The Mons City recapture battle plan was nonstandard in that there was a problem with the collateral damage. In previous battles involving the Separatist Reservation or guerilla training camps they were always over target zones with little infrastructure that was important to America. Well, that is, except for those two civilian terraformer domes Jack had so efficiently disposed of a few months back. But Jack had decided then that the domes were worth giving up if the U.S. Navy forces were able to take out the entire insurgent cell that was using them for cover. There were some politicians who hadn't agreed and when the images of the two domes pouring fire and black smoke into the Martian atmosphere hit MNN Jack was busted from CAG and the talks of getting a full third pip on his collar had ceased almost immediately following the incident.
Jack straightened himself in his chair and reached out into the virtual dogfighting and bombing runs swarming in his head. Through the DTM interface, of course, he was the only person that could see the simulation around him. The other battle planners and logistics experts sitting at the row of consoles had similar simulations or perhaps were merely moving equipment from point A to point B, but the effect was the same. The BOSS Room was filled with men and women in Navy uniform swatting about their heads at nonexistent pests. The simulation room had long been coined as the 'Looney Bin.'
Jack reached out with his right hand toward his virtual squadron of Ares fighters that were strafing virtual Seppy drop mecha around the Mons City domes. Long-wavelength infrared laser imaging detection and ranging (LIDAR) equipment located above his console detected the movement of his hand and the exact positioning of it to within a millionth of a meter was determined and fed back into the simulation computer system. In turn, his AIC detected that Jack intended to move the objects in front of him by hand and fed this information to the same computer. The simulation environment calculated new positions and then fed this into the wargaming models and moved the little virtual Martian red camo fighter planes around the virtual Marsscape accordingly.
The DTM interconnect downloaded and updated the simulation changes into Jack's head continuously and real- time faster than human reflex lag, so the interface was immediate as far as Jack could tell. Of course, Jack had planned hundreds, maybe thousands, of operations before and it had been since Navy Officer Battle Ops Simulation Training Course that he had even thought about how the BOSS system worked, so all of this was transparent to him. He just moved an object, and it moved. In the very old days of naval warfare the flag officers would use real models and marker boards. They would push model airplanes around on a two-dimensional mockup of the battle decks called a 'Ouija Board.' The Looney Bin with the DTM technology had made the Ouija Board a thing of ancient history.
The simulation was looking good and he was planning on using the Gods of War to lead the insertion into the occupied territory for the VIP extraction. The simulations showed heavy casualties in his squadron and a serious amount of collateral damage to the local city infrastructure. It couldn't be helped. And this simulation was based on the sketchy intelligence data of the Mons City insurgency and occupation forces. Jack knew that a simulation was only as good as the model and the data it was based on and there was no way of knowing just how accurate the data on the Seppy forces was.
'Shit, that has got to fucking hurt, Second Lieutenant!' Kootie commented on the bloody piece of metal rebar hanging out of Washington's leg.
'Hell, Private, I didn't even realize it was there.' Second Lieutenant Washington forced a grin that was almost lost on the private. The faint amber city street lighting was just barely bright enough to see through the tinting on the faceplate of the lieutenant's e-suit helmet. The atmosphere being sucked through the large gaping hole in the dome and the continuous addition of dust, debris, and smoke from the ongoing fighting had created a low-lying dense and very dark gray cloud system within the dome. Violent twirls, downdrafts, updrafts, and low-lying cloud scud fell just above the tops of the tall city buildings, blocking out all but the amber and neon artificial lighting of the burning city itself. Dust particles and water vapor fell in a low-gravity drizzle like a strange hybrid of rain, snow, and volcanic ash.
'Check it out, sir.' Corporal Shelly nodded at a skyscraper down the street where a large metallic humanoid figure stood on top of it scanning the region with a DEG weapon held at the hip ready for action. The bot-mode Martian red camo mecha stood motionless like a stalwart metal statue with swiveling forty-millimeter cannons on each shoulder protecting the Marines below and seeking out potential prey. Unseen to the AEMs taking shelter in the alley street thirty stories below were the optical LIDAR scans and acoustic sensor sweeps the mecha's pilot ran continuously to monitor any Seppy activity. Passive sensor systems ran full sweeps as well.
'FM-12s,' Sergeant Jackson added.
'Good. We could use as much support as we can get. We still need to get to the evac and support our VIP's evac. If he makes it there.' The second lieutenant relaxed slightly.
Another FM-12 strike mecha in bot-mode dropped off a building just to the south of the one standing guard and transfigured itself as it dropped to the street level. Just as it reached street level the vehicle that had looked like a ten-meter-tall metal robot now looked like a space fighter with two metal feet reminiscent of a bird of prey's talons. Underneath the wings were arms with humanlike hands at the ready like those of a boxer or a martial artist. He held the main DEG in the left hand. The forty-millimeter cannons swiveled from a mounted position one under the belly of the bird and one on top just aft of the cockpit. If the armored bird and its cannons and DEG weren't enough fire-power, the row of missile launchers spread out across the bottom of each wing would make for a good backup.
The empennage of the sleek red camo killing machine was lined with Seppy flags and just under the cockpit was the name Lieutenant Colonel John 'Burner' Masterson. Burner was the leader of Cardiff's Killers, the Marine- piloted FM-12 strike mecha squadron assigned to the now destroyed U.S.S.
The mecha landed softly with a slight metallic
