Secondary explosions erupted in a rainbow of plasma colors and sparks across the decks and throughout both of the decimated behemoth ships as they approached the Martian atmosphere. Captain Walker looked out the window and could see hull debris and torn metal bunched up against and around the deck of the supercarrier where it impaled the Seppy hauler. There was also blood on the window in places from where the XO's body slammed into it on impact. Debris that had been thrown free of the ships were already glowing red and ablating due to reentry heat. And large shards of metal hull plating that hung loosely from the wreckage flailed and flopped wildly from the heating and aerodynamics of reentry and Fullback could see several very large chunks of hull from each ship peel away and fly off behind them.
The friction from reentry heated the armored windowscreens, but the structural integrity fields of the strong ship held. The bridge environment systems flushed the room with cold air to adjust for the rapid heating. Fullback gritted her teeth from the pain and tried to put it out of her mind. She had to make certain her mission had been accomplished and then see if there was a way to survive this mess.
Marley! Give me all the SIF power on the bridge that you can! If there are other rooms that have been plussed up don't rob them, there might be survivors in there. Can you check?
I'm checking it, Captain. Sensors are failing everywhere but I show forty-seven crewmen still on board in various locations.
What about our trajectory? Did we push the hauler out from over the city? Obviously, the goddamned thing didn't blow up.
Sorry, Captain, all external sensors are down. We do have QM comms.
You're our only hope now, Marley. Keep us alive if you can. We'll need extreme inertial dampening when we hit the ground!
I understand, ma'am.
Open a channel to the Madira.
Aye sir.
"CO Madira! CO Thatcher!"
"Holy shit, Fullback! You're still alive!" Captain Jefferson squawked back.
"Probably not for much longer, Captain. Propulsion is down and we're stuck to the Seppy rust bucket." Fullback grimaced at the pain in her leg. "Did it work? External sensors are down over here, Wally. Did we push the hauler out of the way?"
"Is there any way you can get out of there, Sharon?"
"Negative, Wally. All the escape pods are down and I probably couldn't make it to one anyway. Besides, I couldn't leave Helmsman Lee behind. Did we save the city, Wally?"
Chapter 24
2:20 PM Mars Tharsis Standard Time
"What was that?" Rod heard a sound almost like an insect buzz overhead. Spitap, spitap, went the sound again. "Did you hear that?" He turned to the pregnant lady, Carla, on the park bench beside him and then shrugged at Vincent.
"I heard something. I thought it was just my damn ears ringing from my nicotine withdrawals." Vincent replied. Then a wave of people rushed toward them, forcing them to push the people around them off the young lady. "Get the fuck off me!" he yelled, and turned to the man pushing at his back and punched him square in the face.
"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Carla screamed and Rod and Vincent did their level best to protect her.
"Let's stay ahead of this rushing crowd instead of fighting it." Vincent grabbed Carla by the hand and pulled her with him. "Rod. Get behind her, bud!" Vincent had been in enough adrenaline-hyped gliderchute afterparties when people started moshing in the pit to know that you can't fight a crowd.
The three of them pushed their way along with the wave of the crowd as they passed through the park. They were being pushed toward the central elevator of the Open Court near the giant JumboHoloTron. Mons City Central Park had been designed to hold eighty thousand but there were more than a hundred thousand, or maybe twice that being held in it with Seppy force fields. There was little more than standing room and with the wave of the crowd moving there had to be hundreds or maybe thousands of people being trampled to death.
Vincent jumped up as high as he could in an attempt to see over the crowd. It didn't help much. All he could see was wave after wave of people behind him and the force field closing in on them from the far side of the park.
"The motherfucking Seppy motherfuckers are squeezing the force field on us. They're gonna squish us all!" Vincent said in a panic. He really wished he and Rod had gone with that senator fellow earlier when they had had the chance.
"Why are they doing that?" Carla screamed.
"I don't know!" Vincent continued along with the wave of the crowd jumping up as often as space would allow between him and the next guy. He was very careful not to lose his footing though. Falling down could be the end of them.
"We gotta think of something fast, Vince!" Rod jumped and looked over the crowd ahead of them and could see a wave in the sea of people headed back toward them. The forcefields were closing in from all around. "Vince, we can't keep going with the crowd. We have to get to the center of the park and stay there as long as we can hold out."
Zip, zip, zip.
Separatist railgun rifle rounds tore through the crowds of people splattering the corralled citizens like the old expression "shooting fish in a barrel." The automatic railgun fire was coming from above the crowd on the third floor near the elevator and from other upper floor locations around the periphery of the park.
"Goddamned cowards!" A man behind them held his fist in the air and shook it defiantly at the Seppy snipers. "Come down here and fight like men!"
Rod, Vincent, and Carla struggled to push toward the center of the crowd and prayed that the luck of large numbers would fall their way. There were thousands more people in the park than there were snipers and it would take them a while to kill them all considering the ranges they were shooting from and size of the park itself. The force fields continued pressing inward, knocking over trees and park benches and play sets and monkey bars and other park constructions.
Several people realized what Vince, Rod, and Carla's strategy was and they also noticed Carla's condition and began forming a pocket around her. They kept a hand on each other's shoulders to hold the pocket together. A zipping sound passed by Vince's left ear and he felt something wet splatter his face. He turned to see the man beside him and saw clean through a dark gray and red outlined hole in the man's head and through the chest of the woman behind him. The two victims were pressed together by the crowd and couldn't fall over at first. Then they were drawn down to be trampled under thousands of stampeding human feet.
Vincent and crew continued to protect Carla as best they could. There were pockets forming in the crowd where the Seppy HVAR rounds had cleared them out.
"This way!" Vincent pushed back toward one of the growing pockets of dead.
"Are you fuckin' nuts," Carla screamed. "That's toward the gunfire!"
"Watch those little vapor trails streaking across the park. They fire for a few seconds and then they stop. And then they do it again." Vincent pushed them toward the nearest wave of people rushing away from the gunfire.
"They're reloading?" Rod asked. "Yeah, so! Then we'll be standing in the open and easier to shoot."
"Not if we play dead." Vincent said. "When I say drop. Drop. Rod, we'll cover Carla as best we can." Vincent hated running into gunfire and lying around playing dead. But it was the only plan he had and at least it was a plan. Before they had just been running scared and aimlessly.
"Now!" Vincent screamed once he could see only about ten rows of people between him and the oncoming hail of railgun vapor trails. The trails tracked through the rows of people and then stopped for a second. Vince, Rod, Carla, several others fell to the ground and tried to cover each other from being trampled. Several wounded and scared people tripped and kicked at them. One of them landed a knee right into Vincent's back so hard that Vince was afraid he'd be pissing blood, but then the wave of people pushed away from the blood-soaked pile of bodies as the railgun fire started back up.