One Day on Mars

The switch had originally been about ten centimeters long and several wide and thick, but when the power spike had hit it the switch was completely vaporized, leaving a hole in the switch panel with two large cables with charred frayed ends protruding from spanner lock rings on each side of the box. Bill held the crowbar and the BFW together in both hands. If he used one of them they might melt, if he used both as conductors to bridge the gap then the two should be able to withstand the current flow. Hell, Bill had used just a crowbar before but why take chances if you didn't have to.

Here goes nothing, he thought to Mimi, and with an underhand pitch tossed the two metal tools into the box between the broken cable ends.

The BFW and the crowbar made a slow arc into the cable box and as soon as the BFW got to within four centimeters or so of the cable ends a high-voltage arc jumped out across the air to it and immediately and explosively welded the BFW to the cables, completing the circuit. The explosive weld flashed the room with a bright white-hot burst of light and Bill quickly and reflexively shielded his eyes. The crowbar on the other hand . . .

The crowbar was fractions of a second behind the BFW and the explosive force of the BFW being grabbed and welded to the circuit vaporized parts of the metal box and air around it explosively and never allowed the crowbar to make an electrical connection. Instead, the explosive gases ejected the crowbar out of the box pointed end-first right through the engine technician command master chief's left shoulder, knocking him off balance. The crowbar impaled him just below the collarbone and came out his back.

Bill pulled himself up to his feet and looked down at the metal bar protruding out of the orange coveralls and from his body. There was a lot less blood and even pain than he would have expected. Then he started to pull it out. One slight tug at the bar gave him other ideas about that.

'Oh fuckin' Jesus goddamned fuckin' Christ!' he screamed in pain.

Leave it there, Bill. Pulling at it will make you bleed worse.

Fuck that. Bill grabbed at the crowbar and gave it a yank. He promptly passed out and fell out on the floor. The bloody crowbar clanged to the deck beside him.

Chapter 26

2:23 PM Mars Tharsis Standard Time

The two conjoined spaceships had fallen from near a Mars-synchronous altitude where half of the battle had taken place and dropped through space, slamming into the Martian upper atmosphere at over sixteen kilometers per second. The initial heating and impact with the atmosphere had caused anything on the pile of wreckage that was the least bit loose to let go. The battle had taken place in non-Keplerian orbits ranging from Mars-synchronous altitudes of over thirty thousand kilometers to near-space at thirty kilometers above the surface of the planet. As the ship fell it didn't fall as a typical deorbiting spacecraft would, since it was not in a typical orbit—the hauler had the same type of gravity-modifying propellantless drive that enabled such orbits. Although the hauler had lost its main propulsion capability, it still had attitude control to some degree and managed to put itself in a spiraling nonstandard trajectory that would lead into the large Martian city below.

Atmospheric drag chewed away at the two wrecked ships, their exterior hull plating ablating away as the friction ionized it layer at a time. The carbon nanotube, titanium, and composite fiber reinforced metals held up to a lot of stress, but the force of reentry impact was beyond the limits of many of the joints and connections of a healthy ship, much less two ships that had been battered to hell and gone and then stuck together by the sheer force of collision.

The structural integrity fields of the Thatcher continued to hold while the Seppy hauler began to strip away like an onion layer at a time from the aerodynamic forces. At one hundred kilometers from the surface of the planet the ship was still screaming through the upper atmosphere at sixteen kilometers per second. The ships continued to deorbit into the atmosphere on a trajectory leading them for the Mons City domes. At fifty kilometers altitude the aerodynamic friction had broken off most of the pieces that were going to break off and the falling ships had shed more than three-fourths of their energy, reducing velocity by a factor of sixteen times. By the time the vessels reached twenty-five kilometers altitude the conjoined ships were traveling at about eight hundred kilometers per hour and were beginning to shake loose from each other.

'Captain, propulsion just came back online!' Helmsman Ensign Lee had regained consciousness and was attempting to help with her job, but her left arm was broken in several places, her right wrist was sprained, and both collarbones were broken. Her head pounded from a light concussion and there was a bit of blood that trickled from her mouth if she coughed—and she felt like she need to cough often. She suspected that she had a broken bone that had punctured a lung.

'Transferring helm control to the captain!' Captain Walker announced. Her muscles were sore and there were several of them torn and she had a compound fracture in her left leg, but other than that she was functional. She was in extreme pain, but she was still functional.

'Captain has the helm!' Ensign Lee replied.

Outside the windows of the bridge all that could be seen was the glowing fires and streaming plasmas and shock waves from structures and edges across the two ships. The CO wasn't exactly sure which direction she should go, but adding some horizontal component to their fall couldn't hurt and it might push them past the city below.

'Full forward,' Fullback said, engaging the engines. The ship began pushing forward further into the Seppy rust bucket that was now about to break into several larger pieces. She kept the throttle at max, driving the ship deeper and deeper into the hauler. The ship sung with a ringing, banging, clanking, and metal-on-metal screeching.

'Captain, Sensor Engineer Lieutenant JG Morgen Kirby has repaired the power to the main sensor array. I've got forward sensors and navigation!'

'Give me a continuous feed on our trajectory,' Fullback ordered. Her crew members were nothing more than brilliant heroic gods and she loved every last one of them like the children she never had.

'Aye sir!' The injured ensign moved her right hand about her console as best she could and what she couldn't do that way, she did through her AIC.

The trajectory of the falling ships went online in the CO's DTM virtual mindview. Their present trajectory had them crashing just across the top of the main dome at Mons City and into the southeast where the Churchill had gone down. Fullback added ten percent upward force to the propulsion to