Chapter 105: Man Overboard!

Before the marines could react, I had already calculated a firing solution, the targeting AI locking onto approaching exosuits. Before they could fire, I squeezed the trigger. A volley of ruby lasers flashed out, slicing into the hovering exosuits and blasting them apart.

The first wave went down, armor ruptured, the protective layers turned into molten slag and exposing crackling wires. Even if the pilots had somehow survived the immense heat caused by a direct hit by the lasers, they would probably drown in the sea with no one to help them. If not, they would be surging out of the sea and returning to the fight, only to be blasted apart again.

Only when I squeezed off a third volley did the marines finally swivel around to face the new threat. The exosuits flew around in a haphazard pattern, doing their best not to get hit by lasers and missiles. Not that the Steel Sharks were equipped with missiles – the shoulder-mounted pods were loaded with torpedoes rather than surface to surface or surface to air missiles.

Fortunately, our lasers were more than enough to take them down.

The exosuits weren't without teeth, though. They bombarded us with lasers and micro missiles, the thermal beams flashing red-hot against our shimmering energy shields. The incandescent screens rippled when the tiny projectiles detonated against them, but they held. Lumbering about in a slightly clumsier manner, the marines finally fired back. Thick beams of superheated light crisscrossed the air, slicing into the hovering exosuits. More than a score of them vanished in explosions, the remains of their hulking armor crashing back onto the warship or into the sea, throwing up steaming splashes of water.

More exosuits launched from the bays built into the side of the ships, hatches lowering to allow them to jump out. That was quite the clever design. Usually, in aircraft carriers, the planes would all be parked on the deck, open to the surface. While this allowed for them to launch as quickly as possible, they were often vulnerable to bombing runs.

The exosuits were a lot smaller than fighter jets, which meant the hatches didn't need to be that big. Furthermore, they didn't require runways. With the rocket thrusters built into their backpacks, they could immediately takeoff, akin to a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, but much more flexible because they could adjust the trajectory of their flight paths more easily.

Many of them arced about so that they could shoot us from our rear, but I had already anticipated that. The moment the marines began firing back at the enemy to the front, I had my Steel Shark spin about to snap off a volley at the exosuits coming at us from the rear. The mercenary pilots evidently didn't expect me to see them coming and they banked hard when my lasers streaked through the air. A trio of them weren't able to evade in time and they disappeared in brief, blinding explosions.

"How many of them are there?!" One of the marines, Liao, growled. I snuck a peek at the sensory array console, which depicted enemy icons, numbers and data in several holographic screens.

"Current count, approximately thirty of the enemy. Twenty-seven now." I corrected myself after three red icons blinked out of existence in the screen and the numbers adjusted themselves. The numbers fluctuated, depending on whether reinforcements were swarming out of the ship's launch bays and the number of enemies we destroyed.

"Not as many as I thought," Bing muttered.

"That's because our resident scientist has already shot down a couple dozen of them!" Shang Shi barked, and I could hear that he was grudgingly impressed. Perhaps he wouldn't think of me as a burden anymore. "Step on it, people! You're not going to lose to a civilian in kill count, are you?"

"No, SARGE!"

I rolled my eyes, but ignored their banter. This wasn't a contest. The outcome of a battle was binary. Either we won or we lost. Of course, the outcome of a battle depended on how well a combat unit worked together in the battlefield. Teamwork was imperative. A well-drilled and organized squad, working together, would prevail over a disorganized mob.

The mercenaries were no pushovers, though. They continued to hammer away at our energy shields with their lasers and micro missiles. A few of them skillfully weaved through the air, avoiding the lasers while pummeling the much slower and less agile Steel Sharks in return.

"Damn them! They're moving too quickly! They're just like flies! How irritating!" One of the marines shouted impatiently, trying to track them with the Steel Sharks' lasers. By now, we had whittled the numbers down, and inevitably the most skilled of the mercenaries had survived. The ones who were great at evading and dodging. I couldn't help but be impressed when I saw the twelve or so exosuits deftly avoiding another barrage of ruby beams with minimal movements.

"We can't hit them at all!"

"At this rate, they'll drain us of our shields!"

Glancing at the holographic window that indicated the statuses of the Steel Sharks, I saw that several of the war walkers' energy gauges had dropped to dangerously low levels. At this rate, once the energy levels hit zero, the shields would wink out.

As powerful as the energy shields were, they were not invincible. Hit them long and violently enough, and even they would short out. Certain powerful weapons, such as nuke, would obliterate the shields and the unit inside in one go. The energy shields on a war walker simply wasn't enough to withstand such punishment.

Perhaps one day, starships the size of islands would be able to produce energy shields powerful enough to withstand several nuclear detonations, but certainly not a war walker the size of a small house.

Acknowledging the limits of my war walkers, I ran several calculations. The AI that Arthur Qi had installed in my machines – the super advanced software that he had developed and sold to me – helped me detect any patterns in the remaining exosuits' movements and calculated their trajectories. I then adjusted the lasers to fire upon the positions where they would be a few seconds later and squeezed the trigger.

Before the mercenaries knew what had hit them, about five of them vanished in brilliant explosions, their exosuits straying into the paths of my lasers before they realized it.

"The civilian again!" Shang Shi cursed under his breath. "Marines, you really want to allow a civilian to show you up?!"

They responded with another barrage of lasers, which caught a couple of the now flustered mercenaries and blew them out of the sky. There was about four of them left now, and two of them crashed toward the deck, transmitting their surrender.

The other two continued to hammer away at us relentlessly, refusing to give up and determined to fight to the bitter end.

"No remorse, no pity, no fear!" Shang Shi roared. As one, the two squads of marines fired again. Despite their skill, the two remaining enemy exosuit pilots simply couldn't avoid the sheer quantity of laser beams that literally filled the air, turning into a razor-sharp net of superheated light. They were simply cut apart, the molten slag of their destroyed armor crashing down in cauterized pieces.

And with that, the battle atop the deck ended.

Not only that. I felt the vibrations of an explosion in the distance. A few seconds later, the warship lurched to a stop.

"Seems like Ying and Shi's squads have destroyed the engines," Shang Shi said with satisfaction before he received the confirmation from them over the platoon channel. "Excellent work, people. Take those mercenaries prisoner and guard the deck. The navy will be coming to relieve us."

He had also sent a signal to the frigate and got them to pursue the now stationary ship. I sighed a breath of relief and leaned back against my chair, glad that the mission was over. Glancing up at a holographic screen, I glanced through the colossal amount of combat data that I had gathered. Great. This was a fruitful trip, after all.

*

The navy showed up a few moments later and took over. The warship was towed back to the naval shipyards and the military police apprehended the mercenaries. We left it to them. The marines were not trained to conduct interrogation, after all. They were the toughest, most badass killers on the planet. Semper fi!

Feeling exhausted, I couldn't wait to go home. I uploaded the combat data into the cloud server and proceeded to surrender my Steel Shark to the navy. I couldn't possibly own a personal war walker, and not just because I was a civilian. It was the law. As long as I wasn't fighting in a military-authorized mission, I couldn't bring home a war walker.

Technically, I wasn't allowed to bring home firearms as well. But nobody cared about that, and you had people in the underground possessing guns and weapons. Besides, the military was concerned about my safety after the assassination attempts over the last year or so, so they decided to close an eye regarding my plasma pistol and laser sword.

"Are you all right?" Lily asked, concerned, when I reached home. I nodded, realizing that I hadn't been home for over a week now. No wonder she was so worried. "It's been hard on you."

"Nah…it's going to be harder on the mercenaries now." I couldn't help but grin when I thought about the prisoners. At least they were still alive. Pushing my glasses up, I smirked. "We're going to find out the mastermind…and then we will sue the hell out of the Rong family for involving us in their enemies' grudge."