One Day on Mars

taken the Killers a brief sweep through the Dome Circle district to wipe up the inferior Seppie drop tanks. Burner had taken out three of them himself. The local region was secured, for the moment.

Washington, Jackson, Kudaf, and Shelly took relaxed positions underneath the wing of the mecha. The aircraft offered them some shelter from the drizzle, though in the AEM suits the drizzle was only a nuisance to the faceplate view. QM and IR sensors could overcome the blurring by the water droplets on the faceplate quickly, but the human habit of getting out of the rain was a million years old or more and some instincts are hard to overcome. Burner nodded at the AEMs to remain at ease and picked out their leader as he joined him under his plane.

'Looks like that hurts, Marine.' Burner noted the metal bar sticking out of Washington's left leg.

'Yes, sir. Like fucking hell, sir!' Second Lieutenant Thomas Washington replied. 'But not near as bad as it would've if you guys hadn't showed up when you did. Thanks, sir.'

'Yes, sir. It is a damned good thing Shelly and Kootie stumbled into you,' Sergeant Jackson added with a thin- lipped smile. 'We had them right where they wanted us.'

'You don't look the best in the world either, Sergeant. We have a medic as one of our drivers maybe he can get you two fixed up.' Colonel Masterson smiled at the beat-up soldiers and thought a command to his AIC. Angel, get Boulder over here.

Yes sir, right away. His AIC sent a call to First Lieutenant Jason 'Boulder' Cordova.

'Just relax. We'll get you fixed up,' Masterson said. 'Now, just what in the hell were you two doing at Dome Circle, anyway. We were pushing an entire squad of Seppy drop tanks right into you.'

'Well, that explains why they were running toward us but shooting backwards, sir,' Sergeant Jackson commented. The mecha pilot just grunted and grinned thinly.

'We were deployed just after the Churchill went down, sir,' Washington answered. 'There is a Senator Alexander Moore in the main dome that we were sent to extract. Unfortunately, we got hit hard before we ever got started and ended up crashed in the south boroughs. Then shit started getting worse . . . sir. My AIC has kept on top of him, but . . . ' Thomas looked up and down the street at the noise he heard in the distance uneasily fingering the safety on his HVAR, his empty HVAR, until he realized it was another FM-12 configuring itself into eagle-mode beside the colonel's bird. The canopy of the fighter slid opened with a low volume swish and a Marine holding a medic pouch leaped from the cockpit in a long slow arc and bounced off the side of a building across the street and then to the ground by Burner.

'I got a call that somebody was having a baby over here. Thought I'd pop in and see if I could help.' Marine First Lieutenant Cordova kneeled down beside Washington and looked at the piece of bloody iron rebar protruding out of his left leg.

'Yeah, and I'm having serious labor pains, Doc.' Washington grimaced and relaxed his grip on his HVAR completely.

'Call me Boulder and just hold on a sec.' Cordova pulled an injector gun from his kit and plugged it into the seal layer on Washington's e-suit under the armor access port on the neck of the suit. 'I'm gonna give you some more pain meds and I'm giving you a shot of immunobooster so your immune system can eat that metal out of your leg.' Boulder pulled out a directed energy cutting tool and zipped through the protruding piece of metal like hot butter. The little pistol-shaped cutting tool sprayed out a focused green beam of light that cut the metal bar so quickly that it didn't have time to get hot. The metal rod exterior to Washington's leg fell slowly to the street pavement with an extended claaaaang. The organic gel layer of Washington's e-suit quickly covered the end of the metal bar and sealed off. Clean red armor plating hardened over the new readi-seal material as his suit began to heal itself.

'Is that it?' the second lieutenant asked.

'That's it. Oh, you'll run a high fever for a few hours until your immune system dissolves that bar in your leg, but the pain meds will keep that from being a problem. That side might be a little weak for another half hour or so, too, and you probably won't need any mineral supplements for a few days. Sometimes that much iron in your system will make you constipated for a day or two, but I'd say it beats the shit out having a metal bar sticking out of your leg. Otherwise, you are a killing machine, Marine.' Cordova grinned.

'Oorah,' Washington replied.

'Right, now, Sarge, let's look at that shoulder of yours.' Cordova went to work on Jackson and gave him a slightly lower dose of the immunobooster. Without a foreign object in the sergeant's shoulder, his boosted immune system would literally heal the wound within a matter of minutes.

'Okay, Thomas, now back to what you were up to.' Masterson helped the young lieutenant up to his feet. 'Senator Moore's extraction, I believe is what you were saying.'

'Yes sir. That mission went south badly. We are the only ones left of our deployment. We lost our commander and NCO in the first few seconds and several others not long after that. I didn't see how we could get to the senator and we were cut off. About that time this senator QMed my AIC and said that he would meet us at the extraction coordinates. I told him to stay his ass put, sir, but he said he didn't take orders from the Marines. So our plan was to make a nuisance of ourselves and make way to cover the VIP's evac.' Washington turned his head slightly in his helmet and bit down on the water tube, taking a long slow drink. His heightened immune system was using up body fluids and was making him thirsty.

'When and where is your evac?'

'Tammie, send the coordinates to the colonel,' Thomas vocalized. A second later Masterson nodded in understanding. 'In about two hours, sir.'

'Is there any hope that the evac will still happen? We've been able to contact nobody outside the city for a good while now,' Sergeant Jackson added.

'I doubt it. But we have had even less contact than you have because all of our QM systems are disabled,' The lieutenant colonel explained.

'Why sir? I mean, why are you only using laser coms?' Corporal Shelly asked.

'One of my Killers—an engineer—found too much energy in the QM coms spectrum and he thought it was a virus. So we shut 'em down and therefore we were cloaked off of any QM nets.' Masterson thought about that for a moment and then added, 'It is probably how the damned Seppy drop tanks are cloaked off our systems. So we're fighting all optical right now.'