One Day on Mars

Summit City was more like Las Vegas back on Earth than it was like New York City. Mons City, on the other hand, rivaled any of the huge megalopolises on Earth. It spiraled and grew out over most of the southwestern face of Olympus Mons from the escarpment to the summit.

The peak of the mountain was littered with hundreds of minor domes and highway tubules, but there were five major domes that were considered boroughs of Mons City by the locals. The main dome was over thirty kilometers in diameter with four ten-kilometer domes spread out equally around it. The four secondary domes of Mons City were spread out across the face of the southern side of the giant state-sized mountain at the three, six, nine, and twelve o'clock positions about the main dome. The domes were really cities within themselves. But the entire complex was the largest construct in mankind's history.

A little farther east and up the mountain one could see the naval base. There was continuous air and space traffic in and out of the base, a sign that there was more going on than day-to-day travel—like, a war. A war that had been waging on and off for more than three or four decades. A war that most of the American population wouldn't admit was even a war.

'What's that, Daddy?' Deanna asked, and pointed toward the large supercarrier hovering over the outskirts of the naval base.

Abigail? Senator Moore asked his staffer AI.

Yes, Senator. That is the U.S.S. Supercarrier Winston Churchill.

'That, my dear . . . ' Senator Moore paused for dramatic effect, a trick he'd often used on the senate floor. 'That is the U.S.S. Supercarrier Winston Churchill from the great state of South England.'

'What's a supercarrier, Daddy?'

Alexander smiled at his daughter. She was smart and beautiful—it pleased him, a lot, that she was inquisitive. But the senator had other things on his mind. The summit meeting at the Olympus Mons resort had been dragging on for weeks now with no end in sight. Alexander had come to Mars with the hopes of making a name for himself in political history by bringing the war that was raging at that very moment on the other side of the planet, just a few thousand kilometers away in Elysium, and elsewhere in the Sol System, to a halt.

But he had had no luck. He had known for some time that he needed to be there at Mons City for the summit. But he was beginning to wonder why. He was a minor member of the Senate Appropriations Committee; he simply wasn't powerful enough to make the deals needed to sway the Separatist Laborers Guild to cease hostilities and get back to work—the 'great' work of the United States of America. And somehow, the Separatists had become seriously armed with mecha and aircraft and other weapons far better than the ones he had faced in the Martian desert thirty years earlier. There were even rumors in the press that the extremists of the Separatist movement had acquired weapons of mass destruction, maybe even a gluonium warhead. Gluonium warheads had been developed in the past half century and were based on the so-called gluon force that binds quarks together. A single gluonium warhead could possibly take out a state-sized region. If it was true that the Separatists had acquired gluonium, then they could take out an entire megacity like Mons City with one bomb—if they could deliver it without it being detected.

There was more going on with the Separatists than people generally wanted to admit. The Separatists were getting materials from outside the USA—in other words, outside of the Sol System. But where? There were only four extra-solar colonies known to man: Proxima Centauri Planet Two, also known as Teradise, Ross 128 Planet Three Moon Beta, aka Xander's World, Lalande 21185 Planet Three, aka Utopia, and Tau Ceti Planet Four Moon Alpha, aka Ares. Alexander had a very good idea of what was going on, but he had desired and needed to know more about how the U.S. could handle the situation. He needed access to more information—to classified information.

So, Senator Moore had tried to finesse his way onto the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, or the SSCI —pronounced 'sissy' as he had learned—for all of his latest term. Without being exposed to the intelligence and what was really going on in the Local Bubble, it was hard to be effective in negotiations with the Separatist delegation at the summit. The Agricultural Committee members just do not get the access to Top Secret and special access information that the SSCI does.

The fact that the current administration had chosen to send such a low-echelon, only second-term, politician as the representative for the U.S. government at the summit meeting hinted as to America's sincerity with the Separatists. In other words, the current administration couldn't care less about the Separatists and their plight. It was only a political 'grass roots' hot button that had forced the president to take action and force the SSCI to brief Senator Moore into the pertinent information. After all, the young senator was the mouth of the 'grass roots' folks. He had always wondered why they'd picked him, a senator from Mississippi, and not one from a Martian region. The GOP supporters would spin that they suspected the president was subconsciously a bigot toward Martians, or at the least that he was a class elitist.

More information on how the country was planning on winning the war and with what new technologies gave Alexander a better hold on the summit talks, even if the general population couldn't care less about the war between the U.S. and the Separatist movement. The 'grass roots' groups simply wanted their tax dollars on Earth to quit going to a war on a planet that most of them had never been to. And the skirmishes in the outer part of the solar system were deemed an even bigger waste of tax dollars.

At times it seemed that only the Separatists cared. The latest news polls showed that most Earth and Luna citizens were so far removed from the actual war that the loss of life was being dismissed and Americans in general were sticking to their guns about 'not dealing with terrorists.' That battle cry, at least for now, would outweigh the cost of the war—but eventually the cost of the war would completely drive the politics.

By and large, the general population of inner Sol System thought of the Separatists as terrorists. But terrorists don't have armies, mecha, and air support. The Gnat aerospace fighter and the Orcus tank mecha were expensive pieces of equipment and the Seppies had been using them for decades. There had long been rumors that the U.S. government didn't really care about the aged combat systems because some of the spin-off companies in the Belt, or the Kuiper Belt, or maybe even at the Colonies, were manufacturing them at huge profits that were being used to grease certain politicians. Most of the components of the vehicles were manufactured on Earth, Luna, and Mars and then they were assembled somewhere else. So as long as the flow of money for the components and subsystems continued to keep millions in jobs across multiple congressional districts throughout the system, the purchase and therefore the assembly of the Separatist mecha and fighters was likely to continue.

Terrorists historically had not been known to have the type of economic and political power required to enable the continued support of what for all intents and purposes could be called an army. Of course, most terrorists throughout history hadn't had a region nearly the size of Africa cordoned off and given to them as their own place to live and protect. The Reservation was in essence its own country, separate from the United States, much like the American Indian reservations of the past.

Why would the government continue to allow them to arm themselves the way they had, for decades? The fact that the Separatists had mecha had come as surprise during the initiation of the Desert Campaigns thirty years ago,