"Yes, ma'am. Understood."
"Good. Let me know the instant it arrives and then get it and my ship back here to New Tharsis. I feel . . . vulnerable . . . without it." Elle smiled at Sterling in a very unaffectionate way. The thinness of her lips and the deep, thoughtful stare in her eyes were more than enough to give away that she felt a piece of her plan falling into place. "Admiral, see you soon."
"Good day, ma'am."
Elle shut the holo off and exhaled softly. She pulled the red, white, and blue ski mask off her face and undid her ponytail. The long, dark locks of hair fell loose about her shoulders as she shook her head about from side to side to relieve her stressed shoulders and neck.
"Ah, that's better," she sighed and looked at the broken guest's chair scattered about. "Better get somebody up here to clean up this mess." Her desk chair creaked obtrusively as she leaned back in it. She gave herself a moment to prop her feet up on the light brown Queen Anne–style oak desk and rest her eyes. She had been plotting and scheming for so long behind that mask. And she had been isolated in her penthouse sanctum for so long. Oh, sure, she went out often to run operations or oversee projects or to show her people she was still there in person, which usually meant an execution, but since her longtime friend, co-conspirator, and father of her last child had died, she was lonely. She missed Scotty. She had loved him since the day he, Supreme Court Chief Justice Scotty P. Mueller, swore Sienna Madira into the office of president of the United States of America so many years ago. Scotty had always added a bit of humanity and morality to the plan. And then he had to go and help a damned CIA agent escape. Of course, she had been the one that had killed him. There was no other choice: she had to. So she was solely to blame for her loneliness.
Oh, Sienna Madira had had family, two daughters and a son, a multitude of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren. Sienna Madira had long since been dead and she would never know that part of her life again. Although a small few of them, a very select few, were in on the Separatist plan and helped her subtly from within the Sol System.
But Elle Ahmi had only had the one daughter, Sehera Ahmi Moore. Sehera grew up in hiding with her mother and father during the early years of the Separatist terrorist movement. She was in her early teens during the so-called "thought police" era. Elle never thought history was fair to her for calling it that. She had only used a modern technology to find people within her fold who were disloyal to her. Of course, she had them thrown out into the Martian desert without an environment suit, but she had to protect the integrity of her terrorist-cell structure.
Elle had watched Sehera turn into a tough but beautiful woman before her eyes and hoped that she would be right there by her side all the way to the new, better, and truly free humanity. But that was all destroyed by one soldier. One really good soldier who had managed to survive the surprise offensive of the last Martian Desert Campaign and then withstand the Separatist torture camp, and had somehow managed to get under her daughter's skin. And that is when Sehera did the unthinkable and betrayed the Separatist movement, her father, and Elle herself for that one goddamned Marine. Sehera had helped him escape.
But that hadn't been good enough for that son of a bitch! Any sane man would have cut his losses and run, bounced, crawled, or whatever he could do across the Martian desert to the nearest American outpost. Any sane idiot would have bounced away from the very torture camp in which he had just spent years watching his fellow Americans tortured, wilting and dying around him, but not him. Hell, no, not Major Alexander Moore. Against all odds, that SOB spent five weeks inside his armored e-suit planning, plotting, and scheming just so he could come back to the torture camp and kill every last one of Elle's soldiers. He had been too late to save any other of his fellow prisoners, because Elle had killed them in a fit of rage following Moore's escape. When he returned there was nobody left for him to rescue, so he killed everybody. Everybody. He killed everybody in the encampment but Elle and Sehera. Elle would never forget that day as long as she drew breath. Had she shot her daughter for the treason of helping Moore escape—the way she had executed Sehera's father, Scotty—she wouldn't have had Moore to deal with all these years. It ended up in a big Mexican-style standoff. Moore had discovered Elle's secret identity, so there was no longer any alternative but to take him out of the picture. Elle was certain that he had to die, and then at the last moment Sehera stepped between her mother and the bloodied, enraged Marine. Sehera tried debating with them and pleading with them to cease, but Elle and Moore were each ready to die as long as they managed to kill the other one in the process. Elle had, for a brief instant, considered killing her daughter, or at least wounding her, but she couldn't do it. That was when the unthinkable happened. Then Sehera, Elle Ahmi's only child, chose Moore over her.
Elle had been so brokenhearted that she let them go without a fight. And Moore seemed, at that moment, content to leave with Sehera and his life. After all, he had killed over ninety of her men and women in his surprise rampage. Elle always wondered if Moore had thought that by taking her daughter from her, he was torturing her or paying her back. It didn't matter. Sehera was still alive and, as far as she could tell, was happy with Moore.
Ever since that day, Elle had been accounting and allowing for the two of them in her plans, for decades. Oftentimes, that damned Moore would do some random act of heroism that couldn't be accounted for that would ruin years of scheming, arranging of events, and planning, not to mention major resources. But she still couldn't bring herself to take them out of the picture. She just couldn't bring herself to ruin Sehera's happiness. Sehera was indeed the final love of her life. In fact, she even prodded and directed their paths every now and then without them knowing it. Elle had learned long ago how to manipulate a popular vote and was instrumental in Moore winning his first race as a Mississippi senator. Moore had no idea—or at least Elle had no reason to think he did. Neither did Sehera, for that matter.
And she didn't really regret not having killed them. They somehow seemed to keep her connected to her own humanity. Scotty had often told her that she had become so logical and calculating that he wasn't certain she had any emotion left in her soul. Maybe the Moore family was the only spark she had left of that. One day, she also hoped to see her granddaughter. So far, Moore and Sehera hadn't allowed that. But Elle had a plan for that, too. If all went according to plan, she'd meet her granddaughter in a matter of hours.
And there was always the plan. The Separatist plan that she had been developing, tweaking, forcing, and maintaining for decades, and no matter how many simulations she and her AIC Copernicus ran, it always ended the same way. That Mexican standoff between her and the Moores had to be played out to the finish.
Maybe you should get some sleep, ma'am, Copernicus said into her mind, snapping her out of her racing memories and thoughts.
Perhaps I will, Elle thought as she sighed again, sliding her feet to the floor softly so as not to disturb the quiet of the room and the tranquil view of the rings of the rising gas giant. Call her emotionless or even evil, but Elle still enjoyed the absolute beauty and wonder of the universe. Then she, Elle Ahmi, the most notorious and murderous terrorist known to the Sol System, the leader of the Separatist movement, the once great United States Army General Sienna Madira, the one hundred eleventh president of the United States of America Sienna Madira, felt the weight of her years on her shoulders pressing her like Atlas must have felt. But Atlas had only held up the Earth. Elle was trying to hold up the Tau Ceti star system, trying to coerce the Ross 128 system into jumping on, and planning to overthrow the Sol System. At that point, the other human colonies should follow suit. No, Elle wished she only had Atlas's problems.
Turn out the lights and bring the transparency of the windows down to about fifty percent, she ordered Copernicus. Her loyal AIC complied instantly, forcing Elle to blink a few times and stand still as her eyes adjusted to the darkness. She dropped her clothes on the floor at the foot of her
bed and dragged herself under the sheets. She allowed herself a few moments to view the panorama from her office, her home, of the domain of the Separatists. Not a very full home, she thought. But great plans require great sacrifice.
What's that, ma'am?
Just mumbling, Copernicus. Good night.
Good night, ma'am.
Her mind still raced a bit, so she focused on the view through the windows. The arched windows of the penthouse stretched four meters tall and three meters wide, with only a few centimeters of semitransparent metal structure between them. The giant windows sat side by side, completely around the office. The lack of opaque materials in the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view would frighten sufferers of agoraphobia beyond their wits. Those afraid of heights wouldn't do much better, either. The penthouse sat atop the capitol building, looking to the north across Madira Valley at the spaceport several tens of kilometers away. The dome at the vertex of the Separatist leader's home allowed for not only the three hundred and sixty degrees of view through the transparent armored walls but upward in a full hemisphere at the sky as well. Sitting in the quarters gave the impression of sitting on top of a very tall building on top of a high mountain peak with no walls or ceiling. The walls could be blacked out if needed or even have false images displayed on them to represent wood, concrete, or any other building or decorating material. But Elle liked the open view. She liked seeing the stars and the lights of the Tau Ceti capital city below and around her.
Her four-poster bed sat near the east side of the penthouse, so she could watch the Jovian rise several times a day and Tau Ceti rise in the mornings. She also could look out in any direction and see across several states of the Separatist nation. It wasn't the cold, dry desert of Mars, where she had grown up. In fact, it was a far superior planet, with oceans and an atmosphere and climates ranging from subtropical to cold mountainous regions. Ares was beautiful, and the Separatists would make the Tau Ceti system their home away from home. New Tharsis was the capital city, and she lived at the capitol building above the Senate floor.
Elle laughed at that thought. The Senate was nothing more than a gathering of powerful women and men who were her governors and generals overseeing certain regions of the system or large-scale projects. She didn't trust a one of them, and if something ever happened to her total dominating control over them, she feared that they would begin fighting amongst themselves, turning Ares into a world of separate regions controlled by powerful warlords. Elle didn't want the United Separatist Republic to turn into something akin to twenty-first century Africa. She rolled over onto her left side and looked out across the valley at the occasional spaceport traffic flying out of the city as her mind slowly drifted off to sleep and her eyelids grew too heavy to keep open. Elle needed her rest because she had a big day ahead of her, whether she knew it or not.
Chapter 4
July 1, 2394 AD
Sol System, Mars
Friday, 7:40 AM, Earth Eastern Standard Time
Ramy's Robots 3rd Armored E-suit Marines Forward Recon Unit had bounced alongside the Army tankheads for more than three hours since the war games had started. They had done some fighting along the way against the red-team AEMs, Army Armored Infantry (AAI), and Army tankheads that had dropped on them from the Lincoln and the Tyler, and they had come out on top with only minor losses. The sky was jam-packed with Marine and Navy mecha zigging and zagging through the thin atmosphere, leaving ion trails. Simulated tracer rounds and explosions continuously filled the sky. Modern-day war games looked a lot like the real thing, minus the blood and the terror. For tried and true soldiers who had tested their mettle in real combat, war games generated little more than the urgency to learn new skills or to sharpen old ones. They were so far from the real thing simply because the possibility of death was absent. But war gaming did make the soldiers more proficient in the case of real war, and each and every time they were given the opportunity to war game they brought their A-game. What a soldier might learn in a war game might just pay off in some real situation and save a life or two.
First Sergeant Tamara McCandless and Staff Sergeant Tommy Suez had seen the real thing, and both of them fully expected that the real thing was coming again sooner than most people wanted to admit. The two marines felt compelled to take the games seriously because neither of them wanted to end up a casualty of the real thing when it came. Besides that, there was team pride at stake. The flagship crew couldn't let themselves be defeated by other ships in the fleet.
Suez and McCandless led two small squads of AEMs ahead of the blue team by a couple of kilometers to feel out the enemy attack plan. They had bounced point across the red, dusty, cold desert of Mars mostly through overwhelming odds all day. But that was just the way that Colonel Roberts always liked it and was probably the reason that he had volunteered the Robots to be the tip of the spear. The colonel was at the rear of the forward recon unit. Warlord One of the tankheads guided the attack from a better sensor vantage point mostly because he had lost a game of rock-paper-scissors with the first sergeant as to who got to lead the attack.
It wasn't uncommon for Colonel Roberts to be out in front of his Robots charging into hell, but this time strategy—and the rules of rock-paper-scissors—dictated that he bounce in with the second wave. As soon as the forward teams figured out where the enemy were, Roberts would lead the tankheads in to overwhelm the red-team forces holding down the objective. Sensors showed a static force already occupying the hill, but they had yet to offer any resistance at close range. The original plan was to break through the perimeter front lines, which they did about an hour earlier, and then take and hold the objective.
Tommy understood the attack plan well. They really didn't even need to go over it in detail during the mission prebrief since it was a simple take and hold. The simulation scenario was that there was an important square half-kilometer on a very small and rocky hill in the Hellas Basin just north of the Southern Polar Cap, for no particular reason designated to be the end goal of the war game. If Tommy Suez had anything to say about it, the blue team, which included only the crew and soldiers from the Sienna Madira, was going to win. Tommy and two other Robots took the right side of the hill while Top had taken a squad up the other side. Tommy bounced ten to thirty meters and took cover. Corporal Danny Bates would leapfrog him and take cover. Then Private First Class Rondi Howser would leapfrog them both, and the process would start all over. Unless they encountered resistance, the plan was to continue the cover advance until they landed on the central coordinates of the objective zone.
As far as the staff sergeant could see, there was nothing but rocks, some red dirt, and occasionally some Martian hybrid grasses adding a faint splash of green to the landscape. No trees grew that far south, which meant that, unfortunately, the only cover was the rocks or going underground. What concerned him most was the fact that his QM sensors in his e-suit visor were showing enemy troops all around them, but he couldn't find them visually. There was no motion, no enemy fire, no traffic on the wireless, nothing. Tommy got a bad vibe from that, and he didn't like getting bad vibes.
"Top, where the hell are they? You see 'em?" he asked McCandless through the QM communications tac-net. He hoped the senior enlisted soldier would have a better viewing angle from her location farther up the hill and to the left. Tommy did a belly slide up to a boulder throwing a red dust rooster tail up behind him. He quickly rose up to a knee with his hypervelocity automatic railgun (HVAR) scanning the horizon. The dust settled slowly in the Martian gravity and threw sparkles of sunlight around them in a brilliant display of flashes. The green targeting X in his visor scanned from rock to rock across the desert, looking for a target, a hostile target, hell, anything to shoot at.
"Got anything, Sarge?" Private First Class Rondi Howser slid in behind him, quickly rising to her knees with her weapon at the ready. "I can't see shit with all this dust and smoke scattered about from the fireworks and the smokers."
"I don't see a damned t
hing," Corporal Bates added as he slid in beside them. He lost his balance and fell visor first into the ground. Dust flew up around them as they came to a halt. PFC Howser tried not to laugh.
"I don't see them either, Private. Keep the QM, IR, and lidar sensors pinging away. They're out there. We just have to find them and kill them. Nothing to it." Tommy continued to scan visually and compare what he was seeing to the sensor overlays, but he still had no better information than any of the other marines on that hill.
"Where the shit are they, Tommy?" Danny asked. The two of them had served together since the Oort and had become friends over the years. PFC Howser was new to the team, and they had yet to determine how good she was. But so far, Danny had been having a hard time keeping up with her. Tommy thought that was funny and dangerous and had warned Bates a few times that any chauvinistic attitudes could get him killed if they were in the real shit. Danny wouldn't admit to the bravado, but the fact that Tommy had to warn him of it was hopefully enough to shake him out of it.
"Keep it frosty, Suez," First Sergeant Tamara McCandless warned him. "I don't have them on eyeball, but my sensors are dinging like crazy, too. They're here. Be ready for an ambush."
"Bates, get your ass up and keep your head on. Top can't see them, either, but they're here and about to invite us to a party we didn't care to join." Tommy looked back at the young private. "Stay alert, Howser."
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