"The software to the valve shows it locked HT3, but the flow meters are still reading seventeen megapascals on the flow pressure. The only flow valve down stream is from the SIF generator loop on the forward decks. Do I divert the flow?" Fireman's Apprentice Jimmy King had never seen the Madira hammered so hard. He had been on board for only a few weeks and the previous day's mission had been his first combat. Oh, there had been pilots going and coming from the supercarrier going into battle, but this was the first time the Madira itself had been in the mix of a full-scale naval battle and taking on anything worse than a few SAMs.
"No! Jimmy, if the SIFs go out on that end we'll have a standard coolant pipe with over seventeen megapascals of pressure in it. The instant that SIF went down, the pipe would be a bomb of exploding superheated liquid toxic metals!" Buckley scratched his head in thought for a brief second. The Madira lurched downward suddenly and a little faster than the inertial control system could compensate for, leaving Buckley with the brief feeling that his stomach was somewhere on the deck above him.
"We've got to do something, boss. The pressure in that loop is rising and the main gun is just getting hotter!" the fireman's apprentice replied. "Shit!" He grabbed the sides of his station to keep his balance as the ship continued to jerk randomly.
"No, the cats on all ends are at minimal use now that the fighters are out. Switch over the catapult coolant flow loops to the main gun coolant loops. Maybe that'll take some of the pressure off that stuck valve. The goddamned thing is probably seized open. That happened to us last year at Triton. That was ugly." Buckley grabbed at an icon for the cat coolant reservoir to read the internal temperature of the coolant bladder. Although the cats weren't going presently, they had just taken a hell of a thermal load to launch more than four full squadrons of fighters, mecha, and drop tanks in the last few minutes. The reservoir was above midway on the look-up table, reading yellow and not that far from red. But yellow was better than red. "Fuck. It'll have to do."
"HT3!"
"What now!"
"Looks like the port side SIF generators are starting to overheat!" Jimmy said with a little panic in his voice.
"CO! Port SIF generators are overheating. Starboard DEGs are overheating. We can either take a pounding and not fire or fire and take a pounding!" the XO warned the captain of the Sienna Madira.
"Air Boss! I want all the mecha on the Starboard exterior decks now!" the CO ordered.
"Aye sir!"
"Senator, I think it is time you find a better hiding place," BIL announced over the speaker.
"I agree, BIL. Can you let us out of here?" Moore asked. Just as he did, the rear door slid upward letting the sunlight in. "Let's go! Everybody with me!" Moore grabbed his daughter from his wife and dove out the ass end of the giant mechanical arachnid bouncing with fifteen meter steps at a full run. "BIL, go hide somewhere."
"Very well, Senator. It was fun talking with you."
"You as well, BIL. Thanks for the lift."
"You are very welcome. Bye, little one." The garbage hauler actually lifted one of its front legs and waved it at Deanna.
"Bye, BIL." Deanna waved over her father's shoulder back at the garbage hauler.
Reyez, Joanie, the reporter and her cameraman, and the senator's wife followed him, bouncing out of the garbage hauler onto the Martian soil. The cameraman, Calvin Dean, was videoing with every bounce and every breath. He paused for a second to get a shot of the two dozen American tanks hovering about the gorge's edge and the tank driver talking to a few armored soldiers. The mechanical spider let them out very near the edge of a large drop-off into the gorge at the bottom of the giant volcano's outermost edge. The drop-off must have been at least a half a kilometer deep or more in places.
"Okay, we're going to go to the edge of that set of lava stone outcroppings there and dig into the sand and hide until the evac gets here," the retired Marine ordered them.
Senator? his AIC said into his mind.
Yes, Abigail?
The FM-12 mecha pilots claim to have found the signal center frequency.
Yeah? Moore landed just behind the stone outcropping and sat his daughter down against the largest rock. "Stay down and don't move."
"Yes, Daddy," Deanna said.
It has a center pulse at two three three six megahertz, sir.
Well, that narrows the search down to a bandwidth around that peak. Look for the hopping frequencies around that one. Alexander knew his AIC would have already thought of that.
I'm doing that sir, but without more information that is still an excessive number of combinations. It might take a while.
Well, keep at it.
Of course, Senator.
"Alexander, what now?" His wife Sehera bounced beside him. She was panting for breath, her e-suit inner layer slowly absorbing and recycling the sweat rolling off her face.
"Dig!" he started digging a foxhole behind the rocks. "We dig a hole and hide until they can get us out of here. Where is our goddamned evac?" He looked around the horizon for an aircraft but saw none.
Abigail, where is the goddamned evac?
Hold one second . . . the area is too hot right now, Senator. There is a squad of Starhawks in orbit waiting for a green light.
Shit, get word to them that we have a child with us!
Yes, sir.
They all started digging. Alexander and Joanie used the butts of the Seppy HVARs for shovels. The Martian regolith pushed out of the way slowly as it was cold and hard and filled with lava stones.
"Allow me," a voice said as a shadow loomed behind them.
"What the?" Moore spun around with the rifle but the large Marine standing there quickly blocked the barrel and held up the palm of his heavily armored hand at the senator.
"Easy, sir. We're the good guys," Sergeant Jackson said, and pointed at the E5 markings on the shoulder of his e-suit. "I hear you should understand what that means sir?"
"You're damned right I do, Sergeant. Semper fuckin' Fi!" Alexander shook the AEM's hand. The armored hand engulfed the hand of the standard e-suit Moore was wearing. The sergeant motioned the senator out of the way so he stepped back to let him through.
"Lieutenant, I've found them." The sergeant alerted the other AEMs and then knelt to the rocks and started digging. The added strength of the armored e-suit enabled the Marine sergeant to dig faster and deeper than all of the civilians put together.
"Need a hand, Sergeant?" Private Kudaf and Corporal Shelly bounced into the beginnings of a nice foxhole and started digging, too.
"That was an interesting ride you folks had." One of the AEMs offered the senator his hand. "Second Lieutenant Washington, sir. I assume you are Senator Alexander Moore?"
"Lieutenant." Moore nodded. "That garbage hauler AI turned out to be pretty damned useful."
"Well, if you ask me, Senator," Corporal Shelly added, "spiders, mechanical or not, are just plain creepy. Why not make the thing look like a dog or a cat or something?"
"You got nothing better to do, Corporal?" Sergeant Jackson looked over at the Marine, warning her to keep her mind on her job.
"Ha, I wouldn't have minded if it had been a pig. It got us here," Reyez said. "Smelled like a pig though."
Something the female corporal had said triggered a thought cascade in Abigail's neural network. There was something about animals that seemed to have a familiar pattern to it that she had trained herself to learn before. There was something just at the tip of her software mind but she couldn't quite place it. The AIC knew there was something important here. Something about animals . . .