One Day on Mars

he thought to his staffer.

Already working on it, Senator. All I've got are the same engineering blueprints we've had for these lower levels of the city. The highlighted pathways are the route to the garbage collection and destruction system.

Thanks.

'Well, if I remember right . . . ' Reyez rolled his eyes to the ceiling in thought or recollection and was distracted momentarily by the brown mold stains scattered about by the leaky plumbing system of the city's engineering infrastructure. 'I seem to recall a service lift for reclaimable resources that could be transported to one of the manufacturing domes. I think it goes to a highbay and an airseam at the Southeast side of the dome.'

'Alexander, I'd rather take my chances outside than inside,' Sehera added.

'We could hide out there easier. There are sensors and electronic gates everywhere here,' Joanie Hassed agreed. Her life on Triton during the terrorist insurgency there had taught her the valuable lesson of lying low and staying out of sight. She would have rather kept Senator Moore from engaging the Seppies altogether, but it was too late for that now. And the big man seemed to know what he was doing.

'Okay. We go to that elevator and then out of the dome. We'll see about transportation to an evac once we get that far.' One thing a former Marine could do was to adapt and improvise. He continued to think in the Major Moore mode rather than as Senator Moore. He hoped that would keep them uncaptured and alive.

Abigail, how is the IFF hack coming?

It is harder than I thought it would be. The Separatist AIC technology is better than I had expected. A few more minutes. The AIC seemed uncertain of itself.

We don't need to risk a few more minutes right now, unless you are certain you are jamming it. Are you?

No sir.

Thought so. Keep thinking about it and maybe we'll get another sample later. But for now, I don't want them tracking us directly with it. Moore fished into his breast pocket and dug out the little sunflower- seed-shaped implant and then dropped it on the ground in front of him. He twisted it into the floor with the ball of his jumpboot causing a barely audible crunch.

Understood sir.

How are you coming with the cloaking hack countermeasure?

I know the signal is there because there is more energy overall in the bandwidth than should be there. But without the encryption sequence I can't find it. The dictionary code breaking search is still running but could take years. Any suggestions? Abigail asked.

Yeah, keep at it. Moore was ready for something to go their way, but so far his plans had been falling apart on him. Perhaps he should have listened to those two idiots at the adventure shop and just stayed put there.

'You want another beer?' Rod Taylor finished off his Mons Light and then crushed the can against his forehead. 'Reckon those idiots made it to the top of the dome?'

'I'll take one,' Vincent Peterson belched and then took out a pack of cigarettes and started to light it up. 'Who knows. Hate he had to take that little girl along with them. They're liable to get her killed. Idiots.'

'Hey man, this ain't a smoking section of the dome.' Rod smiled and handed his young friend another light beer. 'Yeah, poor kid.'

'Uh, Rod. Look outside that freakin' window.'

'Yeah? What about it?' Rod shrugged his shoulders and reached into the red and white cooler they had liberated from the beverage store down the street for another beer himself.

'I don't think with all those Seppy bastards out there anybody's gonna give a flying shit if I have a smoke.' Vince pointed at the armored trucks convoying down the street and shook his head.

'Well, it just ain't considerate is all—' Rod started but was interrupted by a group of Separatist troops in e-suits that had begun to unass outside the door of the shop and two of the men came through the door with two behind them in standard two-on-two coverage formation.

'What's up?' Vincent looked up at the Seppy railgun barrel lowered at him and lit his cigarette. 'We're closed.'

Lieutenant Commander Jack Boland sat in the middle of a row of ten simulation consoles in the Battle Operations and Scenario Simulation Room, the BOSS as it was known. The low level lighting of the room was accentuated only by the flickering of changing scenes on flat panel computer displays and cast a dim blue hue over the overcrowded computer battle lab. The display screens were mainly for secondary data acquisition and list display as most of the simulation was done through DTM link.

Jack's AIC was connected hardwire for maximum data rate to the BOSS wargaming, logistics, tactics, and strategy computer system. The BOSS main computer ran trillions of calculations per second to help squadron commanders plan and simulate upcoming operations. The BOSS implemented state-of-the-art AI software and genetic algorithms to predict the outcome of multiple coupled dynamical systems and perform calculations that consisted of thousands of differential equations all tangled up and connected in some way to each other.

The prediction requirements were orders of magnitude more complicated than those of the Navier-Stokes equations defining the chaotic realm of weather prediction. In fact, weather prediction and even chaotic phenomena injection was a subroutine implanted within the BOSS architecture and a small one at that compared to the detailed wargame models and logistics support simulations. It had been taught at war college for centuries that wars were lost and won due to the military handling of logistics implementation. The BOSS was designed to ensure a win.

The BOSS was the culmination of four hundred years of mathematically modeling warfare and it indeed was the boss when it came to wargaming and mathematical game theory and understanding the minutia of every piece of hardware, software, order, plan, tactic, strategy, and logistics effort was within its capability. The simulation was downloaded through the AIC link DTM simply because there was more information to be transferred between the BOSS and the user than could be displayed via any other means known to man. To be a certified BOSS user actually took several months of training, and to understand the system and truly implement it as a battle planning tool took years of experience or a natural knack for the complex DTM modeling and simulation environment. Fortunately, Lieutenant Commander Jack Boland had both.