One Day on Mars

9:45 AM Mars Tharsis Standard Time

"Oorah!!! Take that, you goddamned Seppy motherfuckers!" Sergeant Clay Jackson shouted as he brought down three support troops for a drop tank about seven hundred meters down Lowell Street, the last rounds from his railgun punching through the Separatist armored environment suits with little effort. Jackson could see the midsection of one of the soldiers splatter red against the brick behind him. The enemy soldier fell forward dead. The return fire that had been chewing up the street and building behind the sergeant finally ceased. He looked down the side at the garbage truck he was perched on and saw several railgun pellet entry holes. The wall of the building behind the truck was blown to pieces. Fortunately, the drop tank hadn't taken him seriously, yet. Sergeant Jackson had only had to deal with the ground troops.

"Sergeant Jackson!" Marine Second Lieutenant Thomas Washington called out over the deafening crunching and whirling sounds of the collapsing skyrise building down the street. Dust plumes and a rolling cloud of debris washed down the main street of the southern borough of Mons City. He looked over the body of Private Allfrey as he knelt by him. The unfortunate private had taken the brunt of support fire as a drop tank landed across the street from them. The second lieutenant had the presence of mind to take cover. The private had frozen. Then he died.

Shit! Shit! Shit! he thought to himself as he gathered the private's ammo and ordnance, snapping the containers on the pack belt of his armored e-suit. The dust filling the air from the crashing buildings blocked out most of the sunlight, and the small white light diode lamps of the suit helmet cast a cold still deathly hue on the dead private's face and the red blood oozing from the corners of his mouth.

Sir, the VIP thinks he is going to come to us, the young officer's AIC, Second Lieutenant Tammie One Niner Seven Oscar Hotel Three Three, alerted him.

Shit, what does the idiot think he is doing? Tell him I said to stay put.

I did, sir. He says he doesn't take orders from the Marines.

Goddamnit all to hell! Where is it he thinks he's going?

To the evac point, sir, the AIC replied.

Evac point. Shit again! That's ten or fifteen klicks from us! Has to be forty or fifty or more for them.

He says they will be there, sir.

Goddamnit.

Yes sir. Goddamnit, the AIC agreed with her counterpart.

"Sir!" Sergeant Clay Jackson squawked back over the net without letting up on the trigger of the hypervelocity automatic railgun (HVAR). The lieutenant could hear the spitap spitap spitap of the railgun fire over the net. The standard-issue firearm tracked small three-millimeter-diameter maximum density packed pellets of carbon and aluminum atoms at near one percent the speed of light across the street, leaving whirlwinds and pockets of inflow in the rolling smoke that filled the street along with a faintly glowing ionization trail acting as a tracer.

The pellets impacted and cut through the building four hundred meters north. Larger debris was flung wildly from the pellet impacts, while near the actual impact point the building materials were vaporized in a green fluorescent flash, leaving a hole the size of an e-suit helmet. On the other side of the building was where his sensors were predicting one of the Seppy drop tank's trajectories would end. Jackson's hope was to put such a shitstorm where that Seppy tank wanted to be that it would either get killed or fly away. Jackson preferred the former, but as long as it left him the fuck alone he didn't really give a rat's ass.

The noise of the Separatist drop mecha force had been drowned out momentarily by the collapsing buildings to the east and the cutting away of the building to the north by Jackson's HVAR. The smoke and debris from the battle, the crash of the Winston Churchill, and the collapsed buildings were heavy but the gaping hole in the dome about ten kilometers to the south of them was pulling the gas and debris clouds away because of the differential pressures. The debris swirled through the airflow channels between the city buildings and then out into the Martian atmosphere. War was not necessarily bad for terraforming but it sucked royal for whoever had been in that dome when the supercarrier hit. Second Lieutenant Washington didn't think too highly of war at the moment either. The city was a deathtrap with Seppy bastards scurrying everywhere like termites or angry bees.

"Jackson, that building is creating so much dust we can't see a damned thing. Nothing on IR either. Can you see anything from your vantage point?" Second Lieutenant Washington asked over the direct link he was keeping open with the sergeant. Once Captain Fasim bought it at the insertion point where the transport was shot down, the second lieutenant had assumed command. But he kept the link to the NCO open at all times in case Jackson had any "advice."

Unfortunately, Master Sergeant Sarah Nathan had bought it when the Captain did, so the squad's new NCO was an E5 and was almost as new as its lieutenant. The two of them had seen action, serious action, on Triton together, but they weren't the seasoned Marines that the captain and the master sergeant had been.

"No sir, I can't see a goddamned fucking iota. We are sitting goddamned ducks here, sir. If I were a Seppy bastard, I'd be coming in on the other side of that shit with guns blazing ready to cut us to fuckin' hamburger." Jackson scanned the area again with all his passive systems afraid to go active as "homers" might lock on to him. What a goddamned mess!

I agree, Sarge! Jackson's AIC, counterpart designation Corporal Susan Seven Seven Seven Niner Mike Bravo One, replied.

"I agree with the sergeant, sir," Tammie, the second lieutenant's AIC voiced, over the net so both could hear. "Still no word from CMTOC. Only the local QM coms are working. Nothing longer range than about sixty kilometers is working. I've daisy-chained a com patch through various local hubs to the Marines on the north side of the dome and one to an Army unit on the west side, but they are taking heavier losses than us. No word at all from the 34th." Somehow the Seppies had managed to jam every communications system except for local quantum membrane (QM) transceivers. The smaller QMs were limited somewhat in range.

"Yeah, without any support or word from HQ we'll keep pushing on with the mission at hand. There is nothing more we can do for the VIP other than hope he makes it to the evac himself. So, we need to see if we can't slow down the Seppy advance through this city and somehow get to that evac point in time to get ourselves out and give the VIP some cover if he gets there. Ideas?" Washington asked.

"We need better cover sir," the sergeant responded.

Yeah, and a fucking miracle, Washington thought. His AIC didn't respond.

Sergeant Jackson thought up a different display on his visor that showed his fellow "misguided children" as blue dots on the overlay map of the city. An explosion dropped another building about two klicks north of him and two of the blue dots blinked out. Corporal Gomez and Private Sauro had bought it the hard way—death by falling skyscraper. Fuck! No doubt a black and blue dot also showed up back at the Casualty Management and Tactical Operations Center, or CMTOC (pronounced "simtoc")—wherever the hell that was.

They were getting picked off little by little. What had started out as a rescue mission of twelve lightly armored troops was now down to Sergeant Jackson, Privates Packer and Kudaf, Corporal Shelly, and the second lieutenant—more than fifty percent casualties so far. But their mission changed from rescuing some fat-assed VIP to holding the city after they had been deployed. To start with, they were not equipped for the mission and they were way outnumbered. Then things went to hell in a handbasket once the squad started taking on heavy casualties. Surprise attacks were that way, but by God, the United States Marine Corps, aka Uncle Sam's Misguided Children, didn't train for whining about their situation. It trained Marines to make the best out of a really shitty situation and to kill as many of the rat-bastard enemy motherfuckers as possible before they kill you! Semper Fi!

"Shit! Two more down, sir!" Jackson reported the loss of the two troops. The sergeant's AIC began running an inventory list of available equipment from the remaining troops. At the same time, the lieutenant's AIC, Tammie, began recalculating battle plans and running force-on-force simulations. There were way too many red forces compared to blue for the AIC's taste and none of the simulations turned out . . . well.

"I saw it, Sarge. I'm tired of this sitting around and waiting shit. We can't hold this position and I'm with you. As soon as that dust plume gets to us we are done for. Our reinforcements may not ever be coming either. And the backup evac is still nearly four hours off." The second lieutenant scanned through his maps of the southern borough again.

"What do you want to do, sir?"

"Those buildings are falling because the Seppies are there. Sergeant, I say we take some of this fuckin' mess to them for a change."

"Oorah! Sir!" Jackson was tired of waiting too. Like any good Marine he didn't like sitting around with his thumbs up his ass and waiting to get smashed to hell and gone, especially over some fat-assed politician, which was the reason they had been deployed into this shitstorm in the first place.

"Goddamned Seppies are turning the south borough into a killing field of raining skyscrapers. I wonder just who the hell they are trying to kill?" the second lieutenant said matter-of-factly.

"Probably survivors of the Churchill, if there were any. Orders, sir?" the sergeant buzzed back over the net.

"Okay." The lieutenant thought a few commands that brought the remaining members of the squad online and loaded a map on their displays. "We are going to take cover in the smoke all the way out of the dome. Tammie is modeling and updating the fluid flow dynamics of this shit through the city. We follow the predicted flow path down these side streets." Streets on the map started highlighting in green to show the path. "If it changes she'll update the map. And we stay quiet and check fire until we are on top of the mecha. Once there we'll drop some shit on their Seppy asses and then run like hell out of the dome. Got it?"

"Oorah!" resounded from Jackson, Packer, Kufad, and Shelly.

"You heard the lieutenant," Sergeant Jackson said. "Kudaf, you and Shelly are too far north of us to take this side of the plume. Make way down Tharsis View Drive and rendezvous with us at Dome Circle. Follow the streets Tammie maps for you. From there we'll make through the debris at Aureole Road if there ain't too many Seppies in the way. Looks like Aureole will take us right to the edge of the dome. If there ain't a hole there we'll make one. Keep your goddamned heads down! And move."

"Oorah."

Sergeant Jackson slithered backward to the edge of the garbage truck he had been using for a vantage point. The truck had been such an unusual sight at first that he had to check it out. Every other vehicle and building along the street had been toppled or otherwise rendered useless and damaged by the blast of the supercarrier crash. But the oversized heavy garbage truck was sitting amongst the debris untouched. It had made a decent cover and vantage point but it was time to go.

He sprang over the side of the tall vehicle and landed with a kathunk on the fractured and debris-strewn sidewalk. The jumpers in his armored boots softened the landing and he used the gained energy to launch himself more than thirty meters down the alleyway toward the lieutenant's position. The long arc he made in the low Martian gravity brought him high enough to see over some of the debris and smoke down various alleyways and streets. Enough sunlight filtered through and refracted off the dust pouring a faint red hue over the cityscape. Being above the heavy smoke made Jackson feel nervous; since he was above the cover of the cloud he felt naked and visible—vulnerable to Seppy sensors. He decided to shorten the height of his leaps and lengthen the breadth of them instead from then on.

Each step with the jumpboots added to his own strength, allowing him to cover a half of a kilometer block in about thirty seconds. Jackson carefully picked each step so that each time he landed it was in a shadow-covered section of the alleyway, a trick he had learned the hard way in the Triton campaigns the year before. He also made certain to stay either below debris and building level or below the dust cloud height.

"Packer, where the hell are you?" Jackson could see the blue dot overlaid on the map in his visor. The private's blue dot was practically overlaid upon his own, but Jackson could not see the private anywhere.

"Oorah!" Private Jessica Packer bounded a few meters to the sergeant's right and then back upward out of sight.

The motion startled the sergeant for a microsecond. "Goddamnit Packer, I nearly shot your ass! Next time I might not be so restrained." He had his AIC reset the resolution of his maps to show altitude detail. The map quickly jumped from his visor to his mind. Three-dimensional active maps were better displayed directly to the brain. They were easier to understand that way. Jackson tracked the private now that he had figured out what she was doing. She was using the buildings as springboards and jumping from a building wall on one side of the street to one on the other rather than ever landing on the street. Another tactic learned from having been shot at before. The unit had seen its share of action over the last year.

Sergeant Jackson, on the other hand, liked having ground underneath his feet. Call him old-fashioned or afraid of heights, but he thought walking, running, and jumping were best done from the ground. Besides, after he fell through that building on Triton and into the midst of a Seppy shitstorm, he didn't care to bounce on them anymore unless he had to, absolutely had to. The two Marines continued down the alleyway covering each other as best they could while making toward the smoke plume. A couple of times they had to cover and freeze as Seppy mecha flew overhead. This slowed them down a bit.

Lieutenant Washington was still somewhere a quarter of a klick or so ahead of them and from the map in the sergeant's mind he could tell that the lieutenant was using the same bouncing tactic as Private Packer. The sergeant could hear the enemy tanks and troops from time to time and could occasionally see dust plumes from their movement, but the passive sensors of his armored e-suit was picking up nothing. Nothing! They were being jammed by some fancy equipment. Either that or the Seppies had developed a new stealth encryption that rendered the QM sensors useless. Jackson didn't like it. He may have only been an E5 but he knew a rat when he smelled one. Even on Triton the QM sensors worked. How could the Seppies have that kind of technology?

Jackson and Packer continued carefully bouncing through the city toward Dome Circle, the map in their heads showing five blue dots converging. Dome Circle was the largest driving circle in the Sol System. Fourteen different roads converged on the ten-lane circle, which was about seventy meters in diameter. Several lanes formed from overpasses above it and two came from underground. The lanes twisted and turned until they smoothly dumped out onto the circle. In the middle of the driving circle was a twenty-meter-tall monument to Sienna Madira, the one hundred and eleventh president of the United States and the first from Mars. The great lady was also the leader of the Martian Marauders, the militia that stopped the first wave of civil war in the Tharsis Montes region of the planet.

Sergeant Jackson and Private Packer stopped bouncing on the edge of the driving circle's eight-o'clock position, taking shelter under the pillars of one of the overpasses. Jackson had spotted the second lieutenant about thirty meters to their right in the mouth of one of the tunnels just south of the six-o'clock spot. According to the map in his head, Corporal Shelly and Private Kudaf were on the far side of the circle approaching the two o'clock position. Unfortunately, the smoke clouds were being pulled through the circle with cyclonic force and whirled such a mass of debris and dust that there was no seeing past the statue in the middle. Using radar was out of the question.

"Lieutenant, Packer and Jackson are in position."

"Roger that, Sarge," the lieutenant replied.

"Incoming!" Shelly called over the net. "Goddamnit Kootie, get the fuck down!"

"Corporal Shelly! What's going on?" the lieutenant called back over the rapid HVAR fire sounds coming through the net. "Everybody converge on Shelly and Kudaf! Move!"

"Mecha, sir! We've got mecha everywhere!"