One Day on Mars

'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!'

Chapter 6

10:06 AM Mars Tharsis Standard Time

'Holy shit! There's mecha all over the place! Where did they get that much mecha? Jesus, the Seppies have been busy.' Lieutenant Commander Boland dropped his bombing-run load over the mass of Seppy drop tanks that were wreaking havoc on the fleet's ground assault forces. The counterattack on the far-side dome farms of Elysium was going as planned although the resistance was considerably higher than the fleet had expected.

Although the sun had long set, the mecha were easily detected with the IR and QM sensors. The curious thing