One Day on Mars

'Don't move, Vince. We gotta stop that bleeding somehow.' Rod looked around not sure what to do.

'Bandage it with something,' Carla told him.

'Right. Bandage it.' Rod crawled around on his hands and knees trying to find something to use for a bandage and for the moment didn't think about the possibility of being shot down. A blue ion trail streaked across the park overhead and tore into the third-floor balcony where the concentration of sniper fire was coming from. Then the balcony exploded in a bright orange flash and an echoing thunderous sound. Following that explosion came several more and then a continuous spitap, spitap, spitap and zip, zip, zip of massive amounts of railgun fire from all around. The ground began pounding rapidly with the sound of large chunks of metal stamping the sidewalks and pavement in the distance.

'Missiles!' Vince exclaimed and raised his head just enough to see where the fire had come from. There were more than twenty armored transfigurable tanks standing like giant metal gladiators running and firing weapons in different directions. Vince could see armored soldiers with jumpboots jumping across the park and from building to building, street to street, tree to tree, and anywhere else he looked.

'The military is here!' Rod yelled. Carla squeezed Vincent's hand and her whimpers began to turn from sobbing to cheers of joy. 'About fucking time,' Rod said and started to stand up but his friend stopped him.

'Don't make yourself any more of a target than you already are, bud. Let the soldiers do what they came to do before we start running about all happy and shit.' Vince paused and let himself enjoy the possibility that he just might live after all. 'Pull that dead guy's shirt off and wrap it around my leg.'

'That's right, sir, we've got tens of thousands of wounded here in Central Park and many more than that dead. The goddamn Seppy cowards were just killing them mass-murder style. Women and children, hell, there was even a couple of dead dogs we found. It is just fucking awful, sir,' Armored E-suit Marine Gunnery Sergeant Tamara McCandless told her commanding officer, who had taken a group of AEMs to the shelter on the north side. The gunnery sergeant had the assignment of supporting the Army tank squadron in retaking Central Park.

'Yeah, gunny, it's the same pile of shit over here. There has to be fifty thousand dead and as many wounded in the shelter. We're getting word that it is the same all over the city,' Captain Roberts responded over the quantum membrane net. The QMs' range had picked up once the jamming had been stopped and full tac-net coms were available. They would be needed just in the mop-up of this horrendous mass murder. Marines, Army, Navy, and Martian Air Force were dropping whatever support they could to help. It was the worst disaster in more than a century.

'What should we do, sir?' Tamara asked her CO.

'Shit, gunny, that is way above my pay grade. But if you've got the area secured then start helping whoever you can help however you can help them,' Captain Roberts said. 'We're trying to do the same here but it's a goddamn clusterfuck.'

'Yes sir, copy on the clusterfuck. We'll do what we can.' Tamara couldn't believe that something like this could happen to America. But it had and she had to make certain that the Marines did what they could to help.

'Excuse me, Marine.' A civilian with a bloody T-shirt wrapped around his leg approached him.

'Corpsman!' Tamara called a few feet over to the Navy corpsman tending to another wounded civilian. That one was more critical.

'I'm busy right now, gunny!' The corpsman worked diligently in an open chest wound of the victim trying to stop the bleeding.

'Are you still bleeding, sir? Here,' Tamara pulled the instaseal bandage from her own pack. 'Let me see your leg.'

'Uh, no ma'am. I'm fine. Save that bandage for somebody else. We just wanted to know how best we could help.' The wounded civilian pointed a thumb over his shoulder at a handful of other civilians including a very young- looking pregnant lady. 'And . . . '

'And?'

'You wouldn't happen to have a cigarette on you, would you? I'm dying for a freakin' smoke.'

'I don't smoke sir. Hold on.' The gunnery sergeant smiled at the man. 'PFC Young!'

'Yes, Gunnery Sergeant?' one of the AEMs called from a few meters behind them.

'Give this man a cigarette and show his friends how they can help out.'

'Right away, Gunnery Sergeant!'

'Fish, behind you!' Lieutenant Commander Jack Boland warned his wingman but didn't give her time to respond. 'Guns, guns, guns!' he grunted after yawing his fighter one hundred and eighty degrees and then going to his DEG. The Seppy Gnat burst into four pieces and flew apart.

'Goddamn, where did that fucking Gnat come from?' Fish said over the net.

'I told you to keep an eye out. Just because the Seppy bastards are beaten don't mean there ain't some hiding out in the wreckage with their power off,' Boland reminded his young wingman. He would have thought of her as inexperienced, but after the day they had just been through she had seen more experience than a lot of pilots would in a lifetime. But Jack feared that wasn't going to remain true either. With the Seppies gone to who knows where he feared that the real war was just beginning.

'Demonchild, you've been quiet on that side of the ship for a while. You got anything over there?' Boland looked through the virtual mindview of the wreckage for potential bogies down at the Madira for a brief second. What a fuckin' day.

You got that right, sir, Candis replied.

'We got nothing over here, sir. Must be an hour now that we haven't seen a fuckin' thing,' Demonchild said over the tac-net.

'Well, keep your eyes open. We just got one over here.' Boland yawed his Ares fighter back over to get a closer look at his wingman. Her little fighter was pockmarked and scarred to hell. It would need a new paint job and probably a shitload of maintenance. They had taken on Gnats and the new Stingers from space to Mars and now back out into space for the mopping up. He could see repair crews in suits and mecha already scurrying over the Madira like worker ants putting it back together.

'Roger that, DeathRay. Hey, you think after today we might get a few days' leave?' Demonchild laughed.