction program for the desert environment. But the bad news was that the guerrillas, who looked to have become cautious after seeing the firepower falling from the sky, were in hot pursuit again.

Tiger grabbed the radio to say something, but couldn't, and with the whistle of a fighter jet as it sliced through the low altitude, another different kind of firing sounded, and a twisting curve made by a pillar of sand stirred up by solid rounds cut through his formation. Tiger even saw the plane's blue and white paint job.

"One of the armor pieces in the back is shot through, but all is well with the airframe!" There was a situation report from the MS team on the radio, apparently the guy in the sky was quick to react, solid rounds that weren't disturbed by convection were apparently more likely to hit the target, and those small caliber aircraft guns couldn't paralyze a 70 ton heavy MS even if they could by luck penetrate Baku's back armor, but such shots were deadly to their own jeeps.

"Don't conserve ammo, fire in unison to drive off those guerrillas and speed away." Tiger didn't want to stall any longer, this squad that emphasized mobility could get into unknown trouble if it lost its most valuable mobility. He wasn't afraid of that airborne Union ground unit, those main battle tanks could only fight MS by sneaking, ambushing, or shooting black guns, tactics that made little sense to his squad familiar with high-mobility warfare; but the long-range barrage from that Union ship could cause them unexpected trouble, and the fact that the fighter overhead had been circling and hadn't left indicated that the opponent still had some A backstroke he must guard against.

In the air, Mu . La. Frada lowered his nose again, and even though he hadn't yet passed through the clouds, the radar's downscope scans already showed that the ZaftMS group below seemed to be changing formation, and Baku, who had been covering a few jeeps in the middle, began to turn toward the guerrillas in hot pursuit behind him on the flanks, pointing his main screen at the jeeps that were somewhat obscured on the radar screen, and bucking the moment the fuselage passed through the clouds The machine guns fired their triggers in unison, and he pulled the nose up with some disappointment as he watched a few clusters of light cover the ground somewhat erratically towards the convoy, but eventually veered off to the side in the side wind. It seemed better to leave the ground assault to someone more suited to the task, and Mu shrugged, preferring to deal with targets in the air or on the cosmos rather than on a vast expanse of desert. He marked the location of the updated enemy on his data chain, the friendly planes arriving with bombs were not far away.

====== Here are the author's delimiters ================================

We're really bad at naming chapters, also, fixing a bug. Upon checking the animation, it was discovered that the Rangers were using a very realistic half-track combat vehicle.

10. Air Strike

Egypt

Somewhere over the desert.

The pilot of Air Tyrant 3 had already distinguished several large, fast-moving targets on the radar down-view scan screen, as well as a few smaller, fainter targets. As the sun rose, the desert temperature rose sharply and the clouds that had been covering the low altitude began to break up, he could almost see the moving black dots and flashes of engagement on the desert ahead. Major Frada's long plane kept circling low, and it didn't look like there was any effective anti-aircraft fire on the other side; he put the airframe into level flight and activated the Helfa V anti-tank missiles on the underwing mounts on the operating interface, figuring there was no way those MS's with all the high technology integrated into them didn't have a laser warning/countermeasure system, and to avoid blinding his dog or damaging the expensive optronic system under the nose, he didn't A laser shelf beam was used, instead opting for an infrared-command-guided composite guidance mode.

The only reason this last-generation air-to-surface missile, which was already considered old, was mounted on this upstart fighter was because it was the best in-atmosphere type air-to-surface missile that could be found on Ptolemy's base. Apparently, the Senate and Equipment Committee in Washington never allocated the latest missiles to the unit best suited to use them, and the only ones that could be given to the almost neglected Marine Corps on the far side of the Moonface base were a few extra bits or these kinds of old-fashioned weapons.

Starting in the latter part of the AD Era, with the technological advances in miniaturization of radar and other electronics, the newer generation of missiles have emphasized out-of-visual-range attacks, post-launch regardless, and autonomous target tracking using the powerful active radar that comes with the missile. Because no manned weapon could theoretically match the speed or anti-G capability of a missile that just needed a chip. This trend never changed in the time that followed, and in the series of local wars that dictated the map division of the Earth in the early CE era, the use of active guidance technology reached a peak, and a series of confrontations became about radar power and jamming technology.

But times have changed, after all.

The April Fool's crisis of neutron jamming from the sky turned the miniaturized active radars on deaf ears, and missiles that could have been launched and left alone were completely caught up in the intense jamming that their anti-jamming systems couldn't fight against, covering the entire battlefield, while being reduced almost to unguided rockets. The military had to find dusty wire-guided missiles to fill these terrible gaps; similarly, the almost turn-of-the-century missile, which could be guided using radio commands, had opened up new possibilities.

At this distance, where targets could already be identified visually, the Air Overlord's radar was capable of transmitting target data to the missile in real time, while the vast desert below provided the tanks and Baku with an excellent mobile battlefield as well as a clear view of the ground unobstructed by debris.

The pilot, who had far more space combat hours than flying hours on Earth, knew he wasn't good at ground attacks, and to ensure a hit, the pilot slowed down slightly and locked on to an MS trailing last and fired two missiles. The missiles were designed at the beginning of their combat careers to penetrate any ground unit on Earth at any angle, including the most advanced 100-ton heavy battle tanks of the time, and to penetrate a 70-ton MS that was a full circle larger than a tank.

On the ground, Barthfelut accurately distinguished new, airborne noises beyond the sound of the jeep's galloping wind, the MS's engine, and the annoying fighter's engine in the sky. As he turned his gaze in that direction, he saw two fast-approaching black spots in the cloud-spread canopy, and a flickering flash of light.

"Watch out for evasion!" He bellowed to the radio that hadn't left his hand, the flash of what was apparently some kind of weapon launch, two looming trails already stretching across the canopy that was becoming blue from dark. The Baku under his command didn't have a radar warning system, and to the designers of the far-flung colonial satellites, the adjuster pilot's eyes were obviously more effective than radar alerts when the onboard radar had been disturbed to within line-of-sight, and for the same reason these MSs were even less likely to be equipped with electronic countermeasures; but in the present, without knowing which airframe they had locked onto, he couldn't make Targeted Command.

All of the Baku began releasing pyrotechnic jamming rounds to disrupt the potential infrared guide heads and began to perform a dizzying series of maneuvering evasive maneuvers, one of which had an evasive trajectory that almost threatened the jeep in which the Tiger was riding. But this series of evasive maneuvers in two dimensions meant nothing to the fire control radar that could see the battlefield from a three-dimensional perspective, and the locked Baku happened to be the one that jammed its front leg joint under guerrilla fire, and the first missile hit the multi-mounted missile launcher on the back of the Baku, and the pilot took advantage of his adjuster's reaction time to cut away from the weapon, which was not integral to the fuselage, at the first opportunity! The module, allowing this explosion, which occurred on the side of the fuselage, did not damage the fuselage in any way, but there was nothing left to stand in the way of the second missile that followed. The second missile from the sky hit the MS in the back, and the combat section ripped through its back armor and struck the engine, which was located in a backward position.

Tiger could clearly see the fireball from the explosion, which was clearly far more powerful than the shoulder-fired missiles used by the guerrillas, and the MS that had been hit slowed down momentarily, the wound in his back was smoking ominously, never more concerned with maneuverability, he wasn't sure how this body's explosive suppression system was.

"Cackwood, report!"

"The power system is completely destroyed and cannot be moved."

"Abandon the plane now; other squads, fire your residuals in unison to push back those guerrillas!" He repeated the order he'd given a few seconds ago, it was clear that the MS was hopeless, but he didn't want to abandon the elite pilot inside that he'd been working with for so long. Then he pressed a switch on the hand side in the jeep.

"Cut," pulling up from low altitude again Mu was a little upset, even at this disadvantage the adjusters were able to use their cheating general reflexes to cut their losses, he could see a figure jump out of the MS that was hit and on fire, while the rest of the MS flush fired a barrage of bullets that accurately pressed against the first few vehicles of the guerrillas. On the battlefield situational map at the bottom of the main screen, the missile-firing 3 had passed its target and had to make a half-circle in the air before it could attack, and the one taking cover overhead wasn't carrying a ground-to-ground weapon. Mu stirred decisively to reverse the rudder, intending to try his luck again with the beam cannon on his back, but from the edge of his vision he saw the Zaft formation below him begin to be covered by a smoke screen. He had expected the adjusters, who had always been aligned with the most advanced technology, not to use such backward-looking weapons as smoke, but the smoke that spread out below, making it impossible for the back beam cannon's optronics system to distinguish targets (the Air Tyrant's radar lacked upward vision, which in inverted flight meant that it couldn't look down) showed that these opponents did have the flexibility to use these backward-looking but effective equipment as well.