One Day on Mars

2:20 PM Mars Tharsis Standard Time

"Look at that!" Joanie Hassed pointed up at the brilliant flash in the sky. Even in the afternoon sunlight the flash was more than brilliant. She hadn't seen that type of fireworks even during the Triton raids and this one was the second such flash that had taken place in the past ten minutes or so. "There goes another one."

"Keep your head down, Joanie." Senator Moore leaned back against the foxhole wall and stared up at the sky. There was a serious battle taking place up there. He could discern flashes and glints here and there from the opposing fleets. And there had indeed been several large-scale explosions that had been more than just fascinating in the late afternoon sky.

Moore had only noticed the last couple of minutes though as before that he had been fighting ferociously and fearlessly against the encroaching Separatist forces. In a mad rush into the enemy troops he had fought until he was out of ammunition and could do nothing but cover and hide. He had made his way back to their original foxhole—the one they had dug after leaving the mechanical spider. The foxhole was closest to the escarpment at the edge of the Olympus Mons volcano of all the cover locations he had managed to find. It was just behind a small outcropping of lava stones only thirty meters or so from the edge of the cliff.

They had ended up there after what any sane person would describe as his suicidal run. But Senator Moore would call it an effort to draw fire away from the escape of his beloved wife and daughter over the side of the drop-off. At the time he was certain it would be the last thing he would ever do. But to Senator Moore, who absolutely adored his little girl and loved his wife with all his heart, giving his life to make sure his wife and daughter could live would have been an easy trade to make. On the up side and fortunately for him, the Cardiff's Killers, a Marine FM-12 strike mech squadron, crested the escarpment's edge and zoomed, hell bent for destruction, into the encroaching Seppy tank lines just as he and the AEMs with him were running out of ammo and just as the Army tank squadron Warboys' Warlords were being forced to retreat.

The Marine survivors of the crashed U.S.S. Winston Churchill had risen from the Martian gorge like harbingers of death and the two dozen survivors from the sabotaged supercarrier brought the full bore of their revenge on the Separatist Orcus drop tanks in pursuit of the Warlords M3A17 transfigurable tank mecha squad. The high-tech Marine FM-12 strike mecha made light work of the overwhelming numbers of inferior enemy mecha, especially once the senator's AIC had told them how to fix their sensors to stop the enemy cloaking software.

Stingers and Gnats had buzzed into the mix as well but there were squads of Ares fighters in the mix and only moments before the big flash in the sky more M3A17 tanks and FM-12 mecha dropped in from orbit right into the mix. The Seppy line had been pushed way back up the mountainside toward the city. The battle still raged in the distance, but for now the senator from Mississippi and the refugee from Triton, along with a reporter, a cameraman, and three armored e-suit Marines, sat in the foxhole licking their wounds and relaxing for the moment. It had been a long morning.

"Senator Moore." Mars News Network correspondent Gail Fehrer turned to the senator. "Could you give us a statement at this point? What you did here today was more than heroic and we have the footage to prove it."

Moore raised an eyebrow at the reporter. He had never liked the press, a dislike dating all the way back to his Heisman Trophy days. His distaste for reporters was probably why he went into the Marines instead of the NFL. Several years in a POW torture camp in the Martian Desert had cured him of his intolerance of most things. Moore gave his POW camp days credit for his patience as a parent with his overzealous six-year-old daughter. So, Moore had to admit and allow for the damned reporters, and after all, as a politician they were a necessary evil. Sometimes he wished he'd just stayed a Marine. He could only bite his tongue for the moment and speak minimally as the cameraman thrust the videosensor in his face. He would think of better videobites later. Right now he was still worried about his daughter and the anger and adrenaline of hard combat still coursed through him. He relaxed and let out a slow breath before he responded.

"I just did what any father and husband would do. I did everything within my power to make sure they were safe." He closed his eyes for a brief moment. He had seen Reyez, who was carrying his daughter Deanna, and his wife, Sehera, bounce over the edge just as the FM-12s attacked. But he had been so caught up with the fighting that he had lost contact with them. He had called to them a few times over the QM and optical comms but had gotten no answer. He hoped it was just a range and line-of-sight issue.

"Sehera? Are you there?" he said over the QM. But there was no response. "Sehera! Reyez? Dee?" Nothing. He checked the transceiver on his e-suit helmet and smacked the side of it with his hand. The visor display didn't even flicker. "Commercial piece of garbage."

"Allow me, sir," an odd male voice said over the QM net.

"BIL?"

"Yes, sir. Those cheap radios in your suits will not connect over the edge to the bottom which is almost a kilometer away. They are very shortwave and don't bend over or around edges and out here there is very little multi-path bounce. Since there are no repeaters out here for your AIC to hop on you can't reach very far. But I can," the mechanical spiderlike garbage hauler AI said. When Senator Moore had told it to find a hiding place it had, a very simple one.

"Well, where the hell are you?" Moore asked.

"I'm hanging on to the rocks just over the edge of the escarpment just about two hundred meters form you, sir. That is why I can still receive your transmissions. If you will wait I'll reroute your AIC through the infrastructure uplink through the big ship in orbit back down to the appropriate ships. I certainly hope little Deanna is all right. Although I do see two vehicles at the bottom of the ravine with my optical sensors. If you leaned over the edge you could probably contact them. But please be careful, sir."

"Thanks, BIL." Moore waited impatiently for what seemed like forever and wasn't sure he wanted to decide it was safe to get up yet, especially since they were out of ammo. All of them were out of ammo.

On the other hand, he was getting more and more worried about his daughter and his wife. Had they made it to the bottom safely? Had they been evacuated out?

I'm sure they made it, sir, Abigail said. BIL is connecting me now. I'll let you know in a few seconds.

"Sergeant Clay!"

"Yes sir, second lieutenant?"

"As we are completely out of ammo and for all intents and purposes out of this fight, why don't we see about finding those evac ships and see if we can find any surviving wounded out there," Second Lieutenant Thomas Washington said. Moore approved of the young lieutenant and thought to himself that he would watch him closely and maybe even see what he could do to help the young Marine's career.

The second lieutenant stood and ran a quick sensor sweep over the battlefield and could see no immediate threats. Since they had reset their software Moore suspected that the Marine would trust his suit's sensors. Washington whistled in amazement and horror as he looked across the battlefield at the dead mecha and soldiers and pockmarked and bloodstained Martian landscape. Moore decided to give it a few seconds to see if the Marine was shot down, and when he wasn't, joined him.

Moore rose to his feet cautiously beside the second lieutenant. The sun was beyond the overhead point and was beginning on its way into evening. The evening sun glinted off the hundreds of fragments of torn-asunder mecha and armor suits. Moore whistled at the site.

"Hell of a fight, hey, Lieutenant?" Private First Class Vineat "Kootie" Kudaf said.

Abigail? the senator asked his AIC.

I'm communicating with them now, senator. The evac ships set down at the bottom of the escarpment. They have your wife and daughter and Reyez Jones safe and sound, sir. Apparently Deanna would like to jump off the cliff again as she thought it was a lot of fun.

That's my girl.

Yes sir. Acorn didn't fall far did it?

Humph.

But the battle still rages in orbit and the pilots of the evac ships tell us that they have no place to return to so they are staying put for the moment.

What about the naval base to the south? Can't we go there?

For right now sir, they say their instructions are to stay put out of harm's way.

Then tell them that we are clear up here and could use help with wounded.

Yes, Senator.

Timmy! Captain Jefferson wanted to avoid a suicide run with the Madira if at all possible but things weren't looking good at the moment. The DEGs had bought them critical minutes that the fighter squadrons put to good use and in a heroic last effort one of his Marines had ripped the weapon of mass destruction from the bowels of the Seppy hauler and rocketed it out to detonate harmlessly in space. But that goddamned hauler was still falling on a collision course toward Mons City and would hit in minutes if they couldn't break it up. Or at least push it out of the way.

Aye sir?

Get the vulnerable attitude control point of that hauler transmitted to the squadron AICs! Get all the firepower available focused on that spot to push the hauler off course.

Aye, sir! Uncle Timmy had already analyzed the Seppy haulers and discovered the best places to concentrate fire in order to make its attitude go unstable or push its trajectory an arc second to the west so it would miss Mons City—or at least the main dome. Since the Marine FM-12 pilots had gone on board the enemy ship and taken out the guidance and control power-plant stabilizers, it was now a matter of just pushing the ship hard enough to make it tumble. If they couldn't make it tumble and burn up on reentry then they'd push it over some. But it was a big ship with lots of forward momentum and worse was that just as the Marines were entering the ship the Seppies had put a roll on it so that it was spinning about its axis of travel, giving it gyroscopic stability. Therefore the concentrated firepower at the nose of the ship was causing it to precess about its axis just like a tilted planet does about its poles or a top does before it falls to the ground. It would be hard to push it over. It would be hard to move. And if they didn't, millions in Mons City were about to have a very bad day. A. Very. Bad. Day.

"CO Madira! CO Thatcher!" squawked over the command net.

"Go, Thatcher."

"Wally, we've got propulsion and that's about it! Life support is failing rapidly and I'm ordering all hands to abandon ship. I don't think the Thatcher is salvageable after this. She's been a good boat," the CO of the Margaret Thatcher informed the fleet commander. "But I've got an idea."

"What do you need, Sharon?" The CO was now down to three supercarriers and most of them had only missiles and cannons and were limping along at half normal space propulsion. The DEGs had overheated and fused on all of them and they were all venting life support into space. The Separatists' attack on the fleet had been brilliantly orchestrated and had completely crippled the U.S. Navy fleet and whittled it away to only three out of eighteen supercarriers remaining in any form of useful operation. The U.S. military might had been taken totally unaware and beaten to a pulp, a bloody messy pulp. General Ahmi had executed the battle nearly flawlessly, much more flawlessly than a simple terrorist could. This had been a brilliantly developed and executed plan with multiple waves and levels of attack ranging from global ground force movement, to electronic and cyber warfare, to air and space combat. It had been a brilliant command of an army that nobody even suspected to exist.

The plan was so well thought out that there were multiple failsafes. Even after the Marines had taken the WMD threat from the disabled falling ship, it was still a massive enough ship that it would cause tremendous damage to the city on the planet below if it crashed on a valid target. Its trajectory had been planned well. From the second that ship entered normal space from the hyperspace conduit, even while it was deploying its hundreds of fighters and mecha, even after its propulsion plant had been destroyed, and even after it had been defanged of its weapon of mass destruction, it was still a serious threat that took all the attention of the surviving fleet, which was still having to fight for its life against the surviving Separatist fleet ships. The death toll would be considerably more than the tens of millions if the entire Tharsis region had gone up in a supernuclear fireball, but still with just the crashing ship it would be pushing the millions.

"Well, sir," squawked the net. "If you would kindly run blocker for us, I was thinking about running one right up the gut just like we did back in the Army-Navy game our senior year," Captain Sharon "Fullback" Walker, a former aviator turned command crew said. Fullback had been her call sign because in her Navy Academy days she had played fullback for the Navy, which was not a position that many females played. It was especially not a position that many females played with the expertise and drive that Sharon had. Sharon was built more like a stack of bricks, a big stack of bricks, than a brick shithouse, and had a face that her mother might say was "handsome." On the other hand, she could have been a champion body builder but she was more ambitious and way smarter. And on top of that she could run a four-point-one-second forty-yard dash and do it over and over for four quarters while being hit hard by mean Army linebackers. She was definitely Navy fleet officer material. Captain Wallace Jefferson had played lineman a couple of the years that Sharon played and they had been teammates for a very long time. He was used to making holes for her to run through.

"Roger that, Sharon! I-formation through the two-hole on the snap!" The CO of the Sienna Madira didn't have time to reflect on the fact that he had just authorized his friend and teammate and fellow officer to carry out a suicide mission. Perhaps she had an escape plan. After all, Sharon was smart. But it didn't matter, because Sharon was a soldier and she would do her job whatever it took. It was fourth and one and they by God needed a first down.

Timmy, spread the word to the fleet to block for the Thatcher!

Aye sir!

"All fleet vessels, all fighters, all mecha, form blocking formation and protect the Margaret Thatcher and make sure that she makes it to the enemy kamikaze!"

"XO Burley," Fullback called to her second officer. The Thatcher had been a good tough ship and she had enjoyed her command on board her for the last four years. But all good things must come to an end, she thought. Her ship had taken a beating and she was going to give it a sendoff that was honorable!

"Aye sir!"

"Are the troops away?" She scanned the crew manifest briefly in her mind but was more concerned with moving SIFs around to weak points in the hull and rerouting power as needed. Since the majority of the engineering crew had abandoned ship most of those functions were rerouted to the bridge. There were a few crewmen still aboard, those who couldn't see it in their hearts to leave the ship, and those brave stupid souls had stayed behind to work diligently at their tasks to keep the ship functioning as it was being torn apart around them by enemy fire and soon by one mother of a collision.

"All escape pods are launched, Captain."

"Helmsman, you have conn discretion to give us the shortest path for a collision with that damned hauler!" Fullback ordered her young helmsman.

"Aye sir!"

"Burley, get me every ounce of structural integrity field you can get me on my forward hull!"

"Aye sir!" the XO replied.

"Helmsman Lee, get us moving at full-out balls-to-the-wall maximum acceleration!" the CO ordered.

"Aye sir! Helm at max accel," the ship's pilot acknowledged.

"Time and trajectory to impact, navigator?" She turned her head and looked through her virtual sphere of the ship and the battle around it at the young lieutenant junior grade who had volunteered to stay at his post.

"Trajectory is plotted now, ma'am. Forty-two seconds to impact!" Lieutenant JG Joey Gugino replied.

"Understood." Fullback nodded.

The Thatcher rocked hard to starboard, vibrated and shuddered harshly, and then damped out as the inertial dampening system compensated. At least it was still working, even though it did seem to be a bit sluggish and erratic. Warning klaxons would have blasted the bridge had the captain not had them turned off a long time prior. The helmsman managed to hold her balance but sprained her wrist doing so. The XO was flung forward into the front window and bumped his head against it so hard he was knocked unconscious or worse. The inertial dampening field clearly was no longer working uniformly within the bridge and the health status monitors showed that that was the case throughout the ship.

Her AIC informed her that the XO's AIC had alerted it that Burley's neck was broken but he was still breathing. It didn't matter. They were all going to be dead in a few tens of seconds anyway. She just wanted to take that damned Seppy hauler with them.

"Captain, we're taking heavy missile fire on aft sections," the navigator said as he looked up from the CDC interface screens. The CDC had been evacuated and rerouted sensors to the bridge. The navigator was the CDC now.

"We won't be needing those sections in a few more seconds anyway," Fullback replied. "Helmsman, stay on course full acceleration!" She continued juggling power around the ship's SIFs, attitude control systems, and propulsion systems.

"She's driving like a goddamned beached whale, ma'am, but she's moving where I point her!" Helmsman Lee shouted over the ringing and pounding from the hull being blasted to hell.