One Day on Mars

Bigguns karate-chopped the shiny slender missile casing with her left mecha hand, tearing the thin aluminum and composite materials clean with a shrieking sound like fingernails on a chalkboard. She yanked the nosecone of the missile several times until it broke free. The force of it letting loose caused her to slip backward almost into a tumble before she regained hover control of the bot-mode mecha.

'Where's my fucking hole, Marines?!'

'Right fucking here, ma'am!' her squad replied as they burned the torpedo tube bulkhead away with DEGs and cannon fire. The torpedo tube splattered plasma and liquid metal sparks as it weakened until internal atmospheric pressure was more than the weakened torpedo tube cover could take and it blew outward.

'Fox!' she squawked to her Marines letting them know that she had just released a live missile set to detonate on impact. The missile hit the failing torpedo tube and added to the decompression explosion. The hull bulged outward and blew the bulkhead into space, leaving a hole larger than two FM-12s standing side by side.

'Oorah!' the Marines rallied.

'Skinny, on me! The rest of you Saviors get out there and make a nuisance of yourselves!' Bigguns dove head first through the hole in the Seppy hauler and rolled over into eagle-mode with the Seppy subnuclear force warhead griped in her right mecha hand and her DEG in her left.

'Ahh . . . shiiit!' Bigguns cried as she burst through the hole in the enemy ship only to fly right through a hail of cannon fire from an Ares fighter that was on the tail of a Seppy Gnat. She yanked at the HOTAS to dodge the friendly fire and the Ares fighter.

'Holy shit! Watch out, Marine!' one of the Dawgs called over the net.

'Fuck!' Bigguns was thrown into her seat as the automated evasive maneuvers increased the g-load on her to the point that she thought she felt something pop in her gut.

'Warning, airseal breeched. Warning, airseal breached,' the mecha's 'Bitching Betty' told her.

'Yeah,' she grunted. 'Well, hopefully I won't be needing this bird much longer anyway.'

She pushed the eagle-mode mecha to maximum acceleration on a vector as far out to space as she could manage and away from the engagement zone. The g-load put more pressure on her than she had expected. It almost hurt. Skinny followed right behind her in fighter-mode, firing her DEG and rear cannons as needed.

Captain, I'm reading a drop in your blood pressure.

I'm fine.

Also showing extreme heart rate and temperature drops. You're hit, Captain.

I said, I'm fine goddamnit!

'Madira! Madira! This is Bigguns, copy!' she grunted.

'Go, Bigguns!'

'Madira, I've got the big bomb in my lap and taking it out to space. The hauler is just falling garbage! The bomb is on a timer and is set to detonate in thirty-two seconds,' Bigguns reported as the maximum acceleration of the mecha pushed her back into her seat at over seven gravities.

'Roger that, Bigguns! Great work!' the Air Boss replied over the net.

'Skinny, I'm punching out and you grab me, got it!'

'Roger that!' Skinny toggled the mode control and her fighter-mode mecha slammed over and then back up into eagle-mode. She grunted from the g-load.

Charlie, lock the controls of the fighter on this trajectory!

Done!

'Eject, eject, eject!' Bigguns pulled the ejection lever and the canopy slid away as the ejection field threw her clear of the fighter. The g-load on her felt like a ton of bricks hitting her in the gut and face all at once and then the dampening field of the ejection seat took over, reducing the effect to more tolerable levels. Her fighter sped off in a straight trajectory into space.

Skinny tracked the ejection chair's trajectory and adjusted hers to catch it. Her eagle-mode mecha easily overtook the now drifting ejection seat. She grabbed it and did an immediate rollover and thrust reversal. That bomb was going off any second and she wanted to get as much distance between it and them as she could. Had they been on a planet with atmosphere the shock wave would spread out for fifty kilometers or more and there would be no way to outrun it. But in space that wouldn't be as big a problem. The big problem was going to be radiation dose.

'Detonation in five, four, three, two . . . ' Bigguns's AIC announced over audio so Skinny could hear. Of course, her AIC had the countdown timing as well.

The FM-12s could reach a top speed of about two thousand kilometers per hour in space. Once Skinny had picked up Bigguns and reversed direction, the relative velocity between the abandoned fighter stuck on full throttle with the bomb in it and Skinny's fighter was four thousand kilometers per hour. In the twenty-some-odd seconds before the bomb detonated they had managed to put nearly twenty-three kilometers between themselves and the bomb. The massive warhead exploded with the force of a thousand hydrogen bombs, filling the space above the battle with bright white light expanding in a perfect sphere outward from a singularity point. Imperfections in the tamper shielding of the bomb caused secondary jets of light to expand in different directions as expanding circles of plasma.

Just as a gluonium bomb detonated, more than ninety-nine percent of the energy of the explosion was released as high-energy gamma rays. The gamma rays seared through Bigguns and Skinny, knocking free nucleons in their body, causing radiation products to form. The result would be extreme radiation exposure. They would need treatment in less than thirty minutes or they would have serious life-threatening problems. Not that that was anything that the Marines didn't have on a day-to-day basis.

'Awesome, Captain!' Skinny shouted. 'We better get to sickbay and take some rad meds pretty soon. My radiation meter is going off the fucking scale.'