One Day on Mars

'Aye sir! We've got those solutions locked in and ready to fire, sir!' the XO replied.

'Fire!'

The main DEG batteries of the Sienna Madira opened full bore with blue-green bolts of directed energy that targeted exactly onto the propulsion power plant of the Seppy hauler. The DEGs burned through the hull plating into interior bulkheads, vaporizing the carbon-metal alloys into plasmas that jetted into space explosively.

'Fire all torpedo bays onto lead Seppy target!'

'Aye sir!'

'Keep pouring everything we have onto that enemy boat!' The CO watched the BDA numbers continuously changing in his virtual sphere and screens but the simple fact was that the DEGs were not putting enough energy onto the large vehicle to make it structurally unstable. The energy weapons could take out parts of the hull and major components of the ship but it would take many direct hits to cause catastrophic structural integrity failure.

'CO! DEGs have about five, four, three, two . . . that's that! The main guns are gone sir!' The XO looked up from his console to the captain. 'The DEGs took out the propulsion of that thing, sir. It bought us at least three minutes before it's too close to the planet to go full nuke on it. We could concentrate all of our fighters there, sir! Damage the forward hull plating enough so it will burn up on reentry!'

'Roger that, XO! Air Boss—'

'On it, CO! All fleet vehicles, all fleet vehicles, all fighters, all fighters, pull off present attacks and converge all weapons on kamikaze hauler on coordinates being transferred to AICs! If they detonate their gluonium bomb on us, it's better they do it here than on the surface. But keep that damned ship from reaching the surface!' The Air Boss told his AIC to take care of the coordinate calculations for all the fleet vehicles and fighters.

The Seppy hauler had lost all of its propulsion drive system and was beginning to take on an uncontrolled roll, but it still fell on a collision trajectory for the large city below. The hauler was more than two kilometers long, a half kilometer wide, and more than a quarter kilometer thick. The ship was filled with power plants and ordnance, but worst of all there was the major likelihood it was carrying a subnuclear gluonium force fission fusion fission bomb. To trigger the device alone required a several-hundred-megaton hydrogen bomb. The trigger alone would wipe out the city. The added effect of the gluonium would take out the entire Tharsis region, and only the cities at the very tops of the mountains and at the bottoms of the gorges might have some chance of survival. The body count would be . . . unacceptable.

Plasma and oxygen fires vented into space from the enemy hauler as the gravity well pulled it closer and closer to the thin Martian atmosphere. If the fleet vehicles could just give it a yaw or a pitch and force it to tumble rather than just roll on its axis, the friction with the Martian atmosphere might break the vehicle up and protect the city. But the vehicle still maintained its attitude control. And the remaining Seppy fleet understood what the Americans were doing and were bringing all their forces to protect the kamikaze behemoth.

'You heard the Boss, Saviors! Let's go take hell to that enemy hauler!' Marine Captain Janice 'Bigguns' Cameron ordered her Marine FM-12 strike mecha squadron.

'Oorah!' Offspring replied over the tac-net. 'I'm breakin' off my present attack vectors now and hunting for the big fish!'

'Oorah! Bigguns, I'm on your three-nine line going maximum velocity with maximum ferocity!' Goat replied.

'Roger that! Watch your wingmen, Saviors, those Seppy Gomer bastards are pursuing hard on our six! Oorah!' Bigguns flipped the fighter-mode toggle on the HOTAS and the bot-mode mecha leaped upward from the deck of the Madira and rotated through the transfiguration into fighter-mode. The main DEG that had been in the bot's left hand was now under the nose of the sleek canard-forward stealth-winged dual-tailed plane. The dual cannons were now separated by the fuselage aft of the cockpit and forward landing system, one on top and the other on the bottom. Bigguns led the remains of the Marine mecha squadron—a mere fifteen planes— converting to fighter-mode to burn at maximum velocity toward the falling Seppy hauler. In a few seconds they would revert back to bot and go to maximum ferocity.

She pulled cautiously away from the deck of the Sienna Madira near the main DEG batteries. The Seppy Stingers and Gnats didn't care that she was no longer after them and continued to press in on her. Bigguns pushed the HOTAS to full acceleration and put the upper and lower cannons on full automatic anti- aircraft fire. She and the remaining Utopian Saviors screamed at maximum velocity from the engagement on a death-defying hurl toward the kamikaze hauler.

'Boss, these Gomer bastards are gonna follow us in!' Second Lieutenant Connie 'Skinny' Munk exclaimed. She was one of the newer Saviors but was a good pilot and could take care of her own. She had gotten her call sign for being busted as a cadet for skinny-dipping with some of the senior cadets. She had a permanent reprimand in her file for being 'out of uniform on duty.' But she had made such high grades as a cadet and her flight school proficiency was so near to perfect that a fighter squadron was the only place for her. Anything else would have been a waste and the Navy understood that.

'Well, Skinny, if they didn't come along we wouldn't have any Gomers to shoot back at!' Second Lieutenant David 'Beanhead' Winchester—from Boston—replied.

'Well how about that big fuckin' ship looming toward us?' Goat asked.

'Damned right, Goat! Saviors, let's open up the DEGs full on the forward deck and see if we can't make us an entry hole! Oorah!' Bigguns replied to her squad.

'Alright Dawgs, we can't let them glory- hogging gyrene leatherneck bastards get all the medals!' Lieutenant Armando 'Rabies' Chavez announced over the tac-net to the Demon Dawgs. His Ares fighter squadron had originally been doing quite well until the ghost squadrons of the Seppies came out of nowhere and chewed them up like meat in a fucking grinder. But the CO realized what was happening and pulled them out of the engagement zone, so they missed a lot of the action in the middle. Then sensors came back online. And the Dawgs enthusiastically rocketed back into the grinder for some fucking payback that was due to those Seppy Gomer motherfuckers. The Dawgs had taken heavy casualties and were down to only a dozen good, or at least lucky, pilots.

'Maximum accel to the hauler and its time to vomit!' Rabies ordered the Dawgs.

'Roger that, Rabies!' JavaBean rolled his Ares fighter over nose-first toward the Seppy hauler and initiated a vector correction that would push him at max velocity and minimum transit time to the enemy hauler. At the same time his acceleration line pushed him toward the hauler, he pivoted the little snub-nosed fighter about its center point, scanning and firing on targets to give his wingmen cover. The maneuver was often referred to as a 'pukin' deathblossom' because the wild spin put constantly changing g-loading on the pilot and his inner ear would pretty