One Day on Mars

2:18 PM Mars Tharsis Standard Time

The Saviors ripped through bulkhead after bulkhead until they pushed into the side of a large engineering room. There had been almost zero resistance and only the occasional e-suited soldier firing HVAR rounds at them. The ship must have undoubtedly been flying on a skeleton crew given the kamikaze mission part of its original plan. There were no mecha left on the ship and there was little any poorly armored Seppy groundpounders or squids could do to hold up a bunch of Marines in FM-12s. The Marines had plowed through the ship pretty much unabated by anything other than their own size—they were much larger than hallways and doorways of a spaceship. Several times they had to go to guns to blast a path for them to travel through because the bulkheads and decks were too close together for the FM-12s to fit through. But that was okay, as the FM-12s were loaded with ordnance and Marines loved to use it.

The Marines had kept to the hangar decks and belowdeck engineering sections as best they could because these were bigger decks designed for moving cargo and mecha around in. Several cargo rooms were large enough to accommodate them, but they weren't there for comfort. They had a bomb to find and/or a ship to stop before it reached the planet below. They needed to hurry.

The engineering room they had just burst into was part of the power generation plant that had been hammered by the DEG of the Madira. The room had been blown inward by the DEG bolts and then it looked as if it had blown outward from secondary explosions. The structural integrity fields were the only thing keeping the bulkheads from collapsing under the weight of the ship's gravity field.

The large room was filled with spewing busted flowlines and sparking broken wiring harnesses. Liquid metal coolant lines poured molten sodium alloys out into the corner of the ship. There was a pocket of the coolant building up that was trapped in a force field. The force field was sapping power from somewhere and as soon as that went the deck would be flooded with molten liquids. Bigguns thought it would be best to get out of this room quickly. It looked like the whole damned thing was gonna cave in on them.

There were flames roiling in several corners of the gymnasium-sized compartment. Smoke filled the dimly lit section the Saviors had entered but that was of little hindrance to the Marines who were using QM, IR, visible, radar, and lidar sensors anyway. Bigguns scanned the room looking for the right path to take.

Captain.

Yes, Charlie? Bigguns thought.

Here. A corner of the room opposite the side where the liquid metal coolants were pooling was highlighted in her virtual mindview. That is the attitude control power plant and just aft of that is the torpedo room.

Can we spoof the attitude control and just give this thing a yaw from here?

Probably not in the minute or two we have. I'd suggest mayhem at this point, ma'am. And then push through to the torpedo room.

Where is the gluonium bomb?

I'm still narrowing it down but it is in the torpedo room just aft of the far bulkhead of this room. It's a straight shot.

Roger that, Charlie. Transfer the coordinate system to the team.

Roger.

"Okay, Marines. Let's tear this fucking rust bucket apart, starting with the far section of the room! The nuke is on the other side of that wall. Let's move fast!" Bigguns ordered. "Guns, guns, guns!" She set her DEG and cannons blasting at the highlighted target. The other FM-12s did the same.

Secondary explosions filled the compartment and a gaping hole into a larger room on the other side of the bulkhead was blown out. The Marines rushed inward covering each other in case of enemy fire, but there was none.

The torpedo room was about twice the size of the gymnasium-sized engineering deck and was lined from wall-to-wall with empty tubes. The ceiling of the room contained four different torpedo racks and each of them was loaded with missiles.

It has to be one of those, Bigguns! The missile racks thirty meters above her head was highlighted in her mind view and then a red X crossed over the nose of one of the missiles. There it is!

"Skinny, cover me. The rest of you goldbrickers knock us a hole in one of those torpedo tubes so we can get the fuck out of here!" Bigguns pointed with the giant robot hand of her mecha toward the port torpedo tube and then fired her jump boosters to the top of the room. Skinny followed suit, scanning her DEG left and right and up and down in case of any resistance from the Seppies. There was none.

Bigguns quickly studied the missile rack and decided on a plan. She grabbed the nose of the missile where the warhead was and then looked down the missile tube for a vulnerable point in the casing.

You sure this won't detonate this thing?

Not unless it is booby-trapped. Besides, my sensors are showing the computer is active and is set to detonate in ninety-seven seconds! The dumb computer in the missile doesn't realize that the ship's propulsion has been taken out. It will detonate early, Charlie warned her.

Well, that is great for Mars, shitty for us!

Yes, ma'am, her AIC agreed.

Bigguns karate-chopped the shiny slender missile casing with her left mecha hand, tearing the thin aluminum and composite materials clean with a shrieking sound like fingernails on a chalkboard. She yanked the nosecone of the missile several times until it broke free. The force of it letting loose caused her to slip backward almost into a tumble before she regained hover control of the bot-mode mecha.

"Where's my fucking hole, Marines?!"

"Right fucking here, ma'am!" her squad replied as they burned the torpedo tube bulkhead away with DEGs and cannon fire. The torpedo tube splattered plasma and liquid metal sparks as it weakened until internal atmospheric pressure was more than the weakened torpedo tube cover could take and it blew outward.

"Fox!" she squawked to her Marines letting them know that she had just released a live missile set to detonate on impact. The missile hit the failing torpedo tube and added to the decompression explosion. The hull bulged outward and blew the bulkhead into space, leaving a hole larger than two FM-12s standing side by side.

"Oorah!" the Marines rallied.

"Skinny, on me! The rest of you Saviors get out there and make a nuisance of yourselves!" Bigguns dove head first through the hole in the Seppy hauler and rolled over into eagle-mode with the Seppy subnuclear force warhead griped in her right mecha hand and her DEG in her left.

"Ahh . . . shiiit!" Bigguns cried as she burst through the hole in the enemy ship only to fly right through a hail of cannon fire from an Ares fighter that was on the tail of a Seppy Gnat. She yanked at the HOTAS to dodge the friendly fire and the Ares fighter.

"Holy shit! Watch out, Marine!" one of the Dawgs called over the net.

"Fuck!" Bigguns was thrown into her seat as the automated evasive maneuvers increased the g-load on her to the point that she thought she felt something pop in her gut.

"Warning, airseal breeched. Warning, airseal breached," the mecha's "Bitching Betty" told her.

"Yeah," she grunted. "Well, hopefully I won't be needing this bird much longer anyway."

She pushed the eagle-mode mecha to maximum acceleration on a vector as far out to space as she could manage and away from the engagement zone. The g-load put more pressure on her than she had expected. It almost hurt. Skinny followed right behind her in fighter-mode, firing her DEG and rear cannons as needed.

Captain, I'm reading a drop in your blood pressure.

I'm fine.

Also showing extreme heart rate and temperature drops. You're hit, Captain.

I said, I'm fine goddamnit!

"Madira! Madira! This is Bigguns, copy!" she grunted.

"Go, Bigguns!"

"Madira, I've got the big bomb in my lap and taking it out to space. The hauler is just falling garbage! The bomb is on a timer and is set to detonate in thirty-two seconds," Bigguns reported as the maximum acceleration of the mecha pushed her back into her seat at over seven gravities.

"Roger that, Bigguns! Great work!" the Air Boss replied over the net.

"Skinny, I'm punching out and you grab me, got it!"

"Roger that!" Skinny toggled the mode control and her fighter-mode mecha slammed over and then back up into eagle-mode. She grunted from the g-load.

Charlie, lock the controls of the fighter on this trajectory!

Done!

"Eject, eject, eject!" Bigguns pulled the ejection lever and the canopy slid away as the ejection field threw her clear of the fighter. The g-load on her felt like a ton of bricks hitting her in the gut and face all at once and then the dampening field of the ejection seat took over, reducing the effect to more tolerable levels. Her fighter sped off in a straight trajectory into space.

Skinny tracked the ejection chair's trajectory and adjusted hers to catch it. Her eagle-mode mecha easily overtook the now drifting ejection seat. She grabbed it and did an immediate rollover and thrust reversal. That bomb was going off any second and she wanted to get as much distance between it and them as she could. Had they been on a planet with atmosphere the shock wave would spread out for fifty kilometers or more and there would be no way to outrun it. But in space that wouldn't be as big a problem. The big problem was going to be radiation dose.

"Detonation in five, four, three, two . . . " Bigguns's AIC announced over audio so Skinny could hear. Of course, her AIC had the countdown timing as well.

The FM-12s could reach a top speed of about two thousand kilometers per hour in space. Once Skinny had picked up Bigguns and reversed direction, the relative velocity between the abandoned fighter stuck on full throttle with the bomb in it and Skinny's fighter was four thousand kilometers per hour. In the twenty-some-odd seconds before the bomb detonated they had managed to put nearly twenty-three kilometers between themselves and the bomb. The massive warhead exploded with the force of a thousand hydrogen bombs, filling the space above the battle with bright white light expanding in a perfect sphere outward from a singularity point. Imperfections in the tamper shielding of the bomb caused secondary jets of light to expand in different directions as expanding circles of plasma.

Just as a gluonium bomb detonated, more than ninety-nine percent of the energy of the explosion was released as high-energy gamma rays. The gamma rays seared through Bigguns and Skinny, knocking free nucleons in their body, causing radiation products to form. The result would be extreme radiation exposure. They would need treatment in less than thirty minutes or they would have serious life-threatening problems. Not that that was anything that the Marines didn't have on a day-to-day basis.

"Awesome, Captain!" Skinny shouted. "We better get to sickbay and take some rad meds pretty soon. My radiation meter is going off the fucking scale."

Bigguns didn't respond.

"Captain? Bigguns!" Skinny called out and looked at the pilot she was holding in her mecha's right hand. The pilot wasn't moving.

"Captain, do you copy?"

Zoom the blue force tracker, Alan, Skinny told her AIC so she could see any live soldiers in the range of her sensors in her DTM virtual mind view.

You got it, Skinny.

The blue dots filled the sky until Skinny zoomed in tightly around the fighter. Bigguns' blue dot was there on Skinny's fighter with her she could tell as the zoom came in. Then . . . the blue dot faded out.

"Fuck!" Skinny cried as her commander and friend died literally in her mecha's arms.