One Day on Mars s-1

by Travis S. Taylor

  "Roger that. Good luck, ma'am."

  Nancy just nodded and closed her faceplate. The scrubber kicked in and her oxygen supply read full and not being used—the scrubber was getting plenty of good air from the hangar bay.

  "Good hunting, DeathRay!" The chief snapped a salute.

  "Roger that!" Jack saluted back and the chief quickly climbed down the scaffolding.

  Jack settled into the front seat, then pulled the hardwire connection from the universal docking port (UDP) of his Ares fighter and plugged it into the thin little rugged composite box on the left side of his helmet that made a direct electrical connection to his AIC implant via skin contact sensors in his helmet. The direct connection wasn't necessary, but functioned as a backup system in the case of enemy jamming of the wireless connection between the AIC and the fighter. The wireless connection was spread spectrum encrypted and almost unspoofable. Almost.

  "Hardwire UDP is connected and operational. Lieutenant Candis Three Zero Seven Two Four Niner Niner Niner Six ready for duty," Jack's AIC announced over the open com channel. Then directly to Jack, Let's go get 'em, Commander!

  Roger that, Candis!

  Jack saluted the flight-deck officer and brought the canopy down. The harness holding the fighter lowered and detached, dropping it the last twenty centimeters to the deck with a slight squish feel from the landing gear suspension. Jack followed the flight deck sequence and moved in line for takeoff.

  "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking," Jack said over the fighter's internal speakers. "Please make sure all trays are in their upright and locked position and all carry-on luggage is stowed away for takeoff. We'll be taxiing out to the catapult field and soon after will be flung into a hellacious shitstorm of anti-aircraft fire and enemy Gomers. Please sit back and enjoy the ride. If you intend to fly in the near future may we suggest you don't fly in the midst of a fucking war next time!" Jack laughed and looked in the rear view to see how his cargo liked his so clever and informative announcement. He couldn't be certain, but other than chewing on her bottom lip she looked as if she were taking a nap. Okay, humor wasn't the way to go, he thought.

  Probably not, sir, Candis replied.

  The fighter two in front of him was "at bat" and eased into the catapult field and almost immediately disappeared out the open end of the bay. The one directly ahead "on deck" began to follow suit. Jack was "in the hole."

  "Fighter one-three-three call sign DeathRay, you are cleared for egress. Good hunting, Lieutenant Commander Boland!" the control tower officer radioed.

  "Roger that, tower. Y'all just keep the beer cold and DeathRay will be back soon enough." Jack eased into the "on deck" spot as the fighter "at bat" vanished in front of them.

  "Here we go, ma'am. Y'all hang on," Jack told his passenger.

  "Roger that, Lieutenant Commander Boland. I'm hanging on." Nancy swallowed hard and gripped her harness a little tighter until her knuckles turned pink and white.

  "Fighter one-three-three you are at bat and go for cat! Good hunting, DeathRay!" the catapult field AI announced.

  "Roger that. One-three-three has the cat! WHOOO! HOOOO!" Jack screamed, and was thrust hard into his seat.

  The catapult field took about one thousandth of a second to grasp that there was a matter field inside it. That matter field, Jack's Ares fighter, was not there when the original magnetic and repulsor field lines were put in place, and the superconductor field coils would do just about anything to stay the way they had been originally. The end effect was that the catapult field did the only thing it could do. It expelled the little snub-nosed fighter craft out the aft end of the field at over three hundred kilometers per hour. Without the inertial dampening controls of the fighter the occupants of the craft would have been accelerated against their seats and restraints so harshly that they would have been turned to a bloody mush. From zero to three hundred kilometers per hour in one tenth of a second is considerable acceleration, indeed—eighty-five Earth gravities! Even with the inertial dampening controls the occupants of the fighter felt more than nine gravities for a few seconds.

  "What a rush!" Jack shook his head and squeezed his thighs and abdominal muscles as tight as he could. He grunted as the overwhelming g-forces subsided and there was no longer anything to worry about but the sky full of anti-aircraft fire and enemy fighter planes. He forced the throttle full forward, pushing the fighter to over two thousand kilometers per hour. It took about seven seconds to reach top velocity while conducting evasive maneuvers, and again there were massive g-forces to deal with as well as a hellstorm of anti-aircraft cannon fire. His thigh harnesses squeezed tighter around his legs, forcing blood from them. He flexed his stomach muscles as hard as he could and yanked the fighter left as an anti-aircraft missile zipped past them to the right.

  Candis! he screamed in his mind.

  Got it, Jack! the AIC replied and almost as immediately the DEGs pulsed with a bright green flash of high-intensity light focused on the missile. The missile ablated and flew apart, pounding the Ares fighter with shrapnel at a delta velocity between missile and fighter of over seven hundred kilometers per hour. The shield microplating did its job as multiple spitwangs rang through the fighter.

  Seppy Gomer, Jack! On our six at angels twelve!

  "DeathRay! DeathRay, this is EvilDead . . . you've got a Gomer on your six, copy!"

  "Unh! Got it, EvilDead!"

  Jack pulled the fighter up and fired the pitch spindrive bringing the nose of the fighter one hundred and eighty degrees, flying backwards and upside down but still maintaining the fighter's current trajectory.

  "Copy that . . . Gomer on six!" Jack grunted over the net. Holding down the railgun trigger, he tracked back across his pursuer's flight path with sudden death. The railgun bolts ripped through the blue-gray Separatist Gnat fighter, spinning it wildly out of control just before the g-forces tore it apart into a cloud of shrapnel.

  Thirty-one, he thought

  "Great shooting, DeathRay! Now get off your ass and get the fuck out of here! EvilDead out!" the CAG officer and number one pilot ordered him.

  "Roger that, Lieutenant Commander," Jack replied, and switched to the internal com. "Hold on back there!" Jack yelled, and yawed the fighter to the left, firing at other targets of opportunity as Candis pointed them out in his mind's eye.

  Nancy held on.

  Chapter 2

  7:10 AM Mars Tharsis Standard Time

  "Approval ratings for President Alberts today are the highest in the history of the United States." Walt Mortimer, one of the so-called expert panel members for The Round Table of News and lead White House columnist for the Washington Post, commented on the news of the latest polling data from the nation's capital. Mortimer had long been considered one of the "graybeards" of reporters on Washington, D.C., and systemwide politics helping the populace. Actually, he was just another of the million Beltway Bandits making a living by feeding shit to the American public. But it was a good living.

  "His policies are following a whirlwind of approval from pollsters," Mortimer continued. "Systemwide economic growth and a strong defense against inter-system competition of market goods and commerce due to cheaper products from the Colonies seems to be a big successful hot button for the American voters." Mortimer leaned back in his chair and scribbled some notes on a pad in front of him.

  "That seems to be how the American people feel about it anyway," Britt Howard, the show's host and anchor for the Earth News Network (ENN) at the New York City anchor desk, replied. "It would appear that a 'Buy American' policy has been the unofficial cry of the Alberts administration and indeed the president has lobbied extremely hard to increase the tariffs on all imports from the four extra-solar colonies. There has also been a push from the White House to tax the goods and services coming from the Separatist Laborers Guild on the Martian Reservation. This policy has also seemed to not only be broadly accepted by the American public, but the latest polls show that the public is overwhelmingly
for higher taxation on the Reservation Workers' incomes and businesses," Britt Howard continued, and then nodded across the round table at the only female on the panel.

  "Well, I have to say that I think this will cause the wedge to be driven even deeper between the actual states here in Sol's System and the Separatists on the Reservation at Mars and the colonists at Proxima Centauri, Ross 128, Lalande 21185, and Tau Ceti," Alice St. John of the System Review replied. As the youngest member and with her shoulder-length black hair and more modern dress and demeanor, she was often used to express the radical dissenting voice on the panel. After all, Alice never minded showing the tiniest hint of her cleavage or any restraint when calling one of the "elder reporters" on something that she thought was utter bullshit. Fortunately for Alice, she was smart and pretty and therefore what little bit of radical viewership the Earth News Network had liked her and so she was able to keep her job secure.

  "The Colonies have shown little interest in supporting these new White House policies since, on the surface at least; they appear to be nothing more than the statement that the citizens on the Reservation and in the Colonies are second-class citizens with little voice," she continued.

  "I agree, Alice. That does seem to be the present view of the radical Republicans and the Independents. They are campaigning on the platform that the Reservation should become a state and so should the Colonies. But since there is no longer an electoral college, making those territories states will do little to overturn any major population majority votes. The people of those regions already get to vote. Calling them members of a new state wouldn't really matter, would it? Most feel that this is just a ploy of the GOP to usurp power from the other two parties again. And the radical Republicans claim it would enable Americans to 'take back' their country."

  "Careful, Walt. That sounds a little revolutionary." Britt laughed. Of course neither he nor Walt would think that any members of the United States of America could ever consider such an archaic concept any longer. Civil wars and revolutions were things of the past. Oh, there were terrorist skirmishes but not all-out war.

  "Well, in that case, Walt," Alice replied, "wouldn't you have to agree with the Separatists and the Colonists that they have no voice and that their votes really do mean very little? With no electoral votes the measly few percent of the popular vote they have is easily swayed by, say, the New African bloc, or the Mexican votes or the Chinese votes or the Indian Nationalist votes or the Luna City votes. There are strings of other special interest groups much larger than the few million Separatists or the Colonists. A few percent voting bloc is no longer a large enough piece to really sway the elections of anything one way or the other."

  "Ha, ha. Alice, I most definitely wouldn't go that far. This is still a democracy and the majority status rules," the elder reporter Walt Mortimer said jocularly. "The guidance of our forefathers tell us that 'majority rule' is best. And in the end every vote counts."

  "Come now, Walt. Every vote counts? Oh sure, every vote gets counted. But there is a large difference in the nuances of the two statements," Alice corrected her colleague. She held her composure well but she grew a bit red in the face with anger at the seasoned reporter's judicious use of incorrect statements as facts. "And 'majority rule' isn't history at all. In fact, the United States was actually designed as a republic and the electoral college was created to prevent an uneducated majority rule. Our forefathers actually feared the thought of majority rule once the majority grew complacent and learned how to vote themselves power, hence the electoral college."

  "This isn't a history debate, but I recall there also being an issue of voting technology as a factor in driving the need for an electoral college. People walked or rode horseback to vote on a piece of paper in their general elections. The states counted the votes and then the representative from the electoral college would travel to Washington to cast his distribution of electoral votes based on the general vote."

  "Okay, I have to comment on that." Steam nearly escaped from Alice's ears as she approached the boiling point. She kept her composure, almost, and that is what her radical fans liked about her, emotions. "Walt, that is just not true historically. Oh, the geographical representation was considered, but not for that reason. The Founding Fathers who are now known as the 'Framers of the Constitution' didn't doubt public intelligence of the time. They feared it could happen in the future and that the electoral college could help prevent it in from happening but it was not the issue of the day. Instead, what they feared most was the problem of the 'favorite son' scenario." Alice paused for a second to see if there was recognition of the scenario from her colleagues' faces. She saw nonplussed poker faces, which meant they were probably having their AIs download backup information for them and summarize it to them as quickly as possible. So she sighed and continued.

  "The 'favorite son' scenario is that without sufficient information about the candidates running for president from outside their state, locals have no reason to vote for an outsider and would most likely cast their votes for the 'favorite son' from their own hometown region. The local boy would always win the local election over a stranger from out of town; that was the fear. The worst fear was that no president would ever be elected with a popular majority of the votes to govern the whole country without bitterness from other regions. Another fear was that the popular majority choice of president would always be from the largest and/or most densely populated states which would pretty much render the votes of the smaller states superfluous and irrelevant. Does this sound familiar to anyone here? Déjà vu anyone?" Alice threw up her hands.

  "Well, be that as it may, and it may be a topic for a full show sometime," Britt interjected himself into the debate with an attempt to stall Alice's soliloquy. "The main issue for today is that the Separatists and the citizens in the four colonies do seem to have little desire to support this administration or its policies. In fact the governors of Tau Ceti and from Lalande 21185 have issued statements that their lawyers believe that President Alberts' new tariffs proposal to the Congress is in violation of the Inter-System Free Trade Agreement and that they are indeed seeking appeals of the policies through the Supreme Court."

  "Well, I think that is the right course of action, or perhaps, the only real course of action that could be taken from a colonial standpoint." Mortimer replied magniloquently. "If they don't like the law either challenge its constitutionality or rally Congress to change it or the president to veto it. The Supreme Court is their best shot."

  "Walt, again, is that really true? From a colonial perspective what did the original colonists of the thirteen colonies of the United States do when faced with similar impositions from England?" Alice once again began explaining history to the elder reporter who had long been accused of being a mouthpiece for the DNC and biased but only the GOP extremists would ever say such a thing.

  "Goddamned rightwing nut!" President of the United States of America William Alberts sat in his West Wing office of the White House watching the news. He always enjoyed The Round Table on ENN. Mortimer and Howard were so stately and wise, but that damned broad on there was a hotheaded radical, almost comical she was so radical. Nobody ever really took her seriously; otherwise, the president would not be supporting the ninety-six percent approval rating across the entire country. The country loved him. There was a present economic flourish. There hadn't been a terrorist uprising since a year ago way out at Triton and that crazy Kuiper Station affair from his first year in office in his first term, which was all but forgotten by the general populace. The only bit of trouble was the Separatist Extremist terrorists on the edge of the Reservation, and the armed forces had been able to keep that at bay and the news was playing it fairly low-key. The overwhelming might of the U.S. Fleet prevented any terrorists from truly revolting and besides that, the media loved him. Things were looking good for the administration and the legacy of President Alberts. With only a year to go until the election his successor, Vice President Michelle Swope, could
ride his high approval rating wave right into the White House and give the Democrats four more years.

  Mr. President. Paula, his AI staffer, interrupted his train of thought.

  Yes, Paula? He leaned back in his desk chair and propped his feet up on the desk. It was his office, it was his country, why not? Was it disrespectful? Will didn't think so.

  The secretary of defense, the national security advisor, and the director of national intelligence are here for the daily intelligence brief, the AI said into Alberts' mind.

  Shit. Didn't I do that yesterday? the president asked.

  No sir.

  Well, when was the last time I read that thing? It couldn't be that long ago.

  It was thirteen months and four days ago, Mr. President. The AI paused. Sir, your wife is also requesting you meet with her and the Reservation Historical Fund Society this morning.

  Shit again. Tell her I have an important meeting with the sec def, the NSA, and the DNI that I can't get out of today.

  Very well. And the sec def, NSA, and DNI, sir?

  Oh hell, send them in.

  "Okay Conner." Alberts held up his left hand and looked up at the secretary of defense. "All this secret stuff just isn't any good for the country. The polls show that these clandestine operations make the public distrust the government. You know who the government is, Conner? Me, that's who. Did you see my approval rating today? We don't need to be doing a bunch of clandestine stuff that is gonna screw that up in my last year in office."

  "Uh, yes, Mr. President, we thought of that. But the DNI's office has intelligence that there has been a lot of technology being transferred from somewhere into the Reservation," the sec def told the commander in chief.