Chapter 7C

Martian Planetary Guard Base Troop Club — Eden

The smell of marijuana smoke hung thickly in the air, overpowering even the odor of alcohol and tobacco smoke. The ventilators in the room struggled to keep up with the outpouring but it was a hopeless task. Scores of off-duty MPG soldiers of all ranks, sexes, and ages were sitting at the bar or at cocktail tables; smoking and drinking the intoxicating substances, unwinding from the stressful twenty-four hours that had just occurred. Even though the bar contained about twice as many MPG members as usual, particularly for a weekday, the absence of any marine personnel was conspicuous and a constant reminder of what had occurred.

The speech that Whiting and Jackson had just witnessed had been played in the club on the large Internet screen above the bar; the sound reproduced perfectly by speakers at every table. During the speech itself the room had been eerily quiet, the silence broken only by the occasional outraged muttering from a soldier that knew what Williams was saying was a lie. But the final part of her speech, the part addressed to the soldiers in this room, had been met with stony, worried silence.

When the speech ended conversation erupted everywhere, much of it angry, some of it terrified and hysterical.

At a table near the rear of the room, Lisa Wong and Brian Haggerty sat together. Lisa was taking a thoughtful draw off a bong the server had brought to her. She had paid for the double hit with her debit card; forking over six dollars for it, and was now smoking the last of it. Across from her Brian was sipping out of a bottle of beer. He'd declined the marijuana, not caring much for it. The two partners had coincidentally run into each other at the front door of the club an hour ago and decided to sit together.

"Brian," Lisa said, "you're in a combat branch and I'm only in admin so I want you to give me an honest opinion."

"Okay," Brian agreed, already knowing what she was going to ask.

"Can we win this thing? Can we actually hope to defeat the WestHem marines when they land here? I mean really? I know most of what that WestHem bitch said was bullshit, but she wasn't bullshitting about them sending marines over here to take this planet back from us."

"No," he agreed thoughtfully, "she wasn't. They're gonna send a shitload of them here."

"So are we fighting a hopeless cause here? I don't mind fighting for Mars. In fact I'd be more than proud to do it. And since Whiting is opening up combat branches for women, I'll volunteer for combat duty." She smiled. "I should be able to get in given my background, don't you think?"

Brian nodded.

"I don't even mind fighting if the odds are way against us. I will gladly take the consequences of losing too. But are there any odds? Is there any chance at all we'll win? I don't want to sacrifice myself for no chance at all. I don't want to be a martyr if it's hopeless before we begin."

Brian picked up his beer and took a sip from it. He stared at his partner thoughtfully, thinking of a way to say what was on his mind. "I met General Jackson a few times," he finally said.

"Oh?"

"I did more than just meet him once. We were at a formal party for MPG promotions and I actually got to sit down and talk to him for a while. He's a very smart man. You can tell that just from a few minutes of talking to him."

"What did you talk about?" Lisa asked, suspecting that whatever they talked about had bearing on her questions.

"Military history," Brian replied. "Of course I never got much further than tech school. I'm not one of the elite that was allowed into our university system. But I have studied quite a bit of military history on my own. Do you know what General Jackson's degree is in?"

"Military history," she answered. "Any MPG member knows that."

"That's right," he said. "Military history is his passion. In the fifteen-minute conversation I had with him I could see that he was more than an expert on the subject. He is the authority on it. And do you know what particular wars interested him the most?"

"What?"

"There were three of them that fascinated him. Three that he told me he'd studied extensively. One is very famous; the war that brought the beginnings of what would become WestHem eventually."

"The American Revolution," Lisa replied. "The birth of capitalism and so-called democracy."

"Right," he said. "But the other two wars were very obscure conflicts. Most school kids today have probably never even heard of them. The first was called the Vietnam War. The second was called the Afghanistan War. Both took place in the second half of the twentieth century. All three of these wars have a single thing in common. Do you know what that is?"

Lisa's mind, assaulted by cannabis, could not think of a common thread. She shook her head.

"In all three of these wars," he told her, "an enemy that was better equipped, in better numbers, and that was absolutely sure of victory, invaded a smaller country expecting the conflict to be over in a matter of weeks with their unconditional victory. And in all three cases the under-equipped, undertrained, understaffed inhabitants of those lands defeated those enemies. Soundly defeated them."

"I'm not sure I'm following you," she said, although she was starting to get a glimmer.

"In all three of these cases the enemy — the Russians in Afghanistan, the French and the Americans in Vietnam, and the British in the revolutionary war — were invading unfamiliar terrain at the end of long supply lines. They were fighting an enemy on their home ground, an enemy that was committed to not being pacified, an enemy that was fighting for independence from a superior power, an enemy that had something to fight for. In each case the invaders did not really care for the task that they were embarked upon. They had no passion for the battle. They only wanted to get the job done and get out of what they considered to be a shithole. What do all of the Earthlings call this place?"

"A shithole," Lisa replied. "Or worse."

"Do you think any of the WestHem marines are going to want to die for this place? To give their life to return Mars to the WestHem corporations? Because no matter what kind of bullshit the WestHem ruling council slings via the media, anyone with any intelligence on that planet is going to know what the real reason for the war is. That includes the marines. When they start seeing their friends die, when they realize that this war is not a cakewalk, their morale is going to go down the shitter. Troops with poor morale are the perfect setting for defeat."

"So you think we can defeat them?" she asked. "Drive them off this planet with poor morale? Even though they'll have five times the equipment that we do?"

Brian pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one with a laser lighter. He drew deeply, exhaling a plume of smoke into the air. "I've been thinking about this a lot lately," he told his partner, his friend. "It goes back to those three wars. Now General Jackson hasn't confided his plans in me or anything, but I can make a few guesses as to what he's going to do. Do you know what the major factor in the victory of those three wars was?"

"Home ground?" she ventured.

He nodded. "Exactly. The victors were on their home ground. They knew every nook and cranny of the battlefields. And they all made extensive use of guerrilla warfare. They were all under-equipped forces, with inferior weaponry. They rarely, if ever, hit the enemy head on. What they did was pick at them, piece by piece in their own rear areas. A few squads of harassment troops here and there, squads whose job was to pick off soldiers one by one, when they were least expecting it. The concept is simple. Never give your enemy a place where he can feel safe. Even in their own heavily guarded encampments they were hit by snipers, or mortar fire, or rockets. They made the enemy feel that as long as they were anywhere in those godforsaken places that they were in peril, that they could be killed without warning at any time.

"I believe General Jackson is going to employ a lot of special forces teams whose job it will be to do just that. To go out into the wastelands, to their very landing sites, and pick at them. To position themselves along the march and hit their tanks and APCs with lasers. To knock them off one by one and to degrade their morale."

"And that can win the war?" she asked.

"Yes," he said. "Although in all of the above cases it was a long, protracted process that cost a lot of the defenders their lives. They all took horrible casualties doing this. It took years in every case. With the Vietnamese it took nearly a generation. But they all achieved their goals in the end."

"So you're saying we're going to have to fight them for years?" she asked, depressed at the thought.

"Well," he said, "there's a basic difference between them and us."

"What's that?"

"The Americans, the Vietnamese, and the Afghans were all under-equipped and poorly trained forces. We, on the other hand, though numerically inferior, have the same equipment that the WestHems have. In fact, we have equipment specifically designed for use on Mars, something WestHem lacks. We also have training that's better than the WestHems."

"So how does that fit the equation?"

He smiled. "I think that WestHem is in for a big surprise when they come over here. A shocking surprise. In any case, to answer your question, this war is far from hopeless. I think we're gonna kick some Earthling ass."

All over the planet people did as Laura Whiting had instructed. They talked to each other. They discussed the question. In some cases there were arguments. In some cases the arguments were violent. In a few they were deadly.

In Libby a man shot his wife to death when she refused to change her mind on how she was going to vote.

In Procter two street gang members shot another when he told them that he was going to vote no and they disagreed with his choice.

On Triad there was another violent voting argument between gang members. Shots were fired in the heat of the disagreement and two were killed.

There were other episodes of violence during the period between Laura Whiting's speech and the vote itself. In the industrial city of Dow, for instance, the regional manager of MarsTrans corporation headed for his office as he usually did the morning after Laura Whiting's speech. His wife, a high society Earthling who hated her husband's assignment on Mars, protested, warning him that it wasn't safe but he scoffed at her and headed out of the two hundred and eighth floor apartment, intending to take a first class tram downtown and begin calling each of his managerial staff and ordering them to come in. Where did that Martian bitch Whiting get off declaring a work holiday anyway? He was going to show those greenies a thing or two about playing hardball. He made it less than a block from the front of his apartment before an angry group of middle-class Martians, many of them employees of MarsTrans, attacked him and beat him to death.

But for the most part the presence of the MPG on the streets kept the planet in order. In every city roving patrols on foot and in clanking APCs took up positions on major street intersections and augmented the police force. The actual incidents of street crime — already at an all-time low — took an additional dive.

The cities of Mars were confined to the Western Hemisphere of the planet and stretched across only nine of the twenty-four Martian time zones. The prime meridian for the planet ran through New Pittsburgh, the first of the Martian cities. The furthest city to the east was Dow, a mining city in the northern latitudes with a population of five million. Dow was three hours ahead of the prime meridian. It was here that the polls first opened on the morning of the vote; at 0800 Dow time, 0500 New Pittsburgh time.

Voting was accomplished by calling up the ballot program on an Internet screen. The main computer that controlled it was in the capital building in New Pittsburgh. The computer had been instructed to allow only those people who were Martian citizens to vote. It obtained a list of these people from the census computer and downloaded their names, social security numbers, and fingerprint information. The voters would identify themselves by placing their right index finger on the pad of the screen they were using.

Once the terminal sent the identification information to the main voting computer and the main voting computer was satisfied that that person was a Martian citizen of voting age that had not already voted once, the ballot was sent. In this case the ballot had a single issue on it that required either a yes or a no vote. When the voter made his or her decision it was sent back to the main computer and logged.

The program that controlled voting, aside from being completely tamper-proof (attempts to change the programming would erase the program completely), would not allow the release of any results until all polls had closed planetwide. This was because in the past it had been found that the release of such information as it was collected tended to discourage many people from voting at all. After all, what was the point of casting your ballot if the issue already seemed decided? This was a particular problem among the western time zone cities both on Mars and Earth. Since 2070 the new system of non-release had been in place and all but the media, who used to delight in making daylong newscasts out of Election Day, seemed to like it.