Chapter 10A

During this period of time, while a huge armada of ships and marines were heading towards their planet, intent upon taking it back from them, the Martians went through several varieties of turmoil as the fact that they had really broken ties with WestHem and made themselves independent gradually sank into the collective consciousness. That they had disconnected themselves from their economic system was a major worry. WestHem owned all of the banks, all of the financial institutions, and controlled all of the money. Did that mean that the money circulating on Mars was now worthless? If WestHem didn't approve of the transactions now occurring independent of them — and it seemed that they most certainly did not — didn't that mean that no one on the planet no longer had any money?

This fear led to a brief work slowdown in the vital factories and agricultural fields as the rumor that everyone was, in effect, working for nothing spread like wildfire across the planet. This occurred just as the various workplaces were just starting to get themselves into something approaching optimum production, just as the issues of who was going to run things began to hash out. In this instance the workers had, in almost every instance, done exactly as Laura Whiting had suggested they do. They had gotten together and had appointed supervisors and managers from among their own ranks, for the most part electing people to the position that it was mutually agreed would do a good job of it. But the thought that no one would get paid for his or her labors was almost too much. Work suddenly became shoddy and even non-existent in a few places. Newly hired workers, and even some of the veteran workers, started not showing up for their jobs, leaving holes in the various production lines.

Laura Whiting, with her gift for putting things into perspective, was able to ease the situation with one of her speeches.

"People," she told her citizens during a live broadcast on MarsGroup, "I'm afraid that you are all caught up in WestHem economic thinking here and you are missing the big picture. What is money? Think about that for a moment. Money is nothing more than a notation in a computer somewhere. It does not exist anywhere else. This is not the old pre-colonization days after all. We do not have pieces of paper or metal coins to represent dollars and cents. We have notations in computers telling you that you have this much money, that you owe this much money, that you are paid this much money. This money has value because WestHem says it has value.

"Well I'm here to tell you that the money still has value because we of the interim Martian government now say it has value. Each one of you will be paid for the work you do at the rate that has always been paid for that work. You will have these computer notations deposited in your accounts, just like always, and you may use that money to pay your rent, buy food for your tables, buy intoxicants at the shops, or do whatever else you wish with it. All prices on everything have been fixed in place at the level they were at the day before we took this planet from the WestHems. Your money is still good and will continue to be good until such time as we come up with a new economic system under our new constitution.

"In fact, there are some distinct advantages to you now that we have taken WestHem out of the equation. Most of you were horribly in debt, the result of credit lines with outrageous interest rates that were given to you by various WestHem financial systems. My understanding was that the average Martian citizen, like the average WestHem citizen, was more than sixty thousand dollars in debt to these thieving schemers. The payments on these amounts were set up so that the interest was the only thing that ever got paid. The principal never seemed to get any smaller. Well I for one see no reason to continue to pay on these particular bills. When we are triumphant in this upcoming war, such debts will become uncollectable anyway since we will be setting ourselves up on a different system of currency than WestHem. So my suggestion is that you keep your money for yourselves and pay nothing to any WestHem corporation of any kind."

This speech did just the trick for the sagging faith in the currency. The Martians were made to believe that the money still had value and, as such, it did. Workers returned to their jobs and production reached an all time high days later.

As that particular crisis was going on however, another, more serious one was taking place as well. It was a crisis of confidence. Since the very first day of the revolution, Laura and the legislature that was loyal to her had allowed WestHem Internet broadcasts to continue to be seen on Mars uncensored.

"It is not our intention or our wish to block out information from the other side of this debate," Whiting had been quoted as saying on more than one occasion. "Let the people hear presentations from all concerned parties, evaluate them for what they are worth, and make their decisions based upon that."

And so the big three Internet and media providers information was widely seen throughout the planet during the preparations for Operation Red Hammer. Every day the Martian citizens, many of whom were enlisted in the MPG and preparing to fight, watched dissertations on the composition of the forces that were being assembled to take them on. They listened to General Wrath and Admiral Jules give their briefings each day, explaining how they would outnumber the Martians four to one and how they would destroy the MPG if they did not peacefully surrender the moment that the landings were made. They watched the news briefings of the huge numbers of marines being loaded onto the Panamas for the trip. They watched the thousands of pieces of WestHem armor being loaded up as well. They listened to WestHem military experts in the employ of the various media corporations explaining how a force the size of the MPG could not possibly stand up against the might and sheer numbers that were being deployed against it.

Many of them could not help but lose their nerve in the face of this information. None of the Martians knew about the existence of Operation Interdiction and even if they had, it probably would have made very little difference. A reverse exodus of volunteers from the MPG took place as thousands of people resigned their positions in order to escape the fate that was being promised. It was a mass resignation that threatened to undermine the entire revolution if something was not done to stop it or at least staunch the flow a bit.

It was General Jackson, making a rare appearance before the MarsGroup cameras, who managed to bring things back under control in this instance.

"The MPG is a volunteer fighting force," he told the planet. "It always has been, and always will be. If you don't think you can take the fight, if you don't think the independence of the planet and the ability to carve out our own destiny is worth fighting for, than get the hell out. I don't want you. But know this, citizens of Mars. The only way that we'll get to be free is to fight. I wouldn't have started this fight if I didn't think we had a damn good chance of winning it. We'll be fighting on our home ground, using equipment that has been specifically designed to fight here, and I have more than a few tricks up my sleeve. I'm not sending people to the slaughter here. I have more than thirty years of experience as a commanding soldier and I think I know what I'm doing and I have always made sure that my officers in charge know what they are doing as well. If we stick together, I'm confident we will beat these Earthlings. And if it looks to me at any point like we will not be able to beat them, then I will order hostilities to cease immediately. But if I keep losing people at the rate I'm losing them now, if my soldiers keep resigning on me, we're going to reach that point before the Earthlings even make their landings and everything that we've done so far will be for nothing. So do me the favor of thinking about that for a minute before you resign and hope that others will do your fighting for you."

Over the next week the resignations trickled down to nearly a halt and a sharp spike in the number of enlistments was registered as well. The pace of training, particularly of infantry crews and special forces soldiers, continued.

Triad Naval Base
July 1, 2146

Admiral Belting and General Jackson sat side by side in the control room of the naval base, their eyes watching the live pictures on the Internet screen, their ears tuned into the radio transmissions that were being beamed back and forth. The camera view was a long pan of the WHSS Tripoli Harbor, one of the four pre-positioned Panama class transports. The shot was being taken from an A-12 that was hovering thirty kilometers above it. This was the day that they were to try to bring down the landing craft within it and unload the combat equipment on the surface. In all more than a hundred people were involved in the operation, not a single one of whom had ever performed such an act before.

"Test fire of thrusters is within parameters," said the voice of Lieutenant Kipling, who had been placed in command of Tripoli Harbor herself. In his former life he had been the second officer on board a civilian cargo ship that had done the Triad to Earth route. He had spent the past three weeks studying up on the systems of the Panama and training a crew to help fly it.

"I copy the thrusters are within parameters," Belting told him in reply. "Proceed when ready."

The ship was undocked from its clamps five minutes later, the first time it had free from its moorings in more than six years. Only one of the four fusion reactors had been lit and that was only to provide power and environmental controls to the ship. The fusion engines themselves would not be needed for the operation.

"Thrusting away," Kipling's voice said once they were free. The flare of white appeared from the fore and aft sides and the massive ship slowly began to move away from the dock. It took nearly thirty minutes for it to move out into the departure corridor and stabilize its orbit once again.

"Good job," Belting congratulated once they reported that they were in position. "My compliments to your crew."

"My crew thanks you, Admiral," Kipling responded. "Now lets see if those pilots you hired can do their stuff. Opening the cargo door now."

On the top of the ship a massive door began to swing upward, powered by a set of thirty hydraulic arms. This was the main cargo off-load door. Immediately beneath it were the sixteen landing craft in which one quarter of a fighting division's gear was stored. The landing craft were connected to a system of airtight access tunnels and airlocks.

"Which ones are you bringing out first?" Jackson asked Belting as the door reached the top of its climb. They could only launch four landing craft at a time because they only had four pilots that could fly them. Or at least it was hoped that they could fly them. All of those recruited had come from the civilian spaceports at Eden and New Pittsburgh, where their jobs had been flying the cargo lifters that delivered food products and steel to Triad. None of the four had ever flown a Panama lifter before except in the simulation programs that they had activated at the TNB training center.

"The A through D will come out first," Belting said. "They have the tanks and the APCs on them. Once the pilots land we'll have a C-12 bring them back up again and we'll start working on the next four."

"So a couple of days to get everything down?"

"Assuming that nothing goes wrong, yes."

Jackson nodded thoughtfully, sipping out of his coffee.

"LS-A is reporting a good engine start," Kipling reported over the radio link. "He's beginning the pre-flight checks now."

Within a minute the other three ships reported successful engine starts as well. The pre-flight checks on the landing craft took the better part of forty minutes to complete. Belting and Jackson passed the time by discussing Operation Interdiction. So far the secrecy of the operation appeared to have been maintained despite the fact that Marlin had managed to get out a brief radio message before being destroyed. Both men concluded, based upon the arrogant attitudes of the Marlin's commanding officers, who had been pulled from the wreckage by the rescue crews, interrogated at length by Belting himself, and then shipped down to the POW camp in Libby, that even if the Earthlings received the message they would have a hard time putting stock in it.

"They're arrogance is what is going to lose the war for them," Jackson said with a sad shake of the head. "Just the way it happened in the Jupiter War."

"Thank God for their arrogance then," said Belting.

The pre-flight checks were completed a few minutes later with no problems or reasons to delay being found. Lieutenant Carrie Sing, the pilot of ship A was the first on the radio to announce she was ready to separate from the Panama.

"Go with separation sequence LS-A," Kipling's voice told her. "Releasing docking clamps on your order."

"Release the clamps," she said, her voice not showing so much as a trace of the nervousness she had to have been feeling.

The clamps were released and a moment later the first craft began to rise from the hull of the massive Panama, drifting slowly upward, meter by meter, until it was well above the arc of the loading door.

"I'm one hundred meters above the door," Sing said. "Beginning to maneuver."

"Beginning to maneuver," Kipling acknowledged.

The thrusters on the front of the ship came to life, slowing it just a bit and allowing it to drift backwards in the corridor. The top thrusters fired a few times as well, stabilizing the ship and keeping it from drifting any higher. Once the ship was well away from the Panama the front thrusters went quiet and the opposing corner thrusters lit up, slowly turning the ship around, so that the main engines on the rear were facing towards the direction of orbit. Just as it got turned around and positioned for the de-orbit burn, the second of the landing craft began to rise out of the Panama.

It took another twenty minutes for all four landing craft to exit the ship, get turned around in their orbits, and get stabilized for their burns. Everything went as smoothly as could be expected, with all four of them ending up in a line about two kilometers apart.

"Okay LS-A," Belting said into the radio. "Looks like you're first. Initiate your de-orbit burn whenever you're ready."

"I'm as ready as I'll ever be, Admiral," Sing responded. "Main engines are ready for ignition, navigation data is programmed. Initiating burn sequence now." She paused for a moment. "Burn sequence initiated. Ignition in ten seconds."

The seconds ticked off agonizingly slowly and then a bright white light flared from the rear of the landing craft. It seemed to accelerate rapidly out of the camera's view though it was actually slowing down at a tremendous rate. The A-12 that was recording the event lit its own engines up and began to chase after it. Soon the ship was back on their screens, it's engines burning brightly.

"Burn is initiated," came Sing's voice. "All systems operating within parameters. Course is on the line. Termination of de-orbit burn in four minutes."

"Copy that, Sing," Belting responded. "You're looking mighty pretty from here. LS-B, you're next. As soon as her burn is completed, go ahead and initiate yours."

One by one the landing ships burned their main engines for a specific amount of time, slowing the ships down so that the Martian gravity could pull them downward to a controlled entry into the atmosphere. The speed of their descent was carefully timed so that they would drop neatly into a window that would terminate their final re-entry right over the city of Eden on the other side of the planet. Different computations and different angles of entry would have allowed them to land at any other Martian spaceports.

Ninety-three minutes went by before Landing Ship A started the final re-entry sequence. Lieutenant Sing used the maneuvering thrusters to turn the ship around once more, so that its nose was angled upward and its belly, where the heat shield was located, was poised to take the brunt of reentry. Five minutes later the ship made its first contact with the thin atmosphere. The underside began to glow as the heat of friction was generated, softly at first but then with increasing fury until nothing more than a fiery streak was visible. The ship gradually decelerated from orbital speed to a relatively lackadaisical 1100 kilometers per hour. It continued to fall out of the Martian sky like a rock, it's forward velocity carrying it over the equatorial plains and mountain ranges.

"All systems still on the line," reported Sing. "Course is still steady. I'll begin landing maneuvers shortly."

As she approached the city from the west she was still at an altitude of more than 20,000 meters. She employed the powerful forward thrusters to slow her speed while the ship continued to fall. When her forward speed was only 150 kilometers per hour, the greenhouse complexes were below her and her altitude had dropped to 6000 meters. The landing ship was far too large for wings to have any effect on its flight path. To slow the descent to a speed that was not lethal, more thrusters were used, these ones on the bottom of the ship. They lit at Sing's command and the fall became more controlled, gentler.

"Spaceport in sight," she reported when she was ten kilometers out. "Lined up on the landing path. All systems operating normally."

She began to manipulate the bottom and the front thrusters more, adjusting her speed and descent as the landing strip grew nearer.

"Deploying landing gear," she said, and a moment later eight sets of wheeled gear slid out of slots on the bottom, their locations well clear of the landing thrusters, which would have melted the synthetic rubber and the steel alike.

The ship drifted down on jets of fire, coming to a soft touchdown less than ten meters from the middle of the runway. The bottom thrusters were turned off, allowing the ship to settle, but the rear one remained lit, pushing the ship along the concrete surface towards a huge loading area on the far side of the spaceport.

"We copy good touchdown," Admiral Belting said with relief as he watched the MarsGroup camera image of the lumbering ship rolling out. "Excellent job, Lieutenant Sing."

"Thank you, Admiral," she replied, her voice registering that she was quite pleased with herself.

One by one the other three ships came in as well, all of them touching down gently, all of them rolling out to parking slots. Their engines were shut down and their cargo bays were opened, allowing the MPG troops that were standing by in their biosuits to start the job of unloading.

Jeff Waters was one of the troops standing by. With basic training over he was now a full-fledged private first class in the newly formed 17^th Armored Calvary Regiment of the Martian Planetary Guard. The 17^th had been put together with about one quarter newly trained combat troops, one quarter existing MPG members who had been assigned to non-combat branches before the revolt, and the remainder seasoned combat troops who had been broken up from other units. Matt was assigned to third squad of second platoon of Alpha Company and his unit's armored vehicles were located in Landing Ship B from Tripoli Harbor. Their job today, one of the first that they had been assigned, was to unload those APCs and transport them to staging areas outside of the main MPG base. They were of course dressed in their model 459 biosuits — brand new ones that had been shipped from Environmental Supplies less than a week before — since they were outside the safety of the pressurized building.

"That's a big motherfuckin ship," Jeff said, looking at the huge behemoth of steel that rose more than sixty meters above him and stretched for more than two hundred down the loading area. Hell, even the tires on the landing gear were huge, each one more than three times as tall as he. The two massive front doors had been opened and a loading ramp extended from the inside, down to the ground.

"Shit, Waters, why don't you go lay under one of the tires when it moves and see how heavy it is too?" a voice said in his radio set.

That was Hicks of course, his nemesis from basic training. The two of them had managed to make it through the remainder of their training together, while assigned as squad mates, without entering another physical confrontation. They had been side by side as they'd learned to shoot their M-24s, to load and fire anti-tank lasers, mortars, heavy and light machine guns, and, of course, as they'd run for hundreds of kilometers, both in and out of the biosuits. Verbal confrontations, however, were quite another matter. It had become almost routine for them to badmouth each other at every opportunity. And when they found themselves assigned to the same squad after training, it only became worse.

"And miss out on seeing you get your stupid ass killed when you walk in front of a cannon or shoot yourself with your own fucking gun?" Jeff returned. "Naw. I can't die before that. My life wouldn't be complete."

"In your dreams motherfucker," Hicks told him. "If you think that I'm gonna..."

"Hicks, Waters," cut in Sergeant Walker, their squad leader. "Will you two shut the fuck up for once? Christ, all I ever hear on this tactical channel are you two flapping your goddamn lips at each other. Give it a rest."

"Right, sarge," Jeff said. "Sorry. I keep forgetting everyone else can hear us talking."

"Sorry, sarge," Hicks echoed.

"Why don't you two meet after training some night, go out to a fuckin intox club, and insult each other all fuckin night. Get it out of your system."

"Shit," said Hicks. "I'd rather smoke out with a fuckin Earthling."

"Amen to that," Jeff put in.

Walker shook his head in disgust, wondering what the hell kind of squad he'd been given to work with. He, like all of the NCOs and all of the officers of the 17^th ACR, was one of the ones with combat unit experience (although no actual combat experience, since the MPG had never fought anyone before). He had been given a squad that consisted of three former gang members, three females (two of whom had never been in uniform before, one of whom had been a procurement clerk in supply), two men reassigned from non-combat branches, and only two others, the two corporals of the bunch, who had actually been combat assigned before. He was doing his best to get some sort of camaraderie and fighting spirit going but it was an uphill battle.

"Lets start lining up to unload these things," he told his group now. "Remember, they are to be driven slowly down the ramp and directly over to the staging area. This is not the time to play with them and see what all the neat little buttons do. You go in, you climb in, you start it up, and you bring it down. That is it. Is everyone clear on that?"