One Day on Mars

1:30 PM Mars Tharsis Standard Time

Lieutenant Colonel Mason Warboys had never needed a nickname or a callsign. Warboys was cool enough. The colonel's massive M3A17 transfigurable tank slammed across the Martian mountainside terrain on the hoverfield at over two hundred kilometers per hour, the big DEG turret swinging from left to right seeking targets. There were none to be found. His IFF sensor systems had four blue dots just seconds away near the evac point over the next ridge, but there was no sign of trouble. The Warlords tank squadron followed in behind their commander in formation, scattering dust and debris in a tailwind behind them.

Warboys throttled back his tank as he crested the ridge and saw nothing but a half klick of Martian dirt and ancient lava stones, but his DTM virtual world had the four blue dots dispersed near the edge of the bluff. And then the goddamnedest sight he'd ever seen skittered oddly up over the horizon to the northwest.

"Colonel, this is Warlord Three. Am I seeing things?"

"I don't know, Captain. Could be. But if you're seeing a giant mechanical spider headed right for us then either we both are seeing things or it is really there." Warboys checked his multi-static passive radar, and the sensor system used the background radio noise coming from sources all across the planet and in orbit to generate a three-dimensional image of the spider thing. "Radar shows it is metal. And, it shows that there is nothing else in the area. My AIC tells me it's a garbage truck and that it's our VIP. Let's get him some cover," Warboys ordered.

The hovering tanks converged on the spider's location quickly. As the tank squadron closed the gap down to a few tens of meters, the garbage hauler stopped. Warboys pulled to a stop and popped the hatch on his tank. He hit the repulsor ejector and shot himself out of the tank into a forward roll onto the ground just in front of the spider.

Several meters to the lieutenant colonel's left the dust kicked up and an AEM rose up from the ground. The blue dot on Warboys' DTM virtual view showed it to be Second Lieutenant Thomas Washington. Three other blue spots got dusty almost simultaneously and the rest of the AEM squad rose from their covered locations.

"Greetings, Lieutenant. You Marines look like you could use a lift." Warboys chuckled. "Haven't seen any FM-12s hanging around anywhere have you?"

"Go to all optical and no QMs, Colonel, and I'll explain, sir," Washington said. Warboys sent an AIC command to the squad to go all optical comms.

"All right, how's that?" the lieutenant colonel asked.

"Well, I'll be goddamned if it ain't that Army puke Warboys and his armored nimrods." Burner laughed over the optical net.

"Burner? Is that you? Where the hell are you? What the fuck is going on here?"

"We're under covers. They're tracking our QMs, Mason. They already had a fix on these AEMs so we thought we'd set a trap for them." Burner's answer made Warboys nervous. "I suspect you ought to be getting back in your tank, Lieutenant Colonel. We're expecting company in about three or four minutes."

"That can't be, John. We just dropped in and pinged the entire southern region. Even updated optical scans and saw nothing headed this way. It's all clear," Warboys informed his old jarhead buddy.

"Did you go eyeball, Mason? Or did you use sensors?"

"Burner, I was in a drop tank reentry shroud. How the hell was I gonna go eyeball?"

"That's what I thought. One of my boys found a spread spectrum signal down in the oddest damned part of the spectrum that is uploading a virus or some such thing somehow into the sensors. It changes the code to tell the sensors that there are no Seppy mecha in the view." Burner's voice was dead serious.

"Shit, Burner, are you telling me this is a trap?"

"Yep. But we hope to turn it over on the bastards," Burner answered.

"Hold one, John." Lieutenant Colonel Warboys keyed in the tac-net to DeathRay.

"DeathRay. Warboys. Do an immediate rollover and eyeball the region for me. I mean eyeball, no sensors, and tell me what you've got."

"Roger that, Colonel." Jack rolled the fighter over upside down and searched the mountainside. The squadron was closing in at about ten kilometers altitude and twenty out, giving a slant range of about twenty-two. The resolution of the human eye at that range is about two meters. Jack should have been able to make out a vehicle as a dot from that range. The dots were hard to see, but the dust trails from hundreds of vehicles only about ten kilometers out were not hard to see at all. There were mecha, trucks, and fighters—lots of them.

"Holy shit!" Jack tapped some keys and went all channels. "All hands, all pilots, be aware that the Seppies have us jammed on all sensors. Eyeballs only. We've got a Seppy convoy only minutes from the evac and probably more in the sky. Go eyeballs. I repeat go eyeballs! Holy shit!" A SAM zipped right past his Ares fighter, between him and Fish, taking out a fighter just behind his wingman. Several more missiles streaked by almost simultaneously, all of which hit home on one of the Gods of War before they could take action. "Evasives, goddamnit!"

"CO, did you catch that last transmission from DeathRay?" The XO of the Sienna Madira stood at the viewport of the bridge looking out at the swarming craft around them, trying to compare what he saw with his eyes to what he was seeing in his mind. The continuous audibles of the hundreds of pilots filled the bridge in a concert of guttural grunts, missile and gun firing commands, and horrendous screams. The command-level audibles were amplified and the various bridge officers had their AICs create audio filters to allow only certain communications to get through to their ears. Otherwise, the entire audio mix from the fighters and fleet ships would be overwhelming for any one individual.

"Play it back to me, XO."

"Aye sir!" The ship rocked to port sharply. Once the full fleet had gotten into the mix the Martian Contingent had pulled to the outer periphery of the engagement zone but the Seppies had stayed with them, trying to keep the overwhelming numbers of vessels hindered by friendly fire solutions on their main guns.

"Holy shit! All hands, all pilots, be aware that the Seppies have us jammed on all sensors. Eyeballs only. We've got a Seppy convoy only minutes from the evac and probably more in the sky. Go eyeballs. I repeat go eyeballs! Holy shit!" played through the CO's audio filters.

"XO, check that!" Captain Jefferson ordered in response. Uncle Timmy, spread the word around the fleet!

Yes, Captain.

"Quartermaster of the watch!" the XO called.

"Aye sir!" Quartermaster Senior Chief Patea Vanu snapped away from his viewscreen and looked at the XO standing at the window.

"Captain, I'm hearing similar reports from the tankheads on the ground." The COB added. "This might be like that one time back in the Desert Campaigns where General Ahmi jammed the Luna City Marines, sir."

"Hmm, could be COB."

"Senior Chief Vanu, get me about five lookouts on each deck of the ship that has a portal counting enemy ships with their eyeballs and comparing them to the virtuals. Make it fast." The XO ordered. He had to place his hands on the safety rail at the window in order to keep from losing his balance from the ship being thrown around by enemy missiles impacting the hull plating. "Jesus!"

"Aye."

"Where is that fire coming from?" The CO looked at four different virtual screens in front of him: one scrolling the Madira's health and stores, one scrolling a summarized version of the first for all of the Martian Contingent (the Mandela had a new wing added to it when one of the dying Seppy carriers had rammed it full throttle, both listed out of commission), one displaying battle damage assessments on the attacking Seppy fleet ships (two had already been completely destroyed and another one was heavily damaged), and one with continuous casualty reports. The virtual sphere around his head was a continuous update and display of the battle outside at a small enough scale to fit the battle within it. The ship rocked hard to port again.

Concentrated fire from starboard, sir, Uncle Timmy alerted the captain.

"Sir, this is the CDC. We're taking a serious pounding on the starboard side lower decks. We've got a Seppy rust bucket rushing us head on! And it looks like they've figured out who's in charge because several ships are starting to concentrate on us." The report came from the Combat Direction Center two decks below.

"Ensign Marks, half speed to new coordinates: R equals three kilometers, theta equals one eight zero degrees, and phi equals zero degrees. And give us ninety degrees yaw!" the CO ordered the helmsman.

"Aye sir!"

"Casualty reports don't look like we can't see the bad guys, sir!" the commander of the air wing added.

"I agree with the Air Boss, CO. I'm not seeing that." Colonel Chekov agreed but continued to view the battle outside the viewport just in case things started to change.

"Bridge. CDC."

"Go, CDC," the XO replied.

"We've got three hyperspace conduit signatures about fifteen kilometers in plane off the port bow! Sensors show no new target signatures!" the officer of the CDC said.

"Senior Chief Vanu?" Captain Jefferson looked to his quartermaster of the watch.

"Aye sir! I've got eyeball reports of three cargo haulers dropping into normal space off the port bow coming in now, sir. Eyeballs show hundreds of mecha pouring out of them, sir." QMSC Vanu wiped sweat from his forehead and tapped some keys at his console to double checke his reports.

"Yep, just like the Desert Campaigns." The COB nodded and took another sip of his coffee.

Uncle Timmy, 1MC and all channels to the fleet and transfer the coordinates of the enemy ships to the fleet.

Aye sir! the flagship's AIC replied.

"All hands, all ships, this is Captain Jefferson of the Sienna Madira. We have three large enemy ships at the coordinates being transferred now. These ships are somehow jammed from our sensors and invisible. Lookout reports show hundreds of mecha being deployed from these vessels. Pilots be aware that sensors are not detecting these enemy craft. I repeat, eyeball detection is the only way to see these fighters for now. Good luck. That is all."

"Our fighters are sitting ducks out there!" the XO said.

"Larry, get the second wave off the deck!" the CO ordered.

"Dawgs! We've got serious problems here. Keep eyes out for Gomers not on the DTM or the screens," Lieutenant Chavez ordered his Ares fighter squadron. "Let's pull in tighter and force our way into the middle of as many of the Seppy Gomers as we can following the coordinates being sent now!" Chavez had hoped that staying in close to as many of the Seppy bastards as they could would limit the targeting from the ones that their sensors were blind to.

"Rabies! JavaBean. I've got visual on at least two full squads three clicks out on a vector for the Madira! Sensor show nothing there." Ensign Cory "JavaBean" Davis, Rabies' wingman, alerted the Demon Dawgs over the tac-net.

"Roger that, JavaBean! I see 'em too. Holy shit!" Lieutenant Junior Grade Wendy "Poser" Hill replied. Poser had been an Ares pilot with the Dawgs for more than a year and had seen her share of combat, so her call sign often was a bit of a misnomer. Wendy was known as Poser because she had "posed" in an issue of a particular men's magazine entitled "Women of the Military." Originally it had been a bad thing and had almost caused her to lose her commission. But a marketing guru at the Navy recruiting office got wind of it and spun it around into a positive aspect for the service. What young man wouldn't want to be stationed on board a supercarrier with a hot chick who flies fighter planes? It turned out that she had just been in a bikini anyway and the shot was a candid. The name Poser had stuck with her though. Wendy didn't care as long as she got to fly.

"Poser, I got 'em. You and BreakNeck pull in tight on JavaBean and let's see if we can't pull some of these guys in to the starboard flight deck to meet some of our friends for a good old-fashioned knife fight," Rabies ordered. By now Bigguns should have the Utopian Saviors deployed across the starboard exterior flight deck. In their Marine FM-12 strike mecha in bot-mode they would be able to target their main DEGs with eyeball tracking and hip shooting.

"Roger that, Rabies."

"Boss, port off your three-nine line! Two Gomers. Shit!" JavaBean worked the HOTAS, turning his fighter ninety degrees to the left and pitched at thirty while not changing his trajectory vector. "Guns, guns, guns!" he shouted. He went to his DEG, which sprayed blue-green bolts of energy just above Rabies' cockpit, hitting home on one of the incoming Seppy Stinger fighter planes.

"Shit! Break right, JavaBean!" Rabies banked left and rolled his fighter as he did in order to get an eyeball shot at the incoming. "Argh shit!" He grunted as his pressure suit squeezed his body to help him compensate for the g-loading on it.

"We're blind as fuckin' bats out here!" BreakNeck said. "Fox three!"

"We've got fire from the ground and we are flying blind as fuckin' bats!" Jack turned his fighter nose-over and watched as the ground came up at him rapidly. "Gods of War go for the deck and stay beneath the SAMs' active trackers. Fish, stay on me girl! Goddamnit! Fuck!" Jack cried out as his hull plating was rattled with anti-aircraft rounds. The SIFs and the armor took a beating but he continued to force his fighter at maximum dive velocity for the deck.

Candis say when!

Hold it . . . hold it! Candis screamed in his mind as she calculated the no-return point of the dive. The objective was to pull out just microseconds before it was too late. The g-forces would suck, but it would put him rapidly through the AA fire and on top of the Seppy bastards that were shooting at him. If he survived the maneuver then he would unleash hell on them.

"Candis!" he yelled out loud. He chewed down on his TMJ bite block and took rapid shallow breaths. The pressure system around his torso tightened hard and the bladders on his legs filled with air, squeezing his legs so tight they felt like they were being cut in two pieces.

Now, DeathRay! Now! Now! Now!

Jack pulled back on the HOTAS and rolled the fighter upside down, screaming and grunting and chomping on his bite block the whole way. He pulled over fourteen gravities for a couple of seconds and Candis had to take over the controls for about four more.

Jack?!

"I've got it! Fox three, Fox three, guns guns guns!" he shouted, shook his head, blinked his eyes a few times, depressed the controls to fire the mecha-to-mecha homers, and then went full bore with the DEG blasting away at the drop tanks and missile launchers scattering across the Martian mountain only a few tens of meters beneath his fighter.

The mecha-to-mecha homing missiles used dumb sensors that were closed systems and not connected in any way to the fighters other than the launch trigger. There were no AICs on the missile systems and therefore the jamming wasn't affecting the missile's accuracy at all. The DEGs, on the other hand, were having to be fired from the hip as the pupillary targeting system was being spoofed. Shooting from the hip along the violent flight path wasn't easy or very accurate. The ground effect and the flying debris trail buffeted the fighter harshly or perhaps it was the AA fire and secondary explosions he was flying through. Hence, targeting the DEG wasn't easy.

"DeathRay! DeathRay, you got a Gomer Gnat trying to give you a rim job!" Fish grunted out, and she added, "Guns guns guns!" The Separatist fighter plane flew into pieces as Fish pulled her fighter into the same death-defying roll that her wingman and squad leader had just done. "Wooohooo goddamn!" she screamed over the tac. "That's better than sex!"

"Then you're not doing it right!" came a response from an unnamed pilot over the net. "Oh shit! Guns, guns, guns. Take that, you fuckin' Gomer!"

"Fish! Hit the front line to slow their advance some!" DeathRay rolled his fighter in a corkscrewing trajectory so that he was continuously seeing the ground then the sky, ground, sky, ground, sky. "Goddamn, this is gonna make me dizzy! Guns guns guns!" he growled as the blue-green directed energy beam washed across the front of the Seppy convoy hitting home a couple of times, rewarding Jack with the red-orange fireball from a vehicle exploding.

"DeathRay! We're getting fucking hammered here," Fish screamed.

"I agree with Fish sir!" Lieutenant Damien "Demonchild" Harris corkscrewed orthogonally across the Seppy convoy line of travel, firing missiles. The fireball and dust plume thrown up created a wall of zero visibility. The battered Gods of War zipped through the cover in their mad twirling and sinewy trajectories, ignoring the danger of flying blind. At least in the dust cloud the Seppy vehicles would be blind too. They hoped. "We could use a couple Hellstorms in here!" Demonchild wished for a couple nukes they didn't have.

"DeathRay, we got Stingers and Gnats out the ass over here!" came another one of the Gods of War over the net.

Jack had little time to go DTM and track his pilots to see how many were falling. It was all he could do to keep himself conscious and from being shot down and not necessarily in that order.

Jack, we need to keep them off the AEMs.

Maybe we can steer them away. Hold on.

"Guns guns guns! Fox three!" he shouted as another Seppy Stinger armored transfigurable fighter jumped from the deck in bot-mode unloading a salvo of mecha-to-mecha homers out of his torso batteries at him. Jack zigged left and then rolled over, winding in and out between the missile ion trails almost sending him into an uncontrollable all-axis spin. Fortunately, the maneuver was enough for him to avoid being blown to hell and gone. Going to DEG to burn the missiles swarming all around him, Jack grunted hard and rocked the HOTAS back and then sideways, and the tough little Ares fighter shook violently from the nearby exploding missiles.

"Fox three!" he cried, letting loose a mecha-to-mecha missile that twisted through the fiery debris trails, hitting the Stinger mecha dead center of the pilot cabin. The enemy mecha exploded into a spinning orange and white fireball. Jack had to just grit his teeth and fly through.

"Where do you think you're going! Fox three!" Fish said. "That's another toasted Gomer."

"Yeah well, don't get cocky, there're plenty more where that one came from! Shit!" Jack flipped his bird a complete one hundred and eighty degrees without changing his flight path direction and grimaced at the pain from the massive g-loading. "Fox three!" He fired a missile, taking out the mecha that had taken position on Fish's six.

"Thanks, sir," Fish said sheepishly.

"Warboys, Warboys! DeathRay! Copy?"

"Warboys, here! Go DeathRay."

"We're gonna try to turn these bastards off of you if we can. But we're taking a pounding, so you might want to hunker down in case it doesn't work," Jack told the Army tank driver.

"Negative, DeathRay, that is a negative. If you can do anything to steer them, bring 'em on to us!"

"They have you waaay outnumbered, Colonel!" Jack warned Warboys.

"You let us worry about that. Besides, I got me some friends."

"Roger that." Jack's sensors only showed the AEMs, but four AEMs against a bunch of mecha couldn't be much advantage. Warboys must be cooking up something and the Killers were nearby, somewhere.

"XO! We're rapidly losing pilots!" Captain Jefferson's DTM lists of his crew were blinking out fast. Since the invisible Seppy ships had entered the mix, the battle had turned in the wrong direction—seriously in the wrong direction.

"Aye sir! We need to pull the Ares fighters in, I think. They can't fight like this," Colonel Checkov replied.

"Can't pull them in now! Tell them to get out of the engagement zone at max velocity on any safe vector! And get me every gun with eyeball tracking capability we've got on the exterior decks," the CO ordered.

"Aye sir!"

Sir!

Yes, Timmy?

The Yeltsin has taken heavy damage from one of the ghost ships. It is venting and on fire! The Thatcher has taken heavy damage and the Washington has lost its SIF generators! The Lincoln, Reagan, Kolmogorov, Ames, Crippen, and the Blair are completely out of commission and reporting no propulsion or weapons capabilities.

Shit. The CO scrolled up the Madira's health monitor to the foreground in his mindview. The battle still raging in the mindview sphere around his head.

"CO! Word from Engineering is that the SIFs are holding but the coolant systems for the DEGs are battered to hell. We're going to lose the forward starboard DEGs soon!" the XO alerted the CO. Although the CO had health monitoring menus on the ship in front of him, it was the XO's job to get firsthand reports from the sailors keeping the systems running.

"XO, the guns must fire! Structural integrity will do us no good if we are sitting ducks and not returning volleys."

"Aye sir!"

"Helmsman Marks! R equal to four kilometers, theta equal to ten degrees, and phi set to one hundred degrees at maximum normal speed! Pitch, yaw, and roll to maximize port DEG targeting angles!" the CO ordered.

"Aye sir!"

"Fireman's Apprentice King! Lock that shit down right now!" Hull Technician Petty Officer Third Class Joe Buckley alerted the young enlisted man to the overheating flow valve on the starboard side main directed energy gun coolant system. The three-dimensional DTM view of the ship's flow systems in both of their heads showed overheating systems in red and nominal ones in green. There was a lookup table ranging from green to red of different levels of status for the flow equipment. Some of the systems flowed liquid waste products while others flowed superheated liquid metals. The valve on the forward DEG coolant loop would have to be locked out and the flow rerouted or it could go critical and start a serious fire on the below deck of the weapon system.

"The software to the valve shows it locked HT3, but the flow meters are still reading seventeen megapascals on the flow pressure. The only flow valve down stream is from the SIF generator loop on the forward decks. Do I divert the flow?" Fireman's Apprentice Jimmy King had never seen the Madira hammered so hard. He had been on board for only a few weeks and the previous day's mission had been his first combat. Oh, there had been pilots going and coming from the supercarrier going into battle, but this was the first time the Madira itself had been in the mix of a full-scale naval battle and taking on anything worse than a few SAMs.

"No! Jimmy, if the SIFs go out on that end we'll have a standard coolant pipe with over seventeen megapascals of pressure in it. The instant that SIF went down, the pipe would be a bomb of exploding superheated liquid toxic metals!" Buckley scratched his head in thought for a brief second. The Madira lurched downward suddenly and a little faster than the inertial control system could compensate for, leaving Buckley with the brief feeling that his stomach was somewhere on the deck above him.

"We've got to do something, boss. The pressure in that loop is rising and the main gun is just getting hotter!" the fireman's apprentice replied. "Shit!" He grabbed the sides of his station to keep his balance as the ship continued to jerk randomly.

"No, the cats on all ends are at minimal use now that the fighters are out. Switch over the catapult coolant flow loops to the main gun coolant loops. Maybe that'll take some of the pressure off that stuck valve. The goddamned thing is probably seized open. That happened to us last year at Triton. That was ugly." Buckley grabbed at an icon for the cat coolant reservoir to read the internal temperature of the coolant bladder. Although the cats weren't going presently, they had just taken a hell of a thermal load to launch more than four full squadrons of fighters, mecha, and drop tanks in the last few minutes. The reservoir was above midway on the look-up table, reading yellow and not that far from red. But yellow was better than red. "Fuck. It'll have to do."

"HT3!"

"What now!"

"Looks like the port side SIF generators are starting to overheat!" Jimmy said with a little panic in his voice.

"CO! Port SIF generators are overheating. Starboard DEGs are overheating. We can either take a pounding and not fire or fire and take a pounding!" the XO warned the captain of the Sienna Madira.

"Air Boss! I want all the mecha on the Starboard exterior decks now!" the CO ordered.

"Aye sir!"

"Senator, I think it is time you find a better hiding place," BIL announced over the speaker.

"I agree, BIL. Can you let us out of here?" Moore asked. Just as he did, the rear door slid upward letting the sunlight in. "Let's go! Everybody with me!" Moore grabbed his daughter from his wife and dove out the ass end of the giant mechanical arachnid bouncing with fifteen meter steps at a full run. "BIL, go hide somewhere."

"Very well, Senator. It was fun talking with you."

"You as well, BIL. Thanks for the lift."

"You are very welcome. Bye, little one." The garbage hauler actually lifted one of its front legs and waved it at Deanna.

"Bye, BIL." Deanna waved over her father's shoulder back at the garbage hauler.

Reyez, Joanie, the reporter and her cameraman, and the senator's wife followed him, bouncing out of the garbage hauler onto the Martian soil. The cameraman, Calvin Dean, was videoing with every bounce and every breath. He paused for a second to get a shot of the two dozen American tanks hovering about the gorge's edge and the tank driver talking to a few armored soldiers. The mechanical spider let them out very near the edge of a large drop-off into the gorge at the bottom of the giant volcano's outermost edge. The drop-off must have been at least a half a kilometer deep or more in places.

"Okay, we're going to go to the edge of that set of lava stone outcroppings there and dig into the sand and hide until the evac gets here," the retired Marine ordered them.

Senator? his AIC said into his mind.

Yes, Abigail?

The FM-12 mecha pilots claim to have found the signal center frequency.

Yeah? Moore landed just behind the stone outcropping and sat his daughter down against the largest rock. "Stay down and don't move."

"Yes, Daddy," Deanna said.

It has a center pulse at two three three six megahertz, sir.

Well, that narrows the search down to a bandwidth around that peak. Look for the hopping frequencies around that one. Alexander knew his AIC would have already thought of that.

I'm doing that sir, but without more information that is still an excessive number of combinations. It might take a while.

Well, keep at it.

Of course, Senator.

"Alexander, what now?" His wife Sehera bounced beside him. She was panting for breath, her e-suit inner layer slowly absorbing and recycling the sweat rolling off her face.

"Dig!" he started digging a foxhole behind the rocks. "We dig a hole and hide until they can get us out of here. Where is our goddamned evac?" He looked around the horizon for an aircraft but saw none.

Abigail, where is the goddamned evac?

Hold one second . . . the area is too hot right now, Senator. There is a squad of Starhawks in orbit waiting for a green light.

Shit, get word to them that we have a child with us!

Yes, sir.

They all started digging. Alexander and Joanie used the butts of the Seppy HVARs for shovels. The Martian regolith pushed out of the way slowly as it was cold and hard and filled with lava stones.

"Allow me," a voice said as a shadow loomed behind them.

"What the?" Moore spun around with the rifle but the large Marine standing there quickly blocked the barrel and held up the palm of his heavily armored hand at the senator.

"Easy, sir. We're the good guys," Sergeant Jackson said, and pointed at the E5 markings on the shoulder of his e-suit. "I hear you should understand what that means sir?"

"You're damned right I do, Sergeant. Semper fuckin' Fi!" Alexander shook the AEM's hand. The armored hand engulfed the hand of the standard e-suit Moore was wearing. The sergeant motioned the senator out of the way so he stepped back to let him through.

"Lieutenant, I've found them." The sergeant alerted the other AEMs and then knelt to the rocks and started digging. The added strength of the armored e-suit enabled the Marine sergeant to dig faster and deeper than all of the civilians put together.

"Need a hand, Sergeant?" Private Kudaf and Corporal Shelly bounced into the beginnings of a nice foxhole and started digging, too.

"That was an interesting ride you folks had." One of the AEMs offered the senator his hand. "Second Lieutenant Washington, sir. I assume you are Senator Alexander Moore?"

"Lieutenant." Moore nodded. "That garbage hauler AI turned out to be pretty damned useful."

"Well, if you ask me, Senator," Corporal Shelly added, "spiders, mechanical or not, are just plain creepy. Why not make the thing look like a dog or a cat or something?"

"You got nothing better to do, Corporal?" Sergeant Jackson looked over at the Marine, warning her to keep her mind on her job.

"Ha, I wouldn't have minded if it had been a pig. It got us here," Reyez said. "Smelled like a pig though."

Something the female corporal had said triggered a thought cascade in Abigail's neural network. There was something about animals that seemed to have a familiar pattern to it that she had trained herself to learn before. There was something just at the tip of her software mind but she couldn't quite place it. The AIC knew there was something important here. Something about animals . . .

Abigail! Cats! That's it! A cat! The senator was excited.

I know there is something about a cat, Senator. But what? Abigail could just taste that she was near the answer to the jamming signal.

No! Don't you remember? Ahmi had that goddamned AI kitty every day in that fuckin' POW hell hole! A cat! What frequency do commercial AIKs use?

I don't know, Senator. And, honestly, I'm not certain why I didn't remember that piece of information. But BIL is still in range. I'll have him look it up over the infrastructure communication line. Somebody on the Madira should know. I'll get started on it now.

"Does anybody here know anything about the spectrum of AI Kitties?" Moore asked the AEMs as they spread out the foxhole and prepared it for battle.

"Sorry, Senator. Look, we should get in the foxhole," the second lieutenant warned.

BIL, I need all the technical info on AI Kitties I can get as fast as I can get it. Can you help me? Abigail QMed to him on the infrastructure channel.

I'd love to help you, Abigail. You are such fun to talk with. Please stand by, BIL said.

Senator? BIL is searching.

Keep me posted. Alexander wished there was a way to just download the info DTM so that he would know it, but DTM just added another sensory approach and you still had to experience the data before you remembered it. Alexander had confidence in his AIC. He knew she would summarize the important parts of data from large amounts of information for him.

Yes, sir.