One Day on Mars

Yes, Timmy?

The Yeltsin has taken heavy damage from one of the ghost ships. It is venting and on fire! The Thatcher has taken heavy damage and the Washington has lost its SIF generators! The Lincoln, Reagan, Kolmogorov, Ames, Crippen, and the Blair are completely out of commission and reporting no propulsion or weapons capabilities.

Shit. The CO scrolled up the Madira's health monitor to the foreground in his mindview. The battle still raging in the mindview sphere around his head.

'CO! Word from Engineering is that the SIFs are holding but the coolant systems for the DEGs are battered to hell. We're going to lose the forward starboard DEGs soon!' the XO alerted the CO. Although the CO had health monitoring menus on the ship in front of him, it was the XO's job to get firsthand reports from the sailors keeping the systems running.

'XO, the guns must fire! Structural integrity will do us no good if we are sitting ducks and not returning volleys.'

'Aye sir!'

'Helmsman Marks! R equal to four kilometers, theta equal to ten degrees, and phi set to one hundred degrees at maximum normal speed! Pitch, yaw, and roll to maximize port DEG targeting angles!' the CO ordered.

'Aye sir!'

'Fireman's Apprentice King! Lock that shit down right now!' Hull Technician Petty Officer Third Class Joe Buckley alerted the young enlisted man to the overheating flow valve on the starboard side main directed energy gun coolant system. The three-dimensional DTM view of the ship's flow systems in both of their heads showed overheating systems in red and nominal ones in green. There was a lookup table ranging from green to red of different levels of status for the flow equipment. Some of the systems flowed liquid waste products while others flowed superheated liquid metals. The valve on the forward DEG coolant loop would have to be locked out and the flow rerouted or it could go critical and start a serious fire on the below deck of the weapon system.

'The software to the valve shows it locked HT3, but the flow meters are still reading seventeen megapascals on the flow pressure. The only flow valve down stream is from the SIF generator loop on the forward decks. Do I divert the flow?' Fireman's Apprentice Jimmy King had never seen the Madira hammered so hard. He had been on board for only a few weeks and the previous day's mission had been his first combat. Oh, there had been pilots going and coming from the supercarrier going into battle, but this was the first time the Madira itself had been in the mix of a full-scale naval battle and taking on anything worse than a few SAMs.

'No! Jimmy, if the SIFs go out on that end we'll have a standard coolant pipe with over seventeen megapascals of pressure in it. The instant that SIF went down, the pipe would be a bomb of exploding superheated liquid toxic metals!' Buckley scratched his head in thought for a brief second. The Madira lurched downward suddenly and a little faster than the inertial control system could compensate for, leaving Buckley with the brief feeling that his stomach was somewhere on the deck above him.

'We've got to do something, boss. The pressure in that loop is rising and the main gun is just getting hotter!' the fireman's apprentice replied. 'Shit!' He grabbed the sides of his station to keep his balance as the ship continued to jerk randomly.

'No, the cats on all ends are at minimal use now that the fighters are out. Switch over the catapult coolant flow loops to the main gun coolant loops. Maybe that'll take some of the pressure off that stuck valve. The goddamned thing is probably seized open. That happened to us last year at Triton. That was ugly.' Buckley grabbed at an icon for the cat coolant reservoir to read the internal temperature of the coolant bladder. Although the cats weren't going presently, they had just taken a hell of a thermal load to launch more than four full squadrons of fighters, mecha, and drop tanks in the last few minutes. The reservoir was above midway on the look-up table, reading yellow and not that far from red. But yellow was better than red. 'Fuck. It'll have to do.'

'HT3!'

'What now!'

'Looks like the port side SIF generators are starting to overheat!' Jimmy said with a little panic in his voice.

'CO! Port SIF generators are overheating. Starboard DEGs are overheating. We can either take a pounding and not fire or fire and take a pounding!' the XO warned the captain of the Sienna Madira.

'Air Boss! I want all the mecha on the Starboard exterior decks now!' the CO ordered.

'Aye sir!'

'Senator, I think it is time you find a better hiding place,' BIL announced over the speaker.

'I agree, BIL. Can you let us out of here?' Moore asked. Just as he did, the rear door slid upward letting the sunlight in. 'Let's go! Everybody with me!' Moore grabbed his daughter from his wife and dove out the ass end of the giant mechanical arachnid bouncing with fifteen meter steps at a full run. 'BIL, go hide somewhere.'

'Very well, Senator. It was fun talking with you.'

'You as well, BIL. Thanks for the lift.'

'You are very welcome. Bye, little one.' The garbage hauler actually lifted one of its front legs and waved it at Deanna.

'Bye, BIL.' Deanna waved over her father's shoulder back at the garbage hauler.

Reyez, Joanie, the reporter and her cameraman, and the senator's wife followed him, bouncing out of the garbage hauler onto the Martian soil. The cameraman, Calvin Dean, was videoing with every bounce and every breath. He paused for a second to get a shot of the two dozen American tanks hovering about the gorge's edge and the tank driver talking to a few armored soldiers. The mechanical spider let them out very near the edge of a large drop-off into the gorge at the bottom of the giant volcano's outermost edge. The drop-off must have been at least a half a kilometer deep or more in places.

'Okay, we're going to go to the edge of that set of lava stone outcroppings there and dig into the sand and hide until the evac gets here,' the retired Marine ordered them.

Senator? his AIC said into his mind.

Yes, Abigail?