One Day on Mars

thought police to mass-murder American sympathizers and Sehera had seen it as a girl. Some things from the past were hard to shake. So, visual cues, gestures, and communications over the e-suit's QM would have to do.

Alexander bounced them cautiously from one street intersection to the next and then would cross together in one jump each time. Abigail kept close monitor on the approaching troops and their little fleeing refugee pack's progress to see when and if they would converge. Unfortunately, her simulations never had them making it to the elevator before the troops got there.

Too late, Senator. We just are not going to make it.

Shit. We need a new plan or route. Ideas?

Not really.

'Okay, listen up. We are too late. The Seppies are already at the open court,' he said over the QM com. 'Reyez, is there another way up the dome?'

'Daddy,' Deanna interrupted.

'Just a minute, baby, Daddy is trying to think.' Alexander replied, and continued to scan the area for a new approach.

'I don't know of any other ways.' Reyez Jones shrugged. In the esuit it was a gesture that was hard to do and just as hard to notice.

'But Daddy.' Deanna pulled away from her mother's handhold.

'What, Deanna?' The senator tried not to show his temper.

'Can't we just go down a floor and get on the elevator?' she asked.

I can't believe it. Of course we can, sir. There are seven floors beneath us containing infrastructure equipment. We would have to do some backtracking to get down there though. Abigail illuminated a city tourist map showing the maintenance levels. It just never dawned on me to go down. Sorry Senator.

'You are something, you know that?' Alexander grabbed his daughter in a hug and tried to kiss her through the open faceshield. When that didn't work he just hugged her again and then patted her little helmeted head. 'Follow me. We'd better hurry.' He turned back the way they had come toward the nearest entrance to the maintenance and infrastructure levels.

We are running out of time, Nancy. We had better hurry. Allison warned of the impending second wave of the aerial assault on the mountain range.

I know, I know. I wasn't expecting this. Where are all the people? she asked. They had been bouncing for several kilometers from the landing site and had yet to see a single body, screaming or walking wounded, or any sign of human life. It's almost as if the city had been warned and had been evacuated before the bomb had hit.

That is nearly impossible. Only you and I, a handful of operations analysts, the deputy director, the director, the NSA, the sec def, and the president know of our mission. Unlikely one of them is a mole, Allison responded.

Yeah, well, it's just plain weird if you ask me. Where the hell is everybody?

Nancy continued bouncing eastward and directly radially outward from the center of the bomb blast. The map on her visor showed her position at about twenty-seven kilometers from the center of the blast zone. There was little sign of the explosion at this range other than the occasional strewn debris that could have been blown around by the Martian winds anyway. Oh, and there was the small matter of the radioactive fallout, but the injection she had taken beforehand was taking care of that.

The region was little more than a rural outpost of the city that had been littered with lightweight trash and debris from the lingering winds of the nuclear blast. The streets were Martian soil mostly and were more like paths that had been pounded out by jumpboots, buggies, and hovercraft. There were domes and rock dwellings and shops scattered about the mountain's side but there was no sign of people.

Nancy bounced up on top of one of the geodesic domes that was probably a single family dwelling for a better vantage point. She scanned full-circle around her for motion and to get a better understanding of her path. The city behind her was still aflame and dying with occasional explosive bursts and pressurized environments explosively decompressing into the Martian atmosphere.

There is wireless activity ahead. Must be that we have found the evacuees. Alison alerted Nancy. There is a lot of multi-path and I am having a bit of trouble locating the transmitters but it looks like multiple transceivers. I'm training a neural net on it.

Just keep me posted. Maybe some of the other sensors will work better.

Nancy looked up at the sky briefly and for the first time could see stars through the dust cloud. There was Jupiter shining brightly overhead and Saturn not far above it. The sky to the west was still covered with clouds of dust and smoke and every now and then a star would twinkle through the cracks between them.

Motion, Nancy! Coupling the motion sensors and the wireless multi-path I've trained the sensors to locate the motion Looks like multiple bogies The nearest is about four hundred meters away, Allison warned her biological counterpart.

The three-dimensional view in Nancy's mind zoomed slightly northeast and down the street about four hundred meters. The starlight, IR, and QM sensor systems gave a data fusion image that was crystal clear in the pitch black Martian night.

A child? Nancy thought as she studied the image. She zoomed in on what appeared to be a child-sized e-suit rummaging through a storage bin on the outside wall of a small dwelling dome. Then a second set of views highlighted and zoomed in her visor, and a third, and then the tracking algorithms learned how to spot the motion and hundreds of targets began to pop up on her map. They all appeared to be evacuating in generally the same direction, some moving more slowly than others. The plan was working.

Nancy focused back on the child and the motion nearest it. The algorithm generated tracking trajectories that suggested the two nearby regions of motion appeared to be tracking the child. One a few blocks south of the child and the other a few blocks east. Further zoom revealed that the two tracks were adult-sized e-suits.

They're looking for the child. Nancy thought.