One Day on Mars

11:15 PM Mars Tharsis Standard Time

". . . This is Gail Fehrer with MNN on the ground in the central dome of Mons City. My crew and I were able to escape the war zone in the southern borough domes and sneak into the main dome with the moving Separatist troops. That was quite a harrowing experience, Shennan," the reporter whispered into the video as she scanned over her shoulders for activity.

"How long did it take to get from one borough to the next, Gail? We've been told that the tunnels from one dome to the next had been cut off," the anchorman said deadpan, as if reading from a teleprompter or, more likely, repeating from his AIC.

"It wasn't an easy trek, Shennan." Feher's reply was considerably more animated than the anchor's. "The Seppies have an exterior route set up where they are trucking troops and equipment from dome to dome and from drop ships that have landed between them. We hitched a ride on the back of one of the equipment loads. We were almost discovered two or three different times. We just uploaded some video to you that shows some of this as well as the enemy movement through the airseam on the South wall of the main dome just north of the central city recycling plant. The airseam down there is large enough for lightly armored vehicles to get through. The main dome of Mons City is overrun by the Separatist forces. We have seen some signs that the Separatist troops are rounding up the civilians and moving them inward toward the center of the city. We don't know where to at this point."

"As far as we can tell here at the MNN building, we—the entire city including the boroughs—are being held captive by this invasion force. There has been no word from any of the Separatist leaders at all and we are really uncertain why MNN is still being unjammed and allowed to broadcast. Any idea of what the Separatist forces have in mind? I mean, they can't really believe they can hold off the United States Fleet do they?" Shennan asked with a little more animation than before.

"Throughout history General Ahmi has proven to be wiser than this and has tried not to create an all out engagement with the U.S. on what is considered mainland U.S. soil. There haven't been skirmishes on Earth in more than a century and few on Mars since the Martian Desert Campaign. Since that skirmish more than thirty years ago she has shown no signs of desiring a full-scale war. But, Shennan, I'd have to say something appears to have changed with that policy. The forces we saw outside the domes and moving into the domes are well organized, equipped, and appear to me to be ready for war. The death toll already must be hundreds of thousands if not more. This is war, no doubt. And the question still remains as to where they got so much support and —" Fehrer nodded as if her cameraman had said something to her and then she turned to look over her right shoulder.

"Gail, what is it?"

"Shennan, I'm sorry, but we have to go now. We'll contact you when we can. This is Gail Fehrer for MNN reporting." Then the video feed went blank.

"Wow, amazing report from MNN correspondent Gail Fehrer. Godspeed and be safe Gail. Let's go now to . . . "

"Alexander, we can't fight these soldiers. Deanna is too . . . "

"Yeah, dear, I know. I should never have faced off with the men in the elevator. This was a bad, very bad plan." Senator Moore carried his daughter as they fled through the bowels of the Mons City infrastructure. Using security feeds and other sensors, such as automatic door activations and elevator operations, and by eavesdropping on the enemy communications channels, his AIC staffer was helping them evade capture. The AIC continued to hack away at the security protocols of the commandeered Separatist soldier's AIC with marginal luck. For now Alexander kept the small implant in his pocket, but if Abigail couldn't hack into it within the next five minutes he was going to smash the thing.

"Mr. Moore." Reyez Jones, who was taking up the rear position a hallway behind them, called to him on the e-suit to e-suit wireless.

"Reyez?"

"I was down here once about a year ago and I think there is a garbage incinerator a few hundred meters from here," Reyez said.

"And?" Moore held up and waited for his wife and Joanie Hassed to cross the intersecting hallway to be followed closely by Reyez. Moore motioned to Reyez to hold the conversation until he was in audible distance. "Let's stay off the radio if we don't have to use it. So, what about the garbage incinerator?"

Abigail, DTM the blueprints for this floor showing this incinerator if you can get them, he thought to his staffer.

Already working on it, Senator. All I've got are the same engineering blueprints we've had for these lower levels of the city. The highlighted pathways are the route to the garbage collection and destruction system.

Thanks.

"Well, if I remember right . . . " Reyez rolled his eyes to the ceiling in thought or recollection and was distracted momentarily by the brown mold stains scattered about by the leaky plumbing system of the city's engineering infrastructure. "I seem to recall a service lift for reclaimable resources that could be transported to one of the manufacturing domes. I think it goes to a highbay and an airseam at the Southeast side of the dome."

"Alexander, I'd rather take my chances outside than inside," Sehera added.

"We could hide out there easier. There are sensors and electronic gates everywhere here," Joanie Hassed agreed. Her life on Triton during the terrorist insurgency there had taught her the valuable lesson of lying low and staying out of sight. She would have rather kept Senator Moore from engaging the Seppies altogether, but it was too late for that now. And the big man seemed to know what he was doing.

"Okay. We go to that elevator and then out of the dome. We'll see about transportation to an evac once we get that far." One thing a former Marine could do was to adapt and improvise. He continued to think in the Major Moore mode rather than as Senator Moore. He hoped that would keep them uncaptured and alive.

Abigail, how is the IFF hack coming?

It is harder than I thought it would be. The Separatist AIC technology is better than I had expected. A few more minutes. The AIC seemed uncertain of itself.

We don't need to risk a few more minutes right now, unless you are certain you are jamming it. Are you?

No sir.

Thought so. Keep thinking about it and maybe we'll get another sample later. But for now, I don't want them tracking us directly with it. Moore fished into his breast pocket and dug out the little sunflower- seed-shaped implant and then dropped it on the ground in front of him. He twisted it into the floor with the ball of his jumpboot causing a barely audible crunch.

Understood sir.

How are you coming with the cloaking hack countermeasure?

I know the signal is there because there is more energy overall in the bandwidth than should be there. But without the encryption sequence I can't find it. The dictionary code breaking search is still running but could take years. Any suggestions? Abigail asked.

Yeah, keep at it. Moore was ready for something to go their way, but so far his plans had been falling apart on him. Perhaps he should have listened to those two idiots at the adventure shop and just stayed put there.

"You want another beer?" Rod Taylor finished off his Mons Light and then crushed the can against his forehead. "Reckon those idiots made it to the top of the dome?"

"I'll take one," Vincent Peterson belched and then took out a pack of cigarettes and started to light it up. "Who knows. Hate he had to take that little girl along with them. They're liable to get her killed. Idiots."

"Hey man, this ain't a smoking section of the dome." Rod smiled and handed his young friend another light beer. "Yeah, poor kid."

"Uh, Rod. Look outside that freakin' window."

"Yeah? What about it?" Rod shrugged his shoulders and reached into the red and white cooler they had liberated from the beverage store down the street for another beer himself.

"I don't think with all those Seppy bastards out there anybody's gonna give a flying shit if I have a smoke." Vince pointed at the armored trucks convoying down the street and shook his head.

"Well, it just ain't considerate is all—" Rod started but was interrupted by a group of Separatist troops in e-suits that had begun to unass outside the door of the shop and two of the men came through the door with two behind them in standard two-on-two coverage formation.

"What's up?" Vincent looked up at the Seppy railgun barrel lowered at him and lit his cigarette. "We're closed."

Lieutenant Commander Jack Boland sat in the middle of a row of ten simulation consoles in the Battle Operations and Scenario Simulation Room, the BOSS as it was known. The low level lighting of the room was accentuated only by the flickering of changing scenes on flat panel computer displays and cast a dim blue hue over the overcrowded computer battle lab. The display screens were mainly for secondary data acquisition and list display as most of the simulation was done through DTM link.

Jack's AIC was connected hardwire for maximum data rate to the BOSS wargaming, logistics, tactics, and strategy computer system. The BOSS main computer ran trillions of calculations per second to help squadron commanders plan and simulate upcoming operations. The BOSS implemented state-of-the-art AI software and genetic algorithms to predict the outcome of multiple coupled dynamical systems and perform calculations that consisted of thousands of differential equations all tangled up and connected in some way to each other.

The prediction requirements were orders of magnitude more complicated than those of the Navier-Stokes equations defining the chaotic realm of weather prediction. In fact, weather prediction and even chaotic phenomena injection was a subroutine implanted within the BOSS architecture and a small one at that compared to the detailed wargame models and logistics support simulations. It had been taught at war college for centuries that wars were lost and won due to the military handling of logistics implementation. The BOSS was designed to ensure a win.

The BOSS was the culmination of four hundred years of mathematically modeling warfare and it indeed was the boss when it came to wargaming and mathematical game theory and understanding the minutia of every piece of hardware, software, order, plan, tactic, strategy, and logistics effort was within its capability. The simulation was downloaded through the AIC link DTM simply because there was more information to be transferred between the BOSS and the user than could be displayed via any other means known to man. To be a certified BOSS user actually took several months of training, and to understand the system and truly implement it as a battle planning tool took years of experience or a natural knack for the complex DTM modeling and simulation environment. Fortunately, Lieutenant Commander Jack Boland had both.

The Mons City recapture battle plan was nonstandard in that there was a problem with the collateral damage. In previous battles involving the Separatist Reservation or guerilla training camps they were always over target zones with little infrastructure that was important to America. Well, that is, except for those two civilian terraformer domes Jack had so efficiently disposed of a few months back. But Jack had decided then that the domes were worth giving up if the U.S. Navy forces were able to take out the entire insurgent cell that was using them for cover. There were some politicians who hadn't agreed and when the images of the two domes pouring fire and black smoke into the Martian atmosphere hit MNN Jack was busted from CAG and the talks of getting a full third pip on his collar had ceased almost immediately following the incident.

Imagine what they'd do if we took out a major dome at Mons City, he thought to Candis.

At that point, if you didn't go to prison, I would recommend retirement, Candis chuckled.

Funny.

Jack straightened himself in his chair and reached out into the virtual dogfighting and bombing runs swarming in his head. Through the DTM interface, of course, he was the only person that could see the simulation around him. The other battle planners and logistics experts sitting at the row of consoles had similar simulations or perhaps were merely moving equipment from point A to point B, but the effect was the same. The BOSS Room was filled with men and women in Navy uniform swatting about their heads at nonexistent pests. The simulation room had long been coined as the "Looney Bin."

Jack reached out with his right hand toward his virtual squadron of Ares fighters that were strafing virtual Seppy drop mecha around the Mons City domes. Long-wavelength infrared laser imaging detection and ranging (LIDAR) equipment located above his console detected the movement of his hand and the exact positioning of it to within a millionth of a meter was determined and fed back into the simulation computer system. In turn, his AIC detected that Jack intended to move the objects in front of him by hand and fed this information to the same computer. The simulation environment calculated new positions and then fed this into the wargaming models and moved the little virtual Martian red camo fighter planes around the virtual Marsscape accordingly.

The DTM interconnect downloaded and updated the simulation changes into Jack's head continuously and real-time faster than human reflex lag, so the interface was immediate as far as Jack could tell. Of course, Jack had planned hundreds, maybe thousands, of operations before and it had been since Navy Officer Battle Ops Simulation Training Course that he had even thought about how the BOSS system worked, so all of this was transparent to him. He just moved an object, and it moved. In the very old days of naval warfare the flag officers would use real models and marker boards. They would push model airplanes around on a two-dimensional mockup of the battle decks called a "Ouija Board." The Looney Bin with the DTM technology had made the Ouija Board a thing of ancient history.

The simulation was looking good and he was planning on using the Gods of War to lead the insertion into the occupied territory for the VIP extraction. The simulations showed heavy casualties in his squadron and a serious amount of collateral damage to the local city infrastructure. It couldn't be helped. And this simulation was based on the sketchy intelligence data of the Mons City insurgency and occupation forces. Jack knew that a simulation was only as good as the model and the data it was based on and there was no way of knowing just how accurate the data on the Seppy forces was.

CO is never gonna go for this, he thought.

Maybe, Candis replied. But, it may be the only choice we have if we plan to take back the city and take out the Seppies.

Shit.

"Shit, that has got to fucking hurt, Second Lieutenant!" Kootie commented on the bloody piece of metal rebar hanging out of Washington's leg.

"Hell, Private, I didn't even realize it was there." Second Lieutenant Washington forced a grin that was almost lost on the private. The faint amber city street lighting was just barely bright enough to see through the tinting on the faceplate of the lieutenant's e-suit helmet. The atmosphere being sucked through the large gaping hole in the dome and the continuous addition of dust, debris, and smoke from the ongoing fighting had created a low-lying dense and very dark gray cloud system within the dome. Violent twirls, downdrafts, updrafts, and low-lying cloud scud fell just above the tops of the tall city buildings, blocking out all but the amber and neon artificial lighting of the burning city itself. Dust particles and water vapor fell in a low-gravity drizzle like a strange hybrid of rain, snow, and volcanic ash.

"Check it out, sir." Corporal Shelly nodded at a skyscraper down the street where a large metallic humanoid figure stood on top of it scanning the region with a DEG weapon held at the hip ready for action. The bot-mode Martian red camo mecha stood motionless like a stalwart metal statue with swiveling forty-millimeter cannons on each shoulder protecting the Marines below and seeking out potential prey. Unseen to the AEMs taking shelter in the alley street thirty stories below were the optical LIDAR scans and acoustic sensor sweeps the mecha's pilot ran continuously to monitor any Seppy activity. Passive sensor systems ran full sweeps as well.

"FM-12s," Sergeant Jackson added.

"Good. We could use as much support as we can get. We still need to get to the evac and support our VIP's evac. If he makes it there." The second lieutenant relaxed slightly.

Another FM-12 strike mecha in bot-mode dropped off a building just to the south of the one standing guard and transfigured itself as it dropped to the street level. Just as it reached street level the vehicle that had looked like a ten-meter-tall metal robot now looked like a space fighter with two metal feet reminiscent of a bird of prey's talons. Underneath the wings were arms with humanlike hands at the ready like those of a boxer or a martial artist. He held the main DEG in the left hand. The forty-millimeter cannons swiveled from a mounted position one under the belly of the bird and one on top just aft of the cockpit. If the armored bird and its cannons and DEG weren't enough fire-power, the row of missile launchers spread out across the bottom of each wing would make for a good backup.

The empennage of the sleek red camo killing machine was lined with Seppy flags and just under the cockpit was the name Lieutenant Colonel John "Burner" Masterson. Burner was the leader of Cardiff's Killers, the Marine-piloted FM-12 strike mecha squadron assigned to the now destroyed U.S.S. Winston Churchill.

The mecha landed softly with a slight metallic chunk kachunk. Its talons grabbed the pavement a few meters from the survivors of the AEM squad. The armored bubble canopy of the bird slid back and the pilot in a Martian camo flight armored e-suit catapulted upward from the pilot couch and then bounced carefully beside the AEMs. Cardiff's Killers had just pulled the squad leader and their NCO out of the frying pan. It had only taken the Killers a brief sweep through the Dome Circle district to wipe up the inferior Seppie drop tanks. Burner had taken out three of them himself. The local region was secured, for the moment.

Washington, Jackson, Kudaf, and Shelly took relaxed positions underneath the wing of the mecha. The aircraft offered them some shelter from the drizzle, though in the AEM suits the drizzle was only a nuisance to the faceplate view. QM and IR sensors could overcome the blurring by the water droplets on the faceplate quickly, but the human habit of getting out of the rain was a million years old or more and some instincts are hard to overcome. Burner nodded at the AEMs to remain at ease and picked out their leader as he joined him under his plane.

"Looks like that hurts, Marine." Burner noted the metal bar sticking out of Washington's left leg.

"Yes, sir. Like fucking hell, sir!" Second Lieutenant Thomas Washington replied. "But not near as bad as it would've if you guys hadn't showed up when you did. Thanks, sir."

"Yes, sir. It is a damned good thing Shelly and Kootie stumbled into you," Sergeant Jackson added with a thin-lipped smile. "We had them right where they wanted us."

"You don't look the best in the world either, Sergeant. We have a medic as one of our drivers maybe he can get you two fixed up." Colonel Masterson smiled at the beat-up soldiers and thought a command to his AIC. Angel, get Boulder over here.

Yes sir, right away. His AIC sent a call to First Lieutenant Jason "Boulder" Cordova.

"Just relax. We'll get you fixed up," Masterson said. "Now, just what in the hell were you two doing at Dome Circle, anyway. We were pushing an entire squad of Seppy drop tanks right into you."

"Well, that explains why they were running toward us but shooting backwards, sir," Sergeant Jackson commented. The mecha pilot just grunted and grinned thinly.

"We were deployed just after the Churchill went down, sir," Washington answered. "There is a Senator Alexander Moore in the main dome that we were sent to extract. Unfortunately, we got hit hard before we ever got started and ended up crashed in the south boroughs. Then shit started getting worse . . . sir. My AIC has kept on top of him, but . . . " Thomas looked up and down the street at the noise he heard in the distance uneasily fingering the safety on his HVAR, his empty HVAR, until he realized it was another FM-12 configuring itself into eagle-mode beside the colonel's bird. The canopy of the fighter slid opened with a low volume swish and a Marine holding a medic pouch leaped from the cockpit in a long slow arc and bounced off the side of a building across the street and then to the ground by Burner.

"I got a call that somebody was having a baby over here. Thought I'd pop in and see if I could help." Marine First Lieutenant Cordova kneeled down beside Washington and looked at the piece of bloody iron rebar protruding out of his left leg.

"Yeah, and I'm having serious labor pains, Doc." Washington grimaced and relaxed his grip on his HVAR completely.

"Call me Boulder and just hold on a sec." Cordova pulled an injector gun from his kit and plugged it into the seal layer on Washington's e-suit under the armor access port on the neck of the suit. "I'm gonna give you some more pain meds and I'm giving you a shot of immunobooster so your immune system can eat that metal out of your leg." Boulder pulled out a directed energy cutting tool and zipped through the protruding piece of metal like hot butter. The little pistol-shaped cutting tool sprayed out a focused green beam of light that cut the metal bar so quickly that it didn't have time to get hot. The metal rod exterior to Washington's leg fell slowly to the street pavement with an extended claaaaang. The organic gel layer of Washington's e-suit quickly covered the end of the metal bar and sealed off. Clean red armor plating hardened over the new readi-seal material as his suit began to heal itself.

"Is that it?" the second lieutenant asked.

"That's it. Oh, you'll run a high fever for a few hours until your immune system dissolves that bar in your leg, but the pain meds will keep that from being a problem. That side might be a little weak for another half hour or so, too, and you probably won't need any mineral supplements for a few days. Sometimes that much iron in your system will make you constipated for a day or two, but I'd say it beats the shit out having a metal bar sticking out of your leg. Otherwise, you are a killing machine, Marine." Cordova grinned.

"Oorah," Washington replied.

"Right, now, Sarge, let's look at that shoulder of yours." Cordova went to work on Jackson and gave him a slightly lower dose of the immunobooster. Without a foreign object in the sergeant's shoulder, his boosted immune system would literally heal the wound within a matter of minutes.

"Okay, Thomas, now back to what you were up to." Masterson helped the young lieutenant up to his feet. "Senator Moore's extraction, I believe is what you were saying."

"Yes sir. That mission went south badly. We are the only ones left of our deployment. We lost our commander and NCO in the first few seconds and several others not long after that. I didn't see how we could get to the senator and we were cut off. About that time this senator QMed my AIC and said that he would meet us at the extraction coordinates. I told him to stay his ass put, sir, but he said he didn't take orders from the Marines. So our plan was to make a nuisance of ourselves and make way to cover the VIP's evac." Washington turned his head slightly in his helmet and bit down on the water tube, taking a long slow drink. His heightened immune system was using up body fluids and was making him thirsty.

"When and where is your evac?"

"Tammie, send the coordinates to the colonel," Thomas vocalized. A second later Masterson nodded in understanding. "In about two hours, sir."

"Is there any hope that the evac will still happen? We've been able to contact nobody outside the city for a good while now," Sergeant Jackson added.

"I doubt it. But we have had even less contact than you have because all of our QM systems are disabled," The lieutenant colonel explained.

"Why sir? I mean, why are you only using laser coms?" Corporal Shelly asked.

"One of my Killers—an engineer—found too much energy in the QM coms spectrum and he thought it was a virus. So we shut 'em down and therefore we were cloaked off of any QM nets." Masterson thought about that for a moment and then added, "It is probably how the damned Seppy drop tanks are cloaked off our systems. So we're fighting all optical right now."

"That explains a lot, sir." Sergeant Jackson worked his shoulder around and around a few times to work out the kinks. "We could see the bastards right there in front of us but they weren't on our screens at all, sir."

"Yeah. I had two of the drop tanks trying to snake me in the tailpipe before we bumped into these two," Cordova said, nodding at Shelly and Kootie. "Fortunately, the LIDAR is working and the passive multi-static radar systems are, too, or I'd be a messy spot a few kilometers northwest of here. Well, and Burner got one of them off my ass, too. Probably a lucky shot."

"Luck counts, Boulder, and you should be damned proud of it," Burner said taking the zing out of Boulder's lighthearted comment.

"Oorah, sir."

"What if this senator gets to the evac point and there is nobody there to cover him or to evac him?" Masterson thought out loud and more pointedly to the second lieutenant.

"Good point sir, but we could sure use some reinforcements if we are going to get to him anytime soon." Washington was quite skeptical that his squad could manage it, but Marines did what they had to in order to get the job done. Improvise. Adapt. Now, if the lieutenant colonel wanted to offer up some support, on the other hand . . .

"He's a senator. We'd better get him out of here. If those Seppy bastards catch him he will be toast, literally." Masterson thought for a minute then decided on a plan of action. Angel, optically link through Washington's AIC and QM to this senator. Figure out where the hell he is and what the hell he is doing. And ask him if Rose Bowl of '35 means anything to him.

On it, sir, his AIC replied. Rose Bowl, sir?

Just a hunch, Angel.

"We'll get him out," Burner said to himself more so than to the AEMs.

"Sir, what about the Churchill? Any survivors there?" Jackson asked. "And, do you have any spare ammo for standard seven-millimeter HVARs? We're flat out, sir."

"As far as we could tell, the Churchill was completely destroyed with no survivors. Captain Samuels was a good leader and she led a great crew. We found no one. No. One. We did notice that some Army hovertanks were missing. Maybe some of the tank pukes got out in time. But the area was too hot to stick around to do a lot of recon." Burner paused for a brief silent second and then turned to Cordova. "Boulder, get these Marines whatever we can and lets get rallied to that evac point. From there we'll try to get in touch with somebody who knows what the fuck is going on."

"I'm on it, Burner."