One Day on Mars

7:15 AM Mars Tharsis Standard Time

"The haulers are loaded and away, ma'am!" the commander of the air wing informed Elle of their status. The large space cargo haulers lifted lazily off the Umbra Spaceport in the northernmost region of the Reservation, where the Umbra region and the Boreosyrtis region met. General Elle Ahmi stood and tugged at the ski mask she always wore to hide her face. In her position, which for decades had been one of attacking and hiding like many of the great freedom fighters throughout history, keeping your true identity closely held was not only a good idea, but pretty much a requirement for survival. There was nobody within the Separatists—the Americans, as they liked to call themselves—who would betray the great general. But occasionally there had been attempts on her life by the CIA that kept her always on the alert and vigilant of the constant threat.

"Good, Commander." Elle looked up from the computer display in front of her at the control tower and checked the locations of the haulers on the radar. "The cloaking countermeasures are working, I assume." She looked out the window of the tower at the spaceships that were now drifting into the Martian night sky and slowly out of sight.

"As far as we can tell, ma'am, but until they engage the enemy we can't know for certain," he explained.

"Yes, I realize that. Any word from the carrier group?" the general asked.

"Yes. They are poised for hyperspace on your command, ma'am."

"The Exodus?" Today was a day of days and would be long remembered in the history books of the human race—that is, if all went according to plan.

"All is moving as planned, General."

"Excellent." The general pulled at the unruly long dark hair hanging out of the back of her ski mask and tied it into a ponytail, pulling it up through the hole she had made in the back of the ski mask. She often wore her hair in a ponytail if there was a chance that she would be seeing any action. The red, white, and blue mask contrasted against the black hair and pale Martian skin and her tall slender athletic frame misleadingly suggested late twenties or early thirties and an average Martian female, not the great general who held off the Invasion of the Martian Desert with an extremely inferior force in numbers and technology more than thirty years prior.

The general's deep brown eyes shined with deep intent and purpose such that nobody would dare second-guess her timing or her resolve. Her plan had been in the working for decades—four or five decades. Oh sure, it was a dynamic plan and some aspects of it had changed over the years, but the general purpose of the plan had always been the same. Only recently had there been hope of forgoing the plan when the president of the United States offered to send an ambassador to meet with the Separatist Laborers Guild to discuss tariff relief. But once the administration chose an ambassador the level of seriousness that the White House was taking the Separatists became quite clear.

The president of the United States gave the task to a low-end second-term senator simply to appease pressure from the opposition parties in the Senate. It had become quite clear to the Separatists now just how serious the United States was about the disconnect between the Separatists and themselves—not very. And this day, this one day on the red planet, the United States would regret their decision.

The unknown upstart senator from Mississippi from the GOP was sent to act as the arbiter and ambassador to the Martian laborers of the Separatist movement. Senator Alexander Moore was a competent man, but had little power within the U.S. government as he was only a second-term senator in supernumerary positions of unimportant committees. The general not only knew Senator Moore, she knew him well, very well. She had done some background checking to make certain, but it was the same Alexander Moore that she had held captive for several years following the Martian Desert Campaigns. The arrogant Americans had sent in the entire Luna City Brigade to push the Separatists out of the Syrtis Major Planum and back into Elysium, but they had not expected an organized military force like the one that General Ahmi had amassed. Ahmi had implemented terrorist, resistance, and guerilla tactics taken from the great asymmetric battles of history and literally laid the American military forces to waste.

The Separatist Army quickly decimated the American infantry and Marines much the way the so-called "Task Force Smith" had been decimated at the onset of the American-Korean War centuries before. Stupid complacent American policymakers never learned from their own history. Many of the Marines were captured and kept in Separatist POW camps. They were tortured and were fed propaganda on a daily basis, but most of the Marines died before the American government accepted peace terms allowing for the release of the POWs. During that time Ahmi had the young Marine major Alexander Moore in her camp. He was unbreakable, an excellent soldier, and even in the last of his days with her remained a true patriot to his country.

No matter how wonderful a soldier Moore might have been, now he was a second-rate politician. He was a small fish in a very large ocean filled with sharks, barracudas, and killer whales. Their past relationship would probably be of little use to her, but Ahmi was smart and calculating and patient. She never underestimated her opponents nor did she ever overlook a potential relationship that could be exploited for the benefit of her plan. She hoped the brave bullheaded senator didn't get all caught up in the coming day's events. There was a soft place in her heart for all her POWs and she remembered Moore most fondly. Most fondly.

"Are there any issues that I need to address right now?" Ahmi asked the commander.

"No, ma'am. All is moving smoothly," he replied.

"Very well. Give me a few moments alone please." She wanted to look across her beloved red, blue, and green planet and at the late-night sky one last time. After the day ahead of her, it would likely be a very long time before she would have Martian soil under her feet and the Martian sky over her head. She looked up at Phobos and Deimos through the window at the edge of the spaceport hangar bay. Elle picked up her e-suit helmet and slipped it on over her ponytail and mask and gave it a twist to seal it on. A gust of cool oxygen rushed over her face as the scrubbers kicked online. The general walked to the edge of the airseam in the hangar bay door and stepped through the force field into the Martian atmosphere. She had time to take a short stroll in her new armored transfigurable fighter mecha.

Her Stinger, as the freedom fighters were calling them, was as close a copy of the U.S. Marine fighting mecha known as the FM-12 strike mecha as it could be made from the intelligence that the Separatist spies were able to gather. The mecha was transfigurable like the Orcus Drop Tank Mecha that the Separatists had been using for decades, but the design added a third configuration that mimicked the FM-12's eagle-mode. The Stinger could fight upright as a giant humanoid-looking metal beast in bot-mode. It could fight as an aerospace fighter plane in fighter-mode. Or it could fight as a hybrid fighter like a metal eagle with hands and feet.

The Stingers had taken the Separatist agents, engineers, laborers, and aerospace scientists more than a year to design even with the stolen data on the FM-12. Once the design was settled upon, it took another year to find suitable manufacturing capabilities to build more than just a prototype. Then the fighter went into production outside the Sol System. That had been the most difficult aspect of the effort—the long-range communications and transportation over the multiple-light-years gulf between the stars.

Elle bounced up to her private Stinger and gave the command through her AIC implant to open the cockpit. The Stinger sat like a bird perched on the end of the taxiway in eagle-mode. Elle gave a quick tap on the ground with her jumpboots and bounded upward and into the pilot's couch of the new fighting mecha. Elle was proud of her revolution and what they had accomplished and what they could accomplish. Her Stinger was the culmination of all that. The code that she had helped develop—her original occupation more than three-quarters of a century before had been as a software engineer and wireless technician—would render the mecha invisible to the targeting systems of the enemy. Of course, Elle realized that the sensor systems, the structural integrity field generators, the armor plating, and the weapons targeting systems were not as advanced as the bird's American counterpart, but the little software surprise would help even the playing field.

The general and leader of the Separatist Revolution strapped herself into the seat of the mecha and cycled the cockpit canopy down. Then she addressed her AIC to preflight the bird.

Copernicus? she thought with her mindvoice.

Yes, ma'am?

Run up the cloaking software and let's go for a spin while we still have time.

Yes, ma'am. Software engaged and power plant coming online for main propulsion systems. You are ready to go, the AIC said as the humming sound of the engines coming online grew louder as they spun up.

The mecha shook slightly as it lifted from the ground, throwing whirlwinds from underneath each of the wings as the vertical takeoff engines pushed it upward from the ground effect. Elle gripped the throttle and pushed it full force forward with her left hand while controlling the flight path with the stick in her right. The standard hands-on throttle and stick controls mimicked most fighter control systems that had been developed for centuries. The exception, of course, was the direct-to-mind control links between the plane and the pilot and the AIC. The DTM connections enabled modern fighters to do things that no others in history could have.

Ahmi toggled the mode control to bot-mode, which in turn rolled her through a series of twists and rolls that in the end left her in the cockpit in the torso of the fighter mecha as it flew upward headfirst as a giant metal armored robot. The general cut the throttle back and performed a "head over" into a dive toward the ground, rolling all the way over in a forward flip so as to land on the mecha's feet on the Martian ground with a big kathunk!

This thing is an absolute dream, Copernicus, she thought to her AIC while she maneuvered the mecha into a full-speed run across the northern Martian planes, bouncing and flipping the vehicle over dunes and rocks and crevasses.

Let's hope so, General.

Don't be such a pessimist, Copernicus, she thought, and then was forced to grunt gutturally and squeeze her leg muscles tight as the flipping maneuver imposed a lot of g-forces on her body.

Yes, ma'am.

The general known as the most wanted terrorist in the human race flew the high-tech fighter mecha with the giddy joy of a schoolgirl playing hopscotch at recess. She bounced and zigged and zagged the mecha and even attempted a few martial-arts-style rolls, which she flubbed pretty badly. The rolls shook her up momentarily, forcing her to catch her breath cautiously and almost painfully from the air bladders of the pressure suit squeezing on her. Elle wasn't the trained fighter pilot that her soldiers were and she had only a few hundred hours in the machine. Although she didn't intend on flying one into battle unless all things really went to hell, she enjoyed the rush from piloting one for fun. In another life, one without politics and revolutions and insurgency and unfair taxation without representation and second-class citizens, Elle might would enjoy being a test pilot or even a fighter pilot. But that was just a fleeting fantasy.

Ma'am, it is approaching seven thirty am in Tharsis, her AIC told her.

Right then. I guess I should order the attack to start, she replied.