One Day on Mars

2:20 PM Mars Tharsis Standard Time

"What was that?" Rod heard a sound almost like an insect buzz overhead. Spitap, spitap, went the sound again. "Did you hear that?" He turned to the pregnant lady, Carla, on the park bench beside him and then shrugged at Vincent.

"I heard something. I thought it was just my damn ears ringing from my nicotine withdrawals." Vincent replied. Then a wave of people rushed toward them, forcing them to push the people around them off the young lady. "Get the fuck off me!" he yelled, and turned to the man pushing at his back and punched him square in the face.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Carla screamed and Rod and Vincent did their level best to protect her.

"Let's stay ahead of this rushing crowd instead of fighting it." Vincent grabbed Carla by the hand and pulled her with him. "Rod. Get behind her, bud!" Vincent had been in enough adrenaline-hyped gliderchute afterparties when people started moshing in the pit to know that you can't fight a crowd.

The three of them pushed their way along with the wave of the crowd as they passed through the park. They were being pushed toward the central elevator of the Open Court near the giant JumboHoloTron. Mons City Central Park had been designed to hold eighty thousand but there were more than a hundred thousand, or maybe twice that being held in it with Seppy force fields. There was little more than standing room and with the wave of the crowd moving there had to be hundreds or maybe thousands of people being trampled to death.

Vincent jumped up as high as he could in an attempt to see over the crowd. It didn't help much. All he could see was wave after wave of people behind him and the force field closing in on them from the far side of the park.

"The motherfucking Seppy motherfuckers are squeezing the force field on us. They're gonna squish us all!" Vincent said in a panic. He really wished he and Rod had gone with that senator fellow earlier when they had had the chance.

"Why are they doing that?" Carla screamed.

"I don't know!" Vincent continued along with the wave of the crowd jumping up as often as space would allow between him and the next guy. He was very careful not to lose his footing though. Falling down could be the end of them.

"We gotta think of something fast, Vince!" Rod jumped and looked over the crowd ahead of them and could see a wave in the sea of people headed back toward them. The forcefields were closing in from all around. "Vince, we can't keep going with the crowd. We have to get to the center of the park and stay there as long as we can hold out."

Zip, zip, zip.

Separatist railgun rifle rounds tore through the crowds of people splattering the corralled citizens like the old expression "shooting fish in a barrel." The automatic railgun fire was coming from above the crowd on the third floor near the elevator and from other upper floor locations around the periphery of the park.

"Goddamned cowards!" A man behind them held his fist in the air and shook it defiantly at the Seppy snipers. "Come down here and fight like men!"

Rod, Vincent, and Carla struggled to push toward the center of the crowd and prayed that the luck of large numbers would fall their way. There were thousands more people in the park than there were snipers and it would take them a while to kill them all considering the ranges they were shooting from and size of the park itself. The force fields continued pressing inward, knocking over trees and park benches and play sets and monkey bars and other park constructions.

Several people realized what Vince, Rod, and Carla's strategy was and they also noticed Carla's condition and began forming a pocket around her. They kept a hand on each other's shoulders to hold the pocket together. A zipping sound passed by Vince's left ear and he felt something wet splatter his face. He turned to see the man beside him and saw clean through a dark gray and red outlined hole in the man's head and through the chest of the woman behind him. The two victims were pressed together by the crowd and couldn't fall over at first. Then they were drawn down to be trampled under thousands of stampeding human feet.

Vincent and crew continued to protect Carla as best they could. There were pockets forming in the crowd where the Seppy HVAR rounds had cleared them out.

"This way!" Vincent pushed back toward one of the growing pockets of dead.

"Are you fuckin' nuts," Carla screamed. "That's toward the gunfire!"

"Watch those little vapor trails streaking across the park. They fire for a few seconds and then they stop. And then they do it again." Vincent pushed them toward the nearest wave of people rushing away from the gunfire.

"They're reloading?" Rod asked. "Yeah, so! Then we'll be standing in the open and easier to shoot."

"Not if we play dead." Vincent said. "When I say drop. Drop. Rod, we'll cover Carla as best we can." Vincent hated running into gunfire and lying around playing dead. But it was the only plan he had and at least it was a plan. Before they had just been running scared and aimlessly.

"Now!" Vincent screamed once he could see only about ten rows of people between him and the oncoming hail of railgun vapor trails. The trails tracked through the rows of people and then stopped for a second. Vince, Rod, Carla, several others fell to the ground and tried to cover each other from being trampled. Several wounded and scared people tripped and kicked at them. One of them landed a knee right into Vincent's back so hard that Vince was afraid he'd be pissing blood, but then the wave of people pushed away from the blood-soaked pile of bodies as the railgun fire started back up.

A few rounds hit just a few centimeters to Vincent's left but they missed them and they were safe for now. Several of the wounded were screaming in pain around them and some of them even rose and tried to get back to their feet, but the Separatist snipers seemed to care little about them.

"Oh my God, oh my God!" Carla almost screamed, but managed to keep her voice subdued by biting her hand.

"Hold it together, honey," a woman lying still next to them said calmly. "They can't hear you that far away and over all these poor wounded bastards screaming. You need to calm yourself or you could force yourself into premature labor." Rod put his arm over her and hugged her, not sure if that would help or not.

"Are you a doctor?" Carla asked the woman.

"Naw honey, I've just had a few kids in my day."

"Okay, Vince. They're not shooting at us right now. But what do we do when the force fields start to close in on us?" Rod asked. His hands were trembling wildly. He was scared to death.

"I'm working on it, bud, Vincent said. "Holy shit, will you look at that!"

"What now?!" Rod asked, the panic in his voice never so obvious.

"Look up through the dome. Now, there is something you don't see every day," Vince said. "What the hell is that?"

Above them fell a bright glowing red fireball that showered and glittered with thousands of smaller fireballs spraying off of it and around it falling along behind in its path. Initially, Vincent thought it was a meteorite but it was moving too slowly and was way too big for that. A meteor that size and that shape would break up or destroy the planet. Something was holding it together. From the looks of it the giant fireball was the shape of a cross and had to be at least a kilometer or two wide and maybe twice as long. It was glowing brighter and brighter and looming closer and closer.

The goddamned Seppy bastards never even let up to look at the falling fireball. The HVAR rounds just kept zipping through the crowds of people as fast as they could fire and reload the things. Fortunately for the people trapped in the force fields, the Seppy rifles didn't hold the large magazines that American HVARs did and they were forced to reload more often.

"Maybe that thing'll fall on us and kill those sorry motherfuckers." Vince said. "Goddamn I wish I had a cigarette."