Bigguns didn't respond.
'Captain? Bigguns!' Skinny called out and looked at the pilot she was holding in her mecha's right hand. The pilot wasn't moving.
'Captain, do you copy?'
The blue dots filled the sky until Skinny zoomed in tightly around the fighter. Bigguns' blue dot was there on Skinny's fighter with her she could tell as the zoom came in. Then . . . the blue dot faded out.
'Fuck!' Skinny cried as her commander and friend died literally in her mecha's arms.
Chapter 22
2:20 PM Mars Tharsis Standard Time
'Look at that!' Joanie Hassed pointed up at the brilliant flash in the sky. Even in the afternoon sunlight the flash was more than brilliant. She hadn't seen that type of fireworks even during the Triton raids and this one was the second such flash that had taken place in the past ten minutes or so. 'There goes another one.'
'Keep your head down, Joanie.' Senator Moore leaned back against the foxhole wall and stared up at the sky. There was a serious battle taking place up there. He could discern flashes and glints here and there from the opposing fleets. And there had indeed been several large-scale explosions that had been more than just fascinating in the late afternoon sky.
Moore had only noticed the last couple of minutes though as before that he had been fighting ferociously and fearlessly against the encroaching Separatist forces. In a mad rush into the enemy troops he had fought until he was out of ammunition and could do nothing but cover and hide. He had made his way back to their original foxhole—the one they had dug after leaving the mechanical spider. The foxhole was closest to the escarpment at the edge of the Olympus Mons volcano of all the cover locations he had managed to find. It was just behind a small outcropping of lava stones only thirty meters or so from the edge of the cliff.
They had ended up there after what any sane person would describe as his suicidal run. But Senator Moore would call it an effort to draw fire away from the escape of his beloved wife and daughter over the side of the drop-off. At the time he was certain it would be the last thing he would ever do. But to Senator Moore, who absolutely adored his little girl and loved his wife with all his heart, giving his life to make sure his wife and daughter could live would have been an easy trade to make. On the up side and fortunately for him, the Cardiff's Killers, a Marine FM-12 strike mech squadron, crested the escarpment's edge and zoomed, hell bent for destruction, into the encroaching Seppy tank lines just as he and the AEMs with him were running out of ammo and just as the Army tank squadron Warboys' Warlords were being forced to retreat.
The Marine survivors of the crashed
Stingers and Gnats had buzzed into the mix as well but there were squads of Ares fighters in the mix and only moments before the big flash in the sky more M3A17 tanks and FM-12 mecha dropped in from orbit right into the mix. The Seppy line had been pushed way back up the mountainside toward the city. The battle still raged in the distance, but for now the senator from Mississippi and the refugee from Triton, along with a reporter, a cameraman, and three armored e-suit Marines, sat in the foxhole licking their wounds and relaxing for the moment. It had been a long morning.
'Senator Moore.' Mars News Network correspondent Gail Fehrer turned to the senator. 'Could you give us a statement at this point? What you did here today was more than heroic and we have the footage to prove it.'
Moore raised an eyebrow at the reporter. He had never liked the press, a dislike dating all the way back to his Heisman Trophy days. His distaste for reporters was probably why he went into the Marines instead of the NFL. Several years in a POW torture camp in the Martian Desert had cured him of his intolerance of most things. Moore gave his POW camp days credit for his patience as a parent with his overzealous six-year-old daughter. So, Moore had to admit and allow for the damned reporters, and after all, as a politician they were a necessary evil. Sometimes he wished he'd just stayed a Marine. He could only bite his tongue for the moment and speak minimally as the cameraman thrust the videosensor in his face. He would think of better videobites later. Right now he was still worried about his daughter and the anger and adrenaline of hard combat still coursed through him. He relaxed and let out a slow breath before he responded.
'I just did what any father and husband would do. I did everything within my power to make sure they were safe.' He closed his eyes for a brief moment. He had seen Reyez, who was carrying his daughter Deanna, and his wife, Sehera, bounce over the edge just as the FM-12s attacked. But he had been so caught up with the fighting that he had lost contact with them. He had called to them a few times over the QM and optical comms but had gotten no answer. He hoped it was just a range and line-of-sight issue.
'Sehera? Are you there?' he said over the QM. But there was no response. 'Sehera! Reyez? Dee?' Nothing. He checked the transceiver on his e-suit helmet and smacked the side of it with his hand. The visor display didn't even flicker. 'Commercial piece of garbage.'
'Allow me, sir,' an odd male voice said over the QM net.
'BIL?'
'Yes, sir. Those cheap radios in your suits will not connect over the edge to the bottom which is almost a kilometer away. They are very shortwave and don't bend over or around edges and out here there is very little multi-path bounce. Since there are no repeaters out here for your AIC to hop on you can't reach very far. But I can,' the mechanical spiderlike garbage hauler AI said. When Senator Moore had told it to find a hiding place it had, a very simple one.
'Well, where the hell are you?' Moore asked.
