One Day on Mars

2:01 Mars Tharsis Standard Time

"Prepare to fire the gluonium-tipped torpedoes, XO," Captain Jefferson ordered the suicide command. There was no way that the Madira could survive a close-range teraton explosion. But the Separatist hauler was on a collision course for the Tharsis Mons region of the planet below and that would kill millions. Maybe as many as ten or twenty million. It had to be done.

"Aye sir!" the XO said begrudgingly. At almost the same instant the ship vibrated with a myriad of notes that sounded almost like a bosun's pipe combined with the jarring of the tracks on a garbage conveyor. The ship lurched forward and that was followed by a secondary explosion. Warning klaxons sounded throughout the ship for fire and damage control teams.

"Shit!" The helmsman was thrown face-first into his control console, busting his forehead open. Bright red blood streamed down his face, getting into his eyes, and he frantically rubbed at it trying to regain his composure and right the attitude of the ship.

Uncle Timmy detected the explosion only milliseconds after the upload from Mija and realized what was happening. Mija Kitty's last effort was to upload the instructions to the flagship's AIC on how to bring the main guns online. Timmy quickly flushed the DEG flow systems with dry air and then ran the water reservoir and forward sewage into the pipes while shunting off the bleeding end of the flow loop on the aft and below decks of the ship where the explosion had just occurred. What was left of the molten liquid metal coolants flowed out into the vacuum of space where the below deck aft engineering room had been. Timmy also made record of the heroic activities of her counterpart's last moment of life that the AIC had uploaded. If they survived this situation Petty Officer Third Class Joe Buckley would posthumously be promoted to petty officer second class and Fireman's Apprentice James King would become a fireman. Of course, the Madira would have to survive first.

"What the hell just hit us?" the CO exclaimed.

"Goddamnit!" The COB's coffee cup was jarred loose from his hand and cracked on the deck. "That ain't a good sign."

"I don't know, CO, but the forward DEGs are coming online!" the XO replied with extreme enthusiasm. "I've got several targeting solutions on the kamikaze."

"Take out its propulsion and attitude control first. Then go for its structural integrity," Captain Jefferson ordered.

"Aye sir! We've got those solutions locked in and ready to fire, sir!" the XO replied.

"Fire!"

The main DEG batteries of the Sienna Madira opened full bore with blue-green bolts of directed energy that targeted exactly onto the propulsion power plant of the Seppy hauler. The DEGs burned through the hull plating into interior bulkheads, vaporizing the carbon-metal alloys into plasmas that jetted into space explosively.

"Fire all torpedo bays onto lead Seppy target!"

"Aye sir!"

"Keep pouring everything we have onto that enemy boat!" The CO watched the BDA numbers continuously changing in his virtual sphere and screens but the simple fact was that the DEGs were not putting enough energy onto the large vehicle to make it structurally unstable. The energy weapons could take out parts of the hull and major components of the ship but it would take many direct hits to cause catastrophic structural integrity failure.

"CO! DEGs have about five, four, three, two . . . that's that! The main guns are gone sir!" The XO looked up from his console to the captain. "The DEGs took out the propulsion of that thing, sir. It bought us at least three minutes before it's too close to the planet to go full nuke on it. We could concentrate all of our fighters there, sir! Damage the forward hull plating enough so it will burn up on reentry!"

"Roger that, XO! Air Boss—"

"On it, CO! All fleet vehicles, all fleet vehicles, all fighters, all fighters, pull off present attacks and converge all weapons on kamikaze hauler on coordinates being transferred to AICs! If they detonate their gluonium bomb on us, it's better they do it here than on the surface. But keep that damned ship from reaching the surface!" The Air Boss told his AIC to take care of the coordinate calculations for all the fleet vehicles and fighters.

The Seppy hauler had lost all of its propulsion drive system and was beginning to take on an uncontrolled roll, but it still fell on a collision trajectory for the large city below. The hauler was more than two kilometers long, a half kilometer wide, and more than a quarter kilometer thick. The ship was filled with power plants and ordnance, but worst of all there was the major likelihood it was carrying a subnuclear gluonium force fission fusion fission bomb. To trigger the device alone required a several-hundred-megaton hydrogen bomb. The trigger alone would wipe out the city. The added effect of the gluonium would take out the entire Tharsis region, and only the cities at the very tops of the mountains and at the bottoms of the gorges might have some chance of survival. The body count would be . . . unacceptable.

Plasma and oxygen fires vented into space from the enemy hauler as the gravity well pulled it closer and closer to the thin Martian atmosphere. If the fleet vehicles could just give it a yaw or a pitch and force it to tumble rather than just roll on its axis, the friction with the Martian atmosphere might break the vehicle up and protect the city. But the vehicle still maintained its attitude control. And the remaining Seppy fleet understood what the Americans were doing and were bringing all their forces to protect the kamikaze behemoth.

"You heard the Boss, Saviors! Let's go take hell to that enemy hauler!" Marine Captain Janice "Bigguns" Cameron ordered her Marine FM-12 strike mecha squadron.

"Oorah!" Offspring replied over the tac-net. "I'm breakin' off my present attack vectors now and hunting for the big fish!"

"Oorah! Bigguns, I'm on your three-nine line going maximum velocity with maximum ferocity!" Goat replied.

"Roger that! Watch your wingmen, Saviors, those Seppy Gomer bastards are pursuing hard on our six! Oorah!" Bigguns flipped the fighter-mode toggle on the HOTAS and the bot-mode mecha leaped upward from the deck of the Madira and rotated through the transfiguration into fighter-mode. The main DEG that had been in the bot's left hand was now under the nose of the sleek canard-forward stealth-winged dual-tailed plane. The dual cannons were now separated by the fuselage aft of the cockpit and forward landing system, one on top and the other on the bottom. Bigguns led the remains of the Marine mecha squadron—a mere fifteen planes—converting to fighter-mode to burn at maximum velocity toward the falling Seppy hauler. In a few seconds they would revert back to bot and go to maximum ferocity.

She pulled cautiously away from the deck of the Sienna Madira near the main DEG batteries. The Seppy Stingers and Gnats didn't care that she was no longer after them and continued to press in on her. Bigguns pushed the HOTAS to full acceleration and put the upper and lower cannons on full automatic anti-aircraft fire. She and the remaining Utopian Saviors screamed at maximum velocity from the engagement on a death-defying hurl toward the kamikaze hauler.

"Boss, these Gomer bastards are gonna follow us in!" Second Lieutenant Connie "Skinny" Munk exclaimed. She was one of the newer Saviors but was a good pilot and could take care of her own. She had gotten her call sign for being busted as a cadet for skinny-dipping with some of the senior cadets. She had a permanent reprimand in her file for being "out of uniform on duty." But she had made such high grades as a cadet and her flight school proficiency was so near to perfect that a fighter squadron was the only place for her. Anything else would have been a waste and the Navy understood that.

"Well, Skinny, if they didn't come along we wouldn't have any Gomers to shoot back at!" Second Lieutenant David "Beanhead" Winchester—from Boston—replied.

"Well how about that big fuckin' ship looming toward us?" Goat asked.

"Damned right, Goat! Saviors, let's open up the DEGs full on the forward deck and see if we can't make us an entry hole! Oorah!" Bigguns replied to her squad.

"Alright Dawgs, we can't let them glory-hogging gyrene leatherneck bastards get all the medals!" Lieutenant Armando "Rabies" Chavez announced over the tac-net to the Demon Dawgs. His Ares fighter squadron had originally been doing quite well until the ghost squadrons of the Seppies came out of nowhere and chewed them up like meat in a fucking grinder. But the CO realized what was happening and pulled them out of the engagement zone, so they missed a lot of the action in the middle. Then sensors came back online. And the Dawgs enthusiastically rocketed back into the grinder for some fucking payback that was due to those Seppy Gomer motherfuckers. The Dawgs had taken heavy casualties and were down to only a dozen good, or at least lucky, pilots.

"Maximum accel to the hauler and its time to vomit!" Rabies ordered the Dawgs.

"Roger that, Rabies!" JavaBean rolled his Ares fighter over nose-first toward the Seppy hauler and initiated a vector correction that would push him at max velocity and minimum transit time to the enemy hauler. At the same time his acceleration line pushed him toward the hauler, he pivoted the little snub-nosed fighter about its center point, scanning and firing on targets to give his wingmen cover. The maneuver was often referred to as a "pukin' deathblossom" because the wild spin put constantly changing g-loading on the pilot and his inner ear would pretty much go apeshit while at the same time the ship was a spinning menace spewing death from cannons and DEGs in all directions. The spinning was usually more than the pilots could take and would force them to vomit retchingly from the inner-ear confusion. But most good Ares pilots could take a little vomit in their e-suit helmet and the inner recycle layer of the suits usually absorbed the vomit in seconds. The suits had been designed for just such emergencies. It was the retching followed by the pressure suit squeezes and the high g-loading that took real presence of mind to overcome. It would take them a few seconds on the other side of the maneuver to be worth a damn. But there was usually very little in the way of targets left following the eighteen-second maneuver.

"I'm with you, boss!" BreakNeck replied, following suit and throwing his Ares at max acceleration past the cover of JavaBean's pukin' deathblossom, and then initiated his own spherical cyclone of mad destruction.

"Roger that," came the reply from a dozen more fighters from the Demon Dawgs, all rolling into the wild deadly spin maneuver.

"Ugh!" JavaBean grunted over the net as his ship lurched from the deathblossom into a normal flight approach toward the hauler.

Rabies vomited and wretched violently as his ship righted itself from the mad spin. The world around him went from a pounding rush of blood to his head and stars streaking madly around him—both real ones and ones that weren't there—to an abrupt jerk into normal flight mode.

"Goddamn, I love flying these things!" He puked into his facemask again. Now that the sensors were working, the eyeball obfuscation—puke on his visor—was no problem, as Rabies kept a full world view through his DTM virtual sphere display.

"Rabies, Rabies! This is Bigguns, copy?" Bigguns had led the remaining Marine FM-12s of the Saviors in a mad sprint with DEGs blasting away the blue-green energy bolts at the forward hull of the kamikaze Seppy hauler with hopes of getting on deck and maybe inside the thing to do some real damage to it.

"Roger that, Bigguns! Go!"

"Rabies, you think your Dawgs could give us some fuckin' cover? I'm takin' my Saviors for a stroll on the deck." Rabies understood what she meant.

"You goddamned right we can, Saviors!" Rabies replied. "Dawgs, Dawgs, converge on me and spread cover fire for the gyrenes. Do whatever you can to keep those Seppy Stingers and Gnats off their backs!"

"Gracias, Rabies!" The Marine fighting mecha squadron had gone to bot-mode and spread over the forward section of the ship like a small swarm of angry bees on an elephant, looking for a soft place to bite. And bite is just what they planned to do.

"De nada, Bigguns! Good hunting. We'll keep these motherfuckers off your ass, you just stop that fucking thing!" Rabies replied.

"We will!"

"Goddamned Seppy Gomer bastard!" Bigguns jumped upward into a forward rolling flip and twisted in mid-arch to go to guns to take out a Stinger in bot-mode that had made it through the Demon Dawgs perimeter. "Guns, guns, guns!" she yelled.

The cannon fire from the Marine's bot-mode mechastrafed across the deck of the enemy hauler, throwing plasma jets and sparks as it tracked the enemy mecha across its zigging and zagging path behind bulkhead extensions and exterior hull cannon turrets.

"On your six, Bigguns!" Goat warned her. "Fox three!"

The missile shot from Goat's mecha leaving behind a smoky purple and blue ion trail as it twisted and turned across the deck of the ship. The enemy mecha ran with three giant steps and vaulted itself upward. It rolled over into fighter-mode while its upper cannon fired away at the missile. The little mecha-to-mecha missile zipped in and out of the cannon fire with precise sensor-driven motion as the enemy mecha continued to fire on it. The enemy fighter-mode plane accelerated upward and away from the deck and then turned in to a steep dive at the hull at full velocity.

As the mecha rapidly approached the deck it rolled into eagle-mode, bringing its DEG to bear on the missile. The DEG detonated the missile before it could hit the enemy fighter but the force from the explosion tossed the mecha over onto its back like a turtle. The right hand of the eagle-mode mecha pounded to its side into the deck until it found enough of the loosened hull plating to grab and then it righted itself quickly and went to missiles.

Two missiles streaked from under the wings of the vehicle into the cannon turret that Bigguns and Beanhead were taking cover behind. The two of them dove their bot-mode mecha to the deck facedown for cover. Then Goat, Skinny, and Deuce ran across the exterior catapult deck to a cover position behind a large spherical radome. The enemy mecha continued to spread cannon fire, DEG blasts, and missiles.

"Shit, Bigguns! This Gomer bastard is good!" Goat said. The enemy eagle-mode mecha weaved in and out of the surface obstructions on the deck of the Seppy hauler faster than the bot-mode FM-12s could.

"Goin' eagle-mode!" Bigguns toggled the switch on the HOTAS and transfigured the standing mechanical robot beast into a bird of prey.

Charlie, where is he? she asked her AIC. Come on, Charlie, lock me on.

Searching, Bigguns . . . searching, the AIC replied.

The view in the DTM virtual sphere of Bigguns' mind showed the dots of her squad and multiple red and blue dots overhead but the Seppy mecha that was causing them problems on the deck of the ship was skittering in and out of detection. It was using the radar multi-path clutter to ghost itself from her sensors.

Trying multi-path algorithms, Bigguns. The brilliance of putting the AIC in with the pilots wasn't just their addition to the reaction and control times but also their abilities to react on the fly to new problems and apply innovations to each new situation. The AIC took the analysis code from the low range multi-path radar and applied it across the board of all the wireless sensors. The algorithm cleaned away the ghosts and then the lock tone went off and a red dot appeared in Bigguns' DTM view.

Got him now!

"Fox three!" Bigguns fired a missile and then went full throttle toward the red dot with the DEG ablazing. The enemy mecha was distracted by the impending missile long enough to give Bigguns an edge on it. The DEGs of the enemy mecha detonated the missile just as the blue-green energy blast form Bigguns' mecha tore through the cockpit of the enemy bird of prey. The enemy mecha exploded in a bright red and white-orange fireball almost at the same instant that her missile had detonated. The two near simultaneous explosions blew out a hole in the hull plating where a bulkhead exterior door had been.

"Great flying, boss!" Skinny said over the net. "Looks like we got ourselves a doorway to boot!"

"Roger that! Into the hole, Saviors!" Bigguns ordered.