One Day on Mars

The mushroom cloud rose to a perfect round peak with a bright red and yellow fireball filling it. Rings of dust and smoke encircled the stem of the mushroom cloud and rose upward until they collided with the head of it at the forming and rising fireball. Nancy could see the shock wave spread out surrounding the blast area. She continued to fall toward the surface and stabilized her skydiving position. Focus, she thought.

Nancy, shock wave in three, two, one! Allison warned.

The shock wave hit with high velocity but with low pressure at that altitude. Low pressure or not, it was plenty of force to send Nancy tumbling in a wild chaotic fall. She fought the g-forces of the spin by spreading her body out as flat as she could to slow the neck-jarring tumble. With a few adjustments of leg and arm positions and the arch of her back, she managed to right herself into a flat spin and then into a skydiver's prone falling position.

Engage the gliderchute! Nancy thought to her AIC.

Gliderchute engaged, Allison replied, and the harness around her waist and shoulders yanked her tight and Nancy's diving descent rapidly averted from a downward plunge to a slow sauntering enjoyable glide. Nancy shook her head and squinted her eyes until she regained her senses.

IR and QM, she thought to the suit's sensor array. The night vision system kicked in with a big white saturated bright spot over the target zone. The nuclear blast over the outpost was still too hot to view directly. Allison, adjust the contrast nonlinearly on the hot spot, please, she thought.

Right away. Tree detection system is active and will be marked in the view, the AIC replied.

Good. Overlay latest map on the view, also.

Roger that.

Any pedestrian or vehicle motion? Nancy asked. The AIC ran motion detection and change detection algorithms, searching for any flickers of motion within the view of their sensors that might be something other than random. There were no telltale signs of motion with a purpose.

None.

Nancy guided the gliderchute through the now chaotic winds of the aftermath of the explosion. There were occasional whirlwinds and updrafts that would alter her course and cause problems with the gliderchute harness chords, but she managed to stay on course and avoid the chute being ripped away. As the gliderchute fell through the Martian night and closer to the now devastated mountain basal city, Nancy caught a glimpse of Phobos to her south and just above the faded and scattering mushroom-shaped dust cloud. She surmised from the southward- stretching misshapen mushroom cloud that there must have been a high-altitude jet stream moving in that direction. She spiraled her flight path southward around the edge of the total destruction zone and closed in on her landing target zone.

Radiation dose is growing rapidly but still within the parameters of the injection, Nancy, Allison informed her.

Mm hm, Nancy thought as she checked the altimeter readout on her visor. She was at five kilometers above the westernmost part of the total destruct zone, flying southward and counterclockwise around the periphery of the aftermath of the nuclear explosion. The sight was anything but tranquil or serene. Fires raged across the outpost city, and secondary explosions triggered every few seconds from gas mains or escaping oxygen. To the north in the distance Nancy could see occasional AA fire and missile contrails. The fighting was getting closer. Time was getting short.

Her plan was to bleed off altitude and drop into the eastern edge of the moderate destruct zone at the three- o'clock position. She put the gliderchute in a slip and checked her tree detection system. The Martian conifer trees could reach as high as three hundred meters tall, so they could cause problems when gliderchuting at night. But her detection system was functioning perfectly. There were just no trees or buildings of much concern. The blast had taken care of that. It had taken care of other things too.

There was very little activity beneath her. The AA fire that had tracked the Ares fighter Jack Boland brought her in had stopped once the nuke detonated, and she could see nothing in the local vicinity flying. The electromagnetic pulse and general mayhem due to the devastating tactical nuclear device had done their job and disabled the local perimeter sensors of the Reservation periphery mountain city defenses. This allowed Nancy to slip in undetected— the plan had been carefully calculated for years. It was all working well, so far. Detonating a small nuke just to infiltrate the Reservation might have seemed like overkill, but all the recent intelligence suggested that bad things were on the horizon from within the Seppy homeland and the CIA needed to know just what those bad things were. After all, the president had approved the plan, including the tactical nuke.

Nancy kept a close eye on the altimeter reading—one thousand meters and dropping. The moderate destruct region of the city surrounding the Separatist missile base looked anything but moderate. The shock wave from the blast had strewn debris to and fro and fires raged in almost every direction. She looked for a dark spot with no fires but they were few and far between. Altimeter reading—six hundred meters and dropping.

There! she thought as she spotted a dark spot in the flames. Allison, zoom in there. She pointed.

Got it. The AIC zoomed in on the dark region and increased the sensitivity levels of the QM sensor suite of her e-suit helmet. Then the spike detector went off.

'What the . . . ' Nancy muttered to herself.

Trees. Allison responded matter-of-factly.

Why aren't they burning then?

Who knows? Blast dynamics are weird that way, Allison explained.

Well, whatever. It looks like a park. Those buildings there to the west must have shielded them. Trees around the periphery and a flat field in the middle, looks like a jumperball field, I think. This should do nicely. Nancy brought the gliderchute into a tight spiral over the field, careful of the trees as her altitude was now dropping. She spiraled inside the circumference of the circular field and increased the illumination of the IR and QM sensors, her night vision visor at full intensity. The ground was coming up fast. Altimeter reading was at one hundred meters . . . fifty . . . twenty . . .

Nancy hit her IR diode helmet lights and the ground lit up beneath her just in time for her to flare the gliderchute and stop her descent about one meter from the surface. The gliderchute caught some last-minute