Chapter 2A

The morning following the inauguration of the new Martian governor was also a Saturday morning in the western hemisphere of Mars, where all of the terrestrial cities were located. Being a Saturday it meant that a regular training rotation for the MPG was scheduled at the base on the southern edge of Eden. Of course all of the Eden area MPG members could not train regularly at one time. There were simply too many of them for that to be feasible on a weekly basis. As such, the MPG volunteers — and they were all volunteers except for a few, select positions — were divided into one of four training rotations. This particular week was B rotation's turn. From all over the city men and women woke up early on what was traditionally a day of rest, donned their red shorts and white MPG t-shirts, and headed for tram stations near their homes. The paid twenty dollars to board the MarsTrans public transportation trains which carried them through a belt line and a serious of spokes to the base, the entrance to which was located in one of the more dangerous parts of town. Once there they waited in line for more than thirty minutes to clear the security checkpoints and worked their way to their assigned buildings.

The base itself consisted of four high-rise buildings, a large hangar complex, an armored vehicle parking area complete with airlock complexes, and more than two square kilometers of enclosed, pressurized and gravitated parkland upon which troops could assemble and exercise. Assembly time was typically 0700, except for a few specialized groups that met earlier. By 0730 the vast majority of the troops were out on the exercise grounds, performing the traditional calisthenics or running on the track that circled the base. As they ran and did their pushups on this morning the normal loose discipline that the MPG practiced was even looser than normal as everyone talked about the events of the previous evening. For the most part they cheered Laura Whiting and her idea, telling each other that it was about goddamn time that someone spoke up to the corporations. Many of them talked of the emails that they had composed and sent to their elected representatives. Only a few volunteered that they had not composed such correspondence. Those that did were quickly chided by their peers to do so and quickly, before the legislature opened an investigation.

"You don't think that will really work, do you?" asked corporal Salinas of the special forces division of his squad leader, Sergeant Fargo.

They were well into their fourth kilometer of the warm-up run and starting to breathe a little heavy. "It might not," Lon allowed, wiping sweat from his forehead. "But then she'll sure as shit go down within a week if we don't. If those prick politicians get enough mail threatening a recall vote if they try to impeach Whiting, that just might make them think twice. And it doesn't take much to compose one either. No real reason not to do it."

"And it feels damn good to tell off one of them fuckers too," put in Lieutenant Yee, their platoon commander and a twelve year veteran of special forces. "I went to bed happy last night after I sent mine off. Give it a shot, you'll like it."

"I guess I will then," Salinas said thoughtfully. "What's to lose?"

After their morning workout, Lon and his squad went into the base operations building for their briefing. They were to participate in yet another field operations drill today, their third in the last four months. The last year had brought a heavier than normal training schedule, particularly for the tank, special forces, and flight crews. No one at the operational level knew why although rumors always flew about a possible EastHem invasion in the works. Tensions had been rather high between the two governments lately since EastHem was stationing more warships at their naval base on Callisto, pushing the limits of a treaty signed as part of the Jupiter War armistice. None of Lon's squad minded the increased training in the least. It meant that instead of staying in the classroom all day learning new techniques, or instead of going to the gunnery range to practice old ones, they would don their biosuits and fly out into the wastelands to do what they did best: attack things and blow things up. Today's mission was going to be a fairly realistic anti-tank drill performed with real tanks from the MPG's first battalion.

After each of the four squads under Yee's command was given their operational area, they retreated to the bottom floor of the building where they drew their weapons and their biosuits from the armory.

"Okay, everyone," Lon told his men, "the standard load out will be the M-24 and six hundred rounds per man. Please be sure that you have training ammo instead of the real thing."

Everyone had a little chuckle over that. The training ammunition was an under-appreciated marvel designed by Martian engineers years before. The training rounds were made out of a thin synthetic material injected with helium. They came in everything from four millimeter all the way up to eighty-millimeter tank shells. They were the same size and would fire at the same suicidal velocity out of the various weapons, but instead of penetrating through the biosuits and the flesh beneath as a standard armor piercing round would, they would simply vaporize on contact.

"Matza," Lon said to his most junior member, "you're on the SAW today. Draw two thousand rounds for it."

"Right, sarge," Matza told him, excited to be in charge of the squad's machine gun.

"Galvan and Horishito, you two have the AT's," he said next, referring to the AT-50s, which were portable, shoulder fired anti-tank lasers. "Be sure to load up at least ten charges apiece, twelve if you can fit them. And again, make sure you have the training charges. We wouldn't want to blow the hell out of our own tanks."

"Right," Galvan and Horishito both agreed.

"Appleman," he said to the squad's medic. "You got your kit ready to roll?"

"I sleep with it, sarge," he assured him, hefting it up.

"All right then," Lon said with a smile. "Let's get to it. Our ride will be ready in sixty minutes."

The weapons draw went relatively quickly but it took them the bulk of their time to get into their biosuits. They wore standard MPG suits, the same as the ones the grunts and the tank crews wore out in the field. Each suit was custom fitted to its user and colored in the shades of red camouflage scheme that allowed it to blend in remarkably well in the bleak landscape of the wastelands. They were a vast improvement over the biosuits that the regular WestHem soldiers wore because the MPG suits were specifically designed for use on Mars instead of for use in any extra-terrestrial environment. A WestHem suit had a finite air supply for its user — usually four to six hours worth. In order to stay out in the field longer, a WestHem soldier needed to have spare tanks dropped to him. Martian suits, on the other hand, manufactured their own air from the thin Martian atmosphere. This added up to a smaller storage tank and a considerably less bulky suit. WestHem suits also emitted much more heat during operation, which made them much easier to detect by infrared sensors. An MPG biosuit was designed to slowly vent the body heat that its user produced, expelling it through evaporation via a series of pores all over the surface layer. In a way, it shed heat the same way a human body did, by transferring it into a liquid and then letting the liquid rise to the surface and outgas. Again, this was something that was only possible to do on the surface of Mars, which had an atmosphere, thin as it was. A soldier attempting to use an MPG biosuit on the surface of Ganymede or one of the other Jovian moons would die very quickly.

Once the suits were donned and powered up, a few minutes were spent dialing in the operations frequency that was to be used and calibrating the GPS links that helped them navigate on the surface. Each member of the squad had a radio link constantly open with Lon, who, as the squad leader, had a second link open with the platoon commander. After the radio and navigation tasks were taken care of, each man calibrated his weapon with the combat goggles built into the helmet. The computer in the goggles was hooked to sensors on the outside of the helmet that measured temperature, humidity, wind speed, and several other factors on an ongoing basis. When this information was calibrated with the particular weapon and ammunition type and tied into a sensor on the front of the weapon itself, a targeting recticle would appear in the user's field of vision when the weapon was brought up, showing where the rounds would hit if they were fired at that particular moment. The sensor on the weapon was of the binocular type, meaning that it could judge distance with fairly good accuracy, thus allowing for wind drift and gravity drop on targets that were further away. A small readout in the upper right of the goggle display showed the estimated distance to the target.

Lon sighted his M-24 back and forth a few times at various objects, testing the equipment. He aimed at the walls of the weapons room and then at the far door, watching as the small red circle followed his every move. The readouts seemed to work fine so he lowered the weapon once more and snugged it against his right side.

"Is everyone ready?" he asked his men once they had all finished their own sight-ins.

They were.

"Then lets do it. We got a Hummingbird to catch."

Hummingbird was the slang term for the ETH-70 transport craft that the special forces teams traveled in. It was one of two types of aircraft that had been specifically designed by Martian engineers for the Martian Planetary Guard. Like the biosuits, the Martian aircraft were only useful on the surface of Mars and had been designed to take advantage of the meager atmosphere. Hovers, which were the primary means that WestHem and EastHem troops moved about on the surface of extraterrestrial bodies, were bulky machines that kept aloft by means of directional thrusters on the bottom and back. Hovers were fairly slow moving and horrible gulpers of fuel, with a range of less than two hundred kilometers in the Martian gravity. The Hummingbirds, on the other hand, had two sets of large wings, which could be folded up for easy storage and extended to their full length once outside. These wings eliminated the need for vertical thrusters while in flight, increasing speed and fuel economy. A Hummingbird could haul twelve fully armed troops into the air and transport them more than four hundred kilometers out into the wastelands and back with fuel to spare.

When Lon and his squad entered the hangar deck of the base at 0945 that morning, activity was everywhere. The staging areas were filled with both the smaller Mosquito anti-armor planes — which were gearing up for some training of their own — and the larger, bulkier Hummingbirds. The crew chiefs were walking around most of the aircraft, making final checks of components and armament while the pilots and gunners went through pre-flight checks inside the cockpits. The Hummingbirds all had their back ramps extended into the loading position, awaiting the embarkation of their assigned troops. Their thrusters, which were located under each of the four wing positions, were all in the level flight positioning, facing backward, heat shimmering from their nozzles as they idled. The twenty-millimeter cannons, which were attached to a revolving turret below the nose, were all in the neutral position, facing forward.

"How you doin' today, Lon?" asked Mike Saxton, the crew chief for their assigned Hummingbird as they approached. He was a large man of African descent, dressed in pair of oily red and white coveralls. Since the aircraft hangar was fully pressurized and gravitated, there was no need for him to be dressed in a biosuit.

"Not too bad, Mike," Lon told him after making sure the external speaker for his suit was on. "Is this bucket of bolts airworthy today?"

"Don't be making fun of my hummer," he warned, only half jokingly. "I'll tell Rick to leave your asses out there in the waste."

"My apologies," Lon said, slapping him on the back. "Is this fine piece of machinery ready to take us to our destination?"

"That's better," Mike grinned. "She's all ready for you. Go ahead and board when you're ready."

They boarded, each walking up the thin alloy ramp and into the cramped interior. Though the Hummingbird could transport twelve loaded troops with ease, comfort was not part of the bargain. They crammed in five to a side and strapped themselves into small seats that folded out from the wall. Their weapons they kept against their chests, their packs full of extra ammo and food paste pushed into their backs. In the cockpit in front of them, Rick, the pilot, and Dave Yamata, the systems operator, were running through the pre-flight checklist. Since the aircraft would be depressurized once outside of the hangar, both of them were wearing biosuits as well.

"Ready to move out, sarge?" Rick asked as the pre-flight was completed. "The sooner we blow this scene, the less time we'll have to wait for an airlock."

"We're ready when you are," Lon told him.

"Okay," he said, turning to Dave. "Close us up and run through the final pressure check."

"Closing up," Dave said, pushing a button on the panel. The ramp rose up, pulled by hydraulic arms, and latched into place with a firm clank. "Pressure check in progress... and I got three greens on the panel."

"Copy three greens," Rick said. "Let's get clearance to taxi."

The clearance came a minute later and they began to move as Rick throttled up the hydrogen engine just enough to get them moving. The aircraft turned onto the taxiway and began to make its way towards the airlock complex on the far side of the hanger. Only one Hummingbird sized craft could fit into a single airlock at a time so they had to wait for nearly ten minutes while four Hummingbirds and three Mosquitoes went in front of them. As they waited, talk turned back to Laura Whiting and her now famous speech of the night before.

"I couldn't believe she actually said shit like that on Internet," proclaimed Gavin — who was a high school teacher by trade. "I mean, she told it like it was. She laid out how fucked up our political system is for everyone to hear."

"It was beautiful," agreed Horishito, who was a tram technician for MarsTrans. "I thought she was joking at first. When I realized she was serious, I just about shit my pants."

"I bet those pricks at Agricorp headquarters were the ones to shit their pants," Lon, who was of course an Agricorp employee as of the merger, said with a grin. "I would've loved to seen their faces when she told everyone how evil they were, or how much money they gave her to get her elected. That must've been priceless. Absolutely goddamn priceless."

"Yeah," said Gavin, shifting his AT-50 from one shoulder to the next, "but what are they gonna do to her now?"

"Nothing they can do if the legislature doesn't impeach her," Lon said. "And if everyone sends those pricks the email like Whiting asked, I don't think they'll have the balls to do it."

"They'll do it anyway," Horishito predicted gloomily.

"If they do, then we need to follow through and vote out our fuckin reps if they voted against her," said Mark Corning, a construction worker. "Hell, we need to do that if they even vote to open an investigation. When I sent my letter that's what I told Hennesy I'd do."

"You don't really think Hennesy is watching all of those emails, do you?" asked Horishito.

"Of course not," Corning said. "I bet the bitch don't look at a single fuckin one of them. But someone on her staff does and if enough people sent them in, she'll have to think twice about doing what Agricorp or whatever other fuckin corp that owns her, tells her to do."

Even Horishito had to admit that there was a point there. But he refused to accept that Laura Whiting would simply be allowed to stay in office. "There's no way in hell she'll keep the governor's office after what she said. I respect her for it and all, but you can bet your ass they're gonna find a way to get rid of her as quick as they can by whatever means they can."

"I think if they did that," said Lon, "it would be a very big mistake. Maybe the biggest that anyone has ever made."

With that the talk turned to other matters deemed more important, namely the marijuana they were going to smoke after training today and the women they were going to try to score with. This was a discussion that was as timeless as it was graphic, as crude as it was a part of the male psyche. Just as they were really getting on a roll however, they were given clearance to enter the airlock, something that none of them particularly looked forward to.

"I hate this part," Horishito said, bracing himself against his seat and closing his eyes. He received no words of disagreement.

Rick brought the Hummingbird forward across the taxiway, using small blasts of the thrusters to propel them. The large steel blast doors were standing open on the base side and the aircraft passed through with less than two meters of clearance on each side. He throttled back down once inside, bringing the engines to idle, and then applied the ground brakes when the nose was near the blast doors on the opposite side. "In position," he reported both to the airlock controller and to the special forces team in the back.

"Airlock closing," the computer generated voice replied over the radio link.

The blast doors behind them slid slowly shut upon their tracks, sealing off the airlock from the interior of the base. The moment they were closed the fans began to eject the air from the inside, lowering the atmospheric pressure to the level of the outside.

"Prepare for cessation of artificial gravity," the computer generated voice told Rick and Dave.

"Okay, guys," Rick told his cargo. "Get ready for lightening."

There was no gradual way to shut off the artificial gravity field that existed inside the building areas. It was either on or it was off. It could not be gently lowered from 1G to .3 Gs, the natural gravitational pull of Mars. A computer circuit cut power to the conductor that gravitated the airlock and just like that, everyone and everything, the plane, the weapons, the suit, the fluids within each person's body, lost two-thirds of it's weight. It was not considered to be one of life's great experiences. It gave a terrifying, dizzying sense of falling and spatial disorientation that lasted for almost a minute. Most people who experienced the sensation for the first time became sick to their stomach and vomited. Only the fact that all of Lon's team had been through lightening dozens of times kept them from heaving inside of their helmets.

"Ohhhh," Lon groaned miserably, feeling his stomach turning over. "Sometimes I wonder why I took this fucking job."

Everyone else in the aircraft, pilot and gunner included, matched his sentiments. But, as veterans of the process, all of them recovered by the time the fans finished evacuating the air from the lock.

"Decompression complete," the computer voice told Rick and Dave. "Airlock doors opening."

The blast doors on the exterior side of the lock slid slowly open, revealing a long taxiway that led out to the runways beyond. Red drift sand, a common problem on the Martian surface, marred the paved surface in a few places despite the fact that it had been freshly plowed less than an hour before. Rick throttled up a little and released the brakes, bringing the aircraft out of the lock and onto the staging area just beyond it. Once it was clear the blast doors immediately began to shut behind them to prepare for another cycle.

"Decompressing the aircraft," Dave said, pushing a pad on his computer screen. It was necessary to bleed the air out of the Hummingbird since the troops would be exiting it when they reached their landing area. If this step were not taken then they would all be blown out quite violently the moment the door was opened.

"I copy decompressing," Rick said. He pushed a pad on his own screen. "Unfolding wings."

The four large wings began to extend outward in sections, each piece pushed by mini-hydraulics and clanking neatly into place until the full thirty-meter span was out and ready for flight. This took about twenty seconds to accomplish and once it was done the aircraft, when viewed from above, resembled a very thin letter H turned on its side.

"Six greens on the gear locks," Rick reported.

"Decompression complete," Dave reported right after. "We're now at anticipated pressure for the LZ."

"Copy," said Rick. "Ready to taxi for take-off."

After gaining clearance he throttled up once more and began to roll forward, bumping along on the synthetic rubber landing gear until reaching the end of the north-south runway. Once in position he told the troops to brace for takeoff. Though most air and spacecraft were equipped with artificial gravity and inertial dampers to make the ride as smooth as standing on the surface, combat atmospheric craft did not come with that particular luxury. The heat that such devices produced made detection of the craft far too easy for an enemy.

"Lifting off," Rick said as he pushed the throttles forward to the maximum.

The roar of the hydrogen burning engines filled the craft with noise and vibration as the sudden acceleration pushed everyone towards the rear. Outside, the landscape began to blur by as they went from zero to more than 400 kilometers per hour in less than ten seconds. Because of the thin atmosphere of Mars, the speed one had to travel in order to obtain lift from the wings was considerable. When they reached 480 KPH of forward speed, considerably faster than the speed of sound in that environment, Dave pulled back on the stick and the Hummingbird's wheels broke contact with the runway. They climbed slowly, wobbling a little in the meager ground effect and then climbing above it. Dave pulled a lever next to his seat and the landing gear retracted into the belly of the craft with a thump. He then banked hard to the right, taking them to the east, out over the seemingly endless expanse of greenhouse complexes.

"ETA to the LZ is fifteen minutes," Dave told the troops over the intercom. "This is a combat insertion as you know. Get ready for a bouncing ride."

"Just the way we like it," Lon groaned, closing his eyes and waiting for it to be over. The flight in was his least favorite aspect of his job.

Rick kept them at two hundred meters above the greenhouses in order to keep from violating planetary flight regulations. Once they passed over the last group of them however, he dropped down to less than thirty meters above the ground, hugging the hilly terrain to keep from being detected. The Hummingbird was a bulky aircraft and not terribly maneuverable, especially at the speed it was moving, but he expertly kept it within two meters of his target altitude as they moved over and between hills, as they shot through valleys and old watersheds. He stared forward intently as the terrain moved up and down before him, his hands making adjustments to the stick and throttle.