One Day on Mars s-1

by Travis S. Taylor

  "Okay, then you are in the wrong place. We are leaving the city, fast. As fast as BIL here can carry us. So I suggest the two of you hop the hell out right now," Moore said.

  "Can we ask why you're leaving the city? And who you are?" Fehrer asked.

  "Are you transmitting with that thing? Reyez, take it." Moore nodded Jones to the video device that the cameraman was wielding.

  Jones grabbed for the camera but Calvin yanked it back and started to put up a fight. Moore gave Calvin a rifle butt to the stomach and then swept his legs out from under him with a sweeping hook kick to the back of the knee. He spun around and placed a jumpboot on Calvin's wrist, pinning the video camera to the floor of the garbage hauler. He then placed the rifle barrel closer to the man's faceplate.

  "You sit still, young lady." Joanie Hassed moved in closer to Gail, giving her a nice view of the wrong end of the other Seppy rifle.

  "Wait!" Fehrer cried. "Stop, we can't hurt you because we're unarmed. Calvin, give them the damned camera."

  Reluctantly, Calvin released his grip on the video device and rolled his head back, pounding the back of his helmet into the floor with disgust. Reyez grabbed the camera and made sure that the transmission and record were turned off. Abigail double-checked it with her QM sensors also just to make sure that Reyez hadn't missed anything.

  "Hold on!" Fehrer continued. "We're just following a news story. We've seen the troop movement from here to the far south dome. We can help you. It's obvious that you're not Seppy troops or you wouldn't be hiding in here. Relax. We're on your side."

  "Alexander, I think she is telling the truth," Sehera told her husband. Her daughter stood behind her, hugging onto her left leg, hiding her face.

  "Yes. We are telling the truth." Calvin Dean rose slowly and pulled himself to his feet, grunting and coughing from the residual pain the rifle butt to the gut had created.

  "All right. No sudden moves. And neither of you so much as sneezes without asking me first," the senator warned them. He had never trusted the press as far back as his days at Mississippi State. He had seen them generate news at the expense of his teammates' futures with very little thought. And the way the press handled the Desert Campaigns on Mars was nothing short of treason, but they had gotten away with it. As a politician, granted he was a public person to be scrutinized by the public. But in general, he felt the press had never done anything but cause heartache and hardship. There were occasions for the exception, though, and of course he believed in free speech, but he also believed in ethics and honor. Moore had found that most of the mainstream press had neither ethics nor honor, just a thirst for the power of being a public figure. Moore had seen one or two out of the hundreds of reporters he had met that may have been worth killing, but only one or two. The rest weren't worth the railgun round it would take to blast them. The jury was out on these two at the moment. And Moore wasn't in the mood to put up with much at the moment.

  "Ok. Could you lower your lights a bit, though? They're giving me a headache," the cameraman asked.

  Abigail, dim the lights.

  Yes, Senator.

  "BIL, how much longer?" Moore asked out loud.

  "We have currently accelerated to top speed of one hundred and eighty kilometers per hour and are about forty-seven minutes from the evacuation coordinates, Senator Moore," BIL quickly responded. Moore cringed when BIL used his title and name. Now he'd have to answer a bunch of damned questions. "I would suggest that you all sit on the floor and make yourselves as comfortable as you can. I will try to reduce the bumpiness of the ride as best I can."

  "Thank you, BIL. Just get us there in time." Moore motioned for everyone to have a seat. Once they were all seated facing each other in a circle, he sat down too.

  "Senator Moore? Alexander Moore from Mississippi?" Fehrer asked. "You're part of the Arbitration Summit right?"

  "Yes."

  "That's it? Yes? You're the first politician I've ever seen not in a hurry to wax poetic for the press." Gail laughed, wishing she could get her camera back and record this conversation.

  "Well, if you haven't noticed, Miss Fehrer, we are under attack and under siege by a Separatist military force the likes of which hasn't been seen for decades. And my wife, daughter, and I are caught up in the midst of it all. So pardon me if I'm more concerned with the safety and evacuation of my family and these two citizens at the moment than being on the news."

  "Sorry, Senator. I understand. Listen. Let Calvin have his camera back. We'll record only and wait to transmit until we are safely away from the Seppies. I wouldn't mind getting out of here either. I promise not to broadcast," Fehrer begged the rifle-wielding statesman.

  "All right. But my staffer is QMing you. If you so much as emit one iota from that thing I'll bust some rounds off through it and then squish it with my jumpboots, understand?" Moore eyed the two of them and raised the rifle barrel upward for emphasis, but he could tell they understood.

  "Promise, Senator."

  "All right then. Reyez, give the man back his camera." Moore nodded to the adventure shop manager and then turned back to the reporter. "I guess you've got questions?"

  "Well, my first one is why aren't the troops interested in this . . . thing?" she motioned her arms around meaning the garbage hauler. "I guess you couldn't see it from inside here, but you just walked by hundreds of Separatists troop vehicles all of which were loaded with troops. And not a single one of them paid you any mind at all. Why?"

  "Because BIL told them not to?" the senator's daughter giggled.

  "I'm sorry, BIL?" Gail asked.

  "Yes. BIL, the garbage spider," Deanna replied again.

  "BIL is the AI controlling this hauler," Moore started explaining. "He also controls the garbage hauler schedule for the Mons City Reclamation and Redistribution Center. He put on the schedule that this was a routine run out into the desert to pick up a downed vehicle for reclamation. Who pays attention to garbage haulers?"

  "I see. Clever. How did you convince him to do this?" Gail asked in her reporter voice.

  "We just asked him." Moore smiled at the seasoned reporter halfheartedly wishing that Deanna would stick her tongue out at the woman and say, Duh.

  "Hmm. So you were in the city for the Summit meetings with the Separatist Laborers when the attack started?"

  "That's right," Moore said.

  Laborers' union, now that is a real joke. Laborers' unions don't have heavy drop mecha and thousands and thousands of soldiers. This is a Separatist army and the press is going to have to admit that. Hell, the country is going to have to admit that or we'll never stop this war. And that is what this is . . . war, Moore thought.

  Maybe this is your opportunity to tell them, Senator Moore, Abigail suggested.

  Maybe, Moore paused a moment and agreed with his AIC. Abigail, you're right. This is a golden opportunity. Maybe we can make some lemonade out of this situation after all.

  "Larry, you looked over DeathRay's plans. What'd you think?" Captain Wallace Jefferson had asked his executive officer to go over the final battle plans that the Looney Bin experts had come up with. The two men had been DTMed the final battle plan simulations and were addressing details in the CO's office.

  The fleet had been assembled and readied at the northernmost naval base in the Hellas Basin and were poised to jaunt into a hyperspace orbit that would pop them out into normal space in firing range of the Separatist armada that had amassed over the Tharsis Mons region on the other side of the planet.

  The Separatist armada consisted of six supercarriers—vintage as they were—and many smaller vessels including commercial and industrial vehicles. The entire lower regions of Olympus Mons and most of the Tharsis territory was now under siege by the Separatists and was covered from above at near-space hovering altitudes all the way up to Mars synchronous orbital altitudes by the makeshift Seppy armada.

  "Well, Captain, reminds me a bit of that mess we made out of the civilian quarter in the Cydonian Mountains. Lot of col
lateral damage can't be helped, maybe tens even hundreds of thousands. But I got to say, if we don't drop in and kick these Seppy bastards out of Tharsis then they're likely to kill millions," The XO, Marine Colonel Larry Chekov, replied.

  "Another fine Navy day, hey, Larry?" the CO joked, but then frowned. The Sienna Madira had seen her share of tough scrapes and battles but never one with so many potential civilian lives at risk. And just how many civilian, citizen, lives were acceptable losses? The CO would have to wait for authorization from the Joint Chiefs before an action this size could be ordered. All he could do was to prepare his fleet for battle, offer the Pentagon potential battle plans, and wait for the order to attack.

  "Aye, sir." The XO nodded in understanding of the Navy sarcasm.

  "Well, this is one of those situations that we are damned if we do and damned if we don't. And the political fallout is going to be hell." Captain Jefferson rubbed his neck and leaned back in his desk chair. "I guess we have no choice. Uncle Timmy?" The CO said out loud to the Madira's AIC.

  "Yes, Captain Jefferson?" the AIC of the flagship responded over the speaker on the CO's desk.

  "Upload the battle plan to the Pentagon and request authorization."

  "Aye aye, sir."

  "Well, let's see how big the president's balls are, Larry."

  Chapter 13

  12:41 PM Mars Tharsis Standard Time

  The president of the United States of America sat at the head of the table in the Situation Room in the basement of the West Wing of the White House. He focused intently on the opinion poll data being DTMed into his head. Following the outcome of rapid poll data had served the president well for all of his first term and most of the present one.

  The present question being put to a rapid online poll, he hoped, would give him a good read on the public's desire for the present situation at Tharsis. Should he or shouldn't he move forward with aggressive action against the Separatist incursion of the Tharsis region of Mars and risk the lives of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of voters in the Martian central mountain territory? There were actually over seventeen million inhabitants in the Tharsis territory and more than thirty percent of them were registered voters. If he took action that killed thousands, tens of thousands, maybe more of the registered voters' family members, it would have serious repercussions on the political outlook of the nation. Currently, the political outlook was one that the president and his party enjoyed. He didn't want to do something that would screw that up. His chief advisors and staff were giving him a moment to think while conducting similar analyses and simulations of their own.

  Why did this have to happen now? he thought. To this point his administration had taken the Democratic National Party through nearly seven years with approval ratings near sixty-five percent. In the three strong parties of the American political system those were the best numbers any president—other than Sienna Madira, of course—had had for more than a century. It was likely that his vice president would be able to ride his wake into a whole next era of DNC control. The House and the Senate had benefited from the President's popularity and the DNC had grown to majority status and maintained control of both houses for longer than any other party since before the Sienna Madira years.

  "What do you think about all this, Conner?" President Alberts asked his secretary of defense, Conner Pallatin. The poll data was split in three ways almost evenly over the three possibilities: 1) do nothing and ride it out, 2) attack the Separatist forces, or 3) surround the forces and ask for diplomatic discussions. There was a fourth possibility but it was still sensitive and not released on the poll. The forth possibility involved nothing more than a political "cover your ass" maneuver to rescue a member of the opposition party that had managed to get himself into a pickle. But President Alberts didn't want to take the chance that the internal White House Staff polls would get leaked to the press and therefore let the Separatists know that there was an American senator stranded somewhere in Mons City.

  "I'm not so certain that the Separatists are going to just go away, sir. Somehow they have managed to amass quite an armada and have complete control of the Tharsis territory. The citizens there are trapped and are really at the mercy of the Separatists, Mr. President." The sec def had seen the polling data as well and wasn't sure of a good way out of this mess either. "We aren't even certain what the Seppies want, sir."

  "Conner, you know I don't like that derogatory slang," President Alberts scolded his secretary of defense. "If the press got wind of somebody in my administration using it our approval rating could slide terribly."

  "Sorry, Mr. President. As I meant to say, the Separatists have not even given us any demands, sir. We don't know if this is an act of war or if they plan to hold the region hostage as some bargaining aspect at the Summit talks," Conner explained. The reasoning behind the attacks was baffling to everyone in the system. There was no rhyme or reason for it as anybody could see. What advantage did the Separatist leadership think that an all out attack against the much greater force of the United States would gain? There were some at the Pentagon suggesting that the Separatists had way overestimated their capabilities much in the same way that Hitler had near the end of World War II. There was no way the Separatists could hope to maintain such a massive war fighting machine.

  William Alberts stood from his chair and stepped away from the long mahogany conference table. The Situation Room had basically the same decor since President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had created the Situation Room back in the mid-twentieth century after the Bay of Pigs incident. President Alberts walked slowly around the room where more than ninety-five other presidents had stood and pondered the heavy decisions of their time. The weight of the office bore fully on his shoulders and he looked to history for insight. Was there some approach that his predecessors had used or some profound thought that had kept them on the right path that he could emulate?

  How Nixon must have paced the room during the bombings of Hanoi! What did President Carter do as he analyzed the peace talks between Begin and Sadat? What of President Reagan during the many Cold War incidents, what of the father and son Bushes during their respective wars in the middle east? How had William Jefferson Clinton handled the fighting in Old Africa? What of the several presidents to follow and the Global War of Muslim Extremism? And how had the many presidents to follow the "Great Expansion" of humanity handled their various "situations" of slow economies, overpopulation, civil unrest between colonies throughout the Sol system, and political infighting for territorial control? How had President Charlotte Ames dealt with the creation of the New World Government Consolidation Act and the assimilation of all the world governments under one constitution, an America- and United Nations-based constitution? How had President Victor Kolmogorov handled the news of the first interstellar spaceflight and the subsequent missions out of the solar system to other stars? How had the great President Sienna Madira handled the Separatist Secession and the creation of the Reservation in the desert of the red planet?

  More important, Alberts thought, how would he handle this situation now in such a way that history would recall him as one of the great presidents of history? How could he salvage this incident for the good of the DNC? He searched the faces of his most trusted military and intelligence and political advisors around the room, but was certain that they waited for his direction. Politics was always that way—few were willing to be the first to stick their necks out onto the political public chopping block.

  President Alberts had only made a few other such tough decisions and had used the Situation Room briefly in the past, but they were nowhere near the drastic scale of the decision before him. The Triton invasion was a much smaller mess and was so far away from mainstream America that most voters had paid it little attention. The Kuiper Station raid was even smaller and farther away. Otherwise, the economy had been cruising along steadily—the war didn't hurt that—and most Americans had gone on obliviously about their daily routines. His administration had
been a good one. He sure didn't need this damned Separatist uprising so near the end of his term.

  "Well, we're damned if we do and damned if we don't." The president paused for a brief moment and added more. "Popularity, I have always thought, may aptly be compared to a coquette—the more you woo her, the more apt is she to elude your embrace."

  "Mr. President?" Secretary Conner raised an eyebrow in question of the comment.

  "John Tyler, the tenth President of the United States of America, said that. So true in 1841 and perfectly meaningful in 2383. Just when we've got the approval from the public that we need, something like this comes along and inevitably will destroy all we've worked for. Possibly overnight, and maybe even in a few short minutes."

  "Yes sir." Conner nodded agreement. "I understand sir."

  "Damnit." Alberts paused for a second as if he were going to change his mind but then thought better of it. "We don't attack. At least not all out."

  "Sir? The longer we let them dig in, the harder it will be to dig them out," the chairman of the Joint Chiefs advised from the other side of the table.

  "I realize that, Sandy. But we really need to know what they are up to. My director of national intelligence seems to be a little short on data in that regards, right Mike?" the president scolded his DNI. The DNI only grunted in acknowledgment.

  "We support the withdrawal of Senator Moore and that is all we do on the ground. The press would have a field day if I let a Republican senator get killed and do nothing to try and get him out. Beyond that, we take out the Separatist armada of ships above Tharsis. We do not go to ground with full mecha divisions. One division of tanks and one squadron of fighter support. Understood?"

  "What about our troops still left on the ground in the region, sir?" The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs asked. "We're not leaving them behind to die, are we?"

  "They'll just have to hold out a little while longer while we look for a diplomatic solution." Alberts scanned the room for further insights but there were none. Again, the political chopping block was a lonely place to stick one's neck. It was obvious that the Joint Chiefs did not like his decision but wouldn't risk their careers to contradict him. But that was okay, they didn't have to like the order. They just had to follow it. "Let us move on it, people."