Chapter 16
1:30 PM Mars Tharsis Standard Time
'Everybody down! Now!' Second Lieutenant Washington pulled the civilians into the foxhole as several Ares fighters corkscrewed overhead, only a few tens of meters off the deck, with a wake of noise and flying Martian dust trailing behind them. Two of them were being tracked by Seppy Gnats and there were several Seppy Stingers in bot-mode bouncing and flying around in the mix.
The American tank squadron had gone to bot-mode and were scattering fast along the ridgeline and had begun firing their cannons and main directed energy weapons. The DEGs were held in the hand of the bot-mode tanks and were being fired from the hip.
A mass of Seppy drop tanks pounded over the hillside. There had to be more than two hundred of them and they were intermingled with ground vehicles and armored Seppy troops that were scattering the mountainside with automatic railgun fire.
'Marines! Hold off on cover fire and shut down the QMs. We are to keep the civilians out of harm's way! Understood,' Washington ordered his AEMs.
'Lieutenant, those Army tanks are extremely outnumbered . . . shit!' Moore instinctively ducked his head as an Ares fighter screamed over his head flying upside down and backwards while washing the sky with its blue-green directed energy pulses. A Seppy missile struck the fighter on the port wing, sending it reeling and slamming into the ground. Martian soil, fire, smoke, and debris flew upward in a slow arc across the edge of the escarpment.
'What would you have us do, Senator?' the second lieutenant asked.
'Fight, Marine! Fight!' Major Moore said. 'Fight and keep those Seppy motherfuckers off my family!' He rolled the Seppy HVAR off his shoulder and turned to Reyez Jones who was cowering in the bottom of the foxhole. 'Reyez Jones! If I give you the order you WILL pick up my daughter and jump over that escarpment with her. Do you hear me, Reyez Jones!'
'Uh, yes, Senator! That is a hell of an idea. Why not do it now?' Jones perked up and peaked over the edge of the foxhole at the fifty-meter run to the edge of the cliff.
'No!' Major Moore ordered. 'You'll do it when I say so. That is a last effort because we won't have any Marines or Army tanks down there to protect us. But if I give the word you go! Go fast! And you protect my daughter with your life, understand!' The senator turned to his wife and held her hand for a brief second. 'Sehera, you'll be right behind him, right?'
'I'll be right behind him, Alexander.' Sehera replied affectionately to her husband. If they hadn't been in e-suits she would have kissed him and her daughter.
'All right then, I'm gonna keep these motherfuckers off our ass!' Major Moore said and patted his daughter on the helmet. 'I love you, baby.' He smiled at the little girl and bounced about fifteen meters out of the foxhole and then four or five more times to another stone outcropping and took up a sniper position nearly seventy meters away.
'I love you, Daddy,' the little girl cried. She wasn't sure what exactly was going on but she could tell by the reaction of the adults that something was serious and scary and the noise was terrible and she didn't like the tone of her daddy's voice.
'That's right, Marine, fight!' Joanie Hassed, the little Triton refugee, followed right behind the senator. 'I didn't want to go skydiving today anyway.'
'Shit. Just what we need is a couple of loose cannon civilians,' Washington said under his breath. 'Clay, keep them covered! Kootie on me!'
'Yes sir,' Sergeant Jackson said. 'They're covered sir. Shelly, get those two down in the hole better and dig out the bottom a little deeper. We do not draw fire to this foxhole if it can be helped, understood!'
'Yes sergeant!' Shelly started digging the hole deeper.
Sergeant Jackson leveled his HVAR across the edge of the foxhole and kept a bead on the fight. His trigger finger itched.
The second lieutenant and the private leapfrogged each other up the mountain, taking up positions on either side of the senator and the HVAR-toting woman. The four of them started picking targets and bringing them down. They focused on e-suited Seppies but every now and then got a close shot at a Seppy drop tank's joints and other vulnerable spots.
'Calvin, tell me you are getting all this!' Gail Fehrer patted her cameraman on the back and eased her head up to visor level with the top of the foxhole.
'Every Pulitzer-winning bit of it, Gail. That senator is one balls-to-the-wall son of a bitch!' Calvin held the camera ball over his head above the rocks and tracked the senator's activities through the view on his cameratech's e-suit visor display. Often he would be distracted by a hand-to-hand mecha encounter on the ground or by an Ares fighter screaming overhead through swarms of enemy planes, missiles, and directed energy blasts. Calvin was getting extreme close-ups of war from an inside-the-battle view. It would indeed be Pulitzer material.
'Watch what you say about my daddy!' Deanna kicked at the cameraman's shin with her jumpboots. Sehera had to hold her zealous daughter down or she might have hurt the poor bastard.
'Like father like daughter,' Sehera explained to the big sergeant guarding them.
'I see.' Sergeant Clay Jackson just thought this was the weirdest day he'd ever had as an armored e-suit Marine.
Lieutenant Colonel Mason Warboys and the Warlords were without their sensors and the view from inside an M3A17-T was somewhat obstructed, so the tank squad commander had ordered his troops to all go to bot-mode for better visuals. Warboys maintained a constant bombardment from his DEG into the
