Also showing extreme heart rate and temperature drops. You're hit, Captain.
I said, I'm fine goddamnit!
"Madira! Madira! This is Bigguns, copy!" she grunted.
"Go, Bigguns!"
"Madira, I've got the big bomb in my lap and taking it out to space. The hauler is just falling garbage! The bomb is on a timer and is set to detonate in thirty-two seconds," Bigguns reported as the maximum acceleration of the mecha pushed her back into her seat at over seven gravities.
"Roger that, Bigguns! Great work!" the Air Boss replied over the net.
"Skinny, I'm punching out and you grab me, got it!"
"Roger that!" Skinny toggled the mode control and her fighter-mode mecha slammed over and then back up into eagle-mode. She grunted from the g-load.
Charlie, lock the controls of the fighter on this trajectory!
Done!
"Eject, eject, eject!" Bigguns pulled the ejection lever and the canopy slid away as the ejection field threw her clear of the fighter. The g-load on her felt like a ton of bricks hitting her in the gut and face all at once and then the dampening field of the ejection seat took over, reducing the effect to more tolerable levels. Her fighter sped off in a straight trajectory into space.
Skinny tracked the ejection chair's trajectory and adjusted hers to catch it. Her eagle-mode mecha easily overtook the now drifting ejection seat. She grabbed it and did an immediate rollover and thrust reversal. That bomb was going off any second and she wanted to get as much distance between it and them as she could. Had they been on a planet with atmosphere the shock wave would spread out for fifty kilometers or more and there would be no way to outrun it. But in space that wouldn't be as big a problem. The big problem was going to be radiation dose.
"Detonation in five, four, three, two . . . " Bigguns's AIC announced over audio so Skinny could hear. Of course, her AIC had the countdown timing as well.
The FM-12s could reach a top speed of about two thousand kilometers per hour in space. Once Skinny had picked up Bigguns and reversed direction, the relative velocity between the abandoned fighter stuck on full throttle with the bomb in it and Skinny's fighter was four thousand kilometers per hour. In the twenty-some-odd seconds before the bomb detonated they had managed to put nearly twenty-three kilometers between themselves and the bomb. The massive warhead exploded with the force of a thousand hydrogen bombs, filling the space above the battle with bright white light expanding in a perfect sphere outward from a singularity point. Imperfections in the tamper shielding of the bomb caused secondary jets of light to expand in different directions as expanding circles of plasma.
Just as a gluonium bomb detonated, more than ninety-nine percent of the energy of the explosion was released as high-energy gamma rays. The gamma rays seared through Bigguns and Skinny, knocking free nucleons in their body, causing radiation products to form. The result would be extreme radiation exposure. They would need treatment in less than thirty minutes or they would have serious life-threatening problems. Not that that was anything that the Marines didn't have on a day-to-day basis.
"Awesome, Captain!" Skinny shouted. "We better get to sickbay and take some rad meds pretty soon. My radiation meter is going off the fucking scale."
Bigguns didn't respond.
"Captain? Bigguns!" Skinny called out and looked at the pilot she was holding in her mecha's right hand. The pilot wasn't moving.
"Captain, do you copy?"
Zoom the blue force tracker, Alan, Skinny told her AIC so she could see any live soldiers in the range of her sensors in her DTM virtual mind view.
You got it, Skinny.
The blue dots filled the sky until Skinny zoomed in tightly around the fighter. Bigguns' blue dot was there on Skinny's fighter with her she could tell as the zoom came in. Then . . . the blue dot faded out.
"Fuck!" Skinny cried as her commander and friend died literally in her mecha's arms.
Chapter 22
2:20 PM Mars Tharsis Standard Time
"Look at that!" Joanie Hassed pointed up at the brilliant flash in the sky. Even in the afternoon sunlight the flash was more than brilliant. She hadn't seen that type of fireworks even during the Triton raids and this one was the second such flash that had taken place in the past ten minutes or so. "There goes another one."
"Keep your head down, Joanie." Senator Moore leaned back against the foxhole wall and stared up at the sky. There was a serious battle taking place up there. He could discern flashes and glints here and there from the opposing fleets. And there had indeed been several large-scale explosions that had been more than just fascinating in the late afternoon sky.
Moore had only noticed the last couple of minutes though as before that he had been fighting ferociously and fearlessly against the encroaching Separatist forces. In a mad rush into the enemy troops he had fought until he was out of ammunition and could do nothing but cover and hide. He had made his way back to their original foxhole—the one they had dug after leaving the mechanical spider. The foxhole was closest to the escarpment at the edge of the Olympus Mons volcano of all the cover locations he had managed to find. It was just behind a small outcropping of lava stones only thirty meters or so from the edge of the cliff.
They had ended up there after what any sane person would describe as his suicidal run. But Senator Moore would call it an effort to draw fire away from the escape of his beloved wife and daughter over the side of the drop-off. At the time he was certain it would be the last thing he would ever do. But to Senator Moore, who absolutely adored his little girl and loved his wife with all his heart, giving his life to make sure his wife and daughter could live would have been an easy trade to make. On the up side and fortunately for him, the Cardiff's Killers, a Marine FM-12 strike mech squadron, crested the escarpment's edge and zoomed, hell bent for destruction, into the encroaching Seppy tank lines just as he and the AEMs with him were running out of ammo and just as the Army tank squadron Warboys' Warlords were being forced to retreat.
The Marine survivors of the crashed U.S.S. Winston Churchill had risen from the Martian gorge like harbingers of death and the two dozen survivors from the sabotaged supercarrier brought the full bore of their revenge on the Separatist Orcus drop tanks in pursuit of the Warlords M3A17 transfigurable tank mecha squad. The high-tech Marine FM-12 strike mecha made light work of the overwhelming numbers of inferior enemy mecha, especially once the senator's AIC had told them how to fix their sensors to stop the enemy cloaking software.
Stingers and Gnats had buzzed into the mix as well but there were squads of Ares fighters in the mix and only moments before the big flash in the sky more M3A17 tanks and FM-12 mecha dropped in from orbit right into the mix. The Seppy line had been pushed way back up the mountainside toward the city. The battle still raged in the distance, but for now the senator from Mississippi and the refugee from Triton, along with a reporter, a cameraman, and three armored e-suit Marines, sat in the foxhole licking their wounds and relaxing for the moment. It had been a long morning.
"Senator Moore." Mars News Network correspondent Gail Fehrer turned to the senator. "Could you give us a statement at this point? What you did here today was more than heroic and we have the footage to prove it."
Moore raised an eyebrow at the reporter. He had never liked the press, a dislike dating all the way back to his Heisman Trophy days. His distaste for reporters was probably why he went into the Marines instead of the NFL. Several years in a POW torture camp in the Martian Desert had cured him of his intolerance of most things. Moore gave his POW camp days credit for his patience as a parent with his overzealous six-year-old daughter. So, Moore had to admit and allow for the damned reporters, and after all, as a politician they were a necessary evil. Sometimes he wished he'd just stayed a Marine. He could only bite his tongue for the moment and speak minimally as the cameraman thrust the videosensor in his face. He would think of better videobites later. Right now he was still worried about his daughter and the anger and adrenaline of hard combat still coursed through him. He relaxed and let out a slow breath before he responded.