One Day on Mars

1:30 PM Mars Tharsis Standard Time

"Everybody down! Now!" Second Lieutenant Washington pulled the civilians into the foxhole as several Ares fighters corkscrewed overhead, only a few tens of meters off the deck, with a wake of noise and flying Martian dust trailing behind them. Two of them were being tracked by Seppy Gnats and there were several Seppy Stingers in bot-mode bouncing and flying around in the mix.

The American tank squadron had gone to bot-mode and were scattering fast along the ridgeline and had begun firing their cannons and main directed energy weapons. The DEGs were held in the hand of the bot-mode tanks and were being fired from the hip.

A mass of Seppy drop tanks pounded over the hillside. There had to be more than two hundred of them and they were intermingled with ground vehicles and armored Seppy troops that were scattering the mountainside with automatic railgun fire.

"Marines! Hold off on cover fire and shut down the QMs. We are to keep the civilians out of harm's way! Understood," Washington ordered his AEMs.

"Lieutenant, those Army tanks are extremely outnumbered . . . shit!" Moore instinctively ducked his head as an Ares fighter screamed over his head flying upside down and backwards while washing the sky with its blue-green directed energy pulses. A Seppy missile struck the fighter on the port wing, sending it reeling and slamming into the ground. Martian soil, fire, smoke, and debris flew upward in a slow arc across the edge of the escarpment.

"What would you have us do, Senator?" the second lieutenant asked.

"Fight, Marine! Fight!" Major Moore said. "Fight and keep those Seppy motherfuckers off my family!" He rolled the Seppy HVAR off his shoulder and turned to Reyez Jones who was cowering in the bottom of the foxhole. "Reyez Jones! If I give you the order you WILL pick up my daughter and jump over that escarpment with her. Do you hear me, Reyez Jones!"

"Uh, yes, Senator! That is a hell of an idea. Why not do it now?" Jones perked up and peaked over the edge of the foxhole at the fifty-meter run to the edge of the cliff.

"No!" Major Moore ordered. "You'll do it when I say so. That is a last effort because we won't have any Marines or Army tanks down there to protect us. But if I give the word you go! Go fast! And you protect my daughter with your life, understand!" The senator turned to his wife and held her hand for a brief second. "Sehera, you'll be right behind him, right?"

"I'll be right behind him, Alexander." Sehera replied affectionately to her husband. If they hadn't been in e-suits she would have kissed him and her daughter.

"All right then, I'm gonna keep these motherfuckers off our ass!" Major Moore said and patted his daughter on the helmet. "I love you, baby." He smiled at the little girl and bounced about fifteen meters out of the foxhole and then four or five more times to another stone outcropping and took up a sniper position nearly seventy meters away.

"I love you, Daddy," the little girl cried. She wasn't sure what exactly was going on but she could tell by the reaction of the adults that something was serious and scary and the noise was terrible and she didn't like the tone of her daddy's voice.

"That's right, Marine, fight!" Joanie Hassed, the little Triton refugee, followed right behind the senator. "I didn't want to go skydiving today anyway."

"Shit. Just what we need is a couple of loose cannon civilians," Washington said under his breath. "Clay, keep them covered! Kootie on me!"

"Yes sir," Sergeant Jackson said. "They're covered sir. Shelly, get those two down in the hole better and dig out the bottom a little deeper. We do not draw fire to this foxhole if it can be helped, understood!"

"Yes sergeant!" Shelly started digging the hole deeper.

Sergeant Jackson leveled his HVAR across the edge of the foxhole and kept a bead on the fight. His trigger finger itched.

The second lieutenant and the private leapfrogged each other up the mountain, taking up positions on either side of the senator and the HVAR-toting woman. The four of them started picking targets and bringing them down. They focused on e-suited Seppies but every now and then got a close shot at a Seppy drop tank's joints and other vulnerable spots.

"Calvin, tell me you are getting all this!" Gail Fehrer patted her cameraman on the back and eased her head up to visor level with the top of the foxhole.

"Every Pulitzer-winning bit of it, Gail. That senator is one balls-to-the-wall son of a bitch!" Calvin held the camera ball over his head above the rocks and tracked the senator's activities through the view on his cameratech's e-suit visor display. Often he would be distracted by a hand-to-hand mecha encounter on the ground or by an Ares fighter screaming overhead through swarms of enemy planes, missiles, and directed energy blasts. Calvin was getting extreme close-ups of war from an inside-the-battle view. It would indeed be Pulitzer material.

"Watch what you say about my daddy!" Deanna kicked at the cameraman's shin with her jumpboots. Sehera had to hold her zealous daughter down or she might have hurt the poor bastard.

"Like father like daughter," Sehera explained to the big sergeant guarding them.

"I see." Sergeant Clay Jackson just thought this was the weirdest day he'd ever had as an armored e-suit Marine.

Lieutenant Colonel Mason Warboys and the Warlords were without their sensors and the view from inside an M3A17-T was somewhat obstructed, so the tank squad commander had ordered his troops to all go to bot-mode for better visuals. Warboys maintained a constant bombardment from his DEG into the Seppy drop tanks' line and went to the smaller but more rapidly aimable forty-millimeter gun on top of the DEG turret for in close and rapidly maneuvering targets. The forty-millimeter gun usually ran in anti-artillery and anti-missile mode, but with the sensors jammed they were not very effective on incoming ordnance. So, Warboys had put the guns to use manually under his DTM control. While in bot-mode the turret-mounted railgun looked like a half-dome head atop the bot's cockpit with the barrel sticking out for a nose.

"Shit! Guns, guns, guns!" He fired the main gun across the hillside at a rushing tank mode enemy vehicle. A bright blue-green pulse of energy separated the turret from the main body of the enemy tank. Running headlong at the exploding enemy mecha, Warboys jumped over the fireball and on top of the mecha's wingman, which was transfiguring to bot-mode. Warboys rammed the fist of his heavily armored tank into the transfiguring enemy vehicle and punched through to the inner workings of the linkage between the torso and the right arm. The force of his punch broke through the linkage system. Sparks and steaming black and red hydraulic fluids spewed from within it. Warboys grabbed at the arm from the enemy tank, ripped it free, and then jammed it through the cockpit, running it through the pilot and mecha.

"Colonel, on your six!" Warlord Seven burned a blue-green DEG bolt across the sky just behind Warboys, taking out a tank that had caught the lieutenant colonel unaware.

"Thanks, Seven. Damned Seppy jamming, we need our sensors!"

"You got that right, Warlord One."

"Warlord One, it looks like the Seppy bastards have figured out that their tanks are sitting ducks and are all going bot," Warlord Two noticed. "We gonna get that help anytime soon?"

"Just keep pounding at the fuckers relentlessly, Warlords! Whether we get help or not, we kill as many of these Seppy motherfuckers as we can until there ain't a one of us left. Got it? The U.S. Army Tank Command Warboys' Warlords don't need no goddamned gyrenes to bring hell!" Warboys had to go to guns and fired blindly behind him as he ran and leapt toward an outcropping for cover.

"Hooah! Colonel!"

"One, you've got two on you trying to get you in a crossfire!" Warlord Six saw the two Seppy tanks trying to sandwich their leader and trap him at the edge of the gorge, leaving him with no place to go but Hell.

"Shit!" Warboys continued to fire the forty-millimeter behind him blindly. Without sensors all he could do was shoot and hope for a hit. He scanned to his right and caught a glimpse of the mecha glinting in the Martian sunlight as it slowly dropped behind the mountain. So Warlord One turned his gun toward the general direction of the glint and fired.

"Guns, guns, guns!"

Enemy cannon fire from his other side knocked him to the ground. As Warboys tried to roll the mecha over onto all fours and then up he caught a quick glimpse of two armored e-suit Marines and two civilians with HVARs firing just over his head. They dove for cover as a bot with a missing leg tumbled over the colonel's tank and on top of them. The Seppy drop tank fell only a couple of meters on the other side of Warlord One. The lava rock gave the AEMs and civilians just enough cover to keep from being squished. One of the Marines, a private, rushed out from under the mecha and tossed a grenade into the cockpit and then dove for cover as it exploded.

Warboys pushed himself up to his mechanized feet and strode back over the dead enemy bot and backed away from the gorge. With a quick shake of his head, a deep breath, and a fast prayer, Warlord One turned back across the Martian battlefield to find more anti-American Separatist motherfuckers to send home to Jesus.

"Warlord One, Warlord One! Colonel Warboys, are you okay?" Warlord Two rushed to the side of his leader and turned his back to him, laying down more cover fire with his DEG giving Warboys time to regain his composure.

"I'm all right, Two," Warboys replied. "We've got AEMs and civvies back there. Let's push away from them! And see if we can't clear out an extraction LZ."

"Yes sir."

The tank mecha squadron was holding their own but they were extremely outnumbered and would soon be overwhelmed. But Warboys had a plan. Actually, it was Burner's plan but it was working well so far. And, goddamnit all to hell, even a jarhead like Burner did have a good idea every now and then. As long as his tanks could last long enough to bait the Seppy mecha into the trap.

"Warlord Five, watch your six. There's two drop tanks about to crawl up your ass!" Warlord Four warned his wingman.

"Now, Warboys?" The commander of the Marine FM-12 squadron beckoned. His Marines were ready to go to work and their trigger fingers were way past itchy.

"Not yet, Burner! Not yet!" Warboys scanned across the Martian landscape and noted that the majority of the tanks hadn't engaged them just yet. They had thirty or forty continuously engaging them but there were hundreds of them taking up position on the hill. Warboys, and his AIC, ran scenarios in his mind trying to figure out how to bring the enemy tank mecha closer in so the Killers could rise up and surprise the living shit out of them. He did have an idea. A dangerous idea. A courageous idea.

"Warlords, form up on me and we're going to rush the Seppy line!"

"Yes sir!"

"Hooah, sir!"

"Burner, get your gyrene ass ready!"

"DeathRay, I know it's hot. But we've got word that the senator's family including a little girl is in the LZ," Vulcan argued with the Ares pilot.

"It's too goddamned hot, Vulcan. I repeat. Too. Goddamned. Hot! No, and that is an order." DeathRay yanked the HOTAS left and rolled sideways to let a Gomer's missile flare by just beyond his cockpit.

That was fuckin' close.

Too close. If Jack went, Candis went with him and she didn't want to die any more than her human counterpart did.

"What's that sir? I can't hear you. You're breaking up a bit! DeathRay, I'm sending in an evac now!" Vulcan replied.

"Shit!"

"Angels, anybody want to volunteer to rescue a little girl from a firefight?" Lieutenant Junior Grade Seri "Vulcan" Cobbs asked over the rescue-net.

"Vulcan. Yo-yo. Angel Seven will go if somebody'll take our wing!" Ensign Bobby "Yo-yo" Jones replied.

"Ok, Yo-yo. You're on my wing. Let's get on the deck and stay fast and stay low," Vulcan ordered. Vulcan turned to look back at her gunner, Flight Gunner Petty Officer Third Class Sammy Jo Tapscott. "FG3 get ready to start laying down fire."

"Yes, ma'am!"

The two SH-102 Starhawks pulled away from the rest of the Angels' orbit and went to maximum descent toward the red planet beneath them. Vulcan brought the search and rescue vehicle to the edge of its flight envelope and continued to push the throttle forward. The two ships slammed through the Martian atmosphere, heating up the noses of the boxy rescue vehicles from aerodynamic friction. Klaxons and the "Bitching Betty" started blaring through the cabin.

"Warning. Approaching maximum g-load limit. Warning. Enemy targeting systems detected. Warning. Surface collision threat. Warning . . . " the "Bitching Betty" announced.

"The deck is coming up fast, Yo-yo. We'll flatten out and full-throttle to the evac," Vulcan ordered.

"Right behind you, ma'am." Yo-yo gritted his teeth and hoped his gunner was strapped in. Otherwise, he was having a shitty day. And from the threat alarms sounding in the cabin, it was about to get worse.

"DeathRay, DeathRay. Vulcan."

"Go Vulcan."

"If you can give us cover that would be nice. We're slamming air and about to make a run at the evac!"

"You sure about that, Vulcan?!"

"Roger that, sir! You can court-martial me if we survive."

"Good luck, we will plow the row a little for you." Goddamn Vulcan, he thought.

Senator! Fleet Angels Search and Rescue dropping in from orbit in thirty seconds! Abigail informed her counterpart.

About goddamned time!

"Second Lieutenant Washington!" Moore said over the QM almost at a scream to sound over the HVAR spitap spitaps, fighters careening overhead, and the mecha explosions and collisions.

"Yes, Senator?"

"My AIC has confirmed two SARs vehicles incoming. Can you spread the word to the tanks to give them cover?"

"There!" Joanie Hassed pointed out the two dust trails streaking across the edge of the escarpment.

Senator! I've got the AI Kitty information from BIL.

And?

The AIK is a wireless AI that rides the Kitty robot and controls it through the wireless.

So?

Don't you see, sir . . .

At that moment a missile flared across the overhead and detonated not far from the other foxhole where his wife and daughter were. It was followed by enemy cannon fire and other missiles tracking onto the incoming evac ships. The SH-102 Starhawks yanked and banked as best they could and returned fire but it was too hot for them to attempt any type of landing. Cannon fire flared against the boxy Starhawks with splashes of metal sparks and fiery red plasma venting away as parts of the metal hull plates vaporized.

Over the side, Abigail! Tell the SARs to go over the side of the escarpment now!

Yes sir! I understand sir!

Warboys had pounded into the middle of the largest steady mass of Seppy drop mecha leading his Warlords into the valley of death. They were bringing more than they were receiving. Once they had fully engaged the enemy tanks in the full frontal attack it had thrown the Seppies off guard, briefly. The initial insertion through the line allowed them to do a lot of damage but as the enemy regained their composure it was quite clear that the Warlords were outnumbered with odds they could not overcome.

"Warlord Three is gone! Warlord Three is gone!" Warlord Seven cried over the tac-net.

"I'm hit! I'm hit!" Warlord Four spun over backward onto its back with a gaping hole in the right side of the mecha's torso. The cockpit vented atmosphere into the low pressure outside and the DTM interface inside the cockpit was blinking in and out. Viewscreens on the HUD went dark as electronics spewed sparks and began to smolder and then flame dully in the light Martian atmosphere. Warlord Four, Captain Salma Rodriguez, looked down at the gaping hole in her e-suit that ran from her abdomen to where her left leg and pelvis used to be as she bled out and coughed blood into her visor. "Oh Jesus . . . cough . . . oh fuck."

Vallery . . . self-destruct authorization as the Seppy motherfuckers overrun us, Warlord Four ordered her AIC.

It was an honor, Captain. I'll maximize the damage to them.

You too, Lieutenant. You were . . . a good friend.

Thank you, Salma. Are you sure you wish to self-destruct, yes or no?

Yes.

"Oh Jesus!"

"Warlord Four bought the farm! Shit! Guns, guns, guns! Lay some cover back here!" Warlord Two shouted as an exploding missile tossed him forward, nearly throwing him off balance. Warlord Two spun his mecha around just in time to go face-to-face with a botmode drop tank. He instinctively head-butted the mecha and pushed it backward with his right hand while at the same time sweeping its large mechanical legs with mechanized martial artistic brilliance. Warlord Two stomped through the Seppy drop tank's cockpit with a half ton mechanical foot before the poor enemy bastard had time to respond to being thrown.

"Retreat, Warlords! Retreat to the escarpment and scatter. Lay rearward cannon fire as fast as you can." Warboys did a backwards flip just escaping the grasp of an enemy mecha. He rotated his cannon rearward and blasted it as he ran away. His DEG at the hip cleared a path for his squad. Warboys ran serpentine through the enemy mecha firing his cannon and his DEG and when that wasn't enough, going hand-to-hand with the enemy mecha, ripping at them with the giant mechanized hands and feet of his vehicle.

"Fish, give those tankheads some cover on the north side! Demonchild, see if you and Hula and Stinky can't cover those Angels!" DeathRay dropped almost below ten meters from the deck to strafe the enemy drop tank lines, trying to draw some of the fire from the Warlords and to distract them from the evac ships. "Fox three!"

" . . . guns! Scratch four!" Fish exclaimed.

The problem with drawing fire was always that it meant you were trying to get more people to shoot at you. And at the moment there were plenty of Seppy Stingers and Gnats swarming and buzzing the sky trying to kill the Gods of War so that they didn't also need a bunch of surface dwellers pounding away at them too. But Warboys was in a fix! One of the downed M3A17s had just self-detonated, taking out several of the surrounding Seppies with suicidal efficiency, but that was just a sign that things were going to shit fast for the tankheads.

"Guns, guns, guns." Jack sprayed the DEG, again disrupting the tanks that were about to engulf Warboys. But the Warlords weren't giving up without some serious fighting. And the Gods of War were going to help out as best as they damned well could.

"Warlords, move!" Warboys fought like a madman to keep the tide of Seppy tanks off his Warlords but he couldn't retreat and fight efficiently without his sensors.

"Sir, on your left!"

"Look out, Warlord Two!"

"Fuckin' Seppy motherfuckers!" Warlord Two screamed. "Fuck you! Fox three! Goddamnit all to hell. Guns, guns, guns!"

"There's just too goddamned many of them, One!"

"Well, Burner I guess now's a good a time as any!" Warboys finally called his pal for help and the trap was sprung. Warboys just hoped that the surprise and the superior fire power of the Marine FM-12s would be enough to overcome the extreme numbers of the enemy.

"Now Reyez! Sehera! Go now! Go! Go! Go!" Major Moore stood up, firing the Seppy HVAR full auto to lay down cover at any enemy motherfucker that looked crossways at his little girl. He bounced and zigged and zagged across the lava stones, actually charging the oncoming rush of Separatist mecha. One unarmored retired Marine in a civilian e-suit with a commandeered Seppy HVAR that was running low on ammo charged an oncoming wall of enemy armored mecha. And for the moment he was a force to be reckoned with.

"Kootie, on your right!" Washington yelled over the QM. "Sergeant, give those civilians cover as hot as you can! Kootie, grenades!"

"Hold on, Dee! We're going for a ride!" Reyez Jones hugged the little girl to him and bounced out of the foxhole toward the edge of the cliff, never looking back. Sehera bounced in right behind him.

"Go go!" Sehera screamed.

"Keep the video going!" Gail Fehrer yelled over the sounds of the battle at her cameraman. "This is incredible!"

"Yeah, if it don't get us fuckin' killed!" Calvin replied from behind the AEMs in the foxhole.

"Roger that, Lieutenant!" Clay stood firing his railgun full auto and popping out the grenades from the underbarrel launcher as fast as he could action the slide. "You heard the lieutenant, Shelly!"

"Oorah, motherfuckers!" Shelly bounced up out from the foxhole over the ancient lava rock outcropping and rushed in to meet the senator. She was better armored and armed and could lay down more serious damage. The sergeant fell in behind them, pouring out grenade after grenade into the oncoming barrage of enemy tank mecha. The Warlords crested the ridgeline battered and bloodied and fighting hard as hell!

Reyez bounced one bounce away from the edge of the escarpment and tapped the ready switch on the gliderchute that he'd been packing since morning. He hoped that the little girl's mother remembered how to operate the chute system. With that thought he took a millisecond to look over his shoulder to check on Sehera. She bounced down beside him almost at the same instant, running as hard as she could. Reyez might have been startled if he hadn't already been scared out of his mind.

"Come on!" she screamed at the man carrying her daughter and activated her gliderchute pack like a pro. Just as they crested the edge of the escarpment they bounced their jumpboots as hard as they could and the ground disappeared beneath them for at least a half a kilometer or more as they began to fall out of sight over the edge. Then a swarm of FM-12 strike mecha rose up around them.

"Shit!" Reyez had to roll his body sideways to avoid hitting the wing of one of the fighter planes. Anybody other than a base-jumping expert like Reyez would have probably hit the wing of the plane and been dead. As he rolled his body and arched his back he stared eye-to-eye with the mecha's pilot, who seemed just as surprised as he was. Reyez was so close he could read Lieutenant Jason "Boulder" Cordova underneath the fighter's cockpit. He pulled Deanna closer to him and it took him a second or two to stabilize his fall, but he wasn't concerned at all, for this was what Reyez did for a living!

"Wait on the chute, Sehera!" Reyez was now in his element. "Wait!" He held on to the little girl with both hands as hard as he could, squeezing her to him. He reached down and grabbed his belt carabiner and snapped it onto the little girl's e-suit harness.

The floor of the cliff began to loom upward at them. They had fallen well below the edge of the escarpment by hundreds of meters and were picking up speed. Even though the Martian gravity was only thirty-eight percent of that on Earth, just under four meters per second per second of acceleration was pretty appreciable and there was much less air friction to slow down their descent.

"Now!" Reyez shouted. He waited for Sehera's chute to open so that she would be a second or two above them and then he pulled his cord. The chute opened and jerked them to a slow drifting fall. Deanna squeezed the adrenaline junky hard to her.

"This is fun!" she said. "Look!" Two SH-102 Starhawks pulled into hover formation behind them and followed the gliderchutes all the way to the bottom of the cliff.