Chapter 6A

There were no Internet terminals set up in the abandoned hanger the special forces soldiers were being housed in at the Triad MPG base and, though every last one of them had a PC that was capable of monitoring Internet channels, the signals had all been damped for security reasons. So it came to pass that the 640 men who were slated to strike the first real blow to the Earthlings were the least informed about events on the planet.

They had been fed well during their stay there. Dinner the previous night had consisted of steak and baked potatoes cooked in the base mess hall. Breakfast that morning had been scrambled eggs and pancakes prepared by the morning shift mess staff. All had eaten voraciously despite the nagging knowledge that some unspecified, possibly dangerous mission was awaiting them.

"When the hell are they going to tell us something?" Horishito demanded of Lon about an hour after breakfast. Lon's squad was leaning against the far wall of the hanger, very near the front doorway, their weapons and packs resting beside them.

"When they have something to tell," Lon replied automatically, though he too was growing impatient and bored.

Several of his men had brought decks of cards along with them and an impromptu poker game was being waged. In the absence of Internet access to facilitate betting they were forced to revert to the old fashioned technique of using poker chips to represent money. In this case the chips were actually paper clips that had been bent in specific formations to represent different denominations.

Lon was just about to go get himself dealt in for a few hands when the door to the opposing hanger suddenly slid open and Colonel Bright entered the room. Even at the age of 56, Bright was still an imposing presence, able to outrun and outgun a good number of his younger soldiers in the training fields. He was a stickler for training standards and quite a hard-ass when it came to admission to his elite corps. It was well known that he personally gave final approval on all inductees into the cadre.

Nobody stood up or came to attention when Bright entered the room of course — it just wasn't done in the MPG — but everyone immediately stopped what they were doing and looked up at him as he walked to the front of the room and took up position near a podium that had been set up earlier. A microphone sat on the podium and he tapped it a few times, confirming that it was live. He then began to speak, his voice gruff and self-assured.

"Good morning, men," he told them. "I know it sounds very cliché to say so, but I know you've all been wondering just what you've been brought here for. For security reasons I've been forced to be very vague with you in regards to the call-up and your deployment. The time for being vague is now over however. Let me begin by explaining to you all what has been happening on the surface over the last few hours and from there I'll get to the mission that I'm going to ask you to perform." He paused, his eyes tracking over the collection of soldiers. "Last night, in Denver, a federal grand jury consisting entirely of WestHem civilians and hearing evidence presented only by the federal attorney general's office, voted to indict Governor Whiting on charges of corruption and misuse of office and several other things."

Some angry uproar erupted from the crowd. Lon heard several utterings of profanity echoing off the hanger walls.

Bright waited patiently for them to quiet down and then continued. "This morning, in New Pittsburgh, a group of forty FLEB agents, all of them armed with automatic weapons, attempted to serve this warrant at the capital building and take Governor Whiting into custody. Their intent was to extradite her to Earth for trial and imprisonment, therefore leaving the Lieutenant Governor in control of the executive branch of our planetary government." He gazed out, seeming to lock eyes with everyone at once. "The capital security team — which, as I'm sure you are all aware, is made up of MPG special forces soldiers — fired upon the FLEB agents and prevented them from completing their mission."

Now there was shocked silence in the room as every man tried to contemplate the ramifications of Bright's words. Fired on federal agents? Prevented them from completing their mission?

"The attempt to take our governor into custody on these trumped up charges was unsuccessful," Bright told them. "All of the FLEB agents participating in the raid were killed or captured. The New Pittsburgh police department has been ordered to stay out of the situation by their chief. When the second wave of FLEB agents showed up at the capital, they too were taken into custody by regular infantry troops from the New Pittsburgh area division. At this moment the capital building and two blocks around it is secured and being guarded by MPG soldiers. Governor Whiting has issued an order for the rest of the MPG to mobilize for deployment. As we speak, several platoons of our soldiers are fighting a battle with WestHem marines at the main gates to the Eden marine barracks. Their intent is to keep the WestHem soldiers from exiting the base and impeding MPG operations on the surface."

He let that sink in for a moment and then went on. "Gentlemen, you're all Martians. You have all grown up on this planet under the rule of WestHem and you know what their system has done to us. We are second class citizens on our own planet. I won't try to duplicate the speeches of Governor Whiting here today because I'm just not up to the task. But I know that all of you have been listening to her words and that most of you agree with what she has been saying. It is time for us to break free of WestHem by whatever means necessary. I want none of you to make any mistake about the gravity of the situation that I have just described to you down on the surface. Our troops have fired upon federal officers, killing several of them. We have defied federal orders to hand over Governor Whiting to them. Our planetary guard troops have initiated firefights with WestHem marines and are using armored vehicles to keep them in check. What has happened today is nothing more nor less than the opening move in an armed revolt by the Planet Mars against the Western Hemispheric Alliance. It is a bid for independence from WestHem by force of arms. A revolution. And I'm about to ask you men here to play a part in it."

Without giving them time to think too deeply, he continued. "Now I've been your commanding officer for a long time now. I like to think that I'm the type of CO that makes himself available to his troops. I visit all of the commands regularly and I know most of you by name and by face. I've heard you talk to each other around the dorms and out on the training field. I've seen you all enraptured by Governor Whiting's words when she speaks on Internet. I've heard you rant about those 'fucking Earthlings' and about how Mars needs to be free. I've heard you cuss the name of WestHem and the bastard capitalist corporations that rule our lives."

He stared at his crowd, his expression now challenging. "Well, gentlemen, guess what? The vehicle for that change you all want has arrived and you have the opportunity to be it. A plan has been in place for this day for several years now and the day has come to put it into action. If you really want Mars to be free, if you really want to break the bonds of WestHem rule, the time has come to shit or get off the pot. I'm about to ask you men to go into combat against WestHem soldiers, against the institution that rules us. I'm about to ask you to commit high treason, the penalty for which is life imprisonment on Earth."

"If any or even all of you does not wish to do this you are free to stand and leave the room right now. I have orders direct from Governor Whiting herself that I am not to compel a single soldier to do my bidding. This is a voluntary assignment from this point on and that means more than one thing. If you commit to my plan, you will be doing so of your own free will and you will not have the excuse that you were simply following orders. If we lose, you will most likely suffer the fate I just explained. If we win, you will be heroes for the rest of Martian history.

"If any of you chooses not to be a part of this, I will be disappointed, I will label you as a hypocrite, unwilling to put his money where his mouth is, but you will be allowed to leave this room and go about your lives. You will of course be held until the operation is complete but you have my word and the word of Governor Whiting that you will not be persecuted in any way.

"So..." He looked at his men, wondering if any would fold. A large part of him feared that all 640 would stand as one and move to the door. "Those that do not wish to participate, please stand and exit the room at the back right now."

Not a single soldier stood up. The chant started somewhere in the middle of the room and quickly spread. "Free Mars, free Mars, free Mars!"

Before long the entire room, Colonel Bright included, was shouting it at the top of their lungs.

The Mermaid had docked at Triad Naval base two hours before after its long deployment to the Jupiter system. Though the majority of the crew had been released for three days of shore duty at Triad, Spacer first class Brett Ingram was not among them. He was in charge of a work detail tasked with unloading the unused food supplies left over from the deployment and returning them to the main Owl supply area. It was somewhat insulting work for a skilled computer technician but after nine years in the WestHem navy he was quite used to insulting behavior from his superiors. When Lieutenant Commander Braxton had been faced with the task of forming an unload detail he'd picked the six Martians out of the entire crew to form it, seeming to pick at random but, out of forty-eight enlisted men it was quite a large coincidence that only those of Martian heritage had been chosen.

This was all status quo on the good old Mermaid of the good old WestHem Navy but today it was particularly irritating because Jeff and the members of his detail were burning to monitor the news broadcasts regarding the situation on the surface. Could what they were hearing possibly be true? Had they really indicted Laura Whiting? Had her forces really fired on federal agents? And now new reports were coming in as well, reports about some sort of battle at the entrance to the WestHem marine base. Were MPG troops engaging the marines? What kind of madness was going on down there?

Of course every compartment on the ship had an Internet terminal in it and, since they were docked, they were patched into the base Internet system. They didn't dare turn any of these screens onto anything other than a music station however, nor did they dare monitor things on their PCs. There were security personnel on board the Mermaid too and, as Martians, it would be unwise to show much interest in the goings on down on the surface.

"Do you really think that Whiting is holding the capital building hostage?" asked Spacer third class Fairfield, a young black man in his first year of naval service. He was still young enough and dumb enough to take visible offense at his treatment by his Earthling shipmates. If he didn't get it under control right quick, he would find himself tossed out of the Navy and virtually unemployable before too much longer. Brett had already had a few talks with him about this.

"It sounds pretty wild, doesn't it?" Brett replied, careful to keep his voice down. They were descending the ladder from the galley area, carrying the last of the eggs from the supply room, which was connected to the spaceport dock by it's own airlock door. Since they were docked the Mermaid was connected to the base gravity generators and therefore under normal gravitation.

"It's sounds fuckin' crazy." Fairfield told him. "Can you believe those Earthling motherfuckers? Arresting Whiting? Just because..."

"Hush, Fairfield," Brett barked sharply, looking around nervously at the supply room which thankfully only contained one security person at the moment, and he was on the other corner watching two men pack up milk and powdered juice packages. "Remember where we are. Remember the talk we had. Be static."

"Yes sir," Ingram, his face scowling, nodded. "It's just that..."

"Shhhh," Jeff reiterated. "We'll talk later, once we get out of this ship. We'll go get ourselves a drink, okay?"

"Yes sir," he repeated, handing over a carton of eggs, which Jeff carried silently over to the pile by the airlock.

They continued to work, unaware that they would not be going to any bars for quite some time.

The Triad Primary control building was near the center of the city, in the worst neighborhood. It rose thirty stories above the street level and was surrounded on all sides by high-rise, low income housing complexes. The street level here was a dangerous place full of intoxicant shops, pawnshops, and massage parlors. The walls and even the ceilings were covered with graffiti of all sizes, colors, and sentiments, most of it illiterate, much of it anti-Earthling in nature. Each housing entrance lobby was a gathering place of the residents here. Most of them were unemployed and living off of the meager allowances of the welfare system. They sat out in front of their buildings hour after hour, day after day, smoking cigarettes of tobacco and marijuana and drinking Fruity. Crime was high in the neighborhood and, before the Whiting reforms of the past few months, there had been multiple incidents of control personnel being assaulted or robbed of valuables, enough incidents so that the Triad Police made a habit of hanging around the building at shift change time and escorting the workers to the tram station two blocks over.

The entrance to the building was much like the capital. Two guards armed with body armor and sidearms controlled access from behind a bulletproof layer of glass. The guards were watching an Internet screen and keeping half an eye on the pedestrian traffic walking back and forth in front of them. Currently the lobby was empty and there was not much going on. Shift change would not be for another three hours.

The channel they were watching was a MarsGroup channel of course. A live news broadcast was in progress from in front of the capital building. Nothing had changed there in the last hour. MPG troops could be seen in force out front and patrolling the perimeter. Pedestrians stayed well away from the goings on. Every once in a while they would clip to other shots; the FLEB building in New Pittsburgh, which was now under a similar guard, and the city jail, where it was believed that the FLEB agents had been taken. In Eden, news teams were reported to be heading for the entrance to the WestHem marine barracks where it was said that some sort of battle was going on.

"Governor Whiting," said a pretty female reporter of Asian descent, "has yet to make a statement of any kind in regards to the startling chain of events that has occurred today. It is unknown just where this will all lead. Speculation remains high that the only course of action that Whiting will be able to use is to give herself up to the WestHem authorities on a variety of charges, which now include murder. Like all Martians I find myself..."

"This shit is getting way out of hand," said Roger Ire, the first guard, to his partner. Like most Martians watching the events unfold he was in a state of shock and disbelief. "What's gonna happen to Whiting? They're gonna execute her when they finally get their hands on her."

"I'm not sure that they're going to get their hands on her," Julie Woo replied nervously. "This is starting to look more and more like... well..."

"What?" he asked.

"Like a rebellion," she said, saying the words that she had been thinking for the past hour. They sounded strange on her lips.

"A rebellion?" he asked, astounded and scared. "What kind of shit are you talking?"

"Think about it," she said softly. "The feds come to take Whiting into custody and the MPG fires on them. A few minutes later a whole group of MPG just appears out of the woodwork and secures the entire capital. There's a general call up of forces and now there are more MPG troops shooting it out with marines at the barracks. What does that all spell to you?"

Hearing her logic spoken out loud he had a hard time coming up with another explanation. "Damn," he said slowly. "Can we do that?"

"You mean legally?" she asked, looking at him as if he were a dumbass. "I'm pretty sure that WestHem considers it illegal to rebel against them."

"No," he said, pushing at her with his hand, "I mean physically. Do we have the manpower and the weapons to take this planet for ourselves?"

"I don't know," she said. "What if they ask you to fight?"

He thought about that for a minute. "I'd do it," he said. "Just give me a gun and I'm out there with them."

"Me too," she said.

Their chance to participate in the revolution came sooner than they thought. Their Internet screen changed from the news broadcast to the face of their supervisor. His expression was strange, a mixture of shock and excitement. "Julie, Roger," he barked at them, much too loudly. "There is a platoon of MPG troops heading your way. They are accompanying a Colonel. Let them into the building when they get here."

Julie and Roger looked at each other silently for a moment. What the hell was this about? MPG troops on Triad?

"Do you understand?" their supervisor asked.

"Yes," Roger finally replied. "What is this about? What are..."

"I don't have time to explain right now," he answered, which they correctly interpreted as 'I don't know'. "It's orders direct from Sanchez herself. Let them in when they get there and direct them to the VIP elevator."

"Right," Julie nodded.

"And let me know when they're on the way up."

They emerged out of the train platform and marched down the stairway. The stairwell was crowded with dangerous looking thugs hanging out, some of them undoubtedly waiting for fresh robbery victims. The thugs exited quickly as they saw forty MPG soldiers wearing tactical helmets and carrying M-24s out before them. Whatever was going on, they were certainly not going to mess with a platoon of soldiers in any way.

The troops formed a loose diamond formation after leaving the stairwell and began marching down the street towards the control building. A Triad Police officer who was talking to a young gang member about some outstanding warrants for theft saw them approaching and stared in disbelief. She had never seen anything like this before on the streets of Triad. What did it mean? She let the young man go about his business and walked up to the soldier on the point. The platoon halted before her and all eyes turned to her.

"What's going on here?" she asked a little nervously. Events at the capital and at the marine barracks had not escaped her attention and she could not help but draw the conclusion that they were related to this.

The soldier on point said nothing. Instead, a tall man, unarmed but wearing the rank of colonel approached her from the center of the formation. He stared at her, looking at her nametag on her right breast. "Officer Smith," he addressed her, "I'm Colonel Bright of the Martian Planetary Guard. We have been mobilized at the command of Governor Whiting and we are on our way to secure the control building."

"The control building?" she asked incredulously.

"The control building," he said levelly. "We have a mission to accomplish there. Is it your intention to try and stop us?"

"No, of course not, Colonel, but..."

"We are in haste, Officer Smith." Bright told her. "Things will become clear to you very quickly. Free Mars," he hailed using a greeting that had become commonplace since Whiting's inauguration.

"Free Mars," she replied back, smiling.

The soldier on point gave a signal and the platoon moved out again. Smith stepped aside, allowing them unimpeded passage. Bright stood until the center of the formation caught up with him and then he began to march once again.

Three minutes later they were at the entrance of the control building. Lieutenant Nguyen, the platoon commander approached the two glass encased guards and identified himself. The guards opened the doors without question, just as he'd been assured they would. He began barking orders.

"First squad, accompany Colonel Bright upstairs. Second and third squads, secure the outside of the building, fourth squad, come with me for inside security. Weapons tight people until told otherwise. Under no circumstances are you to fire on any Martians and that includes cops. If the feds show up, normal rules of engagement apply, self defense only unless they try to breach the building."

His four squad sergeants affirmed his orders and the soldiers began moving quickly to their destinations.

"Will the elevators take us where we need to go?" Colonel Bright asked Julie.

She seemed awed at his presence but answered quickly, "Yes, Colonel. We have orders to let you immediately up."

"Thank you." He began walking towards the elevators. His squad followed behind him

The elevator doors opened before them and the eleven men crowded inside. The elevator, like all of Triad, was under the influence of the artificial gravity system and the inertial damper. The elevator shot upwards towards the thirtieth floor of the building, the only indication that they were rising the changing numbers on the display. When it reached 30 the doors slid open to a small foyer tastefully decorated with modern art and couches. The carpet on the floor was threadbare but presentable. A uniformed guard stood before them.

"Colonel Bright?" he asked politely.

"That's me," Bright said, stepping forward and out of the elevator.

"Follow me, sir," the guard replied. "I have orders to take you to Mr. Sanchez and the main control room."

They were led down a long hallway and around two corners before coming to a steel security door. A computer terminal with a fingerprint analyzer was installed in the door. It was supposed to only allow access to authorized personnel. The guard placed his hand on the pad and the door slid open, revealing the large control room.

The control room was a crowded, busy place. Forty people were sitting at computer terminals monitoring all aspects of the orbiting city. They looked up as the doors opened, almost to a person. A tall Hispanic man walked over to Colonel Bright as his escorts crowded into the room and took up positions near the walls and windows. The two men appraised each other silently for a moment. Frank Sanchez, the watch commander of this shift, had been recruited for his part in the mission back in the planning stages. His counterparts on the other shifts had likewise been recruited. In this building, in this very room, was the key to success of their mission.

"Colonel Bright," Sanchez said loudly, loud enough for everyone to hear. "Welcome to the main control room. It is my honor to turn this facility over to the MPG in the interests of a free Mars."

There was a gasp from the assembled controllers, none of whom knew why Bright and his men were here. It was a shocked gasp but not an unhappy one.

"Thank you Mr. Sanchez," Bright replied. He turned to the controllers. When he'd recruited Sanchez he'd made sure that Sanchez would never allow anything other than a second generation Martian to work in this room. He didn't figure he would have any trouble with these people. "Ladies and Gentlemen, I am Colonel Bright of the Martian Planetary Guard. You have all heard of the events at the capital building and in Eden I'm sure so I will spare you the details of that. Let me say to you now that Mars is in the midst of a rebellion against WestHem rule. As I speak the MPG troops that Governor Whiting called up earlier today are making motions to secure the planet from WestHem forces. They will be successful as long as we can keep the WestHem marines trapped on their base. However the entire thing will be useless without a single key element that involves this room."

He peered at their faces, wondering how they would react to what he next had to say. "You're all Martians in here. Mr. Sanchez saw to that a long time ago. You know what WestHem rule has done to this planet. The time has come to put a stop to it. I need your help, people. You are the operators that control this orbiting city and the future of our rebellion now depends on the next two hours. I will ask you to act in the interest of Mars and Martian freedom. If you do not wish to participate you may stand up and be counted. You will be removed from the room and held until the forthcoming operation is complete and then you will be released. You will not be persecuted in any way for failing to assist and you will have the same opportunity to evaluate Governor Whiting's actions tomorrow. We will not compel a single person to participate. This is a voluntary revolution, people. So what do you say? Does anyone wish to stand?"