One Day on Mars

'Excuse me,' Nancy interrupted. 'It hasn't been that long since the Americans bombed the mountain. I suspect they'll be back soon.'

'You're right,' the mother said nervously. 'We still have at least a couple of minutes or so. But you are right. We should be getting underground to the evac train.'

They are evacuating. Do they know of the coming second wave or is it just a good idea to evacuate after a nuclear attack? Allison asked. Nancy could barely conceive that a mole could get that deep into the United States of America to know of the details of this operation.

Unlikely they know? Most likely they are playing it smart, Nancy thought nervously.

Play it carefully.

Agreed. But we should hurry them along as best we can.

'Are you separated from your unit?' the man asked, noting the more elaborate e-suit Nancy wore. Her suit was of the type the resistance fighters wore.

The cover seems to be working . . . 

So far it does, Allison replied.

So far! Be more optimistic.

'You could say that. My brothers and I were retooling the long-range SAMs at the foothills when the attack started. They were all killed by American mecha and their death from above . . . pah, cowards! I returned to the mountains to regroup with others but was delayed by the nuclear blast.' Nancy recited her cover-story memories as she read them in her head.

'How did you end up here?' the man asked.

'Enough, Fayad, we must go now. The train for the evac ships leaves in twenty minutes,' the small-framed woman in the e-suit, obviously his Prime Wife, ordered. 'Kira, you should come with us. If your unit is sacrificed there is little else you can do from here. Ahmi has been served. You can rejoin with your family at the rendezvous.'

Evac ships? Ships to where? Nancy thought.

Now we are getting somewhere.

'Very well. But I am alone. My family was killed at Elysium a year ago.'

'Then you can come with us,' Lelandra said.

'I'd like that.' Nancy agreed and nodded her helmet. 'But we should hurry, I think.'

The three adults, one child, and one robot cat bounced farther northeast and away from the nuclear blast area. As they bounced, Nancy caught glimpses of many more evacuees' motion with her esuit sensors. The QM and IR revealed pockets of e-suits bouncing through the small rural dome outcroppings and all of them were bouncing in generally the same direction. There were actually casualties and some minor wounded that they would stop and help from time to time, but there was no wounded on the order that would have been expected from a nuclear blast. No, the Separatists had left the blast region or were in the process of leaving before the nuke was dropped. Nancy hoped to find out why.

Allison?

Yes, Nancy?

I'm Nancy no more. For now on, I'm Kira Shavi, understood?

Yes, Kira.

Right.

Chapter 8

11:01 AM Mars Tharsis Standard Time

'We'd better fucking hurry, Lieutenant Colonel, sir!' Corporal Shelly downloaded the QM map from his visor to the Marine strike mecha through the optical line-of-sight port. They could communicate with each other on the QM wireless but Lieutenant Colonel John Masterson's AIC had warned him that the Seppies didn't know they were there and since they were spoofing the QM communications and jamming the long-range it might give away the fact that an entire squadron of U.S. Marine strike mecha survived the crash of the Churchill. The long-range coms were still being jammed completely.

'Roger that, Corporal. Looks like your second lieutenant and sergeant are in a heap of shit.' Masterson adjusted his optical sensor net to update continuously from the QM data collected by the two armored e-suit Marines that had run into his strike squadron. That way only the presence of the two AEMs would be compromised. Of course, the fact that his squadron had wiped out several handfuls of Seppy mecha since the crash may have exposed them anyway. But until he knew for certain he was going to use every advantage and take every precaution.

'Okay, Cardiff's Killers, let's get in there and pull these two Marines out of the fire before it's too late. Converge on Dome Circle and kill those bloody Seppy bastards.'

'Die, you Seppy bastards!' Sergeant Clay Jackson ducked back behind the steel and concrete fountain wall surrounding the giant metallic statue of Sienna Madira for cover. The Seppy ground support troops and the mecha were literally only tens of meters from them and had only halted their progression due to the horrendous return of hypervelocity automatic railgun fire that the sergeant and second lieutenant had managed to maintain. But the two of them were running out of ammo and had to take more precise shots with very little defilading fire. Both of the Marines had exhausted their complement of grenades and it was unlikely that hand-to-mecha combat would turn out in their favor. They were outgunned, flanked, and seriously outnumbered. Not to mention that the second lieutenant had a big fucking hunk of metal sticking through his leg.

'It's been an honor, Clay!' Second Lieutenant Thomas Washington rose to a knee and took four aimed shots at