Ma'am, it is approaching seven thirty am in Tharsis, her AIC told her.
Right then. I guess I should order the attack to start, she replied.
Chapter 4
7:30 AM Mars Tharsis Standard Time
Senator Alexander Moore held his six-year-old daughter's left hand with his right. His wife, Sehera, held their daughter's other hand, and occasionally little Deanna would pick up her feet and swing from her parents' hold. The swing was a slow pendulous arc in the low Martian gravity that thrilled the precocious child. Deanna was cute in all the ways that a little girl could be and she'd been fortunate enough to acquire the best traits of each parent. Her mother's long full-bodied dark curly hair and milky white smooth Martian skin gave her a baby-doll cute appeal, while her father's Mississippi State University starting-fullback frame made her appear as a physical force to be reckoned with, even at only six Earth years old.
The three of them were thoroughly enjoying their low-gravity stroll through the shopping and mall district of the largest environment dome at the Mons City resort. The unearthly architecture, dim lighting from Sol mixed with city lights, and light gravity of the Martian city were a pleasant and welcome change from Capitol Hill, which was normally where the family spent all their few-and-far-between together moments.
"Look, Mommy!" Deanna pointed to a large holo projection at the doorway of a shop called Mons Adventures at a man hang gliding down the side of Olympus Mons. The image shifted a moment later to a group of carefree adrenaline-junkie tourist adventurers rappelling down the side of a Martian canyon and then again switching to tourist hiking across the open desert in jumpboots taking twenty-meter leaps at a time across the Martian desert scrub brush. "Neat! Can we do that, Mommy?"
"That looks like fun, doesn't it!" Alexander smiled. The senator missed real-life action-packed fun. His days on Capitol Hill seldom required him to work up a sweat and the only place he managed to do that was in the gym. He missed his more athletic days in college and the military—though he did not miss the pain and daily threat of death from the latter.
"Bah!" Sehera replied. "That is insanely dangerous and I'd better not ever catch either of you doing it."
"Mommy, you're a fraidy cat." Deanna laughed and repeated, "Fraidy cat, fraidy cat."
"Fraidy cats live long lives, dear. Nine of them," her mother said.
The three continued along, looking like nothing more than tourists. Alexander had not been away from the Beltway in a long time and this trip to the Martian Summit was proving to be something other than the political career booster he had originally intended it to be. It was more of a much-needed family vacation.
They continued through the shops along the sidewalks and into an open court area filled with local cuisine and hot dog stands. There were a few trees both of Earth and Martian variety casting shade over the blue-green grass-covered area. The sound of various Earth birds could be heard over the bustle of the tourists and locals with the occasional hovercar screeching by in the background noise.
The dome had a large transparent ceiling and a spectacular view of the south side of the Mons City skyline in the shadow of the great mountain itself. Olympus Mons covered an area nearly the size of the state of Arizona and the mountain was over twenty-five kilometers tall at the peak. Mons City's main dome was built on the escarpment over two hundred kilometers from the peak on the southwest side of the ancient volcano. Summit City was built atop the mountain along the edge of the volcano's ridges and surrounding the caldera of the ancient volcano. The caldera, or pit, of the giant volcano was over eighty kilometers across and more than two and a half kilometers deep. Summit City had sprung up around many different tourist activities that ranged from base-gliding off the caldera, to climbing and rappelling on it, to even the five-kilometer luge that snaked down the north side of the caldera ridge. The southern ridge of the caldera was peppered by several observatories and naval outposts that were adjuncts of the base farther down the mountain.
The caldera floor was covered with dwelling domes of the locals and a major shopping center dome that was nearly twenty kilometers in diameter. Interstate transport tubes covered the floor like a spider's web and turned up the ridge to Summit City at about every forty degrees around the pit's circumference. Smaller street tubes and tunnels cut in and out of the mountain walls. The peak of the giant Martian shield volcano had become a metropolis. Summit City was more like Las Vegas back on Earth than it was like New York City. Mons City, on the other hand, rivaled any of the huge megalopolises on Earth. It spiraled and grew out over most of the southwestern face of Olympus Mons from the escarpment to the summit.
The peak of the mountain was littered with hundreds of minor domes and highway tubules, but there were five major domes that were considered boroughs of Mons City by the locals. The main dome was over thirty kilometers in diameter with four ten-kilometer domes spread out equally around it. The four secondary domes of Mons City were spread out across the face of the southern side of the giant state-sized mountain at the three, six, nine, and twelve o'clock positions about the main dome. The domes were really cities within themselves. But the entire complex was the largest construct in mankind's history.
A little farther east and up the mountain one could see the naval base. There was continuous air and space traffic in and out of the base, a sign that there was more going on than day-to-day travel—like, a war. A war that had been waging on and off for more than three or four decades. A war that most of the American population wouldn't admit was even a war.
"What's that, Daddy?" Deanna asked, and pointed toward the large supercarrier hovering over the outskirts of the naval base.
Abigail? Senator Moore asked his staffer AI.
Yes, Senator. That is the U.S.S. Supercarrier Winston Churchill.
"That, my dear . . . " Senator Moore paused for dramatic effect, a trick he'd often used on the senate floor. "That is the U.S.S. Supercarrier Winston Churchill from the great state of South England."
"What's a supercarrier, Daddy?"
Alexander smiled at his daughter. She was smart and beautiful—it pleased him, a lot, that she was inquisitive. But the senator had other things on his mind. The summit meeting at the Olympus Mons resort had been dragging on for weeks now with no end in sight. Alexander had come to Mars with the hopes of making a name for himself in political history by bringing the war that was raging at that very moment on the other side of the planet, just a few thousand kilometers away in Elysium, and elsewhere in the Sol System, to a halt.
But he had had no luck. He had known for some time that he needed to be there at Mons City for the summit. But he was beginning to wonder why. He was a minor member of the Senate Appropriations Committee; he simply wasn't powerful enough to make the deals needed to sway the Separatist Laborers Guild to cease hostilities and get back to work—the "great" work of the United States of America. And somehow, the Separatists had become seriously armed with mecha and aircraft and other weapons far better than the ones he had faced in the Martian desert thirty years earlier. There were even rumors in the press that the extremists of the Separatist movement had acquired weapons of mass destruction, maybe even a gluonium warhead. Gluonium warheads had been developed in the past half century and were based on the so-called gluon force that binds quarks together. A single gluonium warhead could possibly take out a state-sized region. If it was true that the Separatists had acquired gluonium, then they could take out an entire megacity like Mons City with one bomb—if they could deliver it without it being detected.
There was more going on with the Separatists than people generally wanted to admit. The Separatists were getting materials from outside the USA—in other words, outside of the Sol System. But where? There were only four extra-solar colonies known to man: Proxima Centauri Planet Two, also known as Teradise, Ross 128 Planet Three Moon Beta, aka Xander's World, Lalande 21185 Planet Three, aka Utopia, and Tau Ceti Planet Four Moon Alpha, aka Ares. Alexander had a very good idea of what was
going on, but he had desired and needed to know more about how the U.S. could handle the situation. He needed access to more information—to classified information.
So, Senator Moore had tried to finesse his way onto the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, or the SSCI—pronounced "sissy" as he had learned—for all of his latest term. Without being exposed to the intelligence and what was really going on in the Local Bubble, it was hard to be effective in negotiations with the Separatist delegation at the summit. The Agricultural Committee members just do not get the access to Top Secret and special access information that the SSCI does.
The fact that the current administration had chosen to send such a low-echelon, only second-term, politician as the representative for the U.S. government at the summit meeting hinted as to America's sincerity with the Separatists. In other words, the current administration couldn't care less about the Separatists and their plight. It was only a political "grass roots" hot button that had forced the president to take action and force the SSCI to brief Senator Moore into the pertinent information. After all, the young senator was the mouth of the "grass roots" folks. He had always wondered why they'd picked him, a senator from Mississippi, and not one from a Martian region. The GOP supporters would spin that they suspected the president was subconsciously a bigot toward Martians, or at the least that he was a class elitist.
More information on how the country was planning on winning the war and with what new technologies gave Alexander a better hold on the summit talks, even if the general population couldn't care less about the war between the U.S. and the Separatist movement. The "grass roots" groups simply wanted their tax dollars on Earth to quit going to a war on a planet that most of them had never been to. And the skirmishes in the outer part of the solar system were deemed an even bigger waste of tax dollars.
At times it seemed that only the Separatists cared. The latest news polls showed that most Earth and Luna citizens were so far removed from the actual war that the loss of life was being dismissed and Americans in general were sticking to their guns about "not dealing with terrorists." That battle cry, at least for now, would outweigh the cost of the war—but eventually the cost of the war would completely drive the politics.
By and large, the general population of inner Sol System thought of the Separatists as terrorists. But terrorists don't have armies, mecha, and air support. The Gnat aerospace fighter and the Orcus tank mecha were expensive pieces of equipment and the Seppies had been using them for decades. There had long been rumors that the U.S. government didn't really care about the aged combat systems because some of the spin-off companies in the Belt, or the Kuiper Belt, or maybe even at the Colonies, were manufacturing them at huge profits that were being used to grease certain politicians. Most of the components of the vehicles were manufactured on Earth, Luna, and Mars and then they were assembled somewhere else. So as long as the flow of money for the components and subsystems continued to keep millions in jobs across multiple congressional districts throughout the system, the purchase and therefore the assembly of the Separatist mecha and fighters was likely to continue.
Terrorists historically had not been known to have the type of economic and political power required to enable the continued support of what for all intents and purposes could be called an army. Of course, most terrorists throughout history hadn't had a region nearly the size of Africa cordoned off and given to them as their own place to live and protect. The Reservation was in essence its own country, separate from the United States, much like the American Indian reservations of the past.
Why would the government continue to allow them to arm themselves the way they had, for decades? The fact that the Separatists had mecha had come as surprise during the initiation of the Desert Campaigns thirty years ago, but for thirty years after they still had mecha pop up here and there in skirmishes and nothing had really been done about it. Alexander was quite certain that the Separatists were much more than just terrorists. The ones he had fought against in the Martian desert thirty years earlier most certainly were soldiers, not terrorists. Again he thought, Terrorists don't have armies, mecha, and air support.
Unless he could somehow get the Separatist representatives to guarantee no further actions and to begin talks of getting back to work, this trip had been nothing more than a Martian vacation for his wife and daughter. If people could only see the devastation on Triton, the bodies from Kuiper Station, and the fighting near the western edge of Elysium they would realize this was a war—a serious war and not just terrorists doing minor damage far away from Earth. Now, if the president had come instead, as the Martian delegation had begged of him, they could have gotten the media coverage to sway the Separatists back to work, Alexander was sure.
"What's a supercarrier, Daddy?" Deanna tugged at Senator Moore's sports coat impatiently, snapping him out of his mind-racing train of thought.
"Let's see. It is a very large spaceship that carries a whole bunch of smaller spaceships and thousands of people and tanks and is an awesome display of America's great strength and power. And Marines! You can't win any real war without a bunch of U.S. Marines!" He smiled and gestured flamboyantly with his hands open wide and his chest out. He then subconsciously turned his U.S. Marine Corps ring a few times. His wife grunted at his answer.
"Don't encourage her, Alexander." Sehera glanced at him. "It is a carrier, honey, because it carries other ships and people inside it. It is a supercarrier because it is superdy-duperdy big."
"I understand, Mommy." Deanna smiled and went back to swinging between her parents.
The supercarrier was indeed an awesome display of American military might. Its sleek structure over a kilometer and a half long, two-thirds of a kilometer wide, and a quarter kilometer tall, the U.S.S. Winston Churchill hovered over the largest mountain feature on the Martian landscape. The large vehicle turned on a slow arc and looked as if it would pass right overhead in a few moments, casting a giant shadow over the city domes. But the large brilliant orange, yellow, and red fireball erupting from the port side of the spacecraft caused it to list to starboard rapidly. Then the Churchill appeared to have lost all gravity-modification control and the supercarrier started losing altitude.
"Look!" Deanna let go of her parents' handhold and pointed.
"What the hell?" Senator Moore stopped dead in his tracks as the supercarrier lost propulsion and started on a downward trajectory.
"Oh my God!" Sehera instinctively picked up her daughter and held her tight to her, not exactly sure what to do but certain she would protect her child at all costs. The Martian childhood in her triggered years of instinct and hazardous-environment training. Alexander Moore, on the other hand, having grown up in the southeastern North American continent, knew not to stand in fire ants, not to play with copperheads and water moccasins, and to always steer clear of skunks and polecats. His youth couldn't help with the hazards of Mars. But the seventeen years he had spent in the Luna City Brigade Special Forces might.
"That thing is gonna hit one of the domes! We have got to get out of here!" Alexander grabbed his daughter from his wife and turned down an alleyway that led to the stairwell toward the main exit. Fortunately, they were not far from the exterior hall where the circumference interstate circled the city. There was a greenway that ran between the interstate and the dome that had leak shelters placed along it every few kilometers. "Come on! If that thing hits us we're going to lose atmosphere."
Abigail!
There is a leak shelter on the northwest wall greenway very near us. The AI staffer anticipated her boss's question.
"Run," Alexander yelled at his wife.
I have requested a Secret Service detail to pick you up, Senator. But, unfortunately, there are none available. There is a contingent of Martian Marine Reserve that has dispatched a squad of troops to us. They have all rallied to the governor's request for help.
Thanks.
"Stop, Alexander, wait!" Sehera grabbed at his shoulder.
"W
e'd better hurry and get to the shelter, Sehera," Alexander warned.
"No! Alexander, the shelter is on the other side of the greenway at the northwesternmost wall of this dome. That is over three kilometers away. It could take us a long time to get there and by then the crowds of tourists and locals will have filled it beyond capacity." Sehera was running survival plans over and over in her head. Any good Martian would tell you that the first thing to do is put on your suit and grab your air scrubber! And Sehera remembered seeing suits only moments earlier as they had been walking. Fraidy cats live nine lives, she recalled telling her daughter, and she planned to live all of them.
"Alexander, follow me!"
The supercarrier continued to fall on a ballistic trajectory until it clipped the bottom southwest side of the ancient Martian volcano mound. The large rugged ship ricocheted off the side of the mountain and fell right on top of the southernmost secondary dome of Mons City—the six-o'clock borough. The rupture of the side dome flowed precious atmosphere out into the Martian wind. With the air went the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens in a matter of tens of minutes. Rescue crews were scrambled and several Naval Fleet ships were dispatched to the mountain but it would be more than half an hour before the fleet could arrive.
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